Plus ca change...

While it's hard to believe, the first anniversary of communicatrix: the blog, is right around the corner. And, while TypePad has served me well for that year, for a couple of reasons I've been considering a move to blog publishing software + hosting situation.

First, cost: money continues to be an issue, and there are some savings to be realized by shifting to a DIY set-up, especially if I go with an open-source product like WordPress.

But second, and more important, really, is the feeling of personal satisfaction I think I might gain by flying solo. I like the idea of becoming a little more knowledgeable, a little more adept, a little more self-sufficient. I've read about the problems Wil has been going through updating MT, which scares me a bit, but really, in the end it's just a buncha words on a server. Not all of them especially memorable, really.

Anyway, if any of y'all still have the http://communicatrix.typepad.com address bookmarked (does anyone still use bookmarks since the advent of RSS?), best update to plain old http://www.communicatrix.com.

And stay tuned for fresh details...and perhaps, a fresh look to go with them.

xxx c

P.S. If any of the five of you have recommendations, pluses, cons, raves, rants, about your fave blogging software, by all means, consider your advice solicited.

Quotation of the Day

mandala"Sit in a room and read, and read and read. And read the right books bythe right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time. This realization of life can be a constant realization in your living. When you find an author who really grabs you, read everything he has done. Don't say, 'Oh, I want to know what So-and-so did', and don't bother at all with the best-seller list. Just read what this one author has to give you. And then you can go on and read what he had read. And the world opens up to you in a way that is consistent with a certain point of view. But when you go from one author to another, you may be able to tell us the date when each wrote such and such a poem, but he hasn't said anything to you."

, Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

Photo: "Mandala," by Gilberto Santa Rosa, as posted on Flickr

Searches, we get searchesâ„¢

searchesAnd yea, with our holy Friday feature, Searchesâ„¢, do we put yet another medium-stinky week behind us. "on the seventh day, god created" (Google)

...the communicatrix. (A-fucking-men.)

pay scales for acting roles on hbo series (MSN)

Don't quit your day job.

busk katrina jokes (Yahoo)

Somehow, I don't think you're gonna get too many coins in the hat with this one, dude.

gay boy "washes his car" (Google)

Is that what they're calling it now?

vlog panties (Google)

Okay, there are officially too many blogs.

theater managment software (Dogpile)

Wait, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, okay, what was your question?

nicole richies diet (Google)

Breakfast: Double-nonfat latte, extra caf; half-grapefruit, pack of Salems. Mid-morning snack: pack of Salems Lunch: iceberg lettuce, no dressing; other half-grapefruit, half-pack Salems Mid-afternoon snack: Four deep-ish breaths. Dinner: Three shrimp; small filet mignon; Tab mojito Late-night snack: Half-apple, four Salems, Ex-Lax

slut of the day (Google)

Okay, that's it, I'm officially starting my campaign for the title. Michaaaaaaellllll?

How long did George Bush use Efudex (Google)

Not long enough to get rid of that big wart on his, oh, wait. Never mind...

yikes bi-focals 2005 (Google)

You're telling me, sister...

xxx c

So long, Spring Street

heartshot I've long harbored a perverse and persistent fondness for the Spring St. Network.

In my previous incarnation as Miss Internet Slut (consecutive wins, 2002-04), it served me well and often, with a much higher hit-to-miss ratio than the Lowest Common Denominator Sites (Yahoo!, Match, Matchmaker, Tickle, etc.). With their unusual approach to hottie harvesting, pulling from a network of at least marginally esoteric literary, humor and porn sites, Spring Street tended to draw a slightly more interesting, hipper and, most importantly, funnier crowd than Acme Date, Inc.

The other feature that made The Onion personals (my portal of choice) far more attractive was its pay structure. Unlike the all-U-can-eat subscription sites, The Onion offered packets of credits: buy more, save more, but basically, you could email whomever you wanted for a buck. And that one buck paid for all subsequent exchanges with this person. And, the best part, the other person did not even have to spend dime one to communicate back with you.*

I couldn't figure out how their business model could possibly be viable; apparently, it wasn't. I logged on recently** and, to my surprise, saw a whole new UI...and the pay structure it was designed to justify. Gone is the user-friendly buck-a-throw set-up; in its place is a byzantize structure of monthly and annual plans (with add-ons!) called "silver" and "gold" memberships, which offer increasing levels of hoo-hah for increasing amounts of money.

