Posts Tagged ‘Forgotten Impulses’

Better Be Good

Thursday, March 1st, 2012

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser February 2012)

“In Hollywood they place you under contract instead of under observation.” Walter Winchell

I recently read a brief rave review of a new movie, not a remake, but the umpteenth “psychological thriller” about a psychopath keeping someone trapped in a closet for years on end. And this review, which sounded suspiciously like a press release, reminded me of one of the more bizarre and disturbing passages in my long ago Hollywood sojourn when I tried to succeed as a screenwriter. But first a little of the back-story, as they like to call the past in the movie business.

In 1981, following the success of my first novel, I was hired by Warner Brothers to write a screenplay based on my second novel Forgotten Impulses, with Laura Ziskin the producer. Laura would eventually produce the Spiderman movies and several other blockbusters, including the incredibly popular prostitute-to-riches movie Pretty Woman, but at the time of our collaboration she had yet to make it big. Laura was passionate about my book, had wonderful ideas about translating the story to film, and came very close to getting Forgotten Impulses made into a movie—quite the opposite of bizarre and disturbing.

As a side note to the back-story, Forgotten Impulses, an obscure novel by any measure, was almost filmed four times between 1981 and 2000, with four different screenplays written (after mine) including one by the now famous director Jay Roach; and these screenplays attracted several major directors including Sydney Pollack, Ulu Grosbard, Tony Bill, and Luis Mandoki. The why and how of Forgotten Impulses tempting and eluding production so many times would make a fascinating book about the movie business and the exigencies of fate, something I will jump right on as soon as I get that seven-figure offer from Random House. But I digress.

“A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.” Orson Welles

Two years after I wrote that screenplay for Laura Ziskin, my Hollywood agent was contacted by a famous director of made-for-television movies who had read my Forgotten Impulses script and wanted me to write a screenplay for him based on a true story he owned the rights to. I was a newlywed, short on cash, and desperate to get my career on track, so I listened eagerly to this mogul, a man I will call Frank, though Frank is not his real name, and I mean no offense to anyone who is named Frank.

It seems that Frank read a newspaper article about a young white man, a senior in high school in a big city in the South, who died from injuries sustained when he drove his car into a telephone pole after swerving to miss a dog crossing the road. The young man’s heart and kidneys and other organs were then used to save the lives of several people in need of organ transplants. What made the story so appealing to Frank was that this dead young white man was a golden boy, a football, baseball, basketball star, a devout Christian, a straight A student with a greenhouse full of orchids: a charming, animal-loving sweetheart of a kid who dreamt of a career in politics as an advocate for the poor and downtrodden, his girlfriend a brilliant beauty bound for Harvard.

“I jumped on a plane,” said Frank, his accent unmistakably Brooklyn, “and got down there just in time for the funeral.”

“Wow,” I said, troubled by his gleeful tone. “The funeral.”

“What a scene! The cemetery was packed. Guys wearing baseball uniforms, football uniforms, basketball jerseys, pom-pom girls, a huge choir in white robes, everybody crying and hugging each other. White people, black people. You can’t make this stuff up.” Frank paused. “I got the film rights before they had the grave filled.”

“You what?” I asked, doubting my ears.

“The movie rights. His father signed in the cemetery office and a couple hours later I got his mom to sign. They’re divorced so I wanted them both on board before I sent you down there. Lisa, the mom, isn’t so hot on the deal, but Jeff, the dad, is totally onboard and can’t wait to talk to you.” Frank paused. “So…you in?”

“I…I…”

“Oh, right. Money.” Frank named a dizzying sum. “And expenses, of course, with a fat per diem.” He named a swank hotel where I’d be staying. “I figure you go down there for a week, talk to his folks, his girlfriend, the minister, guys on the team, teachers, then you rough something out, fax it to me, and by the time you get back I’ll have this set up as a movie of the week.”

The money was too much to turn down, so I agreed to take the job. My agent was ecstatic, my wife delirious. However, before I signed a contract, I called Jeff, the dead golden boy’s father, and we talked for an hour. And then I called my agent and said I had changed my mind and would not be taking the job.

“You can’t do this,” she said harshly. “You cannot say yes to Frank and then change your mind. You’ll never work in this town again. Is it the money? We’ll get you more. How much do you want?”

“It’s not the money,” I said, the room spinning. “It’s the whole thing. This is…immoral.”

“Oh, Jesus. Immoral? Gimme a break. What’s moral? This is my reputation you’re fucking with.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry is not enough. You’re gonna have to talk to Frank and explain to him that this has nothing to do with me. Nothing. Do you understand? I love the project. I think Frank is a genius. You make it clear this is your problem, not mine. And don’t use the word immoral. Please.”

