To Supplement Yesterday's Post...
Thanks, ACLU.

My Addition to the War

Bonnie sent me this today. If you're one of the people who doesn't read the links I attach, then you're lame. And you're going to miss out, because this one is really good. It's Fuck Christmas, which is written by the same guy who wrote Fuck the South (neither a sentiment I wholly agree with, though oddly, I agree with everything he says in each...go figure...) and it basically addresses this whole myth about the liberal plot against Christmas.

There's a lot written out there about the plot against Christmas (which is as silly a thing to say as "the liberal plot against fluffy bunnies" or "the liberal plot against cute puppies" and is equally fictional) and I have little to add to it (though I'd like to point out that here Gibson cites "Santa dumped from Coke cans..." as one example of the way in which Christmas is being attacked and also mentions Christmas lights and Christmas trees, but fails to bring up one single example of Christ actually being devalued...but I digress), except this: read the subtitle of John Gibson's book. If your eyes aren't that good or you're just lazy, I'll help you. It says:

How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday is Worse than You Thought

That phrasing "the Sacred Christian Holiday".

I was raised Christian. Not by particularly fanatical parents, but my mom and dad did set out to make sure I had a good Christian education. That I had a good basis in the faith. My dad was active in the church until, one day, he was listening to something someone said and realized "Wow...I don't actually believe any of this." I had a similar moment at the age of thirteen. But thirteen years of Sunday school and Bible reading (admittedly somewhat light when you're Episcopalian) drills a certain knowledge of the faith into you, and let me tell you, Christmas is not the sacred Christian holiday. Not by a long shot. Christmas is not the most sacred holiday to anyone but the big corporations who glut on increased holiday sales.

The most sacred Christian holiday does not happen for another few months. I'm talking about Easter, of course, the real high holy day of the Christian church. The day when Christ died, was resurrected, and assumed his place on the throne of Heaven (assuming you're believe all this). That's the mystery of the Christian church. That's the miracle. That he was born--well, that's no great wonder. More or less everyone does that at some point in their lives.

People like Gibson focus so much energy on the renaming of Christmas trees to holiday tress, the absence of Santa Claus in the public sphere, etc. But these are all pagan elements that have been taken by Christians over the years and made into symbols of Christmas (hell, Gibson even points out in his little rant that these are parts of a Germanic pagan winter festival). When you get right down to it, they are secular elements of the holiday that have been added over the years and adopted by the public sphere, and they have nothing to do with Christ's birth.

If we're arguing that the Christmas trees and lights and Santa are all indivisible now from Christmas, then I'd counter that Christmas has been made, by the importance placed on distinctly non-Christian elements, into a secular holiday. But clearly, it isn't that. Jews don't celebrate it. Nor do Muslims. Nor, to my knowledge, do Hindus or Buddhists or any of the other 20 percent of the population that makes up the rest of this country. So what makes Christmas holy? I don't know...not precisely...but I'd argue that it has more to do with families who come together to be with each other and love each other, with people taking a timeout to share some good will with everyone they meet, with church congregations who come together as a group to celebrate the beginning of their miracle, and with a sort of private revelation, if you are a believer, that the king was born this night and with him, the hope for all mankind. If I'm right, which I think I am, then you'll see that nobody is really able to attack that. And you'll see that, though liberals might have had a hand in making Christmas at large a secular holiday, it is the people on the far right slinging slander who have made it something crass.

Our Christmas Present from the IRS

It's cold out. Very extremely cold out. The thing I love about standing outside in cold like this is how utterly silent everything is. I would think that in the cold, with all of the molecules of air tightening together, sound would travel excellently. It would be crisp and travel to our ears as through a steel tuning fork. But it doesn't. The air is crisp, but soundless on days like this. I like that.

Holiday celebrations are already well under way. The past two weekends have been full of holiday parties with eggnog and mulled wine and the ocassional snowball fight. I leave in three days for home, which I'm looking forward to. My gifts are all made (liqueurs for all, this year), some are given, etc.

The big news right now involves Tantalus. We received a notice from the IRS on Saturday and are officially a not-for-profit organization. This is excellent news, because now it means that on top of benefits to us, any donations made to us are tax-deductible. It's a good thing for Tantalus.

I'm taking an extended hiatus from the company after The Strange Dreams of Nobody in Particular goes up. Just a little time to work on projects of my own and reevaluate my life. After that, we'll see where we are. Recent developments and past issues have sort of come together over the past couple of weeks, and I've realized that I put far more work into Tantalus than I get out of it in terms of artistic fulfillment. That's a problem. Tantalus is very much a company of directors and idea men. As a writer, Tantalus doesn't really offer me much. As an actor, it's become clear that I'm not going to get the opportunity to grow and expand my skills. So it may be time to move on. It's not something I'd do lightly, but it may be time.

Grad school has finally begun to call me, too. It may just be a time for change, in general. New years aren't always that way, but they can be.

I...um...Wow..You What?

I found this through one of the absinthe forums I'm on. One of the members of the forum is creating an Egyptian-style mummy out of a chicken. I'm torn between horror and morbid fascination. Actually, I'm torn between morbid fascination and sarcasm, as I keep trying to find an appropriate mummy's curse joke and just can't seem to place my finger on it. I know there's one in there somewhere, but like the tomb of King Tut, it eludes me.

Quick, somebody, draw me a cartoon or something to express the appropriate joke!

Announcement...

I braved the bitter cold to go see my friend Molly perform as the featured poet at the Funky Buddha Lounge on Monday. I've mentioned Molly on this blog before. She's an exceptionally talented poet and gives a mean performance and I told her so. She asked me to plug this, so here you go:

I've joined a writing ensemble here in chicago. We
have a show put together about chicago, and it's
amazing. For now we're going as The No-Name
Ensemble, because we've been so busy with
everything else...that well, that got left behind.
We'll be the feature at The Green Mill on Sunday,
December 11th. The open mic starts at 7, feature
at 8, and slam at 9. It's $6 at the door. You can
see the sign from the Lawrence stop on the Red
line. It's going to be an amazing show!
We'll also start a monthly show at Martyr's starting
Jan 3rd.
I hope to see y'all there!

Incidentally, they're currently performing as the No-Name Ensemble. I don't want to talk for Molly but I bet anyone who could find them a name would get smooches or something for it. I suggested the Spoon River Ensemble. There were no smooches for me. But do go see them if you're in Chicago. They're really good, and this is coming from a guy who doesn't like slam poetry.

Collecting Anatomy

On Thursday during workshop, Glen told me about the Anatomy Collective's show, "Many Things are Destroying Me," and asked me if I might like to go see it. I said I would, so after my relatively failed writing session at the Pick Me Up, I trained home in a piss-poor mood to my home and then bused (bussed? bust?) out to Wicker Park for the show. By the first five or ten minutes, the bad mood was completely gone.

In essence, "Many Things are Destroying Me" is actually three shows: an interactive installation, a play, and an afterparty (if you can consider an afterparty a show...which I do). And the three parts were disparate enough that it's really difficult for me to review them as one item. The opening installation was a little like walking through a live-action version of Fly Guy. It invited the audience to wander through and a beautiful and surreal environment and interact with the miming characters within. A pair of women, bound in a wirework cage underneath a starscape of broken wine glasses sensually hand danced and made eyes at audience members. A mime in the middle of a circle of flowers played spin the bottle with himself (and anyone who wanted to sit with him) and tossed around an apple with a dancing girl in white and a persnickety writer who wandered the audience announcing himself with a horn. All of this was set to the music of an accordion player, who sat in the corner and whose face was so serious and intriguing that I was simultaneously enticed and terrified to walk up to her. In all, this was my favorite part of the evening, and not just because I'm a whore for artistic installations that invite me to play (although I am), but because of the balance struck between inviting play and giving the audience space. Which is to say that the Anatomy Collective provided ample opportunity for people like me to come and play, while not neglecting the beauty and visual elements necessary to rope in people who prefer to sit back and watch. It's a difficult balance to make--one that even some of the most accomplished spectacle companies often fail in, in my opinion--and the group pulled it off wonderfully.

The second part of the show consisted of five short absurd plays by Chicago playwright Taavo Smith. In them, a pair of men stand before the "Author" (played by Taavo, himself) and ask him questions fanboy-style, though all but his one knee is paralyzed. In another, a man and a woman talk around the presence and possibly rape of another woman (who may or may not even exist). Though they were well written, these really break no new ground. Instead, they tread over the same ground covered years before by Beckett, Ionescu (woot! spelled it right.), Pinter--essentially the canon of absurdist plays. In and of itself that might have left me unimpressed and cold, but they were acted with such commitment and skill that they really took on a life of their own outside of their genre. Thus a scene in which two men held an argument in gibberish, which in unskilled hands might have turned into just another knock-off of the French Dadaist movement, was performed so adeptly that it truly allowed the audience to divorce themselves from the meaning of words and experience the emotion of the argument. Sudden shifts in mood and style in the aforementioned man-and-woman scene helped lend gravity and a real sense of unease to a conversation that said nothing particularly unsettling or creepy.

