That Pesky Molar

For months now, I've been having trouble with a tooth, a molar on the right lower jaw. Biting down, I would often feel a sharp stab of pain. For a while, I pretended it wasn't a big deal. But at some point the words "root canal" took up residence in my head, and I went even further into denial. Because I am, to put it mildly, a great big chicken when it comes to dental work. But the stabs of pain kept coming; and then I started having a more or less constant taste of metal in my mouth.

Last August, I had a little filling done, and I worked up my courage and asked the dentist to take a look at that pesky molar. He said that it seemed an old silver filling was degrading, and that a little slot may have opened up through which a new cavity might be forming. I screwed my courage up a little further and asked whether it would need a root canal. "I don't expect so," he said--but then said further that he couldn't be sure till he drilled out the old filling and took a look.

And then, right there, he said that as long as he was doing the one little filling, he could go ahead and take care of the molar as well. I just couldn't do it. One filling (on the other side of the mouth) was bad enough; I simply couldn't handle any more that day. Knowing that it was stupid to let the problem linger, I let the problem linger.

Last night, Monday evening, I went back and dealt with it. All these months I kept trying to hold onto my dentist's assertion that he "didn't expect" my problem to require a root canal, but of course what I really obsessed over was his uncertainty on that score. Besides, having given the problem another six-plus months to get worse, even if it wasn't that bad before, surely it would be now. All through the weekend I kept a running countdown--not of the days and hours till the appointment was to begin, but of that moment when the appointment would be past. I can't think of a time when I have so longed for it to be Tuesday.

And after all that? It wasn't really a big deal. I asked my dentist (the marvelous Randall Gordon, DDS) to "numb the hell out of me." He injected me once with the novocaine and the effect was only so-so. "Really," I said to him. "I don't care if I can't eat till tomorrow." So he did two more injections, and then he went to work.

You know, every once in a while I lament that I was born in the wrong century. I should have been born during the Enlightement, when the world actually cared about learning and accomplishment. When Willoughby makes Kate Winslet's character swoon in Sense and Sensibility because he carries along a little volume of Shakespeare, I lament all over again that I was born in a time when that would just seem kinda gay. But whenever I go to the dentist, I exult in the wonders of the year 2006, and would not wish to be anywhere else. Novocaine, man, that's some of the best stuff on earth!

(Plumbing, too. Modern toilets and hot showers are pretty damn great.)

Dr. Gordon went at that tooth with a vengeance; drilled out the three fillings that had accumulated over the years, and replaced them with some material that is colored the same as my tooth, so it even looks better than it did. (That must be an L.A. thing, because I didn't ask for it, he just did it.) I walked home through the rain feeling completely thrilled--but also more than a little shocked that it really was over.

Turns out I really couldn't eat till the next day--by 10:00 p.m. the numbness had only just begun to subside, enough that I could manage some cottage cheese, and that was my dinner for the night. With the numbness gone there came some pain, because he really had been grinding away at that tooth for a while, but I took an Advil and went to bed and by morning it was mostly all better.

And now it's all done, and I have nothing more to worry about. Which only means this: now I will sit there dreading what the next thing will be. This is how a hypochondriac is born, isn't it?

Can't Live Without iTunes

I never thought I would listen to music on the computer. It offended the purist in me: compressed files by definition lose part of the music, and after spending money on a decent stereo why on earth would I then throw all that aside to listen to music on cheap computer speakers?

Turns out convenience is everything. And being able to turn on iTunes, set it to Shuffle, and have it play for the next three weeks without repeating a track is so appealing that all other questions became irrelevant. Then I found music blogs that offered free legal downloads, to help keep me current with new music, and I even became a downloader. Another thing I never thought I'd be. Life is long, and full of surprises.

Here, apropos of nothing at all, are the last ten songs, picked by iTunes entirely at random from the 7,598 tracks I own, that have played this morning:

Beatles, "Please Please Me"
Steve Miller Band, "True Fine Love"
The Byrds, "Mr. Spaceman"
Janis Joplin, "Tell Mamma"
Lou Reed, "Wild Child"
Arctic Monkeys, "Knock a Door Run"
Diane Cluck, "Hover Not"
Peter Gabriel, "The Promise of Shadows"
Paul Simon, "Can't Run But"
U2, "Surrender"

And Billie Holiday is playing right now, singing "I Wished on the Moon," a song composed partly by Dorothy Parker, of all people. The thing that fascinates is me is trying to find patterns in the supposedly-random Shuffling of my music, but I suspect that has more to do with how I look for patterns in everything, and not with the algorithms that randomize my music files.

Okay. Things to do, so off I go.

Not About Politics

A friend of mine was looking over the blog recently (there's one!) and said that she liked the pictures, which reminded me that I haven't put up any pictures in a long time. So here, for no other reason than that, is one from Alaska:



And to accompany it, a wee story about those halcyon Alaska days of yore. I took the picture about ten years ago, in Glacier Bay, on a trip with the family; but for me it was a return. When I was only a few months old, my dad needed a good job, and his Navy credentials hadn't helped as much as he'd hoped. But then RCA hired him for a very good job--trouble was, it was way deep in Alaska. Eighty miles southwest of Fairbanks, to be specific, deep in the interior, at the Clear Air Force Base. He was hired to service radar terminals watching for those pesky Soviet missiles that never came, so we piled everything we owned (and by we I mean my parents, because I was, as I said, a little young to be piling things other than poop) into and on top of a VW bug, and took off--for New Jersey. (Training first, for a couple months.) After that, then we drove on to Alaska. I leave it to you to decide whether Alaska or Jersey is the wilder place.

(And by the way: if you remember what the VW bug was shaped like, let me just say that strapping a big wooden toy chest filled with your stuff on top of the car doesn't seem like such a good idea anymore when you're going up a very steep hill, you know what I'm saying?)

We were there for a year and a half, all those miles away from Fairbanks, which is where the nearest grocery store was. So you shopped once a month and bought a lot of powdered milk. There was a river between here and there, and no bridge, only a ferry in the summer or a place to drive across the ice in the winter; so if the ice was either forming or breaking up, you did not get across the river for a while and had better hope you bought enough food the last time you went to the store.

Dad had a job; Mom didn't. And there wasn't much to do where we lived (even when I went back ten years ago, the place was little better than a trailer park outside the AFB). When I knocked the radio off the table, afterward it would only get Russian radio, so Mom learned some Russian because believe me, she had the time for it. Television was mostly soap operas and travel documentaries on places like, say, Miami. I think Mom once said that for a while she found herself teaching Spanish to the natives, so if you're ever up there and you encounter a fiftyish Athabascan who speaks Spanish, now you know why.

Snow drifts so high we could open our second-floor windows and go for a walk; bears that would come up and knock on the front door because they wanted to share your nice warm apartment with you; days of eternal sunshine, and nights that would never end. After about a year and a half, we went back to Miami and that was the end of that. But for Dad, it had done what it was supposed to: once he had RCA on his CV, he was pretty much all set.

And for me, despite the fact that I can't remember a bit of it (that's why the trip back was so important to me), Alaska has always had a romantic appeal that no other place on earth has. For me, at least--I don't think Mom feels quite the same, but then she has real memories and not just the amusing stories that substitute for memory in my head.

Bad Words

Last week, in railing against an effort to force cable companies to offer "a la carte" pricing, I asserted that the real reason behind the effort was not lowering the price of cable TV for American consumers but, rather, the desire of certain prudes to force their decency standards on the rest of us. But I did not make any effort to defend why it is that televised filth is worth keeping where it is.

Up front: if I were a parent, I would be a permissive parent. When the family went to Europe in 1998 and visited Amsterdam, I took my then-12 year old sister and 14 year old brother to visit the red light district. We walked through, we saw the ladies in the windows (my sister's only real comment was "Ewww" at a particularly hefty lady), we did double-takes at some of the statuary, and we did not take pictures because we had been warned not to. Why would I do such a thing? Because I very strongly believe that it's more valuable to safely experience something than to be sheltered from it. It's better to see for yourself what the world is than to be told about it from a distance, through someone else's perhaps-biased filter. I would not have sent them there on their own, and was ready to have any sort of discussion they wanted to have. As it turns out, the whole experience pretty much slid right off their backs, and after a little while we turned back toward the hotel and met our parents for dinner.

This is my attitude toward TV shows, painting, movies, literature, music, the whole shebang of art and culture. It doesn't mean I'm going to show a porn flick to a five year old, but if a fifteen year old wants to see one, well, fine: I'd rather s/he see it with me than on their own. Besides, I can remember one time when I was a kid, and my mother accidentally took me to see a movie called Zardoz, which had nudity on a scale she just hadn't imagined. (It was 1974, so I was eight or nine.) It was a little embarrassing, and Mom was uncomfortable enough that she asked whether I wanted to leave, but I would have found it even more embarrassing to leave. Mostly, though, it was just--opaque, I think, would be the best way to describe it. I didn't understand what was going on, didn't know why those people were so very naked, and the whole experience just became a mildly uncomfortable, undigestible wash. And that's kinda what happens: if a child isn't prepared to experience something (and bear in mind that I'm only speaking here of cultural experiences; cases of abuse or violence are, of course, a whole different thing), it doesn't really penetrate; and if they are prepared, and if you're there to guide them through the experience, then they know more and understand more than they did going in, which can only be a good thing.

