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December 30, 2004
Sketchfest: delegation rocks
Ben Taylor is emailing me a "bump" right now to intro a scene of the show. And Kittyloaf made good purchases at Joann's. And I'm about to meet Shaun at Strange Cargo to start a whirlwind prop and costume-buying tour.
Posted by Fuzzy at 3:40 PM | Comments (0)
A good meal: Hopleaf
originally posted on Metroblogging Chicago
On Sunday when we got back from Mississippi we were waiting for our luggage at Midway and Erica and I displayed the frightening trend we've had lately for thinking the same thing at the same time. "I was thinking we could drop my stuff off at my house and then go eat at..." "Hopleaf!" "Yeah!"
Hopleaf is right around the corner from Erica's house so we were eating there a lot in the fall and drinking a lot of lambics (Belgian fruit beers). For a long time the Hopleaf has been known for their wide selection of beers (a half-a-jillion on tap, all served in specialized glassware) but I was always put off from visiting because the bar was a tiny, loud smoke-filled room. But fairly recently they greatly expanded the bar and added an upstairs and a smoke-free dining area in the back.
On Sunday night the front room was, as always, tiny, loud and smoke-filled. But the back room was quiet, with plenty of open tables. We decided to take a detour from our usual lambics to try one of the drinks under the "warmers" section of the menu. We got a bottle of Quelque Chose, a cherry beer from Canada that's served warm. Tart and sweet and warming.
I usually get the ham-and-cheese sandwich, which comes with frites, but Sunday I decided to branch out on the menu and get the porkchop and Erica got the roast chicken. Neither came with frites, so we got them as a side. You have to have frites!
Erica's chicken wasn't perfect -- a great flavor and moist, but a little tough. My porkchop, though, was great. Super thick and seared on the outside, but tender and flavorful all the way through.
Our Quelque Chose ran out just as we were getting our entrees, so we decided to try the other item in the "warmers" section: glögg. Where the Quelque Chose (and most other items on the menu) had an extensive description, glögg was simply listed as "glögg -- served in a cup". But we've both been living near Andersonville for years we knew glögg was some kind of Scandinavian mulled wine and we figured it was time to try it.
We had a little surprise when the glögg came to the table -- most of the drinks at the Hopleaf are served in glassware from the brewery that is somehow precisely designed to exhance the characteristics of that drink. The glögg came in a wide and shallow punch glass, like you might get at a church function. The bigger surprise came we took our first sip and we discovered that glögg was rocketfuel. 19% alcohol and made with grain alcohol, it turns out.
I don't know if it had really warmed up while we were inside Hopleaf, or if it was the glögg, but I didn't wear my hat or gloves when we left the bar and I felt toasty.
Erica says, "Love the Hopleaf. Love the lambics. Nice back dining room with no smoke."
Posted by Fuzzy at 2:46 PM | Comments (0)
A good meal: La Fonda
originally posted on Metroblogging Chicago
I'm going to play a little catch-up here on some good meals I've had lately, working my way back in time:
Last night we finally got to La Fonda when they were still open. La Fonda is about halfway between my house and Erica's, so we pass it all the time, but often late at night and we gaze longingly at the menu in the window. We've even made it in the door only to be turned away because the kitchen had just closed. But last night, we made it inside. Score.
La Fonda is sort of pan-Latino, with an emphasis on plantains. But damn, those plantains were good. We had the Milanesa de cerdo, which was a breaded and fried porkloin served with plantains and a chicken tostada which replaced the usual corn tortilla with a deep fried green plantain. Crunchy, crispy, tender meat and just-sweet-enough plantains.
Erica says, "The plantains and pork were great. Much more flavorful than I expected. And not too pricey."
Posted by Fuzzy at 2:37 PM | Comments (0)
Illinois in Mississippi
Over at the Chicago Metblog, I just posted a short piece with a couple of photos I took of the Illinois monument at the Vicksburg National Military Park.
