Back to It

Now that my brain is cleared out a bit (a more apt way of putting it would be "now that my brain has recovered from being tenderized by an intellectual meat hammer for the past seven months), I can get back to filling it with things that actually interest me. Like photography.

I found this via Neil Gaiman (who found it via Jonathan Carroll), and I think it's absolutely gorgeous. It's the work of a photographer named Bobby Neel Adams, who spliced together photographs of people from different time periods in their lives. The end result is kind of creepy, but altogether really beautiful. He did the same thing with couples, the results of which are stunning.

Photography is my favorite artform, and one of the reasons is its ability to do this. To record pieces of a person's life and splice them together. We look out into the cosmos and the only way we have to relate to it is through the passage of light. A star we look at--that light is the remains of its life from millions of years ago. In this way, a photograph, which catches and holds the light we gave off at a certain age, is literally a piece of frozen time. Our lives caught in silver.

Marmaduke Explained
Marmaduke Explained, while less philosophically inspiring, is the other thing I've caught up on recently. It's not high brow, but it sure is gut-bustingly funny.

More later on the hobbies I've been catching up on.

Bad Blogger

I've felt lately like I'm travelling the line of a parabolic equation, in which infinity is the point at which I'm done applying to grad school. Which is a fancy way of saying I've had the feeling that the closer I get to finishing, the less likely it will become for me to actually finish.

Then I finished my application to Sarah Lawrence. Then I decided I'm not applying anywhere else. I'm done. I broke the asymptote.

My brain is a fucking pudding. I haven't thought of anything but working on graduate school since before this summer. Or I've thought of them, but haven't had the time or the energy to express them in words to anyone.

Sorry. I really have wanted to blog more often than this. And I will. Things to tell to all of you as soon as I've had a moment for my brain to coagulate a mite.

In the meantime, here's this.

One Down

I mailed my Columbia application in today, complete with personal statement, writing sample, and literary essay. It's been a while since I've written a literary essay. Readers of this blog (both of you) will know that, from time to time, when my fancy is tickled, I like to review theatrical pieces I've seen. But it's been a long time since I've written a really thought-out review for a piece of literature. I ended up with a review of Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted that I was pretty happy with, so I thought I'd include it here. Enjoy.

Caulk in the Mosaic: A Critical Response to Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted

In the afterword to the paperback edition of Haunted, Chuck Palahniuk laments that the first time he read the story “Guts” out loud, nobody fainted. He seems genuinely saddened and he solidifies that impression by going on for the next six pages, recounting in great detail the various fainting incidents at bookstores and universities around the world, about the medical causes of fainting, about his editor telling him he’d, “done enough damage with this story.” Much of the afterword gives the impression that Palahniuk only wrote Haunted as a device to make people faint, since it’s about the only aspect of the book he sees fit to mention. Fortunately, somewhere in the last paragraphs of his essay, he comes to something resembling a reason for writing the book:

“My goal was just to write some new form of horror story, something based on the ordinary world. Without supernatural monsters or magic. This would be a book you wouldn’t want to keep next to your bed, a book that would be a trapdoor down into some dark place. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover.”

Those are brave goals. Never mind that horror novels have tried, pretty much since their conception, to create a safe place for their audiences to explore the darker side of their nature, whether their monsters are supernatural ones or real-life. It’s always admirable for a writer to set out with more than just story in mind, and the horrors of every day life are worth exploring anew by each generation of horror stories. It’s an ambitious goal, which makes it particularly disappointing that the book falls so very short of its mark.

Haunted’s structure is its failing. Palahniuk chose to write Haunted as twenty-three short stories bound together by a framing narrative about would-be writers at a month-long retreat. This form is called a mosaic narrative and, done well, it can be a subtle but effective way to express an idea or a mood. It can be a great form for horror, which works best when it creates the almost subliminal feeling of just waking from a nightmare. Unfortunately, mosaic narrative requires a great deal of delicacy and finesse to pull it off, and this is where Palahniuk falls short.