Now here's where upright parents will jump all over me: the adult is not always there, but the TV always is, and it is difficult if not impossible to fully monitor what kids are exposed to on their TVs. It's a fair point--and I will note here that, through experience, I am utterly determined that when I do have kids, they will not be allowed to have televisions in their rooms. This is not to limit their exposure to what's available, but because I know, through experience, that if given a choice between a book and a TV set, kids will pick the TV set every time, and I really, really want to give books a chance by removing the competition as much as possible.

So: the point is granted, you cannot control what your kids will see on TV. Here's the thing, though: if you establish your household as one in which all issues are open for discussion, and programs are not segregated as "appropriate" or "inappopriate," then I believe that kids are much less likely to try and hide what they're watching. And if my kids want to watch, say, "nip/tuck" then I would prefer that they feel comfortable enough to watch it out in the living room where I know they're watching it. And if something on the show disturbs them, well then, let's all talk about it. It is, after all, well understood that trying to forbid a thing only makes it more attractive; so if nothing is forbidden, then your kids approach cultural material on its own merits--or lack thereof. This is an atmosphere in which reason can prevail, where true learning can happen.

How do you protect your kids? I mean really protect them? By teaching them as much as you possibly can during your brief time with them so that they will be strong and able and smart; then they can protect themselves, and there's nothing better than that.

Art and Politics

I am not the first (by a wide margin) to note that films got more political this year, but it's a fact that is still worth celebrating. The day of the 2004 election, as the exit polls turned out to be wrong, I realized then and there: it was time to start focusing on politically-themed art again. Why has the "culture war" become so important in determining the results of elections, and why are we Liberals so often on the losing side of the culture war? Seems to me that it's because at some point, we Liberals got complacent; we decided, at some undetermined moment in time, that our position on various issues was so unassailable that we no longer needed to keep arguing the point. (Once Bill Clinton said that abortion, for example, should be "safe, legal and rare," didn't it seem to you so eminently sensible that there wasn't any point in arguing the matter further? Come on, didn't it seem just that way, just a little?)

Trouble is, the Other Guys never stopped setting forth their side of the various arguments. And in the vacuum, their voices were the only ones being heard. Of course there was also some mind-boggling timidity involved: the moment George Bush Sr. called Michael Dukakis "a card-carrying member of the ACLU," Dukakis should have immediately squared his shoulders and said "Of course I am. The real question is, why aren't you?"

As clever as I want to feel for having had this minor-key epiphany in early November 2004, obviously some of my Hollywood brethren were way ahead of me. Crash; Good Night, and Good Luck; Syriana; Brokeback Mountain (which does have a political point to make no matter how much the filmmakers talk about its being "just a love story"); Munich; and The Constant Gardener, to name only the most prominent films of the past year, would obviously have been at least in pre-production in November 2004, so I wasn't at all alone in thinking that the time had come for us to stand up and start making some noise again. (Hell, even Star Wars was getting political--whatever else you may think about the last movie, Amidala's line about democracy ending "to the thunderous sound of applause" does have some bite.)

And this notion that Hollywood's "liberal elite" should just stick to making mass entertainments and keep their big yaps shut is of course the most blatantly dishonest form of hypocrisy. We all revere Frank Capra's blatantly political films now that they're safely in the decades-ago past, now that they're no longer dangerous; we all talk about the Great Works of Art that were "ahead of their time," once upon a time, and how brave and how bold those artists were--back in the day. I suppose it's part of the rose-hued nostalgia that everyone feels, that sense that things were better in the past but that now, everything is simply screwed up. But there is also, as I said, pure hypocrisy involved: George Clooney should keep his big yap shut, but Arnold Schwarzenegger is a hero. It has nothing to do with Hollywood types not having a right to speak out, and it has everything to do with Hollywood types speaking out about things you don't agree with.

(Personally, I could take or leave Mr. Clooney back when he was just a fidgety actor on ER, but now that he is a capital-A Artist doing his damnedest to create work that means something, he's become one of my favorites. And his company with Steven Soderbergh, Section 8, is consistently doing the sort of stuff I find most interesting.)

I'm not going to get into which film should win the Oscar this year (though I may succumb as the date draws nearer because everyone does), and that's because the films are so very different, and they're all really quite good this year, and they all succeed at what they want to accomplish. (Caveat: I haven't yet seen Capote.) But I just saw Munich the other night, and if you want my guess as to which film means the most, that one is it. The box office for this film may never have taken off, which makes it a failure in Hollywood terms and it will probably get punished accordingly by the Academy; but I think that in twenty or thirty years, this will be the film that people end up remembering, the one that feels really significant. It may even go down as Spielberg's great achievement; because as the New York Times review noted, "Mr. Spielberg has been pummeling audiences with his virtuosity for nearly as long as he has been making movies; now, he tenders an invitation to a discussion." And what is present in Munich, what makes it difficult for an audience to take but is exactly why it is so good at inciting discussion, is ambiguity, the absence of easy answers, the unadorned presentation of multiple points of view. Eric Bana's character Avner is supposed to represent us: in these times, don't we all feel a little of his paranoia, his regret, his unease? All the way through the movie, we keep hearing about the virtues of home and family; but we keep hearing it from both sides. (There is a brilliant scene when a safehouse gets double-booked, and our undercover Mossad agents find themselves sharing a room with, among others, an agent of the PLO, who reveals that he wants for his people exactly what Avner wants for his.) And after I walked out of the theater, I was torn neatly in half: on the one hand, I felt yet again that Gandhi was right, that violence only breeds violence; at the same time, I knew that if I were the leader of a country, I would have to do exactly as Golda Meir did.

That's good art. That's significant, powerful, meaningful art. It's been a great year for movies, no matter what the box office numbers say, and I for one am hugely gratified that once again, the culture war is beginning to resemble a dialogue and not a monologue.

(Note: Apparently I've said some of this before, back in October. But what the hey, it deserves repeating.)

Cable Prices

Since the price of cable TV here in West L.A. is absurdly high (Adelphia charges about $82 per month for expanded basic plus HBO, and those prices are due to rise yet again next month), one might think that I would welcome any initiative that might lower that cost. But when I saw a headline in the L.A. Times the other day, "Study Finds Savings in Cable Choice," instead I just found my blood boiling. Here's why:

The article reflects a recent FCC initiative to create what is called "a la carte" pricing for cable television channels. The idea is to eliminate the blocks of channels that most cable providers include as a matter of course, and to allow viewers to pick and choose which channels they do and do not want to pay for. On the face of it, this makes some sense: to pick only one example, since I don't speak Spanish, why would I want to pay for SiTV? If a low price could be found that, taken together, gives me only the channels I do actually watch at a lower price, why wouldn't that be a great idea? The L.A. Times article refers to an FCC report suggesting that, on average, consumers would find their cable bills reduced by about 13%. Sounds terrific.

Funny thing, though. An FCC report from 2004 (before Kevin Martin took over the reins of the Commission) concluded that a la carte pricing would in fact drive prices up. Mr. Martin, however, asserts that "the first [report] contained 'mistaken calculations,' relied on 'unsupported and problematic assumptions' and presented an 'incomplete analysis.'" That's Republican-speak for "it didn't come to the conclusions we wanted, so we changed the terms of the argument till it did."

First, let's deal with the basic economics, and how cable TV works under bundled pricing. Like most people, I pay a flat fee for what Adelphia calls Expanded Basic, meaning I get a couple hundred channels of programming for the same cost every month. And as I said before, if I find that I never watch, say, the PAX channel, why isn't it a good idea for me to be able to say No, and get it off my line-up? Isn't that just good ol' American competition, the marketplace in action? Not with cable TV, no. Because for one thing, there's already competition--for advertising dollars, and that is ratings-driven, just as it is for the free network channels like CBS, NBC and ABC. If enough people aren't watching a channel, it doesn't have good ratings and it doesn't make the big advertising bucks. Now to a certain extent these channels are subsidized by the fact that they're bundled together in the first place, which is how niche channels survive--would Trio still exist, otherwise? A couple years ago, I never watched anything on FX; then they started running interesting original programming like Nip/Tuck and, particularly, the wonderful Rescue Me. That's competition in action: now I watch their channel, their ratings have jumped, and I'm sure they're making more advertising money. But if, a couple years ago, I had been on an a la carte plan, I would have probably decided not to keep FX, and would have never been able to sample Rescue Me and would be missing out on a great show. (Sometimes there are downsides to this competition: Bravo used to be a great channel, with a broad focus on the arts; now it mostly shows pop-culture crap.)

