that darn piggy

Another collaborative work I made with my son when he was four. He drew, I painted.

In my son's words, "He was riding a bull and it throwed him off, so he was landing somewhere else. And you know what? That darn piggy always goes off and chases the cows. So that's why he's going to another farm."

not with a bang...

The 'Best Picture' Show: A Final Image Montage on Vimeo from The Final Image Films on Vimeo.

A final-image montage of every film to win best Oscar, all of them, from 12 YEARS A SLAVE in 2013, to WINGS, in 1927.

Cigarettes & the Female Body (most of all, you've got to hide it from the kids)

When I was a kid growing up in a small missionary community in the Amazon basin, we had a well-cared-for concrete swim ramp that went down into a large oxbow lake called Yarinacocha. And because we had this really nice ramp and a ten-by-ten-foot wooden raft that floated about fifty feet off shore, other people liked to come there to swim, including the rival missionaries from the Swiss Indian Mission, which did not have a lake of its own.

They weren't really "rival" missionaries, exactly, but in case you weren't aware, Switzerland is in Europe and Europeans are, shall we say, less than shy about baring their birthday suits to the world. The Swiss were deferential enough to our sensibilities that they wouldn't full-on skinny-dip at "our" lake, but when it came time to change into their swimmers, they had no qualms about going buck wild. And although I never once ever heard anyone say anything overtly negative about it, there was always a sense that those Swiss folks were a little... um... different.

Or licentious, depending on whom you asked.

That's the environment I grew up in, and that's why I can understand the application of lace doilies to the legs of furniture to protect their virtue. It's weird, yes, but I know where it's coming from. They call it "modesty," and hail it above all other virtues as a hedge against "Sin," which, when capitalized like that, was considered interchangeable with "Sexual Sin," which was of course the source of most of what is wrong with America and "The World."

Let's move away from that quotation-mark-rich environment, though, to the picture I posted in that thing I wrote about Why the Christian Church is not a Safe Place for an Artist: a self-portrait by a former student of mine in which a certain harshly-sexual word was written on a piece of tape that was stuck to her face. I wrote the piece, in part, to express my annoyance that a picture like that had been censored from our school Art Show.

One of my friends commented that he wouldn't have wanted to have to explain to his daughter what that word meant, and at first (because of my missionary-kid background, perhaps) I sympathized more with where he was coming from.

But then I didn't. 

Because I got to thinking about it, and the more I thought about it, the more I didn't like the idea that a woman's sexuality and her feelings about how she's perceived are things that need to be hidden away behind a lace doily.

I get the whole modesty thing, and it's obviously not particularly helpful for anyone to walk around wearing a flashing neon sign that says "Available for Boinking," but the problem is that "modesty" is a slippery concept that exists in the heart, not the fabric. It's also stupid to lay all the onus on women, just because men can be slimeballs.

Balderdash! Bull-excrement! 

The human body is a wonderful thing that, yes, has a inherent sexuality to it. Bing-bing! It's how we reproduce! But that's not all the human body is nor all that sexuality is, and it's ridonculously un-helpful to create a culture that focuses on sexuality over everything else, and acts as though female sexuality is where the STD/unwanted pregnancy/rape issues all originate. It takes two (or sometimes one, despicable man) to tango, and the human body is beautiful for so many more reasons than just sex. It is, really. And if we had our hearts in the right place, we could all just strip off all our clothes right now and go live in nudist colonies, as God intended.

Now, you don't want that, and neither do I. I like a little mystery, and nudity takes that away.

Also, human nudity is funny-looking. 

What isn't funny is a culture that tells a woman that her body and her sexuality is something that she should be ashamed of, and then shames her even more when she tries to honestly express in a work of art how that shaming makes her feel. I know the whole "slut-shaming" thing has become an emotionally-loaded cultural buzzword that acts as an excuse for people to stop listening to each other, so I don't really wanna go into it too much,* other than to say that I think that the ostensible goal of much of religious instruction to teach kids to "cherish women" is a noble one.

However... 

