Interview with Eric Appleman | Sound Authors Radio

December 29, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors. Today is Friday, September 12, 2008. We’re in the middle of the political season, it’s been an exciting fall for anyone that watches CNN and listens to the polls like I am. I’ve got four guests on the show today and my first guest will have something to do with the political race. His name is Eric Appleman. The second guest wrote a book called A Nation For All: How the Catholic Vision of the Common Good Can Save America from the Politics of Division; that’s Chris Korzen and Alexia Kelley. The third guest on the show will be Stop Clutter from Stealing your life. Of course that’s always a good thing in our lives at any time of the year. Mike Nelson wrote about clutter from stealing your life. Then I have a musical guest on the show at the end, The Boulder Acoustic Society, a great new band. So my first guest on the show I’d like to welcome Eric Appleman, who edited a book of editorial cartoons called the Race for the 2008 Democratic Nomination, and he also edited a book called The Race for the 2008 Republican Nomination. Welcome to the show Eric Appleman.

Eric Appleman: Thank you, it’s a pleasure to talk with you.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about these books.

Eric Appleman: Yes, so basically I run a website on the presidential campaigns, which I’ve been running since 1998. We have a section where we look at all the different books on the campaign and I noticed there were no books of editorial cartoons on presidential campaigns. There was one done in 1992 on Bill Clinton but there hasn’t been anything since then and so this struck me as a gap and I’ve always been interested in political cartoons. My background is in political communications and how you present ideas. So in 2004 I went to the association’s American editorial cartoonist and said you guys should do a book. I spoke to them at their convention here in Washington DC briefly and no one took me up on that.

I went back again in 2007 and said I’ll work on this book and you guys can get a substantial share of the proceeds; what do you think of that. They went through the Board and approved the idea and the next step was to find a publisher and there was a publisher in Gretna, Louisiana; Falcon Publishing and they’ve done a series every year called best editorial cartoons of the year. So they agreed to take on this project. The idea was to have them out in time for the convention since they describe and show cartoons on the road to the democratic and the republican nomination.

Dr. Kent: Where did you get into the world of cartoons themselves? Of course I guess most folks are more excited about political cartoons than articles and all the rest. They’re fantastic but how did you get this idea for yourself?

Eric Appleman: As I indicated, presidential campaigns is my specific focus, so even in 2000 I clipped a full box of these editorial cartoons and pasted them in a book. So its just basically these are some of the most incisive commentators around and really you can capture in one drawing what you might not even be able to capture in a full length article; the essence of a candidate or a candidacy or an event. So that’s why that’s particularly interesting. But once we got the go ahead to work on the book, it was a very great challenge.

We sent out emails to members of the AAC and I went even further afield to non-members soliciting cartoons. All sorts of cartoonists, over 120 cartoonists, sent in anywhere from one to four or five dozen cartoons and so you can imagine it was a huge challenge to sort through all those and decide which ones were the best ones. The original idea was for a book of 98 pages and we moved that up to 160 pages but even then, that was really not enough.

There were so many good cartoons that we had to cut out and I should really emphasize that this is a unique book because it has cartoons from the top editorial cartoonists around the country who you would see in the paper and news magazines and that was possible through this arrangement with the AACC and in which they receive a substantial share of the proceeds. They also have a very good website that I should note; its editorialcartoonists.com and Ted Rowe, who is the president of that association was extremely helpful in bringing these books together.

Dr. Kent: You have a website called Democracy in Action, the race for the white house. What do you think of it? Its fantastically interesting contest right now. Talk about the election and I guess the importance of political cartoons to us in the middle of what Obama calls silly season where it just seems like lipstick on a pig and all of this stuff. Tell me what you’re following right now?

Eric Appleman: Well, right now we’re just getting off the conventions. I was in both Denver and Minneapolis so I’m still recovering from those experiences, which can be very grueling and they were so close together that there was really no time to recover and so the books came out in mid-June and the idea was to have them available for the convention on the theory that they would be interested in seeing how these candidates emerged and Barack Obama and John McCain. I should note that there were different challenges in putting the two books together. As you can imagine there was a lot more interest in the democratic race and the Hillary / Obama contest. So there was just so much more material to go through and so many more painful cuts that could not be included to try in get in that 160 page limit.

Dr. Kent: And on the republican side?

