Sunday, August 22, 2010

A DINNER I WON'T FORGET

Before I start, let me apologize for taking the Pizza Boy story down. It's only temporary. I'll put up an improved version soon, and I think you'll like it a lot better. I had trouble with Beta Blogger, which isn't set up for the kind of photo stories I like to do, but it gets better every day and, well...you can't argue with the price. Thanks to Roberto, Jorge, Rooni, Fritz and Ben for the kind comments on that post.

Fortunately, I have another pizza story ready to go, this one taken from real life...


A few days ago I had dinner in a pizzeria and I noticed what appeared to be a dad and his four kids wolfing down pizza in the booth next to me.  They seemed like a nice family and I gave in to the temptation to eavesdrop.  I'm glad I did, because what they said was fascinating!



I only heard bits of it. If I got it right, the dad had a small contracting business, which fit the way he looked: like the actor, Ned Beatty.  He seemed like an average Joe, a nice guy who was probably skilled and did good work.  He wasn't very eloquent or talkative but you could tell that he was enjoying his kids immensely.  
  


















Three of kids talked mostly to each other about video games, friends,  rock music; the usual things ten year- olds talk about. The fourth kid, the one closest to the dad, was animatedly telling him about his internet business, which was buying and selling sci-fi figurines on ebay.  The kid was bragging about the deals he made.  He relished the details and the dad obviously relished hearing about them. 



So what, you ask, made this dinner so special? 




















It was special because the kid seemed to genuinely enjoy talking to his dad.  Let that sink in for a minute. He actually thought talking to the old man was fun.  When's the last time you saw that? I guess he thought of himself as a businessman, just like his dad, and it was fun for him to compare notes with a sympathetic peer.  


The dad, who had the kind of stiff, cigar store indian face that most men have, was nevertheless beaming.  He was in Seventh Heaven because his son was talking to him just for the sheer pleasure of it, and maybe because he knew he could be useful to a son like that, and would never have to worry that the kid would grow up rudderless or penniless.  I got the feeling that the dad would remember that night as one of the best in his entire life.



















When the family got up to go,  I felt like shaking the kids hand and giving him my wallet. What a gift he gave to his father! What a son! What a night!  




Thursday, August 19, 2010

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF JAMES ELLROY?



It occurred to me that in my post on writers James Ellroy and Elmore Leonard I forgot to include a sample of Ellroy's writing. Ill make up for that here with a couple of brief Ellroy interviews.  He writes the way he talks, so this should give you an idea of what the writing's like.




Ellroy talks in short sentenses with short words.  It's a very lean style.  In the interviews he comes off as obsessive, which doesn't surprise me.  I think all good literary stylists have compulsive disorders.  They write whether they get paid for it or not. You have to write an awful. awful lot to get the kind of feel for words that they have.

The trick is to avoid getting seduced by your own beautiful words, and to never neglect the content. Good writing is always about something that's worth knowing.




YouTube has several videos where Ellroy talks about Elizabeth Short, the famous "Black Dahlia" whose corpse was found surgically cut in half in Hollywood in the forties. His own mother was murdered when Ellroy was a kid, some (not Ellroy) believe by the same killer. The two murders are always on Ellroy's mind. I'm surprised that Ellroy is able to keep focused on a subject he's spoken and written about so frequently through the years. Maybe this is another example of how you have to be an an obsessive compulsive in order to write well.

 Maybe the tragic crimes gave him a nucleus around which he could grow a compulsion. Maybe the best writers need compulsions for fuel and deliberately set about to acquire and nurture them. Or maybe I'm trying to over explain something that's simple and doesn't need an explanation. I don't know. Anyway, I love the way Ellroy talks.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

FILLER

I hate filler. I hate it in books, cartoons, films, food...you name it. Filler sucks.
























I particularly hate it in books. The other day I was in a used book store and I was infinitely saddened to  see how many books were overwritten, or were stretched out versions of what should have been  long magazine articles.  You can blame publishing's woes on computers and TV,  but that's not the whole story.  The truth is that the reading public is also re-acting negatively to the glut of wordy, needlessly long and expensive books which have come out since the late forties.

Why all the filler, and why did it appear in that time period? I don't know. I only know that books (excepting biographies) were tighter before WWII.



