I don't believe it is ever justifiable to use shame as some sort of correctional tool. Nor do I believe that it is ever appropriate to try and force someone to be the sort of person you want them to be. Moral policing is an ugly, prideful thing, and people who try to do it should be drug into the street and shot (ironic wink).

I have a six-year-old son, so I get the whole thing about not wanting to expose your kids to more than they're ready to handle. In fact, just the other day I steered my son away from something that mentioned orgies because, well, I didn't want the headache of having to explain the whole sexual thing in the context of something that I consider to be a not particularly healthy expression of it.

Here's the thing, though. It's not like my son isn't already aware of his own burgeoning sexuality.

Isn't it possible that all my squeamishness is really doing is depriving him of a responsible adult voice as he tries to make sense of it all?

And furthermore, it's not like he's not being exposed on a regular basis to something that is always harmful and always ugly -- violence. Violence is in the cartoons he watches, the games he plays, and the bully-punches he sometimes endures on the playground. But I don't see anyone frantically trying to pretend to him that violence doesn't exist, until such time as he's old enough to properly contextualize it.

To my friend who wouldn't want his daughter exposed to the word "slut," I would ask this: would you be just as bothered if she was walking through that gallery and she saw a drawing some kid had made of someone karate-kicking someone else in the face? Because here's the thing... she would have seen violent images in that gallery. Not outrageously gruesome ones, but some that were in fact less mild than the perhaps slightly sexually-charged images that got censored. In fact, there was one particular young man who made several pictures that were rather dark and somewhat violent, and not only were they not censored, but I actually had to twist the school's arm a bit to get them to take seriously what I thought might be the possibly suicidal subtext to the work.

Which brings me to the point I really want to make, which is that it isn't even so much the censorship itself (their venue, their call) as it is what the particular items they chose to censor tends to indicate about the focus of the Establishment... which is to create an environment where no one has to think about the fact that females have bodies, and that those bodies are inherently sexual.

That, and cigarettes. Because if there are two things the North American Protestant Evangelical Church has traditionally enjoyed looking down on, it's female sexuality and cigarettes.

Cigarettes are, after all, an obviously easily-kickable and very visible (and smell-able) vice, and we all know that Sexual Propriety is pretty much the sole responsibility of the woman (she had it comin', etc.).

Aaaah! 

Words fail me, so I'm going to go yell at stuff, after leaving you with some of the other pictures that were censored from that show. Beautiful works of art that were apparently inappropriate for the white-washed, sepulchral walls of a church.

by Carly S.

by Carly S.

by Emily H.

by Emily H.

by Emily H.

- - -

*Personally, I think we live in a hyper-sexed culture where women are used like objects, and where corporations looking to make a buck create a false "ideal" with which to manipulate them. On the flip side, even though I'm something of a feminist, myself, I also think that some angry strands of feminism (in their desperation to force men to atone for some of the more egregious sins of the patriarchy) end up contributing to their own dismissal as sexual objects. But I'm certainly not going to yell at them for going overboard in their efforts to right a wrong that I, no doubt, help to perpetuate.

- - -

A FINAL NOTE: Good writing isn't magic. It's hard work, and the greatest reward for that work is to share it with others. So if you enjoyed this little (ad-free) piece of my brain... please share the love on your social internets. And pick up a copy of my Short Story Collection, whilst you're at it. You can get it as an ebook for less than a fancy cuppa coffee, and it'll last waaay longer.

Death to the Third Person

It's not giving anything away to tell you that my brother Joey dies at the end of the first short story in my book. After all, I did announce in the very first line that our love's what killed him.

What you should probably know, though, is that even though I did in fact go tree planting with my older brother, and even though we did in fact jump together out of a helicopter as it hovered five feet off of a mountainside (which I alluded to in the story but did not include because, well, who would've believed it?), my actual brother did not actually die out tree planting.

My actual brother's name is Jo-Ben (not Joey). He lives in Florida, is obsessed with soccer, and his wife's about to give birth to their fourth child.