At the party afterward, I got to speak with Taavo, as well as the Anatomy Collective's artistic director, Stephanie Acosta and company member, Alex Miles Younger. I found them very giving and unpretentious, and I really think that this aided in creating the inviting mood of the show. Because had they been pretentious or dismissive or uninviting, themselves, this would have bled into the performances of the actors. It's good to know, then, that there are people creating fun spectacle and interesting shows who are not so full of themselves.

In all, it was truly a delight to see this show. If you can, I recommend seeing it. It runs again tonight. If not, look for the Anatomy Collective's next performance, Prometheus. I have a feeling it will be very interesting.

Wherein the author’s own sense of irony comes back to bite him in the ass…

Possibly the worst experience I encounter with any regularity as a writer—even worse than sitting in front of a blank page and not having any idea what to write—is sitting in front of a page full of words, fully aware of where I’m going with a story, and completely unable to find the words to get me there with any grace. Because once I know where I’m going, figuring out how to get there seems like it’d be the easy part (I could MapQuest it or something…surely there’s a MapQuest function that maps out narratives for you…well, there should be.)

I’m sitting at the Pick Me Up right now, ostensibly putting work into my pig story, but really just listening to music and, once in a while, writing a couple of sentences that I quickly delete because they sound forced and absolutely worthless. And I’m listening to music, which I already said, but it’s worth noting because “Paperback Writer” just came on, because I added it to my writing mix, because I thought it would be really clever to listen to a song about a failing writer while I wrote.

I am not clever. I am a putz.

Back to writing. Or whatever it is you call this nonsense I’m doing.

Churning the Waters Like a Hurricane in the Atlantic

Today, I took a different route home than I usually do. I stopped at a grocery store to get some cheese and crackers and coffee for the first day of Strange Dreams of Nobody in Particular workshop, which meant I took the bus up to a certain street and caught the el from there. For no reason, I stopped in a shop to Christmas browse and then quickly left because it was a lame shop. A moment later in the shop and I would have missed her. A moment sooner and I would have been on the train too quickly. As it was, I stepped out of the shop right as a girl from the first play I directed walked by.

Running into old friends from Asheville in this town is worth noting at any time. There aren't many of us here...in fact, I don't know of anyone other than me here who I went to school with, though at times I wish the case were different. But running into a friend from Asheville now--even an acquaintance--is really remarkable. I've just been having a conversation with another friend from Asheville, one who also came out of the woodwork recently, about connections with people and how they come and go. And why some people reappear and why others stay vanished.

Synchronicity is strange. If I was Yoda, I would have much to meditate on. Even in my poor little non-Jedi skin, I should consider a thing or two.

Cambridge, Part 2

Years ago, when I was in my senior year of college, I came up to Cambridge to visit my friend, Miranda, who was then a freshman at Harvard. I remember walking around Harvard Square, bustling urban center, and feeling daunted by the activity, the scope. I remember walking through Harvard Yard among the dorms of brilliant students, the halls of academia, the library, and feeling--in my then very insecure way--like I had absolutely no business being there, no right to walk around among the great minds of my generation.

Today, I walked through Harvard Yard again for the first time since my visit with Miranda. I sat in the same tea shop where I met her here on Brattle Street, in the same seat, and drank possibly the same cup of tea I'd had. I walked through Harvard Yard, past her dorm, past the library. It's all as I remember it. Nothing has changed, except that, woefully, Miranda is nowhere near Cambridge anymore, and that I felt perfectly in my right place.

babies, babies, everywhere...
My niece, who for the time being is possibly named Maude, but whose name is really indeterminate, is doing just fine. She has learned very quickly how to breast feed (interesting side note: babies have to learn to breast feed...they don't know how to do it instinctively...weird, huh?), and remains incredibly cute. Which is actually quite rare for newborns, who tend to look a little like squished Jack o' lanterns for the first couple of days.

Not at all apropos of my Jack o' lantern remark, I went to visit with Sam and Terry and their boy, Nathaniel today. He's a healthy ten pounds after three months of life and is very talkative. He's even beginning to make basic sorts of language sounds, which I didn't think babies could do until much later in their babyhood. So, well done, Nathaniel. Sam and Terry are taking very well to parenthood.

So many babies here. I've never been a giant fan of babies, except in the abstract, but--and perhaps this is because I have a certain familial closeness to these two (at heart, if not entirely by blood)--I couldn't get enough of Maude and Nate. It kind of makes me want to move here.

I'm heading to Philly tomorrow. Thanksgiving's going to seem like a really drab affair by contrast to all of this. Just another feast holiday, the same one we had last year.

Cambridge

This morning, after a long last night of rearranging my flight and last-minute packing, I got up early, went to work for an hour and a half, and then left to catch a 10:55 flight out to Boston. I got here at two, right as my niece came into the world, caught excellent train karma from the airport to the hospital. A kind midwife led me into the labor room and told another, somewhat more businesslike midwife that I was Jenn Rossi's brother (a minor omission of the in-law) and they asked if I could come in. I didn't even get my bags down before my brother tackled me (not tackled, exactly, but I can't remember anyone greeting me with such gusto), followed by my mother, followed by Jenn's father, until I finally had to tell everyone in the room that I'd very much like the next person I kissed to be my niece.

She's lovely. She's a week early, but she was right on time because she arrived almost exactly when I did. And she's very strong and curious like I was when I was newborn. And she's beautiful. And she has a smell about her that can only be described as new-human smell, as in she smells the way we smell uncorrupted. And have I mentioned how beautiful she is? Well she is. I hope Uncle Matt gets to be a big part of her life.

We waited around the hospital for a while, and finally Jenn was moved to the postnatal ward of the birthing center and we said our goodbyes for the evening. I was entrusted with my niece's placenta, which was given to me in a large plastic tub. The kind they put potato salad in at the deli. The plan is to bury the placenta tomorrow. I do not know where we're burying the placenta, but I think that I was voted into the task because a) I'm Mike's brother, b) I'm the least squeamish family member, and c) I wrote a story about a uterus that rises up against its owner, so it seemed only natural that I should be the one to help bury a placenta.

Now I should sleep. Because my computer says it is 9:55, but my computer lies because it is actually 10:55 here, and it's actually three in the morning, according to my body.

I have a niece!

She's a Comin' From the Uterus When She Comes

I got a call from my mom earlier today. My sister-in-law is in labor up in Cambridge. By the time I get home, I'll probably have a niece. Which got a hearty "Woo hoo!" from me. I can't wait to meet her. At the moment, I'm trying to figure out a way to change my flight and come to Cambridge on Monday or Tuesday.

Call me uncle Matt

After This, Some Dreams of My Own

Sitting at home with a glass of absinthe, hoping that will help bring a nice deep sleep on.

I just got back from watching Moving Dock's production of Einstein's Dreams. By and large, I found the production a bit sleepy, but there were some moments of great imagination and some bits of nice staging, such as the world in which time changes very slowly, which featured actors moving in unison to a metronome.

The highlight of the evening was the reception and talk given by Alan Lightman beforehand, which was just plain fun because I've been wanting to meet him ever since I read the book in high school. I'm always amazed when I see amazing writers, because by and large I always expect great writers to be very dominating, and by and large they are always very giving, humble people.

Anyway, it was great to hear the man talk. And apparently I hung on his every word. But what wonderful words to hang on.

Sleep now.

I have Internet access at home, now, as evidenced by the fact that I'm writing this just before bed. That means nothing, really, in the grand scheme of things. Except that if you write to me at midnight, I'm fifty percent more likely to write back at 12:05. It also means that I can take my time on blog entries, so I can edit them for quality and the like.

Right. Definitely sleep now.

Next time: Internet games and resurrections from the past.

All Saints

As time marches forward and this blog gets older, I find myself periodically checking my previous posts to make sure I haven't reused the same titles over and over again (for example, I didn't use "All Saints" last year, but I am almost certain I have used the title "Best Laid Plans" at least three times, because whenever plans derail that's the first thought in my head).

Last night's War of the Worlds parade festivities went off reasonably well. Various Tantalus associates showed up in suits and sunglasses as men in black covering up the alien landing. Others we gave Hazmat suits and cotton swabs to assess the possibility of an alien infection. The reporter who was supposed to interview us to let the crowd know exactly what we were doing there had some technical difficulties, which meant we stood around waiting in the rain for about a half hour before we finally scrapped the idea of an interview and just decided to work the crowd. Which we did, and it was fun. I can't, in fact, remember having more fun on Halloween since I was a kid.

After the parade, I went to the Playground to catch the final Monday Show, which was easily the best installment I saw this run. There's some talk of another run starting next summer, and I sincerely hope that happens. The Monday Show is consistently the best improv show I've seen in this city. It's made Monday my night to sit back for an hour or so and see just how cool and interesting and complex people are. I would be really sad to have to say goodbye to it.

Speaking of excellent shows, Capote should be required viewing to anyone who claims to be an actor. It's rare that I watch a movie with a well-known star and am able to forget which actor I'm watching. In Capote, there was only one moment--a microsecond--when I remembered it was Phillip Seymour Hoffman acting. The rest of the time, it was Truman Capote on the screen. Go see it. I wept. You will, too.

And finally, since you've been good little boys and girls, I give you my Halloween costume:

Corrections, Retractions...

An anonymous reader with an uncanny sense of how to write out derisive laughter on the Internet so it really hits home sent this comment in regards to my guerilla theatre action:

hahahahahaha, you even got the cell company wrong. it was US Cellular!

