A Beer With Novick

Steve Novick's new ad for his campaign to be a United States Senator from Oregon

Steve Novick Tells the Truth

My friend Steve Novick, who is running for the U.S. Senate from Oregon, and trying to unseat Gordon Smith, has an ad on television that is a clever take-off on the old show "To Tell the Truth." Take a look:

Realize Your Destiny

Los Angeles musician Matthew Kates has started a blog based on step two of my twelve-step program for realizing your destiny.

Godspeed, Matt!

Seeing Things

Shortly after I got my new glasses I noticed that the thicker frames blocked my peripheral vision.

It took me a while to notice this, actually. One tricky thing about peripheral vision is that when it is partially blocked, your brain fills in the void. I didn't notice what I wasn't seeing. I saw my normal peripheral vision, even though it was obscured by the thick frames of my specs.

I only figured this out after several weeks of bumping into people and working backwards to solve the problem.

In my ordinary life I just chalk this up to an unavoidable concession to fashion, but the problem is especially bad in New York because the city is so compressed. To navigate here you really have to look out. I've been bumping into at least one person a day, and we don't even go out that much.

So, today, having already bumped into two people accidentally, I was on my guard. And so when, during some afternoon shopping, I felt a brush against my arm, I stepped away and turned, and reflexively started into my standard apology.

Only to find that I was speaking to a handbag hanging from a rack in the corner of the book store.

Waiting to Exhale

My friend Pasha Malla has written a moving and beautiful account of his mother-in-law's receipt of a lung transplant. Here's the link: Waiting to Exhale.

Whitney Pastorek's Keen Eye

As you may know, the print incarnation of the small magazine Pindeldyboz died a quiet death this month, with the announcement by Editor in Chief Whitney Pastorek that the upcoming issue (No. 7) will be the last. Issue Seven will be released as a PDF before the end of the year. The website will keep going.

Check out the Hobart website for a short tribute to Whitney and Pindeldyboz, an essay entitled: A Short Essay in Which We Celebrate Whitney Pastorek's Keen Eye for Beautiful Things. Also, as my last act as Hobart web photo editor I used photos from Whitney's Flickr page (with her permission, of course) to illustrate's this month's Hobart stories. You can see Whitney's photos by jumping around this month's links on the Hobart page.

A few months ago I saw Jim Shepard saying in an interview that literary communities are ephemeral, and that's true. My writing friends and I seem to be linked by MySpace or Facebook pages, by the e-mails we send each other, by the brief times we cross path at readings, workshops, or conferences. What was the point of this paragraph? Just that, for many of us, the Pindeldyboz print issue was a familiar waypoint on the journey. We'll miss seeing it on the magazine stand, holding it in our hands, and reading its ecclectic mix of wonderful stories.

The New Phone Book is Here! The New Phone Book is Here!

For the past month or so I've been writing blog posts for the new 23/6 comedy news site. I have to say, it's been going better than I anticipated. I'm finding that I have things to write about, and the good people at 23/6 (shout out to Alex. Hi Alex!) have been very nice to me.

So, wanting to keep track of my writing over there, I've created a new link thing in the right-hand column, containing my blog posts for the 23/6 site. Soon I will have more posts over there than I can keep track of in the column thing, at which point I don't know what I'll do.

What are blogs? Unless they are focused on some subject external to the author, they are complicated exercises in vanity, that's what. This blog has fallen into that pit and is too far down to rescue itself, I'm afraid.

Moving on, we will soon post an essay about Whitney Pastorek, as a small tribute to her move to L.A. and the end of the print version of her magazine Pindeldyboz, perhaps the mightiest of the basement productions that dot America's literary landscape.

Oops. Sorry.

So, I got swamped with obligations recently, which doomed my attempt to turn this blog into a diary of my attempt to make a documentary about Steve Novick's run for Senate. It also sort of turned out that making a documentary film in one's spare time is so difficult and time-consuming that keeping a diary of the effort is pretty much impossible.

However, in the time I was gone I noticed that Stephany put me on her blogroll. Thanks, Steph!

