Just a month ago, I was just asking Paddy what happened to Brody Condon’s “Neuromancer” project, which won the Rhizome award last year. I wanted to road trip out to Missouri to see the barnyard production. Well, that is on hold until next summer, but this Sunday “Case” plays at the New Museum. It’s a 6 hour long live reading of William Gibson’s classic with Sasha Grey. Catch me there, I’ll be in and out all day. Here’s an interview with Condon on Rhizome in the meantime: ” I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I am still interested in this notion of projection of self into other spaces via religious experience, drugs, role-playing, or immersive screen spaces, but I never imagined Case interfacing with the actual internets, he is immersing himself in Gibson’s idea of what he thought this future screen space could be”
“I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse. It’s make-believe. It’s performance. The only difference being that a writer can do it all alone. I was struck a few years ago when a friend of ours — an actress — was having dinner here with us and a couple of other writers. It suddenly occurred to me that she was the only person in the room who couldn’t plan what she was going to do. She had to wait for someone to ask her, which is a strange way to live.” – Joan Didion (via.)
Manil Suri is the math consultant to the Folger theater for their production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (a show I was lucky enough to catch with Kelly Torrance last week.) Here is his Youtube presentation on the subject. (via.)
“We flinch when someone else receives a blow, and neurologists have started to talk about “mirror neurones” in the brain, which make spontaneous representations of what is happening with other people, so you then feel these yourself. And it’s thought that the basis of sympathy – and, to some extent, imitation and incarnation – is partly due to these mirror neurones,” says Oliver Sacks. He explains how this might relate to exceptional acting in a conversation with RSC’S Michael Boyd. (via.)
Street with a view: “May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more.” (via.)
Brody Condon just won a Rhizome award to adapt Neuromancer at a “red barn theatre in rural Missouri with a local, former political activist in the role of the protagonist.” This could be very wonderful or completely terrible, either way I want to see it. With the news The Fly is the source of an upcoming musical, maybe Broadway is next for William Gibson’s book. The full list of Rhizome Commissions Program winners includes several interesting projects, especially “Marfa Webring” by artists Claire Evans, Jona Bechtolt and Aaron “Flint” Jamison. It is described as an “attempt to alter the Google search results for the town of Marfa, TX by creating a Webring and, then, (with the cooperation of the town’s permanent residents) investigating the results of this action on the daily life of the town.”
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