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Where, When, How Much, What Flavor.
The Last King of Scotland (2006): "The seduction of power bears an scary resemblance to the comfort we feel as children with our parents."
Every now and then, I profile some of the podcasts that have caught my eye
Esau to To The Best of Our Knowledge's Jacob.
An Unreasonable Man (2006): "A man's life's work should be weighed in balance, not on his last mistake."
Notes: Documentary about Ralph Nader and his legacy. I've admired both their work but both Eric Alterman and Todd Gitlin come off as whiny dipshits.
I was lucky to catch Re:Art The Art of Re:Use, a recycled art show at the Market Street Gallery, before it closed today. I love trash, love discards and junk, and have a fair number of art pieces made from what we hurl in the dumpster every day. Which is why I'm in serious droll mode over the work of John Kuzich (particularly The Trust series. Hmmm mixed media) and Charles Stinson (who needs to handover one of his bronze sculptures before someone gets hurt).
The show was produced in conjunction with Scrap an organization that collects discarded materials for reuse in art projects and with the counsel of the Artist in Residence program at the San Francisco city dump, a revolutionary program that contracts artists to make work out of the dump's content.
This ain't such a bad art town after all.
I am the only person on planet earth who has not seen this video, right?
I'm probably behind the curve in noticing that a hero of mine, Atlantic Monthly national correspondent James Fallows has a blog. But how neat is that? Now if we can only get Eric Schlosser and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc blogging, I'd die happy.
According to a CNN Poll, support for the Iraq war is at an all-time low at %30. On the other side, 63% of Americans are ready to bring the troops home with %38 of Republicans opposing the war altogether.
This sound like an abject failure to me. Are we ready to pull the plug?
Walter Mossberg, on balance, seems to like the iPhone.
We have been testing the iPhone for two weeks, in multiple usage scenarios, in cities across the country. Our verdict is that, despite some flaws and feature omissions, the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer. Its software, especially, sets a new bar for the smart-phone industry, and its clever finger-touch interface, which dispenses with a stylus and most buttons, works well, though it sometimes adds steps to common functions.
I was thinking that it really didn't suit my purposes (I have an iPod and prefer simple phones) but after reading this, as Homer Simpson once said "I may be all turned around on the subject"
(From the D Conference Blog). Tip-off by Andrew Huff.
Today is George Orwell's birthday. He's one of my heroes. Animal Farm remains one of the singular influences on my writing life.
According to The Writer's Alamanc, 1 million people read George Orwell every year for the first time, even though Orwell wasn't published until age 30 and died at 47.
Talk about a legacy.
World Changing discusses "Serious Games", i.e. video games with a social or environmental mission.
Jewschool pointed me to this article about a Hasidic Jewish community in Monsey, New York objecting to plans for a giant Wal-Mart to drop anchor nearby. Normally, Wal-Mart related protests are over lifestyle issues like traffic congestion and the health of local businesses, aesthetic ones (Wal-Marts are ugly) or political anger (sweat shop labor, union busting). All of that's true here but the community's also worried issues specific to Orthodoxy including magazines "picturing celebrities in provocative outfits."
I'm fascinated by real-life cases of cultures butting up against one another and trying to coexist. I guess it's fair to say the jewish version this has been on my radar since the Crown Heights Riots of the early 1990s. On my bookshelf somewhere is Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America, about a community of Orthodox Jews who purchased a kosher slaughterhouse in the town of Postville, Iowa in 1987. The book's jacket sums up the theme nicely "were the Iowans prejudiced, or were the Lubavitchers simply unbearable?".
I haven't read Postville yet but perhaps I'm overdue.
"God is Hawaiian"
Who knew?
Song: "Running Away"
Artist: The Polyphonic Spree
Sound: The old descripters of the Spree still apply--The ABBA Tabernacle Choir, Pink Floyd meets Up With People, the house band on Fraggle Rock. The percussion seems a little more up front in the mix. But not much.
Source: Reading the blog the band set up in anticipation of their third album The Fragile Army had me counting down the hours until June 19th when I could charge over to Amoeba and pick it up. Since I was at the TOC Conference on June 19th, I had to wait until the day after. I haven't felt that way about a record since, eh, Styx's Caught in the Act?
Listened to: SInce I'm now the proud owner of a vinyl-centric stereo system, I bought the record as a record. It came with a little card that lets you download the whole thing as MP3's too.
Actions: July 17, The Great American Music Hall. The Spree will be there. So will I.
“The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet”
--William Gibson (via Medialoper)
Last night was a lovely night to be a booklover in San Francisco. and a user of BookTour. Earlier this week, I found out (from her BookTour page) that Anne Fadiman, one of my heroes, would be reading at Book Shop West Portal, not too far from my house and proudly respresented on BookTour. The owner of the store is an old friend so I phoned and begged him to let me introduce Ms. Fadiman. To which he graciously said yes.
