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  Watching Blue Velvet. After making a sort surreal type of film with Mickey I see some of the merits of Blue Velvet that I wasn’t aware of before. The town is called Lumberton, they have a cheesy radio station…Kyle McClaughlin’s character before he crosses into the dark side of life is full of that American naivete. Wanna see the chicken walk? he says to Laura Dern. And the Chicken Walk works! Why? Because it’s hillarious. Blue Velvet is a complex film with very simple pleasures I think. 

 I saw a friend/acquaintance in concert last night. She’s someone I greatly admire, and more so last night. They were going through some family issues that could’ve made a lesser personality stay home. Not only did she not, but she compelled a sold out crowd at The Blue Door, one new Blue Door fan I saw was Stacy, a young girl who came by herself to see the artist. 

New Table of Contents

Lately I’ve been loaded with projects that are for the camera and not the page, which is my turf and the place I should be staying.

But past desires need to be tended to before I do that lonely writing thing. Still at night, I return to some of these projects. And I think as time passes, they keep getting better.

Strangers & Sojourners is now shaping up to be strictly essayistic, literary criticism. The intro that I sent to Gray Wolf Press had my two best essays and two throwaways…The introduction I think needs to have more imagination. It bordered on the didactic I fear. I may opt to create a more inviting picture of a Living Library…a sort of introduction of my instinctive attraction to books, why they’ve helped me figure out key concepts in growing into an adult. The problem is that the current cultural landscape is completely immature, crude and fun. It’s very fun to be alive, young and stimulated today. But in the end those kinds of thrills will not bring us to a spiritually better place. When I say spirit I mostly mean conscience and a native desire for truth, beauty, etc. What is it to do a thing in good faith or bad faith?

Mostly my book addiction has felt more like a journey. Stealing away into my room or into the stacks of the Norman library, or showing up at my jobs late, looking at the paintings of writers on the wall. I was never doing it so that people could see that I was doing it. I was doing it, and am still doing it because I believed I was supposed to be figuring some things out, because I had access to words, impressions and personalities that not everyone could access as well as I could.

So the ten or eleven persons, “strangers,” that I attempt to understand in this book are rich. But nothing I can articulate about them is going to instantly make my reader’s life better. There will be no translation. I fear that the best I can offer is “cultural capital.” The goal would be to provide something more pragmatic though. But I think there will be an inward thing gained as each chapter unfolds. A certain sense of self possession is what I needed before writing this book (well, sort of). I know so many smart people who are aimless and adrift. And I figure if the nucleus of our intellectual life remains as bitter and dispersed as it is now, and full of bad faith, then the real idiots are going to sneak back into the core and tear us back down. There will be no new ideas, no new jobs, and not much spirit to build something new. I could be wrong about this. If my book fails it would be literary masturbation. But I’m convinced it is not so, and that keeping at least 10 percent of the time in a week reserved for literature would help the educated person learn much about themselves and their world. How to make a library a living library? Hard to say b/c I’ve always done it so naturally.

 

My tactics for making appeal to current lit people are to include David Foster Wallace. Tonight I decided to add Susan Sontag, a woman who will provide the namesake for my cat if he/she proves to be a girl. Her last book Regarding the Pain of Others takes us back to the language of responsibility. By viewing the atrocities committed often times by our country, we are “co spectators” and have more a sense of caution in our ideas and decisions. I don’t just want to talk about horific pictures, but I’ll probably use that book to lead into an inquiry on current media consumption. That is, if we don’t want to see pain, then we don’t have to. We just don’t have to go to that web site, right? People’s attentions being diverted,e tc. When Susan talks about the pain of others I’d also want to talk about her years fighting cancer. Anyone who knows me knows that Sontag cuts a heroic figure to a person who’s seen some of the things I have in the medical field at this time, with a mom who is fighting the same disease. She fought it, because she asked questions. And then she wrote this book that opened many people eye’s to just how bad Americans are at talking about illness. Or if seeing the ugly realities of nature in general.

 

I also am going to write about Clint Eastwood now. I’ve watched Hereafter three times and it has moved me with a staggering, quiet force.

 

Saw my first acting performance. It’s practically a lead role in an hour and 30 minute picture. I felt vaguely uncomfortable after it. Like I hadn’t done a good job. LIke my voice was annoying to listen to. And it’s supposed to be of course, that’s my character. But others, a visiting actor from L.A. and a pretty good (and gay) one from Norman, gave me very generous compliments after we finished watching the crazy thing. Those two alone, and how close a lot of me and the case got, was really the reward in itself. What happens now is really not up to me, nor is it any of my business. Letting the firefly out of the jar as it were. Can’t scrutinize it any more when the work has been done.

And more work has gotten started in film land. Director wrote a cameo for me in his Bail Bonds movie. For whatever reason these bail bondsmen are very Mad Men ish. It was a blast speaking that fake super confident language in hallways with a power suit on. Should be, like all of his movies, funny without exactly trying too hard to be funny. Just being strange on its own.

