The Best Political Rant I Can Write at the Moment [Archive]

[originally published March 5, 2012] 

When I began marketing my novel Pitch, I made a vow to cease and desist the discussion of politics, not because I lack interest but because it has become such a conflict-ridden subject.  In the aftermath of a presidential election that was won by a mere 53% of the vote, the country is more divided than ever, and people are hyper-sensitive about their belief systems.  Regardless of my own ideologies, I find spirited discussion of issues in short demand, and instead the current culture is that of tilting at windmills, with each side imagining the other to be the manifestation of pure evil. 

Recently, I began following more people on Twitter, targeting those with shared passions: baseball, horror movies, yoga, meditation, wellness, rugby, and cats.  To my shock and surprise, very few of these Tweeters want to Tweet about our like interests.  Rather, they are more interested in a profusion of politics.  Look, I like a good lively conversation about the issues as much as the next guy, but no one is interested in progress.  What does seem to excite them is conflict, discord, and any sort of energy that eschews unity and harmony.  Principles take a back seat to personalities, and their disdain is directed not at failed dogma but at the professed leaders who embrace it.

To read the abundance of "political" Tweets that proliferate the Tweetosphere, one common theme stands out: what's wrong with our country is not "our" fault, but rather the fault of the people "you" voted into power.  Seldom do human energies seem directed at influencing positive change.  Instead, the focus is on how we need to "work together" to get the evil "other party" out of power.  You see what they did there?  They lure you in with the positive message of unity ("work together") but then twist the message into conflict by suggesting we "unite" against a common enemy ("other party").  

This attack appeals to what I believe are two of our basest psychological needs: to belong to the herd, and to have an adversary to push against.  Think I'm wrong?  Imagine trying to sustain your ideology--your deepest, most profound belief system--if people neither supported you (the herd) nor opposed you (the adversary).  You would be beyond alone, beyond ignored.  No person--no, not one--would care what you had to say.  You might proudly assert, "I don't need their approval!" but even this boast is a lie.  I knew plenty of pseudo-nonconformists in college, was even one myself, and do you know what we were seeking?  Someone to pay attention to us!  Even if that attention is negative, even it is from someone who wants to pick a fight, at least it means that we do exist and that our existence is acknowledged.  

But back to politics and my decision to eschew them.  At first, this decision was practical--a strong political stance would alienate anywhere from 47% to 53% of all potential readers of Pitch.  But the longer I stay away from politics, the closer I am drawn to things that truly matter to me.  As such, I have come to an epiphany of sorts, which I believe is best illustrated with a movie analogy:

The above image is from one of my favorite films as a child, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, beloved by me because of Ray Harryhausen's seminal special effects.  In the image above, two monsters, a cyclops and a dragon, square off for the film's climactic battle.  This confrontation proves rather fortuitous for it enables Captain Sinbad and the lovely Princess Parisa (not pictured) to escape and reunite with Sinbad's crew.  

Here's the analogy: Sinbad, Parisa, and the crew are the American people.  The two monsters in the picture above are the two political parties.  But which monster is which party?  Let's look at the facts:

The cyclops has only one eye, so he is myopic in his point of view.  He has the legs of a satyr, suggesting he easily gives in to Bacchanalian desires, and the cloven hooves suggest he is in league with the Devil himself.  He does walk upright, however, so he is more evolved than the dragon, which must still walk on all fours.

As for the dragon, he is more majestic and powerful.  Nevertheless, he has two horns, suggesting he is also in concert with the Devil (unless we equate them with the horns on the head of Michelangelo's Moses, the result of a mistranslation in the Latin Vulgate Bible).  Note also the collar around the dragon's neck, suggesting he is enslaved by some unconstitutional policy.

So which party is which?  I imagine 47% will have one answer and 53% will have another.  As for me, I don't know.  What I do know is that the dragon wins this battle by crushing the cyclops' neck in his jaws.  The dragon then storms onto the beach in pursuit of Sinbad and his crew, but the men shoot the dragon in the side with a giant crossbow, killing it. 

Both parties are vanquished, and the American people are free to go their own way.  You never knew Ray Harryhausen's films had such political subtext, did you?

5 reasons Rian Johnson is The Fonz [Archive]

[originally published 10/12/2012]

In 2005, he gave us Brick, the story of a fringe teenager trying to solve the murder of his one-time girlfriend, maneuvering through the bizarre social strata of his high school in a shadowy plot reminiscent of Dashiell Hammett.  In 2009, he took The Sting, tossed it in the blender, and poured out a twisted tale of confidence men, heavy on the twists and the confidence, and called it The Brothers Bloom.  Now, in 2012, hither comes Looper, a clever time-travel narrative that breaks new ground without really trying to, asking us to contemplate the malleable nature of ourselves.

Writer/director Rian Johnson is Fonzie cool.  We're not talking leather jackets, helmet hair, and "Ayyyy!" but The Fonz is there all the same.  The Fonz was cool because he was one of a kind.  We were asked to accept that his mystical powers, like his ability to start a jukebox with his fist, were a byproduct of his coolness.  Nobody else could do what The Fonz did, probably because nobody had the conviction for it, and throughout the run of Happy Days and its various off-shoots, we were treated to people who made cursory stabs at being cool and always fell flat on their faces.   

The Fonz kept it simple--motorcycle, mechanic shop, jeans and t-shirt.  The same could be said for Rian Johnson.  This is not to say that Johnson's films are dressed down in any way, but no matter what the story, no matter how clever the idea (and so far, the ideas have been very clever), when it comes to filmmaking Rian doesn't try to re-invent the wheel.  Rather, Johnson's films have a quality that makes them almost old school, despite the innovative ideas he uses as a starting point.  Rian seems to eschew pretentiousness, even when not making films.  No moment seems more evident of this than when he was a guest host on the /Film podcast and started playing his banjo loudly over his Skype mic when the regular hosts tried to wax like stuffy, bearded, balding film scholars.

