Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Entry 11

Something’s been stabbing at my gut since my return from Mexico that I can’t seem to shake; the disquieting sensation of no longer being one with the city I love and have always called home.   If I didn’t know better I’d say I was in mourning, and that’s made this particular entry especially hard to jot down.    

Grappling with my emotions is not an entirely new sensation, but then neither is my growing disaffection with what I perceive has happened to New York.   I’ve been resisting a nagging sense of estrangement from it for some time, now; the way one tries to ward off a cold.   You know the feeling: you shrug off the aches, pains and sniffles as best you can, but if a bug’s persistent enough it can ultimately wear you down no matter how many drugs you drop in your system.  All of a sudden it hits you like a brick house and you’re confined to bed fighting feverish chills and the numbing banality of daytime TV.    That’s what’s happened in this instance.    The sense of detachment and alienation between me and the city that has been gnawing at my toes finally widened its jaws and swallowed me whole.   

Call it my F. Scott Fitzgerald moment, aptly reflected in his My Lost City; a piece he wrote in 1932 after climbing to the top of the newly-built Empire State Building.    It was upon looking out at the city from its then highest structure that Fitzgerald understood what he called “the crowning error of the city,” the sobering realization “that New York was a city after all and not a universe”, a realization that caused “the shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination [to come] crashing to the ground.”   

For reasons I’m at a loss to explain, I waxed nostalgic along those same lines as I gazed out at the city from the window of the plane.   Maybe it was the lethargy I still felt from all that downtime under palm trees of the Yucatan, or maybe it was the after-effects of my having lost a bet with Kyoko the night before over a bottle of tequila, and the worm I drank was still alive and turning in my entrails, but for whatever reason my resistance to sullen introspection was ebbing to an all-time low.   The landing flight path took us straight up Broadway; but my usual sense of wonderment and pride over that view immediately soured as we neared the southern tip of Manhattan.          

I got my first glimpse from the air of the newly-completed Memorial Plaza, and might as well have been gazing upon the face of Medusa.  Before I could stop it, a torrent of quicksilver memories of that September morning cut through me like Rio’s straight razor.  I felt like a kid who had just tripped and spilled his bag of marbles, and who had to frantically scurry in a vain attempt to somehow catch them all.   Only my reflexes weren’t fast enough, so I sat helpless as my Pandora’s Box of memories vomited up thick billowing black clouds of vaporized steel, glass and flesh and splattered them across my mind’s eye.   I sat, frozen, a prisoner of my own recollections, and looked on as those plumes of smoke and flame continued to churn, fuelled by jet engines, only to then abruptly collapse in a pan-caking cascade of debris crumbling towards the ground.   Finally, my self-defenses kicked-in and dissolved the avalanche of mangled debris into a gentle shower of tears pouring into the pools the footprints of the Towers had become; black granite pools plugged, like dual computer processor chips, into the earth in a vain attempt to help us calibrate and come to terms with what was lost. 

If that wasn’t disturbing enough, that somber and unsettling vision immediately collided with another as we continued north, to the cluster-fuck of meandering pedestrians cluttering the Disney-like mall we’ve made of Times Square; a swarming hive of pixies armed with shopping bag wings fluttering under lights so blinding they cowed night itself into submission.   Huge digital billboards boosted ads thousands of feet in the air, and mammoth-sized screens bombarded passersby with an endless loop of xenophobic newscasts and promos geared to wearers of disposable income in any currency known to man.  Midtown stared up at me like a painted whore plucked from the garish parlor of a border town bordello; hustling harmless thrills to the throngs of faceless, nameless tourists that even we so-called residents have become.    

Suddenly it all seemed horribly wrong and hopelessly foreign.   I had to shake and remind myself that this wasn’t a storyboard set left over from Blade Runner.    This was supposed to be New York, a city I’ve called home since my birth and fell hopelessly in love with soon thereafter, but that now seemed uncomfortably distant and alien, and I was overcome by a momentous sense of loss.   Perhaps it was the sharp juxtaposition of those two conflicting images which hit me like a runaway sixteen-wheeler.  Maybe my fatigue after the long flight home made me especially susceptible to the vagaries of an ever-changing landscape.   Maybe I was finally struck by just how much our obsession with being constantly entertained on one hand and kept safe and secure on the other has ultimately cost us, but whatever it was I sat in my seat on the plane and wondered how the city of eight million people could abruptly go missing.  

