My life partner in podcast, Tolly Moseley, put up a beautiful post on Facebook about the end of our hosting gigs on the podcast we co-created with Addie Broyles and Alyssa Vidales, “I Love You So Much” (which, in a previous life, was the successor to “Statesman Shots.”
Without her, there would never have been a “Statesman Shots” and I wouldn’t have wanted to take on either show without her laughter, her talent and her can-do spirit. Which is why it feels right that we’re saying goodbye to the show together. It has been the best kind of creative partnership and I hope we brought the best out of each other. We’ll be on a couple more episodes through ACL Fest with Addie but you can hear our goodbye bonus episode below or on your favorite podcast app.
Thanks to all our guests, our newsroom heroes who said yes again and again when they could have easily said no and to all of you who listened, who shared and who helped make our little dream of a fun Austin podcast a reality.
One of the few things that has continued on with this site, as the blogging/journaling has almost completely dried up and my writing work now mostly lives in other places, is this annual tradition of choosing a word for the year.
It what I instead of a full resolution, less a goal and more a tone I want to set for the year and a vibe I want to achieve.
I don’t always remember the word itself as the year goes on, but it’s usually tied to a larger set of ideas I I want to pursue. I’m bad at five-year plans. But I can pick a word that I want to represent where I want to be.
Guess what the word was for 2016. Just take a guess. I’ll hang out for a second.
I have some friends who started businesses and wrote books and got married or had a kid for the first time, and they would tell you that their year was pretty great overall. But for most of the rest of us, 2016 was kind of shit on toast, and not the nice 12-grain toast that absorbs butter like a black hole, I’m talking about some hardened, stale, crusty Melba toast shit.
No one close in my family or circle of friends died, though there were a few close calls. But I suffered the same hurt feelings over pop culture heroes falling left and right. And politically, of course, it was just an ugly, brutal year for truth, for decency, for us to wonder how the fuck we got to this point. As the year wore on, it was clear that for a lot of us, we were going to remember it as anything but joyful.
But, I remember that post and the feeling of going into 2016 wanting to be less in my own head and more out there experiencing things joyfully and in the moment. And in that regard, it was kind of a great year. I made a conscious effort to go to music concerts and not watch them from behind my cell phone screen shooting photos or video. I took a trip to Las Vegas where I did a bunch of stuff I’ve never done before like indoor skydiving, betting on a professional sports game (I won!) and seeing two professional stage performers twist their penises and balls into interesting shapes. If that’s not living joyfully, I don’t know what is.
I saw a really good life coach toward the middle of the year who opened my eyes to some things going on in my life that needed to stop and that I’ve been in the process of cutting out. I stopped selling myself short on certain things that were wedged in my brain and I stopped caring about things that I know won’t matter in a few years.
There were some setbacks I had, just like everyone else, and I definitely ended the year feeling drained and a little lost and uncertain. But there was lots of surprising joy in the year and instead of allowing myself to wallow or hide out, I spent a ton of time with my kids during the winter break and reminded myself why I’ve made a lot of decisions that have kept me close to them (instead of, say, traveling all the time or taking a job that would keep me from seeing them so much).
So “Joyful,” in a weird way, did work itself out.
Along those lines, I’ve been mulling over my word for 2017 and here it is (this won’t be a surprise if you’ve already glanced at the title of this post):
Track.
This is a little bit of a cheat because it’s a word I’m using in a few different ways (why not just choose three words of the year? THAT’S NOT HOW IT WORKS!).
“Track.” Mostly what I mean by it is that I need to do better about keeping track of things in my life, something I used to be great at sometime in my major GTD phase, where I was making tons of to-do lists, labelmaking the shit out of everything in my house and work desk, and being militant about not letting things fall through the crack.
I won’t blame it on age, but I’ve mellowed on a lot of that stuff and some of it just doesn’t make any sense anymore. Meticulously filing thousands of emails? Unnecessary. Keeping all my old paper story files? Even our electronic archive at work is incomplete and that stuff matters more. I find myself wanting to hold on to that stuff less and less.
