some brief nostalgic elongations

I wrote a one man, one act play when I was 19 about a man named Harold, who over the course of the act we find is quite mad. He's a frustrated writer, and in his spiral into the hells of writer's block actually goes on a shooting spree to give the serial killer he's writing about more versimilitude. At the end of the act, we discover that he's in an insane asylum of the old school nature, and he then hangs himself with the strap of the...shasta, I'm blanking on the name...that thing that Houdini used to escape from, with straps tied around you so yr hands are all caught behind yr back. (edited to say: straight jacket)
Anyway, in the drunken haze that was my early twenties, somehow this little gem turned into the kernel of the idea for what I then called The Conversation's Trilogy. The idea's been expanded now into a sextology or possibly a septology, but that's a whole other story. In it's original first reformulation as The ConversTril, Harold witnesses his good friend, the Ned Beatty character, slay another friend of theirs and his own wife as they were en fragante delicto. Harold gets all histerically blind, but in the magical realist vein, he gains the eyesight of our hero, J, and he writes a novel from the bowels of a nuthouse to somehow help J with his own troubles. Harold's story was to be told in a play and J's in a screenplay, and the book was to be actually written. It's to my mind a great novel idea. A kind of admixture of Dashiell Hammett, Elmore Leonard on his good and vibrantly sharp-edged days, and what I have imagined Robert Ludlum to be like from the descriptions my friend Tom used to lay on me.
Again anyway, I had written the first act of the play in one frenzied drunken morning, and was working with my friend, Quintronic, on the screenplay on and off for several months of mostly messing about. Then one day, I just somehow grabbed a book called Mythology by Edith Hamilton to see if there was someway to throw it into the mix. I can't remember why or how it seemed like the thing, but it did. I went down to the Half Shell in Midtown Memphis, and was scanning through the various brief descriptions of the various Greek dieties, when an old man approached me. He gave me a bunch of apples from his farm, and generally talked about how much he missed his wife, who had passed on. It was a strange encounter, but I let him unburden his lonliness as best I could.
In some wierd way that moment unlocked a neural cascade of creativity, and the new story was born. Harold's trials and tribulations were simply a preperation for his being inhabited by the returning Dionysus, who spends half his time in Hades and half on Earth, as he is a shadowed early formation of the Jesus idea, whose worship on Earth gives Dio some still brief time amongst the living. As none of the other Greek Gods are still worshipped, they no longer have the power to exist in this realm, but Hades and all who believed in it still does. Only Dio is connected to this world, and the first act of the play begins at his previous return to Hades and the realization amongst Zeus and other greedy gods that he holds a connective power to the world, and so they trap him and try to draw on it for the lustful expanse that it gives them. Just as he is sacrificed in Hades, he returns to Earth in the form of Harold, and finds that in the preparation process Harold has through his troubles and the eyesight of J written this novel of grim set, hard-boiled, mutated detective fiction. Dio inhabited Harold then escapes the nuthouse to chase down J who is himself about to make the wild mistake of running away from his own problems. All of the three stories end with each character heading to New Orleans.
In the next level reformulation, they all meet there and are confronted with the fact that they are all simply aspects of my own psyche, cognition, volition, and emotion (I was then in the early stages of studying consciousness theory), and they meet a socratic like character who explains how the whole story is simply an attempt to converge psychically on the metaphoric New Orleans, which is intended as the spiritual center of humanity. All heavily wierd stuff, and not a little convoluted now some years past it's sell by date. Still...

thoughts reactivated

I found a book in the recycle bin outside my apartment building just a few minutes ago, and I'm feeling the synchronicitiousness heavily. The book is called Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, and it's got all kinds of mythical women and their stories and explanations. I'm highly intriqued to say the least, but it also occurred to me that this book may be just what I needed to get the female character of the Darwin Trilogy to a more mythic place, as I was lamenting the need to do just that here on this blog a while back.
It then occurred to me that the whole story itself needed to take on an archetypal significance, as I'm not one to just leave it as simply an action film script. That would not be in keeping with my character. I'm now sure that there are three books specifically that will be required reading and in some cases rereading for a conceptual feasting on myths and archetypes and such. The aforementioned Women Who Run With the Wolves as well as, Gaia and God by Rosemary Radford Ruether and Patterns in Comparative Religion by Mircea Eliade are now going to be the trilogy of touchstones for the project, along with, if at all possible, Joseph Campbell's Mask of God series and maybe some Euripides. Since Euripides and Aeschylus and the other Greek Tragedians are themselves already a heavy influence on a play I've got in mind and made a few tentative stabs at, I won't make them required reading for this project, but I'll try to keep them in the back of my head.
It is not clear to me when I can actually get back to this project, but I'm projecting for maybe taking some time on it this summer. I really want to get Eddie the Grouch done first, and I had wanted to see what I could do with the Celebrity Without a Cause project also, oh and the memoir project. I had also wanted to sit back down with HTML-coding and design stuff this summer so I could snazz up the blogs here a little, but this is all way too much to think about finishing in one summer. I'll give it a crack anyway, and we'll see what shakes out.

