How to be a better unsuccessful writer – The first two rules of Writers Club

The general public has a low opinion of someone, especially a young person, who calls themselves a writer.

For the most part, this is because crying “artist” (of any kind) is a lot like crying “wolf”.  If you turn out to be wrong (or deluded), you cut away at the credibility of future criers.  If you turn out to right, it means a lot of effort on everyone else’s part.  (Meaning (if you’ve followed my simile this far) to either kill the wolf or to bother to understand your work.)

When someone asks you “What do you do?” they are usually just saying “What would you like to talk about next?”  So your answer doesn’t really matter to them, or shouldn’t.  Sometimes, however, in slightly less casual conversations, your interlocutor is really saying “How would you like me to think of you?”.

We all wish, naturally, to be thought of highly by others; modern culture is easier to navigate the more respect you get.  So the temptation in these conversations is to pick the most enviable of your vocations (or avocations), or, possibly, to pick the one about which you have the most to say.

Most of us who consider writing to be the most important activity in our lives do not get paid for it.  We are “writers” only in the strict linguistic sense of the word, as in “ones who occasionally perform that verb”.

The problem here lies in the Americentric tendency to define oneself (and, more importantly, others) in terms of discrete occupational categories.  These categories are defined by popular culture as a whole, and they come in arbitrary degrees of specificity.  Each of these categories has attached to it, in each person’s mind, some moral assessment or set of conclusions that automatically get attached to anyone we put into that category.

Now, the people who call themselves writers at cocktail parties have in their own minds some desirable set of attributes attached to their own internal “writer” category.  But what writers (and especially unsuccessful writers) must understand is that in the mind of the sufficiently cynical listener (which, let’s face it, is most people these days) there exists right next to the “writer” category, another category called “person who claims to be a writer”.

Everyone who says they’re a writer, and whom the listener has not heard of as such via other means, goes into this second category.  And, friends, let me tell you, that category is death.

If you tell someone you’re a writer before they read your stuff, especially if you are not getting paid for it, and then they do read your stuff, they will fail to see the work as writing-in-itself.  It will just be a piece of typing done by someone who is trying to be a writer.

Their eyes will crawl over every word, finding your desperation and countless evidences of why you’re unsuccessful collected in the cracks .  They will find all the justification they need for why you work tech support in a marketing firm during the day.

And then their eyes will be adjusted enough to see all of your ‘yearning’, first expressed as a semi-cocky, falsely modest “admission” of being a writer, and now fully flowered in this unpublished piece of shit, which arrived in their inbox accompanied by a puling request for editorial feedback, which is either disingenuous and actually just an excuse to show off, or it’s a sign of utter self-delusion about why both Asimov’s and Harper’s have rejected this work of quiet genius.

This is the path you tread, friends, up a hill made up of the stones of your own desperate, yearning words, spoken not in the spirit of communication or occupational fellowship, but in the simple service of ego.

When you enter that cocktail party what-do-you-do conversion, be proud of your work in tech support, or if this is impossible, then be gently self-deprecating.

Do not attempt to become a professional writer from the outside in.  That only happens when someone decides to pay you (more than once) for doing this thing we love so much.

Gina: a cat from 1999 until today

Hers was a strange, aborted life on this side of the sun, filled with strange visions through windows forever cloudy with urban fog.  The time we had with her was a custodianship undertaken with no false hope or deluded promise, only love without condition that took no effort to give or receive.

Each day with Gina was a day spent asking for our hearts to be broken, and now, with mercy, they have been.

 

 

Why “Hackers” is actually a good movie

The picture above is a completely unauthorized screengrab from the 1995 film Hackers.  What we’re seeing is an image from the villain’s computer as he researches the divorce of our hero’s parents.

By googling certain phrases from the text on the right side, one can determine that the copy is from a real 1994 New York City court case, “Ilya Gotlib v. Lia Ratsutsky” which concerns the complicated divorce of two Russian nationals living in the U.S.  How or why the New York City justic system allows its official court documents to be used by Hollywood for screen filler is probably due to some hippy fair-use public-record thing.