But the stuff I should be keeping track of, such as following through on personal goals, on not letting myself off the hook on benchmarks (writing this post, for instance). That’s stuff I need to track much more strictly after a few years of just letting my off-hours writing and project work fall by the wayside. I mean have you seen how much good shit there is on TV? Have you played Overwatch? Gotten into a fight on Facebook? There’s always other fun and engaging stuff to do and I’ve taken it way too easy on myself to just opt out and not finish things.
Track is also being used here as in “Get to the track” and exercise more. I started running this last year, something I’ve never, ever done, even when I was seeing a trainer two years ago, and even though my body is totally not built for it (chunky legs, bad breathing habits), I’ve somehow learned how to jog without stopping every two or three minutes. So I’m keeping on with that. And following some kind of regular path. Or track, if you will.
Tracks, incidentally, are what I’ve been thinking of as I file a bunch of my CDs (still have them!) into a giant folder and get rid of shelves and shelves worth of jewel boxes. I’m going through all of this music, a lot of which I never bothered to transfer to my computer or phone and thinking, “Where has that song been all this time?” Yes, almost all of it is on Spotify, but I forgot how much music I used to own and just completely lost track of. There are some great songs I haven’t heard in a very long time.
And one more use of the word: I’d like to keep track of my friends a little better. One of the things I do when I’m stressed or having a hard time is just to disengage with everyone, to hide at home or behind a keyboard and to just withdraw from everything. Starting the podcast (still going after three years!) was one was of forcing myself out of Hermittown, but as fun as it is, it’s not enough. I need to do that in my personal life too and devote more time to reconnecting with friends and family I haven’t been paying enough attention to.
I’m not going to promise more blog posts here because that never seems to happen, but I do plan to write a lot more this year one way or another and I hope some of that stuff ends up here.
What’s your word for 2017? What are your plans? Let me know. I really miss hearing from you.
Panning for gold in the backyard of your brain for online riches
Is this still a thing?
Are we still blogging?
Or what was once online journaling? Has it passed on to a new generation, a group of up-and-coming writers who are still writing about their lives on top of the Tweets, Instagrams, Snapchats, podcastings that also serve as to give them voices above the din?
Or is the din the point?
I have a friend, Tolly. We do a podcast together that’s really become my main creative outlet for the last two years, the place where I get to be myself and talk in a very similar way that I once would have blogged here. We both have let our blogs lie asleep for six months or more (for me, my 40th birthday back in April appeared to be the excuse to just stop), and we both recently said to each other, “Hey, wouldn’t it be great to blog again?”
We do. We blog a lot. Just not in our home spaces.
And it frankly shocked me that in 2015, I wrote two blog posts here. Two. That’s it. And one of them was short, and just marking time, and searching for a reason to keep at it that, obviously, never came.
Is anyone out there anymore? Listening? Reading?
It sure doesn’t feel like it. It’s felt beside the point and a drag and that’s why I stopped. It didn’t feel joyful, or spontaneous, or like an outlet anymore, it felt like an obligation, a thing to do that had to be done, a void to throw the most personal stuff that was never going to get seen anyway. (Or, if seen, to be misinterpreted and twisted, as has happened before. At least on social media, you can come right back with a response and turn it into a conversation. An ugly comment on a blog post feels like a drive-by water-ballooning. You’ll probably never see that hateful balloon thrower ever again.)
This is a test, I think. A preview, maybe, or just a call out to say, this still exists. It’s still a thing, at least for tonight.
To the right of this, there’s a blogroll, what we used to pull together to link to the sites that we liked to read, the ones we’d exchange links with, to shout-out friends and people we admired. So many of them are either gone, dumped in digital graves, or simply suspended in time, stopped a year ago or two years ago or more.
Is it the end? I don’t really know. The 15th anniversary of this site’s birth came and went in October and I didn’t even notice. Once upon a time I would have celebrated it like an actual birthday, making a big hoopla for the anniversary. Now, I wonder if it matters, even to me as more than just a repository of old stuff, a filing cabinet of old ideas and passions and words that every year seem a little more like a foreign language or musings out of a different brain.
