A Long And Winding Letter From Paul McCartney to Phil Spector

Someone just shared this wonderful gem on Facebook, though I had trouble finding the original source (I mean, there's so much Beatles stuff out there already anyway, so who knows which of the gazillion massive volumes it could have come from). It was too good not to share here, especially #4. 'Cause let's face it...Paul's right. The Let It Be...Naked version is way better (I actually think that Let It Be...Naked is a superior album, period, but maybe that's just me).

Well hey, at least Phil Spector never held a gun to any of the Beatles (at least as far as we know).

Happy Father's Day!

I found this little gem bouncing around the twittersphere. Can't find the original source, but if anyone has it, please let me know!

"This Video Seems Silly, But It Makes A Good Point"

It's no big secret that I have an odd relationship with clickbait-y headlines. There's value to them, because they work — but the trick is in finding the right balance between intriguing your audience, and just plain pissing them off.

With the launch of ClickHole today, and particularly with the video below, I think The Onion has found the perfect equilibrium.

That was beautiful, man.

An Open Letter From Netflix To Verizon For Being A Bunch Of Greedy Selfish Jerks

Continuing in the modern trend of a never-ending ouroboros of open-letters, Netflix has sent a letter to Verizon about the letter that Verizon sent to Netflix about how angry Verizon was that Netflix was throwing them under the bus and blatantly telling its customers that their slow-loading time were entirely the fault of Verizon trying to throttle internet service (an unfortunate omen of the world to come, should Net Neutrality laws be abolished).

The Greatest Feminist Mermaid Horror Story Fairytale Ever Written

This is Alyssa Wong — or as I like to call her, Death Cupcake. Don't let her seemingly adorable exterior deceive you (or do — she'd probably prefer it if you do, as it gives her the advantage when she swoops in to devour your soul): Alyssa is a wonderful, wonderful person who writes some of the most brutal stories I've encountered. Alyssa's stories, much like their creator, are a perfect marriage of cutesy moments and grotesque, gut-wrenching horror. This seemingly incongruous combination is precisely what makes her and her stories so wonderful.

But don't let my biased voice fool you. Take it from SF Site, who just interviewed Alyssa about The Fisher Queen, her first professional fiction publication. I had the pleasure of reading the first draft of The Fisher Queen at Clarion in the summer of 2013, and it's one of the stories that has stuck with me ever since. The best way I can describe it is as a Feminist Mermaid Horror story. If that sounds weird to, well, that's part of the charm of Alyssa's work — she can write a feminist mermaid horror story and actually pull it off. I was legitimately squirming by the end of this story.

Alyssa was one-third of the affectionately named "Team Tiny Bonesaw" at Clarion 2013, alongside Isabel Yap and Gabby Santiago 

Again, don't take my word for it — you can download the entire story for free on Amazon in this exclusive sampler digest of Fantasy & Science Fiction. And yes, I would suggest you do so — if for no other reason than to appease the Death Cupcake Queen, so that she might have mercy on your soul once she rules the fiction landscape (which she will).

And lest I've frightened you too much, here's Alyssa posing with the UCSD Triton. She's get a weird thing for mer-people — but hey, I don't judge.

Oh Yes, DO Let's Ban Yet Another Book That Tries To Teach Kids About The Overreaches Of Authority

Because banning books has always ended well, and has never been held up as an eternal symbol of a corrupt society...

Yes, after approving Cory Doctorow's Little Brother for the "One School / One Book" reading program, a principal in Pensacola, Florida (where else?) has decided to ban the book from classrooms, because it encourages students to question authority and engage in hacker culture. Are you kidding me?

Cory himself explains it perfectly over at BoingBoing: "I don't think this is a problem because my book is the greatest novel ever written and the kids will all miss out by not reading it, but because I think that the role of an educator is to encourage critical thinking and debate, and that this is a totally inappropriate way to address 'controversial' material in schools."

I mean, I'm 28 now, and I still think this is a valid message.

