Read Recently #2:

What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frannk

Backstory: I had heard of this title several times as an explanation of why the Dems lost on Nov. 2. Then my dad recommended it to me and I was trying to avoid reading another book I really need to finish. A trip to St Mark's Bookshop sealed the deal.

Notes: Funny, smart and personal, like everything Frank (founder of the legendary humor magazine The Baffler) does. The analysis is a little repetitive at times and is weak on exactly why former leftists have gone conservative. Perhaps he would have been aided by looking a little beyond Kansas, to put the tranformations of his home state in a larger social and political context. It's a delicate balance here, between the personal and the political. Frank almost gets it.

Verdict: Great for post Nov. 2 ire but probably not one for the ages.

Jish Nups:

So my buddy Jish got married this weekend. I'm sure there are tons of photos around somewhere but I don't understand all these fancy pants photo archiving systems. So someone will point me to them I'm sure.

Anyway, Suzan and I arrived just before the Welcoming of the Groom at 2 PM on Saturday. Just over 11 hours later, we had arrived at home, exhausted, well-fed, sweat from dancing and deliriously happy for Jish and his lovely new bride Renu. I wish them all the happiness they can muster and a wonderful life together.

Sunday Morning Shards #14

On my mind and in my reading queue this week. The "New York Summarized" Edition.

*The Cooper Hewitt Museum of Design has two superb exhibits on midcentury and functional design. They book run through the beginning of next year. Highly recommended if you are in the New York City area.

*Neil Labute's new play Fat Pig, about a shallow office worker who can't accept that he's in love with ann overwieght women, has begun its run at the MCC theater in the West Village. Starring some of favorite supporting actors like Jeremy Piven (protagonist), Keri Russell (his imperious ex-girlfriend) and Andrew McCarthyAshlie Atkinson as the love interest who is funny, charming and quite cute.

*Better Burger was a major disapointment. After hearing about it on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, I had to see this healthy interpretation of fast food. Sounded right up my alley.

Until I got my tray. Twelve dollars for a hamburger the size of a hockey puck, fries that tastes like salted wall insulation, and a "regular" milkshake that came in an 8 ounce glass. What? Who only drinks eight ounces of anything? It may has well have come in a sippy cup.

Listen, I'm more than willing to pay more for quality. But giving me an afternoon snack at a lunch-for-two price is plain old bad faith. I won't be going back.

*My iPod conked out after 30 minutes on the treadmill in the hotel gym. So I'm going to reformat it using this method. It can only help. Right now the thing's about as powerful as an alarm clock (via Del.icio.us Popular).

*Little Havana is the best Cuban food I've had in a long time.

*Oh and there was a parade or something.

Too Busy to Blog:

Too caught up to catch up. Getcha when I get home.

Also From Yesterday...

Suzan and I were pretty zonked after a day of travel so we decided to spend our first afternoon in New York with some aimless wondering. We took in the Gotham Book Mart, 85 years-young this year and still running like clockwork. Has an amazingly knowledgable staff, an enormous poetry section that Suzan got lost in and is so old school that they fill out orders by hand. I wasn't so charmed by the last part when they mistakenly combined my purchases with Suzan's and had to spend 20 minutes untangling them. I don't find luddites charming. I find them sad. GBM seems to recognize this though. One of the clerks grinned when I asked if they are getting their own website. "We're working on it", he said, and practically winked at me.

Oh and I learned who Delmore Schwartz was. His picture is all over the walls of the place.

From there, with it getting dark, we grabbed a cab to the East Village so Suzan could do some window shopping. I spent way too much time in Dinosaur Hill and bought some antique buttons for a $5 schmate of a shirt I purchased in Cuba that lost its buttons after one wearing. What did I expect? The buttons were $7, 40% more than the shirt.

After stopping for a black & white cookie, we grabbed the subway back to the hotel to meet Jo for dinner.

An excellent, aimless day in New York.