I think I tried, in 2015, to stick to my word of the year “Cohesion,” my goal of aligning my home, work and online selves more closely to each other, by just cutting out the things that weren’t working, or adding value, or bringing me satisfaction anymore. The things that I figured I could get back to someday, but that for the time being were just dragging and pulling and weighing on me. This year, my word is “Joyful,” to enjoy more moments as they’re happening, to seek out the stuff that makes me happy and fulfilled rather than just the stuff I feel I ought be doing out of habit or obligation. And I think I’m very careful judging whether this thing that I worked very hard to build into something a very long time ago, still fits into the equation.
I think a lot of bloggers who’ve stopped are doing the same if they’re considering keeping at it at all.
Flip a coin, maybe? Send out a distress signal? Nuke it and start anew?
I don’t know, honestly. But I hope it’s not another seven or eight months before an answer presents itself.
The plan with this blog, what it has come to, is me telling a little story, a mini-essay maybe and then launching into all the stuff I’ve been working on since the last blog post. This blog started back in 2000 (!) with the intent of just being the place to put all my online stuff so I wouldn’t have to go hunting around the web for it later.
It still serves that purpose, even after all the changes to the online world, from online journals to blogs to microblogs to whatever the Hell it is we’re calling what we do on sites like this these days. I still need a place to park all the things I want to be able to find later if I need to find them. And if I can entertain or Say Some Stuff along the way, all the better.
But this blog is not my main gig, not even close, and hasn’t been for a while. If I lost my job tomorrow, you can bet it would be my first rallying point of retreat. But I’ve been a bad combination of busy and lethargic, manic and exhausted, barely hanging on with some deadlines, way far behind on other important ones, and it’s easy to get paralyzed and discouraged and Why Bother/Who Cares? about it all. I don’t like that and this blog was making me feel that way because of a post I’ve been working on, quite literally, since September.
And it’s not even like a great blog post, not a “Wait till you read THIS shit!” masterwork manifesto. It’s just a blog post full of links and stuff I’ve been working on and cute photos and that sort of thing. But here’s the thing… that blog post kept growing. And growing. And every week, as I wrote more stuff and recorded more episodes of Statesman Shots, this work-in-progress blog post couldn’t keep up with the stuff I wanted to put in it.
So I feel behind. And further behind. It got to where it was basically Lucy and Ethel with the chocolates conveyor belt. I used to think that bit was kinda funny. Now it haunts every waking moment.
Rather than continue to try to whip up this gigantic thing that has built up into an impossibility in my mind, I’m going to take the easier route and try to GTD this shit into submission.
The blog post, this gigantic thing I have been afraid to tackle in anything more than feeble late-night attempts, is going to be broken down into its core components. Will it be complete as I wanted? Who the fuck knows? Will it all make sense? MOST LIKELY NOT! Will I be a little saner doing it this way, spreading out the labor over a few nights? I sure hope so.
How will it be divvied up? I think tonight’s post, the first of four or five posts this week, is going to be the little mini-essay I was working on. That’s coming up here in a sec. And after that, I’ll probably do a post just about all the stuff I’ve been doing at my day job (exciting!) and about some news I want to share about some radio stuff I’ll be doing soon (also exciting!). I want to do a post about Statesman Shots because these blog posts have sort of been sort of serving as an episode guide in lieu of one on our actual blog/site.
What I said earlier about having a place to park all my stuff? One thing I have learned from being in a big media company that lives on the web is that you can’t trust that stuff will always be around. Things you worked so hard to get online have a way of just disappearing before you know it, and I’ve always taken it upon myself to catalog it all here, even if the links may one day rot and dry out.
I’d like to do a photos post because in these two months, everything from Halloween to Wurstfest to The Daily Show in Austin have happened.
And I hope that by the end of these few posts I figure out how I’m going to do this in the future (or if I’m going to) because clearly my current model is unsustainable.
But enough complaining. Here’s the thing I wrote a few weeks ago that now feels oddly distant, like some other dude wrote it and asked me to edit it. And I guess that’s really what it is; Past Omar is asking Present Omar to take the wheel and get this thing published.
So I’mma do that. And then post a bunch of other stuff in the next few days that has been building up.
That first post follows:
It’s hard to say where my head is these days because I’ve done such a good job distracting myself by being really busy.
I don’t do well with inactivity, and I know that’s a little bit of a problem, but I swear I sleep better, eat less and overall am less anxious when I’m busy with things I not only have to do, but want to be doing.