Worst of all is what they've done to the "free" members, which is basically to ghettoize them. From their site:

Standard-level (i.e. non-paying) members are limited in their ability to initiate contact, read full profiles, or view full-size pictures. Get even more interest by allowing standard members to view your profile and send you emails. Without this option, Standard members are limited in their ability to view your profile or contact you.

The cost for this interest-increasing option for lucky, lucky Silver and Gold members? An additional $19.95, per month.

I've marveled over the miracle of meeting someone as exquisite and perfect-for-me as The BF over something as random as the Internet. But I'm starting to realize it wasn't entirely random. Spring St. Network had created, however briefly, a user-friendly venue where like-minded souls could gather...in a way. It was like a really great bar where the drinks didn't cost too much and the lively, eclectic crowd all but guaranteed that if you didn't meet and/or go home with Mr. Right or Ms. Right Now, you'd at least have a good time and some lively conversation. In other words, like eHarmony, Spring St. had a strong brand personality (only one that didn't exclude atheists, homosexuals and other communists); now I fear that it will become just another megalopolic magnet for mediocrity, if it hasn't already, and there will be no island upon which the misfit toys can find one another.

Marketing opportunity, anyone?

xxx c

*Well, the second-best part. The first best was that, like any pay structure, it kept the total freaks and internet date spammers away. Oh, and for the record, I emailed The BF, so technically, I bought the first round.

**I know, I know, I told you it was perverse. The looking was more of a "holy CRAP, thank CHRIST I'm not there anymore", schadenfreude-tinged form of entertainment*** than anything else, and I pulled my profile within something like two weeks after meeting The BF.

***Okay. It's relationship porn. Why don't you just throw a saddle on my back and ride, muthas?

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Quotation of the Day/Life Should Imitate Art More Often Edition

cheesysmile"The key is to connect to the truth of where you are in the moment. When I am uncomfortable and accept my discomfort I am free to change; when I am uncomfortable and pretend to be okay I always get yanked back into discomfort." , Thomas Lascher, philosopher and headshot photographer, on how to take a good photo (and, if you take a step back, to have a good life)

[Photo by Thomas Lascher]

Walking the walk

I remember reading somewhere that it takes three weeks to seed a habit. I think it takes a little less to fall out of one, like, say, a day...maybe two.

Back when I was recuperating from my big, traumatic Crohn's onset I got into the very good habit of walking every day: initially, to the end of the driveway and back; eventually, a full 2.5 mile circuit around the 'hood.

In addition to providing me with much-needed fresh-air and exercise, it became sort of a social event: I befriended the then-8-year-old twins, Nicola and Katerina (and their older sister, Rosa) months before I realized I knew their father through a mutual friend in the theater. I developed a passing acquaintance with Hector and Chassy, owners of both a hip hair salon and one of my favorite houses in the neighborhood, and got a mini-tour of the new backyard patio they'd just put in. I met sweet, crazy Dorothy and the 27 neighborhood cats she'd taken on feeding.

It also did wonders for my frame of mind. I like yoga, but I don't like yoga on someone else's schedule, and I have some problems with the Namaste Lifestyleâ„¢. I'm not good at sitting still, so regular meditation is out. I refuse to go to the gym when it's crowded, which basically leaves me a window of 1:30 - 3 every day. Plus I hate the gym.

With walking, all I have to do is strap on some shoes and I'm good to go. Add an iPod, or my brand new nano, a birthday gift from the wonderful BF, and I'm great to go. Walking is like low-tech EMDR for not-so-hard cases: the scenery engages your eyeballs, the tuneage engages your monkey mind and an hour later, you feel normal again.