The tree planting brother I killed in my book was a mashup of Jo-Ben, some of the other crazy cats I knew out planting, and an inhuman ideal that a lot of us tree planters beat ourselves up about not attaining.

I'm still not entirely sure why I killed him,* but the craziest thing about it to me is the number of people who were as torn up about Joey's death as I was when I was writing it. I think I've had over fifteen people approach me, either by email or in person, to ask me with desperation-tinged anxiety if my brother is all right. Some of them have come right out and offered their condolences, and one woman confessed to being so emotionally wrecked by the story that she couldn't sleep until she'd had a chance the next day to ask if it was true.

I love this. 

I love that I was able to tap into something that emotionally resonated for me to the point where I was crying as I wrote it, and then was able to share that resonance with other people. Love, love, love it. I knew it was a powerful story, which is why I put it first. Grab 'em from the get-go, right?

But then I started to think about why so many people love that story so much, and why so many of them tell me that the tree planting stories in the book are their favorites. After all, I also cried a fair bit when writing the story, "When Twice Again They Died," and nobody really comments on that one.

So... why?

Yesterday I found a bit of stubborn-mojo with regards to a story I wrote called "The Button" that was recently dismissed by the editor of an online magazine as having cumbersome diction and not a lot of impact. So I took that story and I submitted it to fifteen different literary journals. I'll show that philistine who's cumbersomemumble-mumble-mumble, I said to myself, as I sent that bad boy off to glory.

But then I started to think about what I'd discovered with my first spate of (heavily-researched) story submissions: that almost without fail, the literary journals of the world today prefer to publish first-person realism. Pretty much every single one of those journals posts samples of the sorts of stories they publish, and pretty much all of them are somebody saying something about how they woke up and rolled over and looked in the face of the person they'd screwed the night before, and cetera.

It's like the journals themselves all woke up one morning and thought, "You know what... let's hand the story-reigns of the world over to Lena Dunham."

Why?

And why, out of the twenty-two short stories in my book, are the ones that are most commented on the ones that are likewise written in the first person? Is there something about the first person voice that helped me to write better? Did putting two of the three tree planting short stories in there in first person force me to invest myself more deeply? Do I suck as a writer when I'm not overtly pretending that it's me experiencing the story? Am I the reason why my stories keep getting rejected?

Maybe. 

But maybe there's something else going on, here. Maybe in a world of blogs and digitally-fractured selves, what people crave from their written stories these days is the sense of being inside someone else's head. Of really understanding someone else in a way that makes them feel that they, too, could be understood. Maybe in a hyper-speed world where everything's changing and moving faster than we can comprehend -- in which we seem to be hurtling toward a self-inflicted mass-die-off of the human race -- people are just yearning for something slower... something that proceeds at a pace a little closer to the way humans actually think.

Or maybe it's just a question of pop-psychology. What if the problem isn't the voice, but the presumption implied by the voice that anyone could have anything other than an extremely limited and completely conditional point of view?

I recently watched a trailer for a Lindsay Lohan reality TV show in which Oprah Winfrey told the troubled young star that it was "her truth" that Lindsay was going down a dark path with all her drug addiction and childish behavior.

Really?

Do we really live in a world where the presumption of any kind of knowledge is so taboo that you have to pre-qualify every statement with the words "now this is just my truth..." and end up with, "...but what do I know?"

Arrogance is stupid. We get it. Epistemological humility is better. We get it. 

But can we all agree for the purposes of practicality to dispense with the false humility of pretending like we don't have firmly-held opinions about pretty much everything? And can't I write a story in which -- instead of pretending like I'm not playing God by talking about my bowel movements in the first person -- I actually step back and shape the narrative to say what I want it to say, because the fact of the matter is that I don't much mind letting my own strong opinions play an overt role in how my stories are made?

But what do I know (wink)?

Maybe I am just making excuses for bad writing, and my problem isn't that I'm not writing in the approved voice, it's that I'm not actually writing well. Maybe my diction is cumbersome, and my stories don't have any real impact.

