Jan 31 2006
Coachella Lineup Announced:
The Coachella music festival has announced their lineup. Here's the complete rundown. Looks like great stuff.
Kevin's Mailing List
Where, When, How Much, What Flavor.
Kevin's Mailing List
Where, When, How Much, What Flavor.
The Coachella music festival has announced their lineup. Here's the complete rundown. Looks like great stuff.
So I cried like a baby at the Oscar trailer. Let's not think about what that says about me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
Please note the following passage from a story in today's New York Times about big losses at General Moters...
Since 200, G.M., Ford and the Chrysler Corporation have cut or announced they would eliminate up to 140,000 jobs, or a third of their payrolls. Earlier this week, Ford announced that it would cut 30,000 jobs and close 14 plants over the next six years.
It seems GM has been eliminating 14,000 since the waning years of the Roman Empire.
I found out from this article in the NYT that The New Leader a stalwart publication of left-leaning political analysis is shutting down after 82 years of publication. The New Leader has published many of the great thinkers of 20th century including George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, and Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Bermingham Jail."
No doubt it's a tough time to publish a magazine borne of political climates of the past. But I was particularly taken by these three paragraphs about Myron Kolatch, the magazine's editor since 1961...
Mr. Kolatch, 76, is a small, soft-spoken man with old-fashioned manners and the kind of mustache that leading men used to wear in the movies. He occupies what is surely the most antiseptic office in New York: no photographs, no rugs, not a sheet of paper out of place. And in all his years there Mr. Kolatch never got around to hanging pictures on the wall.
"Every day I walk in here and say, 'These naked walls - something should be done about them,' " he said. "But I'm a perfectionist, and I've always worried that if I started obsessing about pictures, I'd never get the magazine out."
It was a similar concern, he added, that contributed to what he regards as one of his great failings as an editor - his tardy embrace of the Internet. "I didn't have the foresight to realize the importance of being there," he said. "If you're a magazine like ours, and you're not there, you almost don't exist. But I can't do anything halfway. It's just like the walls. I felt that if we were going do an Internet thing, it would have to be top-of-the-line, and we couldn't afford that. We could barely afford the domain name."
The New Leader has no Internet presence. None. This would have been excusable in 1998-9 when the first dot com boom probably seemed like a lot of empty hype. In 2006, it is inexcusable. I have worked for nonprofits, some in publishing, often headed by an Executive Director a generation or two removed from the coming of the Internet. All knew they needed to be online. When they didn't have the money, they raised it. When they didn't have the time, they farmed out the job to interns and young staffers who knew these things.
Often their first efforts weren't perfect. Far from it. But they knew they had to be there. Because otherwise, like Mr. Kolatch pointed out, "you almost don't exist."
I had never heard of The New Leader before I read its obituary. I may not be its target demographic but at least it would have rung a bell had I seen it linked from someone's blog or mentioned at Arts Journal. But that's impossible if it's not online itself.
I don't like to rejoice in anyone's failure. But I can't say I'll miss The New Leader because I never knew about it until now. Worse still, I can't say I didn't see this one coming.
Fascinating article in the New Yorker this week by Tad Friend about Los Angeles and its culture of high speed car chases. Real ones, not those in the movies. Though for some idiotic reason, the magazine's website has included this Q&A with Mr. Friend about the article instead of the article itself, it still left me curious enough to ask the following questions...
1) Would there be high speed chases if we couldn't see them on television? In other words, is the fact that they draw huge television ratings a big part of why this article was written?
2) Mr. Friend concludes that technology exists or will soon where you can simply shut off a car's engine remotely. When the cops can do that, will that be the end of the high speed chase?
3) Will you be sad about it?
4) What is the best high speed chase on film ever and is the answer strict geographic chuvanism? Because the answers I usually here are Bullitt (San Francisco), To Live and Die in L.A. (Los Angeles), The French Connection (New York) and The Blues Brothers (Chicago).
