Don Henley has a lot of songs that I love – more even from his solo career than from his time with the Eagles. Boys of Summer, Sunset Grill, Dirty laundry, All She Wants To Do Is Dance – this is great stuff, not to mention all but mandatory on any mix tape of L.A. songs. Then there’s The End Of The Innocence, which is one of my all-time favorite songs period. And then there’s some stuff that’s much less well known, from his 2000 solo album, Inside Job. The album has a lot of good tracks, but my favorite is easily the closer, My Thanksgiving.
It begins as a salutation to an old friend:
Well, a lot of things have happened since the last time we spoke
Some of them are funny, some of them ain’t no joke
And I trust you will forgive me, if I lay it on the line
I always thought you were a friend of mine
And sometimes I think about you
I wonder how you’re doing now, what you’re going through
Because the last time I saw you, we were playing with fire
We were loaded with passion and a burning desire
For every breath, for every day of living
This is my Thanksgiving
I think that Henley here is in fact addressing his listener, each loyal fan individually, more than any specific long lost friend. It’s a nice little trope, personal and not as condescendingly “rock star” as Henley can sometimes come off. But I’m not old enough to be a long-time Henley fan, I don’t connect with the song in that way (which is not to say that I don’t admire the maturity of this song and the album as a whole). I connect with it personally, and to that extent this verse, and therefore the song as a whole, has always made me thing about my friend Romi.
Romi was probably my best friend in high school, a person who always seemed to essentially be me in a different body. I don’t like the term “soul mates” because it’s so associated with lovey dovey BS that I don’t believe in, but I do believe in … call it kindred spirits. Romi was a kindred spirit – we went to concerts together, we talked about books, we dreamed similar dreams. I loved her in a completely platonic but powerful way – one of the best ways to love someone, in my experience. She, who had a sister and therefore has somewhat of a right to know about such thing, once wrote to me one of the happiest compliments I’ve ever received: she said I was like a brother to her.
And we were friends in high school, a time that is the very definition of “loaded with passion and a burning desire.” The whole world was in front of us. We were believers in a certain kind of better future and our place in creating it. The world was in front of us and it was ours, and even if we were many miles apart it seemed like maybe we would be conquering the world together. She was the one person I actually believed I would keep in touch with after high school. I haven’t seen her since 2001, and haven’t heard from for nearly as long.
The next verse and the bridge:
The trouble with you and me my friend is the trouble with this nation
Too many blessings, too little appreciation
And I know that kind of notion just ain’t cool
So send me back to Sunday school
Because I’m tired of waiting for reason to arrive
It’s too long we’ve been living these unexamined lives
I’ve got great expectations, I’ve got family and friends
I’ve got satisfying work, I’ve got a back that bends
For every breath, for every day of living
This is my thanksgiving
And have you noticed that an angry man
Can only get so far
Before he reconciles the way he thinks things ought to be
With the way things are
As bad as the third and fourth lines are, I love the first and second lines so much that I forgive him. I don’t mean to diminish anyone’s pain, goodness knows there are any number of awful things that can happen to us in this life, but seriously we’re pretty damn spoiled here in America. I remember reading once someone’s rant about how our country was based on the assertion in Jefferson’s declaration that we all have a right to the “pursuit of happiness” but that we modern Americans seem to have forgotten the first part. We act all too often like life isn’t supposed to be hard. But that’s not what the promise of this country was supposed to be – you’re not guaranteed happiness, but you’re guaranteed a chance at it. A chance that anyone who doesn’t live in a free society by definition does not have. I could really go off on this for a lot longer, but Henley has done a beautiful job of summing it up in two lines, so I’ll drop it.
The other thing I love is that bridge, where Henley realizes that he’s much happier when he isn’t fighting so hard for his happiness. It’s a bit of a resignation, I suppose, and heaven knows we’d be nowhere if it weren’t for the passion of youth. But at the same time, when you spend all your time raging against … well, whatever, that’s time you’re not spending really appreciating your life. It’s a two-way street – it’s a worth while life to try to make the world better. But you have to take a breath sometimes, and appreciate the beautiful day outside.
The song ends with:
Here in this fragmented world, I still believe
In learning how to give love, and how to receive it
And I would not be among those who abuse this privilege
Sometimes you get the best light from a burning bridge
And I don’t mind saying that I still love it all
I wallowed in the springtime, now I’m welcoming the fall
For every moment of joy, every hour of fear
For every winding road that brought me here
For every breath, for every day of living
This is my thanksgiving
For everyone who helped me start
And for everything that broke my heart
For every breath, for every day of living
This is my thanksgiving
The best part of this section is what he’s thankful for. Look: fear, winding roads, broken hearts. He’s thankful for this? Ah, but that’s the beauty of a life happily lived: coming to terms with the dark times in our past, seeing how they’ve helped to lead us to where we are, and allowing ourselves to appreciate that such pain may have actually in the end made us stronger.
So this song has always made me think of Romi. It came out when I was in college, at a time when I was still sporadically in contact with her. We’d write sometimes, maybe talk on the phone. And then, for whole months at a time, just not. The day after the Dave Matthews Band concert in boulder in 2001, Romi called me. Have you ever actually gotten a phone call from an old friend who is on your mind but you haven’t talked to in a long time? It’s the neatest feeling. A day or two later we had lunch. Afterward, we saw something awful happened, and I haven’t seen her since. There have been a few letters back and forth – yes, actual letters, and the fact that she would write and mail me actual letters is just one more thing that makes her awesome – but even that’s been years.
And so this song came on this morning and made me think of Romi, and I miss her. Maybe, just maybe, she’ll Google herself one day, and this will show up on Page 19, and she’ll click on it and respond. Probably not. But I thought it was worth a try. Romi Pekarek, if you’re out there, thanks. I hope you’re doing well.
Friday, May 11, 2007
Monday, April 23, 2007
I am not making this up
A theme park called Dickens World is opening soon in Kent, England. No, seriously.
See?
I am both horrified, and yet desperate to go.
See?
I am both horrified, and yet desperate to go.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
I've been tagged! Hooray. I think this is as good an excuse as any to finally get back to updating my blog. Now, what was I tagged for?
Oh, yeah: Report on 7 Songs I am Into Right Now: (in no particular order)
1. "My Father's Gun," Elton John. Back when my grandpa died and i went back to nebraska for the funeral the whole experience gave me a very strong Elizabethtown feeling, so I re-watched it one night after I got back. There's a lot of good music in the film (i always enjoy what Cameron Crowe picks out) but this one stood out. Now, it wasn't my father who had died, but the song still really hit me. Even though I've been to a number of funerals and unfortunately have known a number of people who have died, this was the first major family death I've experienced. The whole experience of flying back home and driving back to Nebraska and all of it made me feel adult in a way that was new to me. I had never thought much about what happens to the flowers that get sent, or how much there is for family members to do in the midst of their greif after a loved one dies. as I'm an only child, the only thing I have ever been truly afraid of is my parents' death, because all that shit will be on me - I have no siblings to help shoulder the burden. Also, my grandpa's funeral was the first one I have been to at which all the men in attendance took a shovel full of dirt and dumped it into the grave. I'd seen that in movies, but had never imagined myself doing it. Anyway, all this stuff has been kind of stuck in my mind for the past month and all these thoughts are scored with "My Father's Gun."
2. "Down By The River," Neil Young. Because Dave Matthews Band has started covering it. I'm not sold on their version yet, but hearing it reminded me how much I enjoy the original.
3. "In The Waiting Line," Zero 7. Woke up to it the other day.
4. "Still Fighting It," Ben Folds. Another song about getting older. There is a theme developing, and it's depressing.
5. "Even Better Than The Real Thing," U2. because I have been rereading "Glamorama" and the "we'll slide down the surface of things" quote becomes a very powerful refrain in the club-opening scene. Ellis' books tend to have one line that afterward I always strongly associate with the book. For Less than Zero, of course, it's the opening line "People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles." For Rules of Attraction it's the quote that gives this blog its name. American Psycho is "this is not an exit," and the U2 quote is the one for Glamorama.
6. "Can We Still Be Friends?" Todd Rundgren. Another one from a Cameron Crowe movie. This is the somehat javial sonding tune that disjointedly plays over the scene of Tom Cruise smothering Cameron Diaz in "Vanilla Sky." Brilliant scene. I love when disturbing action is set to an otherwise pleasant score, makes it so much more upsetting. Back in college, I knew a guy who couldn't even listen to that "Stuck In The Middle With You" song without nearly vomiting thanks to "Reservoir Dogs."
7. "Someone Saved My Life Tonight," Elton John. God, more Elton John. But this song is awesome. I learned not too long ago that it's about how Elton almost got married (yes, to a woman) but a friend talked him out of it and encouraged him to continue pursuing music. Turned out OK for him, I guess.
I tag everyone I know who hasn't already done this.
Oh, yeah: Report on 7 Songs I am Into Right Now: (in no particular order)
1. "My Father's Gun," Elton John. Back when my grandpa died and i went back to nebraska for the funeral the whole experience gave me a very strong Elizabethtown feeling, so I re-watched it one night after I got back. There's a lot of good music in the film (i always enjoy what Cameron Crowe picks out) but this one stood out. Now, it wasn't my father who had died, but the song still really hit me. Even though I've been to a number of funerals and unfortunately have known a number of people who have died, this was the first major family death I've experienced. The whole experience of flying back home and driving back to Nebraska and all of it made me feel adult in a way that was new to me. I had never thought much about what happens to the flowers that get sent, or how much there is for family members to do in the midst of their greif after a loved one dies. as I'm an only child, the only thing I have ever been truly afraid of is my parents' death, because all that shit will be on me - I have no siblings to help shoulder the burden. Also, my grandpa's funeral was the first one I have been to at which all the men in attendance took a shovel full of dirt and dumped it into the grave. I'd seen that in movies, but had never imagined myself doing it. Anyway, all this stuff has been kind of stuck in my mind for the past month and all these thoughts are scored with "My Father's Gun."
2. "Down By The River," Neil Young. Because Dave Matthews Band has started covering it. I'm not sold on their version yet, but hearing it reminded me how much I enjoy the original.
3. "In The Waiting Line," Zero 7. Woke up to it the other day.
4. "Still Fighting It," Ben Folds. Another song about getting older. There is a theme developing, and it's depressing.
5. "Even Better Than The Real Thing," U2. because I have been rereading "Glamorama" and the "we'll slide down the surface of things" quote becomes a very powerful refrain in the club-opening scene. Ellis' books tend to have one line that afterward I always strongly associate with the book. For Less than Zero, of course, it's the opening line "People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles." For Rules of Attraction it's the quote that gives this blog its name. American Psycho is "this is not an exit," and the U2 quote is the one for Glamorama.
6. "Can We Still Be Friends?" Todd Rundgren. Another one from a Cameron Crowe movie. This is the somehat javial sonding tune that disjointedly plays over the scene of Tom Cruise smothering Cameron Diaz in "Vanilla Sky." Brilliant scene. I love when disturbing action is set to an otherwise pleasant score, makes it so much more upsetting. Back in college, I knew a guy who couldn't even listen to that "Stuck In The Middle With You" song without nearly vomiting thanks to "Reservoir Dogs."