Like most things that are good for me but require me to actually remove myself from my computer/TV command station, it takes some psyching up even to do something as low-impact as walking. And, much like the way people who feel better after taking their medication decide they no longer need the medication because they feel so great, it's all too easy to stop once I've started.

But also-also, the threat of public humiliation can be a great motivator. So I'm laying it out in light and pixels right now: I'm walking, for at least a half-hour every day until October 12th, three weeks from now, and long enough to seed the habit.

There. I've talked the talk.

Now, for the hard part...

xxx
c

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Quotation of the Day

"(T)he whole beauty of the blog is that it's half personal diary and half public pronouncement. Blogs are like personal conversations at a restaurant that can suddenly include the people at the next table – sort of private, sort of not private." , writer-performer Julia Sweeney, in her post "I'm sorry. And I'm not moving" on her website's blog

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I don't miss you

As you may have guessed from the previous post, I've finally taken on item #8 on my to-do list: "organize photos."

Only along with the photos, I'm turning up some far more interesting items, like letters from my first summer at camp. And most of this stuff I didn't know existed anymore, much less remembered. It's like my own version of Found magazine, happening right here in my living room.

I'm probably the last of my line, so unless I get really famous in the next year or so, before the Armaggedon forces us back into caves, this is it: the five of you (along with a few lookyloos on Flickr) will be the last people to lay eyes on this stuff.

Part of me wants to do something with it: write a book about it or sell it off in some crazy way on eBay or write a book about how I sold it off in some crazy way on eBay. Most of me, however, wants to set a torch to the lot. You'd never know it to look at my neatly labeled file folders (in their corresponding neatly-ordered hanging files) but I'm not a finisher. Which is bad, since as the last of my line I've become the repository for over a hundred years' worth of family crap, and my ancestors were all packrats. Some of it is kind of cool, like these goofy letters or the expired his-'n'-her passports of my grandparents or the series of Polaroids at Benihana, where we always pretended it was someone's birthday so we could get the chefs to sing to us in Japanese and take our picture.

But most of it is, quite frankly, crap of the sort that weighs one down. For every cool snap of Mom & Dad tooling along in a boat on Lake Michigan some lake outside of Beaumont, TX, looking like Jack & Jackie, there are stacks upon stacks of badly framed, blurry shots of unidentified long-forgotten family members. For every fab snap of Mom holding her giant pudding, there are a contact sheet's worth, make that four contact sheets' worth, of culled shots. What do I do with ten yellowed, decaying copies of me in a rabbit fur coat with Linda, one of the nursing students who served as babysitter over the years, when I don't really even want one of them? Do I try to track Linda down, see if she's remembers me, strike up a correspondence? Or do I pitch the lot into the recycle bin and move on?

For the time being, I think I'll shift my sludge onto the giant electronic scrapbook that is the Interweb. I'll spare y'alls the worst of it; I see no reason why you'd care about my mother's report cards. All 12 of them. Plus college.

But as much as I'm annoyed and stirred up and dragged down by the emotional sinkholes piled up on my floor, I can't just throw them all out.

I might miss them.

xxx
c

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Quotation of the Day

Engagement chicken

Sundays have always been tricky for me, a love/hate, digging-the-Now-whilst-dreading-the-Future kind of proposition. Even as all my days become like all my other days (the curse of the freelancer), on Sunday, I still want a little something extra in the way of comfort: an extra half-hour in that toasty bed divot, a higher ratio of silence to noise in the house, a little more lazy-ass crossword-wrangling and a little less hard-ass monkey-working. Sunday is a good TV night and I think that's no accident: people want to shore up the goodness to brace themselves for the onslaught of stormy Monday.

Me, I see no better way to do it than with an ovenful of roast chicken. It's relatively inexpensive and easy to make, makes the whole house smell fantastic (unless you're a vegetarian, in which case I imagine it makes the whole house smell like death warmed over) and, unless you are a complete pig-monster, gifts you with delicious leftovers for the next couple of days.

