Keep passing the open windows

Weekend Assignment #319: The Play’s The Thing.

Nowadays we get most of our comedy and drama from television, from movies and even from Internet downloads. Perhaps we sometimes forget that all of these evolved from a much older art form, the stage play. Do you ever attend plays, musicals or operas? Why or why not?

Extra Credit: Have you ever seen anything by Shakespeare performed live?

I love plays,sometimes. I grew up with not much in the way of arts education. My father’s idea of cultural education was the Mandrell Sisters variety show on NBC. If it wasn’t for my Aunt Rosie(the lovable artsy Aunt every shy lonely kid needs),I think I’d listen only to country and metal, and think Hee Haw spoke to America. She didn’t get the chance to take me to my first play, sadly. If she had, I might have absorbed that along with all the great stuff she introduced me to. My two favorite books of all time, Hotel New Hampshire and the Godfather, were both gifts from her.But I digress

I don’t really count all the school plays I went to in high school as my first plays,because I knew everyone in them and I couldn’t really appreciate them as art in my hormone addled teenage brain. No, the first one I ever ,really truly saw was a College of Lake County production of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead”, which I loved to death. I had not ever read or seen “Hamlet” before that,but went to a version in Chicago the next year. Hamlet in that one was played by Gary Sinise, an actor who I think hasn’t done much since then.(Just kidding, folks.) But it did light a fire for live theatre for me for the next few years, which was really helped by me going to Columbia College in Chicago the next year.

For those of you who are uninformed, Columbia College is a small liberal arts college in downtown Chicago. I could go on about my Alma mater, but the pertinent point is that it has a giant theatre and arts department. And so, I had a lot of people I knew who worked on plays, and would let us students in to dress rehearsals and such to see new things.  Since I could go to  these and still make the train back to the suburbs,I went to a lot of plays those three years.I saw John Malkovich do Lee Harvey Oswald.  I saw every Broadway touring company that came through, loving some(Cats) and hating others(Miss Saigon). But for all those big elaborate musicals, there was something missing. Where was the passion , the fury of the punk and metal I loved?

If you’re thinking it was Rent, you’re wrong. I fell asleep in that thing, and forgot I’d seen it until one of my stepdaughters made me watch the movie.Nope, it was a play who’s title said it all:

Cannibal Cheerleaders on Crack.

If you lived in Chicago in the mid-90s and were anywhere on the north side, you probasbly have heard of this play. Written by Billy Berningham, and staged by the late great Torso Theatre(who took this play to Broadway, I think). It was the only thing besides a Gwar show where I wished I’d worn a raincoat. To give you an idea of the level of this, the first act opens with the President of the US  using  a dildo as a dog toy.  The second act opens with a man performing oral sex on a Big Mac.

We will now pause while your mind processes that sentence.  To say that in an era of extreme, CCOC pushed over the top even then. It was bloody, disgusting,and always worth eveyr second of time I invested in it. If I had any money to burn, I’d put it on here in Charlotte just to see how fast we’d get shut down. I’d been in Rocky Horror, but this was Rocky on,well, crack.

I miss those days of theatre going. Unless it’s a school function, I really don’t get to see live theatre anymore. Touring musicals are a small fortune for tickets, and most don’t really appeal to me. Any national tours here sell out in minutes,and the aforementioned costs don’t lend themselves to quick financing.

But I remain hopeful. There’s a small company here in Charlotte that I hope to see soon. It’s called Citizens of the Universe.They’ve done some really interesting productions, like staging an adaptation of the movie “Fight Club” in a parking lot. So kepe up those shows, and I hope I’ll make it to something soon.

Extra Credit:I already answered this back in the article,so I’m going to take this time ,and list the five plays I’d put back into  production if I had oh say, Simon Cowell’s money:

1)Cannibal Cheerleaders on Crack(see reasons above)

2)Illuminatus! The eight hour adaptation of the Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea trilogy, It was rumored to have been staged in England and Germany  in the 70’s. But I haven’t even ever seen footage, or even a picture.

3)Shogun:the musical. Just to see how fats I can get a crowd to leave.

4)A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I’d have the Looking Glass Company of Minneapolis do it,just because theirs was amazing.

5) Warp! It’s another legend of Chicago theatre that went to Broadway and vanished. It was pretty much a superhero comic on stage, with art direction by comic legend Neal Adams, and co-written by horror film legend Stuart Gordon. Cinefantastique magazine did a an article on it when I was eight, and there were even comics based on it in the eighties, but like the second one, it’s something I was too young to see, but would love to see someone try again.