But rather than ramble like a Star Wars fanboy meeting a Stormtrooper at Disneyworld, let me dress my own argument down to the bare bones.  Here for your perusal are the five reasons I love Rian Johnson, the five reasons his films are cool, and ultimately the five reasons Rian Johnson, in my estimation, is the Hollywood's new equivalent of The Fonz.

1.  Rian's films don't "make you think."

This statement may seem like an indictment, but hear me out.  One of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to film discussion, especially in the case of Internet bloggers, is when they fall back on the tired old cliche that a movie "makes you think."  When I hear that a film "makes you think," that's usually a clear indicator that it has not yet grown into its big boy pants.  Often, Make You Think (MYT) films are marked by a filmmaker trying to be clever while neglecting what makes a good film in the first place (see: Donnie Darko).  Most of the films that Fanboy Nation deem as MYT are obtuse, overly complex, often leaving unanswered questions in an attempt to appear ambiguous and therefore "cool."  But like the poseurs in Arnold's Malt Shot, these films aren't cool; rather, they exist largely to breast-feed the filmmaker's ego.

Rian's films don't play in that sandbox.

Not to suggest that Rian makes mindless actioners like The Expendables.  If that was the genre Rian worked in, the idea of "making one think" wouldn't even enter into the conversation.  Of course those films don't "make you think"; if anything, they ask you to stop thinking and hold on for the ride lest you remember how mundane your life is outside the darkened theater.

What Rian has found is a happy medium.  Like the MYT filmmakers, he enters his narrative with a clever idea or, dare I say, "gimmick."  With Brick (2005), the "gimmick" was to take the story of a contemporary high school kid trying to solve the murder of his girlfriend and tell it in the style of Dashiell Hammett (Roger Ebert queried who the audience for this was, since high school kids don't normally follow film noir, and film noir fans don't flock to see teen dramas).  With The Brothers Bloom (2009), the "gimmick" was to horn in on David Mamet's pick-up confidence game, let the audience in on the con, and then "sting" it more times than a swarm of killer bees.  And in Looper (2012), the "gimmick" is to turn the time-travel genre on end by following a hitman hired to assassinate an older version of himself. 

All three premises open themselves up to convolution, to a filmmaker who might on lesser days become so enamored with his own cleverness that he bogs down the viewer with sloppy narrative pyrotechnique and facile exposition designed to make fanboys feel smart when they actually "get" it.  But Rian plays a different game.  Rather than churn out the kind of pseudo-intellectual slop that routinely gets labeled as "mind-bending" (see: Inception), he taps into an almost lost art: he tells a story.  You know, a story?  Those things with three-dimensional characters, complications, developments, perepiteia, and resolutions both false and true?  

I'll get more into story later on in this list.  Suffice to say, I love story, and so does Rian Johnson.  Story is why Rian's films work, why they transcend the MYT film cliche, and why I could watch them repeatedly simply because I enjoy them, not because I need to figure them out.

Oh, and they still make me feel smart as well.

2.  Action!  Action!  Action!

Are you familiar with the Jason Bourne movies, especially the ones directed by Paul Greengrass?  Have you noticed how Greengrass (and countless imitators) direct action?  If not, let me enlighten you.  

You start out with seven cameras.  Each camera is attached to a battery-powered paint mixer and then suspended from a giant crib mobile, which is spun around the action.  Once the footage is shot, the editing room has strict instructions that no single shot should last over two seconds.  The result is a mishmash of images that liquifies the brain and incites migraines.

I remember the first time I saw hyper-editing in an action film.  It was 1986, the movie was Top Gun, and the aerial dogfight sequences were so difficult to follow in some instances that I walked out hating the movie (I have since warmed up to it, if only because I’ve trained my eye how to watch the combat scenes and because later hyper-edited action scenes are worse).  

The next year it was Lethal Weapon, a film destined to be one of my favorites.  Although the action is great, by the time we arrive at the climax, director Richard Donner decides to go all artsy-fartsy on us.  Remember that scene, Lethal Weapon fans?  It was the moment when Martin Riggs was allowed to go mano a mano with the evil Mr. Joshua.  This was the climactic fight we had been waiting for, and what did Donner do?  He shot it at night, under helicopter spotlights, with water spraying from a fire hydrant to fragment the light, and it was edited at about 15 different cuts a minute.  I remember how that fight almost ruined it for me (plus it isn’t very satisfying--I keep waiting for Riggs to have his Hulk Hogan moment where he pummels Joshua senseless).

The cool thing about Rian Johnson is he doesn’t film action like he’s shooting a music video.  Looper is his most action-driven film so far, and the amazing thing about it is that (drum roll, please!) we can actually follow what’s happening on the screen.  Unlike the numerous fight sequences in the Bourne films, where we don’t know who has the upper hand until it’s over and Bourne is standing over the body, Looper’s action is kinetic but fluid, with a clear sense of space and character geography.  Rian even pays a visual homage to one of my favorite moments from Mad Max, which gives him brownie points.

Now, this is not groundbreaking stuff.  The history of cinema is distended with great directors who take a simple, graceful approach to their action sequences (the raid on Scar’s camp in John Ford’s The Searchers, with the rapid tracking shot alongside a warrior on his fiercely galloping horse, is a great example).  Rian Johnson is not the Lone Ranger here, and as I have said before, he’s not re-inventing the wheel.  Rather, he gives us action in such a way that it supports the narrative and we can follow its contribution to story at the same time.  Rather than trying to be a “cool,” he keeps it real and comes out cool anyway. 

And in an action film, that sort of stuff makes me giddy.

3.  He is ever vigilant for clichés.

I can think of two overwrought conventions in cinema that drive me crazy. 