Eric Appleman: On the republican side, the race ended earlier and so we have included some cartoons from those first few months when senator McCain was out there pretty much as the presumptive nominee but the interesting thing there are the cartoons that show the conservatives distrust of Senator McCain. There are many of those once he was the nominee he kind of distanced the conservatives from himself, which we now see has been somewhat alleviated by his choice for Vice President.

Dr. Kent: So tell me a little bit about you. you’re the author of many political CD ROMs, you’ve self published a field guide to the 1992 presidential campaign, now of course you’ve published these two books with the political cartoons. Tell me about the website, tell me about what you do, what you’re working on now, all of that?

Eric Appleman: Right, well the website p2008.org is really designed to educate folks about the political process and their role in making it work and the specific focus is on presidential campaigns and I really try to be very systematic rather than be turned to a new state where there will be a story on page one on a particular campaign and maybe a story on page B5. I try and lay it all out very systematically and reference original source material and point people to the best available resources by other organizations. So it has done fairly well as indicated by Monster-Sifford in May of 1998 after working on CD-ROMs before that.

The books reflect that approach, so you’ll see in the book that I have included cartoons on some of the candidates who really didn’t get very far, like Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, and Ron Paul for example was a difficult one. The editorial cartoons in some sense reflect news coverage so I had to search far and wide to find some Ron Paul cartoons. I found four finally but you know, I included about 20 each for Giuliani, Romney, Thompson and Mike Huckabee, and really had to scrabble around to just find those four for Ron Paul. So I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your question there.

Dr. Kent: We can keep going. Ron Paul still interests me. He’s apparently still on the ticket out in Montana.

Eric Appleman: I’m not aware of that. I know that he was at the press club yesterday I think it was and had third party candidates on the stage with him and was encouraging people to eschew the two major party candidates and consider voting for a candidate of principle. It was kind of eye opening to see how few of these cartoonists took on a Ron Paul toon. And I should say that after all the editing was done, starting with these 125 or so cartoonists who submitted works, there are about over 75 cartoonists that represented in the books and over 250 cartoons in each book. It’s very rare that you would see such a collection.

Dr. Kent: Tell me the life of a political cartoonist. What do they do every day? How do they go about creating these incredible things?

Eric Appleman: Well, I talked to them and it’s interesting that some of them have very long careers. It’s remarkable they’ve been working for 30 or so years but they go into the office or some of them work out of their home and they face a blank sheet of paper and they’ve got to come up with an idea. Some of these guys are really geniuses and I should also note that the whole industry if one can call it that, or business, is under some pressure. You may have read about newspaper downsizing? And that does affect editorial cartoonists and some of these people have been downsized or offered buy outs.

One of the examples that come to mind is Layne Powell, a Raleigh news observer and a very good cartoonist. He’s been there I think for at least two decades, probably longer and they wanted to reduce his hours and he said no. Bottom line is he’s working there through the election and then after that it’s not clear what he will be doing. So there’s been a lot of stories like that. Another thing that’s very interesting is how cartoonists have tried to adapt to the pressure.

So you see a lot of animation, people working on animations, and that’s very time consuming. Also another thing that you see from editorial cartoonists is some of them have very good logs and they show you some of their early sketches and ideas that they started out; thrown out rather. The newspaper maybe said this is too strong, we can’t do that. So I would be encouraged to take a look at those kinds of things. One in particular was Matt Davies and you can just Google him and he has a very good blog. There are others out there like that.

Dr. Kent: How has it been supporting this book, getting into this world of editorial cartoons so much that you have to have this book and you’re out on the road talking about it and all that? I can imagine it’s like a kid in the candy store.

Eric Appleman: Well you have a fervid imagination there! I haven’t really done much in the public arena; it’s not really my cup of tea. I’m more of a content person so I did you know an appearance out there in Minneapolis at the Civic bash but I have not really done much promotional stuff; I’m not really the most articulate person and I think the books really do speak for themselves. If you are in a bookstore and have a chance to look, just thumb through and you’ll see on any one or two pages there’ll be one that really brilliantly captures the essence of some of these candidates.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s been a real honor speaking with Eric Appleman. He edited two books; one for the democrats, one for the republicans. The Race for the 2008 Democratic Nomination, a book of editorial cartoons and The Race for the 2008 Republican Nomination; a book of editorial cartoons. With all of the recent happenings in the presidential race, wouldn’t it be great if we had a chance to automatically have another book full of the recent happenings but I guess we can check out all of the artists that are within these books on their own websites and blogs. It’s an exciting book, I love reading all of these cartoons. It’s been a great thing speaking with you.

