As I mentioned, I’ve been trying out the Twitter thing, and shockingly, embarrassingly, even, I…really like it. So while I theoretically agree with everything ktempest has to say about the ephemeralness of the medium, I've been sucked in anyway, maybe because I associate with the sort of people that tend towards complete, witty sentences and constantly teeter near the 140-character maximum.

The thing is, though, I’m a lousy enough blogger that Twitter may be your best source for new content from me. Consequently, I'm going to resist my better judgment and copy said content over. So: under the cut, if you want it, is a ( quick recap of the past two weeks. ) If this is remotely of interest to any of you, I’ll try to send a summary once or twice a week. If it's not, you can feel free to spew a bunch of invective at me—or just avoid looking behind the cut.

Oh. I never do this, but since I was posting anyway, and we're all heading to Readercon in three days, I might as well clue you in on my programming schedule. I'm sort of surprised I even have a schedule, since until a week or two ago I was only in the reserve corps; and now I'm suddenly on four panels. I hold Readercon programming in immense esteem, and this all happened relatively quickly, so I’m going through an abbreviated version of my standard “Good lord, why did I think I had anything intelligent to say aboutthat?” cycle. But I’ve done this enough by now to know that I'll figure it out eventually, so I'm sure I'll calm down about it by the next time you see me. Anyway, ( the schedule. )

I'll be sharing my room with Brian Slattery, who—totally unrelated to how much I adore his fiction—is one of my favorite people in the world. He's also a pretty rare presence at conventions (or even on the internet), so please do let me introduce you if you happen to run across us.

I sincerely hope that this won't be the most egregious set of recycled content you’ll see all day, and look forward to seeing a bunch of you in Burlington.

Okay, so that last outing was obviously a failure. Perhaps this one will fare a bit better, though I have no intention of keeping up that level of activity—does everyone get that punch drunk when they start up a Twitter account? I’m spending the holiday weekend in Washington, DC/College Park, MD with current and former members of HRSFA (I’m not one, but I mooned around Vericon so much during college that Tom eventually took pity on me), which should be a good test case.

By the way: they asked me for some bio information for a brief talk I’ll be doing at Clarion Prime when I’m out in San Diego for CCI, so I cleaned up the relevant sections of my public wiki (which will theoretically also be incorporated into my new web page, whenever the heck that happens) and gathered them into this page here. Probably of most interest is my travel schedule—which puts me at Readercon, SDCC, and WorldCon in the space of four weeks; I’m not stressed out about that at all—but there is also some information about the sorts of submissions I’d be most excited about seeing. They tell me it is professionally inadvisable to post such things publicly, but I’m afraid I just cannot see the harm in it.

Alright, I suck. We’re going back in time a week.

The first time they ran Free Comic Book Day I was in college, with enough idle geeks in my environs that I could justify organizing a trip to all of Manhattan’s major comic book stores. This hasn't been feasible for awhile, and this time the comics wound up being incidental to the mission of flyering for MoCCA (I picked up a bagful, of course, but this was at Forbidden Planet, where they were dispensing mostly superhero comics that I didn’t much care about—which ought to teach me to go straight to Rocketship next year). We got rid of all of our fliers before too long, netting some positive responses from anyone who actually looked at them, and then I headed uptown for a home-cooked CUSFS banquet. Going back to college? Still weird.

Sunday was a theatre day with the parents that wound up encompassing both the dregs and the heights of the New York theatre scene. Our matinee was The New Century, the last show in our Lincoln Center Theater subscription. I disliked it enough that I’m pretty sure it’s knocked something else off my list of the ten worst shows I've ever seen, and we’re probably talking over 600 of ‘em by now. Granted, plenty of the audience3and a lot of reviewers, but New York theatre reviewers are hopeless—seemed to be enjoying themselves, but that almost made it worse: jokes about broad gay stereotypes are bad enough when they're aimed at audiences that will understand that they're jokes, but are vaguely creepy when most of the people watching are straight old people from New Jersey. Probably the show's only redeeming quality was Jane Houdyshell, who can't help but inject some humanity into whatever she's in.