Posted by Fuzzy at 1:41 PM | Comments (0)
Illinois in Mississippi
originally posted on Metroblogging Chicago
For Christmas Erica and I went down to Vicksburg, Mississippi to visit her family. I was glad to be getting out of slashing-winds-off-the-lake Chicago for a week in the balmy south. Of course, a cold front blew across the south minutes (literally) after our plane landed so it was in the 30°s and overcast the whole time we were there (until the afternoon we were leaving, when it was sunny and 50°. Shake-fist-at-Southern-sky.)
No trip to Vicksburg would be complete with a trip to the Vicksburg Military Park. In the summer of 1863 one of the decisive battles of the Civil War was fought for control of Vicksburg and in turn the Mississippi River. The land the battle was fought on became a cemetery for the 17,000 Union casualties and, in 1899, a national park. The legislation creating the park allowed any State that had troops in the battle to erect monuments in honor of those troops. Many States took advantage of this and the park is one of the most monumented battlefields in the world (1,324!).
Many of the monuments are this size. This one is the first monument you encounter as you drive through the gates of the park and the words "Chicago Mercantile" fairly leapt out at me. The Chicago Mercantile Battery was an artillery unit organizied by a group of prominent Chicago merchants.
In addition to the dozens of monuments to individual units from Illinois, there's a prominent monument in honor of all 36,325 Illinois soldiers who fought in the battle.
The monument is modeled after the Roman Pantheon and has 47 steps, one of each day of the Siege of Vicksburg. Erica tells me that it's often used for local high school choir, band, etc. photos. It amused me to think of generations of Vicksburg students with a steathly "Illinois" hiding in the back of their class photos.
Posted by Fuzzy at 1:40 PM | Comments (0)
Sketchfest: non-rehearsal
I can show you the emails where Shaun said, "I can rehearse any night this week except Wednesday." So I made a date with my lovely girlfriend. And when Shaun came home at 8 pm and said, "so, you want to rehearse now?" I said, "nope". And went out and got some dinner.
This is not to say that progress is not being made. One of the scenes in the show is adapted from a scene we improvised in a show at the Toronto Improv Fest a few years ago. At one point in the scene Shaun turned on a "radio" and the pianist who was accompanying us began playing Stairway to Heaven and it ended up becoming a central part of the scene. So Shaun commissioned Liz to record a solo piano version of Stairway. After some back and forth in which we discovered that although we said we wanted a John Tesh sound, what we were really asking for was a Jim Brickman sound, Liz just delivered four different versions of the song.
Kittyloaf has been having rougher going with the leather jackets. She says that she has now done enough research that she knows how to make us Dice Rules-style jackets, for pretty cheap. Just not before the show. Evidently, every leather supplier in the U.S. closes for inventory at the end of the year and then takes a generous New Year's holiday. So she and I did some brain storming on the phone last night and now we're looking at a stop-gap featuring silver lamé, christmas lights, and rubber cement.
Posted by Fuzzy at 9:59 AM | Comments (2)
December 29, 2004
By the way, come see the show
So, I'm talking all about the process of putting together this show we're doing at Sketchfest because that's one of things I do here at FuzzyCo -- give you a peek behind the curtain of what it takes to produce a show. But I realized that I want to emphasize that I'd really like you to come see this show. I'm proud of what we've put together in a fairly short amount of time and this level of spectacle (a cast of 15! dancers! a cat!) is going to be a one-time deal, not to be repeated.
Bare at Chicago Sketchfest
Sunday, January 9, 5:30 pm
(with Rhythm Method)
Theatre Building Chicago
1225 W Belmont
$12 (Ticketmaster)
I see that I have a small stack of postcards that will get you $2 off the ticket price (so ask if you run into me), or that you can download a PDF of the coupon.
Posted by Fuzzy at 1:26 AM | Comments (0)
Sketchfest - rehearsals
Living in the same house as your performance partner can be a double-edged sword. On the one edge, we're very familiar with each other's rhythms and thought-processes, which makes us really comfortable with each other on stage. On the other edge, it can be really difficult to stay focussed for meetings and rehearsals, because we're in our house, which doesn't feel as special as a rehearsal in a separate space (and it's where all our toys are).
