You get nerves.  You get laughter.  You get those squirmy uncomfortable silences as the slide show gets borked or the speaker goes all doe-eyed in front of the headlights.  Mostly you get entertained and informed.

Maybe it was just me, but the crowd last night seemed more restrained compared to previous Ignite events.  My hunch is that there were a lot of people attending Ignite for the first time – call them late adopters, to use a geek’s parlance.  The cover charge may have had something to do with it.  It may also just be a busy time of year and the normal attendee patterns are thrown off a bit.  Don’t get me wrong – it’s very nice to see new faces and meet some new people.  But the normal drunken naked debauchery was in short supply.  (ed: Drunken?  Naked? – OK, not naked, and maybe just buzzed).

There were some headline names that everyone in the Seattle geek scene probably knows, or knows of: Marcelo Calbucci, founder of Seattle 2.0; Andy Sack, founder of Founder’s Co-op; and Matt Harding, better known as Dancing Matt, and who is truly Internet Famous.  In keeping with the egalitarian theme of the event, however, the speakers that stole the show were:

• Mark Selander, presenting on the Commutapult, a utopian commuting scheme with a sure-thing 100% safety record.  Biggest LOLs of the night.
• Bradley Vickers, who gave a talk on his real-world experience rowing across the North Atlantic with four guys and not enough food.  Not quite the Shackleton experience, but very captivating.
• Dan Shapiro, former CEO of Seattle mobile tech company Ontela (which merged with PhotoBucket last year), who gave a funny and informative presentation called “Hacking Birth”.
• Vanessa Fox, one of the handful of people who might legitimately vie for the title of “Best Search Expert in the World” (ed: didn’t she just write a book? Yes!  Yes she did), gave a fast-paced and very diverting talk about search and Those Crazy People On the Internet.  I must, in good conscience, ding Vanessa several points for showing photos of a guy on ChatRoulette dressed in a very meowy cat costume.

Last night was one of those nights I learned a lot.  For example:

• You can put rose petals in ice cubes. (via Kim Prohaska)
• You can hail a taxi using the same dispatch system the cab companies use. (via Aimee Cardwell)
• There is a restaurant in Seattle called Nettletown, which coincidentally is located not 100 yards from where I sit as I write this, that serves foraged food. (via Michelle Broderick)
• A donation of one pint of blood can save three lives. (via Jeff Shuey)

Overall: Even a slightly subdued crowd can’t diminish the pure genius of the format or the enthusiasm that the speakers bring to the stage.  If you haven’t yet attended an Ignite event, plan on making the next one – they’re not going away soon.

p.s. What happened to the exclamation point?  I think it used to be Ignite! Seattle, but now it’s just Ignite Seattle.  As a result, my synapses fire slightly less frequently when I read the name.

p.p.s. PSA: do not – EVER – use your cell phone when you are standing at the urinal.  Just sayin’.

p.p.p.s. If you’re in even the slightest funk, go to an Ignite event.  It will expand your consciousness, connect you with the community, and make you laugh.  Guaranteed.

Alas, I saw the note a few hours after Rob had posted.  Surely, thought I, surely the ticket can’t still be available, can it? But I e-mailed him anyway.  Fortune smiled on me, or perhaps Rob took special pity on me, but either way, he responded soon with the best news of my week, that yes, the ticket was still available.  I did a sort of mental entrechat-dix.

We met beforehand for a drink at the Dragonfish Asian Cafe, which is altogether too busy, but convenient to the Paramount.  Then on through the vast mooing crowd, rubbing elbows with fellow nerds, geeks, fanboys and –girls, bluehaired NPR diehards, hipsters, members of the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy, and of course the Contingent That Would Like To Take Carl Kasell To Bed And I Don’t Care How Old He Is.  Our seats were just shy of nosebleed, but *cough* it’s a radio show, and last I checked, sound travels pretty well.  So our seats were just fine.  And distance can have some advantages.  Those sitting closer to the stage probably left the Paramount a little sunblind due the glare from Peter Sagal’s, um, hair.  Watching from great heights, it was like watching a shiny dime hovering around behind the podium.

Of special note to Seattle locals was the presence of Luke Burbank, late of the much-praised radio program Too Beautiful To Live, which went off the air last September. TBTL still has a podcast available, and if you’ haven’t yet drank (drunk? Damn you, Heather, for introducing doubt into my tense-world) the kool-aid, you should give it a listen.  Luke has a semi-long history with WWDTM, having been a panelist and guest host off an on for the last few years.  And if you read “semi-long” in the previous sentence and thought “that sounds naughty”, you have my kind of sense of humor.

Also: I’ve never seen anyone referred to as an “American podcaster” until I went to Luke’s Wikipedia page.  That phrase carries the hum of disappointment, of temporariness, of “I’m between gigs right now”.

