Neil Fein's Blog

We just saw a production of The Last 5 Years at the Cabaret Theatre in New Brunswick. A very good version of the play! It'll be there until March 6th.

Finished Hold Up the Wall yesterday. This will give me something to play in front of the Princeton group next month, any alterations after that will be final and the song will go up here.

This is another piano song, really a piano-harpsichord duet. I have no idea where I'd go about finding a non-digital harpsichord outside of a museum, but it would be nice to try it. In the meantime I'm having fun learning to play what's inside my head for the solos.

The problem with writing keyboard songs is that I can't play them live! Not being confident enough in my ivories, my only option is to figure out how to play these things on guitar, which is always a second-best solution.

Fill In the Blank (formerly known as The Improbable Improvables, my old comedy-improv group) will be performing at Adam's Bar, AKA Cafe Grappa. 97 Woodbridge Avenue, Highland Park, NJ. (That's right across from the White Rose Diner, for you Middlesex County diner junkies.) This extravaganza is on Wednesday March 3rd at 8pm.

The flyer says: "Free Show", footnoted "Drink Lots".

I've put a page of pictures up, and I'll keep adding to it as I scan them in and get new pictures.

This is goign on in Texas, and I can't vouch for it's authenticity; nevertheless, if you use ATMs, you might want to read this:

Bank ATMs Converted to Steal IDs of Bank Customers

Larissa shanghaied me into taping a workshop of the Bergen County Players last night, in Oradell. The show was about 4 minutes long, divided into 4 vignettes. The company is pretty good, and 'Riss in particular is growing as an actor. Keep an eye on them!

The theater is located on Kinderkamack Road in Oradell. Does anyone know where the name "Kinderkamack" came from? We were arguing about it on the way up.

Artistic Differences, also known as Bruce, Grazina and Neil, did some more recording last night, keyboards for The Bile Song.

Apparently the non-group's Website, which currently consists of a logo and tagline in a JPEG file, is blocked by one particular company's firewall, under the "Traditional Religions" category. Weird.

Note to self: Open mikes are going to be pretty empty -- as in nobody shows up -- on Valentine's Day.

I'll try again at the next one, in two weeks.

For those of you who read this to catch up, sorry I haven't posted lately.

I'll be playing at Cleo's open mike this Saturday evening.

The haunted cabinet.

Life sucks. Academic politics are a joke. Here's something funny.

Ruled Britannia
by Harry Turtledove

Amazon claims that this book is 524 pages long, but it's really over 600 pages. Part of this is due to Turtledove's habit of explaining everything two or three times to be absolutely certain his readers understand. Appropriate for non-fiction, perhaps, but an odd habit in a novel.

Don't let that scare you off, though; the book reads wonderfully, and I had a lot of fun plowing through the descriptions of would-have-been Elizabethan England. The premise is simple: What if the Spanish Armada had beaten England at sea in the battle of 1588? Turtledove's answer is that Philip II, champion of Catholicism and the Inquisition, would have ruled over Britan ruthlessly. The Inquisition scours the country for traces of any Protestantism, such as celebrating holidays at the non-sanctioned time according to the new calendar, or those simply associating with known heretics.

It is 1597, and discontent is brewing in England. King Philip II is dying, Elizabeth is imprisoned by the Dons, and a revolutionary cabal fronted by a British nobleman has commissioned a play from Shakespeare that will fan the flames of public discontent. While this seems a weak premise at first -- c'mon, it's a play -- Turtledove points out in his historical note at the end of the book that this is not without precedent in history. Throughout the book, the reader is transformed into a believer. And that's not to mention the play the Dons hire Shakespeare to write at the same time.

And representing the Spanish army, and in fact much of Spanish culture as well, is the historical figure Lope de Vega, a playwright in his own and, as a Lirutenant in the occupying forces, is given the delightful (to him) duty of investigating the suspected troublemakers in Shakespeare's company of players. Of course, this means that the company has to rehearse Boudicca, a play that could earn them a slow and painful death if discovered, even more secretively than otherwise.

With the premise pretentious, the situations evoking 70's sitcoms, the ending contrived, and the characters stock Turtledove, I enjoyed this book more than any of his others save The Guns of the South; high praise indeed. Turtledove is writing at a new high as he deftly interweaves Elizabethan discourse with twenty-first century narrative voice; the reader is never overwhelmed. And it's fascinating to non-scholars like myself to find out just why Shakespeare wrote the way he did -- did they actually talk that way back then? The answer is, er, yes and no.

This novel is highly recommended if you like Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Elizabethan literature in general -- or even if you're just an admirer from afar.

Sandman: The Dream Hunters

by Neil Gaiman and Yoshitaka Amano

A short novel with illustrations, The Dream Hunters is quite good. It's hardly my favorite of the Sandman books as it doesn't fit into a larger story, and there are moments that feel shoehorned in to get it to fit with the world of Sandman as opposed to the Japanese folk tale it started out as. However, Gaiman's writing can overcome almost any obstacle, and Yoshitaka Amano's art is scintillating, yet doesn't overpower the text, as it's abstracted enough to encourage the reader to retain any images already formed. Quite good, and recommended.

Stars & Stripes Forever
Del Rey, 1999

Stars and Stripes in Peril
Del Rey, 2001

Stars and Stripes Triumphant
Del Rey, 2003

by Harry Harrison

Am alternate history, asking, what if the British, interfering in the American Civil War, united the North and South against them? The details of technology and strategy take center stage in this trilogy. While these are important, the cultural differences between Americans and English of the 1860s could have used some more fleshing out.

While these three books are great fun to read, in some ways they're fluff for alternate history buffs. I'm not qualified to judge if they're historically accurate -- at least at in the first book, before history starts diverging into Harrison's vision -- but in many ways the outcomes of these three books is American imperialist wish-fulfillment.

The first book, Stars and Stripes Forever is the best of the lot. The British are shown as having a different agenda than the Americans, not evil as they are shown in the third book. Perhaps Harrison's message was meant to be that any country can be led into evil actions by the right set of circumstances, but this doesn't come across as clearly as it could.

If Harrison had written this as one large book, instead of three smaller novels, he might have had the time to develop characters better, the same problem that plagued Harry Turtledove's Colonization series. But Trilogies seem to sell well, so three small books it is. The Gee-whiz what-if quantity doesn't overpower the tepid characterizations; the creator of the Stainless Steel Rat and of the Hammer and the Cross books has done far, far better in past works than this tragic attempt.