Tuesday, June 20, 2006

The Joys of the Fringe

Opening week has come and gone. The cast was spectacular, the crowds were good except for Sunday, and the theatre was hot. Really. Hot. The AC broke and we all had to sweat. This didn't dampen any enthusiasm and our audiences still laughed. One of our actresses nearly passed out after a particularly frenetic scene, but after a little heaving and some water, she was right back at it. Did I mention that I love everyone in the cast and crew? This past week only increased those feelings. Everyone threw themselves into their work with dedicated abandon, and I'd like to think that the results were really good. I'm really looking forward to the rest of the run. The AC will be fixed this week, friends and others are coming to see the show, and this has been as good a return to the active theatre as I could hope for. Find info on the show at this previous post, or go to the Factory Theater website directly by clicking on this bit of bold text. I'll have to update another previous post to document what's true about me online. Busy times, but I'm having a good time with these outside interests of mine. Now if only I could have some steady paycheck from a career I love (be it from teaching, writing, acting, or some combo of the three), a lack of anxiety every Monday morning, a successful & consistent composing ability, and the ability to have everything nice and orderly in a disorderly world. Yes, that unrealistic greed gets the best of me sometimes, but right now, I'm getting some satisfactory life time. This comes from mainly from rejoining a previous lifetime on the fringe non-union Chicago theatre, but as I attempt to create a career or two outside of the practical money-making career I used to have, and stubbornly believe that I can have a well-paid day job doing something I love, I feel like I'm making the most of life's outside edges. I'm also very grateful for what the fringe gives back to me. This will serve as my reminder post for when I get cranky and dissatisfied with the inevitable future fringe frustration. Here's hoping I'm cheering myself up in the future.

Friday, June 16, 2006

Pulp Friday Continues (PF 8)

And it's actually on a Friday this time, just like when I started.

Previously on Pulp Friday:

PF 1
PF 2
PF 3
PF 4
PF 5
PF 6
PF 7

“Any worse?” I ask. “My wife is dead, I’m broke, and you and your goons just trashed the front part of my building, so how’s it going to get worse?”


“Oh, you should know by now never to say that, silly,” H.P. says. “You’re a desperate man. Desperate people do desperate things; things they would never normally do. You’ve already proven that.”


“So you say.”


“You’ve got the documentation right there in your hands. Don’t you think that a judge and jury wouldn’t come to the obvious conclusion? You killed George Dean, disposed of his body somewhere in Kihei, stole his checks and credit cards, perpetuated the fraud just long enough to finish your honeymoon and scram from Hawaii before you were discovered. It’s black and white, dear. Admit it.”


I’d really like to have a response to that.


The goon to the right of H.P. pipes up: “Yes, and there’s plenty more evidence besides that, sailor.” He speaks with a heavy lisp. I’d comment on how hissy he was if he couldn’t break my bones so easily.


The goon to the left of H.P. reinforces their point: “Yersh, ve harve burxes and burxes of errvidunce.” His accent is so thick I can’t tell what part of the earth he’s from. But again, faced with easily broken bones, I keep quiet.


“Be good little silent henchmen now,” H.P. says with a trace of irritation. “We have business to finish.”


Here comes the boom. I say, “Fine. What do you want?”


H.P. casually puts his left hand out and Lispy Trenchcoat puts a cigarette into his palm. “To clean up your mess, of course.”


As H.P. lights his cigarette and takes a long, comfy drag, that same smoke craving from this afternoon jumps right back on me. I swallow and try to hide my envy.


H.P. exhales a jetstream of blue-gray fog. “Since it’s your mess, you’ll be doing most of the cleaning. We’ll keep close to make sure that you’re being thorough. You’ll be going through each of your transgressions individually, gathering the pieces, and putting them to rest. Think of it as a labor-intensive confessional.”


“Does it matter that I haven’t done everything you claim I’ve done?”


“Come now, dearie,” H.P. says, “we’ve done our homework. You’ve done it all. It’s best to cease the denial and focus on the cleansing. Don’t you think Jenny wants that?”


“Jenny’s not a part of this.”


“Still with the denial,” H.P. says, “but Jenny’s very much a part of this. Always has been. Haven’t you been feeling her on the back of your neck when your conscience hurts you?”


“I don't know what you're talking about.”


The Trenchcoats shake their heads and make tsk-ing noises.


H.P. says, “Don’t you? Well, you’ve only got your word. We’ve got more than that and it won’t be hard for anyone to connect the dots.”