Thanks for that. Actually, I noticed my mistake a couple of days ago when I read the CTA Tattler's post on the whole phenomenon. I briefly considered editing my post for accuracy, but ultimately decided to leave it for two reasons. The first is that the quote I provided from the CTA Tattler accurately identified the cellphone company in question for me. The second reason is that I didn't really care which giant corporation was paying people to annoy me on my ride into work, just that a giant corporation was paying people to annoy me on my ride into work.

But I'd like to point out that my inability to recognize that it was U.S. Cellular on the train doesn't really demonstrate any failing on my part. It seems to me the whole purpose of advertising is to get people to easily recognize your company's product over that of your competitors and to make them think "Hmmm...I sure would like to find out more about that product." Which this "ad" failed to do on both counts. That's not my fault. That's U.S. Cellular's fault.

I send my apologies to Cingular Wireless. If any of the top brass who read my blog over at corporate headquarters felt slandered, please let me know and I will send you a cookie in recompense. And to my secretive commenter, thank you. If I were an actual reporter of some kind, that mistake would have been disastrous to my career. You are my hero, as I can only assume you are the hero to the many blogs you patrol for mistakes.

"Who was that snide masked man?"

"We may never know, son..."

A Few Things Neither Here Nor There

Ian sent me this today:

Power to the people.
After informing CTA brass about U.S. Cellular's annoying and ultimately illegal guerrilla marketing campaign on CTA trains and other property, the CTA "spoke with a US Cellular representative today and also with someone from the ad agency to let them know that we don't allow this type of solicitation. The US Cellular rep said they would stop immediately. "

Which is good news on the not-letting-corporations-advertise-intrusively front, but is bad news on the army-of-people-in-cat-eye-glasses front. I had so been looking forward to my army. Still, it's good to know CTA responds to people when they call and complain. We should have thought of that a while ago:

"Hi, CTA?"

"Yes?"

"Stop righteously sucking."

"Oh! Sorry...we'll get on that."

"Thanks."

But the guerilla theatre keeps flying forward, surprisingly for a project I had more or less abandoned back in September (abandoned isn't the right word for it...we just ended our run). Yesterday while at "The Monday Show", my friend Chris introduced me to the man in charge of the Halloween parade and festivities on Halsted street. We talked briefly about guerilla theatre action (which it turns out is how he originally became the man in charge of the Halloween parade and festivites on Halsted street...by ganking control through guerilla action) and about his plans for this year's parade. And then he invited me to take part and perform something guerilla of my own. So I guess I'm going to be in a parade.

I have a few ideas of what to do based on what he told me about their theme this year, but nothing set in stone. Nothing definite. Mostly, it depends on who I can get to participate with us. But oh...it's gonna be fun.

Guerilla Me

A story:

It started on Wednesday on my ride to work. A pair of guys with their faces painted blue got on the train talking loudly on their cellphones. At first, I thought it had something to do with the White Sox making it to the World Series, that these were some rabid fans who decided to paint themselves blue for some silly reason. Then I thought they were with Blue Man Group or some kind of performance art piece. I thought all of that until the guy standing in front of me said, "Oooooh...they're selling something for Cingular Wireless."

He was right. Their shirts said it, their bags said it. Logos on all of them and signs attached to their bags that said "Talk Until You're Blue in the Face." They were part of a "creative" advertising campaign for a Cingular Wireless calling plan. They left a stop later, and I spent the rest of the ride cursing them, if for no other reason than because they had ganked the basic form of the Pizza Box project to hock cellphone plans.

Yesterday it happened again and I decided to do something about it. I decided that the next time I saw them, I was going to yank the phone out of their hands and smash it on the ground. Or wait a stop and run off the train with it.

Then I decided, instead, to do something that wouldn't get me arrested. I decided to Pizza Box the advertisers.

Today, I met Joanna at the Fullerton stop before work. We pinned signs on our bags that said "Invasive Ads Make Me See Red" and kept them hidden until one of the blue-faced Cingular guys got on the train. Then she and I turned our bags around and put on red-framed glasses. I was wearing a red shirt. And we stood next to the guy with our signs facing the rest of the train and talked loudly on our cellphones about how much we hated invasive advertising and why.

It wasn't quite the army of guerilla theatre I had hoped for (I really hoped we could have guerillas in every car of the train, and I really hoped there would be more of the blue-faced guys today), but it was very effective. The best response was from the guy himself, who leaned over and said "bravo" just as he left the car.

If the ad campaign continues, I'm going to keep doing this and provide a PDF of the sign we used to anyone who wants to lay in wait for them for as long as they keep this up. If I have my way, the trains will be full of people ready to take out their cat-eye red glasses and let the rest of the car know how shitty invasive advertising is. Until Cingular pulls the ad.

In My Defense

Let's get a couple of things straight. I really didn't mean to take today off. Honest. I didn't lie about the gas company having to come by to check my meter so that they could change my address. What I meant to do today was get up, go to work, sit at my desk like a good employee, and then go to rehearsal tonight. It was not my plan to sit around my apartment playing computer games and peeling pomegranates for liqueur all morning, just so that I could run downstairs when I heard my doorbell ring at two, only to find that my landlord could have let the nice man from the gas company in to read the meter all along. Swear to God, this is true. And yet...here I am at The Grind. My day is mildly wasted. No productivity for me. Woe.

I'm reminded of back when I used to take sick days in school. The general rule in my house was that if you were sick enough to stay home from school, you were sick enough to spend the day in bed, and you certainly weren't going out that night. I feel a bit guilty sitting in The Grind writing this. But only mildly so.

Down to business...
There's not much news on this end. Shiny and I are beginning work on the structure and writing of The Strange Dreams of Nobody in Particular, which is my serial/mosaic theatre project to be performed this spring. For the first time since I first proposed the project a year ago, I'm really excited about it. More on that when more develops.

Also, In the next few weeks I'm going to be retooling my Web site a bit to make it easier for me to use, to tie this blog to it a bit better, and to just make it a little less of a waste of space.
Right now, I have a couple of stories up, but nothing new, an outdated film script of mine that was something I slapped together in a week, and a page promising excerpts from my novel, which I haven't finished and really should (the novel and the page). I kind of get the feeling like I could have a blog, sans homepage, and that'd work just as well. And that's not what we want. So.

Anyone who wants to make suggestions regarding this, I'm all ears. Ears and typing fingers.

A Goldmine of Distractions

While checking up on the progress on AGDI's Quest for Glory 2 remake, as well as the inevitable, if somewhate doomed Hero 6 project, I discovered, I do not know how, Acid Play, a repository for freeware games. There are hundreds of them, many of them Sierra-style AGS games. Spent a little while today downloading the most interesting sounding titles ("Ozzie and the Quantum Playwright" sounded fun, if for no other reason than because it might be the first game ever about a college theatre major).

In my search for games, I also discovered Reality on the Norm, a sort of project in online role-playing-game story telling, in which each game is basically a new chapter in the continuing, semicoherent life of the town Reality. Game designers reuse each other's characters as leads and secondary characters in their own projects and in this way, they sort of tell the story of a peculiar, adventure-ridden town. It's a neat idea.

One thing I always liked about Sierra's role-playing games, and didn't much like about the shoot-em-up games that eventually took their place, is the way in which they told stories. Game series really created interactive stories for people to be told, thick with plots and twists, and in the best cases, these stories were really satisfying and moving. More than the books I was forced to read in school, these games were responsible for me reading in my early adolescence, and in some ways, they're responsible for shaping my first efforts in writing (which says whatever it does about my writing...).

What these sites say to me is that I wasn't alone, and even though the tides of digital tastes have changed, there are still people out there who want games that are stories and not just bloodbaths. And there's a new generation of people willing to tell new stories. Or recycled versions of old stories. And that gives me a warm fuzzy.

Comments

I've been hit with a barrage of comment spam over the past week or so. Most of it from automated bots. Since I can't protect from comment spam, or at least, since I don't know how I can protect from comment spam using Blogger, I'm turning off comments for a while. Which sucks, because I really like to get comments.

If anyone knows how to protect Blogger blogs from comment spam, let me know. In the mean time, if anyone has a comment that absolutely must be made, feel free to e-mail me with it. If it's outstanding, I'll even post it.

Update:

Within less than an hour of posting, I received this:

Hello,

I don't know if anybody has already answered your plea for a solution to Blogger comment spam, but I've found the word verification option to work well so far. Just go to the settings page, then the comments page, scroll down a bit, and toggle the button that says something like "enable word verification for comments". Then when somebody wants to post a comment, they have to type the letters they see. I think the letters are an image file, which prevents spambots from being able to do it (so far). Good luck!

Matt Cheney

Thanks, Matt. I'll try it and see how that works.
Which fairly well invalidates this entire entry, but you know. Saga of my life and all.

Done!

Blogger just ate the blog entry I spent the past hour or so crafting out of blood and sweat (and pixels). I don't know why Blogger chooses to do this from time to time, but I can only assume it has good reasons. And that one day I will be wise enough to understand them.

I don't think I have it in me to re-create the entire entry over again, so I'll just summarize the major points in list form.

1) I'm done moving. It was harrowing, but I'm done and ready to get started making my apartment look like a place someone lives.