The first is the cliché of the music montage.  You’ve seen this before, and if you haven’t, you don’t watch much TV or cinema.  In TV, it comes at the end of an episode, one where the writers have no idea how to wrap up the loose ends of this week’s installment, so the director resorts to a montage of each of the key characters, sitting in their quiet little domains, staring off into space and contemplating the meaninglessness of their existence.  Usually, this is accompanied by one of the countless covers of Tears For Fears’ “Mad World,” which you can easily find on You Tube if you’re so inclined.

I have yet to see the music montage in a Rian Johnson film, and if I have it was so unassuming that I don’t remember it.  Give the man a check-mark in the cool column for that.

The second cliché is that of the cute kid.  Yes, yes, I know, Pierce Gagnon, the little boy who plays Cid in Looper, is cute as a button.  That’s the thing with children; they can’t help but be cute.  Wander through Disneyworld and observe your surroundings.  Even the most tired, the most unruly, the most obnoxious children still have an element of cute in them.

The difference here is that Rian doesn’t exploit that cuteness.  Cid in Looper is another character who, as it turns out, is integral to the story.  He has his cute moments, especially when he is showing his toys to Young Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) at the kitchen table, but these sequences are a derivative of the drama itself.  Gagnon is cute enough on his own, and Rian doesn’t shove that cute in our faces like a toddler opening his mouth with chewed food.  

Give the man another check mark for cool here.

There are other clichés of course, and it would take a book to list them.  In Looper alone, Rian has opportunities for quite a few--the ubiquitous smash-cut; the boy-girl cute dance to the radio in the kitchen; the Roger-Moore-as-007 one-liner right before a kill--and he has passed on all of them.  I don’t know if he is actively avoiding clichés, but I choose to believe he writes the way I try to write, with the story’s best interests at heart.  Most clichés in film are lazy mile markers for less discerning viewers, a means to familiarize them enough so they don’t forget they’re watching a movie.  

Rian doesn’t pander to that.  The Fonz wouldn’t pander either.  How cool is that?

4.  He doesn’t flinch.  

About halfway through Looper, Old Joe (Bruce Willis) has to perform an act so appalling that most viewers wonder if he will have the stomach for it.  I didn’t question Old Joe’s resolve, but I did question Rian Johnson’s.  Thankfully, he didn’t disappoint me.  I won’t go into details as I don’t want to spoil one of Looper’s greatest gut punches, but suffice to say in the hands of 99.9% of the writers, producers, and directors out there, it wouldn’t have happened.  

I speak from experience.  When I first shopped my screenplay Baby’s Breath in Hollywood, the first agent who read it loved it so much that he sent it out to ten different production companies, and within two days I had ten meetings.  I'm not trying to brag here, but you don’t get that kind of response unless your script is pretty good.

I took all ten meetings, and I felt like I hit it off well with the producers and young creative executives that I met.  Nevertheless, the mantra from each production office was always the same: “Great writing, but we could never make this film because it does this one thing right here.  Is there any way you could change this one thing right here so that something else happens?”

I tried to be cool and explained that I felt that “this one thing right here” had to happen in order for my characters to reach some closure.  The ten production offices and my one agent agreed and reaffirmed that it was a great story, but “this one thing right here” simply could not happen in a mainstream Hollywood movie.  Audiences would hate it, and the film would tank at the box office.

In Looper, Rian Johnson allows “this one thing right here” to happen.  As I said earlier, it's a wonderful gut punch.  I haven’t felt gut punched that hard since Once Were Warriors, which is sort of a touchstone film for me when talking about films that have the courage of their convictions.  When I saw “this one thing right here” in Looper, I almost applauded.  It let the world know that Rian Johnson has the balls to do right by his story, and that is a profoundly wonderful thing.  

If The Fonz were here, he’d give it his ubiquitous two thumbs up too.  

5.  Story, Story, Story ...Story.  

It's the most important part of filmmaking.  Story is supposed to be the chief product of the film industry, and it goes hand in hand with character.  Story and character are why we stop focusing on the noirish elements of Brick and start caring about Brendan's investigation, why we don't know which character to root for in The Brothers Bloom because we are interested in all of them, and why we grasp the time-travel elements of Looper so quickly because we want to see how the conflict between Joe and Old Joe carries itself out.  Yes, these stories demand your attention, but Rian's not interesting in "making you think."  He wants you to use your brain, but in the end he wants you to feel, and that's the ultimate outcome of any good story.

I felt something in every one of Rian's films, and I find myself revisiting them to feel it again.  That's the sign of a great storyteller, and it's one of the reasons I can't wait for Rian's next film.  

So ... Mr. Johnson, you're hired.  Head on down to wardrobe to get fitted for your leather bomber jacket and see props for your custom pre-unit 500 Triumph twin motorcycle.  And Mr. Tarantino, you best be looking over your shoulder.  There's a new cool in town, and he plays a mean banjo. 

Deliverance in 11-pt. Garamond [Archive]

[originally published 09/23/2012]

On Thursday, August 2, 2012, I composed the following author's note, to be placed as an afterword for the novel, Pitch:
 
Emporia [Kansas] was magical in the 80s.  I arrived as a young college student, my fi rst time living away from home, to a strange new world. My Lit class had a high-brow reading list full of titles I’d never heard of. My art professor screened a print of a Fellini film so unsettling that I walked out at the reel change. And just down the street from campus sat the Full Moon Café, where aspiring beatniks shared frank poetry every Wednesday for open mic night. I thought I had died and gone to Paris.   

But I wasn’t in Paris, and by the time that realization hit me, I had learned to drink like Hemingway.  The drinking went on for a long time, growing like the slow burn, devolving the drinker from the lower stages of mere irresponsibility to the upper echelons of violence and destruction.  As far as drinking buddies went, I was not that safe bet with whom you could “just grab a coupl’a beers.” 


