No, this is not yet another lament for the vanished glory that was Veronica Mars, or even an expression of anarchic glee at It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. This is (gasps, murmurs) a plug!

I'm apparently going to be a guest on Chicago Tonight tomorrow (Tuesday the 29th), airing at 7 p.m. Central Time on Chicago's public TV window to the world, WTTW, Channel Eleven. The topic? You guessed it: The Complete Idiot's Guide to U.S. History, Graphic Illustrated.

Set your TiVos, and remember: I am made possible by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and through donations by viewers like you. And by the publicity department at Penguin Books, which I have to say is beginning to impress me not a little.

Less than a year after adding my name to their masthead, Weird Tales has won the Hugo Award.

Just sayin,' is all.

(Congratulations are properly due to stephenhsegal and Ann Vandermeer. So, congratulations!)

And should you not be aware that I'm writing the "Lost in Lovecraft" column for Weird Tales -- excuse me, for the Hugo-Award-winning magazine Weird Tales -- consider this a much-overdue plug.

***

And speaking of Lovecraft, and plugs, and me, I will apparently be participating in some fashion in the annual H.P. Lovecraft Memorial Ice Cream Social at 57th Street Books, 2 p.m. on August 22, Lovecraft's 119th Birthday, Observ'd.

The more I think about it, the more I think I'm right in classifying some of Olafur Eliasson's most successful installations as a weird subset of film: light and motion. A couple weekends ago yukon_jack and the lovely A. were in town, and since yukon_jack operates at a truly rarefied level of Kultur, the agenda included a trip to the Museum of Contemporary Art to see Take Your Time, a "greatest hits" compilation of Eliasson's photography, sculptures, installations, and whatever you call the things I really liked.

Digression: I'm interested, professionally and intellectually, in perception. (Q. "What do conspiracy theory, magic, ghosts, history, film, cooking, rhetoric, detective stories, game design, and myth have in common?") "How you see things" isn't the same as "how they are," and as obvious as that statement is, we none of us ever seem to act on it without a great deal of effort. This, by the way, may be the best possible reason to drink -- you can conduct your very own experiment into how easy it is to alter your perceptions of things, merely by applying a common solvent to them. Another good experiment is to stand under monochromatic light, such as Eliasson installed in Room For One Colour. Cleverly, he chose yellow, so all you see is tones of yellow and black. Unless you are a bee, in this room, you look like a none-too-freshly exhumed corpse, and probably one buried in a high-anthracite coal tailing. Why nobody has ever filmed a zombie movie in this light is beyond me.

Still another way is to enter the chromatic Cyclorama that is 360 Degree Room For All Colours, a round room with a completely featureless matte white interior -- onto which, through some technological witchery, the various colors of the spectrum are projected in a slightly complex series. Once you've stood in the middle of the space, walk right up to the wall until your entire field of vision -- no depth perception, as it's featureless -- is one color. Then that color changes, and you can literally feel your brain chemistry altering. We were calling it "the twelve-dollar Ecstasy room" (the MCA suggests a $12 donation), and I think yukon_jack and I might still be there if A. hadn't pulled us away to see the Art Institute.

What else? Eliasson's Ventilator -- a perfectly normal floor fan hung by a cable in the center of a room, blown around by its own spinning, recalled Foucault's Pendulum, Leonardo's Man, and every other pompous declaration of filled space. (It's funnier in the tiny space the MCA used than in the giant space in the linked video.) Once the joke hit us, we couldn't stop laughing -- it's rare to see Dada done right in these humorless days. We also thought that Dan Brown needed to write a novel in which the secret society kills the curator inside a Dadaist installation -- stop hiding the secrets in art anyone can understand, Illuminati! (Whoops, it just occurred to me that Christopher Fowler has already beaten Brown to the punch -- that's the setup to Ten Second Staircase. Oh well.)

The most beautiful piece, however, wasn't "film" or even Dada, but sculpture in waterfall: the aptly named Beauty. With this, the photography of islands, rivers, and caves, and Moss Wall (a wall covered with live reindeer moss), Eliasson reveals himself as ... a nature painter. He's a good old 21st-century Watteau or Poussin; where they had to put in nymphs, he has to put in Theory.

Tonight, mollpeartree and I went up to the Angel Island Theater to see Revenants, by Scott T. Barsotti. It's the latest production by Chicago's very own Wildclaw Theatre, which faithful (not to say obsessive) readers of this blog will recall is the company that more than successfully mounted Charley Sherman's adaptation of Lovecraft's Dreams in the Witch House this winter.

Without spoilering anything, I can say that the play is a thoroughly successful melding of the relationship drama and the zombie apocalypse; neither component was bolted on after the fact, and each provides vital momentum and plot turns for the other. WildClaw's Witch House also concerned apocalypse, though interestingly a less personal -- and more cataclysmic -- one than Lovecraft's story. It, also, featured a relationship drama, although one cast as a parallel investigation -- a despairing Thin Man story where Nick and Nora meet only for the catastrophe.

Revenants, by contrast, is all about contact -- enforced contact, as Gary and Karen, two survivors of a zombie apocalypse, are hiding out in a basement with Gary's wife Molly and Karen's husband Joe -- both of whom are zombies. (They're essentially chained up, like the experimental subject in Day of the Dead. And while I'm inside these parentheses -- isn't it strange that we now have an essentially universal understanding of a zombie apocalypse? You still can't make a vampire movie without setting it up, but "zombie apocalypse" is apparently like "country house murder" or "Thanksgiving dinner." It's a stock event you set drama against, not drama itself any more.) Joe and Gary are long-time best friends, and Karen believes that Joe is "alive somewhere in there." Karen's feelings toward Molly are far more ambivalent, which introduces only the first unbalanced moment in the steadily collapsing gyre that is common to all good zombie films. Except, weirdly enough, 28 Days Later. Hmmm. Oh, and Shaun of the Dead, which is a comedy in genre and in structure. Revenants, however, is horror in genre all the way -- especially if the notion of missing, broken, or mutilated love is horrific. In structure? Harder to say. Certainly harder to say without spoilers.

The WildClaw team does their apparently standard great job with the production -- lighting, set design, blood work, makeup are all well above what you'd expect for off-off-Loop drama. The cast is also good, with the standout being Jenny Strubin's Karen. Brian Amidei is probably the best actor on stage (based on his Witch House chops) but the role of Joe calls for little more than presence, alternately menacing and brutalized. Oh well, nobody takes a part as a zombie for the dialogue. Which, I should point out, is always good -- menacing gutturals, contrapuntal groans and growls, and just the tiniest torturous hints of humanity. The director, Anne Adams, balances the zombies (mostly in the background) and the survivors (mostly in the foreground) deftly -- there's always something going on, and nothing is ever blocked or walked over. There's a gun, which gets used, although mollpeartree thought the immense pair of loppers on the wall violated Chekhovian law.