Well, perhaps not abruptly.  As already noted, my F. Scott Fitzgerald moment has been quietly rehearsing inside me for some time.   Putting things in perspective is part of what I’m suppose to do for a living, so I understand that New York has always reinvented itself and that it’s skyscrapers, like so many of its features, have perennially come and gone.   I know the grid has been erected, dismantled and built up again, generation after generation, as the city inexorably grew.   I know that the city the Dutch founded rose as an edifice to commerce, driven by the engines of self-profit, pragmatic accommodation and unbounded imagination.   New York rose on the landscape like a modern day Yggdrasil, a great, man-made world tree with deep roots anchored in bedrock and stretching out towards all horizons.   Its over-reaching branches formed a thick, protective canopy from whose boughs hung fruits both promised and forbidden in Eden.   The city was an open, limitless harbor and idyllic haven to the tallest ships and the greatest dreams.  Its towering buildings were cathedrals to the business of dauntless ambition, and its shimmering lure reduced the Atlantic Ocean to a veritable river Jordan; becoming the melting pot and chief port of entry into the Promised Land that was the New World. 

The rest of the country didn’t always like or understand the great experiment that was New York, but the best and the brightest followed the yellow brick road that invariably led here, regardless.   Who could blame them?   Only in the Emerald City could each and every one of them glimpse behind the curtain and dare become who they were.   New York became the yardstick of all effort and ambition and the one true measure of success.   Here all things were possible, and when fame and fortune was won and lost one could be consoled by the fact that, in New York at least, it could be won yet again if you were worthy.   We were the great cauldron, the world’s pressure-cooker, the personified energy and aspiration of an age, the jewel in Lady Liberty’s crown and raison d’etre for an entire nation.   Here, in the daunting canyons of New York’s towering skyline, and not in the wilting cornfields of Iowa, was America’s true Field of Dreams.     

I’m not sure exactly where and when that changed, but it has and I don’t like it.  

Being the fictional dick that I am I know a frame job when I see one, so I have no intention of laying the blame for this sad turn of affairs at the 9/11 doorstep, as if one more orphan of war.   Too much bullshit’s been swept under that rug, already.  We’ve been force-fed enough lies and misdirection as it is, so I’m not going to add to our collective indigestion.   Let’s keep it real and remind ourselves that New York has always been a target because of what it was and what it symbolized.   There’s nothing new about envy, hatred and fear, and we’ve always had more than our fair share of enemies; foreign and especially domestic.   That kind of animus comes with the territory.  We’ve always been brash, even arrogant, albeit sometimes provincial, but we’ve also always been best, and we’ve always defiantly weathered all storms and have emerged bigger, better and badder for all the sticks and stones thrown at us.     So let’s cut the crap and admit that the shock of that morning in September wasn’t that the Towers were attacked — both we and they had been attacked before — what we can’t forgive, forget or abide by is that fact that they actually fell.   I keep seeing the collapse of those ugly-duckling towers in my mind, a bad dream stuck in an endless cycle of rewind and play, and begrudgingly admit that their falling struck me like the breaking of an inviolate promise; the breach of sacred contract, a betrayal, almost and a shattering demonstration that there was indeed, as Fitzgerald saw seventy years ago, a limit to the city, it’s people and it’s power.  

It’s not our innocence that was lost on September 11 —we never had any to lose — but our collective hubris; our peculiar expression of Manifest Destiny and brazen audacity that enabled us to reach up and out and construct towers to the stars.   To be painfully honest — always dangerous — I’m not sure we still possess the energy, the audacity and the resolve to rebuild them.    

