Nobody Knows Anything

Danny Gregory put up a post asking why there isn’t more political art reacting to current events:

It’s been three years since 9/11 and yet, (except for a couple of forgettable efforts from Springsteen and Bowie, a few made-for-TV movies, and Michael Moore’s upcoming Fahrenheit 911) artists don’t seem to have responded in a significant way that has caught on with the public. Where’s the first great anti-war hip hop song? The Whitney Biennial was great but if any of it referenced 9/11 and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, I missed it.

He’s right: there hasn’t been much in the way of war (or, specifically, anti-war) art. There are, I think, two reasons that we’re not seeing a lot of art dealing with current events. One is that people are scared. And the second is, they don’t really know what they’re scared of.
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Today’s NY Times has an article about the death of the sitcom. This is the kind of article that could write itself every few years. We’ve had periodic deaths of the sitcom and deaths of the dramatic one-hour. Every entertainment rag toots about this every so often—Tamar laughed about Entertainment Weekly’s eulogy to the sitcom not too long ago.

But this time, writer Bill Carter insists, it’s really really different:

Inside the offices of television comedy writers last week nobody was laughing.

For good reason. Amid the hoopla of last week’s presentations to advertisers of the broadcast networks’ prime-time lineups for the fall, it became strikingly clear that the network situation comedy was in as bad a state as it has been in more than 20 years.

It is not just that “Friends” and “Frasier” have left their weekly homes. The trend across all of network television is sharply away from comedy as a staple of entertainment programming, pushed aside by an audience bored by a tired sitcom format, changing industry economics and the rise of reality shows.

No network added to its comedy total in the fall schedules announced last week, one season after ABC and CBS added to their comedy totals. And two networks, ABC and in particular NBC, cut back.

NBC, which built its dominance in network ratings on the backs of hit comedies like “Cheers,” “Seinfeld” and “Friends” (and which at one point in the late 1990’s had 16 half-hour comedies on its schedule), will have only four comedies in its lineup next fall. That total will be NBC’s fewest since 1980, when it had only two, “Diff’rent Strokes” and “The Facts of Life.”

The impact throughout Hollywood is already profound. “In the comedy writers’ community, it’s pure panic,” said Sue Naegle, one of the heads of the television department for United Talent Agency, which employs scores of comedy writers and performers. She and agents from several other agencies said about 150 comedy writers would be out of work this fall. Those still working, they added, would be making much less money.

The article ascribes blame to the current sitcom drought to:

• the expense of running a sitcom versus a reality show and
• the tried-and-true sitcom format of “setup/joke and four-to-six characters sitting around a sofa on a Hollywood sound stage.”

How true. God knows I had said often enough that I cannot stand sitcoms, which require people to act like idiots and have 22 minute conflicts based on some stupid exaggeration or misunderstanding. And if that were all there were to sitcoms, he might have a point.

However, Bill Carter wrote this entire very long NY Times article without ever once mentioning Arrested Development, Scrubs, or Curb Your Enthusiasm. And when you stack the deck, you can come to any conclusions you want.

I cannot stand sitcoms, and yet Arrested Development is my favorite show. It contains several laugh-out-loud moments per episode, and there have been a few times when we’ve had to stop the show in order to recover from laughing. Scrubs is one of Darin’s favorite shows, and it manages to swing between the ridiculous and the sublime in a heartbeat, being both hysterical and affecting in the same scene. (If the Brendan Fraser episode from this year doesn’t win an Emmy, there is no justice. So I guess it won’t win an Emmy.) And I personally can’t stand Curb Your Enthusiasm, but I couldn’t stand Seinfeld either—and even I can tell that both shows are completely brilliant.

It’s possible to make a great comedic show. It’s just gotten a lot harder because the audience has seen thousands and thousands of hours of the stuff on their hundreds of channels, stupid. They’ve seen your stupid-ass sitcoms before with the stupid-ass one-liners and stupid-ass “Oh my gosh, Janie said WHAT?” variety of comedic setup.

It’s quite possible that neither Arrested Development nor Scrubs has caught fire because they require the viewer to have an IQ slightly larger than their resting heart rate, but both shows have rabid partisans who actively proselytize for them. (Curb Your Enthusiasm is on HBO, which could care less if you like the shows, so long as you pay your monthly fee.)

As soon as the studios worry more about making shows that we haven’t seen before that are, you know, funny and stuff, they’ll have an audience.

What the hell: they cancelled Firefly, so screw ‘em.

(Slightly edited for unclear language.)

According to the Wired article:

The ultimate iPod accessory is Fendi’s Juke Box, a $1,500 carrying case for transporting multiple iPods.

