for neecee's birthday liz and i decided to surprise her with tickets to the big crispin glover show at the music box. it started with his "big slide show" which was, honestly, friggin TRANSCENDENT. i don't think i blinked through the entire thing, for good reasons. i didn't know whether to watch the images on the screen or watch crispin glover himself. the eight stories that he went through in the slide show, all of them were phenomenal, disturbing, sweet and sad, and ultimately compelling.

then we watched the movie "what is it", which was not quite so transcendent. it was kind of like a 72 minute slap in the face. horrifying image after horrifying image, you had to go out of your way to keep from being offended every 10 seconds, but that was the whole point of the movie, he said afterwards, was the exploration of societal taboos. it wasn't as traumatic as, say, watching "the silent scream" when you're a 14 year old girl in a catholic school, but it was up there. there's a trailer of it here if you're interested.

here is what i learned from the evening: crispin glover e-nun-ci-ates ve-ry pre-cise-ly. also, the man cannot give a straight answer to a question, but will dance a merry jig around the topic for about 10 minutes. also, he had to sue zemeckis for unapproved usage of his image in back to the futures 2&3, but is going to be playing grendel anyway in zemeckis's version of "beowulf" next year, which i'm very interested in seeing.

we slipped out halfway through the question and answer session to drink way too much alcohol at an empty wrigleyville bar. all in all, a fabulous weekend. :D happy birthday neecee!