Bullshit

Why “Scandal” Worked – At First

Author: jsomers November 6, 2013 0 Comments

That’s right, Imma about to write about the ABC show Scandal starring Kerry Washington. The TL:DR version is: I never would have watched this unless forced to by The Duchess, then briefly found it balls-out brilliant, and now not so much.

Here’s the long version: So, like I said, The Duchess commanded one day that we check out Scandal because people were talking about it and The Duchess loves her some zeitgeist. And I do what I’m told or things get broken. So we started to watch.

Right about here is where spoilers might start happening. Just sayin’.

At first it was kind of dumb: The editing tricks were headache-inducing, and the whole idea of the super-connected Olivia Pope schtupping the President in secret was only mildly interesting. I find a lot of Shonda Rimes’ writing tricks a bit shopworn and annoying at this stage; any attraction they had for me eleventy billion years ago when Grey’s Anatomy launched has been worn away. But it was serviceable, and The Duchess liked it, so we hung in. And for a short period of time, during the Defiance Arc, as it’s known, this show became so adorably fucked up insane it was absolutely entertaining.

The Defiance Arc was brilliant because just as you assumed the whole point of the show was OMFG THE PRESIDENT IS SCHTUPPING OLIVIA POPE! the show set you up and then hit you over the head with a conspiracy that stole the election that elected President Fitz-whatshisname. A conspiracy that involved the First Lady, a Supreme Court Justice, a Texas Oilman, the future Chief of Staff, and Olivia Pope – but not the President, who thought he’d won the election fair and square. This was such a demented plot twist that it carried the show for a while solely on the fumes of its audacity. Along the way, the President murdered the Supreme Court justice while she lay dying of cancer in the hospital, to give you a hint of just how demented it all got.

That was then. The Defiance Arc was resolved and the show must go on, so it’s been casting about for other ways to distract us from awe-inspiring awfulness that is the central relationships of the show (and the fact that the main character is so lacking definition she basically does batshit things all the time for no reason and does not in any way resemble the character introduced in the pilot at all unless you count consuming red wine in volume, in which case, a little bit). These ways have so far involved creating larger and more ridiculous straw villains who Rule the Universe – even more powerful than the President! – who also have intimate connections to Olivia et al. It’s so hammy by this point I fully expect Olivia to wake up in the shower one day and it was all a dream.

The reason Defiance worked was that the central idea was demented, and wonderfully so – but the mechanics of it were mundane. The way they stole the election? Simple, clean, and small-scale. It made sense, once you suspended disbelief sufficiently. The new arcs are now so soapy and silly I’m cleaner after watching this show and that DOES NOT happen when I watch TV, usually.

Ah well, I just wrote 550 words on a TV show no one will remember twenty years from now. I feel dirty.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

The Arc of Walter White

Author: jsomers October 13, 2013 4 Comments

I’ve been a huge fan of Breaking Bad throughout its run, and so I watched the finale, Felina, with a mixture of joy and horror, because it was very well done and it also meant it was ending. You don’t often see television shows that have 60+ episodes that are all reliably excellent. Of all the episodes of Breaking Bad, the worst ones were still pretty damn great. Grading them, I don’t think there would any below a B- in my book, and even those would be rare.

So, yeah: I’m a fan.

The Internet encourages instant reactions to things and then a quick Forgetting. Breaking Bad was a few weeks ago and it’s already fading from the Internet like a dim memory from childhood. But I’ve been thinking about it still. Because the finale was great, and because I think it accomplished something truly amazing. So let’s talk about menace.

(more…)

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

Writing as a Reader

Author: jsomers August 30, 2013 7 Comments

I had one of those moments the other night. No, not one of those “oops I drank a bottle of High West Double Rye and wet myself” moments – or, well, yes, one of those moments too, but that’s not the subject of this little essay thank you very much. The moment I’m referring to was a spine-tingling idea I had to solve a plot problem in a novel I’ve been writing for approximately 75 years. Which is actually a merging of two novels into one. Which has been slowly driving me insane. But let all that drift, because I figured something out, and it was to take a tiny detail alluded to a few times throughout the current draft and bring it back as an awesome but somehow perfectly obvious twist.

