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.

And In Conclusion...

Opening went pretty well on Friday. Opening night jitters and a few things we hadn't taken into account (for example, absurdly, being surrounded on all sides by people) threw us a little bit off, and we didn't quite catch our stride until last night (which went as well as I could imagine this show going). Thanks to everyone who came and saw it. And to the rest of you, come see it some other day and I'll forgive you.

I realized last night that taking into account the workshop, this show's been my life, more or less, for about five months. Almost half a year. Which means that I now have to figure out what to do with myself during my days off. It's a daunting task.

And, since I never updated it, I finished my absinthe a couple of weeks ago, colored it, and have since tasted it many times. It is, by all accounts, a vast improvement over the god-awful tincture I made last time. Roughly speaking, it tastes like a pastis with a hint of wormwood bitterness in it, accompanied with the aromas and flavors of a few other herbs. The next step is to start fermenting a sort of light wine so that I can distill that into my base alcohol. This, supposedly, makes a much more drinkable absinthe.

I suspect this is what comes of being an artist. In seeking out a hobby, I had to find something inherently nonartistic. Because otherwise my hobby would be the same as my work.

link...
Sam sent me this. I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but it seems really cool. So...that's good.
Happy belated birthday to Sam, by the way. He's the only person I know who's more of a mad culinary scientist than I am.

Opening Night

It's the day of opening night, and I'm experiencing this sort of reversed Christmas-Eve effect, wherein I've spent the entire day waiting for the night to come and won't care about work or anything else until it does. I'm trying to edit a financial aid guidebook for the university and just can't find my stride. I mean, for fuck's sake, who cares about financial aid? The world is ending tonight!

I don't remember it being this way in college, but it probably was. It will probably be like this for as long as I have a day job to bother about.

My mother sent me a lovely dozen roses, which is sitting on my desk and brightening my day with its lovely colors and smells. And Neil Gaiman was kind enough to post an announcement for us on his journal. Which I thought was decidedly cool. Thanks to both of you.

Update of the Roses
This is a later post: I've discovered another good use for the dozen roses. Aside from brightening my day, I can use them to get the designers not to whine when I make massive corrections to documents. For example, I just finished editing the hell out of a graduate guide to financial aid. Ordinarily, this would make the designer hate on me, or at the very least, whine for a while. But attach a rose to it, and she cooed joyfully while I snuck away, content that she thinks I'm the sweetest editor this side of the Loop. It's great; the roses are the gift that keeps on giving. Thanks mom.

More on Ragnarok

Glen, the Ragnarok director just called to let me know that tickets tomorrow night are free for anyone who calls in advance and mentions the free tickets. So, if you want the rare opportunity to see an opening night for free, call 773-960-2066 immediately and reserve your space. Mention that you saw this on my blog and Glen will happily put your name on a list, so you can feel like one of the elite!

Dorkadia

The other day I was dropping a few Ragnarok postcards off at the Grind and I showed one to the cute barista behind the counter and proudly told her she should come. She took one look at the back and said something like, “Oh my God…you guys are such dorks.” I blinked, opened my mouth to say something like, “nuh-uh…am not a dork!” then thought better of it and slunk back to my chair, dorky cup of hot cocoa in hand.

She’s right, of course. We’re dorks. Not the entire Tantalus Theatre Group, mind you…one or two of us are patently cool (literally…they have taken out patents on their variety of cool…see, that was a dorky joke), but by and large, we’re dorks. The thing is, I’m not sure that’s a problem. Didn’t the dorks finally win? At the end of all of those ‘80s movies, don’t the dorks prove that smart is cool, that creative is powerful, and don’t we get the hot cheerleader while the quarterback gets dunked in the pool while the college dean laughs at him? Don’t we rise victorious while “We Are the Champions” plays in the background? I seem to remember something about that in the handbook.

I like to think of the beginning of ‘90s as the end of the ultimate ‘80s movie (that being the ‘80s, themselves), and with it, I like to believe the dork found power. The ‘90s saw a pop, followed by a full-on explosion of nerdiness into the realms of cool. Suddenly pedantic intellectual conversations orbiting around minor semantic points became all the rage. Obscure bands nobody had heard of were way more popular than the ones everyone had heard of. Bands that were “alternative” were cool. It became a style of music and a mode of being, as did grunge. Afternoon cartoons began to reference things no child could ever get…and we loved them for it. At the cusp of the decade, Pump Up the Volume came out. It was the definitive 90’s high school movie. Instead of the film culminating in everyone realizing that the nerd was cool for being himself, it told us that in the beginning and went on to the moral that it didn’t matter if the nerd was cool or not, because, cool or not, everyone’s still just as tortured as everyone else.

I liken the dotcom boom at the end of the decade to the moment in Lambada when the class nerd teaches the class that computers are cool by programming his computer (in only three or four keystrokes) to play music that an animated man dances to. In no time, the whole class is up and dancing and they all want to know how to use a computer.

I’m not exactly sure where I was going with this when I started typing it this morning. Maybe I was heading somewhere into the fact that, just as the dotcom boom fizzled, the rise of the nerd seems to have been fleeting. Eventually advertising caught up with it (I can still remember the commercial that called Budweiser the “alternative beer”) and the edgy and obscure was marketed, packaged, and shipped off to Middle America to mellow out in the cask at the nation’s center for a while. The jock vs. nerd high school movie, which was practically extinct in the '90s (unless it was being produced for ironic reasons, because to do so was tragically kitschy or satirical), returned worse than ever for the sense of irony and the apologetic intellectualism it picked up from the '90s.

Worse still, the nerds who forged forward the revolution of proving to everyone that nerd was cool suddenly became elitist and snobby. At the top of the food chain, former nerds had just as little time for people different than them as jocks once had for the former nerds (an event predicted in 1992's Revenge of the Nerds III). The dreaded hipster was born.

Again, not sure exactly where I was going with this, and I’ve kind of petered out. I think this whole entry was really just an excuse to use a Lambada metaphor. Which, I suppose, makes me the biggest nerd of all.

Hurling Towards Twilight

Last night was our first night in the space and it is beautiful. It's beyond beautiful; it's breathtaking. The synergy of the set and the space is unlike anything I've seen in another space. Our set is a table in a mead hall. With the seats removed, the ceiling vaulting over our heads, lanterns dangling from them, our own lights shedding just enough of a dim glow on everything, the set becomes, not a dressed up space within a theatre or an illusion or a blank space upon which a set stands, but a real thing, an immersive space in which the audience sits, forever surrounded and inundated with the world we create.

