Love ain't just runnin away from lonely
Very productive rehearsal tonight for Romance in D at the Bus Barn. We laughed a lot and had a great time. I had almost forgotten what it was like to have a good time working on a theatrical production.
So, the official word is that Romance in D will be fun and cute. If you’re around for the holidays, do check out the show.
In some way, reading Achewood made me feel like I could use comics as a legitimate creative form expressing down and up and sideways moods as long as people knew it was going to be unusual and not always a laugh line in the third panel.
Practically every artist to ever hold a pen and draw a three-panel has talked about a similar personal drive to “legitimize” the form, as though the form needed further validation. I have wrestled recently with several different forms of self-expression… bloggish, music, video, sketch writing, play writing, games and non-fiction… and I believe that all forms come with their own capabilities and restrictions. For example, I feel that the blog form is dissociative by nature. You have no idea when the reader will lose or gain interest — they might click on a random link, thus punching in or out of your carefully crafted linear writing at any moment. This aspect of the form can be considered a limitation, or it can be used to the author’s benefit.
There’s only so much you can do in 3 panels. There is a huge body of cultural expectation that is set up to prepare you for the dissociative punchline in the 3rd panel. Foreign people coming to the US who read comic strips in the paper often complain that the strips don’t make any sense or aren’t funny. What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate. The form does not embody the message.
Rather than wrestling against the cultural expectation of the form (3 panel comic) I suggest that you choose another form that is better suited to the concepts you are trying to express. I suggest you go to 4-12 panels per comic, with a story beat or moment in each sequence. This will permit you to better develop the mood and consciousness you are trying to express.
The Achewood stuff supports this argument… there are four to twelve panels in all the strips, and while not all of them are funny, each one of them contains the equivalent of a “beat” in a screenplay, enough to establish a character fact, or a moment of revelation about a character.
I compressed a bunch of amusing ideas which I could have spread over
about 30+ strips into 12 dense packages, with a punchline in each panel. And towards the end, I steered it to a more and more down mood until it had I thought a rather sad ending.
The kicker that made the Season One sequence work was Alberto’s analysis about the fanatic devotion to the A’s. This was the truth at the center of the bullshit. All really funny material contains a revelation of truth at its core.
You told me once, when I was musically constipated, to “write about something that mattered to me.” April 22 was directly inspired by that comment. However your directive applies to all media, not just four chord rock.
I’m suspicious of popularity and the formulas one can use to achieve it. I need to feel like I can express more facets and moods than just the funny stuff.
You are laboring under the assumption that “me = my art“. Consider johnbyrd.org as a counterexample. Several people — some of whom ought to know better — have decided that I’m a womanizing bisexual from the stuff I post on there. I find this alternately amusing and annoying. Anyone trying to get a good idea of what I’m really like, by reading my web site, will certainly fail to do so. This behavior is by design, because I feel the medium itself cannot handle the strain of true self expression. A longer and more intimate medium — an album, or a play, or a short story — would be required to do that with any degree of success.
It is always necessary to express more facets than funny, even when writing gags. But a proper funny itself expresses far more facets than just funny. I am rehearsing now on a romantic comedy called Romance in D now with Alex A., who you remember from Rainmaker. My character is a metrosexual musician type who has trouble expressing himself verbally. This is a big stretch for me but I decided to accept the part anyway. So there is a big scene I’ll ruin for you, where I kiss the love interest and she confesses, “I thought you were gay.” Now there are two ways to play the reaction to the confession. The first is Three’s Company style with Don Knotts-ish googling… “Whuh! Whuh! Whuy didja think I’s gay, huh?!” with laugh track etc. The second is to play the reaction as honestly as possible… upset, hurt, insulted, surprised. Ironically the first method is simply annoying while the second method is extraordinarily funny. Truth in humor.
Once that’s been established that people will take me as I am, I can more easily give people what they want. That’s about the size of my relationship to art and the world I think.
