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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Das Baby

Ladies and gentlemen...Ian...may I present to you, my newphew/niece:



His/her official name is das Baby. Someone get me a cigar.

Because You Aren't Sufficiently Disturbed Yet

This is one of those rare moments when I've found something so excellently weird and disturbing and random that I not only have to post it here, but I also have to post it at Ogle My Blogspot. That thing is Tarzan Rubberband. God...it's so far beyond anything the ordinary human mind can comprehend...I think I'm going to dream this for weeks to come.

Thanks to Sam for mashing up my brain banana and feeding it to the monkey.

Again with the Foolish Mortals

Slide is coming along well. As I just said to my friend Sue, I honestly didn't think that it was possible to mate Upton Sinclair's The Jungle with Hair. But somehow we did it. Like a freakish literary genetic experiment gone horribly awry, Slide combines grim commentary of the postindustrial urban immigrant experience with happy hippy rock in a weird, but oddly refreshing cocktail. That's if you're making mixed drinks out of genetic experiments.

And I've been cast in Midsummer Night's Dream. The director e-mailed me a couple of days ago to tell me that an actor dropped out and would I like to step in for him. Yes. Yes, I would. So I'm playing Bottom in Misummer Night's Dream in the parks. Which is exactly what I wanted to do this summer.

War and Heroes and Standing in the Breadline

I went and saw The Heroes of Wicker Park yesterday, which was very fun. Surrounding the show for the early arrivals was a sort of arts festival with characters from the show playing instruments and games with a group of kids who I assume were area children. The show itself was largely spectacle, featuring men in beautiful papier-mache puppet heads wandering the park with a giant wooly mammoth. There was a loose story that centered around the two puppet-headed men being kicked out of the park by an umpire, who claimed the park for the baseball club. From that beginning, the processional of mammoth and puppet heads ambled the park into dances, games of chess, flying goose puppets, beat-poetic monologues about the history of the park, and so on and so forth. In the end, the ruling conflict of the show was solved with tremendous ease and very little effort on the part of the main characters, but that's fine. The point of the show wasn't narrative and conflict resolution. The point of the show was the spectacle and the use of the park to set their scene. This they did marvelously.

More than just the experience of watching the show, which was good in its own right, I got a lot of ideas for the serial show Tantalus is performing next summer (the show was my idea, the purpose being to create a mosaic show, one that an audience could see one performance of and get a complete show, but in seeing more than one performance they would see that each show is a piece in a larger structure of a play), many ideas in terms of aesthetic choices, ways of bringing audience in, etc. I've more or less decided to make it my mission to see as many outdoor theatre pieces as possible this summer for the purposes of gathering ideas.

After the show, my friend Jessica and I walked up to the Breadline Theater for a benefit party being held for "The Gunslinger (and a Baby)", which was written by my friend Kalena (the astonishingly talented playwright who is writing the script for Slide). Tantalus and Breadline have a bit of an off history together. When we performed Dreadful Penny..., we used the Breadine's studio space and had a multitude of problems in dealing with their artistic director, Paul Kampf (who was an old friend of my college's department chair), and we more or less swore vendetta against them for all time. After two years, though, it seems the vendetta has lapsed on both sides, and though I don't think I'll want to work with Paul any time soon, it was still good to see him and a few of his company members again.

Bonnie and I have been engaged in a randomness pissing match on Ogle My Blogspot. I was doing pretty well until I discovered an addictive Star Wars flash game and got distracted from my mission. She has since surpassed me and is taking over the Ogle My universe the way the Borg take over planets. Resistance is futile...

Performance Painting

Bonnie just added me as an administrator to OgleMy.Blogspot (which is not officially her blog, per se, so much as it is an online repository for randomness). So I'm adding that to the sidebar.

I'm also adding Ursula Rauh, who is the sister of one of my cast mates from Ragnarok. Ursula is a performance painter (which means exactly what the term implies: she paints as part of a performance; usually music, if I understand correctly), and a damned talented one, too. That is to say, I am fond of her work.

My disappointment over Midsummer Night's Dream was short-lived.
That's not entirely true, but it sounds nice.

I officially have a guerilla theatre project of my own devising going up this summer. I've always found a great deal of value in those moments when life turns a little surreal for a short time--because something out of the ordinary happens, or because I've passed by an extraordinarily beautiful scene, or what have you. Those moments are great. They lighten the day, break routine in half, send me elsewhere with my life. I love them. So Tantalus is taking Chicago as our set this summer with the purpose of creating those moments for other people.

We'll be performing around the city for most of the summer, as well as the Abbie Hoffman Festival and, hopefully, Around the Coyote.

What Fools These Mortals Be...

Well, I'm calling it. As nearly as I can figure, I wasn't cast in Midsummer Night. I won't say I'm not disappointed, because I am, but I still feel like I gave a good audition. It's just likely that someone else gave a better one. And the experience was good in its own right.

Still.

There's always murderous revenge to comfort me.

Spend. Spend! NOW!

I had my audition earlier today, and I think it went well. I walked into the space with the usual jitters and nerves, which kept up until it occurred to me that I was actually just standing in my frined Sheila's house, waiting to audition for a few people I knew. From that point on, it was just another performance for some friends.

We will see what comes of it.

Conceptually, the show seems amazing. The three worlds of the play (the fairies, the lovers, and the rude mechanicals) are divided up among three different directors to create three distinct styles for each. I'm angling for the fairies, whose world is going to be voodoo style. Love it.

Ian and I are talking over instant messenger, and he directed me to the Tantalus Theatre Group store over at Cafe Press. Now for $16 dollars, you can support a good cause and get a spiffy hat out of it, too. Join up. Become our biomechanical billboards.

