A Hot Mess
So I’m doing research for this play I’m working on, and our good friend Rick sent me this TED Talk that he thought would be useful: Rick Smolan Tells the Story of a Girl.
I love TED Talks and I really liked this one. But it was the user comments about the piece that got my brain moving. Check ‘em out — there’s a divide between people who believe that a form of casual racism occurred with this girl’s “rescue” and people who think that this fellow did the right thing. After all, he was a self-admitted young man with limited experience, and he was just trying to do what he thought was right.
My thought on the entire story is that it ended well — whether the right thing was done is difficult to say. I have a feeling that this girl would’ve grown up happy and fairly well adjusted had she stayed in Korea. It seems like she would’ve thrived anywhere, really.
My point here is that the world is a complex and crazy place, and with our limited level of visibility, we’re just trying to do the right thing. Or the wrong thing. Or how about this: We’re just trying to do things. Whether they work out in the end is a subjective and unpredictable thing. So we’re all just trying to do things that seem to fulfill our interests. Good, bad, these results are invisible until later.
Real life is a mess. It’s a hot mess. The best laid plans gang aft agley. And even when things go wrong, they might lead to a place that is better than what we had hoped for.
So in determining whether the right outcome is occurring, I think the best question to ask is this:
ARE YOU HAPPY? Y/N
Clearly, as a result of this particular episode all of the participants in Mr. Smolan’s story are happy, so I think he did the right thing, racism or not.
How this relates to writing: In all of my work, if you were to ask any of my characters at the beginning of the story “ARE YOU HAPPY?”, they would all, unequivocally and truthfully, circle “N”. They might want to circle “Y”, but that wouldn’t be the truth.
Now: By the end of the story they may circle “Y”, they may still circle “N”, but whatever the case, they worked incredibly, superhumanly hard to find that happiness.
Trying to get it: Now that’s the story.
A Series of Open Doors
I’ve noticed lately that when I tell people that my job is “to restore a sense of childlike wonder to peoples’ lives”, they take me seriously and don’t seem to understand that this is a joke that I stole from Fake Steve Jobs. I also sometimes say that in order to write I need to be in a “Zen-like state” in a perfect 72 degree, low-decibel environment. Again, people think I am being serious when I say this. Like writing is some kind of weird magic done by fragile weirdoes.
Here’s the straight dope, my friends: It is magic. We take nothing and create something from thin air. That’s fucking magic. But strangely and ironically, it’s also a job. And like any job, it requires discipline, work ethic, deadlines, and all sorts of other un-magical, everyday things. The temptation to look at ffffound and The Awesomer is often mighty strong.
Yeah. So writing is this strange, improbable coin: On one side you have raw emotion, conflict, and the sometimes rational and sometimes irrational forces of creativity. On the other side you have the lonely act of sitting by yourself in a chair and punching out pages — you have structure and the dissemination of work, all of which seem antithetical to the pure creative process. It’s the weirdest thing in the world.
But I think that’s what makes it a very special job. Because when I get bummed by the work, or I get stuck, or I’m thinking too much about the business aspects surrounding it, I start thinking about the new stuff I’ve got that’s brewing in my head. The new stories. Every new project or new story idea that appears in my mind is like an open door I can jump through… To escape.
Well, maybe “escape” isn’t such a great term for this — more like, “move forward into”.
Every time I start a new piece of work it’s like I’m a recently arrived immigrant in a strange new world. I don’t know the people, I don’t know the language, I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I’m feeling great because I know that I will eventually make this world my own. I will eventually know everyone that I meet here, right down to their nitty-gritty core. I will become fluent in their language, and I will work out the destinies of everyone involved.
Last night at a birthday party I was talking to a friend about how I don’t really second-guess myself as I write. In fact, I don’t even think about it — whether something is going to turn out good or bad. This is because I know that if something doesn’t work, I can fix it. And if things do work, I can make them work better. So it really doesn’t matter either way.
So yeah — that’s one of the things I love about this job: That no matter what, there’s always a new way forward. No matter how crumby things might look, or how stuck we might get in the present tense, there will always be another open doorway up ahead.
Also, as writers, we are fragile weirdoes. But I think everyone is a fragile weirdo at their core, so that’s OK.
