Fool's Gold Coast

Playlist XIII: Latin Influence

I've slapped together another compilation CD for the BFF. I call this one "Latin Influence" because, well, because the music exhibits a Latin influence. A good many of the songs are of Brazilian extraction, but Brazil counts as Latin, right? I mean, I know the language there is Portuguese instead of Spanish, but it's still a South American country full of brown people speaking a Latin-derived language developed on the Iberian Peninsula, so I say it qualifies.

In any case, the CD's track list follows, and, below that, I've included a link to a Blip playlist that includes most of the music listed so that you can feel what it's like to be my best friend. Olé.

1. "Water to Drink," Victoria Williams
2. "Venus," Ari Brown
3. "Latin from Manhattan/I Got Rhythm," Patti LuPone
4. "Pico de Gallo," Trout Fishing in America
5. "Dance the Night Away," The Mavericks
6. "Fly Me to the Moon," Frank Sinatra and Antonio Carlos Jobim
7. "Spanish Rose," Bye Bye Birdie (original Broadway cast recording)
8. "Bambalele," Audra McDonald
9. "Spanish Flea," Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass
10. "Cuba," Gibson Brothers
11. "Carnavália," Tribalistas
12. "Hasta Luego," Justin Hayford
13. "Gentle Rain," Barbra Streisand

Playlist XIII: Latin Influence

ELSEWHERE:
My short reviews of Tympanic Theatre Company's Bastards of Young and Black Ensemble Theater's The Message Is in the Music are in this week's Chicago Reader.

I Hate Those Meeces to Pieces

I have several recurring dreams because, evidently, my unconscious self has run out of material, too. One of the dreams that recurs most frequently, in one form or another, is the one about the rats

I blame my mother. She has a terrible fear of rodents and did her darnedest to pass it along to my sisters and me. All throughout our childhoods, she impressed upon us the conviction that the worst thing in the whole entire world--worse even than liberals, excessive noise, and leaving your shoes in the middle of the floor--is a mouse. In fact, we weren't even allowed to say the word; we had to substitute it with "shooey"--which wreaks havoc on the rhyme scheme in the opening lines of "'Twas the Night before Christmas," I don't mind telling you. I remember once when one of the poor creatures was found in our house, my mother promptly decamped for the garage, vowing to live in her beetle green Mercedes until the thing's removal, and half-inclined, I think, to sign the house and its contents over right then and there, provided the transaction could be done through lawyers and wouldn't require her meeting the shooey face to face.

Naturally, given this state of affairs, rodents loom large in the psyche. I used to have dreams about mice, but living in an apartment in college that had an uninvited guest (I named him Vito) ultimately helped me to come to terms with that particular brand of critter. Rats, however, continue to give me the willies, and so they have taken over as the star vermin of my nightmares.

Mostly, they do ensemble work--infesting my home, pursuing me in great hordes, that sort of thing--but occasionally there will be a star turn: I will step on one of them as I'm getting out of bed, for example, or one will attempt to gnaw my face off, or, as I dreamed the other night, I'll be locked in a leaky barn with a gigantic specimen intent on infecting me with rabies.

It's most unpleasant, I can assure you, and more than enough to make one wonder what in heaven's name one has to do in order to have one of those nice sex dreams one has heard so much about.

All That Glitters 88

A look at how I've been diverting myself lately.

Books
READ: The Letters of Noël Coward, ed. by Barry Day; The Plot against America by Philip Roth.
COMING UP: books by Samuel Beckett, Alice Munro.

Plays
SAW: Yeast Nation (American Theater Company) [everyone else in the world liked it, but I found the production shrill and the show a rehash of Urinetown, which was written by the same people; also, I don't know what the cast did to the costume designer to deserve ending up, at the end of the show, in merciless pink unitards that would make Kate Moss look lumpy--but it must have been something really bad]; The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, An Epilogue (About Face Theatre).

Movies
SAW: Disgrace, The Stepfather [one of those movies where someone behaves incredibly creepily, but only one person seems to notice].
LAST WEEK'S MOVIE NIGHT PICKS:
THEME: Secret Service.
KITO'S SELECTION: Absolute Power.
MINE: Dave.

Music
BOUGHT: Barbra Streisand, Love Is the Answer.