7. "Someone Saved My Life Tonight," Elton John. God, more Elton John. But this song is awesome. I learned not too long ago that it's about how Elton almost got married (yes, to a woman) but a friend talked him out of it and encouraged him to continue pursuing music. Turned out OK for him, I guess.
I tag everyone I know who hasn't already done this.
Friday, January 05, 2007
I assure you this is a 'Children of Men' review
I used to be the sort of person who would say, “This is a book everyone should read,” but I am no longer that person. I don’t know when I changed, or what did it exactly, because I didn’t even fully realize I had changed until recently. I was reading the introduction to Nick Hornby’s “Housekeeping Vs. The Dirt,” a collection of the essays he writes for a magazine called The Believer about what he reads each month. He writes about the decline of reading as a part of the culture, but doesn’t blame TV or movies or computers. Instead he blames readers and English teachers and the sort of people who would say, “This is a book everyone should read.”
Literature, Hornsby says – and I find that I agree with him – is all too often presented not as a pleasure activity, but as a responsibility, as something that’s good for you. But we humans don’t generally like things that are good for us; we think of healthy food as being food that doesn’t taste good, and the doctor as someone who sticks us with needles, and literature as incomprehensible and pointless metaphors for who knows what. This is a problem.
No one says you should watch The Sopranos because it’s good for you – we say you should watch The Sopranos because it’s just a damn good TV show. That it happens to be better for us than, well, pretty much any reality TV program is entirely subordinate to the fact that it’s also just better than any reality TV program. The same thing is often true of literature. Look, I’m not trying to argue that reading John Grisham and Danielle Steele is better for you than reading Cormac McCarthy or Thomas Pynchon. What I’m saying is that it shouldn’t matter whether it’s better for you or not, because ultimately it’s better for us (book-loving people first, but broader culture, too) as a whole.
In high school I worked at a book store and for the first few weeks when a customer would come to the register with two romance novels and a copy of Us it was all I could do to mask my disgust. Jackie Collins? Steve Baldacci? How could people read that crap when they could be buying Hemingway or David Foster Wallace or, God, even an Oprah book!?! But I got over that, too. After all, for every person buying Steve Martini there were countless others not coming into our store and buying anything at all, who were probably not reading at all.
At the end, it has to be better (for literacy, for the publishing industry, for struggling writers, for everyone) if more people are reading five books a year (even if it’s Dean Koontz) than if those same people are (a) not reading at all or (b) attempting to read whatever won the National Book award because they feel like they should, like it will somehow make them better, but hating it and never finishing.
There aren’t many people who still actually complain that Pirates Of The Caribbean will make billions more than whatever movie ultimately wins Best Picture. In the case of movies (and TV, too) we accept that what is good is not always going to be popular and that what is popular can be good without being especially redeeming. The world of books will be much healthier once more people let reading for pleasure be the norm, not some sort of shameful taboo (eg, this British article about people who are supposedly embarrassed to admit they read Harry Potter and Stephen King).
So I’ve given up the “you should read this book” mantra. Reading takes far too long and can be far too painful if you’re not enjoying it. Besides, whatever qualities the book has to recommend it are going to be wholly lost on any reader who resists the project from the start.
So the question, as it relates to what I intended this blog to be about, is whether I feel the same way about movies. Last year, if I remember correctly, I wrote that you should go see Munich. To a great extent, I still really feel that way. And yet, though I own it, I’ve never made any of my friends (nor even my wife) sit down and watch it. I’ve never even suggested it. Here I think the issue of time goes out the window. While reading a book can take hours upon hours of your life, watching a movie takes two, maybe two and a half. I don’t necessarily thinks that’s too much time to ask someone to sacrifice to an important movie. The issue is still whether or not a person essentially forced into watching a movie will get any benefit from it, no matter how potentially meaningful. Last year, Syriana and Munich both left me speechless – but to anyone who doesn’t want to go along for the ride they’re just going to be two movies where things blow up and the plot’s kind of confusing.
So I’ll just say that if it’s the sort of movie that looks even mildly interesting to you, or if you’re in the mood to visit a dark world, or if you just like Alfonso Cuaron – then you should go see Children Of Men.
It is in many ways a very difficult movie to recommend because it’s a movie almost entirely without joy, with only even a tiny amount of hope. Diana said it was good but good in a Schindler’s List kind of way. She’s right, although I hesitate at the comparison because harsh as it is Children of Men was not, to me, nearly as distressing and arduous as Schindler’s List was. That it could have been and is not is one of the greatest things to recommend it, I think.
The movie could easily have been 140-150 minutes, with long stretches toward the beginning that introduce us more fully to the characters and to the futuristic (2027, I think) world in which the movie is set. Instead, you’re thrown in and you have to figure it out for yourself. The characters talk about the calamity of the world they live in, a fragments of news broadcasts fill in other details, but a lot if left unanswered and everything is a part of the plot. The movie is not two hours long and I wasn’t bored or uninterested for even a single second.
Including Children Of Men, I can only think of three movies Cuaron has made (there may be others I either haven’t seen or have forgotten) but I’m not sure there’s any director currently working who I respect more. He just makes good movies. Two (Y Tu Mama Tambien, and Children Of Men) are stories that might otherwise not particularly interest me and I don’t have a burning desire to watch either of them again, but both are lean, well-made films that don’t get boring. Of course, I think the same goes for his Harrp Potter movie (The Prisoner Of Azkaban), which is still my favorite of the series, as much for what it leaves out as anything that’s in it. The guy is brilliant (and how many directors out there can make three so wildly different kinds of movies and be so good at all of them?).
There are pleasures in Children Of Men, just not any that come from the story itself. (I’m not saying the story is bad, mind you, everything about it is good and well done. It’s just so harsh.) Clive Owen is excellent, as he pretty much always is. This is more of a good guy role than he normally takes on and it’s nice to see his strength and rage (and flaws) used for good for a change.
One of the things I was most struck by is the future world they created. It’s a mixture of modern London (remember the story is only 20 years in the future), concentration camps, the American War On Terrorism, and the gray-blue of Minority Report. It’s sci-fi, I suppose, but the world hasn’t advanced much technologically – why would it, if humanity is dying out? The still-green enclave in central London is an interesting touch, and as a contrast the refugee camp on the coast was like Black Hawk Down meets the Blitz. There’s an abandoned schoolhouse, rather late into the movie, that was to me by far the most moving realization of just how awful that world must be. Then there are almost comic touches, like the relative who has “saved” greats works of art (like the David) and now displays them in his foyer, or an inexplicable balloon pig straight off a Pink Floyd album cover.
So it’s hard to recommend the movie, to muster up any enthusiasm. It’s hard to even want to talk about it, which is about 98% of the reason I ever want people to see any movie I’ve seen. But it’s deserving of any award nomination it gets and any best of the year list it makes, and it’s definitely worth your 10 bucks and two hours.
Literature, Hornsby says – and I find that I agree with him – is all too often presented not as a pleasure activity, but as a responsibility, as something that’s good for you. But we humans don’t generally like things that are good for us; we think of healthy food as being food that doesn’t taste good, and the doctor as someone who sticks us with needles, and literature as incomprehensible and pointless metaphors for who knows what. This is a problem.
No one says you should watch The Sopranos because it’s good for you – we say you should watch The Sopranos because it’s just a damn good TV show. That it happens to be better for us than, well, pretty much any reality TV program is entirely subordinate to the fact that it’s also just better than any reality TV program. The same thing is often true of literature. Look, I’m not trying to argue that reading John Grisham and Danielle Steele is better for you than reading Cormac McCarthy or Thomas Pynchon. What I’m saying is that it shouldn’t matter whether it’s better for you or not, because ultimately it’s better for us (book-loving people first, but broader culture, too) as a whole.
In high school I worked at a book store and for the first few weeks when a customer would come to the register with two romance novels and a copy of Us it was all I could do to mask my disgust. Jackie Collins? Steve Baldacci? How could people read that crap when they could be buying Hemingway or David Foster Wallace or, God, even an Oprah book!?! But I got over that, too. After all, for every person buying Steve Martini there were countless others not coming into our store and buying anything at all, who were probably not reading at all.
At the end, it has to be better (for literacy, for the publishing industry, for struggling writers, for everyone) if more people are reading five books a year (even if it’s Dean Koontz) than if those same people are (a) not reading at all or (b) attempting to read whatever won the National Book award because they feel like they should, like it will somehow make them better, but hating it and never finishing.
There aren’t many people who still actually complain that Pirates Of The Caribbean will make billions more than whatever movie ultimately wins Best Picture. In the case of movies (and TV, too) we accept that what is good is not always going to be popular and that what is popular can be good without being especially redeeming. The world of books will be much healthier once more people let reading for pleasure be the norm, not some sort of shameful taboo (eg, this British article about people who are supposedly embarrassed to admit they read Harry Potter and Stephen King).
So I’ve given up the “you should read this book” mantra. Reading takes far too long and can be far too painful if you’re not enjoying it. Besides, whatever qualities the book has to recommend it are going to be wholly lost on any reader who resists the project from the start.
So the question, as it relates to what I intended this blog to be about, is whether I feel the same way about movies. Last year, if I remember correctly, I wrote that you should go see Munich. To a great extent, I still really feel that way. And yet, though I own it, I’ve never made any of my friends (nor even my wife) sit down and watch it. I’ve never even suggested it. Here I think the issue of time goes out the window. While reading a book can take hours upon hours of your life, watching a movie takes two, maybe two and a half. I don’t necessarily thinks that’s too much time to ask someone to sacrifice to an important movie. The issue is still whether or not a person essentially forced into watching a movie will get any benefit from it, no matter how potentially meaningful. Last year, Syriana and Munich both left me speechless – but to anyone who doesn’t want to go along for the ride they’re just going to be two movies where things blow up and the plot’s kind of confusing.
So I’ll just say that if it’s the sort of movie that looks even mildly interesting to you, or if you’re in the mood to visit a dark world, or if you just like Alfonso Cuaron – then you should go see Children Of Men.
It is in many ways a very difficult movie to recommend because it’s a movie almost entirely without joy, with only even a tiny amount of hope. Diana said it was good but good in a Schindler’s List kind of way. She’s right, although I hesitate at the comparison because harsh as it is Children of Men was not, to me, nearly as distressing and arduous as Schindler’s List was. That it could have been and is not is one of the greatest things to recommend it, I think.
The movie could easily have been 140-150 minutes, with long stretches toward the beginning that introduce us more fully to the characters and to the futuristic (2027, I think) world in which the movie is set. Instead, you’re thrown in and you have to figure it out for yourself. The characters talk about the calamity of the world they live in, a fragments of news broadcasts fill in other details, but a lot if left unanswered and everything is a part of the plot. The movie is not two hours long and I wasn’t bored or uninterested for even a single second.