Thoughts on "Sideways"

So Roger Ebert loved Sideways. Suzan and our friend Jo (proud owner of this fine establishment) saw it last night. Suzan hated it, Jo and I both liked it but neither of us could explain why or even what it's about. I had some half-assed theory about male inpotence (ala About Schmidt) that didn't stand up to any scrutiny.

Have ya'll seen this movie? What do you think it's about?

Sunday Morning Shards #13

On my mind and in my reading queue this week. The "Departure" Edition

Elegant Variation has a rundown of reports on the recent National Book Award winners which I have blogged about exactly zero times but has aparently been all over the news. Here's the long and short of it: All the fiction nominees were unkowns. Publishing industry is worried that awarding unknowns is bad for business. Critics say awards are not there to help book industry sell books. Kevin thinks book industry continues to blame others for its woes and needs to take a good long look in the mirror and heal itself.

An analysis of The Incredibles (which I saw last Sunday and enjoyed) from a design perspective .

My favorite bookstore in Baltimore, Atomic Books., now has a blog run by its employees. So does Booksmith, my neighborhood bookstore in San Francisco. Rawk!

Google Scholar: A separate search engine for those looking for "scholarly material", a distinction Google will not expound on. ResourceShelf, "Resources and News for Information Professionals" has a review (via librarian.net).

A lengthy, solid rundown of current woes and future of the music industry, courtesy of The Economist (via Digital Music Weblog).

A look at Miramax, which turns 25 this year (via ArtsJournal).

Feed Envy: noun, first definition. When bloggers feel competitive with one another over who subscribes to more RSS feeds. Here at 'Smoke HQ, we subscribe to 146. And we are not ashamed.

I've been playing around with Omni Outliner, a Mac OSX note-taking program. Good for creating snazzy, dynamic To-Do Lists (via Dan Budiac).

I'm in New York this week visiting family and friends for the Thanksgiving holidays. Eat in good health, ya'll.

Geek Talk 500ccs:

Sometimes you just need a little geek talk. You need to hear smart people talking about "jacking in" and Bluetooth-enabled easy chairs. You don't know why but you're probably doing something utterly mindless and wish you otherwise engaged.

I was thrilled then when Dan Budiac pointed me towards IT Conversations, a free audio repository of various high-geekery speeches, presentations and conference panels. No one (save probably my friend JD Lasica

No, not 51, 50!

Random House imprint Knopf has a new program called First Reads where they will send new books up to 50 registered participants before the book is published and solicit their reviews. I'm not quite sure what purpose this serves other than very minor advanced buzz. 50 people is barely any kind of critical mass and actually seems rather stingy when you consider that movies screen for hundreds of thousands of people for free before anyone has to pay.

So I ask then. Does Knopf know what it's doing and I just don't get it or is this yet another short-sighted, ham-handed attempt at viral marketing from an industry that just now seems to be warming up to the idea (via Bookslut)? .

The Bright River:

So last night, The Hub (which I am on the advisory board of), hosted an exclusive preview salon for "The Bright River", a play by storyteller/beatbox flautist Tim Barsky which will begin a 6-week run at Traveling Jewish Theater beginning Dec. 1. "The Bright River" is a hiphop/klezmer urban retelling of Dante's Inferno with Tim on flute, a killer chello player named Jess Ivry and Kid Beyond (who, after Fray Day, is probably sick of seeing me) on beatbox. Tim and company mingled amongst the guests, then converged at the front of my living room for a short interview (done by me) and then performed a few sections of the play.

Friends, it rocked the house, a hypnotic, swirling memorizing dream of a dystopic America. Imagine if Neil Gaiman rewrote Dante's Inferno for the stage and had Dr. Dre and Yo Yo Ma collaborate on the soundtrack.

It runs 6 weeks in December and January and I'm headed there the first week. I highly encourage you to as well. You will be nothing short of amazed.

