Damage
Secrets of the Wild Child: The story of a girl who spent the first thirteen years of her life locked in a room.
Castle Crashers: X-Box Live Arcade keeps spewing out the hits! Castle Crashers is one of the few games that has made me laugh out loud with its weirdness and visual gags. It pays homage to its genre of beat ‘em ups — plays kind of like Bad Dudes and Knights of the Round with RPG elements and level grinding. It’s got so much wit and is so fun to play that it really gets under your skin.
I just started a brand new project. Writing something new is a great feeling because for the past couple of months I’ve been workshopping or rewriting other projects. You’re taking something that’s already there and modifying/augmenting it. It’s a completely different thought process than starting with a blank page and filling it.
My operating style is to already have a complete outline and blueprint, so when I’m writing I can free up my mind to develop individual beats and scenes. It’s literally like chugging along, running along a pre-determined route and painting the scenery as you go.
So I need a totally mindless, action-filled activity to serve as a rest activity after writing. Castle Crashers and games like it are perfect for that. They’re like coffee grounds at the perfume/cologne counter — they reset your palate.
I also make sure that while I’m writing, I’m reading something really, really good that I admire — a really good play if I’m writing a play, or a really good novel if I’m writing something else. Being exposed to really good work from someone else sets the bar in terms of quality for what I myself am writing daily. Kinda like watching really awesome football plays on TV while you practice and play.
Chefs are Fucking Crazy
My two favorite food shows have one thing in common. Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations has a disclaimer after every commercial break that warns that the show is for mature audiences only. Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares is rated TV-MA. Why? Because the chefs on these shows are fucking crazy.
Ramsay swears like a motherfucker. For some reason BBC America lets the word “shit” slip by but bleeps out the word “fuck”. Bourdain swears, makes double entendres about food and fucking sheep, smoked two packs a day (I’m told he just recently quit), and implies that he takes a massive dose of hallucinogens during his on-camera trip to Peru.
I am told that most chefs are crazy. They scream, curse, throw things around. The phrase “he swears like a sailor” doesn’t apply anymore. It should be “he swears like a chef”. Also, “he punches like a chef”, “he murdered that dude just like a chef would”, and “they went all chef on him.”
I’ve been thinking about this. Why are chefs fucking crazy?
What I have so far is this: They work in restaurants.
Restaurants are where it all goes down. People die in restaurants — they have heart attacks, get food poisoning, choke on something. Historically, a restaurant is a great place to assassinate someone. Restaurants are the likeliest places to be blown up by terrorists. Plus restaurants are stocked with tons of booze, which is essential to giving a person enough liquid courage to punch or stab someone.
And then there’s the kitchen. It’s hot, cramped, and everyone is under pressure. Everyone is armed. Knives, mallets, rolling pins, pots and pans. There are pots of boiling liquid, ovens baking, hot oil.
So essentially you’re planting already insane people in the worst environment possible — an environment most conducive to violence. That’s why chefs are fucking crazy.
And the crazier they are, the better the food. Mmmmm, nummers!
Kong
Donkey Kong. Its objective is clear to any human being that sees it: Propel your mustache-faced man up the ladders to save the lady. An ape will throw barrels at you in an attempt to foil you. It is encoded in our DNA that apes are dangerous creatures, especially when armed with barrels.
King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters — I finally got down to watching this. It had been sitting on my desk for a long time. The time was right, so I popped it in.
Holy cow. You must see this — you would love it. The people in it are such characters — only the real world could produce such interesting, tragic, and hilarious people.
A couple of things about this documentary stuck out to me. The first is how a person will hold on to the defining core of their identity with such ferocity that it makes them sour, blind, and completely insulated from reality. And that’s not a good place for a human being to be.
In the documentary the reigning Donkey Kong champion refuses to play an up-and-comer head to head, face to face. He refuses to even meet with him.
