The last week of May at the Great Plains Theatre Conference in Omaha, Nebraska I’m doing two things I like to do: teaching and judging. I like to teach, and I like to judge. (The latter, at least when it comes to the comportment of elected officials, the relative merits of something artistic, and the personal habits of people who are breezily late and/or ill-mannered.) The conference begins May 24th, and if you’d like to join us, you should click here. If you’d just like to see what I’m teaching, click here. (I’ll be teaching two days, and serving as a panelist throughout the week. And also, if past writing or theatre conferences are any indication, hanging out at pool halls and clubs ’til closing.)

When, late last year, they sent me a very nice email asking me if I would do this, once I ascertained that this in no way conflicted with the San Diego Comic Con (which is in July), I agreed, then set about rearranging my schedule so I could do so. (Among other things, I’m teaching a new class this summer at USC. More about that in a future post.) I also thought: Hey, maybe I’ll drive. As we all know, I love driving that Mustang convertible. I could see wide open stretches of America with the top down. I did that in 2004 stumping in Arizona for John Kerry (he lost). And also, I would have my car. So I looked again at my schedule, both personal and professional, then went to Google maps where I always go now because Mapquest has made it a habit of giving me the longest, slowest, most aggravating, and most often wrong route, and then I discovered something I did not know: Omaha, Nebraska is 1554 miles away. In my mind, it was two states over. No, it’s four states over — in the middle of the country. Who knew? I won’t have enough time to drive there and back, and the nice people at the conference are providing a plane ticket. And so, the plains conference became the plane conference.

I take all this time to relate this story because for me every day is an adventure in discovering what I don’t know, including, to paraphrase Socrates, what I don’t know that I don’t know. I’m eager to visit Nebraska because it’s one of the few states I haven’t been to, but until that fateful day when I looked at the map online, I never had a fixed idea where it is. Now I know it’s next to Iowa. That state I can fix on because it’s next to Illinois, and I’ve been there plenty of times. But Nebraska? I know Springsteen did an album I never wanted to listen to about it. I know that 20 years ago a guy I grew up with who was then a sometimes-dangerous drop-dead drunk once took off for there on some strange odyssey he never allowed himself to discuss again. And… that’s it. I know nothing else about Nebraska. But I’m looking forward to finding out more.

Yes, I’m on deadline with a large writing project. But now the script is finalized and we tape on Friday and Monday, so the smoke is lifting. And so look for more posts here.

You would think that it’s relatively easy to keep count of things that exist in whole units, especially when those whole units add up to only double digits. But today I took a break from working on my new play, tentatively entitled “Second Ice Age,” because I suddenly had the burning desire to figure out how many plays I’ve written. This was partially occasioned by my having to send out an updated bio to a conference I’m teaching at early this summer.

The last time I updated it, the bio that gets put into play programs and speaking notices and such says that I have written “more than two dozen” produced plays. That’s true. It’s also true that I’ve written many other plays that I’ve never sent out because I don’t think they’re ready, which means I’ve written more than 40 plays. I suppose in my mind, I will one day “fix” these other plays. (Or maybe I think that, like some wines, they’ll improve with age. Or just go really bad.) But… how many more than 40?

“The Bar Plays” was intended as a cycle of short plays — a cycle I may finish some day. I’ve written two of them so far. So I guess I should count that as two. Or, is it one unfinished play? Do I count the play I wrote in high school? (Hey, it was even produced.) It isn’t on my hard drive but I’ve got it on file somewhere. If I count that one, I’m now writing my 42nd play. (I think.) But I started writing it before play 41, so which one is actually play 41?

Of the 42 plays, about two-thirds are one-acts, some of them brief. But, I should note, some one-acts are “full-length” plays. Is a 60ish-page play (I’ve got at least two) a one-act or a “full-length” play? When it was done in L.A., “Uncle Hem” was full-length. In New York, it seemed short (because they played it too fast, I think. Which is precisely what one friend called to tell me.). When students ask me, “How long is a full-length play” or, more often, “How long is a one-act play?” I give them a variation of Edward Albee’s response. When asked by an interviewer how many of his plays are full-length, Albee, whose first success was with a one-act, said, “All of them.”