To celebrate I drank a whole bottle of High West Double Rye but I think I already told that story, so let’s let it drift.

After I woke up, went to the desert to dry out, and had a few starvation-induced hallucinations, I realized something: The only reason the twist came to mind or even worked at all was because I’d previously put in a couple of throwaway details. The thrill I experienced when I thought of a way to leverage those details into brilliance was pretty much the same thing I would have felt if I’d been reading a book and an author suddenly promoted what had seemed like an unnecessary detail to a plot point. In other words, I was writing like a reader.

Frankly, I think that’s important.

Here’s how it works, at least for me. In chapter one, I give a character a gewgaw for some color. Then I forget about it. Then in chapter 10 I realize I need that character to do something amazing and for that he needs an implement. And I realize with a thrill that I can just resurrect the gewgaw. I stand up, tear off my shirt, and scream IT’S BRILLIANT while the universe recreates the crane shot from The Shawshank Redemption. I could have given the character the gewgaw right then and there and retconned it into the story later, but because I used something I’d already added to the story and then forgot, I have the same experience (hopefully) that the reader will have.

It’s artificial, of course. I can do anything I want in my story – I can just make shit up any time I want! Yet when I have that moment when I’m just thrilled by a twist because it seems natural, it usually means I’m onto something. For a second there, I wasn’t a jaded, slightly inebriated writer trying to fool people into spending $8 on his books. I was part of the audience, and I was excited.

Of course, I’ve enjoyed some terrible films and novels in my time, so none of this means the story I’m working on is any good. It’s just the religious experience of occasionally shocking yourself with your own writing that gets me every time.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing

The Freaks are Winning Part 65,678

Author: jsomers August 29, 2013 0 Comments

I Wish He’d Looked Like This.

SO, today I noticed I had mushrooms growing on my head so I decided to go outside and take a walk, get some sun. So I loaded up my decoy coffee travel mug with liquor, ate six chocolate donuts to get my strength up, and put on some pants.

I went to my old PO Box to see if any weirdness had come my way, but it was sadly full of junk mail. I suppose when you stop sending out a print zine, people stop mailing you. I am surprisingly not sad about that at all.

Walking home in Hoboken with my earbuds in, suddenly a sweaty, plump woman began talking to me. Because having earbuds in does not in any way imply that you cannot hear what someone is saying. Removing the earbuds, I politely grunted that she should repeat herself.

“I told that man to put on a shirt!”

I followed her gesture. About a block away was a guy in bike pants and no shirt, jogging. Even at this distance I could see he was as sweaty and shiny as a greased pigs. It was unsettling, but I didn’t let her know that. Instead, I looked at her and said “So?”

She looked outraged. “It’s illegal!”

I turned away. “Uh-huh.”

Perhaps it is. The list of things that are, in fact, illegal in this world is always surprising to me, to be honest. Especially when a court-appointed lawyer is explaining them to me in the grim interview room downtown I know so well. Who knew so many activities required pants? But shirts? That’s a whole different story. As far as I know it’s not illegal to run without a shirt. Perhaps uncouth, but not illegal.

The freaks are winning. What’s worse, the Freaks continue to think I look like one of them.

Bullshit

America’s Got No Goddamn Idea: Surviving a Live Taping of America’s Got Talent

Author: jsomers August 7, 2013 6 Comments

Gaze Into the Abyss

There I was, in the audience. A long story. Which I will begin now.

My wife, the formidable Duchess, is a huge fan of America’s Got Talent. Me, not so much. It’s a perfectly inoffensive variety show by and large, though every single episode could be edited down to a tight ten minutes without any loss of entertainment value, unless you find entertainment value in endless repetitions of three or four core memes: That America does, indeed, have talent, that the contestants by and large are so desperate for success and recognition they will likely kill themselves shortly after being voted off the show, that the whole world loves Howard Stern with a blind passion, and that Snapple and Orville Redenbacher’s popcorn are the greatest foodstuffs in history.

Again: Me, not so much.

