Sunday, June 26, 2005

just one thing

Victory is mine, victory is mine, bring me the finest milkshakes in the land, victory is mine...

Posted by Rory @ 01:31 AM CST [Link]

Saturday, June 25, 2005

domestic comfort

This is actually my first post to this site from home. For years my only Internet access was at work, and I've just gotten used to it. Now it's Saturday, I'm mostly naked and lying in bed and writing, which is how it should be. If that image offends you I refuse to apologize. Which is what poor Dick Durbin should have done in the face of the right wing onslaught but sadly, he did what he felt he had to do. A mistake I think, but I don't judge him for it. I'm glad Barack is much too smooth to get himself into this kind of situation. The great Chicago columnist Eric Zorn wrote what Durbin should have said here:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ericzorn/weblog/archives/2005/06/what_dick_durbi.html

But I think he should just have quoted what Homer Simpson once said. "I'm very sorry...Sorry you're such jerks!"

I think that would have applied.

Tonight, there will be a play festival featuring one of my plays. I'm strangely not that excited, despite having sent an obnoxious number of e-mails on the subject. I just hope it's good.

Posted by Rory @ 09:50 AM CST [Link]

Monday, June 20, 2005

This week marks my third anniversary with my desk job. Three years! Three years since “I’ll go temp somewhere for the rest of the summer”. Three long, fruitless, meaningless years. More than ten percent of my life. A man of my talents should spend his days supping with kings and re-drawing the maps of the boundaries of human knowledge, not processing tuition vouchers so some jackass can go get his McMBA from the Kellogg School of Management.

This is the same lament of millions of cubicle monkeys, except in my case it’s absolutely true. A lot of things have been irritating me about the job lately, one of the more amusing, and horrible: My friend Marc who had been working here several months, departed, pretty much voluntarily. This is all well and good, but he sat right behind me, and the person who has taken his place in that cubicle is a Complete Idiot Woman who has also temped here many months, and screwed up everything she touched. And evidently they’ve *promoted* her! And given her my friend’s desk! This is a deliberate insult!

This, among other things, has sent me into the periodic spiral where I desperately want to get another job, but I don’t know what that theoretical other job is. Marc and I talked about it and he feels, despite being a well regarded wordsmith, that the biggest problem in landing a new job is writing a cover letter. This is because cover letters are by nature false. You have to say why you’d be excited to work at their company, when in fact your motives are purely mercenary. I am all about dispensing with falsehood. I am in a ninja/samurai mode because of Batman Begins (which was totally fucking sweet) and the House Theatre’s Curse of the Crying Heart, which I finally saw after people have been raving about to me for what seems like years, and was in fact, also as totally fucking sweet as had been promised. Because of this mood, I believe that the best possible cover letter would consist of these words: I am Ronin.

I would totally hire someone with that cover letter.

My roommate (one of the House Theatre’s biggest boosters) discovered yesterday that a trellus growing outside our back porch contains a mother bird, and a grapevine. So…there’s still whimsy in the world, or something.

Posted by Rory @ 02:45 PM CST [Link]

Friday, June 17, 2005

don't fuck with my state

Apparently Illinois Senator Dick Durbin is the current target of right wing wrath, because he indicated that he has less than a “They are heroes and I would give them blowjobs” attitude towards Our Troops when they engage in torture. Note that he didn’t even say that he would refrain from giving blowjobs to American soldiers who don’t engage in torture. I mean seriously, U.S. servicemen, it’s not such a horrible offer: Don’t torture prisoners, and get blowjobs from Senator Dick Durbin.

Usually when these fascist jackanapes launch their tightly coordinated attacks on other people it’s maddening enough, but this is personal. Durbin’s one of my boys. I’ve met him and he’s very nice in person.

I’ve always liked Senator Durbin, although it seems that in the last year, he’s been even more likable and in the spotlight, partially because he’s the new Democratic Whip in the Senate but also I suspect, the one man rock opera that is Barack Obama being his junior partner has made him step up his game. Not out of jealousy but out of genuine inspiration.

Rush Limbaugh thinks Durbin should resign, I think Limbaugh should resign. What is his job anyway, being an idiot? Walk into any saloon in Chicago at 2pm, you’ll find lots of people being idiots, possibly including my uncle Gerald, for free. The right wing machine should adopt the free market principles they claim to defend and put a microphone in my uncle’s mouth for three hours a day, they’ll wind up with even quirkier material and they can give him one beer a day instead of twenty million dollars a year.

Any of these thugs wanna say something about Durbin in my presence, they get punched in the mouth. Or at least unpleasantly tickled.

I saw Barack on TV the other night. I hadn’t seen him in a while. I miss that guy.

I’m going to Gotham City tonight, everyone says it’s dangerous there, but rumor has it that if you’re in trouble there, there’s this guy who has your back…

Posted by Rory @ 11:48 AM CST [Link]

Monday, June 13, 2005

Highway 57

Just got back from merry old Champaign. A good time, somehow wound up feeling too short, maybe because entirely too much was taken up by Lord of the Rings Risk, a board game I really enjoyed…for the first few hours, until I stopped caring at 4AM, and sleepily admonished my friends that we all need to meet some more girls. They continued to play until 5.

But it was a great twenty four hour period, I must go down again soon.

This webpage, once said to be “unstoppable” feels disappointingly stoppable recently. We’ll talk later okay?