Little Brother is an absolutely exhilarating young adult novel about teens fighting back against Big Brother. Most of us read 1984 in school (and other dystopian classic, such as Brave New World), but Little Brother arms readers with the necessary knowledge to fight back. Big Brother is watching you, all right — but who's keeping tabs on Big Brother? The book is set vaguely now-ish, and even reading it as an adult, it was both educational, and horrifying. I'm glad I read it after the Boston Marathon Bombings, or else I would have been even more freaked out during that situation, rather than being oblivious to the other real-life horrors of what was going on (the basic plot of the novel follows a teen named Marcus Yallow who skips school to go LARPing, which puts him in the wrong place during a terrorist attack and leads him into the torturous hands of the Department of Homeland Security). It's one of those books that I find myself recommending to absolutely everyone I meet, but especially to middle- and high school students. 

Fortunately, when not writing fantastic science fiction books, Cory Doctorow is also an advocate for Internet freedoms and basic Civil Rights (plus a fantastic writing mentor). His publisher, Tor Books (to whom I also contribute, via Tor.com), has agreed to send 200 free paperback copies of the novel to students at Booker T. Washington High School. And on top of that, you can download Little Brother for free in a variety of different formats directly from Cory's website, where he offers all of his books for download under Creative Commons licensing (the idea being that people will download the book for free, like I did, then tell someone about it, like I just did, which then leads to someone buying it. And it works). Even the National Coalition Against Censorship has gotten involved, writing a good ol' fashioned "strongly worded letter" to the educational administration in Pensacola.

So download Little Brother (it's free! You have literally no excuse!), give it to your friends and younger cousins and siblings. Because a society that still bans books is not a good place to live.

Princess Leia's 22nd Birthday Was An EPIC Party, Yo

A (very) short film directed by Chronicle director Josh Trank, who's just been tapped to direct one of the upcoming Star Wars stand-alone spinoffs. Sure, this fun little clip is more than seven years old now, but we can only hope that his contribution to the Star Wars universe is even half as awesome.

Thanks to The AV Club for the find.

Me Am Do Talk Good

I found this fun little link on Twitter the other day: a quiz that proclaims to be able to guess which English dialect you speak, along with your native language. I like to think I have a pretty solid grasp on the English language, in all its bizarre permutations (except for verb tenses of "lay"; I will never get those right), but the results, as they say on the internet, shocked me.

Most of the questions are either "Which picture best portrays this sentence" or "Which of these sentences is correct?", and as I went through it the first time, I was pretty liberal and considerate with my answers. A few of the questions allowed for more than one answer, so I selected more than one — considering some of the sentence structures that were not immediately instinctual for me to use, or were not my personal preference for grammatical comfort, but where nonetheless "right," or at least, not explicitly incorrect. Also a lot of it was in passive voice, which was mostly just frustrating, because whatever dialect I do speak, it certainly isn't passive voice.

The results? Apparently I speak with a "US Black Vernacular / Ebonics" dialect, and my native language is Portugese.

Hrm. Okay. Well that was not what I was expecting, especially having grownup in the famously "accent-less"* (according to us, and no one else) state of Connecticut. I know that I sometimes slip into Hiberno-English (especially when I've been drinking), and that my love of hard-boiled fiction narratives sometimes seeps into my otherwise cheery demeanor (I could be talking about how much I love ice cream on a sunny day, but I occasionally imagine myself doing it while standing in a dark alley wearing a trenchcoat to hide my face and smoking a cigarette, with a flask of whiskey hidden in my breast pocket).

So I took the quiz again, this time being less forgiving in my answers, and as predicted, I speak in a "US Standard English" dialect, with "American" as my native language. OKAY SO FINE I'M PREDICTABLE AND I WAS JUST BEING DIFFICULT BEFORE. Either way, it's a fun little quiz to take (if you can ignore the poor writing), so check it out when you have a chance.

*And yes, I know that this should be "dialect," not "accent" — right? Or should it? Okay, so maybe I don't know, but I think it's supposed to be dialect but most of us say accent anyway. THE POINT IS, I've been told that the indicator of a Connecticut dialect is a softening of "t"s in the middle of words, so that they sound like "d"s instead. You know, like the way we say "Conedikit."

