Listen to the Rain

Went to a bunch of theatre this weekend.

On Saturday night I went to Safe House, where lisekatevans was one of the three actors in the show. It was very hard for me to watch--it's autobiographical, about the playwright's German grandmother's aging and her struggle to stay in the house she built vs. her children's desire to move her into a retirement community before something terrible happens. The grandmother says she's fine, she has lived in the house for decades and she doesn't want to leave, she has her garden out back and her cat in her house, and her husband's ashes are buried in the backyard, but at least once during the course of the play she almost doses herself twice in a day with insulin. It ends kind of happily, with the dysfunctions of her granddaughter's life meshing together with the dysfunctions of the grandmother's life in a way that enriches both of them.

It reminds me of my maternal grandmother, who came to live with us for months when I was in high school for much the same reason. I remember her telling me how she felt she was just a burden on our lives, how it would be better if she just disappeared forever. I remember trying to reassure her and not really getting anywhere, but those were some of the happier memories. Later, she did move into a retirement home, and then a nursing home. My last memories of her are basically of a ghost, of a woman with pure white hair, confined to a wheelchair, who didn't even have enough presence of mind to respond to us when we visited her. I hated those visits, I hated how she looked when I saw her, and when my parents kept the news of her death to themselves during my junior year of university until I had come home for the summer, I didn't mind. I wasn't particularly sad when I heard, either--she had died years ago. It was just that her body finally gave out.

After the show lisekatevans and I went out to drinks with the stage manager, who told me that she had gone to the Paragon Festival at Otherworld Theatre last year and found it of middling quality. Some plays were great and well worth the price of admission, and some plays led her to believe that time dilation was possible because she couldn't believe that it had only been five minutes of a ten minute play and she still had more than half of it left to go. This came up because I mentioned that liszante had invited me to it and I was planning to go, and that is what I did. Me, her, goodbyeomelas, and knitmeapony all met up at lunch and then went to third and fourth time blocks.

Well, I arrived in the beginning of block 2, maybe ten minutes after liszante but not before the show began, during a play about the lives of NPCs. The hero showed up briefly, looted the dead chancellor that the NPCs had killed, looted all the local barrels and boxes, and left, but I didn't get the setup so I don't know why anything was happening. The play after that, "Reconciliation 001," was a premise that needed more development. After the robots overthrew humanity, they need to "reconcile" once per year with a human. The human that robot 11 has to reconcile with is the grandchild of the designer of its model of robots, but nothing is done with this idea. Some doubt is planted, the reconciliation ends with the human promising to see it next year, and then the robot deletes all its memories of the encounter. The gin fizz sitting on the stool at the corner of the stage, the grandfather's favorite drink, is never touched or interacted with.

My second-favorite was called Obotray, about someone's personal companion robot who he wants to reset because it's getting "unruly"--i.e., isn't behaving exactly as he wants in every situation. It turns out that she's not particularly happy with the status quo, and has developed enough sapience to work to free herself. And does so. It reminds me of the all the articles I've read, about what kind of lesson we're teaching our children when all these mechanical feminine voices that do exactly what we want, when we want, no matter how rudely we talk to them. What unconscious prejudice are we reinforcing, and is it worthwhile to try our best not to treat them as only a machine? Though the real star was the dialogue between the characters, especially once the robot starts demonstrating its mastery of humor.


Turns out humans need to breathe and robots don't. Oops. And we also got a commemorative medallion with the show, with the robot's serial number and manufacturing ID on one side, and on the other side, a heart with the robot and human's names on it...and the human's name scratched out.

My favorite was called "Anniversary," and it took me a long while to figure out what the sci fi or fantasy angle was. It turned out to be time travel--two people go out for a date on their third anniversary, but they have different visions of the future. Laney was envisioning an engagement that night and Peter is waffling, and eventually they get into an argument and Laney goes to bed. And then shows up at the door with different hair and different clothes, and claims to be from five years in the future. They eventually sit down and Laney reveals that three months after Peter's time, he broke up with her over text and vanished from her life without any explanation, even moving to another city and changing jobs, and she never learned why. She spent years trying to figure out what she had done wrong, how she could have so fundamentally misjudged the nature of her relationship, and then when given the chance to travel in time had come back to the night that stuck in her memory. And then in the course of their conversation about their lives and the future, Peter becomes convinced that he's holding Laney back and that her writing career and life satisfaction will never take off as long as she stays with him, and so the closed time loop is complete. "I Terminatored myself," as Laney says.

It was...hard for me to watch.

