Key Largo

My review of Key Largo, with the wisdom of an introductory course in screen writing:

"Key Largo" is a classic Humphrey Bogart movie from 1948 that showcases Bogart's massive head. Look at it! His head is the size of his fucking torso! Have you ever seen someone with a head that size? I have once. Some kid in my neighborhood in Duluth, Minnesota had a really big head. We called him, "Big Head." In retrospect, we called him that because pointing out the faults of others is a lot easier on the psyche than holding up a mirror to yourself, regardless of how normal sized your own head may be.

Also, no matter what anyone says about the prudishness of the era (40's & 50's), Key Largo has its edgy moments, for example, graphic incest:



One of the things I loved about movies from this era is that bad guys look like bad guys.




And the hero always wins. It's morally unambiguous.

Mr. Flood's Party


Mr. Flood's Party - Edwin Arlington Robinson

Old Eben Flood, climbing alone one night
Over the hill between the town below
And the forsaken upland hermitage
That held as much as he should ever know
On earth again of home, paused warily.
The road was his with not a native near;
And Eben, having leisure, said aloud,
For no man else in Tilbury Town to hear:

"Well, Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon
Again, and we may not have many more;
The bird is on the wing, the poet says,
And you and I have said it here before.
Drink to the bird." He raised up to the light
The jug that he had gone so far to fill,
And answered huskily: "Well, Mr. Flood,
Since you propose it, I believe I will."

Alone, as if enduring to the end
A valiant armor of scarred hopes outworn,
He stood there in the middle of the road
Like Roland's ghost winding a silent horn.
Below him, in the town among the trees,
Where friends of other days had honored him,
A phantom salutation of the dead
Rang thinly till old Eben's eyes were dim.

Then, as a mother lays her sleeping child
Down tenderly, fearing it may awake,
He set the jug down slowly at his feet
With trembling care, knowing that most things break;
And only when assured that on firm earth
It stood, as the uncertain lives of men
Assuredly did not, he paced away,
And with his hand extended paused again:

"Well, Mr. Flood, we have not met like this
In a long time; and many a change has come
To both of us, I fear, since last it was
We had a drop together. Welcome home!"
Convivially returning with himself,
Again he raised the jug up to the light;
And with an acquiescent quaver said:
"Well, Mr. Flood, if you insist, I might.

"Only a very little, Mr. Flood --
For auld lang syne. No more, sir; that will do."
So, for the time, apparently it did,
And Eben evidently thought so too;
For soon amid the silver loneliness
Of night he lifted up his voice and sang,
Secure, with only two moons listening,
Until the whole harmonious landscape rang --

"For auld lang syne." The weary throat gave out,
The last word wavered; and the song being done,
He raised again the jug regretfully
And shook his head, and was again alone.
There was not much that was ahead of him,
And there was nothing in the town below --
Where strangers would have shut the many doors
That many friends had opened long ago.

A Critics Guide to Christmas, 2008: It's a Wonderful Life?


The Curious Case of Benjaman Button: Not only was this movie terrible, there was limited Pitt nudity.

1/2 Star (for a glimpse of Brad Pitt's bare back)

Grand Terino: This was a (*ahem*) vehicle for Clint Eastwood, who I desperately wish was my own father.

4 Stars

Chicagoland Area Weather: Negative seven without wind-chill my second day of “vacation.” People choose to live here? Take your white Christmas and shove it up your ass.

0 Stars

Chicagoland Area Friends of the Family: Didn’t recognize my brother-in-law and I after shlepping Christmas cookies across town with six inches of fresh snow on the ground. Bonus: Didn’t invite us in out of the cold. Way to donkey-punch my Christmas spirit. If the door wasn't opened just a crack, I'd throw my shoe at you.

0 Stars

Gifts: Nothing really wowed me, and when it comes to Christmas gifts, I really want to be wowed.

1 1/2 Stars

Family: I can take or leave most of them

2 1/2 Stars

Friends: Ditto

2 1/2 Stars

Steak ‘n Shake: Open 24 hours, closed on Christmas, I can’t has cheeseburger?

