My buddy Tim and I went to see writer Michael Chabon (“Shea as in stadium, Bon as in Jovi”) at Bookpeople last night. There were at least 100 people there. I picked up a copy of his beautiful new non-fiction collection with a Jordan Crane-designed cover.
Here’s Tim and I hanging out beforehand:
Good times!
PS. Wonder Boys is one of the greatest movies ever. Not joking. And it has a kick-ass soundtrack. Go watch it.
Went to see John Pierson interview Matt Stone, co-creator of South Park last night at the Austin City Limits studio on campus here at the University of Texas. Here’s a little write-up. I took some crummy sketchbook notes—could not for the life of me figure out how to draw him, so I just drew him as Kyle.
I have a kind of sentimental attachment to South Park: it came out the summer after my parents divorced, and my dad and I used to sit around in his little apartment and watch it and laugh our heads off. Humor when we needed it.
So, it was a real pleasure to hear him speak about the show, and his collaboration with Trey Parker. His thoughts were funny and intelligent.
Some highlights for me:
He listed three things that make his job the best job in Hollywood:
When you think about it, that’s the formula for any great job…
And again, when you think about it, that pretty much describes America.
Lots of other topics were discussed: Youtube, the original “The Spirit of Christmas” short, the Scientology Episode, the Britney Spears Show, lawyers, the 80s, the writer’s strike, Cannibal: The Musical!, and the genius Universal Studios Employee video.
Great, great event. Thanks to Janet for inviting me!
Last night we went over to the Austin City Limits studio to see a Q&A with David Simon, former newspaper reporter and creator of the TV show The Wire. John Pierson was the moderator, and he did a really great job— he asked Simon intelligent questions and then sat and listened while Simon gave intelligent answers.
Discussed topics: the decline of the newspaper industry, journalism and Homer Bigart (“his method: ‘Hi, I’m an idiot and I can’t talk…please help me'”), dumbass editors looking for lame stories about “Dickensian” children (“Pulitzer Sniffing”), Iraq, No Child Left Behind, stealing from Greek Tragedy, the drug war, jury nullification, creative writing students (“my god, you guys are an industry”), books he hasn’t read (Brothers Karamazov), the creative use of profanity, The America That Got Left Behind, and of course, Baltimore (“my favorite character”), and The Wire.
As usual, I doodled and took a lot of notes:
Really cool night, and awesome to finally see the Austin City Limits studio. Thanks to Janet for inviting us!
Links:
UPDATE:
I wanted to point out Amanda Marcotte‘s post about the evening (relayed to me by Gerry Canavan):
Awards: A good excuse for fan wanking disguised as academic inquiry
It was a productive hour and a half of discussion, which is somewhat surprising, since they opened the floor to questions, which is usually an invitation for a bunch of assholes to pretend that everyone showed up to hear them talk instead of the speaker. There were a couple of people who asked questions where the question was a minor pretense for them to bloviate, but on the whole, the question askers were respectable and the questions were good.
It’s such a perfect, hilarious observation, a subject that Meg and I constantly complain about: too often Q&As are just a huge waste of time. This one wasn’t, but I drew a cartoon about it last night, anyways…I just didn’t post it. Here it is, now:
Tobias Wolff gave a fiction reading at UT tonight. He read from Old School, In Pharaoh’s Army, and a short story from a new collection, Our Story Begins, called “Her Dog,” in which a man has a conversation with his dead wife’s dog. I could not BELIEVE he read such a story, because Meg has been BEGGING me for a dog, and being the heartless bastard I am, I have refused her on logical grounds (they’re expensive, someone has to feed them, walk them, take care of them when you want to leave town, blah blah blah), the same positions the man in the story took with his wife, before she got a dog anyways, and he then declared the dog to be HER dog, and he would have nothing to do with caring for it, and then she dies, and then he’s stuck with this dog.
In other words, it was a story about a guilty man with his dead wife’s dog—read to a guilty man with a wife with no dog.
In other words, it hit close to home.
A good reading, only rivaled by the wonderful picnic dinner Meg fixed us to eat beforehand. Nice to finally get to see/hear him read, because he’s one of my favorite writers, and I’ve met a few of his students (Dan Chaon, George Saunders, Tom Perrotta), but never the man himself.
Afterwards, Meg came up with a new system for Q & A sessions: you submit questions on index cards before the reading, and then the writer pulls the questions out of a hat, reads them off, and answers them. This takes all the ego out of question-asking—you don’t get anyone trying to show off or flatter the writer, and people who might not feel comfortable asking a question in front of a live audience get a chance, too.
Crappy shot from my camera phone:
Yesterday Meg and I went to the Texas Book Festival. We were hoping to catch Shalom Auslander at the book signing tent, but he didn’t show up, so we walked downtown and got some Jimmy Johns and ate it on the lawn of the capital. Beautiful day. We finished up lunch and went to the House Chamber (which is pimped out beyond belief with the most comfortable leather chairs I’ve ever sat in) to listen to Tom Perrotta read:
After that, we went to see the always-fantastic-certified-genius George Saunders:
That last panel is a response to a (kinda lengthy) question I asked in the Q & A: “You’ve written about Charles Schulz and Peanuts before. David Michaelis’s new biography questions whether Schulz was as good of a family man as we’ve been led to believe. You strike me as a genuine family man, and I detect the great theme of work vs. family in your writing. So what do you think is the relation between being a good artist and being a great family man, and which do you think is more important?”
That night, we walked downtown to see a screening of Little Children at the newly-reopened Alamo Ritz. I love Tom Perrotta, but he really seemed uncomfortable in the setting:
All in all, it was a great day.
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