But the day was a net gain thanks to The Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928), an Elevator Repair Service show at the New York Theatre Workshop that’s grounded in a word-for-word enactment of the first part of The Sound and the Fury. It is a living example of theatre’s transformative powers that a direct literary adaptation could yield something so beautifully done and weird and funny and involving, one of those shows that teaches you how to watch it as you go. I immediately wanted to see it again, but this is why theatre both gives and takes in its ephemerality: given a fast-approaching close date and the droves of people lining up to get on the wait list, I pretty much had to give up that idea as impossible. But then they extended the show for a week and I was able to grab four more tickets for the final performance: bless you, NYTW and your $20 Sundays. If you're at all able, you should try to snag one, too.

I can't remember anything about what I did on Monday, and there is nothing in my schedule wiki, which is kind of discomfiting. Did I see you? Was I there? But on Tuesday there was NYRSF, where I heard Kelly read her glorious story "The Cinderella Game" for the third time. And dinner gave us the opportunity to have a long talk for the first time in awhile, a secret cabal of quiet-voiced people talking under the crowd.

On Wednesday we had the volunteer orientation for the MoCCA Art Festival. It was reasonably well-attended by interested-seeming people; the only downside being that that meeting marks the point where, whenever I am doing non-MoCCA-related things with my free time (like, oh, writing this entry), I am kind of shirking and should kind of be stopped. After we finished, I rushed home to eat a sandwich and meet a prospective new roommate, who...did not show up. He is automatically less awesome than ecmyers.

A digression: Back in ‘04, my dearest darling Shay got me into the habit of attending the annual screening of Oscar-nominated shorts that the Academy puts on each year at Lighthouse International. I eventually sucked fullcopy into the habit; but we missed it this year, out of strike-related timing confusion, and me with theatre tickets, and him with bridge. Eventually he convinced julianyap that we should just buy all of them on iTunes and do a home screening. On Thursday we actually went through with this plan, and though it was a long night, and I disagreed with the winners (as usual), it was probably the strongest overall slate I’ve seen so far. glvalentine, have you seen "Tanghi Argentini"? It is darling.

On Friday, musetoself, ladyaviva, and I ate some empanadas (the new cupcake!) and then saw Crooked at the Women's Project. It was impeccably acted, frequently hysterical, sometimes brutal, and— though I kind of felt like I'd been slapped when it ended—I basically loved it and can't stop thinking about it. There is only one performance left, but if you're not doing anything on Sunday afternoon, there are many worse things you could do than show up at the Julia Miles at 2:00 and try to rush it.

After the play, I bought some cookies and brought them to Matt's party, where I felt vaguely entertaining for awhile, totally awkward for about twice that long (repeating “this is why people drink” in my head the whole time), and then gave up and went home in a fit of social retardation. Sigh. Unrelatedly: friends my age getting engaged? Still weird.

When I started this entry on Saturday morning, it was supposed to end that afternoon with some statement about what a relief it was to have a completely unscheduled day, especially given how full my Sunday was going to be. This plan was spoiled by the fact that I had been shockingly moronic and had listed the two plays on the wrong day in my schedule, a mistake that was—comically? tragically?—perpetuated by an e-mail from my mother that said "We'll see you at 1:30 at Sunday" (she meant in the Park with George, of course, though she did not actually say that last part). I misread this note as a confirmation that both shows were on Sunday, and didn’t think enough about how improbable that was until my parents showed up at my apartment, half-convinced that I was dead, to ask why I had failed to show up. Eeep. Don't let anyone ever tell you that too much theatre doesn't lead to a life of ruin! Anyway, I have the unused ticket, and I’ve managed once before to recover from gross flakiness by convincing the box office to let me transfer an unused ticket to a future performance (feminine wiles? No, I have none of those—probably sheer patheticness), so perhaps all is not lost.

Luckily, I hadn't imperiled our plans for The 39 Steps. I'm having a hard time judging this one: I thought the performances were great; the stagecraft was brilliant; that the show is charming and clever, delivers everything it promises, and is doing something genuinely new; and I’d gladly recommend it most anyone. And yet, there's a tiny part of me—the part that hates uncomplicated fun—that feels a little bit dirty about the whole operation, like I’d bought into something I oughtn’t. I suspect I may be dragging unrelated emotions into the equation, but it’s hard to tell from here. Ask again later, I guess.

And that’s it for the past. I am hyperaware that by conflating too many subjects people are less likely to read or respond to any of them, but perhaps you will humor me this time around. Yes? No?