It's going to be awesome, in the truest sense of that word. I can't wait. Two more runs and then it's time to do it for real.

Once again, for information about the show, see the Tantalus Web site, or call 773-960-2066. Here's when and where we run:

Holy Covenant United Methodist Church
925 W. Diversey Ave.
Chicago, IL
February 25-March 19
Thursday, Friday, Saturday at 8 p.m.
$10

Call for tickets: 773-960-2066

Student and industry rates available Thursdays
Group rates available any night.

disclaimer:

The following post is fundamentally self-indulgent and whiny. Sorry for any inconvenience this causes.

Grey Days, Fear and Loathing, Disconnect, Writing

I've been out of sorts for a couple of days. Nothing major, just a little off kilter, like I'm out of phase with everything else, like there's a little subliminal something sitting just in the corner of my eye, lending an unsettling bottom note to everything. I keep trying to get in touch with a friend, and we keep just missing each other by a thread, one of us running just too far ahead of the other to touch, and so I've felt disconnected from her. The weather is grey, which has made me feel disconnected from the sun. My sleep schedule was thrown off all weekend because I went to sleep at eight on Friday, a week of late nights and early mornings finally catching up to me. So all weekend, I woke up at four in the morning, my body telling me it had slept the requisite six hours and now it was time to get up, and I had to lull it back to bed and get my mind and my body to shut up and rest. Which has me feeling disconnected from my body.


Maybe it's me picking up Thompson, the radio wave of loathing and unease sent out by his spirit as it readied itself to leave: a signal of restlessness, of disorder, radiating out of the man for any and all of us with sensitive enough antennae to pick it up and let it interfere with our own electrostatic thoughts. Maybe it's my own spirit--my invisible room mate, the one who knocks on my door sometimes as I just slip into unconsciousness--waking me at night, trying to tell me something in that silent stagnant way of his. If only he wrote on the walls in blood, the way nice normal ghosts do, instead of just hanging around in my room

I woke up at six in the morning on Sunday with gastric discomfort, and found myself unable to do anything but fart and think about this post by Jeff Vandermeer, and more specifically this comment of his about style:

Some styles cannot multi-task. This is not a function of the simplicity or complexity of the prose, but a function of the simplicity or complexity of the layering the writer wishes to achieve; some writers have no choice but to operate at a simple level, while others can create simple and complex layering as they choose. Sometimes, the inability to multi-task is due to the banality of writer’s worldview. Sometimes, it is due to audience pandering. Sometimes, the writer hasn’t yet matured to the point where his or her style can carry the weight (or carry it in an effortless fashion).

I found myself thinking, "I don't layer my writing, do I? When I do, it's clunky...you can see my hands muddling about in the prose, you can hear me thinking I'm clever when I do something clever. Am I banal in my worldview? Is my prose just immature? Will it be more than immature...say...ever?" After a half hour of tossing, turning, incapable of sleeping or of shutting my brain up, I did the only thing I could think of. I got up and wrote for an hour. I thought about the structure of the Asexual Reproduction piece and the things my brother told me, which was essentially "Just fucking write, would you? Stop worrying about what you make and make it!" and in my relative state of tired restlessness, did just that inasmuchas I could.

Bonnie says she feels something new is in the works for me, but what new idea have I had? There's a lot of old ideas floating around in here, and ideas that haven't been realized, or new ideas that seem so large I can't even begin to know where to start. And what of the old ideas? That fucking novel who hangs out in my room the way the ghost does and that looks at me every time I turn on my computer with that accusatory file-glare it has that seems to remind me how I started to write it because my grandfather died and suddenly it seemed time to start something. Something other than wasting away and saying I would write the novel some day. And what will it take for me to get up and finish it? Another dead grandparent? What about the stories I started with such good beginnings that just won't end. Will they be left dangling? And what would it really matter if they did? In the grand scheme of things, I mean.

Ragnarok opens Friday. Anyone who is anywhere near Chicago when it does is invited. Anyone. And if you want to come on Wednesday and Thursday for previews, they're free and we need the audience.
Afterwards, maybe I'll be a cocoon for a while, melt away into goop and coalesce again from the essence of me into something new. Something connected. And until then, have beautiful dreams.

Stains: 2; Shirts: 0

One of the things I like about doing theatre is that a lot of times the costumers don't want an element of my costume back, and I end up with a nice article of clothing. I have a pair of nice shoes coming to me when the show's done. Which is great, because I need nice shoes.

We're entering into tech week next week, which in theatre is also known as Hell Week, because it's traditionally the time when stress levels are at their highest, and the production staff of a show practically lives at the theater*. Luckily, actors are often encouraged not to live at the theatre, since working ourselves sick the week before the show opens would just lead to lots of sniffling and vomiting on opening night. Which is rarely the sort of thing that endears you to an audience (you rarely hear an audience leave a show saying, "My, what a good show! And the cast was so pallid! I just love that!"). Anyway, Hell Week is hellish enough to us actors, what with remembering our lines and incorporating elements like lights, sound, a stage, which we didn't have before.

With the stresses of Hell Week looming over me, I decided now was a good time to take a couple of personal days from work (read: "play hooky"). So I did. Yesterday, I went and saw the Body Worlds exhibit, which was every bit as fun and interesting as it had been when I saw it in Berlin, although a few of the more interesting plastinates had been left out (such as the woman turned into a chest of drawers, who opened her belly like a cabinet door to reveal the fetus inside of her), and the comments some people left behind were asinine to say the least. Including such gems as, "The exhibit is really great, but does it have to be so graphic? Do you have to have genitals on every single corpse? Especially the male genitals. Females shouldn't have to look at it and vice versa."(one guess: was the person who left that a man or a woman? I'm guessing it was a guy) Why would that surprise someone enough to be worthy of comment? Short of presenting a touring exhibit of plastinate eunuchs (which I would pay to see), I can't really imagine a way to show human corpses without showing their genitals. Perhaps the commentor wanted them to be dressed in the traditional zombie loincloth.

Last night before bed, I brewed up a bit of the Xsnanian national drink, which is coffee brewed with whiskey in a stove-top espresso pot. This time, I mixed a little raw cocoa I had into it and cooled it off. The result is a nice coffee/chocolate liqueur (currently filtering through a coffee filter at home). Unfortunately, as the cocoa portion brewed, a particularly gooey bubble exploded, leaving big brown spatter marks on my new white shirt. Then, today, I spilled coffee on my green sweater. Not bad, but still. I need to marry a dry cleaner. Or invest in more coffee-colored clothes.

