Unsolicited Advice

One of the rare good memories I have of spending time with family over Christmas break when I was a kid was the video games. Starting at age five, the year my parents brought home a Nintendo and a gold Zelda cartridge, we always took the week between Christmas and New Year's Eve to sit in front of the TV and save the world. My father had the controller, my mother had the notes and the guidebook, and we kids sat on the floor and kibbitzed. ("Have you gone through that door, Dad? No, that door. No, that  door. No, Dad , that thing  is a door.") We kids had no school, Dad took the week off work, and we lived on cheese and crackers and sandwiches and takeout so that Mom could take a break from cooking. After Zelda, I remember playing the original Final Fantasy for NES, and later the first one for the SNES; Dragon Warrior (Dragon Quest, in Japan) I, II and IV; The Secret of Mana; The Illusion of Gaia; and ChronoTrigger. I think I'm forgetting a couple. I don't think we

RATMAS! RATMAS! RATMAS! I know you are all waiting eagerly for news of how Ratmas went. I promise you they are fat and spoiled, as always.  If you want to see all the bits and bobs as they were posted, go ahead and check my Instagram feed. For a good summary of the whole shebang, read on. Re-setting the rat cage is a multi-stage process. First you have to clean the cage. I have refrained from taking photos of that. Rats are adorably disgusting little creatures.  Step two is to actually decorate the little heathens' dens. Top cage is first; Casper and Mickie got dumped on the bed while I wiped down their house, including the ceramic floor tiles I put down to keep them from chewing through the cardboard floor and getting their toes eaten off by the cranky old man downstairs.  Nest boxes go in first. Then a layer of shredded paper. The local supermarket has a bin near the door full of coupon circulars, aka, free rat bedding. Next, a layer of package paper, courtesy of the Chewy boxes

I know it's cliche. So sue me. With all the chaos of the past couple of years, we need a little traditional bedrock to rest on. Since I don't travel or see family for the holidays, I've had to develop my own rituals. Ratmas, for instance. I'm generally the only person in the house who celebrates Christmas, or at least Christmas decorations, so I try to keep the tinsel to my room. On the other hand, I am 100% in control of where my rats live, and they love food they can gnaw open, so I go all out in decking their space. They are rats and cannot stop me. They have fancy snowflake bowls and new fleeces and get wrapped treats and so on and so forth. Pictures tomorrow, so sit tight for that. The other thing I usually do is work a show. There's a local production in Somerville called "The Slutcracker", which is a full-length feminist burlesque version of The Nutcracker. Not suitable for family, obvi, but if you're interested you can rent the video version at

Old photographs are literally precious. Nobody thinks about that, but it's true. Until the advent of modern color processes, which use dye emulsions, all photographs were taken on paper or film coated with a light-sensitive solution of silver halide. Black and white negatives are coated with the same precious metal we make into cheap rings and expensive forks. An even older technique, the daguerreotype, is even richer. Daguerrotypes are taken directly onto a copper plate which has been surfaced with silver and polished to a mirror finish. The latent image is brought out with iodine, built up with mercury vapors (yikes!) and fixed with a solution of gold chloride.  The result is quite striking, and unlike any photo you're used to, although it does bear some resemblance to some kinds of holographic stickers. The image emerges not from development of a pigment, but as degrees of reflection among clouded areas of the mirror. Areas of the plate that have been exposed to light will c

If you were a child in the 1980s, your parents were pretty much required by law to show you several movies: The Princess Bride, The Goonies, Labyrinth, and The Neverending Story. These movies are all surprisingly weird if you think about them too long, which I do not recommend doing whilst sober. The Princess Bride has Peter Falk reading to Fred Savage in a frame story that exists solely because of the conceit of the original book, The Goonies is pretty much an indexed list of "things that look awesome but you should never try to recreate in real life", and Labyrinth featured David Bowie, or more accurately, David Bowie's gratuitous leggings. The Neverending Story is weird. Just weird. I have no idea why all of our parents thought it was a good idea to let us watch that. I am here to tell you, in total honesty, that the book makes the movie seem totally normal and not at all like someone accidentally used a sheet of blotter acid as a filter in the breakroom coffee machine

