A Subdued Cub Fan's Last Request

i suppose I should talk about the Cubs a bit here.

I'm a long-time fan of the Cubs, but I tend not to get overly excited about sports, so something like a Van Morrison concert will put me into a state of frenzy normally reserved for division-clinching.

A year ago I could barely watch the Cubs in the playoffs, too pissed off at them for being a crappy, crappy team for too long. I had spent the last ten years or so flirting with the Red Sox, and just couldn't bring myself to get excited about a team I knew would collapse and fail in the playoffs. (And they did.)

Over the winter I softened a bit, and my roving eye came home to the Cubs. Watched a ton of games this summer, had a lot of fun with the Cubs/Sox mutual sweeps during summer theatre, even bought myself a new cap. And I don't buy stuff like that very often. Just not me.

Tomorrow I'll gather 'round the TV with some family and we'll watch Game 1. And I'll be more excited than I am right now. Right now the White Sox are playing, and I'm trying to figure out if i want them to win or lose. It's quite the existential crisis.

I think I want the Sox to win, because this has been going on all season long. Both teams were in first for most of the season, both teams swept the other at their ballparks. Some of my family and friends are Cubs fans, some are Sox fans.

So if the Sox win tonight, we get to keep this going for a bit longer, and maybe all the way to the Series.

If the Sox lose, well, it's because they fucking suck.

UPDATED: Sox won. Two Chicago baseball teams in the playoffs. Awesome.

If I ventured in the slipstream...

Holyshitholyshitholyshitholyshit!

Van Morrison To Deliver a Complete 'Astral Weeks' Concert

If you know me, if you've known me at least for the past ten years, then you know that this is my favorite album of all time. I've fallen in love over this album, bonded in friendship over this album, and written a play partly inspired by this album.

When I'm happiest, I listen to this album, and when I'm at my lowest, I listen to this album.

I pine for the long-rumored remastered edition more often than I do for the long-delayed remastered Beatles albums.

When the Duders and I went north this summer, all we did is listen to Van on the long drive to Door County.

Lester Bangs wrote a brilliant essay on this album, which I read to my Heroes and Villains cast in order to get them in the proper mind-set of the story I was trying to tell.

Just today I was listening to the last three tracks on Into the Music over and over and over again, because I was in a mood, and it helped.

I could tell other stories about this album, but they're personal.

Goddamn. I think I would rather see this concert than watch the Cubs win the World Series.

I have to figure out how to go to this show. In California. At the Hollywood Bowl.

Tickets go on sale this weekend. Wish me luck.

Dave DaVinci and other Theatrical Endeavors

The House Theatre went back and redid some things with their 2005 show Dave DaVinci Saves the Universe, and it's now the opener of their three-show season. They just moved into a new space at The Chopin Theatre in Wicker Park, have a larger budget, and seem to have moved into a more organized and professional phase of their theatrical life.

The show was great, although a bit more ambiguous this time 'round. I won't go into details, if by chance you, the reader, decide to go see it (you should.) But it deals with a scientist who creates a time machine and tries to go back and prevent the suicide of his teenage daughter. The show had a proper set this time (as opposed to the green foam minimalist-thing they had originally), a melancholy theme by Kevin O'Donnell, and a reworked supporting cast.

I have to give credit to a group who places their biggest star from their biggest show in a cosmic-bear suit for the first act of the show. You don't see that too often.


The day was also spent working on a future kids' show that another Limelight director and I are putting together. Sort of a workshop, sort of a show. Something to do with books, the ones that every generation reads when they're a kid. And something to do with that moment when you realize that your childhood is about to come to an end, or at least a version of it.

We'd had trouble coming up with much in the way of a story (we wanted this to be a fairly original work), and tried to find inspiration here and there, but nothing was clicking. But as we were wandering the aisles of the kids' lit section of the Borders on Michigan Ave., I had an idea.

Of course I'm not going to tell you my idea, as it's still rough, and is probably too influenced by other stories right now. I will say this: it involves Nancy Drew and Christopher Robin in a meta-mystery kind of way.

I told myself I was going to take a break from writing for a while, but this could be fun. To be continued...

Harvest

It's been warm here, in the low 80s for most of the week. Last of the warm weather, before fall really begins on Sunday when a cold front moves in.

Chased after a harvest moon last week, trying to get a great shot. This was all I came up with.


Last weekend brought the annual Big Rock Plowing Match. Started by Welsh farmers over a hundred years ago, it used to be a farm progress show, which showcased the latest in farm implements. Now it's a throwback ritual, a place where antique tractors (and the occasional shiny Korean model) strut their stuff for a few hours. People take pictures, mill around and say hello to each other, and then go eat pork chops and corn dogs before heading home.

It's a lovely day, and something that I'm glad to attend every year.

