Monday, May 19, 2003

Monday, May 19, 2003 4:54:32 AM Joe Coluccio
The dreadful desperate dark world of writing.

I make no secret of it. I write. I do however when I am approached at a brisk café typing somewhat contentedly on this laptop computer, tell the person that I am merely getting some business document ready for the next day. So, my measure being took, I am then asked by the mostly retired person, who has been sold a bill of goods about the wonder of the computer and the internet, if I can get stock quotations fresh from the sprawling web right there in the restaurant. My immediate mental response is, 'What the hell would I do with them?' but I realize that I have established myself as some far seeing technologically savvy business maven, so I just explain that I don't have the proper wireless gear to grab greedy market wisdom.

I make no secret of it. I write. Except to myself. In the past I have needed all sort of personal prodding to get me to confront the blank screen that is portraying a blank piece of paper. The screen that is and is not pristine white paper actually makes my progress easier. Soiling white nothing with black ASCII code that I can completely erase with ease and will, silly spelling mistake and even sillier thoughts that I can change with equal ease but a bit more energetic act of will, and self publishing via copy and paste or FTP (really both) to the internet so that people can read has made a whole world of difference to me. (Aside: If the gods of microsoft and allied software vendors are insufficiently amused I lose power or some molecule collides with some bitful switch and just causes the whole thing to cascade to black. My world folds. I sigh! I reboot!) Here then is the true miracle of the dub dub dub, even I can make a fool of myself open for the whole world in 19 degrees of separation to view. So, those of you who actually take the time to read this, thanks, I can truly say, “I need you!" And can only hope that it pays some dividend to you.

I make no secret of it. I write. Last week I wrote a screenplay. This weekend I purchased a piece of software called Storyboard Quick 4.0. Here we encounter again the miracle of our new digital heritage. I search engined (hey, if you can Fed Ex?) to find software that would help me, I found a page with a demo, I was convinced by the pretty pictures, I purchased the product and downloaded it. About a half an hour later I was drawing my story. Story boarding is a process where you develop a screenplay visually. The results are much like a comic book. It is true that you can storyboard by artistic hand with sheets of paper or cards, but my drawing skills are as close to nonexistent as I have made them. PLUS I realize I only have my own dim understanding about the way in which a movie is structured. I storyboard to learn.

I make no secret of it. I write. I was at once exhilarated and appalled at what happened as I put, shot by shot, the scenes together. I have noticed in the past that as I write I become woefully upset as the depth of what is in my mind becomes more and more limited and hopelessly complicated. It never ends up as the simple, clear beautiful thing that I thought I was writing. Characters get in the way, Plot gets in the way. 'Why, I cry, would any sane person put up with this?' As I worked with the new program, those people and visual angles became concrete and started to limit even more of my vision. I became desperate. Every image as it became stable, no longer shimmered with the magnificent potential that I dreamed.

I make no secret of it. I write. "What,' I reasoned after some fortification of spirit, 'is telling a story but the process of limiting and molding the unlimited gloop that runs through my thinking?' There was still something more to consider. Without those choices, without that limitation, you really have nothing resembling narrative. Maybe an inchoate mess of streaming image and words. What was disturbing me was the jolt of emotion and viscera that sit behind all the lightning of words that rush to create an image which tries to stand. The great ones make it stand. The manifestation of the jolt of guts and memory.

I make no secret of it. I write. It is like firing a twisted arrow from a warped bow blindfolded at a target that only appears capriciously. That is writing. I ride and seek to tame the rush of it. Eventually portray it. With some joy I have discovered that after the initial work of writing, after the rough fashioning of story, comes the work of recreation where if I haven't precisely achieved this vision of emotional target, it is at least indicated. What happens after I pen Finis is in your court.

I write. It is a great secret that I explore, deplore and adore.

Monday, May 12, 2003

Sunday, May 11, 2003 8:51:00 AM Joe Coluccio
Am I the boob, googoo g'joob?
About three weeks ago I made a decision not to watch television. It has been an interesting experiment. Not because, you understand, I am a snob about the déclassé nature of the boob tube. I find people who ban their snooty minds and/or children from viewing have arguments as cogent as people who have found the most convincing new diet and conversations as mind numbing as golfers describing the dog leg just before the sand trap on number sixteen at Alamogordo Pines.

Au contraire --mon semblable,--mon frere-- I was raised in the blue electronic bath of the cathode ray. To me it was mother's milk and other things of that ilk. Perhaps that is the problem. Time for me to wean from the "glass teat".

What then, I ask, am I missing?

Look at what they call the news.
It is at the very least alarmist and certainly slanted to Middle America. Someone once explained to me that the soap opera formula was to immerse a population of upper middle class folk into a vat of lower class problems. It seems to me that news takes a similar tack. It amplifies very small and very tragic situations and places them statistically high in our living rooms so that we can cower and bite our nails to the very nub until the balm of commercial message can be applied. News sells soap as well.

