Neil Young Rocks Seattle "With this old guitar...Doin' what I do"
(posted at 10:49 AM) I watched Neil Young brings the WAMU Theatre down Tuesday night with two sets, one acoustic and one oh-so electric. The Seattle Times picks up the tune from the bridge when:
..anarchy broke out, three songs into the second of his two sets (theelectric one), with fans spilling down in droves to the front of thestage, where they happily danced the night away...
I was among those clamoring for a closer spot than my $80 back-bench ticket would allow. It was certainly no anarchy, just a polite Pacific NorthWest stage-rush down the aisle. The ushers cleared it within minutes.
My heartfelt thanks to generous Row 8 ticket holders who paid $250 a piece and still let me in when the ushers swept by. What a show!
(posted at 2:35 PM) The interns have stormed HQ, and the lawyers are assembling. The bankruptcy court mandated we work with a 'healer'. She's suggested a wilderness retreat to build trust among the staff. So until the power-sharing agreement is worked out, just imagine we're all swinging from trees and getting to know one another 'really'.
We're still committed to exploring all the ways one can express themselves creatively electronically (i.e. that's why we call this 'digittante').
So in between the nailbed and the barefoot firepit, we'll be Twittering
(posted at 11:21 AM) I spent the afternoon fetching props for 14/48: a bullhorn, batteries, rubbing alcohol (to clean the Burning Man ash from the Bullhorn), cherry slushee, an old fashined shaving kit, and beer bottles (that had to be emptied...somehow...). At showtime, I sat behind the row of writers in the almost-full house, and spent two solid hours laughing my kidneys out watching 7 ten-minute plays around the theme of 'power vacuum'.
Props to Sarah Rudinoff for her billionaires-in-jail play "The Big House", in which Tina LaPadula, playing a bored guard, torments two caviar-starved executive prisoners by shouting "Give me my bonus BITCH!"
Becky Hellyer's hilarious three-man play "Porn" brought us the anguish of guys outside a 7-11 desperately trying to spin up their nerve to go inside and buy a porn magazine. A classic suburban trope with a twist: these weren't teenagers but divorced dads. "I can't buy a porn magazine from a guy who lives down the street! What if we see each other mowing the lawn at the same time?"
Keri Healey's play "Jimmy Juarez' Brazilian Facial Parlor and Taqueria" explored the existence of heaven through a lost traveller, played by Mark Diaz, looking for Death Valley but who finds a "service oriented" joint instead. Funniest scene of the night was Diaz, reclining in a salon chair, marguerita in hand, with Jennifer Pratt's head in his lap and Julie Briskman massaging his scalp. "Man, I must have died and gone to some wierd fucking kind of heaven," he says. But then realising the truth in his own words, he sits up and shouts "Blowjobs aren't free..."
I'm headed back today for another long afternoon of fetching random objects from the 99cent Store, and eager to see what Wayne Rawley, Bret Fetzer, Carl, Sander, Greg Loughridge, and the rest of the crew have dreamed up for tonight's show. Tonight's theme, chosen by an audience member last night, is 'forbidden fruit'. Rudinoff's already whet my appetite, emailing this morning that her play is about an organic cannibal.
(posted at 4:01 PM) I'm volunteering this weekend at Seattle's 14/48. If you like theater, and want to see Seattle's top local theateristas conceive, write, rehearse, and stage 14 new plays in 48 hours, this is the festival for you.
Last night's opening event included picking the theme out of a bucket ('power vaccuum'), and writers picking the random envelopes that tell them how many actors they get and the sequence in which their play will be performed. It's not until this morning, after the writers stayed up late writing their plays, that the actual actors for each play are selected, again at random.
As a 14/48 newbie, I also had to pump the keg and serve beer to the gang, which fortunately I knew how to do ;-) Be sure to check it out, or next weekend, when they do the whole thing all over with a completely new set of writers, directors, actors, and crew.