Eric Appleman: Well thanks very much and again I would just refer people to the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, which were essential in putting these books together and their website editorialcartoonists.com.

Dr. Kent: And your website again?

Eric Appleman: That is www.p2008.org.

Dr. Kent: Wonderful, well thank you so much for chatting with me today and I look forward to the next 60 days.

Eric Appleman: Thanks very much, it was a pleasure to be with you, take care.

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show is going to be Chris Korzen from the book A Nation for All: How the catholic vision of the common good can save America from the politics of division. Come on back for that.

Posted by admin | Filed Under Comics, History, TRANSCRIPTS, Politics, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Interview with Christopher Tennant | Sound Authors Radio

December 18, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors! There’s a lot of talk these days about the rich and the poor, Wall Street, the scoundrels and the elite and all sorts of things. There are some television shows on all about the lives of the rich and famous; Gossip Girl is out there for kids and the author of The Official Filthy Rich Handbook is Christopher Tennant and he’s on the show with us today. Welcome to the show.

Christopher Tennant: Hi how ya doing? Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about the lifestyles of the filthy rich in a nutshell here.

Christopher Tennant: Let’s see, it’s the .001 percent of Americans who as you might have read made a ton of money in the last decade basically. There’s always been the rich, but never this sort of filthy rich, which are people with more than well 30 million in liquid assets. And they’ve never had a book; they’ve never had a guidebook in like every exclusive club. Every exclusive club I’ve been to I didn’t see one so I decided to write a book for that. It’s a hysterical tongue in cheek book that is really a cradle to grave guide of how to fit in with the filthy rich.

Sally: This is so funny Christopher. I was reading your website last night and right now I’m actually looking at the heiress and can you tell us a little more about how you came up with the whole idea for how you’re labeling her earrings and her dress. Did you have any sort of models or guides for this particular photograph and picture?

Christopher Tennant: Yeah, basically from my end I’ve been a journalist in New York for about ten years working at page 6 of the New York Post, and a bunch of different New York magazines; New York Magazine and a newspaper called the New York Observer and ran into all of these people. I started thinking there’s a lot of, it’s a subculture like any other subculture. They have their own kind of ways of speaking and dressing and their own social rules that guide how they all behave.

And the official preppy handbook you might remember came out in 1980 and basically the publisher I ended up going with actually published the preppy handbook in 1980 so I got to work with the same designer. The preppy handbook was kind of a first satirical guide and that was about the declining species of the 80s, which was certainly the pop color, glossy, New England preppy. So the format kind of worked for it.

Dr. Kent: The book is amazing. It pops on every page and I’ve got to say I sat there for about an hour just reading page after page when I first picked up the book. It’s fantastically put together. There’s so much information in there, this must have taken you for ever.

Christopher Tennant: It took about a year and a half. It started out being late so I kind of when I was finally done I looked back on it and said oh my god, how did you do that? It was really kind of, I worked at 100 percent true and I wanted it to be 100 percent funny but I settled for 90/80 to be charitable. Yeah, it was just tons and tons of research. All of the information is kind of out there and I did a lot of interviews with a lot of very over privileged people in different parts of the country.

Dr. Kent: This week is a big week in politics along with just the Wall Street stuff and I got to say I’ve been hearing about a lot of really rich folks scrambling a little bit because they know their taxes are going to be going up.

Christopher Tennant: Yeah, they’re just, they seem, the filthy rich are just suffering the same kind of lack of awareness as everyone else. It just seems like the country as a whole everyone is kind of pulling back in anticipation of something really bad happening, which I think is going to be a self fulfilling prophecy. I’ve heard of people canceling their job charters in St. Bart’s over Christmas and all that. It’s those tough decisions but it seems like nobody really knows what’s going to happen so they’re saying oh, maybe its not a good idea to you know go on a three week golf excursion in Scotland this year. Everyone has this wait and see approach. So their obviously doing fine, they’re going to be just fine.

Sally: I’d love to know in terms of you working with your publisher and editor, how much input did you have and how much editorial control did you have to give up? Were you involved in picking the photographs of the models? Were you involved with a lot of it?

Christopher Tennant: I actually did, yes. The design was really a collaborative effort and I was involved in every step. I recluded people for the photo shoots and it was really a back and forth effort. Because there are so many pieces in it, I think there’s over 300 little pieces of independent boxes or little charts or whatever so I would kind of map out what the chapter would look like and the designer would go into it and we’d go back and forth.

