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The skeins I left dyeing in jars while I was out of town have had 4 days to soak, and there have been color changes, so I am undecided about whether to uncork them now or let them deepen even more. In general I am very excited about them though.

Pomegranate rind--hard to say if this is yellow is deepening much from the original overnight bath. And all I have for comparison is the picture I took of the pom and chesnut mordanted skeins then. Was a lemony yellow, possibly a hue shift to buttery?

Red dragonfruit--this started a very intense magenta and has darkened toward purple. I really hope it's light/washfast, it's a very pretty color.

Dragonfruit rind--this looked sort of hot pink to start, like a dilute version of the red dragonfruit. Now it's shifted to yellow. Will be interesting to compare to the pomegranate rind yellow.

Blackberry--this bath looked the closest to true red of all the reddish roseish magentaish dye liquors I started with. It's now shifted to violet, much more what I expected from blackberry.

Prickly pear--a rosy pink, but it looks much lighter on the yarn, I thought it would have saturated more. I doublechecked the navajo dye book; prickly pear is one that is definitely supposed to be cold-dyed like this, boiling will kill the red color (but so will tin or alum, hmmm, possibly I should not have alum mordanted the skeins? I default did it to all of them, as tannin-alum mordanting is go-to for cellulose fibers). The book says it's supposed to be fermented for a week, so maybe if I left it longer it would get deeper; but also I don't know how literally ferment is meant (it is often used in the sense of "let sit for a period of time," rather than the actual formation of alcohol, in dye books). Is this supposed to have a chemical/microorganism reaction though, is being sealed in jars with very little air counterproductive to the dyeing? The book also says you're supposed to stir it an rub the dye into the yarn frequently during the week of soak, and I haven't been doing that either.

I also ran half the jars with the skeins from last time, that got extra mordant from the metal canning jar holder ring, causing them to go grey-green. Cabbage is apparently not light fast, so those skeins dulled to kind of a khaki color I suspect was basically tannin-alum-whatever-the-heck-the-ring-is mordant color. Unsurprisingly, all those skeins look duller and greyer in their jars. I'm not sure I will ever have any intentional use for that ring-mordant effect. Might be iron? Because "sad" is definitely a feel I get off them. They have saddened.

assorted jars experimentally dyeing with dragonfruit, blackberry, and prickly pear

tannin mordanting is an important step for dyeing cotton and other cellulose fibers. Here we have bamboo viscose mordanted with chestnut tannins (brown, left) and with pomegranate rind tannins (yellow, right).

So, red cabbage (which is supposed to give dark blue purple in base and pink in acid) is giving me a whole heck of a lot of khaki-green. (Image, left to right, base increased, acid increased, tap water no additives). This is you know, weird?

Best guess, there's a metal basket that came with my giant enameled pot for lifting mason jars in and out, and I was using it to pull fiber in and out of the dyepot too, without thinking about the fact that metals will have mordanting and frequently hue-changing effects, and you don't have to use the metal salts powders, you can make your own by putting a metal object in water and usually a bit of vinegar, but I'm guessing that the acidity of the alum bath I was mordanting with had a similar effect in leeching material out of the metal basket. possibly also heat related? the bottom of the basket had some black marks where it would have been in direct contact with the pot on the burner.

There was enough random bits of cabbage left on my equipment that my wash water turned dark blue when I cleaned up today; when I poured it into the big pot that the metal basket fits in, it seemed to turn greener. I am taking this as further evidence it's the metal basket. And wondering how to wash the big pot well enough to keep residue from affecting future dye batches.

I want to try again but I also want to get something besides khaki already so I don't want to do cabbage again next. I'm thinking blackberries. They're supposed to give a purple. Maybe I could do a small batch and use the small pot exclusively to avoid the metal basket residue.