Attack of the Literal Grammar Nazis

Today on "Idiotic Psychopaths Desperately Hoping For Public Relations Damage Control," following on the recent news of the NRA asking their members to maybe not show off their Open Carry rights by "casually" bringing assault rifles into restaurants even though it is technically legal in some places, my buddy Jake retweeted a cryptic link from Heeb Magazine, which in turn led me to this remarkable gem:

Yes, that is a tweet from the actual real-life official twitter of the American Nazi Party, in which they are being fascistic about grammar. They are literally Grammar Nazis.

Perhaps more disturbingly, I agree with them. Good grammar IS important. I share personal philosophical beliefs with the American Nazi Party. This realization was slightly disconcerting, of course, so I decided to peruse their Twitter feed to see what other kinds of causes they tweet in support of. Things like...animal rights...sustainable organic foods...they're vocally pro-life...and encourage a straight edge lifestyle (less surprising than it should be)...they're anti-corporation, and support local businesses....ooh, and they also love Moms! Er, wait a second...

Okay well then so ignoring that last little hashtag there, and the swastika, and the specification of "Aryan" moms above all, maybe Neo-Nazis aren't so bad? It seems they care about a lot of the same things I care about, or the things that people like me care about. That's kind of weird, right?

Oh. Well. Nevermind. We're now back to your regularly scheduled supremacist scumbags. Still, this is certainly a lesson in the banality of evil — that for all my touchy-feely artist progressive politics, I could (unfortunately) find some commonality with the American Nazi Party. And in a weird way, I kind of respect their attempts to police the grammar of their followers. Poor language skills often (though not always) betray a lack of education, and, well, they wouldn't want us got-dayum libaruls to think that modern-day Nazis are ignorant, now, would they?

Ahem. Right. Anyway.

Discovering this horrifying corner of Twitter reminded me of a happy little tune I used to sing with friends when I was just a wee young lad haunting American Legion Halls across Connecticut. It went a little something like this:

Disney Princesses Singing to the DEATH! (And Also Kevin Sorbo)

This is Zach (the dude, not the velociraptor. Or the girl). Zach was one of my roommates at Clarion last summer. If the stars align right, you will someday revere him as the author of the Turnbuckle Jack series. In the meantime, you probably know him as The Guy Who Wrote This:

He's got a new wacky web series coming out called Muzzled the Musical, which is about a magical not-Disney kingdom where singing the greatest power. Did I mention that the cast includes Kevin Sorbo (aka Hercules of "The Legendary Journeys" fame) and Juliet Landau (aka Drusilla from Buffy / Angel)

I feel like most people who know me or are interested in the things I do have interests that fit somewhere in the Venn Diagram overlap between "Hercules" and "Disney parody" and "Death by singing." If you're one of those people, Muzzled is raising money to complete its first season, and if the above video is any indication, that's something that you're going to want to be a part of. Check out their (insanely elaborate) Kickstarter video below:

Like most smart Kickstarters, this independent team is essentially using this campaign as a pre-order of sorts, with "rewards" like a soundtrack and a download of the complete first season. But I mean, c'mon: who doesn't want a musical TV show about badass singing princesses?

Muzzled: The Musical on Kickstarter

Net Neutrality Explained With Basic Stick Figures & Do You Finally Understand Why This Is So Serious?!

Did I mention that Comcast has already begun discussing plans to limit your monthly broadband consumption and thereby prevent you from binge-watching your favorite shows on NetFlix? 

If you're still having trouble extrapolating how this is an issue, consider how the narrative structure of television continued to evolve in response to our binge-watching habits. I'm not here to argue about whether or not we are in a "Golden Age of Television" right now, but the truth is, there are some pretty great shows out there right now. The expectations have been raised, as narratives have matured. Networks used to prefer sitcoms because they had a better chance of new viewers tuning in every week. But now, with fewer people relying on live broadcasts, it's changed the way that we interact with TV shows — with episode pacing, exposition, serialized story details, etc. — and those narrative structures will continue to change and evolve. 

That is, unless Comcast starts to restrict your bandwidth. Then you only get about 70 hours of streaming a month (to say nothing of the data limitations on the millions of other things you do online). If that happens, then not only are you less inclined to catch up on Game of Thrones, but the writing team on Game of Thrones is less inclined to create quality programming that really grabs you because it's more financially viable for them to create formulaic programming instead, thereby returning television to the "Boob Tube" status of audio-visual brainwashing instead of a compelling narrative medium*.

