Category / Personal

by Edward Champion

We Can’t Be Funny Anymore We Can Be Funny, We Just Prefer to Stay Sane So We’re Taking a Break

The news is so fundamentally awful and depressing that we’ve now resorted to heavy drinking hanging with friends and disconnecting for a tad so that the profound rage, hopelessness and sorrow we feel doesn’t spread like a cancer into the depths of our soul — the way these incompetents in power want it to. We’ll be back on Tuesday.

[UPDATE: We walked thirty miles in 24 hours. If that doesn’t give you a sense of the crazed lengths we’ve gone to in order to remain calm, nothing will. Of course, wiser folks looking at our neuroses from the outside have been kind enough to put things into perspective. We speak for us (and them) in suggesting that you at least spend about twelve hours away from your television set (pointing out that recusal doesn’t necessarily translate into abdicating one’s responsibilities to stay informed!), doing something modest and without thought that reminds you of the world’s profound wonders. When in doubt, feed the ducks or flirt with someone.]

by Edward Champion

Conversation at Cafe

A: I’ve never seen the beginning of A Clockwork Orange. Every time I see the movie on TV, it always starts in on the part where Alex is raping the writer’s wife.
B: Okay, so at the beginning, they’re at this milkbar. They’re drinking milk, which is a sort of crack cocaine.
[ED, a Burgess and Kubrick freak, can’t stop his ears from pricking up.]
ED: Crack cocaine? I don’t think so. Did we ever once see Alex getting a case of the shits? It could have been amphetamines.
B: Methamphetamines, yes.
ED: It could have been alcohol. It could have been a futuristic version of Kahlua. Or do you think that the sensation of drinking the milk was all inside their heads? Perhaps a placebo effect?
B: Well, they did say that the milk sharpened everybody up for a bit of the old ultraviolence.
ED: Yes. But it sharpened them up. One might argue that the instinct to pillage was already there.
B: Or perhaps the milk represented something maternal.
ED: That too!
B: Given the Christ imagery in the film, the milk was a liquified form of heroin.
ED: Wait a sec. So you’re saying then that violence is irrevocably tied in with drugs?
B: Maybe.
ED: Well, I should point out that Hitler was a vegetarian and a teetotaler.

by Edward Champion

Break in the Storm

Okay, like you, I haven’t been sleeping. This Katrina thing depresses the hell out of me. And yet I am drawn to these horrible events because I have been obsessed with apocalypse since the age of four, which was when, I believe, I first learned about the Holocaust. Perhaps the much beloved churchgoer who once told my mother, “There’s something of the devil in that boy” (when I was five, no less) had a point. Although in my defense, I suppose this was probably because I dared to bring up the concept of reincarnation in a Sunday school classroom.

But I don’t want to become some fearmonger like Lileks or a warmonger like Reynolds or a hatemonger like Malkin or LGF. And I also don’t want this devastation, as severe as it is, to transform this blog into a place without humor or hope. So I’m going to limit “Katrina Headlines” to a once-a-day offering so that I can maintain my sanity. There are several other fine places to go if you really need the goods.

Because it boils down to this: Like B, I feel like the luckiest bastard on Earth. And you should too. Just be sure to donate to the Red Cross while you’re at it.

by Edward Champion

Mike Leigh’s Naked on DVD

Years ago, when I was a gaunt student, I had the opportunity to pick up the Criterion laserdisc edition of Mike Leigh’s Naked (one of my favorite films from the 1990s and one that you should watch immediately) for what was then a colossal sum: thirty dollars. Never mind that I didn’t own a laserdisc player. But I did conjure up some cockamamie idea about duping a VHS copy from a friend’s laserdisc. I demurred on my purchase, only to learn months later that the disc had gone out of print.

mike leigh\'s masterpiece A decade has now passed since that fateful day. Never did get a laserdisc player, but I did get me a DVD player well before it was fashionable. And even though I later got the opportunity to interview Mike Leigh (who, go figure, was a major hardass in person), many tears were shed over the fact that this film, an unapologetic masterpiece, a brutally honest and almost Doestoevskyian depiction of a drifter (played brilliantly by David Thewlis) and the lives he seems to alter and disrupt (when in fact it may be other lives and class trappings that alter and disrupt him), never made the jump to DVD.

Until now. Come September 20, Criterion will finally release this brilliant film to disc. I’m not certain if the commentaries are going to be reflective of the laserdisc ones or freshly cooked up for the DVD. Either way, this film’s ballsy magnificence, multilayered characters and deceptively fragmented narrative cannot be overpraised. And if you have any cinematic awareness whatsoever and still have not seen this film, then I urge you to fill in this cultural gap immediately. Hell, if I run into you at Ameoba come September, I will put this disc into your hands and persuade you to buy it.

The film is one of those rare Rorschach tests that presents oodles of multilayered human behavior for viewers to parse. You’ll constantly question how characters relate to each other, why they relate to each other, and how they can even stand each other. And then you’ll find out more details about them and understand why. Maybe. Because in Mike Leigh’s universe, there are a lot of gray areas and certainly no clear-cut explanations. The reason the film’s characters are so vivid is that Naked is perhaps the summation of Mike Leigh’s filmmaking technique, which involves improvising and developing characters with actors over the course of six months and only then working out what the film is about.

by Edward Champion

Bay Area Writers Group Forming

Like damn near every litblogger, we too have a novel that we’ve been working on that is progressing at a slow but steady clip. (Yes, we never sleep around here.) While we’re loath to announce anything that isn’t particularly finished*, the whole point of this post is to seek fairly serious (serious about the art, but not humorless!) writers based in the Bay Area for a fiction writers group that is being put together right now with a few other nice and passionate people.

We hope that this group will be brutally honest, but encouraging. Ideally, candidates should have steady bullshit detectors, a working knowledge of literature (meaning you read at least a book every two weeks and know what omniscient voice is), and passion to boot. Good grammar and basic storytelling skills are musts.

We should point out that this will be the first writers group we’ve been involved with in a while. Our last foray into the writers group world proved catastrophic, with nearly all of the short stories being written in second person and one unnamed person going in detail about all the coke she sent up her nose the previous night. This person then explained to us in great detail about the drug-related debauchery she was planning on engaging in that very night and responded to our story with the observation “Cool, I guess, but what’s a panegyric?” She failed to elaborate beyond this.

We should point out that all this was many years after the publication of Bright Lights, Big City.

We later came home and sobbed over how we were seduced by this seemingly credentialed coterie (a few were MFAs) and how this (again unnamed!) writers group took us in for saps.

But we have faith in this new writers group. These people are on the level. So if you’re interested, do drop us a line. Email address is to the right.

* — To wit, the novel is so loosey-goosey and unhoned right now that one character has been temporarily named “Bill Dungsroman.” Hardy har har!