2) Bonnie and Darcy moved off to New York. I'll miss them immensely, but at the same time this is sort of a changing of the guard for me. It's like getting a friendship haircut.

3) Something dealing with the Jurassic era and the Paleocene Epoch. Also mentioned was the Jurassic-Tertiary Extinction Event.

4) Saw Serenity on Saturday. It's wonderful and very satisfying. Go see it.

5) Also saw Mirrormask this weekend. It's slightly less wonderful and satisfying, but it's beautiful to look at and worthwhile. Go see that, too.

6) (an addendum added for the purposes of this list) Went and bought books before seeing Mirrormask. Among them was Anansi Boys, which is good, but the real excitement is Glass Soup. I burped a little bit in excitement when I saw that on the shelf. Can't wait to read it.

The End of Fetus Joe

Haven't forgotten to post this, but I've been a bit busy and distracted over the past couple of days, what with moving and constantly having to fend off an attack of giant sentient lemurs. So I haven't posted. My friends Sam and Terry finally had their kid earlier this week (Terry did the having...Sam mostly stood around and looked proud...or so I imagine, since I wasn't actually there...they might have decided to switch things up for a change and let Sam have the kid...or not...but I digress...), and they have a photo gallery up online. That's a mighty fine boy they've got there. Click here to see a kodak slide show. The boy's name, for anyone wondering, is Nathaniel Henry Flint.

Say, "Hi, Nate."

Best Laid Plans

Instead of blogging right now, I'm supposed to be moving boxes into my new home and figuring out how to stack larger furniture on top of Tiffini's car so's we can bring it to the new place. That's really hard to do without keys, though. And I can't get the keys until much later this evening. So I'm here blogging.

This is entirely my fault--I was supposed to call my landlady to arrange a time to get the keys from her earlier, and I simply failed to do that over the past week. So my own damn fault. But still, it's a frustrating thing, nonetheless.

I Should be Glad to Go Home, if Home is Where I'm Going

On Thursday, Whitney and I gathered a group together and journeyed out to Muir Woods to see the giant redwoods. We walked through groves of trees that have seen enough time to understand the rise and fall of empires the way we understand the movement of the sun, and Whitney commented that she felt like she was in church. And we were in a church of sorts, but somehow more real than a great many of the little shacks of wood and corrugated metal that I've seen called church before. The energy from these trees was so strong that when I reached out and touched my hands to them, I nearly passed out. My mind couldn't wrap itself around what I was touching, what I was seeing with my own eyes. Surely, some part of me kept saying, these aren't real; they're fiber glass or something.

After the woods, we trekked down to the most beach I've ever seen. Where the mountains slid into the ocean, the ocean whittled them down into black sand and pebbles and sharp, rocky mesas that rose black and ragged from the water. We sat on these and watched the sun set into a distant rim of fog and watched the full moon rise from behind the mountains. I meditated and let the surf wash up onto me and soak my pants. Even though I was cold, I didn't notice it at all.

We drove back, tired and at peace, and dropped off our friends, then Whitney and I made our way to a hot tub that she knows about, a sacred space in Berkley that is set aside for women to go, where men cannot go anaccompanied. She led me through a neighborhood like any other to a house that looked like nothing special and back to a high fence with a coded door. Signs on the door told us no talking or noise was permitted at or beyond this point. Whitney punched in her code and we walked silently through down a leaf-covered path to a prayer garden and dressing rooms where we disrobed. In the darkness I could see nothing but the light of the dressing room. The was no sound but that of rushing water. I stepped naked into the garden and fumbled my way toward the water and climbed into the tub. It was scalding. Kept at 114 degress to kill bacteria and to aid relaxation, the water felt as though it was cooking me. I couldn't go in more than a few feet, and even then I quickly stepped out of the tub and into the garden. Uneasy, trembling from the cold air and from nerves, I walked through the path to find a place to sit and rest. As my eyes adapted, I saw other people--their bodies glowing pale white as moonlight in the unlit garden--praying, stretching, meditating.

I sat in an unoccupied spot and sat down to meditate, but it was freezing out and I couldn't stop shaking from that and from nerves, though I tried very hard to concentrate on meditating, so I stood up and set myself back into the hot tub. It felt great on my skin this time, still hot, still sclading, but the heat felt wonderful for a while. I plunged myself chest deep in the water, had to concentrate in order to catch my breath because the sudden heat really stole my lung control and I was gasping for air. But after a few minutes that settled down and I could breathe just fine and sit back and really let my muscles relax. Then I could walk around the garden, steam rising from my skin, and not feel the cold. I meditated and relaxed and walked among people naked and unafraid, calm as could be. Whitney and I walked home to sleep. I didn't feel the cold for a second.

Friday I saw a couple of shows and wandered around the park with Sue for a while (not in that order), and in the evening met my pen pal for the first time ever. I've had this pen pal for about five years. We met in an AOL chat room during my senior year of college and started sending letters (real letters...honest to God real letters on paper and everything) back and forth, as well as audio letters and tapes and passion fruits and lenses and so on and so forth. For a while, she lived in Germany and sent more e-mails than actual letters, and for a while I haven't carried a notebook to write in, so that's been fine. She's been living in LA for a while, so when I found out I was coming to San Fransisco, I suggested she could come up and hang out for a few days. Which is what she did.

It turns out, my pen pal is as lovely, smart, and charming as her letters would have a person believe. We met up for a glass of wine and to see a show, then went for drinks with other fringers and afterward to a BBQ party where they had excellent sangria. I spent the night at the house where the party was being held, on a mattress the amazingly generous Danielle, hostess of the party, made out of comforters. Slept next to a man who snored so loudly that I dreamed of chicken gyros (figure out the corrolation between the two if you can...I'm at a loss), and the next day met up with Jessica (the pen pal) for breakfast and to wander around North Beach for a while.

Hanging around with Jessica has been lovely. We've foregone a lot of the pleasantries that come with meeting a new person, but there's still a lot of conversation we've never had, so the conversation is constantly moving. It's not exactly like hanging out with an old friend, but more like spending time with a new friend I've met while travelling. Which in a weird way is exactly what she is.

Today I moved out of Whitney's place in Berkely/Oakland and into the hostel. Said goodbye to all of the wonderful people I met up there. And now I'm about to enjoy my last day in San Fransisco by sitting in an outdoor cafe, enjoying this lovely weather the city has decided to provide me, and reading a new book for a while. Then I'm going to catch a show by the incredibly kind people who put me up for the night on Friday (the Neo-Surrealists...former Defiant Theatre members from Chicago) and then a part and then home.

I'm coming back inspired and aware of things I must change in my life if I'm not going to be miserable back home. That includes elements of my external environment and the influences of people, as well as my internal self and the way that I act and approach myself and life and so on and so forth.

But before then, there is tonight. And the future will never happen as long as I keep not wanting it to.

Before I go, a quick quote from Seneca that I found while eating at Cafe Gratitude last night:

"It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult."

See many of you soon. See some of you much later. See all of you eventually.

Here There Be Pirates

At this point, I've done so much in San Fransisco that I'd have a hard time regaling you with my stories without writing one of those blog entries that makes me sound like a hyperactive five-year-old and goes "And then I did this, and then I did this, and then I..." So I'll skip most of that. Basically I've been wandering around San Fransisco, taking in the sights, drinking coffee, reading, getting to know the city, chatting with people, etc. Yesterday I wandered around North Beach for several hours and bought a couple of books from City Lights Bookstore, which is the sister store to Shakespeare and Company and is owned by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (wow...spelled that right on the first try). Was cornered between the world history/ sociopolitical commentary sections by an aging gay man who talked at me for a half hour about New Orleans before Sue called and saved me. Then I walked a labyrinthe in Grace Cathedral and wandered off to see some theatre.

I've seen a lot of theatre in the past week, most of it good, some of it fantastic. All of it fringe. Except for the opera in Golden Gate Park. That was decidedly mainstream.

San Fransisco is a beautiful city. I say that as someone looking at it through vacationer's eyes, but it really is pretty. It reminds me of those beachside towns that you find in New Jersey with their quiet back streets and the smell of salt in the air. Except on a larger scale, and with mountains. I guess it's unlike any city I've ever been to, really. It's peaceful and cozy, small and very walkable, if you can get past the forty-five degree hills. Always there's a breeze. Always it feels like fall.

Today I walked through the Mission district to Dave Egger's pirate store, which the most effective front I've ever seen to cover a writer's workshop. I bought a literary map of the city from them and then walked literally over hill and valley into the Castro, which flies the pride flag over the neighborhood as though it was a country unto itself. Then into the Lower Haight, where we were warned was not for tourists.

And there's so much more to do, and like every traveller incapable of living only in the moment, I see my time creeping steadily to an end. Soon back to Chicago where it's flat and big and unfriendly to long walks. But not so soon I have to think too much on it.

No Flowers in My Hair

Brief post from San Fransisco. I'm in the common room of the Adelaide Hostel, where my friend Sue is staying, and where there is free wireless access. Sue is upstairs showering or fiddling with headshots for the opening of her show tonight, and Sue's director, Braden, is hanging out in the room.