0 Stars

Imo’s Pizza: So this is where the Christmas joy was hiding.

4 Stars

Those Oblivious to Ric Rolling: Who is pwned if they don’t get it, and at this point probably never will? The year is almost over, and the cool-points have to be tallied.

? Stars

The Youngest and My performance in super competitive floor hockey game with cousin-in-law: We didn’t vomit all over the YMCA floor…That was our highlight.

1 Sad Panda

TSA: You guys getting a bonus for treating people with dignity, respect over the holiday season? I’m a little disappointing there was no frisking.

3 Stars (you've got a lot of ground to make up)

Old Jiu Jitsu Instructor: Knee-bar from reverse sit out side control – teh prodigious talent!

3 Stars (a little humility would go a long way)

I Love Actors


My screenwriting class is almost over. Last night, my fellow students and I brought one of our scenes to class, and cast it by dropping scripts on each other’s desks, and rehearsing it once or twice in the hallway. There were four males out of a class of sixteen, and only three of us were native English speakers, so I was cast for roughly half the scenes that were acted out. I played a doctor, a flaming homosexual (with a make-out scene!), an anchorman, a cop ("Officer Sweet"), and a child (twice). My poor boss was cast as every single minority character from a taxi-driving Sikh, to an 80-year old Chinaman. At one point, a large white student towered over my short Indian boss, and demanded that he make a more realistic looking turban out of his sweatshirt before he would consider yelling “Action!”

It was a hell of a lot of fun. A type of fun I haven't had in years. I’ve never acted before (except, occasionally, like an idiot), and all the flakey things that I’ve heard actors say suddenly made a lot more sense. And the scripts came alive when the professional actors read them. I cast one of the actors who I think is an obnoxious prick (and who I hope dies in a fire) as the main speaking role in my scene, and he was amazing, working with an accent he made up on the spot. When I read my scene before class, even after the Youngest punched it up a bit, I was thinking, "At least I won’t be embarrassed," and afterwards I was thinking, "I’ve got fucking talent!"

The only bad part of the night was three "chick-flick" dramas with breakup scenes in which all three of the female characters said "Who are you?" to a guys who had just broken up with them. Do people really break up like this, or do they watch people break up like this? Or do they watch people break up like this, and then break up like this?

The difficulty with screenplays (for me, anyway) is that it is so easy to use movie jigsaw puzzle pieces. How many movies have their been with an overhead shot of a beat-up pickup truck driving down a dirt road, kicking up dust behind it? If my movie gets made, there will be one more. I used to scoff, but these puzzle pieces are in movies because they work. It’s the medium’s fault for needing action, motion, and an ultra-tight plot. The truck scene tells the audience, in just a few seconds, that the person driving lives in a rural area, is not wealthy, is traveling some distance, and is probably an unsophisticated hick with a simple life. Screenwriters don’t have the luxury of a narrator (unless Morgan Freeman is running short on cash) so they rely on the audience to fill in the predictable gaps. A boiling tea pot in a movie script fills in for a prose sentence like “A sense of foreboding fell upon the room.” I used to roll my eyes at how in the movies, a cab is always waiting for you when you need one, but the alternative is an awkward cut scene from one place to another, or a really boring scene that will look like unprocessed footage from a reality TV show.

Other scripts included a whodunit that takes place in a children's library, a children's fantasy story, a madcap Woody Allen-esque comedy, and an NFL drama from a chick whose father was a professional football coach. Then again, she also claims to have been best friends with the person "Will" is based on from the hit sitcom "Will and Grace," so she may just be a pathological liar.

The whole class bonded. Two of the professional actors exchanged "good working with you"s after class. People waved and said "good-bye" to each other. We learned each other's names. Someone passed out a sheet of paper so we could write our email addresses on them. Everyone was giddy and exhilarated at watching their creations come alive, and nobody was in a hurry to leave – except that asshole actor who kept checking his iphone.

I Hate Actors



From my screenwriting class notes...