I want to play with using pomegranate skins for tannin, I know tannin mordanting always adds a brown/grey cast to the yarn but I'm wondering if it might be less pronounced with something other than chestnut tannin, which is what I'm currently using. Also I'm considering getting a dwarf pomegranate tree to grow on the balcony and be a source of mordant (and also fruit?) if I like the results I get from pomegranate mordanting with ones I get from the store. I should probably do a comparison test--one lot mordanted with the chestnut, one lot mordanted with pomegranate. I should reread my dye books on how much organic material you need to get a sufficient amount of tannin out of.

In a "using up stuff I have in the kitchen" move I am making bread pudding today. I got some stale, clearance bagels at the store the other day and, well, you get what you pay for. I ate one with cream cheese and decided it was a waste of cream cheese, and went back to the store and bought actually good bagels. but what to do with the meh ones? i mean, I paid $0.99 for them, I could just toss them, but like, bread pudding is SUPPOSED to be made with stale bread, so.

5 blueberry bagels, torn into small pieces
2 cans of coconut cream (preferably Trader Joes, no thickening gums)
enough milk (dairy) to bring that 2 cans to 4 cups (about 3/4 cups milk)
5 eggs
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 tsp ginger
1 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp cardamom
splashes of amaretto and hazelnut kahlua (last of both bottles!)

So, you tear the bread into a big bowl; you mix the liquid ingredients + spices together and pour it over the bread, add in the sugar, and stir it up until the sugar is dissolved and all the bread is wet. Then you leave it to soak for like, half an hour.

Put in a 13"x9" baking dish, bake for 50 minutes at 350°F.

so, hmm, it smells like the coconut cream but it doesn't taste like it, moderately disappointing. Pretty good though. Wish I'd had more booze for it, the recipe I was riffing off of calls for 1/4 cup. It's very sweet.

( account of dye batch #1 )

For my second go at dyeing stuff, I am doing 10 skeins of feza peria bambu linen, about 500g in total. This is at about the upper limit of what I want to try dyeing in my big pot (21qts), I don't think much more would fit! Also every time I pull a skein out of the spaghetti monster mess to rinse and it resolves into a discrete loop I am shocked and awed that skeining works and hasn't turned into a nightmare yet. It really looks like it's all one blob in the pot.

I'm still pre-processing the yarn, we're not actually up to dyeing yet.

Scouring bath:
4 gal water (approx, as full as I could carry without sloshing in the 21 qt pot)
8 tsp sodium carbonate
4 tsp dishwashing liquid soap

Simmered for an hour, then rinsed and started on the tannin bath.

In the first dye experiment I think there were subtler colors I couldn't see on the fabric because of the strength of the tannin brown, so I decided to dial down to 5% tannin (25g), which gave me a plenty brown bath so I don't think it was too dilute. I'm getting the feeling that all of the books I've read, save Rebecca Burgess's Harvesting Color, vastly ovrestimate the amount of chemicals needed, especially if you're going to do the long steep method I'm tending to use on everything (since Jim Liles's The Art and Craft of Natural Dyeing, one of the most chemically knowledgeable sources if one of the worst for vast overestimates, points out that mordanting and dyeing all happen at room temperature with cellulosistics). Burgess and a couple of others from this millennium I've read (Sasha Duerr, Jenny Dean) talk about lowering your environmental impact, and that mordanting baths can be saved and reused. There's some implication that you can tell when it's used up, but I don't know how! When I litmus-tested the tannin bath after the overnight 13-hour steep, it was pH neutral, but I didn't think to test it when I started, so I don't actually know if that indicates the yarn sucked up all the tannic acid?

After rinsing the yarn again I started it steeping in a 5% (25g) alum bath. It was pH 4 before I put the yarn it; if it gets to neutral by tomorrow I may do a second alum bath, because 5% is like a quarter of where I started in the first experiment based on my readings. I don't want to overmordant, I don't want to neutralize my damn mordant with sodium carbonate like I discovered folk dyer wisdom urged in every source regarding dyeing cellulose fibers, but I also don't want to undermordant, especially since cellulose fibers don't tend to take natural dyes as strongly as animal fibers.

