My friend Doug interviewed Cameron Crowe for Artist Direct. Is a fun interview!

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For you American expats in the UK, I found a forum with lots of good info. UK-Yankee Forum.

The best part about finding the Web site was finding this post Garry posted in February.

“For people concerned about their fiancé or spousal visas, it’s interesting to take note of last year’s statistics.

On the North American desk, which includes the 3 US consulates and the consulate on Canada, there were a total of 42 refusals for settlement out of 4,771 applications.

It means the odds of success are 99.2% in your favour. The best odds in the whole world!

Chicago has the highest percentage of refusals (1%), followed by NYC, and Ottawa. There were a paltry 2 refusals in LA for the whole year.

On the downside, the North American desk has a solid track record for upholding appeals - among the highest. It means that they do not issue refusals very often, but when they do, it tends to stick.

The British Consulate in Accra gets the hard-nosed award with a staggering 53% refusal rate for settlement applications.”

Those odds make me happy. I have been having nervous attacks that they will reject my application. Ophelia asked me if they are going to ask me what kind of toothpaste Stuart uses, like that scene in Green Card where they ask Gérard Depardieu the brand of face cream Andie MacDowell uses.

I have no flippen clue what brand of toothpaste Stuart uses. He brushes them and they are very nice teeth for which I am grateful.

May I ask what is it with teeth in the UK? I am often terrible with mine. . . I don’t floss and will let years go between visits but if I feel any pain I am right in there. I had braces as a kid and my bottom teeth have shifted on my slightly and I will probably do the clear braces thing soon.

But when I was in London it shocked me how often you would often see a very attractive person and then they opened their mouth and they looked like Sloth from The Goonies.

This is of course an exaggeration. But there were enough bad teeth that you notice it. Are kids just not tortured with braces?

Stuart and Ollie arrive tomorrow so I have been cleaning my apartment because it is rather dusty and I haven’t mopped in months. I used to have a cleaning service come in and it was great because it forced me to keep my apartment clean. I would always have to clean before the maid came because I couldn’t let them see the squalor that I would allow myself to live in if given half a chance.

Trying to think of fun cheap things to do with them. It might be nice to drive to San Diego so Stuart can meet my Nana but given how close Tijuana is, I am reluctant to do that. Nothing good could come from Stuart and Ollie being in Tijuana at the same time. I am certain a Mexican jail would be in our future.

I finally watched the last three episodes of the first season of Lost. Flippen love that show. What sucks now is I thought I had been DVRing the 2nd season but something went wrong so I need to borrow it from someone before I read or see something that I shouldn’t.

Do they broadcast Gilmore girls over there? I may need to set up a black market for my TV shows.

We ordered the Krispy Kremes today for the wedding. 19 dozen. I figured approximately 75 people give or take. . .so 75 * 3 = 19 dz.

That’s a hell of a lot of donuts.

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George Bush: ‘God told me to end the tyranny in Iraq’

From The Guardian.

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Watching Love Actually. It isn’t a very good movie- too many stories but it hits a soft spot for me.

My favorite bit is when the Prime Minister side swipes the President of the US. Wish that would really happen.

My second favorite bit is when Bill Nighy says, “Kids don’t buy drugs. Become a pop star and they will give them to you for free. . .”

My third is when Emma Thompson pulls herself together when she realizes her husband is cheating on her.

Fourth is when the beautiful man that Laura Linney has a crush on takes off his shirt.

Fifth is the little boy in the octopus costume.

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Drove Gordon up to San Francisco yesterday and I came back home today. My apartment is rather lonely with no cats. They were also my alarm system. When I opened the door, if they greeted me, I knew that I was alone. If they didn’t greet me, I knew there was a serial killer hiding behind the shower curtain waiting to chop me up into tiny bits.

I was a bit weepy driving away from Ophelia and Peter’s house. Ophelia was concerned that we couldn’t find him to say goodbye, but hunting around for him would have made it worse for me. He will be really happy with them.

The drive was really easy. I don’t know why I thought it was a longer stretch. That part of the 5 is rolling yellow hills - a quilt of groves and ranches. Very Steinbeck. There is one spot that nearly turned me into a vegetarian. You smell it before you see it.

Cows

Thousands of cows. As far as you can see - a sea of cow.

And the stench of cow farts is enough to make you faint.

Anyway- In other cat news:

George the little bastard has been peeing on things at my Mother’s house. He went through a phase doing that when he was a kitten, but he hasn’t done that to me for ages. Mom thinks he was punishing her for trying to teach him how to use the cat door.