Air(head) America:

So I'm listening to Air America Radio on the way home from the gym where the Al Franken Show is broadcasting live from the dedication of the Bill Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock. Katherine Lanpher, Franken's co-host annnounces that Bono will be speaking. Except she keeps pronouncing it "Bone-o" as if U2 is headed up by a cocker spaniel. Hey Katherine, it's pronounced "Bon-o." He's only the most famous singer in the world. If you can't remember that, just call him Paul. That's his real name. But christ, man, isn't there anyone under 50 in the Air America control room who tell Lanpher that she sounds like an idiot?

Read Recently #1:

The Toughest Indian in the World by Sherman Alexie

Backstory: Sherman Alexie is one of maybe a dozen authors where I try to read everything they've written. These days I've been making a concerted effort to chip away at those author's bibliographies. Alexie begins with "A" so that's where I started. Plus I rationalized buying the book used on a week when I was particularly low on funds that I would read it right away. That was years ago.

Notes: Was marketed as a short story collection in which Alexie examined Indians in urban settings instead of on reservations. That's only half true. Many of the stories lead back to the fictional Wellpinit reservation featured in his earlier novel Reservation Blues and short story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. A few of the stories ("Class", "Dear John Wayne") are as good as anything Alexie has done. A few too many of them feel wandery and less taut than they should.

Verdict: Still great because it's Alexie but probably his weakest book.

Road Long Overdue:

Fascinating article about author Cynthia Ozick, who, at 76, has written 13 books, and is going on her very first book tour to support her new novel Heir to the Glimmering World. Oddly this is not a case of writer's reticence but rather her publisher's simply never figured her then touring type (via Readerville).

Nimbler Netflix:

On a recommendation from last weekend's Media Swap with Mr Budiac, I'm playing around with Netflix Freak, a Mac OSX thingy that sits on your desktop and allows you to mess around with your Netflix Queue without logging on to the site. Bonuses inclue being able to drag-n-drop movies around your queue without retyping in numeric positions, a "shuffle" button for throwing your movies into the air and seeing what order they land in (they really need an "unshuffle" button too), an an option to download your entire rental history (not sure why you'd want to) instead of just the last 90 days.

Simple but how useful? I'm looking into it.

Sunday Morning Shards #12

The "Evening Falls" Edition

Iron Jawed Angels, a fantastic film on HBO (and now DVD) about the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Consitution which gave women the right to vote. Contains all the politicking, back-room deals, violence, generational conflict and moral backbone of a great political docudrama. This movie says, with dignity and firmness, that the road to women's sufferage was not the neat correcting of a moral wrong but rather a messy, chaotic, stumble motivated as much by politics as by rightousness. In short, a daring, honest story about the imperfect machine called democracy.

A better-late-than-never rundown of fall culture offerings courtesy of The Morning News (via Nick Denton).

The most complete profile of author JT LeRoy to date.

An analysis of the New York Times's Book Review's redesign.

Mac Users: Find the RSS reader that's right for you.

Rich loopy fellow tries to collect every MP3 ever recorded. Good for him (via Waxy.org).

A superb interview with David Neeleman, CEO of jetBlue Airways.

A rundown of the U2/Ipod deal (via Waxy.org).

A review of their new album How to Dismantle a Nuclear Bomb.

Fray Day 8:

Fray Day 8 is here. Well tomorrow it is, right here in San Francisco. Deets. I'm on the bill somewhere. So come by and tell your story.

Song of the Week #5:

My buddy Dave introduced me to "The Opera" by Elephant Ride, a mid-nineties band from Los Angeles. Apparently the whole of their one album "Forget" (produced by Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones) is fantastic but I haven't listened to it since I copied from Dave last summer because I can't get past "The Opera", the album's centerpiece. A gorgeously sublime 4 minutes of music that builds, dives and comes to rest like a giant bird of prey. I've never quite understood the lyrics but if the sound is their emotional stand-in, it's a song about pain, regret and ultimately, coping with loss. That it handles these dark themes with such grave beauty and shimmering majesty is why I've listened to this song eight times this morning alone. When I played it for Scott Andrew when he was in town, he shook his head three separate times during the song and says "this is awesome."