And it turns out The Adventures of Fetus Joe were never in danger. Sam just was being a rascal. The next day, Episode 13 showed up in my inbox, and today this challenge appeared:



You heard the man, start producing some cartoons. I know I will be.

And that's that. If anyone is in the vicinity of Wicker park tonight at 7, there's a show going up there. Even, I think, if it rains.

Fetus Joe No Mo'?

This e-mail from Sam appeared in my inbox a little while ago:

Dear loyal fans of Fetus Joe:

The creators of Fetus Joe have realized that the ongoing Adventures have reached an impasse. Due to creative differences amongst the staff writers, they have decided to impose a hiatus until the differences can be worked out. Please remain calm and patient until they see fit to continue the little scamp's Adventures in the near future. We appreciate your support and understanding.

Yours, The Creators of Fetus Joe

I suspect Sam's running a little short on ideas or something. But that's no excuse, and he needs to get the series back up and running. In the mean time, here is the complete series from beginning to--um--middle.

1. The Wolverine
2. The Muskrat
3. The Frog (in Vegas)
4. The Anxious Dog
5. The Sciatic Nerve
6. Stagolee
7. The Turtle
8. Molerat
9 The Shark vs. The Chicken
10. The Exploding Turkey
11. The Imploding Turkey
12. The Frog vs. The Shark

And that's that. It's brilliant and weird, but I'm behind Sam and Terry all the way for taking time to pause. I'll just have to look forward to something else for a while.

Happy Belated Birthday Joseph Beuys

My favorite artist that Cat and Girl have taught me about is Joesph Beuys, who, according to the sources I looked up, was once lost for dead in the Himalayas and saved and revived by sherpas wielding yak fat. Consequently, a great deal of his work utilized yak fat as a medium. Which makes me wonder if the works of Joseph Beuys actively reek in museums. Is the Joseph Beuys wing of the museum kept separated and hermetically sealed?

Anyway, happy belated birthday Joseph Beuys. I wish I had known it was yesterday. I'd have smeared myself in yak fat, just for you.

Ian pointed out to me that I still have one rule of auditioning to break: performing in an accent. Consequently, I will be performing Titania as an effeminate German.

"Zese are ze forgeries af jealousy. Ja!"

Breakin' the Law

On Sunday, I'm auditioning for Ground Up Theatre's summer production of Midsummer Night's Dream. The audition calls for a two-minute comic Shakespearean monologue. At first, I chose this as my monologue, because it's hilarious. I imagined myself very energetically propping up shoes and giving the directors a good bit of the clowny Ha Ha. But the more I started rehearsing it, the less funny it seemed. I kept thinking "If I was the director, I'd think this was silly, but lacking in any layers or depth." It has no story, this monologue. No real beginning or end (a great middle, though...a great middle).

So last night, my friend Dave pointed me to this monologue (Titania, middle of the page). It's a great monologue. It's not particularly comic, it's written for a woman, and it's from the play for which I'm auditioning (which is one of those things audition classes tell you is considered bad form). It breaks every rule of auditioning I can think of. And that is the reason I used to get roles: I never played it safe in auditions. I love it.

Besides, it's not like I'm fixing intelligence to make a more plausible case to go to war in Iraq. Which, according to the British, is more than George W. Bush can say. I really want to see him get out of this. Not that I doubt he will, mind you, but I like the thought of him squirming.

Back in the good old days of the Nixon administration, this is the sort of thing that used to get folks impeached. I miss those days.

Anyway, wish me broken legs. Wish them on the president, too, but for more literal reasons.

Weird Science

Ian alerted me to this article today:

In a surprising feat of miniaturization, scientists are reporting today that they have produced nuclear fusion - the same process that powers the sun - in a footlong cylinder just five inches in diameter. And they say they will soon be able to make the device even smaller.

While the device is probably too inefficient to produce electricity or other forms of energy, the scientists say, egg-size fusion generators could someday find uses in spacecraft thrusters, medical treatments and scanners that search for bombs.

Kick ass! The article goes on to warn that egg-sized fusion generators (one foot by five inches? That's a hell of an egg!) won't provide a limitless source of energy, but that they're useful in other ways. For example, clowns across the world finally have the limitless source of helium they've been craving for so long. Plus there's some nonsense about it being useful for security and medical purposes. Read the article. I ain't the Clif notes.

But I am the Clif notes for this article about putting mice into suspended animation:

The researchers from the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle put the mice in a chamber filled with air laced with 80 parts per million (ppm) of hydrogen sulphide (H2S) - the malodorous gas that gives rotten eggs their stink...

In the latest study, Dr Roth and his colleagues found that the mice stopped moving and appeared to lose consciousness within minutes of breathing the air and H2S mixture.
The animals' breathing rates dropped from the normal 120 breaths per minute to less than 10 breaths per minute.

During exposure their metabolic rates dropped by an astonishing 90%, and their core body temperatures fell from 37C to as low as 11C.

A similar effect can be caused by filling the air with Yo Yo Ma at 250 parts/million. Long-term exposure can lead to permanent torpor.

At Long Last, My Head...
Adrienne finally has Internet access at home, so she sent me the pictures of my birthday cake. Here they are, after much demand.

This will include little commentary, but if you want to know how things were made and what the process was, Adrienne has created a Power Point file that explains everything...er...sort of. You can find it here.