After a few years of good, honest practice at alcoholism, the 90s came and the magic was gone.  I hit that ubiquitous bottom, also in Emporia, and crawled into a Program of Recovery.  I can’t remember if it was good at the beginning, but something in the back of my memory indicates that it was not.  I expected grand miracles and a road to Damascus type of conversion, but instead I got a game of inches, the meandering crawl of day-to-day living without the drink.  A friend of mine in the Program, who for obvious reasons will remain anonymous, used to remind me that I was “slooooooowly getting better.”  I didn’t like the slooooooowly part, but there it was.

A mere two months sober, I discovered that the biggest casualty to this new way of life was my creativity.  Prior to getting into the Program, I wrote at my tinny electric typewriter with an almost manic abandon, churning out page after page of mindless, str¬eam-of-consciousness drivel until all hours of the night.  But once sober, I started to learn how to shut off my mind, or at least slow it down.  Suddenly, that ramble-factory that I mistook for writing had been hit with tough economic times and closed its gates.  I spent hours staring at the blank page, thinking about drinking, and then calling someone in the Program (usually my “slooooooowly getting better” friend) to talk me down.  For the first time in my life, I had come face to face with your everyday writer’s block.  And yet, I had to write, felt the proverbial fire in my gut that so many writers talk about, and it soon became apparent that I would have to learn a new way to do it.

One fine afternoon in 1994, I was driving up the Kansas Turnpike from El Dorado to Emporia.  I believe I was four months sober, but it might have been less.  As I glided along in my rust-colored Chevy Cavalier, listening to a cassette mix tape of angry speed metal, I began to wonder what the future held for me.  What would I be like in ten years, provided I stayed sober?  Would I even make it to ten years?  What steps must I take to stay sober from this time to that?

And then it dawned on me.  What if I could step through time and see that sober version of myself ten years down the line?  Maybe it would give me some perspective, maybe give me something to shoot for.  Better yet, what if my former self, that violent, still-practicing alcoholic who used to leave a Matt-sized hole in everything he touched, could make the same journey?   

What if the sober me from the future could meet the un-sober me from the past?  What would they talk about?  What would they say?

That evening, I set out to write Pitch, the story of this meeting, and I got nowhere with it.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but it would be impossible for me to manifest this story with a mere four months sobriety.  The story I wanted to tell required an insight and understanding that I lacked at the time.  For you see, to write about a man with at least ten years sobriety, I needed to be at least ten years sober myself, and in order to do that, well … I had to stay sober for ten more years.

I set the story aside, poking at it from time to time only to remind myself that it was still there, and instead threw myself into sobriety.  It didn’t go the way I had planned at first, and the slooooooowly part became tiresome after awhile, but I did it one day at a time, and I tried not to look back.  In the meantime, I told a few other stories, and I worked at putting them on paper, and in the process I strung together enough days clean to make this story happen.  

In a way, you might say Pitch was my salvation, or at least part of it.  It’s not the only reason I stayed sober, but it provided enough incentive to make me fight for my sobriety in the early going.  And although it isn’t my only story, it was the one story I wanted—needed—to tell, and the only way it was going to happen was if I stayed in the fight for the long haul.  

That’s the miracle of sobriety and the miracle of storytelling.

Saturday, September 22, 2012, I add the following epilogue to this afterword:  
Someone once told me that the word SOBER was an acronym for Son Of a Bitch! Everything's Real!"  In the last few weeks, those words have been driven home over and over.  It started perhaps on July 19, when I was laid off from my job--son of a bitch, everything's real.  Then my father's surgery went south and he fell into critical condition--son of a bitch, evertyhing's real.  And then these last few weeks, as his condition has hovered somewhere in the middle, giving me and my family little to cling to or prepare for ... one day, Dad is good, the next not so good.  He neither has shown steady improvement, nor has he shown steady decline.  We dare not be hopeful, nor do we dare prepare for the worst because we just don't know.

Son of a bitch, everything's real.

I have been in Kansas almost a month.  I desperately miss my wife, miss my cats.  I miss working, miss having a job, miss being around a place where I call home so I can jump into the job-hunting scene.  Meanwhile, it feels like the earth is slowly contracting, like the shifting walls at the end of Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum," pushing me ever closer to the cavernous drop.

This last week I hit the outlying boundaries of my sanity, and the only place I had left to go was the drink.  I lay awake at night thinking about drinking.  I got up in the night and walked the streets of the town where I grew up, wondering where the open taverns were now located.  At times, my mind would wander to the bottle of Chivas Regal in the cupboard above my parents' refrigerator.  My father has been only social drinker for the last 50 years or so, and even then not very dramatic in consumption.  This bottle of Chivas is evidence of that.  He bought it in the late 1960s for a dinner party (man, consider how it's aged!), and most of it is still there in the bottle, certainly enough for me to tie one on late at night after my mother goes to bed.

When a sober alcoholic contemplates a relapse, it's hard to explain it to normal people.  Most "normies" try to reason away the imperious urge:

        "Don't drink now, bro!  You're on a roll!"

        "Think of all the people who depend on you!"

        "It would break your mother's heart!"

        "Your wife would leave you!"

And then the more condescending ones:

        "You need to get right with God!"

        "Not reading your Bible enough, I see."

        "When was the last time you went to an AA meeting?"

All are well-meaning, I realize, but none of them get it.  They don't have this disease.  They think that the craving for alcohol should be easily controlled with self-will--therefore, the acloholic is weak--or they make broad assumptions the other way, like all the alcoholic has to do is see a photograph of a beer and he'd kill his mother to get to it.  Alcohol for the alcoholic, is indeed a weakness.  The Program itself admits it in the first of the Twelve Steps, where the acoholic is urged to admit his own powerlessness.  But once one accepts that powerlessness and then turns his will over to the care of God as he understands Him, a great strength follows.  It doesn't mean that the disease goes away, but the spiritual focus of the Program relieves the symptoms of craving and refocuses the alcoholic to a more productive path.

For the past few days, I have lost my spirit.  So intense was the will to drink that it became physically painful.  I did not care who it hurt.  I did not care who I lost.  I did not care what I lost.  I cared only for the drink.

