Speaking of people on my blogroll: Pop culture critic, blogger, and transgendered activist extroardinaire Roz Kaveney of Silence Exile and Crumpets was just in town, promoting her new book Superheroes!: Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Films — which I’m hoping to crack the covers of eventually.
Roz is brilliant at analyzing the various mechanics and […]

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I’ve been meaning to mention for ages now that I have a poem in the latest issue of the Chicago poetry journal After Hours … and I’ll be reading it in public this Friday night.
I’ve always been really bad about actually submitting my poems for publication — I always think, here I am fussing around […]

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So yesterdoodle, as part of my ongoing efforts to get the Ocelopotamus back to full health and vitality, I finally got around to overhauling the blogroll (that’s that tall snaky thing over to the right that looks like a list of nonsensical words and phrases!) with some links that I’ve been accumulonimbusing for a stoat’s […]

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So the new B-52’s album Funplex has been out for a couple of weeks now and is getting hot-pink rave reviews everywhere. Of course all during the recent period when I was busy not blogging I was wanting to post all sorts of breathless updates and links about it. But the truth is Astralwerks seems […]

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In case you haven’t seen any of these yet, my pals at Schadenfreude (who I love despite the fact that they terrify me sometimes) are doing a good job of capturing the current logic of the Hillary campaign in video.

 
These are turning up all over Greater Blogistania and one of the other installments in […]

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Well, the Andy White show I posted about last Sunday was lovely. It was a shockingly intimate setting, a cozy and beautifully decorated back room at the Celtic Knot where Andy played for a group of about 20 of us, and he was just as charming and entertaining as any Andy fan would expect.
He […]

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Forget about the possums, the raccoons, even the coyotes turning up in our urban environment.
There are now officially otters in the Chicago River.
Thousands of commuters were walking past Union Station on the day that Chris Anchor happened to see a dream made flesh.
Furry otter flesh, to be exact.
I know, I know. It sounds […]

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It’s been ages since I’ve done one of these little Chicago roundups, but there are so many head-splittingly good things going on this week that it seems like a dandy time to reinstate the tradition.
• First up, this weekend is the opening of the brand-new Theater Oobleck show Spukt, written by the mercurial Dave Buchen. […]

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My friend and colleague Chris Tillman and her husband Joe Losurdo, working under the name Regressive Films, have collaborated on a new documentary about the history of punk rock in Chicago. Titled You Weren’t There — A History Of Chicago Punk 1977-1984, the film will have its world premiere on Saturday, November 24 at the […]

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OcPot is still on hiatus for at least a couple-few more days. But yesterday, down in the comments to the hiatus post, Miss Rubbery Nun asked how I was doing and I thought I’d repost my answer here for anyone else wondering how the move went:
Survived. Just barely. No thanks to AT&T, who, in […]

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I’m a little behind the times with this, but I wanted to offer some belated shoutings-out and linkback lurve to my fellow participants from The Nod this past Wednesday evening.
Don Hall and Joe Janes did a great job of hosting the evening, making everyone feel welcome and creating the opportunity for the gaggle to mingle […]

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Eric Alterman has an outstanding column in The Nation on how the media’s mean girls (of all genders) develop the narratives they use to bring down the presidential candidates they take a dislike to. With examples of what they did to Gore in 2000, and what they’re doing to Obama and Edwards right now.
Two of […]

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Next Wednesday, September 19, I’m going to be participating in a way-fun event called The Nod, in which some of Chicago’s best bloggers will be reading posts from their blogs live at the Uptown Writer’s Space.
And for some reason they’ve asked me to be on the bill, as well. Possibly to make the rest of […]

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If you’re here in Chicago and looking for something fun to do tomorrow evening, I’ll be participating in an award ceremony and “gentle roast” (in the words of Live Bait Theater) for those stalwarts of the Chicago solo performance scene — and my fellow Pansy Kings — David Kodeski and Edward Thomas-Herrera.
The ceremony is […]

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