More Labor Day pics

Had to get the rest of the family in!

Labor Day Pic

Sunset over Lake Michigan, 09-04-05

Running behind.

Phew. The last few weeks have been crazy.

Went home to MI for Labor Day. Saw my new nephew, Jesse! Much cuteness ensued. (That's Jesse's brother Nicholas in the picture with us.)





Caught up with lots of old friends. Saw a few movies -- "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" which was excellent (similar to "Wedding Crashers" in that it's a blend of raunchy sex comedy and romantic comedy but Crashers was better at the raunchy, while Virgin was better at the romance), "Red Eye" which was pretty good until they got off the plane; and "Aristocrats" which was very good and VERY funny, but not very well made (I especially disliked the editing). And I found time to watch the Bears lose.

School is back in session. This is what has been making me insane. Things are going well, but they are going NONSTOP.

I'm also going in to stage manage the Second City ETC show all this week. And they're working on their new revue, which means I have to be at rehearsals as well.

And the fall Euchre League session started. We switched to the Monday night league, which is better for Mike's schedule, but a much bigger and more competitive group. We won our first match this week, though.

All in all, a busy time.

Fair and balanced

Because I, like Fox news, like to pretend that I have no personal agenda in my reporting, I here present a link to the other side of the too-many-Louisiana-National-Guard-deployed-in-Iraq story:

http://www.nationalreview.com/robbins/robbins200509020719.asp

I believe that while these statistics may disprove one specific criticism of the administration's handling of the emergency, even within the article, Robbins points out that it is FEMA's job to deploy resources effectively, and there are plenty of links available about how badly FEMA handled things.

Depressed expressed.

Ugh. I'm still feeling the effects of this "cold" (read: generic term for undiagnosed minor illness), which means I'm stuffy, achy, and majorly tired all the time. All of which yields significant crankiness. I tend to be emotional when I'm sick. Somehow that's worse than the sickness itself >: P

So, here is a round-up of depressing headlines from today's news:

-- Gas prices are expected to keep rising.

-- Where did the money go that was supposed to fund New Orleans' new levees? Iraq. (PS, the National Guard units that should have been helping repair the levees were also unavailable... because they are stationed in Iraq.)

-- The poverty rate is up, while the education rate is down.

-- Pollution is running rampant.

-- Oh, and don't even get me started on THIS.

Sigh. I have a new nephew. Is this the world we're bringing our children into? I guess it is. So, to cheer everybody up, here's a picture of the little cutie-pie (I get to meet him for the first time this weekend!):

Weird Links

A couple of things caught my eye recently:

-- The British are still cooler than we are.

-- Last night I thought God was speaking to me, but now I know it might have just been a counterterrorism measure.

-- I've been sick all the last week and spent a lot of time playing my old friend Civ 3. Can I just say how excited I am that Civ 4 comes out November 15?

-- I was so bored from being cooped up all week that I finally went out on Saturday night and saw "The Brothers Grimm." I was entertained, but disappointed. There are a few things about it that I'd like to discuss.

1) as a movie: Heath Ledger sucked. The cinematography was great. Monica Belluci looked pretty but I couldn't really understand her most of the time. Lena Headey looked very pretty and was understandable. People with French accents are funny. The rest of the crowd around me seemed satisfied with funny French accents and a couple of "shit myself" jokes. Mostly, it didn't make much sense -- see point 3.

2) Peter Stormare is rapidly becoming the next Christopher Walken. Just think about it and you'll see that it's true.

3) I hate fantasy movies (and novels) that don't make sense. Is it just me? Why is there so much insistence that getting magic means giving up reason and logic? This is the brilliance of Harry Potter -- treating it not like a religion but like a subject in school. This movie felt like someone had read some fairy tales, gone to sleep, and then written down his dream. It was a mish-mash of crap that served no purpose and went nowhere. As an audience member, I don't want the character to have a revelation that saves the day that's based on information I had no access to (a VERY common flaw in the genre). I want to be there along with him, figuring it out. I don't want the villain to have no motivation save pure evil and I definitely don't want them not showing up until the climax. I want to understand the villain, and see them as human, or at least clever and sneaky. And by the way, Terry Pratchett has done the whole "old stories are still strong" thing to death, and he still makes it more interesting than this every time. Next time, maybe you should call him for some tips!

Bwah-ha-ha!

