This happy hardy little gourd made it all the way to Thanksgiving from the first few weeks of October. I bought it at the store from a cardboard box filled to the brim with them, carefully selecting it from among the other gourds by taking my time, looking for just the right size and shape to complement my little doorway. The big box itself was a cheerful visualization of the harvest season, and I found myself brightening up every time I came home to it, which is just the way I planned it: that is the essence behind seasonal decorations.
I finally picked it up this weekend to throw it away, because it had gone soft and mushy from the inside out. The stem popped off as I picked it up, and the round little pumpkin quickly rolled away from me and off the porch, bouncing down each of the four front steps to the old yellow house, landing on the sidewalk. I felt like it was running its' last, final steps to freedom, and I took it as a sign that it's beautiful but brief life had indeed come to an end. What an adventure!
I fucking hate musicals, especially the typically overblown, histrionic, tourist fare that's on Broadway. When my stepmother asked me to see one of her choosing during a recent trip to New York, I declined. In fact, I was horrified. What was once a huge bestseller in book publishing (my trade of choice), is now set by some idiot into a series of inane and jarring karoake-style songs. You know the kind: just when you start to get into the story, someone starts warbling their head off, completely interrupting the action. Why? WHY? WHY?! It's so insane. There's flashing lights, weirdo smoke machines, lots of rainbows and glitter and shiny moving parts everywhere you look (and I love big gay shows), so the tourists don't get pissed off at the $60 price tag.
Yeah, right. I don't trust the opinion of anyone who comes to see a Broadway show in an ill-fitting skort, wearing an "Asian lady who hates sunlight" hat (nod to "Family Guy" for that line, often set brilliantly to song), which further obscures any decent view you might have had when you first sat down in your seat. It's a horrid slap in the face to any of the native element in the crowd, like some poor slob wearing ratty jeans and a baseball cap to a fancy restaurant. Take off your fucking hat, douche! Show some respect for masters of the arts. Jeezus.
As far as I'm concerned, the only musicals I've ever truly enjoyed are South Park: The Movie and Team America: World Police, and both had the added bonus of lampooning major American actors and our sometimes dubious foreign policies. I'm sure I'd love their actual Broadway musical, The Book of Mormon, but when I requested seeing that as a show for what was supposed to be part of "my" 40th birthday gift, it was vetoed by my family for not being mainstream and/or cheesy enough, but more about my rotten birthdays later on, in December, when it finally comes around close to Christmas, a time when I also get gypped out of any real, legitimate gift that may cater to any one of my one hundred million interests. Uh, thanks. Stay tuned, folks. I'm just getting warmed up.
The Evil Borg Kitty "Mecha-Anchovy", my first real foe.
Enemies are hardly new to humankind. It pretty much happens whenever there are more than three people in a room, and because of a basic principle called "factioning", the producers of the day stage morality plays in the guise of "reality" t.v. shows, catering to the interests of the drunk and/or mentally ill among us. Me, I prefer the classics in those old school renditions by Shakespeare, but as a publisher, I respect all revisions, updates, and new editions of this ever appealing and exciting classic tale of Good vs. Evil. Who will win?!
Harbinger of Gloom, the evil "Doom Shroom"!
It's all so falsely cliffhanging that students since time immemorial have created drinking games about spot societal clichés to pass the time; time that would be excruciating without a serious crutch to numb and dull the senses, which puts us on pretty much the same level as the morality tales' participants. And just like my college days, I still prefer cartoon enemies over the real, dull, and repetitive kind. After all, new foes are so fun to create, aren't they? Witness my ascent on the game Bejeweled Blitz, as I climb the ladder up, up, and away! The evil Tiki Gods get angrier and more powerful as I rise, and also, strangely, boringly, achingly repetitive. Thanks for watching with me.
I had a post-Apocalytpic dream about an Alien Yeti invasion=I won!
Any master storyteller knows bringing your audience in so close that you can almost feel them sitting on your lap is the hallmark that you've crossed the divide separating you from them. That intimacy is the biggest luxury artists and writers have, something lost in the sensory experience we have as moviegoers. It's a closeness we don't feel watching speeding images projected onto a large screen in quite the same way that we sense a closeness to characters brought to life through a book that's inches from our very face. We breathe them in, like we do the smell of ink and paper, holding a physical object in our hands, in a scale that's designed especially for our senses. The slow crafting of a story produced from the pacing of a book gives our human brains a time frame we can easily adjust to, turning pages slowly (or not), maybe going back to reread something again just to get it right in our head, or pausing to ruminate on the picture the author has just created that illuminates something in way previously unknown; it's that loving lingering that give t.v. shows and movies cause for frustration in hardcore book people like myself.
The director has already called the shots, creating their own world from words made precious in our minds through time, the way books and stories become. We get tripped up by niggling details like the anachronism of an actors' bad hairdo, let alone big story elements like time and space. That suspension of belief is the bane of many a lesser talents existence. It's what every classic, timeless, great story hangs upon; the ability for me to hold you right in the palm of my hand, where I need you to be, so you can take in the story richly from every angle, drinking it in, letting it soak into you, so that the story also becomes a part of you. Some people have it, some people spend years chasing it, some people try to learn it, and the rest become our wonderful audience who we spend our lives wooing in a necessary dance that exists between the creator and the viewer.
The freedom we give a reader to transpose what we've written or drawn into their own imaginative spaces is something that a t.v. director can't do, because they have to "draw" a character and tell a defined story in a half an hour. It's really hard. Books also have the same deadline. We must make something to print on the presses, and the edition that lives on your shelf is semi-permanent, at least until we reprint it and possibly revise it, just like a film is "cut" and released; the story stays that way until somewhat remakes it, which is way more expensive than reprinting a book. Genres are troublesome, too. I hate romances for the exact reasons I outlined above: I simply don't buy it. Love is something best left to poets, because it's like trying to explain the color purple to a blind person. What does color mean to them? I've seen a few really good adaptations of books to movies, but it's something best left to a truly gifted artist. Maurice Sendak wisely advised Spike Jonez to make his own Wild Things instead of trying to lavishly re-create his work into a movie, a world made specifically for children as a book, functioning best on the level it was designed for, and he spoke like a true master. The formats are too different to reconcile the gap that exists. So when I see movies that have characters who feel so real, I actually know people just like them, it's a rare experience. I found this gem of a movie called Gigante that's the most flawlessly real depiction of actual human love than any other movie I've seen about it. There's just no false notes or wrong moves, because every heart-wrenching scene feels exactly like a young man crushing hard and falling deeply in love. There's no bullshit CGI effects, no bombastic declarations delivered hammily or wildly desperate acts for her attention (because our hero is very shy around his lady love), nor fake showiness of his affections. This is a real story that takes place in a real world you know exists, because it's the same thing that's happened to you. He's an average guy (but not to us), working cruddy minimum wage jobs for a buck (just like we have), falling in love with an average girl (but not to him, because she's his whole world), who gets mistreated because they don't love her like he does (or we do). It's that perfect.