Taken just as a book of short stories, Haunted would be worth reading. Stories like “Evil Spirits,” about a girl who escapes from a secret island where the U.S. Navy quarantines carriers of deadly diseases, or “Dissertation,” about a tribe of Native Americans who carry a gene that makes them periodically turn into monsters are interesting reads and evocative of modern fears about disease and strangers, but they can hardly be called horrors of the “ordinary.” The very best of the stories in Haunted, “The Nightmare Box” and “Poster Child,” tap into a relatively simple and genuine kind of horror: the horror of being stripped of mirth by something as simple as an idea.. In and of themselves, the stories are decently written. Even where they don’t entirely work as horrors—really, what’s so horrific about the rich urbanites in “Slumming” pretending to be bag ladies for kicks?—they are entertaining enough that they would warrant sitting down for an afternoon to read them.

Where Haunted falls apart is in Palahniuk’s attempt to jerry-rig a novel out of a book of short stories. A braver writer could have done it. Someone who trusted his stories to speak for themselves could have built a mosaic out of them with just the thinnest of outlying structures. Palahniuk almost does it—each story is preceded by a poem about its narrator, which could have worked nicely as a framing device. But Palahniuk, seemingly unwilling to lose his audience to subtlety and nuance, had to drive his point home with a sledge. So he built a monster of a framework in the form of a half-realized story about people in a writer’s retreat sabotaging their lives and their writing through their collective need for drama. That’s great, or could it be, but the ultimate point he makes in this framing narrative—that we’ve become drama obsessed as a society—feels forced on to the rest of the book. It’s as though he had an idea for a book of horror stories, but feared that their point wasn’t self-evident enough, so he foisted a half-realized narrative about media obsession on them. As a result, rather than helping the stories and binding them together, the framework gums up the flow of the book. In the rare cases where his interludes are short, they’re readable, but as Haunted comes to a close, Palahniuk labors ever harder to make his point fit the rest of the book, and his hand becomes all too visible moving in the stories.

What’s more, rather than giving his characters actual names, he labels them with condescending epithets like Miss Sneezy, Comrade Snarky, The Missing Link, essentially removing any chance that his readers will find actual horror in their stories. For a horror story to really work, the reader has to be able to see themselves in it. The reader of a horror story has to be able to say, “There but for the grace of God go I.” In naming his characters as types and epithets, Palahniuk makes the stories safe for his readers by taking them outside of the story. It gives his readers permission to view his drama mongering character, not as extensions of themselves, but as something other than them. They can say, “I’m not the one who gets caught up in this trap. It’s the Comrade Snarkys of the world.”

Haunted set out with an ambitious goal in mind, but to reach such an ambitious goal takes a writer willing to stick out his neck and let his work stand on its own. Chuck Palahniuk is never willing to keep his hand from meddling in his stories, and the end result is that, rather than giving his readers a trapdoor into a dark place, Haunted hands them a shallow basement full of dull frights and penny-dreadful shocks.

The Art of Stuber

I haven't said much about the upcoming Tantalus show, Toy Chest, largely because I haven't said much about much of anything lately, but also because saying too much about it at this point would give away much of the surprise of seeing the show. What I will say is that Toy Chest is going to be the best Tantalus show since Ragnarok. I dare say, I expect it to be better than Ragnarok was. The script is tighter, the concept is better realized, and the creative forces behind it are working in much better unity than we did during Ragnarok. I expect it's going to be a doozy.

Also, I was pleased to hear recently that Ben Stuber is going to do the poster art for the show. I first got to know Ben during The Prometheus Myth and very much fell in love with his artwork. Though they were underutilized for the production, Ben's designs for the puppets were stunning and dynamic, capturing not just the stiff appearance of the character, but the mood as well. I've since come to enjoy his paintings, as well. At times stark and minimalist, at others, quite lush in color and dimension, Ben's art is going to be fantastic for this show. It's dark and surreal, lively and fantastic. I can't wait to see what he comes up with for us.

Measured Out in Coffee Spoons

Time keeps flying by ever faster as I approach my grad school deadlines, tightening down slowly to that asymptote where I have only the thinnest margains in which to measure out my remaining time. I don't know what happened to November, but it's gone. The absence of night terrors about small grey men and strange metal lumps dwelling underneath my skin isn't proof that I haven't been abducted by aliens, but somehow I think the guy in the New Age bookstore was off the mark on this one. Whatever the reason, I have no time to waste. There's too much I need to write and not enough time in which to write it.