This was a hard lesson for me to learn but also probably one of the most important ones: When other people are successful, it is essential to meet them. Get to know their work, get to know who they are as people. Discover why they are successful.
Granted, what I do isn’t a zero-sum game like becoming the World Champion of Donkey Kong. In that game, there can only be one. But in whatever worlds you travel through, you should always know who’s there with you. You should see what they’re doing and what’s working.
And above all, you should be friends. Because that eliminates the harshness of bad feelings. It allows people to locate each others’ humanity, see what they have in common. Together, everyone excels.
Don’t be the sour dude in the corner, skulking and plotting revenge. It’s not good for your health.
Also the documentary contains this man: Mr. Awesome.
And he is real. Oh, so very real.
No More Subtlety
So I noticed that Best Buy has a new slogan: “You, Happier.” Come in here, buy something, and you will be happier. It’s sweet yet ominous.
It takes a lot of balls to make this your corporate slogan. Imagine the irate father of two who screams his head off at a Geek Squad tech because someone left porn on his kid’s Barbie Princess LCD Picture Frame. On the way in he sees the slogan on the door: “You, Happier.” It only throws fuel onto the fire.
I finished reading Generation Kill. Yes, I got the book because of the HBO miniseries.
It makes me wonder if I could kill another man. Theoretically, due to the enormous complexities of modern culture, we are probably doing harm to other people just by existing. By buying that Barbie Princess LCD Picture Frame, I’m probably contributing to slave labor manufacturing in China. Is making someone’s life eternally miserable up there with killing them? Maybe my heart bleeds too much.
But back to this — I wonder if I could pull the trigger on someone. In discussions with friends it seems that it depends on the circumstances. But it also seems that bombs and artillery aren’t so discriminating.
A cool thing is that Evan Wright, the Rolling Stone reporter that wrote Generation Kill, also wrote the teleplay for one of the episodes of the HBO miniseries.
This is interesting because one of the characters in the miniseries is “Evan Wright” (the miniseries is based on the book, which is autobiographically reported).
This must have been one of the few instances where a TV writer was writing a script containing a character based on himself.
One of the actors on the miniseries, “Fruity” Rudy Reyes also plays himself.
The HBO series has taken a lot of direct cues from the book. The way that they adapted the material for television is pretty straightforward and very well done.
For instance, the writers will take something actually said to Wright by one of the soldiers and put it into a dialogue scene between two characters. And they’ll always use it as a source of tension or conflict.
From the start they analyzed the book, figured out where the central conflicts are, and used those to structure out the episodes. Plus there’s always an action/crucible moment in the middle of each episode so that the plot doesn’t meander.
Good work folks!
Notes on the Olympics / Flawless White
What I love about America in the Olympics: Whenever a foreign nation fields a team sport, all their players are the same ethnicity. But whenever America fields a team, our players are from all over the color spectrum.
That’s awesome.
One thing I like to say about diversity is that it creates versatility. When you have a fairly homogenous group of people that come from the same background and belief system, you have a limited skill set.
But when you have a diverse group of people, you get a ton of intellectual viewpoints and practical skill sets that give the group a greater edge.
Kinda like on House MD — you need the rich white guy to kiss House’s ass, you need Pretty Girl to question his moral judgement, and you need OMAR EPPS to break into ppl’s houses.
Michael Phelps noms 12,000 calories a day, has washboard abs, and has eight gold medals. That’s stupendous. I don’t know why certain segments of the population hate on him so much — he’s awesome. He’s the best thing I’ve ever heard of. He’s living the American dream by every metric that exists. Like if this was Idiocracy he’d be President.
LADIES: Men like you better when you’re white.
Get your man back! Be more white!
Unholy
In a couple of weeks we’re heading to Vegas for a buddy’s bachelor party.
Aside: I once visited Dartmouth College. This is where Beer Pong was invented. A friend there told me that the reason why the frat scene is so wild is because Animal House was shot there, and there are certain expectations that need to be fulfilled.