The mission:

Weekend Assignment #318: Library Books

Recently, it was discovered that George Washington had forgotten to return some books he had checked out of his local library. They were only 221 years late, mind you, but late all the same. How about you? Have you ever checked out a library book and forgot to return it? Tell us about your experiences with checking out, returning, or forgetting to return, books to the library.

Extra Credit: Tell us about the last book you checked out of the library.

 If I suddenly, for some insane reason, started being hunted by a hired killer, I’d be an easy target. He’d have to cover only two places, really. The first would be my house. The second would be the local library.

Some men go to the track to get their fix. Some men go to bars. I go to the library. Because unlike some men, I am a book addict. I fully admit this. I worked in bookstores for close to fifteen years, and it was kind of like being an alcoholic and working in a pub.  I tend to think that if I won the lottery, I’d have to buy an abandoned Borders or Wal-Mart to put them all in. When I was single, if you’d given me a choice between a million dollars and being able to have every book I’ve ever wanted to read, I’d have had to think long and hard about the choice.

I remember seeing the Burgess Meredith episode of the “Twilight Zone”, the one where he’s survived the apocalypse ,and can read all the books, but breaks his glasses.  I remeber seeing it and thinking, “Ok, why doesn’t he havea backup pair?” I don’t know a single glasses wearer over thrity who doesn’t have one. The second was, “Why doesn’t he just hold the book closer?” The piece did give me nightmares for weeks though.

I love libraries. I love the idea of going in and having access to books I won’t see in bookstores usually, and being able to try out new authors I’ve never heard of. I also have a list of over forty authors I read  on a regular basis, who come out with a book or two a year. You can imagine how bad this would be for our finances  if I didn’t have library access. You can say, you can get them online, but I’m sorry , no. At least with libraries I know someone has gotten paid for their work, in some way. And I love the idea of using tax dollars for such a blatantly socialist enterprise. (Take that, Glenn Beck!)(Don’t think your town has any homeless? Visit your local library in the middle of the afternoon in the summer,or first thing in the morning in the winter. The ones who aren’t carting a child are probably them.

One of the best ways I support my local libraries are late fees. I have a four year old, and keeping track of what book has gone where is sometimes taxing. But all her fines fail at the glory of my longest checkout ever.

I was a shy eight year old in 1978, when I saw it sitting on the shelf. Star Wars, the movie novelization by George Lucas( I later learned it was actually written by Alan Dean Foster, creator of the best Star Wars novel ever, Splinter of the Mind’s eye). I took it home, and devoured it in two days. When did I return it?

1996.

Yes, it took me eighteen years to return a library book. I don’t know why, really. We moved twenty miles away in 1979, but it was in the same library system. I think me and my family were horrified at the fine we’d be paying. The library charged ten cents a day, so we were accumulating close to forty dollars a year in fines. My college years and high school years came and went, and with them ,serious poverty. The library never tried to find us, so maybe they just chalked it up as a loss. I used to show it to girls to impress them. Yeah, I’m so bad I steal library books. Considering my outrage at people who steal books from the library before I can read them, it’s kind of ironic.

So along comes 1996, and I find myself couch surfing(A situation I spent most of the 90’s in) and trying to divest myself of stuff. So I take the bus to the library and get the head guy, and nervously explain I’d like to give the book back. After I plead mercy, and asking if there’s a payment plan, he smiles and says I can keep the book.

Say what?

It seems the library updated their computers in 1990, and lost a good deal of thier records in the process. They have no record of my book, or even of my having a card.I can have new one if I have ID, he says. I fish it out and get my new card, and go off into the land of happy library consumer, right?

Wrong.

Flash forward two years, and I am being escorted out of the Waukegan library, and told never to come back.  Waukegan’s is the first library I am told I can’t check out books from, but sadly, it isn’t the last.(The other is Kenosha, but that story involves stepdaughters and Celine Dion autobiographies, so the less said about that, the better) I am led out after yelling and screaming at the same head librarian. He had just told me that even though I had returned some books very late, and had actually had returned them,I was going to still pay the full price of the books to get my library card reinstated. I told him this was the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, and then followed up with disparaging remarks about his parenthood and suggestions of biologically impossible activities.  And it went downhill from there.