You can say I’m full of shit and I won’t argue, but that don’t make me wrong.   I look at the city lately and don’t like what I see.    I don’t like its fortress-like mentality, the constant surveillance, the barricades and check points, our bunker mentality and the Doublespeak of the media and our so-called ‘leaders’ trying to convince us that living in constant fear is natural.  New York was once the great transformer, the great shape-changer to all within its seemingly endless reach, but the tables have turned and the city has now become the thing that is routinely gutted and flayed.  I look at New York these days and see every other outlet strip mall in the country; the same fast food restaurants selling us shit we shouldn’t eat, the same retail chains selling us cheap shit we didn’t make and the same luxury stops selling quality shit most of us can’t afford.   We pay lip service to mutual accommodation and diversity, and no one knows or cares about what and who was here before them or can tell you the name of who lives next door.   New York has always been a magnet for the clash of outrageous wealth and abject poverty, but there was usually an open conduit between the two that’s now as distant and forgotten now as a decent egg-cream and the Third Avenue L.   

I’m not about to pull a Pete Hamill and reminisce on times gone-by.  He does it far better than I could, and his memory is longer than mine.   But even this native son can see we’ve become a city of transients, a stopover for both the mega-rich whose luxury condos are little more than time-shares to a bite of the Big Apple and for the growing underclass only here holding fill-in gigs en route to being something somewhere else.   We’ve become a city of tourists, hipsters, sand-baggers and day-traders profiting on playing small margins and selling each other short.   Our one and only product now is bullshit.   Everyone wants in on the action, but it’s all done by proxy and remote control, and when no one is accountable someone else is always to blame.  No one has enough real skin in the game anymore to give a “Whoop-De-Damn Do” when the cameras aren’t turning.    Everyone arrives here now primping for their close-up and their fifteen minutes of fame, and since they know all the answers they dismiss everyone else with the condescending disdain they once reserved for itinerant busboys.   They’re not content becoming part of the great melting pot; they’re all self-styled Reggie Jackson’s determined to stir the whole drink.  But if they’re that fucking smart I wonder why they had to leave home in the first place.         

My snoop’s nose tells me the tragic events of September 11 didn’t start this transformation, but they may well have marked its culmination; the shattering moment when you realize that even the greatest cities can fall down.  

That’s the F. Scott moment I had while gazing out an airplane window at the city on my way home from Mexico.   I’m not one to cut and run when things get tough, but I’m also not entirely stupid.   Next time I’ll book a seat on the aisle and spare myself the grief.      

Friday, September 9, 2011

Entry 10

It’s good to be home, though I’m not sure why the return trip — from anywhere — is always more exhausting than going there was in the first place.  Why is that?   In my case I’ve been getting lazy on a beach in the Gulf, but I’m not sure that explains why the flight home seemed as if Kyoko and I were returning from New Zealand, not Mexico.   Unlike some people, I don’t sleep well on a plane, so I used the time to give the planned revisions to my upcoming case another look while Kyoko nodded off on my shoulder.   I’m lucky she didn’t drool on my suit.  

To say I like what I see in those notes would be an understatement.   I’ll give the guy at the wheel credit: he does come up with some off-the-wall shit for me to get out of; combining an odd assortment of elements one doesn’t expect to find.   He says that’s to keep me on my toes, but I really think that’s just the way his mind works.   The elements aren’t unique or earth-shattering in and of themselves, but his choice of which ones to combine and in what way can be — providing you drink your stories dark, offbeat and somewhat twisted; just like me.   Blood Rituals promises to be no exception, but I just hope the landscape settles down enough for him to actually put proverbial pen to paper; in a purely digital way, of course.    While catching up on all the changes, though, I couldn’t help but worry that I may be in for another roller coaster ride not so much of story, but of process.   I still wake up in cold sweats about the circuitous way my last case evolved, and I’m not sure even a hard-boiled gumshoe like me would like to embark upon that kind of nightmarish journey again. 

I’ve mentioned how difficult my last case, Portrait of Deadly Excess, was to record, but I may not have been entirely forthcoming as to its convoluted gestation.   Yes, I spilled my guts about how Kane and I tussled over which one of us was going to be top dog, and may have also confided how my introduction to a pre-existing case required it be entirely rewritten with a different center and emphasis in mind.   Draft after draft typed by in what seemed an endless dance of shadows, of entrances and exits, of ever-changing roles, some expanding while others shrank, of certain angles asserting themselves at the expense of others, of whole scenes and sequences moving forwards and backwards in the structure, and in deciding how much to say and where best to say it, before the final work fell into place.  