Yesterday I met Sue, Braden, and our stage manager, J. B. at the hostel, and we briefly paper teched the show. Then we went to the theater and met with the production manager for the EXIT Theatre, a mellow woman named Amanda, and our technician Jean Pierre. We teched for two and a half hours, which was largely spent setting light and sound levels and figuring out what the theater had to offer us. It's a nice little space. Not quite what you'd call a black box, but close.

Afterward, we got lunch at a Thai place and went to Haight-Ashbury to shop for sweaters and be tourists for a while. I'm not much for being a tourist, personally, even when I technically am a tourist, so I was very happy when Braden called a friend of his and she invited us to hang out in her apartment for a while. Ended the night in the hostel talking theatre and life with Braden and Sue until I realized I had better get back to Oakland before the buses stop running (which it turns out never happens...). I spent the night in my friend Whitney's garage (which she and her roommates have converted into an incredibly comfortable, if completely no-frills guest house), and woke up this morning for vegan breakfast with tofu scramble and uberhealthy smoothies with Whitney.

And that pretty much catches you up on what I've done.

A few quick impressions of the city: San Fransisco is beautiful, absolutely beautiful. It's lush and green, even now in the dry season when the hills in the distance are dried wheatgrass brown. The people I've met are friendly and open. There's a sense of community that reminds me of the way things were in Asheville, but in a larger city and with a truer feel to them. People feel genuinely nice. Not just faux nice. This morning on the BART, I made conversation with several total strangers. They acted as though that was the most natural thing in the world.

I find I have an intuitive sense of how to find my way around the city that I didn't get from Chicago for several years. It just makes sense the way things splice together. The way cities in Europe made sense, even though their streets were winding crystalline arrangements of alleys and back alleys. The way New York makes sense to me. And Philly. The air here is sweet and fresh and cool. It's invigorating.

In short, this city feels like an old friend who I just met.

Thoughts on Tori, Synchronicity, and My Periodic Need to Cease to Exist

Last night, I went to the Pritzker Pavillion to worship at the altar of a red-haired goddess, sat rapt by her voice, the inhuman whines and growls, sharp leaps in tone, in pitch, which should not have come from a tiny little pixie wood nymph (thank you, Amanda for phrasing), but did. I was lucky enough to get to bring one of my dearest people in with me in the form of a spectral radio presence broadcast over a phone and to have her there with me almost until the very end of the show, when my battery died. Then went home, tired, gone, and slept soundly until the morning for the first time in a long while.

This morning, I woke up and set my feet on the floor of my apartment, which was not flooded with water, and took the train through my city, which has not been destroyed by water, to work at my kushy job where I sat in front of a desk and e-mailed with Bonnie.

Around noon, I called my apartment brokers to ask them if my lease had come in, and the woman on the line said yes, it had, and then "Oh...but it's dated for today." Which wouldn't have been a problem--she said she could just call them and change the date manually and sign off on it--but I had mistakenly put September 1 as my start date when I applied for the apartment, instead of October 1, and the landlords had accepted my application based on that assumed date. They would still let me have the apartment, but for a cost I couldn't afford. So I sat on pins and needles for several hours, waiting for one of their agents to call me, until the end of the day when I called him and he told me to call them and find out whether one of the other places he had shown me were still open (which they presumably could have done at noon, when I was talking to them, and I'm not sure why they didn't).

It was, so in the long run I had an immensely stressful day full of my worst imaginings, from which nothing has come except that I got an apartment I like better for less money. Which is what I should have done in the first place, but what can a fella do?

Tonight, as soon as I finish this entry, I am going to watch my friend Sue perform her one-woman show for...well, me...reason being that I'm her sound-board operator when she performs at the San Fransisco Fringe Festival. Tomorrow I have a rare night off, then Saturday I clean and pack, and Sunday I fly off to San Fransisco for a couple of weeks of theatre, exploration, visiting, joy, relaxation, late-night conversations into the depths of reality. Then back and packing and moving

I'm busy is what I mean. Good busy, but busy. I've been so stretched thin over the past couple of months that, lately, I feel like I'm not in the room a lot of the time when I am. San Fran seems like a dream. An abstraction. It seems like I'm going there worlds away from now in another lifetime, in another me. This is partly because for all that fills my days until then and after then, it might as well be. But it's also because I've never been there. It's a photograph to me, no more connected to an actual place than a molecular spring-model of an ethanol is to a glass of scotch. To use a distiller's metaphor.

It's very exciting, and a bit frightening, and everything that exploration is. Everything I've missed since I became comfortable here. I can't wait.

Talk to all of you after. Maybe during. Who can say?

Moog

"The Pizza Box Project" spent time at the Abbie Hoffman Festival (full name: Abbie Hoffman Died for Our Sins) this weekend. All in all, I was not merely proud, but awed at what we were able to do there. In all, between planning and executing our guerilla theatre pieces, we logged about 13 hours of theatrical time. And all through the festival, people came up to us to tell us how brave and cool they thought our project was. Our show was very well known. I can't wait to see what we can do with Around the Coyote.

I took today off to recover from the festival, and just because I need a day off in general. I went into the Grind in the morning to get a croissant and a cup of coffee for breakfast, and was very upset to receive an e-mail from my friend Miranda that her father, Bob Moog, had died. For those of you not in the know, Bob was the father of synthesized music. Not that he invented the concept, or even that his synthesizer was the first, but he was the person who made it portable, accessible. He was the man who made the synthesizer a major part of the music scene in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

I didn't know Bob well, but I did have the pleasure of sharing conversation with him on his back porch during summer dinners with him, Miranda, and her mother (who taught philosophy at UNCA, and who I was, incidentally, terrified of). I remember he was very mild-mannered around me, was quick-witted and had a clever smile, and that I had a hard time imagining that someone whose invention had essentially defined the music I had listened to as a kid could be so modest, so soft-spoken and well-mannered.

Anyway, I was very fond of Moog, and I know that a good portion of people who met him in Asheville were, too. Which means he will be mourned deeply. His obituary is here. It covers his life more thoroughly than I possibly could.

Ales Rarus

Back in the day, when my wardrobe consisted almost exclusively of tie-dye and I had my hair long and walked around with a peace symbol necklace around my neck (this was, oddly enough, not more than a decade or so ago), I was friends with a kid named Eric Williams. Eric was a year older than me, was a classic rock fan like me, and he was so pale that when he stood in the sunlight, you got kind of sonogram picture of his heart beating through his chest. Seriously. I think we met in gym class during that first week of school when the gym teachers sat everyone down on the bleachers and paced back and forth, sizing up who was going to be a good gym student, who would be kind of a whiny weakling, and who would just generally not buy into the fact that gym was an integral part of their academic studies. Eric and me...we were in that last group. Or so I remember.

Anyway, years passed and as happens, I lost touch with Eric. I dated his sister Katie for a good chunk of my senior year of high school, became friends with her, then became sort of not friends with her, then became really good friends with her, and now have the honor of calling her daughter my niece. It's been kind of a saga is what I'm getting at, here. The last time I saw Eric was at Katie's wedding, and he had grown considerably from this skinny little pale kid into a not so terribly skinny or pale adult (Katie did this, too...round about her twenties she gained the ability to tan...I think the melatonin gene must just be a late bloomer in this family) who can dance like...well, like I will never be able to dance in my life. Anyway, he and I didn't get to chat much, but I was impressed with him nonetheless.

This is all back story to say that Katie e-mailed me today to ask if Eric could link to my blog from his. Of course he can, I said, though apparently our opinions are in stark contrast many times. He, for example, is Catholic. I am not. Which has never really been a problem for me in the past, but it makes me wonder if I will soon find myself arguing a lot. I do hope not. I lost my taste for argument sometime in college, when surrounded by Christians of every shape, size, and fanaticism, I discovered I could not win and just decided to set down the sword.

At any rate, in courtesy, I'm linking to Eric's blog here. It's called Ales Rarus for reasons that he names on his blog. I'll post a link in my sidebar when I have more time. Ciao, Eric!

Oh, and there's this...

Outside of my landlord troubles, here's some fun things. The first is sent to me by Amanda, and it's this. Wow. That's fucking cool.

The second is the Kingdom of Loathing, an online role-playing game about...well...there's this kingdom, see...

Have fun.

In other news...

Don't ever rent from ICM Properties. I'm currently renting from them and really they're terrible landlords. I started renting from them a year ago, because they offered me a place that was in Lincoln Square, near some friends of mine. I answered an ad for a garage apartment and after a brief interview, they told me that the garage apartment was really pretty dingy, but we should drive around a bit and I could maybe find something else. What they showed me was the apartment on 4903 North Seeley Ave, where I currently live. It was spacious and light and they were willing to give it to me for a discounted rate. The only real problems with the place were a giant hole in the closet floor, missing tiles in the bathroom, a few broken window screens, the fact that it wasn't clean, and the fact that the back porch door had a broken window. All of which I was assured would be fixed when I moved in.

Long story short, none of these things were fixed when I moved in. I moved into a filthy apartment. Postitively filthy. And I'm not one to complain about things like dirt. But this place was disgusting. The electricity was off. The gas was off. The hole in the closet floor was still there, as were the missing tiles and broken window screens. There were several other holes in other floors that I had missed when I first looked at the place. I called them up the day after I moved in and told them I needed to put in an order for repairs. Collected a list of the repairs to the place that were supposed to have been done, and faxed that to them. Some they did. Most, they did not. I guarantee they will glut my security deposit to make those repairs when I move out.

