The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

All the ingredients for an experimental disaster are there: six characters on a non-elevated platform of white cardboard — a sterile space carved out in the corner of a dingy art gallery — all dressed in white, speaking in seemingly disjointed sentences, hugging the wall behind them, twisting, writhing, gasping. But Socktesting, however experimental, is no disaster. Somehow, creators Mark Abel Garcia and Megan Mayer — with the help of six very able actors — have pulled it off masterfully.

The Twitter post sat under my profile photo for almost two days.

"Bummed about Sydney Pollack."

It was pithy, but it was all I could muster at 2:30 in the morning. Sydney was dead. I had woken up in the middle of the night and rolled a drowsy finger over the laptop's touchpad to light up the screen. The news feeds, usually dormant on Sunday nights, served up the reports.

This month marks the third anniversary of Yo Ivanhoe, and considering the similarly wasted years I spent shoveling words in a similar hole (Open All Night) at City Pages, I'm not much in the mood to celebrate five years of futility.

When I first started doing this nonsense I was nothing but a clueless conscript to an online enterprise that meant absolutely nothing to me. Blogging? Seriously, what the fuck?