So I called Frank and told him I had changed my mind; and he offered me three times the original dizzying sum to take the job. And I told him that in my conversation with Jeff, the dead golden boy’s father, I learned that the golden boy had a serious drinking problem, that he almost certainly was the father of an illegitimate child with a very young woman, and that he may not have swerved to miss a dog but swerved to kill himself. I also told Frank that the golden boy had been terribly depressed about his beautiful girlfriend dumping him when she found out about the probable illegitimate child, and that the golden boy had been benched for an upcoming big game because he was flunking so many classes. But, the golden boy’s father assured me, these were just rumors I would hear when I came down to research the story, and none of these rumors had to be in the movie.

“And none of them will be,” said Frank, shouting. “Who gives a fuck what the real story is? The story we give a fuck about is that this golden boy’s heart saves a guy’s life and the guy changes from an asshole into a golden boy himself, and the golden boy’s kidney saves a girl’s life and she becomes, I don’t know, a great singer or something. See? You can make this anything you want so long as it’s beautiful and inspiring. See? With a wise old black man, or, no, a wise old black woman who teaches him right from wrong and…okay…here, listen! Scenes from his childhood, key moments that made him a golden boy, coming off the bench to score the winning touchdown, winning basket, winning home run, whatever. Defending a cripple from bullies. A black cripple. White bullies. He’s crying in church listening to the heavenly choir, a bi-racial choir, golden rays coming through stained glass windows as we dissolve to a hot kiss and not quite sex with his half-dressed Georgia peach of a girlfriend and vows of eternal love on her front porch before he drives away and swerves to miss the dog that looks exactly like the dog he grew up with, his best friend that got hit by a car when somebody didn’t swerve to miss the dog. You know what I’m talking about. Sacrifice. Redemption. Transformation. All that shit.”

“I’m sorry, Frank. I just can’t.”

“What? You think you’re too good to write for television? Fuck you!”

And I thought that would be the last I heard from Frank and possibly from Hollywood, but two years later my agent called to say that Frank was taking a break between mini-series and wanted me to write a Christmas movie for him pronto.

“I didn’t know you were still my agent,” I said to my agent. “Haven’t heard a peep in a couple years.”

“Don’t be bitter,” she said, laughing bitterly. “You’re not exactly a hot commodity.”

True. And my marriage was foundering, our house payment was due, and I had twenty-six dollars in my checking account, so I said I’d be glad to talk to Frank.

“Listen, Todderoo,” said Frank, having won boatloads of Emmys and made tens of millions since last we spoke, “I just read your Forgotten Impulses script again and I am absolutely convinced that we’re supposed to work together, and not just on this Christmas thing, but on lots of things. I think we have some sort of cosmic connection, I really do.”

He said he wanted a two-hour Christmas movie set in New England during World War II. “Think Norman Rockwell family saga 1944 snow and sleigh bells and chestnuts roasting and funny sad desperate people and hope and redemption and presents under the Christmas tree full of forgiveness. That kinda thing.”

“And the story?”

“That’s why I’m hiring you.” He laughed a high staccato laugh. “Come on. Say yes. I hear you’re hurting for cash.”

Thus ensued eight of the craziest weeks of my life. I flew down and back from Sacramento to Los Angeles twice a week for long meetings with Frank and his “assistant”—Frank’s gorgeous British mistress who never missed an opportunity to say, “Brilliant, Frank. Brilliant!” I was never sure why we had to meet in-person so often since Frank was on the phone to me three times a day telling me everything he then told me again in these face-to-face meetings. I also attended several perplexing meetings with three young network executives who kept glaring at me and saying, “This better be good.” And I wrote dozens of drafts of a World War II Norman Rockwell family saga 1944 snow and sleigh bells etcetera Christmas thing that Frank was forever handing over to his staff writers to rewrite per his brilliant suggestions and then handing the mess back to me so I would, as he put it, “make this sing.”

After eight weeks of sheer madness, and on what I thought would be my last day of working for Frank, I arrived by taxi at the Century City skyscraper wherein Frank had his humongous suite of opulent offices, and found the man himself waiting for me in front of the building, smiling beatifically. Dressed all in shiny black leather, Frank was standing beside his shiny black Lamborghini, the mighty engine idling. He held the passenger door open for me and I climbed into a car worth more than most houses. And then, with the Bee Gees singing How Deep Is Your Love on the surround sound stereo, we drove across the stinking metropolis to Frank’s mansion in Beverly Hills, a huge Roman villa Spanish hacienda hybrid with a gigantic abstract black brushed-steel fountain sculpture installation thing splish-splashing away in the center of a circular cobblestone driveway.

Frank led me into his gargantuan dining room and there upon the massive rosewood table was a magnum of champagne riding high in an ornate silver ice bucket towering over a fat contract announcing a breathtaking increase in my fee—with only my signature lacking.

“Our next project,” said Frank, slapping me on the back. “You didn’t think I would let you get away after just one, did you?”

