Angela L. Das

In high school, being a self-proclaimed progressive and
serious drama student, I was in an Artaudian production of
Macbeth. The director, on facing the difficult decision of who
to cast as whom using a class of 12 egomaniacal teenage
females, cast all of us as witches, and all of us employed the
Theatre of Cruelty style to “enact” the story of Macbeth: A
complicated theory, not easily grasped by our audiences at the
time, and even more difficult still to explain ten years on.
Last Saturday, I returned to the play and learned how it
really should be done.

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Evolution | Reversed | Let's Break Something

I arrived in London the Saturday morning of the protest just in time to catch all the hype on the tv over breakfast. I wanted to meet a friend at Embankment, she was late, I took off on the march without her. I wasn’t trying to come across as an anti-capitalist, although I did want to hear what the pro-environmentalists had to say.

But there’s a reason why I bailed out at Trafalgar Square and headed for the relative safety of the National Gallery: There’s just something altogether far too disturbing about British crowds. Read the rest of this entry »

The Kiss - Francesco Hayez

After my virgin expedition into the Los Angeles theatre scene on Valentine’s Day, I went to see Romeo and Juliet at The Met Theater, downtown. After spending years seeing Shakespeare  “adapted for a modern audience” (completely unnecessarily), I was  relieved this was intended to be more traditional. That’s what made me jump at these tickets in the first place, and I wasn’t disappointed.

I’m a student of literature and therefore pretty fussy when it comes to hearing it performed. Juliet (Megan Goodchild) was lovely, and Romeo (Frederik Hamel) was suitably Mark-Hamilton-in-Star-Wars to my liking, to convey the utter teenage madness and angst the characters must have gone through to be so in love at the age of 13. Read the rest of this entry »

The brave Iraqi journalist, Muntadar al-Zaidi, famous for throwing his shoes at W’s head has been sentenced to jail for three years. A bit harsh really, unless it’s because he missed.

I’m feeling genuinely torn about this. I’ve thrown softer objects at the television or radio whenever I heard ol’ Dubya open his mouth. He was a terrible embarrassment to all Americans on a global scale. He made it significantly harder for any American to be respected overseas and repeatedly answered pressing interview questions with an “i don’t care” shrug, as though he’d simply inherited a bad world and didn’t care to change it much. Read the rest of this entry »

He’s pint sized, he’s clever, he’s learning to speak…This little bundle of terror and imagination is my nephew, who is currently experiencing being “Terrible Two”.

They don’t call being two years old “terrible” without good reason. He’s got good questions about stuff (particularly about the vacuum cleaner), he just doesn’t know how to phrase them. Nor does he have the necessary vocabulary to fully understand an adult’s explanation of the question’s answer. How frustrating, poor guy! Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a bird, it’s a plane…it’s the most gorgeous comet flying right over our heads. Is this something straight out a comic book, or what? How inspiring.

In truth, I wanted to post the transcript of President Obama’s speech yesterday. This man knows how to work a room. I love his powerful, hope and awe-inspiring rhetoric. Big pat on the back for his speech writer. Now, let’s just hope he’s sincere.

I have high hopes for this guy. I like what he’s saying so far, and I especially like the way he’s saying it. Can he keep this country from an economic disaster of astronomical proportions?

A rainbow on the floor of the Louvre. Relevant? Nope...

Provide the best possible service to your human users, and the machines will follow.

Web 2.0 and SEO, when executed correctly, can be great marketing and virtually free. Free PR in a recession. Awesome, right? It should be.

I recently came across The Five Ways Social Networking is Changing PR after a few months of rediscovering the social networking world for the purposes of driving business. It’s just so easy to put up some pages on Facebook, or to open an account and get Twittering. But how do you keep these pages from disappearing into the ether? Read the rest of this entry »

Last night, my dream was truly bizarre on a variety of levels. Firstly, the place I’m about to describe where I was in my dream is a place my brain seems to have created for me to visit on the special cases when I eat unusual food late in the evening. SO I’ve been there before (1 point for Weirdness). Read the rest of this entry »