Somewhere in there, a fire broke out in my building. I was making pie, and smelled the smoke, but didn't think anything of it until my neighbor banged on my door to tell me, at which time I noticed that the hallway was full of smoke. Afterward, I wondered why I hadn't heard a smoke alarm go off. The simple answer was that ICM Properties had failed to install a smoke detector in my apartment. I quickly called their maintenance line to alert them to this fact and that they should not only install a smoke alarm, but bring the closet that held my furnace up to code (Chicago fire code requires a metal grate on the furnace door to allow oxygen intake for the fire...I told ICM this the first week I moved in...the fire was about two months later). A month passed. No smoke detector. I told them again. This time the smoke detector came, but the grate still wasn't installed. I forget exactly how long it took me to get them to finally do that. When they did, I came home to an apartment full of sawdust. They didn't bother to clean up after themselves.

Anyway, after almost a year of having put in repair requests, most frequently for the gaping hole in my closet floor, I received a call that my apartment was being shown, because my lease is up soon. I told them I'd like to renew, but would like to discuss the problems with maintenance I've had. The woman I got on the phone took my maintenance request and then informed me that they would not make my lease contingent on the maintenance request being met. I told her that I wouldn't sign the lease until these things had been met to my satisfaction, that they had consistently failed to keep up their end of my lease in that they haven't maintained the building at all since my arrival, and that I wasn't terribly happy with them as landlords in general. Her response, ICM's general idea of keeping their tenants happy, was to tell me that if I wasn't happy, maybe they just won't renew my lease.

I'm not the only one unhappy with them. In a blog entry entitled "Home is Where the Roaches Are", a Metrobloggin' blogger writes:

When I first rented my completely rehabbed apartment three years ago, a small two-guy company owned the building. They were fantastic. Not only was my apartment the only rehabbed unit in the place, they kept the building in fabulous shape. They had someone on staff whose responsibility it was to make the entryways free of spider webs and dirt and they cleaned the carpets and they put up a list every couple of weeks in the laundry rooms that let the tenants sign up for FREE bug removal. Yeah. You could sign up on a Tuesday and your place would be sprayed for bugs the following week. Imagine that.

In short, our rental company sold the building to ICM Properties. Within the space of six months, we couldn't leave our rent checks in the little box down in the laundry room, the washer and dryer beneath my portion of the building were removed, the washers and dryers in the other part of the building were removed with no possible notice or promise of new units, light bulbs in the hallways started going out and not getting replaced and, in general, the building started sucking.

On another blog entry for Metrobloggin', someone named Chicago Monkey writes:

avoid ICM altogether
while the apartment was greatabout 1600 square footin Lincoln Park (shut it)for $1000
the people I had to deal with was not worth it
I actually yelled at the guy when I picked up the keys because he called me a liar.
also had no fridge for first 10 days I lived there
avoid avoid avoid

In opinions given of ICM Properties spaces, we also see this opinion, as well as this one:

ICM Properties Inc. recently purchased this property and their business practices can only be characterized by such phrases as: disrespectful, unethical and felonious.

I can't speak for them being felonious (although I'm reasonably certain neglecting to install a smoke detector before a tenant moves in and after a tenant calls to complain qualifies), but I can say that they have broken the Chicago laws that state a landlord must alert a tenant 24 hours before coming into their home. I have on at least one occasion been awoken by one of their maintenance men. In the incident in question, nobody called me to say they would be showing up, and I was still in bed when their electrician came into my house without knocking first.

Thus ends my gripe. Don't rent from ICM Properties. They claim they are a family-run, family-based business. They aren't. What they are is a large corporation interested in only making as much money as possible from their tenants. Those who complain are quickly singled out as difficult and management becomes impossible to deal with. We'll see where all of this leads. Frankly, I don't want to stay with them. Though I love my apartment, the folks who own it are shit to deal with. And that makes staying there more difficult than you could imagine.

Blogiversary

With all of the hubbub of Midsummer Night, Pizza Box Projects, etc., I seem to have missed my blogiversary. That's right, as of August third, I've been blogging for one whole year. That means it's been a whole year of randomness, literary critique, bootlegging news, occasional whining, and much much more. Thanks to all the folks who have read my blog over the year and who continue to do so. Because of you, I am not just out here masturbating alone in cyberspace. I'm doing it with an audience.

Midsummer Night's Dream closed on Sunday. The last crowds were some of our best, and the last shows were, too. On Sunday, my friends made it out to see me, and brought our weekly Sunday potluck dinner with them. Picnic foods was the theme. It made me really happy to get to perform for them and to get to join them afterward for a quick meal. I was also asked to audition for another play, based on my performance this weekend. So there you go. Simple summer project leads to more work, leads to inevitable stardom.

Now it's on to bringing the Pizza Box Project, my summer guerilla weirdness show, to the Abbie Hoffman Festival and ATC. And it's also on to possibly moving in September, and so on and so forth. But at least next weekend I have a chance to relax some.

Black Midnight

Yesterday as I stepped out of my door, I found that the organic produce fairy had left me a little package. Since the fruit flies have been going a bit hog wild lately, I decided the best course of action was to take the box inside and empty it, before they set their beady little red eyes on my fruit. Inside the box: the usual assortment of leafy greens that I always mean to eat and never manage to in time, a couple of zucchini, a pineapple, and a bunch of black midnight grapes. The fruit flies were all a twitter. I thought, "Cool. Maybe if I don't get to these in time, I can make wine from them," as I so frequently think when I encounter fruit these days. Then I tasted one.

They will not last long.

Today, Sam alerted me to the fact that the 2005 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest results are in. Named for Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), who coined the phrase "it was a dark and stormy night," the contest sets itself the goal of coming up with the worst possible opening paragraph for a novel. The first place winner this year:

"As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual."

Of those that I have read, however (and the list does go on and on and on), my favorite so far is:

It was high noon in the jungles of South India when I began to recognize that if we didn't find water for our emus soon, it wouldn't be long before we would be traveling by foot; and with the guerilla warriors fast on our heals, I was starting to regret my decision to use poultry for transportation.

But there's pages and pages to be read.

In other news, I bought a computer yesterday. It comes with a printer and a four-year warranty, which should prevent it from crapping out like all the other computers I've bought in the past couple of years.

And the Sun Times Weighs In

The Sun Times review is in. I dare say, it's one of the fairest reviews I've ever read. Read on!

'Slide' sounds great but slips on story line
July 26, 2005
BY HEDY WEISS Theater Critic

"Somewhere on the dark highway between a rock opera and a bar act." That's how the Tantalus Theatre Group describes its new musical, "Slide," now onstage in the little back room of the Joy-Blue Club on the corner of Southport and Irving Park. It would be difficult to improve on their given compass points, except to add that the show attempts to serve as a reminder that with freedom comes the need for responsibility.

The question remains: Is this highway that the Tantalus artists talk about a smoothly paved and pothole-free one? By no means. The songs in the troupe's musical odyssey -- primarily the work of musical director and keyboardist Ed Plough and guitarist Steve Clark -- are full of promise, with some soulful, soaring harmonies melded to alternately poetic and sophomoric lyrics.

As for the show's "book" -- the work of Kalena Victoria Dickerson -- it has a few clever sequences that bear echoes to the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, but is in need of a massive overhaul. The narrative line is needlessly opaque at times, and the characters' relationships need considerable clarification.

Yet watching this two-hour production unfold, it's possible to imagine that this may have been what the earliest workshops of musicals like "Urinetown" and "Rent" looked like -- raw, ragged, even laughably incoherent at moments, but with a genuine spark of talent and a tremendous amount of energy behind it all.

The story line for "Slide" (at least as much as could be deciphered) is as skewed and needlessly patchy as the program's cut-and-paste graphic design. Ostensibly it was inspired by Upton Sinclair's muckraking classic The Jungle, which exposed the horrors of the Chicago meat-packing industry and the exploitation of those who labored in it. But the "factory" referred to here seems to be a cross between a corrupt and corrupting music production corporation and a Wal-Mart. Its monstrous Boss Man (the deftly enigmatic Isaiah Brooms) undermines both the hapless aspiring artist Jurgis (Austin Oie, working in a kind of James Dean mode) and the vocal princess known as the Frail Woman (the graceful, silvery-voiced Joanna P. Lind). These two fall in love and are quickly torn apart by nothing less than the sheer cruelty of the world.

This pervasive human cruelty wounds all the characters, including Jurgis' mentally slow younger brother Stanislovas (played with sweet guilelessness by Brian Troyan) and the brothers' much-abused mother, Antanas (the forceful Mikalya Brown, who at one moment literally tap-dances her rage). Everyone in "Slide" is brutalized, and not surprisingly, most of them behave brutally in response.

The score, featuring more than three dozen songs that range in style from grunge anthems to lyrical confessionals, is played by an onstage band that includes Plough, Clark and percussionist Ed Dalton, with many of the actors picking up instruments along the way. Glen Cullen has directed, with sets and stark lighting by Marc Chevalier and nifty costume design and choreography by Symphony Sanders.

