Daily Archives: August 9, 2010

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Nutcase Who Is Kind of Scary

Writing

I was out of the Army and spending a great deal of my time bar hopping for thrills. There really wasn’t anything else to do, and I no longer had any responsibilities, requirements or even a schedule. I had a job, but it was really unimportant and somewhat irrelevant to the grand scheme of things, so I started looking for bars to hang out for brunt of my free time in the evenings.

For me, this meant spending a lot of my time walking home drunk. Well, “drunk” is a mild way to put how I was most of those evenings. Let’s just say that I don’t remember a lot of what happened in between a few of those drinks and waking up the next morning. But showing up at a local bar the next evening told me that I must have had a great time the night before, because everyone in the bar was glad to see me again, talking about what fun we must have had the night before.

I’m a writer, so I chalk it up to one of those learning experiences you’re supposed to gather while working on the next all American novel. Only, 13 novels later, none of them really seem to have been all that American, or anything that would be considered “all American”. Years of experience has taught me that they’re just novels, and if people read them, then they were good novels, and sometimes you take what you can get.

But it was one of those evenings that I remember vividly because I remember talking to a woman I had been trying to get close to for some time at my neighborhood bar. You know the place. It was that bar where everyone came in, but no one knew who anyone was, although you came there so often that you kind of recognized everyone, even if you couldn’t place a name with a face. You’d nod at people, and they might nod back, but that was as close as it came to making a connection.

I knew the owner of the bar. He and I had been in the military together, studying Korean at the language school. This bar was actually located down the street from that post, and one day after he got out of the Army, he bought the bar where we used to go when we were still in the service. Army guys do that sort of crap. I never did, but I sure knew enough of them that did.

Anyway, my buddy was never at the bar but his wife was, and she always poured me a free drink or two because I had met her when she was just a waitress at this bar, before she married my friend. So we were old buddies, even though we really didn’t know each other that well. But she was the one trying to help me make some time with this one girl I was talking about, the one I said I’d been trying to connect with for weeks. Turns out she was a cop, and she was kind of strange, which always seemed to attract me to a woman. But I’m getting ahead of myself because, to be honest, this story isn’t about her. It’s about some guy that showed up one evening and started talking to me.

It was getting close to closing time, and this young guy was talking to me, and he was interested in the fact that the owner’s wife said I was a writer. He said he was an artist and that artists needed to stick together, or some kind of weird crap like that. I was drunk, so it made sense, so he and I were talking about art and all that. The facts kind of escape me, because to be honest, I doubt anything we were talking about was all that important in the first place.

So two a.m. came around, and the bar was closing, so for some reason this guy and I decided we still had so much to talk about, and we took our conversation to the street. We both lived in the area, and he said he wanted to show me his art work, so we walked towards his place.

And I should probably insert that in a lot of stories right after this moment it can go all sorts of directions, including some pretty shocking revelation that this is some kind of gay hook-up story, or whatever, but it’s not one of those. I don’t knoe if the guy was gay or not. I’m not, but it probably wouldn’t have stopped me from walking to the guy’s place anyway, just to see what it was the person wanted to show me. So I went, and it turned out he wanted to show me the sort of art that he does.

Turns out that his art consisted of large columns with pillows on top of them. No, I don’t know the significance of them either. Nor could I figure out what made it art, but his apartment was filled with these things. Must have been about forty or fifty columns with various pillows on top of them. They looked pretty dorky, to be honest. All I remember was how proud he was of his creation, and he wanted to show it to me.

I stood and stared, not really sure what to say, or even what to think. There were pillows on top of columns. and they were everywhere. To this day, I don’t know what they were supposed to convey, or even why it was an obsession. All I remember thinking was, I really needed to get out of that apartment. So I did. And I went home.

Never saw the guy again either. Or his form of art. But I never forg0t what he showed me, and I wonder if that’s the goal of the artist anway, to put forth a haunting image that endures forever, even if it is only seen by one person. If so, he was very successful and in a way that my own art has never achieved itself.

