As I mentioned a couple days back, Stephen Elliott's new internet magazine The Rumpus hosted a reading by Ryan Boudinot and a screening of a movie called Pig Hunt last night at the Northwest Film Forum.

Boudinot didn't read new work, instead reading "Profession" from his short story collection The Littlest Hitler, about a serial killer's dull family life. Boudinot is one of those rare authors whose voice is perfect for reading his own work—you'd think that wouldn't be a rarity, but it is. Boudinot has got such an every-guy aura about him that his stories—which often start out banal and then plant one foot firmly in the obscene—are made richer by his voice.

Stephen Elliott talked a little bit about The Rumpus ("I want it to be about culture, not about pop culture") and the nature of the Rumpus's blogs ("They're more like articles than blog posts. We don't write about what we ate for breakfast.") And later on in the evening, he went on an hilarious rant about Lego art ("Who cares?...You made something out of Legos and it got on BoingBoing and you got 15,000 clicks.")

Pig Hunt is an independent horror film about a group of friends who go pig hunting in northern California. They come across a giant pig and a hippie sex-cult and vengeful hicks. It's a good, creepy, edgy movie—along the lines of Dog Soldiers in terms of thrills and gore, if you're looking for a monster-movie comparison. Robert Mailer Anderson, the author of Boonville and co-writer of Pig Hunt, did a Q&A after the film. Though he seemed at times a little too boastful about his own work (he asked the audience if they could ever tell what was going to happen next in the film, and of course nobody raised their hands and said yes, even though much of the film—delightfully—follows horror movie conventions), he made a case for regional film-making in an exciting, heartfelt way.

And then Elliott announced that everyone was invited to go to Vermillion and get hammered. Because I'm the books editor, I went home and read instead. The end.