We have no quarrel with films featuring lots of Latino actors and music in which, instead of gardening or being one of several desperate housewives, they are handed a knife and instructed to hack, slice and blow shit up for dramatic purposes. I think our enthusiasm is evident in the video below. (Which you can also see at this direct link if the video doesn’t load for you.)
Next up, we’re doing the Facebook feature The Social Network.
For one thing, each story took several months to report and write, and were such large projects that I went through the thing many reporters do where you have so many pages of notes and memories and observances that you forget what it is you wanted to write and begin to panic and get stress headaches.
Luckily, I have a very understanding editor and was given the time to sort it all out. I’m really proud of this story in particular because it’s one I’ve wanted to write for a long time, ever since I first learned what Ken and his organization does (they raise, rebuild and distribute donated computers to Austin’s poorest kids and community groups). It literally got me teary-eyed the first time I grasped the work they do and one thought just kept pounding in my head for almost two years after: I want to help. In some way, I want to help these guys. So I wrote a story. I hope it will help. I put a lot of work into it.
On Monday, a different story I wrote, for Tech Monday, runs. It’s a column about how there aren’t as many BarCamp-style events in Austin as their used to be and about an upcoming “ProductCamp” event that’s bucking the trend. Nothing earth-shattering, but the ever-helpful Whurley helped offer some perspective on the subject and it’s always fun to chat with him.
No NPR segment this week, but I’ve got some other things I’m working on, including a new Trailers Without Pity that was just posted and a separate blog post about a rash I had. Yes, for real.
This one had been on our list of movies to do for a while. The mix of over-the-hill action stars, ridiculous title and even more ridiculous trailer beckoned like a lit, beckoning thing over on the horizon of a hill or something.
The Expendables looks like it might be just enough fun to watch on video, but not quite enough fun to make much money in theaters. I mean, look at The A-Team. That faded quickly and looked way more interesting.
Last week, I asked my folks at NPR if I could do a blog post about how methods of holding your new iPhone 4 might sound really dirty. They asked, “How dirty?” It was a fair point. My list included things like, “FaceTime Fingering.”
Glark helped brainstorm some ideas with me and by the time we were done, the piece shifted into a photo gallery with photos by Glark and text by me. I think the result, “12 New Ways To Hold Your iPhone 4” turned out pretty great. It’s far less dirty than what I originally imagined, but given that this story was mostly told in photos, that’s probably a good thing.
Even more fun is imagining Glark in his home studio setting up lights and gathering props to do these. Or imagining his face, with an iPhone in his mouth, on the front page of NPR.org. He’s got full-sized images on his site. Wow! Check them all out.
Jared and Juanita Esquivel. Photo by Jerrad Henderson, American-StatesmanThe other important thing from this week was a story that ran on the front page of today’s Austin American-Statesman. It took me a few months to write and, as with any long project, I went through all the states of hating the story, wishing I’d never even started it, and then, as it started coming together in the end, passionately defending it and wanting to make everything about it perfect.
That’s never possible, but this one, from my point of view, comes close. All the graphic and photo elements came together, almost all the pieces made it onto the online version and there were no last-minute crazy changes that needed to be made. It was as smooth an experience as I’ve ever had with a story like this. I’m pretty thrilled to have it finished.
Bonus: the comments on the story are actually unintentionally hilarious, or racialtastic. Here’s one:
Yeah but you know how the economically disadvantaged, among other “classes” score on the TAKS. Maybe homie just don’t got the brain power to see that $70 for access for the whole family is cheaper than a net-capable phone in every hand. Plus I got idea that texting my posse is quite a bit more important than looking up some BS about getting a job or school. That’s uncool. The men in pookie’s gang just wouldn’t approve of it. Here the bottom line isn’t necessarily the bottom line.
Dude. Classic! The same guy made a “pork-n-beans” reference in another post. To be honest, I was expecting far, far worse in terms of comments.
In case it hasn’t been made obvious by comicsI havepublished or by the recap I did of Aquaman, I like a good fish joke. Hell, I like a bad fish joke. If there is a fish in the joke I will probably find it amusing. Fish are funny. I hope you agree.
So when we looked at the schedule and saw that Piranha 3-D was on its way to theaters, we could not resist. It was as if it was being dangled in front of us like something you put at the end of an object so that an animal will come and eat it. What’s the word for that?
You know, you use it to catch something? It’ll come to me.
It embarrasses me like you wouldn’t believe to admit this, but here goes: for about a year, I didn’t read any books.
There are a few clear reasons: we had a baby in December and, as much as having one kid shortens your free time, two is a complete bitch as far as testing your time-management skills.
But I’d be lying if I said it’s all due to parenting. The kids both go to bed relatively early and we had a lot of time during the pregnancy and maternity/paternity leave when I could have been reading. Hell, I could have knocked out a short novel at the hospital in the two days after Carolina was born.
