Category: Angst

Lawrence

January 8, 2008 /

He stumbles out of the house and falls to his knees, wiping his hands over and over on his bloody jeans. Smoke’s pouring out of the basement. It smells of hickory, myrrh and scorched wiring.

“Jesus, Lawrence,” says Marti, hollow around the eyes. “Tell me what happened, give me some reason I don’t have to arrest you…”

“You don’t understand!” says Lawrence. “The spell went all wrong–those aren’t them in there. Those aren’t my girls!”

“Not anymore,” says Marti sadly, and pulls out his cuffs.

From the house across the street, the doppelgang watches, hair in pigtails, eyes like wounds.

Yesterday a man was arrested for murdering his stepdaughters in some kind of ritual. It’s a horrible story. It also sounds way too much like a Clive Barker ripoff novel.

I always thought Rowling gave arithmancy short shrift

December 28, 2007 /

Stories I have written that revolve around invented or reinterpreted methods of divination: Stella, Jaboullei, Rob, Shekel and Jewel. I was kind of surprised it was this few–I feel like it’s one of the structures to which I keep returning. There’s another one coming Monday, if you hadn’t guessed.

I think the reason I keep coming back to this is a variation on the existential dread I feel when considering the persistence of objects (eg the lives of sapient dishes): the amount of potential information in the world, and how quickly our ability to capture and interpret it is growing, and how insignificant that capability will always be–in an obscure way, these things terrify me. They also thrill me. Look at what we can discover! If time and distance are the universe’s crypto, divination is the original side channel attack.

I also live in constant fear of side channel attacks, by the way, to the point where I have resigned myself to much-more-likely primary channel attacks. I kind of never want to be even mildly famous, as that would destroy what flimsy comfort I take in anonymity.

Anyway, you’ll know I’ve gutted the shark on this theme when I write the one about logymancy. Meanwhile I want to do more of these little collect-and-explain entries; I think they’d be a better point of entry to Anacrusis for new or hesitant readers than just the sheer blank mass of the archives. When one of my best friends refers to my writing corpus as “a stupid amount” and my own mother is too intimidated to read them, I am pretty much failing to sell my product.

This is just so my grandmother doesn’t have to see the word “fuck” as soon as she opens my journal page. Wait! Fuck!

November 28, 2007 /

So I opened Facebook and saw this much of an ad on my screen:

Jennifer Aniston's face, over the text 'Help Save Her Life.'

And I was like, “What, does she need emergency reverse liposuction? I mean, obviously she DOES, but is that going to save her–oh.” Because by this point I had copied the image out and could see the first frame of the animated gif, to which it apparently never resets:

Little bald Madelyn is fighting CANCER. ASS.

Hi! St. Jude? Call me. We need to talk about this concept called “above the fold.”

This is for everybody who misses how the Internet used to bag on Studio 60

October 30, 2007 /

The sitcom is killing sketch comedy.

Maria was emailing around this one Muppets bit from Seth Rogen’s stint on SNL and she apologized if anyone had already seen it, but, as she pointed out, “nobody watches SNL anymore.” This is hardly news. SNL’s function now is not so much to be watched as to give Andy Samberg Emmys for songs that have a penis joke. The only reason I’d even set it playing on the Tivo was because they had Spoon on, marking the first and only time I’ve deliberately watched the show for the music.

The rest of the show was factory standard, a very careful reenactment of the weekly SNL ritual (is it really a coincidence that part of the show actually airs on Sunday?). The freshest joke was a Macgyver reference. Macgyver ceased production before some of you were born.

I’ve mentioned here before that sketch comedy is unprofitably hard; not coincidentally, I was talking about Studio 60 at the time, like I’m about to do now.

Studio 60 had a running thing where one of the writer-performers wrote and led a commedia dell’arte sketch in several episodes, evidently so Aaron Sorkin could demonstrate that he took Intro to Theater History. The focus groups hated it but the head writer heroically kept it in until it could build an audience (“Matt, Matt! This week two guys in Dallas liked it!”). There are a few problems here.

