A Movie Called Blood

The news you didn't know you'd been waiting to hear: in 2012, a movie will be released called "Blood," and I'm the Executive Producer. You can find all kinds of information all over the place: the website is here, and there are also pages and channels for Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, among others.

Obviously I'll be talking about this a lot from now on, after months of strict silence. So let's start with how and why.

The how, of course, is that writer/director Marc Rosenbush may claim it's his project, but really it's all because of me. (Me! Me! Me!) Because I've read comics off and on since I was a kid, in fact I learned to read with comic books. And after giving them up for a while during high school, shortly after college a friend showed me a copy of "Watchmen" and said "Things have changed."

Boy had they ever. Soon there was Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison and a whole crowd of really gifted writers doing things with comics that no one had ever even really thought about before. And in short order, I discovered my own personal favorite graphic novel of all time: "Moonshadow," by J.M. DeMatteis and Jon J. Muth.

It's basically "Candide" in outer space, but it's also filled with poetry and whimsy and, despite the fact that none of the events in it are remotely like anything in my life, it still felt, while I read it, as if it was my own biography somehow. An emotional biography, perhaps. So I started reading DeMatteis's other work, and he turned out to be an interesting guy: a musician at one time who moves easily between straight-up comics work on Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and so forth (his Spidey storyline "Kraven's Last Hunt" may be his standout), and very adult, very deep, very emotional works like "Moonshadow," "Mercy," "Seekers Into the Mystery" and "Blood: A Tale," done with the fabulous painter Kent Williams.

And at some point, as one does with works one loves, I said to my friend Marc, "You've absolutely got to read "Moonshadow." So he did, and he loved it, and then he started looking for more stuff by that DeMatteis guy. Before too long, he got to "Blood."

And here's where he did what I didn't: he read it and he said "Jesus, this would make a fantastic movie."

So here we are. With a script written, and the deals being put together, and the website and the Twitter feed and all the rest of it, with a team being rapidly assembled and contracts signed and a lot of people getting very excited indeed.

Yep. All because of me. (And maybe a little bit because of the brilliance of J.M. DeMatteis.)

More to come, fer shure.

The Impossible Question

About twenty years ago, Fred Friendly, now made famous by George Clooney in Good Night, and Good Luck, created a wonderful PBS program called The Constitution: That Delicate Balance. What he did was to put together a preeminent group of people: Supreme Court Justices, Senators and Congressmen, the then-president of Planned Parenthood, theologians and philosophers, etc., and to pose to them an escalating series of hypotheticals. The moderator (often it was Harvard’s Arthur Miller, no relation to the playwright) would ask a “What if?” question and ask people to respond to it, from legal, moral and ethical points of view. He would then turn up the heat. He would make the question worse. Make the hypothetical harder to bear. Pretty soon he and the panel would reach that eternally-difficult place where human logic runs smack into human emotion, and logic doesn’t always win; that place where we know what we should think, but the situation posed strikes us in such a central place that the deep, primal, damn-it-this-hurts part of us rises up and will not be denied.

In that spirit, then...

A few weeks ago I posed a hypothetical of my own. If Mark David Chapman, the murderer of John Lennon, were to be paroled from prison and he ended up sitting in front of you asking for a job, would you give him one? I asked it as a lifelong rabid fan of John Lennon, whose influence on my own life has been gigantic. (Put it this way: when I am on my deathbed, my brother has standing instructions to play The Beatles.) A lively discussion ensued on Facebook, and of course what I was going after was the notion of redemption. Do we believe, do we actually believe, in the possibility of rehabilitation. And just to be clear, the question is not whether Chapman, as a specific person, can be made again into a productive, non-murderous non-whacko member of society; the question is whether those of us who love and loved John Lennon can ever find it in ourselves to believe that that man has actually reformed.

But now, let’s do the difficult thing. Let’s turn up the heat.

Mark David Chapman is your cousin. You grew up with him, you played together when you were kids, and damn it all, you loved him. You knew he had withdrawn, you knew he was obsessed with Catcher in the Rye, but you still never imagined for a second that he could actually hurt anyone, let alone kill anyone, let alone John Lennon. But he did, and he’s been in prison all these years, and you’ve had to endure the stigma of being Mark David Chapman’s cousin, and now he’s out and he hopes that you can forgive him. He seems completely fine, he even seems kinda like the cousin you once knew and loved. But can you ever trust your own impressions of him ever again? Can you believe, right down to your core, that he has truly reformed?

The heat. Turning it up.

It’s not Mark David Chapman, but it’s still your cousin, and you grew up together and you loved him. But now the person he hurt wasn’t some public figure who you loved in the way we love certain public figures; now he has hurt your sister. Someone you love has done something awful, truly awful, to someone you love.

Hate the sin but love the sinner. That’s what we’re taught, and it’s right, we know it’s right. We know that it’s right. But someone you love has done something truly awful to someone you love. How can you possibly resolve this in your own soul without your mind cracking open? This question has shattered marriages and torn families apart.

Let me emphasize, right here: I have a sister, and I love her beyond description. Nothing like this has ever happened to her, and I pray that nothing like it ever, ever will, and the mere thought of something happening to her makes my mind skitter away in horror. I do not, for a moment, intend of any of what follows to diminish the hideous pain and anguish of the hypothetical awful thing described.

Because the situation can still get worse. There’s one more layer.

The something awful that was done to someone you loved, it was a sexual offense of some kind. The kind of thing that gets people listed as sexual offenders--for forever. Twenty years have passed since the horrible thing that happened, and your sister was deeply scarred by it and no one has talked to your cousin’s mother for years now. But you have somehow done the heroic, the truly heroic, thing: you’ve found a way to forgive your cousin, in your own heart. You’ve actually achieved that. Your sister doesn’t understand it, but you’ve done it.

And now your cousin has been released from prison. By every indication, prison has done the thing we supposedly create prisons for: your cousin has been chastened, he’s found religion, he is gentle and peaceful and there’s a sense of calm about him that you would have never thought possible.

But he’s on that list. And you’ve found a way to forgive him, but society hasn’t. Society has found a way to continue to punish, even after the punishment is supposed to have ended. It’s easy for them: they don’t know your cousin, they didn’t grow up with him, he’s just another guy on a list and they don’t have to consider whether or not he might be reformed. As a friend of mine put it on Facebook (I’m paraphrasing), why should we use real people as a laboratory to find out whether this guy has actually reformed? Why run the risk to innocents when we can’t ever be truly certain that someone on a list of sexual offenders is actually rehabilitated?