Some of the Best Writing on TV May Never Be Seen

Television, Writing, , , , , , , ,

It’s kind of funny, actually, but there is this bias against certain types of programming on television, specifically that of the science fiction and fantasy variety. But surprisingly, some of the best dramatic writing I’ve ever viewed has been from this genre, and unfortunately no one really seems to be watching it.

An example is the one that everyone talks about when it comes to science fiction, and that’s the rehash of Battlestar Galactica, which had to be one of the best dramas I’ve seen on television in ages. It was intense, well acted, and with plot twists that were so well constructed that it was shocking at how well it was carried out. Some other examples would be some pretty obscure titles, including one I was watching last night that was unbelievable for how well it was written, and that show is Doctor Who. Over the last few years I’ve kind of paid attention to this show, but always thought it was a bit too campy for me. I was watching the middle of the fourth season of the latest variation of this show, and out of nowhere the writing was just overwhelming. Some of the plots were just genius, and then the way they pulled the stories off was beyond anything I’ve seen in modern television. There was one episode that took place on a futuristic airliner (done to be much like the cabin of any airplane, but in space), and the character interaction was just off the charts. The plot seemed somewhat simple, but the story quickly went from a “what’s out there” to a Lord of the Flies segment of anarchy that I kept thinking they were going to somehow blow this great moment of television, but they never did. They did a really good job of maintaining the type of power they were going for, and it was like a seasoned director took a great screenplay and made it just right. You don’t see that very often.

Lately, we’ve seen some brilliant character-driven storylines on recent television shows like LOST, which has shocked so many people at how it did exactly what it set out to do. Yet, we’re still left with this sense that science fiction and fantasy is trash that really shouldn’t be paid attention to.

I had a conversation the other day with someone who told me that she only watches dramas, like Gossip Girl, because she likes shows that are a lot more realistic. I’ll not even comment further on that one, but I’m sure you get the idea. People are so convinced that it has to be a drama to be considered real, yet I can’t tell you how many of our dramas are some of the worst writing that has come along in ages. Sure, there are exceptions, but way too often we’re given trash and get so used to it that we give accolades to medium level stuff, as if it is brilliant. A couple of examples come to mind because I’ve been watching these shows and still can’t believe that people think these are the best we have to offer.

Breaking Bad. An okay show, but for some reason every review of this show acts as if it is the greatest television show ever. I’m deep into the second season of it, and it’s okay. It’s not great, but it’s okay. What I would like to comment about this show is something no one wants to admit: It’s basically Weeds with a much more serious story line. And Weeds does it so much better. Let’s look at that for a second.

Weeds has a woman who needs to make a lot of money because she lost her husband, so she goes into the marijuana dealing business. She has a bunch of wacky friends who hang around, and the show does everything possible to justify that this woman is doing a very bad thing but for the right reasons.

Breaking Bad has  a guy who needs to make a lot of money because he’s got cancer, so he goes into the meth dealing business. There are a bunch of somewhat wacky people who are part of his world (including a klepto sister in law and a DEA agent husband of the klepto who has all sorts of his own wacky drug-related adventures), and the show does everything possible to justify that this guy is doing a very bad thing but for the right reasons.

Both shows are essentially about the same thing, except unlike Weeds, people don’t generally consider meth to be as innocent as they do marijuana. So it has some problems there. All along, I watch Breaking Bad, waiting for the great moments everyone talks about, but I find myself thinking, “why should I care for this guy who is creating a product that is destroying the lives of so many so he can take care of his family?” It’s like the show Dexter, another “great” that people talk about. I watched all of three episodes before I thought, “I can’t root for this guy” and never watched it again. There’s a point where rooting for the underdog just doesn’t justify rooting for the criminally insane guy who considers himself above the law.

Other “great” shows: Rescue Me. I bought the first season and had a hard time getting through the first episode. Trite writing that tries too hard to play the 9/11 angle of brave firefighters. Let’s make them somewhat crazy, and everyone will root for them. Hasn’t worked so well for me so far.

Sadly enough, there aren’t enough ground-breaking shows out there, and the few that are just don’t seem to be that great themselves. Which is pretty sad because the really, really good shows don’t last very long.

Anyway, just a gripe that is slowly going off track now, so I’ll end there.