4 days ago
04 January 2012
"Portlandia" shows how not to handsell
I've been catching up on the IFC hipster-mocking sketch show "Portlandia" before the second season premieres on Friday. I haven't found their feminist bookstore skits set at the fictional "Women and Women First" to be the best of Armisen, Brownstein et al's material -- and sometimes I get the creeping feeling that people enjoy them because there's something inherently funny about a feminist bookstore, not because of the Actual Jokes -- but this one provides a solid example of how not to make a customer for life.
A recent article about the show in the New Yorker mentioned that Brownstein's long-lost memoir THE SOUND OF WHERE YOU ARE will be published (Ecco/ HarperCollins) in 2013.
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For the record, I dated an Ecco editor from 2007-2009. Brownstein was shopping her memoir around at least as early as 2008, and, after G______ mentioned to me that Ecco was considering publishing her memoir, and asked me, because Ecco did not really have a music expert, what I thought. I told her that I thought that she was one of the most important people in indie rock and, added bonus, already established as a writer, with her blog Monitor Mix. Apparently G____ lobbied for it, but was unable to persuade her superiors. My guess is that Ecco reconsidered once Portlandia caught on, and she probably has a frw more book-worthy stories to tell now that she did three years ago, but had they bought her book in 2008, they could have paid far less for it, and then seen a spike in sales when the show came out.
On the bright side, the five years will almost definitely be worth the wait.
Also:
"She blogged for NPR. She loved the blogging, but the quiet writing life didn’t suit her. 'That was the most depressed I’ve ever been,' Brownstein says of her blogging days. 'I really don’t know what to do when my life is not chaotic. Sitting alone in my house with my dog, trying to think of smart things to write about music?'"
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