Sally: It’s just a great job. As somebody that did my own book I just want to say it’s great.

Christopher Tennant: Thanks, they really wanted to kill me by the end of it. They gave me a lot of rope because it was this sort of seminal book for me. I always wanted to write a book like that and I think its pitch perfect satire so that was kind of hanging over me. I wanted to produce something that was at least as good as that so I was really, we didn’t speak for a few weeks after the book was done, they were like okay crazy person go away.

Dr. Kent: Were these models or were they people playing the part?

Christopher Tennant: Half of them are friends of mine and the other half are people that work in publishing companies.

Dr. Kent: How about you? Did you model the filthy rich on yourself?

Christopher Tennant: No, not at all. For better or for worse, no.

Dr. Kent: Is that your goal with this book and all the rest to become on of these filthy rich?

Christopher Tennant: It’s got to sell an awful lot of copies because it’s only $11.95. So 100 million copies might put me up there. If I had known what I was getting into from the beginning because it really took from cradle to grave to cover everything. So I would go around and talk to people at parties or read something and go wait we have to mention that. There would always be something. Or ooh, there’s this picnic boat, this boat made by Hinckley and its 36 feet long and costs $750,000 and John Kerry has one and all these people have one. And it was like no, I didn’t know about the Hinckley boat. So then all these little kind of bits of information was tossed at me from different research excursions and I would add it in. I really did want to be all inclusive.

Dr. Kent: The book is called The Official Filthy Rich Handbook. It’s really something that all Americans, especially middle class Americans have to read. It’s about the lives of the filthy rich and how to get there by Christopher Tennant. It’s a beautiful tongue in cheek satire, I love it, we both love it. Thanks so much for being on the show.

Christopher Tennant: Well thank you, so much. It’s at Barnes, Borders and Amazon and I have a website filthyrichhandbook.com.

Sally: By the way congratulations for being number three today in the sociology class at Amazon. I’m very impressed with your ranking so good job.

Christopher Tennant: Thanks, yeah I was worried about the total economic implosion but we’re hanging on. But its still fun to read even if you’re hurting for cash.

Dr. Kent: Thanks so much and have a wonderful day.

Christopher Tennant: You too man.

Dr. Kent: Right after the break we’re going to have book marketing strategist Warren Whitlock, legendary book marketing fellow and he’s going to be twittering at the same time as he’s talking with us on the show and I’m twittering here as well. Come on back for Warren Whitlock.

Posted by admin | Filed Under TRANSCRIPTS, Comics, Entertainment, Hollywood, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Interview with Davy Liu | Sound Authors Radio

December 9, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors! Today is Friday, August 22, 2008. The Olympics are still going on. That’s my favorite pastime; I can’t get away from it, I watch every second of the day. I have four guests on the show, three authors and one musician as always. My first guest will be Davy Liu and he has a wonderful children’s book that is incredibly filled with art and all of that. My second guest on the show is Lillian Brummet. She is going to speak to me about her book Trash Talk. My third guest will be James D. Stein and that is for a book called How Mass Explains the World, A Guide to the Power of Numbers; that’s fun. My fourth guest will be Carolyn Solobelo from Red Molly, an amazing folk and bluegrass group. So my first guest on the show today is Davy Liu. He has extensive experience in artwork straight out of school. He went to work at Disney Animation Studio on Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and the Lion King but his own work is very powerful. He has written a book called Fire Fish. It’s gorgeous and he’s got some films and books coming out in the near future. Welcome to the show Davy.

Davy Liu: Thank you very much.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little bit about what are you working on now?

Davy Liu: I’m working on the third book, which is the donkey’s perspective of Jesus Christ.

Dr. Kent: The donkey’s perspective?

Davy Liu: Yes, the third book yeah. It’s pretty much the farm animal perspective of Jesus Christ because every year in the Jewish tradition they had to sacrifice an elderly animal but when Jesus came and was crucified and died on the cross there was no sacrifice needed so this group of animals wonders why this year their older son isn’t needed. So they want to find out who died for their son.

Dr. Kent: All of your books are about animals. Where did you develop your love of animals and telling these stories?

Davy Liu: I grew up with pets. I love the animals. Where I come from we can have monkeys for pets. I grew up in Taiwan and had a monkey for a pet and we get all kinds of exotic animals. So I grew this really strong dialogue with animals as a child and I’m in America and I couldn’t speak English so I could only live in my own world so I developed my own kind of visual communications. What if this were to speak languages and if we just understood things through pictures so when I was 13 I was taught doing all these drawings and I worked at that.