Posted by Rory @ 01:08 PM CST [Link]

Friday, June 10, 2005

Ted

I have a co-worker named Ted. Ted is kind of creepy. Like a large portion of my office, he's an aspiring artistic type, an actor. He was trying to get into a short film recently, "a comedy about male sex addicts", and he wanted to play the part of a porn store owner named "Smarmy Sam".

Ted is kind of creepy.

Posted by Rory @ 11:32 AM CST [Link]

Wednesday, June 8, 2005

what I feel

I feel I should write some things, to keep the base engaged. Unfortunately, at the moment I got nothing.

Other than...I cut my Dark Knight script down to a shorter length last night and...uh...that's about it. Having spent a decent enough portion of my life writing plays and then producing and directing, or at least co-directing them, it's very odd to hand one over to someone else and not really have anything to do with it until it's performed. So much of a show'squality depends on the people you cast, and this script, being a horror piece, has so much potential for cheese that if it doesn't have a good director who puts together a good cast, it could be kind of terrible. I must let go.

Uh, yeah, I just ate an apple. I like apples. Actually I ate it while I was typing the above, showing my impressive ability to multi-task. Apparently my friends Marc and Rob and I are taking a trip down to our beloved college town of Champaign this weekend, and will presumably see friend Henry, Erin and webmaster/regular correspondent Kurt Touhy. So that's really cool.

Did I mention I ate an apple?

Yeah?

I'm boring you aren't I?

Sorry.

I'll be going now.

Posted by Rory @ 02:24 PM CST [Link]

Monday, June 6, 2005

Woo? Woo!

2005, The Year My Enemies Fall Before Me has reached its midpoint, and my enemies are falling so fast and so furiously there is a very real possibility that I will trip over them. But I am deft and cunning and that has not happened.

What has happened is that the short play I submitted to the Dark Knight Gallery has been accepted, and will be performed on June 25. This rocks. It’s just cool because it’s someone other than me or my friends who wants to produce my work, and that’s never quite happened before. It’s a sign that objective people think I’m a good playwright. You know, unlike the Chicago Reader.

So I’m happy. Only six plays were selected. Of course, maybe they only got like, eight submissions. But whatever, I’m happy.

There were probably more than eight submissions. But maybe not. I’m happy.

Anyway, they ask for a shortened version, ten to fifteen minutes long, then the audience votes on the top three, which get a full production at some point. So having people in the audience is obviously to my advantage. But I would want everyone to vote their conscience. And I would want everyone to genuinely think I wrote the best play. It’s June 25, at the UIC Theatre. More details surely to come.

I’m being produced! Woo!

Posted by Rory @ 12:55 PM CST [Link]

Thursday, June 2, 2005

That's deep

You know, I always thought that finding out who Deep Throat was would actually mean something to me, but as it turns out, I feel nothing.

Have I grown so cold?

Not so much that I’m not amused that the right wing talking point on this matter, is that he was a traitor, who, by bringing down Nixon, was directly responsible America losing the Vietnam war, and the subsequent genocide in Cambodia.

Wow. To think an actor of Hal Holbrook’s stature ever agreed to play such a horrible person…

It is now June, which means many things, primarily that it’s now been over a year since I’ve made out with two girls at once. Why is that at all relevant? It’s not, but it’s important to note it every so often. I don’t want anyone to forget that in May of 2004, I made out with two girls at once. Or if you didn’t know, now you do! And knowledge is a good thing to have.

Yes, I am a very sad man, but I can admit it.

I had a fairly disturbing dream last night (not exactly a nightmare, those usually wake me up which this didn’t) I was a young rookie cop in this dream (I did once, rather whimsically, apply to become a Chicago police officer) and I discovered, along with a bunch of older cops who told me I wouldn’t be able to handle it, but of course I went in anyway, a room full of corpses. Related to a crazy cult or something. Then, over the next couple of days, there was a funeral held in the very spot where they were discovered, the dream logic apparently not taking decomposition into consideration. The whole thing made everyone very sad. Not scared or anything, as I would think a cult killing dozens of people would tend to make people, just sad. A couple of my real life friends were in the funeral somewhere, oddly enough one of them was performing an improv scene, because in my dream, improv scenes were normal at big funerals.

Make what you will of that.

I’m almost at an end of the two Shakespeare recordings that I’m acting in and my roommate is producing. Much Ado About Nothing has been one of my favorite comedies since I was a teen, and John the Bastard is a great role, although I’ve also discovered how hilarious Antony and Cleopatra is. In that one I get to play Lepidus, who was a major figure in Roman history, as a merry drunkard. The greatest line in history: “What manner o’ thing is your crocodile?” And of course, I’m working with great people, especially Kelly Hoogenaker, who is the greatest actress on the North American continent who reads this blog.

On the writing front, I’ve not heard anything from the people who solicited the dark and scary plays. Which means they probably don’t want my play in which case they’re horrible and are responsible for genocide in Cambodia.

I printed out the big one, Activision, and I’ve been reading it in an attempt to figure out why it sucks, and how to make it not suck. Too many themes and subplots that aren’t properly realized, and I’m not sure what to cut and what to re-emphasize. I’ll figure something out though. I’m fairly good at writing plays. And anyone who says otherwise caused Saigon to fall.

Posted by Rory @ 01:05 PM CST [Link]