The Wonderful World of Sazae-san ( サザエさん ) is a daily yon-koma, or four-panel, manga that chronicles the quotidian life of a housewife named Sazae. The genre is referred to as "slice-of-life"; there are no monsters, no psychic abilities, nobody stares into the camera for four solid minutes to "power up". Just Sazae, and her family. With respect to American daily comic strips, Sazae-san covers topics similar to Sally Forth or The Family Circus, with a market penetration right up there with Garfield. The strip was published daily from 1946 until 1974, moving from a small local paper to the enormous Asahi Shimbun in 1949, and creator Hasegawa Michiko always envisioned Sazae as the modern, forward-thinking wife and mother of post-war Japan. Sazae argued with her husband at a time when men were very much head of the household in Japan (the word now used for "husband", 'goshūjin', originally meant "master"), and she later became a card-carrying

Much like the magic example, special effects are a billion times cooler when you know how they're achieved. I've had an interest in them for as long as I can remember -- they're in that class of things that can pretend to be other things convincingly if you're clever about how you use them. You know, like how YouTube spent fifteen years using Macromedia Flash for the exact thing Flash was developed to not do. Whether older or newer SFX are more interesting is a toss-up. I admit to having a soft spot for hand-drawn and stop-motion animation, but practicals blur the line between optical illusion and engineered stage magic. The public library where I grew up had a giant coffee table book of matte paintings by Ralph McQuarrie that I coveted endlessly. But digital effects use a lot of surprisingly similar techniques to old optical compositing methods, just executed with a workstation and a tablet. The feller below, Captain Disillusion, could be classified as a late-generatio

In 1945, Paris was devastated. The war may have been over, but the struggle for survival was not. Luxuries were unheard of; basic necessities were difficult to come by. Still, they would not give up their stranglehold on fashion. With materials scarce, the tailors and seamstresses of Paris revived an old tradition of sending their designs out for inspection, not on models, but on mannequins. A series of blank-faced figures, about two feet tall, were clothed in exquisitely detailed miniature versions of the latest fashions in real silk, leather, cotton, fur, and wool, complete with tiny beading and working buckles. After debuting in France as "Le Théâtre de la Mode", the exhibit was rechristened "Fantasy of Fashion" in English, and sent 'round the world as proof that Paris still survived. At the end of the international exhibition, no one seemed to know quite what to do with the figures. After spending some time neglected in the basement of a department store, th

The Thief and the Cobbler is an animated movie that has lain unfinished for over fifty years. In 1964, an animated named Richard Williams was engaged to illustrate a collection of translated stories about Mulla Nasruddin. It inspired thoughts of an animated feature, combining elements of Nasruddin. By 1968, news of production was beginning to leak out. And... chaos. Funding was difficult to come by; animation was slow. At one point, three hours of drawing had been done, but had not been arranged into a coherent plot. The translator of the book Williams had illustrated had been partially funding the project, but Williams had questions about the accounting, and when the author withdrew support, the rights to his translations of Nasruddin went with him.  Voice actors came and went. Vincent Price was brought on as the villain. The new main character, a cobbler, was (mostly) mute. Studio funding was promised, withdrawn, promised again. Williams kept learning new animation tricks and re-draw

When I first moved here, I was amused to find a giant monument to drugs in the middle of the Public Gardens. As mentioned, one of the Victorians' favorite hobbies was attaining mastery over nature. The entirety of the Back Bay neighborhood is a testament to their success. It is almost entirely landfill, created by leveling a nearby hill, and in 1837, one of the first ex-marshes was established as the US's first public horticultural garden. Which then spent the next 20 years fending off the city's attempts to annex the land and build stuff on it. In 1859, the dispute was settled in favor of the plants. Since they couldn't build more city over it they constructed a lovely little suspension bridge and swan pond instead. I've never bothered taking the swan boats, but I've spent a fair amount of time under the weeping willows, watching the ducks. The flower beds are still planted in precise and colorful patterns every season, just as the Victorians would have wanted

