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. Click here to read more »

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I’m often amused, tickled, etc about things I come across while walking around Chicago, IL. This is a collection of pics I’ve too-long kept hidden on the private Facebook.

My wife Daria is a brilliant and multitalented theater-type directing her first full-length play this fall, the world premiere of Martyna Majok’s “Mouse in a Jar” at Red Tape Theatre in Chicago. She and the playwright are blogging about the production process; take a look at www.mouseinajar.com.

From the AV Club Chicago

At turns lyrical and fierce, the work of hip-hop poet Kevin Coval is intrinsically a product of Chicago. Coval’s latest collection of poetry, Everyday People, is a paean to the city where he earned his chops, attending basement hip-hop shows as a teen and honing his skills under the tutelage of hometown heavyweights like Reggie Gibson and Dan Ferry. Click here to read more »

This is insane: the album is dead, long live the app. Who exactly wants to interface with their music collection via app? The app browsing/selection process is easily the clunkiest, most frustrating element of the iPhone/iTouch/iTunes interface, and I’d be surprised to see a majority of people interacting with their music selection via sandboxed apps as opposed to the traditional mp3 player interface.

This could work in a few cases—tween-pop stars such as Miley Cyrus that command singular devotion from their fans—but not for mature music listeners with a large collection of artists in their library. What the new band app craze reminds me of more than anything is the failed enhanced CD initiatives of yore, in which labels were going to add value to physical CD’s by forcing anyone who played music on their computers to interface with it inside of a clunky, frustrating Flash or Quicktime file that offered the exact same content you’d find on the artist’s website. Click here to read more »

I’m going to be reading a (lamentably true) short story about my stint living in Crestline, CA and a late-night run-in with a redneck of dubious intentions for the upcoming season of 2nd Story. I’m a big fan of what they do (see this article I wrote for Gapers Block a few years back) and am honored to work with them. For a very partial preview of the story, check out this song by my friends in the Devil Makes Three which alludes to said redneck run-in.

New feature for the Santa Cruz Weekly on the Handsome Family:

MANY ARTISTS have explored the dark recesses of the American id, but few have wrung such effortless beauty from it as the Handsome Family. Since 1995, the married duo of Brett and Rennie Sparks has found gold in the strange, the mundane and the macabre. Specializing in folk, bluegrass and country delivered at a stately pace, the band has become known for songs examining the existential cruelty of the natural world and the sorrows of an ill-spent life, and bone-chilling murder ballads. But on the occasion of their 20th wedding anniversary, the two have turned toward territory they’ve rarely explored: the redemptive power of love.

Read it here

From the Times UK:

Take the music industry. You come closer to spelling out where it’s going to go.

A: Music’s already there. We don’t have to guess about what the future of music is; we can already see it. It’s interesting as an analogy. We wrongly correlated, or equated, the music industry with the record labels. It now turns out in fact that the labels are now the least important part. If you look at the rest of the industry now, from the bands to the fans from Apple to tour promoters, everyone’s doing OK, except for the labels. So there’s really nothing wrong with the music industry; we’re just redefining what it is. And I wonder whether we’re going to see a similar fragmentation and reformation of media. Right now, media is defined as those who own the presses – the presses meaning either the physical presses or broadcast towers or whatever. We’re beginning to see a new class of professional media which operate on internet economics. They’re still small, and they don’t make anything like the money.

Really? Everyone’s doing OK other than the labels? Anderson is making a common mistake here (like most people who have opinions on the future of the music business, but know absolutely nothing about it.) First off, the claim that everyone is doing “OK” no doubt extrapolates from the cases of artists like Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Dave Matthews Band etc, who, of course, are doing OK. They’ve got money in the bank, they’ve got a healthy number of fans (and cross-promotional marketing opportunities) to ensure that they will continue to do “OK”. Like many a tech evangelist before him, Anderson is assuming that these rare instances represent the bulk of the music industry, ignoring the huge majority of bands out there that are operating on a working-class income level. To generalize how these bands are doing—again, the majority of working bands—by using Radiohead as a model is like trying to extrapolate how independent books stores are doing by looking at Amazon’s sales figures. The difference in scale is immense.

To determine how most of these working bands are doing would be very difficult. Collecting metrics on this would demand getting actually profit/loss sheets from working professional bands, a difficult proposition since 1) many of them don’t track that shit very well and 2) the ones that do are loath to talk about the economics of being in a band and guard their bands’ financial information with a Steve Jobs-esque level of secrecy. This is complicated all the more because it’s always been difficult for working bands. As record sales decline, gas prices rise and ticket sales soften due to the economy, are these bands really doing “OK”? It’s hard to say conclusively. Many of them would probably say that it’s always been hard to be a professional musician, and it’s getting continually tougher with each year. Unless Anderson wants to pull out some actual numbers demonstrating how the economic situation has improved in the past decade for 90% of the working bands out there on the road, he might want to think twice about using the music industry as a model for his free new world.

via the Daily Swarm