You know, I wasn't busy -- all they had to do was call..... : )

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-0508290062aug29,1,863151.story


The sad thing is how typical this scenario is. Typical of IO and how Charna runs the place, but also typical of the whole improv world. It's hard to find a great improvisational technician because there's nowhere for them to go. At least in the traditional theater world you can move up to doing a big tour, or Broadway, or become a designer or full-time TD, or even teach. But as an improv technician, what are your options? IO and the Playground don't pay. Second City doesn't pay the touring stage managers much, and the only stage worth having is ETC -- I mean with Vegas you have to live in Vegas, Detroit is in Detroit (although now that it's in Novi it's not as bad), and Mainstage (even if Craig ever relinquishes his death grip on the post -- 26 years and counting!) has shows six nights a week, which kills any social life you might ever have again. Where else are you gonna go? ComedySportz? There was a time when I think I can say that I may have been the best improvisational stage manager in the world, and at my peak I was only making $25,000 a year. I love the business, I love the people, and I love being an imrov stage manager, but I had to leave to make a living. If anyone out there has any thoughts, I'd love to hear them!!

Vengeance Rides Again!

Good old Ghost Rider. Frankly, one of the coolest character designs ever. One of my all-time favorites. Never lived up to his potential. Sigh. So I'm a nerd -- sue me : P

He came up on my radar twice today!

For those of you who don’t know:

In the 50’s, there was an old West character named the Ghost Rider. He was a cowboy who, through his friendship with the local Indian shaman, had access to some strange substance that he put on his clothes, his face, and his horse to make them all glow in the dark. He would then scare the bad guys into repenting. Apparently he was pretty popular.

Then in the 60’s, since the company that had published Ghost Rider had collapsed, Marvel Comics picked up the character and tried to revive him. They were not so successful.

However, since they already had the rights to the name, there was no one to protest in 1973 when they applied it to a new character. Johnny Blaze was a motorcycle stunt rider in a traveling circus. He ends up making a deal with Mephisto (not to be confused with the Devil – they are very separate in the world of comics!) which goes bad, and he ends up sharing his body with a “demon of vengeance” named Zarathos, who has a flaming skull for a head. At first, every night Blaze would transform into the flaming shape of the demon, but would keep his own personality.


With powers like creating a motorcycle completely out of hellfire and the dreaded Penance Stare (which forces criminals to experience all of the pain they have put their victims through), he would (ironically) go out and use these powers to fight evil. After awhile, the transformations would happen whenever evil was near, instead of just at night. And later, Johnny could trigger them at will. But apparently the more often he became Ghost Rider, the more powerful Zarathos became, and Johnny was worried that someday he would lose control and the demon would be set free on Earth. He eventually got rid of the demon (trapping him in a “soul crystal”) and stopped fighting evil. It’s never been clear to me whether that was a natural progression of the character, or if the book got cancelled : )

Then in 1990, a new Ghost Rider was born. This is the one shown up at the top, and my personal favorite. Barbara and Danny Ketch were walking in a graveyard when they witnessed some ninjas killing a guy, and then were attacked themselves by said ninjas. Barbara was killed. Danny found a motorcycle in the junk yard next door to the graveyard with a glowing magical rune on the gas cap. When he touched it, he was transformed into Ghost Rider. The gas cap would glow whenever innocent blood had been spilled (like Barbara’s was), and when Danny touched it, this new spirit, by the name of Noble Kane, would take over his body and go punish the guilty. There were some significant differences between the new character and the old: 1) Danny was never in control as Ghost Rider (although he did sometimes choose not to touch the gas cap), and as a demon was much more bad-ass than the old GR. 2) Updated for the new decade, this Ghost Rider had a motorcycle with flaming wheels, rather than a motorcycle made entirely of flame; and he liked to wear black leather, instead of that goofy blue one-piece that Blaze used to wear. 3) This Ghost Rider had some other cool powers, like his magic chain that could do all sorts of crazy stuff. 4) Well, that’s about it really.

Johnny Blaze showed up in this series, as a normal human (with a shotgun that fired hellfire blasts), and it was later revealed that Danny and Johnny were long-lost brothers. It got pretty confusing for awhile, because while this series was incredibly cool to look at, the writing left a lot to be desired. Oh, and there was another guy in here named Vengeance (real name Michael Badilino), who was a cop whose father had been killed by the first Ghost Rider, so he sold his soul to Mephisto to be possessed by some other demon to take revenge, but then he found out that the new Ghost Rider was a good guy, so they teamed up and fought against Zarathos, who was the demon that originally possessed Johnny Blaze, if you can keep all of that straight.