Current Interests
Social networking media, Philip Roth, the Obamas, lit crit, music, poetry, the World Wars, cubicle life, plays, attractive men, Bill Clinton, tabloid news, Top Chef, my sisters, evangelicals.

Fool's Four
MY LEAST FAVORITE SESAME STREET CHARACTERS:
1. Elmo [natch].
2. Baby Bear.
3. Telly.
4. Bob.

A Foolish Flashback
ONE YEAR AGO: "That's what having a longtime stylist means: he tries to get you to grow your hair out, until you do, at which point he begins trying to convince you to let him chop it all off."

Glitter
Halloween is less than a week away. How about a little something to sharpen your antici . . . pation?

List of Links 33

Found around the Web.

DRAWN TOGETHER: The Trib profiles Matt Groening and Lynda Barry, both of whom will appear at this year's Humanities Festival.

BUT WHERE DO THEY SAY "YOUSE"? A helpful map shows where in the US people say "you guys," "y'all," "you all," and "you" [via Roger Ebert].

LESSON PLANS: What, exactly, does it mean to "teach gay marriage," anyway?

ANIMALS IN PEOPLE CLOTHES: For just $495, you can buy a dead squirrel dressed up to resemble Queen Victoria!
Meanwhile, Huffington Post assembles a gallery of racist Halloween costumes for pets [via Boing Boing].

FRANK DISCUSSION: Barney Frank talks about political marches and running for office and such.

AND FINALLY: A bunch of eggheads attempt to burst Henry V's Agincourt bubble.

B&E

Halloween fast approacheth, which means it's time for the entry in which I fret about the costume I'm going to wear. As of this writing, I haven't the foggiest. Earlier, Kito and I discussed dressing up as gay icons Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street because 1.) Kito looks something like Ernie, and 2.) I have certain qualities in common with Bert--uptightness, a hairy brow, and, though I can't say I share Bert's ardor for paper clips and bottlecaps, I'm certainly not opposed to them (having to draw the line somewhere, however, I cannot support his strongly pro-pigeon stance).

Pulling it off, though, presents a problem. I worry that the costumes we'd put together would either look grotesque (orange and yellow facepaint, finger-in-a-light-socket hair) or dull (striped shirts, slacks). We set the bar rather high last year with our undeniably adorable take on Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and I'd hate for anyone to think we had blown our creative wad.

Better to forego putting together a costume at all than suffer that ignominy.


ELSEWHERE:
My short review of The Right Brain Project's The Modern Prometheus is in this week's Chicago Reader.

Destination: Wedding

Hi, everybody. I've returned from Florida--a day later than planned because, if you must know, I was throwing up on Sunday and didn't feel like sitting on an airplane. The wedding was lovely, though, and--most important--my reading during the ceremony went over like gangbusters. Also, at the rehearsal dinner, I read "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat," which was received well too, once I got past all the pussy in the first stanza. After the third or fourth time I had said the word to only a smattering of nervous laughter, I began to fear I had lost the crowd, but I somehow managed to get them back before the Owl had purchased Piggy-wig's ring, so that by the time the title characters were hand in hand on the edge of the sand and dancing by the light of the moon, the moon, the moon, the audience was entirely in my power.

At the reception, I drank enough red wine to stain my teeth a regal purple and talked for some time to an Australian who, though tiresomely straight, was at least nice to look at, listen to, and lust after. The wine might very well have caused the next day's vomiting, but because I prefer explanations in which I am the victim rather than the cause of bad circumstances, I choose to believe I caught a bug from my three-year-old niece, who had been spewing the contents of her stomach all over the place two days prior.

Unfortunately, she and I were not the only casualties of the weekend. A bridesmaid also succumbed to stomach woes, and, closer to home, my beloved Jack Spade travel bag sustained a tear in the fabric at some point during my travels back home.

Still: rips, bugs, pussies, unseasonably chilly weather (did I mention that?), and straight Australians notwithstanding, it really was a lovely wedding, I promise.


WHILE I WAS OUT:
My review of Lookingglass Theatre Company's Fedra: Queen of Haiti appeared in last week's Chicago Reader.

