Our New Home in Takoma Park, Maryland

The movers brought all our stuff to our new house on Thursday and, after eight years in nearby Silver Spring, our address is now in the lovely, tree-filled Forest Park neighborhood of Takoma Park.

We have a nice fenced-in front yard and an amazing screened-in back porch and tasteful wooden playground in the back yard. There is a finished basement and a sun room that can serve as Jackson's additional play areas. There are really no negatives, except for leaving all our friends at Eastern Village Cohousing. But we have a good number of friends in our new neighborhood already and the neighbors have been uniformly nice in our brief meetings with them so far.

We're off to the Sunday Farmers Market (pictured above), a hallmark of life in the Republic of Takoma Park, which Wikipedia calls "the Berkeley of the East." Like our former home, Takoma Park borders on DC, and it is novel and kind of nice that the city has a "no nukes" policy, has very stringent tree-preservation guidelines, and is about as progressive as possible in every way.

More on all this later, as well as photos when we get a little more unpacked.

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How Does Social Media Fit in to Traditional Public Relations?

I spoke on a really impressive panel on how social media is reshaping the world of public-relations this morning at the Mid-America Marketing Summit at USA Today's headquarters. 

Public Relations in a Social World (left to right)- Kevin Dando, Director, Digital Marketing & Communications, PBS
- Paul Mackie, Director of Communications, Mobility Lab
- Mike Smith, CEO, MSBD
- Elizabeth Shea, President and CEO, SpeakerBox
- Moderator: Jeff Davis, Partner, Sawmill Marketing Public Relations

It was an honor to be asked to speak on a panel with the likes of PBS's digital marketing director and other pros.

My main points were:

• That PR work is more transparent than ever, especially with social media
• Be great at social media, don't simply hand it over to an intern because it's simply too crucial to your full suite of strategic communications
• One of the most important traits of a consistently great PR person is the ability to be friendly, helpful, and a person who gets great stories out of himself and clients
• The ability to build an army of collaborators to help you spread your messages (on both social media and in person)
• Make your issues relevant, no matter how hard your organization may push back on that
• Practice and hone your storytelling and writing by having your own blog (on whatever topic you like)

Conference sponsor Speakerbox also covers our panel nicely here.

God of Carnage Throws Our Manners Out the Window

My buddy Tim Getman stepped into one of his biggest roles yet with the excellent God of Carnage, which just wrapped up a very successful run at the Everyman Theater in Baltimore.

Yasmina Reza wrote the play in French and it's been translated to English and performed all over the country. Its popularity makes sense. The story takes the excruciating plot of two couples getting together to discuss their sons' playground fight. We know this can't possibly go as well as the well-intentioned parents think it will. We're just lucky the play only lasts about 75 minutes because the couples would have definitely killed each other if it went any longer.

The pacing of the Baltimore production was top notch, and the four stars had me laughing steadily throughout. The story is also very compelling, as each person shows the ugly side of how we all think we're right most of the time when, in fact, who's to say who's right.

I'm curious to also see the film version, called Carnage, directed by Roman Polanski and featuring a powerhouse cast of Christoph Waltz, Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly, and Kate Winslet.

****1/2 out of ***** stars

The Campaign is Shockingly a Lame Duck

How does the combo of Zach Galifinakis and Will Ferrell fail? These two are so reliably funny, but being together in The Campaign seems to have negated each's own charms.

This movie is shockingly unfunny. The only saving grace is that the storyline of the little dorky guy with the dorky family rising up to fight the big bully has its charms.

I actually watched this several weeks ago and was trying to forget I had ever seen it. But then I thought I better write this blog now to remind myself never to watch it again.

I don't think I even laughed twice, which is almost impossible. I laugh at all kinds of dumb stuff.

Go back and watch Zach in Two Ferns or The Hangover, or Will in any of his other films.

*1/2 out of ***** stars

Argo Was Truly the Best Movie of 2012

I admittedly haven't seen Ang Lee's Academy-Award-winning Life of Pi, but it's a crime that Ben Affleck didn't win the Oscar for best director for Argo.