JFK All The Way

Ma reminded me today what a fiend I was for John F. Kennedy when I wan elementary school aged kid. I referred to this on a recent blog post when discussing books that shaped my early thinking. One of them was indeed a very slim red covered book on Kennedy’s assassination.

Oddly, but I guess naturally, I’m now more concerned with the man. Whereas the childhood me was interested in figuring out the particulars of his assassination, and in the film JFK how it affected people who worked in and believed in the country. I read an article that Norman wrote about Kennedy before he made his big push to the presidency. At the time of this writing he was still a (junior?) senator: http://www.esquire.com/features/superman-supermarket

It’s long, but if you can get through it you start to see the particularities of Kennedy’s persona. he had an intense gaze that was the result of past injuries, a less than ideal health and a sureness of purpose and intention. These qualities made the Pres seem unreal. Also, he’s not a gifted speaker to Mailer. He’s a superman because he’s not a superman. Because he worked so hard to complete his function…This is contrary to the default midwestern/southern loathing of the Kennedy as a princely son of privilege, which in material ways he is…but not in the metaphysical ways.

He also was an equal opportunity appreciator. When he makes his entry to the Los Angeles democratic convention Mailer notices something that no one else was to put into print, at least not in such a photographic, symbolic way. Here he waves at the beggards and “losers” of Pershing square. This is the same Kennedy the poor Irish Americans latched onto like the green (the other Fitzgerald’s image) hope diamond of imagination:

The afternoon he arrived at the convention from the airport, there was of course a large crowd on the street outside the Biltmore, and the best way to get a view was to get up on an outdoor balcony of the Biltmore, two flights above the street, and look down on the event. One waited thirty minutes, and then a honking of horns as wild as the getaway after an Italian wedding sounded around the corner, and the Kennedy cortege came into sight, circled Pershing Square, the men in the open and leading convertibles sitting backwards to look at their leader, and finally came to a halt in a space cleared for them by the police in the crowd. The television cameras were out, and a Kennedy band was playing some circus music. One saw him immediately. He had the deep orange-brown suntan of a ski instructor, and when he smiled at the crowd his teeth were amazingly white and clearly visible at a distance of fifty yards. For one moment he saluted Pershing Square, and Pershing Square saluted him back, the prince and the beggars of glamour staring at one another across a city street, one of those very special moments in the underground history of the world, and then with a quick move he was out of his car and by choice headed into the crowd instead of the lane cleared for him into the hotel by the police, so that he made his way inside surrounded by a mob, and one expected at any moment to see him lifted to its shoulders like a matador being carried back to the city after a triumph in the plaza.

Mailer was good at nuance, also magnifying his sense for it. “The Underground History of the World.” I do get nostalgic for that kind of enthusiasm though.

In Denis Johnson’s “Tree of Smoke” the first sentence invokes the death of JFK and the reader is instinctively set to feel that the whole debacle of the war is about to happen to people. In American mythopoetics, and in this accomplished novel, the death of JFK is the beginning to the end of something. Maybe it’s selflessness. The famous JFK speech goes “ask not what your country can do for you/ ask what you can do for your country.” These words that reflect in a way that private intensity that Mailer noticed in Kennedy. In the navy JFK tested himself deeply by carrying a shipmate on his back to shore, despite a weak constitution that was riddled with back problems. Mailer wonders what this quality of determination meant when he considered the candidate’s mind. It goes back to a different time altogether. Writers like Mailer who were destined to always feel outside the brotherly circles of combat still signed up to go to war anyway. Just as interesting thinkers like Kennedy joined up. It was a time when many would sacrifice something for love of country. Today, the Germans have that mindset and they are the economic backbone of Europe.

These are all qualities that are hard to quanitfy, and hard to talk about in the news cycle. But they linger in some of the moments of history we remember vividly…the face of JFK always being one of those memories for me. A guy who was more than a guy for reasons we have to figure out why….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Weight of the World

 

The book of Job tells the story of one guy who loses it all. But the power of the story seems to presume that his tale will be useful for all of us. Job, as Kierkegaard tells it in a newly released collection “Spiritual Writings,” experiences a loss that we can all learn from.

All around me I seem to encounter a sense of entitlement people have about their place with the world’s fortunes. Job would laugh at these people, but not too snidely. Kierkegaard notes the serenity of Job’s character by emphasizing one line from the book. It’s after Job sees that his house has collapsed. I don’t know if this is before or after the warts, of being debased in the eyes of the community or before or after his wife tells asks him matter of factly, “Why don’t you just kill yourself?”

What Job offers is this: “The Lord gave, the Lord took away, blessed be the name of the Lord.”

This utterance astonishes Kierkegaard because Job “remembers that the lord ‘gave’ at a moment of deepest despair. His soul is not broken by grief’s dumb oppresiveness.

