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Monthly Archives: January 2008

Bummer

January 28th, 2008Blog0 comments

Last Friday, with a storm drenching the Southland, I saw a very sad sight: Three chubby guys wearing bad Spartan costumes over their shorts and t-shirts, pedaling three-wheeled bikes attached to “chariots” promoting Meet the Spartans.

How much does that suck? You agree to take this one day gig on a lark — or maybe you really do need the money — and you find out what you’re gonna be doing: Pedaling a bike around while wearing a felt helmet. Then it starts raining. At this point I would ask myself, “Where did I go wrong? How did I end up in this costume, on this bike, in the rain? Is this the end point of a slippery slope of bad choices? Or does it get worse?”

This American Life: I watched the entire six-episode season of the TV show. I highly recommend it. Beyond the Chocolate Shake segment on Weiner Circle, there was also a very good bit about a young Mormon hipster who paints pictures of Jesus. According to NPR, the series is coming out on DVD this week or next. Catch it.

It’s Not Easy Being Brown

January 24th, 2008Blog0 comments

Now on YouTube: Planet of the Arabs, an official selection of the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.

Being an Arab American actor, or any actor that looks Arab has got to be one of the toughest things to be right now. Ask Aasif Mandvi, a frequent contributor on ~~The~~ A Daily Show. The guy’s Indian, but I’ve seen him play characters named Abdul, Hassan, etc.. And on the flip side: “Engineering Student” and “Indian Guy”.

Imagine writing the phrase INDIAN GUY in a script. Clearly, you would only do that to set up INDIAN JOKE. Sign #1 that you are a goddamned hack.

Anyway, Planet of the Arabs is apparently inspired by a book titled Reel Bad Arabs: “Out of 1000 films that have Arab & Muslim characters (from the year 1896 to 2000) 12 were positive depictions, 52 were even handed and the rest of the 900 were negative.” Holy crap.

Chocolate Shake

January 23rd, 2008Blog2 comments

So about a year and a half ago I did a staged reading of “Cowboy” in Chicago. The audience was large and extremely diverse: About a hundred black, white, Asian people of ages ranging from twentysomethings to elderlies.

I thought this was pretty great. The jackpot for a writer is for his/her work to reach a diverse audience. So I asked the audience in the Q&A, “Why are you so diverse?”

Someone said that Chicago is, by nature, a very diverse city. A wide spectrum. Okay, okay, that was good. Moved on.

Afterwards, a young black lady came up to me and said, “Don’t believe what that woman told you — Chicago is the most racist, segregated city there is.”

I wondered about this. And riding the train north and south, walking around and mentally polling the people in the vicinity, I felt that she was right. Something was seething in the background. You could feel it. It isn’t like L.A. where people are segregated by — for all intents and purposes — insurmountable distances (traffic). It isn’t like NYC where people are segregated by address but are still forced to come face-to-face on the train and in public spaces. Chicago has clearly delineated boundaries. And no one likes it, but there it is.

Case study: A story about Weiner Circle from Showtime’s This American Life.

I’m a pretty huge fan of TAL — love the radio show. I saw this clip and immediately bought the series off of iTunes.

What I got out of the clip was this: Give people permission to let their true feelings out about race and hate, and they will. And it’ll be nasty and ugly. Is it a necessary thing? Yes. It will come out one way or another. Is it a good thing? Questionable.

Don’t get me wrong: Chicago is a great city. But like any great city, Chicago has wounds.

And also, okay, hot dogs are great. But I like mine wrapped in bacon. Not with a fuckin’ salad on top. But I will say this: You guys got pizza right.

The Middle

January 18th, 2008Blog0 comments

American Idol is back on. I’ve never watched it before, but I think I’ll start watching it now to see what’s up.

Dave said something interesting about the show: We’re watching for the brilliant performers and the mediocre performers. It’s the average performers that wear down the judges. Brilliant performers are great to watch; mediocre performers are great to watch for a different reason. It’s the people in the middle, and the statistically huge size of that population, that wears down the judges so much.

The middle is what tires them out — averageness, and so much of it, is difficult to bear.

The thing is, everyone makes a journey through the middle from mediocre to greatness in whatever they do. In every story there is a trip through the middle — Jesus walking through the desert trying to decide what to do. The Training Montage. You need to work to become great. Brevity often requires a massive compression of that period in storytelling, but in real life the middle is the longest part.

The problem is that most people stop in the middle. It reminds me of this scene in The Sopranos where Jackie Aprile Jr. is hiding from a hit in the Boonton projects; he’s playing chess with a little girl and she starts winning halfway through. Frustrated, he smashes the pieces on the board. “You should’ve played that through,” her father says, “That’s the only way you’re ever gonna learn.” You’ve gotta get through the middle to learn how to play the end game. Don’t stop. The middle cannot be the end.

Bodice Ripping

January 16th, 2008Blog2 comments

iPhone Update: One great thing about the iPhone update is the button layout manager. There were way too many icons on the iPhone screen before. But now that I can shift some of them off screen and change the layout from what-Jobs-likes to what Mike likes, it’s a lot more usable. Also, the iPhone is much better at making me a better and more attractive person.

Full Disclosure: I have never used steroids, HGH, Creatine, or any performance enhancing drugs. Those who claim that I have are g*ddamned liars. I may look totally ripped and like I totally roid it up, but I don’t. This is au naturale.

Plagiarism: Great article here on a nature writer’s non-fiction writing being ripped off by a romance novelist.

This was bad enough with Kaavya Viswanathan’s wholesale lifting of others’ work in Opal Mehta; now whenever I read a trashy romance novel I gotta worry about author integrity? What’s next? This new David Mamet play bears an awful lot of resemblance to a thing I saw on icanhascheezburger?

“I CAN HAS RESPECT MOTHERFUCKER? RESPECT. RESPECT. I CAN HAS IT?!”

Reality Distortion Field

January 15th, 2008Blog0 comments

On Macworld: Everything El Jobso announced seems solid to me. The Macbook Air is the best of the bunch but yours truly needs a bigger screen in his future upgrade. I like having windows open. Can’t help it.

An Apple TV may actually be in the cards for me. I have a lot of TV shows on my mac and it would be good to watch them on my set. Lost Season 3, for instance.

And now that the online distribution model seems to be evolving pretty quickly these days — via Apple, Amazon, Netflix, etc., why can’t the studios come back to WGA and say, “OK, OK, we have some nailed-down models here, let’s start haggling over the minimums?”

It’s clear that online distribution is the way everything’s going to go in the future. Writers have to get residuals. It’s just a fact of life predicated by history. The models of the future are beginning to solidify now. The argument of putting this all off is getting flushed down the toilet. Let’s go already.