In other words -- go see it; it's playing through May 24. See it with someone you'd shoot through the brain, or chain up in the garage, should it come to that.

"In a way, I arrived at the plot of this book by the same method that astronomers use in looking for a new planet - they look for "perturbations," wobbles, in the orbits of the planets they're aware of, and they calculate the mass and position of an unseen planet whose gravitational field could have caused the observed perturbations - and then they turn their telescopes on that part of the sky and search for a gleam."

-- Tim Powers, afterword to Declare

I'm pretty sure I've found two perturbations. I don't think they point to the same planet, though.

In the vast tranche of espionage reading I've been doing (mostly as part of the ongoing Nosferatu Gambit campaign-slash-GUMSHOE-playtest), I stumbled across a weird little one-line note to the effect that William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan, the founder of the OSS (the "CIA-That-Was") visited Moscow on Christmas Eve 1943 to discuss a formal liaison office between the OSS and the NKVD. (That's not the anomaly, btw, that's just FDR being a simpleton.) The anomaly is that they worked out the deal with remarkable, even unprecedented, rapidity. Donovan planned to fly out of Moscow (to Cairo, as it happens) on January 2, 1944. But the Russians refused permission for his plane to take off for twelve days, telling him nothing. On January 14, he was just as abruptly given clearance to leave. So I read this in wherever it was, and decided to check out the story in Anthony Cave Brown's estimably comprehensive biography Wild Bill Donovan: The Last Hero, where I found -- exactly as much information as I just gave you. Which means a rigorous researcher like Anthony Cave Brown couldn't find any documents about the kidnapping of the head of the OSS during the turning of the Russian year. Ohhhh-kay.

The second perturbation is seemingly simpler. Big Jim Colosimo was the vice lord of Chicago. His underling, Johnny Torrio, wanted to get into bootlegging. Colosimo thought it was too much work and risk. Colosimo was summoned to his restaurant by a bogus appointment, and killed there, most probably by Frankie Yale, an out-of-town gun brought in by Torrio. And what, according to Lawrence Bergreen's Capone: The Man and the Era, did Frankie Yale write on his check at Colosimo's Cafe? "So long vampire. So long lefty." I have not been able to discover whether Colosimo was left-handed, not that that's the important thing. (Except that left-handedness is one of the traditional stigmata of the vampire.) It's weird -- I've got eight or ten feet of books on the subject, but I've never run a game about Chicago gangsters. (I almost wrote one once, but the deal came apart as these things do.)

I said they were probably different planets, but the Fortean spirit compels me to note that Frankie Yale was shot (though not killed) in Brooklyn in 1921 on the orders of an Irish gangster named "Wild Bill" Lovell. And while I'm noting synchronicities, and speaking of Tim Powers, the very next chapter in Cave Brown's book after the Christmas 1943 incident is entitled "Noah's Ark."

Fans of things Lovecraftian will almost certainly want to check out Wildclaw Theatre's performance on the Athenaeum Theatre stage of Charley Sherman's play Dreams in the Witch House, adapted from the H.P. Lovecraft short story of the same name.

As it transpires, the play's opening night (this Sunday, November 16) is "Weird Tales Night," and all attendees will get free copies of Weird Tales among other eldritch goodies. There is a non-trivial chance that those fortunate souls will also get to see me give a very few brief introductory remarks from the stage, which is something. (If not, we can all find a bar afterward and you can hear me talk about Lovecraft until you're sick to death of it.)

What I would have twittered today if I twittered: "Tom Yum Kai Soup Recipe, Ergo All Else, Lost."

I've had the Chest Cold From Hell (the one everyone has, apparently) all weekend as punishment for enjoying myself too thoroughly while apple picking on Saturday. So I determined to make my famous Tom Yum Kai soup and cure myself and mollpeartree through the magic of Warming Heat. But today I emptied out my little recipe box and hunted all over the kitchen to no avail: The card for my absolutely perfect Tom Yum Kai recipe had vanished, carried up to Olympus by the jealous gods, most likely.

So I was forced to re-create it in much the same way I created it: Hunting all across the Internet for tom yum kai recipes. I shan't keep you in suspense any longer: I found the Ur-Recipe from which I had derived the perfected dish here; it's by a chef in Bangalore, India, of all things, and it is truly wonderful.

The search was perhaps unnecessarily lengthened by his choice of transliteration: tom yam gai instead of tom yum kai. But while searching, I discovered all manner of other ways to make tom yum soup, and decided to run a change-up on my perfected dish and add more Stuff in the quest for Mega-Health. I think I succeeded, what say you all?

( Tom Yum Kai II: The Ong Is Bak In Town )

A Note on Ingredients: The garlic, shallots, and tomatoes are my additions for Mega-Health, over and above the already mighty health benefits of chicken, ginger, galangal, lime, and chile hotness. Finding tom yum paste probably means a trip to your nearest Thai or pan-Asian supermarket: I bought mine at Broadway Supermarket (4879 N. Broadway) and one tub has lasted me a good while. (I have a spare tub in the pantry.) It also provided massaman curry paste and other wonderful goodies. A return visit snagged me my galangal, which is like ginger and coriander having a party in your mouth. Broadway also has Gigandous Bags of dried shiitake mushrooms for like a nickel, and has thus comprehensively spoiled me for buying shiitakes anywhere else. Broadway has, however, consistently let me down in the matter of Kaffir lime leaves, which is just as well for my Calvinist soul, given the thin-ness of the boundary between this fallen world and the divine when it comes to this soup, and to shopping in Asian supermarkets.

* I know it's been forever and long since we've had a single substantive post here, but post-GenCon creates almost as much rush-and-bustle as pre-GenCon does.

* Especially because this is also pre-ConQuest; I'll be a guest at ConQuest SF (which will be in San Jose, or rather Santa Clara, this year) next weekend. The Guest of Honor will be John Hill, the designer of Squad Leader, which will impose a mandatory -1 penalty to my rally rolls. Other guests include Dana Lombardy, James Ernest, and (according to the website) Dave Arneson. I don't know my schedule, but I imagine we'll get up to some sort of seminars, plus the usual pickup games and goofing around.

* While we were all at GenCon, I apparently published a new product: GURPS Infinite Worlds: Lost Worlds. This book covers six worlds (in standard IW format) cut for space from the GURPS Infinite Worlds manuscript, some of them somewhat familiar ("Etheria," "The Nine Worlds," and "Steel") from other GURPS books. However, it has more details on Reality Cyrano and Reality Iskander-2, from the GURPS 4e iconic character writeups, and one entirely new world, the Indian-dominant Siva-5, which was my attempt to explicate the tossed-off reference to "the Siva worlds" from GURPS Time Travel.

* Sadly, it doesn't include Reality Mameluke, my alien-invasion AH tribute to Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series (and to Poul Anderson's "Soldier From the Stars"). The breakpoint comes in 1965, when President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam hires a dreadnought full of Gormelite warriors to win the war for him. Maybe SJG will publish it in another collection.