It’s useful to think of the grief that befalls us as dumb and inferior to our human capacities for will, endurance and understanding. Implicit in the story of Job is that we can control how we see the world and we will weather its unreasonable demands. Also implied is the fact that Job had no regrets about how he had lived his life. And this we can learn from as well.

“He remembered with gratitude that his feet had not strayed from the path of righteousness, that he had rescued the poor who complained to him and the fatherless who had no helper, and even in the moment the ‘blessing of those who are abandoned’ was upon him as before…”

If indeed our President is doing his best to make universal health care moral and national imperative, one would be impressed by the lengths he’s gone to extend political capital in this direction even under the stress of a global economy in somersaults, incessant attacks from the press, indeed the weight of the world. The blessing of those who were abandoned (see his friends in Altgeld Gardens Chicago) is perhaps still with him as before. And that blessing will sustain a person even at a time such as now when hard line lefties are calling him a closet Republican.

Terror rolls over me, pursues my path like the wind. . . .

At night my limbs are pierced, and my sinews know no rest.

With great power he seizes my garment, grabs hold of me at the collar.

He hurls me into the muck, and I become like dust and ashes

The journalist Jon Meacham was the first person to connect Job and the modern presidency for me. And he does so eloquently here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/books/review/Meacham-t.html

 Maybe in another time, but probably not, we could interpret Job’s troubles as an allegory for our time right now. But with the distractions of niceties, this narrative is harder to see. And the economy and good feeling continue to plunge in the face of our continually effervescent delusions.

Meacham himself probably had to go through some hardship to see the connection. Like Job, he was once the child of fortune. He was heralded a boy wonder journalist right of college. He was one of the youngest editors in Newsweek history. But when the news cycle completely changed, the demands on him were outsized, and he was ousted from the magazine amid dwindling subscribers and readers. This experience will no doubt take him out of the princely perspective of the wonder boy and into the eyes of the tested. And I think something of that experience, and his knowledge on his subjects in general were the makings of this curiously spiritual book review. 

 Kierkegaard: “Those who have fought the good fight, experienced wretchedness understand [Job’s] saying and, even if he or she never speaks about it, interpret it more gloriously than those who spend a lifetime explaining it. 

The Secrets of the Stache

There he is. One of the most enterprising journalists in the country. He’s founder of a thought provoking sports/literary/pop culture journal that features some of the biggest names in the business, Grantland. In my opinion, this was a great idea. And it has drawn out some probing thoughts from Chuck Klosterman ( who’s great theme is ,What is Reality?). An article by Colson Whitehead on gambling made great use of the fish-out-of water scenario in Atlantic City. … When I type in the address to the Web site, I don’t know what I’m going to get. I think this is one of the site’s virtues. I bet it’s not a high maintenance sight to run either. If you build it they will come, and some of the best writers have (Malcolm Gladwell and Dave Eggers among many others…even a video game reviewer).

Basically, this is a guy who should be very proud of his mustache.

But today on Pardon the Interruption Bill Simmons was acting self conscious about it. Part of the reason was probably the imposing opponent he had in Michael Wilbon. The latter TV personality is ubiquitous these days, often filing PTI broadcasts from the NBA Finals and such events where his commentary is in demand. He has a hit TV show and a very professional presence with hints of moral authority. Wilbon is still a young journalist comparatively, but there’s something of the old Edward R. Murrow and Howard Cosell in him somehow, even if it’s just his voice in conjunction with sober analysis. Anyway, right when Simmons got on the show he was acting squirrely about his new stache and Wilbon was acting poised as usual. Wilbon hits a jab mid show. During a commercial break, Simmons says “oh ______ will be happy.”

Wilbon: Why?

Simmons: He loves facial hair.

And finally the nail in the coffin.

Wilbon: “I’m not sure if I even like that look on you.”

At the end of the show, Simmons turns over. “I’m Bill Simmons and I’ll be shaving my mustache tonight.”

No! Don’t listen to him Bill.

I think I know where all this latent tension stems, and it has something to do with the culture of manhood. Intangibly, one can sense that Wilbon has it and Simmons doesn’t. It’s also worth noting that guys like Bob Ryan, Norm Chad have been repeated guest hosts while the internet’s widest read personality was only rarely on, and that was to be cross examined for his ambitious basketball assertions. I may be wrong on this, I haven’t tuned in for months, but since Grantland’s inception has Simmons only now been grudgingly accepted into the PTI ranks?

To talk about what I know about Grantland’s voice, I’ll try to find things that could be construed as unmanly….Gladwell, Simmons and Eggers, even the placid Whitehead are all long form writers (long writing a practice that  a guy like Wilbon gives up to be on TV), of differing literary merits, who seem to make a pardoxically strict effort to sound nerdy and/or nice. Their thoughts are large, but their voices somehow timid.

For example here’s Eggers on wooing a woman:

“Her weight was the ideal weight and I was warm and wanted her to be warm.”

Take care of business already, right?

It’s a far cry since the days of Norman Mailer when Stormin Norman took boxing lessons, wrote about the sport intensively and told John Updike that he needed to get back in the whorehouse and stop worrying about his style.

