Coachella Lineup Announced:

The Coachella music festival has announced their lineup. Here's the complete rundown. Looks like great stuff.

So. Very. Sad

So I cried like a baby at the Oscar trailer. Let's not think about what that says about me.

Good Morning, Ya Idiot:

I've been up less than ten minutes and already Judge Alito has been confirmed, Coretta Scott King has died, Big Mamma's House 2 is #1 at the box office, the Oscar nominations have been announced and someone slipped me the trailer for Phat Girlz.

I'm going back to bed.

Read Recently: "Willful Creatures" by Aimee Bender

Title: Willful Creatures: Stories

Author: Aimee Bender

Backstory: Purchased during the bilio-orgy that was A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books's 30th anniversary sale.

Notes: Aimee is one of my favorite authors and one of my favorite people. I'll read whatever she writes

Verdict: Most of it is classic Aimee, imaginative, funny, a little twisted but a lot of fun. A few stories seem slight rather than substantive but the rest more than make up for it. Highly highly recommended.

Harper Lee Looks Great

And she's out and about, at least for a day (via Readerville).

Sunday Shards (Jan 29, 2006):

On my mind and in the reading queue this week...

*Disney Buys Pixer. Business Week asks "What Will Steve Jobs do to the Mouse" and "What Will Disney do for him?" (via micropersuasion).

*The Jewish Forward explains the difference between the two Oprah picks "A Million Little Pieces" and Ellie Wiesel's "Night."

*How is the publishing industry marketing to older teens?

*An economic analysis of Dr. Seuss.

*Lunch with an antifeminist pundit.

*Yojimbo may be exactly the organizational software I'm looking for (via Kevin Lawver).

*The next time I'm in L.A. I've got to visit Echo Park. I've never been.

*The Commonwealth Club of California is now podcasting. Saweet.

*Watching Season #3 of Homicide: Life on the Street and loving it.

Record Stores Rise Again:

Lest you think the "record store" will soon be a thing of the past, Business Week reports that the Bay Area's own Amoeba Music posted a 6% increase in sales that year while CD sales on the whole fell 7.2%.

Reason? Shopping at Amoeba's three stores is a lot more fun that iTunes. I live around the corner from their San Francisco store, one of the nation's largest music retailers. It hums with activity. Every CD you could ever want is available at a reasonable price. DVDs too. The staff, while snotty, knows everything. Bands play there.

Their next move? A record label and a $20 million download initiative. I'm eager to see how that turns out.

I think the days of dimly lit, scruffy record stores are numbers. High Fidelity's Championship Vinyl will soon be an anachronism. But music shopping that is as much about experience as it is about commerce? That's why people who can cook still go to restaurants.

Comics Crazy:

Los Angeles has gone comics crazy. Two major museums, the Armand Hammer and the Museum of Contemporary Art have featured exhibitions on American Comics. I won't be getting down to L.A. soon enough but if you're in the Southland and partial to the sequential arts, check it out (via Art Talk).

Giving Voice to Your Anger:

During lunch with my friend Marianne, a veteran progressive activist, she posed this question (and I paraphrase)

"Our anger motivates us to act. So how do we give voice to our anger? We can build a large platform from which we can yell at a lot of people. Or we can speak from a position of understanding and love and lead by example. We can show, gently but firmly, that there is another way. Because no one wants to change when you're yelling at them."

Man, that hit me hard. I wrote my first book because I was angry about how the book business sees its future (or doesn't). My second book comes from a deep frustration with the narrow-minded, self-flaggelation of the American Jewish community.

I could on like this. There's always something to be angry about and anger is a powerful reason to get out of bed. But do I want to be heard or do I want to be heard less dramatically and have it matter?

I've been thinking hard about that since our lunch. Yesterday, I heard this poem on The Writer's Almanac. It's by Jim Harrison.

Despond

At midnight in his living room a man
is angry at a fly that is bothering him.
How can this be?

A man is angry at things
that never happened
and never will happen.

He's angry at the woman he'll never meet
because she refuses to meet him
because, not existing herself,
she has no idea that he exists.

He's frying potatoes that don't exist
at sunset. The frying pan is a black sun
and out the window in the gathering dark
the ocean looks so heavy that it might fall
through the earth and join another ocean.

At dawn he wakes. There's a fly in the room
but perhaps it's a miniature bird. Magnified,
the sound is the basso rumbling of the universe
the peculiar music galaxies make when they fray
against each other. He sleeps again, his hand
on his dog's heart which says don't be angry.
She senses the steps of the last dance saved for us

How does your anger serve you? How does it harm you?

The Mystery of My Sudden Popularity:

So I couldn't figure out why my podcast went from 3 suscribers, all of whom I know well, to 18, none of whom I've ever met in like 3 days. A little digging and it seems that Your 10 Minute World was a staff pick on Odeo.

Big thanks to Ev and Noah. That's pretty damn cool.