January 31st, 2010 / No Comments » / by Mike
Lately I’ve been swamped at work writing about turtles and burnt out at home from writing about turtles and haven’t written anything worth reading on this blog in ages. I know, I know, “but what about the people?” you’re asking. “What about your legions of fans?” I’ve let them down, I’ll admit. Turned soft. The term “yella belly” comes to mind. But me, I’m a man of principal, and I missed this old text box and these old yammerings. So here’s something. It’s not much, but it’s what has kept me busy post-work these last few weeks, or months, or whatever. I thought about doing the whole “Best of the Decade” thing a month ago when 2010 was starting but A) never got around to it, and B) it wasn’t the end of the decade. So, here’s this instead.
WRESTLEFEST I
Know what looks great on a brand new HDTV? You guessed it: professional wrestling. I know, I know, it’s professional wrestling. And honestly, the DVD a friend and I rented for our night of pizza, beer and nostalgia was old and had terrible production value and wasn’t even full widescreen. But…wrestling! Who woulda thought? Back in the day we loved this stuff. Like, seriously loved it. The catchphrases, the betrayals, everything. Even of all the things I love most today, the movies that nail me to the seat and leave me thinking about all these deep ideas and careful camera angles… barely do they ever have the hold on me that wrestling did back in the ’90s. Back then, when a wrestler you loved was talking, you listened. You didn’t dare leave to get a snack or a drink. If you had to pee, you held it. When The Rock was facing Goldberg in a pay-per-view, you gathered your friends together and ponied up 60bucks to watch it. There isn’t a two-hour film in the world I’d throw down $60 to watch today. Never.
Thinking wasn’t encouraged during Raw Is Raw or Monday Night Nitro, and you know what? That’s what made it good. None of it was real, you knew that, and these characters…you didn’t have to feel bad for them when they got pulverized in the ring or Chris Jericho made a nickname out of them (oh, Stinko Malenko!). We turned our backs on our favorites just as quickly as their allies did in the show. It was never personal, it was wrestling.
Read more…
Posted in: film, television, white noise
January 14th, 2010 / No Comments » / by Mike
“If I could say what is in my mind in Sanscrit or even Latin I would do so. But I cannot. I speak for the integrity of the soul and the greatness of life’s inanity; the formality of its boredom; the orthodoxy of its stupidity. Kill! Kill! let there be fresh meat . . .
The imagination, intoxicated by prohibitions, rises to drunken heights to destroy the world. Let it rage, let it kill.”
- William Carlos Williams
“There’s no such thing as an unwritten life, only a badly written one.”
- The Brothers Bloom
So this is it, the last in my little poetry experiment. My tangent. It was kinda nice to change it up around here a little bit, search in the closet for some skeletons to fly on the flagstaff. What a rush.
What I like so much about writing are the surprises. I never initially intended to write warm-up acts to the poems I posted, disclaimers or parables or anything. That wasn’t the plan. Honestly, I was just trying to fill in the gaps. But I did want to set each one up somehow, with a date and maybe a tiny hint at each’s context. That seed eventually grew into all the pre-poem mini-narratives and analyses you see in the 6 posts below–which, I’ll admit, sometimes felt a little indulgent or self-serving but, let’s just be honest, this is a blog. Can it really be anything but indulgent? Really, cards on the table, who am I kidding?
But it’s the surprise part I like, how one sentence can sometimes open a floodgate and give birth to this whole other…thing. I love getting lost in the process. Other times, though, I’m suspicious of it, especially when I hear people talk about writing as catharsis. The method, they say, helps them put things into perspective, and then I wonder whether that perspective is a product of the creative “birthing” process, some kind of hidden peace or clarity coming out through the spontaneity of words on paper, or if it was the goal all along. And if it was the goal, is there really anything spontaneous about it? It’s closing your eyes before going from Point A to Point B …then acting surprised when you get there.
At some point I started wondering what writing really was, even started resenting it. With the right kind of prose, couldn’t anything look 20/20? How much of these interpretations do we control? What’s real and what’s rationalized, “sorted out,” tidied? Is writing just a tangible, more articulate way of lying to ourselves?
