NOway

Sam Hemphill Video

Fun With Real Video

Here's a tiny little clip of an interview with Jack Topht and the Vegetables, an interesting and bizarre two-man band out of the BFLO.

Fun With Real Audio

Just trying a little experiment here to see how to embed audio files.

For fun, here is an awkward interview I just did with Jax Deluca, a Buffalo area artist.

Poetry about Ed Asner

I got my hands on the forthcoming edition of "Best American Non-Required Reading," which, for my money, is one of the top Best American offerings. It's edited by my old McSweeney's boss Dave Eggers, who recruits a bunch of insanely productive and intelligent Bay Area high school students to select the contents. In Dave's intro (which follows Sufjan Stevens') there's a collection of three poems having to do, naturally, with Ed Asner.

The most disturbing is excerpted here, purely for journalistic reasons:

 

 

"Bathing Ed Asner"
By Greg Ames

I snatched the rubber duck
from his hairy, wet fist

and in a cruel voice
instructed him to quit
fooling and to sit down
dammit in the tub.

"But I didn't ask for your help,"
Asner whined, sulked, and slapped
the murky water with his puckered palms.

"Well, that's pretty much beside
the point, isn't it?" I said.
"I'm here now, helping you, so stop
making trouble for me, Lou Grant."

"Don't calle me that!" he said.

"Well, then, lift up your arms,"
I whispered in his ear,
"and let's swab out those pits."

-------

I hope you're all sufficiently weirded out.

Saunders Saunders Saunders

I have it. I am reading it. I will not be available until Thursday.

George Saunders' website is saunderssaunderssaunders.com. I think that's so brilliant that in case anyone from my non-existent readership reads this, I will not link to it because it's much, much better to type it in. Try it.

And that's Nadál

Rafael fucking Nadál. Seriously.

That's all.

Fighting against "The Braindead Megaphone"

In college, I worked as a videographer for four years. I would tape various goings-on around campus like lectures on architecture and graphic design, football practices and various conferences dealing with issues like healthcare and terrorism.

It was all wonderful learning, considering that I was often skipping classes to shoot these things for seven bucks an hour. Out of the hundreds of events I shot, the most rewarding by far came when I was assigned to be the videographer for a class called "Living Writers." This was a survey class for incoming freshman, run by the incredibly talented authors and poets of Syracuse University's well known MFA writing program. It wasn't like most other classes, or indeed like any other class. The program would bring in a different writer every other week to read a selection, usually from their latest work, and then submit to a question-and-answer session in which the mostly disinterested students would be lined up and forced to ask questions.

In this way, I saw an parade of great writers and poets, from Dave Eggers (whom I later worked for in San Francisco) and Stuart Dybek to brilliant SU faculty members Mary Karr, Brooks Haxton, and George Saunders.

And in reading through the latest issue of GQ I found that Saunders has a fantastic and hilarious piece on, for all intents and purposes, young journalists and how we often unwittingly help to numb the public's consciousness. It's an excerpt from his new book, "The Braindead Megaphone."

Here is an excerpt of the excerpt:

There's no conspiracy at work, I don't think, no ill will, no leering Men Behind the Curtain, just a bunch of people from good universities, living out the dream, cringing a little at the dog-crap story even as they ensure that it goes out on time, with excellent production values.

How does such a poor, potentially harmful product emanate from such talented people? I'd imagine it has to do with survival; each small piece of the machine doing what it must to avoid going home to Toledo, tail between legs; each doing the best it can, within the extant constrants of time and profitability, each deferring his or her "real" work until such time as he or she accumulates his or her nut and can head for the hills or get a job that lets him or her honor his or her heart.

A Hollywood director once told me that everyone in the movie business was trying to make Richie Rich III in order to garner sufficient power and influence to someday make Citizen Kane.

This first requirement of greatness is that one stay in the game; to stay in the game, one must prove viable; to prove viable, one has to be watched, one has to be watchable, and a convention of Watchability has developed—a tone, a pace, an unspoken set of acceptable topics and acceptable relations to these topics—that bears, at best, a peripheral relation to truth: that is, to the difficult, endless, perhaps-not-so-fun-to-watch process of searching out real truth.

Parallax

I still miss New Orleans terribly. I constantly entertain ideas of dropping everything and heading back down, even though I know the place is not exactly heaven right now.

A couple of days ago, a guy at this bar I used to hang out in in the Mid-City neighborhood just got up, slashed another guy with a knife and then slit another woman's throat, killing her. He didn't know either of the victims; apparently he'd just had a crappy day at work.

There's a screening of short films about New Orleans called "New Orleans Parallax" on Saturday at Hallwalls. Check it out.

This from Courtney Egan and Helen Hill's film "Cleveland Street Gap."

Mercury Falling

Lately, for no reason in particular, I've been obsessively watching interviews with the late Freddie Mercury on YouTube. The thing that strikes me about him, more than anything, is his abrasiveness toward any member of the press, his obvious discomfort with interview situations that was responsible for Queen's long-standing no-interviews policy.

Every day, I talk to people who would rather be filing their nails, rather be watching awful TV shows, rather be getting in terrible car accidents. So, while I watch and revere Mercury, I identify with the man on the other side, or sometimes the same side, of the camera.

Here are a couple of worthwhile clips that reveal the potential for awkwardness and embarrassment in a journalist's every day life: