When we were young

My charming ex-wife Catherine Debon recently sent me some photos from our performing days, in the 1980s, which she had scanned to digital format.

Here we are with our friend Patti Boucher (l.) in a publicity photo for a show we did in 1984 called "The Horse Knows the Way to Carry the Sleigh."

And here we are about two years later in a still from a show called "Swampcrime," which was about a princess (Catherine) who was upset that the frogs were disappearing from her estate. I played a Jesuitical detective, posing here at center holding the flashlight, with our colleagues (from left) Betty Roi, Patrick Irwin, and Caitlin Morgan.

I'm not sure why I favored a blank expression in publicity photographs.

Catherine is still a performer, and is also on the staff at a hospital in Berkeley, while Betty is a well-known yoga teacher and occasionally still performs as a singer.

All I do now is write, though I do really enjoy giving the public reading part of it, when I'm invited to do so.

That's Jenny with an X

The appearance of Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin on the Rachel Maddow Show (thanks, @tara) educated me for the first time on, among other things: that the A-list (for the internet) celebrity's name is pronounced "zhenny zhardan," and that she seems to have excellent diction, even the traces of an East Coast posh accent.

It's a funny story and worth watching, and what a giant plug for BoingBoing. Of course Maddow's audience is likely already familiar with BoingBoing (the most-viewed blog in history) but such a feature can only serve to remind everyone that it's still relevant and not merely the repository of some writers' obsessions with squids, steampunk, and Disney World.

For the narcissist in your life

This Samsung camera has two viewscreens: one on the back, so you can see what you're taking a picture of, and one on the front, so you can take a great picture of yourself.



Not that you would do something like that.

A Samsung press release is quoted saying "The growing popularity of social networking sites has given rise to the self-portrait, with many consumers turning their digital cameras on themselves." There's something very sad about someone who needs a picture for a "social networking" website, yet doesn't known anyone well enough even to ask them to take their picture.

technorati: camera, DualView

This morning

I'm in a cafe in the Mission, sitting toward the front. It's a dimly lit cafe that's very quiet and comforting on a bright, cold morning. In the back there's a twelve-step meeting going on. "See, chronic alcoholics -- they don't know. One day they'll know but not today." They spell out Roman numerals that denote sections of their scripture: "That's X-X-V-I?" "No, it's X-X-X-V."

This morning I'm going to the SFMOMA to meet artist and writer Trevor Paglen and interview him.

Here's the interview on TheRumpus.net.

Paglen may be best known because of his appearance several months ago on "The Colbert Report" talking about his short book about the unit patches worn by people working on secret military projects, I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have To Be Destroyed By Me. He's also the author of "Blank Spots on the Map," a geographical approach to the black world of secret military projects, and co-author of Torture Taxi, about the Bush administration's uncharted rendition air flights.

But he's not just an author and academic -- he is in the geography department at UC Berkeley -- but a photographer whose work is hanging at both SFMOMA and the Altman Siegel Gallery in SF. His photographs, many of which use what he calls "Limit Telephotography" or the practice of taking very long-range telephoto pictures, peek into places you're not supposed to see and pick out needles -- secret surveillance satellites -- in the haystack of the night sky.

technorati: Trevor Paglen, secret