So what saved me?  What kept me from giving in to the craving?

The book Pitch, of course.  Pitch, as you now know, is about the very things I've been talking about.  The story tumbled from the ether when I first got sober, and it gave me a sense of groundedness in the early going because it was writing, my one great passion, the very thing that God has inscribed on my heart in the largest and most colorful font.  The writing process engaged in the creation of Pitch mirrored the recovery process of sobriety, and as I said in my afterword, in a way this story helped me find redemption.

Once again, God has sent the book to save me.  For you see, this novel is the culmination of a lot of dreams.  To get one of my novels published has been something I have worked for, for many years.  Were I a goofy kid in my 20s, I might be inclined to sabotage this goal, but these days not so much.

But here is what is essential.  The marketing of this book--what I think of as the book's greatest appeal--is that its narrative of redemption reflects my own.  No, I was never as evil as the violent Pooch Shepherd, nor have I ever been as saintly as his sober counterpart Nick Shepherd, but there are still aspects of the character in me.  One of the readers who helped Pitch reach publication said that I had a personal story to tell, a story of how even in the worst of it hope never dies.

But who would accept that story if I drank again?  Everything that I believe makes the book special would then be dismissed as a lie.  I would be labeled a hypocrite, and no one would want to hear the tale I had to tell because they would not trust the teller.

So over the last week, I have stayed sober for Pitch.  Once again, the miracle of storytelling and the miracle of sobriety walk hand-in-hand.  Desire'e once sang that "time is too lonely, to lonely without words."  In my case, time without words is worse than lonely--it's death.  The words have come to the rescue, and thanks to God, they have enabled me to tell you this story, a story of deliverance rather than one of decline.  

You don't choose the book; the book chooses you ... even if you're the one who wrote it.

Walkabout [Archive]

[originally published on September 21, 2012]

The original definition of walkabout according to Merriam-Webster circa 1908 is "a short period of wandering bush life engaged in by an Australian Aborigine as an occasional interruption of regular work."  Only much later did a travel writer identify this with a spiritual journey, and today, our understanding of the Aboriginal walkabout is that of a pilgrimage into the wilderness taken by adolescents to trace the paths, or "songlines," that were taken by their ancestors.

All of the above is applicable to me.

My days back in Kansas have been long and frightening.  My father lies languid in his limbo-deteriorative state, and we stave off the anguish of his suffering and our other overwhelming fears.  Every day I think about running, not just from the situation but from everything I love.  

But happily, instead, I go on walkabout.

At first, my walkabout was of the 1908 Merriam-Webster variety, an "occasional interruption," or distraction, from the "regular work" of grieving my father's condition and being strong for others.  But somehow it has expanded to be a metaphor for our more spiritual understanding of the term.  Indeed, I am an adolescent, especially in spiritual matters, and my walkabout is truly a following of the paths and "songlines" of one ancestor in particular ... myself.

This all may sound rather confusing, so let me explain myself in two parts.

First, my adolescence:  There is something unnerving about my return to El Dorado, Kansas.  Currently on hiatus from any kind of "day job," I stay at my parents house, the house where I grew up, and sleep in the upstairs loft that served as my bedroom since I was a small child.  My parents moved to this house when I was three years old and have lived here ever since.  My first truly vivid memory was of this room, where I now sit writing this blog.  We were moving in after a long drive, and I guess Dad had gotten most of the furniture moved ahead of us.  The upstairs loft was shared by all three boys (we were 3, 7, and 12 at the time), and as I crawled up the stairs to look at our room, I saw a stuffed Winnie the Pooh on the bed that was to be mine.  Even now, the memory is like watching a home movie.  I recall running at full-tilt across the room, screaming with delight.  The bed was against the east wall, and as I write here now in the same room, my laptop on an old card-table that's been in the family for generations, I can see my shoes sitting next to the bookcase at the very spot where Pooh Bear and I first became friends.

I spent the next 17 years in this house and in El Dorado before going off to college in Emporia, a mere 56 miles up the road but it may as well have been Paris at the time (I make the comparison in the afterword of my novel, Pitch).  When I was 12 years old, I took over my brother's paper route for the Wichita Eagle, which meant that I had to get out of bed bright and early--5:00 a.m., to be exact--pick up a bundle of newspapers that would be dropped in front of our house, wrap each paper individually in a roll with a rubber band, pile those papers into my newspaper bag, and walk the 770 square feet of neighborhood that composed my route.  Can you imagine a world where a 12-year-old boy walked the streets at 5:30 in the morning without fear, not looking for trouble but actually earning a living?

Everything about coming back to El Dorado--sleeping in my old room, sitting at the table in the same nook in our kitchen, surrounded by everything that shaped me in my formative years ... yes, I become an adolescent.  It is hard to think of oneself otherwise, especially when so many of the accoutrements of his adult life have been removed from sight and he is once again waking up in the night to his old habitat, listening to the distant sounds of trains that never change.

I am an adolescent, and daily I go on walkabout, traversing the songlines of ... myself.

In Midnight Oil's song "The Dead Heart," they sing of the Aborigine's walkabout: "We follow in the steps of our ancestry / and that cannot be broken ..."  So when I get up each morning now, walk ouf of my parents' house, and walk the same route I walked every morning from ages 12 to 20, which ancestor's steps am I following?

Myself, of course.  I am my own ancestry.

It may be hard to grasp, but this is the point of the novel, Pitch, in which a rift in time allows a sober alcoholic to come face-to-face with himself in the form of the violent monster he used to be.  At one point, the sober version of this character refers to his past self as "dead."  When he chose the path of sobriety, perverse creature he used to be died, kind of a reverse version of Obi-Wan's explanation of how Darth Vader "murdered" Annakin Skywalker.

It's a crazy idea, and perhaps it's too morbid for most of us to consider, but I believe as we grow and as we change, whether for better or worse, our past selves die.  Think about it.  I do.  A lot.

