HERE’S A CONFESSION FOR YOU. Right now I feel like that party-pooper guy at the kegger. The one who blurts out that binge drinking can lead to stroke and sudden cardiac arrest. I don’t want to seem like that guy. But I feel like it sometimes when I come across an orgy of grammatical errors and bad…
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THAT MONTH-LONG stay this summer at an artist residency in Portobelo, Panama left quite an impression on my wife. So this weekend when we rode our bikes past a wooded area in Oak Cliff and speculated about what was rustling the trees a few yards away, I wasn’t surprised by what she said. “Monkeys. Whenever we heard rustling…
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QUITE SOME TIME back I made it my personal modus operandi to shirk, or at least shrink back from, technology. But this year I finally popped the red pill. For one thing I am currently committed to creating whatever I’m going to create by way of these plastic chiclets now clicking beneath my fingers (augmented,…
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“WONDERLAND” is a gift. But not to those artists among us who already make our way in a commercial art world. Rather this colorfully wrapped package is tagged for young creatives, filmmakers, musicians, writers, et al, just coming on the scene. Especially the ones fresh out of art school, eagerly scanning the horizon for the…
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OKAY, I ADMIT IT. I’m like a dog that won’t let go of a bone. Lately I’ve been going on about the advantages of writing from a more personal perspective. It all began a couple weeks back, when I wrote a post extolling the benefits of bios and online profiles written in first person, as…
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DURING THE MONTHS immediately following 9/11, I began as a freelancer to write catalog copy for a tiny startup called Wisteria. After thirty years in the business, I’d never come face to face with a brand quite like it. Admittedly, the timing was coincidental. One event had nothing to do with the other, except in terms of…
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WRITING IS SORTA like dating. Not that I’m dating. I’m a happily married man. But I remember dating, and one of the lessons I learned early on is that, while there were women who would never, ever be interested in me, this was good news not bad, and no reflection on either of us. But once…
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YEARS AGO, Les Kerr and I were talking to a photographer friend when he brought up a conversation he’d had with a prospective client from a packaged foods company. It’s a conversation that Les and I have inducted into our Hall of Fame of Funny Things We’ve Heard People Say. The prospect wanted to make…
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I had no sooner published my previous post (Getting To Know You) about first-person vs third-person descriptions in online profiles, when I remembered a different path some take. Rather than be forced to choose between first-person voice (“I invented the Internet.”) and third-person (“Jim invented the Internet.”), they will reject both, dispensing with pronouns and…
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Remember that episodic Seinfeld character named Jimmy? The guy who only referred to himself in the third-person? He’d say to Elaine, “Ya know, Jimmy is pretty sweet on you,” or to Kramer, “Jimmy might have a compound fracture.” Well, Jimmy’s way of speaking is referred to as Illeism. And it can really get annoying. Now…
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