[Argh. I'm falling behind on entries and comments, cannot keep to a sentence limit, and am increasingly unsure why anyone would actually want to read what is basically "what I did today" reportage. Is this whole experiment worth it? I am dubious!]

Thursday: I've become more and more of a This American Life groupie since I've started walking to work and back in the company of podcasts, so I was very excited when they announced a live launch of the second season of the TV show, and crushed when the tickets sold out instantaneously and they started going for astronomical rates on Craigslist. Consequently, I am absurdly grateful to the nice guy who posted on Thursday morning offering up four tickets at face value (he later asked if he could take one back, and Irene and Greg took the other two). The event was amazing—funnily awkward live transitions, compelling previews from upcoming episodes of the TV show, hysterical outtakes from previous ones, and all— and suffused me with adoration from the second it started through to the very end. Why, yes, I am swoony for Ira Glass.

The event was in the Skirball Center, throwing distance from the Dessert Truck, which has fiendishly keyed into the obsessive unique-experience-collector side of my being with its get-it-while-it's-here weekly special. But they were out of the special by the time the show let out (fie!), so I fought with myself, then caved and tried the chocolate peanut butter thing instead. Alas, the milk chocolate mousse was sort of wishy-washy, the only menu item I’ve tried so far that's been a misfire. Perhaps it’s only disappointing in light of the absurdly high standards set by the rest of their options, but it still seems like some kind of a lesson in delayed gratification.

Friday: I'd planned to make it a relatively short night with an early show, the Dufus CD release at Cake Shop. But then there was a run of really weird offerings on my theatre comp service (Manicurist to Millionaires? Mary J. Blige and Jay-Z?), capped off by the chance to see Al Gore at Radio City Music Hall. I debated for about three seconds before deciding to both. That course of action seems to have been given the universe's tacit approval by the fact that Toby Goodshank—solo musician, Moldy Peach, half of Double Deuce, scheduled to play at the Dufus show that very night—apparently works for my theatre comp service, and was there when I went to pick up. Okay, I get it already: New York is tiny. Anyway, the show was on Cake Shop's new upstairs mini-stage, which I approve of, because what’s better than sitting on the floor of a bar with a PB&J bagel and coffee and getting pretty songs sung to you? And, yes, America's sweetheart was there, too.

I had to leave partway through Seth's set, but can't regret it too much: the Al Gore talk was even better than I expected (and I have no idea what I was expecting), funny, charming (really!), and humble to start, then alternately depressing and terrifying for the next hour or so. At the end, there was a note of optimism about the resourcefulness of the American people that didn't quite ring true to me—I'm not ready to give up yet, but most of the hope I manage to retain is couched in cynicism (see also: Part V of this Thomas Friedman article, or the first section of the Slate Cultural Gabfest on personal virtue)—but I don’t think you can blame him for offering some consoling measure. The moderated discussion after his talk was also great, bringing up a lot of the questions on everyone's mind but letting Gore duck them in amusing ways. I’m still working out what lessons I’ve formed from the experience, but I’m very glad to have had the opportunity to see the catalyst.

And now I really should start my journey to the CUSFS banquet.

08-05-04 @ 02:44: Edited for suckage.

[...momentarily harboring the delusion that posting before midnight is like posting yesterday...]

Wednesday: I darted off after work to an organizational meeting for the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art's MoCCA Art Festival, for which I'll once again be coordinating volunteers, and for which I've got two pressing appointments: on Saturday I'll be flyering and talking up the festival in front of one of the shops participating in Free Comic Book Day (where are you getting yours?), and our volunteer recruitment meeting will be next Wednesday.

There were two neat concerts I was considering for after the meeting, but the sold-out Langhorne Slim show at the Mercury Lounge seemed to actually be sold out (though I was told I'd have a good shot at it if I stopped back just before eleven); so I tried the Emilyn Brodsky show at Lit Lounge and found it strangely…non-existent—by which I mean that Emilyn was there, but she wasn't playing a show yet, and I'm not really one to stand around in an empty bar until an event coalesces around me.

