branta

Ken Finkleman sticks the knife in

the Branta Webcrawler — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:56:01 +0000

Funnyman turned author uses a deadly metaphor to pick apart literary jealousy and the act of taking control

A surprising thought entered Ken Finkleman’s mind once long ago as he stared balefully at a boring dinner companion. “I thought to myself, ‘If I picked up this knife and stabbed the person across from me in the heart, for good or for bad it would just open this trap door and I would drop through it and never look at the same world again.’ ”

A quick check of the utensils on the patio table where Finkleman is telling his story reveals no immediate cause for concern. But as anyone who has ever seen his quirky television shows knows, the man is unpredictable. This particular fantasy proved so compelling to Finkleman, auteur of The Newsroom and Married Life, that he turned it into a book 30 years later.

The result, called Noah’s Turn, is a slim but considerably quirky novel that combines all the wit Finkleman honed writing scripts for such films as Airplane II with deep thoughts inspired by a quick reading of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Noah Douglas is an unsympathetic, unemployed television writer with seething resentments who eventually acts one of them out – to the misfortune of a pretentious friend who has committed the sin, in Noah’s eyes, of achieving literary success.

Descending amusingly into the lowest echelons of a media world he frankly despises, Noah does to his rival what most typical attendees at a Toronto book launch only dream of doing. A sharp metal object is involved.

Struggling would-be novelists might not want to know how easily literary inspiration came to Finkleman. “I wasn’t working and I didn’t want to,” he says, describing his creative process. “I was having a good time. I was drinking a lot in the evenings, I was reading a lot, I was sleeping on my couch in the afternoons, I was exercising. I was fine.”

He began reading Crime and Punishment because “it was just sitting there,” Finkleman says, and he put it down halfway through. “It wasn’t my cup of tea,” he says. But the murderer Raskolnikov seemed strangely familiar to him, so he started to write his own version of the story – minus the redemptive ending his ex-wife advised him to skip in the original.

“I had this character in my head, of an amalgam of certain people I know,” he says. “And I just started writing, with no intention of really doing it, and I kept going and kept going. I had nothing else to do.”

Impulsively murdering somebody is “one of the few acts you can actually do where you can take complete control over your life,” Finkleman notes, munching a sandwich on an outdoor patio in the downtown Toronto neighbourhood where he lives, works and shoots most of his shows, and where he is often seen tooling around on his $8,000 vintage Italian racing bike with its limited-edition polka-dot paint job. “You’re able to drop yourself out of this life and into something else altogether.”

Unfortunately for Noah, the act only seems to complicate all the conventional entanglements he sought to escape. Getting away with it forces him into a role neither he nor his creator anticipated. “I didn’t discover that until I was writing it,” Finkleman says. “I said, Wait a second, it’s not working, He didn’t transform himself. He didn’t take himself out of the world. So then I realized the only way he could become this other person was to take responsibility for the crime, to be the killer.”

In devising an appropriate fate for Noah, the author considered Camus’s L’Étranger as well as the brazen criminality of murderer Gary Gilmore, who famously demanded to be executed. “There is something to that,” Finkleman says. “He lived it out to the end as this person who had no apologies. He couldn’t be accused of not being the genuine item.”

By contrast, his own hero’s ultimate goodbye gives Noah’s Turn one of its best jokes. The trap door opened, but the irrepressible funnyman popped back out.

Visions of Fast Food

the Branta Webcrawler — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:48:16 +0000

via GOOD Magazine.

In the short time since fast food chains have become part of our national (and global) culture, a number of burger shops have begotten some truly iconic–and insalubrious—food items, the mass production and marketing of which is utterly astounding. However, when removed from their brightly colored wrappers and shot against a stark, clinical background, as in the case of Jon Feinstein’s photographic series, “Fast Food,” the archetypal snacks and sandwiches take on a decidedly unsettling quality.

“There’s this weird relationship that we as Americans have with fast food,” says Feinstein, who titled each image with the given item’s fat content, in grams. “I made a project where the food mostly looks disgusting, yet some of it is still strangely enticing—probably because the branding is so embedded in our psyches.” He adds, “I may eat it on a lower frequency now.”