To make things more confusing, this then happened: it was also revealed that Johnny and Danny were both related to Noble Kane. Apparently, Noble Kane was the first Ghost Rider. He was given half of a mystical medallion and told to protect it from Zarathos, and it gave him his powers. Eventually he was betrayed by his father and ended up committing suicide. His soul went to Hell, but because of the good deeds he did (or something) he was really more in Limbo. The powers of the medallion became somehow internalized into his descendants. Mephisto wanted the medallion, and the story is now that that’s why he wanted Blaze’s soul in the first place. The new story is that Blaze’s powers were despite him being bonded with Zarathos, rather than because of it.

Apparently there had been a big shake-up in Hell, with Mephisto’s son Blackheart (a main villain in the series) killing big M and taking over. This allowed Noble his chance to reach out to Danny and work through him to thwart Blackheart’s efforts on Earth. Also, Vengeance’s family had the other half of the medallion, and that’s where his powers came from. So, eventually Danny and Vengeance sacrifice themselves to destroy Blackheart, and Noble takes over as ruler of Hell. This ended the series (in 1998).

Johnny now found the power of the medallion within himself and went back to being Ghost Rider. He had a short limited series in 2001, and that’s pretty much the last time anyone heard from old skull face.

But the big news is that Ghost Rider is back!! Next month will begin a new limited series about the character, written by Garth Ennis, who is one of the best writers working in comics today, and known for his dark and twisted stories. Hopefully he will be able to inject some much needed life into this underappreciated character. There was a full page ad in this week’s Comic Shop News, and it looks cool:



The other news is that I saw the first trailer for the new Ghost Rider movie today. The movie will be some sort of unholy mishmash of all of the above, and stars Nicolas Cage as Johnny Blaze, Peter Fonda as Mephisto (apparently changed to Mephistopheles for the movie), Wes Bentley as Blackheart, Sam Elliott as Caretaker (a useless character they should have done away with when they had the chance), and Eva Mendes as the stupid reporter love interest. I have to say that the trailer looks awful. However, the movie is not coming out until next August, and so should not be considered in any way complete. This trailer is one that Marvel cobbled together for this year’s convention circuit, and was not supposed to be released to the public. Of course, I found it online. On the other hand, it’s being directed by Mark Steven Johnson, the auteur responsible for inflicting both Daredevil and Elektra on the world. I hold firm to my belief that as film is primarily a director's art, this more than anything will determine the shape of the movie to come. But only time will tell.....


Any questions?

Road Trip Fun

Is there any way I can NOT title this post "O, Canada"?

So, I'm back from the great white north. We had a fantastic time! Above everything else, it was great hanging out with Adrian. It's been too long! I hope it won't be that long before the next time.

Wednesday, he flew into Midway. We had dinner and stopped by Costco to pick up some bulk snacks for the trip -- which we ended up not really eating : ) Then we went back to Evanston, and since he hadn't ever seen "Mean Girls," we popped in the DVD and hung out.

Thursday we left fairly early in the day. Took a side trip to Grand Rapids where we had lunch with our old pal from high school, Rachel Van Dyke (nee Logan). I haven't seen her since we graduated!

Then we drove over to Novi, a suburb of Detroit, and attended the opening night of the new Second City Detroit show, "In iPod We Trust," (which is also the first show in their new space -- now in Novi instead of downtown). It was really fun to be there! The show was pretty good, and the new space is really quite nice, plus my friend Jenny Hagel is in the show, and my friend Matt Hovde co-directed it.

Friday we finished the drive into Stratford and checked into our B&B. Then we headed straight out for lunch and a matinee of "The Tempest" at the Festival Theater, which was really good. William Hutt was an amazing Prospero (he ought to be -- it's the 6th time he's played it!) and I really liked their Ariel and Caliban, too. Nice lights and good use of the set, but mediocre costumes. (Speaking of the set -- I just LOVE the stage of the Festival Theater. I even bought a model of it at the gift shop!)