As a Disney spokesman noted in the L.A. Times article, the "Disney Channel was once offered a la carte, and only a privileged few bought it despite the strength of our brand." This tells me that, in practical terms, if people are asked to affirmatively pay on a channel-by-channel basis, they will consistently make conservative choices whose purpose is to keep their bill low. In the process there will be less of what cable has to offer that is available, because if the Disney Channel can't draw subscribers, how will C-Span? Thus, consumer choice is actually restricted under a la carte pricing. And as the article noted, minority-focused channels like SiTV would be hit particularly hard, leaving those communities unrepresented.

And if I were to decide that having all those choices was important to me, then it's a pretty safe bet that I would end up paying more for those channels individually than I ever did when they were bundled. I have to conclude that the 2004 FCC report was correct; so then what's going on now?

Decency. That's what it's about. A la carte pricing is a stalking horse for enabling a small number of decency-obsessed viewers to keep the smut off their televisions. Heaven forfend they should take the trouble to learn how to use their V chips; no, they just don't want this stuff to exist at all. They don't want the naughtiness of Drawn Together, they don't want the harsh language and adult situations of Nip/Tuck, they don't want that damned Howard Stern anywhere anyhow. And they know that if you can starve out the stuff on the margins, eventually you start to starve the beast itself.

And that's when I start to turn red in the face. A la carte pricing isn't about the health of my wallet in the least; it's about a few overly-touchy ideologues trying to dictate the content of the airwaves. (Here's a Washington Post article from March 2005 about Senator Stevens's efforts to extend the ability of the FCC to fine cable programming on the same basis as free-over-the-air channels.)

Now if the FCC really wanted to lower my cable bill, then they would do something about the fact that Adelphia has a monopoly in my part of town. That's why my bill is so damn high, because I simply have no other options. (Satellite TV, alas, isn't an option where I live.) The very high price that Adelphia charges has nothing to do with how much programming comes in over my cable lines, or what kind of programming; it has everything to do with the fact that Adelphia can pretty much charge whatever the hell it wants, and what other option do I have but to bend over and take it?

Ciao, Torino

Well, I tried. Tried watching a little of NBC's Winter Olympics coverage. But as I was watching today, I noticed that there sure did seem to be a lot of commercials. Finding that seriously discouraging, and with other things to do, I went off and did those other things. (The second half of City of Truth just became very significantly different from what we had originally planned. So it goes.)

Then tried again tonight, after watching Part Five of the completely terrific BBC adaptation of Bleak House. (Anna Maxwell Martin is doing superb work, and is my favorite recent discovery--and oh, how I love discovering great new actors.) And since I'd had the earlier impression that the Olympics coverage/advertising ratio was skewed, I kept an eye on the clock.

The result: six minutes of half-pipe coverage, then four minutes of commercials; five minutes of short-track racing, then three minutes of commercials. And you know what? Nothing that I saw of the actual competition set my heart to beating faster in the least; now maybe I could find myself settling in just to see what happens, if not for the fact that the coverage is being constantly interrupted by commercials. Too much advertising, far too much, for far too little reward.

Ciao, Torino. Ciao, Winter Olympics. I've got better things to do.

(And on a related note, I heartily recommend Laura Penny's impassioned book Your Call is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit.)

Sometimes I Am Despondent

There was a line in a news story about Coretta Scott King's funeral that made me say "What on earth?" and so I went searching, and I found this. And at that point, all you can do is hang your head and apologize to the Lord for being part of the same species as these people.

(Please, whatever you do: don't go wandering around the main site. It's just not worth what it will cost your soul.)

Absurdity Upon Absurdity

As follow-up to my earlier post, I note this article from CNN about how an Iranian newspaper plans to run a contest seeking cartoons about the Holocaust as a test of just how tolerant the West really is. (Actually, quite aside from my gut reaction that I'd rather not see such a thing, it's actually a fair question.)

But really, doesn't all this beg the question of whether anyone outside Denmark would have ever seen these cartoons in the first place if there hadn't been such a big stink raised? By protesting so loudly, haven't Muslims in fact ensured that these "blasphemous" cartoons have now been seen broadly, all across the world? (I have seen them; if not for all of this, I would have never sought them out.) How does that serve the honor of the Prophet?

Cartoon Bloodshed

Am I the only person who thinks that a headline like "Afghan Police Kill Four in Cartoon Bloodshed" sounds as if Yosemite Sam has taken up a career in Afghani law enforcement?

Fareed Zakaria wrote a superb column about American misconceptions about the Middle East; his column touched on the current imbroglio over a Danish newspaper's publication of cartoons depicting Mohammad in what is seen by many to be a blasphemous manner. (Interestingly, the below-mentioned Neil Gaiman refers to the possibility that "...three of the images that upset people the most were apparently created by the people who were showing them," in other words that the people protesting the cartoons may have created some of them, but I haven't found any corroboration of that anywhere.)

Now I'm the last guy to make value judgments of a culture, and I sure as hell won't do so here. But I will happily talk about perceptions of a culture. The Americans, for example, have for years now been doing a piss-poor job of "winning the hearts and minds" of the Middle East. (Cf. Mr. Zakaria, again.) When the Bush administration pushes free elections as the perfect exemplar of liberty, then refuses to acknowledge an Islamist party when it wins said free elections, it is fair to assume that the people of Palestine and Iraq might see that as yet another example of a pervasive Western hatred of Islam.

But. When Muslims in Europe and the Middle East see a few cartoons and start burning embassies, it also fair to assume that we in the West might see those good Muslims as intolerant, narrow-minded children whose customary reaction to anything that challenges their worldview is to set it on fire.

An interesting parallel: a couple weeks ago, Rolling Stone ran the instantly-infamous cover photo of Kanye West as Jesus. There were certainly plenty of good Christians who found this offensive, and they certainly had something to say about it. (For the record: I do not find the image of Mr. West blasphemous, but I do find it to be in remarkably poor taste.) But you didn't see Catholics setting fire to the offices of Rolling Stone.

So while I readily acknowledge that we in the West are doing a miserable job of presenting the virtues of our way of life, including our tolerance, to those in the Middle East; at the same time, those in the Middle East are not at present doing anything to help their image in the West. It would be awfully nice if both sides would just calm down a little and not be so damn reactive about everything, but clearly I just moved into the realm of pipe dreams and it's time to stop now.

New From Neil

I'm a long-standing fan of Neil Gaiman's work, and just thought I'd take a second to note that his excellent website has just been redesigned. Neil is of course the writer of the comic par excellence, The Sandman, and has also turned into quite a good novelist. Back in '99, Marc and I wrote the stage adaptation of Neil's graphic novel with Dave McKean, Signal to Noise, and Neil, in keeping with his broad reputation as a thoroughly nice guy, encouraged us to make the changes that needed to be made to translate the material into another medium; he provided some of his notes and unpublished scenes; and when we opened, he came down to Chicago for a benefit performance in aid of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

(An amusing note: a couple years later, the BBC had Neil and Dave do a radio adaptation of Signal to Noise, then released a CD of it; in the booklet for the CD, Neil wrote a short story in which time has passed, and the characters respond to a stage play based on their lives that is clearly a reflection of our own play. Neil's criticisms of our work were valid, and the whole post-modern reflection of a reflection of a reflection was fascinating--and frequently hilarious, at least for me.)

Neil's blog is superb (I particularly admire his light-handed brevity--he's brilliant at boiling something down to its crystalline essence), and has as much to do with why I started blogging as anything else. And while we're on the subject, Mr. McKean is an artist of the highest order, and one of my dreams is to get one of his works for my walls.

SOTU, Brute

In a world increasingly riddled with acronyms (or WIRWA, for short), the other day POTUS delivered the SOTU for the fifth time. West Wing has already taught us that POTUS stands for the President of the United States; now SOTU, for State of the Union, seems to be becoming common. I'm waiting for the day when we have acronyms inside of acronyms, the whole damn thing boiling down to PS5, for POTUS's fifth SOTU.

But that's neither here nor there (BTNHNT). I've always made a point of watching the SOTUs, just as I've always made a point of watching as much as possible of both the Democratic and Republican nominating conventions. This isn't because I'm a political junkie; more like an interested observer. (One of the important themes in my script based on the battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. is an emphasis on the responsibilities of an individual citizen--the Greeks, who were so badly outnumbered by the Persians in that fight, had probably twice as many men at hand, but half of them were slaves, i.e. not citizens, therefore they were never asked to fight. Contrast that with this.) But on Tuesday, which was also the day the Oscar nominations were announced, I had it in my head to go see Brokeback Mountain--at the same time as the POTU. Should I keep a long-standing bargain with myself, or go see the movie that I needed to see? (Needed to see? Yep--there's a scene in the movie that is almost identical to one I've had in Beaudry for a year, and damn it all, there is now no way I can use my scene and will have to come up with something else.)

In the end, the decision was easy. Watching the SOTU, after all, is not an end in itself; it's about obtaining the information necessary to be a responsible citizen. But when the entire transcript can be found within hours at the New York Times, the information is the easy part. More to the point, the question became this: is there, at this late stage, anything that George W. Bush can say that I will believe? Does the man have any credibility with me at all? And the answer is: nope. So I went to see the movie.

