Bailout
Is the bailout a good thing? Is it a bad thing? I don’t know. Shouldn’t someone bother to tell me? And tell it to me like you’d tell it to an eight year-old so that I get it?
Right now, what we really need is Ross Perot and his charts.
A note on complex systems: A thing I’ve observed from watching complex systems like the financial sector, politics, The Sopranos, and trying to read Joyce’s Ulysses is that sometimes things will happen in tandem that appear to be linked. They happen at the same time, and the system is so complex that it’s difficult to figure out if they happened as a direct cause and effect or if they’re coincidental.
For instance, someone pointed out that since the bailout vote failed, oil prices have dropped. Does this mean that the bailout caused that drop in oil prices? Or was that just a coincidence smokescreened by the complexity of the financial system?
There’s an old Chinese story about a hunter who waits by a tree. Chinese people who know the story often conjure it up by saying, “He’s like a hunter waiting by the tree”, in the same way we might say “He’s a tortoise and she’s the hare”.
Anyway, a hunter’s out in the woods hunting game. Out of nowhere, a rabbit runs out of the forest and slams into a tree at his feet. He picks it up, amazed at his good luck and by the fact that he’s got dinner without actually having to do anything.
So for the rest of his life he hangs out by that tree, waiting for another rabbit to run out and crash into it again.
Stories like that are great because you can pull a lot of meanings out of them. In this case, the world (or machine that we created) is so complex that it becomes impossible to see whether things are happening because of correlation, coincidence, or just dumb luck. This financial situation is like that.
I have a feeling that people would just feel a lot more secure knowing what the hell is going on. Even if we are presented with a measure that we accept and that eventually fails, people will understand. Because at least we knew what we were getting into, and at least we tried.
W.
My picks for casting the ancillary characters of Oliver Stone’s W.:
- Michael Hogan as Senator John McCain
- Mos Def as Senator Barack Obama (Will Smith would’ve been the more obvious and thus less interesting choice.)
- Hillary Clinton: Obvious choice: Hope Davis. Interesting choice: Jeanine Garofalo.
- Larry the Cable Guy as Bill Clinton
- Christopher Lee as Osama Bin Laden
- Gary Oldman as Vladimir Putin
- Bob Hoskins as Saddam Hussein
- Kal Penn as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
- Masi Oka as Kim Jong Il
- Amy Adams as Jenna Bush
- Ricky Gervais as Tony Blair (Makes absolutely no sense lookswise, but would be fucking hilarious)
- John Cleese dressed up as the Insulting Frenchman from Monty Python and the Holy Grail as Jacques Chirac:
“I fart in your general direction.”
Independence
Independently developed games are emerging as an incredibly exciting part of the industry. Games like Braid, Castle Crashers (which I love, and I wish would be patched soon so I could keep playing it), and this new game The Maw are doing things that the big studios wouldn’t and couldn’t touch. Stuff that doesn’t seem marketable or cinematic enough. I love the DIY spirit.
I’ve also heard that certain indy dev iPhone games have been making buckets of cash. I also find this to be extremely awesome — and it really makes me want to develop an app for the iPhone.
We live in a capitalist society. People vote with their dollars. I think that most art needs to be commercially viable. There’s always room for non-commercially viable art — like if painting pictures of wombats in rainbow wigs is your thing, then you should definitely go for it (although I myself would totally buy a painting of a wombat in a rainbow wig). But why not create commercially viable art in your spare time?
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did it with Sherlock Holmes — that was essentially his fuel source while he wrote his “serious” novels. Of course, no one remembers any of his serious novels. All they remember is his commercial art.
What I think is really cool is when chefs will make their money cooking for the masses, and then after work host a gathering of other chefs and cook for them for free. Just to show them their skills, what they’ve been working with, what their mad science experiments are producing. You sell the mainstream product to the masses, and you share the special, super neato goods with your peers — really, the only people who would get it/appreciate it.
In other words, you sell your commercial art and you give your high art away. That sounds like a cool way to live.
New Favorites
My two new favorite TV shows: Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern and Destroyed in Seconds.
Bizarre Foods — there is nothing that I will not eat. Most of the foods on this show are things that I would totally eat in a second. Whenever Andrew Zimmern eats something, you can hear the crunching and slobbering his mouth makes. They either add that in with ADR or they have surgically implanted a tiny microphone in his mouth.