Here's the photos of process and the final cake without much commentary from me:

My Yummy Body Parts
Why I'm a Smart Guy
My Neck is Fully Recyclable (Thank you Adrienne for that joke)
Skull and Bone
Red Velvet Cake has Never Been More Disturbing
Existential Dillemma
Adrienne Gives Head...um... (oh come on...that joke had to be made eventually)
Another Great Idea Dawns on Me
Me, Myself
Fun at My Own Expense (I'm giving myself a wet willy, in case you can't see)
More Fun
And Now the Violence

That's that, folks.
It's Friday. I'm off. But not in love.

My Life as a Bootlegger

I've been running another batch of absinthe over the past week. This batch is a gallon's worth (actually turning out to be more like two or three liters...still not bad) meant to share with friends. It's not as good as the last batch I made, but it's pretty tasty.

In honor, I took this today. Not bad, I think. I scored a 91% on the hard liquors. I wonder why...

Bacardi 151 Congratulations! You're 134 proof, with specific scores in beer (80) , wine (83), and liquor (95).

All right. No more messing around. Your knowledge of alcohol is so high that you have drinking and getting plastered down to a science. Sure, you could get wasted drinking beer, but who needs all those trips to the bathroom? You head straight for the bar and pick up that which is most efficient.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 58% on proof You scored higher than 86% on beer index You scored higher than 88% on wine index You scored higher than 91% on liquor index

Link: The Alcohol Knowledge Test written by hoppersplit on OkCupid Free Online Dating

Good and Bad News for Lesbians

Have I mentioned that Bonnie and Darcy have blogs, now? Well, they do. And they are listed in my sidebar. Bonnie's blog is called Ogle My Blogspot, which is kind of lewd. Hey baby, where's your blogspot?

Why, it's in my right frontal lobe, you old cad.

The bad news is, we have a new pope. This guy. He's kind of evil and decrepit looking, and is supposedly very conservative, which puts you out of the running for the job of pope in my book, but then what do I know?

This Easter, a few of us went to Easter vigil at a gorgeous bascilica near my office. The service was fun, all full of ritual and incense and other good things that I love, until it got to the part where the priest says a prayer and then everyone says "Lord, hear our prayers," and the priest said:

"Lord, put an end to abortion, euthanasia, and all of those ungodly experiments."

Then there was a moment of "Holy Shit! We're surrounded by the enemy!" from my end of the pew.

"Lord, fuck that prayer," said my friend Tiffani.

Best new comic I have found: Cat and Girl. It's great. And completely open about the fact that it's a Calvin and Hobbes derivative.

Kudos to the Wikipedia for having the article about PB16's election to the papacy up about 15 seconds after it happened. My guess is that they have advanced time-travel technology at their disposal. Most likely a time popsicle.

Quote of the Day

"By persevering over all obstacles and distractions, one my unfailingly arrive at his chosen goal or destination."—Christopher Columbus

I read this quote today when reading a daily planner that the university puts out every year and just thought it was great. Because, of course, Christopher Columbus never once arrived at his chosen goal or destination. Christopher Columbus's chosen goal was the Far East, and with all his perseverance, he missed it by several thousand miles.

Who says there's no such thing as irony in real life?

one other thing...

I found this attached to Neil Gaiman's blog today. It simultaneously depressed me and made me laugh. Which is a sign that it's brilliant. I often feel like Dylan Thomas and Emily Dickinson do in this comic. Don't read just one...you have to read all of them.

updates...

Nothing major. The birthday post has been updated to include a picture of the lamb cake that started the whole anatomical birthday cake deal.

And Hud had this link on his blog: Make Your Own Southpark Character. Badass. This is me:



Oh...and I can upload pictures directly to this page now. Which makes me even more powerful than you could ever imagine.

The Thinking Man’s Improv

On Monday, I went and saw my friend Biddle’s show, The Monday Show, which is a long-form improv show that uses the art form to explore a themes, such as “Sex and Love,” “Beginnings,” etc. The show I saw was “War and Politics,” and it really blew me away. The performers were by and large willing to go to places—heavy and serious places—that I have rarely seen with improv shows and they went there comfortably, taking their time to establish the scene and bring the audience with them. The few times I’ve seen anything comparable in terms of dramatic improv, the performers went through the dramatic scenes seeming uncomfortable, almost apologetic for taking the show there, as if they weren’t sure it was okay to use improv for anything other than silliness and ephemera. It was really something to see a show try for something more, and frequently hit their mark dead on.

Afterward, Biddle and I had a long conversation about improv and theatre, in general and in Chicago. This is a function of their training. Improvisers are taught either short-form improv, which most commonly takes the form of sketch comedy, or long-form, which in Chicago, takes the form of the Harold, which is long in theory, but is actually composed of numerous sketches. And at the larger houses in Chicago, while it’s taught that people can do dramatic improv, by and large people not bringing in big laughs are ignored or dropped. As a result, the schools encourage improv that is jokey, and consequently devoid of real emotion; be they pleasant emotions or hurtful ones, everything felt or expressed in the shows is always done so with minimal after effect, and the improviser’s body language makes it clear that they aren’t really serious.

One of the trends I’ve noticed among the improvisers I’ve met in Chicago (and some actors, although I’ve met few actors who aren’t also improvisers here) is that there’s a quality to many of them that red-flags them almost immediately in conversation. I used to think of it as always being on, which is to say always trying to be the center of attention, but it’s different than that. I came to realize, in talking with Biddle, that it has more to do with always being in sketch-comedy world, where nothing you do has consequences. Emotion isn’t something expressed, except on the most shallow of levels, covered with the glossy veneer of a joke. In talking with them, they’ll happily say seriously insulting things to you and then act like you should learn to take a joke. I have a hard time imagining any of them expressing an actual emotion like love or anger or what have you without covering it up as a joke. Many of them say things like, “I’m not really an actor; I’m an improviser.” Which is crap. I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean, in fact. Improv is acting, though it be a form without a script, and requiring a different set of skills than “standard” acting. That they seemingly teach otherwise in the big Chicago schools, and that they will take anyone, even people without any real training in acting or theatre, through advanced courses, makes me think these places are just huge money factories, to be avoided by all.