Affleck is clearly a student of film. And the student has now turned master. The heartbreaking Star Wars characters and Hardy Boys books on the bedroom shelves of Affleck's son in the film. The classical music touches all the way from the Hitchcock ending-credits tune to perfectly placed classic rock like "Dance the Night Away" by Van Halen and "When the Levee Breaks" by Led Zeppelin. The incredible pacing and tightly wound suspense in general.

The plot is based on a true story (almost unbelievable that it isn't fiction) in which six Americans escape from the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran as it is overrun by anti-Americans. This is set in 1979 as Iran is experiencing serious growing pains in its transition from a near-democratic state into a religious dictatorship. The more well-known hostage crisis is happening at the same time that CIA agent Affleck is creating a movie called Argo (based off a moment when he is talking to his son on the phone while they both watch Return to the Planet of Apes on their respective TVs) that will serve as the plot for rescuing the six non-official American hostages.

That it took 33 years for someone to make such a great account of the hostage crisis is amazing and perhaps a sad statement on the creativity of humanity(!) But that's going awfully negative. There is nothing negative to say about this film.

Best movie of 2012 (barely beating out Django Unchained).

***** out of ***** stars

Best Magazine Reads: Awesome Things I Learned (or Relearned) From the Jimmy Page Rolling Stone Interview

1. Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham died in 1980 in guitarist Jimmy Page's house, strangled on his own vomit, after drinking 40 vodka shots. This was the end of the band, except for a couple of reunion shows, obviously minus one of rock's very best all-time drummers.

2. Page played guitar on The Who's "I Can't Explain," which is tied for my favorite Who song with "Pictures of Lily."

3. Page never met or saw Jimi Hendrix perform, but he wished he had.

4. The Who's spastically wonderful drummer Keith Moon (perhaps rock's greatest skins man alongside Bonham and the ever-underrated Ringo Starr) was the one who actually came up with the name Led Zeppelin.

5. Page says what makes a great guitar riff is one that's hypnotic because it must be played and heard over and over again.

6. Rolling Stone routinely panned Led Zeppelin's albums.

7. Page downplays his debauchery as slightly overstated by the press and biographers. Regardless, I still love this classic tour photo of him swigging Jack Daniel's.

8. Bonus: My five favorite Zep songs, at least today, are: "Tangerine" from III, "Over the Hills and Far Away" from Houses of the Holy, "Going to California" from IV, "Kashmir" from Physical Graffiti, and "All My Love" from In Through the Out Door.


Read the whole interview here.

Gone Girl is a Page-Turning Mystery Thriller for Anyone Who Doesn't Have Much Time to Read

Gillian Flynn took her straight-forward style as a former writer for the non-intellectual (but great) Entertainment Weekly to compose New York Times Bestseller Gone Girl. 

It's excellent fiction, and the kind of T.C. Boyle-like breezy, quick-read storytelling (as opposed to that of more difficult scribes like David Foster Wallace or Don DeLillo) that I increasingly find myself drawn to at the point in my life when I'm raising one kid and have another on the way and have less time to read.

I suppose to truly conserve time, I could have waited for the movie, which is set to be produced by Reese Witherspoon's film company. But this was well worth reading ahead of time.

Nick and Amy Dunne are writers in New York City who lose their jobs and have to move back to Nick's hometown not far from Hannibal and St. Louis, Missouri. Their marriage begins to show major cracks until Amy suddenly disappears and Nick becomes the focal point of a homicide investigation.

The trick of making the story alternately narrated by Nick and Amy provides the suspense, as the reader doesn't know whose conflicting story to trust. But both are tremendously well fleshed-out characters. Gone Girl is an innovative who-done-it crime mystery.

***** out of ***** stars

Hushpuppy from Beasts of the Southern Wild Deserved the Best Actress Oscar

I already mentioned here that Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained would have been my Oscar winner. But another nominee who should have won was Quvenzhane Wallis for her role as little tough Hushpuppy in Beasts of the Southern Wild.