Including Children Of Men, I can only think of three movies Cuaron has made (there may be others I either haven’t seen or have forgotten) but I’m not sure there’s any director currently working who I respect more. He just makes good movies. Two (Y Tu Mama Tambien, and Children Of Men) are stories that might otherwise not particularly interest me and I don’t have a burning desire to watch either of them again, but both are lean, well-made films that don’t get boring. Of course, I think the same goes for his Harrp Potter movie (The Prisoner Of Azkaban), which is still my favorite of the series, as much for what it leaves out as anything that’s in it. The guy is brilliant (and how many directors out there can make three so wildly different kinds of movies and be so good at all of them?).
There are pleasures in Children Of Men, just not any that come from the story itself. (I’m not saying the story is bad, mind you, everything about it is good and well done. It’s just so harsh.) Clive Owen is excellent, as he pretty much always is. This is more of a good guy role than he normally takes on and it’s nice to see his strength and rage (and flaws) used for good for a change.
One of the things I was most struck by is the future world they created. It’s a mixture of modern London (remember the story is only 20 years in the future), concentration camps, the American War On Terrorism, and the gray-blue of Minority Report. It’s sci-fi, I suppose, but the world hasn’t advanced much technologically – why would it, if humanity is dying out? The still-green enclave in central London is an interesting touch, and as a contrast the refugee camp on the coast was like Black Hawk Down meets the Blitz. There’s an abandoned schoolhouse, rather late into the movie, that was to me by far the most moving realization of just how awful that world must be. Then there are almost comic touches, like the relative who has “saved” greats works of art (like the David) and now displays them in his foyer, or an inexplicable balloon pig straight off a Pink Floyd album cover.
So it’s hard to recommend the movie, to muster up any enthusiasm. It’s hard to even want to talk about it, which is about 98% of the reason I ever want people to see any movie I’ve seen. But it’s deserving of any award nomination it gets and any best of the year list it makes, and it’s definitely worth your 10 bucks and two hours.
Thursday, January 04, 2007
Made-up places
Another thing I wrote a few months ago, also inspired by Daniel Handler, but not about him.
As a writer, one of the things I’m always most interested in is place. As in location. That I currently have various ideas for stories that take place in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Colorado is not simply because these are places that I have been to often enough that I feel comfortable writing about them, though that’s certainly a factor. The real reason is because each story has to be set there. Consider that in my own mind I refer to at least two of them as “the Los Angeles story” and “the Las Vegas story,” despite the fact that both have perfectly good working titles (“Screenwriter’s Blues” and “What Happens Here,” respectively). (The stories set in San Francisco and Colorado have no definitive working titles but I don’t tend to think of them as “the San Francisco story” or “the Colorado story” so much as the one is “Aaron’s story” and the other is just “that Big Thompson thing.” This is because the stories could take place in locations other than where they’re currently set, but the intertwining nature of all four books makes the current locations necessary.)
The Las Vegas story could technically take place anywhere, but the point of the story as it’s framed in my mind would be completely different. (When I become famous and dead and my writings are a part of the great American canon, this essay will no doubt be a boon to all those poor graduate students who want to write their theses about my brilliance.) The same goes for the Los Angeles story – sure, people can go crazy anywhere but there’s a whole tradition of “LA makes you crazy” stories that I’m emulating and, besides, the kind of crazy LA drives you is so different from the kind of crazy you get from living in Phoenix that it really would make for a whole different novel.
But this interest in locations gets sticky because I’m writing fiction. I don’t have any idea if there’s an apartment complex in any of the places I need apartment complexes to be in any of these stories. I could drive around and take lots of pictures and get places and crossroads and times just right, but – dammit, why? It’s fiction. Even if I get the right street corner, I’m still putting a fictional person in an apartment that is in fact lived in by a real person. And if the timing of a story is also important that brings up a host of other problems – like, what if it wasn’t in fact rainy in San Francisco that day?
I used to avoid all this by creating my own worlds. Somewhere (I think) I still have a very thick notebook from high school with more details than you can imagine about a fictional metropolis named Harrison City along the southern coast of Oregon. Here was an urban center not unlike San Francisco, a sprawling suburban canvas reminiscent of the suburb I grew up in, a university, a small liberal arts college, a military base, everything I needed. When I set stories in Harrison City (there was some figure of Oregon history who leant his name to the place) I used to sort of imply that I was inspired mostly by Faulkner and his astonishingly complex (given that it was entirely made up) Yoknoptowhatever(who knows how to actually spell this word?) County. Which, I mean OK, I was probably inspired by Faulker a little bit, but in retrospect I had a lot more experience with the fictional Maine towns created by Stephen King (Jerusalem’s Lot, Castle Rock, and Derry, which are themselves apparently based on the trio of fictional town created by HP Lovecraft).
More and more, though, I realized that sometimes the university where a story was going to be set couldn’t be in Oregon – it needed to be in the desert, or in New England – or that the story was about Las Vegas as much as the characters in the story. My reaction was typically overblown. Suddenly every detail had to be right. There’s some use in this. My LA story character is the sort of obsessive who would know everything about all the possible freeway combinations and who would never once tell you how his morning was without relating which route he took to get to work. But ultimately this is inconvenient when you’re me and most of your experience with LA freeways is knowing how to get from the 91 to Disneyland. Moreover, it’s just not important. Sure, there will always be a reader who knows you got a detail or two wrong, but it’s fiction so the nit picky stuff doesn’t matter.
Or then in the middle ground of those two extremes is a place like the fictional San Francisco of Daniel Handler’s The Basic Eight and Adverbs. It is recognizably San Francisco, would be even without being named as such (though it is), with all the landmarks and weather and topography we expect from that city. But it is not San Francisco. It’s Handler’s own unique world. There are band names and terrorist acts and supernatural wonders that are unique to his world. This is all appealing to me and to some extent I emulate the idea. Of my four novels mentioned above, at least three share characters or reference each other in one way or another, and there are short stories that also branch off from those same characters. These are all the same people living in the same world at the same time. If LA is experiencing extreme wildfires in the fall of 2003, it’s something my characters in San Francisco are aware of. If an earthquake hits San Francisco, LA might feel the shock as well. At the same time, I’ve gone back and forth on just how fictional to make my world. Consider my main character in “the San Francisco novel:” He’s an unabashed music lover, virtually everything in his life (all his memories, most of his relationships) is based around music. If I base him on me (and he’s certainly not in full but I’m allowing him much more of me than any other character I’ve ever written), for example, he’ll be a Pearl Jam fan, and a great many of his memories will be traceable to major moments (and concerts) in Pearl Jam history. This is both useful and a detriment to the narrative, potentially. It’s useful in that it’s identifiable. If he wants to compare a feeling to the sweeping chorus of some hit song, there’s a literal equivalent there that the reader can relate to. It also creates a solid timeline around which the narrative can be built. But these are also the potential detriments to the book – Pearl Jam is a known band, so every reader brings a preconceived notion of what it means to be a Pearl Jam fan with them and this may influence their perception of the character more than the actual characterization as put forth in the book. Moreover, the timeline of the real world is often inconvenient for fiction – Pearl Jam’s huge, free (and then aborted) concert in San Francisco was in July of 1995, they have had tours and albums in many but not all years, and their popularity has declined massively over the past decade (it makes me feel so old to write that) … so what if none of this fits the needs of the book? What if, to work with the character’s age and life, Pearl Jam needs to be on tour in San Francisco in 96 or 97? It didn’t happen, so do I look for another band that was touring in San Francisco, then? It gets complicated.
But on the other hand, while you can mold a fictional band to whatever career path and tour schedule you need, you can’t use them as any kind of reference point with the reader. You might love U2 or hate U2 or be indifferent toward U2, but if I talk about U2’s song “One,” you know what I’m talking about. There’s a key scene in the book right now which takes a cue from Better Than Ezra’s “At The Stars.” I could create a fictional song, a fictional band – even one that is self-consciously Better Than Ezra- and “At The Stars”-like, but I can’t guarantee that, as I describe a song about the joys of driving around in a convertible late at night with no cares in the world that the reader will actually think of “At The Stars.” Maybe they’ll think of “Pink Moon,” a great song, but one with a decidedly more somber feeling. Maybe they’ll think of some other song I’ve never heard.
It all gets very complicated, and so the urge to just distance the entire story from pop culture becomes strong. This works sometimes. The Las Vegas story, to the extent I’ve conceived it so far, has no reason to make reference to much of pop culture (the where is more important than the what). But both the San Francisco and the Los Angeles stories rely heavily on pop culture, and I think this is important because pop culture is such a part of all of our lives. The songs we listen to really do say something about us, they really do influence our moods and our decisions.
(As I write this it has just occurred to me that if the LA story and the SF story take place in the same universe then they need to be governed by the same laws of pop culture. The final scene of the LA story (which is all very cinematic) is set to a Beach Boys song. It has to be. So the decision is either maintaining consistency throughout all the novels or letting them be creations unto themselves. Hm.)
The songs we listen to even influence the way we (as writers) write. One of the novels I wrote in high school was completed on an adrenaline-fueled night when the last hundred or so pages came rolling out of me all at once, as I stayed up late into the morning, with The Refreshments’ “Mekong” on repeat virtually the whole time. When I later went back and read parts of the end of that book, I realized the language actually could be read to the songs, it had the same rhythms. Or, for another example, consider that when I write fiction I always listen to music – usually music that is deliberately reflective of the mood I’m looking for in the work. The playlist on my laptop for the LA story includes a lot of Nine Inch Nails, but also Oingo Boingo, 70s Elton John, and Soul Coughing. The Las Vegas story’s playlist is heavy on early-90s U2, Ryan Adams, and Ben Folds. But if what I’m writing is academic I cannot listen to pop music – really nothing with lyrics is appropriate. Film scores, orchestral “tribute” records to pop bands, and classical are my choices then. But no matter what I’m writing, it’s always much easier with music.
And, to bring us full circle (did you catch that? I didn’t even plan it! I am so awesome!), the other thing that has always encouraged my writing is travel. There’s something about being in a different (not even new necessarily) place that intrigues my mind, encourages writing. Day-to-day life at home is uninspiring. Even when I want to write, with work (and now school), and a house to take care of, it’s all but impossible to find the time. I was writing sporadically in the spring and summer but once my classes picked up heavily in July the fiction/creative writing pretty much stopped (that’s also, you’ll notice, when my blog became a ghost town). All of the reading and analyzing was stimulating a different part of my brain. I was reading a lot, even a lot of stuff that had nothing to do with school, and thinking about it a lot, but the creative part of my mind was dead, which is always dangerous because as I’ve grown older I’ve come to realize that not writing tends to result in depression. (When I was younger I had it backwards: I thought that when I was depressed, I could write to pull myself out of it, but writing’s not the cure so much as it’s the symptom. I don’t have much in my life to be depressed about, but sure enough I was depressed just a few months ago, because I wasn’t writing.)