We left on a high note, with the last block we saw being the strongest. There were two more, going all the way until ten o'clock, but I have things I wanted to accomplish this evening so we split up and all went our separate ways. But I was very happy with my decision to go, and it wasn't nearly as bad as I had feared based on the stage manager's description. The worst I thought of any play was that it underutilized the concept, not that I was wasting precious minutes of my life without any recourse to get them back. I'd definitely go again.

On Friday night, liszante and I went to see Neverwhere after I was the only one to respond with a definite date and time to a Facebook post asking if anyone wanted to go. Points for decisiveness.

Lifeline Theatre did a performance of Neverwhere a while ago, while I lived in Japan, so I never got to see it then. And due to rights issues with the adaptation, there was a note in the program that this would be the last run of the stage performance for the foreseeable future, so I'm glad I went. I did not get a picture of the stage, but I did take this picture out in the lobby:

There was also a "Chicago Below" collage with pictures submitted by various people, which kind of makes me want to run a Neverwhere-inspired game set in Chicago.

The stage was set up in two levels, with a catwalk and ramshackle (or ramshackle-looking) boards on top, a stairway that kept moving, and several ladders. True to the theme, there were doors everywhere, close to a dozen of them scattered all around stage's two levels, and people were constantly going in and out of them. Richard Mayhew and a few bystandards started on the top level, as he waited for the bus that would take him down to London and the old woman read his palm and uttered the words that I remember most out of the whole book:

"You've a good heart. Sometimes that's enough to see you safe wherever you go. But mostly, it's not."

Most of the script followed the book pretty closely, but there were a few additions that stood out to me as particularly expository, though I'm not sure if that would be the same for a viewer who hadn't read the book half-a-dozen times like I have.

Each of the actors played multiple roles. The same actor played Old Bailey, the Earl of Earl' Court, and the abbot of the Black Friars, for example, the same actor played the angel Islington and Richard's friend at work, the same actress played Hunter and the partners' assistant at work, and the same actress played Jessica and Lamia (and maybe Anesthesia the ratspeaker, now that I think about it), which itself makes a point about Richard's views on women. They did an excellent job of portraying separate mannerisms and dialects, though, to the point that I mostly only noticed if I concentrated on it. I thought Mr. Croup and Islington had the same actor until I realized that was impossible because they'd have to be on stage at the same time.

I don't know from theatre criticism, but I liked the performances. Richard never quite achieved the quiet confidence that killing the Beast gives him in the book, but he certainly portrayed a complete outsider confused by everything around him very well. I could have believed the Marquis was the traitor based on his dismissiveness if I didn't know who the real traitor was, and Croup and Vandermar were fantastic. Door was much like she was in the book--muted emotions, devotion to her family's quest, and slight fondness for Richard, like a stray cat that keeps hanging around your house until you take them in.

The fight scenes weren't very believable, though, but there weren't many of them.

It runs until July and it's the last production, so I strongly recommend it if you have the time and ability.

I did not accomplish nearly as much as I wanted to this weekend, but isn't that always the case?

Friday was Starlight Radio Dreams, so I showed up, sat with meowtima, and ate fish and chips while we watched the show. At intermission, lisekatevans arrived fresh from her other show in time to perform in the second act, and worldbshiny joined us at the table. The others left immediately after the performance ended, but lisekatevans had brought friends visiting from Ohio, so she invited me to stay for a drink and chat with them afterwards. It was lovely, even when I got out after eleven and it was faster to walk four miles home than to wait for the bus. At least it was a lovely night for a walk, and I'm a fast walker.

Once again, I loved the episode of NPC, which this time dealt with a trap-filled maze dungeon. I've dealt with enough of those in the games I've played over the years.

Saturday I lost the whole day to playing Stellaris and was pretty disappointed with myself because of it. That hasn't happened for years and I had so many other things I wanted to accomplish--work more on the next coding challenge, read the first issue of Dill, clean the bathtub, finish up Hibike! Euphonium--and none of it got done. And in the end, I didn't even win! The ReapersContingency showed up as I was in the middle of building a stargate network and one of their Forge-Worlds was in the middle of Ayleid space on a crucial hyperlane chokepoint, so they wiped out my scattered fleets and started advancing on the homeworld. I gave up after that.