I think of the many children who have been in my life--nieces and nephews and stepkids--and what they were like when they were small: wide-eyed, impressed by the world, bursting with joie de vivre, and inseparable from my side.  Today, they are different.  That doesn't mean they are bad people; it just means that they are adults, growing into adult dreams and passions, seeing the world through adult eyes ... and they will never be those adorable children again.  This is a great tragedy.  In essence, those children are dead.  We will never see them again.  We will never hold them, bounce them on our laps, feel them go to sleep in our arms as we read them Good Night, Moon.  Yes, they have been replaced by exciting, interesting adults but ... the children are no more.

My adolescent self is no more.  I may find myself stepping into his role whenever I return here, but when I rise in the morning and go on my walkabout through that 770 square feet of paper route real estate, I am still the man I am today.  Somewhere in the past, the 12-year-old me charted this territory and blazed these trails.  He created songlines for me by listening to his mix tapes on his Walkman as he made his morning rounds with a sack full of the Wichita Eagle.  On the corner of Olive and Denver, he sat catty-corner from the house that looks like a castle, contemplating life while listening to "Fooling Yourself (Angry Young Man)" by Styx.  On the corner of Ash and Topeka, he paused to rest under a tree, listening to "Reasons" by Earth, Wind, and Fire and pining for a girl he'd met in church camp the previous summer.  Over there along Pine, he rode his bike at top speed while Kansas sang of a "Paradox" at top volume in his ears.

There used to be a row of old houses there on Pine.  One of them had apartments upstairs, and the 12-year-old Matt always looked forward to going inside to deliver the papers when running this route in the dead of winter.  Today, those houses are gone, and a bank sits on the corner where once stood an old full-service filling station.  The thrill of biking this street at night was the way the houses and the trees seemed to crowd the curb, creating a canopy like a tunnel.

Today, as the picture indicates on the left, it is all gone.

And so here I am today, following in the steps of the ancestor that was me, hearing the same songlines from the era echo in my ears as I walk.  Every morning, seven days a week, I rose to do this route, rain or shine, snow, wind, sleet.  My father assured me that this job would build character and refine my soul.  If that was the case, it took awhile for the refinement to catch hold.  Nevertheless I did the job, and for some reason--perhaps the strong example set by my father--I never questioned it, no not once.  As tired as I was each morning, I never looked for excuses or put it off.  Every day it was the same--rise before dawn, roll your papers, and deliver the news to the masses.

Today, that 12-year-old boy is dead, and a grown man follows in his footsteps.  A grown man goes on walkabout to distract himself from his daily work.  But most of all, he searches for that boy's character, for his willingness to do the job without question, for the good person the boy was destined to become before falling prey to the drink and turning even his most beloved customers against him.

That character is out there.  That is why we follow the songlines of our ancestors.  Even if those ancestors happen to be ourselves.

The Dream [Archive]

[originally published September 16, 2012]

Sometimes we choose a movie, and sometimes the movie chooses us.  One of my favorite films right now, a film that definitely chose me, is a little-known 1991 Australian feel-good movie called Dingo, directed by Rolf de Heer,  about a blue-collar handyman in the Australian Outback whose secret love is the trumpet.
  

For most of his life, the world of John "Dingo" Anderson (Colin Friels) was relatively small.  His boyhood days were spent in the tiny town of Poola Flats, located so deep in the Kimberley Region of Western Australia that you'd be hard-pressed to find it on any maps.  One sweltering summer afternoon, a massive jetliner makes an unscheduled landing in Poola Flats, and out onto the tarmac steps jazz trumpeter Billy Cross (played by the legendary Miles Davis).  To pass the time, Cross and his combo perform an impromptu concert for the locals, and young John Anderson becomes so mesmerized by the music that he strikes up a conversation with the mysterious Cross, who urges John to become a musician ("You seem tuned into us, John") and offers a standing invitation for John to visit should he ever be in Paris.

Flashforward two decades later, and John is meting out a living for himself and his family by doing odd jobs and tracking pesky dingos.  He has indeed taken up the trumpet, playing rather standard sets with a local Tex-Mex combo, but when he is out in the wilderness on a job, he sits alone in his tiny trailer, listening to old Billy Cross albums and playing his trumpet along with the music.  We learn that John has been sending tapes of his trumpet play to Cross's address in Paris, and he has secretly been saving money so he can one day make a pilgrimage to the City of Lights himself and take Cross up on his 20-year-old invite.

The entire first half of Dingo follows John's frustration and his dreams.  The music he plays with his combo is bland and uninspiring.  His wife adores him but doesn't seem to understand him.  The only time he seems happy is when he stands alone in the Kimberley, making his trumpet howl and listening to the dingos howl back in response.  Clearly, John is a man with a great passion, and yet no one in his life--not even the woman he loves--fully understand him.  

You don't have to love jazz or Paris or Australia or the trumpet or Miles Davis to love Dingo ... but it helps.  I happen to love all those things, but more than that, I feel a connection to this film.  Growing up in a small town myself, feeling the weight of my own dreams that seem to outgrow my surroundings, I totally feel John and his daily trudge towards his destiny.  I love the child-like wonder in his face when he plays the trumpet--eyes closed, body constricted, as if having a spiritual experience.  I get his frustration and sadness as he wanders about a small town literally in the middle of nowhere, sensing that he is made for better things but not sure what they are.  I like a scene where he sits on his truck in the middle of the Kimberley, howling on his trumpet and imagining Billy Cross's combo in the distance, waving for him to join them.  The imagery of evocative of one of my favorite films, Field of Dreams, but more than this, it taps into my own childhood imagination, when I used to explore the wetlands south of town and dream of meeting my comic book heroes to be taken away on some mad adventure.