So I trudged home, worked for awhile, made a last-minute decision at 10:50 that I'm happier at rock shows than not, and headed out again. The Langhorne show was great, but deeply weird: the second or third time I saw him, he wound up having the last set of a long, late show, so it was probably after 1:00 by the time he started, and there were maybe twenty people left; but by the end of it, he and the band and every damn person in the room were dancing, and it stands as one of my favorite concert memories ever. And now he's gone the way of so many of my favorite antifolkers, and is getting Famous, and is selling out shows to rooms full of screaming girls; and I really don't think that that process ever stops being strange.

The weird thing about seven-hour meetings (well, almost seven: I took a short break in the middle to do some publishing-rather-than-web-related stuff) is that you can go to work all day and barely feel like you've been there at all. Nonetheless, when kristin_wins, gl0ry_gl0ry, and some other ladies from the office caught me right afterwards and told me they were going downtown for free ice cream, it was basically impossible to refuse. I will probably regret this tomorrow, but hopefully I'll be too busy going INSANE.

[You know I suck at the LJ thing (or maybe the waking up thing) when I can write a three-sentence entry, get too exhausted to proofread it and post it before I go to bed, and run out of time to do it in the morning. So, despite appearances, this is actually YESTERDAY'S ENTRY. Today's entry will appear, well, later today. Maybe even before midnight, if I'm really good.]

Monday! A relatively productive day at work, after which I went home and made wasabi grilled tuna and Japanese eggplant with miso in an attempt to dispense with some ingredients I'd bought for my dinner party but didn't wind up using. I was a bit underwhelmed by the tuna (though, to be fair, I might have cooked it for too long—I'm still mastering grill-to-broiler conversion times), but the eggplant, while a bit odd at first, really grew on me: not a bad effort, on the whole. The crucial question now is how much conscious time I have left to read this awesome manuscript before my eyes start closing on me.

I gave today [er, yesterday—my internet issues are apparently more pervasive than I had hoped] over to food and friends, starting with brunch in Greenpoint with lowellboyslash et al, then frantic preparation for a dinner party I was throwing in the evening, a joke housewarming for my friend James. This may strike you as odd if you recall that musetoself, ecmyers, and I moved into our apartment in Alphabet City in September 2006. But we never got around to having a housewarming party due to the insanity surrounding our walls, and James has insisted on calling the place "new" until we did, so I figured the best way to make him stop was to hold a small dinner party for him, the roommates, their SOs, and julianyap. A trio of Japanese-esque dishes later and I think we can safely call our apartment warmed, with the added benefit of giving us our first chance to try out the living-room-plus-dining-table layout. The lack of a dinner party venue has been the biggest gap in my social puzzle, and—because I am secretly an old-fashioned housewife—I am absurdly excited about finally having the means to fill it.

[Edited 08-04-28 to fix our move-in date.]

Today was a theatre day, consisting of Antony and Cleopatra at Theatre for New Audience and Ty Jones' Emancipation at the Classical Theatre of Harlem, two companies that we love dearly and have subscribed to for years. Unfortunately, despite the heaps of strong reviews, I wasn't in love with either, for similar reasons: the productions were thoughtful, attractively designed, elegantly acted, intellectually appealing, and politically striking,
but I couldn't connect with either of them emotionally. In cases like this I'm prone to wondering if it was just me—was I distracted? was I in the mood for lighter fare?—but I don't think so: a college Shakespeare prof of mine who was at TFANA for the talkback concurred that A&C "acted very well, right past each other"; and Emancipation was oddly bloodless given the subject matter (the trial of Nat Turner after his slave rebellion) and the the gloriously engaging work I've seen come out of CTH director Chris McElroen in the past. Still: one could do much worse.

[I swear I wrote this last night, but my internet connection was hiding when I tried to post it, so I just went to bed. Belatedly:]

For the record, I am not at all impressed by how much I've been whining to you this past week, but it does appeal to my sense of perversity that the week I start blogging every day would coincide with one of my toughest weeks at work in recent memory. Today was a perfect storm of madcap delights, including acquisition-related hijinks, Tor's longest meeting of the season (launching our winter '09 list), frantic preparation for said meeting, coming back after it to find that my systems department had forcibly disconnected my computer from the network but would not tell me why, and then one last four-hour tor.com meeting before we left. I came home kind of miserable, but a long talk with musetoself improved my mood a lot (nothing puts things into perspective like the democratic primaries and environmental and economic despair); and now I'll get a good night's sleep and everything will be lovely tomorrow.