Back to work tomorrow. I think I'll go enjoy the day.

*A note on the spellings of the word "theatre" versus "theater": Merriam-Webster doesn't recognize the "re" spelling of the word, but within the theatre industry--among people I know, at least--there is a distinction made between the British "re" and the American "er"; the distinction being that "theatre" refers to the artform, while "theater" refers to the building. Thus, if I start a theatre company, I'm making art, while if I start a theater company, I build buildings. Some people have argued to me that this is a fundamentally pretentious distinction, but I disagree. I think it serves a real and valid purpose of separating an abstract from a concrete. More importantly, pretentious or not, I've encountered it from enough perfectly intelligent sources that I feel justified in continuing it. That is my footnote for this blog entry.

Visceral Origami

I used to love watching The Jetsons. I can remember whole afternoons as a kid, maybe ten or eleven years old, wasted watching the cheap animation, the crappy jokes, the weird vision of the future in which they can give a robot a sense of humor but not a proper-sounding voice box. One thing I never got, though, is who would want to eat food in pill form. Even if you had the technology to create little food-flavored nutrition pills, why would you? As a chubby little kid, I loved food. It goes with the territory of being a chubby little kid. And I just couldn’t fathom tossing back a pill and calling it lunch. Similarly, I’ve never understood people who go to Florida or Huston and come back all excited with little packets of freeze-dried ice cream from NASA. Yeah, it’s what the astronauts eat, but it has the consistency of packing material. Give me actual ice cream any day of the week. I think the astronauts would agree with me.

So I was baffled and intrigued when I read this article:

But the sushi made by Mr. Cantu, the 28-year-old executive chef at Moto in Chicago, often contains no fish. It is prepared on a Canon i560 inkjet printer rather than a cutting board. He prints images of maki on pieces of edible paper made of soybeans and cornstarch, using organic, food-based inks of his own concoction. He then flavors the back of the paper, which is ordinarily used to put images onto birthday cakes, with powdered soy and seaweed seasonings.

The article describes foods made of paper, pills flavored like watermelon, condiments that levitate under the beam of an ion-particle gun. Deep in my little foodie brain, I began to understand the logic of the future dining experience. The world of The Jetsons didn’t eat their food freeze-dried, condensed, gelled, in pellets, in discs, in powders just because they could. They did it because to do so was cool. The Jetsons was really a horrible dystopic vision of a future in which the hipster culture of the new cuisine had run rampant and taken over the world. It all makes sense now.

That said, I’m man enough to admit that the article had me. There is something very interesting about revolutionizing the way we think of food and nutrition. And as works of art, the food served at Moto are beautiful. Delicate, light, with watercolor rose petals and Escher sketches printed on them, they are literally works of art, a magical unification of print and food. Beyond that, what is the appeal of a place like Moto? Can a person really derive satisfaction from plates of paper crackers? Possibly it’s that the appeal of Moto’s cuisine goes beyond the question of nourishment and into deeper questions of food and cuisine in general.

For a while, now, I’ve been thinking about why I like to cook so much. Why go through all the trouble of making a meal, decorating it, making it pretty, if only to eat it? Why do I do things like make a still and sit for hours on end tending it, just so that I can have a bottle of a liqueur that I could have imported. The more I think about it, the more I realize that the reason I like to cook is that it unifies my artistic and scientific sides.

I’m fascinated by science, and I always have been. When I was a kid, I would spend hours mucking around, looking for frogs in the drainage basin at the base of my development. When my father bought squid for dinner, we would clean it together, taking care to examine the organs, look at the structure of the eyes, the ink sacs still full and black. My scientific prospects fairly ended at age twelve when I blew up a glass bottle in an experiment (the goal of which was to make soda). I nearly killed myself in the process and was left with a big crescent-shaped scar on my neck to remind me not to play stupidly again. And I didn’t. I turned to the arts for creative fulfillment and was done with science altogether, but as the old saying goes, you can take the boy out of the lab, but you can’t take the lab out of the boy. Inevitably, I was going to find something technical or scientific that would grab my attention.

This isn’t to say I started cooking when I was twelve. Not at all. I started cooking when I was five, and maybe before then. My mother would let me help her as she cooked dinner and cookies and whatever else she might have been cooking when I was little. When she went back to work when I was five, I told her that I would miss her baking. I think what I was actually trying to say was that I would miss cooking with her (which I needn’t have worried about—mom and I still make dinner together when I’m home). As I grew into my teenage years, I began to experiment again. This time, it was with different combinations of flavors, different ways of mixing and matching foods. Some recipes would come out weird and inedible. Some would be delicious and new. Some I would eat once and love and never be able to re-create again, no matter how closely I matched the recipe. With each, I learned what foods and spices did what. What does the egg do in a bread? What does the wheat do? The milk? What kind of flavor does rosemary contribute to a recipe? If a recipe is too spicy, how can I cut the spice? And so on. In college, while all of my friends were eating ramen noodles, I ate couscous with spicy pepper and tomato sauces. Or pasta with broccoli. When I had next to no money while I was temping after college, I always ate well. You could give me ten dollars and I could whip together a full meal for me and two friends and it would be great. Still can.

It’s this fusion of the scientific mind with the artistic mind that I love about food. Food is chemistry made practical. It is a Bunsen-burner balancing act of oils and crystals, proteins and gases, heat, pressure, time. A recipe for, say, leg of lamb is a scientific formula in coded form. It says, “Soak the protein bundle in a combination of acid and fat to soften the cellular membrane and loosen connective tissue. Heat intensely for fifteen minutes to carbonize the sugars in the outer layer of the meat until crusty, then lower temp to 300 degrees for two hours to denature the protein until easily cut and digested." Seasoning instructions are recipes for which oils best complement which other oils.

It’s art because the experience of eating lies beyond the tongue. We eat with our eyes, with our noses, our minds, our memories, our hearts, our companions. When humans eat well, we eat with our full selves. The meal is a shared experience that demands it please us aesthetically. I love setting a dish on a table and watching people watch the food. I love seeing sushi come out and hearing people “ooooh” at the beautiful pinks and greens. Sushi, especially, is a food that values aesthetics. Fully half the experience of eating it comes in the joy of seeing it beforehand. And then it’s eaten, and it’s gone, a beautiful, intangible experience, like that of viewing a flower or a play. Perfectly filling and ephemeral.

Having come to all of this, I was all set to splurge a bit and eat at Moto some day after work (it is, after all, only a stone’s throw from my office). Until I found out that it costs $245-a-head to eat there. Possibly because of the class IV laser they have in the kitchen.