Anyways, I do watch the show with The Duchess, because it’s fun to gently mock her taste in TV, and heck, once in a blue moon there is actually an interesting act. Variety Shows are pot luck, after all. Yes, every season will have 500 nearly identical dance troupes, magicians, singers, and stand up comedians, but there will once in a while be a very cool thing. That Very Cool Thing is what keeps me sane during the long seasons.

The Duchess and I made some new friends recently, and one of them turned out to be a Gaffer working on AGT, and he got us tickets to a recent taping. The Duchess was beyond excited. I was … less so. But we went! And I survived!

###

Radio City Music Hall is pretty amazing. Showing up for the taping was pretty much like showing up for anything else: You have a ticket with an assigned seat. You get there, go through a sloppy security screening, and have the opportunity to purchase cocktails and soft drinks and snacks assuming your credit scores come back high enough to qualify for the loans required to actually make these purchases. Then you find your way to your seat and wait for the show. The doors opened at 6PM and we were seated by 6:30PM and my god what a mistake because the show doesn’t even begin until like 8:30PM. If you’re lucky.

The place never got full. There were tons of empty seats around us. But Radio City is awesome, so for a moment just hanging out there was pretty cool. And then Joey assumed the stage.

Joey, who has a real name and career I am sure but neither of which I recall, will be referred to here as Joey Bagadonuts. He is the swarthy “warm up” man who went about the business of keeping the crowd at a peak of frenzy with all the energy and concentration of a drunk trying to ward off the imaginary rats in smoking jackets that descend on him with horrifying regularity (not that I would know anything about that). Joey Bagadonuts began a Cult Training Program, reminding us over and over again that we were making television and not watching television, and that this meant we had to leap to our feet to applaud lustily whenever instructed, and follow the other rules (no phones, no shouting – strangely, those were the only rules, meaning this was more cult-like than could have been imagined).

Joey Bagadonuts reminded us of this, our sacred covenant as studio audience, until I want him to burst into flames right there on stage.

Joey occasionally seemed to forget what he was doing and just trail off, possibly to contemplate suicide. Then he would roar back with a nonsensical demand that we get loud even when nothing was happening. Do I need to say I hate Joey Bagadonuts? I hate him.

###

We were seated behind a ginormous balloon, because they had a segment to pre-tape. Presumably due to the possibility that one of the acrobats floating over us via balloon would fall and kill someone. I can certainly see the wisdom of this; by pre-taping the segment they can always release deadly gas into the theater and murder the whole audience in order to keep us silent after witnessing a murder, then remove the bodies and get a whole new audience in off the street.

They moved seat-fillers from the balcony for the pre-taping to provide the illusion that the place was packed. The judges arrived and were cheered, and the act was nice, with acrobats doing moves while floating around hanging from a balloon. Not something I would have paid to see, but entertaining enough. The judges did their feedback schtick and then the seat-fillers were ignominiously forced to go back to their original seats, despite the fact that there were plenty of empty ones. Except for the single aisle seat on my right, occupied by an older gentleman who was extremely keen on the proceedings and kept trying to engage me in serious discussions about the acts. I could only stare at him in horror and calculate silently how many whiskies it would take to be able to sleep that night.

###

When the show finally began, Joey Bagadonuts was back to alternately tell us how awesome we were and demand that we be more enthusiastic, more loud, more more. We were told that whenever they returned from commercial we must be on our feet screaming for about five seconds and then sit down as one as if we’d all just been deactivated. We practiced this at random moments before the show began it’s live phase. It was exhausting. It was like being in that Apple 1984 commercial.

People kept shouting at the judges. Every now and then one of the judges would turn and wave, and this encouraged everyone else to shout at them even more. On the one hand treating these celebrities like zoo animals warmed the frozen cockles of my heart. On the other, nothing is more alarming than someone sitting directly behind you screaming MMmmmmmmmmmmmeeeeeeeeeeeellllllllllllll BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!! every thirty seconds for three hours.

The acts? Who can remember. They were all angled towards the cameras, anyway, so I saw everything from the side.

###

We fled right after the last act in order to avoid being crushed to death by the stampede of people hoping to get Heidi Klum to look at them. Was it entertaining? Define the word. Sure, under certain sets of expectations, it was entertaining. It was kind of interesting for being a glimpse into the sausage factory. Live TV is exhausting. All I had to do was stand up every three minutes and scream and I was exhausted.