Stage magic is a fascinating blend of entertainment and engineering. Sleight-of-hand and street magic can often be accomplished with minimal props, but larger illusion designed to be viewed from a stage use what amounts to cleverly designed furniture. The props are "gaffed" -- rigged with some concealed mechanism or secret that makes them function in a way not obvious to the audience. The Masked Magician has done a series of videos revealing some of the rigging behind popular stage illusions. The mask is because professional magicians hate this; they sink a lot of time and money into engineering these tricks, and I seem to be in the minority who thinks they're more engaging when I know the secret.  The videos also highlight the surprisingly logical reasons why the magician's assistants are almost always attractive women. Firstly, pretty ladies are distracting, which is great when you don't want the audience thinking too hard about your equipment. But secondly, for

The Boston subway is the oldest in the US. Initially built in the 1890s, people thought the first segment running from Park St to Boylston was a bonkers idea. That chunk still exists, and is still in use. It's very historic, by which I mean the concrete spalling suggests that no one has laid a finger on the Boylston St station for at least 100 years.  Other stations have slowly been refurbished, and one of the nicer things the MBTA does is make an attempt to leave some of the original mosaics and tilework when they gut everything else. The original stations date to the Beaux-Arts era, and although the signs are not as elaborate as some you might see in the Métro, they're still detailed and aesthetic work. These stations were meant to be show pieces when they were constructed; the late Victorians saw artwork, and culture in general, as part of man's triumph over nature. They would have been horrified by the later utilitarian forms of Brutalism. The modern signage is mainly m

One of the more intriguing things to come out of the advent of the internet is the idea of real-time interactive mass entertainment. I mean, I guess you can play MMOs if you want, but I find ARGs much more interesting. An ARG, or alternate-reality game, is a form of what's now been dubbed "unfiction", a fictional narrative that purports to be real, which typically invites the audience to participate in the progression of the story in some way. There are unfiction projects that just tell a story that the audience can interact with, but an ARG specifically implies a puzzle element. Get a riddle, solve the riddle, get the answer to the puzzle masters, unlock the next bit of plot as a reward. ARGs can be run on a single message board, or span multiple web pages, YouTube channels, Twitter and Instagram accounts, phone numbers, telephone pole flyers, mailed packages, geocaches, and in-person live events.  Precursor games have been run through newspaper ads for decades (see: the

The Amber Room is one of the most famous lost treasures of modern times. Originally installed in the Charlottenburg Palace at the behest of Frederich I of Prussia, the Amber Room was the work of artist Andreas Schlüter and craftsman Gottfried Wolfram. Most people, I think, assume it was merely a symptom of the excesses of the rich, but it was originally designed as an enormous art piece, not a mere monument to money and power. It remained in place until a visit by the Russian monarch Peter the Great, who admired it so much that Frederich had it packed up and shipped to him as a gift after the two signed a mutual-defense treaty against the grim spectre of... uh, Sweden, who was probably a lot more threatening in those days. The world kept pretty good track of the Amber Room from the point it was shipped to Russia in over a dozen giant boxes, right up until 1943, when the Nazis packed up and left Pushkin ahead of what they thought was the end of the war. The entire room was dismantled, a

One of the things I most love working with in flow arts is silk. Nothing flutters quite like 5 momme habotai. I discovered this quite on my own by buying a set of fan veils from wingedsirenny.com for no particular reason, but I've since found out that I'm not the first person to think much bigger than that. Loïe Fuller, whose real name was Louise, was an American dancer who spent a lot of time hanging out with Toulouse Lautrec. I'm not altogether sure how she wound up in Paris -- the most anyone will say is that she was an actress and burlesque performer, so presumably she just went where being disreputable would earn her decent money -- but once she got there she made a very big splash.  Loïe's gimmick was to dance swathed in yards and yards of China silk, lit by a lot of new-fangled electric lights. The electric part was important, because unlike flames or limelights, electric lights could be fronted with sheets of colored glass, and if you were quick and wore gloves

Cirque du Soleil is undoubtedly the most famous circus in the world. Perhaps the only internationally-known one, since the demise of Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey in 2017.  If you have ever seen their shows, you know they are a master of atmosphere. I have found very little crossover between the local dance and circus people, which is puzzling to me -- Cirque shows prove that there is room for both spectacle and musicality on the stage. There is always this sense that they exist in a strange twilight, not unlike that evoked by the movie Moulin Rouge. Everything is intentionally too strange and too much to be real And yet, it is right there, happening live in front of you. I have to say it was also a trip going to see Zumanity, the burlesque revue, after having accidentally run away from home and joined the circus myself. I know people who do all of those things, and usually in a similar state of undress. Several Cirque shows are available on YouTube, if you rummage around. This