“What is the next project?” I asked, every cell in my body yearning to never see him again.

He handed me a newspaper clipping. The headline read FORTY YEARS IN THE DARK. An old woman died. She was a recluse with no known relatives. When folks from the Salvation Army came to clean out her house they heard scratching sounds coming from a locked closet wherein they found the dead woman’s daughter who had been imprisoned by her mother in the closet for forty years, since she was six years old.

“You were born to write this movie,” said Frank, proffering a fountain pen. “I locked up the movie rights this morning. You can do the novelization, too, and we’ll bring out the book a few weeks before we’re movie-of-the week.” He winked at me. “We’re thinking Halloween.”

“You know, Frank,” I said, only mildly curious to know how he got the movie rights, “I hate to disappoint you, but I’ve decided to only write original material from now on. My own stuff. It’s either that or go insane.”

To his credit, Frank did not damn me to hell, but said I was making a huge mistake I would regret for the rest of my life. We never spoke again. Our Norman Rockwell 1944 Christmas movie was never filmed. My agent dropped me like a hot potato. My marriage evaporated. And I have never again seen a contract with my name on it that had so many zeros following the initial digit. Yet I have not once, not even for a fraction of a split second, regretted turning Frank down.

Over the intervening decades I have written many screenplays and novels, none yet filmed, and not one involving a psychopath who imprisons someone in a closet. That, as they say, has been done and does not need to be done again. Trust me.

Creative movie producers, brilliant movie directors, whimsical book publishers, and loquacious readers are invited to contact Todd through his web site UnderTheTableBooks.com

 

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Creative Paradox

Saturday, December 31st, 2011
garth hagerman

Photo by Garth Hagerman

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser December 2011)

“To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music, we must break them.” Nadia Boulanger

During the four years in the early 1990’s when I ran the Creative Writing program for the California State Summer School for the Arts, I oversaw the work of two hundred teenaged writers and worked intimately with fifty of those talented scribblers. Three of the two hundred were, in my estimation, brilliant and original and highly accomplished writers; yet these three were so deeply introverted I predicted they would never succeed as professional writers. Sadly, so far, my prediction has proved true. In the publishing world of today, ambition entirely trumps talent, and believe it or not, ambitious imitators rule the narrow roost of your favorite bookstore, independent or otherwise.

We recently watched the first two-thirds of Robert Altman’s excruciatingly painful film Vincent and Theo about Vincent Van Gogh and his brother Theo—two-thirds of the movie being all we could bear, and even at that I was an emotional wreck. Whether or not the film is an accurate portrayal of the real Van Gogh, the movie conveys the very real suffering that many visionary artists feel in the absence of lasting emotional connections to other people and society, emotional connections these artists desperately want to make through their art. Yet because society is largely a manifestation of well-established perceptions and carefully regulated protocols for the presentation of those perceptions, most creative introverts are doomed to commercial failure unless they are rescued through the intervention of a sympathetic agent (catalyst) in the body of a functional extrovert.

The few moderate successes of my own writing career occurred because of the divine efforts of an extraordinary literary agent named Dorothy Pittman, the likes of which no longer exist, for she was wholly concerned with quality and originality, while caring not a whit about commerciality or the emotional idiosyncrasies of her clients. When Dorothy died, I was left to my own devices, which, for the most part, proved unacceptable to corporate operatives who care not a whit for quality and originality, and care only about their bottom lines showing large profits.

We want to think those elegant hardbacks awaiting us on the New Arrivals table at our favorite bookstore are the cream of a diverse cultural crop, the work of artists and original thinkers, but this is rarely true, for the source of nearly all of these books is corporate fascism, the antithesis of everything we wish our culture to be. Thus the most original of our writers and musicians and artists survive on the fringes of our cultural mix and remain largely unknown to you or to me or to anyone, save for a few friends, if they are fortunate to have friends.

This systemic isolation of original artists has probably existed since the dawn of urban life, when for the first time in human evolution large numbers of people came to live together in relatively small geographical areas. Certainly without the untiring efforts of Theo, Vincent Van Gogh’s brother and agent and only friend, we never would have received the enduring gift of Van Gogh’s genius. And because in the course of my life I have been fortunate to read the unpublished work of a handful of contemporary geniuses that few others will ever read, I assume there are thousands of such writers and artists toiling away in anonymity; which assumption brings to mind the cultivation of carrots and how of the several hundred seedlings that sprout in the carrot patch only a lucky few will survive the seemingly random act of thinning so they may attain full carrotness, with only the rarest of carrots attaining carrot magnificence.

“Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.” Frederic Chopin

Having published ten books with nine different gargantuan publishing houses, eight works of fiction and two works of non-fiction, and having had essentially the same dreadful experience with each of these corporate behemoths, I, the former Executive Oddball of the International Order of Barely Functional Introverts, finally decided to embark on the path of a self-publisher. Succeed or not, I would at least have some small control over my creations (if only to be in charge of hiding them); and best of all I would never again have to watch as my years and years of toil were relegated to the trash heap with the wave of some moron’s hand, before or shortly after what should have been publication days of joy and celebration.

Though it may seem incredible, even unbelievable, to those unfamiliar with mainstream American publishing, the entire system has, for over forty years, been based on the buying and publishing of thousands of books every fiscal quarter with the foreknowledge that most of these books will be intentionally killed before or shortly after their official dates of publication. How could such a bizarre system have taken hold in a field that most people still think of as a creative part of our cultural framework? A thorough explanation of how this self-annihilating practice came to be would fill a fat volume, but I will use the brief tale of one of my own books as an example of how the system operates.

In 1995, having gone nearly a decade since publishing my fourth novel, I sold my fifth, Ruby & Spear, to Bantam for a 25,000 dollar advance. A rousing contemporary myth, Ruby & Spear is about an impetuous white sports writer, Vic, and his adventures with a fabulous black basketball player named Spear, a sexy feminist named Greta, and Spear’s tough old mystical grandmother Ruby. When they purchased Ruby & Spear, Bantam was owned by Random House, which in turn had been swallowed by a massive multinational corporation that now owns most of the previously freestanding publishing houses in America. In truth, there are only three gigantic publishers left in America, each masquerading as several publishing houses, each in reality a tiny division of a multinational behemoth.

Why did Bantam buy Ruby & Spear? I would like to say it was because their editors and sales people were eager to bring forth an entertaining literary gem; but that would be untrue. Bantam bought Ruby & Spear because they were guessing (gambling) that the movie rights to the book would be optioned for the movies before the book was published, which optioning would result in thousands of dollars of free publicity for the book; and if, indeed, a movie of Ruby & Spear was made there would be millions of dollars of free publicity. Bantam hoped the book might be sold to the movies because another of my novels, Forgotten Impulses, was on the verge of being made into a major motion movie, and because my first novel Inside Moves had been made into a film during the Pleistocene, which film caused many copies of that book to be sold.

But when Forgotten Impulses was ignominiously dropped by the movie people, and that dropping coincided with a few stupid studio execs complaining that Ruby & Spear was strangely void of violence and chock full of strong complex women and atypical men (and it wasn’t set in either New York or Los Angeles, but in Oakland, for godsake!) Bantam decided not to bring out a hardback version (ending hope of widespread reviews); and then they decided to kill the paperback edition on publication day.

To kill a book, a publisher declares the tome out-of-print and ceases distribution before that book has a chance to live. This is the fate of the vast majority of books published by large publishers, and is especially the fate of literary fiction, a rare kind of writing that does not fit into any obvious target genre such as murder mystery, sci-fi, teen vampire, adult vampire, teen wizard, or bodice-ripping historical romance. 25,000 dollars, to a corporation making most of its billions from strip mining and manufacturing cell phones and buying and selling governments, is not much of a gamble, so….

So here I am, an introverted self-publisher, my first two self-published books winners of multiple independent publishing awards, yet almost no bookstores in America carry my books, and that includes those revered independent bookstores. Why? Simple. Many people who buy books have seen and heard myriad advertisements for the latest bodice-ripping historical vampire fantasy, and many of these same people enjoyed the previous seven volumes in that marvelous series, so they very much want to read the latest regurgitation; and they have not heard of Buddha In A Teacup or Under the Table Books, nor have the bookstore people heard of my unclassifiable tomes, neither of which contains a single vampire, though both volumes are mysteriously sensual. Thus we live with the painful irony that independent bookstores generally carry only the most popular mainstream gunk because they don’t have the shelf space for (or the knowledge of) less popular books.

“It is important to practice at the speed of no mistakes.” Lucinda Mackworth-Young

Long ago I had supper with one of the most powerful publishers in America who happened to be married at the time (ever so briefly) to the editor of one of those novels I published in the Pleistocene. And when this famous publisher was nicely lit after downing a few goblets of breathtakingly expensive wine, she raised her glass and proclaimed, “Every book that really deserves to be published eventually does get published.”

And though from a career-building point of view I should have raised my glass and cried, “Hear, hear!” instead I retorted, “Methinks you are rationalizing the actions of unscrupulous corporations,” which only made her hostile. Oops. Silly me.

“Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.” Twyla Tharp

Gazing back thirty-five years through the telescope of hindsight, I realize that my editor’s wife, a great and powerful publisher (who was just a person, after all) was giving voice to what we all fervently want to believe, which is that great new creations will eventually find their ways into the lives of more than a few lucky people. And I think we harbor this belief in the inevitable ascendancy of excellent original art (which hasn’t been the case for thousands of years) because for most of human evolution, when our kind were much fewer and farther between, when we lived in bands and tribes and everyone knew everyone else, that when a good new creation came along, that song or story or painting or dance or myth or spear or drum or flute stood out like the only black horse in a herd of white horses, or vice-versa, so there was no way the glorious thing could be overlooked.

