attend at least one non-music event per month

i am a music geek, so seeing sports is like convincing a fish to hangout on the beach, so, i’ll try

This was so wildly successful that I’m seeing more lectures than rock shows these days. Am I old, or just nerdy? No matter. There’s no point keeping track anymore, because I’m officially in the habit. Special thanks to Town Hall.

Wow, I hope attending all these non-musical events doesn’t ensmarten me to the point where I can no longer rock and roll. Town Hall is a treasure, and happens to be just down the road from the Hideout, the perfect setting for lecture debriefs. The robots are becoming addicted to their lecture series.

• Seth Lloyd on Programming the Universe: this was entertaining and mind-expanding, one of those times where I walked out of an experience thinking about everything differently than I had before.
• Punk on Paper: while their book on rock posters definitely has promise, the two washed up hippies that were promoting it seemed like earnest and rather dull self-caricatures compared to the wry, brainy Seattlites on the panel. When I checked out gigposters.com after the lecture and hunted down the poster for my first ever Guided By Voices show, I found that it was designed by Jeff Kleinsmith, the poster artist on the panel. His stuff is excellent.
• Simon Schama: this guy knows his stuff so well that he can speak in an animated and tangential question at length when responding to almost any question. That’s usually good, and while I’m no history buff, this little known part of American History (African American slaves fighting for the British during the revolutionary war) is pretty compelling.
• Daniel Gilbert on Happiness: already barked about that one elsewhere

• Karen Cheng lecture on Designing Type at the Henry. I liked Karen’s personality, I liked the fact that she transitioned from chemical engineering into type design, and after seeing this lecture I really wanted to take her class. But it’s a UW class, which would probably involve enrolling in the university, and would probably be held during work hours. The talk was such that I walked in with near complete ignorance of the topic and walked out wanting to design a font of my own. I promised myself to wait at least two weeks before buying her book, thinking it could be whimsy. Two weeks have passed and I still want to make a font, difficult as it might be, so I’m picking up her book when it comes out.
• Pop Music Conference at EMP. Attending the conference this year really made me regret never having considered it before. A bunch of erudite people talking all day about rock music? What the hell kept me away the last four years?

I think I’m forgetting one…but in any case, I hit up one and a half non-music events during March.

1. Salon of Shame. This is a monthly gathering where grown adults volunteer to read the angsty, dramatic, wince-inducing biographic prose they wrote in their teens. Or at least, it’s supposed to be a gathering. This time there were all of two readers and a handful of audience members. But a) they were calling for a snow storm that night, which might have scared some peeps away b) one of the two readers spoke twice, making it like three readers (if you squinted during the first one’s encore performance) c) what was presented was very entertaining and d) they gave full refunds to the audience. I have to check this out again sometime, maybe even read if I can find some old stuff. This quarter I have a conflicting photo class, so it might be a while, alas.
2. Cuckoo Crow. This only counts as a half since as a multimedia piece it was musical as well as everything else. I can’t say I gleaned anything from it except entertainment, but it was fantastic entertainment, especially when Haruko crawled throughout the entire center section of the Moore Theater solely on the backs of the (occupied) theater chairs.

Caught a production of Catch-22 at Theater Schmeater. This was interesting because, first of all, Joseph Heller is the only person I’m aware of who both attended Penn State and did something interesting and widely known in the Humanities. With Heller as the only known exception, popular success in the arts and association with Penn State are mutually exclusive. The novel and movie definitely work better than the play does, and in this production the acting was overblown, even more overblown than the slapstick-inspired acting of last month’s Waiting for Godot. But I’ve never been much of a theater goer, so maybe I’m naively expecting play actors to act with the subtlety of movie actors or something. Anyway, little known fact: the title of Heller’s novel, a book title which made the dictionary and common parlance, was never meant to be Catch-22, but Catch-18. There was another war novel out at the time with 18 in its title, so to prevent any confusion, they changed the numeral in Heller’s book title.

Even the catch had a catch.

I also saw 12 Minutes Max, a series of seven pieces with a time limit, last night at On The Boards. A dancy theatery performance-arty sort of thing, where I learned that I am entirely ignorant of the language of dance. I like the way it sounds but I have no idea what’s being said.

I got a little ahead of myself this month, partly because great shows have been few and far between. But here’s what I did:

• Attended my teacher’s photography show opening at COCA. This was long, drunken, and fun.
• Sat through a discussion of electric airplanes as part of the Science On Tap series at Third Place Books. This was short, sweet, and lame.
• Listened to Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt interviewing each other at Benaroya Hall. This was long, sweet, and middling.
• Saw a production of Waiting for Godot at Second Story Rep in Redmond. This was just like you’d expect community theater in the burbs to be like. But I’d never seen the play before, only read it, so it was good to catch a production that was heavy on visual comedy. It was also good to see the benevolent drunk we met at the Comet one night (studying his parts and raving incoherently about the director) remembering his lines. He was Gogo…the one who can’t take off his boots.