I have another red cabbage to throw at this batch of yarn; I am thinking I will go for the dark blue color that comes up initially with my pH 8 tap water for most of the skeins, then I will take the skeins out and increase the pH of the dye bath to see if it goes green like last time, if that was a result of the sodium carbonate alone or in combination with the golden color hanging on from the beets in the first experiment. I'll probably give a couple of skeins back to that pot, whether it goes darker blue or surprise green again, just to be able to compare them to the unadjusted cabbage dyed lot. I think I will also try vinegaring a couple of skeins to see if I can get the petal pink. The tannin brown is less strong with this batch, after rinsing my skeins were beigeish, only a little darker than they started, so I have high hopes for being able to dye subtler colors on them.

Long time no post! Lots of happenings in the world of me keeping me too busy to write about my real life. But today I did some homework for a class on politics and science fiction, and I wanted to post it because I felt like I maybe had a good idea.

The “white savior” trope—or as I have known some angrier parts of fandom to call it, “what these folks need is a honky”—was a facet of Avatar I recognized and reacted to almost instantly. It’s a problematic part of a lot of the scifi I enjoy. It describes Daniel Jackson’s relationship to the people of Abydos in Stargate, where the oppressed people are actually darker human beings, a hypothetical uncontacted tribe (separated from our global civilization by by space travel), rather than aliens stand-ins. It can be applied to a lot of episodes of Star Trek, given Starfleet crews’ tendency to violate the Prime Directive and step in to save the day, though I think the most interesting case is essentially the full run of DS9, where the Federation/America and species/race metaphors mean that a black actor, Avery Brooks, plays the human (metaphorically white) savior to the oppressed/developing nation of Bajorans, whose most common onscreen representatives (Major Kira, some recurring characters like Vedek Bareil and Kai Winn) are played by white actors. I’ve never been sure whether I should be impressed by that inversion or troubled by the perpetuation of the trope in a form that’s less likely to be recognized as what the io9 Avatar review calls it: a white liberal guilt fantasy.
I think the “white savior” trope is related to the “white man’s burden” trope that fiction, scifi and otherwise, took from Kipling. It may even be a form of progress, the notion that it’s the white person’s responsibility not necessarily to perform racial uplift and bring civilization to supposedly uncivilized people, but instead to protect these groups’ culture, that their way of life is valid (just as the concept of the “white man’s burden” was at least progress from the notion that these savage barbarians were like animals, subhuman, not people European colonists could interact with and should afford respect to as human beings). However it is still paternalistic, patronizing and insulting to presume that a white person needs to be involved in that, that indigenous peoples can’t speak for themselves.
All of this made it really, deeply troubling to me to read how James Cameron seems to be living out the “white savior” fantasy.
On the one hand, the kind of filmmaking he’s describing, “emotionaliz[ing]” environmental issues as he is quoted in the New York Times article, is exactly the kind of filmmaking I want to do, using the power of entertainment media to get people’s attention. And he is in a position of privilege and power; how should he use it? My idealistic, utopian streak says he shouldn’t use it at all, that we should all be trying to deconstruct privilege, but people with power are rarely willing to give up power and one of the most effective tools at fighting privilege in our dystopic world is people with both privilege and morals using their privilege to help those without privilege. I think in the case of the Dongria Kondh, where they asked him for help, decided for themselves to try to use someone they hoped their oppressors might be more willing to listen to, that’s valid, justified. I am less comfortable with the idea of Cameron being promoted to Amazonian tribes who hadn’t heard of him, with showings of Avatar to introduce him as a potential advocate. In general, the whole issue makes me gag a little.
I think the next step up, the next trope, needs to be to move to white people who have power and want to help oppressed peoples to use their power in an introductory mode, to help actual members of oppressed groups gain a platform to speak and to encourage their oppressors to listen, rather than the white person doing the talking for them. Maybe we can call it the “white sponsor” trope. Maybe if I start writing the model into fiction it might get more traction as a real world behavior. It’s still imperfect, paternalistic, granting (the existence of) white privilege, and but I think would be a step in the right direction.