What they ought to do is offer free cocktails, right in the aisles, the way Rock of Ages does but, you know, free. If I’d had five or six drinks in me, I would have turned up on stage, shirtless with the word BAZINGA scrawled in shoe polish on my belly, and performed a short dance routine before being tackled to the floor. And I think we can all agree this would have been well worth watching.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

DON’T LOOK AT ME I’m Hideous

Author: jsomers July 26, 2013 0 Comments

(This originally appeared in The Inner Swine Volume 15, Issue 2)

Look at me and despair.

PIGS, despite my superstar good looks and obvious gifts, I’ve never been a gadfly. When I was a kid I was kind of shy and nerdy (shocking! I know); although I have very few horror stories from my childhood to scar me. According to Hollywood movies I should have been the Piggy character in my own story: Glasses, chubby, uncoordinated, and permanent squint from reading too much in the dark. Somehow, though, I had a great childhood. I am walking evidence that Hollywood clichés are not always based in truth—if you believe all the movies and TV shows, high school is a Thunderdome of Nerds Vs. Cools, with the Nerds emerging broken and traumatized to enter into decades of therapy and the Cools emerging into comfy CEO positions. Sure, my high school had cliques and I had a few painful incidents [1] in my youth—who hasn’t?—but nothing too damaging.

Or maybe I’m in denial and I’ve repressed memories so deep they’ve disappeared, because I did emerge from my childhood with a healthy distrust of all of you and a conviction that everyone makes fun of me the moment I leave the room. Aside from the fear of mockery, I also fear violence, convinced that strangers on the street are going to lunge at me suddenly and attempt to garrote me or stab me with their ballpoint pens, probably while screaming gibberish at me. Or maybe screaming something about owing them money, which I get a lot of.

Either way, I fear all of you.

(more…)

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, The Inner Swine

Delivery & Acceptance

Author: jsomers July 18, 2013 1 Comment

NOTE: Found this on my hard drive last night. Not sure when I wrote it. Figured: Why not?

THE PHONE was ringing, and I was doing my best to ignore it. I was buried under cats, four of them sleeping in various positions on top of me, purring softly. Their weight was almost enough to trap me under the covers, and it was only through heroic efforts that I managed to free an arm and retrieve the receiver.

“Hello?”

“It’s Your Editor.”

My editor. A bolt of fear shot through me, and I sat upright, dislodging two cats who landed gracefully on the floor, yowling and giving me unhappy looks. I would pay for this rudeness later, I knew, but one threat at a time.

“Is this about [REDACTED]?”

“Yes.”

My latest book, delivered on time a few days before. Usually it took My Editor at least a week to get back to me with her comments and critique on the book, and dread bloomed inside me. “Uh, did you read it?”

“No. You better come down. We have to talk.”

The phone went dead.

(more…)

Bullshit, CHUM, Writing

To Create, You Must Destroy

Author: jsomers July 11, 2013 0 Comments

“To create / You must destroy / Smash a glass and cry, “Too Much Joy!” – the most obscure lyrics from an obscure band in the history of ever.

One of the few rules of writing that I not only can coherently form in my mind but actually follow goes something like this: A good story is where you spend the first half building a world and the second half destroying it. The exact percentages aren’t always the same. Just the act of completely tearing down everything you’ve created.

The worst thing in the world for a story is status quo. Once you establish a universe, a world, a Rube Goldberg Machine of your own imagination, the urge to protect it is pretty strong. You want to preserve it in amber because it’s good, other people think it’s good, and you did a fine job of building it, so why not.

But you have to destroy it all. Burn everything. The story only gets truly interesting when you start manufacturing Molotovs in the basement and hurling them at your beautiful story. That’s why, in the Avery Cates books I purposefully told the story of a world in decline and then finally in death throes. I enjoyed creating that world in the first book, and then really enjoyed destroying it in books 2-5. If you don’t destroy, you’re just treading water. And it gets boring.

You have to take away the powers you gave your hero. You have to destroy the bedrock of the society you’ve envisioned. You have to rain plague and defeat and horror down on everyone, kill your main characters, drop the bomb, and leave nothing behind.