These are universal issues every writer confronts, but the process of chronicling this particular case was further complicated by the fact that the guy at the controls decided to try his hand at adapting his own work for the screen in between his drafts of the novel and his attempts to find an agent or publisher.  He’d work on the script while marketing the novel, and then polish off the novel while trying to sell the script.    But fiction and screenplays are two very different forms, each with its own requirements, protocols and restraints.   Each required he tell the story and convey information in a different way.    He began to realize that specific passages, devices and angles that worked well in one medium did not work especially well in the other.   The back-and-forth process also revealed problems and inconsistencies in the basic plot and structure, and that required that both novel and script be fixed.      

The back-and-forth made me dizzy; like watching an endless exchange of volleys in a tennis match.  Nor did all of these changes go down with me as easy as the glass of 12 year old Michel Couvreur I’m drinking.   A lot of my introspective commentary and author omniscient narration that worked in the novel flew as far as Icarus before melting in the bright light of the silver screen.   Author-dearest realized the basic structure of the story made the often-used first person narration of some classic noir stories untenable in this instance; there were a few specific scenes of the case I wasn’t privy to because I wasn’t, couldn’t be, there.    Besides, film is a visual medium, and voiceover narration in mid-stream — even when said by the best characters/actors — can often come across as an intrusion of the visual narration one’s watching.   In film, the camera itself is the point of view, and voiceover narration, even the best — MacMurray in Double Indemnity, Mitchum in Out of the Past, Neal in Detour, and Welles in Lady from Shanghai — can call attention to itself in ways the author might otherwise prefer to avoid if only he or she could solve the problem of imparting that need-to-know info or mood in some other, purely visual way.        

Conversely, the BANG BANG action sequences which came to life so effortlessly on the screen do not work nearly as well on the written page.   Action in any written format is hard to pull off largely because the author’s process of writing action gets in the way of our imagining it.  Action voids time, collapses it into a sharp staccato of movement.  You can see something in an instant, but it can take a writer many words to describe the same motion on the page, and it takes the reader many seconds to assimilate a sentence or more.   Film eliminates that time lapse because it takes less time to show action on the screen than it does to read or write it.    It’s tempting, of course, to sacrifice character and plot to loud and explosive action sequences, and to make the wizardry of ever-greater special effects the spine on which you build whole stories, but one becomes anesthetized to pure action after a while; it’s a lot like crack and other narcotics, the more you take the more you want and the more it consumes everything else.  Hell, I’m a self-professed action-junkie, but even I know less is more sometimes.   For me it’s the characters and story that need to be 3-D, not the picture.      

It took the guy at the wheel a while to learn these lessons, just as he eventually learned that dialogue has greater stress on it in film than it does on the page.    In film you actually have a real life actor mouthing the lines, so they better POP and not come across as forced or false or contrived.   You can’t prop up weak dialogue on the screen the way you can on the page.    Unfortunately, unless you’re terribly gifted in both word and ear making characters speak as people really do in life can be like having root canal done without Novocain.   If you’re anything like most people, you don’t always say the perfect thing in any given situation.   You often walk away wondering “why didn’t I say that, instead?”   For that reason, it’s better to write dialogue as a character SHOULD speak if they had all their wits and emotions in the moment about them.  Dialogue’s a lot like makeup for the stage or screen; the lights of the medium itself are so brutal and unforgiving that you’ve got to put makeup on to look natural.  