What follows is a selection from Jon Feinstein’s “Fast Food.”

More at GOOD Magazine.

Authors@Google: Pamela Slim

the Branta Webcrawler — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:34:29 +0000

The @Google team welcomes Pamela Slim to Google’s Mountain View office on August 2, 2010 to discuss her book, “Escape from Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur.” She is introduced by Jenny Blake.

“The creative destruction of the world economy in the last two years has brought plenty of angst, but also a refreshing alternative to traditional employment. No longer tethered to one job configuration (employee, entrepreneur, contractor), people are finding creative ways to weave passions and interests into their work.

Author Pamela Slim gives thousands of aspiring entrepreneurs start-up advice each year, but believes that workplaces of all sizes can benefit from a fresh view of career development. Learn the keys to creating a stimulating and rewarding work life which includes non-mafia management, rapid testing of new business ideas, High Councils of Jedi Knights, creative posses, personal backbone and a life plan that is based on your definition of success, not your parent’s.”

Pamela Slim is a business coach and an award-winning author. She blogs at http://www.escapefromcubiclenation.com

fourthirtythree audio magazine

the Branta Webcrawler — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:29:46 +0000

fourthirtythree is a new audio magazine.

We’ll be broadcasting and podcasting short stories of around five minutes (up to 1,000 words), written and read by some of the best contemporary writers.

We’re looking for edgy, engaging stories about modern life - stories which work well when read aloud.

If you’d like to submit, or join our mailing list, or have any questions, or anything else really, just email us:

433mag@gmail.com

And here’s our first batch of stories for you to listen to.

You can subscribe to our podcast here (iTunes).

NICHOLAS HOGG - PICNIC

Maybe you’ve wondered why we’re in the middle of a decade-long slog of a war, and maybe you’ve read the newspaper or that wikileaks database and felt like you wanted a bit more for the senses. This one will help fill in the gaps. A woman goes missing in Afghanistan, and her captors propose a meal.

EMER O’TOOLE - AQUAMARINE

There are times when a place is just off, and there are moods that not even an intense redecoration project can lift. Fresh from a breakup, a woman grasps the joys of living alone and the terrors of a brand new colour.

—

More at fourthirtythree website.

Brew North

the Branta Webcrawler — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:00:51 +0000

via Toro Magazine

We Canadians love beer. We love it after dinner, or during the hockey game. We love it in a bar, or at the Calgary Stampede. We love to share it with a friend, or for a lonely summer night. Our history with the drink is long and colourful. Author Ian Coutts has documented it with his new book Brew North: How Canadians Made Beer and Beer Made Canada. As a piece of entertaining history, it’s top-notch, but the real gold is in the wealth of archival images, covering all manner of Canadian life. We at TORO are happy to share this gallery of vintage alcoholic ads and labels, just a handful of those found in Coutts’s book. Take a look, and pick up your copy of Brew North when it hits bookstores on September 4.

New Blog Alert!!!

Eric Hill — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 14:07:57 +0000

Bob Mersereau’s Top 100 Canadian Albums through a spotlight on the rich history of our country’s music when it came out in 2007. Its follow up, Top 100 Canadian Singles is due out at the end of September. In preparation Bob has launched a blog to tease you, give you some behind-the-scene tidbits and generally inform you about the musical landscape as it was and is in Canada. In addition there will be a contest, hosted on the Goose Lane and Top 100 Singles Facebook pages where you can contribute your own top 10 lists to win, as they say, fabulous prizes.

Feature Recommendation: Douglas Glover’s Numéro Cinq

the Branta Webcrawler — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:37:12 +0000

Photo by Jonah Glover

Numéro Cinq started January 11, 2010, as…

a reading, discussion and resource site for Douglas Glover‘s current Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing students who are also authors on the blog. It seems to have expanded (be expanding) into something else. Visitors are welcome. Already they form a large part of the community. Please leave comments. Respect the fact that the words herein belong to the people who wrote them.

The name for the blog comes from DG’s short story “The Obituary Writer” in which story the hero, based loosely on the author as a young newspaperman, harasses a distraught neighbour who lives in the apartment across the hall by making loud noises in the night and pretending to be a member of a sinister terrorist group called Numéro Cinq.

