Jeffrey McManus » Art

Shoe Toss Etch-a-Sketch

jeffrey — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 20:47:34 +0000

shoe
Originally uploaded by etchasketchist

The Etch-a-Sketchist is an artist who uses Etch-a-Sketch as a medium. Here’s a recent work that depicts the incident during Bush’s last press conference in Iraq in which one of the journalists in the audience threw his shoes at him.

Shoe Toss Etch-a-Sketch is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

Novel Futures

jeffrey — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 21:35:27 +0000

Link: I am offering 60% of the U.S. royalties of my second novel to “the public”

Shareholders will receive checks (and copies of the royalty statement from my publisher) in the mail every 6 months after the book’s publication (probably Fall, 2009 or Spring 2010). Shares can be resold at any price at any time, I will facilitate trading and promote it on my blog if that is what a shareholder wants. I accept Paypal.

I think this is a terrific idea but I fear the novelist (Tao Lin) won’t get the outcome he expects because of the execution. Selling 6 shares at $2,000 each locks out a significant portion of the market; why not sell 60 shares at $200 each or 600 shares at $20 each? (If the answer is “bookkeeping” then it would seem as if there’s an opportunity here for a technology entrepreneur, cough cough, to create an online marketplace to facilitate this kind of transaction.) In general it would seem like having an honest broker (not the content creator, and not the publisher) to manage these kinds of investments would be better all around; one of the things that would facilitate is the secondary market (investors reselling their shares to other investors) that the author alludes to in his post.

I also wonder if a more general-purpose media futures marketplace would facilitate the creation of other kinds of media. I know that The Guild funded itself this way, are there others?

Novel Futures is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

We Jam Econo

jeffrey — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 15:02:17 +0000

Excellent, there’s a screening of the Minutemen documentary tonight in SF. I’m going to try to make the 9PM showing.

Update: I was able to catch this and it was really good. If you like the Minutemen’s music you’ll probably like it too, although it’s less of a documentatary and more of a collection of vintage live clips with some very brief interviews, and very light on facts and information and a little too long on fanboy worship of the band. So if you’re not familiar with them, you might be a little lost. I feel a special connection with the band because I lived in San Pedro for a little while in high school (long story) and I interviewed Mike Watt briefly in college. I felt really lucky to have met him; it was one of the high points of my brief journalism career.

We Jam Econo is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.

Le Cirque!

jeffrey — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 14:08:57 +0000

I’m chattering with excitement because we’re taking in Corteo on Saturday. We bought the spendy VIP tickets as soon as they went on sale back in June — that’s how much of a Cirque freak I am. (If you’re really really into them, I think the VIP tickets are worth it, particularly since they only come around every other year.)

I’ve seen most of their touring shows and I’ve been to the permanent venue in Orlando to see La Nouba (which was my favorite of the shows I’ve seen, mainly because of the acrobatics and the music). I have yet to see the Vegas shows, though — need to make that happen sometime when family stuff permits.

They’ll be moving down to San Jose starting Jan. 19 so my south bay homies can check ‘em out.

Le Cirque! is a post by Jeffrey McManus of Platform Associates. Follow Jeffrey on Twitter.