This year, I thought it might be fun to “liveblog” (as the cool kids say) my experience of churning out a play overnight. So, starting here at 10PM, I will be providing real-time updates of my slow slide into madness. Here’s a photo of me taken around 2:30AM last year:

I promise to look even more crazy and less flannel-clad this year.

Plus, it’s an all-girls school, so I’ll also be posting the endlessly amusing things you find stuck to the wall. Here’s an exemplar from last year:

Clumsy renditions of bad teen romance? We got ‘em.

So, tune in here tonight for all sorts of wacky good times. It’ll be totally rad. I promise.

And then I saw the trailer for Suck:

Yes, it will take the combined weight of Dave Foley, Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper, and Henry Rollins (that wig really echoes his Black Flag era Jim Morrison-esque hairstyle) to pull me back to the vampire oeuvre. But just barely. And Moby doesn’t help at all.

It is a bit strange that it’s billed as a “Rock Musical Comedy”, and yet no one appears to actually sing in the trailer. But, you know, Henry Rollins. If I suffered through Wrong Turn 2 for Hank, I’ll put up with this**.

*I have a convoluted theory – cribbed from a variety of sources – that classic movie monsters are metaphors for aspects of humanity we find frightening. Vampires represent our fear of taboo sexuality. Werewolves are all about the terror of our animal selves. Zombies represent the terror of losing the self, of being subsumed into a faceless mass. In this sense, the walking dead are more of a political metaphor than the other two. And yes, thinking about these things is how I spend my time.

**I’m being a bit unfair to WT2 here. While not great, it was one of 2007’s better slasher/gore horror movies, especially considering it was direct-to-video. Also, soundtrack by BSG’s Bear McCreary! There’s a fun fact.

As someone with very few interesting traits – and a variety of profoundly boring ones* – I am fortunate to have made the acquaintance of a variety of very engaging folks. It occurs to me I should write about them more, so I’m going to try doing some more profiles on the site. Hence, this.

Back before my knee ass-ploded, I enjoyed a brief career as a mediocre recreational Ultimate Frisbee player. Despite being rather ineffective as a defensive mid-fielder, my days in the heady world of barely competitive frisbee did yield some new friendships. One of them was with Melissa Altro, who, in addition to being an all-around cool person, is also a professional voice actor. And, as she informed me a few weeks ago, is now running her own business aimed at helping aspiring voice actors break into the business. This all sounds pretty neat, so I thought I’d chat to her about it.

By way of an introduction, give us the  100 word  Melissa Altro bio.

I’ve been using my voice to animate cartoon characters for over 15 years. I’m originally from Montreal, and since 1995 I’ve played ‘Muffy’ on the 4-Time-Emmy-Award winning program Arthur. I’ve also played a variety of leading roles in popular cartoon series like Grossology, World of Quest, Pippi Longstocking, Postcards From Buster, Z-Squad and Bolts and Blip(in production). I’m now sharing my industry experience with emerging artists through Voice Pro Studio by offering voice demo production, one-on-one voice coaching and animation voice workshops that focus on microphone technique, creating characters and taking in-studio direction.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: That’s 93 words, in case anyone is taking the question really seriously.

So, in short, you know what’s what when it comes to voice acting. In my casual flirtations with the acting world, it seems like “voice work” is a sort of mystical holy grail where the work is easy and the money is good. Two part question: how did you get into it, and is it the easy street everyone says it is?

This question makes me giggle…yes, the work is so much fun and yes, you are paid very generously. All that being said, it takes a lot of energy, technique and focus to deliver a respectable performance. I started when I was 12 years old back in Montreal and loved the work right from the start. I entertain myself daily with speaking in silly voices and creating vocal caricatures. As a voice actor, I get to work in the studio exploring different sounds, intentions and characters without having to actually look the part. That’s freedom if you ask me! I feel very fortunate to have been introduced to the industry at such a young age because it is a made up of a considerably small community of actors and it takes a lot of perseverance and talent to break into.

What are you working on right now?

I am currently recording my 14^th season of Arthur as the role of Muffy Crosswire, the prissy yet lovable (I hope!) monkey. We are in the studio weekly and just finished recording our 177^thepisode! It’s pretty incredible that the show is still so popular after all these years and that the quality of the program has stayed true to its high standard of providing educational television for children.

For the record, every show should have a “prissy yet lovable monkey”. But say I want to get into voice acting.