Then when I worked at Disney that kind of just was in tune with working with pictures and telling a story from the animals’ perspective. So it was actually very helpful that it was a language I could communicate around powerfully with animals’ thoughts because some of us as humans are kind of the same way. Animals just don’t talk, that’s all.

Dr. Kent: I’ve read the book Fire Fish, which is visually just stunning. How do you as an illustrator make artwork pop so well in an illustrated children’s book?

Davy Liu: For me again, working with Disney and Lucas Films, my role was always production design, which is the picture has to speak 1,000 words and not so much the actors speaking their lines. So visually it has to be very attractive. So all the books I created hopefully can find investors to admit to the quality of the final productions going to look. So I created each book pretty much pre-production design of what a movie package may be so you may see my book and a lot of kids say, wow, is this a movie? That’s exactly the idea; it’s not like making more for illustrations, making more for like a future animated movie film.

Dr. Kent: In all of your books have a theological message but their told through the eyes of the animals. So talk a little bit about that and how you got into that?

Davy Liu: For their first one, which I did the first one called The Giant Leaf, which is an animal perspective of Noah’s Ark. I kind of started with the book of Genesis chapter 6 because God called all the animals to come to Noah and I’m going like boy, that’s pretty daring. Even the animal has to listen to God and they have to take a giant leap of faith and really find the savior vessel, which is Noah’s ark. But for them it’s got to be, you know I have a cat and she’s afraid of the living daylights when I run my vacuum cleaner. I don’t even need to turn it on and she runs.

I’m thinking this big vessel and what was this things impact force when Noah took 120 years to build and what did the animals really think of what this things going to do? He was probably destroying their forests so I took that and started bouncing off and created the whole entire series basically hopefully to really draw not just kids but the theology of understanding I mean who God is. God really doesn’t think the way we think. And if we go and try to understand God through the animals then we can understand Noah’s Ark. So that’s what the Giant Leaf came from because God really put things in fair organic form and the great news is that God came as a human. He didn’t come as a UFO or a superpower being, he came as one of us humans; very humble as a baby on the manger.

So the whole entire story is the same thing with Noah and the Noah’s Ark story. He displayed a message of salvation through a giant leaf that’s floating in the water. My story happened to have dinosaurs because they were the slave driver. They oppressed them and they beat all the mammals on the ground. And all the animals want to do one day is live free from the masters. So that was where the idea came from. All the animals wanted to be free from this big giant and they had no idea this giant flood was coming. So all the animals had these dreams and they just have to leave and forsake their comfort place and they have to go find this giant leaf. Eventually they went north and saw this monster with a big mouth and the three main characters who were hitchhiking to this leaf; a monkey, a fox, and a koala bear are kind of puzzled and thinking why would they go in there all by themselves?

So eventually the flood came and they realized the only salvation was that animal eater so they went inside it and didn’t realize it was the best party in the world in this monster that Noah created to believe. I took that and just went on to different series which is Fire Fish and now Jordan’s Guest, which is the donkey’s guest, who is Jesus.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little bit about when you say okay I need to breathe some life into this donkey, how do you go about doing that?

Davy Liu: Breathing life into the donkey I would say that very much would be a personal thing. I feel like I’m kind of that donkey because being Chinese growing up in a culture where my academic just doesn’t excel. I mean I had a C minus average (C-) throughout my entire academics and thanks to my parents who saved me and brought me to America where I could at least have a crutch saying that I don’t speak English so therefore I have a right to get bad grades.

That worked for about four or five years until I graduated from college and then I went to art school. So living in that culture where everybody’s grade point average is maybe 4.0 I was just a loser you know? I had no purpose and the one thing that I love is art. Somehow because I realized that was a gift that God has given me and I’m able to live freely and just enjoy that. So Jordan the donkey is the same thing. The donkey was tied in the yard and all the barn animals like the sheep, the cow, the camel and the horses, they all have a purpose, and basically this donkey is tied in the middle of the barn.

All the tourists that come to Jerusalem want to ride the horses and the camel to go see Jerusalem. They certainly don’t want to ride the short legged donkey but at the end of the story this donkey was used for The Savior and then the donkey became so famous he became the donkey that everybody wants to come and see when the donkey was the secondary character. I think because the story is not so much the donkey because it’s not who you are, if God uses you you’re wise and radiant. Like there’s no tomorrow in how God can use you and that’s what I did. I said, God I don’t have much I just have this artistic gift and I want to just serve You and just glorify You. Not to be preachy but I want people to know that He really loves humanity in a big way.