When I was an undergrad studying literature, it puzzled me how writers and then critics and academics couldn’t land on an exact number of how many stories or novels or plays or songs or whatever had been created by a particular artist. In cases concerning the passage of time and the lack of good storage, it made sense: Maybe Aristophanes and Chaucer and Shakespeare couldn’t keep track either. But why not Raymond Carver? Since then I’ve come to know that Carver’s stories exist in different versions, often substantially rewritten, sometimes retitled and sometimes not. As does the Bible. As does, it now seems to me, most things.
For years I kept a record of what I had written and in what order. Now I couldn’t tell you even where that is. I have two file cabinets stuffed with various printed-out or published versions of various things — the product also of short stories, and essays, and reviews, and correspondence, and failed novels — and boxes more in storage in the attic. A few years ago I found a computer disk that at some point I had marked “Lee’s Writing” (I like to think that I’ve come up with cleverer labeling systems since then) and found several completed short stories and plays that I had utterly forgotten about.

I am lucky in one regard: I’m not obsessive enough to be paralyzed by this. I have at least one friend who wouldn’t be able to leave his room until figuring this out. I won’t go too far down that rabbit hole, or I’ll never get to play 43. And I remember the beautiful last story I heard about the late Louis L’Amour. When he knew he was dying, L’Amour went into his writing study resolved to clear up all the debris. On every square inch of floorspace he had stacked manuscripts in progress, miscellaneous writing, correspondence, ephemera, drafts — the detritus of creativity, not all of it yet given shape. His wife came in and saw him standing there deciding how to make order of this before he died, and she said, “You leave that. I’ll take care of it.” And L’Amour left all that and went to his desk and back to his writing.

The deadline for a 10-minute play festival that I wanted to enter passed just one minute ago. The topic: “The sense of smell must be an important element of the play.” In about 23 minutes, I wrote a new play called “Crotch Rot” and uploaded it. Will it be selected? Maybe not. But I wrote a new play and uploaded it at 11:59 and however many seconds. I say this to share with my students, whom I constantly advise when they say they don’t have a play that fits whatever imminent submission requirement: “Go home and write one. It’s not due until tomorrow.” (And it’s worked at least once:  I wrote a 10-minute play in 46 minutes to meet that particular deadline — and the play got accepted and produced.)

A learned a few days ago of the death on New Year’s eve of Bill Idelson but didn’t figure I’d blog about it until the Los Angeles Times ran an obit. Now they have, and you can  click here to read it.

To most people reading this, Bill will be known for either or both of two credits: a recurring role as Rose Marie’s boyfriend Herman Gilmscher on “The Dick van Dyke Show,” and for having written the “Long Distance Call” episode of “The Twilight Zone,” wherein a toy telephone provides the link between a boy (Billy Mumy) and his dead grandmother. Bill also wrote and acted in many other television shows, and for years ran a writing workshop from his house that at least a few of my friends signed up for.

He was also one of my professors in graduate school at USC, where he made an indelible impression. Ostensibly, Bill was teaching sitcom writing. In actuality, Bill was teaching Thinking For Yourself 101. He wasn’t interested in seemingly clever puns — I remember him ripping a fellow student apart for writing a scene about a gorilla in a cage in a suburban household that included the very bad line of dialogue, “But there’s a gorilla in our midst!” (This was around the time of the release of the film “Gorillas in the Mist.”) He was interested in the reality of the situation and your take on it. Both elements were important: There’s a reason that good sitcoms reflect the word blend they arise from — situation, and comedy.

On the last day of class, at the height of the reign of Bush the First, Bill decided to go for broke. He stripped away the outer shell of the lesson — the “writing” part — and left only the cold hard center of the “thinking” part. Bill let us know how he saw the world, in terms of the powerful and the powerless. This went over about as well as one would imagine with a much younger generation succored (or suckered) by Reagan/Bush, and in particular with a group of 12 or so who wanted to write junky pun-laden television with creamy caramel centers. Bill didn’t even expect them to agree with him — he wanted them to argue, to defend their positions, to think for themselves in the way he thought writers should — but they turned cold and a pall fell over the room. At the end of class, two of us hung around to console him. I didn’t come of age during McCarthyism, and I wasn’t writing the nakedly enlightened humanism evidenced by “The Twilight Zone,” but I liked to think I thought for myself, and I could surely see the dynamics of the room, and I generally side with the underdog, and in this case that was the aging writer who hadn’t had any reason to risk his self-image in such a personal campaign with disinterested students — except of course he had to.

I will never forget Bill for that lesson. Or for another.