Auditioning is not acting. Read Michael Shurtleff’s “Audition” for a fascinating intro to the process. One of the agonies of giving good aud is creating believable characters instantly or near instantly, given no prep and no deep understanding of the script. The answer to this is to use yourself and inject your own personal history into the character, and to have faith that your personal emotions will tell you what to do. Anyone can act but it takes a real actor to not act.
Do not fear rejection. Sprinkle it on your cornflakes for breakfast. All commercial artists drink 24 oz. of rejection before a two-mile morning run. q.v. G. Sanger’s Daily Dedication for Artists. Also, do not limit yourself to requiring the creative output to be a reflection of the creator.
… and back to Tokyo the week after next.
Post-wedding party last night. Myself, my wife, and ten drunken lesbians. There was heavy whipping cream1 and gratuitous breast fondling.2 I love you, San Francisco!
—
1In the dessert, actually.
2My own breasts, mostly.
The Japanese are nuts about baseball and it’s still a sport for the masses here. Hirasaki-san has kindly purchased tickets for a Japanese major league baseball game. The air is humid but picking up here at Jingu Stadium.
Now the teams playing tonight are the Yakult Swallows versus the Hiroshima Carp. Now you might think it would be difficult, nay impossible, to do a baseball cheer either for carp, or for swallows. You would be mistaken.
And I know what you’re thinking about calling an entire baseball team the Swallows, and that’s just not right, so put that out of your head. Let’s say you’re rooting for the Swallows and you want to show your team support. What do you do? You take out your big green umbrella, of course, and you bounce it up and down, while singing the team song, Tokyo Ondo, at the bottom of the seventh.
That’s what you do, if you’re a fan of the Swallows.
The seventh inning stretch comes up. The Carp contingent doesn’t sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Instead, the Carp fans inflate all these rubber balloons (see, you’re back thinking about the Swallows again, and I told you to stop thinking like that) and we sing the team song and then we let the balloons go and they float into the sky just like… well… here’s a QuickTime movie.
A smoke-filled restaurant somewhere in Omotesando. Jars of sake and imojochu decorate one wall. I keep hearing this Romanian song all over Tokyo — the US will probably be inundated with it shortly. So I’m hanging out with Haba-san and Oikawa-san, enhancing the jet lag with Kirin. I ask about the Kyushu skewers that we’re munching on. “Cow organs,” Haba-san tells me. Haba-san’s girlfriend, Kumiko, arrives, and after a few more beers we initiate the time-honored cultural exchange program of teaching one another dirty words.
“I am mad with him,” says Kumiko. “This case. What do I say?”
“Ah,” I say. “In this case, you say, ‘You shithead.'”
“You?” asks Kumiko.
“You shithead,” I say.
“You shit?” says Kumiko.
“No. You shithead,” I pronounce.
“You shit… You shit, head. You chit. Chit head,” says Kumiko.
“Ssshhhit-head,” I say.
“Ssssshhhhhit-head,” says Kumiko.
“You shithead,” I say.
“You shit, head. You, shit head. You. Shit-head. You shithead,” Kumiko said, with conviction. Then, pointing at Haba-san, she says, “You shithead.”
I nod satisfactorily.
Kumiko pauses, and thinks. “What is shithead?”
That’s my wife. Mickey Finns is a Russian schnapps that’s trying to expand distribution into Ireland. That’s me in the background. I don’t believe that I am the fruit in question.
INT. OVAL OFFICE - NIGHT
A round mahogany table in a dimly lit room. The Presidential
seal leers down on a dozen generals and bureaucrats.
Computer screens flicker and scroll an endless stream of
data. The President taps a note pad with a ballpoint pen.
PRESIDENT
Update.
GENERAL #1
Four thousand five hundred dead,
Mr. President. Bridges into the
city are out. Side roads
impassable. Power, water, all out.
PRESIDENT
Stop. You.
BUREAUCRAT #1
Survivors gathering at the
Convention Center.
PRESIDENT
Number?
BUREAUCRAT #1
Thirty thousand. Dozens of deaths
every hour. Looting, raping,
lawlessness.
