Archive for 2010

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Another Underrated Movie

January 29, 2010

My boss is writing a script right now and reading over some scripts in order to “get into the mode.”  One of the scripts we have is I Heart Huckabees, which I know was a very polarizing film but I, as someone who finds existential humor probably way funnier than it is, freaking ADORED it.  Mark Wahlberg being funny=always great.  Like crashing parties.  It’s just math!

BACK TO: TOMMY AND ALBERT

TOMMY (SMILES):

What are you doing tomorrow?

ALBERT:

I was thinking of chaining myself to a bulldozer.  Do you want to come?

TOMMY:

What time?

ALBERT:

Like one o’clock.

TOMMY:

That sounds good.  Should I bring my own chains?

ALBERT:

We always do.

Fade out.

And some wisdom from aggressive yet funny man, director David O. Russell.

Q: News feels largely like entertainment at this point, doesn’t it?  I mean, that line between journalism and entertainment gets blurred more every day, and i feel like the incarnation we’re experiencing now began with teh first Gulf War, when CNN started with the graphics and theme music.  Now who can tell the difference between the news and Entertainment Tonight?

David: You should see the morning shows out here in LA, where the girls practically wear bikinis.  The most popular morning show has this guy who’s like 55 or 60 with these two super hot girls.  I remember seeing it after the Bush/Gore election, and I was like, Well, that’s why Bush won.  Just look at this morning show and it tells you everything you need to know about why Bush won.  It’s all in the little tops and the giggles and the subtext is, “No thinking or questioning.”  People used to think our totalitarian future would look like Orwell’s 1984 or Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 411 with an oppressive police state — but the mind control turned out to be more insidious than that — it looks like “Wild on E!”

Posted in Conspiracy Theories | 1 Comment »

A Formula for Success

January 28, 2010

A Formula for Success

If you find yourself with a runaway hit (book, movie, television show) on your hands, the key to serializing while maintaining artistic integrity and increasing profits is to try to be determine the number of installments in the series as early on as possible and inform the fan base of said number of episodes soon after you’ve decided.  This way the excitement to the finale BUILDS in proportion to time as opposed to fizzles.

Good examples of this type of success:

The Harry Potter series

Seinfeld

Sex and the City

Lost

The Twilight Saga (that’s what it’s called, right?)

Star Wars

Another rule: if you are involved in a hit television show, the popularity of which is waning, and writers discuss one of the central couples having a baby, DOCTOR K THAT SHIT IMMEDIATELY!

Good examples of this type of failure:

Growing Pains

Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (hello, Vivian Deuce was like, at least 50 when she popped Nicky out)

Full House


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Unfinished Business

January 25, 2010

I once fantasized about putting all my unfinished writing into one document and publish it as “Unfinished Masterpieces,” or something similar. There is a genius in what is left undone, in letting the reader or viewer finish it. I remember part of a quote from the brilliant French movie Camille Claudel that expresses that sentiment much better than that. “It’s pure genius before…” Something like that. Michaelangelo repeatedly didn’t finish his sculptures, and these unfinished works are widely considered masterpieces. Not saying I’m Michaelangelo, but really, isn’t completion a myth anyway?

A new way to think about the unfinished:

“I see unrealized projects as the most important unreported stories in the art world. As Henri Bergson showed, actual realization is only one possibility surrounded by many others that merit close attention. There are many amazing unrealized projects out there, forgotten projects, misunderstood projects, lost projects, desk-drawer projects, realizable projects, poetic-utopian dream constructs, unrealizable projects, partially realized projects, censored projects, and so on. It seems urgent to remember certain roads not taken, and—in an active and dynamic, rather than nostalgic or melancholic way—transform some of them into propositions or possibilities for the future.”
-Hans Ulrich Obrist

This man is the quote most important art curator in the world, and an alien end quote, according to partner-in-conceptual-art-crime PS. So often when I’m evaluating texts for literary magazines (which I do, sometimes…I wear many hats) I think to myself, “This writer would have done her/himself such a favor if he/she had just cut it off two sentences earlier, instead of going into the whole, ‘And this incident with my grandparents is why I am afraid of bananas today.'” And so maybe everyone ought to quit while they’re ahead? Maybe you should always stop yourself two

Posted in I Hate Writing | 1 Comment »

James Wright

January 24, 2010

My boss’/my (?) literary agent turned me on to this poet…

Trying to Pray

This time, I have left my body behind me, crying
In its dark thorns.
Still,
There are good things in this world.
It is dusk.
It is the good darkness
Of women’s hands that touch loaves.
The spirit of a tree begins to move.
I touch leaves.
I close my eyes and think of water.