Anyone who has ever taken an English literature class has had Shakespeare crammed into their heads whether they wanted it or not. There's nothing wrong with Shakespeare, mind; he's just been accorded a very strange amount of status for a guy who was basically writing the 16th c. equivalent of Game of Thrones (or The Hangover, for comedies) for the average groundling to watch while drunk. Because of the exalted position he holds in the academic firmament, people are obsessed with tracking down everything he ever wrote. If we find a laundry list that can be certified as Shakespeare's, it'll be enshrined at Oxford. It's also sparked a variety of entertaining arguments over whether Shakespeare wrote all the plays attributed to Shakespeare (probably yes), or secretly wrote a bunch of stuff attributed to other people (probably no). Documentation wasn't really a thing in the late 1500s, so when the public wanted a collection of his plays, it was up to a couple of his a

Armchair treasure hunts are another long-running fascination of mine, occasionally dovetailing with the aforementioned obsession with lost things. The Ur-example is the 1979 book "Masquerade" by Kit Williams, a 32-page picture book whose text and illustrations contained clues to the whereabouts of a bejeweled golden hare that had been buried somewhere in Britain. Someone did solve that one, although it's been disputed whether he used just the book or leveraged previous knowledge of Williams' doings around the time of the project. Presumably considering that too much trouble to go through again, Williams' followup, known at first as "the bee book" or "book without a name", merely challenged the reader to use the contents to guess the book's intended title, which turned out to be "The Bee on the Comb".  A number of others have been published since, mostly of the "solve-the-riddle" variety. I remember my parents buying &quo

Ballerinas have a reputation for being crazy. This is not entirely unfounded. It takes a very particular kind of person to spend their life training to perform superhuman feats of athleticism and pretend they're nothing. Two authors with whom I am personally acquainted, Matt Phillion of the YA novel The Indestructibles (https://www.theindestructiblesbook.com/) and Phoebe Roberts of the Mrs Hawking series of plays (http://www.mrshawking.com/) independently sat down and had the thought, "You know who would be crazy enough to be Batman? A ballerina." Margot Fonteyn was an English ballerina of the early to mid-twentieth century, who enjoyed considerable renown. Her career spanned decades in an art form where even now top dancers retire well before forty, and her performance style had wide-ranging influences visible to this very day. The linked documentary is quite long, but I promise there is something in it for everyone. The first two-thirds is a charming story of an unlikel

As many of you know, despite knocking around in about a billion different classes, my actual dance specialty is flow arts. If you've ever seen people doing tricks with hula hoops at music festivals, that's part of it; flow arts, or spinning, also covers pretty much anything you can juggle or flap while dancing, including fans, staves, wands, poi, ribbons, banners, devil sticks, and a wide assortment of things that can be set on fire. (I do not spin fire. I have three feet of hair and I want to keep it that way.) Hoops are one of the more common props, mainly because they're cheap and easy to get. Dance hoops are not the same thing as toy hoops; toy hoops are light and flimsy, whereas dance hoops are made of heavier polyethylene plastic. You can construct your own out of irrigation tubing from the hardware store, if you're so inclined. They have to be pretty sturdy, because when you start practicing tricks, you're going to spend a lot of time accidentally bouncing th

Sometimes, your groundbreaking new show is a hit. Sometimes not. On very rare occasions, it sparks a riot. "Le Sacré du Printemps" (music by Stravinsky, choreography by Nijinsky) was one of that last. "Riot" is perhaps a bit of an exaggeration. Not too long into the ballet, the audience stood up and started shouting their uncomplimentary reviews. Some of them threw things. A lot of them demanded their money back. The fuss was loud enough to drown out the orchestra; Nijinsky had to stand in the wings and scream the counts at the dancers to keep them on time. Nothing was, say, set on fire, which was a not necessarily a given back in the days when costumes were flammable and theaters were lit by gas or arc lamps. In the audience's defense, while it is immediately recognizable today as a modern dance piece, modern dance did not exist when it premiered in 1913. If you bought a ticket expecting something along the lines of Petipa's "La Bayadère", and you