He's Got Personality

coming out his ears...

I found this personality quiz on the site of one of Ian's friends. As near as I can tell, it's pretty accurate in its assessment of me:

Your Brain Usage Profile:
Auditory : 35%
Visual : 64
%Left : 40
%Right : 60%

Matthew, you possess an interesting balance of hemispheric and sensory characteristics, with a slight right-brain dominance and a slight preference for visual processing. Since neither of these is completely centered, you lack the indecision and second-guessing associated with other patterns. You have a distinct preference for creativity and intuition with seemingly sufficient verbal skills to be able to translate in any meaningful way to yourself and others.

You tend to see things in "wholes" without surrendering the ability to attend to details. You can give them sufficient notice to be able to utitlize and incorporate them as part of an overall pattern. In the same way, while you are active and process information simultaneously, you demonstrate a capacity for sequencing as well as reflection which allows for some "inner dialogue."

All in all, you are likely to be quite content with yourself and your style although at times it will not necessarily be appreciated by others. You have sufficient confidence to not second-guess yourself, but rather to use your critical faculties in a way that enhances, rather than limits, your creativity.

You can learn in either mode although far more efficiently within the visual mode. It is likely that in listening to conversations or lecture materials you simultaneously translate into pictures which enhance and elaborate on the meaning.

It is most likely that you will gravitate towards those endeavors which are predominantly visual but include some logic or structuring. You may either work particularly hard at cultivating your auditory skills or risk "missing out" on being able to efficiently process what you learn. Your own intuitive skills will at times interfere with your capacity to listen to others, which is something else you may need to take into account.

I'm not able to see me the way others see me, of course, but this fairly well describes me as I see myself (although I'm often much less confident and much more indecisive than it gives me credit for). I'm curious as to how it does for others. And how it works.

Worm and Retort

It’s week three of rehearsals and my body is just about to give out. I’m sore in places I didn’t know could get sore. My body keeps moving in spite of itself at rehearsals, and I get home every night just dreaming of bed. I need a night or two off. Which, thankfully, I will get tomorrow.

My ongoing research on that elusive substance, absinthe, has unearthed a couple of interesting facts. The first is that, outside of the lesser brands being sold at high costs, there are a few very reasonably priced absinthes out there that are supposed to be pretty good. Most notable among the manufacturers is Jade Liqueurs, which makes absinthes based on lost recipes of the Belle Epoque (they were formerly called Belle Epoque Liqueurs). For a little over a hundred dollars (which is pricey, but not as pricey as some), you can get a bottle of absinthe that is of, supposedly, grand quality.

I found reviews for a couple of their products (and there are only a couple of products to review right now) at La Fee Verte, a very informative Web site that has articles on absinthe, thujone (debunking its reputed properties as a drug), wormwood, and the general zeitgeist of the age in which absinthe thrived. They also describe why absinthe must be distilled, as opposed to being merely macerated. Essentially, thujone, which is not particularly soluble in alcohol, must be distilled out of wormwood. Macerating wormwood releases its bitter oils, but not any thujone. I suspect the same is true of anethone, the essential oil found in anise. Consequently, I’m building a still this weekend.

I have found two still designs that I like online. The first is this teakettle still, given to us by Dangerous Laboratories (whose dry ice detonation gif frighteningly resembles what I did to myself when I was twelve). The second is this one at La Fee, which I like because it keeps the alcohol away from the open flame. Mine will be a hybrid of the two. The retort will be a two-liter, heat-resistant beaker with a cork in the top, submerged in a water bath. A copper tube from the top, connects to a flaring unit that connects to the condenser, which is more tubing, coiled inside of a milk jug full of ice water, that then leads into my receiver. If I have time and money leftover, I’ll add a fancy little water escape so I can keep the water cold. But that’s not necessary. And there I will, hopefully, have a functioning still. (I should note that, since distilling alcohol without a license is illegal in the U.S., I won’t actually use this still for that purpose. This is a purely hypothetical discussion, you see, one carried on by a scientific mind for fascination's sake).

The "Korpervelt" exhibit (a.k.a. “Body Worlds”) opens tomorrow at the Museum of Science and Industry. Unfortunately, based on my schedule and when it’s running, I won’t be able to make it. Actually, that’s bullshit; I wouldn’t miss it for anything. It just means I have to play hooky one day from work. At any rate, I once again recommend seeing it. It starts Friday and runs until March 20, and it is one of the most interesting, beautiful, macabre pieces of art I’ve had the pleasure of seeing. See my previous entry on it for more.

My friend, Ian, who would never describe himself as a writer, has posted some interesting entries over the past month or so. The most recent is a monologue he wrote to and from work one day, which isn’t on a vastly new subject (by his own admission) but covers it in a way that is so unpretentious and just genuine that it really appealed to me. The other is about a friend of Ian’s, his arrest (the friend’s, not Ian’s), and their friendship. Anyway, both impressed me greatly, so I thought I’d mention them here. (Incidentally, Ian has commented that he wouldn’t call himself a writer because he just takes forever to write anything, which reminds me of what a teacher once said to me and a classmate who thought she wrote poorly: A good writer isn’t one who writes easily; a good writer is one who thinks about what he/she is writing and strives to write it better. )

A Joyous Slave to My Art

Last night after rehearsal, Steve, our music director, mentioned that the theater we’re renting our rehearsal space from had just wrapped up a show and was holding a free open mic downstairs, and he suggested we should all go. So those of us who either didn’t have need of sleep or who were willing to brave exhaustion for the sake of a good time got some beer and went down to hang out. And, my God, it was amazing! The night started out with a reading of Baudelaire’s “Be Drunk” in French (with English subtitles…no joke), which set the spirit of the night. It was a revel. It was a rollicking, laughing, beating, passionate, irreverent night of poetry, music, comedy, camaraderie, groove, talent.

My friend, Molly, read a poem of hers set in bed with a lover. The line I remember of it: “you’re soft. like silk. like satin. and I could sleep between you.” I audibly exhaled upon hearing that line. Late in the night, a viola player played something so beautiful I almost wept with joy from the sound of it, and Steve put his arm around me when he saw me grinning in bliss. The Tantalus crowd got up toward the end and sang a song from Ragnarok for everyone. Which the crowd responded relatively well to.