Dr. Kent: So you grew up Chinese you said in was it Thailand?

Davy Liu: Taiwan.

Dr. Kent: In Taiwan and you’ve been back to China and you lead tours. Is that correct?

Davy Liu: Oh many years yeah. I paint so I do a China tour every October we go to China and I love China. I mean I just love the people there.

Dr. Kent: What do you think about the Olympics there?

Davy Liu: Oh I think it’s awesome and the Chinese went over the top to run a show its like look at us, you know? That’s great. Good for them. It’s really going to be tough to top that one, whoever gets handed the next baton of an Olympic opening, that’s a tough one to top. I know they poured millions and millions of dollars of their own money just to impress and that’s because they can.

Dr. Kent: That opening ceremony was pretty amazing and quite artistic actually.

Davy Liu: Oh really good. The director, the movie director ### is really amazing with visual stunning stuff so they did a good job.

Dr. Kent: Let’s talk a little bit about your career, where you want to go and what your next projects are. You told us about the book from the donkey’s perspective but what else are you working on?

Davy Liu: Basically I own the preproduction company called Kendu Films and what we do is we pretty much do preproduction design for other companies. But my dream is hopefully that we get enough; we’ve got a broker now and we’re trying to get the first book, The Giant Leaf, which you can get on Amazon also, to go on to a movie. I wrote this thing when I was working on The Lion King and I wrote it as a movie script first. So I want to keep going with the series because I think in Hollywood right now they lack a lot of strong content and what I want to continue to do is produce excellent family entertainment content so that hopefully our culture will be impacted by it.

My passion is really not to create another Pixar. I think our culture needs to have a very strong value on human rights and that human right comes from God. It’s not because humans say so and that value is based on who God thinks we are and I’d like to continue that kind of strong based belief in our system, especially in America. We’re losing that kind of value so my goal is to continue to keep doing every single book from the bible from the animal perspective. My goal is to finish the twelve books and hopefully by then we’ve got some kind of movie film going and an ongoing thing in the pop culture. Again my passion is not to cater this thing to Christians or anybody that believes in my theories, I just want to allow them to enjoy from a new perspective of who God is.

Dr. Kent: It seems fascinating and how will you find all the rest of the animals? Are there that many animals in the bible?

Davy Liu: Oh there are lots of animals! There are a lot. I’m doing a lion’s perspective of the Book of Daniel and a camel’s perspective of Apostle Paul when he got blind because he was a super murderer. I mean he was going around crucifying all the Christians and oppressed them and the camel witnessed this bright light. So that’s one and then I’m doing a whales perspective of Jonah. The whale had a hernia, swallowed Jonah and realized he’s got something really unique that he didn’t even realize he was swallowing in those big teeth of his.

Then we’re doing a mystical animal in the Garden of Eden and the animals are all going to look very bizarre in the Garden of Eden the first time they witness a human was created. They came and ruled the garden and they destroy the garden so there’s a lot of stuff in the bible. It’s really very exciting and then the Jordan story, I mean in the Old Testament God used a donkey that spoke to the prophet and say why are you hitting me? I mean that type of stuff is really stuff that’s a lot of humor that God really did enhance in the bible.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s been a fascinating discussion. Where can we find out about all your projects?

Davy Liu: You can go to kendufilms.com. At Kendu the main character is the giant leaf and also you can find all the projects I’m working on.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s been a real honor and I love what you do so I’ll keep checking it out.

Davy Liu: Thank you very much, I appreciate it.

Dr. Kent: Have a great day. Now my next guest on the show will be Lillian Brummet with her book Trash Talk: An Inspirational Guide to Saving Time and Money Through Better Waste and Resource Management. That will be interesting. Come on back for it.

Posted by admin | Filed Under Childrens, Comics, Art, TRANSCRIPTS, Spirituality, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Inspiration, Religion, PODCAST

Christopher Tennant | Rich & Famous

December 3, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Interview with Christopher Tennant [9:28m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Interviewing Christopher was a blast. His take on the lifestyles of the rich and famous is riveting. Pick up his book! An invitation to the book from his website:

WELCOME TO THE CLUB

Remember when having a couple million dollars meant something?

Neither do we.

Particularly when we recall (with just the slightest of tingles) that over 30,000 Americans are now sitting on at least thirty times that.

