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August 19, 2006
Shorties
Today's Wall Street Journal (registration required) examines authors creating soundtracks for their books. Largehearted Boy's Book Notes is featured in the article, as are a couple of quotes from me.
The Raleigh News & Observer profiles Reverbnation, a startup that aims to increase indie bands' online presence.
"It's not just sales anymore -- it's eyeballs," said Jed Carlson, Reverbnation's chief marketing officer. "It's how many hits is your MySpace page getting. That's insight [for the music industry] into who should we call, who should we sign, who should we produce."
The New York Times examines the importance of artists' colonies for writers.
“For me there’s no substitute,” the novelist Michael Chabon said in a phone interview, as one of his four young children screamed in the background. Chabon and his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, take turns going to the MacDowell colony for two-week stretches each year. “The work just becomes the center of your entire existence,” Chabon said. “You can’t be a good parent and have your work be the center of your entire existence. They’re mutually exclusive.”
AlterNet uses Berkeley's Cody's as an example of why independent booksellers are having troubles competing against internet and chain bookstores.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette covers the open casting call for the film adaptation of Michael Chabon's debut novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.
Throughout the day, dozens and dozens of girls and women eager to be in the movie's punk club scene waited in cutoff jeans over fishnet tights under scrunch socks and Converse All-Stars, or leg warmers and scrunch socks and heels, layers of little tops, long gloves with the fingers cut out, plastic bracelets, blue eye shadow, sinister eye liner and teased and towering hair.
Mae frontman Dave Elkins talks to the Grand Rapids Press.
"I feel music hits all of the dimensions of a person. I don't think there's another medium that does it quite like that," he said. "We just write about life. Life is complex and ... we like to break down our subject matter and let each song tell its story, and part of that is very spiritual."
Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan talks to the Daily Scotsman.
"If I ever say to somebody that I don't like the word 'indie', they tell me it's a compliment. I'm sure to certain people it is, but to me we're just musicians. Narrowing it down any more than that doesn't really interest me. I'm very happy to be considered independent with a small 'i', but I don't want to be indie with a capital 'I'."
The University of Idaho's Argonaut Online lists three "graphic novels worth your time."
JamBase reviews Lollapalooza.
The Guardian examines authors caught in the crossfire in Lebanon.
Brian Whitaker, a Guardian journalist and author of Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East, is only one of the Saqi authors now in Lebanon - others include Jean Said Makdisi, whose Teta, Mother and Me is a family memoir starting in Ottoman Syria in the 1880s and concluding with the civil war in Lebanon, and Alexandre Najjar, whose recently published The School of War powerfully recalls growing up in war-ravaged Beirut. Najjar had only recently returned to Beirut after seven years of voluntary exile.
The Book Standard lists the #1 selling comics and graphic novels for every week of 2005 & 2006.
