Showing posts with label hardcore wrestling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hardcore wrestling. Show all posts
So here's the skinny: for the past 40 days, I've been holed up in my fathers house in Houston, TX, counting down until I leave for Los Angeles, trying to pen outlines and draft chapters to what I hope would be my best "early works," four "great American stories" about love, loss, lust, and lots of murder.
I'd like to think the ideas themselves are pretty unique. As an unabashed nerd, in love with blue-collar science fiction and theoretical physics (but lacking the math skills to be a physicist), I nurtured story concepts rooted in a second Civil War, stem-cell re-grown limbs for sports stars, a teenage runaway who sweats LSD, and a boy who loves a girl he's never met, but whose mind he can read like watching shadow puppets on a wall (the magic of quantum entanglement -- yes these ideas have been copyrighted). I aim to infuse each project with enough originality and artistry and even personality (mine) so that at the end of the day, I'll create a product I'm not only proud of, but one which will be enjoyed by the likes of you too. As I told a girlfriend once, "I really want to be a great writer." (I may have used some phrasing like "literary mind" or "literary genius," but the point is the same)
The truth, and the problem, lies in her succinct answer to my fantasy, "but you aren't." If this is the case, and I have no idea how valid either her criticism or my confidence is, then I only have two questions to ask myself: 1) why do I care? and 2) how do I achieve this goal?
What makes me want to be a great writer is best summed up as a combination of childhood aspiration (some form of which all of us still feel), admiration for a number of authors I admire, and good, old-fashioned human envy: we all want to be what we desire; a drive which increases in concord to the amount of opposition we face impeding our transformation into that goal. The more we perceive people telling us we cannot be, we look to the people who are doing and casually mumble "fuck you guys" in their direction while trying to unseat them even harder.
Here we'll pause for a tangential, but connected anecdote. A weekend ago, Darryl Ratcliff took me on a 36 hour grand tour of Dallas, TX and its surrounding counties. It was a booze-soaked art-orgy full of interesting people, brotherly charity, amazing conversation, and beautiful women. Many of these women happened to be artists, and at one point I found myself in a house full of creative minds, all there to celebrate a daughters admission into a rather good graduate program somewhere up North. There was something hilarious and even fatalist about being in a room full of artists. Its effectively the same feeling you'd get on the first day of 7th grade gym class, within 24 hours of class time at Davidson College, or when finally realizing that, yes, that other guy can make her cum too: suddenly, you feel somewhat hopeful that others like you exist, but mostly just shitty, because now you know you aren't nearly as special as you imagined. This is a problem with Gen-Y babies: we caught the waning end of the "you can do anything" brand of parenting, and the beginning of the paranoid-about-the-probables 90's. Case in point? Cookie "Sometimes" Cookie Monster. We were no longer told "yes you can," but instead "yeah, you could, but Joe Institution might sue/expel/harm/rape you." This is part of why I can walk into a social situation which would infuse Darryl with drive and confidence, and instead feel out of place, and as though I should search out a convenient cubicle instead of expressive celluloid: we're the diverse products of an evolving American mentality, and throughout my development, I've always psyched myself into assimilating a lot of mixed messages. Sometimes I don't perceive moments as being as special and unique as they truly are.
So, if the above paragraph examines why, then what about how? Well clearly, there's a reason why, with anyone who produces (not in the Hollywood sense), the first chapters of their life are called "early works." They're precisely that: early, imperfect, and maybe even just plain bad. Even William Faulkner wrote some pure bullshit before strapping in to write Absalom, Absalom! The daughter benefiting from the above party displayed a few of her best pieces in a mini-gallery attached to the event, but as a whole, my general reaction to her work was simply "meh." This does not mean she isn't, or won't be a talented artist, just as my Gen-Y, Yorrick Brown-esque (if you get that one, I'll marry you) anxiety doesn't mean I can't become the writer I want to be. Early works stay early if you stop practicing, stop growing.
