26Nov, 2008

A Thanksgiving Playlist

Posted by Don
45

Put this playlist together this morning so it’s ready for tomorrow. Wondering what music you’ll be playing on Thanksgiving as you cook and eat and, well, listen to music. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! This is obviously a tiny image, but if you click on it it will explode…. My favorite recent discovery is a kid out of Toronto named Matthew Barber. He’s a very thoughtful songwriter, kind of a David Gray without the severe depression. In other words, his stuff is easy to listen to but doesn’t make you want to kill yourself. Also, Sara Groves has a new Christmas album out, and she is always worth listening to. The Fray is coming out with a new album, so I hear, and that will no doubt be good. Leigh Nash’ solo record was terrific, this year, also. The song Along the Wall might be my favorite song from 2008. It seems to sum up the year for me. Anyway, this playlist is really not so much about my favorites from the year as it is a playlist that will work as background music for hanging out. And for that matter for getting my Christmas mailing out….Enjoy the holiday….

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19Nov, 2008

Billy Collins

Posted by Don
24

    I went to Powell’s to get Malcolm Gladwell’s new book (Powell’s is selling signed editions) and nearly dropped it when I saw Billy Collins had released another selection of poems. I kept the Gladwell book and am looking forward to reading it, but the new Collins book jumped off the shelf and wagged around my feet like a dog. I bought it and went outside and tried to read and walk but nearly ran into a pole so I sat outside a coffee shop and read slowly. It’s hard to read Collins slowly, though. It’s hard to enjoy him when you enjoy him so much. Ten poems in I had ink on my hands and on my chin and I wiped the ink on my sleeves and by the end of it I was holding the book open with my elbows and the top, round pink of my ears were black.   The new book is called Ballistics and I’ll share some of my favorite lines, then give you the title poem. For the rest you’ll have to spring for the hardcover.    from August   I went to grammar school for Jesus and to graduate school for Wallace [...]

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18Nov, 2008

An Autographed Book and a Chance to Support a Mentor

Posted by Don
11

As much as it annoys me to do anything remotely like this, it really is the best way we’ve found to help promote and fund The Mentoring Project. We’re about to send out a mass e-mail offering an autographed book when people sign up to support a mentor. It’s a great cause so I’m having to get over the “infomercial” connotation. Please forgive. Anyway, here’s a copy of the e-mail that is about to go out. Thanks… Receive an autographed, limited-edition, hard-back edition of Blue Like Jazz well before Christmas! Friends, It’s been a long time since I’ve sent out an e-mail, but this one is important. And it may even lead to an autographed book or two arriving in your mailbox! As you may already know, The Belmont Foundation has changed its name to The Mentoring Project, and in so doing we’ve launched our most ambitious campaign yet: To recruit ten-thousand mentors through one-thousand churches. There are over twenty-seven million kids growing up without fathers, and yet there are over three-hundred thousand churches already in place to meet the need. The Mentoring Project is equipping churches to operate mentoring programs as an answer to the crisis of fatherlessness in [...]

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11Nov, 2008

Steve Taylor Walks through a scene in Blue Like Jazz

Posted by Don
26

Steve Taylor on Blue Like Jazz from Donald Miller on Vimeo. I’ve been getting a number of questions about the movie version of Blue Like Jazz and I thought I’d update everybody. Steve Taylor, Ben Pearson and I have been working on the screenplay for a long time, nearly two years. We had hoped to shoot the movie last summer but because the economy tanked it has taken longer to find the right investors (a studio won’t give us the creative freedom we want) so we are scheduled to shoot the film this June/July. Anyway, recently Steve, Ben and I were able to get together for a few hours to go through the script again and I captured a bit of Steve on video. Screenwriting is different work than essay writing in that the work (at least for our project) was done in community. I found this more enjoyable than sitting alone in a coffee shop or in my office trying to dial in a series of thoughts for paper. In screenwriting, the story is everything. And I was surprised at how much the process changed my approach to writing essays. I’ve applied a great deal of story structure to [...]

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