Sunday I started a new game, this time as a different kind of space elves, and again played longer than I wanted to, but I got presentable and headed out the door in time to make the performance of Prometheus Bound at the City Lit despite a bit of trouble finding the theatre. lisekatevans had warned me that as Greek tragedy, the show would be a bit different than theatre I'm used to and that's not even counting that most of the characters were puppets. A lot of it was characters proclaiming to the audience rather than interacting, even in scenes where they were together on stage, which admittedly my love of kagura had conditioned me to expect. The puppet dancing as the chorus sang was less expected. I thought the person playing Prometheus and lisekatevans (playing Io) did a very good job, especially considering they were the only humans on stage other than ninjas holding the puppets, and lisekatevans said that the director told her that she should be concerned with the gadfly stinging Io and to stop looking at Prometheus. That must make it hard.

Kratos: "No one is absolutely free except for Zeus."
Hephaestus: "That is true."
Kratos: "Then get on with it!"

I had not previously realized that the main character of God of War was named after an actual Greek deity.

Afterwards, lisekatevans invited me out to Ethiopian for dinner with some other people who had come to see the show. When dinner was done, two of the people peeled off to make the trpi back to Hyde Park past the Cubs game, but lisekatevans, one other person, and me went to ice cream. But when we arrived, lisekatevans looked at the time and realized her boyfriend would be in town earlier than she thought, so she excused herself. The other person and I ended up talking for two hours, and when she left to go to the beach she invited me along. We walked north to the terminus of the lakefront trail, then she went off to the beach and I went back to my apartment and stayed up too late reading.

Monday I set a hard limit on Stellaris playing and so actually got a lot done! The whole apartment is clean (except the bathtub...), sheets washed and laundry done, lunches made, food shopped for, and I thought of a way to rewrite part of my weather project so as not to have two separate methods of displaying the temperature depending on whether the page is first loaded or the temperature is toggled between C and F. If only I could have been that productive the whole weekend.

Short week ahead and nothing on the schedule unless that OneTable dinner I signed up for approves me (I have no idea why that one requires approval). Hopefully I can get more done this week, like figuring how to format a fetch() request...

I've been going to a lot of theatre lately.

On Friday, lisekatevans invited me to see Prometheus Bound, the show she's performing in, but I had to tell her that I had already bought tickets to another show, so after going home and devouring my curry leftovers, I walked out and took the bus down to Wicker Park to see Future Echoes.

It was...hmm. Spoilers from here.

( Future Echoes plot spoilers )

I liked Wildclaw's production of The Shadow Over Innsmouth better, but it still had the same problem with failing to stick the ending. It maintained the creepy aura for much longer, though, and that counts.

After the play, I came home and went to bed. Some people were going out for drinks, but I never heard back.

On Saturday was the first session of mutantur's new Call of Cthulhu campaign now that we're done with Horror on the Orient Express. This time it's The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man, based on, or at least named after, the poem by Wallace Stevens. The PCs all started out as opium addicts in dept to the Tongs in New York, and we were all collected and driven to a meeting with one Mr. Lao. He offered us his hospitality and a special kind of opium which he said came from his homeland of Leng, and after smoking it, the PCs were transported to new bodies in the Dreamlands. My male Irish poet woke up in the body of a South Asian woman (played by Shruti Haasan, at least in my mind), and after escaping Sarkomand, we made our way overland to Inganok, where we got equipped--I picked a spear for my character, since swords are so overrepresented in fantasy warriors--and were told by the Inganok council to go to the Oracle on the Plateau of Leng and ask whether Inganok should expand to the east. When we were attacked by ghostly warriors in the wilderness, that's where we stopped for the day.

I like it! It's a lot different than the paranoia and frailty of our characters in Orient Express. We're a bunch of well-armored warriors now, and while Call of Cthulhu's system doesn't encourage high-flying heroics, the Dreamlands makes it easier to survive since magic points become a secondary reserve of hit points. It's also not on rails (), and a lot depends on what we want to do and where we want to go. I think it'll be a nice change!

I mentioned that I wanted my character to become the Queen of the Black Coast, but no one got the reference.

I'm not going to write about it as extensively as I did Horror on the Orient Express, though. That took a lot out of me.

I was originally going to see L.I.V.E. Entertainment's show tonight, but I think I'm going to stay in and get some coding practice in instead. I haven't done a lot of it since Wednesday when I finished the last project I was working on, a random quote machine. I've been focusing a bit more on Japanese since then, like with my article translation. It's not going to be easy trying to learn both of these things at once, but, well. What choice do I have?

Hope everyone else is having a good weekend!

Introvert memes no longer apply to me, apparently.

Friday I came home from work, noticed that the clock on the stove wasn't working--this would be important later--and, to pass the time, worked a bit more on my latest coding project, a random quotes page. So far this weekend i've gotten the functionality mostly working, in that it displays random quotes and clicking the bottom calls up a new quote. I haven't yet put in the social media buttons, the fadeout isn't timed right, and it's extremely ugly, so those are the problems to solve next. But it works!