You see the filler problem everywhere. It's in art books which are full of super wide margins and wasted white space. It's in histories which hardly ever address themselves to what readers want to know. I don't want a book with a sappy title like "Brother Against Brother: The Civil War." I want a book called "Why the South Lost the Civil War," or "Why Sherman was an Ineffective General." 

 Maybe publishers are too focused on coming up with the one expensive big seller that will appeal to everybody and make lots of money. Maybe they'd do better if they issued a larger number of books at a much cheaper price, with more specific titles.


BTW: The filler book store I visited wasn't "The Iliad" in North Hollywood, which is pictured above. The Iliad has as much disdain for filler as I do.  








































































Sunday, August 15, 2010

PHILOSOPHY GIRLS AUDITIONS (PART 1)

EXT. THE THEORY BUILDING, HEADQUARTERS OF "THEORY CORNER. INC."

 HUNDREDS OF EXCITED SINGERS AND DANCERS WAIT TO BE INTERVIEWED FOR SLOTS IN "THE PHILOSOPHY GIRLS," THE WORLD'S FOREMOST GIRL PHILOSOPHY REVIEW.




INT. THEORY BUILDING: ON THE APPLICANTS:



BUTTERCUP: "Only two slots left, and there's dozens of girls ahead of us. It doesn't look good!"


















AT THE HEAD OF THE LINE: 







INTERVIEWER: "Nice job, Lily! You sing and dance, you know your philosophy, and you're able to handle tough questions. Congratulations! As of this moment, you're a PHILOSOPHY GIRL! Report to Theory Mansion on Monday and we'll introduce you to the gang!"

LILY: "GASP! I can't believe it! it's been my dream since I was a kid! Thank you! Oh, THANK YOU!"

BUTTERCUP: "Aaaaargh! Oh, great...now there's only ONE spot left!"




















BUTTERCUP: "Lily, you gotta help us out here. We're DESPERATE! Please, please; what questions did they ask!?  They wanted to know about the Positivists, right?"

LILY: "The Positivists? No, not the Positivists.  They were mainly interested in the manly Greek and Roman thinkers...some Enlightenment people...a little on Ayn Rand. "




















BUTTERCUP: "Oh yeah, Ayn Rand.... (GULP!) AYN RAND!!!???? I haven't read ANY of her books!!!"













SUNFLOWER: "Neither have I! She was a follower of Nietzsche, wasn't she?"









DAISY: "Nietzsche!? Rand REPUDIATED Nietzsche! She liked him for a while in her youth, and that was it."
























GLADYS: "EEEEWW!!!! Who let a KID in here!? Beat it, Pee Wee. You're too young to be a Philosophy Girl!"

CONTINUED  IN THE NEXT POST......







PHILOSOPHY GIRLS AUDITIONS (PART 2)

VIOLET: "Well, maybe she's right, Gladys.  Rand says we're born with fundamental rights, which no  Nietzchean Superman or Leviathan state can morally withdraw."


























IRIS: " 'Sounds good Violet, but the Utilitarians had another way of looking at it.  They said the  purpose of the state is to bring about the most happiness for the most people.  It would be hard for the state to do that unless it had a lot of power. "





















PETUNIA: "But who decides what makes you happy?  Hitler?  Stalin? Rand says it's not the job of the state to make you happy. It's the job of the state to protect your right to make yourself happy, whatever way you choose, provided you respect the rights of others to do the same. It's right here in the Declaration of Independence...our 'inalienable right to life, liberty and the PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS!' "






























OUTSIDE, ON THE LINE OF APPLICANTS:


GLADYS (VO): "GOOD GRIEF! ANOTHER KID!!!! What's this, the PHILOSOPHY BABIES!!??

MAGNOLIA (VO): "I don't know, I think she's kinda cute."

GLADYS (VO): "See if you think so when you end up having to clean her turtle bowl!"





Thursday, August 12, 2010

THEORYBOY INTERVIEWS MILT GRAY

Well, slightly exaggerating.  Above, the heroine of Milt Gray's new web comic, "Ms. Viagri Ampleten."
Sepia sketches by John Kricfalusi


Greetings Theory Cornerites! Uncle Eddie here.  That's me above, second from the left. You know, we've interviewed many celebrities on this site: Sammy, Dean, Frank, and even Bob Clampett, but none has been as tall as our present subject, Simpsons timing director, animator, Clampett fan and web cartoonist, the 6' 6" "Tower of Power," MILT GRAY. "Hi MILT!"

















