7 weeks 3 days

At 7 weeks 3 days, it's the size of a strawberry. Larger than a raspberry. Smaller than an apricot. It has eyelids, elbow joints, fingers. Each day its sweetness multiplies. They found four more bodies today from the Air France crash in the Atlantic and somewhere floating near the surface: a briefcase with the Airbus A330 ticket inside. Somewhere a mother sits waiting for a sign of her son sunk somewhere in that vast ocean. I sit too, on the shore of a different ocean, waiting.

sport the stache

Tonight is the third night of WCNY's televised auction, our annual fundraiser that brings in 5% of our station's annual budget while also battering staff with its painfully late nights and unhealthy food choices (I've already had 2 Harrison Bakery donuts, 2 of Tom Murphy's homemade cookies and a handful of M&Ms). Seemingly composed people lose their patience and begin to nip. Everyone becomes aware how little liquor can be found. I find my husband fast asleep each night I return home and slip quietly into bed near 2 a.m. unable to fall fast asleep. TelAuc is a bitch.

To counter the malaise and irritability, I decided tonight to see if I could convince 7 adults to sport one of these "Self-Adhesive Stylish Mustaches." Consider it a social experiment exploring which staff will be most likely to sport the stache! Will it be the high-spirited CEO who already sports a real stache? Will it be the whacky producers or the witty art director or will I find telemarketers spilling out from behind the scenes dying to stick on a stylish stache of their very own? We'll see. Wish me luck... more soon!

Pheww - that was exhausting!

OK, a summary of the results of tonight's experiment:

The NOs: the accountant, the accountant's assistants, the art director (!), the vice president of television, the host of a late-night public affairs program, the entire membership department, the coordinator of volunteers and special events, the already-mustached people, the entire auction department, three salespeople.

The MAYBE LATERs: Surpisingly only one person placated me with this answer, and he was a producer, though one out of his element at the time he was asked and likely to have fallen into the YES category had he not been surrounded by strangers.

The WELL-OK YESes: one salesperson, who randomly took the Grandpa mustache and looked odder than most in the photos; and the producer who fittingly took the Weasel mustache but was never seen with it on.

The HELL YESes: The graphic designer sported the Bruiser mustache, though she looked more like a female Hitler; one salesperson who was ecstatic that the Hollywood mustache was still available and donned it in the blink of an eye; a cameraman who ran camera all night with his Hero mustache on; me, who taped the Sherriff mustache to my lip and looked freakishly like my father; surprise of the night: the gorgeous television reporter who exclaimed "I'm such a dork - I love this kind of thing!" and asked me to take her picture with the Square mustache on!

It's hard to draw a conclusion from these results. Some of the night's NOs have been known on occassion to wax whacky. Membership, for example, is letting me take actual mugshots of them for the next employee newsletter. The accountant entered his fixings into a recent chili cook-off with a giddy competetiveness. And a few of the HELL YESes could have easily gone NO had the night been a bit different for them. For example, the sales guy who nabbed up the Hollywood stache spends most nights working past nine and had I caught him on one of his defeated nights, he might have turned me away. So, this wasn't an experiment that definitively established who was fun and who was not, but rather who I caught in what moment and in what mood.

I guess the only real conclusion that I can come to is that on the third night of auction, with five more nights ahead and only two behind, 7 people were still having fun, or at least desperate enough to make some.

Here's a shot of the crew (I got someone to wear the Weasel afterall!):

book review #1: then we came to the end by joshua ferris

There’s a catharsis that occurs when common experience unearths from a new book, when the shoot of that new plant pokes its green hand above the soil and reaches high past its moss mat feeling about for tenable growth. We find in that shoot’s flight fragments of familiarity: a common conflict, emotion, situation. It resembles for us a collective sigh, when all of humanity takes one deep breath in, one long breath out. “We are the same,” that breath seems to say. Our pettiness, our dreams, each false sense of individuality, each real nugget of uniqueness, dissatisfaction with the moment, sudden awakenings, debts, gluttony, temptations, foul human thoughts. The same.

Such experience plumps out the pages of Joshua Ferris’ debut novel, Then We Came to the End (published 2007), which follows a crew of employees at an advertising agency during the 1990s. The cast of characters runs the gamut, from the unhinged atheist prankster to the hardened female executive. We follow them as they move in and out of advertising projects, worrying each day about the tenuousness of their employment.