And some would call it overextending, but I rarely get in over my head with stuff when it comes to writing assignments. I may stress out a little, but I always remind myself that I’ve been here before, under the pile, typing my way out at full speed.
But despite the being busy, I’ve been a little out of sorts mostly by proxy. I have one friend whose marriage is very close to ending and I’ve been asked for advice on a subject I really am no help on except as a cautious voice of logic and safety. I have another friend who is leaving a job they are closely associated with and although there are happy faces put on the situation, I know there’s a lot more to the story and not all of it is good. And then another friend was hit with a sudden breakup. Maybe it’s the fall shifting into winter, but I was seeing a lot of sudden dissolution all around me.
I don’t like involving myself with other people’s dramas. I don’t seek it out and it certainly doesn’t give me a thrill like it might have in my 20s when other people’s personal lives were fodder for the imagination and got the writing wheels in motion. These days, I mostly just hurt for the people I care about and hate to see them going through bad stuff, especially when it’s past the point where anything can be fixed or salvaged and they must move on.
It’s different in that these are friends who specifically sought me out to talk (and trust me, it’s nobody you know so I’m not spilling any secrets here). As much as I worry that I could make things worse with bad counsel, I think I’m at least a good listener and that’s probably what’s needed most in all three situations.
These situations, though, made me aware of how little interaction I typically have with friends about these kinds of things. When a friend gets divorced or engaged, I usually hear about it on Facebook. When a co-worker is going away, I learn in a staff email. I’m not really plugged in to gossip channels anymore, but more than that, I find I have very few friends who confide these kinds of things in me anymore. I’ve wondered if people think I’m too busy to listen (a valid concern) or that I’ve just drifted too far away from friends who once considered me a confidante.
It’s not like I stopped making friends when I turned 30 or something; I have new creative partners and friends who I discuss things with. I’m not a hermit, I don’t shut myself out from the world.
But I’m not too old to remember a time when it felt like I knew so much about the private lives of my friends and co-workers. Way more than I really wanted to know, but certainly enough to feel connected to the comings and goings of people’s lives. I wasn’t always so out of the loop. Or maybe I was listening more intently back then.
I guess it would be just at 10 years ago that I started a weird little project (in my 20s, I was always starting weird little projects; I guess I still do that but the stakes are a little higher now).
I had an online journal that would become a blog soon but I was still in the habit of publishing pretty regularly on this site. I would post entries, pretty planned-out essays and updates, three times a week, which today just makes me want to go take a long old man nap. There must have been more caffeine in the water back then.
The site never had a huge following, but it did have readers and enough of them that I felt pretty confident that a mix CD project, where people would PayPal me $1 to physically mail them a CD of that year’s best music tracks (at least ones I had bought and had access to), made perfect sense.
It didn’t make perfect sense. It was kind of a pain in the ass, actually, the cutting the labels and finding the perfect plastic disc holders and the laborious burning of the CDs (so much time at the computer, sitting; how am I not dead of a heart attack already?). But it was also really gratifying to get feedback on music I’d chosen, years before we could share iTunes playlists or play DJ in a virtual room (that has already come and gone in that time). So I did it two more years. There was an ’04 mix, an ’05 mix and an ’06 mix (2004, 2005 and 2006, not 1904, 1905 and 1905 young smartasses).
I think the reason I stopped doing it after 2006 was that we had a baby in 2007, which made everything non-essential pretty much impossible, but also because people were already like, “CDs? Really?” even by that point. People were downloading their own music, legally, even, and it was just easier to tell people where to find music online than mailing them something physical. So I stopped doing that project.
About a week ago, a woman emailed me asking about the CDs and whether the list of those songs was still up somewhere. I dutifully sent her the links to find them. She also asked if I was ever planning to convert those lists of songs into Spotify playlists, something which just had never even occurred to me. I mean, I’ve put Spotify playlists here on the site that I still update. But this was a long way back to reach.
I wrote back and said that was a neat idea, and it would be great if somebody could do it (hint hint), but I was too busy to work on that myself.
And then I went on Spotify to see how much time it would take. About 10 minutes total for all three CDs, it turns out.