My two cousins, Ben and Jake, both plowed this year. They spend most of their days and nights as college students in central Illinois, but each year at least one of them is sure to plow in the BRPM. My Uncle Bob plowed on Sunday, but as the outcome of the event is of little importance, I haven't found out if anyone placed. It's more about doing it, then winning it. Keeping the tradition going.

Bob kept pestering me to do it someday, but I don't think I could. I used to work for my cousin Jerry, and know my way around a small A or B or 4020, but I wonder if I have the necessary skills. It's been too long, and I would feel like I was pretending too much.

The day was great, not only for the company of family, but because the Cubs clinched that day, for the second year in a row. (It's been a hundred years since they clinched a playoff spot two years in a row. This actually bodes well for us.)

Even though my Uncle Doug has a nice widescreen HD TV, we ended up watching the last inning in the kitchen, all huddled together, because we seem to prefer being together in the kitchen. I wondered if all familiies were like that, or if it was just indicative of us. Gram thought it was a farmer thing, and she might have been on to something.

More pictures on Flickr. Just hit the fancy new tab at the top of the page.

Break's Over

Aaron Sorkin wrote up a fictional exchange between the fictional President Bartlet and the potential real President Obama for Maureen Dowd's column in the New York Times. Here's an excerpt:

BARTLET: Well ... let me think. ...We went to war against the wrong country, Osama bin Laden just celebrated his seventh anniversary of not being caught either dead or alive, my family’s less safe than it was eight years ago, we’ve lost trillions of dollars, millions of jobs, thousands of lives and we lost an entire city due to bad weather. So, you know ... I’m a little angry.

OBAMA: What would you do?

BARTLET: GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that’s what they are. Sarah Palin didn’t say “thanks but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said “Thanks.” You were raised by a single mother on food stamps — where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you’re at it, I want the word “patriot” back. McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn’t know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can’t do both at the same time and call it patriotic. They have to lie — the truth isn’t their friend right now. Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it. McCain decried agents of intolerance, then chose a running mate who had to ask if she was allowed to ban books from a public library. It’s not bad enough she thinks the planet Earth was created in six days 6,000 years ago complete with a man, a woman and a talking snake, she wants schools to teach the rest of our kids to deny geology, anthropology, archaeology and common sense too? It’s not bad enough she’s forcing her own daughter into a loveless marriage to a teenage hood, she wants the rest of us to guide our daughters in that direction too? It’s not enough that a woman shouldn’t have the right to choose, it should be the law of the land that she has to carry and deliver her rapist’s baby too? I don’t know whether or not Governor Palin has the tenacity of a pit bull, but I know for sure she’s got the qualifications of one. And you’re worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!

The full column can be found here.

I recognize the absurdity of finding wisdom in a made-up conversation between the fake Bartlet and the real (but fake in this context) Obama, but it's still interesting nonetheless. And it does boggle my mind how this race can still be more or less a dead heat.

More on that later, maybe.

EDIT: It's several months after this column, and I still have no idea if Sorkin wrote that, or if it was just Dowd being creative.

Looking Ahead

I'm currently in Week Three of a chest infection, which hasn't slowed me down too much. Didn't want to take a sick day during the first weeks of school, and so I've been lumbering around like Val Kilmer in Tombstone, doing my best Doc Holliday impression. (Damn, that guy was the same age as me when he died.)

The students don't really get it when you hack up phlegm and say things like "Johnny Tyler! The madcap!" or "Frederich fucking Chopin." Okay, I didn't really say any of that. I have been in line to win the Douche Bag of the Year award for busting out a lame Dr. Evil impression, only because one of our vocabulary words was "magma," and it was really their fault, since one of them started it. But yeah, that's probably the real reason I teach fifth grade: a place to do painfully-outdated impressions of worn-out phrases.

But anyway, the next couple of weeks should be good: a new(ish) show by The House Theatre; The Graveyard Book comes out on the 30th; and I'll be attending a reading by Gaiman himself at the Tivoli Theatre in Downers Grove on October 2nd. They're playing Stardust afterwards.

I'm a huge fan of Gaiman, but the movie adaptation of Stardust kind of blew. Massively. So we'll see if I stick around for that.

And then after that, one, possibly two weekend road trips. More to come on that later...

Sewer-cidal Tendencies

I sometimes have this irrational fear that I'm going to drop my keys down a sewer grate. Whenever I'm walking to my car, and I have my keys out, I'll grip them extra-tight and look around to make sure there aren't any grates around. I drop my keys every now and then, and one of these days, I keep thinking to myself, they're going to drop right down into the murky, unreachable depths below. Or worse, I'm going to subliminally loosen my grip on them just to see if it'll actually happen.

I could solve this problem by not having my keys out until I'm actually at my car door, but I'm impatient and I want to save time. Plus I now have one of those automated door-unlock fobs, and I like to see how far away it'll work.