Last night we actually had a great meeting/rehearsal (though Shaun did have to yell at me a few times not to go check my phone's text messages). We made a big list of all the props and costume pieces we still need to get (and it's a big list) and made some progress on the sound cues for the show. And then we did a complete read-through of the show (doing funny voices for the parts of the other people in the show) both to start getting familiar with the script and to get a sense of the timing of the show. It looks like we're right on with the time -- about half an hour for the whole show (which is good since that's how much time we get).
Then tonight we were supposed to rehearse, but our friend Karl was in town so Erica and I took him out to dinner at Moody's and drank a pitcher of sangria, and when we finally got back to the apartment, Shaun and Jin were there watching 007 Days of Xmas and we all got sucked in and before I knew it it was 10:30.
But then Shaun said "Hey, let's do a quick read-through" and we went into the kitchen and read through the script. And Jin came in near the end, which is where his big scene is, so he got to read it with Shaun and I got to do a little "this is how I visualize the blocking of this scene, you move over here and when you get to the end of this line, just shuffle over to him here". And I was a little surprised -- yesterday when we read through the script I could tell it was reasonably funny, but it didn't seem hilarious. Tonight we started recovering our natural rhythms, instead of just reading the words off the page as though they had been written by strangers. And, gosh darnit, if it doesn't seem pretty funny to me now.
And Erica did find some great plastic samurai swords at Uncle Fun for a buck a piece. Score!
Posted by Fuzzy at 12:49 AM | Comments (0)
December 28, 2004
Sketchfest - costumes
Erica is headed to Uncle Fun this afternoon to find a ninja sword that won't actually kill Shaun when I stick him with it.
And Kittyloaf seems to be having some problems with the jackets. Which I blame on me, for not getting her the jackets earlier.
Posted by Fuzzy at 2:34 PM | Comments (0)
December 24, 2004
And again
I walked into the room tonight while Erica's mom was reading the last post. A potentially endless vortex of posting about reading about posting about reading about...
And I sent Tony a picture of me reading his book and he posted it and linked to me and I'm linking to him and around it goes.
There was BBQ today. A little too much -- we had it for lunch and I'm still having BBQ burps.
And we were finally in a place today where Erica's dad said, "This is what Vicksburg is like." Gingerbread lattes and model trains that run around the ceiling, evidently.
Saw a hundred things today that if I were by myself I'd pull over and take a picture of. But I was not by myself and I wasn't driving so I just watched them go by outside the car window.
I guess we left a mess of weather back up in the midwest. Kate couldn't make it home to Ohio because all the flights were canceled.
And there's probably a couple dozen of the many, many who read Tony's site who will have clicked over here because, hey, why not, and here's my one chance to impress them with how cool I write and I'm going all cheese-sandwich. But that's where I am today -- just grabbing five minutes by myself (Erica's family is great, and I'd say that even if Erica's mom wasn't going to read this tomorrow (vortex!), but I spent alllllll day with them and there's just a limit, you know) to chill out. So, hey.
Posted by Fuzzy at 12:23 AM | Comments (0)
December 22, 2004
That was weird
I had just hit -publish- on that last one and Erica and her mom came into the office and said, "whatcha doing?" and I said, "taking care of some sketchfest stuff and doing a little bloggy" and Erica's mom said, "oh, did you put something new on your website? I always read your website." And they stood over a shoulder each and read the post. Instant audience.
Posted by Fuzzy at 9:44 PM | Comments (0)
M-I-S-S-I-S-S...
Hey y'all from Mississippi. I'm in the land of dial-up here, so I'll keep this fast because I'm keeping the phone busy while I'm typing this. But I'm reading Tony Pierce's How to Blog, which is totally putting me in the mood to type fast and think later.
