playbill or agnes dei

Recently, I had the chance to see the local community theatre produce an excellent performance of John Pielmeyer's play Agnes of God. I recall there was a 1985 cinematic adaptation of the piece starring Jane Fonda as court-appointed psychiatrist, Dr. Martha Livingston, and was rather controversial movie, the play itself a dramatization of an actual tragic case.

I did not realize how challenging the original stagecraft was, however, the character of the psychiatrist interacting with just two other players with an almost unhalting monologue and dialogue that lasts for the entire performance. As the fourth wall, I was a little discouraged that there were only three people in the audience to witness the spectacle, though the actors and crew did not stint the small house any of the effort. Dr. Livingston has many memorable reflections, but I think the one of the most profound and foreshadowing moments came with her opening soliloquy when she remembers returning to the cinema time and time again to see one of her favourite stars play out a doomed life, hoping against hope that during one showing she'd be sitting in the darkened rows and all of a sudden and without warning, the projectionist had discovered that long lost “alternate reel,” the one with the happy end. The psychiatrist, despite and because of what she was about to face at the nunnery, still believed in alternate reels.

quitsies, keepsies

The Local (the German daily in English) has an interesting profile of an engineer from Düsseldorf who proposes to revolutionize exploiting renewable and passive energy by installing giant spherical collectors mounted on brackets to focus heat generated by sunlight so power can be squeezed out of it.

Arguably, these Raw Lemon masts are more aesthetic and less intrusive and intensive than shingling one's entire roof with delicate and resource-demanding solar-panels or putting arrays of photovoltaic cells out to pasture, whose manufacture require several rare compounds to function and are prone to the caprice of the elements and cloudy days. Two or three of these simple massive marbles, that are nothing more than magnifying lenses, can heat a household and because of the shape of the Raw Lemon, the sun is never at the wrong angle. This pretty ingenious project has been exclusively crowd-funded and there are a surplus of enthusiastic investors.

the dandy warhols or the factory method

Before his discovery in the 1960s, Andy Warhol (with the help of the penmanship of his mother) designed book jackets, advertising pieces and album covers, like this gallery of art for jazz records curated by Dangerous Minds. Be sure to check out more of DM's daily onslaught of discoveries on film, literature, artwork and sundries.

telescreens have no off switch or the ballad of max headroom

In more underwhelming news, whose aggressions were probably always buried in some consent boilerplate, comes the revelation (read, natural consequence) that Her Majesty's spy agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) ran a program under the codename Optic Nerve that captured billions of snapshots from video chat sessions, indiscriminate and warrantless to be sure.

The article focuses on one particular messaging service but I am certain that others were also sampled. Material harvested was not intended to be a record of users' conversations and contacts—though I don't believe that that cache of intelligence was simply atomized, but was rather a platform to test the limits and filters of facial recognition software and sift out villains already posted in the police mugbook. The exercise is proving of dubious value, and in fact they've sequestered a sizable amount of lewd displays (described as undesirable amounts of flesh). The surveyors plead to be at a loss as to what the disposition ought to be for these false-positives, whether they're to be classified as other distinguishing features or put on deposit in a registry somewhere of posing indecents for future use.

carriage-and-four

Gentle readers, I could not even begin to reconstruct the daisy-chain of thoughts that made me think of the tale of Johnny Fedora and Alice Blue-Bonnet, a short animated musical from 1946 produced by Disney animators, but suddenly the lilting and wistful tune was in my head.

The vignette tells of two fancy hats that fall in love in a department store display case, who are sold separately to two different human owners who do not do much to foster their courtship and rather dash it. The fedora's owner eventually tosses Johnny out as old and tattered, but when all seems lost, a coach driver saves Johnny from the dust-bin and paring out two holes along the brim for ears and outfits his horse. The snazzy happy ending happens when a despondent Johnny realises that the nag trotting beside him is proudly wearing Alice. I don't know where exactly the memory came from but it brought a smile to my face the other day and was happy to find that others recall this too.

jai alai

The European Union and Brazil will sink a submarine fibre-optic cable beneath the waters of the Atlantic to link Portugal and Latin America directly and provide a relief artery for more of the world's population to avoid using American infrastructure for communications.

There are manifold benefits behind this project, which is an upgrade on an existing connection now only able to rely calls from land-lines (though one ought to wonder about the growing strain on band-width and the dozens of tenant advertisers and background services that pounce on with every move, putting exponential demands for speed with malingers plus an array of possibilities of what to do next and how an image is gainsays far more than a thousand words) with cost-savings and added security. Fibre-optics, though far from impervious, are much harder to tap at the source, some hundreds of metres under the sea and to focus in on due to the lack of an electromagnet signature, and I suppose it creates a secondary industry of intermediaries and mercenaries to protect and attack the newly expected integrity of the internet. That's a strange thing to ponder too: when the internet was just simply considered a lawless and enter-at-ones-own-risk place, I think people were more willing to accept trespasses as sublimating things, evaporating and only with mostly fleeting and contained repercussions, though party to any petty-thief and highway-man, rather than a sly and voracious monitoring in telescoping hopes of tilling something incriminating. I hope these efforts at creating an alternative are not immediately contaminated, either by espionage or the peddling of some false sense of security that can never exist in an open and free internet.

three is a magic number

The fantastically thoughtful aggregate of boot-strapping and interesting things, Brain-Pickings, shares a new collection of self-improvement reflections and exercises from Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology in the States—though popular in Europe for years, that seem to certainly fulfill their promises of more joy and less angst.

Though the notion of amending ones gratitude is certainly important and could be nothing but therapeutic—mutually, I am not sure how I personally feel about thanking someone long after the fact, since one ought to be, if anything, gracious, and I know—according to the prescription, at least, some people might not take too well to a confrontation with gratitude. Nonetheless, it is something to think on, even if one does not carry out the rehearsal fully. Seligelman suggests writing a truly heart-felt speech to deliver in person, but I suppose the greatest impetus comes too late, like only socializing with a co-worker for his retirement or farewell celebration. Another ritual, however, appealed very much to me: I have morning routines but not so much a nightly one but I will certainly try to incorporate Seligman's thrice-blessed days along with the news and a pair of posts. One ought to try to recall at the end of the day (and document) three things that went right during the course of the day and acknowledge why, despite or because. No one ought to have to grasp for citations, but it could be as simple as “I heard a snatch of Me and Julio down by the School Yard,” and it was because the Universe knew I needed that tune to carry in my head.