But you know. You know him better than anyone, and you’ve forgiven him, and you can see what he’s become now. You know he’s okay. Still: the list, and his name, and the websites that list sexual offenders in any given neighborhood. Your cousin can’t find an apartment, he can’t get a job.

He comes to you. He begs you. Put in a good word for him, or he’s gonna be out on the street. He will die, out there on the street. You’ve already done the impossible heroic thing, you’ve forgiven the unforgivable, but now he’s begging for that one thing more. Stand up in public, even in front of your sister who cannot understand any of this, and say to the world that you believe this person is okay. That we should stop punishing him. That a person, even a person who has done that truly awful thing, can in fact change. Even though some people don’t change; even though rapists are sometimes released from prison and go back to raping; even though, even though, even though. In this case, this one specific case about this one specific human being, you know reform has actually happened, but the world doesn’t and the world has a million reasons not to believe you.

Will you stand up? Can you?

And here’s where any hypothetical breaks down, because there is no general answer that can ever satisfy the question. It’s personal, and it can only be answered by you, and the answer is almost certainly one thing when it’s a hypothetical but if it actually happened that way you would get swamped by emotion and your real answer in the moment will almost certainly be fuck no.

In one direction, horrible consequences to your cousin. In the other direction, a scar on your sister’s soul is ripped open and she can’t face you anymore. You know what you know, but there are no good consequences in any conceivable direction. So. Will you?

In Which I Am Kindled

It was a most-welcome late birthday present: the new Kindle 3. I’ve written about e-book readers several times, beginning with the very first Kindle and a lamentation over its astonishing ugliness. But Amazon has fixed the ugliness problem, and made a host of other improvements--most notably dropping its price down to a level that people can actually sorta kinda afford. The device arrived on Wednesday so I am now an expert, because fiddling with new gadgets is way more fun than it ought to be.

The whole premise of eInk, and the extra crispness of this new screen, definitely live up to expectations. I’ve had Kindle’s app on my iPhone for months, but I never did much reading on it because of the tiny screen size and the massive, overpowering glare if I tried to read outside. (Which I often do.) In no time at all, I already find myself treating the Kindle almost (almost) exactly like a book. I read indoors, I read outdoors, and if it’s dark I need some light. (No, I did not buy that nifty-looking but expensive cover with the light built in.) The turning of pages is almost automatic, and I find that the length of the screen flash between pages is no worse than the length of time it would take to turn an actual page—often faster, since you never have that problem where several pages get bunched together and you can’t get quite the first one separated, so you spend what feels like twenty minutes trying to flick it loose.

The magnificent difference, of course, is that in a gizmo smaller and thinner than most hardcovers (and weighing about the same, in a cover) I am currently carrying seven books. Which barely scratches the surface of how many books I can actually carry.

Considering that I’m usually in the middle of five or six books at once? This is impossibly cool.

And most of those books were free—material written before 1923 is in the public domain, and there are often multiple sources for copies that can be downloaded at no cost. I’m a little wary of downloading anything that originated in another language, since there’s no telling the quality of the translation, and that leaves out Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Voltaire and hundreds of others; but the whole of English literature pre-1923 is available. Dickens, Forster, Austen, the Brontes, Henry James, the list goes on and on. I even picked up the first volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Right now I’m reading Silas Marner, and enjoying it a lot. The only book I’ve purchased so far? A complete Shakespeare for $2.65. It looks so good, I can easily imagine a bunch of actors at a Shakespeare festival, standing around in rehearsal, reading from their Kindles.

I particularly like the ability to highlight a chunk of text that I like, and the Kindle will keep it both marked in the book, and stored in a separate area where I can look only at things I’ve marked in various books. If I had Proust on the Kindle, for instance, there’s a quote I’ve been trying to find in it for years without success--but if I could search for it, and then mark it, that would be fantastic. All without “defacing” the book by scribbling in it.

There are things that I miss. The specific thumping sound that a book makes when you tap on it, a sound that nothing else quite makes. (Books make decent drums, actually.) The feel of the paper that changes subtly from one book to another. The pleasant conundrum of what to do with the bookmark while you’re reading. People talk a lot about the smell of a book and I’m sure that’s true, but my sniffer isn’t very powerful so that one doesn’t really work for me. The feel, though--plastic ain’t paper, and that’s definitely a loss. But compared to the ability to easily lug around an ever-growing library in one slim device? I’ll happily accept the loss.

When Mark David Chapman Gets Paroled…

... would you hire him? If he’s been set free after all these years, and comes to you looking for a job, and is qualified in every way except that he’s Mark David Chapman and he not only killed a man, he killed John Lennon. Would you give Chapman a job?

It might depend on how old you are--if John’s murder is as distant to you as JFK’s is to me, then you might be (slightly) more inclined to hire MDC. Except of course that there’s still that bothersome history of mental illness, and the fact of a murder in his past. Not to mention how your customers might feel--if you’ve got a bunch of Beatles fans and they find out that man is working for you, might they decide to boycott your business? They might. They definitely might.

Or maybe it might depend on how much you love John Lennon. If you don’t at all, you might not even recognize MDC’s name. But even a cursory background check will reveal the truth, and you’ll then have all the peripheral objections I just mentioned.

(One odd and ironic fact: John Lennon wrote “Attica State” in solidarity with the inmates after the ’71 riot. Attica State is where his killer ended up being incarcerated.)

So I suppose you have to ask yourself, Do I believe people can be rehabilitated? Or, do I rather believe that some people are what they are and can never be changed and therefore should never be let out of prison? In which case, you might as well execute them because there’s no place for them in society therefore society is better off without them. With someone like Jeffrey Dahmer, that argument carries some weight.

But is Mark David Chapman in that same camp? Is he another Dahmer or Bundy or Manson? If we believe at all in the possibility of rehabilitation, mustn’t we extend that hope even to someone like Chapman?

