Two Dollar Radio & Film Moves

One of my favorite small presses, Two Dollar Radio, is preparing to make some films. Two years ago I read The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich and it helped change the way I think about literature. Not right away. My first read of it, though charged with some enjoyment, felt like work, and at the time I wasn't in the frame of mind where I necessarily appreciated hard work in my reading life. That changed after I finished the book, a few months passed where it somehow was still digesting and decompressing in my subconscious. The desire turned up to revisit it. And looking at myself as a writer at the time I felt like a fraud. For a long time I was focused on telling clever stories. Whereas there isn't anything wrong with a fun yarn and a clever twist, I wasn't exploring and challenging myself with the fresh palette of the page. I was bound by old expectations of what I thought good novels should be. I wasn't handling language as a fine craft. Reading the book again moved me to reinvent myself as a writer, to explore personal landscapes and handle language with a finer point of respect and reverence and reshaping. So I credit this book as an important one in my development as a reader and a writer.

Then this past summer I read Crapalachia by Scott McClanahan and I had to do a double take because I didn't know sentences could be so lean and efficient yet saturated with personality. 

I have some other Two Dollar Radio books on my shelf queued up and am already counting potential Christmas money I haven't received yet to load up on some of their newer titles that have intrigued me, like Jeff Jackson's debut novel Mira Corpora. 

As the books of theirs I've read have been like the introduction of strange delicacies I never knew existed, I'm excited to see what they do with the medium of film. They already have an enviable handle on narrative and voice. In the age where Syd Field formulas have rusted many movies, and people's expectations of how a movie should be paced, I welcome and anticipate what they may be projecting in the realm of digital cinema, and how it may change us as movie viewers.

For anyone that stumbles on my little blog here in the next couple of days, consider tipping them in advance at their indiegogo campaign so they can make the first round. 

Read-Head

I spent much of last year reading, and plan to spend much of the coming year doing even more of it, so I've laid down some reflections.

I wasn't much of a reader when I was a kid. I avoided it when I was younger so I could play baseball, other sports, make believe in the woods, etc. I didn't have the attention for it, I suppose I was restless. When I was 10 I got into the idea of making movies, and messed around with my parent's camcorder. At this time I learned that a film director was a profession, and I decided that was what I wanted to be when I grew up. I shot a bunch of little movies, some comedy, some sci-fi, creating space ship sets in my basement, some clay-mation. Mostly these were made up as we went a long, though in early high school I started to experiment with writing a variety of short screenplays, some shot, though many remained as exercises in writing the form. When I was 16 I acted in my friend James N. Kienitz Wilkins' movie Fight A Force of Friendly Fire. I had heard some actor interviews talk about "method acting" and I was curious, I investigated this "technique" some and decided I would try some method acting out on this film. I feel with some surges of intensity I alienated some friends, though it was a rush, I was addicted to it, I decided I had more fun acting, being on screen, on the stage, so I decided more so than a film director, I wanted to be an actor. 

These days I focus more on myself as a writer, though I do some acting from time to time, mostly in our Wood Sugars projects. But my time exploring film and acting was an important period to put me on a path to explore myself as a writer. Some of my writing experiments began as a way to develop new material to act in or shoot on film, such as my early collaborations with Daniel Mac Rae. It was a great experience to act in new material he was writing, and see his pieces progress through various drafts along side the rehearsal process. I learned a lot about writing from him. 

The relationship between reading and writing is a tight one. Most accomplished authors when imparting advice to writers mention they should read, a lot. To be a serious writer, is to be serious reader (as paraphrased from many different authors). The reason may be obvious. Writers create using language, and reading is important in building up a command on language, in exercising the imagination. Some times painters have to stock up on paint. I also think it's important to actively engage in the form you enjoy creating in. If you don't enjoy reading, then how do you expect anyone else to enjoy reading what you're writing.

As mentioned, I didn't read a lot as a kid. I had spurts though where I enjoyed it. In 5th grade I enjoyed Goosebumps and Michael Crichton. In 8th grade I wiggled my way into an Honors English class, as most of my friends were smart kids and I wanted to fit in. My teacher, Mr. Berry, however changed the way I thought. Mr. Berry seemed to have a bohemian past, on his wall was a banner "No Matter What We Study, Everything is Connected." I remember many engaging philosophical class discussions. Each week we had to write "lit logs." They were a sort of informal book report, where we'd write a letter to a classmate, they would respond, all in conversation about the books we were reading outside of assigned class reading. The vibe of class discourse, for perhaps the first time in my life, got me thinking, or attempting, to think deep, to really examine human nature, the meaning of life. I was also going through puberty, so maybe my brain was also going through complimentary changes. Through writing these lit logs, though on a weekly basis I didn't have the time or reading speed to finish every book, I found myself genuinely curious about books, and had a blast talking about them. 

