Mike Crowl's Blog, page 30

Opera Otago's House Operas

I've been rehearsing with four young singers and two directors over the last two and a half weeks or so (with a few more days to go). Opera Otago is presenting two 'house operas' at Olveston on the 8th, 9th and 10th of April. It's going to be interesting to see if everything we've been rehearsing will actually work in the venue, which is not strictly speaking geared for opera, even small scale ones like these two.

They're an interesting pair, put together, I'm sure with both their similarities...

Busy, busy....

Blogging has gone on the backburner because of a number of things. First was the ongoing efforts to finish my third children's book, The Disenchanted Wizard. And now that's gone on the backburner too!

Over the last month and a half I've been tied up playing first for Opera Otago's 60th Birthday Extravaganza Concert; I took over from the pianist who was originally hired because he himself got tied up with something else that caused him to weigh up his priorities. When that finished, just o...

Disenchanted Wizard makes progress...and the next project in line

Just found a post on my blog that was begun the other day and never completed. In fact I don't seem to have got beyond opening the page. So here was this good solid blank space just waiting for me to put some of my best thoughts in it.

Okay, it will accept second-best, third, fourth, etc.

Over the Christmas holiday period (which for me is as long or as short as I like, pretty much, being retired) I sent off a copy of the 'final' version of the my third children's book to my co-writer/edito...

Total Recall and Star Wars

We watched the remake of Total Recall a couple of nights ago. Colin Farrell does an excellent job, not just as an action hero, but as a man with  depth to his personality. I think I've seen the Arnold Schwarzenegger version, but can't remember anything about it. My gut feeling is that Farrell presents a much more interesting character than Schwarzenegger would have. The two women in the story, Kate Beckingsale, who plays Farrell's seemingly indestructible and villainous 'wife,' and...

PDP

pdp apparently stands for performance designed products. I'm not sure what a product not designed for performance would look like.Wouldn't that be a counterproductive, non-performance, undesign?

Don't ask me. I'm assuming that something that is performance designed means (a) it will actually work, which immediately makes it better than many products on the market today; (b) it will be produced to a decently high standard - I'm assuming that, of course, otherwise it would just be clas...

Review of Prostate Wimp

The following review appeared in Readers' Favourites, and is by Java Davies

Like many people, I'm sure, I thought that all prostate issues were due to cancer. Reading Diary of a Prostate Wimp by Mike Crowl showed me other types of prostate issues. Mike Crowl wasn't kidding about this being a diary. It's a combination of diary entries on his blog, entries from other men suffering from prostate issues, and letters to God, whom Mike refers to as "Dad," in the style of Jesus referring to God as Da...

Mumbersons reviewed

The following review comes from the Readers' Favourite site, and is by Michelle Stanley:
The Mumbersons and the Blood Secret (Grimhilderness Book 2) is a children’s fantasy by Mike Crowl and Cherianne Parks. A haircut turned into an ear cut when Billy Mumberson went to the barber. Things got more peculiar when a bedraggled looking elderly couple barges into his home, claiming to be his grandparents, and takes over running it. A text from his father asks Billy to meet him at the factory, but wh...

The Disenchanted Wizard heads for the finish line

Blog posts about the book I'm writing have been few and far between recently, mainly because I've been writing. (#amwriting, as the Twitter hashtag goes...)

The latest posts on the topic seem to be here, and here. However, such has been the nature of this particular beast, that what I say in one blog post seems to get sideswiped by what I say in a later one, because this book has changed so many times.


It started life as a NaNoWriMo exercise, you might say, though I'd had the idea for...

Two Maori movies

We watched two recent New Zealand movies over the last few days, firstly The Dark Horse (2014), with Cliff Curtis and James Rolleston, and Fantail (2013), with Sophie Henderson - who also takes the lead role.

Fantail, for my taste, is rather too slow in its set-up. There's a kind of dreamy quality about the first half hour or so, and you begin to wonder when the story is going to appear. Henderson is terrific in her role of a young girl working all night in a petrol station while caring for he...

Prisoners: morally ambiguous

Prisoners is a disturbing movie, less for its subject matter - the abduction of two little girls - than its moral ambiguity. Are we really supposed to believe that a father who prays the Lord's Prayer before he allows his teenage son to shoot a deer, and who much later prays the same prayer with a great more difficulty, would become such a vigilante character as to beat a suspect almost to a pulp? And I mean 'pulp'.

Another character, supposedly once a Christian, also goes on about doing...