A good flick once in a while can do you some good

There are a lot of ways in which college students spend their free time. Personally, I watch films. There’s nothing better than a good flick on a boring day. Last year, I probably rented out half the selection in the library and paid a ton of late fees (and accordingly got a Netflix account this year). I love films because they take me away for a couple hours, like a good novel. They inject fear, inspiration, laughter, knowledge and a whole bunch of other things into my day. And as a writer, they teach me a thing or two.

Before I jump into the benefits of watching good films, I really need to define what I mean by a film, or better yet, what I don’t mean. A film is not the summer box office hit you took your girl to. It’s not the action flick with explosions every two minutes and it’s not the drama with the played-out lines any half-conscious person can see coming a mile away. Don’t get me wrong, I dig those movies too––I’d watch Megan Fox in Transformers any day of the week––but that’s not what I’m talking about. Read more »

There is a place where great screenplays go to die.  Dialogue that had been analyzed for days – three or four words that had been written and rewritten to get the feeling just right – can meet its gruesome death on the lips of an unprepared actor that wasn’t right for the role to begin with.  That beautiful moment between the protagonist and his mother (a pivotal point in their relationship where they realize they can get along after all) dies in the arms of a gaffer who is also the assistant director and script supervisor and doesn’t know how to light a scene for shit.  An emotional monologue meant to soften our views of a villain isn’t even given the chance to live because it seems the audio file was deleted when the stressed director/editor realizes he is out of memory and formats a hard drive prematurely.

While I’ve seen many screenplays that were terrible on their own before it hit the set of a student film, I find that even some of the best scripts I’ve read can suffer under the often stressful and hectic conditions of a student shoot.

So, when a student film comes out that was not only able to preserve the integrity of the original screenplay but goes so above and beyond that it should really no longer be labeled a student film, a nice round of applause isn’t really enough.

Adriano Valentini graduated from NYU’s undergraduate film program in 2008 – the same year he produced his short film, Clubscene, about a turning point in the life of twenty-something Montreal bartender, Gabe.  I had the pleasure of reading the script before it went into production and held my breath in hopes that the shoot would do the script justice.  Adriano turned out to be as good at directing as he is at writing and the movie went on to receive the Wasserman/King Finalist Award and NYU’s First Run Screenwriting Award the following year, allowing Adriano to present his film at the DGA Theater in Hollywood.  He chose not to abandon the project upon graduation like many film students do and continued to work with the characters of Clubscene, releasing even shorter short films focusing on one character at a time – specifically “The Bartender” and “The Underager.”  His hard work was rewarded with The Bartender becoming an official selection at the Brooklyn International Film Festival this year and becoming a finalist for The Chris Columbus/Richard Vague Fund to pursue directing a feature.

Perhaps it’s envy or perhaps it’s awe, but something was needling me and prompted me to find out what goes on in that brain of his.  What set Adriano apart from the other students (myself included)? Below, we talk a little about inspiration, the writing process, cultural influences, and how the characters make the story: Read more »

How much is a Kangamouse really worth?

How much would you pay for this adorably bedraggled kangamouse? A dollar? Less? What if it was a gift from a soldier in Vietnam to his two young sons back home, a gift that they worshipped alternately as “The Great Faa,” and as “Mr. Peepers” — and a gift that ultimately divided the family and lead to an exorcism via toilet? That seems worth a little more than a dollar, right? That’s because there is a certain value to stories, to histories; this is why people pay thousands for certain baseballs or comic books, this is why experts on Antiques Roadshow can tell people with a straight face that their ancient button collection from the civil war, with letters to prove its authenticity, is worth more than my car.

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Twitter is not especially well-known for fiction. But maybe that will change. Writers are embracing Twitter for the creative challenge imposed by its 140-character limit, for its real-time functionality, and for its interactivity. Twitterature, or Twiction, or whatever else you’d like to call it, is not just a means of reaching today’s ADD-raddled reader–it’s a new medium entirely, spawning new ways to create and interact with fiction.

So without further ado, here’s a short guide to try innovative and interesting Twitter fiction projects, past and present:

@ElectricLit

Electric Literature’s highly anticipated “microserialization” of Rick Moody’s novel begins today, and is definitely worth a read. Rather than chopping up a pre-written story into 140-character bursts as many other Twitter novelists tend to do, Moody wrote his novel Some Contemporary Characters expressly for Twitter and embraced the character limit as a source of creative inspiration. Each section of the novel comes every 10 minutes and lasts until December 2nd.

Bloomsday

Last Bloomsday, two Ulysses enthusiasts took the novel’s 10th chapter, Wandering Rocks, and retraced all the events of that day on Twitter. Videogame designers Ian Bogost and Ian McCarthy registered 54 of the novel’s characters as Twitter users, who all Tweeted about what they were doing on June 16, 1904 at the correct fictional times. (Old project, since June 16 is long past at this point, but still worth a read. Here’s hoping Bogost and McCarthy will revive the project in some way next Bloomsday.)

The Twitter of Oz

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My Grandfather in Venice Way Back When

I have always suspected the missing links between the scattered parts of my being lay within the life of my maternal grandfather.

