The other night I told a playwright friend over dinner that I felt “pregnant with play.” It’s a repulsive metaphor, but better than the alternatives that seem somehow equally right: that a play is going to burst out of me like an alien through my chest; that a play is going to pop like a pus-filled blister; and so forth. Whatever the appropriateness of the image, she knew what I meant: Sometimes you feel like you have a play coming on, and this was one of those times. I had thought I was going to puzzle out the missing section of act two of the play I’ve been writing, and which I told my wife I wanted to drive to Omaha and back (rather than fly) in order to be able to write.
Instead, it turns out it’s a new play. One that just came to me earlier today while driving with my college-student son back to Los Angeles from San Francisco. We were listening to an album by a band he likes. He said, “Do you like this?” “No,” I said. When it came to the end, though, I told him to leave it on so we could listen to it again. Because by then I was writing a play in my head, and this was the soundtrack. Eventually I pulled onto an embankment off the interstate, dug out my journal, and wrote down everything I knew about this play while my son looked around in the passenger’s seat, unsure what to do with himself. Later I had him fish me out a napkin from the glove box so I could scribble down two new notes: the name of a made-up song in the play, and the last line of the play. This sort of thing kept happening. There was the realization that “Oh my God, I know the last line of this play….” And actually I could envision the last scene, completely staged. Then I could see the transitions between time periods — and this is not the sort of thing that I’m very good at. I quickly scrapped the first scene, set at the protagonist’s home, because I never wanted the action to go there, because I didn’t know how to go back there once the play moved on. Then I realized that I could have one actor play two roles in two time periods. Then I had the back story — of how the protagonist and the third main character came to meet again in the present.
This went on in my head for hours.
So now I have to write it, and I think that starts tonight. This is a good time to start it — a few days before I go off to a theatre conference, and then off to visit my mother on the East coast. In the next three weeks I’ll have more available time than I usually have, and as I told my friend the other night, “I’m a clumper.” I write plays in clumps.
After I put the pen back in the unashed ashtray of my car, I heard myself say this to my son: “I don’t particularly want to be a playwright. I just am one.” Because plays have just come to me this way.
His former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, says that Obama “threw me under the bus.” Which leaves me thinking that in his choice of friends and foes, Obama continues to impress. Wright is quoted as saying, “I am radioactive, Sir. When Obama threw me under the bus, he threw me under the bus literally!” I think that from now on, we need to enforce the use of the word “literally” literally. In this case, that will mean literally throwing Jeremiah Wright under the bus. I will grab a shoulder if others will help me.
He is also quoted as saying, “Any advice that I offer is going to be taken as something to be avoided. Please understand that!” This opens a wealth of possibility. I would like Reverend Wright to strongly advocate that we continue to skew the tax code in favor of the top 1%, that we defund schools and roads and bridges, that the U.S. Postal Service discontinue Saturday deliveries, that we include High Fructose Corn Syrup in every food product possible, that every comic book be priced at $3.99 or higher, and that Rush Limbaugh be kept in the U.S. at all costs. I’m now off to work on the rest of my wish list.
In which Mr. Lydon, once and future bomb-hurler for the Sex Pistols and who once upon a time preached anarchy in the U.K., endorses buying British butter. Not sure if this leaves me feeling happy or devastated. God save the queen.
When I tell people here in Los Angeles that I’m from New Jersey, many of them immediately launch into a fond reminiscence of “The Sopranos,” a bad goombah accent, or some other upward nose-turning about the industrial wasteland they think I sprang forth from.
None of any of that has anything to do with where I grew up. Mullica Township is a backwoods borough where some of the roads still aren’t paved, and where most of the commerce takes place at roadside produce stands. It has a culture all its own, and one in no way redolent of most assumptions about New Jersey.
Oh, and we have cockfighting. Ever see cockfighting on “The Sopranos”? I didn’t think so.
The other day while awaiting the latest unpleasant procedure at the dentist’s office, I came across Reminisce magazine, “The Magazine That Brings Back the Good Times.” Those “Good Times” are defined as the 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s. (Here’s the link, if you’d like to stroll down mothball lane yourself.)
People are entitled to their memories and to be nostalgic for what they’ve lost. Although I know that comic books are printed better now than when I was a kid, I miss that smell of decaying pulp. It was part of the experience. So I do understand. But, while I admit to being biased against the 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s — partly, I’m sure, because I wasn’t there — I have to wonder how “Good Times” has been defined. Given that the 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s encompassed global aftereffects from World War I; the Great Depression; the dustbowl migration; lynching; famine; polio; World War II; the extermination of millions of non-combatants; and the development and use of the atomic bomb (to name just the hits), I’m thinking that these are “Good Times” if you survived.
The LA Times’ Geoff Boucher provides a nice obit for Frank Frazetta in today’s LA Times. Note the quote from Guillermo del Toro (of “Pan’s Labyrinth,” and perhaps the best two comic-book movies yet, “Hellboy” and “Hellboy 2”), who certainly knows his way around visual fantasy.
In Boucher, the Times has a pop culture critic and writer who understands and appreciates comics and all their affiliated passions, removing some of the sting from the newspaper coverage we grew up with — the “Pow! Biff! Bam!” gosh-wow features built around just what those attic treasures are worth, and the quaint profiles of elderly broken-backed artists who “still draw funnybooks” and never got to pursue serious art. When Boucher talks about Frazetta, and his impact, and elicits supporting quotes from respected sources, he lends credibility to the idea that Frazetta was our version of Norman Rockwell.