Then in the evening we saw "As You Like It" at the Festival Theater. Sadly, it wasn't as good. It had a lot of interesting ideas (mainly in the designs -- it was set in the 60's), but they were all just jumbled together with no rhyme or reason -- no sense of a guiding concept, and often no sense of why they did something, other than that it seemed cool. The ladders as trees? Made no sense. They weren't even ever really treated as trees. The umbrellas as leaves? Made no sense and just reflected the lights into the eyes of everyone in the balcony. The little pool downstage? Made some sense, mostly because it was squeezed into every other scene -- for one small bit each time -- but then it was ignored for the rest of the scene. Jacques referring to Touchstone's motley cloak? Touchstone wasn't wearing one. La Beau appearing later in the forest? Not called for in the script and didn't make any sense. Even the music by Barenaked Ladies, which I enjoyed, was a pre-recorded backing track for them to sing to, which was annoying. I also found Rosalind a little grating, even in the question and answer session afterward.

Saturday we began with a backstage tour of the Festival Theater. Both the Q&A on Friday and the tour on Saturday were unsatisfying for me, but that's because I'm a theater professional and wanted more detailed information than the rest of the crowd did. The Q&A, for example, seemed to consist half of high school students who had come because of BNL, and half of elderly patrons who just wanted to share their memories of the 60's with the rest of us. Sigh. I did learn one thing during the tour, though, which is that all of the seats on the main level are much more comfortable than the seats in the balcony, so next year it may be worth our while to sit off to the side on the main level rather than front and center in the balcony.

Then we wandered around town. Did some shopping. Spent money I didn't have. Discovered "poutine." Tried it. Enjoyed it. Took a nap. Ate dinner at a restaurant called Garlic's, where almost everything on the menu contains garlic. Delicious. My brother would love it there!

Then we went to "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" at the Avon Theater. It was so-so. I enjoyed it more than "As You Like It." Brick and Big Daddy and Big Mama were all very good, but Maggie was terrible (interesting to note that all but one of the other credits listed in her bio were musicals). The set was well designed but had some problems with the execution (i.e. walls that shook every time someone shut the door), and the lights were only passable. The costumes were nice, but the child actors were awful. And in the end, their take on the script was a little too melodramatic for my tastes.

And then yesterday we drove home. Not much to tell about that, except that it might have gone better if I had realized that there would be not only a Sox game, but the Air & Water Show affecting traffic! It all turned out all right in the end, but there was a tense hour while we were stuck in traffic on the south side.

While Adrian was flying home to Minneapolis, Mary and I rented "Kung-Fu Hustle." Very fun! I liked it a lot. If you haven't seen it, and you like kung-fu movies at all, do yourself a favor and check it out!

Life is strange.

A few random thoughts:

1) My friend Chris sent me an e-mail survey today. One of the questions was "What's the weather like right now?" Chris answered that he didn't know, as he had no window in his office. Now, since I just two weeks ago moved from an office without a window (basically a closet with a computer) to an office with a window, I can attest that the difference is immense. I have worked many places without windows in the past, and never seen it as a problem, but this is the first time that I have experienced the direct shift from one state to the other, and it has made a significant difference in my enjoyment of time spent in my office. Here is a link to a study that found that even having a fake window in your office improves your work!

2) I'm going to Canada this weekend. Maybe I'll just stay..... (Be sure to read all the way down to the part about how much trouble they've had with their plants in Mississippi and Alabama.)

3) Here are some interesting articles about religion. Living with a priest keeps this subject on my mind a lot : )

3a) The Anglican Church Missionary Society has decided to place its newest outreach mission: in Telford, England! People are so disillusioned w/ the church in England that they have to recruit missionaries from Africa to work in England!

3b) Meanwhile, even the clergy in the Church of England don't believe anymore!

4) For those of you craving an entertainment update, last weekend I saw:

"Sextet" by Eclipse Theater at the Victory Gardens studio. I didn't really like it, but that had more to do with the material than the production.

"The Life and Death of Peter Sellers" on DVD. Geoffrey Rush was phenomenal, and the movie was highly entertaining, but I didn't really leave feeling like I knew anything more about Sellers than I did going into it.

"The Crazy Locomotive" at Trap Door. It sure was crazy! I loved it! Check it out if you can.

The future.

Where will you be.....

the day after tomorrow?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1546824,00.html

Give my irregards to Broadway.

A couple of things:

- I'm even more in awe of Banksy after this. What a cool dude. Or multiple dudes. Or dudettes. (No one knows because he/she/they are never photographed.)

