Month: September 2007

Patton Oswalt:

That’s why I hate Last Comic Standing so much — that show is so fucking evil and poisonous. I love the comedians that are on it, and I cannot stand watching these talented comedians get dragged back to the way comedy was in the late ’80s, where it’s that thing of, “Everyone knows this is how you do it. Your whole career comes down to two minutes, and if you fuck that two minutes up, it’s over. So you’d better second-guess, third-guess, fourth-guess everything you say. Really doubt your instincts. Don’t be real up there. You better be terrified of what the audience thinks of you.” That created that whole generation in the mid-to-late-’80s of those bland, forgettable comedians. I can’t even name them, because back then, “You’ve got to get a clean five minutes. It’s got to be perfect. You’ve got to take it on Johnny Carson, and he’s got to wave you over. That’s the only way to do it, and that’s it.” The comedians that really made it and stuck out on Carson were the ones that didn’t do that, the ones that brought something unique to the table: Steve Martin and Richard Pryor early on, then Garry Shandling and Jerry Seinfeld. They brought their own feeling to it. Everyone’s like, “No, no. This is the only way you do it. Don’t do anything personal. Don’t have a single real moment up there.” Basically, don’t have fun. This is not a career, this is spinning the roulette wheel and that’s it. I was like, “No, this is something you get to do your entire life.”

Jhonen Vasquez:

ZE: [laughs] Is there any subject matter you consciously try to avoid when sitting down to write a script or a comic?

JV: To date, no. It’s never crossed my mind to have to baby-sit anyone’s perception of right or wrong, no, so the only conscious decision making as far as content goes is whether or not an idea is right or wrong for the particular project. I’d love to think that the people who choose to pick my noise up are already well enough equipped with a decent balance of hard reason and absurdist thinking to not need to be sat down and told why something is okay or why it isn’t okay. It’s just like in drawing, the more you know what something is supposed to look like in reality, the better equipped you are to abstract it, to stylize it on purpose and have fun with it instead of simply interpreting it badly for lack of education. [via]

That’s a Suicide Girls link, by the by, so maybe NSFW. I guess it depends on where you work.

Brian Michael Bendis:

Every comic book is someone’s first or their last. If someone’s picking this up for the first time, is it entertaining? Can they follow it? You can have a four-part or six-part story, but you should be able to get right in there and figure out what’s going on immediately, without insulting the reader at the same time. And also, someone might read this and go, “I’m never buying another comic book again, I’m moving on to something else. I like girls.” And they never read another comic again, and it’s your responsibility to make that not happen. So these were the theories applied to the Ultimate line more than it was continuity, it was reader-friendly. Don’t talk down to people to get new people in.

I also like how he thinks of problems as “an excuse for creativity.” There’s a great sense of freedom and possibility in that:

You love those films with budgetary concerns, they always find a way to be more creative than they would have been. “Oh, the shark doesn’t work on Jaws?” Okay, Spielberg became a better filmmaker.

Jonathan Lethem and Janna Levin:

Lethem: People take it as a given that the world is presented “as is” on film. When in fact, optically, it’s very unlike what our eyes, and our experiences, present us with. You might be interested in reading the essays of Stan Brakhage, a highly experimental filmmaker who tried to start at the beginning again and not take the narrative construction, the editing assumptions, and the camera-placement assumptions of traditional film for granted, but begin again at optics and ask how we can make film more like what it’s like to look around. His films have this constant movement. They’re almost —

Levin: Oh, interesting. Unbearable.

Lethem: — almost unbearable at times, but they’re abstract art. They’re like a Kandinsky painting. And in that sense, they seem to derive a connection to —

Levin: Actual experience. But there’s that irony again: The closer you try to get to the actual experience, the sort of more abstract and removed it becomes at the same time. [via]

Michael Chabon:

AVC: Do you use research to submerge yourself into the outlook of a particular place?

MC: Research is part of it. I do a lot of research, reading, investigating, and talking to people, if that seems appropriate. But ultimately, it boils down to imagination. I’m afraid that sounds evasive or flip or insufficient or something. I always think of that famous story about Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman working on Marathon Man. To prepare for the drilling scene, Dustin Hoffman starved himself for three days, didn’t shave, slept in his clothes, and arrived on set looking like a total wreck. Laurence Olivier said, “What on earth are you doing?” Dustin Hoffman said, “I’m preparing for the scene.” Olivier said, “Have you ever considered acting?” [Laughs.] All the preparation in the world doesn’t avail you if you can’t make that imaginative leap and put yourself in the position of the characters you’ve created, to imagine what it’s like to be somebody else.

I also like his admonition that “it’s never your defense as a novelist to say, ‘But it’s true.'” It ties in nicely with some of what Lethem and Levin talk about, how art creates truth not simply by reproducing reality. The “but it really happened this way!” argument is something I heard more than once in my college writing workshops. Fine, but that doesn’t make it interesting or believable or real.

It seems like William Gibson agrees:

TVP: Do you think that from your perspective, reality caught up to science fiction in certain ways? Just by creating so surreal a contemporary landscape that it parallels Sci-Fi?

WG: Well, in a sense, although I think when I started, one of the assumptions that I had was that science fiction is necessarily always about the day in which it was written. And that was my conviction from having read a lot of old science fiction. 19th century science fiction obviously expresses all of the concerns and the neuroses of the 19th century and science fiction from the 1940’s is the 1940’s. George Orwell’s 1984 is really 1948, the year in which he wrote it. It can’t be about the future. It’s about where the person who wrote it thought their present was, because you can’t envision a future without having some sort of conviction, whether you express it or not in the text, about where your present is.

I also started with the assumption that all fiction is speculative. That all fiction is an attempt to make a model of reality and any model of reality is necessarily speculative because it’s generated by an individual writer. It can’t be absolute. Fiction is never reality. [via]

Let’s forget about the fact that there is something bizarreal — most comical — about Texas prison authorities believing that a sports history could lead to “the breakdown of prisons through offender disruption such as strikes or riots.”

Let’s forget that they are denying a man reading material in the last hours of his life.

There is something repugnant about the fact that they think a book — any book — would be the source of resistance, but not the basic reality that Gov. Rick Perry has executed 159 people since he took office in 2001. Or not the fact that the people on the row have no civil rights, no access to radio or television, or even arts and crafts. It reminds me of the words of Carl Oglesby from Students for a Democratic Society, who said, “It isn’t the rebels who cause the troubles of the world, it’s the troubles that cause the rebels.”

I do like the idea of the contest quite a lot — a “72-hour exile of writer’s block” — but I’m having a real tough time putting it into practice.