The New York public schools were off this week, so my parents and I took advantage of my dad's vacation, went out for dinner and a show, and met with smashing success on both fronts. We hit up Mamoun's for dinner because it was a lovely day and we wanted something we could take to the park, but we had enough time afterwards that I convinced them that a Dessert Truck run was in order; and, lo, my second visit and I am officially a groupie, and not at all sure how I ever lived without rosemary caramel. Then we saw Adding Machine (A Musical), which is as good and dark and odd as everyone says: full of gorgeous, visceral performances; graced with one of the strangest, most dissonant, most operatic scores I've ever heard; unexpectedly SFnal; and every moment of it difficult to watch in the best possible way--certainly not for everyone, but emphatically for me.

I went home today after working late, which makes three days in a row that I've not had anything scheduled after work, my longest stretch of unplanned weekdays in recent memory. This has reminded me why I tend to schedule myself so compulsively: because I'm terrible at leaving places if I don't have anywhere else I need to be. The combination of late nights, having lost my weekend to a con, and three consecutive 10 a.m. brainstorming meetings seems to have left my brain ill-equipped for anything else, so I'm glad that tomorrow looks like a day to break patterns.

Another late day at the office today, largely catching up on the work I wasn't doing during the five hours of meetings we had about community features for the new site. This is actually fascinating stuff, so I don't mind discussing it ad infinitum, but the work I missed during those meetings never exactly goes away. Consequently, my evening was spent writing e-mails, filing expense reports, mailing books, and going over an author's response to his electronic line edit--for publishing is as glamorous as ever it was.

[It has not escaped my attention that in just a few short weeks I will be expected to fulfill some sort of regular blogging commitment over at tor.com. Last I checked, um, eighty-seven weeks ago, I was an atrocious blogger. I talked about this with Brian Slattery over brunch before his panel at New York Comic Con, and our consensus was that we were both ill-suited for blogging because the journalistic urge is in some ways the antithesis of the editorial urge: while a good blogger must be generative in the face of time constraints and fallowness, an editor is charged with making sure a piece of writing has the exact ingredients it needs to make its case, excising pointless additives and making sure none of the essentials are left out. And it is on these exact standards that I flounder, far too paranoid that I will bore my audience or, worse yet, leave out the precise detail that would win you over to my side.

But this is a balance I will have to figure out, and I'd much rather do it here than there. I think the best way to train myself is to start off in a sprint, trying my damnedest to post one small thing every day. To stave off my descent into the tragic verbosity that is inevitably my downfall, I'm limiting myself to no more than three sentences a day. I am allowing em-dashes, semicolons, links, parentheticals, ellipses, and maybe some artful run-ons, so they may be long sentences (I'm only human!). But I trust that you'll all chastise me appropriately if I stray from my basic goal?

Obviously, this bracketed section is included for administrative purposes only and does not count. Heh. Here we go for real:]

I remarked to thumbelinablues this morning that last Wednesday's KGB felt like it was weeks ago, presumably due to the massive time distortion field generated by NYCC, at which, within the space of about twenty-four hours, I moderated my second comics panel; took an anthropological stroll with one of my favorite writers; gave out several gazillion buttons featuring our rocketship mascot Stubby; acquired several hopeless crushes; attended two panels; ate sushi with an elite cadre of illustrators; had conversations with dozens of creators and publishers who have naught to do with SF, networking wildly in support of my new comics acquisition gig; made myself go to the afterparty by myself and stay there until I'd had a conversation with a stranger; and finally started to feel like my comics cred is slightly less of a sham than I sometimes fear. I also reproduced the absurd trajectory that seems to be my standard MO at conventions dominated by rows of tables, spending the first two days thinking I have all the time in the world, then suddenly realizing that I've actually got two hours left and 80% of the floor to cover, and consequently seeing a depressingly small subsection of the exciting new things everyone had on hand: in fact, the only things I managed to buy were A Journey to the End of Taste (so far, it's like a direct transcription of my internal conflict with mainstream culture, except several times cleverer) and the first two issues of Comic Foundry—which were both, now that I think about it, directly or indirectly Douglas' fault. It was excellent and exhilarating and exhausting, and has invoked the standard post-con bittersweetness at having to go back to my regular life, which currently consists of grapes, carrots, and peanut butter for dinner and a forced march to stay in the office until I've finished just a few more things and set this entry free.