So perhaps subconsciously, Wilbon sees Bill Simmons as surrounding himself with dudes that are less than men. This of course depends on the kind of writers and activities Wilbon tends toward. I reference Mailer because his assurance seems compatible with Wilbon’s at the mic.

I go back to a book I read about the CIA in Vietnam, Tree of Smoke. The French translator character has a mustache and that’s looked upon as a kind of joke. The thing is, you need to be good at something to have that mustache, preferably something with guns or grit. I suppose the Hemingway stache would qualify as well since he worked as a medic in the first great war, and also undressed many fine females and wrote about it in a forward thrusting and dignified way. Perhaps the question in the back of Wilbon’s mind is, what did you do to earn that mustache? Watch more basketball games than me? Blog longer than I did? I waited a long time to start wearing suits like this. I was one of MJs favorite reporters as a greenhorn and I still wasn’t ready for a mustache!

I guess ego plays into it. Simmons seems on an upturn, and the PTI guy may feel threatened.

But as a media guy I see some difference. As Chuck Klosterman once noted on Bill Simmons’ podcast, Simmons bowed out of the Boston Herald job early, realizing he would have to be a hockey beat writer for a decade or so, or until someone died, before he could cover his beloved basketball or football in Boston. So he took to the blogs. On his own blog, where he appealed to a base of self professed “super fans,” that is not critics–sport’s writers– … he became one of the first journalists to see the potential in blogging. And he used it to cut in front of many journalists, earning a spot on espn.com well before he would’ve been allowed to cover the Pats as a newspaperman.

Perhaps older dog reporters resent the bloggers, a group whom Simmons represents whether he loves it or not. Maybe there will always be that chasm between the two. The beat reporter can have a stache, the super fan who talks about going to games with dad can’t.

I, entering college the day Facebook was available to university students only, respect guys like Simmons though, guys who have a sense of timing. For example this literary sports journal thing. Great writers have always felt compelled to freelance a story about sports, to give them more well-rounded credibility. I don’t believe such stories ever had a central location. Now they do. And if magazines like ESPN and SI are going to continue to produce surfacey hero worshipping articles, expecting us to slobber over guys who cheated off us in our physical geography tests then I believe in a place where writers now have a clear target for a work that asks what a given event in sports means on a wider social level.  I think Simmons is fighting the Howard Cosellian  ”jockocracy” even better than the eloquent Michael Wilbon

So Simmons should be proud. He’s a news guy, not an amazing writer. But he’s found a way into a new dimension by the power of an idea.

Keep the  mustache if you want, Bill.

I must say though, part of me recognizes Simmons’s reticence this afternoon on PTI. I too have a mustache.  I first agreed to take it on when taking a film role as an arm wrestling trainer. The role called for more man weight than my slender frame could provide. When I first finished the big shave and took a look in the mirror I felt like a woman who didn’t know if she liked her new auburn streaks.  I realized then that this is what guys have to play with, the facial hair. Any doubt I had was assuaged by a recognition that it was my native right to experiment with my facial hair.

The reactions have been mixed. But like a writer who writes a book, you have to go home and look at the name on the spine and know it’s yours–the reviews are not yours. When I go home, I’m the man with the mustache. Not the ladies, not the admiring gents. And, with that in mind I still like it. So if you like your handiwork then you can put on a face that knows what it likes.

There are moments when I have been challenged. One of my music heroes Michael Fracasso greeted me last Saturday night with a polite, “Hey Danny! … Wait, did you have that last time I saw you?” He mused on the days when he had the same stache and the same hairdo. This was probably strange for him. I went on to tell him about the movie role. We discussed a 70s SNL appearance by a mustachioed Paul Simon.  Many thoughts were being turned on both sides.  Even the fact that he’d had one too didn’t change the overriding feeling I got that he didn’t like it. Gentleman he is, the final word on the stache was “it’s a period piece for sure.”

Tomatoes, for sure.

After his smooth gig at The Blue Door I went with him and Greg Johnson to Juniors. At one point and sort of outta nowhere, Fracasso looks at me and says, “I can’t even look at you. I feel like I’m in a movie or something.”

Every bar I go to the stache promotes discussion. A lesbian bartender I’ve always thought was too tough for me started razzin me, but then this ole thing was a gateway to some flirty and competative shit talk: the kind I’ve always wanted to have with the 37 year old mother and vivacious barhand. At a Bricktown bar with Zebra upholstery at spots a shorter young professional walked by, stopped and looked at me quite earnestly…

“Nice mustache. Really. It’s good.”

It was a solemn and blunt appraisal. One guy talking to another, not too many words, but just the right ones at the same time. Then he’s off, and I’m off.

You will get haters, and you will find admirers. But what you mustache yourself is this: Are you gonna wear it or what?