There are a few things that distinguish this book (aside from the gold “National Book Award” stamp in the upper right corner). First, humor. It’s not often a novel hits on various types of humor, but TWCTTE hits on slapstick, exaggeration, witty banter, absurdity, whimsy, blunder, to name just a few. Take for example the ridiculousness of the advertising projects they’re assigned: make breast cancer funny to breast cancer victims; make buying this type of printer ink heroic. Or a few scenes involving the copy machine: Tom Mota caught by his supervisor printing pornographic materials; Hank Neary photocopying books because the printouts can be easily disguised as work material; Chris Yop copying his resume without shame the day after he has been fired. Ferris is able to put his cast in outrageous circumstances and poke fun at these characters without stripping them completely of their amiability.

Second, Ferris uses a unique point-of-view called the collective “we.” In an interview published at the end of the paperback version of the novel, Ferris says: “My father took a great risk around the time he turned fifty by starting his own company. It was small at first; he was his only employee. Yet his message machine told callers that “we” weren’t in right now...” This is where the idea originated for Ferris’ collective “we” point-of-view. It’s an effective choice for the novel, to say the least. We move in and out of scenes, unsure which of the crew the “we” represents at any given time, galloping from cubicle to cubicle for gossip or bitch sessions or fights or “private” conversations. It affords Ferris the opportunity to explore the whole of the organization, down to the security guard, without need to switch point-of-view. In addition to the freedom it affords Ferris, the collective “we” is simply fun to read. And for readers with experience in an office environment, it’s laughably familiar.

Third, structure. Sandwiched between two “we” sections, the point-of-view pulls in close on one character and switches to third person. Ferris calls this section the “book’s emotional heart,” the organ of the novel’s body that gives it life. While much of the “we” sections seem dangerously devoid of conscience, integrity and emotion, the heart of the novel lays the pavement that leads to moral recognition and redemption for the remainder of the novel. It was a brilliant choice on Ferris’ part and an anchor weighting the text down.

Visit http://www.thenwecametotheend.com/ for more details.

"up" by bridget carpenter

Syracuse Stage presented Bridget Carpenter’s comedrama (did I just make up a new word? – I’m a bit giddy about that!) “Up” last weekend and I scored a few seats so Joey and I could go. I won’t weigh you down with a complete review of a play you’ll (sadly) likely never have the opportunity to see, but in short the story picks up with Walter Griffin about fifteen years after his successful weather-balloons-tied-to-a-lawn-chair launch which carried him 16,000 feet (3 miles) up.

The play explores where reality and dreams meet. At times that place sees our dreams become reality, as witnessed when a hack inventor like Walter fulfills his lifelong dream of flying while tethered to weather balloons. And at other times, our reality becomes a series of dreams that overwhelm our capacity to function in society, often strong-arming us by necessity into sacrificing our dreams to survive. What is interesting is how unrealized and realized dreams can both affect us like the hammer of a god. Indeed they did the real Walter, as according to the theater’s playbill Walter hiked into the woods at age 44, years after the successful launch and subsequent failed attempts to match his earlier success, and shot himself straight through the heart.

What goes up must come down. Perhaps this is the beautiful tragedy of it all, the truth that truly moved me during this play. Many people spend a lifetime chasing that elusive dream and in their chase become jaded, disillusioned, apart from life, by the chase. And yet we witness the same qualities of life in a man who has realized his struggles to hold on. Is it the dream, then, that shatters us?

As a few side notes, the daring Philippe Petit who tight-rope-walked between the Twin Towers in 1974 (coincidentally the year that I was born) makes a few appearances in the play and acts as Walter’s counselor. Check out the documentary about Petit called “Man on a Wire.” Also, though it does not appear to follow the same plotline as Walter’s life, Disney/Pixar is releasing an animated film on May 29 called “Up” about a 78-year-old man whose lifelong dream is to travel the world and whose dream is realized when his home tethered to a zillion balloons begins to float away. Perhaps Bridget Carpenter will follow up with Carl Frederickson a decade after his tour of the globe to see exactly how realizing his dreams has truly fared.

watchmen

(WARNING: Dad, I’m using this space to openly express myself, without censorship or judgment. If you’ve returned to this blog at some point to see how I’m doing, please know you might read some things you’d rather not know. Like this entry. I’d like to think by this point you know I’ve had sex before, but if you’d still like to hold on to that fatherly illusion (completely understandable), do not read this. I’ll try and warn you on other entries as they come up. Love you. Hope it’s hot in the desert!)

“Watchmen” was my first as graphic novels go, and not too dissimilar (forgive me for saying it) to that awkward other first Halloween of 1993 when I lost my virginity to a drunken, face-painted jester with a long hat split into two belled ends (uh, I said Halloween, remember?). Each was unfamiliar, treacherous in its mere mystery, altered over time by the randomness of my memory, and unsettling – however exhilarated I was to simply have both vast unknowns revealed.