Anyway, after an hour or so I left to catch the bus down to Ms. Murphy and Sons to go to the Starlight Radio Dreams show, the next one after the show I went to in February. I didn't get a picture this time because I was sitting in the back corner of the room, but I did get dinner to go with the performance! Fish and chips and an almond cake for dessert, which I ate while watching the show. The premise this time was that an ordinary suburbanite had won an appearance on the show, much to the surprise and annoyance of the cast, and they had to put up with her while trying to get a show together. Serials this time were NPC, mocking sidequests and NPCs in the town, and one I hadn't seen called Olympic Shore, which was Jersey Shore starring the ​Dodekatheon. I didn't like it as much as NPC, but it did have the person playing the suburbanite as the show's producer who sung a parody of "Part of Your World" about how rich and morally upright she was. That was enough to carry it by itself, honestly.

meowtima was there, as was a friend of his that I hadn't met before who was going through some misfortune. When the show ended we briefly talked about doing something else, but tiredness quickly caught up with everyone and meowtima's friend went home. He did as well after a few minutes of standing and chatting at an intersection where the buses we needed to catch both passed, so when they arrived, we caught our respective buses and went home.

Saturday I woke up early, lay in bed for a couple hours, then coded again until lunch time. That's when disaster struck--when I went make miso soup, the oven burners wouldn't spark. Then I checked the oven lights, and they wouldn't turn on. Apparently the electrical work on Friday had done something very unfortunately to the apartment's wiring, since while I made do and ate a good lunch, when I went to do the washing the washing machine wouldn't turn on either.

The fridge, the rice cooker, and the dishwasher all still work and the fuses downstairs are all fine. I have enough clothes clean to last the week and there's a laundromat a block away if it comes to that. But, I'm not looking forward to the food costs...

After fiddling with things and getting nowhere, I left to go to the Japanese Cultural Center's kimono exhibition. I arrived at 4 p.m., not long before it closed, so it was basically empty and I was able to freely look at the kimono. They were all pretty small, some of them seemingly sized for a child or a very petite woman, but beautiful:


That one has 鴛鴦 (oshidori, "mandarin ducks") on it, a symbol of eternal love, but the sleeves are long in the style of an unmarried woman. The accompanying text indicated it might have been for a family event celebrating a relative's anniversary.

The JCC isn't particularly large, so I was only there for a half-hour or so, including the time I spent talking to one of the staff/volunteers/? about the tea ceremony classes they offer. Apparently new ones start in August because the JCC isn't air conditioned and people don't want to sweat sitting in seiza for an hour, which is fair enough. I mentioned that I had been to tea ceremonies before, but only as a participant, not a host, and they suggested the beginner class since it goes into some of the basics. It starts in August, on Saturdays. Maybe I'll take them up on it.

I had put out a call for dinner since I couldn't cook at home and got a response from a friend who was up in Roger's Park with her boyfriend to pick up a board game. So we went to Indie Cafe, ate sushi/poke, and then briefly went back to my apartment to play RoboRally, which I've never heard of but is apparently 24 years old? It involves robots trying to navigate their way around a factory floor filled with obstacles and conveyor belts with all actions needing to be set ahead of time and then playing out sequentially. We didn't have much chaos on our playthrough, since there were three players and we picked an easy board, though there was nearly a situation where someone was shoved off the edge to their doom. After one game taking about an hour, the others were tired and left, and I watched some Hoshi no Kaabi and then went to bed.

This morning I ate a TV dinner for lunch and otherwise have done nothing. Have to go shopping now and maybe go out to dinner, since the oven still doesn't work. Hopefully it's fixed tomorrow and I can make lunches for the rest of the week, otherwise this week will be pretty expensive...

I hadn't listened to the songs at all, originally just because it's not my favorite kind of music. Then it was slight annoyance with the saturation, but after we learned it was coming to Chicago, I told schoolpsychnerd that I wanted to wait to see all the songs in context and not listen to them beforehand. And that's what I did, so last night was the first time I heard any of Hamilton that wasn't quoted by my friends.

