This is a photo of the aforementioned Handlery Hotel, where I stayed for the state Democratic convention a few weeks back. Want further proof that there’s no truth in advertising? Here it is: The Handlery “Hotel” is a motel.

After missing Senator Gravel (a feat that I and I’m sure the rest of the country will be repeating), I spent my first night at the convention attending the environmental caucus meeting and then various hospitality suites. The meeting room was packed with people. All along the walls rows and rows of elected officials and candidates stood hoping to get just a few minutes to talk. The chairman, Luke Breit, noted the standing-room only crowd and the obvious message: that the environment is a key concern for California Democrats. (And that comports with my own observations; last summer when I got to meet with Howard Dean, while he wanted to talk about campaign finance reform and clean elections, almost every Democrat in the room wanted to talk about the environment.)

When we got to voting on actual resolutions — to, eventually, go into the state Democratic party platform (or not) — here’s how seemingly every vote went:

1. The resolution would be read and the issue explained and discussed;
2. A guy half a row away from me would complain that it didn’t cover some other arcane aspect and the chair would explain that we were voting on the resolution as written and that this guy could offer up his own resolution if he wanted and if he could get enough support;
3. We would vote on the resolution, with everyone voting aye except that one guy;
4. Then we’d move onto the next resolution and he’d do it again.

As an example, he voted against the resolution decrying the attempt to put a toll road straight through the middle of a state park (you just can’t make these things up) because it didn’t provide public transportation for low-income people who needed to get through the park.

He voted against the resolution seeking to ban certain “Gopher-Getter Killing Methods for Gophers and other Rodents” because it didn’t cover some other small animals.

He voted against supporting the insidiously named “California Clean Car Discount Bill” (which would actually raise prices on non “clean” cars, meaning that the “discount” is actually an avoidance of the increase) because it didn’t cover motorcycles.

I think he would have voted against seating because it didn’t cover standing.

You like to think we all owe a debt of gratitude to the one person in the room willing to disagree, but we hope that person is Henry Fonda in “Twelve Angry Men” and not, well, the village idiot.

By the time the caucus meeting ended, I was more than ready to hit the hospitality suites. Although I dropped in on all of them, my first stop was Dennis Kucinich’s “hootenanny” — their word, not mine. Essentially this was a small room of shoeless hippies dance to bad jug music. With tortilla chips as the “food.” Kucinich wasn’t there, and after a moment, neither was I.

Yesterday in my email newsletter I wrote a piece with advice on how to become a produced playwright, which some people have emailed to thank me for. If you missed it, click here. In a nutshell, here’s the advice:  be diligent and persistent.

Just today, the graduate writing program I teach in at USC uploaded a podcast that advocates the same mindset, but adds the perspective of fiction writers and screenwriters. I find it fascinating watching friends and colleagues share war stories that sound so very, very familiar. (Click here if you’d like to see it.) One of the speakers is novelist and dramatist Chris Meeks. (A good guy and a good writer.) If you’d like to check out his own email newsletter, here’s the archive.

Almost everyone who has met with any success as a writer has pretty much the same story. They tried harder.

The other night I saw what I thought was the most remarkable play I’ve seen in perhaps 10 years. (Since I saw the premiere production of “How I Learned to Drive,” a play I now teach.) It was “Yellow Face,” by David Henry Hwang, now playing at the Mark Taper Forum here in Los Angeles. Even though I had to get up at the inconceivable time of 5 a.m. the next morning for USC commencement, there I was at 11 p.m. on the plaza of the Music Center declaiming the wonders of the play for Dorinne Kondo, the friend/colleague who invited me, and Tim Dang, artistic director of co-producing company East West Players. I’m going to write more about this play when I have more time, but let’s put it this way:  I wondered aloud how long it would be before “Yellow Face” is published, because I’d like to read it and I might put it into the syllabus of one of my classes.