5) Have you met or have a six degrees connection to someone who stood beside the freeway as OJ passesd yelling "Go Juice Go!"
6) Why does Mr. Friend, who lives in New York, keep writing "Letters from California" as if California is a foreign country instead of the most populous state in the union?
Answer any and all.
"God's Extravagant Welcome"
I don't know what that means but I like the sound of it.
I signed up for Dodgeball last week because I wish to be voluntarily stocked by people cooler than I and because my mobile phone, pre-Dodgeball, wasn't nuturing the insecure pre-teen within me (NUTURE!). So today Suzan and I are at the supermarket and I innocently post to DB than I'm, well, at the supermarket.
5 minutes later, I'm staring at soy milk and a voice says "Ok, fine don't turn around."
It was my buddy Eris, in the neighborhood and my first Dodgeball meetup. I nearly cried.
Also, today, my podcast got not one but two new subscribers who weren't people I'd begged to sign up. Heck, I don't even think I've met them. So Elena Charles and David Milam, if you're out there, I love you both.
What a red letter day for technology wanking. And lord, am I sad.
seems to be the theme of the day...
First two articles via New Media Musings. The first, about peer recommendations profiles Pandora, Musicplasma, Neflix and other media companies working on the "If you liked this, you'll like that" model. The second, on the habits of the "digital generation" (I can't tell if that's me or not), had this to say.
In addition to thumbing his nose at notions of "prime time" by downloading his favorite shows (without commercials), Mr. Hanson almost never buys newspapers or magazines, getting nearly all of his information from the Internet, or from his network of electronic contacts.
"Papers are so clunky and big," he says. If those words are alarming to old media, they are only the beginning of a larger puzzle for today's marketers: how to make digital technology their ally as they try to understand and reach an emerging generation.
Hear that?
Elsewhere, Scott Andrew, weary of more rants about the imploding music industry has this to add
And then there's that remaining core of artists that really do believe that the CD Is Never Going Away¹, that People Won't Pay For What They Can Get For Free², and that Internet == The Devil's Xerox Machine³, etc.
What I'd like to do is shove all these people into a time machine and send them back to 1990, where you could charge $20 for a CD but commercial radio ruled everything and the only way to be known in Australia was to go to Australia. And then when they weren't looking I'd teleport back to the present and blow up the lab. Ha ha!
Still not convinced the music industry is on a collision course with its Day of Reckoning? Here's an example of how ardent music fans are relating to it these days.
Thank you, Sam Cooke. The change has come.
Things are humming over at the Litblog Co-op with their new Read This! selections out. They're doing podcasts, online discussions, buncha stuff. Impressive (via TEV).
Havoc (2005): "The first entry in the 'It sucks to be young in Los Angeles' Film Festival."
What else would you enter?
Episode 4 of my podcast "Your 10 Minute World" is up.
You can sign up to receive it my dropping this here link into iTunes or the podcast reader of your choice.
So I had a swell time guest blogging at Powells.com this week. They give you and email address say, "write something that has something to do with books" and you go. Here's what I came up with.
My fried Sarah and a Sarah I've never met both read along. Not sure who else but it doesn't really matter. Hard work but I think if I beg, they'll let me do it again.
Up next, gotta finish the 4th episode of Your 10 Minute World wherein I continue to ride the word "pulchritude" into the ground. Stay with us.
I'll be guest blogging over at Powells.com this week. So posting here may be on the light side.
On my mind this week...
*Seen at MacWorld this week...
*Roxio's Boombox software lets you convert cassettes into mp3. Bought it.
*Parliant's PhoneValet is an answering machine on steroids.
*Endicia lets you run a post office through your mac.
*The awesome DevonThink now has a best friend DevonAgent which lets you perform metasearches across the Intermaweb.
*Judge Alito appears headed for confirmation.
*Do magazines have a racial glass ceiling (via ArtsJournal)?
*Chuck Klosterman will be writing for ESPN.com once a month (via Justin).