The real truth is that all those evenings I used to read before bed, I was instead following Twitter and Facebook, working no any number of nighttime projects I have going (videos, podcasts, etc.) or just watching TV. I keep a pile of books next to my bed and that pile grew and grew as I brought home books from work, was given books as gifts and used gift cards to buy books on Amazon or Borders that I wasn’t even reading. It got really frustrating and sad.
The only books I was reading were a few I was assigned to read and review for work. I got about 40 pages from the end of Chris Anderson’s book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, and just never finished. It sat with my pile of books, a bookmark of shame lying in between pages toward the end of the hardback.
Not to hype the iPad any more than the astronomical level to which it’s already been hyped, but iBooks is actually what got me reading again. I accidentally bought a $17 iBooks version of Stephen King’s Under the Dome (I only meant to download a sample) and once it was download, I felt obligated to read it. (I had a print copy of the book. Yeah, I know. It wasn’t getting read, though.)
The book, it turns out, is pretty fucking amazing. It’s the best Stephen King book I’ve read in 10 or 15 years, probably since On Writing. And though I’ve missed a few recent ones (they’re all in the stack), Dome feels like King somehow got re-energized, marshaled all of the things that make his best works great and told a story that’s both incredibly ambitious and apocalyptic, but also personal and well-detailed.
And it’s more than a thousand pages long. It must have broken a psychological barrier because after the two or three weeks it took me to finish that book, I figured I could finish anything.
I moved on to Pamela Ribon’s Going in Circles, which had arrived in paperback just as I was in the middle of Under the Dome. I bought the iBooks version, too, which was only $7.99 and switched between the print and e-book versions.
If you know pamie.com, you know the kind of silly, smart humor to expect, but this novel, her third, feels wiser, more heartfelt and certainly more mature than her previous books (which, incidentally, I loved). The book starts with the separation of a marriage and ends with a loving look at the roller derby scene, but it’s much more than a “Divorce ‘n’ derby” tale of loss and new love. The bits that are funny are hysterical. The parts that are sad will break your heart. And the technique she employs to get you into the head of her main character, Charlotte, is clever and employed in just the right amounts.
By this point I was on a tear, and read Sarah Silverman’s The Bedwetter. I actually got my copy signed at her Austin book reading (see goofy photo below where I have now convinced myself I said something that made her laugh), and dived right in.
The first half of the book is amazing. It’s about her childhood and she gives an honest, hilarious, self-effacing portrait of her bedwetting years. It’s tragic and funny and well-told.
Then it stops. The second half of the book is about her stand-up-comedy years, her brief stint on SNL and life on The Sarah Silverman Program (which I loved and was sad to see recently canceled). The problem with the second half of the book is that it feels glossed-over, with huge stretches of time skipped over, and not nearly as smartly observed as the first.
Silverman feels the need to explain and defend the bits that have gotten her in trouble in the past, which by this point seems not only unnecessary, but pretty humorless given the source.
Even comedy nerds will be disappointed: she doesn’t talk at all about her work on Mr. Show, Crank Yankers, Greg the Bunny or really much of anything else beyond her own show and appearances on award shows and talk shows that got her lots of attention. You wouldn’t even know from reading the book that she dated Jimmy Kimmel save for one or two passing mentions of her ex.
It’s strange how the first half of the book is so revealing and honest while the second half feels like it’s written at a distance. Nevertheless, her foreword and midword are hysterical and the e-mail exchanges she peppers in the book are very funny. I just wish she had more to say about her career and life past the age of 18.
'Hey, Sarah, did you hear the one about –' 'Yeah, I heard that already.'
After all this reading, I went back and finished Free (kinda boring and unevenly written, but you’ll feel like an expert on Web pricing strategies when you’re done) and started the first book of Y: The Last Man, which so far is excellent. My stack of books is still huge, but I finally feel like I’m making some progress.
Reading Pam’s book happened to coincide with news that a friend I’ve known since my college years had gotten divorced (I had no idea until long after it had happened). And just over the weekend, the increasingly messy divorce of a pretty famous Web video couple brought the subject up again.
It’s been longer than a decade since I’ve dealt with a romantic breakup, and the older I get and the deeper into being married I am, the more terrifying the idea seems.
I know it happens every day, to lots and lots of people. It happens every few months, sometimes at a happy hour, where I’ll ask how someone’s doing and they give that shrug and hesitate before saying, “Oh, you know, it’s been tough…” and I know exactly where they’re headed in the conversation.
It’s hard to be married sometimes. (Especially with kids.) It takes work and energy and patience and letting go of things that are driving you nuts. Sometimes all at once. But a separation seems like it takes even more energy and resolve, allowing more disruption and chaos to enter your life, even as you hope to get to a future where things begin to work out.
I don’t know how people do it. Or rather, I don’t know how they keep themselves above water, go to work, do the things you have to do every day without completely losing it.
I hope to never have to find out what that’s like.