Today I had lunch with another colleague, a playwright whose work I respect. She’s smart and talented. She wanted to know if I’d seen “Fat Pig” at the Geffen. (Answer: Not yet.) I brought up “Yellow Face,” preparing to launch into full shared excitement. Her reaction:  She left at intermission. “I don’t like plays about writers writing about writing,” she said.  That line was especially ironic to me because in 1992 I wrote a play that specifically satirized a form of novels I loathe:  writers writing about writers who write about writers. (The specific novel that first got me on this rant was “The Dean’s December” by Saul Bellow.) To me, “Yellow Face” was about many different wonderful things, interwoven and unified. To her, it was a play about the playwright writing this play (which, granted, it is on the surface). We saw the same play (well, she saw only half) and arrived at completely different conclusions.

I’ve grown used to having disagreements about art. (And even higher forms, like comic books.) But “Yellow Face”  is precisely the sort of play I go to the theatre hoping to come across — surprising, funny, moving, troubling; something that makes me challenge my own notions of what is right behavior and what is wrong behavior. To me it seems so ambitious, and so successful on its own terms, and so important, that it is unequivocally great. But after listening to my friend this afternoon, I suspect that my dread that night — that the critics are going to reject it as either self-serving or badly constructed — is exactly what’s going to happen.

I hope not.

And I’m going to advise everyone I know to see this show.

Two years before becoming “the hero of 9/11,” Rudy Giuliani channels Dr. Phil for a ferret lover on a radio call-in show. Now the exchange has been lovingly animated.

You must click here.

Moving Arts’ 13th annual one-act play festival just got a great writeup in Flavorpill. I’m looking forward to seeing the show next Tuesday night.

Speaking of one-act plays, the festival I just produced for the MPW program at USC also got strong coverage. Here’s a feature on the festival, with a profile of the eventual contest winner, Kristina Sisco, and a photo of the agelessly beautiful Irene Chapman and her co-star, Del Monroe. Irene is a former Broadway actress, while Del is one of those great classic character actors (I grew up watching him on “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.”) It was a real treat getting to watch their work each night.

Just last week as I was watching the latest episode of corporate malfeasance I wondered, “Whatever happened to Lee Iacocca?” (Or, by extension, people like him.) Then yesterday, Kim Glann sent me this, from Mr. Iacocca’s introduction to his new book:

Had Enough?

Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the course.”

Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

You might think I’m getting senile, that I’ve gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies.

Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don’t need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we’re fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That’s not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I’ve had enough. How about you?

I’ll go a step further. You can’t call yourself a patriot if you’re not outraged. This is a fight I’m ready and willing to have.

You can read the rest by clicking here. Happily, the link is to Snopes.com, who have pre-debunked the piece (yes, it is indeed by Mr. Iacocca).

I wonder if this was written before the November 2006 elections. Probably. Because the only way left to throw these particular bums out is through impeachment and removal — and that’s a crusade I would gladly join.

While I’m on about this:

In the comics, he can beat The Sinister Six (which, you’ll note, includes The Sandman). He’s done it over and over.

In the movie, there are only two villains and still he has to go begging to a former foe for help. Said assistance arrives about one nanosecond before all hopes for a Spider-Man 4 are squashed.

What gives?

On your left is former Senator Mike Gravel, who recently announced for president. How former? A Democrat, he represented Alaska from 1969 until 1981. That means his last real relationship in the White House was with Jimmy Carter.

I don’t think we’re going to need to say much more about Mr. Gravel, no matter how much fans of Charles Dickens might appreciate names like Mr. Gravel.

I’m posting his photo so you can get a little look at him. This is more of a look than I got at the convention, because Mr. Gravel was not afforded a true speaking opportunity at the convention — a decision I support. You open that door for Mr. Gravel and Lyndon LaRouche might think he’s entitled to step through it as well. Rather than a speaking opportunity in the main hall, Senator Gravel was offered “comments” during the party chair’s welcoming reception Friday night. By the time I got there, both all the food and every bit of Senator Gravel were gone. No one I spoke with seems to have caught Senator Gravel’s comments, or to be able to relate them to me. I don’t even think I was very late for this function, so he may have spoken while I was there and I missed it too. Although I was able to get a half cup of Coke for $2.75. With ice. Luckily I had cash on me.