Hear for yourself.

UPDATE: Seems Elephant Ride is now called Virgil, at least acording to this site and has played a bunch around L.A. Also includes the lyrics to "The Opera" (scroll down).

R.I.P Iris Chang:

Yes, I know Yasart Arafat is dead too. There will be plenty of time to talk about that. But I just found out this morning that Iris Chang, author several books about China and Chinese Americans was found dead in her car yesterday from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. She leaves behind a husband, a 2-year-old and a shocked Bay Area literary community.

I met Irish at Litquake 2 years ago and liked her right away. She was poised, smart and friendly. I had planned to read some of her books simply because I liked her as a person. I never got around to it.

The reasons for her suicide are unknown at this point. The polic will not disclose if she left a note. Not yet, anyway.

So sad. So very very sad.

Old School Geek:

As if this week hasn't been media-ganked enough, on Monday I downloaded (and paid for) a Sixty Force and a copy of Mario64 from CoolRom. Now I can play the game on my Apple IBook. Which is better than paying $28 to do so on a hotel TV, which...eh, someone I know did last weekend.

Music Passing Through:

My friend Scott Andrew is touring the west coast this week and Suzan and I put him up for two nights. After hearing about my friend Merlin's boarding of musicians for some time, I figured I was missing out on some potential hip points. And Scott asked if he could.

We had a great time. Scott and I spent Tuesday afternoon in serious music geekery, planning tracks on Itunes then droploading them to one another. It was under the pretense of doing work but very little got done. Scott's show that night at the Brainwash (where Matt Nathanson used to play) rocked the joint and it was great to see MJ, Kristin, Tantek and Amber as it's been way too long. Naturally I got nothing done these last few days but I wouldn't have done it differently.

Did I mention I'm taking November off? I am taking November off.

Deliciously So?

I, like every other media-obsessed geek, has downloaded Delicious Library, the opening salvo in the next generation of personal media organization. In era's past, you could have a database of all your CDs, Books, DVDs on your computer but so what? It took forever to get all the data entered and once you had, it just sat their looking pretty.

Delicious Library aims, so far I can tell, to bring the personal library into the age of Web 2.0 connectedness. Not only can you enter data about six different ways (UPC, ISBN number, Isight Scan, Bluetooth) but the app pulls its data down from Amazon and enables you to compare units of culture to one's like it. It also links up with your OSX Address Book so you can drag an item to a name (a friend say who wants to borrow a book) and create a lending library list. The interface itself is brilliant, a mockup of an actual wood shelf, complete with covers facing out. The whole things create an addictive little behavior loop: Grab stacks of media, take to desk, scan in, fondle digital shelf as it fills up, repeat.

But it ain't perfect, far from it. For some reason, it took me 20 minutes to figure out how to delete an incorrectly entered unit of media. Would a "delete" button somewhere on the main interface have been so hard? It also relies a little too much on Amazon's database, which isn't perfect either. Earlier tonight I tried to enter an out-of-print book. Amazon didn't have the author's name but entered all the rest of the book's data. But once the book had been entered, I couldn't edit the data at all, even after I pressed the "edit" button.

But imagine the possibilities: What if Delicious Monster could be laid over one's Orkut profile with media linked and collaratively filtered the same way your friends profiles are. Imagine if your friends could get an RSS feed of your library and see whenever something new was added. Imagine if each unti of media were connected to Technorati which would automatically download reviews, articles, film trailers or audio clips of units of media? Like all good pieces of software, it may not work perfectly now, but you can only begin to dream about what it will do later on.

I'm supposed to be cleaning the house...

But I just spent 85 perfectly good minutes at Song Meanings.net looking up the lyrics to my favorite tunes and reading how the geekier-than-thou interpret them.

Grab me before I hurt something.