- I wanted to follow up on a few points about "Charlie & the Chocolate Factory" that have occured to me over the last few days in conversations about the movie:

First, I didn't like the half-assed updating of the story. For example, why was Mike Teavee playing what looked like Doom 3 on a video game system that looked like an original Atari? Why does Willy Wonka greet them at the gate with a reference to "Hair" (which was not written until three years after Charlie was published)? Why does the Macarena come from the Oompa Loompa's television set, when no other modern music plays in the movie? Why the annoying "2001" footage?

Second, while I (unlike many friends) enjoyed the Oompa Loompa musical numbers, I wish the lyrics had been clear. From what I could hear, they were singing the original lyrics from the book (as opposed to the earlier movie which wrote all new songs), and I think those were intended to be important plot points, so it would have been nice to understand what they were singing.

Third, while I love Johnny Depp, enjoyed his performance, and even liked the added subplot about Wonka's father; I felt that it all worked against the story. Depp plays Wonka as weirdly detached from life -- he hates to have the children touch him, he can't say the word "parents," he wears purple rubber gloves at all times, and generally seems put off by everything around him; he seems to literally live in his imagination. IMHO, this is entirely contrary to the character of Wonka as written by Roald Dahl. Wonka in the book is an eternal optimist, a man who believes in happiness, but has had his heart broken over and over again by human greed. The golden tickets are his last ditch attempt to bypass adults and appeal straight to the children he loves, children he supposes will be purer and less greedy than the adults who have stolen from him and spied on him in the past. Of course, what he finds is very different, and the course of the book shows his optimism taking beating after beating, until it is ressurected at the very last second by: Charlie. The one boy in the world who has nothing, and wants nothing, except for maybe a little more candy. By comparison, in Tim Burton's movie the golden tickets end up looking like nothing but a marketing gimmick.

Fourth, I say again that I didn't like the design of the factory. I think that Wonka's insanity should be more focused on the candy, instead of extending to the factory around them. It should be the contents of the factory that are magical, not the building itself.

And fifth, what the hell was up with Violet suddenly being a human slinky at the end of the movie? Not only was that not in the book, it didn't make any sense and the effects looked ridiculous.

- I was in DC this week again for a show w/ the Galileo Players. It was a nice trip. We missed our good buddy Matt Hovde, who's in Detroit directing the new Second City Detroit show. But it looks like Adrian and I will be able to stop in and see said show in Detroit on our way to Stratford next weekend! So it all works out in the end.

- Boojie Nights is closed. Sorry if you missed it : ) It was fun while it lasted, though!

- I've got two shows lined up for viewing this weekend, and who know what else may crop up.....

Confession

Okay, okay. I admit it. Yesterday I saw "The Dukes of Hazard" movie. In the theater.

In my defense, I can only point out that we snuck in for free after having seen "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."

I liked "Charlie." But I enjoyed it a lot more up to the point when they actually got into the factory. The two problems I had with the picture were that the design of the inside of the factory made no sense whatsoever, and that Johnny Depp, in playing Willy Wonka as a sort-of Peter Pan, made it seem very weird when he announced that he was giving Charlie the factory because he was getting old. He didn't seem old in the least.

I didn't really like or dislike "Dukes." It was so mediocre that I couldn't even muster up enough energy to dislike it. Dave Koechner plays Cooter. I used to work with him at Second City, so it was fun to see him in what is actually the perfect role for him : ) Beyond that, I always enjoy watching Johnny Knoxville, and that's about all I can say for the movie. If you can't see it for free, don't waste your money.

Oh, and Friday night we rented "28 Days Later." It was quite good, though more epic than I had expected. I liked it a lot, although I would have preferred the darker alternate ending they showed in the deleted scenes. But that's just the kind of guy I am. I quite liked Cillian Murphy, though. I can't wait to see him in more stuff, like the upcoming "Red Eye."

RIP

Well, in case you hadn't heard, Peter Jennings died of lung cancer yesterday. He was a great newscaster, my personal favorite -- mostly stemming from the following story:

One night when I was in high school, I was watching some stupid sitcom (I think it might have been Roseanne), when Peter Jennings came on to announce that in about 10 minutes they were going to go live to the White House for a briefing from the president (Bush Sr.). Then they went back to the program.

Five minutes later, Peter interrupted the program again to tell us that the White House had asked them to specify that it was the station's choice to interrupt programming, not the administration's. Then they went back to the program.

