Over the last 12 months I’ve been working withSaul Williams on an anthology of both well-known spoken word poets and some young and previously unpublished writers as well. The collection we have assembled, CHORUS will be available Sept. 4th 2012 from MTV books. As Saul has said, “My goal is to create an important book that connects varied voices into a cohesive work of art that stands out as a generational testament of our times.”I’m honored and grateful to be a part of this project and to have had the chance to collaborate with Saul and our assistant editor Aja Monet Bacquie. 

You may remember Saul from the Cannes hit SLAM, or may have seen him on “Girlfriends,” or in the films K-PAX or LACKAWANNA BLUES. Saul and I have a similar point of view as actors who write, or writers who act. For me the process is equally satisfying in each craft. I am a vessel in either case, for the creativity that comes through my voice, my body, and my pen. And in CHORUS, having had the opportunity to help usher in a new generation of poets, I have found new joy in the arduous role of editor.

Saul’s previous books, “said the shotgun to the head” and “The Dead Emcee Scrolls” have burned his name into the annals of spoken word literature. A true renaissance man, Saul has put out two albums and has performed with with progressive hip-hop acts like KRS-One and The Roots and punk rockers Rage Against The Machine. He brought his own band all the way from Paris to the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles recently for a unique blowout show.  If you missed this one, be sure to catch him next time around, or, if you can’t wait, check out some clips at his website! 

Why I Need Two Programs | The Fix

Why I Need Two Programs | The Fix

Goodbye (for now)

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New post!

http://www.dufflynsblog.com/2011/03/20/better/

The Gospel According to Jewal Dean

The Gospel According to Jewal Dean

Is Oscar Cursed?

http://www.dufflynsblog.com/2011/02/06/is-oscar-cursed/

REVENGE OF THE NERDS: Is Aaron Sorkin the Sexiest Man Alive?

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The first computer I remember is two miles long. Slate grey metal above and below, to my left and to my right. Every step an echo. I look back at the open door leading to the foothills. Another step and then a sound like the water heater in our old apartments. I stand transfixed before a hallway without end. Over my shoulder black components click and pulse, stacked one atop the next.

“How far does it go?” I ask.

“Too far.” Russell says. This is my father’s friend whom we have come to visit and he does not want me running off. “Stay where I can see you,” he says.

Even now, I wonder if that tunnel of light so many people say they’ve seen in near-death experiences looks anything like the inside of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

As it turns out SLAC is not really a computer, but a multipurpose laboratory for the study of things like antimatter and photons and galaxies and other far-out stuff I do not now nor will I ever even partly understand. But there were plenty of computers in my future. My hometown, Palo Alto, is also the birthplace of Apple, IBM, and now Facebook.

The first boy on our block to have a computer was a studios sort my friend and I christened “Lowly Worm.” We were not impressed. We were much more concerned with hair, ours and his. We were thirteen and we were very short sighted.

It would be another 8 years before I had one of my own: a laptop PC on which I typed out my college entrance essays and then paper after paper on 19th Century novels and French Literature and poem after poem after poem. Sadly, an alarming number of these poems were about some boy or other and I in my haste failed to note what poem went with which boy.

Later I bought a desktop after my third car accident and began writing my first memoir. That was fifteen years ago. I am still writing my first memoir. But it isn’t the desktop’s fault. As it turns out, writing of that sort is best done by hand. By then the Internet had come along and again I was fascinated by the tunnel of light before me; endless, enchanting and mutating.

As I watched THE SOCIAL NETWORK I couldn’t help but squeal (out loud, in the theatre) when I saw the Eichler that the young entrepreneurs shack up in while creating the “monolith” that sucks away so much of my time these days. And now, as I sit typing this blog post on my new MacBook Air I’m thrilled to see Aaron Sorkin accept a well-deserved Golden Globe for best screenplay. Smart Girls have more fun, he says. His daughter is watching. And all I can think is wow, great hair.

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