Then I went to California for two nights and suddenly it was bursting out of me quicker than I could possibly write it all down. Even still, weeks later, all those ideas for scenes and conversations crowd my mind, begging to be put to paper before they are forgotten. But real life is again in full effect. I go to work in the morning, I go home and clean and cook and do homework. I write academic papers because I must, and all the while the ideas in my head are forgotten, they trickle away. I lay in bed at night and the ideas come and I must choose between hoping they’ll still be there in the morning or getting up, writing them down, and getting even less sleep than the too-little I already get.
It’s not that I write about foreign places (LA, Las Vegas, San Francisco) because they are more special or better suited to stories than home is. It’s just that home is home. It’s boring. One day I’ll write stories that take place in Phoenix … but not until I’m inspired to write them because I’m here on vacation.
As a writer, one of the things I’m always most interested in is place. As in location. That I currently have various ideas for stories that take place in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Colorado is not simply because these are places that I have been to often enough that I feel comfortable writing about them, though that’s certainly a factor. The real reason is because each story has to be set there. Consider that in my own mind I refer to at least two of them as “the Los Angeles story” and “the Las Vegas story,” despite the fact that both have perfectly good working titles (“Screenwriter’s Blues” and “What Happens Here,” respectively). (The stories set in San Francisco and Colorado have no definitive working titles but I don’t tend to think of them as “the San Francisco story” or “the Colorado story” so much as the one is “Aaron’s story” and the other is just “that Big Thompson thing.” This is because the stories could take place in locations other than where they’re currently set, but the intertwining nature of all four books makes the current locations necessary.)
The Las Vegas story could technically take place anywhere, but the point of the story as it’s framed in my mind would be completely different. (When I become famous and dead and my writings are a part of the great American canon, this essay will no doubt be a boon to all those poor graduate students who want to write their theses about my brilliance.) The same goes for the Los Angeles story – sure, people can go crazy anywhere but there’s a whole tradition of “LA makes you crazy” stories that I’m emulating and, besides, the kind of crazy LA drives you is so different from the kind of crazy you get from living in Phoenix that it really would make for a whole different novel.
But this interest in locations gets sticky because I’m writing fiction. I don’t have any idea if there’s an apartment complex in any of the places I need apartment complexes to be in any of these stories. I could drive around and take lots of pictures and get places and crossroads and times just right, but – dammit, why? It’s fiction. Even if I get the right street corner, I’m still putting a fictional person in an apartment that is in fact lived in by a real person. And if the timing of a story is also important that brings up a host of other problems – like, what if it wasn’t in fact rainy in San Francisco that day?
I used to avoid all this by creating my own worlds. Somewhere (I think) I still have a very thick notebook from high school with more details than you can imagine about a fictional metropolis named Harrison City along the southern coast of Oregon. Here was an urban center not unlike San Francisco, a sprawling suburban canvas reminiscent of the suburb I grew up in, a university, a small liberal arts college, a military base, everything I needed. When I set stories in Harrison City (there was some figure of Oregon history who leant his name to the place) I used to sort of imply that I was inspired mostly by Faulkner and his astonishingly complex (given that it was entirely made up) Yoknoptowhatever(who knows how to actually spell this word?) County. Which, I mean OK, I was probably inspired by Faulker a little bit, but in retrospect I had a lot more experience with the fictional Maine towns created by Stephen King (Jerusalem’s Lot, Castle Rock, and Derry, which are themselves apparently based on the trio of fictional town created by HP Lovecraft).
More and more, though, I realized that sometimes the university where a story was going to be set couldn’t be in Oregon – it needed to be in the desert, or in New England – or that the story was about Las Vegas as much as the characters in the story. My reaction was typically overblown. Suddenly every detail had to be right. There’s some use in this. My LA story character is the sort of obsessive who would know everything about all the possible freeway combinations and who would never once tell you how his morning was without relating which route he took to get to work. But ultimately this is inconvenient when you’re me and most of your experience with LA freeways is knowing how to get from the 91 to Disneyland. Moreover, it’s just not important. Sure, there will always be a reader who knows you got a detail or two wrong, but it’s fiction so the nit picky stuff doesn’t matter.
Or then in the middle ground of those two extremes is a place like the fictional San Francisco of Daniel Handler’s The Basic Eight and Adverbs. It is recognizably San Francisco, would be even without being named as such (though it is), with all the landmarks and weather and topography we expect from that city. But it is not San Francisco. It’s Handler’s own unique world. There are band names and terrorist acts and supernatural wonders that are unique to his world. This is all appealing to me and to some extent I emulate the idea. Of my four novels mentioned above, at least three share characters or reference each other in one way or another, and there are short stories that also branch off from those same characters. These are all the same people living in the same world at the same time. If LA is experiencing extreme wildfires in the fall of 2003, it’s something my characters in San Francisco are aware of. If an earthquake hits San Francisco, LA might feel the shock as well. At the same time, I’ve gone back and forth on just how fictional to make my world. Consider my main character in “the San Francisco novel:” He’s an unabashed music lover, virtually everything in his life (all his memories, most of his relationships) is based around music. If I base him on me (and he’s certainly not in full but I’m allowing him much more of me than any other character I’ve ever written), for example, he’ll be a Pearl Jam fan, and a great many of his memories will be traceable to major moments (and concerts) in Pearl Jam history. This is both useful and a detriment to the narrative, potentially. It’s useful in that it’s identifiable. If he wants to compare a feeling to the sweeping chorus of some hit song, there’s a literal equivalent there that the reader can relate to. It also creates a solid timeline around which the narrative can be built. But these are also the potential detriments to the book – Pearl Jam is a known band, so every reader brings a preconceived notion of what it means to be a Pearl Jam fan with them and this may influence their perception of the character more than the actual characterization as put forth in the book. Moreover, the timeline of the real world is often inconvenient for fiction – Pearl Jam’s huge, free (and then aborted) concert in San Francisco was in July of 1995, they have had tours and albums in many but not all years, and their popularity has declined massively over the past decade (it makes me feel so old to write that) … so what if none of this fits the needs of the book? What if, to work with the character’s age and life, Pearl Jam needs to be on tour in San Francisco in 96 or 97? It didn’t happen, so do I look for another band that was touring in San Francisco, then? It gets complicated.
But on the other hand, while you can mold a fictional band to whatever career path and tour schedule you need, you can’t use them as any kind of reference point with the reader. You might love U2 or hate U2 or be indifferent toward U2, but if I talk about U2’s song “One,” you know what I’m talking about. There’s a key scene in the book right now which takes a cue from Better Than Ezra’s “At The Stars.” I could create a fictional song, a fictional band – even one that is self-consciously Better Than Ezra- and “At The Stars”-like, but I can’t guarantee that, as I describe a song about the joys of driving around in a convertible late at night with no cares in the world that the reader will actually think of “At The Stars.” Maybe they’ll think of “Pink Moon,” a great song, but one with a decidedly more somber feeling. Maybe they’ll think of some other song I’ve never heard.
It all gets very complicated, and so the urge to just distance the entire story from pop culture becomes strong. This works sometimes. The Las Vegas story, to the extent I’ve conceived it so far, has no reason to make reference to much of pop culture (the where is more important than the what). But both the San Francisco and the Los Angeles stories rely heavily on pop culture, and I think this is important because pop culture is such a part of all of our lives. The songs we listen to really do say something about us, they really do influence our moods and our decisions.
(As I write this it has just occurred to me that if the LA story and the SF story take place in the same universe then they need to be governed by the same laws of pop culture. The final scene of the LA story (which is all very cinematic) is set to a Beach Boys song. It has to be. So the decision is either maintaining consistency throughout all the novels or letting them be creations unto themselves. Hm.)
The songs we listen to even influence the way we (as writers) write. One of the novels I wrote in high school was completed on an adrenaline-fueled night when the last hundred or so pages came rolling out of me all at once, as I stayed up late into the morning, with The Refreshments’ “Mekong” on repeat virtually the whole time. When I later went back and read parts of the end of that book, I realized the language actually could be read to the songs, it had the same rhythms. Or, for another example, consider that when I write fiction I always listen to music – usually music that is deliberately reflective of the mood I’m looking for in the work. The playlist on my laptop for the LA story includes a lot of Nine Inch Nails, but also Oingo Boingo, 70s Elton John, and Soul Coughing. The Las Vegas story’s playlist is heavy on early-90s U2, Ryan Adams, and Ben Folds. But if what I’m writing is academic I cannot listen to pop music – really nothing with lyrics is appropriate. Film scores, orchestral “tribute” records to pop bands, and classical are my choices then. But no matter what I’m writing, it’s always much easier with music.
And, to bring us full circle (did you catch that? I didn’t even plan it! I am so awesome!), the other thing that has always encouraged my writing is travel. There’s something about being in a different (not even new necessarily) place that intrigues my mind, encourages writing. Day-to-day life at home is uninspiring. Even when I want to write, with work (and now school), and a house to take care of, it’s all but impossible to find the time. I was writing sporadically in the spring and summer but once my classes picked up heavily in July the fiction/creative writing pretty much stopped (that’s also, you’ll notice, when my blog became a ghost town). All of the reading and analyzing was stimulating a different part of my brain. I was reading a lot, even a lot of stuff that had nothing to do with school, and thinking about it a lot, but the creative part of my mind was dead, which is always dangerous because as I’ve grown older I’ve come to realize that not writing tends to result in depression. (When I was younger I had it backwards: I thought that when I was depressed, I could write to pull myself out of it, but writing’s not the cure so much as it’s the symptom. I don’t have much in my life to be depressed about, but sure enough I was depressed just a few months ago, because I wasn’t writing.)
Then I went to California for two nights and suddenly it was bursting out of me quicker than I could possibly write it all down. Even still, weeks later, all those ideas for scenes and conversations crowd my mind, begging to be put to paper before they are forgotten. But real life is again in full effect. I go to work in the morning, I go home and clean and cook and do homework. I write academic papers because I must, and all the while the ideas in my head are forgotten, they trickle away. I lay in bed at night and the ideas come and I must choose between hoping they’ll still be there in the morning or getting up, writing them down, and getting even less sleep than the too-little I already get.
It’s not that I write about foreign places (LA, Las Vegas, San Francisco) because they are more special or better suited to stories than home is. It’s just that home is home. It’s boring. One day I’ll write stories that take place in Phoenix … but not until I’m inspired to write them because I’m here on vacation.
My Daniel Handler problem
As promised, here's something I wrote several months back. As always, I feel no shame in spoiling the end of all the books discussed.
Sometimes it almost feels like this Daniel Handler fellow is living in my head.
Well, OK, he’s a writer and I’m a writer (clearly far less accomplished than he but still) and he’s a well-red lover of books and I’m a well read lover of books (clearly far less well read than he but still) and so it’s logical that my brain has more of an affinity with Mr. Handler than, say, with the girl at work who just asked me how to spell "threw."
And of course the particular obsession that his writing indicates that he shares with me is an obsession that is probably shared by most writers. More than anyone else, I suspect, it is writers who fret about the lack of simplicity in the world. I can only think of one writer who even seems to have considered the idea that the world is a simple place. That’s Ernest Hemingway and, as much as he valued simplicity in all things, I could easily make an argument that the plainness of his writing was a deliberate attempt to contrast with the complicated world, not an attempt to reflect it. So maybe the actual count of writers who see the world as uncomplicated is an ironically uncomplicated zero.