To either side of me lay copies of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Charles Bukowski's Septuagenarian Stew. Chuck Klosterman's IV is in my Amazon wishlist, and I just finished Paul Pope's complete bibliography. "Fuck you guys," I'll say. "I need to go write."
Although technically it's December 26th, I still want to wish the Art Star family the best Christmas we all want.
A present to you few items, a Christmas task-list, if you will:
1) Early "Family Guy" episodes are pretty lame in retrospect.
2) The "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" theme song is surprisingly good.
3) Frost/Nixon is a great movie.
4) The Spirit is not.
5) There is no creature more beautiful than a girl from Texas.
6) Bukowski almost makes being a drunken animal sound like a good career path,
7) Take a chance.
8) Give in. She'll thank you for it.
9) "Justice League: Unlimited" was art.
10) That's not writing, it's typing.
11) Get a girl with hips, and then get a scotch. You'll feel all Sterling Cooper, and you'll love it.
12) When's the last time you masturbated?
13) Go to Europe.
14) Don't squat in an artists commune. You're not homeless; don't pretend to be - armchair activism like that only makes you feel important.
15) Watch Dune, Logan's Run, and The Neverending Story all in a row. Be sure to have a few beers or some decent wine while you watch. It's a long marathon, so bring plenty.
16) Give in. She'll hate you for it.
17) Make a best friend.
2) The "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" theme song is surprisingly good.
3) Frost/Nixon is a great movie.
4) The Spirit is not.
5) There is no creature more beautiful than a girl from Texas.
6) Bukowski almost makes being a drunken animal sound like a good career path,
7) Take a chance.
8) Give in. She'll thank you for it.
9) "Justice League: Unlimited" was art.
10) That's not writing, it's typing.
11) Get a girl with hips, and then get a scotch. You'll feel all Sterling Cooper, and you'll love it.
12) When's the last time you masturbated?
13) Go to Europe.
14) Don't squat in an artists commune. You're not homeless; don't pretend to be - armchair activism like that only makes you feel important.
15) Watch Dune, Logan's Run, and The Neverending Story all in a row. Be sure to have a few beers or some decent wine while you watch. It's a long marathon, so bring plenty.
16) Give in. She'll hate you for it.
17) Make a best friend.
18) Try and remember the last time you were in love. Now come up with three reasons to call that person you loved, and write them down on a piece of paper.
19) Burn that fucking paper. You're a moron if you call.
20) Find a good series of blogs/websites to enjoy. I suggest:
21) Look at yourself good and long in the mirror, and come up with three things you don't like about your face. I promise you're the only person who sees those things.
22) Burn a textbook. It's cathartic, and more fun when you do it with friends.
23) Learn something new. Make it something complicated.
24) Do you remember the dream you had last night?
25) Drink a ton of water. It keeps the acne at bay.
26) Don't patronize Tyler Perry. His "Fat Suit Adventures" are the lowest common denominator of base and formulaic entertainment. Highway robbery of the blackest variety.
27) Motherfucking Teen Wolf. Hell yes.
28) Yes, he's flirting with you. What are you gonna do about it?
29) Find a book you read as a kid. Read it again, and feel good about your childhood.
30) Try.
Mankind, Mick Foley, Cactus Jack - is the most intriguing wrestler of all time.
In fact if there was ever a wrestler who transcended the entertainment-glitz of world wide web of wrestling it was Mankind.
There was nothing pretty about him.
He didn't become Hollywood, he didn't become a governor, he just represented everything good, bad, and ugly about the sport.
He represented the darkest part of all of us, the most fragile, the most honest, the most beautiful.
And this is not hyperbole.
Before there was Heath Ledger's Joker, there was Mick Foley's Mankind.
Watch this two-part promotional video and tell me it isn't the truth.
Tell me there isn't more about life, about meanness, about childhood, about dreams, about drive, about the human condition in these 13 minutes than in an entire year at college.
Tell me "What makes a man love pain so much...that he willingly mutilates his own body?"