But John’s death is not distant to me. I have been a rabid fan for decades, and I can’t stop wondering what John might have had to say about September 11th, and the war in Iraq, and the current wave of Islamophobia, and all the rest of it. I wish I could hear the songs he hadn’t written yet. Mark David Chapman, with his absurd Holden Caulfield fixation, took all of that away from all of us, and is it the sort of thing I can ever forgive?

(Here’s a recent piece in Time where Yoko Ono talks briefly about the difficulty of forgiving the man who murdered her husband.)

But there’s the beauty of a hypothetical (for me at least--for Yoko, it can never be hypothetical). Chapman was denied parole for the sixth time the other day, and it’ll be at least two years before he’s eligible again. I don’t have to answer this question in real life, and honestly, I have no idea how I would answer if it did come up. Would my deep-rooted sorrow over the loss of John Lennon outweigh an impulse I believe John would have supported, to believe that someone like that can be brought round again, to believe in second chances and the possibility that we can become better than we currently are? Or would I find myself fighting waves of nausea at the idea that that man was sitting in front of me?

What about you? If he came to you looking for a job, what do you think you might do? Hit me in the comments.

The Daily Beatle

What are friends for? Some days, they're about showing you stuff you hadn't seen before. Therefore, courtesy of my friend Rachel Coburn's recent Facebook post, I bring you catnip for a Beatles fan, Barry Lenser's encyclopedic, and massively entertaining, The Daily Beatle.

Enjoy.

You, Me and the Mythos

Here’s one advantage of keeping two blogs: linked entries. I’ll talk about the documentary I just watched here, but I’ll discuss one of the ideas it raises over on the Damn Lies blog. Collect the full set!

Over at Internet Marketing for Filmmakers, our current clients include Steven and Whitney Boe, two charming and clever folks who have created a film called Mythic Journeys. And though we’ve worked on some fine films, this one happens to come closest to my own sensibilities, so I want to rave about it a little, not to try and goose its sales (though its sales deserve to be spectacular), but simply because I like it a lot and feel like raving a little.

Okay, I always feel like raving a little. But here it’ll be specific raving.



It’s an odd duck of a film, part talking-heads interviews, and part narrative. With puppets. The backbone of the film is a retelling of a famous Indian story translated as “The Bone Orchard,” in which a king must rescue a corpse dangling from a tree and bring it back to a powerful magician—but the corpse keeps telling stories with complex moral questions, and every time the king’s answer is insufficient, the corpse reappears at the end of its rope, dangling from the same tree. So what you get is a very interesting documentary, punctuated by a really good stop-animation film using puppets by Brian and Wendy Froud, with voice work by Mark Hamill, Tim Curry and Lance Henriksen. (And each of the stories told by the corpse is done in yet another animation style.) It had the potential to be a mess, but it totally works.

It’s also one of the very few films where I ever sat there with a notepad out, scribbling things down. It’s obviously about myth, but the tag line is “Every life is a story, and a story can change the world,” which is exactly in line with my wacky novel. So I’ve thought about this stuff a lot, and am always eager to hear more—which is why the density of the material in this film has such great appeal for me. It gave me ideas, it sparked my imagination, and I will happily watch it more than once, then set it on my DVD shelf next to the Bill Moyers/Joseph Campbell set, with which it clearly belongs.

I won’t say any more. But it’s available through their site, through Amazon, all kinds of places. Check out a copy: it’s got the Bob Toombs Seal of Approval, so you know it’s top-notch.

Just Had to Mention...

...this new Facebook group. Plugging the Gulf Oil Leak With the Works of Ayn Rand. At last, a solution that cures two major problems!

A Thing Seen While Walking

A sign on a gate to someone’s backyard, nicely etched into a small piece of painted wood:

RABID DOG’S
KEEP-OUT

Being who I am, my eye is instantly drawn to spelling and grammatical errors, so this one with its pair of problems really leaped out. But for whatever reason, I started to dwell on this particular sign, and three possibilities suggest themselves:

1. The sign-maker is illiterate, and has no business making signs. The owners of the house aren’t terribly literate themselves, so I guess they got what they deserve. (Given the notion that the simplest solution is usually the best, this one has to get high marks.)

2. The sign is in fact correct. If the yard is being called a “keep-out,” which would be unusual but not impossible, and if there is only one dog who effectively owns the yard, then the grammar would be correct: it would in fact be the rabid dog’s keep-out. (This does not seem likely at all, but is my personal favorite alternative.)

3. The sign-maker is a crook who charges by the character. Of the eighteen characters on that sign, two shouldn’t be there but are. So if he’s charging, say, one dollar per character carved, those two extra bucks represent a significant markup in the real price of the work. And if he does that systematically, he’s conning a lot of people out of a lot of cash they don’t need to spend. (This one? More likely than it ought to be.)

The real curiosity here? The fact that my brain is wired in such a way that I will spend this much time pondering bad grammar without ever bothering to wonder--are there really rabid dogs back there? Do they ever jump the fence to maul passing strangers obsessed with grammar? Maybe that’s why the sign is as it is, to lure the grammatically-obsessed close enough that they can be picked off by rabid dog’s!

So yeah, man. Keep-out, please.

A New Blog

Yes, it makes perfect sense. Because I’ve been doing such a great job keeping this blog updated. A second one, absolutely, nothing odd about that at all.

But here’s the thing.

The purpose of the bobblog is that it’s about whatever I want it to be about, at any given moment. If I want to complain about an astonishingly uncomfortable bench outside a great big building in Century City, I can do that; if I want to share excerpts from something I’m writing, I can do that; if I want to relate a comical misadventure in Ireland, I can do that too. But from time to time I wax political, and very often when I do, it’s because I feel that someone official is lying to us, for reasons that have nothing to do with good governance and everything to do with exploiting us for their own gain. This is the sort of thing that makes me good and angry, every time.

So I’ve decided to create a new blog. I’m going to call it Damn Lies, an obvious play on “lies, damn lies and statistics.” (Attributed to Disraeli but disputed; Mark Twain popularized its use.) This new blog will only ever be about one thing: the various ways we’re being lied to, and why. It will be political, economical and social, but it will almost certainly never relate how I locked myself out of my car or what those crazy siblings are up to.

Here’s a bit of overlap: the following will intro the new blog...