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Congrat…ulations?

January 21, 2010

My girl crush is engaged!

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January 19, 2010

Waiting for Law and Order SVU to come on so I can be lulled back to sleep by the sweet ramblings of Munch and the soothing voice of Mariska Hargitay.

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The Wee Hours

January 19, 2010

One of the only things I know by heart…

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones

When small birds sighed she would sigh back at them

Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one

the shapes a bright container can contain

Of her choice virtues, only God should speak

Or English poets who grew up on Greek

I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek

How well her wishes went

She stroked my chin

She taught me turn, and counter-turn, and stand

She taught me touch, that undulant white skin

I nibbled meekly from her proferred hand

She was the sickle, I, poor I, the rake

Coming behind her for her pretty sake

But what prodigious mowing we did make

Love likes a gander, and adores a goose

Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize

She played it quick, she played it light and loose

My eyes they dazzled at her flowing knees

Her several parts could keep a pure repose

Or one hip quiver, with a mobile nose

She moved in circles, and those circles moved

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay

I’m a martyr to a motion not my own

What’s freedom for?  To know eternity

I swear she cast a shadow white as stone

But who could count eternity in days?

These old bones live to learn her wanton ways

I measure time by how a body sways

(I’ve forgotten/not included the punctuation…shapes change when words become memories…)

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Amazing!

January 15, 2010

KM to ID, 10:04 AM Friday, January 15, 2010:

So I don’t usually have dreams that I remember, at least not good ones, but last night i had a dream that I was at a fancy book party for you and you were on the nyt best seller list. Every so often I have dreams that become real and I think this is one of them. Your book party is going to be baller.

Re: ID to KM, 10:56 AM Friday, January 15, 2010:

OMG!  That’s the best dream I’ve ever heard in my LIFE!  It may even top the one in which I was with some friends in a field of daisies and we dropped acid and then Gandhi gave a speech!  And it was fancy, too…amazing.

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A Question

January 15, 2010

If you’re a porn star, are your bikini waxes tax write-offs?

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Faces in the Water

January 13, 2010

Janet Frame is not a terribly well known writer outside literary circles, but she should be.  I’m always equal parts heartbroken and awed by her very personal approach to language.  Frame was mistakenly diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent eight years in and out of mental hospitals in New Zealand.  She was scheduled for a frontal lobotomy when a book of hers was nominated for a literature prize in New Zealand, and she was released.  The below is an excerpt from Faces in the Water, her “novel” about being institutionalized.

“There is no past present future.  Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.  I do not know if my experiences at Cliffhaven happened years ago, are happening now, or lie in wait for me in what is called the future.

I know that the linen room was very often my sanctuary.  I looked through its little dusty window upon the lower park and the lawns and trees and the distant blue strip of sea like sticky paper pasted edge to edge with the sky.  I wept and wondered and dreamed the abiding dream of most mental patients –– The World, Outside, Freedom; and foretasted too vividly the occasions I most feared –– electric shock treatment, being shut in a single room at night, being sent to Ward Two, the disturbed ward.  I dreamed of the world because it seemed the accepted thing to do, because I could not bear to face the thought that not all prisoners dream of freedom; the prospect of the world terrified me: a morass of despair violence death with a thin layer of glass spread upon the surface where Love, a tiny crab with pincers and rainbow shell, walked delicately ever sideways but getting nowhere, while the sun –– like one of those woolly balls we made at occupational therapy by winding orange wool on a circle of cardboard –– rose higher in the sky its tassels dropping with flame threatening every moment to melt the precarious highway of glass.  And the people: giant patchworks of color with limbs missing and parts of their mind snipped off to fit them into the outline of the free pattern.”

And a hero of mine, Dorothy Parker’s review of the book in Esquire:

“It is always fascinating to read of the insane –– but there is a deeper exercise in a book which treats them not poetically or comfortably, but as they are and as they are treated.  Faces in the Water is a brilliantly written book.”

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