Issue 191

News: My Newest Play will be Performed.
A few years ago, I wrote a short story, entitled "Trust Me" that was based on Chaucer's "Pardoner's Tale." The plot of the story was that three policemen are on the trail of a serial killer who calls himself "The Lord High Executioner." They question a homeless guy, and he directs them to go to a bridge. When they get there, they find a suitcase full of brand-new $20 bills. The most senior officer takes some of the money and drives off with it. Meanwhile, he and the two officers set up plans to kill each other: The senior officer spikes two wine bottles with arsenic for them, and the other two decide to shoot him. Both plans succeed, and it turns out that the homeless guy was behind it all along. A few years later, I decided to try and work out some of my writers' block by adapting that story into a one-act play for my college's PlayOn festival. I changed some parts of the original story, mostly filling up some holes I found I had put into the story (like how the elder cop managed to figure out how to get back to town after stranding his inferiors), changing the place names to actual Nebraskan city names (I had originally set the story in the town of "Fidgit." For the record, there are two truly difficult parts of writing: 1) Actually bringing yourself to get started [This is why I have come to only update this blog twice a month], and 2) Naming characters and possibly places), and adding a minor subplot relating to racism against Latinos, with regards to Officer Alvarez, a police recruit just out of the academy, and the most sane officer of the three. And, finally, it turned out that the play was actually chosen to be performed at Oakton's Third Annual PlayOn festival. In the first festival, I had written an adaptation of the Confessional scene from The Seventh Seal, that I hoped would be part of a larger adaptation of the film, updated to 1918 and the Spanish Flu Pandemic. However, the next year, I submitted two plays, and I thought that both of them were problematic; The first one was a monologue that was too difficult to perform, as the climax hinged upon the mononoguist being able to sing (Lip-synching is not an option, as it is supposed to be sung along with another recording) "Largo al Factotum" from Rossini's Barber of Seville (an aria notably difficult to sing) while miming raping an invisible woman, even going so far as to orgasm while singing the last "Della Citta." The second one was an attempt to try and adapt another short story that I didn't think would translate well on the stage, and I think I was right. Fortunately, this one worked out well. The only thing I think would be logistically problematic is how we would be able to create the police car on the relatively small stage of the Black Box theatre it would be set in. Unfortunately, I would not be able to see it, as during the time the play was playing, I would be in Wisconsin.

Quote of the Day: "The task of filling up the blanks I'd rather leave to you.
But it really doesn't matter whom you put upon the list,
For they'd none of 'em be missed — they'd none of 'em be missed!"
____________Ko-Ko, The Mikado, a Gilbert and Sullivan lyric quoted in the end of the play.

Issue 130

News/Review A: Amadeus: The Play.
Last Wednesday, I went to see the play version of Amadeus, which was a film I had been frequently watching over the last few months. I must say that this play version was much better of a version of the story than the film was. Of course, the movie was certainly one of the best films of 1984, if not the 1980s. I must note that one of the major things is that this version effectively makes Salieri an unreliable narrator, thus excusing the poor history (justifiable as it is for the purpose of the plot). The reason the unreliable narrator excuses the poor history is because, unlike in the film version, Salieri admits that his claim to have killed Mozart was a ruse to make people remember him forever, since by this point, Salieri's music will forever become subordinate in virtually every way to Mozart's music. Interestingly enough, the people who hear about his claims seem to entirely reject it, at the end, thus making his last plan towards his proverbial immortality another failure for the time being, at least until poets from Pushkin to Schaffer find the entire plan makes great literature. On another note, I'm not sure whether it is this production of the play, the movie, or the article about Ken Branagh's practically unreleased film version of the opera, but my curiosity towards getting into Mozart's Magic Flute is now peaking. Perhaps this will help me get into the man's music in addition to the man himself (despite the fact that about 70% of my classical music intake is from German composers, Mozart has yet to become one of those I listen to, although Glenn Gould may have something to do with this). In conclusion, I must say that the original play version of Amadeus was much better than the film version. Maybe the Powers That Be at Great Performances should do a TV special of the play version as a complement to the film version, but until that happens, let's just be content with the film, and the occasional performances of the play.

Film Idea of the Day: Desolation Revisited. A man ends up in an affair with a physically scarred preacher's wife and slowly gets insight into the desolate lives of the people in her area that could have ended up making enough material for several Eugene O'Neill plays.

Film Review of the Day B: American Beauty. A decade ago, many critics were saying that this film could very well become one of the greatest films of all time. After it won the Best Picture Oscar, however, this praise ended up abating... Until Now. I must say that the movie has actually managed to live up to the ten-year old hype I either forgot about or never heard until after I actually saw the movie for the first time last week. Definitely one of the best films of the 1990s.
And this isn't just because it is revealed at one point that it takes place in my general area (due to the shared area code).

Quote of the Day: "I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint."
__________Antonio Salieri, Amadeus.

Link of the Day: Witch's Brew: A Dadaist webcomic about whatever the artists feel like.