Garbo is doing really well although they discovered that one of her hiding spots is behind the stove. In order to get behind the stove she needs to jump up on top of the stove and then jump down behind it. I have a vision of her setting herself on fire at some point.

In health news:

I had the cyro surgery a week ago Monday, so that is done. Right up there on the list of things I never want to do ever again.

Back when I had bronchitis in July, my doc took blood and when the results came back she wanted me to redo a test cause some results looked wonky. I have been putting it off but got in there last week. She called today and said my white blood count was low so I have to do another test, but she needs to get permission from the Insurance first (I love HMO’s).

I am certain it is nothing. If it was something serious, I would have lost weight.
Glad that I gamed the system so I have health insurance for all of October.

In wedding news:

It is happening soon. Eleven days.

Gulp.

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I have been meaning to buy the first season of Lost so I can catch up. I DVR’d the shows I was addicted to when I was in London but it filled up so I am rather behind. I was going to buy it but I have been broke so I put it off , , ,then I got a box of goodies that Stuart ordered from Amazon and I was excited to see that he ordered Season One.

He wasn’t pleased when I asked him if I could use it.

I think he is more concerned about my getting my paws on his DVD collection than about our getting married, which is really funny when you consider that his taste is crap for the most part and he wouldn’t know Truffaut’s 400 Blows from a porn flick.

I did get my way at the end of the conversation- but was instructed to not get my fingerprints all over it. Like I am some sort of a gavone. . .

In other news. . . last night I posted my CV on a number of sites- today I got an e-mail from Yahoo asking if I was looking to transfer to the UK office. It would be cool. They are groovy people over there. We shall see. . . Wonder if I will get my stock options back or if I will just be screwed?

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Bush is getting briefed about the situation in Iraq. Suicide bombings, Dead servicemen, Kidnappings, that pesky mother that won’t go away.

The litany of things going wrong ends with, “And Mr. President. Five Brazilians were killed.”

This seems to upset Bush more than the other news. He puts his head in his hands. All of his staff watching him surprised by the extreme emotion.

Suddenly Bush looks up. “Wait.”

“Yes, Mr. President?”

“How much is a Brazilan?”

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Reading the NY Times online and they just posted that August Wilson passed away today. I want to cry. (Oh, hell, I am crying as I type this. I am such a sap.) I know he was ill and it was to be expected, but it still really sucks. He was far too young.

I met him at a reading in Seattle at The Elliot Bay Book Company in 1996 and he was so gracious. His work was some of the first plays I read when I got the theatre bug. We have lost a wonderful artist and man.

October 2, 2005

August Wilson, Playwright, Dies at 60
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 10:27 p.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) — Playwright August Wilson, whose epic 10-play cycle chronicling the black experience in 20th-century America included such landmark dramas as ”Fences” and ”Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” died Sunday of liver cancer, a family spokeswoman said. He was 60.

Wilson died at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, surrounded by his family, said Dena Levitin, Wilson’s personal assistant. The playwright had disclosed in late August that his illness was inoperable and he had only a few months to live.

”We’ve lost a great writer, I think the greatest writer that our generation has seen and I’ve lost a dear, dear friend and collaborator,” said Kenny Leon, who directed the Broadway production of ”Gem of the Ocean” as well as Wilson’s most recent play, ”Radio Golf,” which just concluded a run in Los Angeles.

Leon said Wilson’s work, ”encompasses all the strength and power that theater has to offer.” ”I feel an incredible sense of responsibility on walking how he would want us to walk and delivering his work.”

Wilson’s plays were big, often sprawling and poetic, dealing primarily with the effects of slavery on succeeding generations of black Americans: from turn-of-century characters who could remember the Civil War to a prosperous middle class at the end of the century who had forgotten the past.

The playwright’s astonishing creation, which took more than 20 years to complete, was remarkable not only for his commitment to a certain structure — one play for each decade — but for the quality of the writing. It was a unique achievement in American drama. Not even Eugene O’Neill, who authored the masterpiece ”Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” accomplished such a monumental effort.

During that time, Wilson received the best-play Tony Award for ”Fences,” plus best-play Tony nominations for six of his other plays, the Pulitzer Prize for both ”Fences” and ”The Piano Lesson,” and a record seven New York Drama Critics’ Circle prizes.

”The goal was to get them down on paper,” he told The Associated Press during an April 2005 interview as he was completing ”Radio Golf,” the last play in the cycle. ”It was fortunate when I looked up and found I had the two bookends to go. I didn’t plan it that way. I was able to connect the two plays.”