Perhaps more importantly, if Comcast begins to limit streaming, then my fiance won't be able to listen to Law & Order: SVU every night in order to get to sleep. "How does Law & Order: SVU help her get to sleep," you ask, "when it's a procedural show that mostly consists of horrible, horrible acts of rape and violence against women? Doesn't that give her nightmares or something?" Look, man, I don't understand it either. But if it works for her, then it works me, and then everyone wins, because everyone gets to sleep, so everyone's happy.

DO YOU HEAR THAT, FCC?! MAINTAIN NET NEUTRALITY SO THAT I CAN SLEEP IN PEACE.

*Some folks would argue that binge-watching is in fact the greatest accomplishment of television brainwashing, and that we're even worse off now than we were before. They're probably right, and I'm probably so brainwashed at this point that I'm blindly spouting propaganda in their favor. Oh well. 

#StopTheSlowLane

As far as I'm concerned, Net Neutrality is up there with Climate Change under "Hugely Important Issues That Are Actual Realities (and of which most sane and educated acknowledge the existence) and We Seriously Need To Act On Them Immediately Before Our Entire Society Goes Kablooey," especially now that cable lobbyists have strong-armed Congress into signing a new anti-Net Neutrality petition as of yesterday.

This is a weird catch-22, because I care a lot about Net Neutrality and want to do my part to make more people aware of it. So I tried installing one of these widgets from StopTheSlowLane.com onto my website here, which essentially replicate what would be the experience of using a website (like mine) if the proposed Internet laws were to be passed. The only problem was, it made the experience of using the site incredibly obnoxious — which is precisely why it's an important issue to be aware of, but also would probably deter the little bits of traffic I'm already barely getting on this site. See what I mean by a catch-22? Luckily, there's the GIF up there (linked to more information about Net Neutrality) which gives an impression of A World Without Net Neutrality without actually slowing the load time on my site. In the end, I don't have enough faithful readers (hi everyone!) that there'd be any real benefit to show for giving you all such a frustrating on my website.

Here's Cory Doctorow, one of my Clarion mentors, explaining it in a recent column for The Guardian:

Anyway. That's all for today. Fight the power, save the Internet.

"Always be drunk. That's it! The great imperative!"

It's National Poetry Month, so I wanted to share a little poem with all 3 of you loyal readers out there. I somehow had never encountered this poem until today, when someone posted it on the private Facebook group for my neighborhood pub, The Brendan Behan (yes, there's a private social group for pub regulars in addition to the standard FB page, and of course, a pub named for Brendan Behan would have a bunch of drunken literary fanatics). It's by a French writer named Charles Baudelaire, and while this translation might not be as remarkable for its use of language/imagery/poetic devices (I can't speak to it in French, although there is a picture of the original French below), I think it accurately sums up the artist's mind (by exploring and exploiting substance abuse and addiction, naturally, because art.)

And so, without further ado: "Get Drunk."

Always be drunk.
That's it!
The great imperative!
In order not to feel
Time's horrid fardel
bruise your shoulders,
grinding you into the earth,
Get drunk and stay that way.
On what?
On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever.
But get drunk.
And if you sometimes happen to wake up
on the porches of a palace,
in the green grass of a ditch,
in the dismal loneliness of your own room,
your drunkenness gone or disappearing,
ask the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock,
ask everything that flees,
everything that groans
or rolls
or sings,
everything that speaks,
ask what time it is;
and the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock
will answer you:
"Time to get drunk!
Don't be martyred slaves of Time,
Get drunk!
Stay drunk!
On wine, virtue, poetry, whatever!"

Meanwhile, if you want some more poetry, my good friend Brian McGackin has been sharing a new poem by a different poet for every day of the month over on his blog. And take it from me — his taste in poetry is at least as good if not better than his taste in friends.

Big Ups for BECOMING CUBA!

Last night was the official opening of Becoming Cuba at the Huntington, which is not only a fantastic show, but also just so happens to be directed by incredibly talented fiancé M. Bevin O'Gara (also I totally made her a website isn't that neat?).

