I wrote the cover story for the Spring 2010 issue of Columbia College’s DEMO Magazine. The feature documents two Columbia professors who are using video games to approach social issues, in very different ways. Professor David Gerden’s CONSTRUCT project attempts to bridge bleeding-edge video game research and behavioral science, while Mindy Faber’s Open Youth Projects utilizes gaming as a tool for community outreach:

“This is like the quarter-million-dollar table,” says Columbia professor David Gerding, sitting in front of a modest conference table outfitted with six laptops that are connected to optical sensors. As Gerding speaks, an avatar of his face appears on the laptop screen before him. A click of a button, and beams of light appear to radiate from the eyes of his digital self. “It’s detecting the iris. Can you see the laser beams coming out of my eyes? It’s like Blade Runner!”

In a modest conference room in Columbia College’s Department of Interactive Arts and Media (IAM), we’ve stepped into what could pass as a set from the ’80s sci-fi classic. It’s a futuristic space where individuals interact on screen as small sensors track their eye movements, pupil dilation, and even facial expressions, all in the service of teaching machines to understand how people communicate and collaborate with one another.

Read the entire article at the DEMO site.

Photo by Drew Reynolds

In 2003, I lived in a small California mountain town, where I had moved for love and clarity. I worked at a bowling alley while living there, with coworkers very different than the college students, hippies and hipsters of my hometown of Santa Cruz. One weekend, my girlfriend left to visit family in L.A. Stir-crazy and alone, I got drunk and stoned at the bowling alley, and then found myself lost in the woods.

I wrote this story for the 2nd Story reading series, and performed it at Webster’s Wine Bar last October.

This is the second in my series of short story podcasts. You can subscribe at iTunes or download directly below.

 

 Rim Of The World [12:35m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

An interview with Balkan-fusion septet Beyond the Pale for the Santa Cruz Weekly:

Eric Stein, bandleader and mandolin player for Toronto Balkan-fusion band Beyond the Pale, didn’t grow up on the music of his Eastern European ancestors. He was weaned on rock & roll and folk. As his tastes matured, he developed into a bluegrass aficionado. But after a couple of years performing in the bluegrass style, Stein started feeling conflicted.

"I found with bluegrass there was something about it that didn’t feel quite honest playing it," Stein says. "I could do tons of practicing, I could get the technique required to play that music, but being a Jewish kid from Toronto, bluegrass wasn’t within my realm of experience or my own historical and cultural context to work within."

Read the full article at santacruz.com

From ‘99-’06, I was an active participant in my hometown of Santa Cruz’s music scene, and I have a ton of affection for it. In this retrospective for the Santa Cruz Weekly, I took a crack at documenting it. If you’d like to hear some of the music of Santa Cruz in the ’00s, you can download the compilations that I released while living there–Tastes Like Burning, Someday Coming Down, and Someday Coming Round. Otherwise, this should serve as a decent introduction.

PUTTING a retrospective of the Santa Cruz music scene into print is probably asking for trouble. After accepting this assignment, I posted a one-line status update to Facebook: “writing a roundup of Santa Cruz’s most significant bands of the decade. Suggestions?” It didn’t take long for the responses to start coming in. “There have been significant Santa Cruz bands since Camper Van Beethoven?” wrote one local, illustrating the foolhardiness of trying to present a single overview of a decade of Santa Cruz music. For every resident who thinks the local music scene ended in the early ’80s when CVB signed to a major and left town, there’s a grubby teenager in a Soquel garage blasting through two-minute punk songs who has never heard of David Lowery. (more…)

Oh man, so much going on the past couple of months that I haven’t had time to update the personal site. I read my first finished story for 2nd Story last month, an awful tale of getting lost in the woods and running into a redneck with dubious intentions while living, briefly, in the small mountain town of Crestline, CA. Once I get around to recording the story, I’ll be adding it to the too-long-dormant podcast. I’m working on a second and third story for 2nd Story currently, with more readings to come in the months ahead.

In addition, I spent much of November working on a couple of giant articles, one for Columbia College’s DEMO Magazine (not yet published,) as well as a decade-long retrospective of my hometown’s music scene for the Santa Cruz Weekly. There’s a piece I wrote for community-minded tech site Shareable.net that is in their hopper–not sure when it’s going to run, but I’ll post a link when it does. I also attempted, and failed, at NaNoWriMo, stalling out at 12,000 words.