So I mistyped an actor's email address last night, it seems. Text of reply:

Colleen,

I am writing you to inform you that I believe you have contacted the wrong person. I have not auditioned for any parts, in fact my acting career has a very checkered past. I once played a Christmas tree in 2nd grade and got the lead role in a 6th grade Thanksgiving play. I can also tap dance as long as its not choreographed (nobody knows whats going on down there anyway). I hardly think this qualifies me for your presentation of Honus and Me! However, if you are strapped for actors, please let me know which city and state this audition will be in and I will gladly make the trip. Just let me know if I should show up as a Christmas tree or Squanto.

Best Regards,

[person with same first name and last initial as my actor]

Fortunately the actual actor checked the posted callback list and even somehow knew to come for his sides today.

So I was watching Thoughtcrimes, which is the kind of movie that people only hunt down if they're serious about seeing Everything Favorite Actor X has been in. Navi Rawat now plays Amita on Numb3rs, and, the more common reason for hunting this puppy down, Joe Flanigan now plays John Sheppard on Stargate: Atlantis.

But so I was watching along and the premise is how she's telepathic! He has an eidetic memory! They fight crime! And I thought, "This reads like a pilot." Then I got to the end and saw the USA network graphic and thought, "Oh, so that was a pilot." (Interesting imdb-combing fact: it was two writers' first break-in-the-business effort. They seem to have continued as a writing partnership.) I am kind of sad that it never got picked up: I would have been thrilled to have a couple of seasons of Navi Rawat and The Flan reading minds and kicking ass.

And I asked myself, "Self," I said, "why do you think this pilot was not picked up?"

In all honesty, I do not know why this pilot was not picked up. Maybe somebody somewhere was not offered enough money. Maybe somebody got a gig somewhere else for better money. (I keep wondering where Skiffy lands in relation to USA on an actor's wishlist: they're both cable, they have the same parent company, but Skiffy's genre. But Rawat is working on network TV. That has to be a winner.) Maybe better things were on the table. (In 2003, USA had Monk, Dead Zone, and Peacemakers, a western I recently heard of as being beloved of approximately 8 people.)

But I figured that these might be some of the reasons:

1. The first 22:30 of this movie is dead air. The movie could start when Freya rolls into the big city with her mentor in psychicness and not lose anything.

2. Relatedly, there are several false starts. What is the inciting incident? She's a normal girl who goes crazy! She's a crazy girl who is actually psychic! She's a psychic girl who's just been told the government wants her talents. Yeah, all that is important backstory--that can be glossed in a couple of lines of dialogue and, you know, is. For the viewers who didn't tune in early enough.

3. POV shift. Is this a show about a psychic girl who joins an NSA team? Or is this a show about an NSAgent who gets a psychic girl dumped on him? The moment I was convinced that we'd shifted out of Freya's POV was when they went up to her apartment and we got Brandon's WTF about this amazing space the NSA gave her, rather than, at some earlier point, the WTF Freya should have had about being bought off with a nice place.

4. The incredible civil liberties violation of using telepathy on suspected criminals. Maybe Freya is not the person to think about that--she doesn't really get a choice, she gets to hear people, 24/7, and she's also having issues with will anyone she cares about accept her as she is! But someone should have called this, more than Brandon's personal freak-out about her stomping all over his privacy. Maybe it was something they planned to address later (Freya's sister June was a public defender, and some day Freya was going to tell June what really happened, that she was psychic, so maybe that was going to be June's storyline. But I think it needed a nod. Some kind of, "This will not get us a conviction, obviously, but if we can stop crime from happening I will BLUR THE LINES.")