And it makes me happy and sad all at once that shows like The Monday Show are out there. Happy because they are so damn intelligent and it’s good to see people using such a versatile art for good ends. Sad because they are so often ignored. So go see it. It’s a great show and only runs for two more weeks. I’ll be there for both of them.

And now it’s time for Slide…

I promised it for many entries, and just when you’ve begun to think I wasn’t going to make good on the promise, Slide.

Tantalus is already well at work on our next show, Slide, which is described by the producer as a “philosophical groove musical” based on Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle. That’s really all I can say about it at this point, because we’re only a week or two into the process and we don’t have a script yet. What we have is a concept, which strays from The Jungle in terms of location and time period for the purpose of universality and metaphor, and a few songs and the beginnings of a script. The producer, my friend Ed, described it to someone as being an airplane on the tarmac about to takeoff. Personally, I think it’s more like a group of people in a room with a diagram of the basic principles of aerodynamics. Maybe we’ve begun to build a wing or two, but we won’t be testing them for at least another week.

This project is in the interesting position, one I’m not envious of, of coming on the heels of a show that was very powerful and exceeded anyone’s expectations in terms of success. It’s a little like being the guy who had to follow the Beatles the first time they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. There are now vast expectations of what our company can do, and it will be a difficult task to live up to them. Being the first show to try to keep alive what we’ve begun is an awkward position to be in.

That said, I think it can live up to those expectations. The people working on the show are all very talented in their ways, and come to meetings with suggestions and arguments. Which is good, because, as Ed also said, anything good is worth fighting about. There are a couple of things that I worry about in it. Keeping continuity in it, and avoiding lots of random elements thrown in just because they seem neat is one of them. Which is more or less why I took the role of the script editor (a.k.a. the Narrative Nazi)—to make sure those many random elements (such as a society that created an industry just to randomly destroy objects for no reason) don’t get out of control in the show. Which means I’m a bit of a hard ass a lot of the time, and that’s okay by me. The Jungle is meaty enough without lots of excess additives and filler (that’s a little meat-packing joke).

Birthday Cannibalism, Fetal Ninja, and Other Things Zygotic

So today is my birthday. I’m twenty-seven years old, which I’m told is a good age to be, and if the party is any indication, things should be fun. My friends, Mark and Adrienne, hold a weekly potluck, to which they always apply a theme. Since last night’s potluck fell so close to my birthday, the theme was “Foods Matt Would Make.” It was generally agreed that I would make just about anything (with the exception of any of these dishes), so there was quite a bit of food, from matzoh-ball soup to ultra-spicy chicken rolls to this delicious eggplant pasta dish that Bonnie made. Of them, I had two favorites. Jess made some pasties molded into the shape of breasts wearing pasties (they came in both A-cups and a pair of C-cups). But the cream of the crop was the birthday cake, which was made to look like an anatomically correct model of my head. A story:

Last year around my birthday, I was flipping through Neil Gaiman’s site and found this (created by possibly two of the coolest women in the world; seriously, if I ever meet them, I might have to propose…to both of them at the same time). My birthday just happened to fall on Easter last year, so instead of the usual birthday cake, I decided I would make a sacrificial lamb cake that bled raspberry sauce when I stabbed its neck. It was a great success, inasmuch as a cake that clears a room when cut can be considered a great success (but seriously…the photos of people’s faces make it all worthwhile), but it wasn’t quite enough. I needed more.

I conceived of a cake that would be an anatomically correct model of my head. There would be a skull made of dark chocolate, perched on a spinal column of the same. A layer of buttercream frosting would affix red velvet cake flesh to the skull, followed by a layer of modeling chocolate for skin or some other kind of smooth sculpting material. The eyes would be chocolate candies with white chocolate coating them. When I served it to my guests, I would break open the skull to reveal a pink raspberry mousse brain. I logged this plan under “Things I Won’t Likely Ever Do” and then moved on to other zany schemes.

One year later (give or take a few months) Mark and Adrienne agreed to hold my birthday potluck with the stipulation that Adrienne would get to make my birthday cake, which was no sacrifice on my part. When she asked me what kind of cake I’d like, I said, “I’m fond of Irish cream cheesecake. Oh…and I once thought of making a cake that was an anatomical model of my head.” And thus she became a woman obsessed. For several weeks, it was all Adrienne could talk about: how would she adhere the cake? How would she make the skull? The face, the eyes, the skin?

The end result was a little like me if I was transformed into a muppet—or if someone was going to eat me in effigy (which was really the point)—and the brains looked exactly like brains, wrinkles and all. The best part, outside of all the effort that Adrienne put into it was the fact that my former roommate, who when I first came up with the idea told me he thought it was gross and that he would never eat it, loved it so much that he even stuck a number two pencil in its eye. Yeah.

I’ll post pictures when they become available.

The zygote portion of the evening…

My friends, Sam and Terry got married a couple of years ago, and recently Sam sent me an e-mail to tell me that Terry is pregnant. To which I responded with a giant exclamation point. I was a little worried that Sam would suddenly go the dad route, turn all straight-laced and responsible, become suburban. A couple of weeks ago, I got this, followed by this, and all my worries went right away. My friends are weird, even with heavy responsibility on the horizon.

Which is good to know, because it gives me something to hope for, for my brother. As of today, I’m an uncle-to-be. My father spilled the beans yesterday that I would be an uncle sometime in December, which is, suffice to say, fan-spanking-tastic news. I can’t wait…Uncle Matt.