One of the reasons I still love to watch Hackers is to revisit the perspective of the young proto-geeks living in the age of dial-up.  I love to imagine what their reaction would be to our own brave new digital world, where among other wonders one can find 15-year-old civil court records based on random snatches of prose.

Our world is the world that Lord Nikon and Acid Burn dreamt about,  and it’s people like them, with their vision of a shiny, blinking future all wired up, who made it both possible and necessary.  It’s important for me to see the technological present as, in many ways, a fully formed realization of someone’s fantasy back in 1995, instead of just an imperfect and transitory phase on the way to something better.  I am living in Crash Override’s future.  He didn’t get to see it; he was just a character in a movie.

The other great thing about Hackers is, I guess, a little more personal.  There are moments in a computer engineer’s life, often very brief and rare, when the system he is dealing with, this dumb impenetrable wall of instructions and silicon, blooms open in his mind like a flower, and the machine suddenly holds no more secrets.  He doesn’t need to take apart every piece of it to gain an atomic, bottom-up understanding of its workings, not anymore.

The system reveals to the user the pattern of its being, and the beautiful machine of the human mind, trained millenia ago on predatory savannahs, is able to take this and run with it.  Once the pattern is revealed, once the creator’s hand is seen, everything else about the system, the programming language, the operating system, the idiosyncratic hardware, it all just becomes an “implementation detail”.

I’m talking about when you really grok a system.

This feeling, this rush of silicon communion is almost indescribable.  But I believe that Hackers has done as good a job at capturing it as any work of fiction has ever done.

Now, this movie has taken a lot of flak for using surreal animations to represent how the heroes intellectualize the systems they deal with.  But as has been mentioned before, the real, literal business of hacking is unphotogenic in the extreme.

It was never the filmmakers’ goal to teach you anything about computers.  They’re trying to paint you a cinematic portait of the inner emotional experience of applying a specialized set of skills to a specific genre of problem.  Obviously such a thing can only be done with visual metaphors.

If I had to identify why, independent of my own sense of joy in the film, Hackers is an unsuccessful movie, both aesthetically and commercially, it’s because the language it uses to communicate its message is the language of the digital laity, the audience in general, who believes that working with computers is like working with adding machines, i.e. fundamentally unaware of how deeply emotional the experience can be.

And the people who do understand this are not the set that typically understands visual language or metaphor.  The criticisms of this film from this side are generally variations on the theme “Hacking doesn’t look like that”.  Of course it doesn’t.  Nothing in movies actually looks like what it is.  But we computer types don’t get that.  The reason we’re so good with computers is because we’re all borderline Asberger’s and have sacrificed our entire right hemispheres in order to better think systematically.

But even this essential aesthetic inadequacy in Hackers, how its medium is fundamentally inscrutable by the only audience that could hope to understand its message, this still deepens my appreciation for it.  Because it took the risk.  It pushed the geek point of view out onto the screen, and it took a stab at how to capture it on celluloid.  I appreciate that, and I wish it happened more often.

And the fact that it tried that hard and still failed is strong evidence of how wonderfully unattainably complex such a worldview can be.

This movie proves through its failure the very points it tries to make about the rich inner life of software, and about the depths of the geek’s soul.

Subway Howl

Winter doesn’t mean anything except as a reminder of time passing, and of our old hands that shiver and dry out and don’t care anything about the calendar.  Don’t speak about the temperature, which is like judging a book by its cover and makes you sound like an asshole.

What I’m concerned about is where you think you’re going today, little children in puffy coats, and little women in puffy coats, and warriors of irony in puffy coats.  We’re all going there together, you and I, together on our separate errands that are just so goddamned important, and doesn’t that bother you?

No, fear keeps us apart.  All it takes is one started conversation with a human that turns out to be a devil person that forgets their humanity, and we swear to never speak again.

But if we were truly afraid we’d band together against the wolves or the impending disaster or upside-down Poseidon, or whatever plot device awaits us once we get to Manhattan.  In our case, it’s just cold dry hands and the boredom of blank pages and old tired music.  If we truly knew fear, together we would form a praxis group and divide up responsibilities like a band of brothers should.