  1. Commedia dell’arte isn’t funny.
  2. At least, not in and of itself, and not anymore; humor needs context, and a modern audience–even an audience that took Intro to Theater History–doesn’t have the same context as one composed of 16th-century Venetians.
  3. Dated and ritualized forms of comedy getting inexplicably more popular every week is the kind of thing that can only happen in fiction.
  4. Unfortunately for Studio 60, it can’t happen believably even there.

Now, could you write a funny sketch that incorporated the stock types and exaggerated physicality of commedia dell’arte? I doubt it. What you could do is write a ten-minute play or one-act, which gives you the time to introduce the conventions to the audience, set things up going in a direction that the tropes predict, upend the whole thing and finish with a telling and funny point about the form’s influence on modern writing.

Studio 60 tried to go a lot of places, but that wasn’t one of them. Sorkin, bless him, doesn’t do reexamination; he does reverence.

This is where I get back to SNL, as revered an institution as exists in modern television, nowhere moreso than within itself. Like Studio 60, it can’t bear self-examination; the brand of comedy in which it traffics is built high and shakily on mannerisms that date back to Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, or even Abbott and Costello. It persists entirely due to inertia and the occasional breakout YouTube bit (ever noticed, by the way, that those look and sound like nothing else on the show?).

Now, when every network ran three or four sitcoms and they all made use of the same stylized rhythm as sketch, that was enough: they supplied each other with context. But sitcoms don’t work that way anymore. Poetically, it’s due in part to Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night that shows like Arrested Development, The Office and My Name is Earl were able to take hold and eventually shatter the studio-audience / three-camera format.

I misstated my thesis at the beginning; it’s not so much that sitcoms are killing sketch as that sitcoms have been its life support, and now they’re pulling plugs out, one by one. If the dependency holds, SNL has about as much time left as Two and a Half Men. Both of them are rigid guardians of their genre and flagship shows. Personally, as Matt Boyd once said about syndicated comics, I want to punch a hole in that boat.

I use the word “spook” in this entry because I am currently obsessed with William Gibson’s Spook Country. I’ll write about that too, eventually.

September 12, 2007 /

The quarterly investing magazinelet I get from my IRA holder has, as its latest cover line, “The Best-Laid Plans.” Like Anse Bundren, I don’t think they know the rest.

Plans are worthless. I had half an evening free from work tonight and it confused me: I had kind of forgotten what else to do with myself. I haven’t billed a mere 40 hours since the (four-day) week in which I flew back from London; last week–of which I theoretically spent half vacationing–I billed 60. It’s all for the same hideous, endless project, the kind you hear spook stories about from people who have spent too long working with computers. It was supposed to finally launch tonight, and I–as the project lead–hit every target that was required by 6:00. At 6:02 the client decided that two more problems were worth delaying launch for. By 8:30 (with my Tuesday friends waiting in the living room) I’d fixed those too. Guess whether the launch happened!

I need a vacation; the last one I had was nice, but it amounted to what most people would call a “weekend.” I’m running bufferless in all my endeavors and I obviously haven’t had time to write anything here. I also haven’t had time to get a haircut, pick up my new glasses or practice for a fairly important test.

Boo hoo, I get paid well to work on my couch. Pretend there’s a good segue here about writing, buffers, responsibility and personal milestones.

I miss MC Masala and I’m sad to see its archives disappearing from the Inside Bay Area site. Obviously, Sumana’s still blogging, but her column was different: the early ones had a conspiratory enthusiasm, as if the author was sneaking you in to see how columns work and wasn’t supposed to be there herself; the later ones displayed an enjoyable assurance and a growing set of tools for telling stories.

I hope she posts her own digital archive soon. Or (he murmured hypocritically) perhaps a book-on-demand?

August 9, 2007 /

Sneakers, my favorite heist movie, features some plot elements that involve the NSA. It came out in 1992, when that agency wasn’t particularly well-known–o halcyon days!–and so it has this little exchange between Robert Redford (“Martin Bishop”) and Timothy Busfield (“Dick Gordon”) to introduce it to the audience.