That’s right: multiple iPods.

The bag, unveiled by the Italian fashion house at a catwalk show in Milan, is a rectangular gilded purse about the size of a bread bin. It is lined with multicolored cloth and incorporates a pocket for holding up to a dozen iPods.

Okay, this is just tragic. A sign of the Apocalypse. And you know what’s even sadder? I can imagine a lot of people saying, “Oh, that sounds like a good idea. I’ll go pick one up.”

These are people with a heck of lot of money. These are the same people who bought the titanium Maclaren stroller with the leather seat (at $2500 a pop) because it looked cool (my local Right Start sold out of theirs). Clearly these were people who have never had a kid in a stroller because they get, you know, messy. But then you just have someone else clean it up, I guess.

All I can say is: get a hobby. Or give the money to a worthy cause, like Coffee Kids. Sheesh.

The other day Tamar wrote a wonderful entry about why screenwriting isn’t for her any more.

What she says is true. but despite the odds (which are terrible) it often seems like everyone I know has had some and in some cases a lot of success. (Excepting my MFA buds. So far. Yes, I am snarky and mean. Deal with it.) Mary, the mom in Seattle, has managed to sell two pitches without the so-called track record. She does it by coming up with ideas that scream “Movie.” I am in awe of what Mary has managed to do, because it’s the sort of thing that everyone says you can’t do.

Everyone says a lot of things. There are many pieces of received wisdom among pre-pro screenwriters, and one of the biggest is: as soon as I sell a script, I’ll be in the game, I’ll have some power, things are going to get easier…

And one thing I definitely learned in LA and from Wordplay is: no, things don’t get easier. If anything, they just keep getting harder.

On the Wordplay forums someone asked Terry Rossio (he of Pirates of the Caribbean, Shrek, Zorro, and Aladdin writing fame) if he (and his writing partner Ted Elliott) had any Dream Projects that they’re holding on to until such time as they can get their projects done the right way. As part of the question, the poster asked:

>> If you DO have a Dream Project like that, are you thinking 
>> about doing it as a novel, short story, or stage play first, so that 
>> you can keep at least some semblance of control over  
>> the underlying rights to the story?

To which Terry replied:

Absolutely.

Okay, now, let’s recap: one of the most successful screenwriters in Hollywood says that it’s absolutely imperative to do something other than a script to maintain control over his work.

You know, that’s the kind of advice that certainly makes me reconsider what kind of career I’d want as a screenwriter.

There are actually a lot of parallels between working in Hollywood and working in just about any other industry. Okay, between working in Hollywood and working in Silicon Valley (since I’m not intimately familiar with any other industries). But the way screenwriters and their wares—which are, after all, the basis for putting these gargantuan economic forces known as “movies” in motion—are treated is singular, and it’s horrible.

Let’s say I write a novel, and let’s say it’s successful enough to garner movie attention. I have to be honest: I don’t know if I’d sell it. Maybe if I put enough caveats on it (such as, I get script approval). But the movers and shakers in LA don’t like other people having power. Giving people money is fairly easy. I’d kill the deal by asking for power over money.

No, no, I’d have to do what Harlan Coben has done: keep (or, in his case, buy back) the rights to his beloved series, and write a series of stand-alone novels that practically sing “Hollywood fodder.”

In Hollywood the only way to maintain control of your work is to becomea director (movies) or an executive producer (TV). Coming up with the script is not enough— you have to add a couple of high-pressure jobs that have little to nothing in common with writing to protect it.

Oh dear Lord.

And to those of you who say: Who cares? So long as the checks cash! I remind you of what my first year writing teacher, David Hollander (who went on to create “The Guardian”) had to say on that score: “If you take a job for the money, you will earn every penny.”

I’m not completely unenamored of screenwriting and of Hollywood. But I’m not starry-eyed about it, I’m not gung ho. And I’m not sure I have the fight in me to pursue something even Terry says is a game that can’t be won on their terms.

There’s an article in today’s Mercury News about a local writer who did what I always thought I would do but haven’t yet (registration required—try Bugmenot if you hate registration):

Lolly Winston’s dream came true.

Her first novel, “Good Grief,” is a bestseller. Lately, life’s been “a surreal string of good news,” she says. But before that, she was living a Silicon Valley nightmare.

The Los Gatos writer always dreamed of writing a novel by 40. So she quit her other jobs to finish the book she’d been working on parttime for four years.

Then the bubble burst. Her husband’s software company went bust. They were paying the mortgage with a home-equity loan. The credit card was maxed. Her stepdad died. Her brother drowned.

