rm | sundries, supersized

Tomorrow at 6am EST Patty and I have our last vid date before she is home on Tuesday. Then, I crawl out of bed for 2 Day Film School! Then

ladyofthelog comes over for apartment cleaning and Sherlock obsessing.

If you haven't heard Erica and I screaming with joy on other social media (or generally just from various upper reaches of Manhattan), last night Dogboy & Justine crossed the funding threshold.

So first, thank you. We can't say it enough, and I hope to be able to say it more poetically soon.

As of now, we've raised $6,045 for our workshop production. So what happens next?

First, the fundraising period is still on. If you've wanted to contribute and haven't yet, you can until the evening of the 21st and we will continue to be very, very grateful. Having a cushion is of course always good, and we have other projects in the works including a cabaret evening, and Erica's Pygmalion creation. Plus, we're getting ready to submit Dogboy & Justine to the New York Musical Theater Festival for 2011.

I really, really, really haven't been kidding about the incredibly specificity of Weird Crap in My Brain that put this in gear, and I am so grateful for all the people and pieces that were in the right place at the right time to make this possible. Knowing Erica is a fluke. She is a New Person in a world where I don't really do new people because people sort of freak me out in spite of my whole gregarious chatter holding court thing. And she's scary talented. And it's awesome.

Anyway. On December 21st funding will close. At that point we will start getting in touch with all you lovely donors with thank you cards, information on your premium tickets (how to book or how to transfer them to someone else) and other rewards big donors have earned.

Sometime in the 5 - 14 days following that, the funds, minus Kickstarter's fees will transfer to our Amazon account, and after that, transfer to our savings account for the show. Then January shows up, we make a timeline, hold auditions, look at theaters (I have a few we're considering that we used to help us run the budget numbers) and then here we are.

If you were thinking about donating to Dogboy & Justine and want to put your money elsewhere now that we've reached our goal, we support that too, and hope that if that's your plan you'll consider another Kickstarter project targeted at working artists or the Brain Injury Foundation of America, which we'll be donating at least $200 (and hopefully more) to through a percentage of our ticket sales and audience support in the course of the workshop production.

Yesterday was also a productive Friends of the Text meeting and there will be stuff of awesome for you soon. We are doing our best to fight the academic pace of things, and I think we're on target to make stuff happen.

I also can't make enough noise about Kali and I having solved the book. Which, hilariously has a shitty working title we hate and a title we know an eventual publisher will call it, but not actually a title we like and would advocate for yet. I'm hoping that we'll have some sort of summary or excerpt we can share with at least a selected audience sometime in the next few months.

For fuck's sake, yes, I am still working on ConSweet. And yeah, still listening to that shit Kevin Rudolf song on repeat to do it.

Have I mentioned that Bazmark Inq is actually using the Internet lately? I know, right? Anyway, I alert you to this because today a list of research materials they've been looking at for Gatsby was posted. For those wanting to follow along at home (and also scholars), this is super cool.

When I got home last night, after midnight, I turned on the news and saw footage of the rioting in London and promptly burst into tears. First, there is an easy to understand brutality to the footage. It's just pushing and shouting and people being beaten with truncheons and frightened animals (and, btw, you should also Google "kettling" and get an understand of what's being done to even peaceful protesters).

I lived in DC during the first Gulf War, just six blocks from the White House. I protested and went to cover the protests as a student journalist. I saw cops on horses hit a man over the head with a truncheon not even a foot away from me. He collapsed to the ground bleeding profusely. The photo appeared in our local City Paper but not in any sort of national news.

There were night when the protests broke off from the official protest area illegally, and marched through the streets. One night we got cornered by cops, and it seemed absolutely clear that we were about to be hurt, because we could be, because no one was watching. And then someone pulled out a video camera. And I remember that man, probably 24, 25. He was standing right next me and shaking like a leaf. The cops told him to put it away. And he said no, over and over he said no. We were so scared. And eventually, the cops just escorted us back to where we were supposed to be.

When I think of London, it is a double image of my recent year of visits there, of sitting in a park near Westminster alone thinking about this death and mourning project thing and how I might not have done it had I known what the experience was going to be like. It was hard. It was confronting. It was personal. It was brain stretching. It was me at my absolute finest and me sometimes at my least generous.

But I also think of my childhood when I think of London. I think of Regan and Thatcher and the Cold War and AIDS. I think of older teenagers I knew who explained terrible times made for great music and everything was better in London, because people were so much angrier there. I think of Morrissey and V for Vendetta and fantasies of protests and nightclubs and the world of adults I lived more on the edge of than someone my age was supposed to.

I look at the riots in London and my heart breaks. My heart breaks for the UK. And my heart breaks for America where I despair of anyone ever getting angry enough about the right things in that way anymore. Rioting isn't good, sure. But why aren't we angry? Why are we letting the power of anger be co-opted by racists and other demagogues?

My heart breaks for London, which always seems so far away.

Meanwhile, who's surprised by this one? Not me: some Wikileaks team members are breaking away to form a competing organization, Openleaks, in response to differences with Assange. The money quote comes from a chat log Wired obtained in which a Wikileaks staffer says to Assange, "You are not anyone's king or god, And you're not even fulfilling your role as a leader right now. A leader communicates and cultivates trust in himself. You are doing the exact opposite. You behave like some kind of emperor or slave trader."

I am, honestly, sincerely, actually freaked out by the state of the world right now. It's not that the world is so much more fragile or dangerous than at any other time in my life. In some ways, it's less so. But we are on the cusp and in the middle of fistfulls of changes in a way I've never seen before.

In other news, this is the most useless article about Polari ever, but it's facing extinction and you should know about it.

Let me show you my continuing love for the Disunion blog: Today, Visualizing Slavery, focusing on the 1860 census of the population of people enslaved in the US at the time.

My Last Play: the thing about gimmicks is that they can work. Sometimes, they can also be sincere.

The New York Times writes an article which contains some interesting content yet actually has a thesis that's far, far, FAR more all over the map (so perhaps no thesis) than it realizes, declaring this "the year of the transsexual." The piece is also, unsurprisingly, so full of fail it's jaw dropping.

Randomly: join me in staring at Benedict Cumberbatch's beautiful cat-like face.