Outland

I watched Outland, a short Australian series (6 half-hour-ish episodes) about a group of gay people who love science fiction. The show is fabulous with their references to real and imagined (Lulara is sort of Farscape, but with a black woman captain, who apparently looks like Uhura in her Star Trek uniform). It's not particularly appropriate for kids (there are sex toys, leather, a suspension harness), and very funny. I don't know why I hadn't heard of it before, but it's totally worth watching.

Interference

Wednesday I went to a one-night-only show Interference, put on by Liars and Believers. The performance was a bunch of pieces by different performers in response to Picasso's Guernica. It was evocative, with spoken word, movement/dance, mime, music, and video pieces, sometimes more than one at a time.

Things that stuck with me, in no particular order:

• the building of a memorial like the one at the marathon bombing site, with flowers, stuffed toys, images, candles, etc, as sad music was sung, plus a modern-dress runner, both harking back to last year's events
  
• "you never forget the smell of the city burning"
  
• Futile the Clown, a bullfight in three acts, the third with a fabulously expressive bull with large balls, which the Clown fights despite having lost an arm
  
• three fates/weird sisters/gray ladies dancing, leaving a person behind
  
• the story of someone stopping to help a person lying in the snow, illustrated on a winding spindle
  
• another illustrated story of the battle of Marathon
  
• some wonderful bass music, sometimes using the instrument as a percussive one, along with keyboard and vocals
  
• a discussion of keeping the good, tossing the bad, or perhaps there is no bad, just not as good, and perhaps there is no away
  
• a video of short clips about 9/11, with some of the commentary turned into distressed music, sort of a la Bulbous Bouffant, that was so incredibly sad
  
• people walking through the standing crowd, as if checking them for injury in the wake of some disaster
  
• and at the very end, the possibility of redemption, through love

it was an excellent show, and I ran into friends to stand with, which was cool. The downsides: standing meant sore knees by the end, and it was incredibly warm in the theater. I don't know how other people stood it; I was still sweating when I got down to a T-shirt.