Erica's parents picked us up in Jackson and we went out to eat at a place that did everything as a variation of gyros (which is to say that all their sammichs were wrapped in pita bread) with lots of outdoor seating, vaguely mediterrean decor, etc. I was just starting to think, "so this is what Jackson is like," when Erica's dad said, "this place doesn't feel like Jackson at all." We did a whirl-wind, drive-by of the places Erica lived and worked when she lived in Jackson and then drove home to Vicksburg.
Did someone have a sale on monuments or what?
And straight off to a memorial for the father of one of Erica's friends. He's a great guy (Erica's friend) but this is only the third time I've seen him. Better circumstances could certainly be found. But he really is great (Erica's friend) and at the point in the memorial when the pastor asked for people to get up and share their memories and nobody was for a minute I thought of standing up and saying, "I'm just the friend of a friend of the son of this man, but if the father had a tenth of the generousity and friendliness of the son he raised, then he was a great man." But then, thank goodness, some actual friend of the father stood up and got things started and I didn't force myself on these strangers. And I got all misty-eyed during "Lord of the Dance" (well, I always did like that hymn -- those Shakers sure could write catchy tunes).
And batter fries and black-eyes peas for dinner. Could there be BBQ in Fuzzy's future this trip? And Erica's parents got some Stewart's Key Lime soda for me! What sweeties.
Posted by Fuzzy at 9:21 PM | Comments (0)
December 21, 2004
Sketch show progress
We're in another of those short periods where Shaun and I are both in town at the same time (he just got back from LA, I'm on my way to Mississippi tomorrow) so last night we had a meeting with Frankie and Michelle from Lavender Cabaret, who will be supplying the dancers for our sketch extravaganza. A productive meeting -- we kept asking for the moon and Michelle kept saying, "that should be doable."
We also made progress on costuming. When Shaun has played Elvis in the past (which has been fairly often) Shaun has had enough hair that he just does it up in a pompadour. But he shaved his head a few weeks ago, so he went out and found a terrrrible Elvis wig. I think it's gonna be high-larious.
I also met with our costumer-to-the-stars, Kittyloaf, who is using her Belmont Burlesque costume-accenting skills to decorate two leather jackets for us. (Thanks to The Alley for having cheap leather jackets. And to Shaun for re-buying one of his own jackets, because he thought he had lost it, because I had hung it up. In the coat closet. Cough.) Our design reference for these jackets is the Dice Rules jacket. Yowza. We'll see what Kittyloaf comes up with.
In more delegation, our musical mainstay Ben Taylor is off doodling with his beep and boops to make bumps for the various sketches in the show.
And I've sent out a short press release to some of our press contacts. The folks at Sketch Fest are doing a bang-up job (Shaun has already done a couple of phone interviews that they hooked up) but it never hurts to get your name out there. (And speaking of both that bang-up job and the getting out of names, congrats to Superpunk (guest stars in our show!) for being listed in Chicago Magazine as one of five groups to definitely catch at Sketch Fest.)
Posted by Fuzzy at 5:50 PM | Comments (0)
Whiny grumble whine
Some people get sick when they travel. But I'm always ahead of the curve -- I get sick before I travel. I got a cold two days before I went to Texas for Thanksgiving and now I'm sick again just in time to head down to Mississippi for Christmas. (Yes, I'm meeting Erica's parents. Oooooh.)
Posted by Fuzzy at 10:04 AM | Comments (0)
December 17, 2004
I'm sure they all came to see me...
This last weekend, the Belmont Burlesque Revue made the front page of section 2 of the Reader. They've had pretty good audiences, but this weekend's show was sold out and they had to turn a couple dozen people away (the Playground is all careful about fire codes and such, so we couldn't have people sitting in the aisles or anything).
Here's Gerdes and Reid from the Holiday Spectacular. How can two such nice looking people tell such dirty jokes? Practice, my friends, practice.
Your next chance to see the Belmont Burlesque is at the end of January. Don't risk another sellout! Camp out now!