“It was kind of scary,” Winston says of trying to finish the book in the face of financial and emotional hardship. Once done, she found an agent who secured a book deal. “It was like winning the lottery to sell the book.”

The novel is the sometimes painful, sometimes humorous tale of a young Silicon Valley widow. After her software engineer husband dies, she suffers a breakdown at her PR job, showing up for work in her robe and slippers. She moves to Ashland, Ore., and rebuilds her life.

“Good Grief” is No. 14 on the New York Times bestseller list. Reviews have been good (“Bridget Jones meets Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.”).

You know what? It’s nice to know that it can be done. For those times when I’m not so certain.

Hey Rob! I was right! He is trying to jumpstart the Apocalypse.

t was an e-mail we weren’t meant to see. Not for our eyes were the notes that showed White House staffers taking two-hour meetings with Christian fundamentalists, where they passed off bogus social science on gay marriage as if it were holy writ and issued fiery warnings that “the Presidents [sic] Administration and current Government is engaged in cultural, economical, and social struggle on every level”葉his to a group whose representative in Israel believed herself to have been attacked by witchcraft unleashed by proximity to a volume of Harry Potter. Most of all, apparently, we’re not supposed to know the National Security Council’s top Middle East aide consults with apocalyptic Christians eager to ensure American policy on Israel conforms with their sectarian doomsday scenarios.

But now we know.

(Via Atrios. Like you need a link to find Atrios.)

I know, I know. I’m never around, I never post anything any more. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m tired all the time—if I could, I would nap every day.

My friend Michele speculates that I might be in mourning. Maybe. Maybe I’m just depressed. Maybe I’m just severely lazy and don’t want to do anything. I don’t know.

§

Back in grade school—it was after we moved to San Francisco, because I remember the school and even the room I was in—a teacher led us through something I would now call “guided visualization.” (Surprisingly, I don’t remember who the teacher was who led us in the visualization.) Why did we do this? I don’t know. I just remember the picture that went through my head of walking down some path, in nature… And whoever was leading the visualization said something like, “…and now you see someone who is very important to you…” And I did! Just like that!

I thought that was the coolest thing.

Flash forward a couple of years. Actually, more than a couple of years; I think Darin and I were already together. I had trouble falling asleep for years and went to a hypnotherapist to see if that would help. She speculated that perhaps I had trouble falling asleep because I had grown up learning to be afraid of someone coming in to my room. I guess the whole “repressed memory” movement was still on. My reaction to her speculation was then and is still now, “Oy.” While doing the hypnotherapy session I definitely went under—so far under I didn’t remember any of the hypnosis part of the session when I left.

I didn’t pursue the hypnotherapy angle because I’d been so annoyed the one hypnotherapist I’d been to see, but I did read about using visualizations for self-hypnosis to put yourself to sleep. I eventually developed this extremely detailed area: I start on a beach, facing the ocean. When I can finally feel myself sitting on the beach towel, on the hot sand, I stand up, turn around, and walk toward the cliffs behind me. I go up the spiral staircase cut into the cliff, lined with onyx and with a silver handrail with tons of carvings in it, until I get to the top. At the top is a giant field, and I basically have three directions I can go: to the east, a forest; to the north, the next cliff, off in the distance, which has a gigantic Ludvigian castle on top of it; or to the west, where the field stretches off until I come to another forest.

I usually don’t make it to the top of the stairs. It was a pretty effective method of getting me to sleep.

Last year I began to be a little stressed out about the move (fancy that) and I went to see a hypnotherapist in Sherman Oaks. I wanted him to make me a tape ostensibly to help with weight loss, but I think he saw through that and made me one about relaxing and feeling less stress. At least, I think he did; I listened to that tape a lot and always blanked out on it. Even when I decided I was going to listen to it just to hear every word, I would zone out until his voice told me to wake up. Evidently I’m the kind of hypnotic client who immediately goes into a comatose state. Either that, or I’m taking every opportunity I can to catch up on my sleep. (There’s some word or phrase that means “goes into hypnotic coma,” but I can’t remember what it is. Ba-da-bum-bum.)

I don’t know if the hypnosis actually worked. That move really stressed me out. But maybe it would have been worse.

§

I’ve gotten interested again recently in self-hypnosis. Every book I’ve read has told me to make my own tapes, but since I don’t currently own a tape player, I would have to make my own MP3/.wav files, and I haven’t put together the setup for that. So instead I’ve bought some premade scripts. None of them have worked particularly well. A few haven’t even put me under.