Few writers, though, confront the complexity as a problem itself worthy of discussion. For most writers, the obsession (frustration might be a better term) is only apparent between the lines – books that are overfull of characters, novels that should have been short stories, sophomore efforts that run to thousands of pages and never get finished. But Handler takes the problem head on, and nowhere more so than in the last of his Lemony Snicket volumes. Having created a whole bizarre world of mysteries and questions and with each successive book presenting far more questions than answers, he had backed himself into a corner: How to resolve all this? But the answer was clear from the very first page, the onion metaphor.
Someone more cynical than I could easily make the argument that this is a cop-out. The novelist chooses their topic and thus it is the novelist’s responsibility to answer all the questions they raise within the narrative. But this is short-sighted and restrictive. If the goal of fiction is to reflect the real world, and for me it certainly is, then fiction must also acknowledge at least at some level that no matter how fleeting a character is they do have their own story, and so does everyone who ever briefly enters their life, and so on and so on. The rebukes to the orphans ("You think your story is the only story in the world?") are in fact direct rebukes to the reader. When you start out with the series, you simply want to know what happens to the orphans – that much is explained. All the other questions we as readers clamor for answers to are questions we have invented and they are tangential to the actual story. Or in other words: If you pick up just one layer of an onion, you can’t expect to know everything there is to know about the whole of the onion.
But as much as it might seem a convenient way out of his predicament, there’s plenty of evidence in his other novels to suggest that the world’s complexity really is one of his obsessions and that, as such, the onion-skin rebuke of Book The Thirteenth might have been planned all along.
Consider the first thing we hear from the narrator of his first novel The Basic Eight: "One may as well begin with ..." she writes. Because, of course, that’s not really where the story starts, but it’s where we may as well start because the whole story of Flannery’s birth (and conception, and her parents’ meeting, etc etc) is just a bit too tedious. Part of the story, certainly, but too tedious. So we may as well begin where we do. We flash back, we get background info, but we don’t have to know how all the Basic Eight became friends or every blow by blow of her previous failed relationship. We don’t have to know it, but it is a part of the story.
Or look at Watch Your Mouth, in which Handler becomes the only person I know of besides myself who admits to being interested in those Library of Congress subject guides. And, of course, interest in order and categorization is itself an awareness of the world’s complexity – organization is how we attempt to minimize the world’s cruel complications. WYM also features one of the most self-aware narrators of any novel (novels?) I’ve ever read, and he too discusses the topic, the millions upon millions of stories the universe can tell. (A side note as it relates to WYM and Handler’s in-my-headedness: While basing a novel on the form of an opera is something that has never occurred to me, it is worth noting that the narrative structure of one of my current novels-in-progress is based on the structure of a piece of musical theatre that I’m particularly fond of.)
And his most recent work, Adverbs, is as blatant a look at the bizarre, complicated world as may be possible in 300 pages. Do these characters inhabit the same world? Are those with similar names in fact the same character? If so, are they all living at the same time? We don’t know. Based on the jacket description Handler wrote the whole point is that he wants us not to know – and to wonder.
But Adverbs is also, I should point out, where Handler and I begin to diverge in our philosophy of how to deal with this issue of the complex world. Maybe because he’s a better writer than I, Handler is more interested (at least in Adverbs but also it seems this is true in The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth) in how to tell stories rather than what stories he’s telling. Adverbs is infuriatingly obtuse, sometimes ending at just the moment we start to care about what’s happening in a story. What horrible act was committed? Did they ever get across the bridge? Who flew a plane into what?
It’s not that I’m adverse to the pleasures of language set free. Hell, look at the emails I write or notice how often I’m using dashes and parentheses and otherwise going off on tangents herein – if writing is something you enjoy and believe yourself to be good at then it’s fun to let your typing fingers run free every now and then. But that, to me, is more poetry than prose and I’ve always enjoyed prose more. Poetry exists to tell a simple truth in a beautiful way (which is also the exact point of Adverbs). There’s value in that, but I was also at one point a journalist, so it’s not hard to understand why my heart falls closer to the prose (tell me what happened) camp. It’s not unlike the difference between a Baz Luhrmann movie – all glitz and color and pomp built around a simple premise – and some kind of David Mamet caper – uninteresting to look out, but full of story to unravel in your mind. Neither approach is wrong, I just like story more than I like artifice. Or maybe Handler is just a better writer than I am, and I’m jealous.
But this brings us to the final proof of my argument, which is again an area where I find I have a lot in common with Mr. Snicket’s personal assistant – we find ending all but impossible. Let’s be honest, Handler’s novels (and the SoUE books) are excellent in many ways but the ending of pretty much all of them could be improved. Strangely, it’s not that he doesn’t know how to end a story – his problem is more that he just can’t leave well enough alone once he has ended his story.
This is eminently understandable. In a universe full of people and lives and stories, nothing really has an end. Flannery’s story isn’t really over after the fateful Halloween party, of course it’s not, but the part we really need to know is over. Same goes for Joseph at the funeral on the riverbank. And for Chapter Fourteen.
At some point, the story you’re telling stops. It doesn’t mean it’s the end for the character, and – unfortunately – it’s often harder for the writer to identify this ending point than anyone else. That’s what editors are for.
Sometimes it almost feels like this Daniel Handler fellow is living in my head.
Well, OK, he’s a writer and I’m a writer (clearly far less accomplished than he but still) and he’s a well-red lover of books and I’m a well read lover of books (clearly far less well read than he but still) and so it’s logical that my brain has more of an affinity with Mr. Handler than, say, with the girl at work who just asked me how to spell "threw."
And of course the particular obsession that his writing indicates that he shares with me is an obsession that is probably shared by most writers. More than anyone else, I suspect, it is writers who fret about the lack of simplicity in the world. I can only think of one writer who even seems to have considered the idea that the world is a simple place. That’s Ernest Hemingway and, as much as he valued simplicity in all things, I could easily make an argument that the plainness of his writing was a deliberate attempt to contrast with the complicated world, not an attempt to reflect it. So maybe the actual count of writers who see the world as uncomplicated is an ironically uncomplicated zero.
Few writers, though, confront the complexity as a problem itself worthy of discussion. For most writers, the obsession (frustration might be a better term) is only apparent between the lines – books that are overfull of characters, novels that should have been short stories, sophomore efforts that run to thousands of pages and never get finished. But Handler takes the problem head on, and nowhere more so than in the last of his Lemony Snicket volumes. Having created a whole bizarre world of mysteries and questions and with each successive book presenting far more questions than answers, he had backed himself into a corner: How to resolve all this? But the answer was clear from the very first page, the onion metaphor.
Someone more cynical than I could easily make the argument that this is a cop-out. The novelist chooses their topic and thus it is the novelist’s responsibility to answer all the questions they raise within the narrative. But this is short-sighted and restrictive. If the goal of fiction is to reflect the real world, and for me it certainly is, then fiction must also acknowledge at least at some level that no matter how fleeting a character is they do have their own story, and so does everyone who ever briefly enters their life, and so on and so on. The rebukes to the orphans ("You think your story is the only story in the world?") are in fact direct rebukes to the reader. When you start out with the series, you simply want to know what happens to the orphans – that much is explained. All the other questions we as readers clamor for answers to are questions we have invented and they are tangential to the actual story. Or in other words: If you pick up just one layer of an onion, you can’t expect to know everything there is to know about the whole of the onion.
But as much as it might seem a convenient way out of his predicament, there’s plenty of evidence in his other novels to suggest that the world’s complexity really is one of his obsessions and that, as such, the onion-skin rebuke of Book The Thirteenth might have been planned all along.
Consider the first thing we hear from the narrator of his first novel The Basic Eight: "One may as well begin with ..." she writes. Because, of course, that’s not really where the story starts, but it’s where we may as well start because the whole story of Flannery’s birth (and conception, and her parents’ meeting, etc etc) is just a bit too tedious. Part of the story, certainly, but too tedious. So we may as well begin where we do. We flash back, we get background info, but we don’t have to know how all the Basic Eight became friends or every blow by blow of her previous failed relationship. We don’t have to know it, but it is a part of the story.
Or look at Watch Your Mouth, in which Handler becomes the only person I know of besides myself who admits to being interested in those Library of Congress subject guides. And, of course, interest in order and categorization is itself an awareness of the world’s complexity – organization is how we attempt to minimize the world’s cruel complications. WYM also features one of the most self-aware narrators of any novel (novels?) I’ve ever read, and he too discusses the topic, the millions upon millions of stories the universe can tell. (A side note as it relates to WYM and Handler’s in-my-headedness: While basing a novel on the form of an opera is something that has never occurred to me, it is worth noting that the narrative structure of one of my current novels-in-progress is based on the structure of a piece of musical theatre that I’m particularly fond of.)
And his most recent work, Adverbs, is as blatant a look at the bizarre, complicated world as may be possible in 300 pages. Do these characters inhabit the same world? Are those with similar names in fact the same character? If so, are they all living at the same time? We don’t know. Based on the jacket description Handler wrote the whole point is that he wants us not to know – and to wonder.
But Adverbs is also, I should point out, where Handler and I begin to diverge in our philosophy of how to deal with this issue of the complex world. Maybe because he’s a better writer than I, Handler is more interested (at least in Adverbs but also it seems this is true in The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth) in how to tell stories rather than what stories he’s telling. Adverbs is infuriatingly obtuse, sometimes ending at just the moment we start to care about what’s happening in a story. What horrible act was committed? Did they ever get across the bridge? Who flew a plane into what?
It’s not that I’m adverse to the pleasures of language set free. Hell, look at the emails I write or notice how often I’m using dashes and parentheses and otherwise going off on tangents herein – if writing is something you enjoy and believe yourself to be good at then it’s fun to let your typing fingers run free every now and then. But that, to me, is more poetry than prose and I’ve always enjoyed prose more. Poetry exists to tell a simple truth in a beautiful way (which is also the exact point of Adverbs). There’s value in that, but I was also at one point a journalist, so it’s not hard to understand why my heart falls closer to the prose (tell me what happened) camp. It’s not unlike the difference between a Baz Luhrmann movie – all glitz and color and pomp built around a simple premise – and some kind of David Mamet caper – uninteresting to look out, but full of story to unravel in your mind. Neither approach is wrong, I just like story more than I like artifice. Or maybe Handler is just a better writer than I am, and I’m jealous.
But this brings us to the final proof of my argument, which is again an area where I find I have a lot in common with Mr. Snicket’s personal assistant – we find ending all but impossible. Let’s be honest, Handler’s novels (and the SoUE books) are excellent in many ways but the ending of pretty much all of them could be improved. Strangely, it’s not that he doesn’t know how to end a story – his problem is more that he just can’t leave well enough alone once he has ended his story.
This is eminently understandable. In a universe full of people and lives and stories, nothing really has an end. Flannery’s story isn’t really over after the fateful Halloween party, of course it’s not, but the part we really need to know is over. Same goes for Joseph at the funeral on the riverbank. And for Chapter Fourteen.
