Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Virtually Free
I grew up with the TV on. I remember hiding in the couch cushions when I was afraid of the Incredible Hulk and spinning around like Wonder Woman.
Maybe less like other little kids, my impersonation of Steve Austin as the 6 Million Dollar Man included the raising of a single eyebrow, playing along whenever he ran in slow motion and the sound effects went buh-nuh na na na na.... That eyebrow was his determined look.
Vivian Leigh did a dramatic eyebrow when showing Scarlett O’Hara’s defiance or fear. Single-eyebrow action from Joey Tribbiani, playing Dr. Drake Ramore on the soap opera Days of Our Lives, is that character’s “I smell something bad” method acting.
If a commercial came on television while I was spinning around or building forts with couch cushions, my mother would walk by and sniff. (The word “scoff” always made sense to me, because it was so close to the way she’d sniff).
She wasn’t a mom who would sit and watch TV. This woman was no-nonsense. You could tell by her panty hose.
“Yeah right,” she’d say. “Virtually streak-free. Remember they always have to use words like virtually or nearly or practically because it’s not one hundred percent true. The message is always ‘important’ but it’s just garbage.”
It must have been annoying that I’d walk around singing jingles I didn’t understand: “Mazola’s got no! Cholesterol at all!”
Sometimes though, she’d put on General Hospital while she folded laundry or did paperwork, glancing up occasionally. We’d both pay more attention towards the end of the show, and it didn’t take me long to figure out that it would always end with a cliffhanger that would never, ever resolve anything between Luke and Laura.
By nature children like repetition and formulas. Good guy fights bad guy, love becomes marriage, happily ever after, amen the end. Soap operas on the other hand, dragging out plot, and rationing action like food pellets, just infuriated me.
“That’s how they get ya,” she explained. “They’re called ‘soaps’ because they were invented by companies that sell soap just so they could make people watch their commercials. They only want to show you enough to keep you watching the show and the commercials.”
All good parents should speak to their six-year-olds this way when explaining the ways of things. Spades should be labeled as such.
Talk shows and game shows, judge shows (negligible differences) were invented because they’re cheaper than paying writers and actors of soaps, even when they give away cars and prizes. A ridiculously outfitted house on the Real World or flying people to China is still less expensive than paying quality writers, actors, and production crews, even better from the standpoint of the advertiser and networks. A reality show makes itself with a cheap, reliable formula of baking soda and peroxide.
Many shows I like are practically (there’s that word!) night-time soaps. Lost, Heroes, I forget what I’ve been watching. But I love 30 Rock (worship Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin) because they’re good. They’re funny because they’re well-written. Many of the best shows are/were on the movie channels: The Wire, Californication, Sopranos and the like. Funded solely by subscriptions it’s a different formula with a better outcome (not one I would argue for say, the internet in general. information should be free). Shows on movie channels aren’t created for the same purposes as “soap” television, and the difference shows.
It’s about the content, stupid.
I’m going to try to forget that Ugly Betty/Wicked tie-in. That was atrocity in an otherwise lovable show. It begged questions about who owned and was paying for what. Were they trying to sell tickets or call attention to shame the broadway stagehand strike?
Remember when cable was commercial-free? (when is 32 old? how soon is now?)
Once upon a time, bunnies, cable TV had no commercials. The whole point of paying for cable was that you didn’t have to watch commercials. Cable was still an experiment when it was installed for free in our building in 1982 or 1983 (High rise condos like ours meant tricky television reception. Originally cable went where “broadcast” networks literally couldn’t reach). HBO was actually launched in 1972 and only had a few hundred viewers it’s first night. Cable didn’t really take off until 1984 when deregulation allowed for the digging and planting of more cable. (ok now i’m just being a huge dork) Suddenly there was Music Television and Nickelodeon and “Home Box Office”. And for the TV watcher it was good, for a while.
Now I understand why my favorite shows as a kid were imports of Canadian sketch comedy and European cartoons (usage rights & cost factor largely i’m sure). This was the best television I’d ever seen. Lassie made me barf, but Belle and Sebastian made me cry. I loved Mr. Wizard (ask my mom who found me elbow deep in the toilet, kept dry by a thin film of baby powder. try it!) It’s a shame, but Nickelodeon went downhill when they started making game shows (did YCDTOT get paid for the slime idea?).
But it’s all about the money, honey*. If they can get advertisers and make people pay, and that’s the way it was and they liked it**. Meatwad make the money, see.*** Networks and media corporations are making more with new outlets like DVD and internet. As you might have seen, make commercials describing how pirate downloading hurts the creators and production crews, when in reality hardly any money from legally bought or downloaded media doesn’t go to them anyway.
a sidenote via boingboing on the nature of the beast: “in the first ten years of the US DMCA, 20,000 American music fans were sued and not one penny was paid to artists as a result, nor did file sharing decrease”.