My paternal grandparents are open books – my grandmother with her inexorable tongue and my grandfather with eyes that can’t betray a single emotion.  My maternal grandmother is a storyteller on speed – something always reminds her of something else and various tangents can be made within a single sentence.  My paternal grandfather, however, was a little less clear in his communication.  My uncle used to joke that all it took to keep my grandfather happy was his daily newspaper and a bowl of mixed nuts.  For years, I believed this to be the case – but as I got older, I suspected something much more existed within his alleged simplicity.

After he passed away in the fall of 2005, my aunt emailed our family scanned photos she found of him.  The photos dated back to the forties and consisted mostly of posed portraits.  I was excited to find that I looked quite a bit like my young grandfather since I grew up looking not quite like either parent.

It was, however, in a photo where his face was less visible that I found myself identifying with him most: in the middle of Piazza San Marco, stood my grandfather in an ascot and a three-piece suit – tall and full of quiet confidence.  Though we all knew that my grandfather suffered from a hushed case of wanderlust, we never knew he ever had the means to treat it. Read more »

Oi vey, getting published.  That’s the elephant in the room here in my graduate writing program.  We’re all working on becoming better writers, critiquing one another, reading a ton — it’s incredibly valuable time spent on self-improvement.  But let’s be honest, to what end?  Why are we all doing this?  Because we want to be published.  We want the validation that our work is worth something.  We want to be able to add some italicized names of magazines to our biographies.  We want to write…drum roll please…a book.

Whether or not connections are actually necessary to get published is a separate question.  But if you want to do something other than self-publish, you might have a tough time if you assume that the all-knowing, all-powerful internet can help you find a publisher. Read more »

One of the cool things about the arts is that they all complement each other. Dance and music are each arts unto themselves, but the results are transcendent when they are paired together. Music is also an integral component in film and television, which in turn makes use of screenwriting and visual arts. Everything overlaps.

But with the exception of the rare book soundtrack, the printed word tends to stand alone from the rest of the arts. Maybe that will change as new technology gives us interactive books with synchronized soundtracks and accompanying video. And while we’re at it: maybe new technology will give us books with holographic characters jumping out of every page.

Until then, there’s STFUAJPGM, a miniature micro-music mixtape magazine that marries literature with its long-lost friends: music, visual arts, and video. Each “episode” is centered around a central theme inspired by video game culture (think heroes, love stories, and travel) and involves a smorgasbord of multimedia to illustrate the theme: pixel art, video, short stories, and an overarching soundtrack that neatly weaves all the components together. STFUAJPGM is focused on freely distributed music within the chiptune community, so each episode is also available for download.

They’re only up to episode #5 so far, with new episodes coming out every month or so. An uncommon thing in today’s daily updated culture, but very much worth the wait. To get a better idea of what STFUAJPGM is and what they have to offer, hit the jump for Episode 0 (Pilot): A Love Story. Read more »

An old writing teacher of mine once said to my class, “I read because I’m secretly a peeping Tom. I want more than just a glimpse of someone else’s life–I want to be a full-on voyeur. I want to step into someone else’s skin and see the world from their eyes. Because when else would I ever get to do that?”

So maybe that explains part of the pleasure I get from watching documentaries on Veoh. A user named simply “documentaries” (is it the BBC? an avid documentary fan? the film gods themselves, digitized and uploaded for our mortal amusement?) has hundreds of documentaries online, for free, and I’m starting to worry if my fascination with them has become something of a problem. The documentaries are a veritable sampling of the (intensely) varied human experience and include such titillating titles as “My Car is My Lover,” “The Man With No Past,” “Child Chain Smoker,” “Prostitution Behind the Veil,” and “The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off.” Lest the titles might lead you to believe I’m directing you to a collection of Jerry Springer-esque romps: all of the documentaries (or those I’ve seen, anyway) are both intriguing and refreshingly fair-minded. And most of them are less than one hour long, which means that when you finish one, it doesn’t seem so indulgent to start another, and then another, and then another… Read more »

On June 4, two of Inhae Lee’s teeth (or as she puts it, “teef”) jumped into a bathtub and scrubbed themselves clean with toothpaste. On August 4, they went for a dip in the pool. These are a few of the recent entries on My Milk Toof, a blog that details, through photo essays, the not-so-mundane adventures of the creator’s liberated baby teeth, lovingly named ickle and Lardee.

Each photo is a treat to behold, having been painstakingly assembled with a mix of both miniaturized props that complement the teeth’s small size as well as actual-sized objects. And though visually stunning, the narratives themselves are surprisingly straightforward. A recent post called “Sweet Treats” consisted of nearly 35 photos of the two “teef” eating ice cream, and a large majority of those photos were merely captioned with the words, “slurp slurp slurp.”

Faulkner, it ain’t.

But readers loved it. “Sweet Treats” has received over 200 comments and counting, and while there are no statistics available about the readership of the site itself, the 13,500+ fans on My Milk Toof’s Facebook page indicate this is more than just a casual project. Read more »

A familiarly young Wallace Stevens.

I was recently pointed digitally towards an article written by James Longenbach for The Nation—-a publication which appears both as an internet persona and in print—-pertaining to Wallace Stevens, a modernist poet whose work appeared between the years of 1927 and 1972.  Early on, the piece touches upon the seemingly strange duality of Stevens’ pursuits:  The first as the Vice President of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he performed Surety Law; The second, the voice of reserved understanding we encounter in his poetry, a tone which we might recognize in The Snow Man: Read more »