*RIP Blockbuster Video (via Kottke.org).
*Hey Bostoners! The Brattle Theater needs your help (via Cinema Treasures).
*SXSW Baby is humming. Festival is T-minus 5 weeks and counting. I can't wait.
For the first time since I left Austin in 2000, I'm able to stick around after SXSW Interactive for SXSW Music. In 2000, long before mp3 blogs or decent streaming technology or podcasts, you yanked the music preview for the festival out of the Austin Chronicle and guess which bands to see based on whether you had heard of them or whether you liked their name. Maybe you researched them on the Internet or at Waterloo Records first. It was a labor-intensive, sucky process.
No more. See You in the Pit is a grassroots mp3 blog exclusively devoted to artists playing the festival this year. It's not affiliated with SXSW and contains tons of mp3s of bands slated to play.
Phat efficient. I've already signed up (via Large Hearted Boy).
Broken Flowers (2005): "Flowers, women, the color pink and Bill Murray staring straight ahead."
Jason Kottke linked today to a site devoted to well designed book covers. I clicked and whatdya know?
To be in this kind of company just takes my breath away. Wow.
So Monday the NY Times broke the story that JT LeRoy is a big ole' hoax. The London Telegraph has covered the story as has the SF Chronicle since LeRoy Inc. has their headquarters here. Writer Susie Bright talks about being one of the dupees on her blog.
I exchanged a few emails with this JT person when I the author Arthur Bradford (whom I knew from graduate school). I saw "JT" in one of his rare public appearances at Arthur's reading that September at Booksmith. His assistant (whomever that was) sent me a racoon penis bone soon after.
I certainly didn't have the kind of contact or relationship with "JT" that Ms. Bright did, or Ayelet Wadman (as she writes here) nor do I possess the kind of justifiable outrage San Francisco writer Violet Blue does, calling out LeRoy for exploiting a troubled past for fame and profit. I was just someone else, someone much less famous and connected, in his orbit.
Know what? In a perverted way, it felt good. It felt good. I feel pathetic even saying it but I was new in San Francisco, just starting to get my writerly legs and here was someone who hung out with Winona Ryder and Dave Eggers who wrote back, who said "hey thanks" who wanted to know what I was up to.
LeRoy never asked me for anything but I had nothing to give. In the rigid hierarches the hoax was built on, I was somewhere between penthouse and basement, not famous but not really a fan. I'd never read his books, never raved about how much I related to his story because I didn't. I was taken in by someone who swore by the power of writing so much and wanted share a little with me.
When I look at the coverage (particularly in the Chronicle) of this whole ugly, sad mess, I can't help but think of the Kaycee Nicole story, a blog of a fictional teen girl dying of lukemia, which was actually written by an adult woman playing her mother. The web's brightest stars (including the huge-hearted John Halcyon Styn) were taken in by the story and devestated by its implosion. But the aftermath revealed a kind of junior high stratification of grief, where high profile bloggers had their grief magnified by their influence and how badly you felt reflected how close you were to the white, hot center of the then young blogosphere. I was new to blogging and knew nothing about it.
The list of folks wronged by the unveiling of JT LeRoy is long and distinguished, many of whom have very public forums to lay out their grief and outrage. Maybe I was lucky that LeRoy and company never wanted anything from me and thus, don't feel gamed. A sad little part of me wishes (s)he had because maybe it would bespeak a level of notoriety or acheivement I didn't know I had. But when I'm real, like in the case of Kaycee Nicole, I mostly feel bad that I couldn't feel worse.
If you live in San Francisco, please see Duma at the Balboa. Duma is the little movie that could, given a death sentence by its studio as "uncommercial", given respite by a great review from Roger Ebert and a handful of movie theatres that have stuck by it. Bravo to Gary Meyer and the Balboa for their support. Suzan and I went to a 2:40 Sunday show and the joint was packed.
Duma (Swahili for "cheetah") is the story of a cheetah cub raised by a South African family. When Duma grows up, the son Xan decided to return him to the wild.
