Pop-Up Magazine
Last Friday I was really happy to participate in the second issue of Pop-Up Magazine, a “live magazine” consisting of twenty writers, filmmakers, photographers, artists, etc. sharing their work (all unpublished/ unheard/ unseen) for < 5 min. each, at San Francisco’s Brava Theater. I was on between a demonstration of Braille maps for blind people, and a documentary about the Bay Area’s most famous female bodysurfer (a geophysicist who took up bodysurfing at age 37).
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I was unfortunately unable to notify any of my dear readers of this event, because tickets sold out literally 90 minutes after they went on sale, i.e. before I managed to send out an email. Next time I will write before the tickets go on sale—not a precaution one usually has to take on the D-list, but apparently that’s what happens when one ends up on the same billing with 8 different writers for Wired magazine.
For future reference, the live magazine format turns out to be great—it really takes the “painful” out of “painful literary events.” Well, and it also takes the “literary” out, since there was so much other stuff—e.g., on Friday, a live interview with artist Wayne White; a demonstration of some inspiringly powerful LED-lit sneakers (unfortunately not these, which I believe can only be worn by taxidermic specimens); a really evocative sound recording of children splashing in a lake in Angkor Wat; some incredibly beautiful/ sinister pictures of racehorses; and, as Solzhenitsyn’s publicists say, much more.
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Wayne White, “Drop the Cowboy Act” |
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Elena Dorfman, from Pleasure Park |
I read a 3.5-minute excerpt from The Possessed, about judging an adolescent boys’ leg contest in Hungary, which I am posting here in an extended, 4-minute version, featuring my conversation with some Hungarian police officers.
Here is another great thing about a live magazine: it turns out that, instead of a Q/A session at the end, they just sell $3 drinks in the lobby and everyone mills around and receives free copies of Mother Jones. In this way I got to meet lots of people to whom I was now known exclusively in my capacity as a judge of adolescent boys’ leg contests; thus after shaking hands, one young man actually stepped back and gestured alluringly toward his own legs, as if to invite a rating. Because of the brief nature of our acquaintance, I didn’t feel comfortable rating his legs, and was greatly relieved when one of the event organizers stepped in for me and said: “8.8.”
Tags: animals, clothes, d-list, events, THE POSSESSED