Joining Luke on the stage were, of course, Carl Kasell (who is very funny), the comedienne Paula Poundstone and the writer Tom Bodett.  Paula spent the night channeling Gilbert Gottfried, which may not have been a conscious attempt.  Perhaps as we age we all end up like Gilbert; squinting, confused, and wry.  Nevertheless, all of the panelists had their moments of glory: the well-timed jibe, the elegant riposte, the throwback, the send-down.

Special guest of honor for this week’s program was Northwest author and literary superhero Tom Robbins, who is seventy-seven years old.  Hard to believe.  He gets around pretty well for having one foot in the grave.  He noted he’s on sabbatical right now.  Tom doesn’t really have the right presence for radio (IMHO, of course) – he’s a slow, sure speaker, thoughtful, and taciturn – he actually reminded me of my dad a bit.  He’s got a sort of throaty/scratchy/hoarse inflection, and further, he’s sort of a low talker.

I was very interested to witness some of the minutia of the recording of the radio show; the retakes, the do-overs, the little hand gestures that Peter Sagal used to indicate this or that or the other thing; the hovering presence just out of the spotlights of the show’s production staff; the practiced way that the lady came out and mic’d up Tom Robbins just before his spot.  It’s a world completely unknown to me and I loved every minute of it.

Also: Peter Sagal really looks nothing like he sounds.  Take a look at his website and tell me if you don’t agree.

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 21

She and director Nicholas Jasenovec, played by Jake Johnson, travel around the country asking people things like “how do you know you’re in love"?”.  Interspersed with the interviews are puppet-show sequences that nominally describe stories from the interviewees.  I’m guessing Seattle Weekly editors rolled their eyes when they watched the movie, but I thought they were creative.

That’s the structure.  The key drama begins to take shape when she meets fellow quirky young thing Michael Cera at a party; the film shifts gears to document their growing (actual) courtship.  They’re cute and awkward; they do and say mad stupid things to each other that I can only imagine people in L.A. doing or saying; they move from tight, uncomfortable silences to hammy home-video montage, they eat pizza; they kiss.

It’s sincerely derivative.  Yet, at the same time, Charlyne is such an enigma that one can’t help but wonder:  Is she really this awkward in real life?  I found myself thinking about her creative output, the shows she presents, and wondering if there isn’t some vast reservoir of creative genius that lurks behind the monotonicity of her interactions.  A few times, when she’s laughing, authentically laughing, I “got” the attraction.

Best part for me: right near the end of the film, Charlyne puts on a melodramatic puppet show, and in the voiceover, she says:

Life is too short to be wondering “what if?”. Sometimes you just gotta live and see what happens, even if you get hurt. Sometimes you can only feel something if you take a risk.

This is not Charlyne speaking, not the Charlyne of the first 88 minutes of the film, anyway.  Could it be who she really is, beneath the careful exterior management? Fascinating.

For me, for now, right now, this passage is advisory, confirming notions rolling around in my head about love, relationships, people.  Don’t be afraid of risk.  Realize that yes, life is very fucking short.  Risk getting hurt.  Be authentic.

I’ll let you know how it goes.  My journey won’t end up in Park City next January, but you may find enough pieces here to construct your own documentary.

The pursuit continues.

1. Syncope: writers are finding it easier and easier to write things like srsly, in which all the vowels are removed; or o rly? in which the important vowels are removed.
2. Noun Desuffixation: You see this a lot: preso instead of presentation; convo instead of conversation; aggro instead of aggravation.  This continues a trend that I think has been going on a long time; even pre-text-message, writers came up with info instead of information; invite instead of invitation; prep instead of preparation.  But the prevalence of thumb-writing has made this trend even sharper and the evolution of acceptable / understandable writing even faster.
3. Hashing: this was born out of a need to track threads on Twitter.  People will “hash” – or prefix a certain word with the “#” character – when they want to call attention to a category, topic, theme, or if they just want special emphasis.  #win and #fail are so common on Twitter that no one even bats an eye anymore. People feel free to make up hashtags whenever they want to start a conversation; many examples can be found at hashtags.org.  Question for my readers: should this third trend be called “hashing” or “hashtagging” or something else?

Do you see any other net-inspired writing trends that are worth calling out?  Bad grammar and poor spelling don’t count, as they are neither novel nor interesting.

200,000 books?  For a DOLLAR EACH? Are you fucking kidding me? I’m giddy with anticipation.  Rush Limbaugh would have less fun at an OxyContin convention. Is “wordboner” a word?  Cause if not, I’m adding it to Urban Dictionary.

Seattle Public Library Spring Book Sale
Magnuson Park, Building #30 and the Brig
April 17th, 9 AM – 5 PM
April 18th, 11 AM – 4 PM

See you there!

