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| Come Away With Me March 3 Well I don't feel too guilty about being a little late on the update, considering the last time I did three updates in four days (or something like that). So what's been happening? Not a whole lot really. Had a chance to judge some high school public speaking. always interesting. Played a great game of Risk: 2210. it was very cool. Anyone who knows me knows that i love my Risk and getting the chance to play a version I hadn't tried was great. Winning was even better. "Haha Steve, you may keep your puny Moon base...the world is mine!!! MUHAHA!!" Okay, enough of that...moving on. Norah Jones rocks big time. Mom got a combo DVD/ CD of Come Away With Me for Christmas and i finally listened to it yesturday. Yikes. This woman may dethrone Diana Krall as my favorite modern jazz female vocalist (boy that was a mouthful!).... I haven't watched the DVD yet. but soon. I played an open mic at The Spur this past Saturday (hangin with the bro) and I have to say it was a great time. The atmosphere was really nice and a whole bunch of my friends came down to see me play. I ended up doing three sets and even had the people in the bar voting for my last song...tee hee. Surprisingly, they voted against Piano Man in favour of an original. First time that's ever happened...Some dude said my music was better than Billy Joel's any day. He was probably drunk...but it was nice to hear all the same. My sweetie is back in Newfoundland. YAH!! Going to visit her in a month in Corner Brook. It will be a nice little vacation for a few days. It will be good to get back to the West Coast. Income tax refund time!!! Bam! I have three days off starting tomorrow. Anybody want to go to the Mall? I'm gonna need some help carrying all the stuff I'm gonna buy. :) Normally I get really guilty about spending money. I don't know why, but I do. Well, I'm gonna put those feelings aside this weekend and do some major shopping. It will be nice... Ok, I'm gonna wrap it up there for now and get to bed. I might do some stuff with the page over the next few days, since I'm off and don't have much to do around the house. Who knows. I'll keep you posted. cheers, |
| Sunny Days March 11 Boy oh boy. Two sunny days in a row. Just seeing a blue sky makes everything better. it puts me in such an awesome mood. yes, there will be an end to the winter, yes there will be an end to my job, yes I'll get to do some theatre again. Ah. It's amazing how the weather can change your attitude. I've been very bummed out recently, but a few sunny days have changed it all around. (as well as a bit of shopping...) In anticipation of my little trip to the West coast and (hopefully) a move to Trinity this summer I bought a new piece of luggage yesturday. Buying luggage is great. It makes you feel like a world traveller, even if you're only buying it for a weekend trip within your own province. I realized yesturday I've got to do some more traveling. I've got the itch. I used to say that I'd be happy to live in Newfoundland my whole life, but now I'm not so sure about that. There is so much more available elsewhere...I don't know, we'll have to see. Played some pool a few nights ago at the regular place (Dooley's). Darrell kicked our asses all night. That boy was on fire! Whew! In other news, I got a little TV for my room. It's sweet. I can lie down on my futon and watch a movie or play a few games. Perfect. You'll notice under current projects is Old Romantic. I finally got back to recording it a few days ago. The link is to the album site if you want any more info on it. I've finally got around to updating it. Started reading Life of Pi by Yann Martel and just finished Choke by Chuck Palahniuk. The latter was pretty wild. I'm starting to read more fiction lately. Not that i'm abandoning Sci-Fi or Fantasy, I just figure it's time to expand my horizons. Anyway, I think that will suffice for now. enjoy the weather. get outside and I'll be talking to ya in a week. |
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| The Significance of Lettuce March 13, 2004 ola! Big changes in store for the web page over the next couple of days. I'm basically trying to make the navigation and updating a little easier. it'll take a few days to get everything in order (unless i get distracted by some other project...). Most of the stuff from the old page will be incorperated into this one. Geek in the City is looking at a major overhaul, I've dropped the Notebook section, Currents has been moved to the main page (a- la - this one) and I'll be putting up some of my poetry and art as well. the album sites will be getting an over haul as well, combined into one music section. Hopefully this will cut back on the amount of room i use on my geocities account and enable me to put up some larger files. So. What is the significance of lettuce? Well ladels and germs, tonight i went to Subway and for the first time EVER, bought something other than a meatball sub. It was a roast beef. With lettuce, no less. This recent obsession with lettuce marks a dramatic change in my dietary habits. I've been turned off on grease. This is a good thing. Quite a turnaround. Anyway, I'll cut it short there, since this update was really just a way of letting the thousands of visitors to Notnaywhereland know why their beloved site looked different. (hehehe). Cheers, kevin |