And so on the process went for the better part of a decade.  I’ll cut the guy some slack because he was working a day job all that time, but that didn’t change the fact that I was getting moldy waiting in the wings while all this tinkering was going on.   More frustrating still was the fact that there was still no market for me in the end.   Not as a novel, not as a script.   I suspect it may have been my in-your-face attitude and mixed racial makeup that got in the way, but I’ll leave that particular rant for another time.  Even a fictional character’s feelings can get hurt by repeated rejection, but I’ve also been known to occasionally delight in proving others wrong.   My doubters made me better, stronger; they helped the guy who writes me figure out what he was doing wrong.   I was there to help.   Fictional characters do that, too, you know.   Actors aren’t the only ones who nudge, nag, and throw fits and tantrums in their dressing rooms.   Fictional characters do it, too.   If we’re worth our salt we also change lines, refuse to say the really bad ones, and have the audacity to suggest we do this instead of that.   We steal scenes, alter sequences, and point out missed dramatic opportunities.  

Despite the ego-tripping all-too-common of our so-called ‘creators’, we fictional characters have some good ideas of our own now and again.  The trick for authors is to pay attention to our kibitzing or risk having a stillborn child on their hands.       

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Entry 9

Sometimes we all need a wake up call; an event or a sign illustrating that we’ve strayed off our particular straight and narrow, an indication that adjustments are necessary if we’re to salvage our objective, our case or our cause.   That goes for authors, too.    It takes a few brains and a large dose of common sense to listen to those big or little voices babbling to us in our heads,     and the sooner we listen the sooner we get those heads out of our ass and back on track where they belong.    

That might explain why I’m packing my bags while Kyoko’s calling us a cab to the airport.   I can smell the burned rubber from the tread marks left by my author’s abrupt about-face, but I’m supposed to be a nimble sort of guy who can deftly change directions on a dime.   His authorial brain is feverishly plotting out the implications that the change of scenery will have on the case, and has even stumbled on another twist in the plot that opens up an over-sized satchel worth of new possibilities that could pay off big time as the story unfolds.            

I can’t spill my guts prematurely, of course.   The devilish details haven’t been set in stone, yet, and I don’t want to spoil our collective fun of finding out what happens as we turn the page.   The guy who writes these potboilers would really be pissed if I tipped my mitt on what he has in mind.   Then again, he’d also probably take offense at my calling my adventures ‘potboilers’.  As I’ve mentioned before, he’s the sensitive sort, and likes to think he’s writing literary suspense, whatever the fuck that means.  My guess is that he thinks that using the term ‘literary’ implies he’s not an out-an-out hack and that the words, when strung together, have some value as literature beyond their more pedestrian function of moving the story along.   I’m not sure he’s gotten the memo that no one really gives a flying shit anymore.  

I say this with affection, of course, but the guy at the controls is something of an anachronism.  He’s been plugging away writing things for a very long time with barely the proverbial pot to piss in or window to throw it out of to show for his efforts, and he sometimes gets thrown by change despite his frequent embrace of it.   His thinking, especially about his art and his craft, can sometimes border on archaic.   Take this blog, for example.  He knows absolutely nothing about writing a blog or the social networking that can make it such an influential tool in both the ether and the marketplace.   Its ulterior purpose, of course, is to sell the brand I’m trying hard to become.  Hopefully that commercial intent doesn’t dampen the fun we can have together, but reality must occasionally intrude on these exchanges if author dearest is to put food on the table.   

But that’s what I don’t get about him.   To say he doesn’t always do what’s in his commercial best interest as a writer seeking an audience would be a gargantuan understatement along the lines of saying the Titanic sprung a slight leak after hitting that iceberg,   He hasn’t exactly been the best friend of his own career.   The first strike against him, besides his being a pathetically poor networker, is that he writes for himself, not a prospective audience per se.   He doesn’t stop to think what the public might want to read; he only considers what he wants to write, and he doesn’t always understand how far behind the eight-ball that puts him.  I’m not sure he understands just how self-absorbed our audience today really is.  They’re too obsessed with their own problems to care very much about the ones he would call attention to.  They’re also not all that into risk-taking.  Hell, even werewolves and vampires these days have been de-clawed and de-fanged, transformed into antiseptic creatures that live mundane middle class lives save for the curious circumstance of their particular ‘condition’; which is about as central to their being as their hair color.   They’re different, but in a pretentious, harmless, innocuous sort of way and, though looking somewhat pale or iridescent in daylight are still safe and presentable enough for teenage girls to bring home to mother.  