Believe it or not, there are a few things I am not good at. If you don't believe me, ask anyone who ever got stuck with me in a high school chem lab. Music theory was one of those things for a long time. I was fine all the way through the part where it's math and physics -- frequency ratios and overtones and all that make perfect sense to me. But I lost the plot right around the part about keys and modes and and voices. I kept asking, "But WHY is it grouped like that? WHY is that the pattern we use? WHY?" The answer turns out to be, "Because 300 years ago, a rich white guy wrote a monograph, probably in German, and we all just ran with it." The brave soul who finally said the quiet part out loud and admitted that all of this is completely arbitrary was Adam Neely, a jazz musician and YouTube personality who has provided the only explanation for any of music theory that has ever made any sense to me whatsoever. Most of his videos are uncontroversial, at least

I have always been fascinated by lost things. If you saw my YouTube history, you'd find countless videos on lost media, unreleased games, and uncracked codes. Things that once existed (maybe) (probably) (documentation is spotty) and had meaning that has slipped away into the cold void of time. Ideas and imagery once existed, and might still if we could just find that one forgotten copy, stuffed away in a dusty attic, stored in a trunk that no one has opened since WWII, neatly shelved among identical tapes that everyone technically knows are there , but nobody cares about enough to actually look at.  "Agrippa, or: A Book of the Dead" is a piece that intentionally evokes the loss of this disappearing media. A project consisting of a poem written by cyberpunk novelist William Gibson, written to a floppy disk that was then embedded in an artist's book assembled by Dennis Ashbaugh. Both the poem and the book centered on themes of nostalgia, contrasting the subjective, impe

Back in 2020, one of the ways I tried to keep myself from going bonkers was sewing. I always have a stash of fabric, if not from the local discount fabric store, then at least from various dead and dying garments I've disassembled for the raw materials. I started ages ago making bags and purses, and oddly enough, small plushies. Normally, those aren't novice projects; plushies can be small and fiddly and get into odd bits of 3D design that apparently most people have trouble with? I always just think of the seam lines like a wireframe model, but I also have an equally-amateur background in 3D CAD modeling, which most sewists don't. Eventually I did get around to making actual clothing, for myself and others. I started those with commercial patterns, but didn't stay there long. Commercial patterns are drafted for a standard body with standard proportions, which is decidedly not me. So by the time I adjusted things for a full bust and hip and a short torso and wide should

I rarely if ever live in a house with roommates who all celebrate Christmas, even the secularized tinsel-ful version I observe, so I confine my decorating to the rat cage.  Ratmas planning starts around Ratsgiving, partly because everyone else is doing holiday things and I need to keep myself occupied, but mostly because the elaborate cage sets involve building a lot of miniatures that are washable, disposable, edible, or some combination of the three. Everything that goes into their cage has to be safe to chew on, because they will, and I try to make most of their decorations out of food, because it gives them joy. Things that aren't food are paper, cardboard, or fabric, all of which they will eventually destroy, pee on, and then shred for their nest. Unsurprisingly, I find kit-bashing to be a useful way to work. Miniatures artists are accustomed to rummaging through their parts bin and finding something that "looks like" what they need for their project. Maybe with some

Those of you who have been around a while -- and there are a surprising number of you here -- will recall that I run an Advent Calendar every year, or I try to. I gave up about halfway through last year because... well, you know.  This year's theme will be the arts. Art is one of the few things I can do for free, or nearly so. I lucked into a very good arrangement with a local non-profit almost a decade ago, and it's been almost the only thing keeping me sane. The world is a giant dumpster fire right now, and I'm starting to see Nero's point about the distraction value of an impromptu stringed-instrument recital. I am personally mainly in live performing arts, but I have a practical, historical, and archival interest in a lot of others. One of my focuses way  back in college was in the history of media and technology; the field was still very new around the turn of the millennium, to the point where my best choice of advisor for this was the guy who admitted to owning a