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Flow

Friday, August 26th, 2011

(This article first appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser August 2011)

“Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting what you are doing. This is the ultimate.” Zhuangzi

Something happened to me a few days ago the likes of which hadn’t happened to me in eons. I was shooting hoops at the elementary school, playing alone, as is my custom now that I am deep into middle age and easily injured, when I became aware that I was caught up in an extraordinary flow of action involving my body, the ball, the air, the backboard, and the hoop. I think this was what sports commentators mean when they say a player is “in the zone,” playing with seeming effortlessness, yet playing superbly and flawlessly for an extended period of time. A frequently used adjunct comment to saying a player is “in the zone” is “he’s unconscious.”

That adjunct comment turns out not to be true, because the cool thing about being in the zone, and this has been corroborated by many athletes speaking about their in-the-zone experiences, is that they were not unconscious, but rather fully aware of being in the zone yet not consciously controlling what they were doing. That is to say, they were not conscious of making decisions about what to do next while they were caught up in the flow of action because they were, in essence, inseparable from the flow of everything going on.

It is also true that the more practiced and skillful an athlete, the more easily and often she will find herself in the zone; zone being a misnomer since it is not really a place, but a state of being. My in-the-zone moment was probably the result of playing more often these past few months when school has been out and my access to the courts has been unlimited.

My experience of being inseparable from the ecstatic flow began with the awareness of the ball coming into my hands as if thrown to me by an invisible cohort, the ball leaving my hands as if self-propelled, the ball arching high into the air and tumbling down through the center of the hoop, the ball returning as if passed to me by that same invisible friend, my body dancing back from the hoop to a distance I usually, consciously, avoid, the ball leaving my hands again, arching high, smacking through the net, on and on, dozens of times without a miss from near and far, until I had the thought, “This is so fun!” and the ball caromed off the rim into the weeds.

“As far as I’m concerned, the essentials of jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing, and instrumental personality.” Mose Allison

Musicians, artists, dancers, inventors, thinkers…all creative people aspire to be in the zone.

“Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.” Tobias Wolff

On the way home from my in-the-zone experience on the basketball court, I fell into a memory of my largest (in terms of numbers of dollars) experiment with money. I was a pauper by American standards from 1969 when I dropped out of college until 1980 when I made what was for me a small fortune through the sale of the paperback rights to my first published novel and the simultaneous sale of the movie rights to the same novel. Shortly thereafter, I paid a large amount of income tax, moved to Sacramento, and bought the only house I’ve ever owned. And then in 1984, just as my movie money was running out, I got married and resumed my practice of making just enough to get by.

Then in 1995, hot on the heels of my divorce and the concurrent disappearance of my house, I made the second small fortune of my life through the unlikely sale of a one-year option on the movie rights to my obscure novel Forgotten Impulses, published in 1980, for one hundred thousand dollars, and the even more unlikely sale of my novel Ruby & Spear to Bantam for twenty-five thousand dollars. In the case of Forgotten Impulses, no movie was ever made, and in the case of Ruby & Spear, Bantam took the wonderful book out of print the day it was published (though copies of both novels can still be found on the interweb for pennies, and you may listen to me read Ruby & Spear (and play all the different characters) at Audible or iTunes). But in any case, I suddenly had, by my standards, another large pile of money.

And I decided to give this second fortune to favorite friends who had very little money and would greatly appreciate some cash. Having spent much of my first fortune on myself, a strategy that brought me little joy and much sorrow, I was curious to see what would happen if I shared my wealth. My hope was that in giving away my fortune I would be priming the cosmic pump, so to speak, which priming would eventually bring me even more money.

As it happens, giving away a fortune in America is not as simple as simply giving money away. First of all, one must pay a large portion of the fortune to the federal and state governments, and this portion is especially large if one is not in the habit of making big sums of money and does not have shelters and deductions and depreciations and such to mitigate the taxes owed. Not wanting to go into debt, I called my accountant and, despite his good-natured assertion that I was insane, we figured out I could give away seventy-six thousand dollars and still have enough left over to pay the taxes I owed, make an impressive contribution to Social Security, and have a few thousand dollars left for rent and food and a new basketball. So I made a list of people I wanted to give money to, most of them artists and poets and musicians working at low-paying jobs while painting and writing and making music and hoping for big breaks such as the two big breaks I’d gotten, and I gave them each two thousand dollars.