Posted by Fuzzy at 2:48 PM | Comments (0)
December 15, 2004
"Song" by "Artist"
I've been reading a lot of mp3blogs lately (and then listening to the downloaded mp3s on my iPod) and I so let me say "yes, yes, yes" to Merlin's comments about crappy metadata in mp3s. I have 155 songs on my iPod right now with nothing listed for the band. I'm sure those are not all the band or label's fault, but some are. Oh, some most certainly are. (Steely glare at the bands who dare to mislabel their free music. You know who you are.)
Posted by Fuzzy at 5:15 PM | Comments (0)
December 13, 2004
Script Conference
Shaun and I actually had a day when we were both in town this weekend (he's now off in LA for another week) so we sat down last night for a four hour script conference where we ironed out a bunch of the major issues with and disagreements about the script for our sketch show at Chicago Sketch Fest. We got something set that we can email out to the cast.
Yes, the cast. For our two-man sketch show, we've recruited a cast and crew (with a lot of overlap) of 15. This is going to be spectacle with a capital TACLE.
Now I've got a prop list a half a mile long I'm out looking for. And musicians to work with. And a press release to send out. Shaun's got dancers to coordinate and rehearsals to schedule. Yay fun!
Posted by Fuzzy at 6:47 PM | Comments (2)
December 10, 2004
Coming Home
originally posted on Metroblogging Chicago
I wish there was a Philadelphia Metroblog I could have been guest-posting on this week, so I could have told you about the train and driving to Maryland for dinner and snow-boarding next to city hall and Kaki King and hunting for a Nintendo DS and finding one and then not buying it and Continental and bad movies on hotel cable and cookies and having my sleep schedule get so out of wack that I'm still up at 5 AM typing this. But there isn't such a thing, so all I can tell you about is missing my girlfriend and my city and looking forward to getting back tonight.
Posted by Fuzzy at 3:58 AM | Comments (0)
Kaki King
Kaki King, Tin Angel, Philadelphia, December 9, 2004
Kyle and I were talking today about great opening bands we've missed (I missed Nirvana, Kyle somehow missed most of DJ Shadow because he was his own opening band (it was complicated)) and so tonight I... got to the show late and missed Devon Sproule. Oops.
I walked into the Tin Angel to find a silent room of people enraptured by Kaki King. She plays guitar. And that's it. (She was talking about getting popular in between some songs tonight and said, "You don't need to worry about singing or dancing, because I can't do those things.") Some of her stuff was quiet and slow and some was fast and sometimes she slaps her guitar and does all crazy things with plucking strings and scratching the pickups and sometimes she just played. It was a great show.
Posted by Fuzzy at 2:51 AM | Comments (1)
Reality trumps fiction any day, I say
Discovery channel spent all that time and energy building robots to figure out who would win in a battle of Lion vs. Tiger or Baby vs. Rhino and meanwhile out in the real world, ducks and rats are going at it.
(via Haddock)
Posted by Fuzzy at 1:15 AM | Comments (0)
December 9, 2004
Day job news
There are going to be more and more of these as Midway Marketing heats up on Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, but Shaun was interviewed about MKSM by 1up.com.
Posted by Fuzzy at 9:11 AM | Comments (0)
December 8, 2004
Sketch-a-rama
I'm sitting in my hotel room in Philadelphia and I just emailed Shaun a complete script for our upcoming sketch show. Not necessarily done, but complete in the sense that there are no more places in the script where it says "insert brilliant sketch here" or "this is where the big speech happens" or such.
Shaun and I got accepted to Chicago Sketch Fest a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving on the basis of some old material, but we set out to write a whole new show just for Sketch Fest. It's been a time period marked by a week-long business trip for Shaun, a trip to Texas for me, and now this work trip to Philly. So we've been doing a lot of our collaboration over email. Which feels a little odd since we live in the same house. And have I mentioned the part about us usually doing improv?
Anyway, I'm very proud tonight at reaching this milestone. I think we've got a great concept for the show (it's a whole show rather than a series of unrelated sketches. Well, there are unrelated sketches, but they're framed in pretty tight.) and now we just have to execute. Which has to wait until I get back to Chicago. And until after I get some sleep tonight.