I was eating an apple on Saturday and a couple of the seeds that fell out of it had taken root and were getting ready to sprout. So I potted them and am trying to get them to grow. If they grow, I think I’ll give one of the trees to my brother, my sister-in-law, and to my nephew.

Next time: Slide...really...no, honestly this time...

Quests and Whanot

The computer: it is to my generate what the television was to my parent's generation. This strange new technology that, when it first appeared seemed strange, untilitarian, even ugly and frightening, but at the same time mystical and cool. If your friends had a computer, you wanted to be around it, to play with it. You wanted to spend hours obsessively writing lines of Basic so that you could make your computer say "Hi, (insert your name), how are you?" and then answer, "That's great!" when you told it you were fine.

My dad got into programming early in his career. He's a smart guy, my dad (writer, Jonathan Carroll once told me my dad was the smartest person he ever knew. It made my dad blush when I told him that; I was so proud), and he could tell that computers were the new and the coming way of the world, so he learned how to use them. Dad was an English teacher at the time, which I guess is why it was so easy for him to pick computers up. The transition from one language to another must have just struck him as natural. So I grew up around computers, and as a result, I grew up around computer games. The first game I ever played was The Leather Goddesses of Phobos, a racy sci-fi game in that was text-based, which meant that, at age nine, I always knew something kind of sexy was going on without having any inkling what that might be.

But the game that really had me hooked was King's Quest III. I can still remember the day I went over to Mark Irving's (he was my best friend at the time) and found him playing this guy on his computer. We spent the rest of the afternoon in front of the monitor, likely blowing out our retinas in the process, as we guided our heavily pixellated hero around collecting various items to use in potions, solve puzzles, fight pirates, and defeat the evil wizard who had us enslaved (that's the guy on the box cover).

King's Quest III was followed by Space Quest, Quest for Glory, King's Quest IV, and Space Quest III, Quest for Glory II and III. They were all the adventure I wanted, needed, could realistically expect as a chubby suburbanite kid with a fantasy bent. Other of my friends ran around with B.B. guns playing war games. Not me. I stayed pale and inside and fought dragons and griffins out in the Shapier desert. As the games demanded ever-greater graphics components and drive space, I spent birthday and Christmas presents year after year, just so I coould keep up with them. I had to have them. How could I not have them?

As I grew up, I still loved the adventure puzzle games, but the tides were shifting. Computer gamers had fallen in love with the first-person shooter. Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem: while my little adventures mired themselves in two dimensions, these games rendered environments in three, making game play a fuly-immersive experience. The market changed, and by the time I got out of college, the adventure games I grew up with had gone the way of the dinosaur. It was a sad day.

When I was about a year out of college, had just moved back home, and was bumming around in my dad's place, looking for something to do in my spare time while I looked for a job and tried to break into my imminent career as a world-famous actor, I found the Hero 6 project on the Internet. Hero 6 was the efforts of a group of devoted Quest for Glory fans who didn't want to see their favorite series die, so they took matters in their own hands and started writing their own game: not a sequel to QFG, but an hommage. I jumped on the project, and before I knew it, I was writing dialogue, quests, etc. for a game series like the one I had loved most as a teenager. It was great for a while. But the project was mismanaged. Too many voices with too many disparate aims and few people willing to iron fist it. This guy wanted a ranger class and it was in. This guy wanted a realistic Celtic style, but this guy didn't. This guy wanted a more DND feel to the game and was depressed that the original was just too easy to build stats in. And so on and so on. Each of these voices pulled and prodded and pulled again, taking the project this way and that, like a ship caught in a storm. And after a while, real-world concerns, like finding a job and working in theatre, took my attention. So I abandoned the project.

A month or so ago, I went back to the page and discovered, to my delight, that my login still works. So I've been stalking their boards here and there. Largely, it seems to be moving forward, although with the same ship-in-the-storm direction that I remembered.

I assumed for the longest time that Hero 6 was the only such project out there, but yesterday, just tooling around the board for a while, I found AGD Interactive, a group dedicated, not to writing new games based on the old, but to revamping the old games for VGA computers. They've already done the first King's Quest games, and are working on the second Quest for Glory. From there, I discovered the SQ7 project, which is making a sequel to the Space Quest series, and Quest for Infamy, a sort of antithesis to Quest for Glory. I discovered a bevvy of these projects. There's Quest for Glory 4.5, and Re-Quest for Glory, which patches the original QFG into the very beautiful style of Morrowind. There are an astonishing number of projects like these. Low-budget, collaborative efforts made just for the love of the game.

I'm really glad to see these sites. In the future, my generation will talk of the computer the way our parents talked about the TV. We'll remember what it was like not to have one, and we'll be savvy enough with them to be able to see how they so cleanly will define the first half of this century. We are the last generation of whom that's true. When the first-person shooter game became the norm of the gaming industry, I sort of lost my interest in computer games. The graphics were cool, sure, but I never cared about that. All I cared about were the stories, the plots, the clever one-liners. Without that, you couldn't keep me in my seat long enough to get good with a sniper rifle. As a result, computers became a hassle to me, a thing I didn't really see any reason to know much about. I've since gotten over that, but it's nice to know some remnant of that old style of game still lives out there and that there are people who still care enough about it to devote their free time to creating new ones.

Best of luck to all of you.

Next time: Slide (this time for real)

post blog entry aside

Monday is my birthday. I turn 27. While I don't require gifts, I also wouldn't mind being showered with lots of chocolate and gold. In that order.

I Likea the Girl Scout Cookies...