In the meantime, I've been remiss in my blogging. It's not that I haven't had anything to write about. I have. But every time I sit down to blog, I start thinking about all of the crap I still need to get done, and I panic a little. To date, I have started and failed to write blog entries on the following:

• Two photo essays, one on what to do with two pounds of muscadine grapes that a friend happens to have growing on her back porch, and one on how to make my family ravioli.
• A review of The Fountain (which is very good, by the way, but only if you're prepared to turn off reason for a while and watch it with your dreaming brain) in which I was going to talk about time and acceptance and brilliantly unify these things into a single concept that would have blown your minds wide open across your kitchen's back wall, where all the world might have seen them.
• Endless observations, some witty, some merely whiny, about the process of applying to schools.
• An essay about the endless bits of wonder and small magic that I find in cities. Such as a basket of pears my girlfriend and I found attached to someone's house one day with a note instructing people to take as many as they wanted.
  
• A ton of generic entries about my everyday life that would have caught my friends (the only people I believe actually read this) and fans (who exist in my head, but don't tell me to burn things) up on what I've been up to.

So here I am, and for once, the act of procrastinating has intersected with the act of blogging and the two have unified into a kind of procrastiblog. That sound you hear is the fourth dimension tightening around me.

Just a Quick Reminder

Hey folks. Just a reminder that, if you live in the U.S., tomorrow is your chance to implement some change or put in your vote for the status quo (if you don't live in the U.S., I'm flattered you're reading this, and I'm really sorry...just be happy you don't live with the guy*) . I'm not long for promoting any one candidate, but I will say I'll be positively green with rage if you don't vote for someone. Yep. Positively. Green.

As a bit of an election day special, Jay Is Games has been running nothing but politically based games for the past couple of days. One such, September 12, a Toy World, is an interesting meditation on the nature of violence and terrorism. You're given a crosshairs and your objective is to shoot or not to shoot. If you shoot, you can aim for terrorists, but watch out to avoid civilians. What results should be reasonably obvious to anyone who's given a moment's thought on the question of why people become terrorists in the first place (hint: it's not just because they're a bunch of crazy people who don't value life the way we do).

So there you go. Now go out there and vote (tomorrow).

House of Tea

The other night, I got home from a Tantalus meeting and found that my father had sent me this article, about the House of Tea in South Philly. When I was a teenager, my father and I would regularly visit the House of Tea as part of our weekend grocery shopping. The first green tea I ever drank was from there, a Japanese sencha that a overbrewed until it was intolerably bitter.

The owner of the House of Tea was named Nathaniel. He was this short man with a great big Franklin stove of a belly who wheezed with every breath and knew more about tea than anyone I've ever met.

He'd say things like, "I'm a seventh level tea master. I could become an eighth level tea master, but it would take too long."

How do you become an eighth level tea master?

"You perform the tea ritual over and over again, meditate on tea, write poetry about tea."

The man always had a story to tell, no matter when you were going into the shop. He'd deliver it in the most matter-of-fact fashion, without theatrics or elaboration, as though he wasn't telling the story for any other reason than to tell you the story while he was measuring out your tea. I was never sure if they were true stories or if Nathaniel was just an accomplished bullshitter, but it never much mattered to me. They were fascinating stories and that was all it took to keep my father and I in wrapt attention for, at times, a good hour.

Nathaniel died a couple of years ago and with his departure, I had assumed that the House of Tea was no more. It's good to know it's still there and that his daughter is carrying on his work. Maybe I'll stop in there the next time I'm in Philly. See if she's got her father's gift for gab.

Homeward

My vacation time is coming to an end, and for once at the end of a vacation, I'm happy to be going home. Which isn't to say that I haven't enjoyed being in Asheville. I have spent the past couple of weeks reconnecting to people and friends I never should have lost touch with, and for that reason alone, this trip has been fantastic. Now I'm ready to go home and be in my city and see my friends from now. I'm ready, most of all, to sleep in my own bed again and enjoy the company of a familiar form there with me. I have moved forward and so has Asheville. It was good to be here again and to know that it's still here. It will feel good to go home and start forward again.

