Legally Blonde is a hoot

September 30, 2012 in PDX with 0 Comments

“Legally Blonde,” Pixie Dust Productions‘ latest show, is currently playing at the Newmark Theater. It’s there until next Sunday, October 7, and you should totally go see it.

I’m constantly repeating how amazed I am at the number of people I don’t know in Portland, and the same can be said for companies, galleries, and cultural opportunities of all sorts. I had never heard of Pixie Dust before, but dude. This was a production that much bigger cities would be proud to put on, and it was mostly home grown.

Of course, it helps that the book and lyrics are hilarious. Well acted and danced, and some quality voices in there as well. Totally worth going.

Black Swans and Writing

September 28, 2012 in Writing with 0 Comments

I consider myself a better than average writer. I went to a fancy school and everything, to learn to write gooder than I did before I went to the school. It’s a thing people do.

In the context of getting the MFA, I attended the Associated Writing Program’s annual conference in Portland one year. It was my first taste of a city I would come to love, although to be fair I was in an airport hotel and conference space that I don’t actually remember. I did get to make my typical pilgrimage to Powell’s, but that was about it.

The thing you need to know about the AWP is that it is largely made up of useless bastards who are more concerned with tenure or one-upsmanship than they are about craft. I was truly horrified to discover how stupidly mono-cultured the universe was. I don’t often arbitrarily judge whole swaths of people, but trust this one: if you meet someone who is a professor at a graduate writing program, it’s odds-on that that person is an asshat. There are notable and wonderful exceptions all over everywhere. Make friends with those people. Continue Reading…

Reading the Phone Book

September 25, 2012 in Ephemera, Kickstarter with 0 Comments

Over at kottke.org, Jason Kottke suggested a Kickstarter to get Jay-Z to rap all of the “99 problems” gags on Twitter. This dovetails weirdly with a thing I was thinking about last night.

Ever heard someone say that Morgan Freeman could read the phone book and it would be interesting? Well, ladies and gents, we need to apply some empiricism to that statement. And since phone books are made up artifacts of this “past” we tell our kids about, I think we might also need some other super-boring fodder. Routine maintenance. Crop numbers. Transcripts from particularly egregious business presentations.

Off the top of my head, I would want:

Morgan Freeman
Dame Judi Dench
John Lithgow
Liam Neeson
Kevin Spacey
Helen Mirren
Stephen Fry
Ian McKellen (can you fucking imagine?)

Etc., etc. I think that there are a whole lot more people who would be relevant or fun or great. You’d want vignette-length pieces, maybe 5-10 minutes depending on subject matter. Enough for ambience, not so much that it goes all stupid.

Thinking more about this as I write, I think I’d like to see creation on both ends of the spectrum. So not so much found poetics within boring tracts – instead, a constructed “boring thing” that has some hooks for the performers to riff off of.

So that’s it. I might think about what the trailer would look like for something like that.

In which I attempt to impress a penguin

September 17, 2012 in Ephemera with 0 Comments

Hello, Penguin.

First it was Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Then it was Pride and Prejudice and Erotica. It seems wherever you go, the classics are being “refreshed” to ensure that they reach a new generation of readers. As more of the canon enters the public domain, this will only continue. Continue Reading…

On Reliance

September 11, 2012 in Social Media with 1 Comment

(On a day when something incredibly disruptive happened to our nation, this feels like a very stupid post to write. But at the same time, maybe my noticing the airing of petty annoyances like service downtime on the anniversary of one of the most stunning attacks on the country is a larger proof of the point – massive collapse is gradually smoothed over and made a thing of words.)

At opposite ends of the savvy spectrum, but with similar results: GoDaddy had an interruption of service yesterday, which turned out to be caused by some sort of internal mishap that borked the routers. Meantime, GitHub was also down (and then down again this morning), causing a hue and cry in my Twitter feed from all of the developers who are smarter than me and care when GitHub goes down. I don’t actually use either service (in GoDaddy’s case I switched to NameCheap/Hover a while back, and I really don’t have anything worthy of gitting). I certainly would never have used GoDaddy for hosting, even if I was still using them as a registrar.

No, my new issue is that Feedly is no longer working for me on Chrome (at least at work, where I use it to read feeds during my morning drink coffee/become a worker ritual). As anyone who knows me knows, I NEEDS MAH FEEDS. It’s entirely possible that the draconian desktop at work is at fault – it’s certainly not a widespread problem. But if it were, I think you’d hear about it.

A lot of people got disrupted yesterday, in small or big ways, by an absence of a thing that is usually just there. Continue Reading…

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