Is our world becoming an Internet peep show? – good review of peep in Winnipeg Free Press…

first couple of paragraphs:

That’s the question one of Canada’s leading alt-culture gurus, Hal Niedzviecki, asks in this insightful work of popular sociology.

His main theme is that we’re becoming less inhibited and more prone to trading our private lives for attention, catharsis, convenience or money.

Toronto-based Niedzviecki, who will be at the Winnipeg International Writers Festival in September, is well-positioned to comment upon our particular zeitgeist, where individualism is colliding with a “need-to-know” attitude.

Read the rest here.

I interrupt the normal flow of peep info and debate to bring you breaking exciting news from Broken Pencil, the magazine of zine culture and the independent arts. (I’m the publisher and the fiction editor of this amazing mag!)

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Toronto author Hal Niedzviecki’s new book, The Peep Diaries, was listed in Oprah’s magazine as one of the top-25 reads of the summer. Now he wonders, is that because the talk-show queen is ahead of the curve?

Read it in the Globe and Mail newspaper here.

The Peep Diaries has been chosen by O Magazine as one of the “25 Books You Can’t Put Down” this summer. There’s a paragraph about the book in the July issue on stands now, and online here there’s an excerpt from the book and a reader’s guide with discussion questions for book clubs. Thanks Oprah!

New York Reading: presented the book to a very kind and interested group at the McNally Jackson store in Manhattan. They gave me a coupon for a free book which I forgot to use. Hey New Yorkers: email me a great peep story or link and I’ll send ya a free book coupon. The great thing about McNally is that they do events in their cafe which is open not only to the rest of the bookstore but also very visible from the street. Even in New York, passerbys were tempted by my big screen video of, among other things, a fleshy pair of buttocks getting a spanking and a man skulking over to his neighbor’s driveway and stealing his newspaper.

In New York I also managed to stay up till 3 in the morning 2 nights in a row, something I haven’t done since before the kid was born. Among other things my friend Sax hooked me up with an invite to a cookbook launch party featuring free beer, heaps of fried chicken and buckets of boiled peanuts (in my opinion, boiled peanuts taste like…uh…but everything else was great).

Speaking of the kid, she was pretty happy to see me back at home, even if it was only for a day or two. Originally I was going to just go right from New York to the rest of the tour (I’m writing this in the airport about to board a flight to Chicago) but I decided to come home for a night and a day instead. I’m glad I did. Got to pick up E. from day-care, play with her and do some Daddy stuff. A nice reminder of what really matters.

While in New York I did two things that were surely the top two most surreal author-type experiences of my career. First off, I was a guest on late night talk radio show the Joey Reynold show. Joey (who is ageless and timeless ie. old in a very indeterminate way) sports giant sized yellow tinted sunglasses and wears a leisure suit. His producer, who wandered into the interview quarter of the way through and made herself comfortable at the mic next to me, is a 76 year old bubby inclined to say things like “Oh Joey!” and, in my case, “Blogging is stupid! Stop being stupid!” (She’s probably right….) Also along for the ride were a middle aged couple who were promoting the release of their Fantasy audio book series, the Goddess Forest (or something like that anyway). Meanwhile, out in the main office a group of people including what I think was a midget in a wheelchair with a violin on her lap, were scarfing down a platter of tongue sandwiches. You can see how the whole thing felt a bit strange. Anyway, producer Sally got video of the whole thing so hopefully she’s going to get snippets of it online – bizarre doesn’t do it justice. This is Joey…

And then it was on to surreal moment #2: the Jewish Book Council annual pitch session. Every year, all the Jewish book event coordinators from around the world gather in New York. There, Jewish authors with books coming out in the summer or fall each have 2 minutes to pitch their product in the hopes of getting bookings in the fall at Jewish Community Centers all over the land. So there I was amidst the Holocaust memoirs, cooking-like-bubby books, and political tracts on the Middle East. I was a bit nervous – taking the podium to pitch my book was like getting called up for my Bar Mitzvahs. But I think it all went well and afterwards at the post-presentation dinner and speed dating shmooze fest, I got a lot of positive response and interest. Will I be seeing you at the Cherry Hill, New Jersey and Austin, Texas Jewish book festivals? Time will tell.