* Speaking of my e-retail presence, Atomic Overmind has brought Dubious Shards and Tarot of Cthulhu: Major Arcana to DriveThruRPG, should you be interested in purchasing either fine item from that purveyor. And who could blame you if you were? Not I.

* My attempt to make chicken corn tortilla soup last week was deflected by the covert metamorphosis of my dried pasilla peppers into something truly unappetizing; I was forced to make do with two ancho peppers and a cinnamon stick. The result was still pretty darn good, but I'm waiting to post the recipe until after I try it with the correct peppers. Which cannot be had for love or money in Hyde Park, apparently. Or in the Oak Park Whole Foods, which carries ancho peppers helpfully labeled "Ancho Pasilla Peppers," because somebody or other also calls poblano peppers "pasillas." Gah.

* In other news, robin_d_laws has descended so far as to blog my unfamiliarity with the legendary Black Hand killer "Shotgun Man." Having noodled around on the topic since, I can assure Robin that the Wikipedia entry holds every datum available on the topic. Or perhaps more data than are, strictu sensu, available: the source of the tale is Herbert Asbury's Gem of the Prairie, (republished in 2002 as The Gangs of Chicago to take advantage of the nascent Scorsese-induced mania for all things Asburian) which shares with Asbury's other works a charming preference for lurid effect above grim historicity. (That said, Asbury is more reliable than Wikipedia; he gives the span of killings as January 1910 to March 1911, contra Wikipedia's still-sloppier source, Sifakis' Mafia Encyclopedia.) A check, for example, of the Northwestern University 1870-1930 Chicago Homicide Database indicates only three firearm murders that fit the pattern in early 1911, one of which was in a tavern, not on "Death Corner" (now part of the former Cabrini-Green). Should anyone be interested in that or any of Chicago's other death corners, I can heartily recommend Richard Lindberg's Return to the Scene of the Crime: A Guide to Infamous Places in Chicago, which manages to combine lurid effect with more historicity than otherwise.

* Further to the Ongoing Interrupted Conversations File, on Sunday lhn and I were wondering just when the "mean old Normans vs. doughty stout Saxons" meme got started, the one we all recognize from reading Ivanhoe, or rather from watching Robin Hood movies made back when anybody read Ivanhoe. It sounded suspiciously like the kind of thing Hanoverians would make up to remind people that Germans were good and the French (and by extension the Stuarts) were bad, and that furthermore it had a kind of Tudor "black legend" feel to it (which was, of course, right around when all the Robin Hood gestes were being printed, along with everything else), but neither of us could remember anything relevant from Shakespeare's King John, and I resolved to look in my Robin Hood books once I got a chance. Well, I still haven't, but I did wind up looking in Leon Poliakov's The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalistic Ideas In Europe, which indicates that I'm almost exactly right. He cites the future Bishop of London, John Aylmer, fulminating in 1558 against the "lousye law brought in by the Normanes" compared to the "Saxonysche" language and customs of the people. And again, the aim is to contrast (Protestant) Germany and England with (Catholic) France. That said, neither the word "Norman" nor "Saxon" appears in King John, so it probably doesn't achieve takeoff until Cromwell (combining Protestantism with anti-aristocratic populism) and then the Hanoverians.

Big night ends with the sun coming up through my window; that's how they mostly end, to be sure, but tonight I was downtown until 3 a.m. for Looptopia, a Chicago version of the "Nuit Blanche" they do in Paris and other cities not (quite) as wonderful as Chicago. Last year we made it all the way until dawn, but the meager breakfast reward in Millennium Park was so disproportioned to the night that this year we ejected ante-anti-climax.

But before that, we saw a re-imagining of More Songs About Buildings And Food with a joyous crowd vibe (and a crowd that was, on average, considerably younger than the album, your humble narrator excepted), and Daniel Burnham cornices standing out against the reflective sky like a screen grab from God's Blu-Ray, and a rhythm-and-rec-room band playing behind acrobats and stilt-walkers in a Midnight (EDT) Circus in Daley Plaza, and all the art the Fine Arts Building would show us including a So-Creepy Little-Girl Sphinx by Richard Laurent that is the best Changeling cover never used (and sadly not on his website), and a giant glowing piece of hard candy, and a late-night book sale, and a kite parade, and "The Weird Sisters" (who billed themselves as "naughty vaudeville" but were more "normal music-hall") in Adler and Sullivan's sublime Auditorium Theatre, and an hour of an experimental film group only just a wee bit too much in love with itself but entrancingly earnest withal, and horrible Dunkin' Donuts mocha latte but every other coffee shop mysteriously decided to leave thousands of dollars just sitting in the street for others to pick up ...

... and some really awesome fire dancers. For that show, we started back behind the crowd, unable to see anything except on the tiny display screens of the digital cameras being held above us. "What's the opposite of Jumbotron?" I asked my companions. Responded wisely bigstokes80: "Tron." And so it was, and upon tron upon tron we watched the dancers spin and twirl flaming hula hoops and batons and bolas and staves, fighting and mating and claiming and presenting, with their fires flapping desperate bids for liberty in the wind off the river, seeing them scattered on tiny screens in all sorts of light-setting and freeze-frame defaults, a fractal vision of postmodern paganism complete with communal soul-capture almost as entrancing in its way as the actual spectacle.

* * * *

Which I eventually did see, thanks to my osmotic eeling powers, as I shouldered toward the front row throughout, occupying niches emptied in the demos as sated spectators fell back or ran off to some other delight, until I had as good a view as anyone not pounding away at a bongo drum. I remember thinking, of the slim blonde fire-eater, that I was surprised that I was surprised that she had a pierced tongue. In retrospect, once you've gone in for fire-eating, a little tongue-piercing is like a walk on the beach, I imagine.

* * * *

All this plus Hot Doug's for lunch and another Nikkatsu Action New Wave film (Velvet Hustler) at the Siskel Center, serendipitously keeping us out of the rain, and Iron Man in digital projection tomorrow with Hop Haus burger to follow. My city is so very, very good to me.

Last night, gnosticpi and I hit the last night of the premiere run of Jim Sikora's film The Earl, at the Siskel Center. Think Intacto crossed with The Hitcher, restricted entirely to one scene -- total unity of theme, place, action, and character. It's Aristotle with crowbar-fights.

It's based on Brett Neveu's late-night play of a couple years ago, and it retains the staginess of its ancestry, not least since Neveu adapted the script. This is not a down-check; it's like watching a Mamet film.

And not just in the staginess -- the focus on arbitrary gamesmanship, the physical and emotional cruelty, and the hyper-masculine atmosphere are all Mametesque. (Mametian? Mametish?) The story is about three brothers who meet in an abandoned warehouse to play a ritualized game of physical violence -- the repeated jargon ("Ten acknowledged!" spoken in a triumphant, sneering tone) and rules-lawyering ("You can't call a hold unless a person or animal is actually approaching!" "There's no way you're at H now. I think that was a short count.") was especially true to life, and darkly comical, to us gamers.