I'm constantly in search of the Ultimate Roast Chicken Recipe, but trial-and-error has proven the genius of a high initial temp with the chicken cooked breast-side-down to sear the outside and seal in the juices, followed by a reduced tempurature for the remainder of cook time with the chicken in a more seemly, backside-down position. I'm behind the use of a rack (chicken cooked in juices puts the "ew" in "stewed") and agin' the use of the foil tent.

As of last night, I have also joined the ranks of devotees for an adaptation of a Marcella Hazan recipe that's come to be known as "Engagement Chicken," not because I like fruity monikers or am looking for good matrimonial juju, but because it produces the moistest, juiciest, delicious-est roasty-toasty chicken it's been my pleasure to consume outside of a restaurant extraordinary enough to know how to cook the simple things well. And as cooked in a convection oven (thank Jeebus for The BF and his expensive tastes in kitchen accoutrements), it may even match it:

Engagement Chicken

(Adapted from Marcella Hazan's More Classic Italian Cooking)

1 whole chicken (approx. 3 lb.) 2 medium lemons Fresh lemon juice (1/2 cup) Kosher or sea salt Ground black pepper

Place rack in upper third of oven and preheat to 400ºF*. Wash chicken inside and out with cold water, remove the giblets, then let the chicken drain, cavity down, in a colander until it reaches room temp (about 15 minutes). Pat dry with paper towels. Pour lemon juice all over the chicken (inside and outside). Season with salt and pepper. Prick the whole lemons three times with a fork and place deep inside the cavity. (Tip: If lemons are hard, roll on countertop with your palm to get juices flowing.) Place the bird breast-side down on a rack in a roasting pan, lower heat to 350ºF and bake uncovered for 15 minutes. Remove from oven and turn it breast-side up (use wooden spoons!); return it to oven for 35 minutes more. Test for doneness, a meat thermometer inserted in the thigh should read 180ºF, or juices should run clear when chicken is pricked with a fork. Continue baking if necessary. Let chicken cool for a few minutes before carving. Serve with juices.

*If you're using a convection oven, lower temps by 25º. Cooking time will be a little less per lb. than usual.

Supposedly, the wimmens who make this chicken for their mens end up with hardware on their digits faster than you kin say "finger-lickin' good!" Me, I just got a Band-Aidâ„¢ on that finger (casualty of spaghetti squash wrangling the night before), but the rest of 'em I couldn't keep out of the lemony schmaltz at the bottom of the roasting pan. Throw a bunch of carrots and onions (and sweet potatoes, if you're not on the SCD) underneath the rack in yer roasting pan and LORDY, you won't care if you're engaged, divorced or married-up in the seventh circle of hell.

IT'S THAT GOOD, PEOPLE!!!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled buzzkill Monday.

xxx c

PHOTO: "Kip", by _sammy_, as uploaded to Flickr

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Weekly roundup

What I read while I shoulda been workin':

What is more cruel than the love of your life dumping you three days after you give her a six-month anniversary mixtape of loooove? The Internet.
[via metafilter]

As Seth Godin points out, at Lord & Taylor, your first taste is free...

Whoever says science and poetry don't mix hasn't read the periodic table of haiku.
[via metafilter]

In the piercing world, Prince Albert doesn't always come in the can, but the customer is always perverted.
[via BoingBoing]

John August gets really honest about Hollywood, the green-eyed leech and the need to cut people loose.

Note to all my friends who are more than two years away from retirement, still in advertising and haven't scaled back their consumption yet: you have been warned.
[Seth Godin strikes again, as reported by Hugh MacLeod on gapingvoid]

Me wanna wiki.
[via Lifehacker]

A most wonderfully eloquent paean to Hank Williams on the anniversary of his birth, by Tony Pierce.

Now, get back to work!

xxx
c

Photo: "Chain" by JaundisElf via Flickr

You win some, you lose some

Today's good news: the very talented people for whom I shot this finally locked in cast and secured financing and location, officially moving their feature from pre-production to in production.

The bad news? In true Hollywood fashion, the part I was supposed to be playing went to the location owner's girlfriend.

