A Found Treasure From VidLit To You… Happy Holidays!

“Available on a name your price basis — but keep in mind that it’s a tough job keeping a memory for a nation addicted to amnesia.”

http://www.theclotheshavenoemperor.com/

THE NEW YORK TIMES

BEST SELLER,

BACK AFTER 20

YEARS OUT OF PRINT

SPOILER ALERT! This book is not for fans of Ronald Reagan.  It is not for Sarah Palin fans.  It is not for anyone who can currently call himself or herself a Republican without feeling even a twinge of embarrassment, because everything that is repellent about that party today – the proud ignorance, the shrieking hypocrisy, the utter disregard, no,contempt, for the truth – was given a glorious send-off during the Reagan ’80s.

The Clothes Have No Emperor, first published in 1989, is for anyone who lived through this surreal era not with a sense of pride in being an American – a pride the culture tried to make one feel guilty for not experiencing – but rather of humiliation as an American for being led by this vapid front man for the avaricious, the corrupt and the callous.

It is for anyone who was appalled to the marrow by the reality that no matter how many times Reagan forgot his lines and needed to be publicly cued, or referred to note cards containing scripts for even his most miniscule small talk, or trotted out those relentlessly recycled one-liners yet again (and received, yet again, the obligatory unearned laughs for them), the public and the media nonetheless conspired to pretend that an actor wasn’t playing the role of President of the United States.

It is most especially for anyone too young to have been politically conscious – or even alive – during those eight surreal years, and who might therefore be tempted to buy into the preposterous myth of Reagan’s greatness.

Out of print for two decades, we’re reissuing this collection of idiocy, offensiveness and absurdity to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Reagan’s birth by providing evidence to counter the vigorously propagated fable that Ronald Reagan, Godhead to the bitterly regressive party of greed and hate that the Republicans have become, was a Great President.

Read the first section here for free, then

Name Your Price to download the book.

VidLit 2.0

It’s a new year and the “well-told tales” specialist VidLit has some new stories to explore for the information and entertainment communities.  The 20-teens is the decade of communication, and we are looking for an exchange of ideas.  We don’t have all the answers – no one does, so don’t let them tell you they do.  No company is an island, and we want your input.  Tell us what you think.  We’re listening.

Our project goals for the next year are:

Help build brands. Building brands may sound trite, but it is the basic of the new entertainment economy.  We’ve been watching the impact of digital on the entertainment and information industries for over twenty years and our conclusion is that if you love writing books or making music or art, the only way to monetize it is to build your public brand.  Brand-building is not haphazard.  You need a plan and we’ve given it a lot of thought.  In the meantime, here’s an excellent brand-building compendium:

Create and publish enhanced books. No one can deny that the publishing industry has gone through mega-changes.  What we’re looking to do is help figure out the new book.  We’re not looking to interrupt the reading experience with needless video or sound effects.  We want to use technology to improve the experience.  For example:  The Year of Living Shamelessly, which uses in-text links to illustrate and annotate the text.   Later this month we hope to add social publishing to this book that will allow you – the reader – to add to it and share your own political observations.

We’re also exploring kinetic educational books.  Will more in-book entertainment help children learn?  We think so, but then again we still remember the Conjunction Junction from School House Rock.

Other categories of books we think can benefit from the VidLit touch include: humor, short stories, poetry, first person essays, and certain non-fiction.  But we want your ideas.

The big project (code name). We have had this idea since 1984 and its time has come.  It’s a global project.  It’s a vantage point to look at history and try to predict (or dream up) the future.  It’s a way of putting tools into the hands of global citizens within a frame.  More on this soon.

So, let’s start a conversation, here or on Facebook or Twitter.

LieSpotting: It starts with the book LieSpotting, which introduces everyday people to deception detection techniques well known in law enforcement and in the intelligence world. If you master these ten tips, you’ll know when it’s time to ask harder questions and you’ll know if Sarah Palin is telling the truth, the next time she tweets “U Lie” to Rahm.

Read The Post

Adding to our ever-growing list of services, VidLit now offers dynamic websites for Authors, Entrepreneurs, Businesses, Artists, Musicians, Non-Profits and more.

VidLit has partnered with KR Media & Designs to create what we like to call ” teach a man to fish” websites. We want our clients to be able to update and maintain their sites with as little knowledge of coding as possible. Many of our websites are built on a CMS platform like WordPress, making updating easy for clients. We also customize a Mobile-friendly theme for  each site built on a WordPress platform.

Recent examples include BoozeNews.net,  LiveTalks.org and our own VidLit.com

If you are interested in an efficient, easy to maintain, web user friendly and Mobile friendly website, give us a call!