I guess I will now, out of the blue, turn this post into a run-down of the success of my writing friends. Because I've been marveling lately at how many of the friends I've made through writing have gone on to become so successful. Laila Lalami wrote a great collection of short stories and now writes for the Nation and other magazines. Maud Newton's blog took off and made her famous among the literati. I've heard Pia Ehrhardt on Selected Shorts and Tin House published her collection "Famous Fathers." Aaron Burch, who I met when I found a bookmark he had placed in a copy of "John Henry Days" in a Seattle Barnes and Noble, started Hobart, which has become, for my money anyway, the most exciting lit mag in America. Pasha Malla landed a deal for a novel and a collection of stories.

There are many others, of course, who deserve mention on this small backwater of the internet known as my blog, but I will say here that the most talented and charming writer of all the friends I've made through writing is Stephany Aulenback. She's simply brilliant. So I was happy to see that after what seemed like a hiatus she took when her son Luke was born, she is back and writing with such energy. Every word she chooses is a pleasure to read. Go Steph!

I Will Be the Next Michael Moore

Above is the first text I've written in the script that actually has a decent chance of making it into the movie, although I'm sure I'll re-write it.

The good news is that I have the angle from which I want to tell the story, and I have the introduction, first, second, and third acts roughly outlined. So that's good. You have to have a really good story. My feeling is, if you don't have a good story, you shouldn't even start, because if you don't have a good story, nothing can save you.

Making films, at least the short films I've made (five so far), convinces me how little I know my way around story writing, and why I've never even started a novel. I have a strange intuitive knowledge and confidence about making films that I just don't have when it comes to stories. I'll try to write a story, and it won't work, and I'll tackle it a second time, convinced I know where it went wrong, and the result will merely be a different kind of failure. A dead lump of a different shape, but still a dead lump.

But with films I seem to have a clear idea of what I'm doing from square one, and each step feels natural. Like someone has given me clear instructions on what to do, and in what order.

Which is strange because, of course, no one ever has.

It could all be a delusion. I worry about that, too. That I'll get halfway into it and realize I've gotten completely lost down some path and have no way to find my way back to the main road.

At least I have the tools I think I'll need. I already had the camera (see earlier post) and the years' old version of Adobe Premiere, purchased on Ebay for about $50 (limited special effects and it tends to crash).

In the past few weeks I've picked up a Zoom H4, for ambient sound and, who knows, maybe I'll try to find some sort of marker so I can link up the audio from the Zoom with the video track.

I also got a Sony microphone for the camera. I discovered, in making my classic debut, "Incident at Swamp Gas Lane" that, predictably to anyone who would have known what he was doing, the camera's built-in microphone produces horrible, unusable, sound.

I've also downloaded RealPlayer 11, which lets you capture video from the web, and I downloaded a decent video converter (you need to convert web video clips from flash to mpg before you can plug them into the Premiere timeline).

I also downloaded a screenshot program (hence my ability to quote the working script above).

I wrote a model release, based on a form I got off the web, and I also ordered a 10-watt light for the Sony camera, which may or may not arrive this week.

I ordered two extra batteries and a second battery charger, which should arrive this week and hopefully will give me about six hours of shooting time each day.

Which, I hope is enough. I'll have to be careful about what I decide to shoot. I can't just leave the camera running all day.

Finally, I picked up a 2gb external hard drive (Toshiba) and today I bought about 24 Fuji DV tapes, which I hope is enough for my first trip to Portland, this coming weekend, when I'll spend three days on the trail with Steve and his campaign manager Jake.

I have a plane ticket and a room at the Ace Hotel the first night.

Portland here I come!

From These Humble Beginnings

A few years ago I purchased a Sony dv video camera. I had it delivered to my office, and after work I shot some footage of myself driving through the University of Washington campus on my way home. Over the next month I made the footage into a short film using a trial subscription to Adobe Premiere.

"Quimby Explodes" sat around for years, but recently I purchased a copy of Premiere and learned how to put films on YouTube. I added some new titles to the film, and so I guess it's finally finished.

I'm posting it here as a way of changing gears. I'm embarking on a project to make a documentary film of my friend Steve Novick's run for the United States Senate. Since making Quimby Explodes I've made a few short films for work, and I think I've sort of gotten the hang of it. Enough to attempt something real, anyway.

So I think I'll turn this blog into a kind of diary of the experience of trying to make a feature documentary. So watch this space, for either a triumph of independent film-making, a spectacular failure, or (curse the thought) another in a series of abandoned projects.

More soon on my new project. In the meantime . . .