This is, I think, the crest of a wave of creative energy that I’ve been moving on since Friday (or maybe it’s just the swell of it…I certainly hope so). Tantalus did a 24-hour theatre this weekend, which means that we wrote, directed, lit, set, etc. an entire show from scratch in 24 hours. It was amazing. We met at the space on Friday night for a meet and greet. I was introduced to the lighting designer (who is the current boyfriend of my most recent ex…which was harrowing at first, but turned out to be better than fine), and then we set to work figuring out what we had, what we needed, etc. By midnight, a script synopsis was written. By two, we had built a makeshift dimmer board. At dawn, we had the first read-through of the script, and most of the lights were hung and ready. By nine o’clock the next night, we created a show that was as good as, and in fact better than many shows I have been involved that had full rehearsal processes. In the end, I spent forty-four hours awake, and I didn’t feel tired or exhausted, at all, until the moment when I decided to go home. The experience was so incredible—it was like nothing I’ve ever been involved in. Like squeezing the full experience of working with people on the run of a show, finding little intimacies with them and inside jokes into such a short time that it just infused me with energy.

The more time I spend with the Ragnarok cast, the more impressed I am with them. With us. Everyone comes to rehearsal with ideas and energy and a willingness to explore and go above and beyond what is usually expected of actors to create something that’s beautiful. Last night we had photo call for our publicity photos and afterwards I was struck with just how powerful the scenes we’ve created are. The music for the show sweeps and swells with the intensity of a folk opera—the sort of thing sung by heroes around a table in a mead hall. We play with the passion of people who are about to see the world end…because that’s what the play is about.

Anyway, I feel blessed, as if the cosmos is inserting me into new places with new people and experiences. I feel overjoyed to get to be a part of something incredible, and to work with such strong and intelligent and motivated people. It’s good fun and it’s exhilarating and I want it to last.

Yes. Well...Ah...Inauguration Cake, Anyone?

AOL News has been reporting on the Congressional hearings for Condoleeza Rice's nomination for Secretary of State, which has kept me thoroughly amused as every time I log into my AOL account, I see Condi's face, alternately scowling (presumably when some meany Democrat Congressman asks her a question she doesn't like) or smiling (when general approval shines down on her from the majority). It's been amusing watching what has seemed like an up-to-date report on Condoleeza's mood.

This article was interesting/disturbing:

Looking at the personnel of eight federal agencies chosen at random, the GAO found that 463 employees showed up on the enrollment records of just three unaccredited schools. (It actually looked at four colleges, but only three responded to its request for information and only two fully cooperated.) This was merely a sampling of the dozens of mills operating nationwide, not an exhaustive audit; given the limited nature of the GAO's investigation, the true number of federal employees who are academically unqualified to fill the positions they hold could be in the thousands.

Agencies tasked with defending America from terrorism were among the top employers of workers with phony diplomas identified by the GAO. The Department of Defense employs 257 of them. Transportation has 17. Justice has 13; Homeland Security, 12; Treasury, eight.

Also interesting is that whoever edited this piece let this gorgeous bit of irony slip into the final sentence:

The American people need to know that the best-qualified workers are running the war on terrorism, not a bunch of hacks and cheats.

Yes. Yes we do.

Strindberg and Helium

Last night, we had our first rehearsal on our feet, and today my butt has informed me that it is very displeased with me. I woke up this morning sore and in need of a good stretch and a run of calisthenics to get my muscles working again. Instead, I sat on a train for an hour. Which didn't help. I'm thinking that six nights a week of jumping around in rhythm like a monkey and weilding a sword like a Viking is just what I need to get into shape. I should be significantly less doughy by the time this show goes up.

My friend Jamsky (whose name is Jen, but has been Jamsky ever since I forgot whether her name is spelled with an "i" or an "e") sent me Strindberg and Helium, which is...well...exactly what one would expect from a cartoon pairing the Expressionist playwright, August Strindberg, with an ebullient pink helium balloon. I can't recommend it enough. It is only possibly surpassed in its weirdness by the home of its animator, Eun-Ha at Milky Elephant, which has all sorts of fun flash animation to play with (but is a little hard to sort through).

Tres strange. Enjoy.

Fun Facts, Links, and Updates

A few fun and interesting links...

My friend, Sam, sent me this article, which proposes a plausible explanation for the weird lump on Bush's back during the elections. I don't know if it's true, or not, but as my neighbor, Jim, pointed out, the fact that the Administration denied that Bush even had a bulge, when he clearly did, is a good sign that something is amiss.

Personally, I wonder how Bush feels being one of the few presidents whose inauguration is met with protests and jeers.

Jeff Vandermeer's blog has a couple of interesting entries on it, including an entry about automatons with lots of informative links, a neat essay on shortwave radio, and the most recent, an article about a collaboration between Mexico's most famous crime novelist and Subcomandante Marcos. If only more revolutionaries had such artistic leanings as Marcos, the world would certainly be a better place.

And from Neil Gaiman's site, dated January 11, Theresa Nielsen Hayden provides links to nigh every article she's written to date on the subject of writing. My favorite being Namarie Sue.

I finally decided that, since I reference the Wikipedia every time a term comes up that I want to explain, I really ought to just post the Wikipedia in my sidebar. So I did that. Makes life easier for everyone. Not to let the Wikipedia stand on its own as my sole reference book, I've also added the Urban Dictionary, which can be equally useful. Amanda (the friend who was in town last week) led me to the Urban Dictionary, explaining that her mother uses it to sort out the slang in her students' papers. Which I think is a much smarter approach than just failing her students, outright, which is what many teachers would do.

I've added a link to my friend, Adam Verner. He's a voiceover talent, and just a talent, in general. He's the single most Aryan-looking human being I've met outside of Denmark. And since I've never been to Denmark, that means he's at the top of the list.

Back to life...
I dropped Amanda off at the airport, last Sunday, and then went to watch the season premiere of Carnivale (the best show on television) with my friends. Was overjoyed to hear from her after the show. Then I went home, and my bed felt terribly empty, and there was the impulse to reach out and hold someone who wasn't there. So life is back to something like it usually is, with the exception of the fact that I'm still fairly glowing from our visit. And the miracle of cellphones makes it so much easier to keep in touch with her.

But life back to normal means I've been sitting in coffee shops, writing--fighting desperately to finish a few short stories before rehearsal starts tonight. Because, once rehearsal starts, I'm enslaved to my other art for a little while and I don't get much time to write. So.

And life back to normal also means appreciating the strange and beautiful things I find. The other day, a few of us from my office went to Chinatown for lunch. Across the street from the restaurant was an herbalist/Chinese grocery store and after lunch, I dodged away from my coworkers to see if they had any star anise on hand (star anise being a key component in my next absinthe recipe). A pomegranate tree sat in their window, its fruit literally bursting with the little ruby-gem seeds.