But one I got from Audible called “Contacting Your Inner Guide” by Shakti Gawain did work. Well, actually, at first it didn’t: I listened to it and nothing happened. I didn’t get any of the pictures I was supposed to get. There are two sessions: one relaxes you so that you can ask yourself a question and boom: the answer appears in your mind. (This did not happen for me.) The second one has you going to your nature sanctuary, where your “inner guide” appears to help you.

I remembered that visualization exercise from school so long ago, and I really wanted an experience like that. So I listened to the second session on the recording a couple of times, and I couldn’t get it to work. I’d come up with some natural place (that wasn’t my beach with cliffs, because if I used that all I do is fall asleep for the night) and then try to see the person/animal/color/whatever, but nothing ever happened.

Until I decided that I didn’t feel relaxed in the natural setting. What I wanted was a nice cozy manmade retreat. I have a painting that shows the corner of a beachfront property with a long covered patio. It’s the kind of place I dream of having. (Without the hassles of, like, property ownership or anything.) I said, I should imagine myself there. So I did. I walked through my wonderful beachfront house, which strangely had all-white furniture in it (a choice that is simply Right Out when you have kids), and then I settled on to that long covered porch to wait.

And sure enough, when the time in the guided visualization came for someone to show up, a long stretch car something like this only in yellow with the top down comes through the gate toward my house, and out pops a young Joan Collins in a white Givenchy suit with a white wide-brimmed hat (much less frilly than the outfit in that picture) hops out and bounds over to me. She tells me I need to have more fun! more style! I need to remember to enjoy myself more and not be so deadly serious about everything! (I don’t know if she threw a “darling” or two in there, but she should have if she didn’t.)

I don’t know if this was a lifechanging experience. I do know it cracks me up every time I think about it. So maybe Joan did her part in bringing me a little fun.

§

The hypnotherapist in Sherman Oaks told me about one client he had, a TV writer, with whom he worked on a script in which the writer would watch a TV and the show he wanted to write would come on. All the writer would have to do when he woke up was write down the show he’d just watched.

Maybe I can work my way up to that. But in the mean time, I’m going to have girlfriends over so we can discuss nailpolish colors.

I love Danny Gregory’s weblog. This piece he did for The Morning News is hilarious. Check it out.

I keep reading people quoting the latest column by Victor Davis Hanson, saying that they are stunned by how much of the neocon koolaid he’s drunk. I’m not amazed at all. Here’s all I needed to know about VDH, from his book Who Killed Homer?: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom:

Greek literature to an American student of the present age can be unpleasant. No wonder we now prefer to instead to craft mechanisms to convince us that the hurtful past is not really what it was. Consider, for example, what the Greeks would say of this advertisement from the Fall 1995 Oxford University Press “Special Sale Catalogue,” promoting a new edition of the The New Testament and Psalms:

…a new version of the Bible that speaks more directly than ever before to today’s social concerns, especially the move towards universal inclusivity. The noted scholars who produced this work address issues such as race, gender, and ethnicity, more explicitly than ever before. In this version, biblical language concerning people with physical afflictions has been revised to avoid personifying individuals by their disabilities; language referring to men and women has been corrected to reflect this inclusiveness precisely; dark and light imagery has been revised to avoid equating “dark” as a term for persons of color with “dark” as a metaphor for evil; references to Judaism have been corrected to avoid imprecise allusions in relation to Christ’s crucifixion; God’s language has been improved to reflect a more universal concept of God and Jesus Christ.

Words of two millennia are to be “corrected,” “revised,” and “improved.” Apparently the sensitive academic is equipped to do what God could not. This reinvention of the past comes with the now customary Orwelling twist: weakening vocabulary, bowdlerizing the text, and seeking distortion are to be reinvented as speaking “more directly,” addressing issues “more explicitly,” and avoid “imprecise allusions.” Any reader of the New Testament knows that for good or evil there are really few “imprecise allusions” in relation to Christ’s crucifixion. Readers grasp who did it and why.

I can’t help but think: code words. I’m not sure of this, of course: after reading about half of this book, I wasn’t sure what the primary agenda of Who Killed Homer? was, let alone any secondary, covert one. But little fillips like these showed up often enough to make me go Hmmmm. And I wasn’t at all surprised to read op-eds from him that put him ever so slightly on the right.

I swear on whatever semblance of dignity I may have left that this was actually said today:

                  SOPHIA
      Mommy. There is no screaming
      in the car. In the car we use
      indoor voices. We can scream
      when we’re outside but not when
      we’re in the car.

Should I just wave the white flag now, or wait until she’s old enough to challenge me to three card monte?