Culture Surfing

Alice Hoffman: the definition of grumpypants

Get this: apparently, being a New York Times-bestselling author of only occasionally tropey chicklit (but, to be fair, sometimes really awesome fantastical lit-fic) means that you get to act like an utter jerk on the interwebs!

When Boston Globe critic Roberta Silman dared to say things about Alice Hoffman’s new book, The Story Sisters, such as “this new novel lacks the spark of the earlier work” or “Admittedly, there are some wonderful passages as the book winds to a close” or other, um, burns and, uh, digs?, on par with those, Hoffman did what any self-respecting author angry at her book’s review would do: She turned to Twitter to extract vengeance on the reviewer.

In a series of 20-some-odd tweets, covered in all their stand-alone glory on Gawker, Hoffman became more and more unhinged, finally posting personal contact info for the reviewer at the Globe, and encouraging folks to contact said reviewer to tell her what they “think of snarky critics.”

Snarky critics, it must be said, who include statements in their reviews such as …”one of my favorite books is her “Illumination Night,’’ which amply displays her gifts of precise prose and the ability to create sympathetic characters.”

Continue reading “Hoff in a Huff” »

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Is any explanation needed for the “Nicer Film Titles” meme on Twitter, or can you just figure it out from the hashtag? On Wednesday, Twitterers went wild coming up with cutesy names for famous films, and though enthusiasm seems to have waned a bit, it’s still going strong. I came up with a few:

Kill Bill… With Kindness!
Batman: The Park Knight
Star Wars: The Empire Strives To Improve Living Conditions
A Cozy Country for Old Men
Cloverfield (With an Actual Field of Clovers)
You Only Live Thrice
Softer, Pussycat! Purr! Purr!
I Spit and Polish Your Grave
Start The World: I Want to Get On
Bring Me the Gift Registry of Alfredo Garcia

I’m not sure I can come up with a nice title for Shriek of the Mutiliated, though.

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SMOKE ’EM IF YOU GOT ’EM: Businessmen in Food, Inc.

Got beef with Robert Kenner’s new film Food, Inc.? Maybe you just have questions or comments about the “harrowing documentary that serves up a kind of sampler’s platter of the recent culinary exposé trend,” according to CL film critic Curt Holman. Well, you’ll get your chance to ask the man behind the movie tomorrow at 1 p.m. via a live Twitter chat. Here’s how it works:

At 10am PST this Friday (June 19th) login to twitter and put #foodinc in the search bar and hit enter. You are now following the conversation! If you have a question, be sure to include the #foodinc tag. This way the question will stay on this thread. We hope for a large turnout so please be patient while we try to answer as many questions as possible.

(Photo courtesy Magnolia Pictures)

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Last Friday, I mulled over some discussions I’d heard at GATHER Atlanta about the various ways in which local artists should and could communicate with each other to cross-promote events, form a larger support system, and generally raise the profile of Atlanta’s artistic community. There was a general sense that people wanted a central place to go to find out about arts events in Atlanta. Why not create a hashtag on Twitter that folks can mark their updates with? Why not indeed. So we created #atlarts.

Know about an awesome event? On your way to or already at said awesome event? Tweet it and tag it #atlarts. The idea is to have an of-the-moment resource for artists and art lovers that says what, when, and where arts events are happening. All updates tagged #atlarts will run through a feed in the righthand column of our A&E page. And remember, you can also follow both Curt Holman and I on Twitter. Now get to it!

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COME TOGETHER: The 'Cartoon Madness' opening at Alcove Gallery

When I arrived at Eyedrum last Saturday evening for the GATHER Atlanta event, the panel discussion on the arts in Atlanta had just paused for a brief intermission. It resumed a few minutes later with a discussion about the various ways in which local artists should and could communicate with each other to cross-promote events, form a larger support system, and generally raise the profile of Atlanta’s artistic community.

Comments were made about creating a comprehensive arts calendar for the city, taking advantage of Twitter’s immediacy to stay informed about Atlanta arts events, and the role of government as a cheerleader/backer for the art community. Having served as the Events Editor for Creative Loafing and now as the A&E Editor for the alt weekly, the first of these three points — creating a comprehensive arts calendar for the city — left me somewhat befuddled. Do folks not know about our vast online events database? Sure, the print listings have taken a beating in the past year but we have more than 4,200 events currently listed online, a huge portion of which are arts specific. So I guess what I’d like to know is, how have y’all’s needs changed as technology and local arts scenes have evolved? And how can we (CL) better serve them?

In response to point No. 2 involving Twitter (and to some extent the first point as well), we’re creating a Twitter hashtag and corresponding live feed on our A&E page set to go live Monday. The idea is to create an of-the-moment resource for artists and art lovers that says what, when, and where arts events are happening. Check back in after the weekend for details.

Continue reading “What to do, where to go, and when to do it” »

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We websitin’. We bloggin’. We FaceBookin’. And now we Twitterin’. Follow us — DebsMichaud and Curt_Holman — for mini insights from movie screenings, art openings, theater premieres and maybe an update or two on our pets.

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Forget the Kindle vs. paper books debate — apparently the days of actually “writing” a “book” are slowly coming to an end. You know, craft, art, substance(s), the actual minutia that all go into making a book a piece of work — it’s all becoming as outdated as banks crash, attention spans diminish, and robots begin serving us dinner in capsule form (OK, that last one won’t happen ’til 2011). In this new cultural landscape, we will need leaders, like the Jonas Brothers, to rise up and, with a firm hand, guide us to new levels of social media interactivity. Fortunately David Pogue, New York Times columnist and author of many books that teach your grandmother how to check e-mail on her eMac, is here to save us via his forthcoming The World According To Twitter.

From the blog of Pogue (David Pogue, not the Pogues the band, because you know very well that I’d heap high praise on anything penned by Shane MacGowan):

It all started with a live demo of Twitter. During a talk, I was trying to demonstrate the real-time nature of Twitter. On stage, I typed: “Anyone got a pun that can fit in 140 characters?” Your responses started flowing within 10 seconds….

Wait, wait, dear Culture Surfer reader, don’t check out yet, it gets better (in the way that “better” means “worse”):

Next, I posted a picture of a squirrel in my yard, and asked for captions. You turned out to be the wittiest caption writers ever!

(Oh, sorry, I added that exclamation point up there. It just needed it, didn’t it?)

That was it. I knew my mission in life: to compile and edit a whole book of (Twitter) responses, written by my 200,000 followers.

(As you can see, that is not actually the real cover of David Pogue’s book that you wrote for him)

In today’s collapsing publishing landscape this book screams both timely and vital. I’ll be greatly looking forward to Pogue’s well-thought-out treatise on Friendster soon!

No, really, all snark aside, this sort of attempt at an of-the-minute cash-grab really irks me. While publishers, authors and other various incidental folk in the book business are actually working, diligently and full of heart, to discover what it’s going to take to turn the sinking ship of books around, Pogue’s trying to ramp up excitement for 200 pages of @SomeGuy tweeting “hey I really like dogs.”

And speaking of @someguy — if you, lucky you, end up being selected to be a part of Pogue’s scam project, you certainly get compensated, right?

Of course you do. Per Pogue himself, he’ll send you “a free copy of the book, inscribed to you personally.”

Oh, wow, lucky day!

Continue reading “@heywritemybookforme” »

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