The soundtrack was pretty great, too, and for an immensely low-budget film (shot on VHS of all things) the rest of the technical stuff was more than adequate.

The only flaw, such as it was, was that the structure of the film was as brutally simple as the dialogue was oblique. The brothers play their game, the Earl shows up and reverses the dynamic, the end. The film would have benefited from at least one, or ideally two, twists, to play up the gamesmanship of the story, rather than merely the gamesmanship of the setting. Now, this may have been Neveu's point -- that all games end when the powerful refuse to play -- but I think he could have kept (or even reinforced) that theme while still feeding us a little narrative twisty-juice.

All of which said, well worth seeing if it comes to a festival near you. I'd call it a B+ movie with little hesitation, and if you grade on the curve for the budget and such, well, then the movie has definitely taken its ten.

Tonight, his_regard and I went to the Bailiwick Theater on Belmont to see the Tantalus Theatre Group perform Dreadful Penny's Exquisite Horrors,¹ which for a play involving severed fingers, suicidal puppets, and a murderous rape (among other things), was oddly restrained. The sense of play-acting, of theatricality, was always there, but only intermittently productive of heightened sensibilities. Since it simply could not be naturalistic (although the first shock of naturalistic fear in the play worked surprisingly well), it needed more blood, more threats to the audience, more use of the sheer presence that only live theater can convey.

Part of it was no doubt down to the mechanical constraints -- lighting, makeup, and such could have worked better, but the budget and facility might not have supported them.

Part of it is that the role of the Grand Guignol in society has been taken over by the visual media -- currently the Saw and Hostel school of "torture horror" -- and so the theatrical community writ large has let those muscles atrophy.

Part of it is that this is not something that theater likes to say about itself. An awful lot of authorities claim that no play of Seneca's was ever performed, or that Titus Andronicus is a bad play (rather than what it is, a brutal play), or otherwise talk as if theater didn't begin as Dionysian orgy complete with omophagia. From there it's just a hop and a skip to versions of Hamlet that leave out the ghost. With nothing pushing theater into that niche, and no social vacuum waiting to be filled and pulling theater into it, this kind of intellectual softness can perpetuate itself.

Part of it is that the moral raison d'etre of the Grand Guignol and Dreadful Penny's -- to implicate the audience in the performance and indict us as batteners upon bloody violence -- is so often, and so easily, used as a transparent excuse to present naked carnography. Theatrical critics of the type adduced above are sensible of the risk of pandering, in this realm at least, and often the decision is taken to simply avoid the question, or to treat the entire topic as distasteful. This is evasion. The line between Peeping Tom and Saw IV may be murky, but it's there.

And all of it is kind of a shame, because if the cast and the playwright hadn't had to fight both the audience and themselves, they might really have gotten something going on.

[1] It's based on a play by Matthew Rossi called Dreadful Penny's Midnight Cavalcade of Ghoulish Delights. I think this Matthew Rossi is not our own ezrael, the gifted eliptonist and author of Things That Never Were, but a different Matthew Rossi.

So the way I remember it starting is like this: sitting in the booth in Clarke's on Belmont with gnosticpi and serpentstar, eating a "hobo omelet" (though it seemed awful picky for a real hobo -- portobello mushrooms, red onions, and mozzarella) and thinking "it doesn't get any better than this."

It was about to get better.

But why I thought that: I was in my city, on my way to a party, in a place I'd never been and drinking the second mango-tini of the night, with good friends, one of whom had come all the way from North Wales to see me. I had fed him not just well so far, but superbly, to wit:

* Thursday, we ate Giordano's stuffed pizza, shipped piping hot from the outside of Plato's cave to Earth. (We also drank a great deal of homemade damson vodka, a lovely hostess gift from serpentstar.)

* Friday, we ate lunch at Hot Doug's: Bacon-Jalapeño Duck Sausage with Blood Orange Mustard, Pâté Bigarade and Mandarin Oranges; a Smoked Crayfish and Pork Sausage with Cajun Tartar Sauce, St. Pete's Blue Cheese and Diced Sweet Peppers; and a Bacon and Cheddar Elk Sausage with Guinness Mustard and Hickory-Smoked Rambol Cheese. The duck was so good it made the elk taste expected.

* Then dessert (black cherry and vanilla cone) at Oberweis Ice Cream, which puts the real into nonpareil.

* Then dinner (Seven Seas Soup at a Mexican seafood place in Pilsen where we went because I couldn't remember Cocina Mundial in time -- still pretty great, as were the salmon ceviche tostadas. The oysters were mediocre, but one can't have everything -- OR SO I STILL THOUGHT AT THE TIME, he foreshadowed.)

* Saturday noon I grilled up three New York Strip Steaks from Paulina Meat Market, where we had gone on Friday. The plan was to feed serpentstar on good Chicago steak so that, upon encountering actual good steak for the first time in his life, his fabled British reserve would crumble and he would roll around meeping in sheer delight while we sat and mocked him from the perspective of people who can eat steak like this any time we feel like it. Well, the enginer was truly hoist by his own petard -- even given the kack-handed way I wound up grilling it (on a freezing cold grill in 30-degree weather, so it never actually, you know, seared) it was perhaps the fifth-best steak I've ever eaten. So we all drowned out serpentstar's complete emotional collapse ("This is really quite good.") with our own ecstatic Maenad cries.

* Although they went with that meal, the martinis I shook up in my new Zeppelin-shaped cocktail shaker deserve their own bullet point. North Shore Gin, Vya Vermouth, blue cheese stuffed olives.

So I wanted to feed serpentstar Ethiopian food, but he threw a British tantrum ("Er, could we possibly have a salad?") so we went to Clarke's. Where, as I intimated previously, things were as good as they could get.

Until the waitress showed up with a hot-chocolate brownie, topped with whipped cream, and three spoons. "These," she said, "are from the young ladies in the corner booth." Yes, three cute girls had bought us dessert!¹ And sent us a mash note! With runes in it!

What could we do but introduce ourselves and invite them along to the party (a Flash Gordon screening at d_swindler's place, where rumor had it there would be Really Good Bourbon)? And who could then be surprised to find them au fait with RPG jokes and Sealab 2021? They turned out to be zombienedwin, Chesney, and Kris10, and were very funny and charming in addition to being remarkably trusting of strange men in diners.

So the moral of the story is: in Chicago, there's no top floor on that elevator. And the other moral is: eat plenty of salad.

[1] Technically, they no doubt had bought serpentstar -- who was his usual resplendent self in purple mohawk-dreads, leather, and ophidian skull tattoo -- dessert, but being courteous types, they included myself and gnosticpi in their gesture.