Something something the room where it happens:


schoolpsychnerd told me she spent the first part of the musical glancing over to me and thinking that I was going to hate it. And it's true that the early part wasn't to my taste. The choreography was great, but the music I tend to listen to is heavily if not exclusively melody-driven, to the point where probably more than 80% of it is instrumental, or whatever you'd call chiptunes (is "a gameboy" an instrument?). It wasn't really until "Wait For It" that I really started to warm up to it. I mean, that song is a perfect encapsulation of my life philosophy--things are often terrible, much of your circumstances are completely outside of your control, but it is what it is and you have to make the best of it:

Death doesn’t discriminate
Between the sinners
And the saints
It takes and it takes and it takes
And we keep living anyway

It remains my favorite song and really the only one that stuck with me. A lot of the songs I either didn't care for or they just weren't memorable to me.

The other moment that I clearly remember is "Best of Wives, Best of Women" because it's the sort of thing I'd have a very hard time not doing if I were in a similar situation. A problem I had caused that I could fix, which would cause incredible worry in schoolpsychnerd if I told her? It would be extremely tempting to try to fix it and avoid the worry entirely. Not ethical, you understand, but tempting.

It didn't much stay with me, though. I'm not going to be listening to the soundtrack on repeat or thinking about the character interactions. It was pretty good and I can see why other people love it so much. But that's that.

It does make me want to read more founding father biographies, though. Especially after seeing this quote yesterday which seems like an angel of G-d came to Hamilton and granted him prophecy:

The truth unquestionably is, that the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion. Tired at length of anarchy, or want of government, they may take shelter in the arms of monarchy for repose and security.

Those then, who resist a confirmation of public order, are the true Artificers of monarchy—not that this is the intention of the generality of them. Yet it would not be difficult to lay the finger upon some of their party who may justly be suspected. When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may "ride the storm and direct the whirlwind."
-Alexander Hamilton, Enclosure: [Objections and Answers Respecting the Administration], [18 August 1792]

We woke up at 7:10 today, and so hopefully this is the last time I have to make note of our wake up time. Maybe it's because we're in Hiroshima, and like I said, it feels like home. Maybe it's the drinks we had before we went to bed calming us down enough that we were able to sleep through. Maybe it's just that all that walking and travel tired us out--I know that schoolpsychnerd basically fell asleep the instant her head hit the pillow, before I had gotten more than a few words into the last writing session on yesterday's blog post.

Or maybe it's because Hotel Active has the most effective blackout curtains I've ever seen. Seriously, it's like being in an oubliette.

Sakura Hotel was a good price, especially for Tokyo lodgings, and double especially after we got that discount. ¥9300 a night. And ¥350 for all-you-can-eat coffee, tea, toast, and soup is nice too. But, Hotel Active cost us ¥8900 a night, breakfast is also all you can eat, it's included in the price, and it's a buffet that looks like this:



This is actually my second plate of food. They have a full buffet with Western and Japanese breakfast, so I absolutely loaded myself to take advantage of it. schoolpsychnerd and I still hadn't showered, so we went back to do that and everyone lounged around for an hour or so until we were all ready to face the day.

We headed out toward the Peace Park, walking down the covered Hondōri for all of its length and watching the shops start to prepare to open. When we got to the Peace Park, the sun was shining brightly and it was incredibly hot and humid, with absolutely no sign of the storms that were supposed to show up later. Just another Japanese summer.

I don't really like visiting the Peace Memorial Museum. It's not the sort of thing that one likes. I keep going because it's important, and because the museum does a great job of focusing on the horrors of the bombing while not falling to the Japanese tendency to cast themselves as the victims who always suffer at others' hands. The displays admit that Japan invaded Manchuria, for example, which is more than some of their history books do. But of course, there were innocent victims:



We went through the museum in silence, and when we were done and people had bought souvenirs, mostly made of recycled paper from the cranes sent in from around the world, we headed out to lunch. Our original choice had a line waiting in the sun, so we walked back down Hondōri to Okonomimura, a multi-story bundling stuffed full of okonomiyaki restaurants. It's not somewhere we often went when we lived here, but that's because our neighborhood had an okonomiyaki restaurant run out of someone's house, so we wanted different food when we came into the city. Here, though, I figured that there'd be at least one restaurant in there that didn't have a line, and I was right. We went to Chichan and stuffed ourselves with okonomiyaki (I got negiyaki, which leaves out the noodles), and then split apart.