Keep this anecdote in mind as I continue.
Like American wedding ceremonies themselves, bachelor parties have become bigger in scope. From what I gather, a bachelor party used to happen at some guy’s house. A fuzzy porno movie would play on the VCR. Beers would be consumed. And that was it.
These days, a bachelor party has to happen in Vegas. It has to take the entire weekend. Half of the weekend needs to be spent in a strip club. Guns need to be fired. Brain-damaging levels of alcohol must be consumed. Massive amounts of food need to be eaten off of plates with special gutters built into them to catch the blood. An animal of some type needs to be killed.
It’s like a huge ritualistic anti-wedding. The groom needs to be high on ecstasy with a stripper’s coochie in his face, shooting an M-16 at a target of Bin Laden, all while wearing a taco costume. That’s the level of insanity that this all has been driven up to — probably on the basis of dares and what people have seen in movies. I.E., dead hookers that need to be chainsawed and buried in the desert. The media has defined certain expectations.
This trip is going to be fun, but I’m also a little scared. With this much reckless consumption, what Nietzche said about fighting monsters comes to mind. Except instead of fighting them, you’re getting wasted with them.
Also, because I’m fascinated by other cultures and their grub, I’m currently madly interested in the classic British dish known as egg and chips. As in a fried egg and chips.
A British friend sent me this blog where a man is exploring various “greasy caffs”, ordering Egg Bacon Chips Beans and reporting his findings. Well done!
It’s a Trap
Not sure how I feel about the new Star Wars: The Clone Wars. My inner Comic Book Guy has taken a look at the trailer and feels a catch phrase coming on.
I have been burned pretty badly by Star Wars since episode one. The level of storytelling quality, thoughtfulness, and magic seen in Eps. 4-6 have been completely absent in the new trilogy and everything that has followed (except for the Bioware RPGs).
What is the magic? Where does the quality come from? I have a feeling that they come from a sense of truth that the original trilogy had. They were about clearly defined heroes and villains, about growing up in a dark time. They rang true, felt true.
Consider this: Every movie begins with the words, “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…” These are the opening words of a fable. “Once Upon a Time…” It evokes legendary storytelling. It’s epic.
Now consider the opening crawl of Episode One that immediately follows: “Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute.”
What the fuck?? Taxation? Trade routes? Who gives a flying fuck about that shit? At the very least it’s bad copywriting — no artful word choice, no poetry, nothing that deserves to follow the phase “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away”. That’s like following the Declaration of Independence with a 1040EZ tax form.
In a better world, episodes one through three would’ve been a dark mirror reflection of episodes four through six. They would have presented a clear and stark opposite of what the first trilogy represents — a journey into the dark side. A young man falling into darkness because of a crumbling and decadent society that has lost its way. A once powerful society of knights that has become irrelevant because of its own mismanagement. Revenge leading to the dark side.
The thing that the first trilogy had that the second trilogy lacked was clarity. Everything was razor-sharp and precise. The second trilogy was stuffed with ill-thought of paths to nowhere: Jar-Jar Binks. Midichlorians. A fucking 1950s alien diner. All that garbage diluted the story, pulled it away from its own sense of purpose.
I get the feeling that all these errors, everything that has gone horribly wrong with Star Wars, came from the fact that no one ever had the balls to tell George Lucas “NO”. “This doesn’t work, George.” “This needs work, George.” “This Jar-Jar Binks dude might be perceived as a grossly embarrassing black stereotype, George.”
I’m getting the same sick feeling out of Clone Wars. I may be wrong, but the early reports about Ziro the Homosexual Hutt are causing a disturbance in the Force.
Disappointed, I will be.
My Work in Print
Year Zero
Available from Samuel French and Amazon.com
Cowboy Versus Samurai
Available from Samuel French and Amazon.comFor a complete list of books containing my work, please click here.