Posted by Fuzzy at 11:29 PM | Comments (0)
December 7, 2004
My girlfriend is an anime character
I found a link to the hallowig and sent it to Kittyloaf, because I know she's doing a lot of knitting these days. And she made one for Erica. Hooray for silly hats!
Posted by Fuzzy at 9:21 AM | Comments (0)
And yet no-one was grumpy
The advantage of all that coffee was that I was plenty awake for the two hour drive down to Baltimore to meet up with my brother and Jeanne and her boyfriend Tom.
Disco, Jeanne, and me
I couldn't get a single picture in which both Tom and Jeanne had their eyes open.
We met up at Crabby Dick's in Fell's Point and had a pleasant evening of family catching-up. I also satisfied, to a degree, the crab-craving I've been feeling for some time. Tom and I split a dozen mixed. Chesapeake Bay crabs are not in season, so these were Louisiana and North Carolina crabs, but prepared in the Maryland way -- covered in Old Bay Seasoning and steamed. The Old Bay is on the outside of the crabs, but it gets everywhere as you crack them open and ends up flavoring everything you're eating. It's a lot of work for not so much crab meat, so I always feel like I might be hungrier when I finish than when I started.
Posted by Fuzzy at 1:32 AM | Comments (1)
Look out!
There were only two problems at the training today. One wasn't really a problem -- they kept filling a vacuum carafe in the conference room we were in with great Whole Foods coffee -- I had 5 big mugs during the day and I was pretty wired by the time we left.
The other problem, of course, was the tiger.
Posted by Fuzzy at 1:17 AM | Comments (0)
December 6, 2004
Philly
Hello from Philadelphia, 1 AM.
Posted by Fuzzy at 1:14 AM | Comments (0)
December 2, 2004
'stache
The real question, of course, is "how's that moustache going, Fuzzy?" I got rid of the mutton-choppy-things a few weeks ago, and it made it through its first trim, so I think we're gonna stick with a moustache for a little while.
(My current Game Boy Advance game is Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga, a delightful platformer/RPG mix in the same vein as Paper Mario. One of the stats that your characters can build up is "stache", which gives you discounts at the in-game shops and affects your chances of getting a critical hit. I can only hope that my 'stache power does the same.)
Posted by Fuzzy at 12:49 PM | Comments (1)
Too Much Goin' On
Erica and I had a great Thanksgiving in Austin (well, Round Rock/Pflugerville) with my family. I have super-cute pictures of my super-cute niece and nephew I need to share with you. (Yes, need.)
And Kenan installed iTunes Watcher and then scrapped that and set up with Audioscrobbler and I thought, yeah it'd be cool to have a lil' thing on the sidebar here that says what I've been listening to, even if it means finally learning a little PHP to make it happen, so I got myself an Audioscrobbler account just in time for their servers to all blowup. So, OK, maybe iTunes Watcher is more suited to my needs, anyway... and the whole Thought Anomalies website was down (it's back up now). Grrr. Just frustrating. (What I have been listening to, I'll tell you, is a bunch of Pete Miser. Oh, and this morning Accordion Tribe's Boeves Psalm came up on random on my iPod and I rewound it and played it 4 times in a row. (I originally found it at Music For Robots.))
So I gave up on iTunes for the moment and I thought I'd work on being able to post to FuzzyCo from my Treo. I found a ton of scripts and it took me a couple hours to figure out that each one did about 85% of what I wanted and that I was going to have to pick one and modify it to suit my needs and by then it was time to go have dinner with my honey. So all together a frustrating time. Why aren't things exactly arranged for my convenience!?
And then Shaun and I are busy working on our sketch show for Chicago Sketch Fest (Sunday, January 9 at 5:30 pm!). Except that he's been out of town and sick and I'm sick and about to go out of town.
Oh yeah, I'm gonna be in Philadelphia all next week. I'll be in training all day, but I have Tuesday to Thursday night free. Is there anything fun to do in Philadelphia?
Posted by Fuzzy at 10:14 AM | Comments (0)