I haven't gotten around to posting for the past couple of weeks, partially because I've been really busy at work (which is where I do most of my blogging), partially because I've been writing a short story that's going really smoothly, and I didn't want to mess with my energy while writing it. But mostly, I haven't written in a couple of weeks, because I haven't had much of anything to say.

I considered writing something about Terri Schiavo, but found I didn't have much to say about it that I didn't consider obvious. Bonnie sent me this article and also this one on the day Terri died. Both make good points about the political circus that this case was and about the tricky situation of determining if a brain dead woman would have wanted to die. It seems to me that the only person who really knew for sure was her, and that any further decisions amounted less to a question of "did Terri want to die?" than a question of "can we bear to see our loved one live like this?" Her parents could. Her husband couldn't. His argument won out. All the rest was political bullshit, as evidenced by this memo from U.S. President, George Bush, proving that this has more to do with votes than it does to do with life.

But I'm preaching to the choir, which is why I didn't post this article in the first place. However, in the off chance I get into a ghastly accident and find myself in a permanent vegetative state, let this stand as my official request that you let me die. Preferrably in a way that takes out as many of these people as possible.

So, like I said, I haven't written in a a couple of weeks, because I haven't had much to say.

Then two things happened yesterday: the third person commented on my lack of blog and the Pope died.

I can't really say which has driven me to write more, but I can tell you I'll miss the Pope. JP2 has been Pope since before I was born. He's the only Pope I can really visualize, and even though I'm not and never will be Catholic, I'm really going to miss the guy. I liked JP2. Sure he said all sorts of ridiculous shit about birth control and homosexuality being sins against God, but what do you expect? He's the Pope. He's a Catholic...in fact, he's THE Catholic. There's certain standards he has to uphold. However, he's been willing to break with a couple of traditions. For starters, unlike his predecessors, JP2 wasn't hit on the head with a hammer to determine his death. They just took his pulse this time. And the Cardinals won't be locked in the Sistine Chapel until they vote in the new Pope. Presumably because the ghost of Michelangelo proved just too scary for Cardinals Shaggy and Scooby to bear.

Bonnie and Darcy have a picture of JP2 up on their chalkboard, for reasons I've never known. It's a picture of him looking very contemplative. One day I walked by the chalkboard and found "Girl Scout Cookies" on the board. So I wrote in a thought bubble and the words "I likea the Girl Scout Cookies..." Bonnie and Darcy thought it was so funny, they've left it there ever since.

That's that.
Next time: Slide...

Take a Bow and Have Some Chocolate. Twilight Falls.

Ragnarok finally came to a close on Saturday. A pair of Asatru (contemporary worshippers of the Norse pantheon) came to the show and loved it. They thanked us afterward for creating a show that honored their religion. Which was possibly the highest compliment our show could receive. Then we partied until dawn at a cast member’s apartment. I spent most of the night smoking on a hookah (which is now my hookah and sitting lovely on the keg we used for the show) and reminiscing and discussing new projects and writing and sex and attraction and etcetera with anyone who came by to smoke. It was a good night, all in all, and very meditative. Except for the wild hours of dancing to good old Louisiana zydeco.

At dawn, those of us who had hung on walked to a diner and got some breakfast, then said goodbye and got as much sleep as we could before we had to be at strike. It hasn’t really hit me yet that it’s really over, but I think, come Thursday, I’m going to find myself very down in the dumps.

To everyone who was involved in this show: Thank you. You helped make this, not just another show and another cast, but a truly spiritual and cathartic experience. I’m going to miss you; I’m going to miss drinking with you and talking to you and the weird and wonderful jokes that we all shared. I’m going to miss the special chemistry of personalities and experience that made us a cast.

One of our customer service reps just came in with a Chunky Bar from a customer, sent as thanks for getting a job done quickly. If only more of our customers showed gratitude with chocolate…

Tooralooraloo

I’m caring for the little tigers again, while Bonnie and Darcy are off flouncing around Europe for a few weeks (I assume they’re flouncing…they are gay), only now the tigers aren’t quite so little. And they’re still very cute. Last night, one of them grabbed hold of my arm and began gnawing lightly on it, so I rubbed and scratched his belly and generally played along until I realized, with some horror, that he wasn’t just playing. He was really going for the hand. Which was followed by the awful realization that I had no way of getting him off of it without his claws tearing long lines into my arm. For a few minutes, I really had no other recourse than to wait until he grew bored or severed my left hand. Luckily, I’m nominally smarter than a cat and was able to reach for a bag of treats, the sound of which made him quickly disengage my arm and attack the bag, whereupon I slipped out of the room unnoticed.

The best part is that he was purring the entire time. “I love you….chomp!…I love you…” he seemed to say.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day. For those of you who don’t know, St. Patrick’s Day celebrates the day when St. Patrick drove all of the snakes out of Ireland. March 17, 423 A.D. (You know…because they had standardized calendars back then.) I’m generally on the side of snakes (because they’re clever, efficient, and practice good hygiene) so I’m not long on celebrating their demise; however, I’m also on the side of whiskey and of buxom redheads with creamy white skin, so I’m all for celebrating St. Patrick’s day. If I didn’t have a show tonight, I would spend much of this afternoon with a glass of Irish whiskey in front of me and a pint of Guinness behind me. I may play catch up after the show tonight.

In honor of our Irish heritage, and I do believe everyone’s got a little Irishman in them (if you don’t, would you like one?), I give you this. Enjoy.