Where do I start? By taking my workshop! Ha! Seriously though, it’s important to learn about the industryif you want to work in it,and a good way to do that is to take a workshop or some one-on-one coaching with an experienced professional. Then you should visit www.voicebank.net. This site hosts all the premier voice talent and their demos in North America and serves as a database for casting, producers and directors to hear talent. Creating a voice demo is definitely the next step. A voice demo is an invaluable tool to help you get an agent and to promote your abilities. Once you have an agent, you will be in a position to be posted on Voicebank and to be sent out for auditions.

Tell me about Voice Pro Studio.

Voice Pro Studio opened in the fall of 2009. I am very excited to respond to what I understand is a huge existing curiosity and desire by actors and non-actors alike to learn about the world of animation voice recording. Every time I meet somebody new and get asked the question “What do you do?” and I say “I do cartoons!” the response is always “Wow that is soooo cool!”, immediately followed by “I would love to do that. How do you get in to voice?” Voice Pro Studio is geared towards answering those questions by teaching emerging actors about the ins and outs of the industry and working towards the actor’s development of microphone technique,taking direction and the production of voice demos (which gets your voice heard).

What’s next for you?

Well, right now I am delighted about the fact that my days are filled with working in the studio as a voice recording actor, instructor and demo producer. That being said, when the timing is right, I would love to move into the realm of voice directing and casting for animation series for television. I think that’s pretty exciting stuff.

And there you go. An interesting person that I know. If you’d like to know more about getting started in voice acting, visit www.melissaaltro.com. Voice Pro Studio on Facebook.

*According to my girlfriend, whenever I start a sentence with “Well,…”, you’re in for a boring twenty minutes.

Mmmmm. Now that’s good satire. Via MN.

In short: I want one. I was skeptical at first, maybe even a bit standoffish. But once I saw the word processor functionality, the handy keyboard dock, and the price ($499 base, $599 for the one I’d want), I was sold. For a guy who does a lot of writing and jotting on the go, this just makes so much sense. In fact, this could be an excellent home computer for about 90 per cent of users- folks who just need a web/media browser. The brilliance of this thing is that it hits the most lucrative emerging computing market – those who use it for entertainment and recreation – so squarely, it’s like a tactical nuclear strike.

I’m getting a bit fanboyish, so I’ll stop before I drool all over my lame, so-last-year, physical keyboard.

As usual, Gizmodo has a nice round up of all the details. I also enjoy MightyGodKing’s take.

If you have money to burn, this video will make you want one, too.

Take Don “Moose” Lewis (please). He is the commissioner of the new “All American Basketball Alliance”, currently looking to set up franchises in 12 cities in the Southeast United States. In order to differentiate itself from popular basketball leagues that you might actually like to watch, the AABA has strict limits on who can participate. Namely, “Only players that are natural born United States citizens with both parents of Caucasian race are eligible to play in the league.”

Yes, that’s right. “Moose” Lewis presides over the first overtly racist basketball league in the history of the game. Like most people of his ilk, Lewis justifies his hatred of others though poor grammar and trapezoidal exercises in logic:

“There’s nothing hatred about what we’re doing,” he said. “I don’t hate anyone of color. But people of white, American-born citizens are in the minority now. Here’s a league for white players to play fundamental basketball, which they like.”

For the uninitiated, Lewis’ conception of “fundamental basketball” is distinct from “street ball” played by “people of colour”. It’s also different from fundamentalist basketball, which is like regular basketball with more frequent prayer breaks.

The phrase “fundamental basketball” immediately makes me think of a bunch of guys in bushy moustaches and tight pants throwing a leather ball into old peach baskets. This scenario is immediately recognizable to anyone who has watched Canadian television in the last 15 years:

So, to summarize “Moose” Lewis’ proposal, he would like to take basketball to it’s rich, honky-strewn roots, and therefore make it totally unwatchable. With strategic thinking of this quality, the AABA is surely poised to take over the world. Well, the predominately white parts, anyway (I’m looking at you, Switzerland).

To me, this just seems like a bunch of mediocre white basketball players sore that they can’t play in the NBA on account of all the fantastically talented Black/Spanish/Turkish/Canadian/Etc. cluttering up the court. In fact, this kind of thinking is the basis of most racism, scaled up by many orders of magnitude: a bunch of people, painfully aware of their own shortcomings and terrified of fair competition or equal interaction, building little walls to hide behind. Schoolchildren should be required to attend AABA games just so they can see what human failure looks like in shorts and hi-tops.