Then it happened. I was driving on the highway when all of sudden it’s bumper to bumper. Dead stop. And I see smoke in the distance. Read more…
Posted in: poetry
Tags: Reflective
January 10th, 2010 / No Comments » / by Mike
In college I had this ongoing joke with a girl I shared a couple of writing workshops with. My pieces, they were always wordy and introspective. I liked the technique of telling about a half-page’s worth of action, then expounding on it for next 3, analyzing it, exaggerating it. Action, commentary, action, action, commentary–that structure didn’t do it for me. I wanted 90% commentary–all commentary. How else could I really get at the double consciousness thing I was going for? The idea that everything is two-sided, love and hate, rational and irrational, emotion and logic, and that each side is fully aware of the other. How else than to make my lusts into obsessions and my doubts into pure dreads could I really nail it? I think what I was going for most was avoiding definition. I didn’t want my characters to come to revelations; no epiphanies or morals; I didn’t want arcs to peak and then resolve. I wanted something a little more… blah. Something blurry and real.
Anyway, the joke, if you want to call it that, was that this girl would call me a romantic after each new piece of mine she read. And I’d laugh and look down and say, “No… What? No way. A cynic–if anything–but not a romantic.” And this was our thing. She’d smirk, say that it was sweet, and I’d blush, and say she didn’t get it.
What’s funny in all this is just how quickly after graduation I began to see things differently. Yeah, okay, I am a romantic. And yes, I’m also a cynic. It was the whole idea of everything I was writing at the time–the one theme I kept coming back to and trying to get right–and I was never even able to just admit this to myself, as if the word alone–”romantic”–made me into a sucker, naive or pathetic somehow. I still thought of “jadedness” as a badge that you wear or a mark of maturity, instead of a disease, a cancer you treat in stages. It defines you the same that it means absolutely nothing. It is possible to love and lose, and then be angry, and then be messed up for long time, and still one day get out of the shower, look yourself in the mirror and understand that the fog around you isn’t all heavy or all light but rather a million shades and slivers of everything, some parts cold and others warm, some sharp, others soft. If we do it right, the fog should be a crowded, directionless mist of honesty, not necessarily changing our reflection, just aging it a bit.
So I guess the best way to introduce this poem would be to say that it’s from before this “revelation,” if you want to call it that, happened. It’s still searching for extremes, in a way yearning for them, but it’s detached and aware enough to get that they only exist now in flashes–just not enough so to totally accept that. …I think.
This one’s from March 26, 2009. It’s called “Antique Soundscapes.”
Read more…
Posted in: poetry
Tags: Reflective
January 2nd, 2010 / No Comments » / by Mike
“Half of what I say is meaning less
But I say it just to reach you”
-The Beatles
Every now and then something happens and the air around you gets heavy. Nothing changes in these moments–things look the same, smell the same, even kind of feel the same–but you know that whatever is going on in those few seconds when time slows down is important, representative of something bigger. You usually don’t know how or why, but instead of just passing, these moments present themselves to you, stop dead in their tracks as if to tap you on the shoulder or wrap themselves around you. “Something’s happening here,” these moments whisper in your ear. “Are you paying attention?”
Times like these, I think, are what poems are made of.
I don’t pretend to know what I’m talking about. The blog, all the words and pictures and poems and theories, it’s all spackle covering up the total wordlessness of not knowing. But a poem is like a snapshot, a firefly you catch in your hands but can’t fully analyze or admire because you know that if you loosen your fingers just a little too much, it’ll fly away and not make sense anymore. They’re tiny, piecemeal stabs at understanding and remembering. If I can only capture why this moment is important, what about it made the lighting dim and the camera close in, remember the motion of her lips when she spoke, the pit in my stomach, the sound of the wind, then I’ll know I’ll have lived. I’ll have proof–on paper. A history. Something tangible.
This piece spawned from a moment like that. It wasn’t anything earth-shattering or huge–just something I noticed, a shirt, and what I thought it meant
Poems, I think, are attempts at achieving those other, rarer kinds of moments, the seconds that pass where all of a sudden you’re a million years old and sitting in a rocking chair, wise and completely at peace, content in knowing that you finally get it, you’re not confused anymore–or better, you’re just old enough to understand that there is no “getting it,” there’s only trying. And that’s okay.