I've long held a strong distaste for Best Actress winner Anne Hathaway, which makes it even more bitter to swallow this Oscar crime. But award or not, Beasts is a treasure of 2012 and a classic worthy of being ranked comparatively well with the other greatest indie movies of all time.

The large themes of global warming and Hurricane Katrina and abject poverty are captured compellingly by telling the story of this young girl and her abusive but somehow likable and sympathetic father simply trying to get by in the swamps of Louisiana. Their community is called "The Bathtub" and it's an amazing insight into a fascinating way of life that has somehow been under-explored in pop culture.

There's also a small side story of beasts being released from the melting icecaps in the Arctic. This is fantastical, and works in powerful ways that the recent film version of Where the Wild Things didn't.

****1/2 out of ***** stars

Year Zero is a Loss for the Aliens and the Music Industry

Year Zero by Rob Reid may seem to have a far-out premise to some, but, upon starting the book, I considered it pretty great. Aliens discover Earth's amazing catalog of rock music and attempt to acquire rights to it all.

Many reviewers have compared it to the classic Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is certainly one of the best sci-fi novels of all-time. And Reid's style and language tricks are indeed very similar to those of Hitchhiker author Douglas Adams. But the comparisons end there.

Year Zero begins promisingly. The main characters are established and the reader starts to feel a connection with them.

The somewhat-uninteresting aliens visit Nick Carter, a low-level lawyer whom they mistake for a former Backstreet Boy. Ever since they heard the Welcome Back, Kotter theme, they have been obsessed with Earth's rock music. Now they have a plan they present to Carter that they believe will help them acquire all that music. Nick realizes that this may be a good way to undermine his awful bosses and win a girl that is way out of his league.

I loved all that part, but then the second half of the book wallows in a mess of navigating through an unnecessarily complicated inter-galactic journey that never really seems to go much of anywhere. The ending completes the mess when (I don't feel too bad in telling you) Bill Gates is some kind of alien and somehow behind it all. Even that sounds like it could be a somewhat interesting premise, but Reid's story is so convoluted that I had lost the ability to care by that point.

** out of ***** stars

Minneapolis Treats Me Well Again, From the Mall of America to Westerberg

The family just returned from a kid-focused weekend in Minneapolis to visit our old friends/cousins/drummers Paula and Harlan, and their 2-year-old Davis.

I had never been to the Mall of America, and we headed straight there from the airport. If you have a 5-year-old, and it's snowy with not much else to do, it's really tough to beat the low prices of the rides in the amusement park at the famous shopping center. The park is mammoth, and the mall itself supposedly is big enough to hold seven Yankee Stadiums.

Jackson takes after me in loving the log flume the most of any amusement park rides.

Then, except for one night out at a tasty restaurant and local-character-filled tavern, it was mostly more of a kids weekend. As these photos display, there was snow on the ground when we arrived and more fell while we were there. It made for some of the most perfect sledding and snowman-making I've experienced in decades.

And, along with going to look at many of the haunts from my mom's childhood growing up in Edina (just southwest of downtown Minneapolis), I got this photo outside of legendary rocker Paul Westerberg's house. He lives about a mile from Paula and Harlan. 

And I'm pretty sure it was his wife, author Laurie Lindeen, who looked out the window right after I snapped this photo. I felt a little bit like a stalker and feel that way even more after reading her blog about some teenage girls who once violated her privacy to see her rock star husband. But c'mon, this guy is one of the top 10 rock stars of all time, I had to get a picture of his house.

I really love Minneapolis and think it's one of the few cities where I would want to live in the U.S. besides D.C.

Things to do next time I visit? Perhaps see more of little Davis' future school. It's incredibly the same one that my mom attended years ago. And also see Prince's house, although that's a long shot since it's way out in the 'burbs.

And, according to this list of my favorite things about Minneapolis (Westerberg's former band The Replacements ranks as #1), there are a lot of other things I still need to check off my list.