Some weeks after mailing out those thirty-eight checks, I got a postcard from Paris from one of the recipients informing me that on the day she got my check she bought a round trip ticket to Europe, packed her bags, and, as she wrote, “I knew it was now or never, so I went for it. Merci!” Another recipient sent me a list of how she spent her two thousand: one thousand donated to a non-profit organization dedicated to spaying feral cats, three hundred for art supplies, six hundred and fifty rent, and fifty bucks on expensive coffee beans. Several recipients said they felt weird taking money from me and wanted to give the money back. When I insisted they keep the cash, they all seemed mightily relieved. And most fascinating to me were the four recipients who never said a word to me about receiving the money, though cancelled checks confirmed they had, indeed, gotten the loot.

Did my giving away my small fortune prime the cosmic pump as I hoped it would? I assume so, though my income for the next several years remained barely adequate to cover rent and vittles, and the Internal Revenue Service did audit me for that year because of what my auditor called “an unlikely income spike.” But money, after all, is not the only measure of how Universe indicates her support for what we do and how we do what we do.

“My hand does the work and I don’t have to think; in fact, were I to think, it would stop the flow.” Edna O’Brien

So today I’m sitting on a bench on the terrace at the Presbyterian, summer fog cloaking the village, and I overhear the following snippets of conversation going on two benches away where six people, four men and two women, are passing pot pipes around and shooting the breeze.

Woman #1: Dude. You were married? For real?

Man #1: So, yeah, I was like totally married. Only she was like thirty and I’m like six years younger, so she just didn’t get me, you know? Like we were from totally different generations.

Woman #1: So are you like…divorced?

Man #1: Totally.

Man #2: Hey, where have you been? Nice shoes.

Woman #2: I was, you know, in LA and like…now I’m out on fifty thousand dollars bail.

Man #2: Dude. Fifty thousand. What did you do?

Woman #2: Lots.

Man #1: Pot?

Woman #2: No. I said lots. Credit cards and shit.

Man #1: Whoa, Dude. I thought you said pot.

Woman #2: No and one of the big credit card things was totally not mine, so…

Man #1: You want to smoke some hash on top of that?

Woman #2: Sure. Why not?

Woman #1: Totally, dude. Go with the flow.

Todd’s web site is UnderTheTableBooks. com

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Disappointment

Thursday, October 28th, 2010

Whilst discussing my hopes and expectations for the San Francisco Giants with Mark Scaramella, he suggested I try my hand at writing about disappointment. I just hope my attempt doesn’t disappoint him.

“Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy—the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation.” Eric Hoffer

What is disappointment? The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary defines disappointment as: dejection or distress caused by the non-fulfillment of desire or expectation. Substitute the word suffering for distress and we land smack dab at the outset of Buddhist philosophy. The First Noble Truth (and I have yet to read a satisfactory explanation of why the Four Noble Truths are noble rather than big or unavoidable or groovy) is that life is suffering. I recently read an article in a Buddhist magazine suggesting that suffering might not be the most accurate translation of the Sanskrit word Buddha purportedly used. The article suggested that annoying might be a more accurate translation. And in some texts the First Noble Truth is stated as: Life is full of suffering (though not necessarily completely full, which would allow for the occasional pizza, chocolate bar, or delightful flirtation).

But seriously folks, the Second Noble Truth states that the cause (or origin) of suffering is attachment. If we can learn not to be attached to things and people and baseball teams winning the World Series, or even just to being alive, then our suffering will lessen and might even disappear entirely. And check this out: in the absence of suffering, we would still be alive, which is a blatant contradiction of the First Noble Truth and necessitates restating the First and Second Noble Truths as: Life is suffering (or disappointing) unless we aren’t attached to anything (very much), in which case life is…what? Joyful? Maybe. I don’t know.

Here is what I think Buddha said: “The First and Second Groovy Truths combine to say that we suffer disappointment if we are attached to any sort of outcome, such as owning an elephant or getting laid. Indeed, if we can learn to dispense with expectations, we will cease to be disappointed, and in the absence of disappointment our suffering will vanish.” Since no one knows precisely what Buddha said, that’s my guess.

“Rigid beliefs make disappointments seem unbearable, whereas realistic beliefs help us to accept disappointment and go on from there.” Eileen Kennedy-Moore

The root of disappointment is appointment, a word that joined the ranks of our ancestral vocabulary shortly after Olde English morphed into Middle English and our various vernaculars mingled shamelessly with French. The French word was appointement, and meant an agreement, a contract, a decree. “We hereby make an appointment, honey, to meet in the forest for some hanky panky.” From which it follows that a disappointment was the breaking of an agreement, the violation of a contract, or the ignoring of a decree.

Thus we might construe that an expectation is an agreement we make with ourselves, i.e. that the Giants are going to win the World Series, and the violation of this agreement would be a disappointment.