So now begins the second leg of my trip, which includes a reading tomorrow night at Chicago’s famous Quimby’s bookstore. Come by if you’re in the area, if not check this space and I’ll let you know how it went.

 my next stop…

So the second official day of shooting for the documentary happened a few days back. Here’s what we did:

Filmed me (pretending) to take out the trash. Filmed me watering the garden, stirring my compost bin (nice assortment of worms and grubs in there…).  Filmed me (pretending) to watch tv on the couch.

The idea was to establish my relative normalcy, my basic reticence, the general sense that I am not someone who generally makes a big spectacle spewing my emotions and private moments all over the place. This is true and I tried not to ham it up, and just be natural, though Director Sally kept accusing me of mugging for the camera so I’m not sure how successful I was. The culmination of this was a 40 minute on camera interview where Sally lobbed questions at me, asking to defend the project, and commented on the fact that many people she’d talked to about me referred to my abruptness and incivility. (Your point Sally?)

The day went quickly and suddenly it was 4 o’clock and we were in a time crunch to get things done – the crew had a bunch of interviews scheduled with my brother and some of my friends (again to establish my baseline normalcy and lack thereof). Frantic rescheduling on everyone’s part and we were off to the food court shopping area downtown underneath the TD Center.  

At the Wireless Wave store next to the Laura Secord, we filmed a scene where I pretended to enquire about a cell phone. I was just pretending because the cell had already been picked out and activated by producer Jeanette. The Wireless Wave guy was a bit nervous but got into it after the first take. He showed me the features and advised me against doing things like Twitter and signing up for Google Latitude. Yeah right! I’m pretty sure Sally liked that part. The core of the scene was true: it is my first ever cell phone and I’m not particularly excited about having it and I have only a slight notion of how to work it so far.

On the way out the camera and sound guys harassed the girl closing down the Laura Secord into giving them free cones of maple walnut ice cream.

Next scene, a park in the Annex where I fiddled with my phone. I couldn’t actually figure out how to send a Twitter so I ended up pretending to send a Twitter at Sally’s instruction. The fake Twitter claimed to say “I am in the park.” Watching this was a group of 12 year-olds on skate-boards. Kids: “Are you filming a commercial?” Sally: “No a documentary” Kids: “What about?” Sally: “It’s about, uh, cell phones and stuff.” Kids: “Oh.” They promptly departed.

Somehow all this activity took us to 8:30 at night. I hurried home to find W trying to put E. to bed. We all lay down in E’s bed together and fell asleep.

Here’s a really interesting and well written article, complete with a healthy dose of snark and skepticism. The piece is called Are We All Big Brother Now? and, written by one of newspaper’s news reporters, a guy who spends plenty of time on the crime beat, it has a refreshing no nonsense look at the ideas I espouse in my book.

Here are two paragraphs from the piece:

As such, the flawed footage was typical of how CCTV plays out in major crimes, as a crucial but incomplete piece of the puzzle. But the other factors, especially the frantic speculation about the case on dedicated Facebook sites, also typify an emerging culture of democratized digital surveillance, in which security and entertainment have blurred into voyeurism, usually with the narcissistic consent of the surveilled.

This “Peep Culture,” according to Toronto author Hal Niedzviecki, is what happens when pop culture’s mass audience gains the tools to display themselves online as celebrities, with their private lives on enthusiastic display. But with time, it spreads beyond the time-passing frivolity of social networking into the most deadly serious corners of the culture.”

I liked the way this piece approached, without any sentimentality, the question of whether or not surveillance and self surveillance are worth the price that we ultimately have to pay as individuals and a society.

A column by me based on ideas in my new book the Peep Diaries has just been published. The piece connects our obsession with private spaces to the over-spending and overextending of credit that lead to the current recession. Check it out here and let me know what you think.

hi everyone! welcome to the new smellit.ca page. I’m currently blogging at the peep diaries site, dedicated to my new book The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors. But I’ll also be dropping by here to post stuff.

Toronto launch of the peep diaries.