Ms Fadiman gave a fantastic reading from her new essay collection At Large and At Small. attended by several members of her family who live in the Bay Area, Hut Landon, president of the Northern California Independent Bookellers Association and renowned science writer Ellen Ullman. Me, I felt like the third relief pitcher on the All Star Team.
Ms Fadiman enjoyed my introduction and I even got to give her a signed copy of my book. All because of a gentle tip-off from BookTour.
Hooray! (x-posted with BookTour.com Blog).
Composer Vangelis discusses the score from Chariots of Fire, one of my all-time favorite movies.
I'm going to be on my dear friend Felicia Sullivan's radio show Writers Revealed tomorrow at 7 PM EST. The topic is "building book buzz online" and I'll be throwing in a little about BookTour.com with any luck.
You can listen to all the shennanigoats here.
Title: "Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film"
Author: Peter Biskind.
Synopsis: Book length history of the modern independent film movement, beginning at the mid-80s foundings of the Sundance Film Insitute and Miramax Films.
Backstory: Picked up at a Green Apple warehouse sale earlier this year. The period Biskind covers picks up where my teenage crush on independent film (Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, John Sayles) leaves off. Also stuck me as a sequel to John Pierson's Spikes, Mikes, Slackers and Dykes which I enjoyed.
Notes: Brisk, exhaustive, insidery. Biskind doesn't hide what he's thinking and jabs at his subjects with a stick in trying to get their essence to leak out. It's an effective strategy for powerful men used to being either coddled or screamed at from the margins by the press. You can argue (and I do) that his agression arrives at fairness. It also makes you never want to work in the movie business, independent or otherwise.
Verdict: I learned more than perhaps I wanted to reading this book as now, every romantic idea I've ever had about independent film has been ground to dust. Yes, there are committed directors, even producers like Christine Vachon who do it because they love movies and live to bring good ones to life. But the level of shit one must go through to make that happen makes the whole enterprise stink. To those committed, it's probably just an occupational hazard. Me, I'll stay a fan.
Biskind tells a great story propped up by reporting as thorough as Gay Talese. In places he sounds gossipy rather than informative and seems a little too pleased with smacking Robert Redford and Harvey Weinsten about the knuckles (he views them both as struggles between egomania and pathological insecurity, a deadly blend when you throw money and power in too). I
f you love movies, this book is nine course meal you eat ravenously but feel sick afterward. I'm glad I visited but I won't be coming back.
My friend Baratunde made this brilliant video called "I Hate the Smugness of Apple." I love Apple but still think this is friggin' hilarious.
Knocked Up (2007): "I owe Seth Rogan my sacred existence for making the pot belly and Jewfro leading man material."
"Rock n Roll is filled with Peter Pans. Someone had to be Captain Hook." --Alice Cooper (in an interview on Fresh Air)
Happy Feet (2006): "Regarding the state of our world, the penguins are trying to tell us something"
Notes: Seen in New York while my feet ached after a weekend at BEA. I spent much of the movie saying, out loud and to nobody, "I have very sad feet."
So New York was great, exhausting, bewildering but amazingly great. We got great support, twice that many ideas and launched in public beta in an interview Chris did with my friend and mentor MJ Rose. It was a neat merging of two halves of my life I've been trying get joined up for years.
Some specifics. At Book Expo last week--myself, Chris and our partner and CTO Adam Goldstein pulled the ripcord on BookTour.com, a web-based service enabling authors, readers and venues to connect up with one another for live events. We describe it thusly...
BookTour.com is a free online service that connects authors on tour and potential audiences of all sorts, from book lovers to professional groups. Authors create their own page (biography, books, our dates and availability) and any group looking for a speaker can find them and contact them directly to arrange for an appearance. We include fields for authors wishing to handle speaking engagements through their speaking agents and/or in-house publicity departments. Relevant author information can be added in minutes. Connecting authors with potential audiences is as simple as searching (by geography, book titles, subject, dates of availability) and sending an email.
My job is Chief Evangelist/Community Director which means I speak on behalf of our service, assure a smooth user experience and facilitate relationships with the publishing industry and future partners.
It's a whole new way of living for me as I haven't worked fulltime for anyone since these people over a decade ago. Also building something from scratch, even something as focused as this service, is a bit like designing a civilzation. There are few precedents. No one's even laid the roads yet. You talk a lot about how your decisions will play out but fundamentally you can't know for sure. You do a lot guessing, knowing you can always fix it should it not work. It's its own kind of relief.
You can sign up right now to find out when your favorite author is coming to a town near you. And I'll be posting about the gig here from time to time.
Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times edited by Kevin Smokler