I listened to them again for the first time in years and except for a few bad-in-hindsight choices (James Blunt, that U2 song that isn’t really that great, too much Franz Ferdinand), I really enjoyed digging those songs out in order. I have them all on my phone, I can listen to them individually anytime, but having them by year in that time-capsule form really speaks to me. Maybe I’m just remembering the careful curation that went into those CDs and the satisfaction I got designing those labels and shipping them out in flat brown envelopes. But whatever it is, the magic still works on me.
So here they are, the three playlists. There were just a tiny few songs that aren’t on Spotify (the Pixies song, for instance, you can easily find on iTunes or elsewhere). In one or two cases, a live version has been subbed in for something that’s not on the service. And if you really want that Islands “Flesh” song, you can probably do a Google for it or drop me a line and I can point you in the right direction, probably.
Thank you to that reader for reminding me how much fun I had doing this and for bringing some joy back to me that I thought had link-rotted away on the Internet, a thing I loved that I believed was just digital dust now.
I did a grab-baggy column reviewing the Tablo TV box (which lets you record over-the-air broadcast to a DVR) and discussing a new show from The Daily Dot and Rooster Teeth. I wrote about that on its own blog post as well.
And most recently, I wrote an essay about some things I think are happening on Facebook (and maybe soon on Twitter) that really came out during last month’s protests in Ferguson, Missouri. I wasn’t looking to write a Ferguson think piece, but I think there are even larger issues happening on social media and this was one clear warning sign of where we’re headed.
And on Tuesday, I did a little bit of coverage on Apple’s announcements of the Apple Watch and new iPhones.
Statesman Shots
Shots is moving along and we got the Mayor! Very exciting time as we’re kind of ramping up what we’re doing and have gotten comfortable enough with the production side and being on mic that we’re able to think a little more long term and have even more fun with the show.
Episode 31 with Jason Neulander on The Intergalactic Nemesis — Jason and I had crossed paths a couple of times before and I have friends who’ve been cast members in “Nemesis.” We had a really great conversation for a story I did and as we were talking it clicked that he would make a great guest on Shots. So we booked him. And he brought sound effects. And they were awesome!
Video: Foley artistry with Jason Neulander (choo choo!)
Audio:
Episode 32 with Mayor Lee Leffingwell on Austin’s many changes — I still kind of can’t believe this happened, but we had been saying a while how great it would be to have the Mayor come on and as we were ramping up, it just didn’t seem realistic, but then it suddenly did and all it really took was a call from me to the Mayor’s office, a few emails back and forth to let his very nice press person Reyne know what the show was about and what the topics would be and we were scheduled! The Mayor turned out to be really, really game for what we were doing, relaxed and poised, and just way more fun than we could have expected. I like to think we were probably a welcome break from the more serious stuff he has to deal with from day to day.
Oh yeah, about that last one. I went wakeboarding at the Texas Ski Ranch for the first time. That’s a fun story I’ll have to tell you soon that involves lots of water splashed in my face.
I started writing this (or thought about writing this) close to the 4th of July. I was feeling really patriotic.
We had just gotten back from New York City, staying at a hotel that was right next to the World Trade Center site. And when I say right next to it, I mean that when I looked out the window, there was the Freedom Tower, doing the towering thing in front of us and the still-under-construction stuff 25 floors below us. But we could also see, from our quite nice hotel room, one of the memorial pools.
We chose to be there. We usually stay within walking distance of Times Square or at least close enough to be within shouting distance of Broadway and 54th, but this time we knew we were going to the 9/11 Museum and it was much cheaper to stay in that area. Right in that area. Right up on it.
I’d be lying if I said the Museum was the highlight of our trip. It was gut-wrenching, unforgettable, an experience we felt we had to experience as out-of-towners after having visited NYC previously while it was in progress. In-towners? The friends I spoke to have not gone nor do they intend to anytime soon, and I completely understand. They’re not keen to relive something so horrible as a leisure activity or even as education.
In 1995, I covered the Oklahoma City bombing. I moved away in 1997 and though I’ve visited Oklahoma a few times since then, I’ve never gone to the Bombing Memorial downtown. I will someday, probably, but it has never been an experience I felt I needed to revisit in that way. Maybe it’s fear or avoidance.
