Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on October 17, 2009
Filed Under Music | Leave a Comment
Offices Within Offices
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on October 16, 2009
Filed Under Business | 2 Comments
The office was ensconced within a vicious slab that prioritized desperate spendthrift tendencies over comfort and efficiency. The man who rented out this thin rectangle on the 33rd floor seemed to believe that the $1,200 he paid each month granted him some illusory status. He took advantage of the economic downturn and shouted at the receptionist every time she failed to mention his firm name. The powerless receptionist, who had initiated with an attorney to secure her job just after the Dow first plummeted below 10,000, was forced to comply with a smile. She hoped she wouldn’t have to lower her adulterous standards, but there were enough office rumors to make her suitably feared. She fed her priest all the sordid details in confession so that she could live with herself.
With special permission, the man who rented out this tenuous office could use the floor’s conference room, where he could hold meetings and attempt to persuade people that he rented out a substantial percentage of the 33rd floor. But every client with half a brain noticed his firm’s dubious placard situated next to the firm renting out the floor. So he took it upon himself to only meet with people who made less money than he did. And he took it upon himself to persuade them to give him money. There was never a question of morality. After all, he had office he had to pay for at $1,200 each month and he had to spend money on people who had more money than he did.
The receptionist was fired in June when the attorney ended the affair. After all, the attorney soon found himself more heavily supervised by the partners and he could not risk any half dalliance on the public record. He paid the receptionist a lot of money to shut up. But the receptionist could not find another job and, therefore, could not find another man with money to fuck. But since she had a lot of money — enough to rent out a small office for a good year — and since the man who rented out the thin rectangle had stumbled onto hard times, she decided to sublet his office. For $600 each month, the ex-receptionist rented out half of the man’s office. She was able to secure use of the conference room more effectively than the man because people on the 33rd floor still feared her. The attorney feared that she would reveal his affair and offered to give her more money if she would go away. Instead, she decided to sublet his office too. Soon, the ex-receptionist was traveling between her two sublets. The partners found the situation within the attorney’s office quite awkward and decided to let the attorney go. (Because the attorney was stressed out about the subletting situation, and because his anxiety increased because he never quite knew when the ex-receptionist would start working in his office, his work began to suffer.) The firm, thanks to the economy, had fallen on hard times. And the ex-receptionist, who ran an under-the-table cocaine operation within the 33rd floor’s otherwise ethical business makeup, then bought out the ex-attorney’s office. She also told the partners that she would rent out the thin rectangular office for $1,600 each month. Soon the honest man was told he had to leave and a pimp soon replaced him. The ex-receptionist began doing good business on the prostitution front. As the firm’s finances grew more shaky, and the ex-receptionist was feared more than ever before, she began — after establishing a reliable relationship with a fancy hotel two blocks away — recruiting various support staff to fuck the remaining men who had money to burn. The firm, seeing no other option for survival, then merged with the ex-receptionist’s lucrative business. And the ex-receptionist made a lot of money. She adopted a new philosophy, independently arrived at. Always meet with people who made less money than you did and be sure to take it.
The office was ensconced within a vicious slab that prioritized desperate spendthrift tendencies over comfort and efficiency. The woman who rented out this thin rectangle on the 33rd floor seemed to believe that the $1,600 she paid each month granted her some illusory status.
Live Conversation with Sarah Hall — November 3, 2009
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on October 15, 2009
Filed Under hall-sarah | Leave a Comment
The Bat Segundo Show may be on temporary hiatus (with several shows still in the backlog). But that doesn’t mean that I’m not talking with authors. Sarah Hall, author of How to Paint a Dead Man (the subject of a recent roundtable discussion on these pages), will be coming through New York. She’ll be appearing at McNally Jackson on November 3, 2009 at 7:00 PM, where I will be chatting with her about her fourth novel.