Five minutes later, Peter interrupted the program again. "We are now going to take you live to the White House where the President will be making a speech." Nothing happened. After about fifteen seconds of staring calmly into the camera, Peter said (with just a touch of annoyance), "Someone is now going to tell me in my ear prompter what's going on."

Eventually they got around to showing the speech, but I've loved Peter Jennings ever since for that calm yet stern admonishment of the men behind the curtain.

I don't watch network news anymore, but I hope that the next generation gets a newsman as good as we did.

Lately.

Well, AmeriKafka has closed. It was fun while it lasted -- such a great group of people to work with. I hope I'll be seeing more of all of them in the future (three of the actors already have new shows lined up and I'm making plans to see them). The show was sold out every night of its six week run, and you can't beat that! : )

In other news, I've been stage managing Boojie Nights at IO (no longer called Improv Olympic due to being sued by the actual Olympics!) on Wednesday nights. It closes next week, barring any extensions (they don't tend to really plan things much in advance over there), but it's been a blast to work on (two of the performers, Pip Lilly and Rebecca Jackson are the duo from Straight and Nappy that I worked on back in March). It's a really funny show. I hope they can keep it going.

I'm also now playing in a Euchre League once a week w/ my good friend Mike Brownlee. This has been so much fun it's almost criminal! Mike and I tend to feed off of each other's goofiness in a great way. And sometimes we do well at the game, too : ) Before this week's game, we were ranked 20th out of 38 teams, but then we kicked the ass of the #1 ranked team, knocking them down to 3 and propelling ourselves up to #10!

At Columbia these days, we are cleaning and reorganizing the prop room. Classes start again the day after Labor Day.

Next week I have a trip to DC w/ Galileo Players. And I'm planning a trip to the Stratford Festival with my old pal Adrian Ahern (aka the Magic Twit, aka Little Britches, aka the Kettle).

What else? Dad was here briefly yesterday and we had lunch. It was great to see him. I need to find a time to get over there soon. Maybe Labor Day...

Saw the ever delightful Michael Kingston in Scarrie the Musical at last Sunday's matinee. He was great. All of the performances were great. It's not really a matinee kind of show, however, and there were some serious technical problems, but all-in-all I had a great time!

Tonight I'm off to see the aforementioned Mr. Brownlee in a show at the NeoFuturarium. Should be a good time!

And now I must get back to work. C-ya!

Science is silent

Every once in a while, someone agrees with me!

http://www.utne.com/webwatch/2005_210/news/11739-1.html

And more often, someone important doesn't.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/02/AR2005080201686.html

Sigh.

Entertainment tonight

Well, entertainment last night, anyway, but that's not as catchy.

Saw "Wedding Crashers" last night. Very funny. A little too much sappiness at the end, but overall highly enjoyable. Those are some funny guys. And since Lindsey Lohan has gone "off the reservation" (as Vince Vaughn likes to say), maybe I'll move on to Rachel McAdams as the recipient of my "Mean Girls" goodwill.

On Friday I saw the Looney Tunes Animation Festival at the Music Box. What a treat! It didn't include any of my all-time favorites, but there were some excellent ones I'd forgotten, and some interesting ones I'd never seen, about 12 in total. However, it was all Bugs Bunny ones, except for one Pepe LePew and one Daffy Duck (Yosemite Sam, Porky Pig, Marvin the Martian, Pepe and Wile E. Coyote appear in one episode each; Elmer Fudd, Daffy and the Tasmanian Devil appear in 2 each). They should either have made it all Bugs and called it the Bugs Bunny Festival, or put in more of the other characters.

Finished "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" last Monday (the day after I got it). I'm not sure how I feel about it. Notably, it was about 200 pages shorter than the last book, and it felt rushed to me. However, all of the reviews that I've read thought that was a positive thing and that the last two had dragged, so maybe I'm in the minority on this. Basically, I really enjoyed reading it and was sad when it ended, but it could have been even better and squandered opportunities are what REALLY make me sad.

Also yesterday, I saw CTYA's production of "The BFG (Big Friendly Giant)," adapted from the book by Roald Dahl. It was a good production, with beautiful sets and lighting (they even had 3 intelligent lights!) and costumes and puppets and props. The pace dragged a lot, and the overall tone of the whole production was a little cutesy for my tastes, but all-in-all not a bad effort.