As I stepped in, the girl behind the counter looked at me with a slightly confused glance, as though I was the only white guy who had set foot in the place in weeks.

"Can I help you?" she asked.

"Yes," I said, "Do you have any star anise?"

"Star anise?" she said, shaking her head. "It is a fruit?"

"No, no," I said, "it's a spice. I don't know what else it's called."

Again, she shook her head.

"It's star-shaped," I continued, "and it tastes like licorice."

She thought for a moment, and then produced an enormous bag of brown, woody shuriken, smelling sweetly of licorice. The bag was labeled, clearly, "Star Anise." I asked for two ounces of it, which cost me a dollar (when she said "one dollar" I was so convinced that couldn't be the price that I thought she was saying something in her language to one of the men who worked language. It was just too cheap to be true), and then left to rejoin the people from work. All day long, the little envelope of grey paper that she had wrapped the anise in filled my office with a sweet potpourri of licorice candy.

So life back to normal is not life back to boredom.
But I still miss my friend.

Off to write for a bit, and maybe a haircut today, in preparation for Ragnarok.
Happy MLK day.

In the Company of a Dear Friend

I'm in The Grind with Amanda, who is reading Sleeping in Flames and periodically looking up to catch me watching her as I write this, and frankly it feels like she was never anywhere else. She just belongs here or just always is here somehow. Or something. We've done little more this week but sit in my apartment and talk, go grocery shopping when we realize the woeful lack of food in my apartment (I have parts of recipes, but no real whole recipes), and just be in each other's presence, which I think is really the point of it all. Just to be with each other.

We had an interesting New Year's, in which we spent the first couple of hours of the night walking around looking for the party we were supposed to show up at, and then spent the second half at a different party, drunk off of the French absinthe Amanda brought. Then we walked home and went to bed at dawn.

Every time Amanda visits, it's a new visit, which seems like an odd thing to think but really isn't. Some people visit after a few years and you come at each other from the same place as the last time you saw them, and even if you've kept in touch, you still act like the person you once were or you expect them to be the same person they once were. Amanda's never been that way with me. We just take each other as we are. We've seen each other's worst and our best and we can just be around one another whoever we are. It's a friendship that I'm always amazed by and grateful for.

And now I'm going to go back to being with her. Because that's better than blogging.

(as a final aside, our absinthe came out of steeping yesterday; it's painful to drink and has a flavor like an herbal medicine and even mixed with cranberry juice isn't particularly palatable...but it sure makes the world all shimmery for a while)

All's Well

I'm back in Chicago after one of the best Christmases in recent memory. My mother decided to stay home this Christmas and invite the rest of the family to see us (which raised some unexplainable anger from the rest of the family), which meant that, instead of rushing off to New Jersey on Christmas morning, I got to sleep late and then help my mother cook dinner all day long, then sit down for a meal with my brother, my sister-in-law, my mother and her husband, my step brothers, and my grandparents. More or less everyone I wanted to sit and have a meal with. Which was great. We had squash ravioli for an appetizer, followed by pork loin that my mother and I stuffed with apricots, using our combined medical knowledge to realize that using a process of peristalsis would be the most effective way to work the stuffing into the center cavity of the loin. Imagine my mother and I standing around and chatting, while we feed apricots to a giant esophagus, and you have a pretty good image of what we were doing.

Yeah.

The rest of the vacation was uneventful but fun. I made it up to NYC with my brother. We saw The Life Aquatic, which was profoundly disappointing (a fantastic title, fantastic concept, tacked on to a long, winding, and incidental film that wasn't terribly funny; except for Bill Murray dancing in a wet suit...that made me giggle out loud) and wandered around for a bit. Received some bad news from a friend (her grandmother died) and then spent a great evening wandering around the Village and SoHo with her while New York gave us a night full of snow, moonlight, and an irrate cabby.

All in all, it was the best Christmas in recent memory and I can't wait to do it again.

Now I'm back. In the brilliant cold. In my city, having experienced my other cities. They're like friends, cities are. I spend a great deal of time with Chicago, and I love its character and I hate some of its quirks, but I miss my other cities and long to be back with them. So. Joy.

The absinthe is steeping with the flavoring herbs now, and is a beautiful forest green. Which it is supposed to be. In a few days, we'll see how it tastes.

Rejections

Heading for home, today, which has me in high spirits (although I'm a little afraid that I'm going to experience delays on the way home. Never good).

Received a rejection letter from Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine, which I posted on my wall next to the others, though the curtness of the reply and the swiftness of the rejection left me feeling more--well--rejected than the others. So I'm a bit low.

There's a few things that I find cheer me up when I read rejection letters. The first is posting them on my wall as a reminder that this is part of my body of work. Rejections mean someone has looked at my work, even if they didn't see fit to pay me for that. They mean I've been looked at by an editor. In some cases, the editors have been very helpful and kind, too, which I appreciate. So there's that. The other thing is everything contained within this article. To explain--no, that would take too long--to sum up: no matter how bad it feels when you receive a rejection letter, it isn't personal. Never ever ever is it personal. This is what I keep in mind, and it really does help me. Just last week, I sent a letter to the brother of a friend of mine, saying pretty much "Rejections suck, but they're a part of the life of a writer, and all you can do is buck up and move forward." And they do. And they are. And you must.

So the adolescent boy in me is saying "Screw you, buddy!" and the determined business manchild in me is saying "Alright, so I'll send it to someone else" and the editor in me is saying, "It's nothing personal. Just a matter of tastes. How can we make this story better?" but the writer in me is saying "Ah well. Keep writing."

Which is what I did last night. And I'm happy with the way my new short story opens. So here it is:



1. Morning

He woke beside his beloved.

The sun rose sideways into the room, neatly drawn and quartered into rhombuses by the sash and grill of the window. Light trickled across the books in the library, casting long faint shadows from the ziggurats of literature piled around his love’s bed. The books in the shelves grinned out at him like great sets of teeth, smiling because they knew they were a part of history. The whole room in which he lay beside his beloved smelled of it. Decades of bohemianism, revolution, art for the sake of art for the sake of beauty for the sake of decadence hung in the air, as palpable as the dust in the sunlight, carried on the scent of mushrooms. He rose amid this—twisting his head until, much to his delight and with an audible pop from his vertebrae, the tightness that had taken residence in his neck through the night freed itself—and wagged his nose at the ceiling. Stories written in mildew across time-moistened pages, told in a voice as sweet and tender on the taste buds as truffles, traveled their old vaporous paths into his nostrils. In one breath, a book of poetry bought for a lover on the day the bookstore opened, later bought back, dog-eared and worn by a lifetime held close to the woman’s heart. In another, oil from the fingers of a great playwright, days before he would begin writing two plays—one a brilliant parlor drama, the other a play that would redefine the art of theatre—grazed across the pages of a philosophical essay, turned to for inspiration. In another, long dried, set into the margin of a history book, these words scratched in India ink in terse loops belonging to a traveler who passed through the city, like so many others, looking for the poetry locked in its walls and cobblestones:

Love is pure, and poison, too
Liquors of bliss and blindness both
Distilled from the heart and the water hemlock
Mixed in phials of morning dew
For the taking of spirits
When other faiths fail us

Other stories in other sips of breath. His nose cluttered with each of them, all of them competing for his attention. His attention turned toward his beloved.

