Digital Manipulation

Okay, so there are laws and then there are Laws. And of course, we all know what laws are for – to be broken. Now you can rail against copyright scofflaws all you want, but you know damn well that a little law breaking now and again is relatively harmless and usually pretty fun. After all, why would they bother to make cars that can go twice the speed limit if no one would ever dream of committing a moving violation? And if you haven’t lied on your taxes then you can hardly consider yourself an American. I won’t even get into recreational drugs or sodomy.

So in the scope of things, downloading a few songs here and there is no biggie. Frankly, most of the stuff I’ve downloaded and liked enough to listen to repeatedly I’ve eventually gone out and purchased – mostly because I’m a vinyl snob, and it’s relatively difficult (though not impossible) to bootleg records. But in the age of peer to peer filesharing what is at stake is more than just the record and movie studio’s profits. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act and the loosening FCC restrictions on media consolidation are politicizing the internet – and its users. And not entirely in a bad way.

So when I finally found a binary distribution of BitTorrent for OS X that was simple to install and easy to use, I dove in head first. BitTorrent is a relatively new P2P protocol that differs from the more popular Gnutella (the network used by Kazaa, Morpheus and LimeWire) in that it’s skewed toward relatively large files – read: entire albums, TV shows and movies (as well as source code distributions, video games and software applications). BitTorrent, as well as eDonkey and the like, have become infamous for two recent revelations:

• This is how people have been trading a recently leaked portion of Microsoft’s most valuable secrets, Windows source code.
• This is where to find digital copies of movies before they’ve even been released.

The latter, of course, is what I’m interested in. And it’s how I spent last night drinking beer and watching Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind in my basement last night, just five scant days after it’s nationwide release. I also watched downloaded copies of the latest Sopranos episode; Tuesday’s Daily Show; and a great, completely legal program called The Broken.

The Broken is a great show that is produced right here in San Francisco. Hosted by Kevin Stone and Double D, it features relatively simple explanations of hacking techniques. While lay computer users probably won’t find the tips that useful, for someone who puts together home networks and knows where to find pre-release copies of Lord of the Rings, it’s quite instructive. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t entertaining or accessible. And while the tips could be used for evil, so can a pair of cuticle scissors (at least according to the Transportation Safety Administration). More importantly, the tips can be used to help protect yourself from the less-than-ethical. For instance, hacking into a secure wireless network could land you in jail, but unless you know how it’s done, you would be hard pressed to defend your own network from attacks.

The highlight of the show are the segments by Ramzi, who gets to demonstrate fun stuff like how to build a battering ram to bust down doors (and gain physical access to a target machine) and how to use chemical accelerants to completely and utterly destroy a laptop and all the data on it. One gets the sense that Ramzi was formerly in the employ of some national intelligence service – hence his tips are both dangerous and incredibly cool. The point I’m trying to make here is that just as the internet enables people to rob movie studios blind or hack the Pentagon, it also enables two twenty-somethings in San Francisco to distribute a cheaply (though capably) produced television show to millions of people around the world for absolutely no cost. Now that’s what I call media deregulation.

One final note: I did study film, and while I wasn’t so happy about the structure of the business, there are a lot of creative, hard working people that support their families by driving trucks, mounting lights and painting sets for movies. I would never endorse the exclusive use of pirated movies. So I’d like to point out that the pre-release movies you download will probably suffer from poor color correction, low resolution, scratchy sound and may include or exclude shots or scenes that appear in the final print, since the copies are usually taken from working edits (or worse, video taped from the audience at a preview screening). So just as people didn’t stop going to movie theaters when the VCR was introduced, fans of a movie will probably still go and buy the final DVD release of their fave films because the pirated copies suck and DVDs only cost about $25 these days. But when you just can’t wait to see Obi Wan or Frodo (or Kate Winslet), it’s just the ticket.

Rest In Peace

Horrible news today. Spalding Gray, a personal and professional acquaintance, was identified as the body which had recently washed up in Brooklyn. He had last been seen on the Staten Island Ferry, and had been harboring thoughts of suicide by drowning. This is a blow to me, since I had worked closely with his wife Kathy Russo when an intern and employee of Washington Square Films / Arts. Spalding was an eccentric and entertaining person, and a powerful performer with a unique and transformative artistic vision. He will be missed dearly by me and likely millions of others. Raise a pint to him where you may, and please think of his beloved family.

C’mon, It’s Good For You

Okay, so I’m not a huge fan of live theater. I don’t know why – maybe it has something to do with living with musical theater majors in my dorm freshman year. There’s just something about the people at your table in the dining hall bursting into Adrew Lloyd Weber that would put anyone off the stage. Compound that with my mother constantly playing her Camelot, My Fair Lady and Guys and Dolls CDs at home and anything involving actors, singing and a stage is tainted.

Of course, not all theater is musical, and I do have a soft spot for opera (thanks to latent classism), but I get out to the legitimate stage maybe once every two or three years – only the dentist sees me less often. But I was recently delighted by a show currently running at the Magic Theater put on by Word for Word.

The show, Three Blooms, is a set of three pieces based on the short stories of Amy Bloom. If you don’t know Word for Word’s modus operandi, they basically produce plays that are literal adaptations of short prose and poetry pieces – every line of a story, including narrative, description and dialog, is written into the script. While this would seem a difficult, highly conceptual form to execute, it is in fact very effective. This, I’m sure, is in no small part do to the quality of direction and acting that I was surprised to encounter this far from the lights of Broadway.

Another important component to the show was the great stagecraft, although I have to admit that I helped my friend Tanya with some of the computer issues involved in her portion of the show, which were the luminous projected images framing the stage. Overall, however, the sets, costumes, props, visuals and audio definitely maximized the dramatic possibilities in the work and together with the acting made for a fine evening of theater. There, I said it.

The stage is set in the ’round’, with seating on three sides. The night I attended was sparsely attended, mostly due to a nasty storm ripping through the city. Still, sixty or so folks braved the elements and sat in the center section. The night opened on Hyacinths, the story of a young boy who is caught between two worlds and is forced to choose. The protagonist was played by two actors – Todd Tressler, who narrated the observations of the boy as an adult, and Peter Parish who played him in the present tense of the story. This is where Randall Stuart, and his company Upon These Boards, the director, shines in his use of props. The boy is actually represented by one of Wendy King’s many magical puppets which lend both visual impact and emotional connection to a character voiced by two different actors.

Maybe it’s my background in multimedia that helps me make sense of all the visual and spatial cues at work on the stage and in the story, since other critics have felt the production overly busy. I felt that it was engrossing and original, especially the depictions of water, cars, children and the like. This “object theater” may seem overly stagey, but I felt it added to the impact of the stories, and isn’t that what’s important? It was also a nice departure from the minimalist theater I had experienced on the East Coast.

Certainly this approach to staging stories not written expressly for the stage can make the proceedings drag, and for the actors to turn in three hour performances every night must be exhausting, especially considering all the cues and blocking direction. Some, like Katy Stephan, who played piano, sang and acted, certainly had a chance to show off an incredible dramatic versatility. Others, like Gabriel Marin, where given sizable roles in all three pieces, a daunting test of endurance. When given the chance to concentrate on a single role, the performances shone, such as those by JoAnne Winter in “The Sight of You” and Amy Kossow in “Silver Water,” the two pieces done after the intermission.

All in all, the ensemble performed admirably, especially considering the size of the audience. The technicians who designed the set, props, visual and music similarly rose to the challenge. If you are willing to set aside some critical distance and enjoy a good show, get yourself to the Magic Theater before Three Blooms closes March 21st.