Bishop: Sorry to waste your time, gentlemen. I don’t work for the government.
Gordon: We know. (Flashes ID) National Security Agency.
Bishop: Oh, you’re the guys I hear breathing on the other end of my phone.
Gordon: No, that’s the FBI. We’re not chartered for domestic surveillance.

Ah ha ha ha ha! Ha ha! Ah ha ha ha ha. Heh.

Bishop: Oh, so you just overthrow governments–set up friendly dictators.
Gordon: (chuckling) No, that’s the CIA. We protect our government’s communications–try and break the other fellas’ codes. We’re the good guys, Marty.
Bishop: Gee, I can’t tell you what a relief that is. Dick.

And now it is later

August 1, 2007 /

I read the arrival time on my ticket as the departure time. That is what I did. That is the stupidest and most expensive mistake I have ever made.

My housemates kindly refused to let me heave all my luggage to Heathrow myself, and so we set out together with a bag apiece at a little after 10 am. We took the express and I was at the check-in counter by 11:15, smirking at the former self who had worried about transportation time and long lines. There was no line! There was only a brusque man explaining that my flight was not at 1:00, it had been at 10:30.

I explained that I had still been on the first of several public transportation routes at 10:30.

The brusque man directed me to the ticketing counter.

I got on standby for the next flight for 200 bucks, and I did end up on it, and my seat was actually one of the best on the plane. I completely missed the last plane to Louisville from O’Hare, of course, but got on a different standby flight to Lexington and Saint Maria drove out to those hinterlands in the middle of the night to pick me up.

It should be noted that my seat on the Lexington flight was also impossibly good. Here’s what I have learned about American Airlines: reserve a seat and get fucked, or get on standby for infinite leg room and an unobstructed window view. I’m never flying on a reserved ticket again! Wait, no, I said “on a reserved ticket” when I meant “anywhere.”

My original mistake almost ended up much more costly than I anticipated. The somewhat hilarious coda is that, during my panicky evening in O’Hare, I had to make a number of pay phone calls to David Flora and Maria, trying to figure out whether I would have to stay overnight in Chicago in order to get a morning flight to Louisville. I had forgotten that trying to call a nonlocal number (like, say, any cell phone ever) from a pay phone requires more quarters than I could have held in my cupped hands, so I had to charge all these to my credit card. This meant swiping the card directly on the phone, punching in the number on the keypad, and reading it aloud to the operator before I could connect.

Apparently someone wandered by and listened to me obligingly reading out the number, expiration date, CV2, et cetera, and proceeded to charge an amount greater than my entire credit limit to the card. Capital One actually noticed and denied it; their overenthusiastic fraud department often made things inconvenient in London, but my attitude toward them is much warmer now. I’ll miss my old card number, though, which I’ve had memorized for almost ten years. Farewell, 5291071505966037! May you serve Internet in poor decision-making as well as you did me.

There is a subtext to this story: I had three friends in London to help take my luggage all the way to Heathrow, buy me yogurt and let me send emergency emails from their phones. Those emails went to more friends, one of whom was willing to put me up in Chicago, another of whom was willing to drive to tiny airports late at night just so I could get home when I wanted. I traveled across seven time zones and I had people offering me help at every step. Who cares how much ticket changes or credit card scammers might cost me? I’m rich.

After I type this title I am going to shower for about a week

June 19, 2007 /

Fourteen hours ago I was on top of an Alp. Three hours ago I was getting lengthily hassled by Immigration about my months-long residence in the United Kingdom with no visible means of support. Eventually they decided they couldn’t really deport me and grumpily let me back in, but not without permanently detaining–get ready for it–my London library card. That is the pettiest thing I can imagine! I am going to write a book about petty people just so I can use that as an epitome!

But the hassling and bag search and back rooms and subsequent two-hour night bus ride don’t really take away from the experience of looking down on Innsbruck from four miles up (a good quarter of which we hiked) with a really good song on my headphones, learning the secret of Hafelekar summit. The secret is this: it’s fucking covered in poop and bugs. I guess the mountain goats and snow rabbits just love to use the lookout point as their special private time space, but man. They grow the flies big on Hafelekar summit.