Wilson was referring to ”Gem of the Ocean,” chronologically the first play in the cycle, although the ninth to be written. It takes place in 1904 and is set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District at 1839 Wylie Ave., a specific address that figures prominently, nearly 100 years later, in the last work, ”Radio Golf,” which premiered in April at the Yale Repertory Theatre.

Pittsburgh, Wilson’s birthplace, is the setting for nine of the 10 plays in the cycle (”Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” is set in a Chicago recording studio). Although he lived in Seattle, the playwright had a great deal of affection for his hometown, especially ”the Hill,” a dilapidated area of the city where he spent much of his youth.

Wilson, a bulky, affable man who always had a story to tell, usually returned to Pittsburgh once a year to visit his mother’s grave, but he said he couldn’t live there: ”Too many ghosts. But I love it. That’s what gave birth to me.”

Born Frederick August Kittel on April 27, 1945, he was one of six children of Frederick Kittel, a baker who had emigrated from Germany at the age of 10, and Daisy Wilson. A high school dropout, Wilson enlisted in the Army but left after a year, finding employment as a porter, short-order cook and dishwasher, among other jobs. When his father died in 1965, he changed his name to August Wilson.

Wilson was largely self-educated. The public library was his university and the recordings of such iconic singers and musicians as Bessie Smith and Jelly Roll Morton, and the paintings of such artists as Romare Bearden his inspiration.

He started writing in 1965, when he acquired a used typewriter. His initial works were poems, but in 1968, Wilson co-founded Pittsburgh’s Black Horizon Theater. Among those early efforts was a play called ”Jitney,” which he revised more than two decades later as part of his 10-play cycle.

In 1978, he moved to Minnesota, writing for the Science Museum in St. Paul and later landing a fellowship at the Minneapolis Playwrights Center.

In 1982, his play, ”Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” was accepted by the National Playwrights Conference at the O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut. It was there that Wilson met Lloyd Richards, who also ran the Yale School of Drama. Their relationship proved fruitful, and Richards directed six of Wilson’s plays on Broadway.

The first was ”Ma Rainey,” which opened on Broadway in 1984. Wilson’s reputation was cemented in 1987 by the father-son drama ”Fences,” his biggest commercial success. The play, which featured a Tony-winning performance by James Earl Jones, ran for more than a year.

It was followed in New York by ”Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” (1988), ”The Piano Lesson” (1990), ”Two Trains Running” (1992), ”Seven Guitars” (1996), ”Jitney” (2000), ”King Hedley II” (2001) and ”Gem of the Ocean” (2004).

Wilson’s plays gave steady employment to black actors, not only in New York but in regional theaters, where most of his plays tried out before coming to Broadway. Besides Jones, such well-known actors as Laurence Fishburne, Phylicia Rashad, Angela Bassett, Charles S. Dutton, Brian Stokes Mitchell, S. Epatha Merkerson, Roscoe Lee Browne and Leslie Uggams appeared in his plays on Broadway.

”August’s work is like reading a rich novel,” says Anthony Chisholm, a veteran Wilson performer in such plays as ”Gem of the Ocean” and ”Radio Golf.”

”It conjures up vivid images in the mind, and it makes the actor’s job easier because you have something to draw upon to build your character.”

Later this month, a Broadway theater, the Virginia, will be renamed for Wilson, a rare honor also bestowed on such theater greats as Eugene O’Neill, Richard Rodgers, George Gershwin, Helen Hayes and Al Hirschfeld.

Wilson, who was married three times, is survived by his wife, costume designer Constanza Romero; their daughter Azula Carmen, and another daughter, Sakina Ansari, from his first marriage.

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Joe found on NPR a full concert they broadcast that Gray did in August.

I really like his new album, Life in Slow Motion.

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Went to the Magic Castle last night with Margee. We were guests of my friend Jon Armstrong who is a terribly talented magician. If you ever get the chance to see him perform, you will not be disappointed.

For those who do not know, The Castle is a members only club that civilians can only go to if they are the guest of a member. There is a dress code and it is rather nice to see folks dress up in the land where everything is always so casual. Will post a picture of us later when I get a soft copy.

On the way to the castle at that spot on Franklin where it veers to the left and you need to decide if you want to go on Highland or stay on Franklin, Margee spotted a woman wearing a short black skirt, a rock star belt and knee-length black boots. “Is she a prostitute or is she just trendy?”

I looked. “I’m not sure. Let me see when we are closer.”

We moved closer.

“Ooh, yeah. She’s just trendy.”

I am sure that some men would disagree, but I think it will be a good thing when the Paris Hilton cheap whore look is a thing of the past. I refuse to go there myself.

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