And it was good, and in the end none of it mattered: I got home at 10:00, turned on the TV and CNN was just beginning a complete replay of the entire SOTU. So I got to have my movie and get pissed off at the President! Such a deal! (I must confess, it was nice to be able to see the whole thing--the moment when he complained about Congress not passing his Social Security "reform" and the Democrats started cheering definitely had me cackling.)

Now--what did I think of the speech itself? Well, it boils down to some pretty simple stuff. First, you have to admire the skill of his speechwriters, whose skill at making night seem day and day night is extraordinary, an artistry of bullshit that I think has never been matched. Bush is a dualist right down to his toenails, a black-and-white ideologue who seems incapable of comprehending anything that might be complex. His early statement that "...the road of isolationism and protectionism may seem broad and inviting, yet it ends in danger and decline" was typical of the whole speech. His path is presented as "[t]he only way to protect our people, the only way to secure the peace, the only way to control our destiny," and anything that is not his path can only end "in danger and decline." It was particularly astounding to hear this President--who during the 2000 campaign sounded like such an isolationist--suddenly beating the drum against the dangers of isolationism. But then it has long been evident that the son of the man who railed against a "new world order" is in fact trying to create a new world order, with himself as its head.

Now it might seem that in changing his position on isolationism, Bush is doing exactly what his critics always accuse him of never doing: changing his mind to accept a new reality. September 11th clearly demonstrated that a problem festering somewhere else in the world can now wreak havoc on our shores all too easily, so that isolationism is simply an unviable option. Trouble is, everyone agrees with that, Democrats and Republicans alike. But where George Bush sees freedom "on the march," wearing the boots of soldiers, there are other ways to advance freedom. Martin Luther King understood this, so did Gandhi, so did Jesus Christ. The thing that continually astounds me is how unChristian these Christians are, how incapable they seem to be of embracing Christ's most revolutionary idea: turning the other cheek. Greet hostility with love. The path will be hard, and unclear, and fraught with danger (it is serendipitous that the final volume of Taylor Branch's magnificent biography of Dr. King has just been released, reminding us of just how dangerous and hopeless Dr. King's path of non-violence became), but in the end it is (not to get too dualistic about it) the best way to achieve peace. Freedom need not march forward on the boots of a soldier; it can also take flight on the wings of a dove.

The Runner Stumbles

Okay, so the thing about a thirty-day sprint is that keeping up that pace for a full thirty days is, you know, hard. And this week, I just kinda sat down where I was, blinked a few times, and watched the world pass me by.

City of Truth has to wait till Marc gets freed up again, after Sundance and several meetings with production companies; Beaudry is moving slowly because I'm having classic third-act problems (i.e., I don't actually know what on earth happens during the third act); and although I've also been working on my taxes, at the moment I'm stymied because filling out one form requires first filling out another form which requires first filling out yet another form. It means, for mathematically-challenged persons such as myself (or numerically impaired, or just plain 'rithmetic-stupid), that you really need a big block of time with no distractions when you can just get in there and grind it out. This thought is in and of itself deeply depressing.

It got so bad the other night that I looked at the Sunday newspaper, sitting there unread on the floor next to the sofa, and thought that I really ought to just dump the whole thing in the recycling bag and get it off the floor. I leaned down for the paper and then stood again, thinking it was just too damn hard. The paper still sits there, waiting for me to find some giddyup somewhere.

Exercises? No, those fell away for a couple days, though I was able to force myself back on track by Wednesday. Mostly I have sat on the sofa, watching Bugs Bunny cartoons and cackling over "Hillbilly Hare."

And I could write more, but suddenly it all seems so... so very...

Another Excerpt

It's been a while since I last excerpted something from my writing; here's something else, then. It's from a short story called "Absinthe," and if you're familiar with Degas's painting then you know everything you need to know. The story came from my having this on my wall for years (erm, a copy, of course--a cheap print in a cheap frame, to be honest) as, slowly, it started to tell me a story. Oh, and by the way, the language is just a wee bit blue. But we're all adults, yes?

Blindness would come first.

First the dimming, then the fade then gone, and after it death. She always had known this but drank the drink anyway. It made no difference.

Alois sat next to her, smoking his pipe. Once he had explored her with its stem, but she had protested and he did not attempt it again. The other things, though, on these he would from time to time insist. It had been a long time and perhaps tonight he would wish one of these again. The scarlet cords or the kneeling with her eyes shut.

Suzanne wore her prettiest bonnet but that no longer meant anything to anyone but her. It had long ago gone as grey as her skin. Across the bar, in the smoked mirror, she saw her face, blank and grey and immobile, like a bust made of dead ash from Alois’s pipe. Or perhaps her face only seemed to wane when it was in truth her sight that was sinking. Was it possible that she still shone as once she had, only now she alone unable to perceive it?

She looked down to the green, almost viscous liqueur before her and even this effort was an effort, even this cost energy and seemed wasteful. No. She no longer shone.

Alois sniffled from his cold. In the heat of their fucking his nose would run and he would not notice. They had lain together so often that she knew this past doubt, and past caring. Everything was so vague, the edges indistinct, objects blurred together until even shape became difficult to distinguish. She knew of the painters who spoke of such things as a virtue but she could not see how or why. A painting ought not to make people feel as she always felt. Why would anyone wish this? Monsieur there in the corner—oh what was he sketching now?—, he told people he was a painter. She might ask him. But last week he had said he would paint her portrait one day, which could only mean he hoped to take her upstairs and pay with something else, with lines on paper. She had since refrained from meeting his eyes. The question was not so important.

The glass stood before her. She picked it up, sipped. Another mote lost forever, she thought, and sipped again.

On Being Not-Yet-Rich

So here's the thing: I am at present extremely not-yet-rich, and sometimes this is not-yet-fun. Take for example: the date January 20th recently passed, and for those who do not take pause to observe the moment, January 20th is the date assigned for the inauguration of the President of the United States--in those years when a President is inaugurated. Five years ago, when George II was inaugurated, I made a little pact with myself: on that day I donated money to an organization dedicated to the environment, because I figured that with a Republican in office, such organizations were going to need every dime they could get. (For the record: originally I donated to The Nature Conservancy, but as time passed I decided I needed someone a little more militant and switched over to the Natural Resources Defense Council--but don't worry, you'll never find me becoming an Earth First!er.) And then every year thereafter, for at least as long as George II was in office, I would donate money on the 20th of January. (Alas, as time passed it began to feel important to donate to a whole host of organizations: the ACLU, Amnesty International, and so on. So many important things at risk these days, and so little money to spread around.)

But this year, I just plain don't have the money, and the 20th of January passed with my pledge broken. It was not a happy moment. But you won't hear me calling myself poor, oh no. I am proudly not-yet-rich, that's what I am. I'm doing the 30-day sprint, I've got balls in the air (so to speak), and eventually something is going to happen somewhere. It's just a matter of time and continued application of effort.

In the meantime, there are things to learn. I got fired from a dayjob a while back, and with everything in my life in real jeopardy I suddenly found myself feeling a real hostility toward, to pick only one example, drivers in their fancy cars. Those smug little SOBs hurtling around L.A. in their Jaguars, their Mercedeses and their Lexi, the ostentatious overly-manicured women behind the wheels of their ginormous Escalades. There are a lot of aggressive, downright obnoxious drivers in Los Angeles, and there's a lot of wealth on conspicuous display. But it took me no time at all to find myself one of those people shut out of that world, and even if it was only temporary, it came as a revelation: there are an awful lot of people out there who are not not-yet-rich, who are instead ain't-never-gonna-be-rich, and I know firsthand how they feel sometimes (not all the time, but sometimes) when they see the wealthy tooling around town. I had a little taste of desperation, and it's not pretty. When I reach the position of being finally-really-truly-rich, I need to make damn sure I remember that feeling; and make damn sure that my money goes out into the world in places where it does some good. Habitat for Humanity, for instance. Add it to the list, and not just when a Republican's in office.

In the meantime, there is joy to be found for free if you know where to look. The internet has opened up a world of free downloadable music, and sometimes this yields extraordinary dividends. There's a music blog called Said the Gramophone that features some really fine writing (sometimes), and that recently led me to this: a Hungarian gypsy band called Félix Lajkó playing nearly fourteen minutes of the most heart-stopping, can't-stop-dancing music you've ever heard in your life. Go and listen. Geez but are you gonna thank me for this one.

Still Sprinting

It was a good weekend, productivity-wise. Both City of Truth and Beaudry have reached the halfway point, and I don't think it's an accident that they are suddenly marching along at the same rate. As I continue to figure out exactly how my work relates to standard movie outlines, it makes a certain sense that I would focus on one chunk at a time. In other words, now that I've reached the midpoint in two very different scripts, what's the next set of beats? It actually helps that I'm working two scripts at once--in Save the Cat! terms, how does "The Bad Guys Close In" apply to both scripts? Figuring this out, how to apply one principle to two different sets of requirements, forces me to really absorb the underlying principle.