Sylvia. Ah, Sylvia. Beautiful porcelain Sylvia, bound under sheets of white linen. How his heart leapt at the mere sight of her face, at the thought of her body hidden under the blanket, her nightgown just covering her, revealing just the slightest curve of her buttocks, the barest shadow of her sex. He inhaled again and drowned in the scent of her. Lilac bath oils, sandalwood incense, fine jasmine perfume, and musk—inescapable and pungent—musk, blended together in an effluvium called Sylvia. He watched her roll over in the bed and turn her face toward him, making slits of her eyes.

“It’s morning isn’t it, Jamon?”

“Past morning, dearest. Into midmorning by now or, dare I say it, late morning,” he said, turning to her.

“But not noon? Not yet?”

“No, no. There have been no bells to indicate noon.”

“Good. Then I needn’t be awake,” she said with a small smile. And she turned over in the bed, taking the blanket with her to cover her eyes from the invasion of light.

He returned to watching her, listening to her, inhaling her, and smiled because he could do so. Because he was close to her. His beloved.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And that's what I have so far. The title is something like "Parisian Decadence," or "Parisian Delight" (because it's written as a Decadence story and the Decadents hated that term for themselves...so would they use it in the title of a story?)

Happy Christmas, all. Pleasant New Year. The next two weeks are going to be fun. Going to NYC sometime over my time home, getting to see lots of old friends, and then a week of Amanda, drenched in rum rolls and absinthe.

Fuck you and all that you have done to this country

History will remember this as a time when villains no longer fought heros, but fought other villains for control of the theiving.

Taxation, Representation, Etc.

I keep trying to wrap my brain around exactly what my problem with the whole "let's make a Constitutional ammendment forbidding them homos to marry" thing. Aside from the fact that its properly "those homos" and the fact that making a Constitutional ammendment barring a group of people from expressing love seems just fundamentally wrong, I've been probing myself (so to speak) for exactly what is wrong with it. Barring freedoms isn't fundamentally wrong, of course. Most laws bar freedoms. Such as the freedom to kill, the freedom to drive at 500 mph on open highways, the freedom to forcibly remove someone from their home and declare that home yours. These are all freedoms that the law has reasonably barred. So why not this one?

It comes down to this: one of the fundamental principles of this nation, the principle that, arguably, launched the American Revolution is "No taxation without representation." Roughly speaking, that means that nobody can enact a law that affects you and only you unless someone in the government represents you. Which is why it was wrong for the English to make laws affecting the colonies, and why it's wrong for a bunch of White people to make laws restricting the rights of a bunch of Black people. If, for example, a law were enacted allowing White people to walk around wherever they want, sit where they want on buses, attend whatever schools they wanted, and eat at whatever restaurants they wanted, while Blacks had to go to specific schools, eat at specific restaurants, and sit at the backs of the bus--well everyone would say that was madness...eventually.

There are freedoms that belong to everyone and there are freedoms that belong to only a select group of people, and whenever we try to restrict the freedoms of a select group of people without restricting the freedoms of everyone else, we are not just on a slippery slope, we are already sliding away from everything that makes us the land of the free. We cannot reasonably enact laws affecting one group of people without representing the will of those people within our legislature. Gay marriage: where are the homosexuals in the House of Representatives? Who represents queer issues in the Senate? Where are there gay people in the Oval Office? In the Supreme Court? In the lives of the people trying to fuck up the lives of people not like them? We can't allow it. We can't. It's this, then the removal of the right not be fired from a job for being gay. Then the ghettos. It's a backwards step away from enlightenment and it goes against the principles of our Revolution. America isn't just founded on the Will of the People. It's founded on the Will of the People and the rights of people who stand reasonably against that will to live their lives in peace.

The Absinthe Drinkers

Ah shit. I've been seriously remiss in my blogging duties over the past week. Mostly because I've been spending evenings at home, getting actual work done on short stories and on that novel that's been sitting around on my hard drive, twiddling its thumbs for the past--oh--six months. It sits there, taunting me. Actually, it sits there, telling me to get off my literary ass and write the fucking thing. Because I know how it ends! At least, I think I do. As I've been writing, I wonder if it actually ends the way I think it ends. Anyway. Point is, I haven't been going out and pretending to work while actually perusing the Internet quite as much as I used to do.

But I sat down and blocked out where the novel has been these past couple of chapters and where chapter five might be going. Which is good. Chapter five has felt a bit aimless to me, which is generally what frustrates me and makes me stop writing it.

Finished the medical story. Have started another.

Oh, and I bought an absinthe kit from this guy (I find it disconcerting that the first part of his URL is "deadflesh.fear"), which arrived in a timely five days. I began to macerate it on Sunday, and so I now have a decanter full of 151 rum and wormwood macerating in my linen closet, slowly turning into a familiar forest green. A few people have wondered, "Why are you making absinthe? Doesn't that make people go mad?" And the answer is no. Absinthe doesn't contain enough of its active ingredients to make people go mad. Wikipedia has a good article on absinthe, which describes some of the conditions that caused absithe to eventually become illegal and some of the reasons why some brands were so dangerous (competitors of Pernod absinthe added industrial-grade alcohol and other horrible things to their blends to cut corners and add color).

In my experience with the drink, absinthe has little of the effect that people ascribe to it. It's just a nice warm sort of drunk. With some synaesthesia to top it all off. Very nice.

So that's all. I started a new story in a sort of Decadence style. About a pig.
Oh...and as nearly as I can tell from this post in Jeff Vandermeer's blog, there is further evidence that I'm a medium for the zeitgeist. A story about a stripper stripping her epidermis? This sounds almost exactly like my story "Pornography," in which a boy can't get off with his woman unless she strips her skin off (because his first experiences masturbating was to Gray's Anatomy).