Tract Review: First Bite. A strangely Alfalfa-like vampire named Igor is born of a woman named Vampyra. Every lame Vampiritic cliche aside, this ends in a way that few vampire stories, but virtually every Chick tract, winds up ending; Igor gets saved. One wonders if he still would retain his bloodlust.

Issue 126

News: I have returned from the dead: my experience as a Shakespearean actor.
As you may have noticed, I have not been updating the blog at my usual thrice-monthly schedule. This is because of various factors, the largest of which being that I was on vacation in a place where I had minimal wi-fi, barely getting enough time each week to get caught up with my Adult Swim Video, email my assignments to my English teacher, and compile contemporary reviews of American Psycho for another assignment, and as a result of the 2-week vacation, I was caught up with several things, including doing two-plus weeks' worth of laundry in as little time as possible, and studying for my final for my American Lit course (a substantial portion of which I had to miss for vacation). By now, all these things are more or less finished. But what I want to tell you about now is an interesting experience I had on vacation. First, a bit of exposition: I was vacationing in Door County, and when my family and I visit there, we try to see as many theater shows as possible in the two week period. However, this marks the first time I was drafted into acting in one of them. This time, I was at Door Shakespeare, and the show was Midsummer Night's Dream. I believe that this play, of all of Shakespeare's, may have been the one which I had seen most times in its more or less complete form (versions of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet abbreviated almost to the point where it's more or less one scene notwithstanding). Indeed, this was the second time I had seen it in this location, but I didn't imagine what would happen. In the last act of the play, after Bottom had returned to human form and completely disregarded his affair with Titania as a dream, I was pulled from the audience and added as an impromptu member of the troupe within the troupe, as much as my attire of Woody Allen glasses, fisherman's cap, lumberjack shirt over Obama T-shirt, and Jeans would have been out of place with the cast who had apparently been trying to look historically accurate. All I had to do was follow the directions when I was told to, and I even was given one line: "Yes." Of course, this scene took some liberties with its original sources (notably, the Pyramus and Thisbee play-within-a-play ran much shorter than I had expected), and much of the action I did wasn't even in the original script version of the play. However, at least the director of the theatre troupe, after the end of the play, thanked me for helping with the performance. I told him that I only regretted that I wasn't drafted into the catfight scene in Act IV.

Band Name of the day: The Running of the Strange People. We were watching parts of the Wimbledon tournament in the bar, and at one point there were people running in slow-motion dragging the tarp, and not knowing what to make of it, my mother called it "The Running of the Strange People." For once I actually have a band name.

Film Idea of the Day: Nothing this week.

Film Review of the Day: The Dark Knight. The movie was quite possibly the best movie of Batman I've ever seen since the 1966 West/Ward film version. Of course, this certainly blows its predecessor Batman Begins out of the water, noticeably by using characters that the audience is likely to be familiar with (like the Joker and Two-Face) as opposed to characters who'll need to be researched on Wikipedia (like Ra's al Ghul or Scarecrow). Indeed, Heath Ledger's ACO-inspired Joker effectively blows every other past portrayal of the character out of the Water, including Cesar Romero, and the decision to cast Christian Bale as Batman (His version of Batman will hereafter referred to as Bat(e)man to me) felt unusual to me for reasons which can be inferred to by anybody who's read the article carefully enough, but he was more capable than Val Kilmer. The only real flaw with this movie is that it has apparently upset the balance of IMDb for reasons which become abundantly clear when you see the Top 250.

Quote of the Day: "That which does not kill me makes me stranger"
____________Joker, (Heath Ledger)

Link of the day: Just pick the genre, the decades, and your current mood, and get an interesting webplaylist.

Issue 69

News/Film Review/Film Idea: Cyber-Seduction: The Musical.
Recently, I found out about a film called Cyber-Seduction: His Secret Life. It was a film made for Lifetime television in 2005, which actually manages to break the seemingly sancrosanct formula of "wife, after years of being beaten to a pulp by her husband, leaves him". After managing to obtain a copy, I viewed it and found it to be the relative Reefer Madness of our time, and thus, perfect musical satire material. What will follow may seem like a work of satire, but in fact, the creators are dead serious. In the movie, a 16-year old boy named Justin (played by Jeremy Sumpter) is a great student and his school's star swimmer. One day after making all-state, he goes onto a chat room and finds a link to a webcam run by a student named Monica which leads him on the down slope to pornography and with outsuits like "belly shirt" and "sweater" (FYI: The "porno" in the film consists of women in no scantier clothing than the underwear Susan Sarandon wore in the "Touch-a touch-a touch me" number from Rocky Horror, and doing behavior no more sexual than blowing a kiss.) At one point, his mother (played by Kelly Lynch) looks at her son looking at "porn" through an ajar section of the door (he could have just closed the door) and while doing nothing at first (on the father's advice), when she sees how it is ruining his life (a telltale sign being that he gets third in his next swim meet by half of a body length, and having a fantasty consisting of women in sarongs swimming around him) and seeing how his younger brother gets into it after watching him, she slowly cuts off the Internet supply for the entire house, afterwards he looks at Monica's webcam on the school computer, even when she's sitting two seats away from him. After watching it, I came up with the idea that the film would make a great musical satirizing the film, and the anti-pornography movement in general, especially noting several of the idiosynchracies of the film in the lyrics of the songs, including a song about Justin's addiction to Red Bull climaxing in him chugging an entire can of it and the mother singing a lament about her son only winning third place in the meet.

