All Entries in the "Arts & Culture" Category
More reflections on the passage of time - Anushka Fernandopulle
Another new year …..Is it 2009 already?!? How did that happen?!? What happened to 2008?!?
Wait, isn’t there some deja vu with this whole new year experience (what happened to ‘07, ‘97, ‘87 ‘77, insert year here)?
Reflecting on the passage of time (including aging and death) is considered a positive tonic for your spiritual life in [...]
Life and art at MOCA - Heather Dundas
Heather Dundas from the LA Times op-ed page today:
I wanted my children to experience that connection between art and life, so I continued to take them to exhibitions. We saw the enormous photographs of Thomas Struth in 2002. (Teo’s reaction: “So what?” Adena’s: “Scary families.”) In 2004, we went to see Doug Wheeler’s unearthly bright neon wall, which we all loved, and in 2005, we saw the monumental paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat, which gave me a chance to tell the kids what it was like to live in New York City in 1980. Going to the museum had become a habit with us, and Teo had begun to forget that he hated art.
When the Going Gets Tough, Satire Gets Going - Seth Greenland
American culture has long had a carnival aspect. How else to explain the ascendancy of Paris Hilton and her fellow celebritards, or the career of Flavor Flav? But until recently, these people and their antics had been a diversion, something to be glanced at in a dog-eared magazine at the dentist’s office, or to be glimpsed on a teenager’s laptop. Not anymore. With the advent of the Palin Family . . . reality took a turn that must make all practitioners of satire quake in our boots. If this is what truth offers, our audience would do well to ask, then who needs comedy?
Publishing 2.0 - Seth Greenland
One of the more vexing decisions a novelist makes today is how aggressively to promote a new book. Time was you sold it, then moved to Paris, ran with the bulls in Pamplona, or danced in Plaza fountain after a night of drunken carousing, while the publishing house did all the work. Alas, those days have gone the way of the fifty-cent paperback. For example: to blog or not to blog? You can see how I answered that one.
A Hero for our Times - Seth Greenland
But the most piquant detail from my daughter’s B’Nai Mitzvah Tour circa 2005 was observed at – where else - a country club. It occurred during the cocktail hour, somewhere between the canapés and the cocktail wieners, when the bar mitzvah boy was going to make his entrance. The lights dimmed, a spotlight hit a pair of gilded doors on a balcony above a sweeping staircase. The music kicked in : P.I.M.P. by 50 Cent. If the bubbes and zaydes present were aware of or concerned with the lyric content (No Cadillacs, no perms that you can’t see, that I’m a motherfuckin’ P.I.M.P.) they gave no evidence of it.
Rachel Resnick’s Love Junkie Book Party
Rachel Resnick’s book party for Love Junkie was the place to be seen on the uber-trendy edges of Los Angeles this Sunday.
Click through for photos . . .
Novel of the Year - Head Butler - Way to go again Seth!
Jessie Kornbluth from Huffington Post and Head Butler’s sane holiday giving guide.
His pick for Novel of the Year is none other than our mindful dad’s new novel Shining City!
Shining City. Seth Greenland’s comic triumph begins: “Julian Ripps was too fat to be reclining in a hot tub between a pair of naked women, unless he was very rich or they were prostitutes. He wasn’t, but they were.” The rest is just that smart. And funny.
One of WashPo’s Best Books of 2008! Way to go Seth
From Jonathan Yardley’s Picks of the Best Books of 2008 in the Washington Post:
I’m not going to make any cosmic claims for Shining City, by Seth Greenland, but it had me laughing out loud over and over again. It concerns a rather hapless Los Angeles middle-management guy who falls into a wholly unexpected bonanza: His sleazy older brother dies of a splendidly stage-managed heart attack and leaves him a dry-cleaning business that turns out to be a front for a prostitution ring. I’d never before heard of Greenland, but Shining City sent me to his first novel, The Bones, and the two put me squarely in his fan club.
The Passage of Time…. Anushka
If you have little kids in your life you know how fast they grow and change every day, week, and month. But actually so do all of us! Perhaps it is less obvious to us, but it is true! The fact is, what we usually call ourselves– body, mind, emotions– is always in constant flux, changing, swirling, moving. And there is no pause button.
Ferris wheels and the integration of intuition and reason. - Susan Kaiser Greenland
There is a brand new Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica Pier, not so far from where I live. Countless blogs, news reports, articles and YOUtube videos depict the rainbow of 160,000 colorful, solar-power and wind lit LED lights that hover above the Pacific ocean and sparkle in the night sky as the new Ferris wheel spins. As artful as these descriptions might be, no amount of reading or thinking about this fantastic amusement park ride can compare to the visceral experience of taking it.
Finite and Infinite Games
Sue Smalley applies James Carse’s uber-intellectual and way cool game theory to this election on Huffington Post.
“A finite player is one who plays the game to win or lose and sees it as having a beginning and an end; an infinite player is one who tries to keep the game going with the objective of engaging as many players in it as possible.”
Guess who’s the infinite player?
Sarah Palin Book Club
Seth weighs in on the emergence of Sarah Palin as a character in the LA Times Book Blog.
Building Emotional Intelligence and Fostering Resilience in Children — Linda Lantieri
What are some of your hopes for the important children in your life? Whether they will be successful at realizing those hopes is dependent on whether we, the adults in their lives, have equipped them with the inner strength they will need to approach their day-to-day challenges as well as the big challenges life may throw them.
A walk on the not-so-wild side.
Novelist Diana Wagman published an op-ed piece in last weekend’s LA Times about unlikely connections that can be made while walking in her eclectic neighborhood.
Anti-Chick Lit Author Rachel Resnick interviews Anti-Dick Lit Author Seth Greenland
The only tip I can give writers about writing and selling comes down to this: find your voice. That is the only thing you have that no one else can offer. By the way, this is not easy, and may take years. If there is anything else you think you might like doing, by all means do that.
Why is my husband on the Internet in his underpants? - Susan Kaiser Greenland
My brilliant and erudite husband has a new book coming out and it seems as if the ‘author video’ is de rigeur - I uploaded a screenshot and posted it below . . .
Not so fit - Lisa Dinsmore
What keeps me going back for more? I can’t stand “losing” to a machine. I realize this is a competition only in my mind, but since it’s keeping track of my fitness “progress” I’m compelled to make it change its’ tune and am scared every time I step on the board. I guess anything that gets the heart rate up is a good thing, right?
There is absolutely nothing interesting about me. Seth Greenland
I have been stymied in my efforts to craft a memoir. Here is my problem: there is absolutely nothing interesting about me.
Duttons Bookstore is closing in LA - Where is a book-loving soul to go now? Tom Teicholz
In a world where the bookstore is less and less viable . . . where will we find knowledgeable guides to help us find what we are looking for or make suggestions? Where can we go to see our literary idols?
Way to go Janet!
Rising expectations for the future of film distribution paved the way for a pair of important industry moves within the independent movie industry today. . .