*Axl Rose singing Welcome to the Jungle
**Mike Meyers as the grumpy old man on Saturday Night Live
***Theme song from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, I haven’t eaten yet today and I’m very hungry
***
A Comedy Writer on Strike
Over at the Writopia blog, Steve Young, a television writer for Late Night with David Letterman, and the father of star a Writopia Lab writer, shares his thoughts. This is good reading. (Thanks, Rebecca!)
Sunday, December 02, 2007
Thought Competition
Rebecca Wallace-Segall, the writing mentor of my early NYC days, has written a terrific piece “In Praise of ‘Thought Competition’” in the Wall Street Journal. The article is behind a pay wall, but for a few more days you can read it here.
If the link above doesn’t work for you (pay walls be damned) you can read the article on Rebecca’s blog here.
Rebecca’s ability to think large and deep still impresses me (she’s written for Salon and The Voice). Knowing that she’s working with kids at Writopia Lab, people gives me a warm, fuzzy, optimistic feeling because she offers a rare mix of intelligent and nurturing support. Not everyone founds a school and makes it a beautiful success.
Rebecca is sort of educator I hope kids would have, mainly because our school system undereducates and ill-prepares students for pretty much everything they’ll need to know in order to be confident (through self-knowledge) people with realized talents, people who “make” the world and don’t just consume it… without which we are are doomed on a large and small scale. Doomed, I say.
So, yeah, I’m proud to know this lady.
p.s. The story of the insomniac owl, mentioned in the article, was one piece I was lucky to hear at the student reading held at Barnes and Noble on November 19th — howlingly, snortingly funny, well-crafted and smart.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Astrophysi-guitarist-ist
This just in via Susan‘s brilliant emails....
(no i haven’t left the house yet, shut it. and my hair dried naturally and looks just like this icon, in black. dang it.)
From Susany Q (via NY mag):
“Astrophysicist to Offer Conclusive Evidence That Fat Bottomed Girls Make the Rockin’ World Go Round: Queen guitarist Brian May, who recently earned a doctorate in astrophysics, has been named the next chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University. Wait, what?” (reuters)
See ladies? So do your part, eat on Thanksgiving. Eat and repeat. Give spanks and thanks on turkey day.
I’ll be in Susan’s kitchen, getting in the way while she makes an awesome dinner.
Wing It on Foot
For months now I’ve been putting off going the bank in person. Part of the problem is that I can’t remember how to get there. It’s only Tribeca.
This bank was close to two of my past offices. I went to that area by subway for at least a year, almost daily. Now I can’t even be sure which station I want. This knowledge has just fallen out of my brain.
I know that my bank is near Bubby’s, who has that great pie and mac n cheese. I remember going there for lunch with Adam, Dan, and Jeremiah. I remember walking down that street and the corner where Jeremiah fixed how I wore the lapels of my new coat, because he can’t help but fuss and critique when he’s right, and that the lapels are fixed open like that to this day.
Then I remember the time at Derrick‘s birthday party when I was having “a bad face day” and Jer told me I was wearing too much powder, but in a nice way, and besides, I knew I was. Then we all danced, The Russian picked me up and swung me around, I got dizzy and escaped by bending backwards until my hands touched the floor. I tucked and rolled back. I break-danced and got down, and got two big splinters from the unkept wood floor, one in my hip through my jeans, and one in my palm. I showed them to people, pulled them out, and kept dancing.
Charles was there. He was smiling. I was wearing a handmade “special thanks to my vagina” shirt with the zipper opening at the neck that I’d bought at a rock show that he had taken me to, earlier that month.
When The Russian drove me home in his pickup truck (how surreal! a personal vehicle in brooklyn!) my clothes and hands were dusty and filthy from the floor. I couldn’t remember the Russian’s name, Peter, something obvious. We had worked together but not really together. I didn’t make out with him or anything. It wasn’t like that.
All this was two and three years ago.
Meanwhile, I just had to look up a simple transfer to the 2,3, that I have made at least 600 times. Except this time I transfer from Jay Street. I plan to get out where I think I need to be, then wing it on foot.
Wing it on foot? heh
Oh my filling head.
Today’s lesson: sometimes you have to figure out how to get to an old place in a new way, and it’s not as easy as you’d think.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Hard Work, Harder Work, Karma and Kismet
Last night I had my third critique, and finished the Evelyn Waugh’s Unconditional Surrender for my War and Politics lit class tonight. Tomorrow night, I’ll read at our student reading. I think I’m the only non-fiction person reading, so with any luck, they’ll forget immediately and assume everything out of me is fiction. There’s an eight-minute time limit, so I have to cut my story way, way down. I’ll edit the tone so that it sounds better “performed” because I’m an insane-o who doesn’t want to suck (from a journalistic read to comedy in a few hours of editing, step right up folks).
I’d like to describe the miracle of having finished the novel last night, instead of finishing it this afternoon as per usual. There is a relative wealth of free time. I slept in til 11am and dreamed. There is time to go to The Strand and find books for a “Young Adults as Narrators” weekend workshop . It’s at school, taught by the professor Ann Hood, so far, so fabulous — and free of charge. Luckily I’ve already read three of the four books, and can’t wait to read Pessl.
Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird
Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics
S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders
Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
Remember when I wrote about The History of Love? Now I get to read it for class and pick apart the craft.
Remember when I blogged about Shelley Jackson? Um, she’s going to be my lit professor in the spring!
On Halloween, I saw her before classes started. Shelley had made a life-sized paper mache human head and attached it next to her own (like the main character in Half Life. It was well made, hilarious, and brilliant. Knowing why she’d done it wasn’t necessary, though it made it funnier.
This is our reading list for her class themed “The Unnamable” (The unsayable, the unspeakable, the unreachable, the unknowable.)
Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Christa Wolf, Cassandra
Franz Kafka, The Castle
Joseph McElroy, Plus
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading
Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.
Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure
Georges Perec, A Void
Lyn Hejinian, My Life
I have only read one of these, and am thrilled to get my brain all bendy. Maybe I should try to grow another head just to handle it?
And last in my list of “why I’m a kid in a candy shop,” remember (Susan) how I used to sometimes go on and on until i was teased (by Susan!) about how much I loved my college prof Vassily Aksyonov? In my current lit class we read his mother’s memoir about being caught up in Stalin’s first purge and living in various prison camps for twenty years. I got to be a nerd and tell the class all about Aksyonov, the man, his Gogol class, his amazing amazingness. And the smart kids took notes. How did I get here? (hard work, harder work, karma and kismet)
In other news, I need more, many more bookshelves, and to join a gym or dance class (years recovering from martial arts injuries makes me think i’m too violent and clumsy to keep that up). I re-sprain my wrist every time I hold a heavy book vertically to put it back on the shelf. That’s not a good thing. Meanwhile, even though I still rock the 0.7 waste to hip ratio, the measurements have gone up because I’m older and I sit, and something clearly needs to be done about that.
Nice to hear I’ll make smart babies, but I rather not be so curvy before they’re in my lap. teehee
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Norman Mailer, RIP
NPR has a broad and informative retrospective on Normal Mailer, Co-founder of the Village Voice, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and the National Book Award, and, very near to my heart, the person considered to be the first to write creative nonfiction. I like NPR’s definition: “appl[ing] the narrative style of the novel to real events”.
Regular posts will begin again soon, regular like you haven’t seen in years. It should be a good thing.
Update Monday morning aka The continuing education of Mintjelly:
I received an informative comment via email from a former editor at The Voice, regarding the whole “first to write creative nonfiction” issue:
“Not to sound like an old guy quibbling, but I don’t think you can say he was the first person to do creative non-fiction. Could probably say he was the first novelist to utilize fictional techniques in the way that he did. But the real New Journalism, ie creative non-fiction, groundbreakers in that period were Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gail Sheehy and Clay Felker at NEW YORK magazine (where all three worked.)
Even Mailer’s non-fiction sort of transcended the genre, and unlike Wolfe, Breslin and Sheehy he wasn’t a model for young writers of non-fiction because you couldn’t aspire to be him stylistically or intellectually. He was a near-genius novelist who was out of reach of mere journalists, even ‘creative’ ones.”
Thank you, Quibble, very educational and interesting. Maybe you can’t learn everything in school and from NPR after all?
Maybe when we die, we get credit for things we’re only partially responsible for. For instance, I started the “pink” trend a number of years ago, before you could buy pink things. I coined the phrase Hacking the Body, and I made chipped nail polish cool. (legal note: When I die, I want a Viking funeral. Push me out to sea to the tune of “And She Was” by Talking Heads. If someone says “this is what she would have wanted” the appropriate response is “heck yeah")
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
More Naked than Naked
My hair is wet and I’m sitting on the floor just out of a quick shower, my legs bent over folders, printouts, books, chords, jeans, a duffle bag and tote. I have at least five hours worth of a novel to finish by 8pm, but I might go to a 6:30 lecture. I wish I had a work desk the size of a king bed.
I’m annoyed that it feels like summer outside, and that each day I get new bug bites in creative places.
Last night I had my first critique. I’m so relieved to have that over with.
It went well, better than I expected. In the moments before I passed out my work, I found a million problems with it. These, of course, were pointed out in workshop, because I’m not surrounded by fools.
But that they liked it so much was fabulous. They laughed, in the good way. Holy cow! I was only hoping they wouldn’t think I sucked.
It definitely feels more naked than naked. I hated it (and myself, and everything) when I re-read it a week ago, then thought it was “ok” yesterday. Now the things I hate just feel like annoying little bug bites that I will scratch until they go away. I will never again have my very first grad school holy shit MFA program critique. I consider it a happy success.
Carrie Brownstein was great, her readings (with slide show) were interesting and funny. I also had known nothing about the Rock and Roll Camp for Girls. Now I really wish I had a little daughter who wanted to rock (because i already did, now i really do).