On Friday night, along with mollpeartree, lhn, prilicla, luckymarty, and ladysophis2k8, I had what is probably the closest to an authentically Shakespearean experience you can have without the plague and boy-actors. To wit: a rewrite of an already familiar play; in colloquial contemporary language; in iambic pentameter; with lots of in-jokes and references cultural, political, and sexual; and plenty of songs; in contemporary dress.

We saw Merchant on Venice, a rewrite by Shishir Kurup of the Shakespearean play of similar title, set on Venice Boulevard in L.A. among the (primarily) South Asian diaspora community. Antonio and Bassanio (Devendra and Jitendra) become Hindus, along with Portia, Nerissa, Gratiano, Launcelot, and one or two others. (Lorenzo stayed Catholic, though -- Mexican-American, in this version.)

And Shylock becomes Muslim (Sharukh). In these oh-so-enlightened times, one knows going into this kind of thing that one is in for an After-School Special ending instead of anything like Shakespeare's. (But for what it's worth, Kurup throws a really interesting head-fake toward a really good, and appropriately and ironically double-coded, Shakespearean ending that I think he could have pulled off in spades had he been willing to risk the controversy.) So having appropriately lowballed the predictable (and to be fair, entirely Modernist) disintegration at the end of Act IV (and kudos to Kurup for almost entirely truncating Act V instead of leaving it there like an appendix, as most directors of the source play do once they shift the play's emphasis from Antonio-Bassanio to Shylock-Antonio), I was totally unprepared for how truly excellent the entire rest of the play was.

There's just something about iambic pentameter that can really bring out the best in a playwright -- being forced to hit that rhythm, to hunt for the right word instead of the easy one -- and Kurup rose to the occasion, filling the dialogue with revamped Shakespeare (mostly from other plays), quotes from rock lyrics, Hindglish and south Asian and south L.A. slang, always working to provide call-backs and emblems in Shakespeare's style, and using each character's voice to identify them. There were bits that mollpeartree and I kept discovering on our way home (after a convivial round or two at the Encore), such as our realization that the word "mercy" did not (so far as we recalled) occur in the play, being replaced with "empathy," the very model of a modern virtue. Or that only Anish Jethmalani, as Sharukh, was acting (terrifically) in Bollywood style, while the other cast were acting (generally quite well) in more Western mode -- a very subtle way to convey outsider status for Shylock, and a thrill to watch. Or that the name of the Gratiano manque, Amitabh, conveys the character's obsession with old-school larger-than-life masculinity (Sinatra in this case), being also the name of Amitabh Bachchan, the Man's Man of 20th Century Bollywood.

mollpeartree and I also recognized both Bollywood tracks (with new lyrics) used in the play's dance numbers, which was gratifying.

Here's one last instance of how good the rewrite was: Even the casket scene was not entirely unbelievable in the context of Indian arranged marriages. Portia/Pushpa's father was a Bollywood director, you see, and he got the idea for her wedding arrangement lottery, a suitor's choice of three DVD cases ... from his own remake of Merchant of Venice. It was that kind of joyous riot of a play.

Having hit a momentary gap in the onslaught that is Trail of Cthulhu, it's time to post my post-Chicago International Film Festival roundup, as always using the format and judgement categories of robin_d_laws' Toronto roundup post.

I am willing to take some of the blame for this year's less than superb experience -- when you're spending damn near every waking moment either at a movie theater or writing RPG rules, you lose a certain detachment that might be needed to fully accept that foreign directors have their own notions of narrative and color and so forth. My mom's visit meant I had to jam everything into ten days instead of 15, and so we missed some likely contenders, and I missed Antenna, which gnosticpi and his_regard said was Recommended, at least. And when you're watching some large chunk of the films gooned on DayQuil to keep your head cold at bay, you may miss a few stray strands of brilliance. Between one thing and another, we skipped All the Invisible Things to take a needed sleep-in day, and our showing of Not By Chance was cancelled. And as it happened, I only saw one film that made the dozen "Best of the Fest," so perhaps we just picked badly to begin with.

That said, this was by fairly universal assessment a mediocre Film Fest year. Way too many films that will inevitably show up in general release, way too many American movies, and what -- only one South Korean film? Did the great gold-farming republic fall down on the job of cinema last year, or did the Festival committee recoil from the Korean onslaught last year? The international side was not just small but fairly weak in general; Takashi Miike's new Western was especially missed, but genre always takes a boot to the head at this show, which even in its best years still has a strong middlebrow tendency.

But even its somewhat-best years are better than this one. Or maybe it's the DayQuil talking.

The Best

Eye in the Sky (Yau Nai Hoi, HK) I'm surprised there isn't already a law against thrillers this good, enforced by the vast majority of directors and producers. In control, feel, and good old-fashioned nail-biting suspense, this tale of an elite jewel theft gang and an equally-elite Hong Kong police surveillance unit just can't be topped. It seamlessly delivers character, setting, and narrative with beautiful efficiency. It's almost on a par with The Departed, and easily the equal of the Bourne movies. It leaves virtually everything else you've seen in the genre looking kind of sad. Johnnie To was a producer on it, and it shows.

Becky Sharp (Rouben Mamoulian, USA (1935)) Meanwhile, Rouben Mamoulian and William Makepeace Thackeray between them refute any notion of progress since 1935 or 1847. Both the movie and the novel (Vanity Fair, for those just joining us) conclusively demonstrate that everything modernism claims to have accomplished was already present and alive before it got started in film and literature, respectively. Miriam Hopkins heads a sure-fire cast (Nigel Bruce is especially delightful as Joseph Sedley, as is Cedric Hardwicke as the depraved Marquis of Steyne), and the script (from a play based on the novel) horsewhips Mira Nair's crap 2004 version up and down the street. This was the first feature shot in three-strip Technicolor, and the restored version just glows -- the production design is wonderfully alien to our modernist sensibilities, and looks like a million bucks.

OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (Michael Hazanavicius, France) Where this amiable romp truly stands out is Jean Dujardin as the titular OSS 117 -- he can go from Sean Connery to Will Ferrell and back again in a split second, giving a beautiful performance as an idiot manchild who happens to be postwar France's top spy in Nasser's Cairo. It's a better conceit than Austin Powers, since "Hubert Bonnisseur de la Bath" is actually as sexy and tough as he thinks he is -- he's just also an idiot with a four-second attention span. (The parallels with the West in general -- sexy, tough, self-absorbed, and stupid -- are not hammered home, but are quite intentional.) Special kudos also to the costumes, which effortlessly replicate classic-period Bond. This is the one of my choices that made "Best of the Fest," btw.

Recommended

Hard-Hearted (Aleksei Mizgiryov, Russia) To its Training Day: Moscow vibe, this surprisingly deep urban drama adds the "hero comes West" archetype and a love story by turns touching, desperate, and scary. Moscow comes alive as a setting, though mostly through the characters and the types they represent.