While writing my first novel I discovered my theme. Proust asserts that every writer only really has one theme, and every new work is a renewed attempt to express that theme, or a piece of it, better than the last work did. (If I could find the quote I would provide it, but those books are huge.) And so, while I was writing a novel that turned out to be about the way our lives are like stories that we tell to ourselves, I realized that this is the idea I will probably explore for my entire life. In my newest work, a play based on the infamous cadaver synod, I examine the ways institutions lie to us, but how the power of a good example, a good story, even if it’s just propaganda, can still transcend its manipulative origins.

Segue to this new blog.

As you can guess from the title, it will focus on the lies we’re told, and how those lies are used to exploit us. But from time to time I hope to also tell the other story, about how we’re able to, let’s just say, take a sad song and make it better. I’ll try to keep it light and entertaining, to restrain the impulse toward outrage can make an outrageous subject seem muddy and clouded, thereby weakening its impact. But when anger is called for, angry I will be.

So there you go. There’s more over on the blog, namely a quick examination of gift cards and calling cards and how they’re being used to swindle us. Just a little taste of what’s to come. Hope you’ll take a look.

Lasers!

The last time I got my teeth cleaned, my dentist told me I had a little cavity. Needed to be filled.

Cue two weeks of dread.

Because I am a dental wimp of the first order. Do not like dental pain, no sir no how. It's so bad that when I had my wisdom teeth pulled, I was so paranoid about the pain that even as I drifted into unconsciousness I actually resisted the anaesthetic--because my brain was thinking "Was that pain? Is it hurting now? Find the pain! Focus on it! Pain! Pain! Pain!" And then, fortunately, blissful unconsciousness at last took over.

So when I know I'm going to have to have a cavity dug out, I will spend the days before working myself up into a small frenzy of anticipatory pain. When it's about time to leave, I always have five or ten really great excuses as to why I should postpone. I go anyway because I have at least a little self-control, but by the time I get there I'm a barely-contained mess of dread and fear.

This time, the good Dr. Gordon said he was going to be using a laser instead of a drill. And really, there'd be no need for any anaesthetic at all.

Cue the comical double-take.

I took some novocaine anyway, because I just wasn't prepared to make that leap. So I got the long pinching piercing pain of a needle being stuck into my gums, then a little wait and then, aaaah, the spread of that delicious numbing sensation. Perfect. He began.

The device looks a little like an electric toothbrush, and it makes a clicking sound so you know when it's working. Of course it also leaves a considerable smell of burning tooth when it's working, so there's really no mistaking it. But in about a minute, it was done.

A second double-take. "What, that's it?" (Or rather, "Wha, assit?") "That's it."

No grinding, no drilling, no horrible zzzzzzzzzzzzz sound. No pressure. No pain. Nothing. The only painful part, by far, had been the needle with the novocaine—and now I was stuck with a numb mouth for the next four hours, unable to eat or drink without drooling all over myself.

This may be one of the greatest things I've ever had happen to me. (No, not the drooling.)  Really, I’m not kidding. It was that fantastic.

Every once in a while I think, "I was born at the wrong time. Should've been born during the Enlightenment, one of those periods when society actually cared about language and reason." (It's a fallacy, but that discussion is for another day.) But that thought is always followed by another: indoor plumbing and modern dentistry. And I would not live in any other time than this one right here now.

Lasers!

On the Doing of a Thing

In a recent Facebook status update, I reported that I was one pound away from hitting my college weight again.  Many delightful and encouraging responses followed, and of course there was the inevitable question from more than one quarter: "How did you do it?"

In a word: slowly.  I did it slowly.

And of course, since I'm a gadget junkie, there was some electronic help as well, but I'll get to that in a second.

"College weight" is what I'm calling my target—I'm pretty sure I was hovering around 185 by the time I graduated.  (And at 6'3", that weight is squarely within the Normal range.)  The specific memory I'm clinging to is when I was walking through the Boston Common, past the fountain at the corner nearest Downtown Crossing, and some guy sitting at the fountain said something or other to me—and then called me "Slim."

These are the sorts of things we remember.  I weighed 185 when a complete stranger called me Slim.  Almost a quarter century later, that's why that particular weight is my target weight.  It's completely silly, and it's just as valid as any other reason for picking a target weight.  (In truth, in high school I was five to ten pounds lighter than that, so I could pick a lower number if I wanted, and maybe in time I will.)

There was a span when I was gaining about a pound a year, which seemed fine till I realized what would happen in thirty years.  And indeed, shortly after I moved to Los Angeles, something I should have foreseen happened: because I now lived in a place where I drove rather than walked, I gained weight.  A lot of it.  And fast.  Before I could blink, 200 pounds had become 220.

Enter a gizmo.  The iPhone, and a free app called "Lose It."  I had already, with exercise and a little diligence, gotten 220 back down to a range between 205 and 210.  But what Lose It does turns out to be invaluable: it's a simple calorie tracker, and it presents a clean, graphically unmistakable chart with a red line denoting your maximum caloric intake on any given day.  If your bar graph representing that day's food intake passes the red line, you've eaten too much.

There's a large database of brand-name and restaurant foods with the number of calories, the amount of cholesterol, etc. already programmed in, and that helps with the data entry.  I still end up entering a lot of things freehand, but there are lots of websites out there that will tell you the calorie content of almost anything, so it's not too hard to get accurate information.  No, the hard part is really this: you have to be honest.

If you don't enter that third cookie you had, sure, you'll stay on the correct side of the thin red line, but your body will still know the difference and you will have defeated the whole purpose of using the app.  That kind of truth-telling is hard as hell, but there are rewards to be had.

I lost weight slowly.  Very slowly.  Started using Lose It early last February when my weight was 206, and only now have I reached 186.  There are always thresholds, where you'll hit a weight and won't seem able to dip below it for a long time; then suddenly you'll drop far below it and find a new threshold.  Naturally, my current threshold turns out to be 186, so I haven't been able to get below it yet, haven't been able to grab that one last pound.  But it'll happen, I'm confident about that.

I'm no nutritionist, but I have to think that losing weight slowly is better than losing it fast.  Because if you lose it fast, you're very likely to gain it back, just as fast.  In other words, if you go on a crash diet where you follow some program and crush your daily caloric intake and blah blah blah, you're making a temporary lifestyle change.  You hit your target, you congratulate yourself, then you go right back on the rotuine that got you overweight in the first place.