I say luckily because I pulled into the convention center at the precise time my orientation was supposed to begin and didn’t have time to stop at an ATM. Parking at the convention center is eight bucks, they want payment upon entry, and no, they won’t take a credit card. They will take a check, though (?) and, of course, cash. I fished in my wallet and found five singles. And then spent what felt like nine hours digging through the jumbled coins-and-CD-storage area of my car trolling for stray quarters and such until finally exhuming three bucks in change including, yes, pennies. The attendant wasn’t thrilled and the 87 drivers behind me were decidedly unhappy. Once inside the convention center I immediately hit the ATM and took out $200 — and was dispensed four $50 bills. Want to know how many places won’t take a $50 bill? One way to find out is to do what I did — make sure it’s the only cash on you.

After orientation and receiving the schedule, I got back in the car and drove to find my hotel. It was somewhere near the end of the known universe. Remember the famous New Yorker cover that shows everything past the Hudson River in the far distance, hovering near the vanishing point? My hotel, one of the convention headquarter hotels, was similarly located. From the convention center, my hotel was somewhere past the point where Medieval mapmakers showed ships passing sea monsters and falling off the map. After 20 years of regular visits to San Diego, I had naively asserted that I had stayed in every hotel in San Diego. Not so. This hotel, and I use the term loosely, was something called “The Handlery.” No, I don’t know what that means either. I can say that it is a hotel in the way that Ticketmaster service charges are “convenience fees.” Rather than a hotel, it more closely approximated a Howard Johnson’s from Pennsylvania cow country. From the luxury of my ground-level room, conveniently adjacent to the parking lot where someone was having a tailgate party while I checked in, I could listen in to my neighbor’s television through the wall. Not because the television was too loud, but because the walls were too thin, a determination proved by the fact that I could also hear him use the bathroom. You may use your imagination about that; I didn’t need to.

Once I had checked in and absorbed all the glamor afforded by these surroundings, I went back to the convention, missed Senator Gravel as detailed above, and then went to my first caucus meeting and did the tour of hospitality suites. A lot of this was inspiring, some discouraging, and some downright wacky, as I’ll recount next time.

As I recounted here, in January I was elected as member of the California State Democratic Central Committee. Specifically, I’m a member of the Assembly District 43 delegation. This two-year position makes me a delegate to the state convention this and next year. And that’s where I was just over a week ago: at the convention in San Diego.

While there, I got a close look at all the major Democratic presidential candidates except one, Joe Biden, who didn’t come — although he did have people working a table in the exhibit area. These people seemed abashed that he wasn’t there and gave queasy explanations having to do with the sudden change of the California primary (it’s now much, much earlier), making this convention more important but only after Biden had already planned to stay in South Carolina. (Also the site of a convention in the same timeframe, and also a state with an early primary.) We already have a “president” (please note the quote marks) who doesn’t adapt quickly to change and we don’t need another, so I won’t be supporting Biden.

Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, Barack Obama and Bill Richardson all made it. In fact, even former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel made it — and his last campaign statement showed net assets of only $458, so I’m not  even sure how he swung airfare. So again, why not Biden?

Over the next few days I’m going to upload some photos and share some thoughts about these candidates, as well as overall impressions of the convention. In fact, I’m going to start with the very next post.

As I watched “Spider-Man 3” yesterday morning patently bored by endless scenes concerning Mary Jane’s acting-career frustrations or Aunt May’s rheumatic recountings of her idyllic past with dead Uncle Ben, I began to recall that as a boy I was not a regular reader of Spider-Man comics. In fifth grade I did do a trade with a boy named Chris and got a slew of Spider-Man comics from issue 70-something to issue 90-something, but I never spent my own money to buy one even as I paid for dozens of other titles. This web of memory spun on as, on the big screen, Harry Osborn lost his memory again and then regained it again, and an action scene was interupted for a too-long and unclever pas de deux between J. Jonah Jameson and a little girl in a crowd — and then I hit on it.

Spider-Man is a neurotic loser whose gift of incredible power never eclipses his character flaws. And on many levels, those character flaws are ones we mostly associate with gawky high-schoolers. He is somehow trapped in a failed adolescence.

The Fantastic Four are science adventurers, amalgamatic representations of Shackleton and Einstein. They explore the limits of space and time to broaden our understanding and enrich the human race.

Somehow at age eight I must have realized this:

Spider-Man comics were for boys who wanted to be someone else. Fantastic Four comics were for boys who wanted to be somewhere else.