At some point, the story you’re telling stops. It doesn’t mean it’s the end for the character, and – unfortunately – it’s often harder for the writer to identify this ending point than anyone else. That’s what editors are for.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
It’s not even been an hour since I walked out of the theatre and, as such, it’s far too early to properly judge, but still: Stranger Than Fiction might be my favorite movie I’ve ever watched.
There are movies I love. Movies I admire as incredible achievements, movies that make me laugh uncontrollably, movies that do any number of things very well and that I enthusiastically recommend. But it’s very rare (I suspect this is true for everyone and not only me) that a movie comes along that I find really speaks to me. Transfixes me. Grabs me early on and makes me feel like it’s not simply talking to me but through me. Like it’s expressing a part of me, but in a better, more perfect way than I ever could.
Almost Famous did, but was far from perfect – it was too long and the actual plot wasn’t as great as the feeling of thee movie. Pleasantville was speaking to me – right up until the last third of the movie turned to total shit.
From the very first moment, Stranger Than Fiction seemed to be speaking to me. Naturally this filled me with terror, because I was so sure this movie couldn’t end well, they were bound to screw it up somehow (you can just see the gaping plot holes), and every failed ending is proportionately worse based on how much you enjoy what came before. And then … I was wrong. It’s just this amazingly perfect movie, all the way through. Well, not perfect, there’s at least one thing that doesn’t work, but that’s pretty easy to forgive in a movie that’s otherwise so good. So good and so funny and so dark and so sad and so … I don’t know, so me.
I’m still on a high from it clearly, because wow. Just wow.
There are movies I love. Movies I admire as incredible achievements, movies that make me laugh uncontrollably, movies that do any number of things very well and that I enthusiastically recommend. But it’s very rare (I suspect this is true for everyone and not only me) that a movie comes along that I find really speaks to me. Transfixes me. Grabs me early on and makes me feel like it’s not simply talking to me but through me. Like it’s expressing a part of me, but in a better, more perfect way than I ever could.
Almost Famous did, but was far from perfect – it was too long and the actual plot wasn’t as great as the feeling of thee movie. Pleasantville was speaking to me – right up until the last third of the movie turned to total shit.
From the very first moment, Stranger Than Fiction seemed to be speaking to me. Naturally this filled me with terror, because I was so sure this movie couldn’t end well, they were bound to screw it up somehow (you can just see the gaping plot holes), and every failed ending is proportionately worse based on how much you enjoy what came before. And then … I was wrong. It’s just this amazingly perfect movie, all the way through. Well, not perfect, there’s at least one thing that doesn’t work, but that’s pretty easy to forgive in a movie that’s otherwise so good. So good and so funny and so dark and so sad and so … I don’t know, so me.
I’m still on a high from it clearly, because wow. Just wow.
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
I have been having some trouble this year – as I did the year before, and the year before that – getting into the holiday spirit. This didn’t used to be particularly hard for me to do. Though not my favorite holiday (it’s pretty much always been Halloween, even when I was little), I’ve always (or perhaps I should say at least until recently) really loved the holiday. This despite my complete lack of religious belief and general annoyance with the crass commercialization of something that I love for the Rockwell-like ideas of hot apple cider and family and gathering around the tree. My childhood was at times amazingly like that Rockwellian fantasy. My adult life to this point, sadly is not.
When I was younger I had a tradition that I observed every Thanksgiving night that began my happy embrace of the season. Sometime after all the family had gone home and I was as full of apple pie and cranberry sauce as it is possible to be, I would go to my room and listen to a very particular song on a very particular holiday CD. (The actual artist and CD are too embarrassing to reveal here, and that must be truly embarrassing when you consider that just a few posts below this one I gush all over how much I enjoy that “Unwritten” song.) That tradition has in recent years fallen by the wayside. This year it didn’t even occur to me until sometime last week that I hadn’t listened to the song – and even though I’ve finally broken down and put holiday music on my iPod, I still haven’t heard that song.
Part of this, almost certainly, is that I have not yet (and may never truly) adjust to the reality of winter in Phoenix (read: there isn’t such a thing). I all but missed Halloween what with the 100-degree temperatures and on Thanksgiving I was uncomfortably hot sitting outside. Even the recent “cold”-er weather hasn’t really helped. I’m not going to extol the virtues of a white Christmas or anything – snow is only pretty in theory, in reality it is wet and cold and makes traveling a distinct pain in the ass. But it does at least set the right mood.
More of the problem, though, is just that I’ve become an adult and being an adult sucks. Sucks hard. I mean, OK, sex is pretty good and I enjoy my booze every now and then and driving is nice, but besides all that adulthood is pretty much a bust. Work? Sucks. Money? Don’t have enough. Bills? Don’t get me started. And even Christmas. It’s just not fun anymore.
The worst of it is that Christmas reminds me not only of the basic things you lose as you grow from a child into an adult, but it reminds me in particular of a part of me that I’ve lost and that I miss. It might seem hard to believe, those of you who have never known me as anything but the decidedly cynical bastard I am, but as recently as high school I was terribly romantic, hopelessly romantic. Not in the Valentine way (I’m still reasonably good at all that), but in the classical way. I believed in the goodness of the world and the power of love to overcome everything and in beauty and in soulmates and … basically all the shit that I today roll my eyes at and regard as utter bullshit.
But, like most cynics who deride the more wide-eyed among us, I really only do so out of jealousy: I miss being that way. Even as I openly gag and push away any such silly, starry-eyed idealism, part of me still yearns for it, part of me remembers when I believed in it, and that part of me misses being that way. It’s a much more fulfilling way to live.
Take the movie to which I increasingly make an effort to relate every thing in the world to – Love Actually. It’s not just a romantic comedy. It’s like ten. It’s sickeningly bursting with optimism and joy and the belief that amor omnia vincit and “all you need is love” and while it gets to me on all those levels (I’m still not that jaded, apparently) the stories I find myself liking best are the dark ones – the long-time wife who knows her husband is cheating but doesn’t know exactly in what manner, and the new wife who suddenly realizes that her husband’s best friend is in love with her. These plot lines have the ring of dark reality to them, and of course like any realist I’m far more enamored with dark real stories than happy real ones (my happy marriage is not nearly as interesting to write about as a marriage falling apart would be, for example). This is disturbing, and while this is itself a sign of hope, I just know that it wasn’t so long ago when I would have seen myself in Colin Firth’s writer character and hated the two stories that dared to bring darkness into such a bright movie. I still love Firth’s story, and Hugh Grant’s, and etc., but they don’t interest me. This is how I have become a dark and cynical person: I am, at least in my approach to art, more head than heart – I’ve become overly cerebral. And it’s ruining my Christmas.
There’s other adult stuff getting in the way, too, of course. The older you get, the shorter any individual month becomes in terms of the entire life you’ve lived, and the more you begin to realize that whether it’s Christmas or Halloween or some week in June, you still have to go to work and your boss still needs those TPS reports yesterday. But that, ultimately, I secondary. I mourn my lost Christmas spirit, but some of that is inevitable and I can live with that – it’s just ridiculous to bundle up in a parka to do Christmas shopping when you know perfectly well that it’s going to be sunny and 70 outside. It’s bad enough admitting that – it’s even worse being reminded that every year I become a little more like Ebenezer Scrooge and a little less like his nephew.
When I was younger I had a tradition that I observed every Thanksgiving night that began my happy embrace of the season. Sometime after all the family had gone home and I was as full of apple pie and cranberry sauce as it is possible to be, I would go to my room and listen to a very particular song on a very particular holiday CD. (The actual artist and CD are too embarrassing to reveal here, and that must be truly embarrassing when you consider that just a few posts below this one I gush all over how much I enjoy that “Unwritten” song.) That tradition has in recent years fallen by the wayside. This year it didn’t even occur to me until sometime last week that I hadn’t listened to the song – and even though I’ve finally broken down and put holiday music on my iPod, I still haven’t heard that song.
Part of this, almost certainly, is that I have not yet (and may never truly) adjust to the reality of winter in Phoenix (read: there isn’t such a thing). I all but missed Halloween what with the 100-degree temperatures and on Thanksgiving I was uncomfortably hot sitting outside. Even the recent “cold”-er weather hasn’t really helped. I’m not going to extol the virtues of a white Christmas or anything – snow is only pretty in theory, in reality it is wet and cold and makes traveling a distinct pain in the ass. But it does at least set the right mood.
More of the problem, though, is just that I’ve become an adult and being an adult sucks. Sucks hard. I mean, OK, sex is pretty good and I enjoy my booze every now and then and driving is nice, but besides all that adulthood is pretty much a bust. Work? Sucks. Money? Don’t have enough. Bills? Don’t get me started. And even Christmas. It’s just not fun anymore.
The worst of it is that Christmas reminds me not only of the basic things you lose as you grow from a child into an adult, but it reminds me in particular of a part of me that I’ve lost and that I miss. It might seem hard to believe, those of you who have never known me as anything but the decidedly cynical bastard I am, but as recently as high school I was terribly romantic, hopelessly romantic. Not in the Valentine way (I’m still reasonably good at all that), but in the classical way. I believed in the goodness of the world and the power of love to overcome everything and in beauty and in soulmates and … basically all the shit that I today roll my eyes at and regard as utter bullshit.
But, like most cynics who deride the more wide-eyed among us, I really only do so out of jealousy: I miss being that way. Even as I openly gag and push away any such silly, starry-eyed idealism, part of me still yearns for it, part of me remembers when I believed in it, and that part of me misses being that way. It’s a much more fulfilling way to live.
Take the movie to which I increasingly make an effort to relate every thing in the world to – Love Actually. It’s not just a romantic comedy. It’s like ten. It’s sickeningly bursting with optimism and joy and the belief that amor omnia vincit and “all you need is love” and while it gets to me on all those levels (I’m still not that jaded, apparently) the stories I find myself liking best are the dark ones – the long-time wife who knows her husband is cheating but doesn’t know exactly in what manner, and the new wife who suddenly realizes that her husband’s best friend is in love with her. These plot lines have the ring of dark reality to them, and of course like any realist I’m far more enamored with dark real stories than happy real ones (my happy marriage is not nearly as interesting to write about as a marriage falling apart would be, for example). This is disturbing, and while this is itself a sign of hope, I just know that it wasn’t so long ago when I would have seen myself in Colin Firth’s writer character and hated the two stories that dared to bring darkness into such a bright movie. I still love Firth’s story, and Hugh Grant’s, and etc., but they don’t interest me. This is how I have become a dark and cynical person: I am, at least in my approach to art, more head than heart – I’ve become overly cerebral. And it’s ruining my Christmas.
There’s other adult stuff getting in the way, too, of course. The older you get, the shorter any individual month becomes in terms of the entire life you’ve lived, and the more you begin to realize that whether it’s Christmas or Halloween or some week in June, you still have to go to work and your boss still needs those TPS reports yesterday. But that, ultimately, I secondary. I mourn my lost Christmas spirit, but some of that is inevitable and I can live with that – it’s just ridiculous to bundle up in a parka to do Christmas shopping when you know perfectly well that it’s going to be sunny and 70 outside. It’s bad enough admitting that – it’s even worse being reminded that every year I become a little more like Ebenezer Scrooge and a little less like his nephew.
