May 20th, 2009
I put in for a database repair yesterday and it actually worked! I really thought I’d done this before, but maybe I hadn’t?Anyway, I might actually start blogging again… since my blog is fully functional once more.I wish I knew what the heck happened?Welcome back, friends!
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May 6th, 2009
Check it out. Let us know what you think (on YouTube, since, you know… you can’t do comments on here).
Posted in works, places, visual, worldview, video, arts, economics, Pennsylvania, social | 2 Comments »
March 5th, 2009
So, I finished my novel all the way back in 2006. It took three years to write it and I guess maybe it took three years to write the synopsis. I’ve been kicking around versions of this for years. I wrote a new one this morning after hanging out with a writer friend on Tuesday and revisiting some of this stuff in my head. Tell me what you think. Here it is:
Evan Neverever is on the run. He just isn’t sure if anyone is chasing him. So he drives further west from D.C. every day and by night he waits in generic hotel rooms for someone to kick his door in. He kills time by writing out his story on a stolen typewriter. It’s the story of unraveling Zoe Calypso’s true role in the tragic life of her protege, Lena Pavlovna. Lena’s a 22-year-old owner of a resurgent art gallery who saw her father murdered at 14, lost her best friend at 18 and never really had a mother. Evan’s running now that he has solved the mysteries of her life by using his otherworldly talent. A talent he’s so reluctant to describe that he doesn’t even like to do it on paper, alone, in a random East Texas hotel room.
Here’s the old version that I had been using:
Since witnessing her father’s murder in their Capitol Hill home at the age of 14, Lena Pavlovna, 22, had only trusted her father’s colleague, Zoe Calypso, and her own best friend, Thena. Then, Thena died, too, in a suspicious car crash, and it was down to Zoe, the famous artist and art purveyor. When the novel begins, Zoe has hired the heavily indebted Evan Neverever to be her errand boy and fence. She introduces him to Lena, and he, in turn, pulls her out of fist fights and reveals his secret talent, a kind of textual ESP, to the younger woman. Her guard lowered for the first time that she can remember, Lena charges him with solving the most vexing mystery of her troubled life: why is her best friend dead? In pursuing an answer, Evan forces her to face a new side of her late father and the real monster behind his death.
Which is more compelling? Very curious what you think.
I know, I know… you can’t leave comments here anymore. I’ve tried very hard to fix it, but I haven’t succeeded at all. So, if you’d like to let me know what you think, hit me up on the exact same post over at my personal life blog on Livejournal. Sorry. I would love to see your thoughts.
Posted in works, literature, arts, my novel(s) | No Comments »
February 21st, 2009
When it comes to artistic collaboration, two works top them all. They are the single largest, longest running, most consistent and most evolved two works of artistic collaboration in history. You might be scratching your head if you randomly stumbled across this headline just now, wondering what I might be talking about, but there really is no question. If anyone reads this, they are going to decry what I’m saying here and call it crazy, but it’s absolutely true. Their best arguments will be prejudice.
The two largest works of artistic collaboration of all time are the fictional universes of Marvel and D.C. Comics.
It is a point that needs to be made, urgently, because the foundation on which these two works are built seem to be crumbling, and as we choose as a society not to support these universes anymore, we need to be cognizant of what we’ll leave behind. This week, over at CHUD.com, a writer foretold the doom of superheroes with glee. He wrote:
I welcome the death of superhero comics with open arms. I gladly bid farewell to the endlessly serialized adventures of the members of the Justice League and Reed Richards and friends. Hopefully the people who have made their livings creating and selling these awful comics will be able to find new jobs and make new livings. I wish them all the best of luck. But if there’s going to be one good thing that comes out of this new great depression, it’s going to be the understanding that comic books are bigger than superheroes.
He’s welcome to his view, but I think he’s missing a larger beauty of the superhero universes. Never before have so many people been involved in one enormous interweaving narrative. If you’re not familiar with comics, there’s a thing in comics called “Continuity.” It could also be called “History.” Everything that happens in comics becomes a part of that history, and, like in real history, what happens in the past often shapes the stories of the future.
Of course, “History” in comics is a lot more fluid, changeable and shifty than real history and there is no question that a fixation on history can lead to some of the more annoyingly persnickety attributes of fanboy culture. On the other hand, there’s some special about one writer returning to an old story by a different writer, finding new meaning in it for a character today and letting it inspire new revelations about a character or new challenges for him or her to face.