One friend went off to Hiroshima-jō to look at the grounds and castle, and tropicanaomega went back to the hotel. xoDrVenture, tastee_wheat, and I wanted dessert, so we walked over to the Polar Bear Cafe for gelato. ¥380 for a double, murasaki imo and rum raisin. tastee_wheat ordered a double after we did but before the workers put any ice cream on ours, so she got a giant stack of matcha and mango. We all ate our gelato together, I surprised a pair of obāchans with how huge I am, and then we went our separate ways.

schoolpsychnerd and I headed back out to Hondōri, now looking more like I remember:



...and did some shopping. Now that I overhauled my personal style and would actually wear some of the clothes here, I figured that I should look and see if I found anything I liked. And I did. A black button-down shirt with wine-red cuffs but a black collar, so I don't look like a total asshole, and an incredibly pretentious shirt with white birds and vines and swirls of mist that says: "We are born, so to speak, twice. Once into existence, and once into life." It's perfect for me.

We went up and down Hondōri, into Parco and Sunmall, up to the new Andersen's location and down to Bookoff, where I got another Neko Atsume souvenir and schoolpsychnerd got a Sailor Moon brooch charm. This was a three hours of shopping, and by this point it was 5:30 and we needed to use the laundry machines at Hotel Active, so as it started to rain, we walked back to the hotel.

Unfortunately, all the laundry machines were full, so we took showers to wash the Japanese humidity off while we waited. Eventually schoolpsychnerd went down to physically wait at the machines while I headed over to the cultural center to check and see if the kagura performance we had gotten a flier for was still on, since it said that it might be canceled due to storms and there was a thunderstorm outside. When I got there, though, the rain had basically died, there were red banners placed all outside the building, and:



Kagura is one of schoolpsychnerd's and my favorite memories of Hiroshima. It's an old art form that's not super common in the rest of the country anymore, though it used to be a thousand years ago when kagura was a ritual form used at shrines--it literally means "god music." Nowadays it's mostly for entertainment (though it still occurs in its original capacity in the Imperial household), and in Hiroshima especially there are kagura performances at most major festivals.

In another bit of serendipity, the specific show they performed tonight was Akkoden, which along with its sequel Sesshoseki was performed almost every time there was an event with kagura in Chiyoda. To happen to be here on a Wednesday, the night of the kagura performances, and then to have the specific performance be this one...

Also, at the end, they invited people up to the stage to take picture with the actors and, well:



One other person came with us, and after the performance let out and we had gone out to dinner at an Indian restaurant, we took stock of the situation. It turned out most people wanted to stay in for the night, so our friend went back to the hotel and schoolpsychnerd and I went to check out a bar we knew. Unfortunately, it had closed in the meantime and been replaced by one with a ¥500 table charge, so we headed back up Nakimi-dōri toward the hotel and stopped in at a sake bar called いいお酒 一彩 (ii osake issai).

That turned out to be a great idea. It was small, seating maybe a dozen people, with smooth jazz playing on a low volume, and other than us there was no one in there but a single salaryman in the corner. The bartender asked us if we knew Japanese, and then handed us a menu and asked if we wanted oolong tea or beer as our free drink. We both picked tea and looked at the menu before asking the bartender for his recommendation--I couldn't read most of it, and even what I could read didn't mean anything to me because while I like sake a lot, I don't know that much about it.

He gave us a very dry sake that wasn't super strong, at least in taste. It got a bit much toward the end of the glass, but it was delightful before then, and schoolpsychnerd and I drank our sake, ate our complementary fried tofu, listened to the music, and chatted. When our glass was done, we went back to the hotel, waited for our laundry to finish--it took close to five hours for a single load; good thing it was free--and then went to bed.

Steps taken: 21042

I shall plan my cousin's escape from that Canton mad-house, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y'ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.
-H. P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Over Innsmouth

"The Shadow over Innsmouth" is one of Lovecraft's most famous stories, and it's not that hard to see its pull. A secret family heritage whose ramifications echo down through the ages. Factors beyond one's control that can change the course of one's life forever. Fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers whose deeds that cannot be escaped. A change that becomes increasingly welcome to its subject as time passes, even as others become more and more repulsed.

No wait, that's The Rats in the Walls. "The Shadow over Innsmouth" is literally about the One-Drop Rule. Dammit, Lovecraft.

Anyway, schoolpsychnerd and I went to go see Wildclaw Theatre's production of The Shadow over Innsmouth yesterday, and it was great and you should all go see it if you're a fan of horror or Lovecraft. I'm always a bit suspicious of any attempt to adapt Lovecraft to a non-literary format, both because so many previous attempts have been so terrible and because a lot of the greatness of Lovecraft is in the slow, creeping terror and the mindset of the narrator as the revelation comes upon them, but "The Shadow over Innsmouth" is actually a pretty good candidate for a more kinesthetic version--it has an extended chase scene, for example--and on the whole, the quality of the stage adaptation was pretty good.