No more use in arguing. Never was. I fix my eyes on the net and wait.


I hear H.P. take another long, crackling drag before he says, “Good. Now to cleansing. We want you to go back to your apartment and get something for us. We were trying to find it there when you barged in early. It was right at our fingertips. We even had someone who, though unwilling, was very helpful in the search. She knows a little about you and your life, you see. Still, we couldn’t very well transport both her and what we wanted with your badly timed return.”


“Who are you talking about?”


H.P. says, “Be patient, dearie. You’ll see. We decided to take her and let you transport what we wanted since you were so rude.”


That explains the pair of legs that were being dragged through my front door this afternoon. Doesn’t explain who she is, though.


“So, that means this little meeting is over. Time for you to be a porter.” H.P. and the Trenchcoats turn and begin to leave the court.


“What’s my cargo?” I ask their backs.


H.P. looks over his shoulder at me. “It’s the last thing you did in Maui. You'll know what I mean.”


Next on Pulp Friday: PF 9

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

I Gotta Be a Dope for Doing This...

It's so silly for me to try to encode anything, but hey, this is my playground. My friend Roach hooked me up on Flixster, which is supposed to be a meet & greet place spot for people based on their feelings about movies. The meet & greet doesn't work so much for me (the majority of Flixster users appear to be teenage Canadians) but the site also allows for posting movie reviews, which works GREAT for me. How nice to have a shared forum for my movie pontification! At this site, you can be your own Roeper and give people crap about their reviews: an idea I like. So, back to the encoding, Flixster allows for a way to post my movie reviews to Blogger. I'm currently at 667 ratings with 84 written reviews, so I should share this body of work which I'm rapidly becoming addicted to and will surely grow. See the sidebar to check if my encoding worked or if I crashed the whole blog.

Friday, June 09, 2006

Opening Weekend!

Yeah, baby! Here it comes. My first show in three years and it's gonna be a blast. It's been an exhausting and fulfilling week. I think everybody in the cast needed audiences a week ago and now we get them. Everything's going amazingly smooth, considering all the work and the set changes we learned this week. I gotta stop bungling shit up backstage when I move the flats and props. With a little more practice, I'll be like clockwork. I can't wait! What an incomparable thrill to be doing this again. It's my greatest love that I've missed so badly. The cast and crew are spectacular and I still laugh my ass off like an idiot every single night. We don't have a bad apple anywhere. Everyone and everything in this show kicks ass. Am I biased? You goddam betcha. But I'm also proud. Is this great American theatre? Hell, I dunno. It sure is fun, though. We won't open anyone's eyes to the AIDS crisis, we won't examine the critical undertones of the human psyche, and we won't be stirring up any political debate. But we're not supposed to. There are more than enough plays for that. This show is laughter and entertainment, which, in my view, are important and always relevant parts of the human psyche. Humor is critical. Well-made and smoothly produced theatre is to be emulated in other parts of life for its dedicated community, creativity, and skill. This is a show I hope many people see because they'll laugh, be entertained, and appreciate the fun. Kiss it, love it! If you see the show, you'll know what that means.

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Nerd Note for Self-Serf

How many times have I lost this damned icon and now there's an easy way to re-create it!

How to re-create the Show Desktop icon on the Quick Launch bar

The Show Desktop icon is not an ordinary program shortcut. If the icon is deleted, the procedure for re-creating the icon is not obvious. To re-create the Show Desktop icon, follow these steps:

1. Click Start , click Run, type notepad, and then click OK.
2. In Notepad, type the following text on individual lines:
[Shell]
Command=2
IconFile=explorer.exe,3
[Taskbar]
Command=ToggleDesktop
3. Click File, click Save As, and then save the file to your desktop as Show Desktop.scf.

Note Notepad may automatically append a .txt extension to the file name. Remove this extension if present. The file name should be Show Desktop.scf.

I'm not Douglas Coupland yet, but I've taken the first step in controlling my programming language future.
(I doubt there will be a second)

Monday, June 05, 2006

Old Time Radio

I'm so glad that I found two sites to keep my mind occupied. The first site contains hundreds of old time radio programs. The other site contains synopses of every indexed old time radio program. Most of these programs are from the 1930s through the 1950s. I enjoy this dated form of entertainment. This medium was a predominant distraction for a generation. It's fun to hear the stereotypical '50s voices and ridiculously inaccurate foreign accents. The organ music during transition makes for goofy kitsch. Plus, there's a different form of writing and overexposition at work to create pictures for the audience: It's history, sociology, and entertainment rolled into one. On the one hand, it's amusing to hear expressions like "dope" have a totally different meaning. On the other hand, some lines give a wince or two: "I'm inclined to agree with Schopenhauer that women are an unscrupulous race." Thus, the socio-historical study, both the good and the bad. And they really did use the word "buddy" a lot.