'SLIDE' SOMEWHAT RECOMMENDED When: 8 p.m. Mondays and Tuesdays through Aug. 30 Where: Tantalus Theatre Group at Joy-Blue Club, 3998 N. Southport Tickets: $10 Phone: (773) 960-2066

And the reviews just keep coming...

From the Chicago Reader:

Slide: Very freely adapted from Upton Sinclair's meat packing expose, The Jungle,Tantalus Theatre Group's ambitious two-hour rock opera/bar act delivers a strong score and dedicated performances. The company transforms Sinclair's muckraking depiction of the Chicago stockyards circa 1905 into a brutal, but maddeningly indeterminate portrait of a "music plant." Wannabe star Jurgis, an immigrant as in Sinclair's book, pursues his dream and loses his way, his wife, and his family. Finally he acheives a perverse peace by surrendering to the status quo of the music-making machine. Ed Plough (and Steve Clark)'s songs, well-performed by the tenecious ensemble unleash a ton of eloquent anger and end with a lovely lament. Though this adaptation is too abstract, never arriving at specific parallels for the abuses Sinclair detailed, its progressive spirit rings as true as Sinclair's did 100 years ago.--Lawrence Bommer

Through 8/30: Mon-Tue 8pm. Joy Blue, 3998 N. southport, 773-960-2066. $10.

I'll keep posting reviews as they come. This show has been more reviewed than any other Tantalus show, largely through the efforts of Leah Fox, our PR person. She did a marvelous job of selling us around, and it shows through in these reviews. Cool.

More Reviews and a Slew of Bad News

The Chicagoist reviewed Slide this week. Very positive review. Here it is.

You don't have to convert, but you can't stay gay...

Bonnie blogged about this NY Times article (for those of you without a password, bugmenot). To summarize it for my non-article-reading slacker friends, after a teenager came out as gay to his parents, they ordered him into Refuge, a Christian program designed to cure kids of gayness. The program is sponsored by Love in Action, "a group in Memphis that runs a religion-based program intended to change the sexual orientation of gay men and women."

I can't even begin to comment on how wrong this whole program is without preaching to the choir, so instead I'll quote the article. Hopefully that will, you know, get the point across:

The goal of the program, said Mr. Smid (the executive director of the program), who said he was once gay but now renounces homosexual behavior, is not necessarily to turn gays into practicing heterosexuals, but to "put guardrails" on their sexual impulses.
"In my life I've been out of homosexuality for over 20 years, and for me it's really a nonissue," Mr. Smid said.
"I may see a man and say, he's handsome, he's attractive, and it might touch a part of me that is different from someone else," he said. "But it's really not an issue. Gosh, I've been married for 16 years and faithful in my marriage in every respect. I mean I don't think I could white-knuckle this ride for that long."

So the point of the program, if I read Rev. Smid's words right, isn't to give people a health sexuality, at all. It doesn't argue that homosexuals deserve a healthy sex life and that this can only be acquired if they go straight. No no. If I read Mr. Smid's quote correctly, the whole point of this program is just that they shouldn't be gay. If they can't be straight, by God and His Son Jesus Christ, they can't have any sexuality.

Also interesting is that he says he isn't a homosexual anymore. And then goes on to say that he's attracted to men in a way that touches him differenly than other people. Well...I mean, surely there are other success stories. Let's see:

"It's like checking into prison," said Brandon Tidwell, 29, who completed the adult program in 2002 but eventually rejected its teachings, reconciling his Christian beliefs with being gay.

Oh wait...no, not him. Let's try:

Occasionally, recalled Jeff Harwood, 41, a Love in Action graduate who still considers himself gay...

Uh...nope...not him, neither. Oh, okay. Here's one:

"In my experience people who struggle with their sexuality are more mature in general," Ben Marshall, 18, said. He recounted being in turmoil, growing up gay in a conservative Christian household in Mobile, Ala.
In 2004 his parents sent him to Refuge. "I went to Memphis kicking and screaming," he said. "I had grown to hate the church for the militant message it gave off toward homosexuality...But even success comes only through continuing struggle. Although he plans to date women in the future, Mr. Marshall said, he is avoiding any romantic relationships for the time being. "In all honesty, I'm just trying to figure out how to deal normally with men before I start to deal with women," he said.

So after all that, you still don't know how to relate "normally" to men and women? Here's a suggestion: You already knew how you relate normally to men...you were normal. Imagine being normal and different. Baffling to the folks in Alabama, I know.

Dangerous biker gangs...

But enough about the horrible things that people do to their children in Red States (why didn't we just let them secede when they wanted to? Why???), in this lovely city I call home there's a doings a happenin'. Also sent to me by Bonnie (or my own private Harvard research assistant, as I like to call her). Read this article (or wait for the bullet points to follow):

Police spent six hours Tuesday on bike patrol in Lakeview, giving out 37 warnings to bicyclists for running red lights, riding on sidewalks and, indeed, going the wrong direction on a one-way street. Next month, police will start handing out tickets, with fines that range from $25 to $250.

The article goes on to say that it's for reasons of safety and because bicycles need to obey the rules of the road like every other vehicle. Which is great, if we're given the same rights as every other vehicle. Which we aren't. Police aren't, for example, upping the number of fines they give out to cars who pull into the bike lane in order to get ahead of the rest of traffic. Or the folks who cut me off and run me off the road. Which is ultimately why cyclists break traffic laws in the first place: because it's the only advantage we have to keep ahead of the rest of traffic. By and large, motorists don't treat cyclists like they are legitimate vehicles. They cut us off, pull into our lanes, don't pay attention to us when pulling into traffic, etc. This makes biking according to the rules inviable and even dangerous. If one car cuts another off and they collide, there's likely to be a minor fender bender. If a car cuts me off and we collide, I'll probably be injured--maybe seriously so--and my bike is going to end up in shit condition.

The things cyclists do that are being complained about in the article--riding on the sidewalk, running stoplights when traffic isn't coming, etc.--we do because it makes the ride safer for us. I don't pull up on the sidewalk unless some fucker has run me off the road and my choice is sidewalk or crash. I run reds because it gives me the chance to get ahead of traffic. And obviously I don't do it if there's cars coming. The few times I have almost been hit on my bike, incidentally, happened when I was obeying traffic laws--once notably when a truck driver came barreling through an intersection after my light had turned green.

I don't know how serious all this is. It could be just another story in a newspaper. And I certainly haven't had any problems with cops. But if I were just starting out as a cyclist, I sure would be thinking again about it. It's weird in a city as bike-friendly as Chicago (which this city really is) to have cops effectively deterring people from taking up biking.

Sensitive Subject

I just received a fairly unprecedented phone call from Glen Cullen, the director of Slide, in which he said that my review of Slide hurt some feelings and could I edit the entry so as to express, perhaps, a different opinion or express my opinion differently. I told him I won't do that, and gave him these two reasons: First, the opinion I expressed in that review is my opinion, honest and true, presented without malice and without ulterior motive. To edit that, to change that would be a sort of lie on my part. Secondly, because I feel that to simply edit what I wrote without saying anything about it would be a sort of cowardice on my part. It would be like an attempt on my part to gloss over something I said, without taking actual responsibility for it. For better or worse, I did write what I wrote.

So, without editing the text below to cover up anything, I'm writing this, which is a sort of apology for where I went wrong in my review and a clarification of those points I feel might have made my review sound less positive than I meant it to sound.

So, first things first, to anyone who had their feelings hurt by my review, please accept my apologies. If you know me, you know that I certainly didn't aim to do so, and you should also know that I didn't write what I wrote callous to the fact that people I cared about might read it. I understood clearly that might happen and that, in writing a review that wasn't universally praising, I might step on toes. It's a risk that comes with writing in a public medium, but I feel that if I start censoring myself to avoid controversy, I miss the entire point of having a blog to express my opinions on.

Where I went wrong, and what I will apologize for is this: I wrote the review below fairly hastily and in-so-doing, perhaps didn't make clear some of the arguments I was making. For that, I am sorry. There was a good reason for the haste (the computer I wrote it on has a habit of spontaneously rebooting, particularly when I'm on the last sentences of a long and unsaved essay), but still it would have been better of me to have taken more time and state my case in a more thorough fashion. I take responsibility for not having done so, and I apologize. This is, alas, a problem in writing time-sensitive reviews and such.

In rereading my review, I can see where people would think it was meant to be a negative review. It wasn't. I meant it to be a fair and balanced review. When I wrote that it was a little like a staged concept album, or something along the lines of The Darkside of Oz, I meant that as praise. Slide isn't an excerise in straight narrative story telling. It tells its story through flashbacks, through Pinteresque dialogue in which more meaning is contained in the unspoken than in what is laid plain, through the movements of its ever-present underscoring. Unlike, say, The Wizard of Oz or Carousel, the song lyrics in Slide don't drive the narrative directly forward. Instead they utilize deeply image-based poetry and semi-psychedelica to infuse the audience with the mood of a location, a character's emotional state, an idea, or just the rollicking good time of a rock show. In a couple of places, this made the show difficult for me to follow from a standpoint of story, but by and large I didn't mind. What I got instead of your standard musical story was a primarily visual and auditory experience, loosely bound with a story. The same sort of thing I would get out of, say, a concept album like Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (which is a fantastic exercise in sensory story telling, and I defy anyone who says otherwise) or a film, like The Wall (which has a plot, but not one told in anything resembling your standard narrative).