All of this meant that my nice three-day weekend was largely sacrificed. I was up at 6:15 each morning in order to be ready to work by 9:00, I've had the DVD of Mr. and Mrs. Smith in my player for days but simply haven't been able to get around to it, and then there were the bizarre moments--twice this weekend I tried to go somewhere and found myself trapped in the parking lot because some nimrod had parked their car so as to block the only exit. Not once, twice: Saturday night and Monday night. Kinda hard to go pick up food if you can't get your car onto the street, isn't it?

But the next two weekends, I get my life back: Marc will be at Sundance, and then he'll be busily pitching to production companies and attending the DGA Awards. I'll still be writing, of course--we work together on City of Truth, but Beaudry is all mine--but I won't have to get up quite so early, and won't have someone else's schedule to consider.

One political note before I go: if Al Gore had delivered speeches like this back in 2000, I would've voted for him. And at the moment, he seems to be one of the few Democrats not afflicted with foot-in-mouth disease. But enough of that for today--now I've got to get back to writing.

One Two

The 30-Day Sprint

Lately I haven't been writing here because I've been writing elsewhere. A friend of mine calls it "the 30-day sprint," a serious focus on career that tries to cram in as much work and as much opportunity as possible. It kinda sorta came about by accident: some events in the immediate future where it would be useful to have a completed City of Truth script ready at hand. Which is a little tricky, since as of the end of the year we were only through the first act. But now, after some 9-to-5 days, we're almost at the midpoint, and I'm only slightly exhausted.

Therein lies the whole problem with having a day job to pay the bills: it also sucks up time and energy and resolve. If one must also do things like laundry, where exactly does one find the time? And then, since I live in an apartment complex with laundry rooms, how does one find workable time? On Friday night, at a quarter to eleven, I tried to bring laundry to the only laundry room that is available late at night. Someone else has just put in their laundry ten minutes before. This left me to do mine Saturday morning, getting up at 6:00 in order to be sure everything was done before meeting Marc at 9:00. And then, of course, after we worked all day, there was still exercising to be done, and dishes to wash, and groceries to buy at 10:00 p.m.

But there is also another way I'm spending my time: visualizing. Picturing the outcome in my head, not in a general sense but very specifically. At various times I imagine the meeting with my future agent, I imagine signing the contract, I imagine depositing the check, I imagine spending the check. When I take walks around the neighborhood, I look at the houses and I pick this design element over here, this one over here, and I construct in my head exactly the sort of house I want, and where it should be. I imagine first table read with the actors, I see the first screenings in my head. Every bit of it is as specific and as concrete as I can make it. And if all this seems a little new agey, well, here's a story for you:

Several weeks ago we did some pick-up scenes for Outta Sync. (By the way, the website has been redesigned and looks terrific--you can also see the band's video there, just follow the link.) There was a scene the director wanted, just a quick shot of Sergei getting into a limousine. But in the ebb and flow of the day, we weren't able to make those particular arrangements. The director was disappointed, but figured we'd put it together later. Then we're standing in front of the producer's apartment, waiting for our director of photography to walk up, camera in hand, and just as she arrives, suddenly a limo pulls up. Someone who lived in the building was just coming back from a trip, and had taken a limo home. Our producer immediately pulled out some cash, stepped over to the driver, our DP put the camera to her shoulder, I was already in costume, and we shot it. One take, five minutes, done. Visualization: the director wanted the shot, and the world provided. If the limo had arrived two minutes earlier, we wouldn't have been there yet; two minutes later and we'd have already been inside. Picture a thing, see it clearly in your mind, and the world very often finds a way to make it happen. You cannot tell me that this isn't true.

A Musical Interlude

But last night, because Marc had an event at Sony to attend, I actually had a little bit of time free. A friend of mine told me about a musical series at the L.A. County Museum of Art called Sundays Live. These are one-hour concerts by national artists, completely free, of classical music. If one is, shall we say, temporarily financially challenged, this is a great way to get a little culture back into one's life. Last night it was the pianist Inna Faliks, a Ukrainian-born musician. She played pieces by Scarlatti, Rachmaninov and Schubert. I've never really heard anything by Scarlatti, but the two very short piano sonatas she played were delightful, and I'll have to pick up some of his work. The real topper was Schubert's C-Minor Sonata, which I also hadn't heard before. The most fun, though, was watching Ms. Faliks work. All the reviews I've seen focus on her expressiveness, and that's exactly what struck me as well. There were a few moments here and there when it seemed the music got a little bit ahead of her fingers, or a chord didn't quite resolve the way it was supposed to, but these were tiny technical details that I just didn't care about because the whole of her work was so wonderfully expressive. Her face is mobile and alive, and I found myself delighted just to watch her as she played, her features a window into her experience of the music she was playing which then informed and enriched my own experience of the music.

I see that in March there's going to be a performance of Dvorak--I think I'll definitely put that on my calendar. By which time, I hope to have seen one or two of my visualizations, my fully-imagined life to come, come fully to life.

Snappy New Year

Congratulations to everyone: the earth has successfully gone round the sun once more, and most of us have lived to tell the tale. And since one point on a circle is as good as any other to serve as your starting point, well then, welcome to the new.

There's a Scots saying that I heard once (or at least I heard it was the Scots, but this could all be dead wrong): the way you spend the first day of the year will determine the shape of your year to come. Last year, on January 1st, I remember thinking it was very important that I spend the day getting some writing done, and I did--but there were distractions, and I didn't get as much done as I'd hoped. What I didn't do that day was anything that might have helped me to actually sell the writing I was doing, or to establish myself in my career. I didn't even spend any time visualizing the success that would surely follow. And sure enough, my year was exactly like that: I got some writing done, but not as much as I'd hoped; and although there are interesting tides rising here and there, my career in the year 2005 advanced exactly nowhere. Then there were certain events that turned out to be a great eduation, but that sure as hell made it difficult going much of the time.

Today? I'm spending today differently. Let's see how it goes.

If I Ran "The West Wing"

That's West Wing the TV show, not the real thing...

On the 16th, John Spencer died. A damned fine actor, and it was a real shock that he went as suddenly as he did. It brings up, all over again, that peculiar intimacy you sometimes feel with celebrities you've never met--all that time they spent in your living room, etc. But in the real world, this is as close as I ever got to John Spencer:

Back in 1989, I spent a summer as an intern at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, which mostly means that I was an unpaid laborer who was occasionally allowed to do something that maybe resembled acting. At the same time, one of the real actors, Leland Gantt, was playing Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus for us then going off to shoot Presumed Innocent. He came back talking about how great it had been, not the work itself, but just hanging out with Harrison Ford and with this other actor I'd never heard of named John Spencer. That's it, that's as close as I ever got to the man--but I think it's telling that even before I became aware of him as an actor, I was already hearing about what a great guy John Spencer was.

But now he's gone, and that's a damned awful shame but it happens. As a fan of "West Wing," though (the Season 5 DVDs are currently on the way--yes, even without Aaron Sorkin I'm still getting the DVDs), I inevitably start to wonder what all the other fans of the show are wondering: how does the show treat the loss of a much-beloved principal character? Which is my roundabout way of getting to my hypothetical of the day: if I were John Wells, how would I choose to deal with the show's biggest challenge to date?

First off, John Spencer's character, Leo McGarry, has to die. You can't just push a Vice Presidential candidate off to the wings and pretend he's just not onscreen for several weeks. The most important piece of information, which I don't have, is how many unaired episodes Spencer shot before he died. If filming is complete through the election that is the center of this season, then you go one way; if it's not, you have to go another way. Put it this way: Democratic candidate Matt Santos loses his VP candidate just days before the election. Either he loses the election because a key part of his team has just disappeared (it happened just that way to William Howard Taft in 1912), or he wins but then has to wonder forever after whether he won on his own merits or because of a sympathy vote. Which is actually an interesting character question that could be fun for the writers to play with. On the other hand, if the election has already been filmed, then the show has to deal with a transition that is suddenly radically different than everyone expected--which can also be very interesting dramatically.

There's a second question, too, which is largely unrelated to Spencer's death: is this the show's last season? Again, there are two ways to go. The obvious one is, Yes this is the last season. This show was always about the Bartlet White House, and the obvious way to end it is to show Bartlet and his team handling the transition and then going off into that good night. In that case, it doesn't really matter which character wins the election--though it would certainly be interesting to see how Bartlet reacts to having hand off his administration to someone who approaches it from a different ideological point of view (which was already touched on in the episodes when Bartlet resigned in the wake of his daughter's kidnapping).

That's probably how I would handle it--the show has been very interesting lately in its in-depth exploration of a presidential candidate, but already it is straying far from what defined the show in the first place. On "West Wing" you were always led up to the point where the President made a big speech or launched into a debate, but the focus was always on what happened backstage. When the show did its live debate stunt, all the backstage stuff went out the window, and the essential character of the show went with it.