Dingo moves with the lazy rhythms of a good piece of jazz, but it works structurally as a traditional tale of a dreamer following his bliss.  In some ways, the staging of the narrative is similar to a sports drama (scrappy underdog fights to get his shot and succeeds), and when John gets his moment in the sun, the goofy grin on his face and joyous twinkle in his eyes are enough to make even the least discerning listener a jazz fan.   

If you're a dreamer, and if you can find Dingo, I urge you to watch it.  It's not streaming online yet, but you can order the DVD, and the soundtrack can be purchased on iTunes.  For jazz lovers, this album gets my highest reccommendation, plus it keeps all the tracks in order and incorporates just enough dialogue from the film to give you a sense of the narrative.  When I need to be centered, I pull this album up on my iPod and drift away.

Here below is a track from the musical score entitled "The Dream."  In the context of the film, John is listening to one of Billy Cross's albums and playing along with his trumpet.  As he plays, he retreats into a fantasy world where he and Cross share the stage, playing a gentle duet.  This aching melody is a recurrent musical motif throughout the film, first heard when young John spies Billy Cross's massive jet drifting from the sky.  Its melody is simple, but it captures the longing of a dreamer as he fights to guard his heart from the world.

The two photos in the video are of Colin Friels, director Rolf de Heer, and the great Miles Davis discussing the dream sequence.  Miles was quite ill during this shoot and would die shortly after the production was completed, but according to de Heer's journal, the jazz legend was a consummate professional and a joy to work with.

Give this track a listen, then go find the movie ... and whatever you do, always follow your bliss.

Paradise Lost [Archive]

[originally published September 11, 2012]

The first 3/4 of 2001 were among the best days of my life.  I was part of the Walt Disney Pictures/ABC Television Screenwriting Fellowship, which meant that the entire year was devoted to writing.  No "day job," no "freelance" chores to make extra money, nothing like that.  I was, for one idyllic year, a writer full time and nothing else. But 2001 was also the year of The Seattle Mariners' record-breaking 116-win season.  Although they were unable to parlay this historic event into a World Series (they were choked off in the play-offs when the mighty Yankees "flipped" the proverbial "switch"), for six perfect months, the M's were playing some of the best baseball in the country, giving fans of the team and the sport in general plenty to cheer about.

Let me flashback a bit to show you where I came in:  In late March of that year, just prior to opening day, my wife and I decided to take a day trip from our tiny rental in Hermosa Beach to Edison Field in Anaheim, home of the Anaheim Angels and just down the street from Disneyland, to purchase game tickets for when the Mariners came to town.  Our original intention was to see one or two games, maybe a three-game series, but when we got to the ticket booth of the stadium, we looked at the schedule and saw that the M's would be coming to town three different times for a total of nine games.  On a whim, we purchased tickets to all nine games--April 13th through the 15th, June 29th through the July 1st, and September 10the through the 12th (foreshadowing--cue the music).  

We also bought tickets to the Mariners series with the Dodgers, a game at San Diego, a game in Oakland, and a mid-summer series vs. the Angels in Safeco Field up in Seattle.  That made 17 games in all we saw that year, and to cap it all off, on October 5, 2001, when we were up in the Seattle-Tacoma area visiting family, we purchased tickets from a scalper on King Street just off Occidental Avenue, and saw the Mariners notch win #115 in Safeco on the same night that Barry Bonds broke Mark McGwire's home run record.  

Of those 18 games we attended, we witnessed only six losses as the Mariners lived a steady string of high-fives en route to a historic regular season.  The Mariners were so special that year that legendary Tacoma-based guitar group The Ventures composed a song about them.  As a baseball fan and a Mariners fan, it was hard not to feel good all of that summer.  

It was a little peice of Baseball Paradise.

There were so many highlights from that season, but let me direct you to one play in particular, this dramatic game-ending catch in left field by Charles W. Gipson Jr.  A photograph of that play appears below.  I have told this story a number of times in other blogs, but I realize there may be people who have not heard it, so allow me to share it again:

On that night at Edison Field, the Mariners earned their 104th win behind the strong pitching of Freddy Garcia, who in 2001 was quite simply amazing on the mound.  Freddy pitched 8 scoreless innings, giving up just 3 hits and no walks, to get his 16th decision as a starter.  Going into the bottom of the 9th with the M's up 5-0, manager Lou Piniella called Arthur Rhodes from the bullpen to close the game out.  Rhodes gave up three hits and one earned run, and catcher Dan Wilson committed an error.  The Angels had two men on base, now trailing only 5-1, with two outs, and Tim "Big Fish" Salmon stepping up to the plate.  Salmon was a strong hitter capable of putting the ball out of the park, and although Rhodes had been a serviceable set-up pitcher all year, he had blown his share of leads.  One errant pitch, and Salmon could make this a one-run game, and the fans knew it.

My wife and I were sitting along the first-base side, back about 20 seats or so, almost in front of Ichiro Suzuki.  We were decked out in Mariners gear and biting our nails.  The Angels fans around us were on their feet, clapping and screaming to rattle Arthur Rhodes (this was a year before they discovered those obnoxious "Thunder Sticks").  As a Mariners fan, it was one of the more tense moments I had felt at a ball park.

And here is something important to note.  If you glanced out at wall in right field, the one with the scoreboard for all the other major league games, you would notice something interesting, something that didn't occur to me until much later.  Every other baseball game being played that day had a great big F next to it.  All the the other MLB games were finals--they were in the books.  This lone game between the Mariners and the Angels there on the West Coast was the last baseball being played anywhere in America that night.  

According to the Baseball Almanac, the game lasted 3 hours and 8 minutes.  According to my ticket stub, first pitch was at 7:10 p.m. PDT, so the moment pictured above occurred at roughly 10:18 that night, 1:18 a.m. on the East Coast.  That meant that when Tim Salmon popped an Arthur Rhodes fastball into left field for what looked like a sure hit, and when Charles Gibson Jr. ran that ball down, dived, caught it in mid-air, rolled head over heels on the grass, but came up holding the ball high to end the game (pictured above), it was the very final play of baseball on September 10, 2001 ... which on the East Coast was already September 11th.

Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini once wrote of his fascination with still imagery, how it contains only a moment but denies the viewer all moments that came before and after it.  The last century of history is filled with just such images--the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square on V-J Day, or the nude Vietnamese girl running down the road near Trang Bang after a napalm attack on her village.  But no one has really stopped to contemplate this photo.

In this photo, we see the very last play of Major League Baseball in America before the country lost its complacency.  This was the last game played where the seventh inning stretch was accompanied by the crowd singing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame."  A week later, after a moratorium on all American sports, the seventh inning stretch would resume with "God Bless America."  When Gibson made this catch, the thought of a terrorist attack on American soil seemed impossible, even though it was less than 10 hours away.  When Gibson made this catch, baseball was just a pleasant diversion, not what it would become--symbol of Americana, vehicle for a New York mayor to seek out photo ops, and great unifier of a people.

Before this catch, baseball was just a sport.  After this catch, baseball as a sport was the equivalent of the 1980 US hockey team's victory over Russia or the 1995 South African rugby team's victory over New Zealand.  

Or at least that's the way we wanted to think of it.

When I first blogged about this years ago, I still romanticized this catch, romanticized the moment when our beloved M's nabbed win #104 and were that much closer to making history.  On the night of September 10, 2001, it was just a catch, but in hindsight the following morning, I wanted to go back to that moment and just hold it frozen--my wife and me in the stands at a baseball game, barely a care in the world, feeling as safe as can be.  

After that catch, things changed ... and then they didn't change.  For a week, maybe two, maybe three, there was a sense of civility everywhere I went, perhaps most strongly symbolized by members of Congress from both parties singing "God Bless America" on the steps of the Capital.  In the World Series in October, Republican and Democrat alike cheered when President George W. Bush walked into Yankee Stadium and threw out the first pitch in Game 3.

For a brief time, we did not argue about the petty things, about whether or not moving the war from Afghanistan to Iraq was justified, about whether or not interrogation techniques were necessary for national security or a barbaric practice that made us no better than our enemies.  Had we "gotten" Bin Laden back then, we would not have cared who got the credit.  Back then, a shared trauma pulled us together, and then once the grieving process was over, we were back to the business of hating each other as usual.

Today you will see a lot of images of the Twin Towers with smoke pouring out of their blackened, flaming orifices.  I'd like you to look instead at the photo above, at a moment in baseball.  It was the last moment in baseball before everything changed.  

Good night, and God Bless America.

Tales of My Father [Archive]

[originally published on September 9, 2012]

In the 1980s, when I fully surrendered myself to the drink, my relationship with my father suffered.  Ever the good man, Dad never left my corner, and he was always there to pull me out of a long concatenation of furnaces that I repeatedly cast myself into.  Nevertheless, there was always tension between us.  I was a great disappointment to Dad, I knew, and there reached a point where he could not trust me with even the smallest of tasks.  And I, fully aware of this disappointment yet secretly holding Dad in the highest regard, managed to bury the shame wrought of this contradictory circumstance by nurturing my alcoholism and irresponsibility to the fullest extent.

When I finally got sober in 1994, my father and I set out to mend our wounds.  There was no efficient way to do this.  It took time and an openness we had not previously shared.  Much of this healing took place while watching baseball, a sport I had previously loathed.  Prior to sobriety, I had found baseball to be a stultifying experience, the equivalent of watching people read.  But something magical happened when the drink was removed and the scales slowly began to fall from my eyes.  I share some of that magic in the video below.

Another snapshot of this story is important to share.  In 2006, while living in Florida, my wife and I rented the movie Click, starring Adam Sandler.  In the film, Sandler plays Michael Newman, a harried workaholic disengaged from his family, who is given a magical TV remote that allows him to jump around through time and to different points in his life.  But this is one of those "smart" remotes that remembers trends and repeats them, and soon Michael is skipping over huge chapters of his life, missing some of the most important moments.

One of these moments that Michael skips over is the death of his father.  Horrified by this, he asks the remote to take him to the last time he saw his father alive.  Michael immediately jumps back in time and is a spectator, watching himself as the bitter CEO of his own company, too occupied with matters of business to take a moment to go to lunch with his father Ted (played by Henry Winlker).  The last shot we see of Michael and his Dad together is of Michael at his desk, working away on reports, while Ted slips out of his office, shoulders slumped and a heartbroken look on his face.

I immediately vowed to get home more and spend more time with my Dad.

Today, at the hospital, Dad was a bit bleary, having difficulty staying awake, and he was obstinate when we tried to get him to do his physical therapy exercises.  When he began to ignore us, Mom decided that we needed to leave (we had been there awhile anyway).  When we told Dad goodbye, he had that same look of abject despair that Henry Winkler as Ted has in Click.

I don't know if my father will ever come back to us.  He is not the Dad I know right now, still struggling with delirium and so frustrated by his disorientation that he lashes out at all of us.  But as long as he is still taking breaths, he is still my Dad, and as such, I felt compelled to honor him in the following way:

In 2010, when my wife was out of town, I decided to take a road trip by myself up to Dyersville, Iowa, to see the farm and ball diamond that served as the shooting location for Field of Dreams, my favorite film (you can probably guess why).   On the drive, I made a few special stops to videotape myself ruminating about my life, my father, and baseball.  After editing in some narrative and including several images from the film, I presented The Field, my 30-minute finished documentary, to Dad on Father's Day 2010.  

I warn you, this video is rather frank, and I take pains to be as honest as I can about the nature of my own past transgressions.  I hope you take time to watch The Field, and if you do, I hope you get something out of it.  If you do not watch, I will understand.  Many who have seen the entire documentary have told me it was quite an emotional experience.  That was my intent, I guess; no artist sets out to create something that will be ineffective.