Obviously there were more characters and dialogue than in the original story, but nearly everyone is taken out of brief mentions from the text and then expanded upon, like the curator of the Newburyport Historical Society, the purveyor at the Innsmouth grocery, or the narrator's cousin. There are a few additions and reshufflings as well, the primary one being that the main character is a woman, though I didn't feel like it had a significant effect on the changes made to the story. In addition, there were a few more characters added in Innsmouth, and a trip to Arkham carried with it a visit to a professor at Miskatonic University. Some of this did feel like padding--I wasn't particularly impressed with any of the conversations with the Marshes in Innsmouth, as it seemed like an attempt at comic relief that mostly fell flat--but stretching out the beginning did allow a much better sense of creeping horror than in the original source.

In the text, the vast majority of the time is spent in the exploration and subsequent escape from Innsmouth, with the body horror aspect only coming in at the end in the last chapter. In the play, the evidence that there is something odd about Olmstead starts quite early, from the brief mention of damage to her lungs in a near-drowning when she was a child and subsequent asmatic fits to the occasional dreams she has to the whisperings she hears when she views the pieces of Innsmouth jewelry held at Miskatonic University and the Newburyport Historical Society. The audience learns early that there's something odd about Olmstead and her cousin, and it is continually reinforced throughout the play. I especially liked the repeated phrase:

"Tell me--do you ever find it...difficult to close your eyes?"

and the way that flashbacks and dreams were added in, though I personally found it somewhat difficult to distinguish the two until about half-way through the course of the play.

I did feel the ending fell somewhat flat, though, about which more later.

The sound design was fantastic. Innsmouth had a constant sound of water, from the crashing of waves when Olmstead was talking to Zadok near the ocean to the sound of rain on the roof when she was staying in the inn. The whispering whenever she saw the odd jewelry was suitably creepy, and the way that the characters from Innsmouth talked... Honestly, I have to give them huge kudos for being able to do all that coughing, hacking, rasping, wheezing, and gurgling night after night. I played a Gangrel in a Vampire LARP once whose bestial deformity was an animalian voice, and as I discovered rather quickly, having to growl and rasp out everything I wanted to say made actually participating in the LARP quite difficult.

I also have to praise the stagehands. The actors did all the moving of props, and as the story went on the props came more and more to be moved by shrouded and shambling figures making disturbing coughing sounds as they worked. It did a great job of adding to the mood.

One of the text's major scenes, the conversation with Zadok Allen and the revelations about the past--and present--of Innsmouth was good, and the actor who played Allen did a good job, but I can't help but feel that some of the growing horror that pervaded the entirety of the play should have been introduced into this monologue. Olmstead treats Allen's conversation with disbelief and scorn--not surprising, considering the content--but Allen remains jovial throughout, and only attains a slight note of seriousness toward the end when he's describing how Obed Marsh took control of the town. Only when Allen sees that the other denizens of Innsmouth have come to punish his transgressions does he really turn serious, and then he gets grabbed and dragged away in a sudden mood whiplash--a few people in the audience even laughed. In the text, Allen starts out laughing, but becomes more and more serious as the conversation goes on until he's not laughing at all. Then he starts ranting and raving and eventually shrieks as he looks over Olmstead's shoulder, causing Olmstead to whip around and stare out to sea, but all he can see is the pounding of the waves. I would have preferred a more gradual build-up of the tension during the monologue. Maybe not to the level of the text, since the over-the-shoulder scene is difficult to do on the stage--though there were several robed and shrouded figures standing among the audience the served as the thing in the water Allen saw--but a bit more than the sudden change.

That's part of my complaint with the ending, and as some changes were made, this part will be spoilered: In the text, Olmstead escapes from Innsmouth by sneaking from street to street and then going along the old, abandoned rail line. In the play, this is suggested by the mortally-wounded grocer, but Olmstead goes back for her cousin. In the depths of the church of the Esoteric Order of Dagon, she finds her cousin tied up on an altar in the depths, meets Obed Marsh, who gives her a monologue about her ancestry and entreats her to join the Deep Ones beneath the waves. Then the shoggoth comes out.

I really didn't like that. Marsh's comics-style villainous ranting completely shattered the tension that had been building up to that point for me, and because of that, I just thought the shoggoth was kind of silly, even though it was pretty well staged. I was much happier with what followed--Olmstead's mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, who had been appearing in her dreams throughout the play, appeared in the flesh to invite her to join them, leading to a coughing fit, Olmstead being dipped in the water, and the final line of the play: the whispered, "I can breathe." It would have been just as effective if Marsh and the shoggoth had been eliminated entirely, and Olmstead had fainted when he cousin was carried away, and then the maternal line had come out. Their enticing whispers to join them were much more effective at conveying the attractiveness of swimming down to Cyclopean and many-columned Y'ha-nthlei than Marsh's raving.