My, but There's a lot of Banjo

Yesterday I said goodbye to a friend of mine I haven't seen in two years. She had come in from Durham the night before to see me and reconnect a bit, and we'd spent a couple of days wandering around town. We had seen a Klezmer Gypsy Tango Punk band (the combination of genres sounded very promising and delivered on it abundantly) play at a pirate/goth club owned by an old friend of ours, who, as my friend from Durham pointed out, always threw the best parties anyway, so it really made sense that he opened a bar.

After the show, we crashed on sofas at a big old semidilapidated house where I know people. My friend was a bit mortified by the entire idea of just dropping in on a group of people for the night and was doubly mortified when she saw the place we were dropping in on. I think it was the giant spider in the bathroom. Or the squatters we displaced coming back at two in the morning, looking for a place to sleep.

The next morning, we had breakfast at Tupelo Honey and spent the rest of the day window shopping in galleries too expensive for either of us to ever afford . Then we said our goodbyes in the afternoon in a parking garage and I walked off happy to have seen my friend and wishing it was more than just a couple of hours in a couple of years. Wishing I had someone around to talk to. I walked into the Everyday Gourmet to check my e-mail and to write a bit, and as I fixed my coffee, I got into a conversation with an elderly lady who spent the next hour telling me her life story--a hell of a life story, at that. By the time she was done and I was off to get dinner, my blues were gone and I was ready to move on with the night.

This is the kind of town Asheville is. It's the kind of town where you can have the most interesting conversation of your life with a complete stranger and you can spend hours sitting in a coffee shop refilling the same cup of coffee for a dollar fifty. It's a quiet mountain town whose streets are alive at night with bluegrass musicians and street artists of varying quality. It's a place where the worst poverty you've ever seen exists side by side with grotesque wealth. It's a town of rastafarian white kids who drive to downtown in fancy cars with leather interiors and hang out talking about bringing down Babylon, not seeing their own part in it. It's a town where even being open minded means corraling your thoughts into a specific viewpoint. It is it's own bubble, and what a pretty bubble it is, a self-contained little generator of a kind of energy I find I need from time to time. It would be easy for me to forget why I left in the first place, but ultimately I find myself thankful for what I've had since I left. For opportunities I've been given and for the people I've got.

It's Better in the Mountains

I arrived in Asheville on Sunday after a painless flight spent mostly sleeping. The night before the flight was a jumble of business, running around buying bottles for samples, packing, racking a batch of muscadine wine from the plastic bucket in my kitchen to its fancy secondary, a Carlo Rossi jug, piling organic fruit into my freezer so the fruit flies don't get it. At ten o'clock, as I made myself some angel hair pasta with peppers and eggplant, my friend Biddle called and asked if I wanted to have a walk-on role in a burlesque show. I did, so at eleven o'clock, with my luggage only half packed and my kitchen still not fruit-fly proof, I put on my best used-car salesman costume and made my way down to The Playground to walk on during the Belmont Burlesque and hand the MC divorce papers. Then I watched the rest of the show, went back home, finished packing, and slept for two hours before heading off to the airport. I boarded the plane, put my head against the window, and fell sound asleep.

I woke in Charlotte, caught a puddle-jumper over to Asheville, and was met at the airport by Sam and his boy, Nate. They drove me into town for some brunch at the Frog Bar, formerly the New French Bar, with folks in town for my friend Tracy's wedding. As Sam and I found parking in town, we drove past the Frog Bar, and there was everyone--Tracy, his bride Julie, Lauren and Jeremy, Terry; my old college friends--sitting outside drinking bloody Marys and beers as they had on Sunday mornings years ago. It was strange. I might have been staring at a memory.

It's strange to me how much has stayed the same as it once was. I'm sitting in Gold Hill right now, which was the coffee shop where I spent the entire summer after I graduated college. I sat in the same seat everyday, writing plays and chatting with my friend Kim, my friend Sam the jazz musician. The name of the cafe has changed. It's the Everday Gourmet, now, but they still serve the same coffee and I'm still there in the same seat, the same age, writing in my notebook. I'm incognito at the moment, wearing a beard, and I bet my name is different, but it's still basically me there. My replacement. Someone to fill the space I left. A great deal of the town is like this. Names have changed to protect the innocent--The World Coffee Cafe for Old Europe, The Frog Bar for the New French Bar--but even under new management, they're still basically the same places they always were.