And in that way, it’s a collaboration. It’s true that there’s just one writer or artist on a book at a time in most cases, but he draws on all the past writing of that book and every other book in the universe to tell his story. If a guy writing a story about Daredevil (a fairly gritty urban superhero) can think of a good reason to have a Norse God pop up and ask for his help in fighting a mad scientist who hasn’t shown up since the pages of West Coast Avengers, the writer can do that. As long as it’s a good yarn.
And the next guy over in the bullpen might read that story and pick a thread of it up in his own book.
Or the editors might make the writers of every book come up with some element of a larger crazy story, which isn’t always everyone’s favorite way for a story to play out, but it does reflect the point.
It’s as if F. Scott Fitzgerald could have introduced his rich dandies to the rough and tumble gentlemen of Hemingway and sat them across a diner booth from the down-on-their-luck Okies of Steinbeck.
Books very seldom share characters. At most, it happens within the oeuvre of one writer, but not across multiple writers. And, in the exception when it does happen, it isn’t “real.” If one writer borrows a character from another, it’s a cameo, a reference, the former writer has no need to think of that event as part of his character’s history the next time he decides to use him.
This is a unique facet of comics and I find it beautiful and moving. Some people look at comics and just see guys in tights flying around, and I guess that’s what this fellow Devin has come to. I see two gigantic narratives (Marvel’s and D.C.’s) that has been molded, renewed and transformed again and again by hundreds of very talented creators to create two unwieldy masterpieces, unique in their scope in all the world.
Posted in collaboration, literature, arts, comix | No Comments »
February 9th, 2009
I want to make a movie short about different people going into some secret basement alley room where dangerous men do dangerous things. Only, the way people get in would be very funny.A slot would open up and eyes would appear and a guy would ask, in a harsh voice,
“What do gay horses eat?”
And the different visitors, all of whom conform to noir archetypes, would answer
“Hayyyy!” with different sorts of expression.
That would be great.
Posted in visual, arts | No Comments »
February 7th, 2009
It’s been about 3 years since I had a novel underway. That’s when I finished the last one, Debt & Faith, and it’s mostly sat on my hard-drive since then. Unfortunate. Having a novel going is sort of like being in a shaky relationship. You feel like you should be dealing with it all the time and you’re mind keeps turning to it and coming up with new strategies and angles on it. I miss having that sort of relationship. The one with a creation in my head that takes shape on paper. So I think it’s time to start one up again.
I’ve had some ideas floating around. Time to focus in and settle on one. Oh, right… that’s not how I work. Time to focus in on several and see what that leads me to come up with.
More to come.
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February 5th, 2009
The last thing I remember about Philipp Meyer when we graduated from college in 1999 was that he took the lead in building a gigantic barbecue pit out behind the 3rd most-hippie co-op home on campus in order to barbecue a full sized pig. Now he’s got a book coming out.American Rust is set in my adopted state of Pennsylvania. The publicity blitz is coming soon. For those of you reading this in Philadelphia, he’s going to be here on March 3rd. If you want to see where else he’s showing, go here.
Posted in places, Philadelphia, literature, arts | No Comments »
January 16th, 2009
I’ve always liked to leave resonant spaces, gaps and hints in stories, where readers can do their own work and find clues or insert their own wild and often brilliant theories. I’m often trying to create a kind of fuzzy quantum uncertainty or narrative equivalent of a Rorschach Blot Test effect, which invites interpretation. Lazier readers hate when I do this but fortunately they seem to be in the minority.
Posted in political | 1 Comment »
December 17th, 2008
Most of the time, I’m a bit of a geek. It’s okay to say that after 30. Geeks are cool now, or something. Anyway, it’s been that way all my life, but (ever since college) not quite all the time.
In fact, some groups I find myself in these days actually think I’m kind of a cool guy. Don’t laugh. It’s true though. Sorta cool. Sometimes. I only bring it up, because, as a pretty socially mobile guy, I am acutely aware of the fact that in a lot of other circles I am just as uncool as I was back in Middle School.
Go figure.
In fact, I did go-figure, and here’s what I came up with…
I’m going to take you through a chain of logical conjecture on my part, but here’s where I’m going to end up. I call it the Hypothesis of the Geek Population Constant. The Geek Population Constant is a number, expressed as a percentage, that can be found in any group of non-voluntarily organized people of a certain threshold number. That is, any group of people organized into any non-voluntary regular contact will self-organize a certain number of them into a sub-group identified as geeks.