On the other hand... maybe not. Maybe I'm not just a sucky third-person-omniscient, and what's really going on here is that the literary-journal world is riding a set of waves I haven't seen coming. I'm getting blasted again and again, tumbling over and over myself because I haven't had the prescience to see the writing on the zeitgeist-wall.

Let's see. 

I'm currently over twenty-thousand words into a novel I'm writing in the first-person, in a voice similar to the rambling, informal one I've cultivated on this blog (which people seem to like).

So let's just see if maybe it's not me who's the problem. Maybe it's everybody else. And maybe when everybody else gets a load of this new novel, they'll come together to launch it to the top of the charts. Then I'll use some of the bajillions of dollars I make from the sale of my book to buy a printing press and start a literary journal that publishes only stories that are told in third person omniscient.

That'll show 'em who's in charge.
That'll show 'em who knows what's really going on.

- - -

*In POUNDERS, the screenplay version of the story, he actually survives. Barely.

- - -

A FINAL NOTE: Good writing isn't magic. It's hard work, and the greatest reward for that work is to share it with others. So if you enjoyed this little (ad-free) piece of my brain... please share the love on your social internets. And pick up a copy of my Short Story Collection, whilst you're at it. You can get it as an ebook for less than a fancy cuppa coffee, and it'll last waaay longer.

Drawings With the Boy: Alamar

A couple of years ago I did a little project with my (at the time) four-year-old son, where I got him to draw with a pen in a sketchbook of mine, and then I went back in and water-colored the drawings he made -- often writing down his explanations for what the drawings meant.

This is one he made after we'd watched the gorgeous Mexican father-and-son film, ALAMAR, for the second time. It depicts a scene in which the young boy watches as his father and grandfather go spear fishing.

"They went underwater to catch fish. They were using little things that had bow and arrows to shoot them."

- - -

*NOTE: The purpose of this post is three-fold. First, to show you some beautiful art. Second, to brag about my awesome son. And third, to make me seem like an awesome father. What can I say? After yesterday's downer of a post I needed a pick-me-up, and you neglected to drop by to give me a hug, you jerk.

rejection (a.k.a. -- i suck)

This is what it feels like to be me, right now: 

Inside my chest I have this massive ball of yarn. I don't know how it got there, but it feels like it's expanding and displacing some really important stuff. For a moment, I wonder if that's why my eyes keep dribbling... but then I remember that the real reason I feel this terrible is because I just checked my email, and someone told me my writing isn't any good.

There's this scene in Sister Act Two where Whoopi Goldberg's character tells Lauryn Hill's character that the way to know if she's meant to be a singer is if she wakes up and she can't think about anything other than singing. She got the idea from Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet," which I read in college but didn't retain, because it was college. I like the idea, though. Awesome idea.

Except that I don't get up in the morning and think about writing.

Instead, I usually think about not-writing. I think about checking facebook and making breakfast and eating it while looking at my RSS feed, checking my email and facebook, and then checking my facebook again. Anything but writing. Oh Lordy, please don't make me write.

When I finally do sit down to write, the first five hundred words are a decidedly uphill battle. Eventually I get my flow on, though, and I get through it. I've done this day after day, all day, for the past roughly six hundred and thirty-five days, and in my every spare moment for the four years before that, and then on a pretty regular basis for the four years before that.

Ten. Freakin. Years.

I've worked hard at my writing, and although my family and friends have been wonderfully encouraging, right now I feel exactly zero percent closer to making a living at it. Because some dude I don't know has told me that he liked the premise of a short story I sent him but that the diction was "cumbersome," and that I should take this opportunity to study the piece and figure out how to make it more impactful. Then he was kind enough to remind me that in a short story, every word counts. Thanks, buddy.

As if I hadn't been over that story thirty-four bajillion times before submitting it.

As if I hadn't been writing my entire life to get to the point where I could write that story as well as I did.

So I've got this ball of yarn inside my chest, and I can't help thinking about how everybody keeps saying you should only be an artist if you can't imagine not being an artist, when there are about a million things I can imagine doing that would be a *@%^! of a lot more financially rewarding and a *@%^! of a lot less repeatedly, endlessly demoralizing.