This crew includes every entry on the Forbes 400 (who, at last count, were worth a combined $1.54 trillion, more than all the money held in commercial U.S. banks) right on down to that guy back in B-school who first told you what a hedge fund was.

They’re not all famous, or even well known, but these 30,000 do have much in common. Relative to the average citizen, they can travel where they want, live where they want, do what they want, and even screw who they want—both for business and for pleasure. Their money allows them to be truly free, and isn’t that what our forefathers were getting at?

But, as we’ve been told so many times, freedom has its price. In the case of the aforementioned 30,000, it’s the tyranny of too many options. St. Barts or St. Moritz? Gulfstream or Boeing? Where to build your private golf course—or did you want a polo field? With all those wealth managers incessantly ringing you up, should you consider counter-surveillance measures?

We’re exhausted just thinking about it.

We call this tippity-top tier the Filthy Rich. As you’ll soon learn, you don’t need to earn or inherit more money than you already have to join their ranks. You just need to try a little harder.

Maybe a lot harder.

—Christopher Tennant

Posted by admin | Filed Under Comics, Entertainment, Hollywood, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Interview with Erica Ferencik | Sound Authors Radio

November 8, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors! Today is Friday, October 17th. I’ve got four great guests on the show. My first guest, her name is Erica Ferencik; I believe I’m saying that correctly.

Erica Ferencik: Perfectly.

Dr. Kent: Okay. The book she’s written is called Cracks in the Foundation. It’s a hysterical book about real estate and a town called Squams Cootknockitt. Now I have to have you tell me how that’s pronounced.

Erica Ferencik: Also you did that beautifully. I grew up in Schenectady, New York so I feel I’m at liberty to make fun of all those towns up there. You know, like Scatterkill and you know and others in my book like Vanderscleef and so on.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about this book Cracks in the Foundation. On the front cover there’s a hysterical real estate agent with a for sale sign halfway in the background.

Erica Ferencik: Well she’s sort of your quintessential old school veteran real estate agent in this sort of no where town of Squamscootnockitt, New York and she sort of half lives. She drinks too much white zinfandel, she’s 40 pounds overweight, and she’s sort of an over the top character, kind of like I don’t know, Ignavious J. Riley in Confederacy of Dunces you know? You remember him; he had a flatulence problem and lived with his mother and worked at Levis pants. Its kind of a dated book at this point but it was part of the inspiration for the book.

Dr. Kent: In that book, I remember he had a what was it? A hot dog cart for awhile and he ate all the hot dogs?

Erica Ferencik: He did.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about this 39 years of digging for pay dirt in Squamscootnockit by your main character Ginger.

Erica Ferencik: She’s a scrapper. She wont take no for an answer and she’s that kind of realtor. She’s of the bunch that still sends the lemon cake recipes and knocks on your door to try to get the listing and I guess there’s something about her that yeah, it’s ridiculous over the top, but there’s something really admirable and lovable about her, I mean I think. She’s just sort of the unsinkable molly brown of real estate. In high contrast to her newest office mate who comes from Manhattan and she’s just got the heels and she’s very slick; and her name is Candy Rickenhousen so she’s totally mucking up Gingers little world of basically a three person shop in upstate New York.

Dr. Kent: The whole story revolves around a starter out house.

Erica Ferencik: Yes, well its like as a realtor, so many ridiculous things happen to us and sort of the stuff you wouldn’t believe I mean anyways. But the outhouse was just like I always think, what’s the worst possible listing I could get? Anybody could get? The completely unsellable item. What’s the worst possible thing you could get and in the book it’s on a tiny piece of land and its historic and you cant tear it down so its like this enigma is sort of symbolic of her life. She can’t seem to make any sales and the funny thing about this book.

I’ve been a realtor for eight years, I wrote it in 2006 when the market was actually not bad. Well, I guess no one predicted things would fall, well I guess a few people predicted things would be as bad as they are. I didn’t mean for it to come true but that’s her situation and again as a novelist I wanted to give the protagonist a real problem. She’s going to lose her house, she’s going to foreclose unless she makes some dough, you know?

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little about this market right now. Are you still in real estate or have you signed off and decided to become an author exclusively?

Erica Ferencik: I’ve signed off and decided to become a rich and wealthy author. Door number two. I guess I’m still a full time realtor as much as I can be right now. The market, I’m in the Framingham, Sudbury Massachusetts market, those being actually two very different markets, ones a bit higher market than the other but its really tough right now. We have one town that 90% of the sales, the listings under 300,000 are foreclosures or short sales.