Happy Holidays, if I don't blog before then.

Korpervelt

Had a good writing night, last night. I've been working on a story that takes the form of a scientific/medical paper, and have been wrestling with how to bring elements of dialogue and characters other than the person writing the paper into the story, and last night solved it by adding footnotes to it. I'm not sure why that didn't occur to me sooner. Footnotes can be kind of gimmicky--and it's a done gimmick, too--but in this case, it really frees the body of the text from the choppiness of switching back and forth between the scientific voice and the narrative voice, and it also opens up room for a lot of explanation and parenthetical commentary that was tanking the story. So I went to bed feeling happy and productive last night.

This morning, I was very excited to see this article in the Sun Times:

A controversial new exhibit of human body parts, which has fascinated millions in Europe and Asia but appalled and infuriated others, is coming to the Museum of Science and Industry..."Body Worlds'' features some 200 body parts, including 25 whole figures, that have been preserved through a process called "plastination." Created by a German scientist and artist, the procedure replaces body fluids with resins and polymers.

The article goes on to describe a little of the controversy surrounding the exhibit, which, frankly, surprised me to read about. I got to see "Body Worlds" when I was in Berlin a few years ago. I found it weird and wonderful and right up my alley. At the end of the booklet that accompanied the exhibit were quotes from some of the dozens of people who donate themselves to the doctor/artist who makes the sculptures. Some said it was in the interest of science, but many--and this is what interests me--were doing it for religious reasons.

Anyway, the last time I saw the exhibit, it sparked a great flood of creativity in me, which included the story I was working on last night, so this is clearly an omen. Rest assured, I will be at the museum. Possibly many times.

Feb. 4-March 20
$21 for adults,
$11 for kids 3-11 and
$17 for seniors.

Pie Interruptus

How I Met My Neighbors

Last night I was in the middle of making two dozen or so hand-held chicken pot pies for consumption over the next weeks (I'm not sure why, but winter always makes me want to make pie...any pie, really; just pie), when I heard a knock at my door. Which was odd, because I never hear anything from my neighbors. The last time I received a knock on my door, I opened it to a pair of Baptists from Indiana who wanted me to come to their church. So I asked who it was, and the response was, "It's your neighbor, Dan. My apartment's on fire. Which, naturally, made me open to door. Smoke billowed in from the hallway, and I stood in the doorway for a moment, trying to figure out what to do. After a second, I grabbed my coat and ran to knock on doors to get people out of their apartments, before the fire department called up the stairwell and ordered both Dan and I to leave.

As I walked outside, barefoot, into the cold air, I glanced up at the window of Dan's apartment. Fire belched out in big swirls. Fire engine lights flashed everywhere. The small crowd of interested neighbors that always appears at these sorts of events had already begun to gather on the sidewalk. Some out of sheer curiosity, some to see if there's anything they can do to help, some to be nosy and poo-poo the poor soul who accidentally started the fire.

I stood outside in my socks and winter coat for an hour, watching the fire department work, chopping away at my neighbor's windows, raining glass and water down to the street, until there was nothing left but the shell of an apartment. A square space where an apartment once lived, it's eyes hollow and black and unframed. When they were ready to let us back in, I made sure Dan and his wife had somewhere to go, and then went back in to see what had become of my apartment. Everything was fine, but it reeked of smoke. So I opened up all of my windows and placed fans in them, called my friends Bonnie and Darcy, and went back to making pies, while my neighbors evacuated their houses and their pets.

A while later, Bonnie and Darcy showed up and sat with my while I made pie in my winter coat, and we drank moscata and lit scented candles and nag champa and just generally enjoyed the best of a bad situation. Every so often, someone would knock at the door--first the curious friends of a downstairs neighbor who wanted to make sure he was okay (everyone got out okay, as far as I know) and then my upstairs neighbor, who was away during all of this and came home to her apartment wide open and her dog locked in her bedroom. I explained everything to her, lent her a fan, and then spent the night at Bonnie and Darcy's house, just in case the carbon monoxide levels were dangerous.

Today, the apartment next to mine is all boarded up, making it look even more like a ruined shell. My front hallway is cold and dark and smells of the most horrible, acrid, chemical mixture of smoke and fire-killers that I could ever imagine. The hall outside my door is dingy, grey, as though it won't even let light brighten it. Black, mildew-like tendrils run up and down the walls where the smoke and water infiltrated the paint, the wood, the carpet, the air. Everything has a current of smoke and burning running through it now. Even my apartment, which was relatively untouched, reeks of smoke still. But it's getting better and it will be better.

People are generally good natured, I've decided from this. Most people, anyway.
And I'm okay and so is everything I own. And I'm thankful that I can sit here and write this over a cup of hot cocoa and everything's really pretty cool.

A Warm Winter's Day

It's another grey, damp day in December, with temperatures not much lower than the forties or fifties and a veil of moisture in the air, dulling the line of the sky. Last year around this time, I remember walking out into the cold air, feeling it hit my skin and solidify my mind into these neat little crystals of thought. Last year, I remember walking around a cemetery in snow drifts, struggling just to breathe against the wind, and skies a permanent blue because the air wasn't warm enough to hold clouds. That's proper winter.

This year, it's just grey and moist. Good weather for a sinus infection. Yay, global warming.

Despite that, I've been very content over the past week, due in no small part to the fact that a friend I love very much is coming to stay with me soon. And because we've actually both taken a proper amount of time off to enjoy each other's company, so we're not rushing to cram a proper visit into a short period of time. Makes me smile every time I think about it.

Also, the benefit went well. We raised about a thousand dollars for Tantalus, and more just keeps coming in. If you haven't been able to donate or whatnot, please do. So we can do brilliant theatre.

Wandering Books
While tooling around on the Web today, I visited Jonathan Carroll's site and was happy to see that he has been updating it and even has a blog, which is, like most of what he writes, really good. On it, I found a link to bookcrossing.com, whose goal is, "to make the whole world a library. Book Crossing is a book exchange of infinite proportion, the first and only of its kind." The idea is to leave a book that's moved you in a public place for someone else to pick up. That person does likewise and so on and so forth. You can track your book's progress via a sticker that the site provides. It's a brilliant idea; I think I'll start doing that, at once.

For those of you who don't know him, Jonathan Carroll is an author. His books are largely slipstream fantasies--dreamscapes glazed upon ordinary life. They're about the magic of true love and imagination, philosophy, talking dogs, and heroes/heroines who eat far more Sachertorte than is probably healthy for any human being to consume. I can't recommend him enough. Especially his book White Apples.