APOKALIPSIS

If you want to know just what kinds of strange and terrible things people have been making to promote the 2008 presidential election, I’ve written a new article about that very thing, for Matador Goods.
I scoured the depths of the Internet to find the very weirdest Obama, McCain and Palin paraphernalia on the planet (no one makes weird Joe Biden merch for some reason), which ranged from condoms to comic books. I was surprised to find just how many people have been trying to cash in on the election by making things like Ojamas (that would be Obama pajamas) and Sarah Palin underwear, and I wonder how many of them have managed to actually turn a profit.
Some of the products had decent, professional websites, but some of them were downright dreadful and I’m sure scared any potential customers away. The lesson here seems to be that while you can indeed sell almost anything, it all comes down to the presentation. There is (shockingly) probably a market for Sarah Palin condoms, but not if they look like regular condoms wrapped in a piece of printer paper.
I really enjoyed writing this article, but the published version was trimmed down to the point that it doesn’t really sound like me any more, and I think a lot of the humor I was going for got cut down to the point that the jokes don’t really parse properly. But what do I know? Maybe it’s better than my original version. If nothing else, it has shorter sentences and more paragraph breaks.
Have a read and tell me what you think!

There’s a new article by me up at Travelers Notebook about choosing music for a travel film. My film school experiences really helped out on this one, but I still ended up doing a lot of research into copyright law, which is something that’s constantly changing and a bit difficult to get a real handle on in this age of globalized media. For example, it’s legal to use music recorded for a major record label in a You Tube video, but not necessarily legal to use the compositions and lyrics of some of those songs. Check out the article for a slightly more coherent look at how that works.
Legal wrangling aside, I firmly believe that a movie’s soundtrack is one of the most important and overlooked aspects of film making, and something budding filmmakers often forget. When I interviewed Academy Award-winning sound editor (and Chapman professor) Harry Cheney last year, he told me that sound is vital to a film’s success, even more so than picture quality. “If a film looks bad, the audience might think that it’s just supposed to be grim and gritty,” he told me, “but they won’t accept bad sound. It makes a film seem cheap and cheesy.”
Some of my closest friends in film school were sound editors, and I know that they work as hard as anyone and generally get much less acclaim. As a former boom-mic operator, I know that sometimes it can be a struggle to even get an aspiring director to acknowledge that he’s shooting a film with sound in it. Of course, the good directors know better than to discount the sound production, and even the most casual filmmaker will do well to think just as much about what the audience will hear as what they’ll see.
p.s. the folks at Travelers Notebook did a great job with the layout and photos for this article, and we’d all be happy if you took a moment to Stumble It!

There’s an article by me over at Travelers Notebook about what it takes to fund your travels playing online poker. Please give it a read and tell me what you think!

My editors would also love it if you would take the time to Digg and/or Stumble Upon the article so that more people know about it. And please leave comments!

Thanks, everyone!

Salman Rushdie spoke at my alma mater, Chapman University, last Monday. Of course, it was Tuesday in Australia. I half-way considered keeping my job at Chapman for a few months longer just so I could stick around to see him, because he’s one of my favorite authors. Rushdie is most famous for the fatwa, or death threat, issued against him by the Ayatollah of Iran for alleged blasphemy in his book The Satanic Verses. It’s a fascinating case — a lot of people have died because of that book, but Rushdie still walks.
But I’m not really interested in Salman Rushdie because of the death edict, because I think that says more about the world we live in than it actually does about the author. Rushdie didn’t choose to be in the middle of such a firestorm, and from what I’ve seen, he’s done his best to carry on in spite of it.
To me, Rushdie is interesting not as an international flash point, but as an author. Reading The Satanic Verses in college changed the way I looked at writing and opened my eyes to what a novel can do — but not in a way that had anything to do with the fatwa or Islam. Rushdie an extremely allusive writer, with references to music, politics, history, anything, you name it, it’s there, littering the pages of his writing, even in his “children’s book,” Haroun and the Sea of Stories. It’s part of what makes him difficult to read at times, because often the meaning in his writing has got to be constructed from what the reader knows about whatever is being alluded to. To really dig into Rushdie, I think you have to be willing to play along with the constant references he tosses out, which are like crossword puzzles with clues but no right answers.
But if you don’t dig all that, it’s find, too — Rushdie knows that an author has got to tell a story first and foremost, and like Thomas Pinchon, his writing can be maddeningly complex, but also effusively poppy. The Satanic Verses actually opens with the two main characters plummeting out of an exploding 747 toward the Atlantic Ocean. You can’t buy a better hook than that in Hollywood.
I read a scathing Western review of The Satanic Verses which accused Rushdie of being smart enough to get away with 500 pages that don’t add up to anything because they’re only held together by allusions and magic tricks. I myself am not smart enough to debate that point one way or another, but I will say that Rushdie may use tricks, but to my taste, they’re fun tricks. So that’s what I think about Salman Rushdie.
The Orange County Register ran a typically blase article about his appearance at Chapman. At least it included this bit, which proves that Rushdie writes the way just about every other professional author does:
“Rushdie told [the students that] he goes to his home office daily to write, and sets himself a word quota. Some days are better than others, he said.”
… and that’s pretty much how it goes!