Then as realtors we have to learn how to conduct business in an entirely different way. We have to learn how do we transact a short sale; its much more complicated than life involving even more people than the usual set of people that we have, which is realtors, buyers, and sellers, mortgage people, attorneys; now the banks are involved and that’s just a whole different bag of wax. It slows things down and makes transactions really difficult for everyone. Plus the fact that people are losing their houses. Real estate is so much more than the house. It’s a symbol of status and family life and it’s very emotional and I mean it’s a huge thing for people.

Dr. Kent: So let’s talk about this woman and her life in your book. How much is she like you? Of course you’ve talked about the long, crazy, New England names and the starter out house but she also has a daughter, a Wiccan daughter and she named her Harvest. So talk about these tongue in cheek things about how do you relate to this character?

Erica Ferencik: Well, I guess I was trying to take myself who does have sort of an unsinkable personality in many ways and sort of take it over the top to make it funnier. Again going back to things that happen to us as realtors I was looking at a house and there was two little dogs in the house. They escaped out the back and luckily they were fenced in but it took me like 45 minutes to round them up. I was thinking what would happen if I lost them or something?

In the book, and I will answer your question by the way, Ginger Canadu loses two twin daschunds and they are able to recapture one of them only one of them and she replaces that dachshunds with one from the pound and of course she gets caught and its totally ridiculous. But I was just thinking what would someone do whose completely unethical and sort of foolish yet had a good heart. And let me explain that part. She has this relation, she loves her daughter more than anybody, and her daughters name is Harvest.

She came up with that name, she was actually smoking pot when she was pregnant, and she was eating a PB&J and she saw Harvest on the bread and she came up with that name. but anyways, so I mean, Ginger is more of the sort of drinks a bit too much and throws a bone every now and then whereas Harvest is completely the opposite; very conservative, drinks mint tea and is wiccan and is also bisexual which is another thing that came up. But this thing that bothered Ginger the most was that Harvest was Wiccan because it’s something she can’t understand. It’s very scary, what is she doing with these rituals and all that.

Dr. Kent: Let me ask you since you’ve brought up an interesting thing about pot smoking and the bisexual daughter and all this. How about the political season right now. What’s your take on this crazy back and forth in the media?

Erica Ferencik: Oh you mean the upcoming election?

Dr. Kent: Yes.

Erica Ferencik: I just wish it were over, I’m so sick of it. Two guys put in a box are going to fight each other if enough time goes by. It’s absurd that it’s taking so long, it just feels that way because it started so long ago, at least that’s how it feels to me anyways.

Dr. Kent: What would your character Ginger think about it? She is wearing a pantsuit on the front cover.

Erica Ferencik: She probably lets see, maybe she would I think she would want Obama. I think she would go for Obama. Hillary Clinton and then you know the switcheroo to Obama. I think she’s pretty cool, she definitely has her issues but she’s not a republican.

Dr. Kent: Is Harvest old enough to vote?

Erica Ferencik: She’s 18, is that old enough?

Dr. Kent: Yes. 21 to drink and 18 to vote. Well this has been a wonderful conversation about Cracks in the Foundation by Erica Ferencik, is that correct?

Erica Ferencik: That’s exactly right.

Dr. Kent: Your website as far as I can tell is wakingdreampress.com. Is there another one or is that it?

Erica Ferencik: Wakingdreampress.com is the publishing company that I started but you can also go to cracksinthefoundation.com and read about it. There’s Q&A, my press events, all kinds of info.

Dr. Kent: It’s a hysterical book, when’s the next one coming?

Erica Ferencik: I wish I knew that. I have sequels running through my head; I just got to get it on paper. I’m 24/7 promoting this but definitely something will come out soon.

Dr. Kent: Can you tell us was she able to sell the outhouse or are you not allowed to tell us?

Erica Ferencik: She was able to sell the outhouse to an outhouse collector in the end.

Dr. Kent: Well good luck to you in the real estate market and the book is called Cracks in the Foundation by Erica Ferencik. Her website is wakingdreampress.com or cracksinthefoundation.com. Thanks so much for chatting with me.

Erica Ferencik: Thank you so much Dr. Kent.

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show is Nuala Gardner. She is the author of a book called A Friend Like Henry. We’ll talk a little about autism and other things coming up. Don’t miss it!

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