You, you pass around a tiny bottle of aloe vera skin lotion.  You, unwrap your Soho scarf and divide its hipster warmth around a dozen more hands.  You, show us all the correct way to coil our earbuds, so that we can stow them away and listen to You, you with the high voice and distant-faced boyfriend, tell us about why you rest your head on his shoulder while he looks out the window at the dark tunnel walls.

Where do you think you’re going?

How to find my blog on Google

Here are my rankings in various Google searches (as of post time):

• nine inch nails rock opera (top 2)
• beowulf gawain thunderdome (top)
• rock it subfocus action movie (top)
• musical theatre frequency analysis (top)
• film noir masculinity (3rd)
• fbi phase 1 (3rd)
• fbi meet and greet (3rd)
• using your fucking eyes (5th)

Thank you, everyone.

My annual Halloween poem: “A Tolerant Kind of Fright”

What can you do with a monster in chains
That doesn’t get everyone mad?
What is the point of mad scientist claims
If everyone thinks you’re a cad?

What should you do if you’re forced to become
A beast once a month with the moon?
It’s not like you could instead change in the sun
And have your nights free for “Dexter” and “Glee”
As long as you’re up before noon.

You’re bound, is my point, by the rules of the game.
You don’t deserve pitchforks and mobs!
You’re helpless as gremlins when gripped by the mane.
If only a mummy could sob!

There aren’t a great number of jobs, don’t you see,
For horrible hunchbacks and thralls.
They’re all just “support-hyphen-lab’ratory”.
They don’t have a hope of an increase in scope
In their workplace assignments at all.

What can we ask of a composting wretch,
Who’s crawled all the way from his tomb?
He’s hungry!  He’s forced to eat what he can catch!
Wouldn’t you be if you died last June?

And don’t get me started on monsters from space,
The “Old Ones” or “aliens” or “grays”.
They’ve made a great effort to come to this place.
The least we can do is stop being rude
And forgive them their strange, probing ways.

So this Halloween let’s try to hold back
Our usual premature screams.
Don’t jump to conclusions.  Please take a new tack.
The demon is not what he seems.

He’s one of a group who are trapped in a role
As tight and restrictive as nuns’.
They don’t actually want your little kid’s soul.
They’re just saying the lines written multiple times
By Hollywood fools who think hokey is cool.
So don’t be too mean (but still run).

Our dependence on the shopkeep

This was my unsuccessful entry into McSweeney’s Internet Tendency‘s contest for new writers.

I set it up like this:

Dear Sirs and Madams -

Please accept the below column for consideration in McSweeney’s. I am a huge fan of the material with which you are associated, and I am very glad to have this opportunity to be associated with it.

If you’ve ever read The Confederacy of Dunces, you might realize, as I did, that Ignatius Reilly could have been the world’s greatest blogger were it not for the accident of time.

I envision a series of articles written from such a perspective as Mr. Reilly’s, with a little bit of The Extra Man‘s Henry Harrison throw in for volume (wait, were they the same character?). These would be on the normal stresses and irritations of modern urban living, seen through the eyes of a fat, lower-class, over-educated, loquacious, aristocratic idiot with access to the Internet via his local branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.

This would not be as much of a “character” column as you might think. The columns would be short, because our man’s writing style wears upon the brain, but I can promise you that my ability to find his point of view is extremely reliable.

And this was my entry:

The politics of everyday life are really quite impossible.

The gentleman who runs the tiny convenience store near my home was standing with his back to the door, facing the waist-high sink that is inexplicably (until today!) located behind the counter, and I got the distinct impression that he was micturating into it! Now what is a gentleman of high moral standing to do!

No matter that he immediately washed his hands and pretended that nothing had happened. I simply depend on this man to supply me with cheese-flavored snacks and cola. So I am loathe to make an enemy of him by confronting such a distasteful situation head-on (as it were)! The power, I am sad to say, is almost entirely in his hands, along with his genitals on this particular day.