I've had roles that I've refused to take at first, because they were too expensive. . . I knew they would cost me too much emotionally to perform -and-and-and live out the rest of my life. Eventually, I would talk myself, or be talked into taking the role, and it ends up being so worth it...

...But taking care of yourself really helps.

I hate actors because they are trained to eliminate their superego, the part of our psyche that enables us to act like adults. They are man and woman-children. They are utterly carefree and irresponsible. They are everything I wish I could be, and everything I'm glad I'm not. Lucky fuckers!

R.I.P.


To piggy back on The Youngest, David Foster Wallace hung himself on Friday night. What a terrible and terribly inconsiderate way to go. There's nothing quick or painless about a self-hanging, and the wife finds you swaying eerily back and forth, bug-eyed and with soiled pants. I imagine that a high majority of self-hangers have second thoughts when their throats makes cough-gargling noises and their feet point down, reflexively scraping the air.

So when the urge strikes to make a hasty, and premature exit, take a tablespoon of this stuff every day for a few weeks. I take it every day, and I'm right as rain. It doesn't flood your system with serotonin like those nasty, over prescribed SSRIs. It just makes you feel normal, and normalcy is easily medicated with drinking.

David Foster Wallace's only vice was Kodiak chewing tobacco, which he chewed copious amounts of while writing his novels. So let's all raise a plug and spit some tobacco juice for a modern genius of letters.

Here's mud in your eye.

Back to (Old) School



I just enrolled in "Introduction to Screenwriting I" with professor Kim Krizan, Academy Award nominated screenwriter, as well as a film and stage actor.

This expanded version of Introduction to Screenwriting I guides students to develop their feature film script idea to create a detailed step outline or beat sheet, and then write the first act (30-40 pages). The basics of screenwriting are covered, including plot and subplot, beat outlines, story structure, and character arcs. Students also analyze successful scripts and study the structure of successful films. The class runs through December 16.

I'm nervous. My last college course was more than eight years ago at a small school in Minnesota, not a world-renowned institution of higher learning like UCLA. Plus, I'm only going to be on campus once a week, which will make it really challenging to break into the social scene. I'll barely have time to toss the bee on the quad let a lone rush for one of the cooler frats. I’m going to have to fall back on the wisdom of my years (and ability to purchase alcohol) to win over the Y generation with their iPod music players, slightly crooked baseball caps, and hairless bodies.

I’ll be living off campus AND holding down a full time job (lame), but I feel a strong urge to purchase a bean bag chair, lava lamp, 20-pack of ramen noodles, small white board, 3 cubic foot fridge, pennant, beer bong, UCLA sweatshirt, and a big-ass Led Zeppelin poster of “Stairway to Heaven.” I’ve already lofted our queen-sized bed, and if we keep things quiet, my res-hall director (I mean, “landlord”) will be none the wiser when we use the liberated space to host Tuesday tippy-cup tourneys.

My apprehension comes mainly because my 40-year-old boss will be taking the class with me. I really like the guy. In fact, I wouldn’t be going back to school if it weren’t for him, but he’s got, like, a ten year old son, wife, mortgage, and all sorts of other “grown up” problems that have the potential of really killing my buzz. If I want to TP the evil dean’s house with a bunch of my pals, is he going to wait to carpool me back to work? Is he going to be willing to cut out early for happy hour at Q’s Billiards on Wilshire? Will he back me if some of those USC (University of Spoiled Children – LOL) punks try to out-cheer us at homecoming, and someone needs to show them what the Bruin Bears are made of? Maybe, but something tells me he might not have school spirit the way I have school spirit, and his Indian culture might inform his college experience slightly different than me, and this could cause friction on our long PAC-10 road trips.

Otherwise, I’m stoked.

Joe Frank



A couple of years ago, I listened to the Joe Frank radio show for the first time. It was after 11:00pm on Sunday night, and The Youngest called me into his room. He said, "I'm listening to a radio show where this guy is calling up people from all over the country that have his name." It sounded interesting, so I listened, transfixed, as trippy music loops played in the background, a Buddhist man with a Mr. Roger's voice calmly dispensed wisdom through modern zen anecdotes, a woman told a horrifying story involving self abuse with a lobster, and Joe Franks from all walks of life described themselves.

