THEATER REVIEW: Outside People at the Vineyard Theatre

Posted on 2012.January.15 by Rachel / @girl_onthego

Down-and-out Brooklynite Malcolm (Matt Dellapina) heads to Beijing on the invitation of his college buddy Da Wei (also known as David, and played by Nelson Lee). There, he meets English tutor Xiao Mei (Li Jun Li), falls in love with her, and ultimately falls prey to the cynicism that comes hand in hand with believing everybody else wants a piece of your country. Ultimately, Malcolm leaves a burdgeoning romance thanks to a lack of faith in his lover’s motives.

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Publication news! My SciFi Short “The Tell Tale Tech” will help launch The Veillee Blog on Jan 16th!!

Posted on 2012.January.12 by Rachel / @girl_onthego

A man is dead, and a cop knows who’s responsible. Was it murder? In my new short story, The Tell Tale Tech, the style of Poe’s The Tell Tale Heart is the jumping-off point for an atmospheric detective thriller that asks questions about technology, innovation and morality.

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Homework Takeaway #4: Uncertainties in Time, Space and Relationships

Posted on 2012.January.10 by Rachel / @girl_onthego

I’m still chipping away at Elegant Universe, and have just finished watching Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen – the version starring Daniel Craig as Werner Heisenberg and Stephen Rea as Neils Bohr. So now there are a few threads going though my mind. Copenhagen is an illustration of how the uncertainty principle and physics can map themselves onto individual relationships; this is illustrated well in the moment where Frayn writes Bohr and Heisenberg and Bohr’s wife Margrethe, as they race around a room demonstrating the difficulties of observing an racing beam of light.

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THEATRE REVIEW: Hedwig & The Angry Inch at ALT Theatre

Posted on 2012.January.8 by Rachel / @girl_onthego

What is completeness? What is love? According to the philosophy of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the search for love is an endeavor to re-unite once-whole souls who’ve been split apart by the gods. At its most basic, this is a story about how one person seeks their “other half” – only to discover that strength, love and completeness come from within, not from one’s constructed self-image.

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Things Are Hotting Up – On Climate Change, Speculative Fiction, and Short Story Anthology HOT MESS.

Posted on 2012.January.5 by Rachel / @girl_onthego
http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=345

Carlos Porto / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

My first summer in New York City was hot. Not “better put on flip flops and a tank top” hot. 105 in the shade hot. Born and raised in Buffalo, New York, and having just spent four years living in Scotland, I remember calling my mom as I walked home from work one day. She could probably hear the sweat in my voice. “What was I thinking?” I asked her. She had no answer.

Most of the year, NYC is a climactically pleasant place to be.  But every summer I’ve been there, without fail, has included one or two miserable days – at the least. And every winter has been a little bit less extreme. In 2011, those miserable summer days came in mid-July, and with them an idea for an anthology of short stories that could examine the idea of climate change and its impact on the way people live in and relate to their world.

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Low Sodium Pernil – Reddit Recipe

Posted on 2012.January.3 by Rachel / @girl_onthego

Some time ago, I saw this recipe for pernil on reddit. Today, I’m giving it a try – with, of course, a low-sodium twist.

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Homework Takeaway #3: Calabi-Yau Dimensions: You Are Where You Are Cuz You’re There

Posted on 2012.January.2 by Rachel / @girl_onthego

I’m entering the second half of Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe, and last night read a beautiful, resonant section about Calabi-Yau dimensions. (That page is in French, though Google translate seems to be handling it OK; the image above is taken from that page’s reproduction of the image in the book.)

“If you sweep your hand in a large arc,” Green writes, “you are moving not only through the three extended dimensions, but also through these curled-up dimensions. Of course, because the curled-up dimensions are so small, as you move your hand you circumnavigate them an enormous number of times, repeatedly returning to your starting point.”

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Homework Takeaway #2: Weak Force Expansion & Limited Elasticity

Posted on 2011.December.28 by Rachel / @girl_onthego

Another good point brought up in Brian Greene’s “The Elegant Universe.” After overturning Newtonian physics, Einstein ran into a situation that suggested the universe might be expanding. This was, according to Greene, too much for the genius to handle; he came up with some kind of way of negating the reality as he knew it.

Some years later, Edward Hubble was able to demonstrate that the universe was indeed expanding.

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Homework Takeaway (#1): Light Ain’t Old

Posted on 2011.December.26 by Rachel / @girl_onthego

I’m reading Brian Greene’s “The Elegant Universe” as homework for a creative project I’ve got cooking with a co-writer. I decided to start organizing some of the thoughts I’m having as I read this book.

The most interesting line I read so far today was about the age of light. Greene is discussing how objects use up their motion either in time or in space, with most objects expending most of their energy via movement through time – that’s why nothing can achieve light speed, except for light.

Therefore, this means that light expends all its motion by moving through space, and the inverse meaning is that light doesn’t age.

As he puts it in his book, “Thus light does not get old; a photon that emerged from the big bang is the same age today as it was then. There is no passage of time at light speed.”

Kind of makes me want to go back and watch the end of SUNSHINE again.

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THEATER REVIEW: Farm Boy (the sequel to War Horse) at @59E59

Posted on 2011.December.13 by Rachel / @girl_onthego

Last spring, I saw the National Theatre’s War Horse at Lincoln Center, shortly after it was awarded a Tony award. While the production was absolutely impressive, in terms of the technical savvy of the performers and techs, in the end the puppetry didn’t strike me as necessary to the dramatic action of the production; at times, it felt like it separated me from the characters’ experiences.

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