Question: Would this page ever have existed if you had never looked at it?

Saturday, December 25, 2010

A Steampunk Tempest for Christmas

So I just finished my fifth semester a few days back. Before leaving for home, I had one last final, a presentation for my Scene Design class. We each had to present our full color model or two color renderings for our production of The Tempest. I of course did a full color model, enjoying crafting much more drawing. In the presentations we also had to go over our concept for each design. Me, being slightly out there compared to the rest of the class, chose to create a Steampunk version of The Tempest. Please understand thatthe pictures of myproject in this post are of a model. Nothing to fancy here, so please don't judge too harshly.

Now for those who may not know what Steampunk is.... well... its something you can't describe too easily. It's better to glean the aesthetic from pictures and such. Below is an... okay video describing Steampunk.

So... Yeah. I want to reiterate that this is not exactly the best source. Honestly, I would just do a search of Steampunk and see what pictures come up. Or this is another pretty good source, surprisingly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk
Basically the idea of Steampunk is to take the Victorian age, turn
of the century, and put a
twist on it. Take what appeals to your eye and incorporate it in with today's technology and such. What if steam power brought about th
e information age? How could you make a steam powered motorcycle? Airship? You get the point.
Usually there is a bit of the occult or what have you thrown in for good measure. But the core of Steampunk is the gears and steam and pulleys within the machines, not the shiny exterior.

Anyhoo... I love love love the aesthetic. So while reading The Tempest for research on my set,
I started thinking of abstract ways of doing the island or magic and what not. For those not familiar with The Tempest, this is a passable excuse for a substitute. Please read it. It's truly not that difficult to understand what's going on. And it's short. But if you really don't want to read a piece of good literature...



Anyhoo.... Take two.... I found myself imagining, as I read the play, this great machine floating in the middle of the Mediterranean. This machine was state of the art at one point, but, for some undisclosed reason, it was utterly and suddenly abandoned. It lay in a dormant state for years, until the usurped duke of Milan, Prospero, was marooned there. Prospero's wizardry in my interpretation of the show becomes his ability to control the machine of the island. During the many years of solitude, the island-machine was overtaken by nature. Nature and the machine have become twisted and entwined within each other. Thatwas akey idea I wanted to focus on, this underlying tension, war waging between machine and nature. What is truly natural on the island? Machines were built without the presence of nature, yet nature was always their before the machines were ever build. Who actually has claim to the island? This is epitomized in the structure that Prospero lives in, shown to the left. I wanted to try to portray the pipes and tubes of the machine fighting against nature, growing out of the ground haphazardly. This structure would emit bursts and puffs of steam every so often. Moss is growing on most surfaces on the island, flat areas of the machine are being buried underneath a fine layer of dirt. Both nature and machine are not dormant on the island.

Around the heart of the stage I thought it would be cool to have wires and cables emanating radially like veins into the island. These would glow blue as Prospero casts his entrapping circle. I also wanted to have cutouts in the stage for the audience to see the gears beneath
everything. Plexiglass would lay over the holes as to not cause any accidents. The gears would twist every time magic occurred. I would also love for there to be lights beneath the gears that would shine during the magic as well.

At the very beginning of the show, I envision Prospero coming out to center stage, silent with a single spot light on the heart of the stage. As Prospero nears the heart he looks out into the audience and then back at the heart, inserting his staff into the stage's heart as if a key to wind a clock. And he does such an action. Winding the Stage-gear, the gears underneath are slowly illuminated and creak to life. The veins glows a eerie blue. He takes his key-staff out and while
the lights dim, the audience continues to hear the gears turning and the "clock" ticking. The scene swiftly flows into the shipwreck scene. At the very very end there is an epilogue in which Prospero puts down his staff and renounces his magical ways. I envision Prospero undoing his original magic by unwinding the Stage-gear and putting down his key-staff, retiring his mechanical ways. This coupled with the beginning scene set up the convention that: 1 Prospero while somewhat omnipotent, is limited by the machine (being created by man is inherently flawed and has limits), 2 Prospero purposefully set this entire set of events into
motion by winding the Stage-gear.

Of course the costumes would be out of this world! I haven't thought too much about them, since this was for a scene design class more than a costume design class. None the less, there would be plenty of goggles believe you me.

So that's basically the entirety of the project. Below are more photos that I couldn't find a place for in our conversation. Hope you enjoy them. I'm always open to questions, so drop me a line if you have a query.

This piece, which I called Main-gear, took almost three hours to make.

Main-gear turned out quite nice after a bit of antiquing paint.

The beginning of the stage.

Construction of Stage-gear. Lots and lots of floral foam.

Things glued down with a bit of moss for texture.

Proscenium up with Curtain-gears attached.

Everything painted.

One of the best angles I was able to get of it.

The man, as in the earlier picture, does not represent costuming or what-have-you, but merely gives a sense of scale and size. As you can see Main-gear is quite a sizable object.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Poems Conceived in the Library About the Library (One More For the Road)

a matrix of words
collected in the rows and columns
of pages
paragraphs
sentences
a three dimensional array
of ideas
turned physical
ideas given weight and thickness and font
arrays strung into clusters
clusters into programs
programs into systems
systems into collections
collections into a single unifying building of storage
a matrix of matrices of matrices of matrices
of words