Please note that this conversation will not be recorded or released as a future Segundo show. I am remaining a stickler about my hiatus. Thankfully, this particular conversation is permissible through a technicality. So here’s a chance to see the Segundo format unfold in real time with a very talented writer. Feel free to stop by on November 3rd for some high-octane conversation.
Scene from a Mall (1993)
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on October 14, 2009
Filed Under Ed's Films | 2 Comments
In 1993, I took a film class and was grouped with an amicable ragtag crew. We filmed little shorts with the Panasonic PV-535, the only consumer VHS camera that had chroma key and that was compulsively used at just about every opportunity. The camera had a little mini-camera that you would mount on the top. You couldn’t directly feed in a video signal into the camera, but those who used the camera certainly improvised around the limitations. I would make long-distance telephone calls to video engineers and technicians around the nation, wondering if a converter existed to transfer the signal. I even attempted to persuade Panasonic to send me the blueprint, but they weren’t exactly flexible to some 19-year-old kid trying to hack their proprietary system. The camera had been given to me and I certainly wasn’t in the position to purchase another one to reverse engineer it. But it did serve me and several other folks quite well during the early 1990s.
As the guy with the equipment, I somehow ended up being the one who organized the shoots. I certainly never intended to seize control. I was just the guy who ended up with logistical ideas. I rotated crew duties, shifting directorial, editing, and photographic duties after I asked our crew members specifically what they were interested in doing. In Sacramento, we had a small ensemble of actors that included several friends, my sister, and all of the crew members. I solicited ideas from the group, often stepping in to help others flesh out their stories into a screenplay. I had spent much of high school studying screenplays (I once had my Terminator 2 screenplay book confiscated by my English teacher after my friend Tom and I were geeking out as the teacher delivered a lecture), writing scripts, and even attempted to make a feature film (called Three Kinds of Respect). Armed with this experience, I’d often sit next to a writer at a computer, asking the writer questions about the characters and the situations. We’d then bang out an intricate shooting script.
The above film, “Scene from a Mall,” was one of many films made during this period. It was built around an improvisational situation in which I played a disturbed man and Misa Whiteford played a woman waiting for her boyfriend. We shot this at the Country Club Mall in Sacramento, California, about ten years before the renovation. I suppose we approached this mall because, like Sunrise Mall, the 1960s aesthetic appealed to everybody. (It certainly reminded me of the original version of Dawn of the Dead.)
I’ve revised the film slightly, taking out about 40 seconds from the original version. At the time, I was editing these little films using two four-head VCRs. So you’d be able to cut two shots and get it roughly within a half second of where you wanted. This was trickier than it sounds. Because you had to anticipate that the output VCR would begin recording at precisely one third of a second after you pressed the RECORD button. And it therefore took multiple attempts for each cut. When I later learned how to cut and splice Super 8, and when I worked on flatbeds, it was a luxury to be able to cut on the exact frame. The present generation is spoiled with their NLEs.
Of course, now that I’m working with NLEs, I thought I would exonerate my 19-year-old self and offer the cuts that I had intended all along just before getting this film up on YouTube. What once took patient hours now takes about one twentieth of the time.
The editing limitations never stopped me from being ambitious. I would eventually make another short film that would contain more than 100 shots and would be filmed in San Francisco, Folsom Lake, and various points around Sacramento. (I even managed to shoot some video with an ancient black-and-white video camera, but the camera was on its last legs and it actually shocked the cameraman and never worked again. My mother yelled at me for this technical deficiency, as if I had deliberately killed the camera. But that’s another story.)
I’m going to slowly get some of these old films up onto YouTube — in large part because the videotape sources are starting to deteriorate. And if I don’t digitize some of this footage now, it may be gone forever. (These films are from fifteen to seventeen years ago. Given that videotape is known to deteriorate within twenty years, it appears that I’ve got my hands full.)
I don’t know if I still have the original sources for this film, but I wince at all the mall chatter contained within the audio. I may revisit this film again and do my best to filter out the background noise and boost the dialogue. But however I mess with these films, I promise that Han Solo will not shoot first.