You, the Living (Roy Andsersson, Swe-Ger-Fra-Den-Nwy) Basically a series of sharp vignettes best summed up as "Ingmar Bergman's Monty Python's Meaning of Life." Each shot, however, is framed and set up with creepily exact Scandinavian precision; it's an abstract mosaic of brilliantly polished gems.

Trade Routes (Jim Loftus, Bulgaria/USA) More than adequate Le Carre-style post-Cold War thriller about the intersection of a junior CIA agent, an ambitious democratic Bulgarian politician, his American campaign manager, and a nervous Bulgarian state security chief. The plot is the highlight, with the whole thing ticking down like Greek tragedy -- you know what's coming, and you can't wait to find out. The wild cards are a retired Bulgarian spy, his mafiya pal, and the creepy nationalist Front movement. The Bulgarians in the audience were full of sputtered Balkan objections, which filled me with the urge to go to a Bulgarian film festival, attend a movie set in Chicago, and spend the entire Q&A session arguing with the director about the decor of Mister Beef.

Good

Control (Anton Corbijn, USA) If you're a big Joy Division fan, this is "Recommended" on the basis of the soundtrack (and the incidental score by New Order), but it never exceeds the biopic straitjacket. The tone is nicely north-of-England staid and undramatic, which on the one hand evokes Macclesfield well, but on the other doesn't really let us into the movie. We watch Ian Curtis live, write, marry, sing, cheat, and despair by the numbers, and only a few voiceovers try to tell us why any of it happens. Sam Riley does what he can with the part, but the real fun is Craig Parkinson's Tony Wilson.

Weirdsville (Allan Moyle, USA/Canada) Slacker drug comedies, like teen romance comedies, run to a formula. This one does, too, although there are a whole carload of midgets instead of just one, and the blonde Satanist with the machete livens things up a bit. Matt Frewer is in it, along with a lot of people you wouldn't flip on cable to watch -- Scott Speedman, Wes Bentley, Taryn Manning -- unless you were already stoned. That said, you'd leave it on, even if you were out of Cheetos.

Okay

Beaufort (Joseph Cedar, Israel) This one might have vaulted up to "Good" if I hadn't been previously irritated at Session 9 for likewise wasting a superior concept -- the IDF, harassed by Hezbollah, waits to evacuate a mountaintop outpost -- and a wonderful set -- a recreation of the Crusader castle Beaufort -- on a rote iteration of a formulaic story. The dramatic high point occurs in the first ten minutes, and the movie spends another two hours, in "Itchy & Scratchy" terms, driving slowly away from the firework factory. It turns out that occupying Lebanon is pointless. Go figure. If you're grading on a curve, this could go up to "Good" merely for depicting soldiers accurately, but that should be like keeping the lens cap off, or using the boom mike correctly -- the baseline of acceptability, not a cause for special commendation, especially in a war film.

Almost Good

Surveillance (Paul Oremland, UK) It's rare to wish a film looked worse, but this one needed to. The conceit is that the whole thing is assembled from surveillance-camera, CCTV, and phone-cam footage, but it doesn't remotely look like it, being shot in bright digital video for the most part. The script has way too many interiors -- the whole thing should have been set in seemingly deserted outside locations, or eerily miked in crowds. Walter Murch could have saved this film; the director admitted that it was a rewrite short of what he wanted to see. The story is stupid, but even good conspiracy films never care that much about such things -- it's the production design and locations that needed changing.

Not Good

Duchess of Langeais (Jacques Rivette, France/Italy) I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that everyone involved in this movie lost a World Cup bet or something, and were forced to make a film based on this Balzac novel as a consequence. Nobody -- not the director, the actors, the producer, the writer -- seems to know or care why they're there. It has a certain level of competence, and individual scenes are sometimes well-acted, but it's like Rivette just filmed until he ran out of pages and celluloid and went home.

Opium: Diary of a Madwoman (Janos Szasz, Hungary) We disputed afterwards whether this was a hackneyed story told sententiously or a mawkish story told predictably. Nothing in it remotely surprised anyone, probably including the characters themselves, which is a shame when you're in a Hungarian insane asylum in 1913. By about halfway through, I was entertaining myself imagining future archaeologists assembling the entire conventional narrative and ideological context of 20th century feminism from this film alone, although the frequent naked breasts might confuse them.

Actively Horrible

Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz, France) Who knew it was possible to make a film that simultaneously trivializes, and lugubriously pontificates on, the Holocaust? (Okay, Roberto Benigni knew.) Perhaps this works in France, but -- SPOILER ALERT! -- "European executives had connections with the Holocaust" is not exactly the Big Reveal in my neck of the woods in this year 62 A.P. (After Patton). When you don't care about the characters, there's no point in showing endless footage of their slack-jawed reaction to something a schoolchild can find out on Wikipedia. The whole "conspiracy" is nothing more than tedious corporate politics -- lots of arbitrary footage hints at a story the filmmakers are too chicken to write. A tiresome, cowardly, sententious waste of good actors and everyone's time, most especially mine.

For those in a) Chicago, and b) a mood to see the same films as myself and (usually) his_regard and gnosticpi, the schedule as I know it:

Tuesday, Oct. 9

9:45 pm (River East): Surveillance (Paul Oremland) Thriller shot entirely through surveillance cameras.

Wednesday, Oct. 10

6:45 pm (River East): Opium: Diary of a Madwoman (Janos Szasz,¹ Hungary) Belle Epoque horrors in a Budapest madhouse.

Thursday, Oct. 11

4:30 pm (Landmark): You, the Living (Roy Andsersson, Swe-Ger-Fra-Den-Nwy) Formal meditation on interconnectedness.
6:45 pm (Landmark): Hard-Hearted (Aleksei Mizgiryov, Russia) Moscow breaks the weak.
9:45 pm (Landmark): Eye in the Sky (Yau Nai Hoi, HK) Jewel thieves vs. surveillance.

Friday, Oct. 12

4:30 pm (Landmark): OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (Michael Hazanavicius, France) WWII Matt Helm, only French. And in Cairo!
9:30 pm (River East): Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz, France) Human resources evaluator stumbles onto conspiracy.

Saturday, Oct. 13

2:30 pm (Landmark): Becky Sharp (Rouben Mamoulian, USA (1935)) 1820s seductress goes wrong.
5:00 pm (Landmark): Duchess of Langeais (Jacques Rivette, France/Italy) 1820s seduction goes wrong.
9:15 pm (Landmark): Beaufort (Joseph Cedar, Israel) War movie set in Lebanon withdrawal.

Sunday, Oct. 14

4:45 pm (Landmark): All the Invisible Things (Jakob Erwa, Austria) The kids, not so much all right.
No Schedule Online: Not By Chance (Philippe Barcinski, Brazil) Sense of Place, Sao Paulo edition.