Oh dear. I’m doing that thing again where I got so busy planning an event that I failed to leave time to actually tell people about it. Luckily, word has gotten around enough that most of you probably already know about it... but you still gotta post about it on LJ, right? Right.

For those of you who aren’t up to speed: last year I edited Jeff VanderMeer's most recent opus Shriek: An Afterword, which I’d think was brilliant even if I hadn’t worked on it. Jeff’s a mega-ambitious and very creative self-promoter, so when he realized that he wouldn’t be in the US for the release of his own book, he decided to commission a short film based on plot elements from the book in order to get people excited about it in his absence. Then he hit on the idea of getting people all over the country—the world, even—to throw parties in their cities to promote the film and get the word out about the book’s release. Although one of Jeff’s New York friends is throwing a private party, I figured that NYC—being the greatest city in the world, and all—needed a really big party. And since I’m a giant dork who loves planning events, I figured I should give it one.

We’re calling it “FROM UNDERGROUND: A night of strange and varied entertainments centered around Jeff VanderMeer’s ‘Shriek: The Movie’,” and with that pretentious title comes an even more pretentious event listing:

In honor of the release of Jeff VanderMeer's groundbreaking, mind-bending novel Shriek: An Afterword... a multidisciplinary event centered around the Brooklyn debut of “Shriek: The Movie,” a short film based on the novel of the same name, directed by Juha Lindroos and with an original soundtrack by legendary art-rock band The Church. Before and after the screening, a full slate of fantastical acts including readings by Catherynne M. Valente, Ellen Kushner, and Scott Westerfeld; burlesque by Jo Boobs and Bambi the Mermaid; rap by Schäffer The Darklord; and visual art by Hawk Alfredson. MCed by ¡Jeff! the Clown, with interstitial music by Nick Lesley. August 20, 2006, 7-11 p.m. at Galapagos Art Space [70 North 6th Street between Kent and Wythe, Williamsburg, Brooklyn (718 782-5188). Subway: L to Bedford Ave.]. $7.

(More info here.)

As I said when I spammed my friends about it: “If making me smile isn't justification enough, I could also take the guilt approach, which (depending on who you are) goes something like "Hey, guys, it's the first event I’ve planned at a bar in Brooklyn, so please show up so I don't look like a dumbass," or, "Hey, guys, a major art space is letting me do an event centered around science fiction and fantasy, so please show up so we can prove there's an audience for this sort of thing." I think it’s gonna be swell, and I hope you can make it.

And in order to justify not putting this under some kind of friends lock, here are some other contributors to the absurd busy-ness that’s been consuming me lately:

• Work is, well, awesome (duh). And while I’m gloating, I may as well mention that both of my books this summer (the other being Dave Duncan’s tremendously fun Children of Chaos) got starred PW reviews. And Shriek is the first Tor book ever to get a Believer review (the secret hipster part of me is thrilled). And I’m walking around with the manuscript of Not Flesh Nor Feathers in my bag. So all in all I’m pretty darn self-satisfied, I’ll tell you what.

• Seattle was grand. I only had two-and-a-half days to play around after PNWA , but I think I made a pretty good showing of it, thanks in part to some suggestions from you lovely folks: a brief jaunt to the university district, the Bastille Day Celebration at the Seattle Center, ”Game On” at PacSci, Fêtes de la Nuit (a Charles Mee play) at Re-Bar, the Pike Place Market, Archie McPhee, the underground tour, the Central branch of the Seattle Public Library, the Elliott Bay Book Company (and lunch there with Vlad Verano, who is awesome), Ellen Datlow’s Clarion West Q&A with Eileen Gunn, and quality time with captaincrax0rz, cmpriest, and moriarty6 at Bimbo's Bitchin' Burrito Kitchen and Espresso Vivace Roasteria. And. Um. I think that’s it.
       Needless to say, I was pretty exhausted when I got home, and promptly exclaimed that I was done traveling for the summer; for as much as I would have liked to be at WorldCon, I like my sanity better, and I’m also don’t like being completely broke. Then pnh realized that Tor needed someone other than senior staff there to run the Tor party, so I’m going after all. But I am not—I repeat, not—there to have fun, so don’t go trying to suck me into any, okay?