When my play “Guest for Dinner” was produced in the USC MPW one-act festival — a festival that oddly enough I now find myself executive producing — Bill came to see it at my urging. He brought his wife, the actress-producer Seemah Wilder whom, through further odd circumstance, I would wind up producing in a play about 10 years later and whom I hadn’t remembered as Bill’s wife until reading these obits the past week. “Guest for Dinner” had been produced at Stockton College when I was an undergrad and it had been a sensation, with extra chairs required for every performance and big laughs and a sense of minor celebrity in the making. If anything, the USC production had better acting and better direction, and was clearly working better than at least two of the other plays in the festival. (The fourth play, by a fellow grad student named Peter Chase, was very strong.) On opening night, as people streamed outside filled with what to me seemed like excitement, I asked Bill what he thought. He said something short, friendly, and noncommittal like “Congratulations.” But I wanted to hear more, and said, “No, what did you really think?” And then he told me. Within the space of about two minutes, he ripped the play to shreds. I guess my face betrayed my shock and disappointment, because when it was over, Seemah gripped my arm warmly and said, “Well, I liked it.” I thanked him for his honesty and walked away, licking my wounds. As I thought about this later, I grew to agree with Bill that the play didn’t really work: The writing is self-conscious, the motivations at times weak, the conflict muted. These are mistakes I like to think I haven’t repeated, and as for the play, I allowed one further production and haven’t sent it out since.

People who teach writing aren’t there to be your friend — at least, the good ones aren’t. They also aren’t there to feed their own ego by destroying yours. They are there to teach you something about writing. It’s not always an enjoyable process, either for the provider of advice or the recipient. Given my personal experience with him, I have to think that Bill really cared about what he did, and I’m in his debt.

The LA Times is reporting that the Virgin Megastore on Sunset in West Hollywood is closing next month. This may not seem like much of a landmark — it’s been open only about 12 years — but given the closing of Tower Records this time last year, I’m not sure where one could go to buy a physical CD in that immediate area, let alone find out about new artists by browsing racks and displays.

On a more personal note, I’ve spent many happy hours over the years picking through those displays on my lonesome or with my wife or with friends like Trey Nichols and Joe Stafford and Paul Crist, to fill time either before a movie in the Sunset Plaza complex or because traffic was impenetrable and I was hoping for a cessation.

Joe and I visited the freshly minted Sunset Plaza shortly after its opening and had an experience that resulted in one of our favorite catchphrases. Because the operation was new, there was still some doubt about how some aspects of it worked — for one parking attendant on one evening, anyway. We pulled into the underground parking structure, and he wanted to hand us a ticket. Given that an automated ticket machine was directly within reach of my hand, I asked if I shouldn’t just press the green button and get one out of there. He said I could do that, but then I’d have to hand it to him. I wondered aloud why that was, and what he would do with it other than just hand it back to me. He also seemed uncertain how validation might work, which led me to ask if he was expecting me to pay him, which would make no sense because I expected one of the vendors to validate the parking. This entire exchange was pleasant and polite and was conducted in a language that was not this man’s native tongue (which I would estimate to be Urdu). Finally he looked at me, at my car, at Joe in the passenger seat, at the ticket machine, then back to me, then said, “Do whatever it is you do.” And that’s what I did, collecting a ticket from the machine and pulling my car into the structure.

Since then, I’ve made every effort to “Do whatever it is you do,” usually not in an actual sense but in an ideal sense; in other words, Stick to the mission of your daily existence. This excellent advice applies to most things, as Joe and I have discovered. I’m sorry that Virgin Megastore will no longer provide browsing — and buying! — opportunities for me, which means that I will be visiting the Sunset Plaza even less frequently. But I’m glad it has gifted my life with this zen koan, which has a Vonnegutian clarity I like. For 12 years now as we have faced the hills and valleys of our personal and professional lives, Joe and I have reminded each other, “Do whatever it is you do.”

Envisioning the loss of the Virgin Megastore conjures up the refrain from “Cat’s Cradle”: So it goes.

Looking ahead to the New Year, I advise you: Do whatever it is you do.

Even those of us who liked the second Fantastic Four movie groaned when we saw “Galactus.” That’s because we know that Galactus is a miles-high humanoid in blue and purple armor who eats planets whole, and not a dumb amorphous cloud. Based on this news item about a “death star galaxy” with qualities strikingly familiar to some of us who grew up reading Lee & Kirby, maybe we shouldn’t have been so quick to judge.

Here’s the lede in the story: “The latest act of senseless violence caught on tape is cosmic in scope: A black hole in a ‘death star galaxy’ blasting a neighboring galaxy with a deadly jet of radiation and energy.” In emailing me this piece, my wife expressed a special joy at that personification of the death-star galaxy, asking “Are black holes sentient, that this is viewed as ‘an act of senseless violence.’ Isn’t it just nature?” Nature… or nurture. The debate goes on.