Thus it has always been in human society: those who control our simple wants and pleasures are soon drunk with the power of it. I am half tempted to cease my patronization!

There are, as I am sure he realizes, no less than seven such establishments in the surrounding three blocks. You would think that the simple realities of economic competition would drive prices to zero and the quality of service to unparalleled heights of orgasmic delight!

I suppose one could say that we are responsible for the fomentation of our own decline via the simple mechanism of self-imposed dependence on the creature comforts. That by having no more sophisticated requirements than a crunchy way to experience the simulated flavor of cheddar, we implictly engender a society with similarly retarded sophistication.

To this point of view I take great umbrage, for as I must habitually remind my many hangers-on at the 4th Avenue Dunkin’s Donut Cafeteria in Bay Ridge, a truly great society would treat each citizen in accordance with his own personal greatness. Such a society would not visit upon him the consequences (punishments!) of a life less great than his own.

For some of us, even taking into consideration our own chosen sweet and salty gustatory comforts, are Truly Great Men, and it is through such great men that the future of the species is improved. And we will neither grovel for the resources needed to fuel a Truly Great Life, nor will we settle for less than we require.

I didn’t win.

Three reasons you won’t laugh at “Young Frankenstein” after watching “Son of Frankenstein”

Ah, Young Frankenstein.  So zany, so Wilder, so Brooks.  A seminal work for Brooks (despite a rare absence from in front of the camera) because of the clarity and honesty of the comedy, and arguably his most beloved by my generation.

The film also serves to kick-start and define several of what will become Gene Wilder’s signature motifs.  Here we see infidelity as kind of a good (and comedic) thing, a la The Woman in Red and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex.  We also experience exactly one non sequitur musical number, as seen later in Haunted Honeymoon and Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother.

Now go watch the 1939′s Son of Frankenstein.

Obviously, Young Frankenstein parodies large swathes of the classic horror genre.  But there can be little doubt that Son was the rubric for Young.

There is the neat little mustache on our hero.  There is the medical-expert descendant pooh-poohing his infamous ancestor’s work with zombiism, who takes up the work within moments of seeing the castle and the cool lab.

But most interesting are the three following elements, which once you know their antecedents in Son of Frankenstein, you won’t be able to stop thinking about their sickening implications, despite the jokes made in their names.

#1. What hump?

In Young Frankenstein, Igor is a “hunchback”, loosely based on the character Fritz from the original Frankenstein, but later to evolve into his own multi-parented amalgam of images. Young Frankenstein’s Igor is playing on the image that we all share, and Marty Feldman has big googley eyes, and the hump moves around, and we all think it’s very funny.

The corresponding character in Son of Frankenstein is Ygor, played by a strangely blond Bela Lugosi.  Dracula and Frankenstein had been re-released as a double-feature in 1938, and our pals at Universal decided that Lugosi and Karloff together (albeit under a different director) could be dynamite.  So here we are.

Ygor is in fact deformed.  He walks with a lurch and with his shoulder up and his head to one side much like a hunchback.  But he is no such thing.

He looks the way he does because he survived his own lynching.  For graverobbing.

His neck was broken and mangled when the noose caught his plunge through the trap.  But he did not die.  He grew a beard and made friends with a monster to seek his revenge.

Every movement he makes uses nerves that still function despite being crushed between gnarled, eastern European vertebrae.  Every movement that he makes, that he’s able to still make, causes him pain.  And that pain reminds him that everyone that lives in the town where he lives tried to kill him.  Just because he was trying to make some spare money by recycling the recently departed for the good of science.

#2. This is the twentieth century, Kemp. Monsters are passe, like ghosts and goblins.

Young Frankenstein‘s Inspector Kemp has the eyepatch with the monocle and the impenetrable accent.  But what we all remember the most is that crazy mechanical arm that is never explained.

Inspector Krogh in Son of Frankenstein explains it.

