Devil on Ice

There's a player on the Slovakian Olympic Hockey Team whose jersey reads: Satan. I really like watching him skate around.

Heddatron - My Friends' Parallel Successes

As I mentioned on the At Dusk blog a few days ago, my friend Alex has been having quite a year as the enfant terrible of the New York theater world, with coverage of his theater group, Les Freres Corbusier, in 2 New York Times slide shows, and a whole bunch of other couldn't-ask-for-better-press this year. His new project - put on and written by a bunch of my former theater brethren at Yale - is called Heddatron and is, through various framing devices, a play in which a woman is abducted and forced to act Ibsen's Hedda Gabler ad infinitum with a bunch of robots who are, literally, actors in the production. The run starts this coming week. If you are in New York, you should definitely give it a whirl. These guys are good at what they do.

This artistic triumph, along with classmate-of-our's Jake Gyllenhaal's Oscar nod, are giving me that much more drive to finish our record this week. You guys remember my "It's my time!" exclamation-snap from senior year? Yeah, that again. It's cool/scary to have enough time have elapsed since college to see friends' labors begin to bear publicly recognized fruit. 2006-The year of the dusk, yo. Either that, or total global annihilation.

Heddatron

Not music, nor Portland, granted, but certainly cultural and all in the family. My friend Alex has been having a bunch of success in the past few years doing weirdly revisionist and absurdist theater pieces about intellectuals. The press fiesta continues with this Wired piece about his latest - written/produced by some other folks from my former East Coast life. It's called Heddatron and, as I understand it, involves a bunch of robots kidnapping a housewife and forcing her to act Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler" ad infinitum. Many roles in the play are played, apparently, by robots. If you're in New York, you should see it. I would.