Speaking of personification, my favorite quote was this one:

“It’s like a bully, a black-hole bully punching the nose of a passing galaxy,” said astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, who wasn’t involved in the research.

Just to clarify: Actually, no, it is not like a bully, a black-hole bully punching the nose of a passing galaxy. It’s also not like the oil slick laid by the car in front of yours in the Spy Hunter video game series, it’s not like the outraged chimps that fling their own excrement at gawking visitors to the zoo, and it’s not like the misdirected shot blasting from Dick Cheney’s shotgun. (It is somewhat like the deadly force emitted by the prosthesis on Klaw’s arm, though.)

In Sunday’s Los Angeles Times Book Review, editor David Ulin picks apart Charles Bukowski’s poetry and finds not much there. It’s a good analysis, with several typical Bukowski poems providing corroborating evidence. Why then the reverence by so many (a reverence I share) for Bukowski?

Bukowski’s enormous impact, especially in Los Angeles, outweighs the limitations in his poetry. As Ulin notes, Bukowski was an active part of the burgeoning coffeehouse (and bar) literary scene here and a frequent contributor to even the smallest rags. He was also giving voice to a gritty Los Angeles underside unexamined by anyone else, and as such directly challenged the New York powers-that-be view of Los Angeles as all tinsel and no truth. His poetry may be weak — and I think it is — but the legacy of what one might call his “community work” is huge.

Bukowski is not alone in this. Mary Shelley is a particularly rotten writer, but “Frankenstein” spawned an entire industry (or two). Philip K. Dick is a writer I enjoy reading whose prose gets stuck between my teeth; nevertheless, I’m confident his legacy will prove him one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. The poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, who birthed the detective genre and whose gothic horror remains burned into our collective consciousness (most memorably, for me, with “The Fall of the House of Usher”) is frightfully overwritten and carries the adolescent skip of a jump-rope competition. To wit:

from The Bells

Hear the tolling of the bells-
Iron Bells!
What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!
In the silence of the night,
How we shiver with affright
At the melancholy menace of their tone!
For every sound that floats
From the rust within their throats
Is a groan.
And the people–ah, the people-
They that dwell up in the steeple,
All Alone
And who, tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone-
They are neither man nor woman-
They are neither brute nor human-
They are Ghouls:
And their king it is who tolls;
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
Rolls
A paean from the bells!

And so forth, until it’s your head that is ringing like the bells, bells, bells.

Or this:

The Raven

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
” ‘Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door;
Only this, and nothing more.”
Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow, sorrow for the lost Lenore,.
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore,
Nameless here forevermore.

The cadence may be memorable, but so are all those songs by Abba. Someone, please, help me to forget.

While Bukowski’s poems bemoan the poet’s inability to offer insight, his novels are another thing entirely. “Ham on Rye” is a shattering portrayal of growing up tormented, clueless, ugly, and lower class in the shadow of Los Angeles, the land of the pretty and gifted and well-off. “Post Office” is requisite reading for anyone who wants to understand the torture of smart people trapped in a deadening circumstance; its revolutionary message is that to embrace freedom is, sometimes, to embrace the decision to be a complete fuck-up.

Bukowski was smart about the sham of Los Angeles, the citywide put-on he himself refused to don. And in print and in his readings he was funny. When he had nothing to lose, which was most of his life, he was fearlessly funny and filthy. Every Bukowski piece, however exaggerated and at times badly written, carries the comic stench of real life. There will always be a place for that.

In a profile of Ray Bradbury this month in Verdugo Monthly we find this sentence:

Just turned a youthful 87 years, Bradbury continues to pour on the creative steam, most recently publishing a pair of new novellas and receiving the Lifetime Literary Achievement Pulitzer Prize.

The photo, you’ll note, shows Bradbury wheelchair-bound and with a drooped-to-closing left eyelid, looking every bit of 87. If this is “youthful,” then middle age is preschool.

Could the writer have meant youthful in mind or spirit rather than in body? Perhaps, but she doesn’t say that. And given several encounters myself with Mr. Bradbury during the last five years, I don’t think he has aged in a way that one could say has left him young for his age.

I’m glad he’s still with us, and I wish him continued health. But Bradbury is a writer, and for writing to be worth anything, then individual words have to retain their core meaning. And “youthful” he isn’t.

Anyone who has seen the Beckett play “Act Without Words” (“Actes sans saroles”) will find this battle between an animation and its “off-stage” animator and his tools thematically similar. There are no new ideas, only new mediums for expression.

(If the embed doesn’t work for you, click on the link at the bottom.)

Animator vs. Animation by *alanbecker on deviantART