But here's the beauty of Lose It: I didn't change my diet.  Didn't change the sorts of foods I ate, not at all.  (Okay, there was one change: potato chips had to go.  There was no way they could fit into any day without driving me over the red line.  And man, do I love potato chips.  But one sacrifice isn't so bad.  Now, if I'd had to give up pizza….)  (And yes, a nutritionist would hear all this and shudder for reasons that have nothing to do with weight gain.)  (And by the way, even as I write this I am eating a nice lovely cookie.  So there.)

Around last October, I stopped using Lose It for a while.  "I've got the system down," I said to myself.  "I know the quantities, I know when to stop eating.  No problem.  The app got me started, now I can continue on my own."  The result was no surprise at all: the amount I ate started to slide upward, so slowly I never really noticed—till I got on the scale.  And sure enough, the weight was starting to slide upward again.  I got back onto Lose It, saw how many days were well over the thin red line, and realized that this little app, and its descendants, will probably be with me for a very long time indeed.

So that's the answer to how I did it.  (And am doing it still.)  By losing weight slowly, not by dieting, not by eliminating food I like (with that one notable exception), but by simply paying scrupulous attention, being honest with myself, and sticking with the program on a long-term basis.  It's not necessarily easy, but it sure as hell ain't that hard.  Now go forth and shed ye the pounds.

Adventures in "Aww, @#$%!"

Here’s how I managed to lock myself out of the car this morning. It was comedy, all the way through.

The parking garage of the place where I work quite naturally requires a parking card before you can enter. As I rounded a turn half a block from said garage, said parking card flipped itself out of the place where it rests. Flipped itself rather beautifully, actually: I caught its flight out of the corner of my eye, and a gymnast would have been proud of the precision of its tumbling routine.

It stuck the landing, too: totally out of sight under the passenger seat.

Fortunately, before you actually reach the garage entrance, the building has a little freight/delivery area where I was able to pull off, out of the way. No problem. I got out, went around to the passenger side, the door was still locked. Duh. I went back around to the driver side, opened the door, hit the Lock/Unlock button, closed the driver-side door, and went back around to the passenger door.

Naturally, and it need hardly be said because otherwise there’s no story: I hit the Lock/Unlock button the wrong way. Then closed the door.

Passenger door: still locked. “Ho ho ho,” I said to myself, and trundled around to the driver’s door again. Which was now quite thoroughly locked.

I was no longer saying anything resembling “Ho ho ho.”

Oh, and my business partner was making my cellphone tintinnabulate repeatedly.

Two items of good fortune: it’s a lovely early-spring day here in Los Angeles, and I am a tall person with unusually long arms. Which means that both windows were slightly open, and my long arms and long bassist’s fingers were barely long enough to barely reach the Lock/Unlock button on the passenger-but-not-the-driver side.

Pop goes the door, card retrieved, business partner’s problems dealt with, everything back to normal. Arms red and stinging, scrapes washed and cleaned.

But really. I mean, really. Come on, world, leave me alone, wouldja?

By the way, in the movie version of this (because that’s how my brain works), the story as it happened tells itself pretty well—except that there must not be a convenient freight/delivery area. The poor hapless schmuck locking himself out of the car must be blocking the entrance to the garage, with cars piling up behind and honking, people yelling, the whole thing. Because one of the primary rules of storytelling is always this: whatever the situation is, make it as bad as possible. A cop approaching on horseback, demanding the guy move his damn car. Some burly guy getting out of a truck about to beat the guy up. That sort of thing.

Some days, the world, it just says to you, “Nah. Go home. Trust me on this one.”

Did I mention I have a dentist’s appointment for this afternoon? That should finish things off nicely, don’t you think?

A New Thing Comes to Life

Things I cannot yet discuss: the name of the movie, the work it’s based on, and why that guy did that thing in that particular way.

But, speaking as a producer of said unnamed motion picture-to-be, I can tell you that the all-important “first money” is in the bank. It’s called that because it is, literally, the first money anyone invests in the movie, and it is prized because it represents the greatest leap into the dark for any investor. For all those who follow, there is the comfort of knowing that someone else has already signaled their faith in the project via their checkbook, and that the project is almost certainly going forward. “First money,” then, represents the nudging of the boulder, the thing that frees it from stasis and starts it rolling downhill. We can now use this money to make an offer to a name actor, and once an actor is attached it becomes that much easier to close the deal with other investors. Each step forward makes the next step (slightly) easier, till the boulder acquires its own momentum and a movie gets made.

When you’re listening to a director’s commentary on a DVD, you sometimes hear a director say something like “This project took three years to put together.” It’s one thing to hear that in the abstract; it’s another thing to have to live through it. Didn’t take three years for this specific project, but it has been three years since “Zen Noir” was released in trying to get some project moving forward, dammit, and that’s been a mighty long and agonizing time.

But now we’ve got a check. And it’s cleared the bank, too. That means we get to move forward now. And soon I’ll even be able to say what and when and why and how.

That thing about that guy, however, will have to remain top-secret for forever. Sorry.

Architectural Crimes, an Ongoing Series

Spent several hours the other day at the MGM Tower in Century City. And I must say this:



Whoever designed this so-called "bench" outside the building should be strapped to said "bench" and forced to sit upon it for twelve hours. That, trust me, would be sufficient punishment for this egregious crime against the human body.

Whither Books?

I attended a conference in San Diego this past weekend, about “21st Century Book Marketing.” Inevitably, a great deal of it was about the ways in which technology is changing the book-publishing world. One speaker, Dan Poynter, flat-out said “Don’t bother going to a New York publisher,” predicting that in a few years they will all be, simply, gone, and that self-publishing, and electronic forms of books, will be the only game in anyone’s town. A subsequent speaker disagreed, saying that the industry is certainly changing but that the experience of a physical book won’t be replaced for a good long while yet.

Speaking as a person who loves books, and the physical form of a book, it is terribly hard to imagine ever abandoning that. And yet, I never thought I’d listen to music on a computer--now it’s almost the only way I ever listen to music. My CDs are all ripped, and iTunes just plays, one record after another, for as long as I want. The convenience so outweighs issues like sound quality that I really only use my big stereo in conjunction with the TV anymore. I still have all the CDs, but most of them haven’t been touched in years.