5. Those Argentinian Muslims. It was like, how many hot spots can we hit in five minutes. I mean, okay, the Indonesian Muslims made mildly more sense, but then you got the Ukrainian in on it and the ex-KGB agent made it just a round of Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? See, clearly it didn't matter who the villain was, that was background to Freya and Brandon forming this partnership and fighting crime. But if you cannot come up with a cohesive, sensible case, how can you write a Case of the Week show week in and week out?

ftfisher has been pitching this psychic procedural to me. Clearly these are points to keep in mind.

Bizarrely, someone picked up the Psych entry so I um, moved the class stuff out of it. Weirds me out that people might follow that.

In other news, I only have one class this semester and it doesn't feel like enough. I'm contemplating signing up for some other online courses (maybe I'll feel more compelled to sign on once in a while)?

So far am tempted by:( Read more... )

ftfisher and I are highly, highly amused at the USA TV show Psych, particularly the certain dorkish bent that screams of fannishness. (Did you see the "They fight crime!" ad? Oh, yes.) In the course of combing IMDB for clues as to who on the production was most responsible for that, we found that a) it was probably creator Steve Franks, who has written most of the series, and b) this man is my hero. 98% of his IMDB page is Psych. He wrote a screenplay in 1999 that was breakout, spent several years script-doctoring, not that it's easy to tell by the credits, and now is a showrunner. Show. Runner. He's made it, man.

So I've been watching Slings and Arrows with

ftfisher, a Canadian cable miniseries about the backstage life of a Shakespearian theatre festival. It's all raving drama queens and the occasional ghost. The main character, Geoffrey Tennant, was driven mad by his director seven years ago and ran screaming into the night during a production of Hamlet; now his old director is dead and haunting him, and Geoffrey has been asked to take over the festival and bring artistic vision back, despite being still quite mad. I've seen Slings and Arrows before and in fact

ftfisher is borrowing my DVDs, but I still love watching it and have been following along with her.

Slings and Arrows is remarkably good at creating characters you love to hate and then providing a creatively satisfying comeuppance for them. Holly Day, Sanjay, Anna's writer boyfriend... oh, they're all so AWFUL.

Geoffrey's nemesis is Darren Nichols, whom he has known since college. Darren, a pretentious bastard director who hates the theatre, is at first called in to direct Hamlet when Geoffrey, understandably, says he is not currently mentally equipped for the job. Past misfortunes with Darren's productions involved finding out the hard way that horses and fire did not mix. The horse stepped on an actress and apparently it was impossible to get across the stage without stepping in horseshit. Darren's vision for Hamlet involves running with the phrase "something rotten in the state of Denmark" for a "foul-looking, foul-acted, and, if possible, foul-smelling" show. His comeuppance involves swordplay and whimpering.

The first couple of times I watched the series, Darren was hard for me to deal with, but this time around, I'm finding myself enjoying the character more. He's still firmly in the love to hate him category, but I am loving it, whereas before it was hard for me to watch. I mentioned this to

ftfisher and she said, "Were you having to work with the asshat?", referring to a fellow film student of mine whose crimes against cinema are so egregious that we do not speak his name. In fact, I don't think she's ever even met him, but she has always responded to my tales of woe with sympathetic loathing.

(In all fairness I should probably mention that I'm not always a peach to work with either, but honestly, if you start poking at the camera asking, "Hey, what does this knob do?" just after your DP has set up a shot, how do you EXPECT her to react? And then, of course, I am certain that I am at least eight people's Bizarre Film School Story now, for the shoot during which I did not speak.)

I cast my mind back to the first time I saw the series and realized that yes, in fact, I had been in a class with the asshat at that time. Huh, no wonder Darren Nichols grated. And now? I haven't seen the asshat in months.

Another thing Slings and Arrows is really good at is portraying drama caricatures that anyone who's worked in show biz will recognize from the people they've had to work with.

Funny how life imitates art, or vice versa, isn't it?

Current Mood: cheerful

We just closed our spring production at SCC, a show which kept me so busy I haven't had time to post about it before now! It was Mary Zimmerman's METAMORPHOSES, based on Greek myths from Ovid. Here's our publicity photo of Eros and Psyche. I love this play unreasonably. I went to see it when Nearly Naked Theatre did it in Phoenix last December and I was so very excited to find out SCC was doing it this semester.