Chayefsky, the mad genius

Paddy Chayefsky, the mad genius of the early days of television, who so wonderfully embodies the values of the Hollywood Renaissance, I just felt I had to say how inspired and inspiring the film Network is; how intense and burrowingly perceptive the whole thing is. I was concerned early on about the portrayal of women, but this transcends gender as does business. It masculinizes everyone involved or scoffs them off to lick their wounds unobtrusively and out of the way. The performances all around are well renowned, but the smaller role of William Holden's wife played by Beatrice Straight is the moment of punctured life in the continued saga of histrionics. It's an important and well-placed moment that gives the film a roundness that I respect greatly. He nails it down with every word, and the actors give breath to those words with astounding dignity. It's just a really good movie, and one that has given me just a moment of inspiration and feeling when I thought films had lost that ability forever. A mild exaggeration, but then I'm prone for such things.
It occurred to me as I was watching the Ecumenical Liberation Army's squabble over distribution costs and anciliary rights or somesuch that there is a powerful tradition of great truth telling in the arts, and one that must be continued and fought for and sought out and delineated. It also occurred to me how much creative will must go into the creation of something like that. I'm struggling to get at my meaning here because as usual I refuse to speak directly. Let me try again. I think that there is so much that is creative and powerful and unique in our artistic history that it's a crying shame that the kinds of remakes we get are things like old sitcoms or cheap cash ins on a once popular or possibly solid artistic product (i.e. Sabrina). It occurs to me that there's this huge wealth of wonderful material that should be drawn from and used as an inspiration point, not just gimickified for a quick dollar bill. Some questions arise: is it art or business that controls the artistic markets, and is there an art to business that isn't a con, especially when it comes down to art? It really feels hollow and plastic when the business end of things gets through with our cultural representations, and it just occurred to me that this is not healthy, is entirely counterproductive, and quite possibly heavily financially restrictive. It's just that artists tend never to take financial considerations into play, and so the business end of things always feels they must find an exploitable element and try to play that up. It's slickness personified: an idea made manifest in our collective consciousness and then realized in individuals who find there ways into positions of control and influence. Perhaps I'm talking beyond my scope and not making much sense, but it just feels like a cheap con sometimes. I just think we can do better.

The Seagull among other things

I started rereading this Chekhov gem this afternoon, and it was instantly clear that this was the play that I was looking for. I had virtually randomly selected it from plays that I have copies of to be the play that the character Lilly from the screenplay Eddie the Grouch is in, and it fits perfectly. In fact, after their first act falling out over Eddie's birthday outburst, he'll be dragged off to see it by Thera and it will inspire him to try for a more abstract novel project. It's also clear to me that I absolutely need to be more careful about leaving ideas just inside my head. I had laid out the major plotpoints of Eddie's novel and how it changes at the end of the second act, but this morning as I was reading The Seagull and thinking about the script for the first time in weeks, it occurred to me that the remnants of those brainstorm sessions are vague and not as solid as they were when I was working on them. This is not uncommon, it's just tough to always do notetaking, but necessary (as he reminds himself yet again) since we work on more than one project at a time and have work and school as well to contend with. You know these things, so keep to them.
Creatively it's been a languid time. I should be working this week, but I can't muster up much energy for the whole thing. Now that I have the play in place with it's relatively large cast, I have to work out who we meet, who plays who, especially whether Lilly plays Arkidina or Masha or Nina. Now that I think about it there would be no solid choice for a typecast, but certainly she would need quite a bit of range to get from her personality to Arkidina, who is clueless and grandiose. I see them as a group, so cohesive and intense about the theatre, quoting lines from their characters and discussing maybe Konstantin's desire to break with trad. theatre or Trigorin's soliloquey on writing. This will all make Eddie terribly jealous and finally set him off, maybe on David, the director or the actor who plays Trigorin or even Lilly herself. Who knows? Just letting it all hang out a little.
Of Trigorin's monologue, I've got to include this qoute:

"They're deluding me into thinking I'm sane, and I'm really not, and someday they'll creep up behind me and drag me off to the crazy house. And when I was young, and could have been out enjoying myself, writing was sheer hell. A beginning writer, unless he's lucky, feels completely out of place- awkward, useless, nervous. He's obsessed with successful writers and people in the arts, he hangs around them, but nobody notices him. And he's afraid to look anyone in the eyes. He's like a compulsive gambler without any money! I never knwe who my readers were, but I had this vision of them: hostile, unimpressed. I was afraid of the public, terrified of it, and whenever a new play of mine opened, I always thought the people with dark hair hated it and the ones with blond hair were bored by it. It's horrible." From the character Trigorin from The Seagull by Anton Chekhov.

Chekhov is such existential deepness, I can't help but love him. Definitely my kind of playwright, but still humorous at times but such meaningful discussions of life, and so universally and timelessly true. The discussion of fame and celebrity has only become more poignant.

Also just quickly, The Seagull is also going to be used for the introductory scene between Sarah and Belle for the Play section of The Coffee Shoppe, so we'll get maximum umph for our buck out of this material. There's just so much there it's unbelievable, and I like the idea of characters from different projects getting to comment on the same material, maybe we'll get a whole different take from Belle and Sarah than we do from the crowd that's putting the play on or from Eddie who's at first bitter and then inspired by the piece. Okay, that's all.

kizmetic ponderings

I noticed that there's been some wierd synchronicity in some of my posts here. The week I posted the idea about a film of celebrity fame as a haunting and an overarching destroyer, Heath Ledger overdosed. The day after I posted the novel idea about someone's destructive behavior building and building until it maybe destroyed their lives, it was revealed that Eliot Spitzer had been caught up in a sting operation for hiring prostitutes. If cartoons start coming to life and attacking us, don't say I didn't warn you before hand. It could already be happening, so be aware.