Tag: Tina Fey

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Podcast – Our Lady of Organized Vituperation

Virtual Memories Show:
Mary Fleener –
Our Lady of Organized Vituperation

“I was so excited to get an issue of Weirdo in the mail. I ran up my driveway and saw my neighbor and said, ‘Look! I got a letter from Robert Crumb!’ And he said, ‘Who’s that?’ And I thought, ‘Here’s my introduction to the mainstream appreciation of underground comics.'”

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lotpViva Cubismo! Mary Fleener joins the show to talk about her career in cartooning, her love/hate relationship with LA (mostly hate now, but there was a little love in the early days), the Zora Neale Hurston story that made a cartoonist out of her, the story of how Matt Groening accidentally derailed her career, her past-life regression while attending the King Tut exhibition in 1978, the roots of her Cubismo comics style, the joys of simplifying her life, the new book she’s working on, the horrors of The Comics Journal‘s message board, and more! Give it a listen!

“When I was going to college, you’d pass the guys selling ‘Muhammad Speaks,’ then you’d run into the Hare Krishnas, then there’d be the La Raza guys, then the Jesus freaks. Everything was in flux. Everybody was getting in cults. Everyone was either asking you for money or trying to convert you.”

FLEENER!

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Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! Related conversations:

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About our Guest

Mary Fleener was born in Los Angeles when smog was at an all time high, Hollywood was still glamorous, and every woman’s ambition was to own a mink coat. Inherited good art genes from her mother and never wanted to do anything else. A collection of her comics was published in 1994 by Fantagraphics as Life of the Party. Her Illustration work has appeared in The SD Reader, OC Weekly, The Village Voice, SPIN, Guitar Player, Musician, and Entertainment Weekly, as well as projects like The Guitar Cookbook, Weird Tales of the Ramones (CD box set), Star Time (the James Brown CD box set), Carlsbad Museum of Making Music – “Hands on the Future” exhibit, and CD covers for The Insect Surfers and Buddy Blue. Her paintings have been exhibited at La Luz de Jesus Gallery, Track 16, David Zapt Gallery, Laguna Beach Art Museum Annex, LACE (Los Angeles), COCA (Seattle), Southwestern College, Patricia Correia Gallery, Sushi Gallery and Ducky Waddle’s Emporium. She also enjoys making hand-built ceramics and wheel thrown functional pieces that she glazes and fires in her own kiln. She enjoys painting on velvet, that which we all consider the King of Kitsch, but which also makes her color and “cubismo” style of drawing even more dramatic and mysterious on the plush background of black velvet. She lives is in Encinitas, CA, with her husband, a dog, a cat, and lots of stringed instruments. They have a band called The Wigbillies.

Credits: This episode’s music is Boomcubism by Brian Eno. The conversation was recorded at Ms. Fleener’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom H5 digital recorder. The intro and outro were recorded on a Blue Yeti USB Microphone. Processing was done in Audacity and Garage Band. Photos of Ms. Fleener by me.

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Podcast: Hassling The Hoff

Virtual Memories – season 2 episode 15
Scott Hoffman – Hassling The Hoff

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“When people talk about the death of books, they couldn’t be more wrong. Physical books may exist the way vinyl records do, for collectors or fanatics, but people read more today than they have at any time in history.”

It’s time for a new episode of The Virtual Memories Show!

“I think that the New York publishing industry has missed a large section of readership. For a long time, they always thought ‘those people’ didn’t read books.”

Our latest episode features a conversation with Scott Hoffman, co-founder of Folio Literary Management, about his transition from Washington, DC lobbyist to New York literary agent, the fate of the mid-list author, why zombies are hot, his agency’s e-publishing initiatives, the importance of globalization and developing markets for authors, the likelihood that the Random House / Penguin merger will go through, the diminishing relevance of publishing’s gatekeepers, the explosion of the YA market, and why he now reps much more non-fiction than novels.

“You get stabbed in the back just as often in publishing as in Washington, DC, but in publishing it’s with a cocktail toothpick.”

We also talk about the most important books in Scott’s past, and how some of his adolescent faves did or didn’t hold up.

Enjoy the conversation!

Scott Hoffman on The Virtual Memories ShowPhoto by Amy Roth.

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About Our Guest

Scott Hoffman co-founded Folio Literary Management in 2006. Scott has served as Vice-chairman of the board of SEARAC (the only nationwide advocacy agency for Southeast Asian-Americans), a board member of Fill Their Shelves, Inc., a charitable foundation that provides books to children in sub-Saharan Africa, and a member of the Metropolitan Opera’s Young Associates Steering Committee. Before entering the world of publishing, he was one of the founding partners of Janus-Merritt Strategies, a Washington, DC strategic consulting firm. He holds an MBA from New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business, and a BA from the College of William and Mary.

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If you’d like to check out past episodes, you can find us on iTunes or visit the Podcast page for all our back episodes, as well as e-mail signup and tip jar! And why don’t you friend the Virtual Memories Show at our Facebook page? It’d make my mom happy.

Credits: This episode’s music is the end credits for 28 Days Later by John Murphy. The conversation was recorded in Mr. Hoffman’s home in New York City on a pair of Blue Encore 100 mics, feeding into a Zoom H4N recorder, and I recorded the rest on a Blue Yeti mic into Audacity. All editing and processing was done in Garage Band.