MILT : "Hi, Uncle Eddie! Wanna see my latest drawing of Viagri Ampleten?"

UNCLE EDDIE: "Sure! Wow! She certainly is...(gulp!)...ample. So this is your new web comic character! She's a spy, right?"

MILT: "Well, not exactly. She's a free agent. Sometimes she works for the government, and sometimes for private people. She takes on the really dangerous assignments that no one else wants to touch." 

UNCLE EDDIE: "How does she decide what jobs to take?"

MILT: "Good question. Well, she's more likely to take a job that gives her scope to follow her hobby, which is sex. She's on a crusade to liberate people from their sex hangups."


















UNCLE EDDIE: "Uh oh! There goes your 'G' rating."

MILT: "'Not worried. I'm after whatever rating makes sense for the stories I'm telling.  I figure the readers will tell me how graphic I should go."

UNCLE EDDIE: "How did you figure out the format?  There can't be many web comics that scan the way yours does."

MILT: "Yeah, it works great, doesn't it? It came about because the project started as an animated cartoon, and the panels were meant to be layouts. That's why they're all the same size. When I decided to do a web comic instead, it seemed like a natural outgrowth of that to put them in a column and let the reader scroll down. I guess I was lucky, because everybody seems to like it that way."














UNCLE EDDIE: "How did you color it?"





MILT: "Well, I xeroxed the original drawings down to a size my scanner could take, then I just fed them in.  The color was done on Photoshop by my color stylist, Cynthia Macintosh. 
















UNCLE EDDIE: "I'll put a few of the panels up (that's them above, cropped badly by me, and in a different format than the one Milt uses. I was just too sleepy to do it right).  Boy, you can tell that an animator drew them."

MILT: "Thanks. There's a lot that's different about this comic. I hope it influences things. The web is a great vehicle for comics, and it'll get even better if we continue to experiment."


Milts web comic:  http://www.viagriampleten.com

Sunday, August 08, 2010

WHAT MADE JOHNATHAN WINTERS SO GREAT?

Jonathan Winters (above) is an interesting guy. You can spend a lifetime in the entertainment business and never come up with an appealing character, and here's   Jonathan Winters who comes up with new ones by the cartload every time he speaks. What was his secret?




















I'm not sure. Maybe it had something to do with Winters being mischievous.  People like that quality. Maybe that's why mischievous people make good joke tellers. They make you aware of the absurdity of the fact that you just dropped something important to listen to something that's going to be incredibly stupid.

I don't remember many jokes, and I'm not really good at telling them. What I do remember is the way they were told. I love the way joke tellers look both ways then grab your arm and lean in furtively. I love the whole ritual that's associated with joke telling. Mischievous people are experts at creating the atmosphere that precedes a joke.


In animation you know you've got a good character if you start laughing before he even talks. Good characters have ignorant charisma. Funny things happen just because they're in the room.  The air fills with electricity and potential just because a force of nature has arrived, and is checking out the room. For me the joke is of far less importance than the set up.

John achieved this with Ren and Stimpy. In his best period Winters achieved it every time he opened his mouth.





Saturday, August 07, 2010

JONATHAN WINTERS IMPROV



All three of these YouTube videos are of Jonathan Winters, from the period when he first started to do improv on TV.

He was far and away the greatest hero of my childhood. Unfortunately he was only on late at night when I wasn't allowed to watch.  To see him I had to wait til my folks went to sleep, then sneak downstairs in the dark, taking care to avoid creaking floorboards and barking pets.  I'd feel around for the TV controls in the dark, then with infinite patience slowly turn on the set, with the brightness and sound almost as low as they could be.




The films you see here include some of the very same sketches that I watched in the dark. I never saw them with this clarity, though. The screen was always so black that I could barely make out the shapes as human, and I had to press my ear hard against the speaker to hear what was happening. My grandfather was a light sleeper and more than once he caught me and terrible yelling ensued.  Then there were the ghosts, but I won't go into that.  