(posted at 1:57 PM) Steve Gilmor introduced the lunch-time 'Gilmor Gang' by noting his pleasure at seeing the 'podfathers' Dave Winer and Adam Curry seated next to each other. During the session, Adam Curry characterized podcasting as the "Holy Grail" of broadcasting. With little press, but 400 bloggers in the room, there's possibly more coverage than content. So check Technorati for your Gnomedex update fix.
(posted at 11:06 AM) Attending Gnomedex in Seattle. While I had nothing to do with the firedrill that emptied last night's Google reception, the company updates and announcements today have started coming out as quickly as firemen.
(posted at 12:20 PM) After 3 years in Seattle, and this our 4th Seattle International Film Festival, I was determined to do it properly this time. In past years, we hadn’t grokked onto the SIFF thing until the final week, racing to see two, maybe three movies before the whole shebang ended. There was that strange Korean film at the Harvard. There was Torreros ’73 at the Egyptian. And there were a lot of film freaks who got there before us and took the best seats.
(posted at 2:17 PM) Kim Peterson, writing in today's SeattlePI, says:
"Microsoft hit the road again, testing the colors last December on focus groups in Japan, the United Kingdom and Texas. People felt the gray was wishy-washy and vague. Reaction to the white was extremely positive — particularly in Japan.
When people there were asked what company might have made the console, they guessed Sony or Apple. That thrilled Microsoft executives.
(posted at 10:21 PM) Dan Gilmor launches a San Francisco-based community journalism/blog called Bayosphere that is “…of, by, and for the Bay area…”. It’s built using an open-source CMS platform named Drupal, for which they’ve also posted an explanation for why they chose it. Daniel Rubin, a writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer launches Blinq, an Inquirer-backed blog. There’s also a Boston-based portal called Universal Hub.
(posted at 10:06 PM) After 7 months as Managing Editor of their business portfolio of 30 websites, the world’s richest software company and I have parted ways. It was a tremendous (and somewhat all-consuming) experience working with such talented, committed people. But I’m looking forward to re-establishing life on the “outside”. Apologies if you’d experienced radio-silence from me since last year. Expect more updates soon. I look forward to hearing what you’re up to.
(posted at 11:04 AM) You've bought all the new shiny gadgets, you bought the accessories. And come next January, you can buy O'Reilly's new publication MAKE: and learn how to mod your gear and make new stuff with it. DIY steadicams from soda bottles, digital pictures taken from a kite and more. Or, you could visit the Tinker Master himself, Phillip Torrone. War-kayaking anyone?
(posted at 4:04 PM) Have we become so consumed by the "Micheal Jackson turned into the Scarecrow he played in the Wiz" news that we completely missed this? The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has discovered U2 frontman Bono morphed into the shaggy-haired, grizzle-faced comic-howler Bobcat Goldthwait.
(posted at 6:05 PM) 'This could go on for 10 minutes or three hours,' warns Kiki Durain (Justin Bond) during the opening number of Friday night's Kiki & Herb show at On the Boards. For two acts and two encores this gorgeous road-weary performer and Herb (Kenny Melman) her 'trendy gay jew-tard' sidekick sing, belt, scream, wail, and seduce their way through a wide range of standards and 80's alterna-pop covers.
There's Kiki front and center, slurring like Joan Rivers while telling the audience about her good friend Princess Grace driving her car off a Monaco cliff out of boredom. There's Kiki by the piano, vamping through Tom Jones' Sex Bomb. There she is crawling from table top to table top demanding the audience 'lick my leg!'. There's Kiki reclining in the chair, asking the doctor performing her episiotomy for 'an extra stitch for Yasaweh,' the tender husband of her daughter Coco. Behind the piano, we see Herb, cheerfully raising his eyebrow and his glass at all her jokes. By the end of the first Act, there's Kiki passed out on the stage while Herb yells back at the hooting and hollering audience 'you should have killed her when you had the chance!'"
(posted at 5:37 PM) Does anyone find it in poor taste that so many media outlets chose to title their coverage of the death of the former President, long-suffering from Alzheimers, with various forms of "Remembering Reagan"?