If you think it odd that I might be comparing the very meaningful act of first sexual encounters to the experience of reading a little picture book, then you clearly have never read a little picture book. In fact I’m more inclined to share with you “Watchmen” than I am that Halloween night, and it’s not for any puritanical modesty (please, I’m so beyond that) but rather that one is more vivid, more plot-ridden, more packaged, more for sale at your local comic store, more likely to have a feature film of the same name COMING MARCH 6 TO A THEATER NEAR YOU! Can you guess which of the two I’m referring to? Let me give you a clue: it will have plenty of face paint and sex, but no jesters.

So what was it that caped me into the caper? What dialogue bubble dragged a literary zealot from her Gogol and Bolaño into the realm of bathroom readers without so much as a kick or a scream? (In point of fact, I put aside Dostoevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov” after reading – and enjoying – its first 100 pages so that I could tackle the literary tome “Watchmen”).

So what was it? Dare I say the simplicity of its morality, the directness of its plot, and the funness of its format. “Eek!” my literary professors would scream, not only for my shallow literary pursuit, but my unforgivable attempt to make the adjective “fun” into a noun. But sometimes sweet and shallow wins the day, professor. Throw into the package a villain who’s killing off masked heroes, a group of vigilantes without any real superpowers who dress in tights and save people from burning buildings, a trip to a biodome in Antarctica and a feisty foul-mouthed journalist and I can’t strip myself away.

Plus, Dave Gibbons rocks. Especially with the pirate comic book within the graphic novel illustrations – holy cow, am I really marveling over his rendering of a raft made from the bloated remains of an entire crew? Why, yes I am, and with a strange sense of pride, as though I’ve found myself among the ranks of a whole new group of misunderstood masses who have found the marriage of artwork and words tells a pretty mean story, a whole new group that really, really gets me right now.

SEE YOU FRIDAY!

sm(ART) thinking

I’m back, and this time I mean business with this blog thing, if only to write mundane wrap-ups of my week or ponder on the origins of Pringles. I suppose you’ll just have to bear with me. This is a pretty big transition in my life, during which – in my attempts to truly embrace my art – you are stuck with both my best and my worst. What I am aiming for is to understand exactly where my art lies, in the moment, in that split-second between sentences when the art that exists (the sentence on the page) spawns another idea which becomes another sentence. For where that art lies is where I must exist. It’s the moment when the past and future drift away and in that moment a driving momentum picks up, a momentum that pushes toward a certain vision or imagination without losing sight of the now.

I am reading Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by Bayles & Orland, which is where much of my direction these days comes from. HISTORY: About a week ago I found myself wondering why I spent so much of my energy avoiding my art, why I found it painstakingly difficult to even sit down to the computer, let alone find it in myself to spend hours pecking away at some keyboard in the word hunt for that story or novel. And yet, I yearned for it. I yearned to spill myself into a moment, to lose myself in the gesture of a character or the creak of a nearby floorboard. What is it, this chasm that separated me from my art? And while I’m not completely sure I understand where the core of my trouble lies (if indeed there is a core trouble and not a cluster bomb of scarcely-related issues), what reading this novel – now in its 8th printing – has done for me is made me understand I’m in considerable company, that artists struggle with the same things I struggle with and that the true separation between the haves and the have-nots is a willingness to struggle, a commitment to pursuing your art, however it may come.

More on the Art Pursuit later, as it evolves... It’s Sunday, and so for the working-class artist, it is that one day a week I set aside for my art. For my pursuit of art. Whatever that may mean.

movie review - "semi-pro"

Will Ferrell movies are like pizza: even when they’re bad they’re good. While “Semi-Pro” is no deep-dish olive and pepperoni, it’s enough to keep us Ferrell fans sated.

Ferrell stars as the flashy buffoon Jackie Moon, owner-coach-player of the worst team in the American Basketball Association (ABA), the Flint Michigan Tropics. When the National Basketball Association (NBA) announces its plans to absorb four ABA teams, Moon and his Tropics attempt the impossible – to win 4th place and snag the NBA prize.

While the film is vulgar, stupid and downright absurd (with Ferrell sporadically erupting into his trademark tantrums and balderdash), semi-serious subplots emerge with co-star characters Clarence “Coffee” Black (Andre Benjamin) and Monix (Woody Harrelson) weaving into the narrative struggles of self-doubt and self-actualization.

You won’t be moved to tears or split your gut laughing, but Ferrell’s comedic doofus genius and the subplot drama makes for an entertaining 90 minutes.