| I can't go on...I'll go on March 18, 2004 Hello hello. Picked up Cronin's biography of Beckett again last night. I had laid it down for about two months. You see, up until that part in his life, I could relate to him. He was a frustrated writer. But then fame started to hit. He wrote a little play called "En Attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot)". So I put his biography down...picking it up just last night. Talk about fresh inspiration. It's interesting that my two favourite writers, Whitman and Beckett, have completely opposing views of life. I hadn't really thought about that before. Strange. Anyway, I digress. I've been newly inspired to "get back at it." Aside from snippits of poems and a few pages of a play, i haven't really written anything since the summer. Time enough. First things first is to finish typing up the final draft of "Traveling to the Moone" that I finished the summer. It's play that has been driving me nuts for two years now. I've got to get it out of my system before i can really dig into something else. It's a sin that it's been sitting for so long, when i just need a few days of typing to finish. But it's something that I started working on 2 years ago and every time i pick it up, I want to re-write it. Yikes. It's probably a bad play, but I have to at least finish typing the "final" draft. There are a couple of projects i have lying around in just that state: waiting to be edited.. it's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it. So, what's been happening this week? Well i got offered a job with Rising Tide Theatre to work in the Trinity Theatre Festival this summer. I don't know yet what I'll be doing there ( I assume acting is part of it), but I suspect it may be music related. The details have yet to be worked out. Going to check out a stage adaptation of Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman on friday night. Brad Hodder is directing it at the LSPU Hall in St. John's. Really looking forward to it. I tend to not go to the theatre (wierd huh??) I get too strange watching the performance. Part of me wants to be up there. Part of me is criticizing the directors choices and another part of me is cringing on the inside that something is going to go wrong. But when i enjoy something...I REALLY enjoy it. When I can lose myself in the show it's great. I guess because that hasn't happened often for me that I don't go to the theatre much. But I'm trying to get out of that habit and this will actually be the second show I've seen since October...which is pretty good for me..."baby steps" as they say. Anyway, I promised myself I'd cook breakfast when i got home from work, so I better get at it before I fall asleep. Take care everybody... kevin |
| Back to Life March 22, 2004 Feeling like I'm coming around today. Maybe it's the beautiful morning outside. 7 degrees...insanely wonderul! Add to that the glorious fog and rain and we've got ourselves a bonefide spring. yah! The last couple of days have been interesting. I went to the Hall to see The Edible Woman and it was great. Hilarious! While there I ran into a lot of old friends. Afterwards I went out with the cast as well as my brother. I kept running into people I know and the general question was "Where have you been?" It seems my Goulds exile has perpetuated the myth that I've fallen off the face of the earth. One old friend of mine even thought i was working in Toronto! Crazy. Made me realize how easy it is to dissapear. Well I hadn't been in the bar an hour and another old friend was asking me to stage manage a production of Mamet's "Glenn Gary Glenn Ross." Me? A Stage Manager? Well, there have been stanger creatures under the sun. I'm looking forward to the challenge. My first rehearsal is today. Should be interesting...All in all I'm glad to be finally doing something in theatre. It just took one night at a bar to get hooked up. wild. Now I know last time I said that I was getting back at the writing. i had been all inspired by Beckett and was going to finish some old plays. Well as it turns out I have a new one boiling. I had taken two old plays down to work to edit...but I just couldn't stay focused on them..man I hate editing. So I started writing a new one. Later that night at home I started typing up some sort of thing about theatre and i realized i was writing a narrator part and that it was turning into an intro to the new play! Sweet! You see, I can't sit down like Ibsen and plan out the story from beginning to end, writing up character histories and all that. For me it just has to happen. The characters tend to reveal themselves to me..as well as some of the situations. Take a bunch of characters, throw them in a room and see what plays out is sort of how this one started. Well.....it's going really good and I think I have the momentum to actually bring it to a conclusion. Whew... So..what else this week? Listening to Guthrie, Tindersticks and Bright Eyes. Good stuff all around, but not everybody's cups of tea. Don't Look Back was an amazing documentary. I've got even more respect for Dylan after watching that. Look for a review of Monkeybone in the Dice and Cup section really soon. I feel it's my duty to warn people not to see this movie (let alone buy it like some poor soul i know well just because it was in a bin at Wal-Mart for 6.88 and he thought he might like it...). oh...Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance II owns me.... ....and Songbird by Fleetwood Mac is one of the greatest songs ever written... Well folks, I have rehearsal today and work tonight, so I'd better use the morning for sleeping. See you soon... kevin |