Almost every Sunday since then, I have tuned into the show on Chicago public radio WBEZ on Sunday evenings over Internet radio. Joe Frank stopped producing his show after broadcasting out of Santa Monica for many, many years. I'm currently living just a few miles from where Joe originally produced his material, but I tune into Chicago radio over the Internet. All radio shows are hit and miss, but the Joe Frank show has produced some absolutely amazing works of radio art. It's a shame that the great radio shows of the day: Joe Frank, The Mischke Broadcast, This American Life, are virtually unknown.

Some time ago, I saw Joe Frank perform at the Largo in Beverly Hills. Although I arrived early, I was forced to sit on a hard bar stool in the back of the room. I was alone, and drank three beers quickly while waiting for the show to begin. I stepped outside for a cigarette, and saw two woman, dressed up, looking for a lighter. I lit their smokes and talked to them briefly.

"How do you know Joe," one of the women asked, who turned out to be Debi Mea West, a regular on the Joe Frank radio show. Her friend was involved in editing and writing the show. Debi does voice for commercials, video games, TV shows, and movies. A lot of Joe Frank's later shows are very autobiographical, and the talent sometimes complains that they are not being treated fairly by Joe. A lot of Joe Frank's talent appear to be involved with Joe sexually. I had always wondered how much of the show was real, and how much was scripted. Based on the five minute conversation I had with Debi Mea West and her drunken friend, assuming they weren't engaged in some sort of performance art for an audience of one, the shows that were meant to come across as autobiographical were indeed based on actual conversations between the cast. Debi Mea West, it should be noted, accused her friend of "fucking Joe" in a manner that suggested that Debi doesn't shit where she eats.

I brought a friend to the same show at the Largo a week later, and before Joe took the stage, ran outside to smoke a J. A couple of people outside had the same idea, so we all huddled together to create a human shield to block our minor transgression from Fairfax avenue. The couple asked me if I was a fan of the Joe Frank show and I described how I started listening to him. The guy told me that he used to listen to Joe when he was broadcasting out of Santa Monica, and his show would air on Sunday mornings. He and the girl he was with would smoke a bowl on Sunday morning, lay on the bed together, and go to "the church of Joe." The three of us, reentered the Largo red-eyed and giggly, just as the show began.

The live performances were good. He incorporated some of my favorite monologues into the piece. Joe was physically a mess. His voice was still powerful, but his body appeared weak and old. He was apparently recovering from a major surgery, and I happened to meet one of the owners of the Largo, who explained that all ticket proceeds were going straight to Joe.

The Noble Prince



I received a unique opportunity to review a novella, The Noble Prince, recently published by my cousin. It is her first major work, but it has received high acclaim, and is being featured on local news in the St. Louis area. She has an interview scheduled for taping on Tuesday.

Personally, I thought there were some significant flaws in the narrative arc, and the characters were extremely formulaic. It's almost as though she took the most common elements of stories she read, and pasted them into a hastily conceived plot lacking any character development. Who is the prince other than the archetypical "Prince"? Sadly, this question was never asked by the author, and if you think I am being harsh, I cringe at the thought of what the poison pens at the New York Times will write about this daring, but flawed first effort.

The medieval battle scenes were the highlight of this novella, and the author's skills as an illustrator shone through the disappointing text. The reoccurring use of purple created a dreamy effect, and the symbolism of the purple dragon matching the dark purple castle was neither too subtle, nor to heavy handed. The "evil dragon" is not always a purple dinosaur, rather, it can sometimes be your own home, in this case, the castle. The purple hue reinforced the Princess' desire to leave her home, and her dark childhood behind her.

***Warning, major plot elements will be revealed in the following paragraph*** I think the author took an unnecessary risk leaving out the climatic scene in which the Noble Prince may, or may not have killed the Ogre-Prince. Clearly, her intention was to embrace an ambiguous ending in which the reader is left to imagine the strategy her noble Prince employed to win the Princess' hand in everlasting happiness, however, this comes across as gimmicky, and I believe most readers will feel cheated that they are not privy to the details. Did the Noble Prince slay the Ogre Prince? Did he set out an a long and arduous journey to find the Princess? Unfortunately, we'll never know.