Monday, Oct. 15

9:15 pm (River East): Trade Routes (Jim Loftus, Bulgaria/USA) CIA skullduggery in Bulgarian election.

Tuesday, Oct. 16

6:30 pm (Landmark): Control (Anton Corbijn, USA) Ian Curtis biopic, so guaranteed good soundtrack.
9:30 pm (Landmark): Weirdsville (Allan Moyle, USA/Canada) Canada; hilarity ensues.


[1] As far as I can tell with a quick Google search, no relation. But synchronicitous, eh?

This last weekend, I was blessed with the mellifluous company and smooth jazz stylings of yukon_jack, who immediately fell to work at his twin gifts of keeping my blood alcohol (we were drinking mostly Moscow Mules at home) and my cultural intake elevated.

Admittedly, on Wednesday he had to go see Grinderman and I had to go see a screening of a bunch of Harry Smith experimental shorts, but on Thursday we hooked up for a little architecture (they're at last letting us rabble into the ground floor of the Rookery Building lobby again, although you still can't go up on the balconies) and for the Jeff Wall exhibit at the Art Institute. Wall is a tremendously challenging artist, as his stuff essentially mocks both the Cartier-Bresson 'Decisive Moment' as self-glorifying bushwa, and the Modernist painters' photography-induced flight from Realism as cowardice. Where does that leave photography, then? Not his problem.

But the greatest illustration of the power of illustration was not until Saturday, as Friday was the Feast of St. TiVo Redivivus, complete with my Jim Beam pork chops for all.

So Saturday morning, on the train to meet kaynorr and gracefuleigh I mentioned that of all the T-shirts I own, the only ones to consistently get a positive response outside the gaming world are my Green Lantern shirt (neither Batman nor Captain America, two far better-known heroes, get the civilian love that GL does) and my Clash shirts. This came up because I was wearing my Clash "Kamikaze" shirt, which over the course of that very day got me:

* a free Coke at Hot Doug's (just the thing to wash down a breakfast of Blue Cheese Pork Sausage with Apple Creme Fraiche and Toasted Almonds) from Doug himself, who had just recently driven to Cleveland to see the Clash exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame;
* a shout-out ("only band that matters!") from a guy waiting for a bus on Belmont as yukon_jack and I walked to the Blue Line;
* a fist-pump from a guy in the crowd at the Wicker Park Fest as we, by this time amplified with his_regard and gnosticpi, watched the clumpy and mournful "Creedence Clearance-Sale Revival" stylings of Catfish Haven;
* an "Awesome shirt, dude" from another g.i.t.c. as I went to get a steak sandwich after seeing the much superior band Maritime, which performed a set perhaps best characterized as "The Replacements' Tribute To Ken Hite's CD Collection";
* another crowd-guy shout-out on the way to buy an urgently self-prescribed Red Bull during Centro-Matic's dreary-sounding opening song;
* a lengthy discourse on the awesomeness of the Clash, punk rock in general, and my shirt, complete with rubbing its decal, from the proprietor of Retro Image Apparel, which had a lot of excellent-looking shirts for sale, mostly covers of pulp magazines, though sadly not of either of H.P. Lovecraft's only two magazine covers;
* and a drunken chest-slap holler of 'Clash! Shirt! Woooah!' from across the street on my way back from the last entry.

Although a lot of people were wearing Cool Band Shirts, this being a) Wicker Park, and b) a music festival/street fair, I didn't see anybody else get Random Crowd Guy love -- or, wearing a Clash shirt. Just saying.

Centro-Matic pulled it together to produce a really tight "Uncle Tupelo vs. Nebraska" set, after which we left the Fest victorious. That was it for shirt love, as the young lady working the counter at Cooking Fools was barely interested in me as a commercial entity (the watermelon-cucumber-mint Popsicle was mighty tasty, though) much less as a sartorial good-will ambassador for the Only Band That Matters.

Which is certainly her prerogative, but I bet nobody gives her shirt drunken shout-outs from across the street.

So tonight on a lark I hooked up with gnosticpi, voxel, and heathey (to the latter two of whom great thanks for saving us seats) for a free Decemberists concert, backed by the Grant Park Orchestra, at the Pritzker Bandshell in the lovely (and only a wee bit over budget) Millennium Park here in the greatest city in the world.

Now, about that bandshell -- in Frank Gehry's defense, it wasn't his idea initially to lard it up with all those metal curlicues, but Mayor Daley wanted a by-God Frank Gehry bandshell, and that meant curlicues and lots of 'em. So the thing is just hideous from almost every angle -- except, as it happens, from inside, where the worst of the arabesques are hidden by the main shell, and the view through the fretwork runs from the resplendent South Michigan street wall all the way up to the Aon Center, and the internal sight and sound lines are considerably better than the old Petrillo Stage. And the metal works, at least for this show, when the lightning in the west reflected off the stainless steel.

In front of my city, under that steel canopy and lowering cumulo-nimban skies, the setting was first rate. I'm not what you'd call a huge Decemberists fan, although I'm fairly sure I saw their Conan O'Brien debut of "O Valencia!" However, for a band that basically sounds like Richard Butler, backed by Jethro Tull, channeling Robyn Hitchcock, they put on a better-than-fine show, complete with a wave of fat summer rain to cool us off -- and you sure can't beat the price. My favorite piece was "We Both Go Down Together," but they really sold "The Infanta," and I very much liked "Los Angeles I'm Yours" and a wildly grandiloquent "I Was Meant For the Stage." The symphonic backing arrangement was what one expects -- a lot of trips to the Lalo Schifrin well, for example -- but it made the sound real big where it could (as on "Infanta") and surely didn't hurt the rest of it.

That said, the Decemberists encored in fine fettle sans symphony as the skies turned black as a cachalot's throat for a rousing up-tempo "16 Military Wives" and beloved crowd favorite "The Mariner's Revenge Song." A few drops followed us to the bus, where the deluge opened up.

We swam home through the monsoon to eat Ribs 'n' Bibs and watch Anthony Mann's criminally neglected 1949 paranoid noir Reign of Terror (aka The Black Book) and if anyone asks what I did to deserve a life this good, I just have to shrug and say, with the Decemberists, "Was there ever any doubt?"

So tonight, on a perfect June evening in the greatest city on God's green Earth, his_regard, gnosticpi, and myself hit the Park West for an evening with Richard Thompson.

It seems churlish to object to any aspect of an amazing two-and-a-quarter-hour concert spent standing about 15 or 20 feet from one of the greatest guitarists of the last half century, but as my title hints, he didn't play "Shoot Out the Lights." Or "I Feel So Good," but there you go -- as his_regard (to whom many thanks for the ticket, btw) pointed out, he's got a catalog stretching almost literally back to my birth, so they can't all go in.

But he closed (before the two encores) with a version of "Read About Love" that took the radio track back behind the barn and callously shot it in the head, played a heart-stopping "'Dad's Gonna Kill Me" (which struck me, as he described it after the number, as "a pro-anti-war song"), and about a third of the way through he hit us with one of the single greatest musical experiences of my life.