I love libraries, and I hate to do them wrong. If you like libraries, you should go through your funds and give them some, because libraries all across this country are really hurting. And because librarians got parts of the Patriot Act ruled as unconstitutional, and fight for your rights. And if you have to give funds by returning books late,that’s ok, unless I’m next in the hold queue. And may your gods help you if it’s the new Jim Butcher or Charlaine Harris.

Extra Credit: I just checked out “Leadership Secrets of the Rogue Warrior” by Richard Marcinko. Yes, you geeks, I know his video game sucked. But this is a great motivational and business guide.

Weekend Assignment #317: Merry Meetings
People used to socialize with each other on street corners, at cocktail parties, at club meetings, and in a later era, at shopping malls. These days, however, we seem to do most of our socializing online. Where do you go most often for face time with friends and acquaintances?

Extra Credit: Do you ever hang out with co-workers after hours?

Warning:this post falls into what I usually hate most about blogs, which is self pitying mental masturbation.  But when asked this question, it was the only response I could come up with. If you don’t like it,there’s the door.

Hello, my name is Trevor, and I’m invisible. Considering I’m 6 foot three ,280 pounds, and have a fondness for obnoxious t-shirts(current fave:Some people are alive only because it’s illegal to kill them),this seems ludicrous. Meet me at some small social occasion,  and I usually can’t shut up.  But then there ‘s the other 98% of the time.

I am a stay at home dad. This means a good portion of the time,my only person to talk to is a four year old. Yes, that has prepared me even further for a career in retail, but it has left my social skills impaired. If any of you laugh at that, you haven’t realized how insane hours of not talking to adults can drive you. There are days I pity my wife. She’s just been sleeping for  six to eight hours, when I come along and wake her up. And she’s barely awake, when I’m off and ranting about who got what part in what remake. It’s got to be the aural diarrhea equivalent of  Montezuma’s revenge some times.

So why don’t I go out and socialize.?Well, all you non parents should realize it isn’t that easy. I have these silly things called responsibilities, like  getting people  through their day. Getting out to a bar is a major act of planning.I’m over forty now. I’m officially “creepy old guy” every time I show up to something at a night club. I felt old for the first time at a Goth night last month. Plus there’s this whole thing people in this country have about making new friends once they’re past a certain age.

This is where part of the invisibility comes in. Single people ,or non parenting couples, tend not to make new friends with couples. There’s this unspoken rule that if you’re part of a couple, you have to be friends with both of them. They tend to see you as one unit. And if they aren’t interested in one half, they usually don’t bother. So they’ll talk to you if you’re at a meeting or something, but they want nothing to do with you outside of it.

Well,what about online, you say, or Facebook? I’ve met one real person from Facebook. There are others who have potential, but lets be honest: no one has real friends on Facebook or Myspace. Anyone who is a real friend is someone you’ve met in real life, or knew before Facebook. Go down your friends list on any of those. How many of them would you take a 4AM call from after their mom died? Before you go on about “these people are my real family”, ask how many of them actually helped ,and not just typed platitudes the last time you  had a crisis?  Go ahead, I’ll be here waiting when you think of  an answer.

Chat rooms? Don’t make me laugh. Chat rooms went the way of the Dodo as soon as AOL and Yahoo decided there wasn’t any money in policing the spambots. If you want the lowest common denominator of expression, there it is.  I stopped going to Yahoo Pagan Chat after I came back two years ago and saw the term Towel head four times in one hour. No one said boo. Racism is stupid, and I am a bigot against stupidity. It’s why I don’t have a job in marketing anymore.

I moved here to the Charlotte area three years ago. People are fairly nice and polite, and carry on a civil conversation. But that’s it. They don’t really care to know you. Most people don’t want to know new people. Studies have shown that most people have their core friends by the time they’re twenty five. Don’t believe me? Go look at your friends, either  online or in real life. If you’re over thirty, how many of them have you met in the last five years? I’ve made two good friends in the last ten years. The rest are either casual acquaintances or people who are in industries I am involved in. Or authors I’m stalking.(Just kidding, Mr. Scalzi!)

So I swim through the water of people, invisible. Most don’t notice me, so I get some stuff out in my writing.  But meetings? Forget it. I try to make local Pagan and gamer meetings,and they do remember me there. But that’s once a month if best. Outside of work, the only people who know me on sight are the staff at my local comic book store,and the library.