This one’s from March 5, 2009. It’s called “An Old Shirt.” Read more…
Posted in: poetry
Tags: Reflective
December 27th, 2009 / No Comments » / by Mike
“I didn’t realize you wrote poetry
I didn’t realize you wrote such bloody awful poetry”
-The Smiths
A couple posts ago I was talking about all that you could get away with in poetry. Well, this piece, I look at it today and it still makes me laugh, that I not only dedicated an evening to putting it together but that I actually had the balls to bring it in front of a class and read it aloud. People are writing diddies about their grandmothers and their tatoos, ex-boyfriends and alcohol, depression and sex. And I’m busy in my room crafting an ode to HBO’s The Wire, only with dogs instead of people. Oh, how I crack myself up.
I was just looking for a reason. When you’re in the middle of one of the best tv series ever made and in a poetry workshop in your last year of college and you overhear dogs going crazy in the distance at a dog park, it’s only natural that you imagine them warring over territory, that some dog drug deal has gone bad and there’s a badass vigilante pooch somewhere in the bunch out to disrupt the trade. Only natural.
I had a lot of fun with this one. It’s from March 15, 2009. It’s called “The Altercation at Poochie Park.”
Read more…
Posted in: poetry
Tags: Comedy, Reflective
December 19th, 2009 / No Comments » / by Mike
Ah, the elegy.
Sometimes I think they’re all I ever do (you know, minus the meter). I look at each piece I write and, whatever the topic, in one way or another it always seems like some form of hat tip to something that’s gone. The flowers I rest by who or whatever’s headstone usually accompanied by a huge loogie I hock on their grave.
What can I say, I love the hybrid. I’m fascinated by it, the past, what it means, what we’re supposed to do with its leavings. And when anger’s involved, I don’t know, the mix of fragile beauty and biting ugliness seems so real to me. Idolatry and blasphemy. “I miss everything about you–except your stupid face.”
I even like the word. “Elegy.” Such a nice sound for such a sad sentiment.
Anyway. This one’s from February 12th, 2009. It’s called “The Year You Dyed and Were Reborn” Read more…
Posted in: poetry
Tags: Reflective
December 17th, 2009 / 2 Comments » / by Mike
*Free Verse: poetic verse that follows no fixed rhythmic or metrical pattern
One of the few artforms that’s managed, maybe only through self-promotion of the so-called intellectual “elite,” to uphold a genuine sense of untouchability is poetry. There have been bad boys, sure–Robert Frost, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams…–who’ve messed with the form and made it their own, in a lot of cases demystifying and humanizing it. But still, even today poetry remains the only medium I can think of that people are hesitant to unapologetically trash. People don’t like a movie, it’s because it’s horrible. A band, because it’s talentless. But a poem? Well…maybe it’s just not for them.
You ask me, the reason for all this is the bunk misconception that poetry is this highly refined, almost celestial form, measured in syllabics and strict rhyme and whatever else. And yeah, sometimes that can be true, but in all of it there’s this huge exception, this clause in the contract that says, “Ok, everything I just taught you–forget it. Now instead, do whatever the hell you want”: and that’s free verse. Free verse says you don’t have to rhyme or count syllables. You don’t have to have the same amount of lines in each stanza. You can write how you speak and write about anything, write dialogue if you want to, indent lines in the middle of stanzas, float words in the middle of the page. This is creativity, dammit! It expresses itself however it expresses itself. This is where the term “poetic license” was born.
But they didn’t focus too much on that in grade school.
Free verse was one of the things that made me an English major. Nothing has to have rules — this is a pretty powerful revelation. And once it happens to you, you start worrying more about actually writing and less about fitting into some structure of what you think writing is supposed to be. You start exploring deeper the things you care about and why you care about them, thinking about the things you think about, fleshing out your memories and sense of humor, all the passing thoughts that somehow seem like more than just thoughts when they shuffle by. Say what you want to say, how you want to say it. We’re all poets, each trying to find our voice in prose we tune to sound like music.
You can get away with pretty much anything free-forming (trust me), and after awhile, it’ll stop feeling like you’re “getting away” with stuff and more like you’re making it, pulling it out and articulating it from the bottom of wherever emotions come from. Which can be as scary as it can be awesome. And eye-opening. And even sometimes fun.