Books That Change

I often feel like I’m the only person who peruses Bizzell’s memorial library’s Books that Inspire series. You get a gauge on the dream life of all OUs movers, shakers and teachers. No prouder have I been of my friends Jennifer and Jimmy than when their picks were featured, Jorge Borges’s short stories and McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian,” respectively. My dean friend Joe Foote picked a study of poverty, which seems in accordance with the generous spirit I got to engaged with when I knew him as my dean–and vibrant Sam’s Club customer.

So, I wanted to do some writing tonight and I think the topic of game changing books is a good place to get warmed up. In my case I can promise there will be more. The ones that expanded or shaped my thoughts for the different aren’t exactly beloved books. But there was something about them that expanded my thinking significantly.

The Giver – Lois Lowry 

I was a real cut-up in poor Mrs. Stafford’s 8th grade English class. There was a corner reserved for quiet reading. I never utilized it. I remember wanting to be closer in proximity to K.C. Smith’s “Hard Day’s Night” t-shirt–red on black. When I wasn’t trying to be funny I engaged once with this book. It was a first engagement with sustained solemnity. This book was melancholy and sad all the way through and I exercised many of my thoughts trying to figure out why. At the end of the book we realize that everything wasn’t what it appeared to be and the man with the memory has a lot to give, an impression of our real selves or past selves. Compounded with the imagery of needles and brainwashing, the old man memory was my first entry point to the world’s sadnesses

George Orwell – Animal Farm

This was simply the strongest storytelling I had encountered up to this time. Before I had tried “Lord of the Flies” and the prose just didn’t grab me. This narrator wanted me to understand what was going on. So I perceived the injustices as sharply as I have noticed anything else. I still don’t know much about communism, but I know Snowball and Sarge got and are getting a raw deal.

Last year I got to teach this book to Mrs. Hoffman’s senior English kids, and I most enjoyed figuring out which kids endeavoured to figure it out with me. Full circle kinda stuff.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X – As Told to Alex Haley

One of the most fascinating figures in American history, IMO. I read this when I was bed-ridden my last semester of college. It was a brutal winter, but Malcolm’s fighting spirit kept me thinking about my goals and intellectual ambitions.  He is always reading, and with a pointed purpose, namely to improve the condition of his black brothers. If he knew I was so engaged, he knew it was by the gift of his charisma. He would tell me at the end of his life that I could follow, but at the first or middle I’d be like the blonde college student whom he denies when she asks if she can help in any way. Like President Obama, I found more “blunt Poetry” in the prose of Malcolm’s oratory than i did almost all of the Harlem Renaissance writers. So in my imagination a linkage is developed between Malcolm and Homer and Rabelais and Rousseau in his confessions. Brendan Behan’s “Borstal Boy.” For most Harlem Renaissance, I just thought they were either trying to be too obscure (Toomer. too pretty (Hughes) or too cute (Schyler). Or the despair was just too much (Baldwin). In Malcolm’s talk there’s always fight. If we are to believe Spike Lee’s amazing portrait, he was indeed smiling when those faceless guys pulled the guns on him at the Audobon Ballroom in Harlem.

Recent book reviews of Manning Marble’s Malcolm biography make note of how Alex Haley creates a “redemption” narrative outright in order to give the book more appeal. It works, and I digest this story as one would an epic. Besides, I don’t know a journalist who doesn’t exaggerate. Well there are a few, but they are rare. Even if Malcolm made his youthful exploits more lurid than they really were … he still went to jail. And learned from the experience.

When I read this book to some Mustang High students I received plenty of blank stares. The indian kids liked it. or one. How could they be so cold to so mischievous, obviously self parodying an intellect (“March on Washington? I call it the farce on Washington!”)?  … One girl prone to good dry jokes said, “that book sounds awesome. He’s probably ranting all the time about the white man.” She alone caught the sly humor of Malcolm’s game that many deny him today. We read his story because it’s vital.

Harold Bloom – The Western Canon

I didn’t realize what a state our higher English education was in until I read Bloom’s intro to this and immediately remembered with great pain all the useless debates we tepidly waged in our English classes. Bloom quests for the sublime and strange in literature, and always seems to find it, where we were too intimidated to look. But that’s what the real teachers do, give us a bridge.

Warning: Strong writing provokes imitation. I’ll often find myself going off on things like “the American religion” without being completely sure of what I’m saying, though I know my instincts are good.

For a good laugh look up the Boston Globe editorial where he is lambasting Harry Potter and Stephen King.

The Books of My Life – Henry Miller

For most of the same WAKE UP reasons I read Malcolm.

 The Assasination of John F. Kennedy

I just remember buying this dry conspiracy theory of a book in the 3rd or 4th grade. A movie tonight reminded me of this decision. A young Mexican boy, son of Jennifer Lopez’s “Maid in Manhattan” , does his high school project on Richard Milhouse Nixon. Though he was impeached, he also opened talks to the East….says the  kid to a dead audience. This is hysterical. And for a gift mama gives him “The Nixon Tapes.” My ma made sure to let me know that I was just this kind of kid. And my childhood obsession with the Kennedy tapes, which culminated in a foiled attempt to watch Oliver Stone’s “JFK” at my grandma’s house, prove this. Thanks aunt Teri and Uncle Ron, But I can handle this shit.