• And, finally, lest you think it’s all smooth sailing, this month we got evicted, or, at least, were denied the opportunity to re-sign the lease on our dearly beloved apartment in Williamsburg/Greenpoint. It took us nearly a third of the month to find out that what was happening and decipher the mixed messages we were getting from our landlady (who, while we’ve been living there, has gone from sweet and accomodating, to a little bit crazy, to actually crazy and kind of conniving to boot). And if you think looking for an apartment in NYC is fun, try starting your search a week-and-a-half into the month. Luckily, after about five days of hellish, non-stop searching, ecmyers and musetoself and I happened onto a place that we think will be absurdly fabulous. I’m not going to jinx it by talking about it before we’ve moved in, so for now I’ll just say that we’ve somehow preformed the rare feat of getting priced out of Brooklyn and into the East Village. Also, that thing I said about not liking being completely broke? I’m going to need to get over that in a hurry.

• Okay, wait, un-finally, because I must add that Pinchbottom’s superhero burlesque was every bit as fabulous as it sounded. Maybe about 3% less perfect than their sci-fi burlesque, but I spent so much of the show laughing until I was crying that you could have fooled me. Megan was entirely when she said I need a shirt that says “My Heart Belongs To Nasty,” but, then again, don’t we all?

Okay... must frantically print out some raffle tickets for the Shriek thing, bring home some party supplies, and then head out to Rubulad with modernache. It’s been real.

Another drive-by, for another audience request. Some of you know that I'm going to ReaderCon this coming weekend, which I'm enormously psyched about. What I'm not is particularly ready. Like, I've got a membership (two, actually—damn you, PayPal); and I've got a room; and I know that rambleman is flying into NYC on Thursday afternoon and we’ll be making our way to MA at some point in the next 24-36 hours. Unfortunately, a bunch of the truly useful details are still fuzzy. So I'm going to throw myself to the mercy of the LJ community and ask a pitiful question: since both of us work in publishing and are consequently nigh-broke, is anyone out there interested in reducing costs by joining our room or folding us up into theirs? Also, if—and this is a big “if” at this point—we wound up renting a car for the trip, would anyone be interested in driving with us and helping out with gas bills? I'd mildly prefer people I know (or people who people I know can vouch for), but it’s far too late to be picky at this point. And since we’d need to cancel with the hotel a day or two beforehand, this is obviously a limited-time offer.

Also urgently: suppose I were to do something crazy like organize a Pirates 2 trip on Friday or Sunday afternoon (pirate garb optional but highly recommended). Could any of you be convinced to join me for that? Of course, the alternative is waiting to see it with my awesome Fed friends—who will dress up as pirates—the following Monday or Tuesday, so you’ll have to make a pretty compelling case that it’s worth my effort.

Aside from how absurdly not on top of ReaderCon logistics I am, things are pretty damn good. I feel especially spoiled right now, since the Divine Miss Shay has been bunking up with me for the past week or so. We saw DeVotchka, Seu Jorge, Macbeth (via Shakespeare in the Park), and Orlando Bloom (and Kate Bosworth) fangirling the History Boys; ate Korean, Filipio, Malaysian, mac ‘n’ cheese, Shake Shack shroom burgers, Magnolia baked goods, and wasabi ice cream (OMG so good); cooked brunch and Lebanese eggplant; and, y’know, hung out. I can’t really make myself believe that she’s going away again in mere hours, but at least I can counterbalance that with the delusion that she’ll be back soon, and possibly for a good long while.

In the mostly-too-late-to-be-of-any-use category of theatre reviews, at some point during Shay’s visit I skipped out to see The Busy World Is Hushed, which will be at Playwrights Horizons until July 9th. Keith Bunin is not yet a perfect playwright, but it's almost scary how quickly he's progressing. I'm only a little bit sheepish about admitting that I hit the curtain call crying, but I think it was defensible. For perspective: the last time I cried in the theatre was probably for Albee's The Goat; before that, for Hedwig and the Angry Inch (nope, I’m not a sucker for LGBT themes at all). In the actually-too-late-to-be-of-any-use category is the Classical Theatre of Harlem’s Waiting for Godot, which was somehow, stunningly, recast into post-Katrina New Orleans without being obnoxious about it at all. I am almost as notorious for my of dislike of Samuel Beckett as I am for my dismissiveness of Stephen Sondheim, so it is no small feat (even for the continually impressive HCT) to have pulled off a Beckett adaptation so breathtaking that even a rube like myself could appreciate it.

