I’m suffering from jet lag in a change in venue and some unwanted down time while the boss struggles with the plot points of my next case. I wish he’d work a little faster. It’s not easy lying back on a beach in Mexico sipping lollipop drinks when you’re a life-sized made-for-action figure. I don’t do nothing especially well. I’m more the shark type — got to keep moving — and I start getting stir crazy when I’m idle for too long. I’m much better at following the bouncing ball from page to page, pointing out glaring omissions, pace-killers and missed opportunities in my cases. That’s part of the give-and-take I alluded to in my last entry. There’s really more than one spider weaving this web.
It wasn’t always that way. I started my career on shaky ground. It was less a full partnership and more of an uphill challenge because I came so late to my role. After hanging in mothballs for longer than my author or I would care to remember my number was finally called. Embarrassingly, I staggered out of the gate, stiff and rusty and blinded by the bright lights when the opportunity finally came. It took me a while to gain my sea legs and start acting like the hardass I was intended to be.
Kane, my chief antagonist my last time out, did his best to take advantage of the situation until I set him straight. He was used to being the center of attention and didn’t take kindly to being demoted to second-string in his own story. But then it wasn’t his story anymore. It was mine! I had to work my butt off — and my author's — to finally displace the arrogant bastard and claim pride of place as my own. Kane and I ultimately struck a deal. He became the story’s irresistible force and I settled in as its immovable object. Something and someone had to give when we eventually collided. Damned if that was going to be me. But give Kane credit. He still haunts the story despite being dead when it starts.
My author will candidly confide to anyone who’ll listen that a key progenitor of the character Daniel Kane was Conrad’s Kurtz from Heart of Darkness, with support from Coppola’s film adaptation of Conrad, Apocalypse Now and in similar fashion Laura from the 1944 Preminger film of the same name. I warned you the guy mixes his drinks! Anyway, the common denominator between the characters Kurtz and Laura, and the element author-dearest was trying to capture was what I call the black hole effect; Kurtz and Laura, like Kane, dominate their stories from the outset, bend memories and motives, if not time and space, despite being ‘dead’ or at least gone native and missing at the time. Neither step live onto the stage of the story until it’s nearly all told. That gravitas in absentia, that mystery and validation by proxy is what gives these characters a greater weight and importance than what they might otherwise possess. You, the reader, can’t help but grant them exalted stature because you’ve waded through more than half the film or book marveling at the way they’ve shaped and changed the lives of those around them. In a very real sense, they are the black holes of the story, the relentless maws churning, like a wormhole in the distance, inexorably pulling you closer despite your repulsion by the raw violence of the ever-expanding event horizon sucking you in.
That, friends, is Daniel Kane, and that was an act I simply couldn’t match at first. Holding my own against such a force of nature required I become one of my own. Suffice to say it took several drafts to build up my voice and my muscle to get to the point where I could trade blows and barbs with the bastard without getting my butt thoroughly kicked. My face-off with Rio in Portrait was a cake walk by comparison. Rio was Death dancing a samba; dangerous, but only to proverbial life and limb. Kane was a far deeper threat, to my sense of self, my sense of order, justice and balance, my sense of trying one’s best to do right.
It was probably my lady, Kyoko, who first posed the question: why? Why my obsession with Kane? What about him drove me so crazy? Why did busting his ass become, for me, a veritable mission from God?
There’s a reason the Norse AllFather, Odin, forbids the asking ‘why’? He hung upside down and gave an eye for the wisdom to understand there’s never a satisfactory answer to that question, so I won't waste my time by asking. All I know is that I’m supposed to be professional about my cases, not take them personal, but I couldn’t manage that when Kane was involved. Ours was a personal grudge match from square one, and it’s not all that easy to explain.
The son-of-a-bitch knew how to get under my skin, of course, and the ease with which he did it pissed me off all the more. A good part of the agitation was what I felt was the unjustified cult of celebrity that Kane so actively cultivated and made popular. I can remember a time when you had to earn your celebrity stripes by being especially good at something; great leaders, inventors, artists or visionaries who could touch the rest of us in some essential way, enlist us in a cause greater than ourselves and transfigure us to the point where we’d never be quite the same again. The operative word in this context is ‘us’, not ‘them’. People usually aren’t deemed great and worthy of notoriety if the only one they influence is themselves. The latter more typically profile out as recluses or hermit sages; they may be geniuses or they may be manic depressives, but whatever they are isn’t our problem because they usually keep what they do to themselves. To be worthy of celebrity used to imply you possessed the ability to shape and influence others. In short, you had to be contagious of something. That holds true for serial killers as much as it does messiahs. To earn the wings of celebrity you had to be very, very good at something that could either influence or affect others. That’s the kind of celebrity I can understand and respect.
That’s not the kind of celebrity Kane wrapped himself in, however, and it isn’t the cult of celebrity we’re so totally obsessed with today. I’m stretching a point here to lay the latter development at his doorstep, but he’s as worthy a suspect as any other, and more so than most. Kane, like Warhol, changed the name of the game. Never mind one was purely fictional. My point is that , after Warhol, after Kane, raw talent was no longer as essential as the ability to promote its absence. The people we now make overnight stars and viral sensations would seem to have exceedingly little to offer in the way of transformation or enlightenment. Embarrassment, even more than entertainment, seems more their calling card. We’re beset by a locust-like plague of new-age celebrities, vapid, would-be stars and starlets who’ll unabashedly masturbate their way into your favorite media conduit in the desperate hope you’ll confuse their come-on squeals for notable quotations. They’re living, real time caricatures who buffoon and pimp themselves in whatever media peepshow will have them, and they race into the hot-lights of the public stage predestined to melt and fall on their face.
That embarrassing fall, too, seems to be part of their charm. In the not too distant past it took us a while to discover the clay feet of our heroes, and some actually seemed worthy of admiration and belief for a brief while before they tripped over their own excess and indiscretions. The rabid media, eager to peddle its intrinsic importance in our lives as if it were deodorant or beer have collapsed that interval and begun to mistake their ‘Gotcha!’ cry for honest journalism. Our new-age would-be celebrities come to us now already naked and lame, wearing their fatal flaws on their sleeves like neon booster buttons. Exposing themselves in public is part of their nature. Like Kane, they’re alchemists of the infinitely-fertile ether and can turn an embarrassing moment into a mythic rite of passage or cry for attention, spin a blatant lie or distortion of fact into indisputable gospel, and build the complete absence of discernible talent into a lifetime career and thriving cottage industry.
When did we stand logic and value on their heads and feel that the shocking absence of talent was as worthy of recognition than its abundant presence? Or have we become so jaded we can no longer tell the difference between the two?
Then again, what if talent is as ubiquitous as shit, and what really matters is not how much you have but what you're willing to sacrifice for and to it?
Be afraid, friends, be very afraid...I'm beginning to sound like Kane...again.
Then again, what if talent is as ubiquitous as shit, and what really matters is not how much you have but what you're willing to sacrifice for and to it?
Be afraid, friends, be very afraid...I'm beginning to sound like Kane...again.