The State of Online Video

69% of internet users watch or download video online; 14% have posted videos.

http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2010/PIP-The-State-of-Online-Video.pdf

The Voice of McDonald’s team has won a 2010 Silver Quill Award of Excellence from the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC)!

The Silver Quill is a regional award and is in addition to the Bronze Quill Award of Excellence we were recently awarded at the Chicago chapter level. The Pacific Plains Region, one of only three IABC regions in the US, includes 20 member chapters in 19 states from Wisconsin to Hawaii, from Arizona to North Dakota. A panel of senior IABC members judged the 101 entries received. One judge noted, “Creative campaign and a very solid plan to ensure a comprehensive worldwide program. Highlights one of the many reasons McDonald’s is so successful from the inside out.”

By  SONYA SORICH

ledger-enquirer.com/features/sto…

Call it the moment you handed your relationship a “do not resuscitate” order.

The decision is spurred by a variety of factors, ranging from fundamental life differences to conflicting opinions about the “Twilight” series.

“This will never work.”

Each story focuses on the moment the writer realized her significant other would get the “ex” label.

Some of the accounts draw on serious forces like commitment issues and infidelity.

But just as many are rooted in the seemingly insignificant gestures that remind us of incompatibility.

Take “Video Killed the Love Story,” Aimee Cirucci’s essay about a video gamer boyfriend who got her a TV for Christmas, even though she didn’t have cable.

When he got her an assortment of video games for her birthday, she knew she’d reached the final straw.

“I didn’t need high definition to see that we were both in love with the same person, and it wasn’t me,” Cirucci notes.

Then, there’s writer Judith Dewey, who was only able to see her relationship’s flaws after her boyfriend groomed his unibrow.

In “The Unibrow Breakup,” she writes, “… Paul found his happiness in an index-finger-width of wax and, forgive the pun, gave me a smooth exit plan to New York and my future.”

Does the book boast deep relationship lessons? Maybe not.

But at the very least, readers will take away an assurance that bad judgment often makes for the best writing inspiration.

Fans of “What Was I Thinking?” might also like these rejection-inspired collections:

“Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me” (edited by Ben Karlin)

The essays, penned by recognizable names like Stephen Colbert and Nick Hornby, highlight life lessons that often accompany romantic rejection.

“Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak: by Writers Famous and Obscure” (edited by SMITH Magazine)

Sometimes, love’s complex universe can actually be summarized very succinctly.

Not impressed? Try explaining your romantic history in six words.

“Rejected: Tales of the Failed, Dumped and Canceled” (edited by Jon Friedman)

Talk about turning lemons into lemonade. You’ll laugh as writers and comedians detail their brushes with the world of “thanks, but no thanks.”

Sonya Sorich, feature writer, can be reached at 706-571-8516.

By Borys Kit

http://ca.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idCATRE53G0RA20090417

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – Actresses Leslie Mann and Elizabeth Banks will explore the comic side of bad relationships in “What Was I Thinking?,” a movie based on the nonfiction book of the same name.

New Line has picked up the project.

In the book, Barbara Davilman and Liz Dubelman compiled 58 bad-boyfriend stories.

Producer Lynda Obst enlisted Susanna Fogel and Joni Lefkowitz, who wrote the Sarah Jessica Parker HBO pilot “The Washingtonienne,” to come up with a movie story.

The film will revolve around a woman who gets dumped during her engagement party. Her friends spring into action and whisk her away on a ski trip for healing and hedonism. Threading through their adventures on the trip are four flashbacks dealing in “worst ex-boyfriend” tales.

“It’s a story of how women help each other,” said Obst. “And we do that by telling stories.” Obst also described the project as “a girls’ Apatow movie,” referring to filmmaker Judd Apatow’s signature male-centric comedy style.

Mann (who happens to be married to Apatow) would play a woman who dates a lot but never seems to have serious relationships, while Banks is a woman on the rebound. Two other lead female parts have yet to be cast.

Mann co-stars in the Zac Efron-toplined “17 Again.” After that, she appears in Apatow’s “Funny People,” as well as Robert Rodriguez’s “Short” and “I Love You Phillip Morris,” starring Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor.

Banks recently starred in the comedies “Zack and Miri Make a Porno” and “Role Models,” as well as the horror movie “The Uninvited.”