First disclaimer: I'm not really railing about the unfairness of it all, at least, not much. For starters, I'm told she's eminently qualified, with a bona-fide resumé to back her up. And I'm sure were the roles reversed (no pun intended), I'd have no moral qualms about taking the gig. Next, it's a small part, not the kind that makes careers or piles of money. Truthfully, I'd forgotten about the gig until my friend who called to break the good/bad news to me this afternoon, and I know he felt worse about it than I did.

At least, at first.

ActresssmallIt's been a difficult year, career-wise. Thankfully, I'll make my insurance (SAG requires its members to earn a minimum amount working union jobs over a 12-month period in order to qualify), but in a year where my expenses were much higher than usual, my bookings were much lighter and the spots that did air, paid little. I got outgraded on one, a nice euphemism for cut the hell out of the thing, and none of them are paying the Big Money that most civilians seem to think commercial actors make (and, in fact, that we used to make, at least sometimes, in richer times with less media fragmentation).

So I'm living on savings, making money kind of an issue. But the other difficult thing has been the sharp drop-off in actual acting and creating that I've been involved in. I made a conscious decision a few years back to stop pursuing theatrical (film and TV) work, as the rate of return for my efforts had become deeply unsatisfying. For other reasons, some health-related, some personal and some completely random, I've basically stopped doing theater as well. My writing partner has had to take money work that basically makes her unavailable for working on our stuff, so the musical incarnation of #1 & #2 is no further along than it was at the start of the year.

As it gets harder and harder to land fewer and fewer jobs, I've thought seriously about dropping out of acting entirely, or at least, letting go of the notion until the competition thins a bit and I can play old ladies. And it's not just because I'm in a strange no-man's-land (pun sort-of intended), category-wise. I find myself uninspired by acting classes and happy to write...or design, or cook dinner, for that matter. As the old adage goes, if you don't have to act, don't.

I'm hoping that this is just me transitioning into the next incarnation of Colleen, Front and Center. Maybe it's really about me tiring of working for other people, the latest in a long series of moves to call my own shots. After all, I'm blogging online rather than journaling privately; it's hardly like I've lost the desire to get up in front of people and do stuff. (Unlike my retirement from copywriting, when I really and truly had, in the words of my old art director, lost the will to advertise.)

The thing is, it still hurts to lose the gig, even if it never really was mine to begin with. I know it's something I'll have to make my peace with, especially if I continue to make choices that put myself out there. And no matter what losses I sustain, since getting sick it's been much easier to clock my head a few degrees to the right and to see how much I have to be grateful for.

And there's always the idea that losing this opportunity makes me available for a better, cooler one.

But still, I want the job.

Or at least the opportunity to turn it down.

xxx
c

What to bring to the bunker

There's been a lot of talk about earthquake preparedness in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, but precious little about Armageddon preparedness. And frankly, maybe it's time we all gave it some thought. After all, beacons of light and joy notwithstanding, there are still an awful lot of people whose words and actions (or lack thereof) are the equivalent of taping a giant "KICK ME, HARD!" sign to our big, fat, collective American ass. So lately, I've been doing a lot of thinking about caves. As in, "Honey, what should we bring to live in the cave after they blow up our big, fat, collective American ass?"

I'm pretty sure we'll need some kind of pedal-generator for power since the battery on my new iPod nano is only good for 14 hours, but other than that, what sort of items would be useful at the end of the world as we know it?

Here's my working list so far:

  1. Water
  2. Bourbon (small-batch)
  3. Waterproof matches
  4. Carton of Marlboro reds
  5. Pringles, Sno-Caps and Space Food Sticks
  6. Blankie
  7. The BF
  8. Extra-large bottle of sleeping pills
  9. Second extra-large bottle of sleeping pills for The BF
  10. That stack of New Yorkers I'm behind on to read until #8 & 9 kick in.

xxx c

Quotation of the Day/Birthday Wish Edition

ann & fatty "For somebody to keep pounding on people and saying, 'This is damned foolishness, it cannot be that the 49th variety of bagel is more important than your schools or your bridges and you ought to ask yourselves why you act as if it were,' is, I think, a public service that needs repeating in every generation."