I should also mention that I'm back into comic books again, which has been a breath of fresh air. I didn't realize how much I had missed them the past few years. Especially the Marvel "Ultimates" line is really great -- they take classic characters (so far they've done Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Avengers, and the Fantastic Four) and imagine what they would be like if their origin stories had happened in the present day. It's very interesting and fun to see such unusual takes on the characters. I'm also really enjoying both companies' big summer crossover events: "The House of M" at Marvel and "Infinite Crisis" at DC. And a special big shout-out to DC for bringing back my old favorite the Blue Devil, even if it's just as part of a team and not in his own book (yet!).

Well, I must be off. Ciao!

Another good review

From the Chicago Reader by Justin Hayford:

Amerikafka
Trap Door Theatre

In late 1911, when Itzhak Lowy brought his Yiddish theater troupe to a Prague cafe, 28-year-old insurance clerk Franz Kafka showed up night after night. As Kafka wrote in his diary, he loved the exaggerated acting, extravagant costumes, schmaltzy melodrama, and exotic "shabbiness" of these shows. A quiet bureaucrat who still lived with his parents, Kafka wasn't just indulging his artistic fancy--he was stepping into a cultural, religious, and familial hurricane. And the complexity of his feelings informs this Trap Door Theatre midwest premiere of Amerikafka, Ken Prestininzi's dizzying take on what Kafka's Judaism meant to him.

In the early 20th century, Yiddish theater symbolized everything that "respectable" German-speaking Jews wanted to leave behind. The 1899 Prague anti-Semitic riots, which destroyed many Jewish-owned businesses, were fresh in the city's memory; Kafka's father, a successful shopkeeper, had escaped attack by registering his family as Czech nationals. Like many "civilized" Western Jews, he'd made every effort to assimilate and forswear the "old ways," even giving his children German rather than Jewish names. When Kafka befriended Lowy, championed his theater, and even lectured on "the Yiddish tongue," he was standing in defiant opposition not only to his father but to the dominant culture.

Still, Kafka's relationship to "backward" Judaism was hardly simple. Though Harold Bloom asserted that Kafka "quite simply is Jewish writing," the writer regularly denied or evaded the connection. "What do I have in common with the Jews?" he wrote in his diary. "I don't have anything in common with myself." And when he sat down to write his first novel, Amerika, in 1912, he figuratively ran screaming from the cultural minefield of Prague: his plucky, robust 16-year-old alter ego, Karl Rossmann, sails to America in search of a new, innocent self. The journey is a failure for Rossmann--who descends the social ladder into oblivion in an ironic subversion of the American myth of the self-made man--as the novel was for Kafka, who left it unfinished.

With a kind of perverse glee, San Francisco playwright Prestininzi turns this escape fantasy back on its creator. In the vibrant Amerikafka, Lowy appears to the consumptive, dying Kafka and leads him Dante-style back into his tortured relationship with his own faith and identity. A phantasmagorical character like many in Prestininzi's play--in the stage directions, they often exit by floating out the window--the impresario brings his Yiddish theater into Kafka's tiny sickroom to show him a stage adaptation of Amerika. Bearing only a superficial resemblance to the original, their version is garish, schmaltzy, and cheaply done. To make matters worse, the lead actor hasn't shown up and a naive stagehand is playing the central role of Frankie K, Kafka's literary alter ego once removed. Nightmarish, inexplicable interruptions continually disrupt the show. A grim, sword-wielding Statue of Liberty grows from a "speck" at the beginning of the piece into a human-size figure that crashes through Kafka's window. Characters from his other writings, including a cockroach as big as a man, turn up unexpectedly. Seminal figures from Kafka's life--his literary champion Max Brod, his sometime fiancee Felice Bauer, his tyrannical father--barge in unannounced. As in a dream, they never identify themselves. His three younger sisters are a nameless, twittery trio who splash onstage through a slit in the door and swat flies.

Doing away with plot, cause and effect, and linear time, Prestininzi comes up with a two-hour play that seems to be heading in every direction at once. In one scene, when Kafka is meeting Brod for the first time, he reminisces about the first time they met. Later in the play he meets Brod again for the first time. Lowy seems to be orchestrating all the fragments, however, and eventually two parallel stories begin to emerge: Frankie K's struggle to leave his personal and cultural history behind and Lowy's to maintain his Jewish identity in an increasingly fearful and intolerant Prague. In effect Amerikafka is a kind of exorcism of Kafka's divided soul, with each half hurtling toward oblivion. In the blank slate of America, Frankie K devolves into a mindlessly optimistic nobody, and Lowy--like Kafka's sisters--ends up in a German camp.