Still, not to sound like I'm not enjoying my time here. On the contrary, there's a certain beauty to it all. There's a joy in coming back and reconnecting that I haven't experienced in other homecomings. Although Asheville hasn't changed so much, I have, and in returning, I have the opportunity to change who I am to this city. To fill a new space.

If You Stare Long Enough into the Abyss, It Asks You a Quant-Comp Question

The GRE is officially over and done with. I took it yesterday afternoon on the sixteenth floor of 20 N. Clark St. in an office absolutely devoid of any markings. A room could potentially be more colorless, but I'm at a loss for how. There's an interesting kind of ritual to taking the GRE. I'm forbiddent to talk about the test in any explicit detail, so there will be no nudity in this post, but I can say that before you go into the testing room, you have to place everything on you into a locker. Bare of all cellphones, pagers, books, paper, pens, hats, jackets, little knicknacks that remind you of your mother, the photograph of the girl you left waiting for you like a war bride back home, you pass from the first room into a second room. A kind of holding area where they ask you if you are prepared--Is this your name? Did you leave all of your worldly possessions behind? Did we give you enough scratch paper?--and then they take your photograph and lead you into the room where you will take your test.

Not to romanticize it, but the whole ordeal is rather like the rites of manhood in some tribal cultures. The entry into a special area, the power relationship between priest and boy/proctor and test taker. It makes me think that Albee must have written Zoo Story just after taking his GRE.

Anyway, it's over. My score, for anyone interested, was a 1370. 690 verbal; 680 quantitative.
Afterward, I made a bonfire of my study materials and sat on my back porch drinking beers and watching them burn. Tomorrow, I leave for Asheville to visit with old friends I haven't seen in far too long.

1380<1450

I woke up this morning with something of a panicky sweat on my brow. The GRE is eleven days away, and I woke up feeling less prepared to take it than I ever have before. So I took a sick day to take a practice exam and study. I did better on the practice exam than I thought. 760 verbal and 620 math. Which means, not surprisingly, that I'm better with the English language than I am with the numeric language. I can up that math score some, but I mainly want to spend the next eleven days writing essays. Thanks to Sam, who was nice enough to send me essay topics. I'll post my answers here soon. I promise.

The essay section actually remindes me of a poetry professor I had in college. His name was Garland and he was a fantastic guy, but he let me get away with things I really shouldn't have gotten away with. Such as my answer to essay question that asked us to compare and contrast three poets we had read. I had compared and contrasted them according to their sexes and whether the first letters of their names were vowels or consonants. I remember thinking I was pretty clever at the time. How wrong I was.

Garland, if you're reading this, rest assured it's come back to bite me in the ass. I'm off to go write essays arguing whether--well who knows what topic they'll want me to argue.

Can I Take the Physical Challenge?

As I've mentioned, I'm taking the GRE in a few weeks. I've been preparing for it, studying vocabulary, brushing up on my eighth grade math, panicking slightly. Mostly, I've been taking practice exams online and with my computer. This helps me to see my trouble areas in the math and verbal sections, but it doesn't help me with the essay portion of the test. I figure the only way for me to get better at the essay section is to write a lot of essays, so I'm asking for your help. Send me essay topics. They need to be phrased in the form of an argument (i.e., "The only way to really cut loose and have fun on a Friday night is by studying a nice stack of flash cards."), but other than that, I leave it up to you. I'll publish the resultant essays here.

The Tyrant Calls You...
The first issue of the NY Tyrant is out. Buy a copy and you can read my story, "Every Little Farm Girl Knows How to Fix a Tractor." You can get it via their Web site or, if you live in NY, at your local independent bookstore.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Well, I'm back. I'm not actually going to bore you all with the details of my summer vacation, but in brief, I traveled up through the foreign lands of Canada to Niagra Falls, which would be utterly gorgeous if not for the fact that it's surrounded by one of the tackiest tourist towns I've ever seen. After that, I hiked in the Zoar valley and wandered around western New York for a few days before I caught a train to NYC to visit friends and then caught a bus to the Jersey shore, where I stayed for most of the rest of my trip.

