[A]ny action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman's vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child.
This video segment was the first I'd heard about the proposed amendment, and I'm embarrassed to say that it took me until partway through to realize that Sen. Johnson was making an absurdist pro-choice statement with her amendment. Then the story was twice as funny as it had been before.
We had a wonderful, marvelous edition of Tuesday Funk last night. There were five strong readers who engaged and captivated the audience with their words, and there was the regular Poem by Bill feature. I read "Four Road Trips" to kick off the second half of the show, and it went over well enough that I was really excited to put the video online. Unfortunately, Houston, we had a problem.
The way I record these shows is pretty basic, and usually works really well. I mount my iPhone on a little tripod, set the tripod on top of the amp, and point the lens at the microphone. I let the phone record straight through each half of the show, only touching it to adjust for the height of each new reader. Later that night or the next morning, I take the two long video files and chop them up into individual readings.
Well, last night when I downloaded the video files from my phone and opened them up for editing. The first file was fine, but the second...
The second file starts with me stepping to the microphone to introduce the second half of the show and read my poem, all while speaking in a woman's voice. Wait, a woman's voice? Yes, to be specific, in the voice of Lauryn Allison Lewis, the reader who followed me at the mike. Somehow the video file became corrupted and shifted the soundtrack forward by nine minutes and forty-four seconds. The audio of my reading was completely lost. The final 9:44 of the video, during Margie Skelly's reading, is silent.
I was able to fix the recording of those last two readers by extracting the audio from the file and reinserting it at the correct point (though trying to perform that task in Quicktime Pro was kind of like trying to tie a square knot in fishing line while wearing iron gauntlets). But that great reading of my poem is gone forever.
Trust me, though. It killed.
Which is exactly what I want to do to my stupid iPhone.
Some of you know I co-produce and co-host a monthly reading series, Tuesday Funk, at a great little bar here in Chicago. At our October event about three weeks ago, I read my story "The Visitors at Wriggly Field," which was written two years ago in support of Chicago's Worldcon bid and concerns a very unusual World Series matchup in 2012.
You can read more here about how it came to be written, but since the text of the story is no longer available online, and since Game 6 of this year's World Series is tonight, I thought it would be a good time to share the video of the reading here. I hope you like it. Go, Cubs!
Since 2006, I've spent a week almost every summer at a workshop for novel writers—either Blue Heaven or a spinoff based on its organizing principles. And since fall of last year, I have co-produced and co-hosted a monthly reading series called Tuesday Funk at a Belgian beer bar on the north side of Chicago.
I'm pleased to announce that these two worlds will soon collide! I'm spending the next week at the Wellspring Workshop in Lake Geneva, WI, organized by Brad Beaulieu, but for one night only the group of us will be roadtripping back to Chicago to invade Tuesday Funk for a "Science Fiction Sextuple Feature."
This special edition of Tuesday Funk convenes Tuesday, June 21, 2011, 7:30 pm, in the upstairs lounge at Hopleaf, 5148 N. Clark St., Chicago. Arrive early, stake out a table in the upper room, and grab a beer from John at the cash-only bar. We start seating at 7:00 pm and no earlier. Admission is free, but you must be 21 or older.
If you can't make it on June 21st and are curious to see a typical month's edition of Tuesday Funk, we shot video of all our readers at the May 3rd edition. And here is that evening's Poem By Bill:
The great folks at Essay Fiesta have posted video of the memoir excerpt I read for them at the Book Cellar on April 19th. This is a segment from The Accidental Terrorist called "Gluttons for Punishment":
(Damn, that was over my time limit. Thank God I didn't exceed the YouTube limit of ten minutes.)
Essay Fiesta is a monthly reading series that benefits the Howard Brown Health Center, hosted by Keith Ecker and Alyson Lyon. Please come out to the Book Cellar in Chicago on the third Monday of every month to support the series.
Some of you here—and you know who you are—will share my enthusiasm and anxiety about this coming Tuesday's release of the new Rush album, Snakes & Arrows. The first single, "Far Cry," didn't blow me away, but the fragment of "Spindrift" now available at the Rush site sounds different from anything they've done, so my hopes are high.
Anyway, for those of you I'm talking to—and you definitely know who you are—here's some "YYZ"/Guitar Hero 2 action for you:
Ella the Wonder Dog saves the day again, this time warning the Invisible Hounds of Hell away from Astoria before they can instantiate a doorway into our dimension.