I was but a child at the time, about the age of your own son. The monster had escaped and was ravaging the countryside…killing, maiming, terrorising. One night, he burst into our house. My father took a gun and fired at him… but the savage brute sent him crashing to a corner. Then he grabbed me by the arm. One doesn’t easily forget, Herr Baron, an arm torn out by the roots. No, I… My lifelong ambition was to have been a soldier. But for this… I, who command seven gendarmes in a little mountain village… might have been a general.

Ha ha!  So behind Kemp’s hilarious cigar-lighting gag in Young Frankenstein lies the image of a child’s arm being torn off its body.  How droll.

Interestingly enough, the idea of keeping spare darts stuck in the false arm was lifted unaltered from Son of Frankenstein.  But Inspector Krogh is not making a joke when he does this.  He is trying to constantly remind the new Baron of the consequences of tampering in God’s domain.  The darts are arrows pointing down at how bad and how serious his kind of science can be.

#3. It reaches the soul when words are useless.

Freddy uses a violin melody to call and sedate the monster (accompanied by Igor) after it escapes.  Frau Blucher implies towards the end of the film that the tune has a supernatural connection to the members of the Frankenstein family and the legion creatures they make.

This motif’s counterpart in Son of Frankenstein is also a clever plot device, but it is less hand-waved away.  Here, we see that in the years that Ygor spent alone with the monster, after the original Frankenstein but before his son, he was carefully plotting his revenge.  With Skinner-like specificity, he has conditioned the monster to commit murder when he hears particular melodies.

These melodies are played by Ygor on some traditional reeded instrument that can be heard throughout the valley, which allows Ygor to exact his revenge on the eight men who condemned him to his broken-necked life of pain and ostracism, while simultaneously providing him with an audible alibi for the times of the murders.

It’s brilliant movie-making, because the first time watching the movie, you’re completely surprised at the connection drawn between Ygor’s suspicious behavior and the monster’s strikes.

But the second time through, you know what the melody means, and you get a little sick every time you hear it played in the background of dialog or whatever innocuous little scene is happening.  You know that a few hills over, a seven-foot tall semi-decomposed electric zombie is crushing a burgomaster into Romanian salsa, for the simple crime of prosecuting a criminal.

In conclusion

Obviously, Wilder and Brooks are making these juxtapositions intentionally.  Their talent, one could argue, for all of their careers, is being able to turn really painful concepts into comedy.

But I don’t think modern audiences understand the references that are being made.  In Young Frankenstein, we have a case where the subtlety of the humor works against it.  And we have a case in Son of Frankenstein where the quality of the storytelling makes parody very difficult indeed.

Action movie screenplay written just to showcase “Rock It” by Sub Focus (excerpt)

Cast:
Black Peter – young Taye Diggs
Ruth – Scarlet Johansson
Maggie – Chiaki Kuriyama
Greaser – Charlie Day
The Colonel – a fat Tom Hanks with white hair like Colonel Sanders

The suggested timings provided below are from the official album release of the song, but you can hear the song (with different timings) here.

(© me, right now)

Love Song for Buster Keaton (it doesn’t rhyme)

Everything’s old, and then it gets new again.
The old isn’t bad, but it’s not what we want.
My mother says old is just new with old clothes on.
But even kids know what the old cannot be.

My eyes see themselves and wish they saw new things.
But once you are new, you start growing old.
So why not indulge them and show them some new things,
Things that are so old they’ve just sprung anew.

It’s good to be old but only if we are.
The young want the old to seem newer than they.
And "new" doesn’t mean the same thing as "living".
Life is a thing that lives where it wants.

Our hearts they are born old. Their jobs require patience.
And still they are filled with a light at the new.
A light like the sky, like a feather not sinking,
When you show your heart something so old it’s new.

How did it feel making new things that olden
Into great big new things at which hearts take delight.
Did new things back then seem to live in a new way
That made them expect that they’d live again soon?

I hope that they knew that their love for their new thing
Would clutch at my heart despite being old.
Or maybe because it was old, it "became" for me,
"Becoming" like I did when I first turned old.

I think that I see in their bright black-white new thing,
The shimmering life that is me when I’m old.

This poem’s about new things that used to be old,
That used to be new things, so loved and so few.