I actually did get some fishing done. My mother's husband, Joe, and I went out deep-sea fishing one day. I caught this guy, a mahi-mahi who later became this meal, and Joe caught half a dozen sea bass. The rest of the time, I mostly relaxed by the water, read, kayaked, and spent time with my niece (picture to come) before I caught the train home.

On my way back, the train was waylaid by a group of monkeys who were hellbent on taking over the train. I managed to fend them off from most of the rest of the passengers, but was taken prisoner. They brought me to France and forced me to perform street theatre with giant puppets for days at a time. Finally, I escaped on one of the elephants and found a cruise ship bound for Chicago by way of the Atlantic. I stowed away disguised as a cocktail waitress and made my way back home one cocktail at a time. The ocean was lovely, and the tips weren't half bad, either.

Anyway, I'm back. I have a month to finish prepping for my GRE, a trip to North Carolina coming up, and all sorts of other craziness to deal with, but I'm back. It's good to be home. When I got off the ship at Navy Pier, I had a definite sense that I was back home, back in my city. I took it in on my way to the train, and boy, did it feel good.

Update
This is my niece, Maude. Tell me she isn't adorable.



As luck would have it, she's also fond of her Uncle Matt. I love family.

Gone Fishin'

Hey, all (both of you), I'm going to be gone for a couple of weeks, starting tomorrow. I'm taking off tomorrow with a friend for a few days of hiking in upstate NY, followed by a few days in Manhattan. Then I'm off to the beach. I probably won't be updating while I'm gone so, well, don't miss me. Both of you.

Strange Ending

The Strange Dreams of Nobody in Particular closed this weeked. It was a great run, and thanks to the many talented people who worked very hard on it, we pulled off a final marathon that I'm very proud of. Now all that remains is our encore performance in Millenium Park, and then my baby goes off on its own for a while. I'll miss this show. More than I think I realized.

Belle Epoch...
Last Saturday, I woke up, went to the store for some milk, and when I came back, noticed that my mail had come. In it was a package containing a small bottle of hausgemacht (that's German for Home made) absinthe. It was sent to me by an acquaintance on one of the absinthe forums I'm a member of. He had received a bottle of it and wanted to share his good fortune. There's really nothing quite like receiving unexpected presents of absinthe in the mail. It made my morning.

As recently as a decade ago, the only place anyone could get absinthe was the Czech Republic, which sold mixtures of cheap essential oils in poorly rectified alcohol to American tourists for far too much money. Today, there are several online suppliers, of varying reputation, that you can go to for your absinthe fix, but what really impresses me the most are the HGers, the people who make absinthe at home. There's a surprising number of peope in the U.S. alone who make absinthe. They come from diverse walks of life--IT people, military men, theatre folk--and they're united simply by a love of this drink, its complex history, the desire and ingenuity to pull off a culinary challenge.

This is what I love about absinthe. Beyond its history, beyond the mythology and romance of the drink, I love the ingenuity that it inspires in people. Even people who aren't making the drink make accoutrements for it, from spoons and grilles made by artists like Kirk Burkett, to a slew of homemade fountains, some merely functional, others unique works of art unto themselves. I have to admire the cleverness of these people. Anyone can buy the accessories to go along with a drink, but it's this ingenuity and creativity that makes it a hobby. I'm happy to raise a glass to that.

Strange Dreams at Millenium Park

I've been sitting on a bit of news for a while, not wanting to jinx it, but I think it's safe to talk about it now. A few weeks back, right around the opening of Strange Dreams..., our artistic director, Glen, got an e-mail from the city, asking if we would be interested in performing Strange Dreams... for Millenium Park's Promenade Performance Series. We wrote back and said that we would definitely be interested, but we didn't hear from them again.

On Friday, they wrote to Glen to tell him we've been booked for performance this coming Wednesday and on August 5. This is a fairly big deal. It means good exposure for Tantalus, and on a personal level, it's good to know people like the show.

Before the Offer Expires

Hey all. I can't believe I almost forgot about this. Tantalus Theatre Group is running a promotional sale of T-shirts and sweatshirts. The shirt features the Tantalus logo on the front with our Web address on the back. Sweatshirts come both with hoods and without, as zip-ups and pullovers. E-mail me soon if you want to order one and I'll place an order with you. If you don't live in Chicago, don't worry. We can either mail it to you, or I can bring it back east with me when I visit this summer. Details for the order are below. I believe I need to get them in within the next couple of days. E-mail me if you're interested and I'll send you the information about the prices.