Are books following the same path? I still don't own a Kindle or any other e-reader, but I’m starting to want one, just as I once began to covet an iPod. Because I’m in the middle of five books right now, which is not at all unusual for me, and it would be kinda great to have them all together in a form that never weighs more than a few ounces. (Although it must be said--there’s some odd thing about the clutter of books that is part of their appeal. Book lovers love having great precarious piles of books in every corner. I will sometimes demonstrate to new visitors the extent of my obsession by opening the kitchen cabinets--to reveal that the top shelves, all the way around, are filled with books. Not cookbooks--theatre and film books, actually. I simply needed the shelf space more for books than for food.)

This weekend I was talking to someone at the conference (the marvelous LiYana Silver, who kinda blew my mind with her “Redefining Monogamy” ideas), and as we talked a man came around handing out copies of a novel he’d written. A physical book, words on paper. So I did what I always do, what I call the First Paragraph Test: I open to page one, read the first paragraph, and if it sounds like something I’ve read before, I abandon the book.

This book was easy. It only took four words for me to toss the book aside. “Don’t write at me,” I said to the book and by proxy its author, “if you’re not gonna do it well.” But the point here is that it’s hard to beat that particular experience. Sure you can look at previews of a book online--the Kindle offers them, in fact I’ve got the first several chapters of Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions on my iPhone’s Kindle app right now—but wandering through a bookstore, letting your eye wander, picking up books that look interesting, that you might never have thought of before, then doing the First Paragraph Test with a happy result, I don’t know that there can ever be an electronic replacement for that.

Just a few weeks ago I was in Borders, wandering, and came across a book by A. Roger Ekirch called At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime, and it completely caught my attention. When the power goes out I’ve often thought about the world before electric light, but the moment I saw this book I immediately had the old thought: Why didn’t I think to write that? It had simply never occurred to me that that random thought might make an interesting book. But as soon as I saw it in the store, bells went off, and the perfect rightness of the idea became instantly self-evident.

An Amazon search, or a random browse through the Kindle’s lists, probably would have never turned up this book. You can never prove a negative, can never know what you never found, can never appreciate the opportunities that never crossed your path. And I find it terribly difficult to imagine a world where I can’t wander into a bookstore and hope for something, some glorious unknown and uncontemplated something, to leap off the shelves at me.

Which leaves the publishing industry where, exactly? Well, that probably depends on how many people like me are still out there. And I’m sure someone has run a study on those numbers, but I don’t think I want to know.

The Borders at the Third Street Promenade, one of my favorite places to go wander, closed a few months ago. It lasted long enough to drive out an earlier tenant, the fabulous Midnight Special bookstore, but then even the Borders went away. This may just be a train that is already leaving the station.

Birth of a Demagogue

You may remember that I had some issues with Ayn Rand recently. My initial reaction, upon finally being exposed to some of her work, was to object vehemently, mostly on artistic grounds. I wrote a blog entry, posted it, and moved on to other things.

Then I discovered the power of Google Alerts.

Followers of Ms. Rand (you could almost call them Rand cultists) had Google Alerts set up for any mention of her name. So quite suddenly I found that my readership count increased measurably, and people were leaving comments on my post. And because the tone of my blog post was light (I believe the relevant phrase was “Ayn Rand can bite me”), these comments contained charming and insightful criticisms calling me, for instance, “intellectually jejeune.” (My new favorite phrase!)

Naturally, I immediately realized that this represented a host of new opportunities. Because what’s more fun than messing with the heads of a group of Ayn Rand cultists?

“Ayn Rand can bite me” set the tone, and I wrote a couple more entries in which I took little shots at the cult of Rand. And sure enough, my readership spike continued and the comments kept coming in. It was huge fun.

Trouble is, in order to keep the cultists aggravated I ended up writing things that I didn’t quite believe. I mostly believed them, they were in the neighborhood of what I believed, but strictly speaking, no, I was asserting untruths in order to keep the attention of the Randiacs.

Still, that “intellectually jejeune” comment stung a little. So I finally decided to stop telling lies in the name of outrageousness, and to write a thorough, essay-length critique of Objectivism. Then an actual dialogue could begin, and perhaps a real back-and-forth might prove possible with the people I had been maligning as Randiacs.

The result: crickets.

The readership spike stopped spiking. The only comments I got were from friends of mine who already agreed with me. From the cultists, nothing. Stone silence.

I joked about it in a subsequent blog. Pretended that since no one had attempted to refute my argument then ipso facto it must be considered as having been proved true, and I expected sales of Atlas Shrugged to plummet immediately. No such luck.

The more likely explanation is, per Occam’s razor, the simplest one. Now that I was no longer being provocative, no one was provoked. And to the cultists, the idea of responding to a 3,700 word critical essay was absurd in a Comments box on someone else’s blog post, so naturally none of them even attempted to.

This is one explanation for how Rush Limbaugh was born. How Glenn Beck came to be. Being as charitable toward them as humanly possible, I have to concede that once upon a time, they might have been real people with something real to say. But that they quickly discovered that real criticism vanishes into the wind, while verbal grenades draw attention and response and further attention and increased ratings and yet more attention and bigger paychecks and then more attention. And never mind if, little bit by little bit, the things they said strayed further and further from the neighborhood of truth.

Do that long enough, and eventually it does become true, because you start to believe your own bullshit. And then you’re a weeping monstrosity like Glenn Beck.

So.

Just in case my mention of Ms. Rand happened to trigger a Google alert, if you are one of her devotees, I ask only one thing: don’t bother. There’s no need to respond in any way. We’re not going to agree, so don’t waste your time. If you are one of those who believe Glenn Beck is the new messiah, and you too have a Google alert set up, there’s just no point trying to defend him here, so move on. I’m not going to say anything outrageous just for the purpose of picking a fight, and if you try to pick one I’m probably going to just ignore it. So move on. There are better things to do, and I plan to go and do a few of them.

Have a lovely day.

(Chowderheads.)

Dear Mr. or Ms. Congressperson:

Hi. Just in case any of your staffers are roaming the web looking to see what we the people think about healthcare, I thought I’d let you know what’s going on in the head of this one particular voter/taxpayer.