Another good site is RadioLovers.com, where I first found old time radio programs. "Police Headquarters" is quite a hoot for its dated dialogue. But back the otr.net site, I've been listening to a lot of The Shadow for melodrama cheese, Sam Spade for the hard-boiled stuff and even silliness like "The Air Adventures of Jimmy Allen" and "Your Truly, Johnny Dollar." "Dragnet" is surprisingly dark, especially for a 1950s program that turned into a Dan Ackroyd-Tom Hanks buddy movie. Listen to shows like "The Whistler," "Hall of Fantasy," and "Murder at Midnight" and you can see (or rather hear) the roots of "Creepshow," "Tales From the Crypt," and "The Twilight Zone." It's a good distraction to go with menial work tasks. I don't know if I'm learning anything, but I feel a little like I'm in history class. It's still one of my favorite subjects.

Friday, June 02, 2006

Mind Text (Make Your Own Phrase)



Try reading this several different ways (across, backward, diagonal, non-consecutively, etc.) and see what comes up. I know what I made, and there's more than one message.

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Horrible Horrors

Back to horror movies (a favorite subject):

What I want to do is think back to the primal and the viscerally terrifying within the cinema. That’s what modern Japanese horror movies have done. They're fresh. They draw upon the same instincts that make the older horror movies so scary: primal fear. Everything else is a copy or it’s gimmicky. Saw is cool, but it’s not based in primal fear: it's mind gimmicry. What makes The Exorcist so scary (like so many other successful horror movies, in my mind) is that it taps a most basic fear in many people: assault from the unknown and, even more, the unpredictable and unexplainable. Same with Nightmare on Elm Street. It’s a movie about dreams: something we can’t totally explain or defend ourselves from. Technology and Science have made so many things much more controlled and predictable. Ghosts and demons are still scary, but they seem to have lost the edge. Buffy and The X-Files made those things more accessible while still leaving them scary, but familiarity drained the mystique. Same with cars breaking down in extra-rural America (i.e., out of cell phone range) where there are murderous hillbillies or truckers. Part of Stephen King’s success comes from his ability to mine something that so many people have thought about at one time or another: what if I get attacked by a vicious dog, what if my other pets decide to become uncontrollable animals and turn on me, what if that funny looking clown is actually evil, what if a super-sickness wipes out all of civilization, what if someone could predict exactly how & when other people are going to die? And so on and further.

Recently, there have been a couple of new things in horror movies, mainly from across the Pacific. Sure, a videotape that kills people is a rather silly and kitschy concept, but it was new, and the execution was spectacular. It tapped into the primal fear of something strange and deadly, just like other Japanese films have done with basic concepts such as curses or angry spirits. I’d like to find something that is contemporary but still retains that sense of the primal unknown/unpredictable that yanks the basic fear right out of your guts. The slap of cold water to your face that makes your innards grind before you feel the ice on your feet. All my boredom-numb blasted mind can come up with at the moment is something evil lurking on the Internet, but that won’t work. Fear Dot Com had the chance to do internet horror and failed convincingly. The idea of a malevolent website won’t work now. But maybe something that goes back to the wilderness, the primal, while still having to do with modern technology (not something Terminator-esque) will do. Maybe that's the ticket to contemporary horror, but maybe not. With all the re-makes going on, society is begging for something else.

In case you're interested, there's previous musings on horror movies here. What can I say? I love 'em.

Oh, and here's an example of a really good horror movie that works well with the primally and viscerally terrifying.

By the way, Dee Snider will be hosting "Fangoria Radio" on Sirius satellite radio channel 120 starting June 25. I'll be interested to hear that, though Dee will have to prove his horror knowledge. Here's hoping.

UPDATE: I listened to Fangoria radio and I liked. Dee's got his work cut out for him, but so far, so good. It airs Friday nights at 10PM ET on Sirius 102.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The "response" to this post was almost better than the original post itself. See below. I left in a really long post from another anonymous douchebag that you don't have to read; just skip to my comment immediately after. I'm glad that this post was my most trafficked one, and I still don't know why this particular post would seem to be a great place to post links. Maybe there's more people online looking for good horror movies than I thought.