If NBC gets greedy (not likely, given the ratings lately) and pressures the producers into sticking around for another year, then I think Alan Alda's character has to win the election. It's the only way to keep the show dramatically interesting: go backstage with a whole different kind of administration. But that doesn't seem likely--in that "three years later" teaser at the beginning of this season, I could swear that the President about to get out of that limo had dark hair. Thus Santos wins. And as much as I like the character, and as much as I wish that someone like him could someday become President, haven't we already had seven years of wish fulfillment with the Bartlet administration?

Ah well. It's all completely idle talk, of course. The inescapable fact is that when the show resumes new episodes on January 8th, I'll be sitting there like everyone else, waiting and watching, and still terribly sad that John Spencer isn't around anymore.

There and Back Again

I left home and went home; then after a few days, I came home again. Brief impressions:

I left sunny L.A. with temperatures in the 60s and low 70s, and palm trees swaying in the breeze, and flew to sunny Miami, with lower-than-usual humidity and temperatures in the 60s and low 70s as palm trees swayed in the breeze--those that weren't knocked over by the hurricanes. Even though Florida wasn't hit nearly as badly as the gulf coast states, still there was plenty of damage--both my dad's and my mom's houses had considerable landscaping damage, and piles of debris still waiting to be carted away; those trees still standing had been severely pruned because of branch damage. (Hard woods had a harder time than the more supple palms.) There were lines of trees along the road where it seemed every other one had been knocked down, and crews were still slowly working their down, standing and replanting these trees. At one point I drove past a housing development and wondered why anyone would build houses with blue roofs, before Mom pointed out that they were all FEMA-issued blue tarps.

Dad's house is slowly emptying--my sister was out of town for the first few days of my visit, getting herself established in Gainesville as she transfers to a new school; and in the next few months it is reasonable to assume that my brother will be moving out as well. The population at Mom's house, however, has at last stabilized: two people, three indoor cats and three outdoor cats. For a while there the cat population seemed to be exploding, but everything seems to have settled for a while.

My long losing streak at last ended. For years--since roughly 1986--every time I have attended a sporting event, the home team has lost. The Red Sox at Fenway, the Cubs at Wrigley, the White Sox at the new Comiskey, the Blackhawks at the United Center, every single time: if I went, they lost. But my brother had tickets to a Florida Panthers game (against the Buffalo Sabres), and for various reasons we couldn't get there till the game was already half over--and the Panthers were up 3-0. Barely two minutes after I sat down (with excellent 14th row seats) the Sabres scored, and I got that sinking feeling. But the game was already half over, which may be the key--there wasn't really time for the Panthers to crash dramatically. In the end the score was 4-1, and my losing streak had been snapped. That is very happy news--now maybe I can bring myself to go to a Dodgers game.

I drove my brother's new Hummer H3 and was actually impressed--that behemoth (which is actually smaller than an Expedition) handles very nicely, and has a very impressive turning radius, not to mention gas mileage that isn't so much worse than my little Subaru. Now if only I could convince him that having a DVD player/display in the front seat isn't such a great idea...

Lots of nice presents, given and received; quality time spent with everyone; and my sister had a spectacularly good idea, but I can't talk about it here because--well, because I can't talk about it here. Now I'm home and life is already back to normal--but with weeks of good cheer to come, what with the books to read, the music to listen to, the DVDs to watch. Life ain't so bad this particular yuletide.

He Spies

I keep wondering, over and over: how much does it take for people to figure out that this is a bad president? When several former Bush officials, most notably Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill, came out publicly with information critical of their former boss, I wondered how many insider reports does it take before people start to believe what's actually going on behind those very closed Oval Office doors? It took an act of God called Katrina to finally strip away the level of incompetence in an administration where loyalty counts more than qualifications, and Bush's poll numbers dropped, but then they started to rise again.

Now comes news that is not news. Secret National Security Agency wiretaps on unnamed Americans. Exactly the sort of thing that those of us who worry about civil liberties were worried about when legislation like the Patriot Act was being proposed. Salon's David Cole does a good job of dissecting why Bush's legal arguments are preposterous, and it seems inevitable that the question will make its way to the Supreme Court, which, no matter how conservative its members may be by then, will almost certainly declare the president's actions to be illegal.

I am not one of those calling for impeachment hearings. For one thing, I don't think it does the nation any good to have to endure the awful procedure a second (actually third) time, particularly if it then threatens to become standard procedure for one party to try to impeach any president of another party. Let's try to keep the bar raised as high as possible on impeachment, shall we? (Although if the Clinton impeachment had never happened, I might in fact be calling for Bush to be impeached.) But also, impeachment does no good because look at the line of succession: if Bush goes you get Cheney; behind him, Dennis Hastert; behind him, Ted Stevens. No, the only solution is to hamstring these clowns and try to keep them from doing too much more damage over the next three years, then vote them the hell out of town and try someone who actually, you know, cares about the Constitution.

How bad is it? Lately I've been finding myself thinking with warm nostalgia about the days of the Nixon administration. That's how bad it is.

The Actor's Nightmare

The actor's nightmare has always been very simple: he is thrust onstage, before a large audience, and he has absolutely no idea what his lines are. There is a long, awful moment as these people all stare at him, blinking, waiting for what he'll do to entertain them, and then the actor wakes up sweating.

Oh--and often in this dream, the actor is also naked.

So on Friday, my dayjob held its office Christmas party, and I was subjected to an almost perfect version of the actor's nightmare. Somehow everyone kept quiet about the fact that at the Christmas party, the new people are expected to get up and perform something, so it came as a complete surprise to all three of us. Easy enough for the other two: they're not in The Biz, and they're not as invested in the whole notion of performing well. One person sang two short verses of a Christmas carol; one sang "My Darling Clementine" while substituting "Honey bunny" for every word. (No, really.) And then it was my turn, and they just wouldn't let me squirm out of it.

Now bear in mind, I quit the acting game several years ago, so it's been a long time since I had to go to an audition. Thus everything I used to keep in my head has pretty much left my head, a piece at a time. Thus I really couldn't come up with anything at all--unless you think Macbeth's "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech, the only text I could remember completely, is appropriate holiday fare. (I damn near did it anyway, out of sheer spite.)

Also bear in mind: phoning it in was not an option. If you put me in front of an audience, I cannot help taking very seriously my responsibility toward an audience, a responsibility that boils down to two simple words: don't suck. Even if I'm not an actor anymore, when I find myself in front of a crowd, I always find that although the monologues may have faded, the Don't Suck ethos still has a potent grip.

Long story short: I sucked. The only piece that came to mind at all was the Scarecrow's song from "Wizard of Oz," but I didn't have time to go through the verses to make sure I knew them, and once I got up there I almost immediately skipped to the wrong place in the song--which made it very hard for people who were trying to sing along. A funny happened, though: as I hit the line "If I only had a brain" I suddenly found myself ad-libbing "Then I wouldn't work here!" which got a laugh, and I realized that a whole avenue of improv had just opened up.

Still. At that point I couldn't even remember the structure of the song, let alone what any of the rest of the lyrics were, and it's hard to adapt lyrics if you can't remember what they were. So no, I did not strike out on a path of brilliant improvisation like Ella Fitzgerald when she forgot the words to "Mack the Knife," instead I just wrapped it up as fast as possible and sat down, as fast as possible, wiping the sweat from my brow and desperately hoping that the person with the camera phone (Twitchy, as it turns out) hadn't recorded the whole damn thing. (She had.)

But hey, at least I wasn't naked.

I Heard the News Today

I was 15 years old on that wretched day in December 1980, and I had been a rabid Beatles fan for about two years. I already wrote about my Beatles obsession in August, but in December 1980 it was so potent that I listened to nothing else. When I chose to listen to music, I chose to listen to The Beatles. I was in the process of getting all the albums and was chiefly focusing on the group's work; of their solo albums, I think I had only purchased a McCartney/Wings greatest hits album by then, and although John's new record had recently been released, I wasn't in any particular hurry to buy it. (Hey, I was still on an allowance back then.)

On the night of December 8th I either went to bed early, or simply didn't have the TV on that night, or something. I was a Sophomore in high school and although school started at 7:30, I liked to get there at 7:00 in order to hang out with friends. So on that night, I did not hear the news, and slept the sleep of angels.

Except that the next morning, Mom woke me up early. Here's where memory kicks in, sharp and clear. I remember that it was dark out, I remember her calling for me through the closed door, I remember looking at my clock and seeing that it was about fifteen minutes before my alarm was supposed to go off, I remember the usual morning confusion being amplified because suddenly I was getting more morning than usual. But you see, my alarm was a radio alarm, and she didn't want me to hear the news over the radio.

I slumped my way into the living room as Mom leaned over the stereo, which rested on a wooden plank laid over white concrete blocks. The needle slipped into the groove of the last track on the Hey Jude compilation--"Ballad of John and Yoko." Only then did Mom begin to tell me why she had awoken me so early. And just as she told me that John had been shot, and that John was dead, that was when the song reached this particular line, John's voice saying to me:

The way things are going, they're gonna crucify me.