Monday, December 04, 2006
Just like Jay-Z ...
I’m back. Except, I think I was gone a lot longer than Jigga ever was.
You might notice that my absence corresponds rather well with a typical fall semester of school and there’s a reason for that, of course. But now, while not being completely finished, the bulk of my class work is finished, and here I am again.
I have to admit, it’s not that I was so busy 100% of the time that I couldn’t blog, far from it in fact. But this semester I was enrolled in two literature classes, which turns our to be a hell of a lot of reading, even when you can skim or skip a few books that you’ve read previously. But, again, it wasn’t that I was too busy … I was just unmotivated.
One thing I have learned about myself in recent years is that I’m a writer. That is, I’m not someone who can write, or who writes well, or who uses writing as a particular tool to solve this issue or another. Nor does it mean – God knows – that I actually make any money from writing. I used to think that when I was depressed, if I could force myself to write that it would help to cheer my mood. In fact I had it backwards: it’s not that writing cheers me up necessarily, it’s that not writing makes me depressed. And if there’s one thing that can keep me from writing too much, it’s reading.
This is, I know, kind of a terrible thing to say. A writer has to read, has to really fucking love reading, if he wants to be a good writer. This I believe absolutely. By the time I reached high school I understood – mostly intuitively, though I was able to break it out if needed – a lot of the basic underlying conventions of writing in different genres. It shocked me that so many of my peers – and when I here use the term peers I’m not referring just to other high school students, but to those who were in AP English classes with me and many of whom were way, way smarter than me – flat out didn’t get this stuff. Even some of the good writers didn’t same entirely capable of functioning outside of the convention 5-paragraph essay. I learned all this from reading; not reading anything about how to write, just reading. I read newspapers and saw how that kind of journalistic writing is different from magazine journalism, and how features are different from news, and how and when it’s OK to let opinion slip into writing. Surely I wasn’t born with any of this knowledge, though I may have been born with a brain receptive to it – I just read all the time as a kid. It wasn’t until college that I learned that reading could be a problem, too.
Throughout junior high and high school, I wrote all the time. Awful, trite crap and silly stupid shit, yes, but I just wrote and wrote and wrote. I loved it so much that during my sophomore year of high school it occurred to me that – outside of writing books, which, let’s face it, doesn’t pay the bills – one of the best ways to get paid for being a writer was journalism. I was good at journalism, both writing and editing, because I understood it. The problem was that I kind of hated it (mostly the reporting). So, even though one of the reasons I was interested in UA to begin with was their strong journalism program, when I went to college I enrolled as a creative writing major. And then I promptly stopped writing almost altogether.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I was writing a lot. I had papers to write all the time and all kinds of interesting and not-at-all interesting stuff to read. I didn’t stop reading for pleasure, but I surely cut it back a lot. And as I spent more and more time thinking about academic topics, I spent less and less time allowing the creative side of my grain to make up stories.
I graduated with a creative writing major and barely wrote anything creative in all those four-plus years. Everything that I finished in that time was required of me for a grade. Nothing was longer than 30 pages or so. And most of it was bad. I mean, I was an OK writer then, though four years have made me a better writer now so that I sometimes wince to read some of my old stories, but the stories themselves were just uninspired. You can tell they were forced. There’s nothing behind them, even when they’re (mildly) clever, or (almost) have a plot. Almost all of that fiction (and even some of the “creative non-fiction”) was banged out in the wee hours of the morning mere hours before it was due to be turned in. Every writer runs up against deadlines, but I was pathetic.
The only two stories I’m at all fond of that I wrote in college were both conceived – if not written – while on vacation. One takes place in London, where I went on vacation during my sophomore spring break. The other takes place in an unnamed city but was a re-inspired version of a story I had worked on in high school that came back to me while I was in Hawaii. I wrote something recently (which I will probably post here sooner or later) about the very great extent to which travel and foreign places inspire me. It’s not that I can’t commit to a story and let writing it become a part of my daily life. In high school I was good at that, and over the past 2+ years I have learned the skill again. But when much of my life becomes devoted to some other kind of pursuit – generally school – the creative side of me atrophies. In those times, it seems only travel is particularly effective at breaking my stupor (London and Hawaii in college, a weekend trip to California this fall).
I always want to write. As I said earlier, not writing tends to put me in a bad mood. But there are times when I have much else to do that I find I can’t force it – and that if I were to try, I would be forcing it. At these times, even my recreational writing (what there is of it) gets vaguely academic – see the aforementioned essay about me, travel and writing, and another literary critique of Lemony Snicket that I’ll post here as well.
The good news is that the semester is over, more or less. The bad news is that winter session starts in a week or two. But at least I’m blogging again.
You might notice that my absence corresponds rather well with a typical fall semester of school and there’s a reason for that, of course. But now, while not being completely finished, the bulk of my class work is finished, and here I am again.
I have to admit, it’s not that I was so busy 100% of the time that I couldn’t blog, far from it in fact. But this semester I was enrolled in two literature classes, which turns our to be a hell of a lot of reading, even when you can skim or skip a few books that you’ve read previously. But, again, it wasn’t that I was too busy … I was just unmotivated.
One thing I have learned about myself in recent years is that I’m a writer. That is, I’m not someone who can write, or who writes well, or who uses writing as a particular tool to solve this issue or another. Nor does it mean – God knows – that I actually make any money from writing. I used to think that when I was depressed, if I could force myself to write that it would help to cheer my mood. In fact I had it backwards: it’s not that writing cheers me up necessarily, it’s that not writing makes me depressed. And if there’s one thing that can keep me from writing too much, it’s reading.
This is, I know, kind of a terrible thing to say. A writer has to read, has to really fucking love reading, if he wants to be a good writer. This I believe absolutely. By the time I reached high school I understood – mostly intuitively, though I was able to break it out if needed – a lot of the basic underlying conventions of writing in different genres. It shocked me that so many of my peers – and when I here use the term peers I’m not referring just to other high school students, but to those who were in AP English classes with me and many of whom were way, way smarter than me – flat out didn’t get this stuff. Even some of the good writers didn’t same entirely capable of functioning outside of the convention 5-paragraph essay. I learned all this from reading; not reading anything about how to write, just reading. I read newspapers and saw how that kind of journalistic writing is different from magazine journalism, and how features are different from news, and how and when it’s OK to let opinion slip into writing. Surely I wasn’t born with any of this knowledge, though I may have been born with a brain receptive to it – I just read all the time as a kid. It wasn’t until college that I learned that reading could be a problem, too.
Throughout junior high and high school, I wrote all the time. Awful, trite crap and silly stupid shit, yes, but I just wrote and wrote and wrote. I loved it so much that during my sophomore year of high school it occurred to me that – outside of writing books, which, let’s face it, doesn’t pay the bills – one of the best ways to get paid for being a writer was journalism. I was good at journalism, both writing and editing, because I understood it. The problem was that I kind of hated it (mostly the reporting). So, even though one of the reasons I was interested in UA to begin with was their strong journalism program, when I went to college I enrolled as a creative writing major. And then I promptly stopped writing almost altogether.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I was writing a lot. I had papers to write all the time and all kinds of interesting and not-at-all interesting stuff to read. I didn’t stop reading for pleasure, but I surely cut it back a lot. And as I spent more and more time thinking about academic topics, I spent less and less time allowing the creative side of my grain to make up stories.
I graduated with a creative writing major and barely wrote anything creative in all those four-plus years. Everything that I finished in that time was required of me for a grade. Nothing was longer than 30 pages or so. And most of it was bad. I mean, I was an OK writer then, though four years have made me a better writer now so that I sometimes wince to read some of my old stories, but the stories themselves were just uninspired. You can tell they were forced. There’s nothing behind them, even when they’re (mildly) clever, or (almost) have a plot. Almost all of that fiction (and even some of the “creative non-fiction”) was banged out in the wee hours of the morning mere hours before it was due to be turned in. Every writer runs up against deadlines, but I was pathetic.
The only two stories I’m at all fond of that I wrote in college were both conceived – if not written – while on vacation. One takes place in London, where I went on vacation during my sophomore spring break. The other takes place in an unnamed city but was a re-inspired version of a story I had worked on in high school that came back to me while I was in Hawaii. I wrote something recently (which I will probably post here sooner or later) about the very great extent to which travel and foreign places inspire me. It’s not that I can’t commit to a story and let writing it become a part of my daily life. In high school I was good at that, and over the past 2+ years I have learned the skill again. But when much of my life becomes devoted to some other kind of pursuit – generally school – the creative side of me atrophies. In those times, it seems only travel is particularly effective at breaking my stupor (London and Hawaii in college, a weekend trip to California this fall).
I always want to write. As I said earlier, not writing tends to put me in a bad mood. But there are times when I have much else to do that I find I can’t force it – and that if I were to try, I would be forcing it. At these times, even my recreational writing (what there is of it) gets vaguely academic – see the aforementioned essay about me, travel and writing, and another literary critique of Lemony Snicket that I’ll post here as well.
The good news is that the semester is over, more or less. The bad news is that winter session starts in a week or two. But at least I’m blogging again.
Thursday, September 21, 2006
In which I make my triumphant return
(A blog in 5 acts.)
*
I think if I were a pop music producer I would have a backup choir in pretty much every song I produced. Usually coming in toward the end to add that last over-the-top soulful touch. Seriously, I know plenty of songs have this already, but I can’t fathom why every song doesn’t. It’s not like pop music has ever been afraid of doing too much of a good thing. And a choir singing backup and adding little soulful shouting behind the vocals is most definitely a good thing.
This is how I’m justifying my love for this Unwritten song that was (I guess) a pretty big hit this summer. It’s a good bit of bubblegum pop anyway, and goodness knows I’m a sucker for inspirational-seize-the-day type songs anyway, but it’s that choir toward the end that takes me “this song is OK” to “I’m actually embarrassed by how much I like this song.”
Sure, there are other factors. I tend to hear the song in particularly appropriate situations – driving through Beverly Hills on a lovely June day, driving through Mission Hills on one of the most beautiful August days God ever created – and so I associate the song with those happy times. That’s all well and good, but it really comes back to that choir.
It’s basically a verse-chorus-verse-chorus-chorus-chorus song and the end would be really monotonous if it were just Natasha Beddiwhatever (full disclosure: this song is on my iPod so I could look her name up, I’m just too lazy) singing it over and over – though even then she (or, probably, the producer) does a nice job of altering the phrasing anyway. Still again – that choir.
Thing is, it’s probably not actually a choir. There could have been one or two people in the studio doing background vocals and it’s easy enough to make them sound like hundreds of voices. I care not. When those voice kick in I allow myself to see a balcony full of soul-singing women in white robes, giving it their utmost. I can see the lady at the far end of the line who’s not singing the words but instead is skatting and making all kinds of bizarre but soulful noises, complete with wild gyrations and hand movements. I see the choir moving together as one in a side-to-side motion, and yet individually breaking the rhythm of movement with arms thrown into the air or hands extended to assist in reaching a note as appropriate. I see and hear all of this and the song becomes secondary. I am powerless, I turn up the volume, my face breaks into a smile, I sing along. I feel no embarrassment until the song ends.