Civilians
The other day I was hanging out with a good friend of ours, shootin the shit about relationships. “Do you think that you could date a civilian?” she asked. By this she meant “someone that doesn’t work in the entertainment industry”.
That night as I lay snug and smug in my bed, I chuckled to myself over her choice of words. “Civilian… Ha ha ha…” This was the same nomenclature used on The Sopranos when stray bullets or stray kicks to the head happened to hit innocent bystanders: “He killed a civilian!” It sets a tone: There’s them, and then there’s us. As Tony Soprano would say, “We’re soldiers.” And it’s kind of cool to be a soldier — like you’re in on a secret, like you’re a band apart.
Then the next morning I woke up and had a change of heart. Maybe over the course of the evening I was visited by three ghosts and then forgot about them, but the idea of “us” and “civilians” really started to bug me.
Some old British dude once wrote something about holding a mirror up to nature — that the storyteller/actor/writer/day player’s objective is to communicate and reflect the truth as he/she sees it in the outside world. It occurs to me that we need to live in the world in order to accurately reflect it in our storytelling. That is, separating the world into us and them tends to be antithetical to that objective.
I think it’s part of human nature to want to group ourselves apart, to feel special. We’re still tribal animals. We want to feel like we made the right choices in life.
But I don’t know, man — it’s way too easy to lose touch. How do you stay connected with the rest of the world when A) Most of your friends are actors, B) You don’t spend time in an office, and C) You don’t really hang out in the real world anymore — plus you live in LA, which divorced itself from reality back in the 1920s.
It’s really easy to find yourself trapped in a bubble. And if that happens, you move further and further away from the world and all the fantastic truths that it contains. See M. Night, who I think is a great dude but seems to have drifted off on an ice floe into his own world.
Basically, I gotta keep myself connected. Take a cooking class or something. Meet more people, civilians or not. I think if my friend asked me again if I could ever date a civilian, my response would be an unequivocal “YES”. I’m a big fan of living in the real world and remaining a human being. It’s hard work for anybody, and if I’m going to put out stories that connect with people, I need to hang out with them and keep my ears open.
I feel pretty grounded though. I’ve never been a very cool guy, but ironically that now seems to be a part of my newfound coolness. But it also occurs to me that the truly cool never have to call attention to their coolness.
Also, one may think that they’re cool but they’re really just a dog wearing a sweater and sunglasses:
Although his ‘tude really sells it.
Programming and Writing
So yours truly pulled down the latest iPhone SDK 3.2 beta last Friday and dug in, checking out the new iPad Simulator and associated sample code to see what there was to see.
I will always love programming. Programming taught me a lot about writing — how to be structural, how to break large ideas down into small, workable components, and how to make things elegant and “read” properly. Lately I haven’t had a chance to program much, so I’m trying to rectify that in my spare time with a little hobbyist programming on the iPad/iPhone.
I’m probably dating myself, but fuck it — my first computer was a Commodore 64. My dad brought it home one day and hooked it up to the TV — back then, computers used CRT TV sets as their monitors. I was immediately obsessed with it. We would type in programs in BASIC that were printed in magazines like BYTE, etc., and run them. They were stored on tape drives. By that I mean cassette tapes.
Eventually I started taking the programs apart to see how they worked. This was one of my favorite things to do when I was a kid, and I still do it today with everything I read and watch. I think those early years shaped my thinking process — everything I wanted to do involved deconstructing and analyzing ideas — and then reimplementing them in my own way. So programming has always been a big part of my life. I owe a lot to it.
It’s a weird thing — people tend to perceive programming and creative writing as respectively “left brain” and “right brain” activities, but to me they’re the same side of the coin. One is designed to be compiled by a computer, and the other is designed to be compiled by the human brain — which is a lot more subjective than a computer, but still requires just as much structure and thoughtfulness.
Plus there’s something thrilling about solving a computing problem and making it work. IE, being stuck on a bug for hours and finally figuring it out and making it run.
However, the high you get from solving a writing problem is exponentially greater — because it’s about something absolutely emotional.