I don’t have a healthcare horror story to relate--I just have the sort of story that millions of us have. When I opted for self-employment I discovered in real terms what it means to no longer have the leverage provided by small-group coverage: I had no negotiating power whatsoever, and was entirely at the whim of the insurance companies. I’ve written here already about what ensued, but suffice it to say that the merest hint of a possible malady on some sort of red-flag list they keep (an MRI that proved I didn’t have rheumatoid arthritis or any other kind of arthritis, just a shoulder problem that eventually resolved itself) was enough for various insurers to refuse to take me on. I spent weeks trying to arrange coverage until I finally went to the specialist, obtained copies of my medical records, and faxed them in to prove that dammit all, I wasn’t sick. At that point, sure, they were happy to see me and I got coverage.

Two months later they nearly doubled the premium price.

And, of course, after assuring me that I would be able to stay with my current doctor, who is fantastic (and thus my first priority in arranging coverage was to stay with this guy), I called said doctor’s office to make an appointment and was told “Oh no, he doesn’t take that coverage. Hasn’t for ten years now.”

So after being harassed, lied to and conned by the insurance companies, I find myself firmly believing that a public-option healthcare plan is essential. The insurance companies have created a cartel with monopoly powers, and if the government can come in and compete with them, well hell, seems to me that’s good old capitalism at work, and I can’t imagine why all those free-market Republicans would be against it.

Oh wait a second, yes I can imagine why. It’s the tale told by Wendell Potter, former head of corporate communications at CIGNA, who related to Congress and then again on Bill Moyers’s invaluable program, exactly how and why the insurance companies would rather see me die than lose an extra dollar in profit.

And so, Mr. or Ms. Congressperson, Mr. or Madame Senator, I’m putting you on notice. Specifically, Rep. Waxman, Senators Boxer and Feinstein, I’m putting you all on notice: I’m one of your voters, and I’ve decided that in the next election, I’m going to be a single-issue voter. If any of you vote against a healthcare option that includes a competitive public plan, I will in turn vote against you. I don’t care about the rest of your record or how effective you’ve been on this committee or that, I don’t care. Healthcare reform is essential for the long-term growth of the nation, and I firmly believe that a public option must be part of that reform. Give me this, or I’ll go find someone who will.

Thank you for your time. Or I should say, your staffer’s time.

A Few Years With Falstaff

Just learned that one of my all-time favorite teachers died on May 29th, so here then are a few tales about what good teaching looks like.

Bill Sharp taught at Emerson College for only about fifteen years, after teaching at Stanford and then starting the theatre program at the University of California – Riverside. But those fifteen years happened to cover the entire period when I studied there, the more happy me. What Sharp excelled at was teaching acting styles, most particularly the classics. Now, acting is a particularly difficult thing to teach--it’s too easy to fall into the trap of saying to your students “You’ve got it or you don’t.” But he focused intensively on a few key things: understanding the text, trusting your instincts, and challenging your limitations.

He was wonderful with Shakespeare. In fact, the man was Falstaff. Squarely built, a bit of a belly, a good Falstaffian beard, a booming voice when he wanted it and a beguiling sweetness when he wanted it, plus a tendency to perhaps drink too much from time to time. If I were directing Merry Wives or the Henry IV plays, I’d have cast him in a cold second without bothering to audition anyone else. So he wasn’t one of those “If you can’t do, teach” sorts of teachers—he could do, indeed, and very well. Those of us in his class were always conniving to find ways to make him demonstrate a few lines of whatever we were working on, just for the fun of watching him handle the text.

And when we were working on a piece with some complex language, like Shakespeare, his first rule was always this: never say the line till you really understand it. He would sit with us and go line by line through a soliloquy and make sure we really thoroughly comprehended exactly what each line meant, why it was there, what it hoped to accomplish. By the time he was done, our speeches weren’t that awful generalized Shakespearean wash of sound but were concrete, and specific, and rich with meaning.

As for challenging an actor’s limitations—this is the guy who cast me as Othello in a long-form collection of scenes our class presented my Senior year. Bear in mind: I am just about the least likely Othello you could hope to imagine. Iago has always been more my speed, in fact I love that part and hugely regret that I never got to play it. (Though Sharp did spend ages working with me on an Iago speech that became part of my standard auditioning repertoire--the one that ends “’Tis here, but yet confus’d: Knavery’s plain face is never seen till used.”) But he wanted to push me, he wanted to see what would happen if I played a character way outside my normal range. It was essentially an in-class project with only a small audience from the other classes, so the point was not to create great art, it was to push the actors and see who could rise to the occasion. In the end I didn’t really do that great a job--but I appreciate hugely what he was trying to accomplish.

And here, finally, is a story about trusting your instincts. After I graduated, Sharp was nice enough to take on a bunch of us in his off-hours. His own personal time, something he didn’t have to do at all, but for about ten of us he decided what the hell, he’d continue working with us for a while. In that group were a couple of actors who weren’t really very good. Anyone else (me included) would say that these two just didn’t have it, whatever “it” may be, and that there wasn’t much point in spending too much time with them. Which may be exactly why Sharp included them in the group....

These two were doing the nunnery scene from Hamlet one night, and it wasn’t going terribly well. Stiff, and awkward, and dull. But at one point, Sharp noticed something, and he stopped the scene. He said to the guy playing Hamlet, “You had an impulse just then, didn’t you? You wanted to walk out of the room.” The guy nodded. “Then do it,” Sharp said. “Walk out of the room. It’s her job to keep you here, but if you have that impulse, you’ve got to honor it. Let’s try it again.” They started from the top, reached that point, there was a moment’s hesitation and then the guy really truly did walk out of the room. The girl playing Ophelia chased after him, and a moment later they returned, with Ophelia basically dragging Hamlet back onstage.

And after that, after that was one of the best versions of that scene I have ever witnessed. And for those two not-particularly-gifted actors, it was almost certainly the pinnacle of their acting lives, there in a dim room in the old Student Union at Emerson for an audience of about ten. Because Bill Sharp wanted to see every student accomplish as much as they possibly could.

I left Boston and have no idea whether he continued with the extracurricular classwork, but I know he retired in 1994, and despite the drinking he lived till the ripe old age of 84 down in Swampscott. I’m not much of a drinker myself, but I shall, this one particular time, most definitely raise a glass.