This is what it feels like to be me right now, and it doesn't matter how many people leave me a comment and say that they like what I write, I'm going to keep feeling this way until sometime tomorrow morning, when I'm about five hundred new words into my novel.

I know this is true, but *@%^! if I like it.

Because even if my mom and a few choice friends are right and I don't suck, a dude out there with a red pen feels that my work does, and as a result I'm one sweet paycheck further from being able to afford to continue to do this in three months, when my self-granted time runs out. Sandra Bullock makes over fifty grand an hour for acting in GRAVITY, and I work full-time for almost two years and end up with a cool two-fitty, and a bulging knapsack full of rejection. That is what the world at large thinks my work is worth.

If you need me, I'll be over here in the corner.

Knitting.

- - -

A FINAL NOTE: Good writing isn't magic. It's hard work, and the greatest reward for that work is to share it with others. So if you enjoyed this little (ad-free) piece of my brain... please share the love on your social internets. And pick up a copy of my Short Story Collection, whilst you're at it. You can get it as an ebook for less than a fancy cuppa coffee, and it'll last waaay longer.

Bradley Cooper's Selfie

The first play I was ever in was a Christmas musical. I was a pipsqueak wise man with a fake-deep voice and falling-down pants. Everybody laughed, and it wasn't because it was a comedy. It was a disaster. I did a bunch of musicals after that (my mom was usually the director), and I think I pretty much always felt like my pants were falling down.

My first real dramatic role was in a fifth-grade play about dental hygiene. I played a dentist. I had a little mirror-on-a-stick, and I was probably awesome. I don't remember, because it, too, was a traumatic experience. As was my role as King Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream, as Dr. Chumley in Harvey, and as something else in an Arthurian thing I seem to have blocked out completely. That blockage makes sense to me, given that every time I had to get up in front of people to act, I ended up with a bad case of the sweat/chill/spews.

In college I took a couple semesters of drama, and even though it was terrifying, I had a bit more fun with it.

"Your Australian accent was awesome!" my classmates said.

"I told you not to do accents," my teacher said, and she gave me a B.

I hate acting, I thought.

Later, she assigned me a "kissing scene" with a girl I wasn't all that into. She told us we didn't have to actually do the kiss, and since at that point in my life I'd not yet kissed a girl... I ignored my scene-partner's eager entreaties and passed on the big smooch-moment.

"I'd hoped you'd be more committed," my teacher said, and she gave me a B-.

When I handed in my first review of the first play we had to attend for class, my teacher took me aside and told me that I was a really good writer, and I ought to consider maybe a career as a critic. What I heard her say was that I was a terrible actor, and that I should consider hyperventilating and passing out for the duration after our next set of warm-up exercises.

I hate critics, I thought. And acting. And myself.

At first, I internalized all this to mean that I was an inherently terrible actor. But later in life, when I'd decided I wasn't inherently anything (just too thin-skinned to suffer the indignities of acting) I figured it meant I should try something else. Maybe writing, you know?

Because writers never get rejected, or told they suck. Right. 

Still, I plunged in. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote some more and then, to my surprise, I found myself writing things for actors. I wrote a couple short films that got produced, a couple more short films that are getting produced, and even a (seventh) feature that's got a pretty decent chance of going to celluloid (metaphorically speaking) sometime in the next twelve months.

Like, as a movie. You know, with, like, actors in it.

I love actors. I'm fascinated by these magical creatures. I've found them to be intelligent and creative and oh-so bizarre. They're this weird, un-hinged hall of mirrors, and I've loved seeing how they've taken my words and added shades of meaning to them that I never could have imagined.

And then there was this: 

This, if you've not heard, is a little Bradley Cooper selfie that Ellen Degeneres posted on twitter yesterday. It got nearly two million re-tweets pretty much immediately, and apparently broke twitter. Because actors.

I love actors.

Everybody loves actors.

Look -- a picture of actors! They're all so beautiful and glamorous and special! Like wonderful little daylight-sparkle-vampires in some vomitous teen blockbuster! They're so happy and vibrant and alive! I just wanna lick em!