In other news, Strange Dreams... is almost finished. We run for two more weeks and then, poof! It's gone. I've considered going back to the original stories, though, as written and reworking them. There's a lot to Strange Dreams... and although a show about storytelling is very different than a book about storytelling, I think it could make a really good children's book. It has potential, anyway.

After this show closes, a long hiatus from the company is in order for me. Mostly for practical reasons--I can't study for the GRE and focus on getting into grad school at the same time as I focus on Tantalus. But it's also to give me time to think and to rest. We've been going through a lot of restructuring lately, rexamining our mission statement, and it's made me realize a couple of things. One of them is that I really do care a great deal about this company. It's been such a part of my life in the past three years that I have a hard time conceiving of what I did before I was a company member. The other is that, despite that, I may be in a very different place artistically than Tantalus is. I need some time to think about that.

Here We Are, Now. Entertain Us.

I've been entertaining a lot this past week, having folks over for dinner and drinks out on my back porch. I had forgotten how much I enjoy having folks over for dinner. Living in a small place and on a limited budget means that dinner parties are more or less out of the question, and since I don't have a proper table to sit at and eat in doors, even small parties are fairly impossible in the winter. The upshot of that is that I don't cook as much as I would like. Cooking for one is distinctly different than cooking for lots of people. I tend to make myself simple, small meals--like pastas and rice dishes--that I can eat in a sitting without too many leftovers. If I make larger, more complicated recipes, I can't eat it fast enough, so I end up wasting food. I hate wasting food.

So with all of the people coming by this week, I decided to take the opportunity to cook a couple of feasts. I'm particularly proud of the mushroom-spinach burgers I made on Thursday, so here's the recipe for any of you folks who want to try it out.

Mushroom-Spinach Burgers
Inspired by the Asheville Brew and View (and particularly by a failed attempt to find the same in Chicago when Amanda was visiting a couple of years back)

2 lbs portabello mushrooms
1 bag of baby spinach
1 medium onion (in truth, this was half a large onion and some leftover of another onion, but I estimate it came out to roughly as much as one medium onion)
2 eggs
Bread crumbs
Garlic, thyme, basil, and other herbs to taste

I washed the portabellos and spinach, then chopped the portabellos until they were coarse. Just enough to get them into manageable pieces to sautee. Sauteed the portabellos in a large skillet, then added a good portion of white wine. Enough to essentially boil the shrooms for a bit. After that cooked for a while, I slowly added the spinach--putting the lid on the skillet when I did, so that the spinach would wilt and cook into the mushrooms--until I had added the whole bag of spinach and cooked everything until the liquid portion was gone. After that, I tossed the whole mess of mushrooms and spinach into a food processor and blended until it was good and pureed. I'd rather have had them a bit chunkier, but my food processor doesn't do that very well.

I also ran the onion through the processor, then tossed everything into a bowl and mixed it well. Added the two eggs and the bread crumbs until the mixture was firm. Then I formed it into patties and broiled them.

They were a little mushy, but all in all, they were really good, especially for a first attempt at a burger clone. The next time I try it, I'm going to leave about a third to one half of the mushrooms out of the puree and simply chop them up so that there's a bit more of a meaty feeling. Also going to add more egg and use either matzoh meal or oats instead of bread crumbs. The ultimate goal being to have a burger pattie that's firmer than the ones I had. I've also found that they firm up pretty nicely when I reheat them the next day, so I might give them more time to set before I broil them.

In the mean time, if anyone wants to come over my place for a bite to eat, let me know. The oven's all fired up and ready for you.

Speaking of Suburbia

I was exploring Jay is Games today and found the interactive work of art, Blue Suburbia. Explore the surreal environments, the haunting collage of sounds and words, the strange imagery. Blue Suburbia is what I think we'd see if we could walk around inside other people's dream lives. Enjoy, but be careful...there's a couple of dead ends.

Edit: As I've explored this further, I've found some portions of it are fairly disturbing. I know a few of you will find this genuinely creepy and that it will resonate with a couple of you in ways you might not like. Personally, I think it's a worthwhile thing to go through, but just so I'm playing fair, be warned.