There’s more to say about NYC, as there always is, because I love being there so much and so does my wife. It was completely impractical to go for just a weekend, but we did it anyway because we really, really, felt we had to go, especially after we scored tickets to a dream show we both really wanted to see.
But I’ll skip ahead to after we got back the next weekend, 4th of July.
We didn’t have any grand plans in New Braunfels. We didn’t really go anywhere or do anything super-special.
I thought about buying fireworks for the kids, just sparklers and snakes and little tanks, the useless stuff that even a 4-year-old as mischievous as Carolina can’t turn into trouble, but even when we get lots of rain, the fireworks are super-illegal where we live. Not just to fire them, but to even possess them. Don’t ask me, I don’t know. All of our neighbors seem to have no problem breaking that law if the noise and shower of sparks in the sky that weekend were any indication.
But anyway… our kids go to bed so early that we’ve never kept them up late enough to see the fireworks in town. The first fireworks they saw in person was at Disney World, with the blasts right on top of them, terrifying and thrilling them. They thought, first off, that fireworks are supposed to be loud, like cannons right above. Then they saw fireworks at the beach last year and realized that there was a different way to experience them.
This year, we went down to Landa Park, or near it, to see the fireworks. Bedtime be damned. We went to the parking lot at the Knights of Columbus and instead of getting out of our car and walking to the park, like people do, we stayed at the car and watched from there.
The sky was dark and thundery and it kept drizzling, threatening to turn into a downpour, so we wanted to stay nearby. I made an incredibly clumsy Prius 180 turn in front of a bunch of people who were probably hoping I would hit a lightpole so we could face the fireworks and sit in the hatchback trunk.
A little girl from the car next to us made friends with Lilly and Carolina and shared cookies and cupcakes she had made while we waited. A local radio station started playing the simulcast with the fireworks, which went on for almost a full 3o minutes, long enough for me to start wondering where all this small-town money was coming from for this gigantic display of burnt powders. The simulcast was both awful and stirring in almost equal measures. They played all the cheesy country songs about driving a truck in America, and some I hadn’t heard before, but that sense of ‘Murica started hitting me about halfway through and instead of thinking uncharitable thoughts about the spectacle, I just went with it and watched the faces of my kids as they went from awed to restless to a little bit awed again to tired to wanting more snacks (always with the more snacks) and finally, a little tired and punchy as an hour past their bedtime we finally headed home.
Not long after the New York trip and 4th of July, we took a road trip to Houston, a test to see if the kids have gotten better about not being complete psychopathic killjoys in the car and it turns out they’ve matured! We did the Houston Zoo, saw some butterflies at the Natural History Museum’s very cool aviary thing, ate at some great places and enjoyed this other city that’s been there this whole time but that we just hadn’t gotten to. It’s been a really good summer.
The kids took a two-week swimming lessons course at the public pool and it’s been fun watching their divergent personalities (daredevil, reluctant swimmer) converge into water confidence.
Just as the swim lessons were starting, we saw Boyhood, which manages in a little under three hours to articulate years of intangible fears and ideas and thoughts I’ve been having about aging and my kids growing up and how things change but not really much at all in the day-to-day. Linda Holmes gets it in this lovely essay and we had fun talking with Joe Gross, who’s written lots of insightful stuff about the movie, on the “Shots” podcast (more on that below).
I can’t tell you to rush out and go see it because it’s exactly the kind of movie that could wither and die under the hype it’s already getting and it’s not even into Oscar season yet when people watching it on their TVs will wonder what the big deal was about this scruffy, leisurely-paced movie where hardly anything happens. (But everything happens, in between the scenes.)
The best I can say if that if you’re open to it and it hits you the right way, at the right moment, it’s a freight train of emotion and ideas that I’m still unpacking more than a week after seeing it. It seems miraculous that a movie like it even exists.
Other things that have happened: Lilly turned 7 and is starting second grade. We went to the beach and had a lovely long weekend. We took a trip to Houston to visit my sister-in-law and did the touristy thing. Both long road trips were not quite the ordeal they used to be when the girls were younger.
And as for the regimen I mentioned last time, I’m still converting fat to muscle and getting used to doing longer and longer runs. I haven’t really dropped much weight at all, I still am about the same in terms of poundage, but my body looks and feels a little different and my endurance has improved dramatically. I don’t know if ever was in shape to run more than five or 10 minutes at a time without stopping or getting winded and now I actually look forward to it. So that’s working out well and has been worth the expense and time.
