About ten years ago I worked on a documentary that was screened at military bases and indie theaters in non-military base markets. The film followed a group of soldiers in Iraq and the thinking at the time was that the military market would come out in hordes to see it. Not the case. The film did best at two screenings held with a “progressive” think tank instead. A few people showed up at the military base locations, while standing-room only was the case in other locations. What happened? This was a film about soldiers, showing events soldiers had lived through.…

[This post ran last November. This week, Ranger Up helped share a special giveaway of The Return, a Black Irish Books title by David Danelo.  We just wanted to thank the Ranger Up team for sharing The Return — and Nick Palmisciano for sharing Ranger Up’s backstory. Working with Ranger Up is always a reminder of what can be accomplished when someone fights for his passion.] Nick Palmisciano was earning a quarter million a year when he learned he was being promoted — a promotion that would add another hundred thousand or so to his income. The promotion announcement landed on a Friday. The…

How much time do you spend at the beach? a)    Five Minutes b)   One Hour c)    One Day The question above was on a test my first grader took last week. She came home, saying that she would have picked “one hour” because she doesn’t like the beach, but that her teacher had “gone over this one a bunch because it was a hard one” and the correct answer is “one day.” Let’s just skip over the ridiculousness of this question being on a test framed to gauge a child’s understanding of time (and the fact that the answer was…

Working without a contract is like walking a tightrope without a net. Doable, but risky—with the potential to do real harm if you slip (depending on the height at which you’re walking and the conditions awaiting below). Working with a contract you don’t understand is just as risky. There’s an ever-growing list of bankrupt artists with wealthy publishing/recording/etc houses, of artists who have lost ownership of their work because they didn’t understand what they were signing, or who went unpaid because their contract didn’t protect them/their work. For the above reasons, my advice to young artists, particularly those slogging through…

Two weeks ago I wrote about Dave Danelo’s book The Return and “Exile,” which is to The Return what “Resistance” is to The War of Art. Last week, Shawn wrote about the “Groucho Marx Syndrome,” of an author spooked by the possibility of success, of actually achieving what he wanted. This past week, a friend e-mailed about an artist friend of hers, asking for suggestions to help share his work. Upon receiving my ideas she replied with doubt, that she didn’t think he’d go for it. He was an artist and just wanted to create. The artist Shawn wrote about…

Ernest Hemingway opened his introduction to the anthology Men At War (which he also edited) with: This book will not tell you how to die. Some cheer-leaders of war can always get out a pamphlet telling the best way to go through that small but necessary business at the end. PM may have published it already in a special Sunday issue with pictures. They might even have it bound up as a companion piece to the issue I read in November 1941 entitled “How We Can Lick Japan in Sixty Days.” No. This book will not tell you how to…

This afternoon I drove through the Santa Cruz Mountains with David Carr and Neil Young, on the way to Neil’s Broken Arrow ranch. I’ve been mining David’s columns and this one is a favorite. I like how he molded words to animate stories and convey thoughts — and have felt them tugging at me these past two weeks. I was cruising through his interview with Neil until he crashed in a quote from Neil’s book Waging Heavy Peace: “Writing is very convenient, has a low expense and is a great way to pass the time,” he says in “Waging Heavy…

(This first ran August 10, 2012. It’s making a repeat appearance this week as a reminder to unplug and clear the head while clearing the snow on the ground.) The headline stared out from the magazine rack in the check-out line. Beyond the guess-which-celebrity-has-the-worst-beach-body headlines was: iCrazy Panic. Depression. Psychosis. How Connection Addiction Is Rewiring Our Brains It was splashed across the top of Newsweek. * * * In January, my husband and I bundled up our kids and headed skiing. The lodge where we ate lunch was the only place to plug-in during the day. The first day I…

This past week, the Crazy Train rolled through, packed with reports about Harper Lee and another book. Had the media storm that followed been an actual snow storm, it would have been the first this season to have been predicted with 100% accuracy. As Winston Churchill put it, “A lie gets halfway around the world before Truth has a chance to get its pants on.” In this Global Village of ours, I doubt if Truth was even out of bed by the time all the rumors were on their second circuit around the pond. I don’t know Lee or her…

In the March 1914 edition of Vanity Fair, James L. Ford discussed movies as a menace to stage. A hundred years later, in the March 2014 edition of Vanity Fair, James Wolcott called “Everyone Back to the Cineplex” (after two years before writing, in the May 2012 issue of Vanity Fair, that “cinema has lost its sanctuary allure and aesthetic edge over television.”) In March of this year, Tina Fey and Robert Carlock’s new Netflix series, “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” will be released, and the conversation that will follow this already-buzzing series promises to be a continuation of the old-as-dirt…