When I Had Hair
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on October 13, 2009
Filed Under Personal | 4 Comments
In the mid-1990s, I made my way around various film and theater circles. My interests were mainly centered around the prospect of putting on a good show. I enjoyed being one of those wizards behind the curtain executing an illusion. And it didn’t matter whether it was coming up with a wacky storyline or perfecting a visual detail that only a handful of people would notice. But because I was often so lively when I worked on sets, friends began to insist that I should act in their projects. One even promised me a bottle of vodka for a day of work. And it seemed impolite to say no. I would begin to point out to them that, although I had taken several acting classes to understand the process, there were plenty of people out there who could act.
But no, they wanted me. I had something that these actors didn’t. Or maybe they just liked seeing me ham it up. So in my early twenties, I would often be enlisted to act in short films and plays. I would either play authority figures (attorneys and doctors) or completely crazy characters (psychotic killers and lunatics in a sanitarium). I would develop an intricate character backstory far exceeding anything the writer had intended, and I would often work out elaborate character relationships with other actors so that we would have additional facets to work from during a scene. And it was all a great deal of fun.
Recently I discovered a videotape containing one such scene. I was twenty-two. It was 1996. I was enlisted by my pal Han Lee to play a scene from Glengarry Glen Ross for his film directing class at San Francisco State University. The other guy, playing Shelly Levene, is Eric Gibboney. At the very least, the clip demonstrates to the world that there once was a time in my life in which I did indeed have hair!
Am I Going to Be Doing This at Fifty?
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on October 12, 2009
Filed Under Confusion | 1 Comment
Eating Young Jewish Writers
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on October 12, 2009
Filed Under Foer, Jonathan Safran | 2 Comments
[The following article is an excerpt from my soon-to-be-published book, Eating Young Jewish Writers.]
When I was young, I would often spend the weekend at my grandmother’s house. She would ask me if I was hungry. And when I would cry, she would tell me that I needed to toughen up and expand my gustatory horizons. It wasn’t until years later that I realized she was testing me to see if I had eaten a young Jewish writer for dinner.
You see, my grandmother survived the Great Depression eating young Jewish writers. It wasn’t that she was anti-Semitic or anything. My grandmother would scavenge around America looking for inedibles. Unfortunately, other hobos had eaten the rest of the food. When the rotting potatoes, discarded scraps of meat, skins and the bits that clung to bones and pits had all been exhausted, the people who were still hungry would turn to other human beings to eat. This was before the Holocaust, when one could still eat a young Jewish writer and not be declared a National Socialist. I remember attending hotel buffets: while the rest of us kept our meals vegetarian, there would be some adventurous diners who would gnaw upon young Jewish writers and think nothing of it. After all, Jews tended to write a lot of books. This was one of the reasons that Alfred Kazin made so many infrequent appearances in his younger days. He feared being eaten by those who weren’t picky.
It was my grandmother who taught me that eating a young Jewish writer saved you money. The meat would last a long time. You wouldn’t have to go to a butcher. You could just show up at some shul, wait for some eager young Jewish intellectual to open up his notebook, throw a burlap sack over his head, and whisk him away. You could really make a young Jewish writer last a long time if you had a walk-in freezer. Of course, you’d have to inure yourself to his shrieks of anguish as you chopped him up with the hatchet. But if you were hungry enough, well, the possibilities were limitless.
We thought my grandmother was the greatest chef who ever lived. And we’d enjoy our meals until we realized that we were eating human meat. Then we’d throw up onto our plates and ask for seconds. There was always plenty of young Jewish meat to go around.