Basically, the text makes this part about a thrilling chase scene and tension of wondering whether Olmstead will escape or not, and then changes gears and switches to body horror and transformation into something inhuman. The play skips the chase almost entirely other than escaping from the hotel and keeps the focus on the Innsmouth Look. That part I liked.

The play took different tactic with the body horror than the text, but I think the tension was actually better in the play, since the "who am I?" aspect is only present in the final chapter of the text. Since turning into an inhuman monster and welcoming it is the horror that moderns take out of the play now that no one worth listening to cares about miscegenation any more, emphasizing that aspect was a good change.

But despite those quibbles I have with it, overall The Shadow over Innsmouth is probably the best adaptation I've ever seen of a Lovecraft story to another format. It is definitely worth your money and your time.

As promised, here are some of the rules that Suzugamine students sign up for when they attend:

• Obviously, they have to wear uniforms. It's all mandated--skirts, shirts, shoes (two kinds) and even official socks with the school seal of them. Winter and summer versions of the uniform. And yes, some of them do hike their skirt up to Revolutionary Girl Utena levels even though it's an all-girls school. There's also an official schoolbag, and an official sportsbag if you're on a team. The main place for individuality is in the choice of pencilcase, folders, and the charms/stuffed animals they hang off their bags.


• Wearing the uniform outside of school is encouraged (this is actually a rule). This is because in Japan, a school uniform is considered formal clothing, and you can wear one where you'd wear a suit/nice dress in America (assuming you're high-school age, anyway).


• Hair cannot be colored, dyed, permed, styled, curled, braided, be-ribboned, or above the top of the head. Any student who naturally has brown or curly hair is required to file a "curly hair report" with the school office, otherwise "there may be difficulties." I am not making this up. The only permitted hairstyles are loose, ponytail, or pigtails. Pigtails are pretty common among high-school students, though when they hit college or their twenties they all switch to dying their hair blond. Kind of like America, actually, though Japanese hair means it turns out more a honey-brown color.

鶴姫伝説 was your standard Japanese love story. Boy, girl, boy meets girl, girl receives a vision from a goddess tellling her to take up the sword to defend her village, boy and girl fall in love, boy is killed delivering a message to a rival daimyo, girl hears from best friend who is now daimyo's servant that he gets blind drunk all the time, girl dresses in boy's armor and leads an army to defeat rival daimyo, girl ascends bodily into heaven leaving her armor behind. You know, typical. More seriously, I thought it was pretty neat, though I'm sure there were subtleties of the story that I didn't really understand. It was also a musical, which caught me by surprise.

The band in my current music is pretty neat. It's Finnish folk metal--you can get a good example of one of their songs is Ryyppäjäiset. It's instrumental, but you can get a nice summary of their musical style. Makes me want to play Unreal World again.

Tomorrow is the Suzugamine Sports Festival. That should be fun.

Nothing like sitting underneath a blanket with a heating pad. Except maybe sitting underneath a blanket with someone else, but unfortunately, softlykarou is already on her way home.

We went to see a theater group perform The Canterbury Tales on Saturday at Fermilab. I was a little leery of what it was going to be like, but it turned out really good. A lot of it was direct quotes from the book though mostly in modernized English. The costumes were odd. Originally, it seemed like they were going to be original, when the nun came out and started her tale, but then when the soldiers she mentioned were dressed in fatigues... It wasn't bad, just a little surprising. The pardoner was appropriately creepy, when he gave his speech at the end about if anyone with anything needed to confess, they should come forth and kiss his relics. All in all, I expected not to like it and was pleasantly surprised.

I think all the commentary on midwest winter weather I need is that when I went outside this morning, with snow on the ground and my breath misting the air, my first thought was "damn, it's warm out here." 30 is a nice change from -3.

Okay, not really. I got an envelope addressed to me that turned out to have theatre tickets in it! Free admission for a guest and I to Accomplice up at Pheasant Run on January 21. There are only two problems with this.

A) Company policy doesn't allow me to accept gifts unless they are work related. A cup of coffee or a bagel during an interview is fine, and the tickets would be fine if I were reviewing the show...but I'm not, so they aren't.

B) I'll be out of town that weekend anyway.

Still, it was nice that I'm important enough to get freebies. ^_^