| on the moon March 25, 2004 Wow. It's 5:20 am and I just finished typing up the final edit to Traveling to the Moon. What a strange feeling. This play has been with me for two years. I can remember workshoping it at Grenfell when I just started. I can remember the first time I heard it aloud. And the night I finished typing the first draft I opened a bottle of wine. I wish i had some right now. :) The black book with the final edit written in it over the summer is sitting next to my computer. I thought I would never really finish it. i thought it would just end up collecting dust. But tonight I felt inspired to just do it. To buckle down and type. there was no reason not to. So i fought my own laziness and got it done. only took about 3 hours. i don't know why i hadn't done it before now. silly me. looks like the sun is coming up. i feel like a weight has been lifted. like i can move on to other projects without feeling guilty about this being unfinished. hmmm....i have a lot of unfinished work like that. i think it's time to start checking some of that stuff off the list. in other news..the new play is going really well....i actually like it. :) Anyway , my back is killing me from sitting on this old wooden chair and i want to get to bed before mom gets up for work. I'll finish this update later today, once i get a well-deserved sleep... good night all. Later... Okay. So i got up,pleased as punch (where did that expression come from) to print off the play....no ink left. No ink left?? Arghh. That's a drag. So this week I picked up "On Writing" by Stephen King. (yes, that means I finally finished "The Last Modernist"...things will never be the same...) It's the most inspiring book on writing I've ever read. There's 0 pretension about him and his work. he tells it like it is. How he did it, how he thinks other people can do it. What works and what he thinks sucks. It's really inspired me and is probably the reason I stayed up all night typing. :) Monkeybone review is up in the Dice and Cup section and I've added a neat picture of my model collection under Warhammer. hee hee...yes, i'm a geek. I'll wrap it up there for now. take care, kevin |
| I like to ride my bi-cy-cle... March 28, 2004 Well, it's only been a few days, but I thought, why not update.... I DID manage to pick up an ink cartridge and print off the play a few days ago. The weather was absolutely amazing and me and a bud went to the park and stuff. So the next day (that would be yesturday) I bought a bike! YAH!! It's a Huffy "Ravine" Mountain Bike. Pretty cool. Of course it would snow today...grrr...What else....i picked up Wade Davis' The Serpent and the Rainbow, been wanting to read it for a while. I also posted a list of my top 5 books in the Dice and Cup section. These are the books that have deeply affected my life. You'll notice "On Writing" is there....I just finished reading that book yesturday. I think I talked about it on my last update but I just want to say again that if you are interested in writing...read this book! Inspiring with a capital I. Time grows short until my little vacation to Corner Brook. Less than a week to go! Can't wait. I was hoping to have the second CD finished before the trip, but it doesn't look like that is going to happen right now...we'll see how the next couple of days go. The 'new play' is going really well, thanks in no small way to "On Writing." I just can't say enough about this book. It should be a required text in Creative Writing classes. Of course, the profanity in it would probably preclude it from High School classes. Damn! But if I were teaching a University or College course, this would be on the reading list for sure. It's helped to calm me when I'm writing. Not to get too stressed out about the state of the work; the characters, the plot, etc. He doesn't say that they are not important, but he does tell you not to stress out about it. to take your time and let it happen. As long as you are honest with the characters and their situations, the story will reveal itself. it's a refreshing way to write. It involves a leap of faith...but that faith is in yourself. like i said...refreshing. And yes, amongst all the reading and writing I found the time to finish Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance II....and start a new game with a different character...bah, it will never end. Anyway folks, I'll stop there. Maybe add to this in the morning, we'll see. stay kool. kevin |