List of Links 32

Tomorrow I leave for Florida to attend my youngest sister's wedding (at the ceremony, I'll be reading this, not this). I'll be there 'til Sunday; new entries won't appear here until after I return to Chicago. Here are some links that should keep you occupied for the first five minutes or so of my absence. After that, you're on your own.

WELL, WHY NOT?: Bob Dylan sings about Santa Claus.

YOU PUT IN OTHER DETAILS: In a letter from 1957, a little boy offers rocket scientists his adorable ideas on spacecraft design.

STUCK AT ZERO: Martin Filler examines the lack of progress on Ground Zero architectural projects.

RESOLUTELY BRITISH: In a review of Piven Theatre's Two by Pinter, Nina Metz makes a point I strongly agree with: "If nothing else, Pinter's work is resolutely British, so it is not clear why director Joyce Piven (the company's founder) has her actors forgo English accents. I suppose no accent is better than a bad accent -- but Pinter's argot tends to sound impossibly arch without the proper context."

THINGS I DONE WROTE: One year ago: "She asked me if I wanted to read a story to her students. I complied with what I thought was a fairly riveting interpretation of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie."
Two years ago: 1.) "[duh, duh-duh, duh, duh, duh, duh]
Go, Northwestern, go!"
2.) "The problem, I said, is that 'books are static, but the self is not, so rereading a book necessarily involves confronting change.'"

AND FINALLY: A song that I hope is not, under the circumstances, apropos:

Have a lovely weekend and I'll see you on Monday.

A New World

Yesterday was Columbus Day, so of course there was much talk among the dirty liberals in my cohort about imperialism and decimation of natives and incomprehensible post office closings, but I thought the best remark of the day came from a Columbus Day supporter. One of Kito's co-workers pointed out that for all the land-grabbing and Indian-killing that followed Columbus's Dominican vacation, at least one good thing came from the introduction of Europeans to the Western Hemisphere: the invention of Latinos.

I say: hear, hear. Maybe you're okay with the idea of living in a world without Ricky Martin, Chita Rivera, and my boyfriend, but I, for one, am not.

Fore!

Ultimately, when it comes right down to it at the end of the day when all is said and done, I guess I oppose circumcision. I find from experience that most American men of my generation are--in chat room parlance--cut (trust me: I have seen quite a few of the penises of my generation), and my own American penis is no exception. This has little bearing on the matter, however, because had I been consulted, I feel fairly certain I would have objected obstreperously to the procedure--provided, of course, my infant self could have somehow been made to understand what was going on and give voice to his concerns. The point is: nobody asked me before they started slicing and dicing my most sensitive and beloved body part, and I just don't think that's right.

Besides--and far be it from me to criticize anyone's parenting or religious choices--but you have to admit that the practice of mutilating a child's genitalia is, regardless of whether you support it, a teensy bit gross. I mean, at least the Jews have the excuse that God ordered them to do it so that the sons of Abraham would be differentiated from other tribes (why other tribes were apparently looking up Abraham's robe all the time is another matter entirely). We goyim, however, don't even have the ancient holy directive to justify our butchery. Many of us actually choose it for our children for some unfathomable reason. I mean, of all the things to steal from Judaism, why couldn't we steal something good? Like musical theater? Or a decent deli?

I know what you're thinking. "But Zac," you snivel, "I find foreskin unsightly and vaguely unsettling. If I decide to let my son keep his, won't there be hygiene issues? How will he pee? How will he have sex? Is he at greater risk of contracting STDs? Will people think he's anti-Semitic? Will he have to learn a European language? And, most importantly, what. about. the SMELL?"

And to you I say: how the hell should I know? What am I, your own personal penis expert? Do your own damn dick research for once.

Seek and Ye Shall Find 43

Addressing your recent search engine queries.

hornyoldladies
Here.

hedy weiss photo
Go nuts.

Interior sainte chapelle
rodin sculpture balzac
Done and done.
(Those are my own photos, by the way. And if you'd like to see more pictures from my trip to Paris, that can be arranged.)

taking the newspaper into a restroom
Even cartoon reptiles do it!

fool's gold coast
These days it's basically this.

ELSEWHERE:
My short reviews of Theater Oobleck's An Apology for the Course and Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on This His Final Evening and Chicago Children's Theatre's The Hundred Dresses are in this week's Chicago Reader.