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Last night I had a chance to play with my new Roku. It was a breeze to set up and having previously loaded up my NetFlix queue, I was happily watching movies lickety split. I loved the experience, the ease of use, the remote (although I hate having another remote) and the immense queue of movies available.

Here, now, for your enjoyment, are some unboxing photos. The full set is on my SmugMug.

The Full Contents

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Dyson, the company known for making those crazy-insane vacuum cleaners, needs to come up with a gizmo to suck the gooey stuff out of my lungs. I’d gladly lay down five easy payments of $39.95 for such an As-Seen-On-TV gadget such as that.

I’ve spent the last three days exuding more secretions than I care to dive into detail about. What the hell I have is anyones guess, but it seems to be a crappy flu-like demon that is hiding in my chest. Very Alien like. Well, Alien meets The Blob.

The worst part is the wheezing. Today is better, and I can breathe normally without the cacophony of noises in my chest. I also have no fever today, which means the infectious nature of whatever it is I have has departed. But two days ago every breath I took reminded me of the windswept forest at the beginning of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

Whoosh I says. Whoosh.

Today I’m bringing up gobs of gunk. When I cough I sound a bit like Juno (Sylvia Sidney) in Beetlejuice. Attractive right? At least I’m back at work.

P.S. My Roku is here. Unboxing pics to come!

Mom and I went to see the new Indiana Jones movie yesterday for the bargain price of $5 per ticket at the Norridge theaters. Not only was it pretty dead when we arrived, but we managed to get the sweet-spot seating I love so much, smack-dab in the middle of the theater, perfectly aligned for the surround sound.

I. Loved. The. Movie.

With so many critics trashing the film, I’ll admit I was a bit apprehensive. Of course I KNEW I’d go see it anyway, but I really didn’t want to be let down by what I thought was going to be a flat movie.

In reality, the only flat part of the film was Karen Allen. She really seemed out of place and awkward in a cast that was varied and wonderful. I wanted so much to love her return to Indy, but alas, it was not to be. She basically showed up, said her lines, and looked at other people a lot.

I won’t spoil the plot lines of the movie except for a few comments:

• The crystal skulls looked fake because they appeared to be fairly lightweight. If they were heavier, I think I would have believed they were real. The actors were in the habit of moving them around a bit more than I liked. A crystal skull, hell, even a glass one, would be pretty damn heavy. But I can forgive this oversight because the gold idol in Raiders was tossed about like a piece of candy. A gold idol would weigh a hell of a lot…
• Cate Blanchette is divine. The camera always loves her. She is, I think, at the top of my favorite female list.
• The visuals are as breathtaking as ever. Yay Spielberg and Kaminski. The music, not so much. The credits say John Williams, but it didn’t feel like his score. He may redeem himself in the upcoming Jurassic Park movie. The original Jurassic score is my favorite Williams work.
• There is a nuclear test-site scene that is surreal and wonderfully done, and Harrison Ford says “nu-ku-lar” instead of nuclear. I think.
• Shia LaBeouf does favor Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones. Super hot.
• Fuck the critics. Go see the movie and enjoy. It really is a wonderful two hours.

This morning we had an ensemble meeting full of donuts, coffee, and much laughter. We’ve received a very handsome grant that will enable us to get serious about writing more grants for the company, a move that is the key to surviving in the current climate.

During the meeting I realized that some of the finest people I know were seated around the table. Talented performers dedicated to their craft, but not the kind of stuck-up actor types I’ve so often met. Everyone at that table has a life outside the stage, but in many ways, their lives are dedicated to getting on the stage whenever they can.

They are there because they love it. Me too.

Whenever I’m feeling restless and less-than-happy with my life, I think about the ensemble.

en·sem·ble \än-ˈsäm-bəl, äⁿ-\ noun
from the old French ensemble together, from Latin insimul at the same time
: a group producing a single effect: as a: concerted music of two or more parts b: a complete costume of harmonizing or complementary clothing and accessories c (1): the musicians engaged in the performance of a musical ensemble (2): a group of supporting players, singers, or dancers; especially : corps de ballet

“A group producing a single effect” is my favorite definition, but I’d change it slightly to read “a group producing an effect”. These folks are part of a world I thought I left behind. It’s funny how life can turn on a dime if you want it to. I suppose the biggest challenge is recognizing which way the wind is blowing. Thankfully I figured it out in late 2006.

In any case, the meeting was enjoyable and left me with visions of all that will be coming for the next year. And let me tell you, it’ll be a busy year indeed. Now if I can only figure out when I’ll get myself out of the country for a vacation…

So I finally received a shipping e-mail from the Roku folks. I should have my new toy after the holiday (wah-wah) on Tuesday.

Needless to say, I’m excited.

Tech toys are the second best thing* about being an adult. Well, tech toys and a job that affords the luxury of buying the occasional gizmo on a whim. And what happened to strike my fancy yesterday morning?

The Roku Netflix player.