POSSIBLE AGAIN
When I was 2, the writers of all my bedtime books were young Jewish writers. The first thing I can remember learning in school was how to pet a young Jewish writer without accidentally killing it. This required some skill because many young Jewish writers were hypochondriacs. One summer my family fostered a young Jewish writer. I kicked him. My father told me that we don’t kick young Jewish writers. Years later, the young Jewish writer would write a three-volume memoir about how he had experienced severe anti-Semitism when staying with my family. He would base an entire lecture around the incident. Because of this, there were many years where I was banned from attending bar mitzvahs. When I had earned enough pocket money as a teenager, I was forced to hire a group of young Jewish writers to kick me repeatedly over the weekend.
When I was 7, I mourned the death of a young Jewish writer I’d won the previous weekend. I discovered that my father had chopped up the young Jewish writer and flushed him down the toilet. I told my father — using other, less familial language — we don’t flush young Jewish writers down the toilet. When I was 9, I had a babysitter who didn’t want to hurt anything. She put it just like that when I asked her why she wasn’t reading young Jewish writers with me.
“How is reading a young Jewish writer hurting him?” I asked.
“Because we goys can’t possibly know their level of suffering. We might hurt them accidentally if we read about their pain.”
The babysitter’s intention might or might not have been to convert us, but being a kid herself, she lacked whatever restraint it is that so often prevents a full retelling of this particular story. Frank is probably eating a young Jewish writer as I type these words.
Mark Twain said that quitting smoking is among the easiest things you can do: he did it all the time. I would add avoiding cannibalism to the list of easy things. In high school I refused to eat human flesh — whether Jewish or not Jewish, young or old — most often to claim a bit of identity in a world of people whose identities seemed to come effortlessly. I also wanted to be the biggest wanker in America. I wanted people to hate me because I crammed my views down their throat. Because I was a smug kid then and I’m a smug kid now. Eating young Jewish writers is certainly wrong and I don’t know if I can forgive my grandmother for what she did. But writing a boastful book on the subject is almost certainly worse. Thankfully, I have hired a bunch of young Jewish writers to beat me up at every stop I make on my next book tour. Together, we can correct the moral divide. But if you’re not willing to beat me up, perhaps you can find it within your heart to spend $25.99 on my 352 page book, Eating Young Jewish Writers.
Happy Columbo Day!
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on October 12, 2009
Filed Under Holidays | Leave a Comment
New Review
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on October 11, 2009
Filed Under Reviews | Leave a Comment
In all the NYFF madness, I failed to note that my review of Morris Dickstein’s Dancing in the Darkappeared in Friday’s edition of the Chicago Sun-Times. It begins:
While the intrepid academic Morris Dickstein has been noodling around on Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (W.W. Norton, $29.95) for 29 years, the regrettable surprise is that the chapters read like airless lectures delivered to a fidgety audience that’s only sitting through the whole darn talk for a college credit or a free barbeque.
You can read the rest here.
Coverage Interruptus
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on October 9, 2009
Filed Under Film, New York Film Festival | Leave a Comment
A last-minute deadline for a very fun and entirely unanticipated eleventh hour project has cropped up. This development means a break in New York Film Festival coverage. I have quite a number of films that I still have to write about (and not just NYFF offerings), and my plans are to attempt to unroll as much of this as I can in the next week.
But for folks still on the fence about the films that are playing in the final days, here’s a quick rundown of immediate thoughts. Todd Solondz’s Life Under Wartime is a flawed offering, but but not without its moments. I can’t echo the angry “I’m done with Solondz” sentiments that seems to have made the rounds. I’m certainly not done with him. But if you’re looking for Happiness redux, you’re likely to be disappointed. I hesitate to recommend the film to anyone who is new to Solondz.
You can read my review of Broken Embraces here.
I had to miss Bluebeard because of a conflicting appointment, but Catherine Breillat is always an interesting and provocative filmmaker, and I hope to have a chance to see the film at a later time. I had to miss Bong Joon-Ho’s Mother for similar reasons, but I’ve asked around and heard solid but not ecstatic buzz about this latest offering from the South Korean filmmaker behind The Host.