Now I can hear you say, but Trevor, you have a loving wife and family. Yes, and I’m driving them insane. Back when I had a gaming store to go hang out in, I was a somewhat saner man. Every guy needs something like that. Some guys have barber shops, others have gun clubs, or strip clubs.My nearest game or comic store is a thirty minute drive. So I’m going through withdrawals.

It’s mostly my own fault. I haven’t made enough effort I suppose. But it’s also hard when you  go out to places and can talk to people(and I can,trust me) and then leave,and realize that if that person died tomorrow, you would not be one neuron’s space in their brain. So I’m invisible.

That’s the end, there is no grand finale to this entry. I’m off to numb my brain watching pro wrestling, and then to sleep. Bonus points if you can name the 90’s song I got the title of this  piece from.(Hint:the other line repeated a lot in it is “An eraser of love”)

Extra Credit:I work as a book merchandising rep. I haven’t seen a co-worker in over a year.

Weekend Assignment #316: National Poetry Month

As April wraps up, let’s not let it get away without celebrating National Poetry Month. For this assignment, please share with us something about poetry. Tell us about your favorite poet, or quote us a few lines of your favorite poem, or if poetry doesn’t happen to be something you enjoy, tell us why!

Extra Credit: Write a Haiku!

Me and poetry have had a long, storied,and semi-tragic love affair. I took creative writing twice, and both times flunked. Lowest scores? Big heaping vats of iambic pentameter. I could do free verse, but I wasn’t a big fan of most. The first poem to rock my world, truly was called Something as it really is.

I am going to burn down the world

I am going to tear down everything

that cannot stand alone

I am going to turn ideals to shit

I am going to shove hope up your ass

I am going to reduce everything

that stands to rubble

And then I am going to burn the rubble

And then I am going to scatter the ashes

And then maybe someone will be able to see

Something as it really is

-Mel Lyman(Apocalypse Culture.ed. By Adam Parfrey)

To say that this imprinted on my nineteen year old depressive nihilistic brain like a hot iron would be an understatement. This was poetry that spoke, that rocked, meant something. I told one of my coworkers at the bookstore about this piece, and he said “If you like it so much, why not get up on stage and read it? They’ve got an open mike night at Cafe Kismet.

Cafe Kismet, for those of you reading who didn’t live in Waukegan, Illinois during the nineties, was as close to a liberal enclave as the far north suburbs of Chicago got. It served fancy coffee, pastries, and more smarter than you attitude than a bus full of Noam Chomskys. So, as a college age smartass, I was instantly hooked.

I can say that those times at Kismet over the years certainly broadened my horizons. I got introduced to Henry Rollins, zine culture, and the peculiar pleasures and pains of dating bisexual women at that place. I made new friends, new enemies,and got the nerve to write poetry again.

Nation of Rebels

We all shine on…

Just as long as we got canvas Cons

Don’t conform, Don’t conform, Don’t conform

I’m really not a yuppie

No, I’m not a wombat dancer

(Where do Doc Martin’s profits go?)

Yes, at Kismet, you are a target market

chew on that, oh artsy ones

If we’re so different,

Why do you all look the same?

-Trevor Curtis, 1992

I chose that poem because it was the last I ever read onstage at Kismet. The owner Lorenzo had decided his profit margins(yay socialism!) were not large enough, so he started cracking down on how many people were coming in, how much they were buying, yadda yadda yadda. My friend Chris had gotten banned form the place, and I wanted to follow suit. My disillusionment was crystallized by my then girlfriend cheating on me with a girl who looked like DJ Qualls from Road Trip. I’ll wait for that image to get out of your head for a minute.

But my disillusionment had been codified by a young man who came up every week, and read a long rambling poem about mine workers in Chile. It was heart rending, descriptive, and read in a monotone. It was the poetic equivalent of “dark and stormy night” every week. Finally, I’d had enough and asked the guy if he’d ever even been to Chile.  I actually asked him while he was on stage. He got really upset and stalked off, so I guess I’d hit a nerve. About this time poetry slams started gaining ground, and I could never deal with those. If I want poetry as competition, I’ll listen to rap, thank you.

So I’m forty now. I have my slim volume of poetry on my bookshelf, A reminder of who I once was, and in some ways will always be. Poetry can be life affirming, it can be beautiful, and some days, like all art forms, it’s a two dollar hooker in an alley.

Extra credit:

Poetry is a

blind warrior in lead chains

hoping for quick death