Yes, I have an AppleTV. Do I love it? Of course! But since I’m a hard-core Apple user, I *sad-face* can’t play streaming Netflix movies. Their DRM is bound up in the Windowz world and that made me very sad. Until I saw all the press coverage about the Roku player yesterday morning. A tiny black box that will stream Netflix movies via HDMI (and just about every other connector) to my television?

How could I live without such a gadget?

Whipping out a trusty sliver of plastic, I deftly entered my vital bits and pieces on the Roku site and, with a few billion electrons and the internets at my command, I ordered said box for my entertainment center. I waited for my confirmation e-mail. And waited. And waited some more. At midnight I randomly checked my trusty iPhone, but still no confirmation e-mail.

Having just spoke with the tech support folks at Roku, as I suspected, they’ve received tons of orders and their system is backed up a bit. They did get my order, there aren’t any left in stock to ship, they will get me one when they come in, and my confirmation e-mail should arrive today.

In the mean, I’ve loaded my Netflix queue with streamable (is that a word?) content. With Auntie Mame on demand, who wouldn’t want one of these boxes?

* The best thing about being an adult has to do with life in the bedroom. And that’s all I’ll say.

Time to Master Cleanse yet again. Spring is springing and I need to wash out my gut, so with a cuppa Smooth Move tea this evening, I’m beginning another round. My CSA begins around June 11th I think so the timing is just right.

It means no popcorn for the upcoming Indiana Jones movie, but hey, I’ll deal.

a pic of me at Spin a long time ago

I gigged the other day with a DJ acquaintance at a private party. I wasn’t nearly as rusty as I thought I’d be, but I’d almost forgotten how energizing it is to be in the mix. House music is and has been one of my passions for years and years, and plugging into a huge system once again made me feel anxious as hell and right at home at the same time.

Some of you don’t know how it works. This post is for you.

There are two basic schools of DJs out there. There are those folks who slam one record into another, i.e. one song is playing, and then all of the sudden another takes its place. I generally convulse when I hear that happen in a club, and if you watch the dance floor closely (if there is a dance floor) you can see the crowd seize, take a few beats, then find the new groove. This is done commonly by newer DJs, during most hip-hop sets, and a few other genres depending on the style. Part of the reason you might have to slam a record in has to do with the beat structure, but more on that later. Slamming records just isn’t my cuppa tea.

I hate it. Ugh.

And now, for my conceited POV. I am cut from the far superior cloth of the beat-matching or mixing DJ. House music was designed to be beat-matched for many reasons, but the biggest reason in my book is so that the groove never stops. Ever. From the first record to the last, there is a steady stream of music, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, often dramatic, and undoubtedly House.

Beat-matching isn’t something that is easy to explain in words, but essentially a good House track will have a four or eight-beat structure in 4/4; 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8. If you want to match two records, you line up the beats. The 1-beat is the downbeat, so you start playing your second records’ 1-beat at the same time. But increasing or decreasing the speed of the record (the turntables/CD players are pitch-controlled) you can line up the beats so they are the same speed. Then, all you need to do is start the second record exactly where you want it, and fade it in so both records are playing at once.

There’s lots of tricks you can do with twiddling the hi-mid-low eq’s, or cutting in and out on one of the records, but in a nutshell, you end up playing two records at once for as long as possible so that the songs seamlessly blend from one to another. When it’s done right, with the right two songs, you can create a third track that never existed.

I LOVED tracks with vocal stabs in the outro or intro. A popular example would be that C+C Music Factory track “Pride, A Deeper Love”. One remix ends with the diva hollering “Pride! A deeper love! Pride! A deeper love! Pride! A deeper love! Woah-ooh-ooh-ooh!” in a sixteen-beat loop. I’d laid Mousse T’s “Horny” over that a few times and the crowd loved it. The Mousse T hook is an eight-beat “I’m horny all night long! I’m horny all night long!”

You get the picture.

A beat-matching DJ has the power to create a new sound. The superstars of the beat-matching world lay multiple records over each other. I’d seen Todd Terry throw five records at once and it nearly blew my mind. He was making custom music on the fly. This was before the sampling CD players and effects boxes that can be found in most clubs ever came on the scene.

I do have to tip my hat at the hip-hop kids tho. Much as I dislike hippity-hop, the culture of scratching and laying track samples down owes a lot to the early DJ battles those folks imagined. I can’t scratch, and occasionally I’ve only managed to do a reverse pull (grab the live record and pull it back for a beat, then let it go) but not always successfully.

THE signature part of my entire DJ set was always the last record: Gospel music. I’d play non-dance tracks at times, and one of my favorites was the song from The Color Purple (film) where Shug Avery returns to the church. It’s called “Maybe God Is Tryin’ To Tell You Somethin’” and it would always get some folks hollerin’ on the ‘floor.

Why not have a ‘lil Jesus at the end of the night?