I hope the author keeps writing, and we as readers can only hope she does not get roped into writing epic fairy tale screenplays which is all the rage in Hollywood. What we readers need is what the author ultimately provides us with - a fresh perspective and stunning visual journey in an epic setting. Assuming the author can clear the hurdle that is her tendency towards the hackneyed, I believe she will have an important place at the table that is modern American literature.

We Don’t Call it Pain, We Call it a “Deeper Understanding”


While home a few months ago*, I asked the Old Man about his financial situation. Things had been looking grim, but it sounded like the crises was averted, and he would be able to retire before becoming too senile to continue working. He told me that it was God’s plan, and the financial mini-crisis forced him to quit giving away as much money as he used to be able to, which was humbling, and now he was involved in other avenues for spiritual giving (volunteering).

At work, we recently signed a contract with a devout Muslim, who when receiving calls to prayer on his laptop, would interrupt meetings to bow to Mecca. Anything that happened to him in business, in his personal life, in other people’s lives, was all ascribed to “God’s will.” On the software contract, he wrote in Farsi next to each of his signatures, “Glory be to God.”

I’ve always found this knee-jerk “God’s will” explanation distasteful. Nobody ever says, for example, it was God’s will that a roving gang of genocidal maniacs raped, tortured, and killed hundreds of children in an African village. Nobody volunteers God up for natural and man-made disasters involving massive numbers of causalities, Pat Robertson notwithstanding. When people say “God’s will,” in mind’s eyes I picture the holocaust, and scores of dead Jews steam shoveled into mass graves, and I know what everyone knows – that can’t be God’s will.

About five years ago I had a conversation with a devout atheist. He explained to me over tequila shots that he was a “materialist,” and believed that everything in the universe, including those of the mind, were all accountable to material agencies, and there was no free will, only the fate brought to us through the material world. All of our choices were born from complex chemical and physical processes, and the effects of these choices percolated throughout the world subject to the same complex chemical and physical processes.



I’ve recently read a couple of Jack Kornfield books on Buddhism geared towards Western audiences. I’m not all that familiar with Buddhism outside of these books, but Jack focuses on the philosophy and practice of controlling one’s mind and emotions via “insight mediation,” and the crux of the teaching is to respond to everything as an opportunity for learning.

If you claim it is all God’s will, and rejoice when God provides you a bounty, and rejoice when God puts you through the grinder, or it’s all an opportunity for growth and insight because it’s an illusion anyway, or even if you are a materialist, and believe all of our choices, and all of our actions are merely a cosmic crystallization of chance, then we all pretty much believe the same damned thing. We are all saying “it’s ultimately outside of my hands.”

I was already to sign, seal and deliver this post as I was listening to the Joe Frank Show, and coincidentally, this subject came up, and a metaphysical answer.



Joe Frank: how do you reconcile the holocaust with a…with a God that um…that you would worship?

Man winging it on a phone call: Ummm…I do so in the following kind of way. There’s a magnificent scene in a novel written some years ago by a man named Meyer Levin, the novel is called the Fanatic, and in the scene is a Talmud scholar standing in a selection line with his son, who is a cynic. It’s dawn and as the sun begins to rise the old man begins to recite the morning prayer. His son spins him around and screams at him “in a place like this where people are being chosen to live and die how can you pray? Doesn’t this place prove to you that there is no God?” The father with tears in his eyes turns to his son and he says “it is precisely in this place that I must pray because what this place proves to me is that man really has free will.”

The thing that’s most tragic about humanity is that we are unwilling both to accept the power given to us as the gift of our freedom, the responsibility that goes along with that power, and the understand that the freedom operates because we have the will to do so.