A local newscaster answered when queried, "Well, what is good news? We can't very well report that Joe Doaks didn't get shot last night." The good news to these, what was it, “nattering nabobs" is the commercials. They don't really have any idea, nor do they care to spread the wonders of imagination and good work that occurs daily!
I have my own ghosts to scare me thank you very much!

I can't really comment on network prime time shows. I simply don't watch. There is that tradition of great TV comedy after you strain out the truly boring sit coms with comfortable people doing simple things in an unconvincing manner. I don't need to name the great shows. You know them. I have heard that a network manages a gem on occasion. I just don't have the patience to set aside a period of time to sit and watch. Although technologically adept (I can even set the timer on my VCR), I find myself far too lazy and disinterested to videotape for a later viewing.

Sports. I think TV is excellent for sports and I think it is well done. It is immediate and real. Somewhere along the line my interest waned. The Pirates get me in the spring for about a month. I watch a couple games even learn a new name or two. Alas Dixie Walker and Ralph Kiner or the whole menagerie that The "Gunner" named for the 60's Pirates are part of another time. The new world is about contracts and sports, I am told endlessly, is a "business". Sorry friends, no matter how many employ the litany, sports remains an entertainment. I preferred my players and teams to seem loyal to the city and region, even when they weren't. Shucks betrayed again!

Educational TV can be swell. Sadly it is not only bound by time constraints but defeated by the medium. It cannot give you the depth of a subject; it can provide an emotional response that starts you on a journey of discovery. It is often tainted by the same problem as news. SARS killed a little more than 500 people out of a world population of 6 billion. 0.00000000833%. This is not even a blip on a very finely attuned radar screen. I'm not saying that a story about a new potentially harmful vector in the world isn't something of concern. I am saying that last year it was shark bites. There was more danger in turning on the specials about rampaging marine life. TVs can spontaneously combust, you know. Saw it on America's Most Subtle Videos.

The commercials. Isn't it amazing that these little gems of video and audio aesthetic are the best of TV? And boy do I have a great admiration for the infomercial. It is a commercial that mimics a real television broadcast by interrupting itself with a commercial. This, I swear, is more ingenious than insidious. The brilliance of the whole concept sets both my tongue and my tail to wagging.

Maybe if there were all infomercials all the time I would turn the set back on.
Just when I figured where the yellow went.

Monday, May 05, 2003

Sunday, May 04, 2003 8:27:08 AM Joe Coluccio
I saw what you did, I know who you are

After about four years of journaling in the morning, I see a lot of what I did.

I made a deal in a dream, very shortly after I began my personal scratching, with my inner censor in which I was granted the kind of unlimited access that memory can allow to the very personal past. As I began to write, events began to come into close focus, memory tickled memory triggered event. Often along with those images, sometimes smells, sometimes sounds, at other times with a kind of synesthesia came a rush of emotion. I found myself blushing in embarrassment at gaffs that should by now have become less sharply pointed. I found myself laughing at some truly funny moments. I have relived days with folks that have passed on (even among the living), so delicate and so precise that it at times has taken my breath away.

It is the source, the wellspring from which my life and my writing derive and I was glad to find that the water there wasn't stagnant but fresh and strong and bubbling. As I journal it is possible to set a tributary of those ghostly waters flowing more closely to the surface. I am not always pleased with the result.

Stringing along with that memory comes a little self knowledge. Enough to keep me up at nights counting the mistakes I made along the way, which seem more numerous than the grains of sand flung into the night sky to form the milky way. Finally I realized that those mistakes were in reality no more than lighted blips along the way. Little reflector signs that I had been turning into large neon blinking display arrows pointing to gouts of landscape that I had been chewing up and never really spitting out. It came to me as I dismantled one relatively Las Vegas large blazing sign and filled over the hole making it resemble a fresh grave that these markers had one virtue over the others (the ones where I was one smart SOB and did everything right and caused joy in Mudville). They are there for me to remember. They make up the road map of a large portion of my memory. We remember the place where the bee stung us not the place where a pleasant picnic with crustless sandwiches and potato salad took place. And so we learn.

I wish that I could say that I no longer cringe when I see Joe take part in such asinine drama, like when he kicked his kindergarten teacher and got expelled from school before it really even started. Like when he lied and told Madame Rose that he could speak and read Italian. Didn’t think I was gonna tell you the real country blues, did you? The day I lost my life? The day I gained it back? That remains in the dark recesses of my daily journal and my mind.

Every so often I get a glimpse a small taste of the universal. It’s enough to make me believe in Jung and his archetypes. It comes as an extremely personal vision which then transcends and integrates. It comes in dreams. It comes when I am driving in the car. It comes when I write. For those few seconds I know without any doubt that I am connected every point of my being with every point of all other being, with the universe at small and at large. I get mystical just holding your hand.

What do you remember? Give old Mnemosyne a kick in the pants for me. Don’t worry we already know that you peed your pants in the third grade when someone slipped a frog under your belt. You’ve only got your life to win.