Related link: A conservative Orange County blogger also attended the event and got some quotes from Rushdie. Mostly stuff about the fatwa, which I’ve heard before — I think he probably just repeats the same stories — but there’s some other good stuff as well.

A while back I wrote a series of articles about some of the star film school faculty at the university where I work. This was probably one of the coolest things I’ve gotten to do on my job, since I got to sit and rap one-on-one with some really talented filmmakers. It was almost like going back to film school again, but in the best possible way. I also like to think that the articles turned our pretty good!
One of the people I talked to was David Ward, who wrote a ton of movies including The Sting, Sleepless in Seattle and the rewrites of The Mask of Zorro which actually made that movie good. One thing that he told me was that he told me is that it’s easy to start a story, but it isn’t a full story until you finish it. His point was that even if you don’t like a story you’re working on, you should still try to finish it, because that way you’ll learn something.
I have started a lot of stories, and have notes for dozens of others in my notebooks, but have only completed a handful of them. I have to say that I think Prof. Ward is right, though. Finishing a story is what it all comes down to. That’s where I’m always the most surprised with a story, and it’s the only way you can see the true shape of the thing.
Tonight I finished the longest short story I’ve written. I had to take a day off of work and spend the whole day writing in order to get it done, and it’s about twice as long as I expected it to be, but it is finished.
I’ll probably post the whole thing in a few parts later on. Dunno if it’s any damn good, but I’m glad to have brought it to a conclusion. Now hopefully I can move onto something better.

I gave up reading about the comic book industry for Lent, which sounds really lame, but it was taking up at least an hour of my day, every day, and for the most part completely unnecessay. I wasn’t surprised to find that I hadn’t missed much when I checked back after Easter. The only really worthwhile bit I found was in this interview with comic book scribe Brian K. Vaughan. He mostly talks about the books he’s writing and movie deals, typical blah blah blah stuff, but I really appreciated this insight into the writing process:

Q: How do you maintain that productivity? What’s your secret?

Vaughan: I guess the secret is that it’s not very hard. It’s not working in the coal mines; I’ve had other jobs that are horrendous. Jobs are hard. Even if you’re going into an office and answering phones, jobs are unpleasant. But I work at home. I roll out of bed in my boxers – sorry to put that image in your head – and I sit down and write about people punching each other and kissing each other. It is a joy.
When you have to write 22 pages a week it’s not a lot. I’m lucky enough to have ideas; I’ve never had writer’s block before. I’ve always had something I’ve wanted to say.

Q: Do you believe in writer’s block? I know some writers who have never been blocked who just don’t believe it’s a real thing.

Vaughan: It sounds sort of… I imagine that if I had had writer’s block before I would feel that any writer who says that it’s a fiction is a douche. I’m reluctant to be like, ‘No, it doesn’t exist.’ But I’m lucky enough that I never had it before. The closest thing I’ve had to approximating writer’s block is X-Box, in that is fun and it is sitting there and it is easy to do and writing is hard and complicated and lonely. I think writer’s block is a way of being, ‘Why isn’t writing fun right now?’ But I’ve been doing it long enough that I don’t think writing is ever fun, it’s a drag. It’s not hard, but it’s not fun either. Finishing something and being done with is fun, and it’s thrilling, and it’s worth fighting for.

….

I guess I just thought it was nice to see someone admit that while writing can be the greatest job in the world, that doesn’t mean it’s fun all the time or not hard. Like anything worthwhile, it takes dedication and sacrifice, but I sometimes get discouraged because I have a very flighty muse and my interest in a project often doesn’t last long after the initial burst of inspiration. It may be strange, but I’m glad to be reminded that writing isn’t always fun!

So I am trying to write a lot of stuff. Oh, I did sort of just say that. Stupid title. Anyway, writing can be hard! But it seems like it should be easy. I will let you know more about stuff I write as I write it, but for now I just signed up for National Novel Writing Month, which I’ve wanted to do for years.
Now that I’m not in college and writing a screenplay, I have time to do it. I’m getting started a little late, but hopefully I can still make the deadline of writing a 50,000 word novel by the end of the month. I don’t quite have 1k words done yet, but at one point I thought it was 500,000 words, so I’m feeling a little relieved right now!
You can monitor my progress here:

And if you want to join me in writing a novel, there’s totally still time! hoorah!