This is what I'm talking about trying some of this summer. Should be possible to do.

Mud-wrestling Jefferson Davis on the front lawn of a house made entirely out of prime numbers. Fuckin' a.

Some clueless nerds are laughing it up because someone self-published their Star Wars fan-fiction on Amazon and is surprised she's violating Copryright.

It always surprises me how many essentially intelligent, honest and well-meaning people can be so subservient to the established order. I understand that making your way in life involves accepting certain norms, but this is ridiculous.

Seriously. Why not be surprised? Star Wars is more than 25 years old. In the pre-Disney era, Copyright expired sooner than that. It's a natural feeling that you should be allowed, at this point, to write a story inspired by the great stories of previous generations -- even one which is explicitly an extension of that story -- and publish it if you want.

Besides, putting aside the letter of the law, do you think George Lucas (or his parent company) has any kind of moral claim to the characters and places he created which have entertained so many? After the way he's whored that epic bitch out? For that matter, why is Michael Jackson living out his days in Bahrain, subsisting of the royalties from Hey Jude? Why? Because we fucked this shit up, man! It's not supposed to be like this.

Publishing your fanfic novel and selling it online is just plain stupid, and publishing your fanfic novel and selling it online when you're theoretically a professional editor is just about as stupid as you can get without actually receiving head trauma from a tauntaun.

Maybe she's from the school of "editors who help people right better," not the "editors who specialize in the byzantine and unnatural world that is information policy."

Look. If she sold it at a neighborhood bookshop it would have been fine and you would never have known. No harm no foul. In fact, I say no harm no foul with her shit available (to the world, egad!) on Amazon. Come on, what's really going to happen? She's gonna sell 50 or 100 copies, mostly paying for postage and printing.

Is this "stupid?" Is it even a problem? Should George Lucas really have the right to control Star Wars 29 years after it was published? Certainly he gets all rights to the actual thing he created, but to all derivative works as well? Does that make fucking sense?

The squares think so; I think because they're trained to do that. They're trained to believe that ideas are a kind of property, like a diamond or a bar of gold, even though this is not the truth. Maybe someday they'll open their minds. I hope they do.

Went and saw my acting teacher/mentor Steve Wang's production of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew at the old ETW on Thursday, along with Frank and J-Mo. Ran into Ben Newman there, as well as Croft and Karisa (who's name I was embarassed to not remember: she ran sound for my play Nitewerk) and some familiar faculty faces. It was quite a little blast from the past.

The show itself was enjoyable. Steve set the floor of the theater up like an Italian restaurant and seated the audience there, using the risers where chairs are usually placed as playing space. He also cross-cast the principle characters, which served to undercut the somewhat questionable gender messages of the play. This let it just be the screwball comedy it was meant to be, backed with schmaltzy piano even.

The music was provided by Rachelle Garniez, who I know from back when she did some grand accordian playing for Steve's Merchant of Venice, which Frank and I were in together as Antonio and Bassanio. She did a wonderful job here, composing and performing a score which added a lot to the play, and got stuck in your head.

The performance was fun, but it also could have been tighter. There were moments where the vocal execution was right on and the timing crisp and sharp, and these were some of the most hillarious bits. It made me wish the whole show was like that, a little more tightly wound, quickly performed. Shakespeare is meant to be fast. The thing is, it's really hard to do that, especially when a lot of your players are working outside their normal vocal range.

Even with that challange, the cast performed well. The young woman who played Portrucio -- the Tamer of the Shrew, who was herself well-played by a tall black man -- carried things admirably. There was also some delightful bits of character work done by a few cast members who filled multiple roles. I should have saved a program so I could name names, but Bravo everyone.

The direction was also a pleasure. Steve likes to break the barrier between audience and performer, and there was plenty of that to see.

The setting itself broke any notion of the fourth wall right off the bat: as the audience entered they were greeted by cast members in the characters of waiters and waitresses, and shown to a "table" on the floor of the theater. They served bruschetta and then changed into their alternate-sex/character outfits, intracting all along. Pretty good way to set a mood.

This layout also let action happen "on the floor," with chases literally circling the house and the risers serving for more language-heavy scenes. There was one particularly inspired setting, where a trip back to Kate's father's is inexplicably cast as a mountain-climb, complete with a clipline and carabiners. It's just a short little wordplay scene with the Portrucio running his tame-game on the new bride, but the physical comedy created by the setting really let it pop.

The whole experience left me feeling at once energized, and also old. It was good to see art, and nice and nostalgic to remember my college days; but it also makes you think, to see how young everyone looked. I felt vaguely lecherous just being there, though that could just me being a little overly sensitive.

Yeah. There's a lot of energy. It's a good scene, and for the most part everyone is cool. They got new lockers, and the Men's bathroom shower is really a shower rather than a hole in the ground, so things must be going pretty good.

I spent a little time talking to Ben Newman (a hard-luck guy) and also good old Angela Hurley while sort of eyeing her little sister (who's got to be in her 20s now and was wearing cowgirl boots). After the show I got to give Steve a hug, and then we were out.

Saying our goodbyes to J-Mo, Frank and I bombed it into W-burg to catch up with our cohorts at TKs, riding a kind of competative semi-race most of the way. We passed some folks on our way over the bridge, one of whom came back to smoke us on the second leg of the uphill with his well-tuned fixed gear. Frank's comment later was, "we awakened the dragon."

After that just another night with friends.

Some news relating to the possible upcoming war with Iran:

U.S. Wants Russia to Stop Iran Arms Sales

The United States pressed Russia on Friday to halt missile sales to Iran amid international efforts to defuse a standoff with Tehran over its disputed nuclear program.

The U.S. wants other countries that are concerned about Iran's nuclear intentions to use their influence, be it cutoffs of trade ties or, in Russia's case, cancellation of a planned sale of Tor-M1 air defense missile systems.

Seems like something you'd want the Iranians not to have if you were going to be bombing them, but otherwise there's no real reason to prevent this kind of sale. These weapons systems are only useful for defense.

Russia is also setting up a deal to enrich Uranium for Iran, which will probably not diffuse the tensions. The problem here is that the Bush Administration demands a counterfactual: they want proof that Iran isn't working on nuclear weapons, but no matter how much evidence is provided there's always the possibility of a secret program of some sort. There's also the strong possibility that Iran is pursuing a homegrown nuclear program, and the truth is that in the long run we can't stop this.

There are really two options here. One is to learn how to deal with an increasing number of nations which possess their own Nuclear arms. The other is to massively strengthen international controls over nuclear technology, probably leading to a phase-out of nuclear power as a legitimate operation to remove "cover" activities for covert weapons programs. The latter isn't very likely, so really we're just going to have to learn to deal with more nuclear nations.

In real terms, I think countries like Iran want nuclear arms as a deterrent against outside powers (e.g. the US) coercing them with military force or attempting "regime change" through invasion/occupation. This is the most logical rationale -- and in spite of all the rhetoric, the Iranian leaders are at least as rational as ours. It's also an point of view any thoughtful person can understand.

Really, all of this is the natural outcome of a unipolar power dynamic (one in which a single party is dominant). Even under the best of circumstances and the most benign of rules, the people who are being ruled over will come to quarrel with the people doing the ruling. Empires don't last. Enduring power differentials are oppressive, and eventually the oppressed start pushing back. The fact that we've gone ahead and played the knave here has just accelerated the process, and cost us dearly in terms of our chances for setting up a better balance of power.

Too bad, you know? Shouldn'ta voted for Nader.