Did you know that Sandra Bullock is getting paid at least  70 million dollars for her work in the movie GRAVITY? That's right, seventy million dollars. For (at most) a couple months work, she is getting paid seventy. million. dollars.

Like, over a million dollars a day.
Like, about fifty thousand dollars every waking hour.

I'm not bitter about this. I'm not. Okay, fine... maybe a little. But we live in a topsy-turvy world, and wonky money-dispersion has always been one of the best indicators of that insanity.

Can I be perfectly frank with you, though? It's impossible to not be just a little bit worried about the way everybody treats actors. About fifty thousand dollars an hour. About two million retweets in an evening. Because each of those actors in each of those movies at the Oscars was a paid performer, acting out stories that were initially created by a group of people almost universally-neglected when it came time to say "thank you" up on stage at the most glamorous, hyped-up awards show of the year.

That's right... the writers. And even though I tend to think (along with most real creatives) that the concept of an awards show for "best art anything" is more than a little bit silly... I still believe that if you've simply got to have one, then it might possibly be worth giving a little more credit to the people who's brain-babies these movies really are.

Don't get me wrong... it's not the actor's fault our culture is structured this way. In my experience, good actors love and crave good writing like milk from their mommas' teats. They know that without good stories to tell, they're just good-looking people standing in a room. They also know that good stories are hard to come by, and they are extremely grateful when they feel you've come up with one for them to play with. They're curious about how you did it, and interested in you as a storyteller.

While they're just as likely as writers and musicians to float off into the hinterlands of their minds and forget you (they're usually introverts), they nonetheless tend to make an effort to be friendly. They can't just whip up a new movie in their home-studio and put it out on the internet, so they tend to be good about staying in touch -- with you, and with their humanity. They know that movies are a group effort, and even though they'll take the crazy-money that's given to them as the figureheads, they're still pretty cool about remembering the little people.

And also, they're ridiculously pretty to look at. 

So I love actors, and I want them to love my work. I want that desperately, because the only factor that might be more important in getting one of my scripts made into a movie after having a director enthusiastically attached is getting a good actor on board. And if they're famous...? Woo--eee!

Getting respected character actor Nick Searcy to sign on last summer for my short film LOCKER 212 was a major coup, and probably what got us the budget we needed to make it a reality. So I do understand that good, well-known actors bring out an audience.

It's not just their talent -- it's the fact that when audiences see a known entity on the playbill, they're comforted by the familiarity of a previously-enjoyable experience they've had with that actor. I get it. I sometimes watch movies for the same reason. Every since Brad Pitt made me feel cool-by-proxy in Fight Club, I'll watch anything and everything he ever does, just because he does it. He's a pretty hunk of man-meat and a great actor, and I don't mind saying it.

But I worry.

I worry about the way we gush, and retweet, and don't bat an eye at insane money. I worry because I remember that these are real people, people with holes and hurts in them. I tend to think that all the adulation does them a disservice. I don't think they look at that retweeted picture and giddily fall before the throne of their combined awesomeness.

I think they see that picture for what it is -- a fun memory of a fun night with a group of humans with egos and foibles and failings.

I think they probably hear about two million retweets in a day and they think, "Oh my God! What kind of an idiot country are we living in?! Can't they see we're just people? Don't they know the world is full of seven billion of us, and that we're no more worthy of worship than the ones being shot in the streets in Venezuela, or Ukraine, or Syria? Than the children starving to death slowly every. single. day!?!"

At least, I like to think so, because I worry what the insanity of it will do to them if they buy into the lie we're all trying to sell them.

And I love actors.

- - -

A FINAL NOTE: Good writing isn't magic. It's hard work, and the greatest reward for that work is to share it with others. So if you enjoyed this little (ad-free) piece of my brain... please share the love on your social internets. And pick up a copy of my Short Story Collection, whilst you're at it. You can get it as an ebook for less than a fancy cuppa coffee, and it'll last waaay longer.