Poems Conceived in the Library About the Library

knowledge stacked in neat tidy rows
balconies of studies, poems, dreams
written down for posterity's sake
written down to be read
analyzed
understood
argued
confirmed
bound volumes of research
placed on metal beds
to be lost and forgot
for a time

students searching
scouring
studying
surveying the stacks
for the source of inspiration
that strains their theories
stretches their ideas
strengthening and solidifying
the soul of the thesis

written four centuries before
anyone in this building was born
waits the long lost volume
of an unknown author
for over half of eighty years
the book lies waiting for a purpose
to be used in a dissertation
to be needed
acquisitions brought him into his world
cataloging gave him a name
an i.d.
at first circulation put him in browsing
and after his two months were up
he was placed on a shelf
three floors up
in the back
in the corner
in the dark
lost

daylight
an abandoned cathedral of understanding
ghosts of students walk the silent halls
whispering
passing notes
getting that last sentence printed before class
there is barely a buzz of life here
save for the ever busy organs of the building
blood cells staffing each system of operation
ants working for the good of the colony
and for the overall necessity of their queen
knowledge

duskfall
a quiet metropolis of bodies
each working independently
not listening, understanding, or caring about the others
they abide by the code of conduct
two levels of dull roar
three of silence
night is when the flying buttresses come to life
with spirits praying for grace from their masters
worshiping the holy grounds of
physics
literature
history
government
the congregation worships in ignorance
to the others around them
they all pray to the same deity
although they think differently
they all pray to the god of
partial credit

Thursday, November 25, 2010

A Thankful Thanksgiving.

Two years... well almost. Darling, this Thanksgiving I'm thankful for especially one thing. You have become an integral part of my life. I honestly don't know how to live without you anymore. You are loving, compassionate, caring, smart, funny, passionate, beautiful, amazing, gorgeous and overall just wonderful. You have changed me forever and only for the better. You bring out the best in me and show me the most this world has to offer. I love you more than life itself and only want to make you happy. This Thanksgiving I am thankful for you and your love. Darling, I don't know why you love me, but I know why I love you. I love you simply because you're you. I love you Jennifer. Forever and always.

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Lady Autumn

Hot beverages grow cold
waiting to be drunk
by the lips of a woman
whose scent lingers in the air
She is the one who comes in the night
breathing softly on the windows
as you sleep
leaving frosty panes for when you wake
She is soft breeze you feel rustle through
the boughs as she sighs and bats her lashes
Her hair is the autumn leaves found in each splash
of color on the mountainside
She is your lover
and
your past lover
and
every one who has ever
loved you
cuddling up to you in the chill of the season
She is in your heart and in the earth
in the sky and in the water
She is the feeling that all beauty will leave you
yet inner poetry remains as the world dies
slowly
She is your autumn mistress
whom you will love for a season
Cast her aside to die
Fall for her again in a year.
Lord Winter welcomes Lady Autumn
with open arms and a cold hard smile
Lady Autumn lingers in the air

The Endless Sandman

This semester, the first of my junior year at Franklin & Marshall College, I am fulfilling my humanities requirement by taking ENG273: Graphic Novels. Most people, when I tell them that I am taking this class, are become quite excited and interested that it's a class at F&M. They dive into how they wish they could have taken a class like that and eagerly ask what books we're reading. It's interesting to me how enthused they are when the topic is breached, as if they are taking the class vicariously through me.

Graphic novels are a very interesting medium. They fuse together words and pictures uniquely as I have never seen before. My first graphic novel was Alan Moore's Watchmen during my freshmen year of college. It was several months before the movie came out, and I am so glad that I read it before I watched it. Following that, I dove into Moore's Batman: The Killing Joke, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Vol.1, V for Vendetta, Spiegelman's Maus I and Maus II, Bechdel's Fun Home, Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and Seagle's It's a bird... . Each of these are absolutely amazing pieces of art and literature.

One of the best graphic novels I have read to date though is The Sandman series. Currently I have read volumes one through... seven or eight, I forget, but plan on finishing the series very soon. The best part of the series is how imaginative it is. Neil Gaiman has created concepts and realms beyond the wildest of some of our imaginations!

"There are seven beings that are not Gods,
that existed before humanity dreamed of Gods,
that will exist after the last God is dead.
There are seven beings that exist because,
deep in our hearts, we know that they exist."

I have long exhausted my supply of physical copies of Sandman unfortunately and have thus gone to reading the later volumes
online. This wonderful quote came from a site that was recommended to me to continue my reading (http://www.comicoo.com /sandman/index.htm). The series focuses on one of the seven Endless, as they are called, named Dream. Each endless has complete control over their realm, their plane of existence which intersects the planes on which all living things exist. Pretty wild, right? But they are not Gods. No, they are something very different.

The series starts with the capture and imprisonment of Dream in the twenties by a cult of magicians. Eventually Dream is able to escape but it is almost sixty years after his initial imprisonment, which have left dreamers in a constant flux of visions due to the chaos in the realm. The rest of the first volume follows dream searching the globe for three objects that were stolen from him in his absence.

Each volume after follows Dream or dreamers who interact with Dream, leading up to some grand series climax in the second to last volume. Unfortunately I haven't gotten there yet, but once I do I'll update and share my full review of the series with my avid two followers, who probably don't actually follow. To anyone reading, let me know you're out there.

The reason I love graphic novels is in their form. Combining literature and art into a medium that is greater than the sum of its parts is simply amazing to me. Sandman really stretches the limits of the medium just like Watchmen and Maus have done. The imagination within the panels are enthralling and just brilliant to read and look at.

Well I'm not exactly sure what this post was meant to really be about, other than me rambling about my love for comic books and graphic novels. I hope it was interesting and made someone read a good book.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Haikus of Assorted Thoughts

The word juxtaposed
such a funny little word
to compare two things


Hecate, your will
You, three as one, cast your spell
Fate lies in your hands


She's often absent,
yet she is with me today;
the muse in my soul.


Hung around Death's neck
the collective ankh of our lives.
Smiling, she greets us.


Glass bottle rockets
fly through the incandescent
scrim of the night sky