“Nobody succeeds beyond his or her wildest expectations unless he or she begins with some wild expectations.” Ralph Charell

I expected I would be an immensely successful writer and musician. That was my conscious expectation. My unconscious expectation was that I would be a colossal failure. The trajectory of my career as a writer and a musician is a perfect reflection of those dueling expectations, with the unconscious expectation always eventually trumping my conscious efforts. For many years I blamed others for the recurring disappointments of my life; but I understand now that the sabotage of my creative efforts was an inside job.

For instance, just as my second novel Forgotten Impulses was about to be published in 1980, I received an excited call from my editor at Simon & Schuster. Time magazine was going to run a big fat rave review of the novel, so fat and big that an additional fifteen thousand copies of Forgotten Impulses were being printed, and Sales, previously reluctant to support the book, had finally agreed to put some real money into promotion and distribution. The next day I got a call from a Time photographer arranging to take my picture for the review. The photo shoot was a dream come true, and the photographer’s last words to me were, “The buzz in New York says your book will be huge.”

Three days before the issue of Time containing the rave was to go to press, the review was inexplicably pulled. The Sales honchos cancelled all promotion and distribution of Forgotten Impulses, and cancelled the publication of my next novel, Louie & Women, for which Simon & Schuster had paid a large advance. And my mainstream writing career, for all intents and purposes, was destroyed. Why? I never discovered the outside why, but I have no doubt that in the ballroom of my psyche the demons gleefully celebrated the triumph of self-loathing.

Thinking back to that particular disappointment, and to many other similar experiences with my books and screenplays and music, I feel disappointed anew. And what I find most interesting about the sensations attendant to my disappointment is that they are indistinguishable from the telltale feelings of another emotional state I know a great deal about: depression.

Depression, one might say, is a state of constant disappointment. But why would someone be constantly disappointed? Well, according to the Second Groovy Truth, we suffer disappointment if we are attached to any sort of outcome. Thus constant disappointment must be the result of a constant attachment to things being a particular way. And wouldn’t constant attachment to feeling rotten have to be a deep and hardwired propensity, as in a propensity developed in childhood? I think so. I think it is only human to be disappointed about losing a game or not getting a job we wanted or getting dumped by our girlfriend. But staying disappointed, I contend, is a neurotic tendency engendered in us by those in charge of engendering our tendencies when we were infants and children.

“I am not in this world to live up to other people’s expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine.” Fritz Perls

So maybe the Giants won’t win the World Series this year, and maybe this article isn’t what Mark had in mind when he suggested I write about disappointment; but now that I have explored disappointment for the last two weeks, and exhumed some of those pesky demons still inhabiting my innards, I am confident that my disappointment about the Giants or anything else will not be as great as it might otherwise have been. Why? Because the demons of disappointment lose their power in the light of conscious scrutiny. And I am now prepared to proclaim, “So what if we didn’t win the World Series? The important thing is we gave it our best shot. We played the game with all our hearts, and that is victory enough.”

(This article originally appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser, October 2010)

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Culture of Narcissism

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

(This essay originally appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser, July 2010)

“Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.” Christopher Lasch

A few weeks before my second novel was to be published in 1980, I got a call from my editor at Simon & Schuster saying that Sales had decided my title wasn’t strong enough and they needed a more seductive replacement. Mackie was the title of my novel and the name of its central character, a charismatic narcissist on the verge of a nervous breakdown. As it happened, I was in the midst of reading Christopher Lasch’s remarkable book The Culture of Narcissism, and therein found the expression “forgotten impulses”, which Sales adored. Thus my novel was published as Forgotten Impulses and garnered the following from The New York Times. “Piercingly real eroticism told in an ear-perfect rendering.” Oh, for such a review today.

For those not familiar with The Culture of Narcissism, I will briefly synopsize this seminal work. Seminal is an appropriate adjective, for The Culture of Narcissism spawned dozens of other works in response to it. Lasch, a historian with a special interest in the history of psychotherapy, theorized that the social developments of the 20th century, particularly World War II and its aftermath, suburbanization, consumerism, the movie industry, and the conquest of our psyches by television, created a perfect storm of conditioning from which emerged a society of narcissists: individuals with no reliable inner sense of self, and thus prone to fixations on celebrities and extreme vulnerability to manipulation by mass media. In the 1960’s, psychotherapists in America began to see more and more of this personality type entering therapy until by the mid-1970’s such persons were the norm rather than the exception. Other eminent traits of this personality type include a fear of commitment, a dread of aging (which Lasch posited as the engine of the youth culture of the 1960’s and 1970’s) and the puzzling contradiction that, despite the absence of an authentic self, these people operate as if they are the center of the universe. Combine this narcissistic personality with the dissolution of multi-generational social continuity (neighborhoods and extended families) that marked the latter stages of industrialization and the coming of the technological state, and we have America today: a cultural wasteland populated with people not merely separated from the natural world, but separated from who and what they actually are, i.e. human beings.