In other words, if you made a school of all the most popular kids from like 20 other schools, a certain percentage of them would find themselves relegated to the geek camp. In fact, the percentage of them that would become geeks would be equal to the weighted average percentage of geeks at each of the schools tapped to create the new school.
Crazy? Yes. Feels truthy? Definitely. Let’s talk about how I came up with it, and then I will propose a method by which one of you anthropology grad students out there on the Interwebs (looking for a thesis idea) can use it to find a way to make yourselves useful and write a PhD that will get you in the New York Times Magazine.
The thought process started off on a nice note. I asked myself, why is it that in some groups, as an adult, I usually find myself treated as if I were sorta cool, sometimes as I am outright cool, but, usually, like I’m still the little dweeb I know myself to be.
That last part is crucial.
Because it alone is enough to suggest that it’s not a change in myself nor a change in the general maturity and acceptingness of adults (please).
Could it be my relative position of success in life? It’s true that I’m doing fair to middlin’, which would put me past some while yet way behind others, but that doesn’t quite explain it. No, that doesn’t cut it.
My idea is that in adult life, we tend to self-organize. So, people start to find people that they feel comfortable, which tends to create a certain social levelling. There is, of course, an alpha in every group, even it’s so imperceptible that they work more as a bellwether than a straight up leader. Bear with me, I know I’m not breaking any new ground yet.
I thought to myself, I wish I could go out and talk to all the struggling geeky kids out there and tell them that when they get a little older they won’t be forced to come to a school every day, that as long as they work hard enough to pull a half-assed career together they will probably find themselves to have at least a marginal amount in common with those they go to work with. That it will get better.
You won’t, most of you, feel quite so alone or quite so helpless as you do right now, I would say. You’ll be given the space to find others like you, if you can just get out of here. So I’d say they should stick with it, buck up and tell some stories of my own inept past.
Then I’d say, “But some of you are just fucked no matter what happens, and you know who you are. Sorreez.”
That feel good idea wasn’t enough, though. I have always marvelled at the natural human tendency to divide itself up. To create a couple of groups to shit on no matter how much the group overall has in common.
Growing up, we learned about slavery in my pretty-much-all-white-at-the-
Later, though, we studied the conflict between the Bosnians and the Serbs and the Croats and I thought: crikey, here’s a few shades of Eastern Europeans and they have to get all kill-crazy on each other? It really isn’t any different, other than the fact that if you introduced a group into the mix (say, Muslims) into the group, the other warring factions would most likely unite at least temporarily against the more other, other.
Then we learned about New York in the days before it had lots and lots of freed slaves to give it a real black population for the whites to unify against. Without a black population, the Irish were the cities Other. “Irish Need Not Apply” signs went up about the city and Irish were treated as if they had a meaningful difference between other Europeans.
I know. Seriously. There was once racism against the freaking Irish. Can you imagine?
Then I went to High School Church camp, and that’s where I saw a sea of largely middle social Christian kids create a whole new hierarchy in less than 24 hours, watched kids sure to be social non-starters and also-rans at home rise to the central clique of church camp and realized: we can’t help it. Humans have to create hieararchies. Especially if we find ourselves sitting at tables with lots of people that we didn’t necessarily choose to sit with.
Huh?
What I figured out is that any group of people, especially people who didn’t choose to be together, are going to find a way to split themselves up into recognizeable categories. They’ll use obvious differences to do it first, but, failing that, they’ll find less obvious ones and roll with those. They will find something, though. If you think inter-marriage is going to end racism because one day we’re all going to have a roughly even tawny shade…
well…
you’re not paying attention.
In other words, if all the Black folks in the U.S. did get fed up and did move to Liberia, it wouldn’t end racism. We’d just start kicking the crap out of the Irish again.
And that’s when I made a huge intuitive leap, but it’s one that I think is worth testing. I guessed that in any given culture or region, there’s a natural percentage it prefers of people within that population who fall into cool category (as an aside, I think you’ll find that if you look back on your high school, you’ll realize that the cool kids were simply the largest clique in your class — its always true — if the band geeks would have just united with the theater rats and the Math Team, you too could have been cool).
In other words, if you’re studying high schools in Kansas City and you find that about 15% of the kids at Blue Valley North are the cool kids, then you’re probably going to find that 15% of the kids at Blue Valley East and West are cool kids too. But, were you to study Seattle schools, they might have a slightly higher percentage. Say, 20%, and it would probably trend pretty naturally in the lands between the two cities (with maybe some other forces at work, like rural schools versus urban ones).