PRESIDENT
Go.
GENERAL #2
We've dispatched haz-mat teams from
McClellan. Eight thousand men,
armaments, vehicles. Arrives
tomorrow morning.
PRESIDENT
Status.
BUREAUCRAT #2
Administration approval rating down
twenty-four points. Friendly news
media replaying your speeches from
three days ago. Unfriendly media
calling for your resignation. The
region went solidly against us in
the last election.
PRESIDENT
I know.
GENERAL #1
Sir, we need a go no-go.
The President sighs. He caps the ballpoint pen.
EXT. CONVENTION CENTER - NIGHT
Urban hell on earth. Fires burn; people attack one another
with sticks, knives. Stampeding, glass breaking, an idiot
melange of screaming.
A woman clutches a wailing baby in her arms and dodges
bullets. A bleeding man staggers into her; she pushes him
away with a shriek.
Four men surround her. They carry guns and knives. One man
swings a pipe experimentally.
A new, mechanical sound: the distant hum of rotary engines.
The chaos pauses and the people look up.
WOMAN
Food!
MAN
Water!
Helicopters appear over the black city skyline. Their blue
searchlights scan the destruction.
The mob stops fighting, drops their weapons. People flag the
helicopters, shouting with joy.
INT. PRESS ROOM - DAY
Bright sun through the windows. The President shuffles
papers behind a podium. A makeup artist touches his nose
with a powder puff.
PRODUCER
We're on in five.
PRESIDENT
I'll rehearse.
EXT. CONVENTION CENTER - DAY
Helicopters slowly descend upon the crowd. The faces of the
people, smiling, shouting, waving, gather around beneath
them.
PRESIDENT (V.O.)
My fellow Americans...
Our woman's face. She looks at the helicopters, thinks...
then turns, and begins to run.
PRESIDENT (V.O.)
I have consulted with the governors
and the mayors of the affected
region...
A milky white powder billows from canisters on the sides of
the helicopters.
PRESIDENT (V.O.)
And unfortunately, despite the best
efforts of the state and federal
authorities...
As the powder hits the people, they crumple and fall like
narcoleptics -- silently, suddenly, as if poleaxed.
PRESIDENT (V.O.)
No survivors have been found.
EXT. BLIND ALLEY - NIGHT
The baby in her arms still screaming, our woman cuts down a
back alley. She runs into a blind end: a door, a metal
Dumpster, three brick walls.
PRESIDENT (V.O.)
We will be tireless in our efforts
to overcome this disaster...
She wrenches at the locked doorknob -- useless.
PRESIDENT (V.O.)
We will not falter and we will not
fail.
A familiar mechanical drone. The baby wails. Our woman
looks up, and as she does a dark helicopter fills the sky
above the alley.
PRESIDENT (V.O.)
And though there has been great
misery and pain...
She wildly looks around her, sees the Dumpster.
PRESIDENT (V.O.)
I believe we as Americans can rise
to the challenge.
She looks up. From the woman's POV, a billowy cloud
envelops us, and we are in sudden perfect white silence,
except for the President's voice...
PRESIDENT (V.O.)
Through this challenge, we will
discover our capacity for
greatness.
FADE TO:
EXT. CONVENTION CENTER - MORNING
Morning, gray and fine. Camouflaged army troops, bearing
rifles, pick their way through innumerable piles of corpses.
Smoking, charred rubble, overturned cars.
PRESIDENT (V.O.)
It will take more than weeks or
months. It will take years.
EXT. ALLEY WAY - MORNING
An Army grunt wanders down the alley. He shoulders his
rifle. Our woman lies in the alley. He nudges her hand with
his boot.
PRESIDENT (V.O.)
It will cost billions. We will
find the money.
A tiny, reverberating cry.
PRESIDENT (V.O.)
For a time, my fellow Americans, we
will mourn. But then...
The grunt turns toward the Dumpster. Tentatively, he lifts
the lid, and we hear a baby's cry...
PRESIDENT (V.O.)
We will rebuild.
CUT TO BLACK.