Also, never listen to a man whose nickname is “Moose”. Don’t ask me how I know this. I just do.

I have kind of a love-hate thing going with Pat Robertson. On the one hand, he’s a virulent bigot and ignorant worm who likes to preach hate. This is bad. On the other hand, he is the source of a seemingly never-ending stream of blog-worthy material.

Yesterday, on his daily television show, Robertson suggested that Haiti is “cursed” because it made a pact with the devil to secure its freedom from France in 1804. You can watch the video here, because I don’t want such vile material on my blog. You’ll recall that Rev. Robertson, a prominent religious conservative, also thinks that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for America’s sinful ways.

For the record, this is what Rev. Robertson said:

“Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it,” he said. “They were under the heel of the French … and they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French.’

“True story. And the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal,’” Robertson said. “Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after another.”

This is an excellent example of what I like to call the “Onion of Insanity”. Some insane ideas, such as the conviction that your dog is a concert flautist or that your apartment is made of cheese, are fairly straightforward. They are what they are. However, there is a category of insane thinking that operates on several different levels. While presenting itself as a single insane idea, it is actually a densely layered, highly nuanced ball of crazy. In order to understand it, you’ve got to peel back the layers of the Onion of Insanity to get at each separate piece of nutbar logic while fighting the urge to weep.

In this case, the Onion of Insanity has three layers:

1. Incredible indifference to human suffering. Thousands upon thousands of people were killed in Haitian earthquake, and many million more are struggling through the aftermath. To suggest that this cataclysm is somehow the fault of the Haitian people is monstrous. It is especially disgusting to suggest that this punishment is the result of an alleged event that can only be described as superstitious nonsense.
2. Failure to grasp the theology which is presumably his entire job to understand. Pat Robertson is a Christian minister. Now, I’m not sure what they’re teaching in seminaries and bible colleges these days, but I assume that at a minimum, a cursory reading of the Gospels would be high on the list of required material. Funny then that Robertson has somehow missed the large sections dealing with “loving thy neighbour” and empathy towards the suffering of others. Maybe he just fell asleep after finishing the Old Testament.
3. Total disconnect with reality. Or, it’s a “True Story”. No, it’s not. This has never happened anywhere, ever. Satan does not make pacts with humans, for the simple reason that he doesn’t exist. Anyone who believes that “The Devil” is an actual guy who has the power to influence events in the real world is at best profoundly uneducated and at worse willfully ignorant. Look, it’s no secret that I give zero credence to religious interpretations of the natural world. And I would hope that most modern religious people understand that concepts like “Satan” are moral parables that speak to the human potential for evil. But if you really think that a horrible earthquake is the result of an unholy transaction between the founders of Haiti and Lucifer, then I am forced to conclude that you’re crazy. It’s not a rational belief, based on anything even remotely resembling evidence, science, or a basic grasp of how the world works. It must therefore be considered crazy.

Voila. Pat Robertson’s onion of insanity.  I have long since abandoned the hope that it will be forced from the public sphere and relegated to the compost heap of stupidity. But I suspect it will continue to grow and become more ponderous with each passing example of idiocy. Oh well. At least I’ll get a few more posts out of it.

UPDATE: Keith Olbermann says it much better than me.

Large cities, by virtue of their populations and opportunities for self-indulgence, typically support large communities of idiots. New York, being an especially large city, seems particularly blessed.

I was dismayed yesterday to read about the rise of so-called “modern cavemen” in NYC. Theses devotees of the “paleo lifestyle” eat large amounts of meat, fast frequently, avoid grain-based foods unavailable to actual paleolithic humans, and exercise by running around in the bushes and hurling stones at one another.

I have no real problem with any of these activities on their own. But when you start organizing these various things into a lifestyle and start proselytizing about it, you incur my unending wrath. I mean, listen to these people:

“I didn’t want to do some faddish diet that my sister would do.”

So why not invent a faddish diet all your own! Brilliant!

Mr. Le Corre, 38, who once made soap for a living, promotes what he calls “mouvement naturel” at exercise retreats in West Virginia and elsewhere. His workouts include scooting around the underbrush on all fours, leaping between boulders, playing catch with stones, and other activities at which he believes early man excelled. These are the “primal, essential skills that I believe everyone should have,” he said in an interview.

Not a day goes by where I don’t wish I was better at catching stones. And the ability to “scoot through underbrush” will no doubt prove useful while traversing the dense, triple-canopy jungle foliage that covers much of the Upper West Side and portions of SoHo.