All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers – By Larry McMurtry

Portrait of the artist as a young Texan, a blurb calls it. I read t his and realized that I could write novels too. I had access to all the feelings found here. And of course this was more approachable than James Joyce.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce

The quality of young Joyce’s ardor is contagious. It was one of those books I read just for the power of language, even if half the time I didn’t understand what that language was telling me. Today I consult Portrait for its ideas on what makes pure art  vs. what makes impure art (see my Zodiac review). This book teaches the artist to be weary of politics. In the first scenes we see how it destroys relations at the dinner table. We also see how to appreciate a pretty pale thing who stirs the great ocean with her lithe toe. We also learn from Joyce, to trust ourselves.  I received a 5/5 from my English teacher, which opened the door to a troublesome, difficult, hard and ecstatic writing career of my own. Thanks James, you mental case, they say, though what they mean is misunderstood. Slainte to the secular saints out there.

What Makes an “Art” Film?

Last night I pulled a late one, needing to calm down and unwind. It had been a stressful day. So, I happened across the Zodiac film, one of my favorite moody treatments of the news scene from the 70s (dig the Nixon button in the pic).

The director David Fincher is widely regarded as a “good” filmmaker. His movies push boundaries, deal with serious topics, and often make you confront something you don’t want to confront. They are often violent, shadowy and intense. The editing tends to be hyper fast. He comes from the music video world where a lot of us learned to appreciate images in our most impressionable mind sets.

Indeed, Fincher seems to be getting a grasp on favored color schemes here:

As I watch Zodiac for the third time I’m 1. loving the actors. But also I start trying to think of why this movie is getting under my skin more than a normal slasher film which exists only to make my blood race. Thomas Aquinas has something to say about this in his theory of aesthetics, which was adopted by James Joyce. If a piece of art is crafted to excite our basest emotions/desires/feelings then it is inferior art. So art designed to tickle our lusts, fears, loathing, prejudices is not going to really linger in the imagination.

Avoiding this kind of art is harder now with demands of the marketplace, but that’s what makes Fincher’s art even more impressive. He’s making big pictures. A lot of folks I wouldn’t consider ambitious intellectuals and talkers walked away from The Social Network having enjoyed the experience and they had been somewhat challenged by it. Here, Zodiac was a less successful experiment box office wise. But I think as time goes on different people, the feelers out there, are going to be intrigued and drawn to the human obsessions that play out over Zodiac.

And despite the gore, the rich nostalgic fantasy, the little quirks (“Where’s my animal crackers?” Detective Toschi asks his assistant, with seriousness) there are moments of humanity that Fincher includes, subtly not beating us over the head with it.

Last night I explored Jake Gylenhaal’s character Robert Graysmith, an infinitely interesting one.

One of the things worth preserving in movies is personality, and this movie excels at this mightily. Even the minor characters like Brian Cox’s talk show host have intimated layers of vanity that aren’t immediately available to the viewer. Jake’s version of Robert Graysmith, the trusty narrator could have been boring in the same way Nick Carraway, the trusted source of The Great Gatsby, isn’t entirely interesting. He who saw it was listening, not acting. But the rememberer of Zodiac is injected with intrigue. He’s a goody-too-shoes, the tough editors of The Chronicle call him a “boy scout.” He doesn’t drink, smoke, womanize. He draws cartoons.

“So what do you like to do?” asks Downey Jr.’s cops reporter Robert Avery.

“I like to read…I like books,” Graysmith says.

Downey:  ”Those are the same thing.”

Yet, this boy scout is instinctively compelled to help solve the case. Over the course of the film he looses his girl and gains some 5 o’clock shadow. He also wins the respect of San Francisco’s most dedicated detective. Most people who exhibit Graysmith’s boyish/naive character traits today wouldn’t think twice about following The Zodiac around puzzles, into library stacks and Ace hardware stores where the culprit may or may not work–just to get a look. Most of us would huddle home and turn on World’s Biggest Loser.

But, I kept asking myself what it was that made Gylenhaal so appealing in the scenes. He’s the intermediary, he should be a static character. What was it that made him more than just a guy who really likes to solve puzzles?

If one pays attention to the edits, you can begin to notice that every time the Zodiac makes a public threat about harming a school bus of children we cut to a scene of Graysmith and his son. He walks him from the bus after one of them.

The threat of the Zodiac reaches into Graysmith’s feelings of fatherhood. Subtly, a deep connection is drawn between father and son. It’s impossible to conceive that the relationship could be threatened by a man, an unknown force, at random. There has to be a reason.