Mr. Jackson

About Michael Jackson, I only have this to say:

When I’m driving down the highway and there’s an accident, I generally make a decision to not look at it. For one thing, of course, there’s the practical side: all that slowing down and looking makes traffic impossible, even when the accident doesn’t actually block any lanes, and I don’t want to contribute to the problem. But on a human level, it just seems to me that whoever is involved in the accident is probably having at minimum a very bad day, and at worst one of the most awful days of their lives--and surely they deserve whatever privacy they can get. What they simply don’t need is all those looky-loos staring at them for their own damn entertainment value. “Thank God that’s not me!” think the looky-loos. And “Is somebody dead? Ooh, is that a corpse? Oooooohhhh.” I don’t want to contribute to that problem, either.

And certain celebrities--we all know who they are--slot perfectly for me into a category I think of as Perpetual Wrecks by the Side of the Road. Thus, Jennifer Aniston’s love life deserves just as much privacy as someone whose car got smashed. Which brings us back round to Michael Jackson, who was the King of Pop but who was also, unfortunately, the King of the Car Wrecks. I ignored the stories about his marriages, about his kids, about his various personal travails, about his court trial, all of it. It would mean nothing to him, of course--there will always be plenty of people in the world who delight in staring at the wreck--but it felt good for my soul to just leave that poor man alone.

And now he’s dead, and the world has gone a little bit crazy over it. I did not watch the memorial and frankly I can’t see why the City of Los Angeles should pay for it, but whatever keeps the peace, I guess. I’m certainly sorry he died, and I can’t help but feel a monumental sadness about that sweet kid who got so twisted by his awful life. (I also can’t help thinking that the weirder he got, the more we stared, which can only have contributed to making his weirdness get that much weirder.) All in all, then, I think it’s a better thing to just keep on driving through my own life, and not slow down to stare at the awfulness of his.

The Failure of the Demos

Good article in Time this week about the current state of California’s budget woes. And I completely agree with Mr. O’Leary on one point in particular: the state of the State of California demonstrates the failure of direct democracy.

“Democracy” itself is a Greek word, from demos or demoi, originally a phrase for an Athenian municipality but a word that came to mean “the people” generally, combined with kratos, which means power. And since they basically invented the idea, the Greeks got the naming rights. Originally, democracy in Athens was pure and direct: when a vote was to be taken, every single citizen was compelled to go to the Pnyx. (And I do mean compelled: servants would roam the city with a rope dipped in red paint, and any citizen caught wandering the streets instead of going to the Pnyx was slapped with the rope, leaving a red stripe for all to see. They called it “ruddling.”)

But of course this direct democracy was only possible for two reasons: only about a third of the residents of Athens were considered citizens, and only adult males were allowed to vote, so it was possible to cram everybody onto a hillside for the requisite speeches and poll-taking. But even then there was something called the Council of 500, a group of leading citizens who actually made most of the day-to-day decisions. So even at its birth, there was already the necessary beginning of what we now call representational democracy.

Representational democracy is what we have here in most of the U.S. We elect people who go to the state capital or to Washington and who cast votes on our behalf. We cast one vote for a representative who then casts all the others. But in California, we have found a way around representational democracy and back to something very like the original direct form, through the referendum system.

It’s been a disastrous failure. Just about every issue gets submitted to the voice of the people through a ballot initiative, often through expensive special elections where they don’t wait for a national contest to be held but instead call for everyone to come out and vote again and again. This creates voter fatigue, where turnout gets lower and lower with each special election that gets added to the calendar (particularly when no one is getting ruddled...), so that only the people fiercely committed to a particular issue actually bother to turn out and vote. Which has the effect of actually perverting democracy, because only the ideologues end up having any voice. You can end up with some mighty strange laws that way.

But to make matters worse, when one side doesn’t get what it wants, it simply creates another referendum and submits that for a new vote a year or so further on. Exactly this is happening right now with the infamous Prop 8: having lost the first round, the opponents of Prop 8 are collecting signatures to submit the same issue to the voters again, as soon as possible, so that they can try different tactics and hopefully get a different outcome. But what’s to stop the people in favor of Prop 8, if they should lose the next round, from coming back themselves a year after that? Potentially there’s no end to it, not so long as the vote-count is close. So even though I happen to be on the side of the opponents of Prop 8 and would love to see that appalling decision done away with, I just don’t see where this endless referendum cycle does anyone any good.

But of course the classic example of failed direct democracy involves Prop 13, which limited property taxes (and thereby the amount of revenues the state can generate), and declared that the state legislature cannot pass any budget without a two-thirds majority. Combined, this double-eyed whammy means that the state has a nearly impossible time raising money when it needs it, unless it goes directly to the people and asks for the passage of a bond initiative. And as we saw in the last special election, the people are perfectly willing to vote for spending for new mandated services, but they are considerably less willing to vote for anything that even remotely sounds like higher taxes.

We the people want everything for nothing. It’s understandable, but it’s also horrific from a governance standpoint. And it is most definitely related to the Era of Excess we just lived through, where people spent money they didn’t have to buy things they didn’t need and then found themselves deeply in debt, and clueless as to how they got there. (Obviously that’s not the whole story--there were plenty of corporations perfectly happy to exploit our something-for-nothing weakness. But for now, I’m focusing on our own culpability, on why direct democracy has failed so badly.) The entire global economy rode a massive bubble of imaginary wealth and has now come crashing to the ground. Because you cannot have everything for nothing. TANSTAAFL, as Heinlein was fond of saying. (See? Sometimes I do agree with Milton Friedman.)

The result of all this in California was inevitable: at some point bills would come due that the state couldn’t pay, which is where we are right now, leading to what will surely be massive cuts to all sorts of state programs. And the inevitable result of that? Every group facing funding cuts is taking to the airwaves begging We the People to demand that funding not, in fact, be cut.

It’s only a matter of time before someone writes a new referendum, whereupon We the people, upset at the loss of such things as our lovely state parks, will vote to re-fund everything that the governor has cut--while still refusing to pay for a bit of it. And we’ll blame it all on the governor, refusing to acknowledge that in reality, it’s our own fault for creating this unworkable system in the first place.

Once we’ve done that--once we’ve had one more round of demanding the restoration of our pretty little baubles without paying for it--the state will be doomed.