One reason the TV show Mad Men is still considered one of the best shows on TV after 6 seasons is because Matt Weiner and company knows this. In each season of that show, he has violently changed the circumstances. In Season 1, Don Draper’s mysterious past is set up as this defining mystery – and then revealed, and no one cared. Over the course of the seasons Don’s marriage has broken up, his company was bought, he formed his own, he got married again, he lost his creative edge, he mismanaged things, he caused his brother to commit suicide, he got fired. Mad Men has been burning to the ground since about episode seven of Season One, which is about right. That was about the time the universe Weiner was working on was pretty much fleshed out for us.

A lesser show would still be trying to work that early-60s style angle. A lesser show would always end on a note of triumph as Don pulls another bit of brilliance out of the air. Instead, Don’s losing everything in slow motion, over and over again. And that’s why it’s interesting.

So, next time you’re stuck in a story and not sure why it’s dead on the page, ask yourself if it couldn’t benefit from a sudden wildfire that would leave behind nothing but bones and ash. Chances are, it would.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing

Old Man Bars Are My Eventual Destination

Author: jsomers July 10, 2013 8 Comments

This essay originally appeared in The Inner Swine Volume 14, Issue 4.

Just five more minutes of sleep, and then I get my shit together.

Here’s a horrifying scenario: I meet some friends at a local restaurant for drinks. Not a place of my choosing, because despite my best efforts I have not yet been able to bend people to my will simply by focusing my thoughts on them, though research continues. The waitress comes for drink orders and the following exchange occurs:

WAITRESS: What’ll it be, folks?

ME: What whiskeys do you have back there?

WAITRESS: Uh. . .some. . .uh. . .we have. . .er, bottles.

ME: Johnny Walker Black, neat.

I’ve come to recognize the sort of fear and blank-minded panic on the faces of waiters, waitresses, and bartenders when I enquire about their booze selections that indicates they either have no idea what’s back there or that there’s not much back there to begin with. Whenever I spot this sort of panic, I immediately give up my quest for single-malt goodness because it will only end in tears, and fall back on either Johnny Walker or Jack Daniels, because there isn’t a bar in the fucking world that doesn’t have those.

Now, there’s nothing really wrong with Johnny Walker. As blended whiskeys go, it’s a fine dram and I can always get by on it. But it has come to represent defeat to me, because I know there are bars, at least in New York City, where you can stroll in and order just about any decent whiskey you can think of and it will be brought to you, posthaste. Having been in such heavenly places, it is always a difficult transition to regular bars, where most people drink wine or beer or mixed drinks, and if they do go for an unadulterated spirit it’s blended Scotch or American Bourbon.

Again, nothing wrong with good old American Bourbon. I like quite a bit of it. But I feel handcuffed in such situations, because, goddammit, I want what I want.

(more…)

Bullshit, The Inner Swine

The Inner Swine Volume 11, Issue 3, The Entire Issue

Author: jsomers June 24, 2013 0 Comments

A few years ago I wanted to challenge myself a little with my zine project, so I decided that the next issue’s theme would be minutiae and then I decided that the issue would eschew formal articles and just be a stream-of-consciousness examination of the minutiae of my life. I think it kind of worked. So, here’s the entire issue of Volume 11, Issue 3 of The Inner Swine, which published in September, 2005. It’s about 25,000 words written by a guy I no longer am.

Minutiae. I am standing on the corner of 30th street and 7th avenue, desperate for coffee. I’m here just about every weekday, on my way to work, and I buy my coffee from a very pleasant Arabic man in a cart. I like his coffee, and he’s incredibly friendly. For the past ten years I have bought all my coffee from these sorts of carts in New York City, and the coffee is always good, the carts always owned by Arabic men, and these Arabic men are always very friendly. I’ve been in other cities that have no equivalent to the coffee cart on the street, places where you have to purchase your coffee from someplace horrible, like Starbucks, or Au Bon Pain or something. That’s not civilization. That’s corporate domination. What this country needs is more Arabic men selling cheap but delicious coffee out of metal carts.

(more…)

Bullshit, Fiction, The Inner Swine, Writing