I guess you appreciate what you have to make sacrifices for. All these videos have great meaning for me.
I read somewhere that the young Bach had to do something similar in order to get access to his dad's music library. His father was certain that his oldest son would be the musically gifted one, and didn't want Bach, the little kid, to get a taste for something that was so obviously beyond his meagre ability.

Thursday, August 05, 2010

ROBERT CRUMB'S SURPRISING NEW BOOK

The book (above).....



























....and the author (above), Robert Crumb.

He chose his subject well.  Genesis is a true masterpiece, arguably the best book of its kind ever written, regardless of the religious convictions of the reader. It's also pretty doggone weird.

The weird parts start with the old age of Noah.








Noah (above, click to enlarge)) has too much to drink and falls asleep naked in his tent. One of his sons, Ham,  happens to see his father  naked and tells his brothers about it, maybe (I'm not sure) in a humorous way.  The brothers are appalled and take pains to cover the father before he's seen by anyone else.  

When Noah awakens and sees what happened, he's outraged  and condemns  Ham's son to slavery.  Why Noah chose such an extreme punishment, and why he took it out on Ham's kid isn't clear. There's tons of Jewish and Christian commentary on this, but I'm not familiar with it. 

I don't think it's fair to say that God justifies slavery in this story. At this point in history the Jewish faith doesn't exist yet. Genesis is chronicling the prehistory of that religion, when Hebrews shared most of the beliefs and prejudices of the society around them. The writer has God take a special interest in them, but we don't yet know where that interest will lead. Even so...it's weird.

Afterwards, God is compelled to take sides in endless disputes among the Hebrews.  A deity who recently had been involved with the creation of the universe and was steeped in the mechanics of black holes and such, was forced to mediate zillions of oddball disputes among sheepherders.

Surprisingly we don't question it, maybe because the atmosphere in Genesis is alive with growing potential.  In the writer's view, these people are being nudged inch by inch toward a more sophisticated law and a higher destiny.  It's what Merlin tried to do to Arthur and his friends in the film "Excalibur."

Surprisingly Crumb tells this story with great understatement and empathy.  The book is worth having.


 

Tuesday, August 03, 2010

HAVE YOU HEARD OF THE "DANDIZETTE?"

The dandizette is a female English dandy. Their peek period coincided with that of the male dandy, roughly  from 1810 to 1820. 




















Dandizettes hung out with male dandies.  Even though they were women, some of them adapted the speech and habits of male dandies.  That's bizarre when you remember that male dandies were imitating women.  It's a case of women imitating men who were imitating women.  Geez!

Wait a minute, let me backtrack.  I implied that all dandies were gays, and I didn't mean to say that.  I imagine that the great majority of dandies were heterosexual and completely masculine. Disraeli was a dandy. Dickens was something of a dandy in his youth. Even so, I feel justified in hazarding a guess that gay men had something to do with the founding of dandyism. They started it, but a big portion of it passed into the hands of heterosexuals. 

  

















Dandizettes are with us even today, witness John Allison's "Fop Catcher" (above) (copyright John Allison 2009).  Some modern girls just like to hang out with dandies. I'm not talking about hetero girls who have gay men friends. That's different. I'm talking about hetero dandizettes who fall in love exclusively with male hetero dandies. 




Is anybody following what I'm saying here? I wrote it, and even I have trouble understanding it. 


















Girls are strange. They seem to prefer men who are  either ultra-masculine, or who look and act like girls. No doubt the truth is more complicated, but I make no claim to possessing the truth. 

  



















Were dandies of the Regency period really as over the top as they were portrayed in etchings?




























I hope so. It makes the period much more interesting.


While we're on the subject of dandies, I think I'll take a shot at answering  Paul's comment about whether or not metrosexuals are todays dandies. It's an interesting topic.  

I do think that Regency dandies will be found to have had a greater intellectual impact on succeeding generations than metrosexuals, and that's because they were better versed in culture.  Go to iTunes and listen to  Stephen Fry's podcast on language.  Fry doesn't dress like a dandy, but he was influenced by that culture, and you'll hear for yourself how powerful dandyism is when its allied to a good classical education.



