Category Archives: Housekeeping

Scenic Portland, Oregon

Alternately: I’m heading there tomorrow, for the weekend. Am I looking forward to visiting the land of Voodoo Doughnut, quality music, and Powell’s City of Books? Oh yes.

Because I’m a nerd, here’s a list of the books I’m bringing to read on the trip:

And, yes, I realize I’ve been neglecting this space. Mostly because the usual “hey, I wrote this over at Vol.1 — here’s a link” seems a bit superfluous these days. Probably time to change certain things over here — whether another design or something else, I don’t yet know.

Design (department of scowl)

So: decided to do a quick theme-change here, for no apparent reason. I have plans afoot for a much larger-scale renovation around here , but for the time being, I figured I’d shift a few things around and see how it looked. The theme in use is The Erudite by Matt Wiebe; I’ll be getting working some kinks out over the next few days.

the thursday agitation: an introduction

Today brings the first installment of The Thursday Agitation, a weekly series of short interviews on The Scowl. First up will be Christopher Weingarten, my onetime editor at Paper Thin Walls, to discuss (among other things) his 1000 Times Yes project. Said interview should be up within a few hours.

For the record, I’m using “agitation” in the sense of

persistent urging of a political or social cause or theory before the public.

and also

debate, discussion, argument.

These are interviews that, hopefully, will lead to more questions. These are things that I was curious about; hopefully you will be, too.

three (3) brief updates

One: I’ll be taking part in Hex Education Journal’s Vol.1 reading later this month. More information to come next week.

Two: Over the weekend, I’m going to be messing with the design of The Scowl somewhat. Thrilling, I know, but it’s been over two years since I last tweaked the look of things, and I’m thinking of trying out some new features. Alternately, The Scowl is slowly evolving into my way to hearken back to my zine-making days, with the occasional burst of self-promotion. (See item one above.)

Three: Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World is damn good, with added points for the Microphones references. Feels in places like a summation of everything Bryan Lee O’Malley‘s done up to that point; there’s a Lost at Sea feel to it in places, which is the first time in the Scott Pilgrim volumes I’ve had that impression.

Recommended food writing: 11.17.08

I’ve been meaning to add a “Food” section to the links collected here for a while now. And, lo, I’ve now done so, including a couple previously filed under “NYC”.  Among the initial selection:

Kat Bakes, which concerns itself with, well, baking;

The Internet Food Association, in which a number of political and cultural essayists shift gears to the preparation of food;

Table Matters, a relatively new general survey of all aspects of food, which includes a regular column from Scott Gold.

heading (mid)west

Between a number of deadlines and assorted tasks related to next week’s ERMP show, I’ve been pretty light on the posting this week. I’m heading to Minneapolis tomorrow night for the weekend, so posting will remain fairly sporadic until I’m back sometime on Monday night. That said, expect some lengthy, rambling thoughts on both Zach Plague’s boring boring boring boring boring boring boring and something lengthy on conflicts of interest, music writing, and record labels — which will, of course, tie everything back to late-90s indie rock.

Mac users.

If you’re a reader of this blog and a Mac user, I suspect you may also use Camino as your browser. If you’re using version 1.0.2, I’d recommend upgrading to 1.0.4 or the beta version of 1.1; there is a bug in 1.0.2 which causes the bookmarks to become corrupt and, well, vanish. (These new versions back up the bookmarks file automatically.) I know this because, well, mine did. And at present, Camino does not automatically notify users when a new version is available as, say, the copy of Firefox on my work PC does.