blog: things you should check out

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Via: Splitsider’s “Ten of the Funniest Unaired SNL Sketches”

The November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine has published an article of mine, called “Consider the Elephant: Nine Ways to Feel a Bookstore”:

When you don’t know any better, there’s nothing to stop you. This is why, last fall, two friends and I decided to start a publishing company. Now, with twenty-five thousand copies of our first book in print, a five-figure unpaid invoice from the late Borders, Inc., and an incessant, restless anxiety — all things I didn’t have twelve months ago — I have tried to wrap my mind around that elephant in the room for anyone who thinks they can put out a book: the bookstore.

Everybody has an opinion on this topic. Financial analysts and book-industry insiders wring their hands as e-books threaten to outpace physical volumes in readers’ hearts and shopping carts, authors increasingly wonder what those stores are doing for them that they can’t do for themselves with a website, and the people who work every day between towering stacks of Penguin Classics and get-rich-quick hardcovers wonder if they’ll have jobs by this time next year. The bookstore is one of those elephants that the blind men take turns feeling in the old parable…

The book I’m referring to, of course, is Machine of Death, and in the article, I explain not only what we did to make MOD successful (a tale you know well), but what happened afterward, the strange lessons we have learned in the past year about the bookstore industry, and why there are no easy answers to the question of “what is the best way to sell a book these days?”

I’m pleased that a publishing-industry magazine chose to publish what is really a bit of an iconoclastic view, although it ends up rather optimistic, I think. The editor who worked with me on this story also told me that this is the longest article that P&W has ever published, which I will take as an insane compliment. “We got to make room for this thing, it’s gold!”

The article is not online, so may I suggest you check out the paper magazine in a…bookstore? (It’s really quite a good magazine, if you’re interested in writing.)

Just a brief note to say, if you’re still looking for strange gift ideas for sticky folks on your list, here’s some stuff from my friends and colleagues that might be off your usual radar, but which might nonetheless strike a chord! Check ’em out and see what they got.

Artwork by Eric Millikin

Evil Inc. Holiday Cards
Evil Inc. Books

The new book from Not Invented Here: Runtime Error

Sam and Fuzzy goods & finery

Schlock Mercenary
New! Schlock Mercenary 2012 Calendar

Shortpacked! store
New! Shortpacked! Book 4

SMBC store
SMBC “Revenge” shirts

Spacetrawler cards & gifts

Unshelved bibliophile gifts
Intellectual Freedom Fighter messenger bags

Surely you can find something you like among all this good stuff.

SURELY

It’s strange how sometimes commercials can expand on your experience of your favorite film franchises. I remember seeing a Star Wars-themed Energizer battery commercial in 1994 and freaking out. It had new footage of Darth Vader.

The recent DirecTV campaign (called “Fourth Wall”) that recreates popular scenes from movies tried for the same reaction, but doesn’t get much farther than “Hey, look at that.” The message of the commercials — DirectTV is in HD? has a bunch of channels? is generally good? — isn’t relevant to the gimmick. Still, it was a neat idea.

Another “recreation” that comes to mind is this 2006 Gatorade commercial, which recreated famous sports moments gone wrong to convey the precision of Gatorade’s…lab-coated researchers with beakers and pipettes? To tell me that every gram of salt in a Gatorade is measured out by a person wearing safety goggles? It’s so vague that I remembered the concept of the commercial five years later, but not the advertiser. I thought it had been a Nike spot.

Well, this is kind of cheesy, but kind of cool too. Christopher Lloyd and the Back to the Future brand have been doing commercials for the Argentine electronics chain Garbarino. Here’s the first:

And here’s another that I kind of like:

The best thing, with this second spot in particular, is how on-message the premise is. Doc Brown, an inventor, goes into the future and is wowed by all the amazing electronics he finds. I don’t know if Garbarino is any better or worse than any other electronics chain — I can see a campaign like this being done in America for a big chain like Best Buy or Radio Shack, and essentially lying about how amazing those stores are — but it’s cute. And we get to see my friend Doc on screen again! Hooray!

(There are a few more videos at the Garbarino YouTube channel as well.)

Perhaps you know Nicholas Gurewitch from his seminal comic strip The Perry Bible Fellowship, or perhaps you know him from the interview I conducted with him in The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack which you got without knowing about him because you are a me completist. Regardless, he is a singular talent and, in addition to his work in comics, has long nurtured a filmmaking impulse as well.

Trails of Tarnation is his surrealist Western. Shot on film and using handmade sets, Nick’s work has an incredible, tactile aesthetic that’s becoming uncommon in cinema, and it’s remarkable to behold. Here is Trails of Tarnation Episode 3, “Ants!”

More of Nick’s video work can be found on his Vimeo page, New Picture Agencies.