This hasn’t been a bad summer for me, but it feels like it’s been a bad summer for the world in general with the people we’ve lost, the crazy, angry wars and aggressions happening. My family is good and I’m very lucky, but you just feel it in the air, this taste of sadness and anger and loss. It’s very hard to keep your head up and soldier through if you have much sensitivity at all. You put your head down and push forward if you can and count yourself lucky that you have so much to be grateful for.
“Shots”
“Statesman Shots,” the weekly podcast and video show I do at the Statesman with Tolly Moseley, continues to roll along and survived a period when Tolly was away having a baby. She returned much earlier than expected, which was fantastic for the show because I was completely running out of ideas without her and my desperation each week was starting to grow. Here’s the recent episodes:
Episode 22 with Funniest Person In Austin Cody Hustak — Dale Roe returned to the podcast, this time as a guest co-host and brought along comedian Cody Hustak, who had just won the Funniest Person in Austin contest. We had fun taking Casey Kasem trivia (the radio countdown host had just died), we talked about outrage on the Internet, specifically Twitter, and Tolly sent us her first baby dispatch from home.
Episode 23 with Riders Against the Storm on building community — Our Statesman music writer Deborah Sengupta Stith was another return guest who filled in the co-host chair with Tolly gone. She told me about this married couple who do music and call themselves Riders Against the Storm. We communicated a little bit over email, but even as they were walking in to do the podcast, I was freaking out a little bit, feeling unprepared and overwhelmed. It was the first time we’d had musicians on the show and it’s not an area I’m as versed in as, say, TV, or comedy or technology. But once the podcast got going, I fell so hard in love with them that I went against all journalistic protocol and I think I actually said, “I love you!” toward the end of the hour. It really was a very special episode, one of my favorites that we’ve done because it was funny and honest, positive and warm-hearted.
Episode 24 with Tony Atkins on being new in town — As I explain in the podcast, Tony sits right next to me at work and he is really kind and curious and has a great sense of humor, which is always good to see in a young journalist. If he believes I am a crusty old man, he hides it well and we had a lot of fun with him on the podcast exploring what it’s like to be a new Austinite. Tony was originally scheduled to be a guest co-host but we were thrilled for Tolly to return to the show much earlier than expected. A segment we did on the “10 Things You Must Do Before You Can Call Yourself An Austinite” went sorta-viral, or at least generated more chatter than usual. It even appeared to completely by coincidence in a random and strange universe not at all influence this piece that Zagat ran a few weeks later from a local freelancer. Hmmm.
Episode 25 with Arianna Auber on Austin’s drinking scene — We finally got the Statesman’s cocktails writer to come on and school us on what we should be drinking. This topic seemed a little ill-timed when Tolly was very, very pregnant, but six weeks after birth, it was totally cool. (One of my favorite moments in all of “Shots” history is Tolly telling me to shut up with my judgey parental looks. I laughed so hard it almost derailed the episode.)
Episode 26 with Jackie Huba on Austin drag culture — One of the things we envisioned about the podcast from the jump was having on experts every week who could talk about specific areas such as food, film, music and what have you. We knew this also meant having on experts who would talk to us about subjects we know very little about and drag culture is certainly one of my lifestyle/entertainment blind spots. I have not really watched Rupaul’s Drag Race, but given how fun it sounds, I should probably start. Jackie does drag, and as a straight woman doing drag, she is not what most people would expect, but what she is is a great writer, a person filled with curiosity and a great speaker. We were lucky to have her on.
Episode 27 with Joe Gross on Boyhood and “Weird Al” — There’s a really good reason we’ve had Joe on the show three times (plus one guest-host stint while Tolly was gone): he’s super smart, funny and knows a lot about all the things we like to talk about, whether it’s pop culture, parenting, Austin weirdness or whatever. Joe is always up for any discussion, he’s sounds ridiculously good on mic and he told us early on after appearing on our pilot episode that he’d be available whenever we needed him. And he has been. He was also was the perfect person to talk about the film Boyhood after writing a review and several smart articles about the movie. You could probably call this a prototypical episode of “Shots”; it gives you a very good idea of exactly what we are trying to do with the show.