Sunday Morning Shards #11

Ariana Huffington on why we lost the election (via Barking Moose).

"How my Dad was Brainwashed into Voting Republican in 2004" (Not about Irv Smokler).

Neal Pollack is fed up with novelists who dabble in politics (via Bookslut).

The Artful Manager is a mighty cool blog on the business of managing arts organizations. Published by the good people of Arts Journal.

A midwestern professor rationalizes obsessive book collecting. Pretty convincing (via Tara).

I'd like to give a name to the practice of reading blogs about one's home town when one lives far away. Maybe "expatria-blogging?" Anyway, lately I've been keeping abreast on all things Ann Arbor by reading Good Speed Update.

Jimmy Breslin is retiring.

My friend Chris has a new book out this week called . Blurbed by Jim Hightower and Jeremy Rifkin, it looks to get my lefty blood boiling. Check it. Great cover, eh?

A primer on Web Comics.

Delicious Library arrives tomorrow. I can't wait!

'20' Stories:

Let's say you're in Austin, TX this weekend. Let's say you'd really like to spend your evening doing something other than eating queso and avoiding lacivious Dell salesman. Let's say you'd rather be both entertained and stimulated.

Go to 20x2 this Saturday. And stop listening to me now.

Politic Off:

I've been thinking nothing but politics for the better part of a month. Now it's time to stop. I handed my book in on Monday, putting to a relative end two years of work. I've seen the cover. It's going to look great.

Bush won. There's nothing I can do about that. I will be ready to hold his feet to the fire, to question him at every turn, and to rejoin to regain Congress in 2006. In the meantime, I'm thinking I'm going to write Terry McAuliffe a letter saying what I think is wrong with the Democratic party and how it can change. It'll probably do nothing. But it will make me feel good.

Life will go on, here in San Francisco, in the rest of the nation and here, next to my fireplace with Suzan and Faygo. I've been neglecting many of the things I love about this life to focus my energies on the election. Now that it's over, it's time to bring them home.

So more art, more culture, more books and music around these parts for the forseeable future. I'm scaling back on work this month to give myself a much needed break. But I'll still be blogging because I love writing and I love talking to all of you.

"Our Fight Does Not End Here..."

I just watched John Kerry's concession speech. While I understand that he and his staff determined that they could not win Ohio and therefore not win the election, I still think all the voters in Ohio, in Iowa and in New Mexico deserved to have their votes counted. It couldn't have hurt for Senator Kerry to say "It's important for every vote to be counted no matter how long it takes. I accept the results and the verdict of the American people but each of them needs to be heard." The people who have worked their hearts out for Mr. Kerry. They deserve better than to have their votes rendered meaningless because of some vague idea about "healing the nation."

As sympathic as I am for John Kerry, what we just saw was everything that is wrong with the Democratic party. Namely, that it's more important to be gracious in defeat than to represent the will of the people. Al Gore did it in 2000. Have we not learned?

Our good manners will not save us. Our conviction, understanding, empathy and reason will. John Kerry is a good man who had the chance to be a great one. By conceeding early, he disrespected his supporters when he needed them most.

Indecision Decision:

I'm not holding my breath.

Tejas Day III:

It's always a good sign when I don't write a lot that I had a great time while on the road. My time at the Texas Book Festival was this way.

I really had a great time. I don't get to go to Austin that often (where I was in graduate school from 1997-2000) except for a week in March each year. I have old friends to see, old hangouts to visit, a slow, casual pace of existence there that feels just like a vacation. Even though I was busy, I felt relaxed.

My panel was fine. It was great to see Paul Collins again and to talk books, busines sand Iowa city. I also met Geoff Guinn, books editor of the Fort Worth-Star Telegram, and Kyle Smith, author of the very funny sounding Love Monkey. On our topic "Literature, Alive or Dead?" I'd say we voted "Alive" and kept the audience engaged in passing our verdict.

Time to Change:

Please vote. It's our country.