Here, at the End of All Things

We're hurling toward the end of Ragnarok about as fast as we hurled toward the beginning, and I can't wait. Not because I want this to be over; in fact, there's already a sort of "But I'll miss you most of all, scarecrow" effect brewing in my mind, of a sort that I don't usually get when a play ends. I just have this feeling it's going to be glorious, huge, epic. With three more shows anything can happen. Energy will be high and vigorous. I half expect a snow storm, followed by a giant wolf eating the guy who plays Odin. It will be great (not that I want Cory to die, but if he has to, being eaten by a giant wolf is the way to go; I think he'd agree).

Anyway, I can't think of a group of people I'd rather do this show with than this cast, and I'm going to miss them when it's over. I'm rereading American Gods in preparation for beginning work on the elusive fucking novel again, and I hit a line about the gods waiting for the Vikings when they arrived in America--"Tyr, one-handed, and gray Odin gallows-god, and Thor of the thunders"--and for a moment, I knew I was going to miss the gods very much. And the people playing them, more so. I can't think of a group of people I'd rather end the world with every weekend, and even though I'm going to see each of them again, I'll miss having us all together as a group.

So we'll go out with a BANG! POP! BOOM! POWIE! and then we'll party like there's nothing left to fear. And then I'll rest for a while. And then. And then...

A Few Things Neither Here Nor There

Show Stuff
The show is still up and running. Anyone who hasn't seen it and likes the thought of people dressed as neo-Vikings enacting the end of the world really should come out and see us perform. We might even get you drunk afterward.

Apparently the rash of bad/mediocre reviews to good and innovative shows continues on with the reviews for Don't Spit the Water. I have not seen Don't Spit the Water, but a good friend has told me about it and it sounds like great fun. There's more on this over at Hud's blog. He makes the point that reviewers should take into account audience reaction to a show, and I really have to agree. Ragnarok might not be for everyone, but those who have seen it have raved about it to us. So the Reader reviews it poorly, based on some judgement, and the people who are inclined to give a shit about reviews don't come. Which is a shame.

Wine Stuff
My wine is up and making, which is neat to see. I mean, it's not television or anything, but when I consider the fact that I'm basically using the same creature that attacks my feet every summer to make yummy alcohol, I get a little giddy. And I've considered that what I'm doing is a sort of biomechanics, using a living thing to act as a machine for the production of a...um...product (score one for articulation). Which means, if I am to believe the sci-fi movies, that I'm bound to go mad with my new-found power and my yeast is bound to turn against me and plot my demise. I keep one eye open as it bubbles ominously away.

Whine Stuff
I usually like editing. Sometimes, I even love it. This morning was not one of those times. I came in today, tired from a night of karaoke (in which I kicked ass, by the way) but generally in a good mood and was promptly greeted by a sarcastic letter from an asshole doctor essentially saying we're incompetent. He called our designer incompetent. He called me incompetent (in so many words). He called our whole department incompetent, and did so in the most snide tone I have ever seen in writing at this school. We're not incompetent. We're fucking geniuses, in fact, especially the designer who he criticized (and who hauled ass so this shit could bitch about us taking too long to do things).

This sort of thing happens all the time, and it happens from doctors most of all. Because doctors seem to think that because they have advanced degrees in medicine, they somehow know about English. In sort of the same way that my knowledge of English qualifies me to perform liver surgery...right? Right?

Pissed me off thoroughly. Think I'm going to go take my rage out on some Loki meat.

End bitch session.

Tom Cruise Gets It. Why Can't We Get It?

So I’ve been holding off on talking about this for a while. For those of you who don’t read my articles, William Poole, a Kentucky high school student was arrested and detained after writing stories that were deemed to contain “a direct threat to Clark High School”. The kid, in response, claimed that his stories were fiction and that the stories were about zombies. Jeff Vandermeer and Neil Gaiman have both commented about this story on their sites, as have numerous others on the Web. So I figured I’d shut my mouth and let other, more eloquent people say the things I would have been saying anyway.

Today, I read this article in which, shock and awe!, it is revealed that the boy’s writings didn’t actually contain zombies, at all:

What they do contain, Winchester police Detective Steven Caudill testified yesterday, is evidence that he had tried to solicit seven fellow students to join him in a military organization called No Limited Soldiers.
The writings describe a bloody shootout in "Zone 2," the designation given to Clark County.

"All the soldiers of Zone 2 started shooting," Caudill read on the witness stand. "They're dropping every one of them. After five minutes, all the people are lying on the ground dead."

The tone of the remainder of the article is one of vindication; it suggests that the police in this matter are the poor victims of ignorant Web junkies who were quick to bombard them with epithets like "idiots" and "incestuous hillbillies,” when in fact, they had a real and present threat that needed immediate attention. It concludes with this, from detective Steven Caudill:

But after school shootings such as the one at Columbine High School in Colorado, where 13 people died, authorities must take threats seriously, he said in an interview.

"Do we as a society want the police to stop there—that he didn't mean it?" he (Caudill) asked. "I'm not going to take that responsibility and have children's and police officers' blood on my hands."

That’s great, but he’s missing one major point: that Poole didn’t actually threaten anyone. What he did was write disturbing fiction about destroying his school. Ignore for a second, if it’s possible, that every high school student has fantasies about destroying their school, ridding the world of a classmate or a clique, tying up and abusing their principle, or what have you and assume that Poole’s writings were genuinely the product of a disturbed and murderous mind; writing down a story about killing classmates is in no way the same as threatening a classmate with death.

Had Poole said to someone, “I am going to kill/main/blow up/torture you/your school,” that would constitute a threat. But he didn’t. He wrote his fantasies out in a short story, which is a patently sane and legal way of dealing with feelings of violence.