Oh, the burdens of having a dramatic parent. No wonder I remember every second of this, eh? I mean the news itself was bad enough, but the delivery, yikes.

The rest of the day does not remain in memory. I can recall finding a friend in the school's library, a fellow Beatles fan who felt just as hollow, just as mystified as I did. I can remember standing next to that same stereo in the living room a few days later as the minute of silence that Yoko had asked for was observed by radio stations around the country. I can remember going into the store with everyone else and buying Double Fantasy, taking it home and being more than a little puzzled by Yoko's songs but refusing to join in on all that "Yoko destroyed the Beatles" nonsense. And I can remember being in New York several years later, walking around the city on my own and realizing that I was close to the Dakota. I walked past, saw the entrance to the building, the gilded guard's tower, the small crowd of people who still lingered there, playing music and sharing stories.

But time passes, and the news doesn't have the sting it once did, and really, I never met the man so it's hard to get so worked up any more. (The irony does not escape me that the other day I waxed ironic about a real emergency happening to someone I actually know, whereas my tone today is mournful and sad about this man I never knew.) So really, what matters to me is John's music, and I have that in spades: every one of his songs on records, on CDs, on the computer, on my iPod. The John Lennon who really matters is, at least in my own personal universe, beyond life and death, an unvanquished truth. Mark David Chapman is still in jail and John's still singing to me, practically every day. It's not perfect, but it's enough.

Panic in the Halls!

So the other day (yesterotherday), this lady in the office where I work was having a normal sort of a day: getting coffee, shooting the breeze, showing off her new Richard Nixon doll, that sort of thing. (Personally, being a liberal, I think everything that followed musta been Nixon's fault.) Now this lady--we'll call her Lady A, although her real name is Louise Smith-Smythe Smithington and she lives at 1423 Smithenfield Road in Schmitty, Oregon, which makes her commute to Santa Monica pure hell--turns out that Lady A has a history of epilepsy, which means that she can't drive, which of course makes her commute from Smithlyville even more difficult. But given the whole epileptic thing, let's not call her Lady A, let's just call her Twitchy.

So, Twitchy. Turns out the epilepsy thing has nothing to do with what followed, it's just kinda interesting. (Like I said, it was all Nixon's fault.) Now me, I'm going through my typical day as well: getting decaf coffee (lest I get a little twitchy myself), shooting the breeze, trying desperately to banish the memory of that damned Richard Nixon doll, that sort of thing. I see Twitchy walk hurriedly down the long hallway, looking in each office and finding them empty (ah, Christmastime--the only time of year when you actually spend more time with your family than with your coworkers). I think nothing of Twitchy's perambulation, because of course I'm still suffering Nixon flashbacks. A moment later, there is a commotion from down the hall. A lot of hollering, something about calling paramedics and a heart attack.

"Well gee," I think. "That sounds peculiar. I should go see what it is all about. Maybe the Nixon doll has come to life and is attacking people." I mosey on down the hall and find Twitchy in someone's office, lying flat on her back and doing some up-tempo variation of Lamaze breathing. People are running hither and yon, the paramedics are being called, people rush in to tell Twitchy that the paramedics are on their way, and then people just stand around because of course no one actually knows what the hell is going on and that's what you do in those situations, you just kinda stand there and hope the person doesn't, you know, die.

Twitchy sees me. "Robert!" she says. "Do CPR on me!"

Me being me, I had to argue the point. "Hell, it's been twenty years since I took a CPR class, you really don't--"

"Do CPR on me now!"

In a situtation like that you don't really have time to stop and work things out. You can't take a second and say to yourself "Wait, if a person actually needs CPR would they be in any condition to say 'Hey, I need CPR'?" (Answer: nope.) So I got on my knees next to Twitchy and took her wrist, hoping that maybe I could feel a pulse even though I'm lousy at feeling for people's pulses so really all I was doing was trying to buy myself some time. But instead Twitchy took my hand and put it on her chest. "Do CPR now!"

"Gosh, I hardly know you," I said, and then got as far as lacing my fingers together in what I hoped was a place on her sternum that wouldn't crush her to death with the first compression. But with my hands there I could feel her heart thumping, racing, and now there was no question: if I did what Twitchy was demanding, I would probably in fact give her the heart attack she was afraid of. And fear, as I soon realized, was the real problem here, blind unreasoning fear. So I started asking her specific questions about specific symptoms, trying to get her to focus in on something, suspecting that that in itself might begin to reduce her symptoms.

But Twitchy decided that since I refused to compress her chest I was useless, so she turned to others and sent them scrambling for aspirin. (Helpful hint, learned later: if you are in fact having a heart attack, taking aspirin during the attack will not help; neither will lying flat. Someday you'll thank me. Just don't ask me to do CPR.) Turns out the office's first aid kit was completely out of aspirin, which resulted in further scrambling around, and the substitution of a pain medication containing a little bit of acetaminophen and a little bit of aspirin, but instead of swallowing them with water she mostly ended up just pouring cold water all over her face. (Which probably helped, now that I think of it.) And then she started sobbing on someone's shoulder and kicked the rest of us out until the paramedics came. By the time they wheeled her out on a gurney, she looked fine.

According to WebMD, it was a textbook example of panic disorder. Which makes perfect sense in retrospect, though when you're in the moment and you're not a doctor and you don't happen to know what the precise symptoms of a panic attack are, you're pretty much left just standing there with nothing more to go on than the vague instinct that maybe you shouldn't crush this woman's heart today.

As Twitchy was being wheeled out she asked someone to get her purse and her cellphone. The purse was produced and the Nixon doll was in it, providing one last surreal moment before the story ended (and, unfortunately, reviving in me all the horror of having seen a Richard Nixon doll). Twitchy went away to the hospital and the rest of us stood around, feeling a little better about the quality of our day than we had been feeling half an hour before, and with something quite new to shoot the breeze about. End of story. Go in peace.

(By the way: a surprising amount of the above is actually true.)

Screenplay Structure

I think that if my writing life over the past year has been about any one thing, it's been about reconciling myself to the requirements of structure. Because, you see, I'm one of those creative right-brain people, so I have a certain ingrained bias against anything that feels like a template for creative work. Why does there have to be a Catalyst on exactly page 12? What's wrong with page 13 or 14? And who says that your protagonist has to have likable traits even if he's supposed to be a son-of-a-bitch? I was instinctively certain that all these things were just crutches for people who don't really know how to write.

But in Hollywood, you face certain challenges. Like script readers, people paid a set amount of money per script to read whatever comes in and make that first basic decision as to whether the script is worth someone more important reading it. If the script reader who happens to be assigned your script is one of those who looks for certain elements in the first ten pages then throws the script away if s/he doesn't get those elements, then you're hosed and it doesn't make one bit of difference whether the rest is good or not. And if your script does get passed up the line, the development person at a production company could do exactly the same thing: look for an interesting Catalyst moment on page 12, then look for a big, decisive act break on page 25, and if they're not there, in the trash it goes.

Fair? Phooey on fair. Just imagine that you've been assigned to read ten scripts over the weekend, and a full reading takes around ninety minutes. That's fifteen hours out of your weekend, reading what are probably bad scripts. Anyone, even us hoity-toity right-brain types, would soon find ourselves begging for a system that gives us more of our lives back.

But there is an even more inescapable reason why these screenplay-structure outlines exist: they work. Whether it's because audiences have been trained to react to this specific structure, or the structure emerged because audiences instinctively respond to it, I don't know and it doesn't matter. The structure works. There are exceptions, but you don't get to write those exceptional screenplays until you're already an established writer who will be given the latitude to stray and try something new. Until then, if you want to get anywhere near the door, you are strongly, strongly advised to pay attention to the classic structure.

Does it feel like selling out? A little bit--but there's another way of looking at it. Think about what poets often say: the requirements of writing a sonnet actually force them to be more creative. Anyone can string together fourteen lines of iambic pentameter with an AB-AB rhyme scheme and a couplet at the end, but writing a good sonnet is hard. The words that first come to mind don't exactly fit the meter, and simply switching them around doesn't fit. Now you have to find another way to say the same thing that does fit the meter, and along the way the thing you want to say starts to shift. Quite often you'll find that this shift is toward something deeper and truer and better. Before long, all those damned pesky restrictions on your creativity have forced you to be more creative, and the work is better and you're a better writer for it.

Or put it this way: when you have a thousand choices available, you tend to go for the easy ones. When you have only three or four choices, you tend to go for the better ones. (My crazy novel, Thereby Hangs a Tale, is monumentally difficult precisely because it deliberately discards a bunch of rules and then makes up a bunch of new ones. Since it can go anywhere and do anything, it is very hard to figure out exactly where it should go and what it should do. I find myself suffering as a writer precisely because I don't have a structure to hang my hat on.)