I signed on as ASM. I feel like I know the script backwards and forwards now, I've given so many line notes. And I got fairly soaked every night, because the set for this thing is a pool, and during the run I was constantly wet-vac'ing carpet and tossing a load of towels in the dryer.

This is the first show, theatre or film, I've ever worked on that on every day of work, every night of performance, despite any backstage crises or ordinary drenchings, I loved. Constantly. Most work I've done has time, somewhere in the grueling hours of frustrations, when you hate what you're doing and you wonder why you got involved in the first place and you want it all to be over. I never felt like that about this show. I love this show. I mean, sure, I got frustrated by wet rugs and the like, but I never asked myself, "What the hell am I doing here?" because I knew. I love this script, I love our production of it, I loved getting to see the process of rehearsals and how it all got put together, I love this show.

1. Oner, oner, oner, three and a half minute oner...

2. Fuck up your lines every two seconds.

If you really want to go for the gold, try both at once. But I don't swear your editor won't kill you dead.

ETA:

3. Look at the camera. While fucking up your lines. During the master shot.

Okay, I sorted that out... I think... *rubs face*

I knew I had to use Log and Transfer, not Log and Capture, with P2 card data, but I was having a fun time sorting through the help manual to figure out how to grab a file of copied P2 data rather than a mounted P2 card. It turns out there is a nice little folder button up in the corner of Log and Transfer. Easy if I just knew to look for it...

(It's not that I have nothing to say, it's just that I have no time to say it in.)

Music video:

I'm very happy with how my vignette turned out! Jim Jacques, one of the film program faculty, volunteered his house and his car for me to use, and I am so grateful, it was awesome of him to let us invade. The footage looks great--all of it does, we got some incredible stuff with the band at the Mesa Arts Center.

There are currently three finished cuts of the music video:

Performance only version, on youtube.
Tony Mundell's edit, on youtube--uses the vignette footage in 20-30 second sections, so, whole vignettes at once.
Shawn Gulney's edit, embedded quicktime--uses the vignette footage interspersed with performance and other vignettes through out.

Tony's is definitely the best to watch if you are watching particularly for the vignettes (not that some of us are biased that way at all!) but I haven't decided which is my favorite version overall.

I signed up to help in post, so I could have a shot at editing a version if I, basically, well, if I bought another drive so I'd have enough space to store all the footage. Heh. I may yet do that.

I already have a copy of the footage from the vignette I directed. It's such beautiful stuff that I am planning on using it for my project for the Final Cut class I am currently taking this summer. None of my vignette has the band in it, and I'm planning to use a different soundtrack, so there shouldn't be copyright issues.

I'm currently taking a music video class at Scottsdale Community College.

A short list of things that are awesome about this class:

Shiny new toys! We are shooting with several of this HD camera and M2 adapters for 35mm film lenses.
The opportunity to see our student work hit air. Products of the music video class are likely to hit MTV2, Fuse, etc.
A decent freaking budget.

I will be directing a segment of the music video. We're working on a five minute song called "I Am Lost" by the Angie Raess Band (you can hear it on their myspace there), and six vignettes about various people facing various problems are going to be shot to be interspersed with footage of the band playing at the Mesa Arts Center, which is a gorgeous, colorful glass building.

But I digress. One of the vignettes is mine. As in I wrote and am directing it. This was not an opportunity I expected to have in this class--I was going to go out for camera operator and just learn everything I could about the camera and HD--but when it came time to pitch, how could I turn down a chance at creative input?

I'm currently in the process of casting the vignette. Mine is about a mother and teenage daughter fighting; I have two good candidates for the daughter and three for the mother. I'm withholding final decision until tomorrow (or, later today, as I look at the clock...) as final casting call is this evening. I may not pick anyone that comes in on the last day, since I already do have strong actresses, but I hate to not even consider them.