And while I admire the intelligence that is often contained within Claire Denis’s films, I’m afraid that White Material was a disappointment for me. The film took a perfectly interesting subject (white imperialism) and turned it into a mostly pedestrian and sleep-inducing movie. (Had I not been wired on coffee, I am almost certain that I would have fallen asleep. I wanted to throttle the white characters for their narcissism and thoughtless stupidity.) But I can report that Denis was very passionate in the press conference that followed the screening, particularly when responding to an idiotic journalist who suggested that the African people were “tribal.” I have both video and audio of the exchange, and I hope to get this up, along with my review, early next week.
There’s also a full-length Segundo interview coming with a renowned filmmaker. Stay tuned on these pages for more. But in the meantime, have a fantastic three-day weekend!
Books To Jump Up and Down Over
Beyond Heaving Bosoms by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. The famed writers behind Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have written a very funny and thoughtful volume about romances, both Old Skool and New Skool. Here is a book that any smug and humorless literary manboy beating his flabby passive chest over Banville or Bolano should probably read pronto, if only for the distant possibility that he might get over himself. While the Choose Your Own Adventure segment at the end caused me to have a very disturbing dream involving Shelley Long (don't ask), Sarah and Candy did have me rethinking many of my own misperceptions when I wasn't busy laughing. They're not afraid to take on the New York Times Bok Review or even the groupthink within certain sectors of the romance community.
Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. This wild and highly enjoyable narrative involves two sisters (presumably, the third one was still being rented out by Chekhov), a hippie ex-junkie mother who lives with seventeen dogs, a murder, gambling, and libidinous Hollywood actresses who live in Woodstock. But this is the wonderful Maggie Estep we're talking here. And what seems at first like a quirky yarn becomes something unexpectedly moving about connectivity. What I love about Estep's work is the way that she'll juxtapose an extremely astute observation (now that you mention it, why do cab drivers always have somebody to talk with on the phone past midnight?) with an often outrageous story development.
Generosity by Richard Powers. It doesn't come out until September 29th, but Richard Powers's latest will have anyone committed to books reconsidering their literary fervor. I foresee some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels, but book bloggers, YouTube chroniclers, and MFAs would do well to plunge into this chance-taking narrative, which introduces vital questions about what the reader's relationship is with media, scientific dissection, and "creative nonfiction." Are we rats fleeing to happy cities? Or can we find the humanism within the purported plague?
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is one of the most underrated fiction writers working today. Much as On the Night Plain proved that Lennon had a lot more in the toolbox than heartfelt (and often very funny) suburban satire, this slim but fascinating volume juxtaposes 100 small-town anecdotes -- arranged by category -- in a manner that reads, at times, like Nicholson Baker's passions for minutiae and, at other times, Stewart O'Nan's concern for psychological detail. The result is fiction that makes us wonder about whether one person's subjective view of particulars can entirely be trusted. This book never found a publisher in 2005. But thankfully, Graywolf has released it in the United States, along with Lennon's latest novel, The Castle.
Wonderful World by Javier Calvo. This wonderfully raucous volume has been completely ignored by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. But it's probably one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had this year. Calvo cavalierly mashes up multiple genres and manages to mix up familial subtext with larger-than-life, almost cartoonish characters. (Indeed, one might argue that one mobster's penis is a character of its own in this sprawling novel.). This is not an easy thing to pull off, but Calvo makes it work. And it's helped immeasurably by Mara Faye Lethem's idiom-specific translation. (See longer post.)
The Means of Reproduction, Michelle Goldberg This thoughtful book tackles the complicated (and little discussed) subject of reproductive rights from numerous angles, which includes a number of unpleasant but necessary ones. The upshot is that there isn't a quick fix solution for declining birth rates and fundamentalist abuses. Just about every political faction has contributed to the friction. But you'll want to read this book anyway to refamiliarize yourself with the topic, but also to understand just what's occurred during the past several decades to get us where we are today. (See also podcast interview with Goldberg.)