I’d ramble on, and maybe proofread this a few more times, but I have a Harry and the Potters show to run to. Here’s hoping I like the band more than the books.

Oh yeah... I’ll be in Seattle next weekend for PNWA (plus a few days lax), so now might be the time to tell me what other awesome things I should be doing while I’m there.

ETA: Damnit all, Harry and the Potters was sold out. Well, next time, I hope...

Hiya, LiveJournal.

No, wait, don’t get too excited. This isn’t a real entry either. I’m once again doing that boorish thing where I skip in, mutter to you about some event you should attend, and waltz right out again; without bothering to properly acknowledge a single one of you.

But this one’s worth it. I promise.

I’m here to urge anyone with the remotest proximity to New York to the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art’s fifth annual MoCCA Art Festival, which is. Um. Tomorrow. Any remotely sensate comic book fan would be insane to skip this opportunity to rub shoulders with the usual combination of the Big Name Artists, the ones I’m personally desperately enamored with, and the ones I bet I would be if I simply were simply cooler or smarter or better-read. Like:

Gahan Wilson • Adrian Tomine • Sam Brown • Evan Dorkin •Charles Burns • Ryan "Dinosaur Comics" North • Sara Varon • Elizabeth Genco • Leland Purvis • Dame Darcy • Kim Deitch • Denis Kitchen • Raina Telgemeier • Alex Robinson • Ariel Schrag • Brian Wood • oh.my.god.so.many.more.
Did you see how I cleverly managed not to embarrass myself by telling you which name goes in which category?
So, yeah:
The 2006 MoCCA Art Festival
June 10-11, 2006, 11:00am - 6:00pm
@ The Puck Building, 293 Lafayette at Houston, New York City
$8 per day or $10 for a weekend pass
(MAF admission also gets you free admission to the museum itself, which is currently showing a glorious exhibit entitled She Draws Comics: 100 Years of America's Women Cartoonists.)

And what exactly is my agenda in this whole thing? Well, months ago, in my "I love you, MoCCA, but I cannot possibly!" phase, I agreed to coordinate the volunteer after-party; wandered off for a few months; attended another planning meeting (in my defense, it was the week between World Horror and WisCon, so I was probably slightly addled at the time); and somehow found myself agreeing to volunteer coordinate the entire festival.

To give you an idea, the Art Festival weekend probably takes about 1500 man hours (not including prep time) to pull off, with, say, 45 volunteers working at any given time. Right now we’ve got about 45 volunteers total, which means that things will be fine, but that we’ll all be working our butts off most of the time. Thus, I’m going to follow the blatant advertisement above with the plea to follow: you give us 6-24 hours, we’ll give you ( the world ).

On the up side, once this is over with, I don’t have to give up any more weekends until ReaderCon. That’s, like, a whole month from now.

Don't got plans for Tuesday night? Now you do. Presenting the Third Annual Anti-VD Cookie Swap at the House of Six Giraffes.

Also: new Anti-VD cards. Chill the cockles of your heart right up, they will.

(I know, I know. Real content coming soon.)

LiveJournal, baby, I've gotta come clean. The rumors are true: I've been cheating on you with VanderWorld. But, hon, I can explain. Y'see, Jeff offered me a the chance of a lifetime, the chance to have my way with allll of his readers at once. You know I couldn't pass that up. So I gave him my "Best Music of 2005" list. I just thought it would be good opportunity for us, y'know, a chance to start our future together on the right track?

Anyway, baby, I'm gonna make it up to you, I swear it. Like, I had to give the VanderMan first dibs on the CDs, but what if I promised you that I'd give you a list for all the other kinds of culture? And what if I did a life recap for you to, y'know, help smoothe over all those times last year when we maybe weren't as close as we should have been. Oh, you'd like that, huh? Yeah, thasright. You can have the moon, baby, if I can get it out of the sky for you.

Okay. I'll be right over, soon's I finish up that, uh, other thing I gotta do. Laterz, baby.

Confidential to cataptromancer:

Hey, look who's reading at Barnes & Noble tomorrow night. Here's your big chance! Did you get her on your list yet?