Band Name of the Day: She Likes Cloth. From a recent Homestarrunner.com cartoon.

Quote of the Day: "Men are equal; it is not birth
But virtue that makes the difference."
________Voltaire, Eriphile (2.1), Mahomet (1.4)

Link of the Day: A More thorough review of Cyber-Seduction.

issue 64

News: A one-man bible show.
I just recently came up with the idea of a one-man show of the Bible as a companion piece to my annotation to the King James Bible (see Issue 56) , which consists not only of the stories that everybody seems to remember (like the ones that are ubiquitous in Children's picture book bibles [ie David and Goliath, The creation, Noah's flood, the gospels], so that the sex and violence in the regular bible doesn't alienate them from Christianity too soon), but also some parts of the Bible which tend to be obscure to people who haven't read the Bible (ie the times [all three] where Abraham [Isaac in the third one] saves his and his wife's life by claiming that she is his sister), and with my commentary from the original annotated Bible interspersed with the Narration and even the Characters' dialogue, although the dialogue will for the most part, not be taken verbatim from the King James Bible (though some exceptions will be taken when I do the poetic sections of the Old Testament and make light of the Elizabethan language and its absurdities to the modern day reader). The idea was inspired by the Reduced Shakespeare Company's own condensation of the Bible called: The Bible: The Complete Word of God (abridged). In their show the three members of the troupe act out sections of the Bible and often including jabs at the religious right (one of the top 10 rejected Commandments in the show was "The Christian Right is Neither Christian nor Right.")

Band Name of the Day: Frenglish. It comes from a line in the Movie D.E.B.S.: "You need to speak French or English. Frenglish is not a language."

Film Idea of the Day: See above.

Film Review of the Day: DEBS. In this film there is a secret test in the SAT which recruits teenaged girls (in Schoolgirl uniforms, no less) for a secret spying agency called D.E.B.S., and the plot consists of a major conflict of interest when one DEB (ironically, the only DEB in history to ace the secret test) falls in love with a supervillain named Lucy Diamond. When I saw the DVD, I mainly rented it for the apparent kitsch value of the film (Schoolgirls in uniform as secret agents), but I wound up enjoying it not just as a kitsch film, but as a film in general.

Quote of the Day: "Well, I believe in the soul. The c*ck. The p*ss*. The small of a woman's back. The hanging curveball. High fiber. Good scotch. That the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a Constitution Amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas eve. And I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days...Goodnight.
___________Kevin Costner, Bull Durham

Link of the Day: Here's a site of movie monologues, including the above quote.

Tract Review: Heart Trouble?: A doctor diagnoses a man with a heart problem. He uses this to get off on a tangent on other "Heart Problems" (read: sin), and that the cure for the "Heart Problems" is Jesus.
Fame: No relation to the film/TV series or the David Bowie/John Lennon Collaboration, but it is a predominantly-black version of the recent tract The Star.

Issue 58

News: Chicago's future biggest theatre troupe.
I apologize for not having posted a new entry in two weeks, what with the Persuasive writing essay I had to take to get to Senior year and the Woody Allen project for Film class. Anyway, after coming to the new and Improved Chicago Historical society, I saw a brief feature on Chicago's biggest theatre troupes: The Lookingglass, Goodman, and Steppenwolf theatre troupes. From this exhibit came an idea for a theatre troupe based in Chicago which covers many different styles, ranging from Theatre of the Absurd to Greek Tragedy to Elizabethan theatre. Plays I would plan to make for the first season: Aeschylus' The Persians, which is the earliest play known to exist today, Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, which was said to be the first play to have been performed in the Americas, Tom Taylor's Our American Cousin, which everybody knows about as the play that Abe Lincoln was watching when he was killed, but very few people have ever seen or read in any form, Beckett's Waiting For Godot, which is a classic of Theatre of the Absurd, and a double feature of Edward Albee's Zoo Story and my
play Wot??!!&,:;%${}, which I wrote about in Issue 30 this February. There will be (or at least, I intend for there to be) other seasons of the theatre, but the plays I would put out for them remain to be seen.

Band NAme of the Day: Bible-God. A term I found used on the page I will link to today.

Film IDea of the Day: Filmed/Taped/DVD'd versions of the plays I would put on for the aforementioned theatre.

Film Review of the Day: Teahouse of the August Moon. I recently saw this film about life on post-war Okinawa and its effect on an American Soldier sent to build schools, and turns native (in a much more civilized way than one would expect). Curiously, Marlon Brando manages to do a dead-on Gedde Watanabe impression in his role even before Gedde Watanabe was even born.

Quote of the Day :"By the Power of Mencia! I don't have to wear pants anymore!"
____________The King of Mexico after turning into a giant worm, Drawn Together.

Link of the Day: A Deistic page about the religion (or lack thereof) of the Founding Fathers.