Palm is in Deep Shit: I was talking to my dad today — he was an early Palm Pre adopter, and I wanted to know what he plans to do if Palm goes away. Here’s the rundown on Palm’s troubles from our friend Jean-Louis Gassée, formerly of Apple and Be, Inc.
My dad is a true believer in Web OS, and is hoping that Palm will somehow weather the storm. I think that it comes down to this: Somebody needs to buy Palm. I have my doubts that Google will do it since they’re doing quite well with Android; Microsoft is doing its own Windows 7 Mobile thing. So I think Nokia or RIM are the likely candidates. A Nokia move could stop their slide into irrelevance; RIM is losing mindshare to Apple and Android, so a Palm purchase could be a good way to refresh and stay in the game.
Whatever the case, Roger McNamee is being rightfully blamed for setting expectations for the Palm Pre way too high — “The Pre going to be a million times — well, not a million times — several times faster than the iPhone” he said way back before Palm got clobbered by Apple.
In technology, no one should ever use the future tense when describing their product. Well, okay — you can — but use it in a qualitative sense like Steve Jobs does. Don’t use it in a quantitative, measurable sense. Because then you give people the ability to do the math.
P x I = G
So I finally watched Dead Poets Society (it’s frequently mentioned in The Inside Story as a case study) and was amused to note that the photograph they used of Robin Williams as a teenager is one that I and many of my old chums are familiar with. It hangs in the library of Redwood High School, our old alma mater. Yes, Robin Williams and I went to the same high school, just a scant 15-20 years apart from each other.
There’s nothing much for me to say about DPS except for the fact that it’s now one of my favorite movies of all time. Oh, and it’s kind of weird to see Robert Sean Leonard (Wilson from House) as a teenager. See? He did fulfill his father’s wishes and became a doctor after all.
So today I ordered the low-end 16 GB wifi-only iPad. My rationale for doing this is such: I’m going to use this thing to develop iPad software and as a couch-based web surfing device; then when the 2nd generation of the iPad comes out I’ll get a new model and give this one to my mom.
Also, look man: I’ve gotta have it. I can’t not-have it. I am legally required to purchase it and use it. It completes me. Get off my back already.
Bong Joon-Ho’s MOTHER
Bong Joon-Ho’s MOTHER: I saw it last night courtesy of our good friends at Giant Robot — if you want the skinny on this sort of thing, get on their FILMMATTERS mailing list here.
I liked the movie although I’m still processing it internally. I know for sure that I liked Memories of Murder much more — I was telling our good friend Dave that I felt that was a stronger film for me because it tied the story of an individual to the emergence of Korea as a modern nation with all the advantages and problems that come with it. That’s a fine thematic trick. It’s also a very good idea to watch David Fincher’s Zodiac back-to-back with Memories since they tackle the same themes and subject matter in different ways.
Anyway, here’s what I have to say about Mother: (*** SPOILERS? ***) Anybody is capable of killing. Even your Mike Golamco. Actually, especially your Mike Golamco after a lady lets her pup poop in J.Crew and refuses to clean it up. People like that definitely get a brick to the face.
The moral of the story: Let it go, people. Let it go. Sure you killed a guy, but the more you let that bother you tell-tale-heart style, the less you’re going to enjoy life! Wipe that blood off your hands and go do something nice for yourself. Have a little You Time. Eat a Hot Pocket, go dancing.
Plus it’s like, totes easier to kill again after you’ve killed the first guy. In fact, I think you have to in order to cover up the initial killing. But fuck it, everybody’s gotta go sometime.
(*** SPOILERS END ***) Mother: Go see it. It’s intense. Right after I saw it I emailed our good friend Dave with the message: “Saw MOTHER. Only the Korean people could come up with such a film.”
I mean this as a compliment.
Yeah, Well, You Know, That’s Just, Like, Your Opinion, Man
Some might argue that the Nihilists are Chaotic Evil, but I dispute that — because they do believe in something: Money.
Also, whenever I see this movie I’m reminded that Flea is in it, and that fact makes me really happy.
UPDATE: An ongoing crime against humanity is that The Big Lebowski is not yet available on Blu-Ray… But it’s available on HD-DVD??? Someone is going to get their chonson chopped off.
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.
