Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

This is just a test

please ignore me.

Testing3

testing again

Testing2

testing again

Testing

Ignore me.

Decadent Fashion Friday.

I’m leaving town again (but this is the last time — for at least a couple of months!) to see the Seattle contingent. Yay!

Here are two things that are awesome:

Catholic Church Fashion Show from Federico Fellini’s Roma. I won’t try to describe it. Just watch it.

Featurette: The Eyes of Laura Mars — Helmut Newton and Rebecca Blake photographs, a lovely Faye Dunaway, a young Brad Dourif (aka Doc from Deadwood), and magnificently extreme late seventies styles. (Personal to garretfw: if you ever need to appear in costume, I think you’d be an excellent Dunaway-esque Laura Mars.)

Oh, and an extra awesome thing, unrelated to decadent fashion unless you consider Guys and Dolls costumes to be examples of same: thanks to caitiecait for letting me know that a passage from Empress is up on literaryquotes!

Comics: Not Literature Since 2007

Via Journalista, colleencoover and castellucci: “Now available from TCJ.com through the month of September: A podcast recording of the “Comics Are Not Literature” panel from the 2007 San Diego Comic-Con, featuring Douglas Wolk (moderator), publisher Dan Nadel, and writers Sara Ryan, Cecil Castellucci, Paul Tobin and Austin Grossman. Click here to download the 50.8MB MP3 audiofile. Please note that this file will be removed from the site on October 1.”

Twelve things on returning from Ashland

  1. I just became a member of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
  2. You should totally come next year.
  3. There was a corgi cameo in The Taming of the Shrew.
  4. I already have some favorite actors.
  5. I’d forgotten that one characteristic of an effective stage actor is oversized hands; their gestures are more easily read from the back row.
  6. On the backstage tour, I didn’t ask the question I most wanted to ask: “So, what’s the story on the dusty rubber ducky in the green room?”
  7. There’s always somebody on the backstage tour whose questions make you cringe.
  8. On the other hand, without the cringe-worthy questions we would never have learned that one particular actor’s nightmare is to perform in soccer uniform.
  9. I will only change two things for next year; stay somewhere downtown, and buy a real city map.
  10. Ashland to Portland is a four-hour drive if you’re sufficiently lead-footed. I’m not saying, I’m just saying.
  11. Of course, in the hotel we ended up watching Animal Planet again, this time one about a leopard being reunited with her cub. He greeted her with many affectionate nips. I said, “See? Snag loves us. He does the exact same thing.”
  12. And he is.

Those of you who’ve been reading this a while will know what a thrilling discovery it was for me to learn…

…that William Gibson watches The Wire. He says:

 I don’t know what constitutes “noir” in 2007. I mean, would The Wire be noir? I don’t think so. Actually, noir—I was taught in college—is a kind of baroque pop version of literary naturalism. Anyway, that’s the way some critics have looked at it. I think that a show like The Wire is the closest we come these days to naturalism. It’s a genuine, authentic attempt at naturalism. I’ve never really attempted naturalism before, but I value it a lot, so all of its more baroque forms have been very valuable to me. One of them, I think, is noir.

Totally read the rest of the interview, too.

About to be an audience member

It’s funny. For the amount that I write about theater, and as much as I value it and think it is awesome and amazing, I spend remarkably little time actually, you know, seeing live theater.

But that’s gonna change this weekend, and I am super excited. For the first time since I’ve lived in Portland, I am making the drive down to Ashland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Has anyone besides quirkybird been before? Anything I must see while I’m in Ashland? It will be my first time in Ashland, too…

Opposable paws

We don’t have a bread box.

Actually that’s a lie. I have a fantastic bread box with two compartments, one labeled Bread, the other Cake. But it is extremely old and rusty and I use it to store all my old journals:

bread.jpeg

cake.jpeg

But anyway, the point is that we don’t have a bread box suitable for bread storage. This totally wasn’t a problem until Snag entered our lives and we discovered his affinity for gnawing through bread wrappers and consuming portions of several slices.

Then I had the genius idea that we could keep the entire loaf of bread inside the toaster oven. Same size, more or less, as a bread box, same functionality. Take that, I thought, you little carb-seeking missile. It worked! We’ve enjoyed our bread un-gnawed for months.

You see where this is going, don’t you?

You’re right.

Today Snag learned how to open the toaster oven.