So – about the talk. Stiglitz spoke for about 50 minutes on who and what was responsible for the 2008-2009 economic decline and what we can do about it.  He pulled very few punches, giving out sharp raps to Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Wall Street, the anti-regulation crowd on Capitol Hill, free-market fundamentalists, and even Robert Rubin.  Economics is not my forte, but I gather he’s a sort of a contrarian sort, the smart-as-hell guy who sits outside the clubhouse and doesn’t let relationships or tradition get in the way of facts and evidence.  He’s sort of charming in a professorial way, not a fire-breather by any means, and talked simply but not patronizingly about a very complicated set of subjects.

What to make of it?  I came away thinking about a few things: corporate governance; what are known as the “agency problems”; the role of the old-boys’ network in ignoring and/or fomenting the mess we got ourselves in; and his obvious distaste for the blindly obedient invisible-hand adherents.

Interestingly, he didn’t once talk about individual decisions that people made to take on more debt than they could afford; matching, I suspect, both his personal views as well as that of most of the audience.  I’m not sure that a fully-fleshed out argument can accurately leave out personal agency as a contributing factor to the mess.  I mean, someone can offer me free heroin, but I still have to inject it.

I also found out last night that Dr. Stiglitz has a family connection with someone whom I used to work with and still admire very much; meaning that I’ll be following his talks and writings more closely than otherwise.   Context and personal relationships still matter in this day and age of stateless interwebs.

That’s the good: now the bad.  The movie is intense, often painfully so, and if you have a history of alcoholism in your family, some of the scenes are going to make you uncomfortable.  At least they did me, but that may be partially the result of natural sensitivities in addition to my own family history.   Some parts of the movie were HARD.

A surprising delight was Maggie Gyllenhaal as Jean, a single mom who falls into Bad Blake’s universe, and, even after a lifetime of bad decisions, continues to make them, to near-catastrophic effect.  I won’t give up the plot line, but Jeanie says at one point that having a relationship with an alcoholic is “like living with a rattlesnake”, and her family feels the bite.  She’s a surprisingly beautiful actress and exudes a sensuality that I’d missed in the other roles I’ve seen her in.  Her characterization runs the wire – from frank and strong to weak and vulnerable, angry and tender and needy and distant.  She deserves her Best Supporting Actress nomination and I hope she wins it (although Vera Farmiga in Up In The Air was spectacular also).

I’m not 100% convinced yet that the ending is the one I would have hoped for.  Again, without giving too much away, I feel it could have been more dramatic and of a piece with the rest of the story.  The movie is based on the book by Thomas Cobb, so I assume it follows more or less faithfully the plot line of the novel, but still…

Worth seeing?  Absolutely.  The acting performances are amazing.  I’m surprised that the movie wasn’t nominated for Best Picture, in a year that has Inglorious Basterds, Up, and A Serious Man among the Best Picture nominees – all of which I panned in various ways.

Part of the wonder of the movie – and I only realized it after the movie was over – is the seamless way that real actors intermingled with the CGI actors.  The CGI is so good that there are no moments where you brain switches over and says “hey, that’s fake!”.

I won’t review the plot here – suffice it to say that Smurfahontas is not too far off the mark.  But the movie gets tons of man points for the military / combat scenes, the man-eating wildlife, the adrenaline-rush cinematography, and let’s just say that Sigourney Weaver, reincarnated after a fashion into an alien body, has still got it, 30 years after her performance in Alien made her every geek’s dream girl.

I’ve heard a couple people complain that the movie isn’t as “sharp” in 3-D as it is in 2-D.  And, for my only complaint about the movie: it doesn’t fully leverage the 3-D technology.  Coraline, released earlier this year, was breathtaking in its use of 3-D, and when stuff flew out of the screen, you cringed, because you thought it would poke your eye out.  Same thing with Beowulf, from the year before.  Avatar?  For whatever reason, the 3-D is more subtle. Perhaps that was a directorial decision, to try to prevent the visuals from overtaking the film.  At any rate, I still fell into the story, unquestioningly, and loved the experience.  This is one of the few movies I’ve seen in the last couple years that I would happily see again in the the theater.

But Melissa Allison’s continued reporting on all things coffee, which she links to from her Twitter account, make me realize that there is this whole other world of coffee snobbishness out there.  Now we can talk about terroir and not immediately think Bordeaux or Burgundy, but Guatemala or Yemen!  We can talk about nose and body and finish and all those wonderful evocative things that make wine so appealing.  In fact, the time may come soon when the only thing that the wine lover can lord over the coffee lover is the alcohol – but any coffee drinker worth his or her salt knows about Bailey’s, so it’s a fair draw on that score.

All joking aside, I like the fact that there is a sub-sub-subculture within the larger coffee scene that is excited about such arcane topics as where the beans are grown.  Anybody who really gets into something, whether it’s coffee, or architecture, or music, or triathlons, or roller derby, is fun to be around.  The enthusiasm is infectious and invigorating.  I hope to be able to attend a barista competition in ‘10 and taste my way through a very fun day.