You will find some wonderful short fiction, including stories by Goose Lane author Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer…

“The Longest Destroyed Poem”

When Rosa saw him after all those years her first thought was how fleshily ugly Victor had become, and yet, if she was honest to herself, he hadn’t ever been much of a looker. He was a poet. And the second thing she thought was how easy it would have been all those years back to get him in one of his gin sleeps, and suture his mouth tightly shut.

…as well as Branta contributor Michael Bryson…

“My Life in Television”

When I was sixteen, a man spoke to my parents. A week later, he bought me a new set of clothes and I flew with him to California. His name (and I’m not making this up) was Sly. Maybe my story starts with the arrival of Sly. My parents will tell you straight out he’s an evil bastard, which is true enough, but Sly’s character was nothing if not Byzantine. He looked a bit like Santa Claus, an fact he exploited with the young and the old.

There is also Poetry, NonFiction and clever Contests (Aphorism contests, for example). Much to recommend.

How Google Unwittingly Helped Propegate the Misleading “Ground Zero Mosque” Label

the Branta Webcrawler — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 00:43:34 +0000

Andrew Price for Good Magazine Blog
As the inane controversy over the Cordoba House, the Islamic community center being planned in Manhattan, gained momentum, the facility quickly came to be known as the “Ground Zero Mosque.” And that label is misleading because it’s not at Ground Zero and it’s not a mosque.

Where the label started, who knows? Cable news (read: Fox) seems like a good bet. But what’s interesting, as the Nieman Journalism Lab points out, is how it came to stick.

When a handy label like “Ground Zero Mosque” emerges, it’s immediately attractive to bloggers and editors because it’s short and a little provocative. And once it becomes the accepted, if inaccurate, term for the thing, then not using it means sacrificing the easy searchability of the piece you’ve written.

Poynter ethicist Kelly McBride zeroed in on that idea of search-engine optimization, noting that the AP is being punished for their stand against the term “ground zero mosque” by not appearing very highly on the all-important news searches for that phrase. In order to stay relevant to search engines, news organizations have to continue using an inaccurate term once it’s taken hold, she concluded.

There’s a positive feedback loop that reinforces the popular term and it’s hard to break out of because, with web traffic as the currency of digital media, optimizing the stuff you publish for search engines is a real revenue consideration.

How do we fix this? I don’t know. It would be nice if Google could somehow flag certain terms as epithets or weasel words, but I’m pretty sure that’s beyond its capacity and the company doesn’t seem very interested in assuming editorial responsibility for anything anyway.

More likely it will just be a matter of responsible media outlets thinking twice before adopting whatever slangy, loaded term gets bandied around on cable news. On that count, my colleague Morgan, who refused to use the label at the height of the controversy, did a better job than I.

Book Trailer: YOU comma Idiot

Eric Hill — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 12:10:24 +0000

YOU comma Idiot from Goose Lane Editions available soon

Q&A with author Doug Harris can be found here.

Longshot Magazine One : Call for Submissions

Eric Hill — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 11:57:37 +0000

Longshot!

Longshot Magazine Issue One begins August 27th at noon, Pacific time.

We’ll unveil a theme and you’ll have 24 hours to produce and submit your work. We’ll take the next 24 to select, edit, design and lay everything out. The end results will be a beautiful glossy paper magazine, delivered right to your old-fashioned mailbox. Don’t like paper? Word. We’re also going to roll out a Website and iPad version over the same weekend. Oh! And we’ll keep the cameras rolling the entire time. There may even be a radio program. We promise it will be insane.

—

In May 2010, we conducted a two-day media experiment. 8,000 people signed up, 1,500 submissions came in, 35 editors selected 70 pieces to fill a 60-page magazine.

People liked it. We broke our distributor’s sales records, received positive reviews in The New York Times, PBS, and the Village Voice, and won a Knight-Batten Award for Innovation in Journalism. Here, we present selected work from the print edition of Issue Zero.

Issue Zero

Longshot Magazine

Longshot Magazine Twitter.