It's just a jump to the left...

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." -Oscar Wilde

So some super exciting news, I'll be doing 'Rocky Horror' come fall! Yeah baby! Definitely come and check us out. I'm in the ensemble and I'll tell you why I accepted.

• We did our first read-thru and the ENSEMBLE list reads like a who's who of Bay Area Theater. I mean we're talking people who have played leads, people who have played cameo roles, people who almost have their Equity cards. People who are incredible dancers and limitless singers. I'm in INCREDIBLE company.


• Which leads us to the company, ROLT. They're a young, fledgling company putting together great shows with energetic, talented casts mixing both experienced and experiemental insiders with talented newbies raring to show off. I've been wanting to work with them for a while-if only for the fact that they ALWAYS do shows that I want to do and they're just on the edge of getting big but still inspiring new ideas and independent thought.


• Which leads us to their newest indepent thinker, director C. Caplin. Damn, this woman is serious. Not only is she an award winning choreographer and dancer, but she's also a thoughtful, introspective, forward thinker. My type of director. She brought us all into the read-thru with an invitation to bring all that we've got - including our ideas and individuality.


• And plus, it's friggin ROCKY HORROR! During Halloween. In San Francisco. Could you say perfect? Perfecter? If there was ever a time and place to do a cult musical-this would be it. Hahah, after this production I should just start writing on my resumes, "cult musicals only plz., thx."

So during our discussion of character and costuming on Monday night, someone threw in the word, 'steampunk'. As a designer, it's important to know all sorts of different genres of design from rococco to art nouveau to bauhaus to chinoiserie...but I had never ever heard the term 'steampunk' before, so I looked it up.

• 
  Steampunk is a subgenre of fantasy and speculative fiction that came into prominence in the 1980s and early 1990s. The term denotes works set in an era or world where steam power is still widely used—usually the 19th century, and often set in Victorian era England—but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy, such as fictional technological inventions like those found in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, or real technological developments like the computer occurring at an earlier date. Other examples of steampunk contain alternate history-style presentations of "the path not taken" of such technology as dirigibles or analog computers; these frequently are presented in an idealized light, or a presumption of functionality.
  Steampunk is often associated with cyberpunk and shares a similar fanbase and theme of rebellion, but developed as a separate movement (though both have considerable influence on each other). Apart from time period and level of technological development, the main difference between cyberpunk and steampunk is that steampunk settings usually tend to be less obviously dystopian than cyberpunk, or lack dystopian elements entirely.
  
  

Steampunk is sort of fucking cool. And possibly getting a little played out with its emergence from underground obscurity (see Edward Gorey Ball). It's basically a mix of Victoriana, punk, Industrial era-think the Matrix meets Henry James, Dr. Who. Firefly, that mixes sci-fi with Western with Asian touches and design is a perfect example of 'steampunk'. Hellboy2 is also a good example. Leather corsets or vests mixed with fluffy bloused shirts, boots with buckles. Industrial utility mixed with Romantic touches.

And the coolest friggin' office ever designed. Photo at top. I'm not quite sure how people actually work in this environment; because it is amazingly gorgeous (and they have an open bar and comfy lounges and GuitarHero). It's the homebase of Three Rings Games in SOMA. (via Wired Mag) Based upon pirate ships, Jules Verne and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Soooo cool.