(written 11/14/03) So I missed the Brian Eno talk because I was blogging here. D’oh!

Okay, not quite. The talk was at 8pm, and they warned that people should get there early because it was a free talk. But I go to a lot of weird little events where nobody shows up, concerts where there were more people on stage than in the audience, that I took it with a grain of salt. So I decided not to show up at 7pm, because I thought I’d just sit there for an hour and be bored. I compromised and showed up at 7:30.

Oops.

The line was over two blocks long at 7:30, not counting the people they’d already let in. I ended up being several hundred people away from getting into the theater. They let us into the lobby area, and tried to pipe the audio in, but it was so muddy that he sounded like the teacher from Charlie Brown. So I left, to await the video they promised to upload to the Long Now website.

The experience wasn’t a total waste, though. The lobby area was the site of an American Express-sponsored exhibit of portraits by Annie Leibowitz. Wow. I hadn’t seen any of her photography before, and it’s just amazing. I really liked the portraits of Steve Martin (in a white tux daubed with black paint in front of a large abstract black and white painting), Yo-Yo Ma (with his cello in an autumn setting with falling leaves) and Andy Warhol (taking a picture of her, naturally). Very cool stuff. Worth the visit.