One of the more pathos laden subplots of the film witnesses the descent into despair and alcoholism of the gifted reporter Robert Avery. Downey Jr. could play these roles asleep on a swing and he’d still make me feel something. When Avery gives up, Graysmith doesn’t. He stays at the paper drawing cartoons, secretly patching the clues.  In a brief moment Graysmith’s qualities of human connection take another turn. Before we’ve seen the father, and later we see the adoration, the bromance that has developed over this chase. Avery is replaced at the office with a newbie (always appreciated Adam Goldberg). Graysmith makes sure to greet the reporter: “You’re a lucky man. A great reporter worked at this desk.”

The new reporter shrugs, he doesen’t seem to care. And so goes the lightening fast news biz. It moves on. But for certain unique characters, for Graysmith, the impressions linger at that desk.

The movie is about how 3 lives become completely consumed (one could argue wrecked) over decades by this case. The killings can’t just be random. Nothing that threatens the safety and willful flow of a human life should be let out. But often times they are. The deranged man holds a gun behind a hard working congresswoman. A group of wild scalpers set the West ablaze with native blood, under the soil of our history. A boy steps into a school with a trenchcoat. Little by little each character wrecks himself over the mystery of evil.

Thankfully, The Graysmith of the Fincher film doesn’t ignore the call to combat this evil. The film fittingly ends with detective Toschi and Graysmith at a diner virtually agreeing on the identity of the killer. Toschi tells Graysmith, helplessly, urgently: “Write the book.” Graysmith finally achieves the vindication he’s been chasing Downey, Ruffalo and The Zodiac for all film.  There are many Graysmith types out there. Good students, well behaved, lovers of quiz shows, men who relish taking care of their lawns, amateur librarians, and loving parents. But very few of them will step outside the home and confront the abyss. Jake’s Robert Graysmith, then, is more of an amazing character than we thought.

Books to Write

The Fair Courts - Recently began 16th draft of the small town saga. Should be the final swipe.

Gladys looked around, not noticing Melvin’s staring, a kind of stare that Melvin didn’t recognize as rude. He was idling from the host stand again. The light dangled in plastic crystal above all the booths. For some young people, this was always the best time of night. Two hours before there had been sets of families seated, and Gladys was nervous. Now, she was calmly annoyed. She found herself moving to Tyler’s side. She scooched over the plastic cushion to his black jeans, the same color of his work pants when he’d worked in the kitchen here. She touched his hand while he stared ahead thinking about ways to stay awake. 

Strangers & Sojourners - 10 important lives, literary and non, and what the arc of those lives can teach us:

 It’s not until Bloom reintroduces repetition to his prose, that we realize how long it’s been since we’ve looked up the definition for all the words we use. In other books, he repeatedly pulls out Emerson axioms which have served him well over the years. And Shakespeare, the most abundant theater of the world, is often condensed into vibrant refrain: Give us life, not death.

Popping the Cork - The college novel. Settings. Norman, Oklahoma and Cork, Ireland. Cast of characters. Kind of insane. Future senator of California and future German stage actress carry the plot away from wallflower narrator though.

 

Marroquin on Mailer: 

 

In my most recent Gazette interview subject I found a sense of conquest, vitality and passion that I identified with Mailer…  It’s like what George Plimpton once said about Norman Mailer: “There’s definitely a large field that comes off Norman. Even sitting with him he’s absolutely at his ease, the energy is there, something almost palpable.”

The book aims to position, as Joan Didion did, Mailer’s true believer’s stance toward romance in America, and all the Gods and Devils contained within. Also there seems to be a needed statement to make on Mailer’s spiritual style of writing within an inherently illusory and plastic pop culture environment. His hopelessly Christian character in fact gets him in trouble when he tries to practice his impulses by getting a literary prisoner out of jail. The guy can’t handle it and stabs a waiter in NYC. In a display of stubborn manhood Mailer stands by his man and gets grilled. but any student of his life will see that his initial thoughts roamed and wrote around thoughts of redemption. ….Subjectivity and an objectivity beyond all of his new journalism peers ended up redefining a new niche of journalism, his legacy to letters, ultimately, despite his best efforts at the novel. But even in his novels there’s much we can discover about our culture and ourselves.

John Leonard: While Updike confirms, Mailer changes your life … I suppose what i’m talking about is teh notion of a “body of work.” By this I mean the energy in a writer to keep producing, the challenge the system undergoes. The constant feeding on your psychic yard goods is the highest drain, and what is amazing is that Mailer has produced–what, twenty five books?– in the most difficult public and personal lives imaginable.

Walter Anderson: there are some, as Faulkner said, do more than endure, they prevail. These are the best among us, our real leaders, and Norman is one of them. He’s broadened our culture, made us less afraid to be ourselves. He’s caused us to ask questions, to think about who we are and what we are doing, forced us to become better than we have been. But above all it’s his energy, his enormous energy….”

The Dream Team

One of the minor sadnesses I deal with on a day-to-day basis is the sadness of not working with a team. I came of age rounding up people to go to concerts or organizing concerts and events through my high school student council. I’ve always been a reluctant leader, I guess is the way to put it. To write is an act of leadership but it’s a more solitary one and requires a distance that most group leaders don’t ever have to get acquainted with.