See, the police aren’t saying that they’ve found evidence that he was beginning to stockpile weapons, or that they’ve found evidence of a conspiracy in action, or that they’ve found evidence that he was beginning to act on his stories. And until they do, they have no business in the matter. None, at all. Until the kid makes a move to actually enact his fantasies, all the police should be doing is sitting on their incestuous hillbilly asses and suggesting the name of a good psychiatrist (for example on why this is the case, see Minority Report…or read a good book on causality).

It’s an unfortunate thing that crimes happen, that lives take tragic turns, that blood is shed. It’s an unfortunate thing that the world is cold and that death sometimes comes for our children at the hands of our children. But more unfortunate is the society in which a child’s grandparents call the police when they discover a few short stories that he’s written. More unfortunate is the society that thinks that they can stop these awful things by declaring criminal everyone who suggests openly that they might have a dark side. It's in these societies that mental illness festers and grows, that people who truly are sick don't seek help for fear that they will be declared enemies of society.

More than that, if we keep looking to lock up everyone who shows a sign that they might pose a threat at some time, we will never grow into adulthood as a society. Tragic deaths are awful, yes, and they hurt us in the short term, but if we are smart they do not kill us. What they do is make us stronger and more able to face the big bad world sanely and with power. We want to protect ourselves from real harm, yes, but if we turn to the police like mommy and daddy to take away the bad man every time someone suggests something bad might maybe could happen, we’ll raise a society of children, all of us too afraid to face what the big world will throw at us without holding our government’s iron hand. And it is when that happens that we will be in the truest of danger.

The Similarities Just Keep Growing

Ways that I'm Like Jesus:

Beard: check
Long hair: check
Ability to turn water into wine: check
Likelihood that Ian will deny me three times before the cock crows: check
Walking on water: still working on it

Had to post that. My champagne yeast just arrived, which means that my master plan to make gallons and gallons of cheap and flavorful brandy is under way.

The Reviews and Other Randomness

The reviews of Friday's show are in.

InsideOnline thought the show was great:

In Ragnarok, the gods do play games with the universe. Up to and including charades. The interactive theater piece, based on Norse mythology, is beautifully staged in Holy Covenant United Methodist church, a chapel with a vaulted wood ceiling and striking shadows. There are no pews. Instead, you sit, like a toddler, at a massive table, and the action takes place around, in front of, and including you. If you want to be absolutely certain that you aren't just sitting at home watching television, it's perfect. The play takes the form of an unusually demanding party. Odin, the big white beard of the Norse pantheon, is your aloof host, directing a group of loyal and full-throated players in musical versions of the myths. Loki, the desperate and maniacal Norse trickster god, is a gate crasher, trying to disrupt the performances, win over the audience, and bring about the end of the world. Both the players and the trickster play literal games with their guests, giving audience members a chance to change the course of the show. Unfortunately, the same lively church acoustics that give the cast's folk-rock harmonies their splendor make the dialogue muddy, and hard to understand. Combine this with in-the-round seating, Loki's interruptions, and the general party atmosphere, and you get a play that teeters on the edge of sheer chaos. But who wouldn't endure a little chaos for the sake of an experience this sensually lush, this genuinely strange?

The Reader's reviewer, on the other hand, had this to say about it:
Tantalus Theatre Group aims to bring the competitive, vain, lusty, conniving gods and goddesses of Norse mythology to life in this ensemble-written show. But despite 100 minutes of storytelling, song, dance, and improvised games, the effort fails. Directors Glen Cullen and Devin Brain and their cast are occasionally inventive at telling tales most American audiences won't know well, but the narratives are often so unfocused we can't follow them. The trickster Loki (annoyingly played by crude class clown Kevin Antonio Viol) vies with a dull Odin (Cory Conrad) for support in a series of interactive scenes with the audience that might be better suited to children's theater; we never really care who wins. Ragnarok roughly translates as "twilight of the gods," but this play's world ends with a fizzle and we're left wondering, is that it?

Never mind the fact that it's a bad review or that the reviewer seemingly didn't get the play (which admittedly, it was our job to make her get); what's that bit about unfocused narratives and games in which we never care who wins being better suited to children's theatre? What? In children's theatre the stakes must be absolutely as high as in adult theatre--even higher--and narrative must be clear.

I'm probably just nitpicking to make myself feel better about the bad review. Which I really needn't do. Because I just got this review from an audience member who saw the show last night:

as for last night, i'm gradually getting away from my "wow" phase so i can actually analyze it now. if you don't mind, i would like to take one of your words....brilliant. the play was actually brilliant. i had my doubts, and lord knows i could have used more preparation to know it was THAT interactive, but it was brilliant. i'm definitely going to try to coax some of my friends into going now.

So there you go. Without agenda. Still, with reviews this polarized, can you really afford to rest on your laurels and miss this show? No, I didn't think so.

Last weekend I caught a creeping awful disease from someone at a party (I even know who it is...she apologized for it last night), so I'm off today, recuperating my voice and resting my body. Only I can't do that at home, because my landlords have decided today was the day to fix up the apartments next to, above, and below mine. And my power decided to go out. So recuperating and resting at the Grind is what I'm doing. Some hot tea and honey and yeah.

a few links...
I found SerializerDotNet indirectly through a link on Neil Gaiman's site that further linked to The Salon. Not only is The Salon very cool (if for nothing else than for a plotline involving Gertrude Stein as a super sleuth), but a few of the other comics on it have caught my eye, too. Achewood Sunday Edition is very funny in a dry, crass sort of way. There are others, too. It's a great deal to explore, and at $2.95 a month, is well worth it.

Query Letters I Love is a blog from a Hollywood reader that is exactly what the title promises: a series of astonishingly bad query letters for scripts.

And that's about it for today. A cup of lemon tea with honey beckons me closer.