Bad Advice Wednesday: Walk a Mile in their Shoes
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Ooh, those people and groups and activities and works of art and parts of the country and professions and foods and music and movies we hate. Musicals! Someone said to me recently, just the one word, meaning how awful. But I like musicals. Always have. And here’s an acquaintance assuming I agree with her–because who in their right mind wouldn’t? These days I’m always ready to answer with the truth, and did, trying to sound affronted: “I like musicals.” I like lots of stuff that you don’t like. That doesn’t make me crazy. Anyway, bad advice for writers this week is to like something you hate. Danny Kaye movies? Sushi? HipHop? Camping? Cats? Continue reading →
What is Perfect? This Short Film by a Couple of Awesome Teens, That’s What!
categories: Cocktail Hour / Movies / Sunday Sermon
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My daughter and her friend Maeve made this short film for their summer English project when they were both fourteen. At last their classes have seen it, they’re fifteen, and I can finally share! Maeve wrote the music and sings it with a little help from Elysia, who choreographed the dance. Together they wrote, directed, edited, and absolutely everything else. Assignment was to address a social problem. Please feel free to share it around! Continue reading →
Great Minds, Little Minds
categories: Cocktail Hour
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One of the deepest pleasures of reading literature is being in the presence of great minds. Please note that I didn’t say socially-responsible minds or consistent minds or minds that are exactly in step with how we are told we should think in the year 2015. I said great.
Conversely, one of the frustrations of the present is what you might call the tyranny of the small and rigid-minded. To be honest I’m not a big reader of magazine articles, though I sometimes write them, and I especially avoid pieces where I know I’ll end up feeling like I’ve been dragged down into the muck. “Largeness is a lifelong matter,” said Wallace Stegner. For some people so is smallness.
All this to say that I tried to avoid the recent New Yorker piece on Henry David Thoreau, despite the fact that more than a few people pushed it on me. With a title that seemed more suited for reality TV than a New Yorker piece–“Pond Scum”–you pretty much knew what you were going to get before reading it: a straight take-down piece that was meant to get hits and attention (look–it worked!).
The piece is consistently unpleasant, dragging out the boring old Thoreau laundry crap that we thought Rebecca Solnit had finally swept away years ago, but it is also, in its own strange way, kind of funny. Funny in that its author seems to be completely unaware that she embodies exactly what she criticizes in Thoreau. This is a writer (Schulz not Thoreau) who seems to love broad statements about what humans are and what they should be, who speaks with an apparently never-wavering sense of certainty, and who is always insisting on consistency in the way of the Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Vasilios Asimakos
Bad Advice Wednesday: Make Your Own Work
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour / Movies
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Vasilios, cast and crew, Sixty Grades of Cray
Last November, I directed a movie from a script I had written.
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Guest contributor: Bill Lundgren
Lundgren’s Lounge: “The Narrow Road,” by Richard Flanagan
categories: Cocktail Hour / Guest Columns / Reading Under the Influence
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I have been a fan of Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan ever since reading Gould’s Book of Fish (Stuart Gersen’s all-time favorite novel). Flanagan’s work might at first seem preoccupied with man’s abject cruelty to his fellows, as many of the stories take place in wretched prison settings. But if one looks more closely, there is a discernible thread weaving itself through through each narrative, examining the nature and limitations of human love and man’s capacity to endure the most dire circumstances.
Bad Advice Wednesday: Celebrate! (Or How I Won the U.S. Open)
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I’ve always been jealous of the way tennis players act when they win tournaments. The way they hurl their racquets in the air, drop to their knees, lift their arms to sky, lie on their backs. The way they exult in a manner that you rarely see in other professions.
Writing, for instance.
It’s been my experience that almost every writing triumph, no matter how large or small, comes with some qualification. Trained to deal with rejection, we are wary of jubilation. We know that after the rise will come the fall. We temper triumphs with the word “But” followed by some discounting phrases. Our inner Bill Belichicks squash whatever celebration we hoped for.
But this August, watching the U.S. Open and witnessing players in the throes of joyous celebration, I decided I wanted some of it. I vowed that the next time something good happened I wouldn’t immediately reach for my qualifiers but would do a little reveling instead.
Save the Shack!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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We all have a place where our writing comes from and we should do all we can to protect that place. Alas, I left home at 5 am yesterday without even putting up the plywood window protector on the windows of my writing shack. It was muggy in North Carolina but the first I heard about a hurricane was when I landed in Montana (71 and dry). Now, if I understand it correctly, Joaquin Phoenix is taking aim at the shack. Here are some pictures from earlier this week BEFORE a new storm was thrown into the mix. With the rains and super moon there was already 2 feet of water inside. Not sure if it will be there when I get back Monday….
Guest contributor: Thierry Kauffmann
Anxious Bode Tries Out at the Comedy Cellar
categories: Cocktail Hour / Guest Columns
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Thierry Kauffmann, aka Anxious Bode
Hi, I’m Anxious. I want to thank Bill and Dave’s Comedy Grotto for inviting me to try out for the Comedy hour. But let’s get right to it! I love flying. I do. Getting on the plane can be tricky with Parkinson’s, but once I’m seated, I’m good. Now I’m supposed to make jokes about airplanes and flying and how horrible the food is. Actually the food is pretty good, especially the stuff that doesn’t land on the floor. Have you ever seen the floor of an airplane? Amazing what you find. I was looking for my dessert. Still wrapped in its aluminum foil. I started leaning back at around 4:45pm. At 5pm I was so low I could actually reach the dessert. My neighbor was down too. He had lost his smartphone. So we were both down. He looked panicked. In a cheerful way. He was an actor. Expecting calls. I thought I would help him. Continue reading →