The second strike against author dearest is that he’s one of those writers who mix more than just metaphors in his stories; he mixes styles, traditions and genres, not to mention tenses.  My opening case, Portrait of Deadly Excess, for example, is equal parts suspense, classic noir mystery, neo-noir, genre horror, supernatural noir and attempted social commentary.   Is it any wonder traditional publishers and agents wouldn’t touch it!  They probably couldn’t figure out what it wanted to be when it grew up.   I keep telling him the public — and that includes the so-called gatekeepers and doyens of the entertainment industry — wants known, well-defined and tried-and-true formulas, unpredictable around the edges perhaps to give the illusion of novelty but at core conforming to dozens of books and vehicles they’ve read, represented and produced before.   People don’t want new and they don’t want different.   People want a sure bet, the homerun, the in-your-face slam dunk that brings down the house.   They want comfort amusement that mildly surprises but more importantly reaffirms and reassures.  They want more of the same, the same as themselves, the same as their next door neighbor, the same as the cardboard cutouts we call ‘celebrities’ and ‘leaders’; any bright, sparkly designer bag filled with warmed-over crap aimed at diverting us from the deeper, darker questions threatening the promised safety of our lives. 

To that overriding sentiment of today’s marketplace author dearest delivers me, a hard-assed son-of-a-bitch who threatens your safe, sanitized status quo with his very presence.   I’m an uncompromising half-breed who goes off in search of all sorts of inequities and injustices that you would prefer to totally ignore if not deny, and I also have the audacity to try to set them right against not only assorted villains and bad guys but also against known and accepted pillars of established power.  Worse still, I somehow manage to actually pull most of that off.   I challenge everything, have the ability to, like Samson, bring down roof, and I don’t even bother to pretend to offer up new idols and reassuring answers in exchange.        

Which brings me to the third strike against him as an author: he expects the reader to work and to have something invested in the story while reading it.   You’re supposed to read between the lines and make definite associations using your own frames of reference.  He expects you to understand my mixed racial identity is as much metaphor for where we’re at as a people and a species as it is a real issue in my pathetic excuse for a life.   You’re supposed to get the hint that my refusal to embrace one half of myself at the expense of the other is really a larger rejection of false opposites and an insistence that we focus on the more important subtleties of who and what we as individuals and peoples are, and not get caught up in the barbed wire of the shallow differences of ethnicity and race.   He expects you to realize it’s not simply black and white I’m rejecting, but up and down, right and wrong, good and evil, liberal and conservative, etc.   I’m calling them what they are, bullshit, deliberate lies and well-crafted prevarications, archetypal red-herrings, and a magician’s artful misdirection where a carefully planned gesture or eloquent banter distracts you long enough for the box-jumper to pick your pocket as you applaud in the dark. 

I’ve already mentioned how all the mumbo-jumbo about the power of Kane’s paintings was just another one of his metaphors taken to the extreme; the nature of art and its ability to transfigure everyone with whom it comes into contact, including the creator.   He and I were probing into the real power of art; not only over the viewer, but over the artist.   That was the real case I was working in Portrait, wasn’t it?   We were probing less what is entailed in owning art but more what is involved in creating it.   What determines artistic success, and what are artists willing to sacrifice for it?     

There are no easy, trick answers to such questions.   My author and I know what we think, but shocking as it seems, we want you to have an opinion, too.   We don’t necessarily give a shit what that opinion is, but we want very much that you have it.   Please remember we’re not writing ‘Which Way’ stories, here, where you, the reader, choose the path the story takes.   Piss on that!  Writing, like all art in general, isn’t democratic.   Author dearest has definite ideas of where my next case, Blood Rituals, is heading, but it should be clear by now that I’m following his lead about as much as he’s following mine.     

If you want to influence something in a genuine way then influence the pandering imbeciles you entrust to elected office, influence the safety and cost of the food and products you buy at market, influence the nameless lobbyists and multinational conglomerates who daily hold you and whole nations hostage, and who, like the aforementioned magicians, dangle bright and shiny carrots in your face with one hand while they steal your lunch, if not your soul, with the other. 

But leave my cases to me and the guy at the wheel.   They’re hard enough to write as it is.