If you're in Boston in the next month, it is absolutely worthy seeing (all personal bias aside). But if that's not enough to convince you, here are a few videos I put together about the show that could do the job just as well.

(And for the record: being paid at your job to edit video with your fiancé's face on a 36" screen is every bit as awkward as it sounds)

Upcoming Stuff & Events & Things (Nov. '13)

Hello, website! Long time, no update! I swear that one of these days I am going to actually train myself to just make brief updates here as they happen, instead of these info dumps. ANYWAY. I've got some stuff going on, because of course I do. It goes like this:

• Saturday, December 7, I'll be returning to MORTIFIED and performing some hilariously terrible songs that I wrote when I was 16. The performance will take place at Space 538 in Portland, ME; tickets are $8 in advance and $10 at the door. Do I know anyone in Maine that I can even embarrass myself in front of? I don't know, but I can tell you that it is definitely worth it to go to Maine to laugh at my terrible, terrible songs.
• I've also got 2 new short plays in the 4th Annual Boston One Minute Play Festival, January 4-6 at Boston Playwrights Theatre. They'll be directed by Megan Sandberg-Zakian and Meghan Mueller, which I'm sure makes my sister proud in some way.

Meanwhile, in addition to my normal duties at Five By Five Hundred, I have a review of Eric Smith's new book The Geek's Guide To Dating on Tor.com, and some coverage of SpeakEasy Stage Company's world premiere production of Make Up Your Mind, a brand new play by Kurt Vonnegut even though he's dead.

And then, ya know, the youge (like, the slang/shortened word for "usual," but spelled phonetically? Is that right?): Workin', writin', so on and so forth. Tonight at the Huntington we start performances for The Cocktail Hour by A.R. Gurney, which is directed by Maria Aitken, a favorite of ours at the theatre. Here's a little video I made for that:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa_ckErMzAY]

I also wrote some fun stuff about ghost stories at the theatre on the Huntington's blog which is still worth reading even though it's after Halloween, as well as two pieces of flash fiction in this "Quantum Shorts" competition that you can go read and vote for so I can win some monies: I Kill Dead People and Not Dead Yet (which was the basis for my story in Grayhaven Comics' Fifth Dimension anthology).

Wow that's a whole lot of dead stuff. In that case, I should end this on a happy note, which is that Maurissa Tancharoen both listened to and enjoyed my song "I'll Fight A Whedon For You"; unfortunately, her husband Jed was less than impressed.

So now I've pissed one Whedon and armwrestled another, which only leaves Zak for me still to cross. But overall I think that means that I've successfully become a Whedonverse villain?

Holy crap, I'll be 28 in 2 weeks.

Huntington Updates

We've got one week left of The Jungle Book (now officially our highest-grossing show of all time), and previews began tonight for The Power of Duff, a new play by Stephen Belber (and featuring, among others, Jennifer Westfeldt, writer of Kissing Jessica Stein and wife of Jon Hamm). Here's a little video I put together about it:

Here's another brief video I made for our Annual Fund ask, which hopefully gives a glimpse of the size and scope of our productions (and makes clear that even when shows are selling well, we still need money because, well, theatre this good don't come cheap, y'know?)

I'm also trying to up my blogging quotient for the company -- because hey, I enjoy writing sometimes, believe it or not -- and here's one of my latest posts, about our new young donor program "The Hunt."

Oh, and One More Thing...

Who's got two months and totally has picture (along with the rest of his talented Clarion 2013 cohort) in this month's issue of Locus Magazine, like some sort of real-life science fiction/fantasy author? THIS GUY.

That's me in the center, with the Red Sox shirt and sunglasses. No, not that guy with the sunglasses, that's Will Kaufman (though you should probably know him, too, because the dude writes the weirdest fucking stories that will absolutely break your heart and blow your mind and he's kind of brilliant and hilarious and also I love him dearly). I'm the handsome one next to him.

*This month's issue of Locus also includes features on two of my incredible Clarion mentors, Nalo Hopkinson & Cory Doctorow, as if my handsome mug weren't reason enough to check it out.