unexpected talks by interesting people
RPG is my micro-conference. RPG is sporadically held, suddenly announced, and leaves little but mental limps and frustration / aka instability—take it as step #1 toward getting you decanalized. I choose the speakers and I don’t care what you think; I choose the topics and I always choose first loves. I want people telling me about things they cherish / not about how they make their living. Here's what I've got going this year for the first edition.
* Michael Jarmer / fiction writer / Here Comes Everybody on extreme forced creation
* Guy Steele / computer scientist on designing singing calls
Michael Jarmer: I met him when I was getting my MFA. Around the breakfast table at school we used to say "Michael Jarmer is fiction." But he's most profoundly a musician, recording in the Portland area since the late 1980s. He belongs to Veronica Lodge. A lodge is a group of people or bands each of whom dedicates one day of the month to write, record, and mix at least six and less than twenty songs in a twenty-four-hour period. Some of these songs end up on his albums.
Guy Steele: You know him as the world's foremost computer scientist. He's Guy Steele. But I know him as my best friend. For the past five years he's been square dancing about 8 or 9 nights a week at Tech Squares. And for about the last three years he's been learning how to call, which is how the dancers know what to do next. He does singing calls, which take a song you might know—but never think of as a square-dance song—and sing a variation of its words, with embedded calls; when you plan it out carefully, the result can be a complete artistic package. He's going to describe, explain, and demonstrate.
At Splash 2011
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
5:30pm