Where I was genuinely critical of the show, I stand by. The scope of the story is, in my opinion, far too large for the space it's in. That's no fault of anyone in the show or involved with the show. Tantalus Theatre Group is a small company with a limited budget, and we simply couldn't afford more. What we do have, the cast and director have, as I said in the review, used admirably. But on occassion, the limits of space did come through, and when they did, the stage seemed cluttered and I was jarred out of my pure enjoyment of the music.

Similarly, having worked on the writing team for the show, I can say that the script could have used a bit more time to develop. Kalena Dickerson wrote the script in less than a month, an extraordinarly short period of time for anyone to write anything (I've been known to take a year on just a few pages...a month to write an entire play would mean a marathon bout of writing for me). She did well with the time we gave her. She would have done better with more time. That's the pitfall of the Tantalus show. If I hadn't been quite so intimately involved in Ragnarok, I probably would have written something similar about it (and, in fact, I spoke with several people through the run and after, suggesting the same thing as I suggested for Slide: that we take it back to workshop after the run and iron out the kinks and fix what didn't work, tighten what did, etc.).

Finally, to anyone who still wants to talk about this with me, please do so. I'll be at most of the shows and I'm happy to talk to anyone about my opinions. Or if you'd rather not talk to me in person, feel free to e-mail me or discuss things on this blog. That's why I allow comments and that's why I allow you to post anonymously.

Slide

I'm a little late in posting this, but better late than never.

I caught the opening of Slide on Monday and Tuesday of this week, and have to say I was really impressed. The show has grown considerably with the addition of actors, such that what was an extraordinarily rough script with music that didn't quite manage to tie in when last I was involved in the project, has evolved into a very interesting sort of staged concept album. The music and the script still don't tie together in a neat little brown-paper package, but on an abstracted level, they work together, they feed each other, and the end result is something like The Darkside of Oz, which is to say it is rather like ...i think not generated an album that happens to fit a play written by Kalena Dickerson, as opposed to being like a musical the two wrote together. For an audience willing to give up concise narrative story telling for a looser more sensory experience, it's a bitching show. But only if you're willing to do those things.

This is not to say I felt that Slide is complete yet, or that it's reached its full potential. For a show designed to be a bar act, it is far too large in scope. Bar acts are intimate, minimal affairs, wanting for nothing more than a front man and a band to tell their stories. While Slide makes an admirable attempt at keeping the cast tiny, through double casting and by employing any actor not present in the scene to play in the band, the stage is still too small to comfortably hold the eight cast members/band members, and the stage frequently feels cluttered.

In all, Slide is well worth the price of admission, and is a good reason to get out and have a drink on a Monday or Tuesday night, but if I were in the company performing it, I would suggest that it go back into workshop for a month or so after the run to iron out the kinks, tighten script and music, and to figure out this crazy thing that isn't quite a bar act and isn't quite a full-theater musical. If that happens, it will become a full-on cult phenomenon, ready to stand among Hair and Rocky Horror as one of the greats.

A Little Too Ironic

The Reviews are In...

From the Chicago Reader:

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM You'd think that having three different directors would make for confusion beyond what Shakespeare had in mind: Sabrina Lloyd stages the court scenes, Don Johnson directs the fairies, and Devin Brain rules over the rude mechanicals. But GroundUp Theatre's choice of a Mardi Gras theme and New Orleans setting creates a giddy milieu that easily encompasses accents from Elvis to Yosemite Sam, fashions from goth to Tammy Faye, and characterizations from a nerdy teenage Bottom to a cheerful voodoo-mambo Puck. Ninety minutes long, this outdoor production touring Chicago parks throughout the summer more than makes up for its lack of polish with its invention and exuberance, particularly during the rough-and-tumble horseplay on the grass before friends and lovers are peacefully reunited. --Mary Shen Barnidge

Excellent...

The Time of the Season for Contests...
Yesterday I was running late for work, which naturally meant that I hit every red light I possibly could on my way there. For some reason, it made me think of Alanis Morrisette's song "Ironic" and how the true irony of that song is that it demonstrates with great clarity that Alanis has (or had) no real concept of what irony is. Because not a single thing listed in that song qualifies as irony.

Irony, strictly speaking occurs when someone says the opposite of what they mean. Situational irony is possible, too (although it's usually literary); it happens when actions have the opposite effect of what they should reasonably have. To take an example from the song, rain on your wedding day isn't ironic because there's no reason for anyone to believe weather patterns will change, just because it is their wedding day. That isn't irony, it's just an unfortunate coincidence. However, if a person took great pains to make sure they had their wedding in the Gobi desert in the middle of a drought, inconveniencing everyone in their party to ensure the perfect weather for their wedding, then rain would be ironic.

The real problem with Alanis's song is that, although every line in it has the potential for irony, each is missing a key situational factor to make it truly ironic. Thus, I pose a contest. Take a line from "Ironic" and come up with the circumstances under which it would become true irony. Correct Alanis's omission and e-mail your situation to mlrossi80@hotmail.com. I'll post the best of them here in, say, three weeks.

Nah...make it two.
Fuck it. Just send them to me and I'll post them for as long as they come in.

My Friends are Cooler than Your Friends

Unless you happen to be one of my friends, in which case...

This weekend was the pride parade in Chicago. Though pressing business elsewhere made me skip it, I'e heard stories, and the stories are good. The best of them is Ian's anti-anti-gay-rights parade, which you can read about by clicking here.

And I finally saw Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. Thought it was fantastic.

How Yesterday Was Made for Me

Last night I arrived at rehearsal about an hour and a half early, and because I lacked any reading material (a copy of Kafka On the Shore waits for me at home, for the day when I have copious free time to start reading it), I decided to head over to Hilary's Urban Eatery for a bite to eat. I walked in, passing a woman on her way out, and sat down at the counter to check out the menu. As I read over the light fare, and ogled the dessert menu, the phone rang, and the hostess picked it up and had a brief conversation.

When she hung up, she looked at me and said, "Do you remember the woman who was leaving when you came in?" I said yes. "That was her. Her name is Eunice, and she's a regular here. She said she thought you were cute and that she wants to buy your dinner."

"What?"

"She said you made her day, so she wants to buy you dinner."

Once in a very rare while, it pays to be a boy.

I had the salmon cakes, and tipped the staff the price of my meal. And spent the rest of the day feeling gorgeous.

GroundUp Theatre Presents: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

GroundUp Theatre will reimagine A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare’s beloved story, as a Mardi Gras bash. GroundUp Theatre’s founding artistic director Sabrina Lloyd and company member Don Johnson, along with Devin Brain, a member of the Hypocrites, will codirect. Each director will take the helm of a different world as Lloyd’s Goth rock lovers rebel against their Baptist preacher father, Johnson’s fairies employ hoodoo charms of alligator feet and graveyard dust, and Brain’s star-struck mechanicals take a darker turn.

This family-friendly, 90-minute version of the Bard's text is a great introduction to Shakespeare, as well as a fun revisit to this classic favorite. All performances are free in the park. Bring a picnic and a blanket. Donations will be appreciated.

When/Where
June 25, 26: Ravenswood Manor Park (4626 Manor Ave) @ 5:30 p.m.
July 9, 10: Skinner Park (1331 W Monroe) @ 5:30 p.m.
July 16, 17: Touhy Park (7348 N Paulina) @ 5:30 p.m.
July 23: Moran Park (5727 S Racine) @ 2:00 p.m.
July 24: Nichols Park (1355 E 53rd St) @ 4:00 p.m.
July 30, 31: Pulaski Park (1419 W Blackhawk) @ 2:00 p.m.
August 6, 7: Winnemac Park (5100 N Leavitt) @ 5:30 p.m.
August 7: Ravenswood Manor (4626 Manor Ave) @ 12:00 p.m.

Visit the GroundUp Theatre Web site for more information.

Busy, Busy, Busy

Wherein I apologize for not updating without actually saying "sorry"...

I woke up today feeling like something that had been terribly out of place was finally back in order. Like the tumblers on some giant cosmic lock had turned and rolled into alignment and suddenly I, and maybe all the world, could move forward again. I rode the train to work with the "Let the Sunshine" part of the "Age of Aquarius Suite" playing in the iPod in my head and imagined the city ripped asunder while it played. Which is what I always imagine when glorious, highly choral songs play in my head. I think because I imagine if there is a God who might come to end the world, the banner her armies carry will have be of such undeniable beauty that we all must accept that the world's end is for the best.

Only the artists will survive the rapture.
Only those without a sense of beauty will fight it.

Right. Back to the mundane.

Misummer Night rehearsal is proceeding well. Last night was the first actual run-through of this three-director play, and to everyone's surprise, chaos did not ensue. In fact, what we have shaping up for our opening on Saturday is a really good play. For my part, I'm glad to have had the opportunity presented to me. It's been a long time since I've done a play written by someone other than my friends or myself, and it feels good and challenging to have this work to do.

As I said, we open Saturday, June 25 at Ravenswood Manor. All are welcome. It's a free show. The other shows are at different parks around town. I'll post a schedule here just as soon as I have it.

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