Schools in India might have much higher percentages of cool kids and Britain much lower (or vice versa), but the numbers would follow cultural borders of some kind.
In other words, the Geek Population Constant is modified by the Regional Variance Quotient, but, it’s still a constant. A few local variables would modify the way the Constant expresses itself in a given region I’m guessing, but there’s a fundamental number out there.
Or maybe the number would be constant everywhere, i.e. no quotient? Maybe that’s the way we are all the same? See how easy it would be to make The Times with this shit? It writes itself.
Anyway, so let’s say you divide kids up into roughly these categories:
Elite: The very, very cool kids that all the other cool kids looked up to (I’d say we had about 9 of these in my graduating class of 180).
Cool: The rest of the smart set, including jocks, preppies, pretty girls of most varieties and your older sister (always).
Middle: The kids that are socially non-bothersome. No one picks on them, but no one invites them to the big parties either.
Drop-outs: the kids who try their best to reject the whole institution and its social conventions.
Geeks: The ones that don’t reject the norms or the institution, precisely, but aren’t accepted within it, either. They trial and fail so they try to succeed somewhere else (like Math or Band or Debate).
Invisibles: the kids other kids don’t know. They break my heart.
Here’s how you would test it: you’d get a group of kids from a graduating class of a pretty decent size, take their year book, black out all the names and ask kids to go through and tell you the names of kids in the year book and assign them to a group above. You would only score people into a group if the person putting them there were actually able to correctly give you their name.
This is how you would find the Invisibles. There would be a few kids in every school that hardly anyone will be able to name. They are the Invisibles. They are the kids to worry about.
So, here’s what I suggest: conduct this study in a bunch of schools in a few big cities. I bet you’d find that the percentages matched up pretty well within each city, but that they would vary a bit from city to city. If the results were consistent enough, I think you could take it a step further and try it in a few cities in other countries and see if the ratios really varied from American percentages. They might, but I bet the same basic categories and rules would still apply.
That’s how you’d find an actual figure for the Geek Population Constant.
And that’s why I’m ‘cool’ in some circles. Cool is all relative. Our DNA demands some cool kids in any group and some losers too. In some groups, the criteria by which they naturally decide who gets to fit into which categorie will change, but the ratio of categories won’t. That’s the insight. In some circles, the criteria work in my favor and I get to have some cake for once, but as long as I keep moving around I’ll find plenty of circles willing to remind me that I will always be the person I always was: the boy who didn’t get to kiss his prom dates.
Posted in blogging, worldview, Counter-intuitive truths, arts, social | No Comments »
December 16th, 2008
Born Standing Up is Steve Martin’s autobiography about his stand-up days. He takes you from childhood (and issues with his dad) all the way through to the days when he was the highest ticket grossing stand-up comic of all time. And then, the moment at which he walks away from stand-up forever and never looked back.
By the way, did you realize that he was the highest grossing stand-up comic of all time? I didn’t know that until the hooplah around this book got going.
Even if you’re not interested in stand-up, there’s a reason why you might be interested in this book: it’s the story of reinventing an artform. He talks about how he went from being a normal comic who did sketches, told jokes and used punchlines. Eventually, he became the creator of what Rick Moranis called “anti-comedy.”
Steve Martin describes his approach variously as creating tension that never gets released, memorable strangeness and killing. Okay, he was trying to kill. Whatevs. I heard him talking about this on NPR at some point. He said that he got a lot of his ideas for changing comedy when he was studying Philosophy in college because Philosophy taught him to question everything (including Philosophy, incidentally).
Years ago, I saw Martin in Book Magazine, talking about how writing was really his first love, but that is not how he tells the story in this book. He tells a story about how performing captivated him from his earliest days. You can also tell in his book, as it is not the most compelling one that I’ve ever read, if the story itself hadn’t been so intriguing.
His attempt to incorporate his relationship with his family into the story just came out as forced. Critical moments, like when he left comedy, come out as a little obtuse. Sometimes, time seems to move around without any sort of indication, and, really, it just seems sometimes like there is really more depth to the story than he is quite managing to tell you.
That said, I liked Born Standing Up a great deal. It’s such an important story that it still stands out even with a less than virtuoso telling.
I listened to the audiobook version, narrated by Martin himself, which really pays off when he reprints old bits or even some of his songs. It restores your hope that no artform necessarily needs to be quite dead.
Martin’s autobiography might even trick you into believing that you could be the one to rejuvenate any other old dying form. If you just think about it enough. Scratch that, if you obsess about it enough.
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