(Editing by Sheri Linden at Reuters)

by Claire Suddath

Barbara Davilman and Liz Dubelman have written a book — with the help of 54 other women. In What Was I Thinking: 58 Bad Boyfriend Stories they write of the men they have dated, the men they have dumped, the men they should have dumped and the men they wish they had never met. There’s the woman whose porn-star boyfriend dumps her for being too promiscuous, the college girl who dates a fanatical Barbie fan, the woman who overhears her date calling her fat and dozens of other guys who just weren’t good enough. Davilman and Dubelman talk to TIME about what happens when the sexes don’t get along. (See the latest dating fads.)

How can women avoid dating bad boyfriends?
Davilman: My belief is that people tell you who they are in the first five minutes. Most people have expectations and needs and an idea of how they want their life to be, and they will only hear what they want to hear to make someone else fit into their idea. Sometimes you go through this entire relationship only to find out that you should have paid attention to the person they told you they were in the first place. You ignored it.

You write that you found some of the book’s many contributors through Craigslist ads. Did that really work?
Dubelman: Some of them came that way. There are stories still coming in. We have a website that we put them on. Some of the stories even turned into videos on Slate.

Did you think of taking submissions from guys?
Dubelman: We originally tried to make it more mixed, but all the men’s stories that came in were the same: “She was so hot, but she was crazy.” There wasn’t a whole lot of depth to that.
Davilman: Those were their submissions. They were like, “Here is what was wrong with her: this and this and this and this.” And you get to the end and there’s still no acceptance of responsibility or any self-awareness.

Yikes. That doesn’t speak so well for men.
Dubelman: But then after they read this book, we got more stories that were a little more shaded, had more color. They realized what the stories should be about. I think they get it now. (See pictures of the 20th century’s greatest romances.)

But the men in your book didn’t come off as being that awful.
Dubelman: They’re not awful!
Davilman: They’re not!
Dubelman: We love men!
Davilman: They just weren’t right for those women, that’s all. I’m really glad the book didn’t devolve into male-bashing. It’s really about the women and the things they didn’t see.
Dubelman: Or saw and ignored.
Davilman: Or couldn’t see.

Have you gotten feedback from any of the men who were written about?
Dubelman: I got a lot of Facebook messages from old boyfriends who said, “The book’s great — I’m not that guy, am I?”
Davilman: Liz got an e-mail from a guy I wrote about in the book. He asked to get in contact with me. And I said yes because we didn’t end on terrible terms.
Dubelman: I’m not 100% sure he knew he was the guy in the book.
Davilman: He did not know! So I wrote him back and I said, “Did you recognize that story? Do you remember that moment that I described?” (See the top 10 nonfiction books of 2008.)

So you told him?
Davilman: Yes, and I have yet to hear back from him. But it wasn’t a bad story! He doesn’t look bad in it. We just didn’t fit.

Why do the women settle for these men if they know they aren’t the right fit?
Davilman: That’s the thing — I don’t know. You don’t walk into a store and see a broken toaster and go, “Aw, well, when I get it home, it will start working.” You don’t go, “Oh, that dress — the sleeve is falling off. But I can fix it at home.” No, you want a dress that fits. You want a toaster that works. But women — and I guess men too — are so willing to take the broken one. (Watch a video about dating advice for women.)

The authors in this collection range in age from 19 to almost 70. Did you notice any generational difference between the stories told by young women and those who were older?
Dubelman: Younger women were more explicit about sex. That’s really the only thing. They wrote about sex more openly and they used more explicit language. But the sentiments were all the same.

Did you ever get any stories in which you felt the woman was at fault?
Dubelman: Oh, sure. And the women are so great at confessing their own faults. There’s a story in the book where the woman has sex in a bar bathroom. She absolutely knew that this was a crazy idea, the bathroom was dirty, it was not a nice place, she didn’t even really want to do it. It was a horrible idea — and gross — but she’s willing to confess that she did it. So you don’t blame her for it, ’cause she says, “O.K., I made a mistake.” So yes, women are at fault as much as men are at fault, but in this particular book — and the next one will be different — the women were the ones willing to say, “You know what? I made a terrible mistake.”

Will there be a second book?
Dubelman: We hope so. We want to do a book from the man’s perspective. And we want to get some same-sex couples.

Do you think that men feel the same way about relationships as women?
Davilman: That’s what we want to find out!

Do you have your own relationship tale? Davilman and Dubelman are still accepting stories about bad boyfriends and girlfriends on their website.

See the top 10 celebrity breakups.

Read a dating Q&A with Steve Harvey.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1881164,00.html#ixzz0sVSFc2BG

by Dwight Garner

papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008…

Paul Slansky’s most recent book is “Idiots, Hypocrites, Demagogues, and More Idiots: Not-So-Great Moments in Modern American Politics.”

What are you working on?