In high school, well, I spread myself thin with sports and extra curricular activities, and making some movies, that I barely read what was assigned for class, though I did make every effort to. Many evenings I'd fall asleep with a book open. 

I started to take reading seriously again in college. Many of the great actors seemed to be voracious readers. Dustin Hoffman, Richard Burton, Al Pacino, Tom Hanks, Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, all seemed to mention literature throughout various interviews. Tom Hanks I believe kept an active book list on his MySpace page. I felt that, to further myself as an actor, I should probably deepen my "sensitivity to language." Naturally, in theatre school we read a lot of plays. I read some novels and poetry on the side, trying to correspond reading choice material to parallel an acting role, to perhaps expand my understanding of a character perspective or time period. For my role in Magnets: Hyena Daniel Mac Rae recommended Cormac McCarthy's Child of God and Outer Dark, as well as Irvine Welsh's Marabou Stork Nightmares. Such books buttressed a visceral thought process and inspiration toward bringing the character Jerry Thompson to life. This, over the years, led to my interest in authors as artists, just as for a long time I was quite interested in various actors, or film directors before that. And this of course led to my urge to throw down more writing of my own, and not just as material to shoot. I found a thrill in language sometimes being its own means to experience a story. I began to see literature as a mind expanding drug. Words, stimulating imagination, put the author inside my head, while at the same instant, I was put inside their's. 

I have a lot of writing goals for 2013. Though as active as I want to be as a writer, I want to be even more active as a reader, pushing myself further, eating up more pages than I ever have. One, because I quite enjoy it. Two, because I'd like to keep growing as a writer, and as a person (reading has been linked in brain studies to increased empathy). I also find; the more actively I read the more fluid word choices feel as I write.

I will be writing some more about my reading. Much in the vein of those lit logs, some posts here may be, not as a book review or a book report, an exploration, a further dialogue about literature. I remember watching Martin Scorsese's documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies where he showed clips and talked about the movies that inspired and influenced him. I'd be interested to do something similar here with novels and short stories and essays as I continue my own journey through the creation of literature.

Generational Pissing Match

This morning I was sitting in my recliner, cat in lap, reading A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. I came to a part where Gertrude Stein was telling Hemingway his was part of a lost generation. Stopping for a moment to sip my coffee, I saw a flash in my mind of Sarah Palin expressing her disgust at me for sitting on my ass and reading an outdated book by a writer she believes to be a lunatic asshole. 


"What's wrong with reading a book?" I asked.


"You read filth that corrupts you, that gives you stupid ideas, and makes you think you're entitled to things you don't deserve!"


"And do you deserve, respect? Your generation is the one that set in motion the end of the world. Whether you like it or not, miss, your generation collectively is the Anti-Christ." I lashed back, an imagined out-let for anger. "My child will probably be born with asthma, thank you very much, smoke stack champion!"


As a disclaimer, there are many in my life (parents, Aunts and Uncles, extended family, landlords, colleagues, clients, friends, friends of the family, etc) who are actually are down to earth, thoughtful, respectful and level headed. They understand the struggles that my generation faces in our young careers. It's the political leaders, corporation leaders of my parents generation that get under skin and where I intend the following expression of disgust. 


I get the sense that the middle aged politicians think so lowly of my generation. But their parents' generation thought little of them, and back on to their parents' generation who thought little of them. A vicious cycle of low confidence in and attempted understanding of their own spawn because they've slowly realized they can only control them so much. And it fuels the pissy angst they feel towards the engine of society they have fed into another complex, mushy disaster. They cling to old philosophies on how to fix this, not realizing it was these old, musty thought processes that caused kinks in the work flow of a society. And they want dish out disparaging remarks on their children's generation because they'd be embarrassed if it was some punk kid that found the solution. 


The problem lies not only in a class conflict. But a generational one persists. We've been taught that we must work hard to get ahead. But many are trapped in a stage of life where hard work is actually, unfortunately not paying off, on a wide scale, because the shareholders are scared to sprinkle what's in the kitty. And those that are out in the workforce as collection agents of sorts to suck in consumer exchange to fill the company kitty, are made to feel like assholes for questioning when the shareholders might feel comfortable enough in the base of this kitty to open its valve.


There grows this distrust in the previous generation for having told them to work hard and reap what one deserves. And then as a result, the old generation in turn gets mad at the kids for being mad at them. They complain that we complain, and then they go and complain with such fervor it would make a mountain hides its cliff face. 


But I will not be discouraged. I will continue to work hard, because one day, when the old generation has to call it quits on their political careers, and people from mine start theirs, maybe things will finally be revitalized.