And it gets worse:

Another caveman trick involves donating blood frequently. The idea is that various hardships might have occasionally left ancient humans a pint short. Asked when he last gave blood, Andrew Sanocki said it had been three months. He and his brother looked at each other. “We’re due,” Andrew said.

Dear god, please shut up.

There are two things that bug me about these urban cavemen. First, they totally misapprehend the process of human evolution:

“The problem is that as soon as we get out of our temperature-controlled environments, we’re weak,” Mr. Durant said. “Where’s that wildness that allowed humans to flourish throughout history?”

It was not, in fact, wildness that allowed humankind to thrive. It was our large brains that allowed us to invent things like clothes, tools, buildings and architecture and gain a decisive advantage over other wild things that, as well as being much better at being wild, wanted to eat us. All of these so-called cavemen still live in centrally heated apartments, so I question their commitment to a truly paleolithic lifestyle.

But the far more irritating thing about these people is what they say about our culture. Notably unlike our hunter-gatherer forebearers, modern city dwellers have both a surplus of cash and leisure time. With enough money and spare hours to indulge one’s self, its not surprising that all sorts of people come up with all sorts of stupid ways to become even more self-absorbed. Eat meat, or don’t. Scoot through the underbrush, or don’t. It’s no skin off my nose. But don’t organize it all into a “lifestyle” and pretend like you’ve discovered the secret to a more fulfilling and healthy life. These people just like belonging to a big, fun club that makes them feel special. It’s a basic human urge, one that I’ve never felt too comfortable with. This kind of thing gives us Boston Red Sox fans and fascism, so perhaps it’s something we should embrace less readily in our personal lives.

Really, the tragic thing about these modern cavemen is that there aren’t any modern sabretooth tigers to messily eviscerate them in the streets. Then they’ll know all about what it’s really like to be “wild”, and I won’t have to listen to their inane preening.

So, I finally bit the bullet this weekend and when and saw James Cameron’s sprawling uber-hit Avatar. I reckoned since it had been out for four weeks, I wouldn’t have to fight off a mob to get a decent seat. Not so. The film is apparently a box office juggernaut, and has cruised to the $1.3 billion dollar mark on the strength of it’s fourth weekend. For the average moviegoer, this means the theatres continue to be full. Book early.

It sure is popular. But is it any good? Answering this question – at least for me, prone as I am to over-thinking – is proving to be complicated. At the structural level, it’s a pretty good film. The story is entertaining enough, and the sheer audacity of its scope overshadows most of the film’s many implausibilities. The dialogue clips along, and the performances, while workmanlike, are efficient. The actors all know who the real star is – Avatar’s game-changing special effects. As a technical achievement, this film is masterful. It looks like nothing you’ve ever seen, which is good, since the story combines elements of at least 15 movies you’ve seen already.

It’s at the next layer of complexity – the movie’s themes, and dare I say, morals – that Cameron started to lose me. Avatar’s politics are relentlessly ham-fisted. I’m not entirely unsympathetic to the whole “technology corrupts man” or “respect the Earth” threads that run through the film. It’s just that Cameron’s treatment of them is totally lacking nuance or depth. The human representatives of the technological world are either clownish villains or unquestioning drones, while the indigenous Na’vi live a virtuous and perfect life, free from conflict, disease or want. I don’t begrudge the film’s right to criticize the failings of human industrial civilization. The trouble is there’s no real redemptive aspect to this story. Cameron seems to be saying that humanity is a doomed and immoral aberration, so your only hope is to become a big blue bucolic alien. And since those aliens don’t exist, it’s a problematic moral.

Of course, this is just part of the swirling vortex of contradiction that is James Cameron. There’s a delightful irony in a director that seems to hate technology yet is one of the most technology-driven filmmakers working today. And, it’s interesting to me that Cameron’s last film – built around a giant floating symbol of man’s hubris – bankrolled Avatar, a film that is, in itself, a mammoth exercise of ego. At this rate, the self-proclaimed King of the World will soon be bigger than his own films. No mean feat.

And yet somehow, I still enjoyed Avatar. There’s something to be said for participating in a cultural event, even if it is flawed. If you can keep your mind floating blissfully above the clumsy politics, there’s a lot to appreciate here. Unlike other effects-drive filmmakers (I’m looking at you, George Luca), Cameron can still back up his eye candy with a decent story. It’s not a great film, but it is great spectacle.  And, in the end, that’s probably worth the $15.