Which brings me to Lebron James, a huge and talented basketball player who recently chose to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers and join forces with two other superstars on the Miami Heat. Larger than life describes what the corporate oligarchy has made of Lebron, so that his decision to switch teams has been declared by numerous sources to be an economic disaster for Cleveland and Ohio and possibly the entire Midwest. The millions of Clevelanders who once worshiped Lebron with fanatical fervor have embarked on an equally fanatical campaign to remove all signs of Lebron’s Cleveland existence; and Spike Lee predicts that when Lebron returns to Cleveland to play against the Cavaliers, the governor will have to call out the National Guard to protect Lebron from the wrath of those he has forsaken.

Because two of my published works involve basketball, several people have asked if I intended to write about “the whole Lebron thing.” I said I didn’t think I would, but now that literally hundreds of sports writers and pundits have branded Lebron a narcissist, I feel compelled to point out that though narcissists may be profoundly self-centered, it is more important to understand them as emotionally fragile and captives of illusion. Narcissists are not, merely because they are narcissists, malicious or inherently evil.

Narcissus, as the myth describes, fell in love with his reflection, and in so doing spurned Echo, a sexy woman ready and willing to give him all she had to give, if you know what I mean. Thus poor Narcissus literally missed out on life as he gazed unto death at his reflection. One may argue that Lebron is certainly not missing out on the Echoes of our culture, that he is living the high life and adroitly wielding power at the top of the steep-sided pyramid that delineates the corporate kingdom ruling and devouring the world. Lebron is, by all the mainstream measures of modern America, one of the most successful people alive. But that assessment assumes Lebron is actually here, in the sense of being true to himself. And having listened to The King (as he is called by his worshipers) speak to the slavering hordes that greeted him upon his arrival in Miami, I conclude he is only sort of here. For he said to that deluded mob, “I chose Miami because this organization is all about family, and that’s what I’m all about.” And I could not have invented a larger falsity than that.

In 1996, long before the advent of Lebron James, I invented and published Ruby & Spear, a Buddhist novel, if you can imagine such a thing, that wondered for a few hundred pages what might happen if a vastly talented black basketball player developed a deep spiritual practice and a profound commitment to family and community before becoming a professional athlete? Would not his playing be imbued with all he had become? And would not the huge and talented Spear of my novel represent the quantum opposite fulfillment of the potentiality of the likes of LeBron James?

Ruby & Spear proved to be my last novelistic adventure with a big New York publisher. Sales (this time at Bantam) killed the book upon publication and fully three weeks before The New York Times declared the book to be pretty good. Hollywood sniffed around the story for a time, but the consensus among agents and studio gatekeepers was that since my black characters were disturbingly atypical and complex, and there was much talk of poetry and art and love and mysticism, and the humor was offbeat and subtle, and the female characters were every bit as strong and important as the male characters, and there was a shocking absence of violence, and the hero was a friggin’ Buddhist with a clairvoyant grandmother…who’d want to see a movie like that?

So today the myriad pundits suggest Lebron acted cruelly when he abandoned Cleveland for Miami. I think he acted predictably. A braver narcissist would have gone to New York, to the really big show. But Lebron, if you’ve ever watched him play, is a classic bully and not particularly brave. More than half of his many shots per game are dunks and few of these are contested. Anyone stupid enough to get in the way of nearly three hundred pounds of Lebron rampaging toward the hoop would surely suffer broken bones in the ensuing collision.

In the game of my youth (those fabled 1960’s and 70’s) Lebron would have been called for traveling every time he went to dunk, or penalized with a charging foul. But Lebron grew up as the game evolved to accommodate his style, which in less dramatic form was perfected by the not-very-talented-but-enormously-huge-and-strong Shaquille O’Neal knocking people over to score. Indeed, this legalized violence has necessitated adding a line in the paint five feet from the hoop, inside of which a player is permitted by the new rules to shove other players out of the way on his way to score. Thus for the likes of little old me, LeBron represents a further devolution of the game into staged bits and circus faire. Yawn.

Friends of mine not keen on sports, roll their eyes when I muse aloud about Lebron. “Why do you care?” they ask. “It’s such a huge waste of time, such a waste of human potential.”

Perhaps. But I was entranced by the spectacle of the overlords of America’s great city states bidding for the services of this inarticulate gladiator, a god to so many in our collapsing culture. The spectacle of billionaires groveling at the feet of this ephemeral colossus seemed a perfect echo of Christopher Lasch’s pronouncement that “Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.”

Greed upon greed beyond greed. Insatiable hunger, never to be appeased, even should they eat the entire globe. Buddha’s hungry ghosts unleashed upon the carcass of the dying culture. So it goes.

The first hour of Todd’s reading of Ruby & Spear may be heard gratis at UnderThe TableBooks.com and is available in its entirety from iTunes. The book itself may be had for pennies via the Interweb.

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