In other big news, Is Greater Than is re-launching on December 30th. It went on an unannounced hiatus around the middle of the year, due to a sense that I needed to re-focus the site and find a way to re-engage with it. With the help of fellow editor Brigid J. Barry, I’ve figured out those issues, and I’m really excited to get it up and running once again. It’ll have an increased literary and cultural focus: one of my realizations of the past year has been that I just don’t have the stomach to run a politically-focused publication, and that if I wanted to continue working on the site, I needed to focus on topics that gave me a sense of personal satisfaction in addition to the ulcers. There’s a ton of great political work in the archives from many great contributors, and I’ll always be grateful to them. It’s not what the new incarnation will be, though: instead, we’ll be focusing more on cultural criticism, fiction and creative nonfiction. If you’d like to pitch or submit a piece, please take a look at the submissions page for details.

From the Santa Cruz Weekly

Call it the curse of consistency: any band can take a long hiatus before being welcomed back with open arms upon the release of a so-called “comeback” record. On the other hand, you have the unassuming bands that create strong work, album after album. Bands like Yo La Tengo who never get their comeback record because they’ve never gone away. Some start taking these artists for granted. But as Yo La Tengo demonstrates on Popular Songs, that would be a mistake.

Read the article

Dan Sinker’s Cellstories project is finally live, and it’s very cool. He describes it as “a daily dose of awesomeness”, which is pretty spot-on. The premise is simple: a short story, delivered to your fancy phone, on a daily basis. Only cell phones, mind you: by wrestling web content away from the tyranny of distraction of the web browser and its endless distracting tabs, Dan’s inserting a bit of magic back into the experience of reading.

I’m honored that my story “Life on Mars” is second up to bat during Cellstories’ launch week: it’ll be visible from your iPhone/iTouch/gPhone/iClone today (Wednesday, September 2nd) and again this weekend. Head over to Cellstories on your phone to read it. If you’re without a fancy phone with a decent web browser, you can listen to me reading the story on this podcast.

The service has been getting a ton of great press, including from Publisher’s Weekly, the Chicago Reader, Reuters, and the WBEZ Chicago Public Radio blog.

Also very exciting: I’ve been invited to join Serendipity Theatre Collective’s 09-10 season of the 2nd Story storytelling cycle. I’ve long been an admirer of their work, and I can’t wait to collaborate with the prodigiously talented writers and directors already involved in the project.

In other news: I interviewed Nathan Maxwell of Flogging Molly about his new solo project for the newly-launched Verbicide Magazine (which looks great,) and am working on a piece about the challenges facing indie publishers adapting to the web for Utne Reader. In-between those projects, I’m rethinking Is Greater Than and have some exciting ideas to re-launch it, and I’m blogging with a number of IGT peeps over at 12 Pt. Plan.

As always, thanks for reading!

From Vagabondish

Last year, I accomplished something unlikely, if not quite impossible: during a six-month road trip around the entire United States, I continued to work my full-time publicity job, and did steady freelancing work on the side. It wasn’t easy, and I can’t say that I accomplished every task to the best of my abilities, but I learned a ton (the hard way) on how to work while taking an extended trip.

Read it here

Appeared in the Santa Cruz Weekly and the North Bay Bohemian.

Illustration by Mott Jordan

To paraphrase Dave Chappelle-as-Rick James, “Internet’s a hell of a drug.” Like James’ drug of choice, the web is addictive and alluring, its benefits debatable.

I speak as someone intimately familiar with an addictive drug: two years ago, I quit smoking. To this day, I find myself smoking in dreams, and occasionally sneak them from friends at the bar. The rest of the time, the Internet serves as a proxy.

Addictive personalities often replace one addiction with another. My new worst friend is the social web, the endless stream of information constantly streaming down Senator Ted Stevens’ infamous “series of tubes.” Here’s a short list of Internet services that I use and check on a daily basis: email, Facebook, Tumblr, Delicious, Evernote, Twitter, Remember the Milk, Google Reader (tracking some 180 RSS feeds), and Yahoo News. I back up longer articles using Instapaper to read on the bus; at the home office, I work with two web browsers open at all times, 10 individual tabs loaded in each, spread over two monitors. While commuting on the train, I’m checking text messages via my Internet-enabled phone and reading archived blog posts on my iPod. At times, it seems like a type of digital schizophrenia, or if nothing else, a hell of a drug. (more…)