At the moment I’m on a tight deadline to finish a quiz book about political sex scandals, inspired by a quiz I did in The New Yorker. I’ve been researching about a hundred of them and it’s an enormous amount of work, because for each one I’ll start with Wikipedia and within minutes I’ll be on Nexis scrolling a list of three hundred contemporaneous stories, which is where all the really sweet details can be found.

It’s an interesting challenge because they have to be very carefully constructed. I approach all but the most infamous of them with the notion that most readers are going to be unfamiliar with the details, if not with the scandal itself. For every Gary Hart or Larry Craig or Bob Packwood there are a dozen Ken Calverts and Don Sherwoods and Vito Fossellas. So I have to make each one a story in quiz form, unfolding question by question.

As you would expect, the most satisfying ones are those that bring down our most self-righteous moral scolds, who suddenly find themselves in the very gutter they’ve been so smugly looking down on. For schadenfreude aficionados, there was no better time than the autumn of 1998, when no less than six of the most rabid proponents of Clinton’s impeachment had their own affairs and illegitimate kids and lickings of whipped cream off the chests of large-breasted women exposed. If I could see any headline I wanted in the paper tomorrow morning, it would obviously be “Bush and Cheney to Stand Trial for War Crimes at the Hague,” but close behind it would be one reporting a sex scandal involving Joe Lieberman.

How much time – if any – do you spend on the Web? Is it a blessing or a distraction?

I’m on a lot. Not that it’s time wasted, because for most of the things I write, all the material I need is on the Internet. But often I find that I have to stay up until 3 a.m. to get my actual writing done because I’ve spent the whole day on the Web.

I met my wife Liz Dubelman (the founder of VidLit, which produced most of the earliest book trailers for the Web) in January 1994. She was already paying the rent from Web work, while I was in my Hollywood apartment with an old Compaq 286 DOS computer and no Internet connection. I couldn’t imagine how she could prefer to read her news on a screen rather than in a newspaper. I knew I’d never be like that.

And now, of course, I get the whole world on that screen and am thrilled to be able to do so. Everything is there. I can remember a time when I’d have tormented myself if I’d failed to capture on videotape an exquisite moment like McCain’s eight seconds of silence as he scrambled around in his head searching for an answer to a question containing the words birth control and Viagra. Now I just go right to YouTube and watch it. The Web is the ultimate in instant gratification, and now with the iPhone you never have to be without it, you can carry the world in your pocket. And how do these “chips” that are too small to even see do all these incomprehensible things at warp speed? I have no concept whatsoever of how it works or even exists.

I used to have Google News as my home page but switched to the Huffington Post (for which I write occasionally, as I do twice a week for its humor site23/6) because I trust its editors to keep me updated about everything I’m interested in. I’ve got Amazon, Drudge, eBay, the Onion, Salon, Slate and YouTube on my Google toolbar, and among my thousands of bookmarked favorites are dozens of other sites that I check in with at least once a day. I always have AOL open, because checking to see whose e-mail has just thunked into my box is always a welcome distraction, and I get a running feed from Facebook with all of my friends’ status updates, because they are often among the funniest things I read on any given day. (“Danny in no way meant to imply that he wanted a large piece of space junk to land on Hillary when he said, ‘I hope a large piece of space junk lands on Hillary.’” “Liz is wondering if the enemy of her enemy’s enemy is her friend or has it all just gone too far?” “Nell believes that the growth removed from John McCain’s face is actually a polyp from Karl Rove’s colon.”) As for blogs, there are so many that it would be silly for me to try to list them here. If anyone is interested email me at: paulslansky@gmail.com

The Web is the ultimate blessing – a unified brain, with billions of people’s collective information (and, less happily, disinformation) available to anyone who knows how to look for it. And so, it’s also the ultimate distraction.

Whose books are generally shelved around yours in bookstores? How does it feel to be sitting between them?

Depending on the depth of stock, I might find David Sedaris, Harry Shearer or The Simpsons to my left and Jon Stewart, James Thurber or Calvin Trillin to my right, all of whom I’m happy to be nestled between. At the same time, there’s something frustrating about always being relegated to the humor section. My books are always about politics or current events, but they’re never shelved in those sections. It seems that no matter how serious the subject actually is, if you emphasize the absurd aspects of it, it’s called “humor.” My first book, “The Clothes Have No Emperor,” was a daily chronology of the Reagan era that I described as “history with a bad attitude.” Surely there were thousands of political junkies who would have bought it if they’d known it existed, but unless they were looking for Calvin and Hobbes or Garfield, there’s no way they would have ever stumbled upon it.

But then, how much longer are we even going to have bookstores?