But the ultimate floor filler, a record from 1998 that I seldom brought out, is my all time hottest piece of wax. Kelly G. featuring Sharon Pass on the Silk Entertainment label with a track called “Go Down Moses”. It remains one of the records in my collection that I’m almost scared to play because I don’t want to damage it. Full of gospel piano and five-part harmonies fo’ yo’ azz, I remember hearing the track on the radio and furiously trying to find it. I couldn’t find a copy anywhere until a German friend phoned a store in Berlin. They actually had a copy and I bought it for some insane amount of money. But the first time I played it for a crowd it worked like magic.

Heard a cry from the people
Send a leader just as fast as you can
Told him don’t take to long, but you gotta make him strong
‘Cause Pharaoh is an evil man

Woah yeah, now

Go down, Moses
Way down in Egypt land
Tell him, tell that Pharaoh
To let my people go…

I don’t miss DJing. I miss the rush of the music. I think I need to work a few sets into my life from time to time at home. Just to make those mixes once again.

Meo, sitting pretty this morning in the sun, like the Great Sphinx at Giza.

backstage at the bailiwick

Last night we started our weekly four-in-a-row run of Die, Mommie! Die! again and it played to a great crowd. I DO hope you have ordered your tickets to the show. It really is a great production, and I’m super proud to be a part of it.

There was something strange in the air last night as I left the Bailiwick. I can’t put my finger on it, but something was amiss. The full moon is Monday night and I suspect this weekend is going to be crazy-as-hell as a result. I don’t have any major plans to speak of for the weekend (well, lots of R&R) but I think the craziness will somehow carry me somewhere exotic.

We shall see.

Vive La Foie Gras!
(this is an old photo I did for Chicagoist)

The foie gras ban has finally been repealed. Big thank you’s go out to my out and proud Alderman Tom Tunney who helped raise the repeal along with support from Alderman Stone and Alderman Mitts. This is a wonderfully comic story of the city presiding over what we should eat, and I’m thankful the matter is laid to rest.

Take that Alderman Moore *SNAP*

I can’t wait for the city restaurants to start creating foie gras tasting menus. I’m dreaming of a sizzling slab of foie atop a mini-burger, or in some risotto with truffles, or covered in a sticky sweet cherry sauce, or skewered with chunks of marinated lamb kebob style, or in a confit with apricots and almonds, or on a cracker with brie and smoky maldon, or inside of a veal meatball, or in one of Hot Doug’s dogs, or seared and cubed with pickled green onions in dashi (like it were tofu in miso soup), or… oh man, the list is endless.

Vive La Foie Gras!

Last night I went to see As Told By The Vivian Girls with Handbaggers Ed, David, and Derek, along with our director extraordinare of Die Mommy, Cheryl.

The play was amazing, but it took quite a bit of warming up to. There was a lot of what seemed to be pivotal action at the beginning. As we were wandering through the spaces we seemed to miss a bunch of things. But by the time we had all broken up and began to wander our separate ways, the action started becoming clearer.

The Dog and Pony link above explains the work in depth (go read it and return to my post…please :-p), so I won’t go into story detail except to say that it’s the kind of show that needed to occupy a space to create a world. Beyond the usual proscenium or storefront kind of show I’m used to, the company has done something extraordinary with the Theatre on the Lake.

Everyone in the audience had to wear the mask you see in the photo. It was awkward, and it afforded limited peripheral vision, but the gimmick ran far deeper than you’d expect. By having all the audience wear the masks, you always knew who the actors were (duh, no masks). Your limited vision also forced you to turn around at every noise and look what was happening. The littlest sound and you could see masked faces turning to find the action. You were also all wearing the same masks, thus you were all one of the Vivian girls.

The central character, Henry Darger, was ensconced for a good time in a room-sized box, his ‘house’, pecking away at his typewriter, eating peanuts, painting the walls, and verbally laying out the story as it unfolded elsewhere in the space. How they got the timing right on that I’ll never know, but it was impressive.

There were windows and little flip-up doors you could peek through to watch him in his room, an amazingly effective trick because as people began to peek into the room, you could see the masked faces watching the action across from you. Darger was truly surrounded by his ‘girls’ who just happened to be the audience members wearing masks. As he would walk around the room, the faces would follow him, an eerie but amazing effect.

During the final battle scene in the largest section of the space, the girls were pitted against the soldiers. During the awesome fight choreography in the round (you really were able to walk anywhere you wanted), there was a moment when Darger stepped into the space and the room went still.

A beautiful and haunting string and flute melody began to play and the entire cast went into a sort of three dimensional slow-motion tableaux. As Darger slowly ambled in among them, they bowed and curtsied in turn, smiling. It was as if he was meeting his art come to life. There was so much stillness in the room, but so much emotion as the entire ensemble shifted from scene to scene around him.

My eyes started to well up with tears.

I’m really not sure why. The music, the intense happiness Darger seemed to gain from the experience, the back-story of his lonely life, the gorgeous large-scale choreography, I don’t know, whatever it was, it moved me. And that, just that one single experience, made the entire show a success in my mind.

Art, in whatever form, should force you to emote. As Told by the Vivian Girls did exactly that. If you are in Chicago, hurry. The show ends on the 25th. For details, visit dogandponychicago.org.