If you lie in bed at night staring at the ceiling wondering about things such as who invented talkies like I do, this video is for you. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t one person but a global evolution.
It gave me a chance to use a small bit of my Fulbright-Nehru research. This was not my primary research topic but a subplot I stumbled upon, so India makes a couple of guest appearances.
I enjoyed creating the opening animation using generative AI to create a thematically relevant image, then generative AI video to animate it. In later a portion, I used two old photos of the 1900 Paris Exposition and an Edison wax cylinder recording to make a brief film sequence using generative AI video and Adobe Premiere Pro to bring to life the moment when the auxeto-gramophone was blasted from atop the Eiffel Tower.
I’m thrilled beyond recognition – -thrilled to a crisp, in fact — to share the exciting news that I’m one of 24 professional writers selected out of 16,000 entries in this first ever Amtrak Writers’ Residency competition.
The what? You heard me. I’m thrilled beyond recognition — thrilled to a crisp, in fact — to share the exciting news that I’m one of 24 writers selected out of 16,100 entries in the first ever Amtrak Writers Residency. Not without its fascination and controversies, the residency has been covered microscopically in the New Yorker, New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and HuffPo over the past 8 months. For my money, Boris Kachka wrote the best overview inNew York Magazine. Basically, we each get to travel for a week or two in a private cabin on the Amtrak routes of our choosing during the next year as kind of a moving residency, as opposed to being isolated at a cabin in the woods or holed up at an artists colony like Yaddo where I have also stayed.
Alexander Chee, the writer who started it all.
This unique residency program started because last year in a PEN interview, novelist Alexander Chee said that he did a lot of writing on trains and that he wished Amtrak had writers residencies. He was joking but Amtrak got wind of his remark, thanks to a grass roots Twitter campaign, and decided to heed his call and launch such a program for established writers.
One of the writing samples I submitted was my Washington Post story from last year about my crazy spiritual experience aboard a commuter train between New York City’s Penn Station and Philadelphia. However, my primary writing sample was an excerpt from my award-winning, yet unproduced (anyone?) screenplay Lords of Light, an historical drama about Nikola Tesla and his rivalry with Thomas Edison, written while I was a graduate student at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Speaking of this, I can’t help but proudly mention that Continue reading “Mystery Train: the Amtrak Residency”