I’ve recently been acting in a movie. It’s a project that I sometimes think of as the Mickey Reece shotgun school of acting. I’ve never bought into the idea of actor’s studios and workshops. Like anything else I’ve done acting has been an experience of just jumping in the fire and getting started. Through the course of this work, we are about half done shooting, I’ve gotten real close to my team, a co actor and director in particular. After a days shoot we question everything we’ve done and start talking about the logic of the story as it will play out.  Also, though I ad lib and that requires some creativity, for the most part I’m being told what to do. I find this experience extremely therapeutic in contrast to the editing jobs I’ve been pulling lately, where I’m making suggestions for others.

What I’m saying is, though I guard my alone time like it’s life or death (it is), I also relish the building and workings of a team.

That said, I keep tabs on people and I’d like to do a generic run down of people on my hypothetical dream team. This team may be called into action if the fates have it that I’m put in charge of a publication, film, small venture capital firm, diner, halfway house, school. Something. These people also have survived the weeding out process that’s starting to get pretty heavy in my mind when I get down to the business of evaluating the real nature of my friendships (o! but can we ever really know that?).

Officer of Unexpected laughter: Jairus McDonald

Watchdogs: Gene Perry (Tulsa) and Tim Altegoer (Germany)

The Money Marketing Man- Curtis Piper

Interns: Jeff Jones and Rayna Stem

Contributing Source of Energy, Work and Creative Abandon/ Guy who constantly reminds staff that both God and the Devil reside in each one of us: Norman Mailer

Ambassador to a certain Southern poet who may or may not have told Harold Bloom over lunch that Ralph Waldo Emerson was the Devil: Laura Heller

Radio department: Tara Hudson Feuerborn

Proofreader and etiquette counselor: Blayze Hembree

Psychologist/Human Relations: John Fullbright

Physical Education: Baxter Holmes

Recipticle of lively but reasonable smack talk: Michael Kimball

Zen therapist/resident Falstaffian: James Nghiem

Secretary: Jessica Chonlahan

Weather: Pete Johnson

Political Adviser/Fung Sui: Becky Chown

Social Media Director: Walt Whitman Jr. Jr. (the cat)

Bartender: Ben Wilkins and Heath Hargrove

Resident Optimist: Helen Grant

Resident Pessimist: Nate Weygant

Stocks and Bonds: Tyler Mossmeyer

Health Care: Tres Savage and Dr. Toll

Farmhands: Mike Mason and Samantha Lamb

Dream Analyst: Darren Carter

And that’s all I can think of for now, but I’ll update this as dependable people cross my imagination

“Walrus,” Production Diary Day 2

So here it is, the first still featuring me from Walrus, the 7th or 8th film by OKC filmmaker Mickey Reece.

And that’s Kameron Primm in the back, an old school method actor with a fresh face and really impressive concentration on the set. This is a movie about Russians, aliens and arm wrestling. It’s also partly influenced by 70s art house cinema. How that will pan out is all Mickey’s game. We are just along for the ride, as it were.

I was a little unprepared, confused about many things in life, and hungover during today’s shoot. Little did I realize when I arrived at my N. OKC home with Mickey and Kam waiting with the equipment, that today was the day I was going to shoot my most serious scene (pictured above) .

That scene takes place in a tub after a match. That’s all I can really reveal. Mick had to shoot 3 different angles: a wide, a close on me and a close on Kam. He sent us our lines in facebook messages that we then read from our cell phones. I was essentially learning my lines on the spot. But since Kam and I have been thinking about our characters for some time, it only took a few mistakes to slip into character (me making the bulk of these mistakes; my character talks a lot). …  Mickey was good about this. Outside while they had a smoke he was direct and clear about how I should say a “be,” and I think it made the line work. Before this scene Mick squatted against the bath tub and watched, intently, Kam and me run through the scene twice. When he felt like we had it, he propped himself up and said, “let’s shoot.”

After 30 minutes of doing this rather serious scene in tight quarters, I started to get the feeling that we were really onto something worthwhile. I’d say a line a particular way but it followed a flub. Mick would say, “that was just perfect, but we gotta get the first part again. ” Other times the audio might catch my neighbors dogs barking. The more takes we took the more into my character I became, I had to affect some tenderness too. We were all very focused and crouched in this tight spot, doing work. This must be what filmmaking is all about.

On another occasion Mick whispered an order for me from behind the camera to where Kam couldn’t hear.  When he yelled action I hesitatingly did what he asked and was nervous too. But we got it, and it looks pretty damn real. The result makes for some pretty realistic acting.

I also like this guy they got to play the mail order Russian bride’s dad. The Russia scenes were shot, understandably, in Tulsa.

Mickey’s the homogenized weirdo to the right. Becky Cox lookin’ pretty and oppressed and Scott Mason looking like the shit.

Photos courtesy of Mickey Reece.

Stay Tuned!