, Robert M. Solow, Nobel laureate economist, on the reissue of John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society

xxx c

,

Quotation of the Day

,

What lies behind blogjam

Having signed on to this writing-out-loud thing just prior to the blogging bubble bursting, I'm still relatively new to its attendant ups and downs (and techie widgety time sinkholes), but I've already experienced that thing known as blogging burnout, several times, to my great chagrin.

As any blogger knows, on occasion offline life intervenes, making blogging difficult. Sometimes the magnitude of a very blogworthy event is stultifying. Sometimes, well, sometimes it seems like there's just nothing going on.

Seems like.

Writer/actor/producer Shane Nickerson has an excellent and brave post up at Nickerblog about Blogjam, those times when yeah, there's something going on and yeah, if you did even a little poking around the thing that was going on (and the 47 things behind it) would bubble right up to the surface but nah, there's no way you're gonna tell anyone, much less everyone, what it is. In it, he ascribes his recent struggle with Blogjam to his current albeit quietly raging conflict with desire vs. reality. As in, I have the desire to be/do/have x and that's not really what's happening, at least, not in the way I'd like it to.

He wrote about acting, which is something I can and probably should address in a blog post at some point, but with such specificity that, of course, it manifested as something universal. Who among us doesn't have a deep, deep (and sometimes dark) secret we carry around, whose weight and density become ever greater and more burdensome even as our ability to access it grows weaker and weaker? Who wouldn't rather let life intervene in a million daily ways, rather than undergo the painful excavation of this truth, not to mention the irksome reality of it sitting around our mental living rooms, tatty and dirt-covered, reminding us of our shame?

Okay, maybe that's a little overwrought. What do you expect? After all, part of my secret dream is to be an actor, okay, a much-beloved oracle-pundit. The desire to yak the truth out loud in front of people (and to be much-beloved for it) cuts across a few job descriptions.

And yes, it's a wee bit frivolous (not to mention guilt-inducing) to ponder on such things when there is so much very big, very real, very horrible news all around us about people and things that need our immediate, physical attention.

But Shane's post, and, hopefully, this one, is a good reminder not to let too much time roll by. Yes, try to maintain a sense of proportion, but also please tend to yourself. Put on your oxygen mask, or make sure its readily accessible, before you attempt to assist the passenger in the seat next to you.

Because you either deal with the truth or it will come back somehow, someway. Either you will wind up in the hospital, 20 lbs underweight with blood pouring out of your intestines or you'll get the c-a-n-c-e-r or you'll you'll find yourself, at 88 years old, sitting at your kitchen table with your grandchild, tears pouring down your face as you finally acknowledge, out loud, that if you had it to do all over, Colleen, you would have done it all differently.

I have seen too many loved ones die with their truths unrecognized. Note that I'm not saying their dreams unrealized: who knows if Gramps could have directed pictures or Mom could have been a movie star or if Dad could have been a singing cowboy? There wasn't much call for singing cowboys after 1938. Actually, there wasn't much call for singing cowboys ever, but I'd guarantee you dollars-to-donuts that Dad would have died, and probably lived, a much happier man if he'd gotten down with that truth.

So by all means, let's keep sending checks to rebuild and fighting for democracy and reducing/reusing/recycling. But let's also stay in touch with what that kid from New Hampshire in all of us came out to Los Angeles to do, or what he really wants to do now. Because not acknowledging what's really going on in ourselves, whatever fear or desire or strange bugaboo haunts us, is the first step on the road to isolation from everyone and everything around us.

It's not easy. Sometimes, it's not even simple. Often, it might even feel frivolous. But it is so, so necessary if we're going to make this any kind of a world to hand over to the next shift.

xxx
c

TECHNORATI TAGS: , , ,

Quotation of the Day

"If “Ana” is a lifestyle, so is Russian roulette. Are you a practicing rouletter? Yes, that's why there's a bullet in my temple."

, JJ McMillan, in the comments section to Neil Kramer's post on Citizen of the Month about the flak-back he's getting from the pro-ana lobby for questioning the extra-svelte-ness of Nicole Richie's new profile

xxx c