What follows is an adventure pretty much like The Black Stallion in reverse or Fly Away Home straight on(directed, like Duma, by Carol Ballard). These are all great films, beautifully photographed, about animals without being cutesy, "family friendly" without insulting their audiences.
I've been thinking about Duma all day. If I drove past the Balboa, I'd have trouble not buying a ticket. If you offered, I'd be out the door before you stopped speaking.
So see Duma. You will not be sorry. According to this review, it's getting a wider release this Friday.
Plus Duma looks mad cool in a hat.
On my mind this week
*Episode 3 of my podcast is ready. I've posted it at this new dedicated Odeo channel so it's now easier than heck to sign up for it.
*If you live in San Francisco, please see Duma at the Balboa before it goes away. The movie is hanging by a thread and it's one fabulous, beautiful piece of work.
*MacWorld is this week!
*Seems now you can recycle your ipod at any Apple Store.
*Reactions to John Stewart's appointment as host of the Oscars.
*Point by point evidence of why I don't get Starbucks at all.
*Scarrryyyy Slate piece on what business movie theatres really are in (via Cinema Treasures).
*I despise the Frat Pack.
*Rockrgrl magazine is shutting down. Their website doesn't say why (via Scott Andrew).
*The LA Times asks, rather obviously, why don't men read relationship books (via ArtsJournal)?
*I'm off and running with my second book proposal. YeeChah!
Will you be patronizing Google's new Video Store when it opens? Episodes of CSI and Charlie Rose look rather attractive to me. I'm thinking this may be yet another nail in the coffin of the corner video store. Seeing this item (via Largehearted Boy) about the closure of the legendary Rhino Records Westwood, where I used to browse on weekends when I worked as a day laborer for Warner Brothers in the early 1990s, got me thinking there may simply not be a market for retail music and movie stores in our digitally delivered future. And while that convenience sure sounds great, the fallout may be much sadder and more painful than I had originally imagined.
Thoughts? Feelings?
So hey, I've finally finished Episode #3 of Your 10 Minute World which clocks in at 14 minutes. Trimming evades.
I've exported all three episodes to a dedicated Odeo channel which will make subscribing much easier. Simply drop this URL into whatever you use to listen to podcasts. Or click on this graphic...
I'll be posting show notes on this page from now on too.
Did you hear that Mr. Vargas (Ridgemont High's spacy science teacher) died? Sad.
Title: Don't Get Too Comfortable: Essays
Author: David Rakoff
Backstory: Heard on Writer's Voice Radio. Purchased during the bilio-orgy that was A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books's 30th anniversary sale.
Notes: Enjoyed Rakoff's first collection and would like to have his way with words someday.
Verdict: Enjoyable, sometimes slight, thoroughly crafted. I'm putting it by my desk in hopes of osmosis.
Sunday was New Year's Day so this week's link dump will be today. Enjoy!
*10 Web Trends the Should Die in 2006 (via micropersuasion).
*Louis Menand on "Literature's Global Economy" (via ArtsJournal).
*My man Baratunde asks if we can please kill the music industry. I'll second that.
*N+1 weighs in on the "reading crisis" (via Readerville).
*Lengthy profile of Roger Ebert, one of my heroes (via Kottke).
*The Real People Network (another fine Lasica project).
*Police Squad is coming to DVD (via Brad).
*Has book reviewing gone creepy (via ArtsJournal)?
*Do you understand how Urbantic can help your life? Because I don't.
Spartacus (1960): "This is a metaphor for the civil rights movement"
Hello 2006, whatcha knowin? Technically I'm not on vacation anymore so I should getting back to work. But it's going to take a few days to clear the X-box related dentritus out of the office, to clean out the inbox and adjust to not watching Unsolved Mysteries at 11 in the morning.
Give me a day or three. In the meantime, I'll start regular blogging again.
Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times edited by Kevin Smokler