What I like best about this show is that it’s ALL EATING. Bourdain’s show contains filler where he rides ATVs and is almost killed. But Zimmern’s show is all about food. That’s all I care about. Bourdain may be more interesting, but Zimmern actually does more of what I want to see.
Also, Zimmern looks like the kind of guy you’d want to watch eating stuff. And I don’t mean that in some kind of homoerotic food way — I mean that he’s a perfectly designed eating machine. Kind of like how Michael Phelps has the perfect body for swimming or Ron Jeremy has the perfect dong for high-fiveing poon. Zimmern has the exact same proportions as Homer Simpson. Spherical. Ready to eat everything and anything that appears before him. A Pac-Man-like, double-hinged jaw capable of crushing the skulls of bats.
And to me, the food that he eats isn’t all that bizarre. Tripe isn’t bizarre. Pig’s blood isn’t bizarre. Deep fried fat isn’t weird. It’s fucking awesome. This show should be renamed Awesome Foods with Andrew Zimmern.
Destroyed in Seconds is a show whose title speaks for itself. It’s just thirty minutes of clips of things blowing up, falling down, and disintegrating on impact. It is only appreciable by people with testicles. It’s the kind of show that would be in Idiocracy, and I love it. On DVD, it also makes the perfect wedding present.
In the Dark
I’m almost finished with Oscar Wao. It’s one of my favorite books this year.
As I get toward the end of a book I really like, a sort of two-headed anxiety comes on: 1) I wish this could go on a little longer, and 2) What am I going to read next?
Fortunately, I know the answer to #2:
Man in the Dark by Paul Auster. I’ve read everything Auster has written. Literally, everything. I was even thinking of playing the baseball card game he invented (“Action Baseball”) with other Austernerds, but I decided that would be going too far. Like trespassing on Bill Shatner’s horse ranch.
I’ve got a day off today. I’m going to spend the time thinking. Floating things on paper, see how they look. Read about pandas. Leisurely finish Oscar Wao. Enjoy the sunlight. Drink Diet Coke outside.
The execution phase of writing uses a completely different sort of thinking than the outlining/”brainstorming” phase. When you’re executing, it’s like you’re in the shop hammering and welding stuff together. You’re a technician.
When you’re outlining and brainstorming, it’s like you’re a hippie-dippy beardo frolicking through a meadow while high on goofballs, drawing make-believe pictures with your magical crayons.
I don’t know which mode I like better.
Postpartum Depression
The thing is, once you finish writing something and it’s done, you’ve suddenly got a lot of time on your hands. You’ve been thinking, crafting, and assembling this thing for a while, and now it’s suddenly done. It’s left the nest.
It’s a weird feeling. You still want to work on it, but there’s no work to be done on it anymore (for now at least). So you just sorta sit there. You have other things to work on, but the impression of the finished project is still heavy in your mind. It’s like carrying a heavy load in your arms and suddenly putting it down — its impression is still felt in your muscles like a phantom limb.
So since I’ve finished I’ve been doing some stuff that I’ve been putting off. Vacuuming. Playing Half-Life 2 again. I’ve wanted to do this for a while — I loved HL2 the first time around and I’ve wanted to play it over since I finished it the first time.
I have a personal theory that Gordon Freeman and the G-Man are the same person. I think that the G-Man is actually an older Gordon Freeman who has somehow traveled back in time to Black Mesa to try to stop the events there and to aid himself in saving the human race.
Note that they both have the same facial structure. They also both have green eyes.
There’s this other, newer project that I want to start outlining soon. There are still big chunks of missing information in it, so it’s not going to be ready to go into that stage for a while. But it’s the next logical step forward.
It seems that with me, a project’s development takes the form of an hourglass. I spend a long time planning it out, outlining, structuring it. Doing research, thinking on paper.
Then I write it very quickly. After that I spend a long time re-writing, developing, and utilizing notes from others to shape it.
The form of my life will probably look like many hourglasses set end-to-end, stretching on until the very last one.
New Car Smell
Project completed. One hundred pages of a new script.
I remember reading something that stuck with me from Michael J. Straczinski’s book on writing: Print it out. Feel the heft of the pages in your hand. This is the work, the output, all the thinking and planning in physical form. This is what it is, now alive and born into the world.
To celebrate I had hearty slabs of red meat. Kalbi. So good. I hadn’t had red meat in a long time. It really fortifies you.
It also makes you really sleepy.
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.