This one’s from January 27th of this year. It’s called “Mr Frederick.” Read more…
Posted in: poetry
Tags: Reflective
December 14th, 2009 / No Comments » / by Mike
I realize I’m not writing as much as a used to. This is probably due to three key reasons:
A) I’m working full-time now
2) I was focusing on buying a new computer and transferring my URL to Wordpress for a while
D) I just discovered Half-Life 2.
Having said that…more than a few times I’ve considered posting some of the poetry I’ve written in some of my college workshops on here. And I think for the sake of staying semi-active, and for making this blog a bit more comprehensive, I’m finally gonna do it. I thought about looking through my archives and picking out some “early-period” stuff as well, but it was just too much. To simplify, I’ll stick with just workshop material, and every few days I’ll post a poem that I presented in class, starting with one from my first poetry-exclusive workshop.
It’s funny, re-reading a lot of the older work in these folders. A lot of what I imagined at the time to be these profound metaphors now seem pretty lame, or sometimes plain nonsensical. But I think it’s interesting to try to reconnect with older “versions” of your self that you don’t necessarily relate to anymore. To even kind of embrace the whininess or pretentiousness–because if nothing else, it was real at the time.
This piece I still kinda like, though. The exercise was to write a poem from a random newspaper headline. After you have that base, it’s cool to see how your obsessions kind of leak back in to make this hybrid of author-specific themes and an out-there “plotline.”
This one’s from November 15th, 2008. It’s called “Sky Birth.”
Read more…
Posted in: poetry
Tags: Reflective
December 13th, 2009 / No Comments » / by Mike
A few months ago, maybe half a year, it came out that HBO was ready to do a third season of Flight of the Conchords whenever Brett and Jemaine were, but that the guys were unsure, not exactly putting on the kibosh, just kind of leaving the question open-ended. They gave the impression that if another season was gonna happen, it wouldn’t be airing any to soon.
This made sense to me. As funny as the first 2 seasons were, they were incredibly wacky. Not a bad wacky, but a kind of wacky that could easily go all crickets if the novelty was to wear or the writing got less clever. So, in a way, even though it might have meant no more episodes of Flight, no more Murray, no more Pretty Prince of Parties, bongo solos or racist fruit vendors, I had to feel this was the right decision. To go out on top. To only go on talking if you still have something worthwhile to say.
But, now it’s been confirmed that Flight is dead and it feels more bitter than it does sweet (well, not sweet, but you know what I mean). This statement was posted on their site yesterday: Read more…
Posted in: television
Tags: Comedy, HBO
December 13th, 2009 / No Comments » / by Mike
Pretend it’s 5 years ago and you can tell the future.
Being a psychic and all, you’re obviously wearing a turban or fez, and, rubbing a giant marble, you glance over to me, go all Nostradamus and say: “You know, Mike, in 5 year’s time you’ll be writing articles on litter and the question of climate of change.”
Then sit back. Just wait for it. 10 to 1 I’d laugh at you.
Crack up, actually. Uncontrollably. Laugh you out of your carnie psychic booth. Or maybe I’d just roll my eyes.
Even if you told me this last year I wouldn’t have bought it. It’s funny, how things happen. One day you’re looking for work, the next you land an unpaid internship (if it’s possible to “land” unpaid things), and the day after that you’re working for the company you interned for, pretending to be passionate about global warming and cigarette butts. It’s the game. Get or get got.
Here’s an article I wrote for where I work’s website. It’s about cigarette litter. Note the cheesy title and the obligatory call to action at the end. I also wrote little news-item diddies on the homepage about our move into a larger place and the craziness of the climate debate–those I titled “Movin’ On Up” and “‘Is there a Voice of Reason in the house?’,” respectively.
My goal is to add as many bad jokes and as much of my corny humor into the business as I possibly can. People like that, right? Shows a Human touch.
Anyway, the article’s attached below and the other stuff’s on Ocean’s site. I write pretty much all the tidbits on there. That’s why they call me Mr. Tids.
See? Bad jokes. Can’t be helped.
Oh, and one more thing, the “I” referred to in the piece isn’t actually me. It’s my boss.
This is me ghostwriting. It’s like regular writing, only scary. Read more…
Posted in: essay/social crit