Some viewers may be puzzled, bored, or pissed off by Prestininzi's difficult script. To audiences unfamiliar with Kafka's life and literature, the characters may appear merely odd figures with a mysterious influence on him. But the audacity of the play's illogical "story" gives rise not only to ambiguity but to evocative collisions and epiphanies. It's as though we were watching the bold, cheap exaggerations of Yiddish theater blown apart in Kafka's fever-ridden imagination. The liveliness of Lowy's theater is everywhere, but the conventional literary structures that held it together have fallen away, just as conventional Jewish life in Prague collapsed at the hands of the Nazis.

The recklessly adventurous Trap Door is one of the few nonprofits in town uninterested in giving audiences what they think they want. Thankfully director Kate Hendrickson does nothing to simplify Prestininzi's bewildering text, trusting the suggestive power of confusion. And though her actors' exaggerated performances often degenerate into shrill histrionics (Tom Bateman as Kafka veers between harrowing pathos and nonsensical screaming), the sheer force and volume of the acting help keep this unwieldy script barreling forward. Ingenious set designer Ewelina Dobiesz and lighting designer Richard Norwood transform the tiny bare-bones space into a hallucinatory yet self-consciously clunky world, and Sarah Bendix's marvelous, marvelously vulgar puppets give Redmoon a run for its money.

Watching Amerikafka is hard work--I often felt utterly defeated by Prestininzi's maddening vision. But, as in any contest, watching the maneuvers of an extraordinarily talented opponent is mesmerizing.

All I ever wanted #62

Back from vacation. Thanks to everyone down south for their hospitality!! You know who you are ;-)

Flew into Nashville. Saw "Howl's Moving Castle" that night -- very pretty, but not a great story. I felt the same way about "Spirited Away," which is by the same director, but maybe something gets lost in translation. Billy Crystal steals the show as the fire demon Calcifer.

Also while in Nashville we dropped by Davis-Kidd Booksellers. I love them! Stop by if you're ever in town. They had new T-shirts, so I bought one. I love the two I already have, and this one looks poised to be a favorite as well!

Drove to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Camped. Hiked. Swam. Laid out in the sun. Cooked over an open fire. Got really sweaty and smelly and gross (no showers in the park!). It was awesome! The weather couldn't have been better. Unfortunately, no fireflies this time around. Apparently they had decided to pack it in early this season, so next year we'll have to make the camping trip in June to be sure we'll catch them.

Went to a drive-in movie theater and saw "Fantastic Four" (which wasn't fantastic in the least) and "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" (which was so-so but perfect drive-in fare).

Rented a car. Got screwed by the car company. Drove to North Carolina.

Stayed with my mom. Relaxed and read a LOT. Started and finished: "Banewreaker" by Jacqueline Carey (quite good actually -- a little derivative of Tolkien but told from the bad guys' point of view which was neat); "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" by J.K. Rowling (was re-reading it to prepare for the release of the new one this weekend -- I'm halfway through the new one right now); "Dress Your Family in Courderoy and Denim" by David Sedaris (more serious than his other books but still highly enjoyable); and "Moominpappa's Memoirs" by Tove Jansson (one in a series of children's books about the Moomintrolls, I enjoyed them immensely as a youth and have been trying to collect them all again). Read a few more chapters in "The Confusion" by Neal Stephenson. It's excellent but kind of dense going, and I had already been reading it before the trip, so I wanted some light and fluffy stuff for a change.

Went to "The Lost Colony" outdoor historical play. It was pretty weak, overall, though I might have been judging more harshly than normal due to the rain.....

Dropped by the Botanical Gardens in Norfolk on the way to the airport. Gotta love the pretty flowers! Although I, like an idiot, forgot that I had a bar of chocolate in my luggage, which melted all over everything after sitting in the hot car while we were looking at plants. Sigh.

I wish I could say that the trip home was uneventful, but I was routed through Baltimore which was getting a lot of bad weather (probably due to Hurricane Emily), and I was delayed by over 4 hours. Finally got home at 3:00am! But at least Southwest didn't lose my luggage. Take that, Delta!