#david raether

[concretejunglegym]

Top 15 articles I've read from Longform.org

Subscribe to Longform.org and get great long form journalism articles in your inbox (they take about 20 -30 minutes to read)

1. The Serial Killer has Second thoughts: The confessions of Thomas Quick by Chris Heath

2. Dear Leader Dreams of Sushi by Adam Johnson ( profile on Kim Jong Il's Sushi Chef)

3. The Empathy Examas by Leslie Jamison (What's it's like to be a medical actor)

 4. The Body is 348 by Mark Bowden (A man is found dead in a hotel by what appears to be natural causes until the autopsy reveals that his insides look like he was crushed to death.)

 5. What it's like to freeze to death by Peter Stark

6. Did Your father touch you? by Jennifer Gonnerman (An eight year old said yes. She regretted the lie ever since)

7. The Nazi Anatomists by Emily Bazelon

8. She stole another's identity, and took her secret to the grave. Who was she? by Maureen O'Hagan

9. How Chris Mccandless died by Jon Krakauer (Into the wild)

10. How the feds took down the Dread Pirate Roberts by Nate Anderson (Story of the creator of the silk road drug website)

11. The Mystery of the Creepiest Television Hack by Chris Knittel (during the 9 pm news in chiacago in 1989 a bizarre broadcast interrupted normal programming for less than 30 seconds and then again two hours later for over a minute)

12. The Strange and Mysterious History of the Ouija Board by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie

13. Tyler Hadley's Killer Party by Nathaniel Rich (He killed his parents and threw a party while they were still inside)

14. What it's like to Fail by David Raether ( What it's like to go from being a hollywood writer to homeless man)

15. Master of Murder Castle by John Bartlow Martin (the story of americas first serial killer H.H. Holmes)

[uberconference-blog]

The Joys of Audio-Only Conference Calls

By: David Raether

I have eight (8) children, now mostly grown.  Two live in New York City -- Brooklyn, to be exact -- one lives in Washington, D.C., one lives and works on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation in South Dakota, one goes to college in Minnesota and another is in South Africa, and my two youngest live in Germany.  I live in Berkeley, CA.  The nine of us regularly do Skype Group Calls, and there is nothing I love more than seeing all eight of them in a group call.  Take my word for it, they are all incredibly beautiful-looking children.  

That pretty much covers my need for video calling.  The rest of you? I don’t really want to look at you when we talk on the phone.  Nothing personal… oh, okay, it is something personal.  It’s not that I don’t like you.  It’s just that, well, I’d prefer imagining how you look.  

And here’s how I picture you: you’re looking great.  Your hair is perfect and you’re dressed in a casual yet elegant manner that bespeaks the quality of you as a person.  

In addition, if I’m going to talk to you on the phone, I kinda don’t want to spend anytime making sure I look good.  I just want to sound good.  I want you to imagine me the way I’m imagining you.  I want to sound smart and competent and brilliant and insightful and piercing in my analysis, or -- depending on the situation -- maybe a little sexy.  Even if I’m wearing that ratty University of New Mexico Football sweatshirt with holes in the armpits that I got at a thrift store eight years ago, and my hair is a mess, and I haven’t showered since Tuesday.  You don’t need to see that.  No one needs to see that.  Frankly, it’s upsetting enough to me that I look like this, and I certainly don’t want to inflict it on you.

A couple of months ago, I did a video call with my writing partner on a film project.  We had never met, but had corresponded and done a lot of work together via email and Google Docs, and I felt completely comfortable with him as a partner.  Then we did the Skype video call.  His hair was a mess and his nose was bright red from a cold… and he was lying in bed!  To be honest, that killed it for me.  It felt as if I were lying in bed with him.  And he was sick!  I did not want to be lying in bed with a sick guy talking about the second act break.  I didn’t.  

“Can we continue this call tomorrow?” I asked.

“Why?” he said.

“You’re sick and in bed,” I said.  “And I kinda feel like I’m in bed with you right now and I might catch what you have..”  And so we ended what had been up to that point a productive call.

Look, I don’t want to come across as Mr. Fussbudget Himself, Felix Unger, and certainly the technology exists to make video conference calling simple and convenient.

But don’t you sometimes wish you were just doing an audio-only conference call?  That way, all of us could be sitting in our PJs at home, and we could all be imagining that everyone else looks as good as they sound.  These are smart and brilliant and handsome people I’m working with, you can think to yourself, without reality -- messy hair and ratty t-shirts and dingy living rooms -- ruining it for everyone.

[mrtommyzee]

David Raether. Image from: www.salon.com

On Christmas Day, 2001, I sat down at my Yamaha G2 grand piano, set up my metronome, and opened up a book of Shostakovich’s “Preludes.” It was late afternoon, and the warm, orange light of the fading day poured into my five-bedroom house — paid for by my $300,000 a year income as a Hollywood comedy writer — in San Marino, California, a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles. My wife, Marina, was cooking dinner for me and our eight children, and it was as happy a Christmas afternoon as I would ever have.

****

On Christmas morning, 2008, I woke up on the floor of the 1997 Chrysler minivan I lived in, parked behind the Kinko’s just two miles from my old house in San Marino. It was raining, and I was cold, even though I had slept in three layers of clothes. It was one of those blustery storms that regularly whoosh down from the Gulf of Alaska and pummel Los Angeles during the winter. I climbed out of the van and walked to a Starbucks five blocks away. Although I didn’t have any money, I had scavenged the Sunday Los Angeles Times crossword puzzle from another coffeehouse a couple days before. The baristas didn’t mind me sitting quietly for several hours every day to warm up and kill time.

I was neither a drug addict nor an alcoholic, nor was I a criminal. But I had committed one of the more basic of American sins: I had failed. In eight years, my career had vanished, then my savings, and then our home. My family broke apart. I was alone, hungry, and defeated.

Taken from and continued at Priceonomics.com. 

[jasmined]

Yes, I, David Raether, the smart and funny guy who graduated with honors from college and read thousands of books and played the piano and went to church and won television awards, was homeless. What happens when you hit bottom? I can tell you one thing: you don’t bounce back. You crawl back, fighting every step of the way. It isn’t a straight arc back up either; there are dozens of setbacks every step of the way. And the place you land isn’t anywhere near where you were when you slipped off the cliff.

What It's Like to Fail