You know how, on the Great Plains, you can walk out in the late afternoon, and suddenly the light in the sky is yanked through a kind of grey-amber filter, and the inside of your skin pulls taut with the pressure drop, and all the sweat on your body shocks into ice-water as the air temperature plummets, and you look to the west and from horizon to horizon there's a low, sullen panzer-armee of thunderheads the color of under-exposed daguerrotypes rolling toward you at sixty miles an hour? And then your neck muscles twitch ferally back as three million years of savanna evolution start listening for startled predators, but hear the first temblors of subsonic thunder?

Well, it turns out what that actually is, is Richard Thompson playing "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" from twenty feet away.

We're pausing the Tour de Lovecraft (don't worry, the next one is "The Moon-Bog," so we're not in any rush to get there) to bring you my gloat about having seen the new super-freak experienza Brand Upon the Brain! by the Winnipeg Wonder, Guy Maddin, on Saturday.

I don't know how many of you are already Guy Maddin fans, although statistically I would have to guess "very few." his_regard and I were won over in 1992 by Careful, a neo-Expressionist movie about a champion butler in a village threatened by avalanches, where nothing may be expressed above a whisper. Since then, we've seen all his subsequent features and one or two of the shorts. Maddin is definitely an acquired taste, so if you don't begin with a taste for German Expressionism, silent film technique, and total full-bore commitment to the bizarre and the Freudian, your first taste of Maddin should probably be the mostly accessible Saddest Music in the World, a relatively conventional narrative about glass-legged beer baroness Isabella Rossellini's contest to find the saddest music in the world. Oh, and there's twisted cross-generational sex narratives, and some of the funniest anti-American sentiment I've ever seen. (Not that that's a particularly high bar, but this is a very funny movie.) So that's the normal one.

I think my favorite Maddin is Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary, a film of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet performing an amazingly faithful, emotional, and suspenseful version of Stoker's novel. It obviously lacks Maddin's signature insane writing touches, but the direction is note-perfect. It's a little too arch in places ("Money! Stolen From ENGLAND!!"), but the audacity of casting a Chinese actor as Dracula is echoed throughout the film's narrative and dramatic choices.

Maddin is also well worth seeing if you're just a fan of film technique. His trademark is filming things after the manner of the 1920s or 1930s -- silent films, or films with popping, badly synched sound, hand-tinted color or two-strip Technicolor, etc.

Anyhow, for this weekend's shows of Brand Upon the Brain! all the sounds we heard were produced right in the theater. There was an 11-piece orchestra performing the score (really good and jittery and cool -- like, oh, maybe early-period Mahler hopped up on reds), Crispin Glover narrating the action live on stage, a castrato (!) named Dov Houle ("the Manitoba Meadowlark" [!!]) singing two solos, and a team of Foley artists producing all the sound effects live. Just an awesome night at the theater, and a great Maddin film to boot.

"Harpist and crime solver Wendy Hale!"

Deep kowtows to his_regard for discovering its show date and hooking me up with a ticket, and gnosticpi for beating us to the theater and saving three seats right behind the sound board, giving us nigh-perfect sight lines for the whole show.

* We interrupt the Tour de Lovecraft to bring you a Smattering of information, opinion, and jolly good fun, starting off with a notice of my newest Out of the Box column being posted, featuring the Indie Game Roundup 2006! Now you, too, can be as cool as the kids who were playing these games last August!

* Yes, I know this isn't working. I have Hopes that Things will change Soon. Or this year at least.

* But enough of that -- myself, mollpeartree, kaynorr, gracefuleigh, voxel, heathey, gnosticpi, and jovianconsensus all went to see 300 on IMAX over St. Patrick's Day weekend (see, it's not just the column that suffers, it's my LJ updates). If you liked the comic book, you'll like the movie. Any criticism you might have had of the comic book will not be addressed to your satisfaction, unless your criticism was "This comic book needed a tacked-on plotline about Leonidas' wife to break tension." I like the observation that I've seen elsewhere, that the movie is the equivalent of a red-figure painting, portraying the battle per a set of artistic conventions -- that's why the Persians have a Rhinophaunt ("he hath as it were the strength of a unicorn: he shall eat up the nations his enemies, and shall break their bones") and a cave troll, and it's why the Spartans are all in ahistorical nekkidness instead of heavy armor. Being less fond of Realism as a project (and more fond of Herodotos as a writer) than some, I can't really get all het up about "was Xerxes a nine-foot Brazilian with bling piercings and a team of transsexual Asians" questions. Nobody who asks that question (usually in a high, quavering voice teetering on the verge of outrage) really thinks anyone is confused about that.

* Speaking of St. Patrick's Day weekend, the real imbibers start at midnight the night before. Just sayin', is all.

* But somehow mollpeartree, myself, gnosticpi, and jovianconsensus had recovered enough by Sunday night to eat Italian pot roast, which was excellent, if I do say so myself. But I will also say this, in letters of fire that Will Be On The Test: The reason to make pot roast is to have leftover pot roast. The pot roast sandwiches on Tuesday were transmendous.

* I should also note that mollpeartree, myself, and his_regard saw Zodiac weekend before last (Gumbo Battle Weekend), and -- although I admit that the year is young, and has gotten off to a rocky cinematic start -- it is pretty much a lock to be in my Top Five movies of 2007. Astonishingly good -- almost fearless -- script, which Fincher rises handily to the level of. Robert Downey Jr., Jake Gyllenhaal, and Mark Ruffalo are only the high points of an almost wastefully overlarded cast of terrific character actors. (Philip Baker Hall? Document expert, in maybe four scenes. Clea Duvall? Prisoner, in one scene. Elias Koteas and Donal Logue? Local law enforcement, possibly five scenes total. Brian Cox? Melvin Belli, in three standout scenes complete with Star Trek shout-out. So very good.) Set and production design is so good that you almost never realize how very very good it is ("Hey, they repainted the newsroom set. To an equally accurate, and equally hideous color scheme. God.") leading to an absolute concrete realism of setting. Perhaps my favorite set-piece in the film was the bravura "calendar pages falling to denote the passage of time" sequence in which the entire Transamerica Pyramid gets built in time-lapse photography to show how long this case drags on. Even the incredibly ham-handed projection at the River East didn't spoil it, possibly because the moment we lost the picture (eventually rewound so we didn't actually wind up missing anything) is the moment the movie pupates from Silence of the Lambs to The Conversation. Such an excellent, excellent movie.

* And in a rare future-looking Smatter, I note that I'm Guest of Honor-ing at ConQuest Sacramento again, over the weekend of April 13-15. It's fun, fun, fun gaming goodness in the 'Mato City, so I hope to see you there. If I can get a few hours of time to figure things out, I may have an alpha version of a new boardgame along.