I should have snapped a photo of the Passat Wagon I saw today that had a sticker that said “One Less SUV”. You know, maybe you have the right to be this kind of sanctimonious shit if you put that sticker on your bike. But if you’re driving a car? Any car? I think that qualifies as hypocrisy. Especially if your car gets between 18 and 23 mpg depending on the model; that’s only 2 mpg better than a Hummer H3.

This was in the Whole Foods parking lot, as you might have suspected.

I haven’t written about it, because it unfortunately did sort of did live down to expectations.

As mentioned in the comments of an earlier post, a lot of the film’s success rides on it being a film, and it just didn’t translate well to the stage.

There were some nice touches:

• Local NPR host Robin Young was featured actually reading the day’s news. (Nevermind that they played the intro to some other newscast, and the fact that hers is not actually a news show). It was also thematically serendipitous that her show is called “Here and Now”. It was a nice touch, but still not sufficient give a real sense of place, not the film was so rooted in Berlin.
• Right from the beginning, these giant, thin, underlit streams of falling sand fell from above the stage onto the floor (specifically onto some kind of lighting unit), all the way through more or less the whole show. At first, I couldn’t tell what it was, but it looked like clouds flying past from an airplane window (if your airplane were going straight up, or if you were, say, an angel). And then, of course, they started to look like big hourglasses as the sand piled up. Clever.

I’ll not rant about every little thing, so here are my biggest gripes. The angels seemed very earthbound, and were upstaged by the actual trapeze artist. They were also much more buttoned down than Bruno Ganz in the film (whose look I have come to realize is a rip-off of Cary Grant’s look in The Bishop’s Wife, which I had not seen when I first saw Wings of Desire). Their seeming a little too uptight and cold and removed is actually somewhat necessary for the story to work. The actor who played Damiel in particular was way too laid back and physical from the start. The actor who played Cassiel, on the other hand, though scruffy, was actually quite good. He watched the mortals in a way that you could really see that he was watching them, and brooding; that’s hard to do on stage, because it can’t really be done with words or large gestures.

It wasn’t time wasted, but it probably would have been better to just rent the film again. (Have I mentioned how much I love the film? Go see it if you haven’t).

“Nerd” works, too.

But “Geek”’s day has come and gone; it has just become so commonly applied as to be meaningless.

That is all.

If there were a giant Venn diagram of dorkdom, the slice where all the different brands of dork you have to be to get this is very thin indeed. Yet I suspect two or three of my readers to be in that slice, so I pass it along to you.

One or two others might even get the reference in this post’s title.

But Idi claimed he had done all the engineering, recording, and tech work. “Where are these engineers? Where are these men? Show them to me and I will honor them.” No one ever stepped forward to take that honor. Idi claimed he had “digested” the skills of certain producers. Gordy simply enjoyed giving out fewer paychecks.

I had an epiphany last night in the bathroom while I was getting my pajamas out of my suitcase.

I get blog-block more often than not because of that damnable title field. Sometimes, I just don’t have something to say that’s enheaderable, and this was not meant to be the kind of blog where I’m actually supposed to have Something To Say.™

So when I get into that state, my title will be “Daily Dispatch, DD-Mon-YYYY”. Problem solved. Let the blather begin.

I’m with Terri at the Trident slurping down beer by Beck’s (not bad– why did I never try one before? Better than a Heine, better than the other $2.95 options at the Trident (Miller Lite, Dos Equis)) and slurping down free bandwidth by NewburyOpen.net. Terri is off looking at magazines high as a kite on some tranquilizer that she took before her MRI tonight. I picked her up at the Harvard Vanguard in Fenway so she wouldn’t have to navigate the T alone.

Dinner was a breakfast burrito and a basket of fries.

Oh, in case you were wondering, I had my suitcase in the bathroom because I am still not unpacked from Christmas. I took it into the bathroom to get out some toiletries on Monday and have been taking an item at a time as needed. Such is the nigh on bottomless depths of my ability to procrastinate.

OK, computer is crashing and Terri has returned. We must get her home before she crashes, too.