An essay for Utne Reader about what independent publishers can learn about Apple’s iBooks store from the experiences of App Store developers and independent music labels:
…as I navigate the iBooks store and learn about the submission process, I’m concerned that independent publishers will suffer many of the same issues that App Store developers have faced. 150,000 iPhone applications have been released in the App Store since 2008. And for some of those developers, the App Store has been a goldmine: there are many apocryphal stories about coders toiling in their basements in off hours, building their own successful app business. But for every success story, there are countless developers whose work is buried deep in the App Store, never to surface. After a few days with iBooks , which borrows much from the App Store in organization and interface, I have to wonder: will this new platform empower independent and self-publishers, or will they similarly be hidden in the dark recesses of an online store?
I bought an ipad this weekend, and I adore it. This usually-reflexive-cynic is blown away. It makes reading digitally–be the source the Internet, an eBook, or Instapaper–a totally tactile, pleasant, satisfying reading experience. Unlike reading on a browser at a desktop, which I’ve always found vaguely dissatisfying and frustrating.
Totally pumped, I began work on an ebook anthology of work from Is Greater Than. This is a preview of the first Is Greater Than Digital Omnibus, an eBook designed for the iPad and other ePub-compatible eReaders. This is a very rough draft of what I hope to have submitted to the iBooks store and other eBook outlets by the end of the week. It will include features, art, comics, creative nonfiction, humor writing and fiction by myself, Brigid J. Barry, Jeff Severns Guntzel, Deb R. Lewis, Thomas Mundt, Carrie Sieh, Megan Stielstra and more.
I didn’t know a single thing about authoring epub ebooks before this weekend; it is ridiculously simple. Here’s a post I just wrote for Shareable.net about how you can make your own epub books (which, for the record Cory Doctorow et al, are as easy to drag and drop into iTunes and sync with the iPad, DRM-free, as mp3′s have been with every iteration of the iPod and iPhone since version one.) Read it here.
Just got back from a group workshop meeting for 2nd Story. If you’re not familiar, 2nd Story is a theater collective I’ve been working with that produces readings at wine bars around Chicago. The process is what sets it apart from other reading series: 2nd Story pull actors and directors from the theater world to workshop pieces of short narrative nonfiction with writers, to craft the stories and their performances into something that people at a wine bar will actually want to engage with while imbibing.
It’s challenging for me: frustrating, rewarding. All of my prior performance experience comes from playing in bands, where the only verbal interaction with the audience was short quips in-between songs. While performing the songs, the guitar served as a crutch separating myself from the audience, and I was performing practiced, relatively polished songs with a group of other people. We were delivering loud, complete products with clearly delineated beginnings and ends, barreling over chatter and indifference with unnecessarily loud amps.
A new short story, an extended riff, an excuse to use the term “brain stew”, for Cellstories: A People’s History of the Zombie Apocalypse. I’ll be reading this story on Tuesday, April 6th at Quimby’s Books in Chicago at 7pm for the Joyland vs. Cellstories event. A preview:
The zombie apocalypse began on a frigid February morning in Chicago when Mildred Cavanagh, age 82, slipped and fell while attempting to step around bum’s puke that crystallized on the sidewalk. When Cavanagh came to a few moments later, she raised herself from the ground, gathered the groceries that had fallen out of her cart, and faintly murmured the word “brains”. Cavanagh was shot six hours later by Officer Mike Kowalski as she attempted to suck her son-in-law’s brain through a straw she’d bored in his skull.
The apocalypse took decades longer than it does in the movies: three weeks after Cavanagh’s fall, only 23% of Chicago’s population had joined the undead. The zombies continued with their day-to-day tasks, harvesting brains under the cover of night. Undead teachers went to school, CTA employees continued to drive their buses, and city workers drank coffee on the side of blocked streets during rush hour. In the early days, it was difficult to tell who was or was not a zombie: there were polite zombies, asshole zombies, plumber zombies and day-trading zombies, Jew zombies and goy zombies, gruff meatpacking zombies on the South Side and college-student zombies who brained their roommates with bongs.
Read the rest (on your mobile device) at Cellstories.
UPDATE 4/30/10: This story is also now up on Is Greater Than. Read it here.
An essay I wrote for Shareable.net about Goodreads and social networking for bookworms:
You can’t go a day without someone declaring that the book is dead, whether at the hand of the Kindle, the iPad, or social media. And while those technologies are certainly vying for attention with the printed book, a lot of social media users still read them–and are even using social media to complement their reading.
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.
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."
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. Click here to read 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.
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.
A new short story, an extended riff, an excuse to use the term “brain stew”, for Cellstories: 
An interview with Balkan-fusion septet Beyond the Pale for the Santa Cruz Weekly:
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 
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 
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