This is what pop music should be – and would be, if I were producing it.
**
I’m thinking about changing my license plate again, mostly because I want a personalized plate, but also because it offers the side benefit of ridding myself of A6NEW, which I have hated ever since it arrived.
This started mostly in San Diego last month, because I saw a few music-related plates and I envied them. I spent one bored afternoon checking what was and was not currently taken according to the AZMVD web site and determined many interesting DMB-themed plates were available. I tabled the idea at that point, because my registration will need to be renewed at the end of October anyway – I decided to wait until it came due and if it still seemed like a good idea then, I would go ahead. It’s not registration time yet, but it’s been several weeks, and I’m still thinking I might do it. My favorite options are both reasonably easy to interpret, though even once correctly read most people won’t necessarily understand what it refers to. That’s OK with me.
The best of the options I remember were NMBR41 and LVRLYDN, for the songs #41 and Lover Lay Down, respectively. Something like 364041 is also an option – those are the untitled/numbered songs in the DMB catalog. I like all these options, but really wish I could somehow get something relating to the phrase “Don’t burn the day” on there. But I just can’t see how to compress that to seven letters. The lyric comes from the song “Pig,” but I really don’t need a license plate that says “Pig” on it. Suggestions and/or comments are welcome.
***
I know I’ve been reading a lot of old literature (Shakespeare and gothic novels – all for school, of course) because when I above wrote “because I want” I first started to write “I am desirous of” and when I wrote “my face breaks into a smile” I originally had “my countenance becomes full of joy.” No kidding.
****
Every year Neil Young puts on two concerts in San Francisco that are a benefit for the Bridge School, a special program that supports disabled children (gross oversimplification but I don’t really know all the details). The concerts attract big name bands that each night play acoustic sets of about an hour. Usually there are 3-4 big name bands and a few other smaller acts that you may or may not have ever heard of I’ve always thought it would be fun to go, but never been sufficiently motivated to make the trip.
This year’s lineup, however, includes not only my two favorite bands – Dave Matthews Band and Pearl Jam, to the uninitiated – but also Brian Wilson, Foo Fighters, Death Cab for Cutie, and – perhaps most intriguingly given the all-acoustic setting – Trent Reznor. Oh, how I want to go!
I spent Sunday looking up travel deals and flights and hotels and car rentals and all those nasty details. It wouldn’t be ridiculously expensive, but it’s more than I need to be spending. Plus it would require at least one and possibly two days of vacation from work, and those are increasingly hard to come by at this point. On Monday I decided the wise thing would be to not go. I made my peace.
Then yesterday I got a check from NAU for the balance of my student loan for this semester – they’re idiots and not only didn’t process it in a timely manner but also didn’t reduce the amount as I had requested. So it was a sizable check and for a moment there I thought, “Damn it all! I’ll go! I’ll pay for friends to come, as well! It’ll be a grand old time!” Then I came to my senses and reconfirmed my commitment to adult sensibilities – but the peace I had made had been disturbed and I was sad again.
But as of last night a wondrous new possibility has presented itself. It’s not in San Francisco and it’s not a bunch of interesting bands, but it’s within driving distance, it’s on a free weekend, and it’s realistic enough that it might cure my melancholy. On Saturday October 28 and Sunday October 29 Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds will play acoustic shows at the Santa Barbara Bowl! I’m giddy at the thought. Tickets will be hard to come by, but I think I’ll at least have to try. Even if only for Saturday night. And could there be a way to work this into a Disneyland / Knott’s / Six Flags trip? Oh, the enticing possibilities …
*****
People sometimes look at me like I’m crazy when I confess how much I like Elton John, but you have to understand that I’m not talking about Lion King/Aida/80s and early 90s Elton John when I praise him. Most of that stuff wasn’t even good pop music. But in the 70s, he was brilliant, and some of his most recent records have at least teased at that old style and quality. Now he has released a record called The Cowboy and The Kid that claims to be a sequel to one of his best albums of the seventies – Captain Fantastic and The Brown Dirty Cowboy. And not only is this new record great, I think it’s better than Captain Fantastic. Definitely gets a seal of approval.
I also am feeling the need to pimp Amos Lee as much as possible. His first album has been out for some time, but you still probably haven’t heard it. It’s great. He’s got an acoustic songwriting style that’s reminiscent of folk, but he sings like Otis Redding. And his new album, which comes out next month, is amazingly good stuff. (Uh, a little birdie told me so.)
*
I think if I were a pop music producer I would have a backup choir in pretty much every song I produced. Usually coming in toward the end to add that last over-the-top soulful touch. Seriously, I know plenty of songs have this already, but I can’t fathom why every song doesn’t. It’s not like pop music has ever been afraid of doing too much of a good thing. And a choir singing backup and adding little soulful shouting behind the vocals is most definitely a good thing.
This is how I’m justifying my love for this Unwritten song that was (I guess) a pretty big hit this summer. It’s a good bit of bubblegum pop anyway, and goodness knows I’m a sucker for inspirational-seize-the-day type songs anyway, but it’s that choir toward the end that takes me “this song is OK” to “I’m actually embarrassed by how much I like this song.”
Sure, there are other factors. I tend to hear the song in particularly appropriate situations – driving through Beverly Hills on a lovely June day, driving through Mission Hills on one of the most beautiful August days God ever created – and so I associate the song with those happy times. That’s all well and good, but it really comes back to that choir.
It’s basically a verse-chorus-verse-chorus-chorus-chorus song and the end would be really monotonous if it were just Natasha Beddiwhatever (full disclosure: this song is on my iPod so I could look her name up, I’m just too lazy) singing it over and over – though even then she (or, probably, the producer) does a nice job of altering the phrasing anyway. Still again – that choir.
Thing is, it’s probably not actually a choir. There could have been one or two people in the studio doing background vocals and it’s easy enough to make them sound like hundreds of voices. I care not. When those voice kick in I allow myself to see a balcony full of soul-singing women in white robes, giving it their utmost. I can see the lady at the far end of the line who’s not singing the words but instead is skatting and making all kinds of bizarre but soulful noises, complete with wild gyrations and hand movements. I see the choir moving together as one in a side-to-side motion, and yet individually breaking the rhythm of movement with arms thrown into the air or hands extended to assist in reaching a note as appropriate. I see and hear all of this and the song becomes secondary. I am powerless, I turn up the volume, my face breaks into a smile, I sing along. I feel no embarrassment until the song ends.
This is what pop music should be – and would be, if I were producing it.
**
I’m thinking about changing my license plate again, mostly because I want a personalized plate, but also because it offers the side benefit of ridding myself of A6NEW, which I have hated ever since it arrived.
This started mostly in San Diego last month, because I saw a few music-related plates and I envied them. I spent one bored afternoon checking what was and was not currently taken according to the AZMVD web site and determined many interesting DMB-themed plates were available. I tabled the idea at that point, because my registration will need to be renewed at the end of October anyway – I decided to wait until it came due and if it still seemed like a good idea then, I would go ahead. It’s not registration time yet, but it’s been several weeks, and I’m still thinking I might do it. My favorite options are both reasonably easy to interpret, though even once correctly read most people won’t necessarily understand what it refers to. That’s OK with me.
The best of the options I remember were NMBR41 and LVRLYDN, for the songs #41 and Lover Lay Down, respectively. Something like 364041 is also an option – those are the untitled/numbered songs in the DMB catalog. I like all these options, but really wish I could somehow get something relating to the phrase “Don’t burn the day” on there. But I just can’t see how to compress that to seven letters. The lyric comes from the song “Pig,” but I really don’t need a license plate that says “Pig” on it. Suggestions and/or comments are welcome.
***
I know I’ve been reading a lot of old literature (Shakespeare and gothic novels – all for school, of course) because when I above wrote “because I want” I first started to write “I am desirous of” and when I wrote “my face breaks into a smile” I originally had “my countenance becomes full of joy.” No kidding.
****
Every year Neil Young puts on two concerts in San Francisco that are a benefit for the Bridge School, a special program that supports disabled children (gross oversimplification but I don’t really know all the details). The concerts attract big name bands that each night play acoustic sets of about an hour. Usually there are 3-4 big name bands and a few other smaller acts that you may or may not have ever heard of I’ve always thought it would be fun to go, but never been sufficiently motivated to make the trip.
This year’s lineup, however, includes not only my two favorite bands – Dave Matthews Band and Pearl Jam, to the uninitiated – but also Brian Wilson, Foo Fighters, Death Cab for Cutie, and – perhaps most intriguingly given the all-acoustic setting – Trent Reznor. Oh, how I want to go!
I spent Sunday looking up travel deals and flights and hotels and car rentals and all those nasty details. It wouldn’t be ridiculously expensive, but it’s more than I need to be spending. Plus it would require at least one and possibly two days of vacation from work, and those are increasingly hard to come by at this point. On Monday I decided the wise thing would be to not go. I made my peace.
Then yesterday I got a check from NAU for the balance of my student loan for this semester – they’re idiots and not only didn’t process it in a timely manner but also didn’t reduce the amount as I had requested. So it was a sizable check and for a moment there I thought, “Damn it all! I’ll go! I’ll pay for friends to come, as well! It’ll be a grand old time!” Then I came to my senses and reconfirmed my commitment to adult sensibilities – but the peace I had made had been disturbed and I was sad again.
But as of last night a wondrous new possibility has presented itself. It’s not in San Francisco and it’s not a bunch of interesting bands, but it’s within driving distance, it’s on a free weekend, and it’s realistic enough that it might cure my melancholy. On Saturday October 28 and Sunday October 29 Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds will play acoustic shows at the Santa Barbara Bowl! I’m giddy at the thought. Tickets will be hard to come by, but I think I’ll at least have to try. Even if only for Saturday night. And could there be a way to work this into a Disneyland / Knott’s / Six Flags trip? Oh, the enticing possibilities …
*****
People sometimes look at me like I’m crazy when I confess how much I like Elton John, but you have to understand that I’m not talking about Lion King/Aida/80s and early 90s Elton John when I praise him. Most of that stuff wasn’t even good pop music. But in the 70s, he was brilliant, and some of his most recent records have at least teased at that old style and quality. Now he has released a record called The Cowboy and The Kid that claims to be a sequel to one of his best albums of the seventies – Captain Fantastic and The Brown Dirty Cowboy. And not only is this new record great, I think it’s better than Captain Fantastic. Definitely gets a seal of approval.
I also am feeling the need to pimp Amos Lee as much as possible. His first album has been out for some time, but you still probably haven’t heard it. It’s great. He’s got an acoustic songwriting style that’s reminiscent of folk, but he sings like Otis Redding. And his new album, which comes out next month, is amazingly good stuff. (Uh, a little birdie told me so.)
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