Sunday, August 01, 2010

ABOUT ELMORE LEONARD





Who's your pick for the best living American novelist? Wait, just to be fair let me amend that to the best practicing living novelist. Don Delillo? Bret Easton Ellis? Tom Wolfe?  Let me weigh in with my own pick. So far as I'm able to tell, the best novels being written now are genre novels, and the best genre novelists are crime writers Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy. 

It's confusing because these guys write alike, look alike, and their names even sound alike.  Both believe in lean, dialogue driven prose with minimal third person narrative. 

I remember when books that were mostly dialogue began to make big sales. Everybody thought it was the end of civilization because we took it as a sign that  modern audiences were too dumb to appreciate good narrative. I used to think that too, but I've since changed my mind. The fact is that only a few writers of the 20th Century were ever any good at narrative. The ones that weren't plodded along in that vein, because they thought it was expected of them, and that produced some pretty bad books. Like Taylor Caldwell's, for example.  Try reading a couple of random lines from "Ceremony of the Innocent" (1976), reproduced below (click to enlarge)........



Do you see what I mean? Professional but boring is how I'd describe it (above). A real sleeping pill. Now sample (below) the leaner, more effective style used in Elmore Leonard's "Get Shorty" (1990).........



Nice, huh? Dialogue carries the scene, and it works beautifully. Leonard's a good practitioner of the new style. Shakespeare told his stories with dialogue, and so can we, provided the dialogue is good. 

My only criticism of this lean style is that in our time it's worked best in genre novels with flamboyant, over-the-top characters. Will it work for other types? Only time will tell. 

Leonard's a terrific stylist and amazingly he's willing to share how he does it.  Here, from the internet, is an abridged version of Leonard's top ten tips for writers. It starts with an admonition to avoid adverbs, then goes on to.........


1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a charac ter's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his bookArctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
2 Avoid prologues: they can be annoying, especially a prologue ­following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."
3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.
4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".
5 Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.
6 Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.
7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apos­trophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.
8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "American and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story.
9 Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.
My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.



BTW: I added something important to the Bette Davis post immediately below, to the part about Mankiewicz. Take a look!


Wednesday, July 28, 2010

MY LAST (AND BEST) BETTE DAVIS POST

This'll be my last Bette Davis post for a while. I hate to put an end to this, but I think I'm boring everybody. Well, I'll go out with a bang by putting up what has become my favorite Bette/Joan Crawford story.  


Here it is, as told by Bette's daughter in her book, "My Mother's Keeper." I think the daughter is about twelve years old here (below). The incident takes place on the set of "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?", which as you know, costarred Betty Davis and Joan Crawford, who both hated each other.  Both women took their children to the set with them (click the book pages to enlarge).  



Add caption


Great story, huh!? Geez, my admiration for Joan Crawford doubled when I read this.  I  tacked on a little of the next paragraph about Joan's boobs because Bette's reaction to them was so funny.




On a different topic: a lot of critics consider "All About Eve" (1950) to be the high point of Bette's career. It wasn't, not by a long shot. There are some terrific lines in it, but she doesn't deliver them right. Don't take my word for it, see for yourself. Here's (above) her most famous line: "Buckle your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night." See what you think.

Did you watch it? Then you see what I mean. Bette's way too restrained. The line calls for style and she reads it almost straight, like it's just information. I don't entirely blame Bette. I also blame her director friend William Wyler, who someone on the net credited with talking her out of her over the top approach to everything. This is a story that requires over the top.






















I also blame Joseph Mankiewicz who wrote and directed the film. Mankiewicz writes great dialogue but he was an inept director in this period. Look at the boring compositionh in the picture above. That's how Mankiewicz shoots the most memorable line in the film. Can you believe it? It's the lamp's scene, not Bette's. 


Sometimes it seems like everything and everybody in the film is more important than Bette. In other scenes (not shown in the clip) even the maid, Thelma Ritter, is allowed to upstage her. What was Mankiewicz thinking of? He inexplicably downplays the star and lets everybody else go over the top. 


And what's with the awkward dress and the super wide hair style that de-emphasizes her face? What's with the flat lighting? What's with the camera angles that make the star look short and dumpy? Did Mankiewicz even like Bette Davis?




BTW: The awkward paragraph spacing in this post and others comes courtesy of Beta Blogger, which has great potential if the bugs can be ironed out.