The tragedy of humanity is that it will make itself God in an attempt to eclipse that which is divine and meaningful. It’s not a matter of reconciling the holocaust with God, it’s a matter of reconciling ourselves to the reality we were created with. We seek to escape it either by trying to make ourselves more powerful than the universe in order to flee from our own sense of frailty and loss. Or else we attempt to make ourselves appear in our eyes to be like God - Omniscient and all-powerful in order to say we are wise and good.

The minute humanity takes that position it puts itself in a position in which it has to lose. And ultimately like holocaust, man tests whether or not he really is or isn’t God. One of the things we need to understand is that the responsibility of God and the holocaust is that God gave us the gift to choose and to act with power and with authority. To be angry at God and that gift means that we would also have to deny our humanness. And we can’t do that, because when we do that we end up slaughtering millions of people.

* I noticed he removed my favorite Christian haiku from his office:

Be still, and know that I am the Lord
Be still, and know that I am
Be still, and know
Be still
Be

Infinite Jest

“Mario, you and I are mysterious to each other. We countenance each other from either side of some unbridgeable difference on this issue. Let’s lie very quietly and ponder this.

I’ve been reading this novel, a magnum opus, and perhaps a lasting work of genius called “Infinite Jest” by David Foster Wallace. It has been my evening dose of pleasure, humility, and pleasure in humility. His craft is top notch, and if I shared his divergent thought process, I wouldn’t bother getting out of bed in the morning, rather, I would entertain myself with thoughts for the next 16 hours, and then pass out into a world of dreams banal in comparison.

I’m through recommending books to anyone ever again because it’s a no-win situation, and nobody reads these days anyway. So don’t read this book. Instead, read this excerpt of the aforementioned book, and then rot your fucking brains with whatever is on television:

An oiled guru sits in yogic full lotus in Spandex and tank top. He’s maybe forty. He’s in full lotus on the towel dispenser just above the shoulder-pull station in the weight room of the Enfield Tennis Academy, Enfield MA. Saucers of muscle protrude from him and run together so that he looks almost crustacean. His head gleams, his hair jet-black and extravagantly feathered. His smile could sell things. Nobody knows where he comes from or why’s he’s allowed to stay, but he’s always in there, sitting yogic about a meter off the rubberized floor of the weight room. Tank top says TRANSCEND in silkscreen; on the back it’s got DEUS PROVIDEBIT in Day-Glo orange. It’s always the same tank top. Sometimes the color of the Spandex leggings changes.

This guru lives off the sweat of others. Literally. The fluids and salts and fatty acids. He’s like a beloved nut. He’s an E.T.A. institution. You do like maybe some sets of benches, some leg-curls, inclined abs, crunches, work up a good hot shellac of sweat; then, if you let him lick your arms and forehead, he’ll pass on to you some little nugget of fitness-guru wisdom. His big one for a long time was: “and the Lord said: Let not the weight thou wouldst pull to thyself exceed thine own weight.” His advice on conditioning and injury-prevention tends to be pretty solid, is the consensus. His tongue is little and rough but feels good, like a kitty’s. It isn’t like a faggy or sexual thing. Some of the girls let him, too. He’s harmless as they come. He supposedly went way back with Dr. Incandenza, the Academy’s founder, in the past.

Some of the newer kids think he’s a creep and want him out of there. What kind of guru wears Spandex and lives off others’ perspiration? They complain. God only knows what he does in there when the weight room’s closed at night, they say.

Sometimes the newer kids who won’t even let him near them come in and set the resistance on the shoulder-pull at a weight greater than their own weight. The guru on the towel dispenser just sits there and smiles and doesn’t say anything. They hunker, then, and grimace, and try to pull the bar down, but, like, lo: the over weighted shoulder-pull becomes a chin-up. Up they go, their own bodies, toward the bar they’re trying to pull down. Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down to himself. And I like how the guru on the towel dispenser doesn’t laugh at them, or even shake his head sagely on its big brown neck. He just smiles, hiding his tongue. He’s like a baby. Everything he sees hits him and sinks without bubbles. He just sits there. I want to be like that. Able to just sit all quiet and pull life towards me, one forehead at a time. His name is supposedly Lyle.