Episode 28 with Austin Kleon on creativity and stealing like an artist — Tolly has known Austin for a long time and I had interviewed him for a piece in advance of this year’s SXSW Interactive and found him to be a really warm, chatty, super-thoughtful guy. His books on creativity, Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work are must-reads if you’re a person who makes stuff for a living (or if you’re trying to get there). On the show, I loved the weirdness of the cat/dog book segment, “What IS this?” which I’m sure will return with other wacky topics. That we got actual knowledge out of that segment was a very awesome surprise.
Episode 29 with Dan Solomon on Austin’s freelance economy — I didn’t know Dan before this episode; he’s a friend of Tolly’s and I’d only run into him once or twice before at shows. But I’d read a lot of his stuff in the Austin Chronicle, New York Times and other places and Tolly said he’s a friendly, smart guy. And that he was! He was super game for whatever we wanted to talk about and extra-friendly to boot. He’s also very funny and open, two traits we love in our guests. I enjoyed the detour (which you can see in the video) into more talk than was necessary of urine and urine-related problems.
Episode 30 with Addie Broyles on new food delivery options in Austin — Addie’s always a great guest, this is I believe her fourth time on Shots, and we wanted to talk about the big story on food delivery in Austin that she and I worked on together (more on that below in the Statesman section). Really good episode with discussions about the situation in Ferguson, Missouri, reality TV and movie adaptations of books we love.
Oh boy have I been busy at work, but that’s really nothing new. I think I’ve gotten a little better about balancing the “Statesman Shots” stuff with everything else, but sometimes it becomes a little bit overwhelming and that weekly column is never far from deadline.
Here’s some of what I’ve been writing about since the last blog post.
Digital Savant columns:
Photo by Mauricio Valentino for the Austin American-Statesman
This was supposed to be a short grab-bag column but instead I ended up covering the explosion of hackathons, giving a wearables update (I ditched my FitBit Force) and explained why early adopter console owners will be waiting till next year for big games.
It took a lot of work and time, but I’m thrilled with how it turned out. The print version, which ran in the Sunday paper, took up three pages and had lots and lots of information. It was a beast, but I’m glad we did it. We ended up using it as fodder for “Statesman Shots” as well.
I wrote a fun story about Gov. Rick Perry’s mug shot and how he should approach it. It involved me talking to some image consultants who are, no joke, the nicest people I have ever spoken to. Or maybe they just are so good at projecting their images that they fooled me. Either way, this was enjoyable.
And a piece that may be useful for next year if you’re planing to submit a SXSW panel: tips for the doing that, spun off from a Shots discussion.
So that should give you enough reading material for the rest of the summer and fall.
Previously.TV
Vampires, y’all!
Since The Walking Dead ended I was taking a long break from writing TV stuff, but I was intrigued by the show Halt and Catch Fire (that intrigue didn’t last). I ended up writing a piece for Previously suggesting they turn it into a Half-Life series, a suggestion I STILL STAND BY BECAUSE WTF HAPPENED!? Halt was just renewed for a second season and I sure hope it’s less dopey and Joe-focused than the first half-crappy season. (Half was great, but seriously, it really sputtered for a while.) Go check out that link because Glark did an awesome illustration to go with it.
But the real gig I’ve had with Previously this summer is covering The Strain, the Guillermo del Toro vampire show that I am actually liking a lot more than I was expecting. It’s kinda dopey at times, but they get the visuals right and the vampires are legit scary. (Though I’m getting a little tired of the long throat hose attack. Would be scarier if it came out of their butts.)
Here’s the pieces I’ve written:
Photo by Michael Gibson / FX
A “New Show Fact Sheet” telling you what you need to know before you start watching.
I’m covering the whole season, so just visit Previously every Sunday night (my articles usually appear right after the show airs) and also check out Jeff Drake’s very funny Fart Faces of Strain features as well.
Space Monkeys!
We announced a hiatus in May and it’s taking longer than we expected to get back on track for a return. So… new comics soon, I hope?
Sorry, not much else to report on this front right now.
Other stuff
This has gone on way too long, so I’ll just tell the rest with some photos I like of the last few months.