The outline that Marc and I have been following lately--and which has indeed spurred our creativity--has been Blake Snyder's Save the Cat! Which is funny, since he's a romantic-comedy writer and we definitely do not write those sorts of scripts--but if the aim is to be "bulletproof" when your script goes before a reader, then this outline seems pretty damn tight. Marc found it first, and practically had to hold a gun to my head to get me to buy my own copy, but now I'm (grudgingly) glad I did. Other writer-friends have now encountered the book through us and picked up their own copies, so there does seem to be something about it that speaks to us in the right way.

And by the way, I've been reading John August's weblog this morning, and I like it a lot. I finally got around to watching Big Fish this weekend, and I'm amazed that I hadn't seen it before because it is exactly my kind of movie. I completely loved it, a five-star movie for sure, and Mr. August wrote one hell of a script. If you're interested in screenwriting, his blog is entertaining and informative; and that movie in particular is a gem. Highly recommended.

Oh My Aching Back!

All my best pain comes out of nowhere. Take my back (please).

One April morning in the late Eighties, I was living in Boston and looking forward to visiting my roommate's family for Easter dinner. I had never had a moment of back pain in my life, but on this particular morning I woke up and couldn't move. There had been no injury, no twisting or lifting the day before, it came straight out of nowhere and knocked me flat. The pain quickly subsided that day, and ever since then I have lived with the possibility that it could come back for no good reason. Like it did last week.

Then on Saturday, the mysterious back pain decided to top itself. I spent the entire day howling, basically, and even when I did find a position that was comfortable (no, not comfortable--not painful is the best that can be said), even then I would occasionally suffer muscle spasms that would make me howl anyway.

All my life I have avoided taking any sorts of pills unless ordered to by a doctor, or forced by urgent necessity. For years I never even kept over-the-counter painkillers in the apartment, and when a headache came I would always try to just ride it out. Lie down with the lights out, try to fall asleep, and hope it would be gone when I awoke. Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn't, and then I would find an Advil somewhere. (This got harder to do as time passed, whether because my tolerance diminished or the headaches strengthened, who knows. Now I keep a bottle of Advil at home, and one at work.)

This practice is so ingrained that it took a full day of this howling before the thought even occurred: Hey, I can take an Advil! The thought woke me up Sunday morning, after a fitful night of "sleep" that mostly consisted of trying and failing to find a position that worked. I took the Advil, I put an ice pack on my back, and over the course of the morning the pain subsided at last. I've been taking Advil every six hours ever since, and the pain is manageable and I'm doing the things that I do.

I'm sure that one of those amazing doctors you see on TV could dig through layers of symptoms and find that in fact these pains don't come out of nowhere; but in practice, I find that doctors aren't usually looking to be Dr. House. On the one hand, symptoms are almost always what they appear to be on the surface, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred, "Take two aspirin and call me in the morning" really does get the problem fixed. On the other hand, the doctor has a full day of appointments and you have to keep these things moving along. So whatever arcane thing is causing my back to hurt, sometimes a little sometimes a lot, irregularly and unpredictably, will probably never be explained. And me, I'll just have to remember to keep a bottle of something at hand, always.

Here's to hoping this particular episode decides to end itself soon.

Watching Star Wars

One of the ways I spent the lovely long Thanksgiving weekend was by watching all six Star Wars movies, in order, episode one through episode six. I also completely failed to achieve my real goal of working on a particular script, but for that I can blame the length of the movies I was watching, so it's all George Lucas's fault. Yep, that's it.

One of the things I was wondering, and can never really know, is how the movies play when they aren't watched in the wrong order. I imagine a day when I have a son, and he reaches the right age and we sit down together to watch the movies in the "right" order. There is much that might confuse him: in "A New Hope," Obi-Wan Kenobi says he can't remember ever owning a droid, when clearly R2-D2 was by his side almost non-stop through almost every moment of the first three episodes. Obviously these sorts of little errors are the inevitable result of making episode four in 1977 and not getting around to episode one till more than twenty years later. Inconsistencies will happen, and I will just have to explain why to my young viewer. But the real mythos of the Jedi doesn't really emerge until episode five, "Empire Strikes Back," which in context emerges even more clearly as the best of the bunch. This was fine for those of us who saw episode five as the second in the series: we get a taste of what the Jedi are about from Alec Guinness in "A New Hope," then in "Empire" we get really grounded in the straight-from-Japan mythos of the Jedi. But if you're watching in the "right" order and don't get this grounding till the fifth episode, that's a bit late in the game. Those of us watching in the "wrong" order accepted the nobility of the Jedi in the first three episodes because we'd already been primed for it; a new viewer might likely see them as simply another political faction who are just a little too fond of themselves.

But there are bigger problems, and let's not even dwell on the dialogue. (It was nice to see Lucas, when accepting his AFI lifetime achievement award, poke fun at himself as the "king of wooden dialogue," but it would be even nicer if he could have done something to actually, you know, fix the problem. Just look at the huge leap in quality, dialogue-wise, when Leigh Brackett and Larry Kasdan wrote the script for "Empire.") Let's also not dwell on Lucas's failures as a director of actors (again, note the improvement in "Empire" when one of Lucas's professors at USC, Irvin Kershner, directed.)

No, the bigger problems have everything to do with the character arc of Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader. You do see very clearly, as the episodes progress one to another, how the character fell, and that is rewarding--as far as it goes. The trouble is, you don't care. What's more, the Anakin/Padme romance completely fails; I for one kept finding myself watching the scenes between the two of them and wondering why this intelligent, grounded young woman would possibly fall for this petulant, whiny brat of a Jedi. (And saying that woman often fall for the bad boy just isn't sufficient here--these stories are supposed to operate as myth, and there's nothing mythical about this romance.)

The reason you don't care about Anakin is because there are never any moments of--here's that word again--nobility. There is skill--clearly the character is a phenomenally gifted pilot and fighter. But he completely lacks the humility that ought to go with those skills--he is, in fact, nothing at all like the noble Jedi Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan or Yoda. So when the collective Jedi Council denies Anakin the rank of master you think it's absolutely right and fitting; this whiny little jerk simply doesn't deserve it. Yeah it's sad what happened to his mother and all, but look at Luke Skywalker--his father murdered (or so he's told), his aunt and uncle reduced to smoldering skeletons, and he seems to find his way from whiny teenager to noble adult without any trouble.

It's not that hard to do, ultimately. You just need a couple moments in each of the first three episodes, when Anakin is tempted to do something wrong but rises above it. You also have to see Padme witness a couple of these moments, to see her realize that there is enormous human potential in this young man, and then their romance makes sense: she falls in love with the man he could be, but he fails and dooms them both. Now that would have made for a great tragedy. Instead, we're left not liking Anakin at all, and not much liking Padme either--this despite the fact that Natalie Portman is an inherently likable actor, but since the majority of her scenes are with Anakin, there's really nothing she can do.

With all that said, there's still plenty to like, particularly if you saw the films in the "wrong" order. (Is it possible to get the same kind of thrill from the Frankenstein-like first sight of Darth Vader in episode three if you've never seen episodes four, five and six?) The battle scenes are almost uniformly thrilling--and in one case where the first three episodes clearly outshine the last three, the lightsaber battles are clearly better in the earlier episodes. From 1977 to 1983, everyone was locked into this awkward two-handed fighting style, but after that movie fights in general began to absorb Oriental martial-arts styles, as in The Matrix, so that by the time Lucas got back to the series in 1999, the hand-to-hand work had improved significantly. Much more fluid, much faster, much more exciting.

And speaking of thrilling, all six episodes are worth the trip for just one perfect moment: in "Empire," when Luke tries to lift his x-wing out of the swamp with his Jedi powers but can't, and then little Yoda does it without trouble, Luke stares at his ship, turns to Yoda and says "I can't believe it." Yoda then says "That is why you fail." A perfect moment, one of those magnificently right movie moments, mythic and powerful in all the best ways, that makes you wish the rest of the series had been that good.

Still, I can't end without a few more complaints. Like the disturbing overtones of racism in the portrayals of Jar-Jar Binks and those weird Trade Federation guys, the ones with vaguely Japanese accents whose mouths never move right. I also wish that Lucas, in his fervor over new technologies, hadn't made all his scenes so damn busy--there always has to be a window in the background, and that window always has to be filled with distracting stuff. Not just a couple speeders flying past but thousands of the damn things, an endless stream of "lookie what we can do!" distractions that have nothing to do with the scene we're supposed to be watching. But nothing, absolutely nothing is worse than the midichlorians (or however the hell the name is spelled--frankly I can't be bothered to try looking it up). If there were five minutes of any movie that I wish I could wipe out with a wave of Harry Potter's magic wand, this bit of nonsense is top of the list. By attempting to provide a rational explanation for why the Jedi have their powers, where the Force comes from, Lucas damn near ruined the entire concept. It's okay, George--it's a movie, and we were perfectly prepared to accept the religious overtones of the Force. In fact we already had--to then hit us with this bit of preposterous blather was to very nearly ruin the entire series.

All in all, I'm still looking forward to the day when I can screen the series for a young child of mine. But until that time, it's doubtful I will find myself inclined to pull them out again.