Save Community

One of my favourite Abed "moments" is from the episode where he got the news that his favourite show "Cougar Town" was being moved to midseason.  Poor Abed was devastated and now in the wake of the news that "Community" has met with the same midseason fate, I'm beginning to wonder if it wasn't show creator Dan Harmon's way of telling us what was to come.

It's not my style to get uppity. As a fan of shows like "Better Off Ted" and "Arrested Development" I'm used to networks sacrificing quality shows on the altar of ratings. I know it's a business, but I think it's bad business to axe a show that has dedicated superfans like Community obviously does.

Maybe NBC doesn't understand exactly what they have in their hands or maybe I just don't get why every single human being on the planet doesn't watch Community. So I decided to rewatch Season 1 to see if Community could pass my ultimate test: Can it be watched over and over again?

Yes. Yes, it can.

 The show's pilot opens with students milling about campus. A skinny bald man is making as ass out of himself with a boombox.  He announces over the PA system that he's the dean of a - "loser college" - a boy in a varsity football jacket scanning a bullentin board looks up as if his name's been called - "for remedial teens and 20 something dropouts" - a blond girl looks up angrily as if she's been insulted- "middle aged divorcees" - an older lady holding too tight to her purse is pointed out- "and old people keeping their minds active as they circle the drain of eternity" - the white-haired bespectacled Pierce Hawthorne makes a Fletch face.

Community's pilot episode is one of the cleverest introductions of characters to ever grace the small screen. 1 minute, 18 seconds in and we've met the Dean, Troy, Britta, Shirley, and Pierce.

In the shadows a shorter man MicroMachine's his life story to a taller man. His name's Abed by the way. The other guy's Jeff Winger though he can't be bothered to introduce himself. The taller guy wants an inroad to the hot girl in Spanish class. Abed gives Jeff the jist in rapid fire. Jeff sees his value. Annie shows up later, uninvited.

In a mere episode those individual characters become a "community" and I became a fan. I tried to watch with clinical eyes, but I really Britta'd it up. I got distracted by all my laughing.

For three seasons I have not learned Spanish with the study group of the show Community. Hearing that the show was being moved to midseason I ranted and raved on Twitter. I had just started to realise, in part thanks to Twitter, that behind the show there is a man some call Dan Harmon and he's a fucking genius.

So why shouldn't Community be canceled? I could go on and on about the show's merits; it's cleverness; the brilliant people involved with the show - but would it help? Being a clever show is obviously the kiss of death in a land where people don't see the value of using your thinking cap while watching the boob tube.

Maybe there's no saving Community, but that hasn't stopped me from tweeting and going so far as to create a Twibbon campaign. If it means anything to the cast, crew, and the one they call Dan Harmon - I've decided to support Community.

(Holds up sign that reads Immunity for Community.)

I went for rhyme over clarity.

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Honey 2, the Dangers of Insomnia

I ended up taking a nap yesterday, which pretty much threw off my entire day. When I finally headed off to Bedfordshire at 2 am, I couldn't sleep. So I decided to watch Honey 2.

I confess, I love dance movies. I watch them all, good or bad, because at one point I was ready to quit college because I made the cuts to callbacks to potentially dance on Janet Jackson's tour. I didn't make second callbacks, but I was pretty proud of myself. I went on contented to teach hip hop aerobics and giving salsa and tango lessons until I started having my heart problems.

So of course I had to watch Honey 2. I've had my eye on Laurieann Gibson's moves long before she appeared in the first Honey starring Jessica Alba, which is based on her life (like Jennifer Lopez, Gibson was a Fly Girl on In Living Color). I loved her choreography. Now she's worked with Lady Gaga, who isn't a great natural dancer (which is another reason why she's no Madonna to me). But Gibson is a natural dancer. She moved her body about 3 times in all of Honey 2 and you just see it. Her body moves like it was dancing all along and you just couldn't see it.

Now don't get me wrong, the dance moves in Honey 2 were sometimes top notch, but a lot of the moves are pretty standard across the genre of "street dancing". If you remember the scene in Flashdance where Jennifer Beale's character picks up some breakdancing moves then consider that during the 80's, this was a popular thing to do. Madonna stole the idea off the New York streets for her video and it's been a common "scene" in dance films ever since.

My main problem with the film is they chose an actress over a true dancer. I tend to classify dancers into two groups: jumpers and spinners. I'm a good spinner. I can pirouette 5 times without trying for example, but I am not the best jumper. A good friend of mine who trained with Alvin Ailey is an amazing jumper.

Now Kat Graham is sassy and she's a beautiful girl, but other than shaking her ass she really can't dance. She can't jump and she most definitely can't spin. I think it's ridiculous to have a movie where other dancers are doing complicated jumps, spins, and precise movement and all you can do is, to quote Missy Elliot from Honey, "look like you dance back up for Heather Hunter".

As far as dance movies go, Honey 2 sucked. It sucked so bad I went to sleep, woke up, and still felt like I needed to blog about how bad it is.

The only redeeming aspect of this film for me was the one crew that beat out the steps on their bodies & with their feet. I am so out of touch I don't even know what it's called, but here's a video. These boys were fresh. The Asian crew wasn't bad either, so fast forward through all the non-dance parts is my advice.

Okay, so there's a few non-Asian boys too.

If you're an aspiring dancer keep on dancing. If you're the person who makes the decisions for films like Honey 2, please hire an actress who can actually dance or get better dance doubles.

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Updates & Steinbeck

Friday morning I moved my laptop from the coffee table to the dining table and heard an odd sound. My computer rebooted and then couldn't boot up the hard drive.

It sounded a bit like a car in the throws of a breakdown. I prayed, caressed the key riddled dash, and told her she could do it. She can't. She didn't. She needs a hard drive transplant. She is not the little computer that could.

It never fails that some sort of disaster strikes me when I'm getting in my groove. When I'm about - to quote  a  song from my youth, "put the needle on the record when the drums beats go like this" - thankfully there's a crap Acer backup computer with a wonky backspace key to help me through this latest shit storm.

I took a deep breath, made some chicken & sausage gumbo (delish!), some peanut butter blossoms with out-of-date Hershey Kisses, and tried not see it as yet another sign that my writing is not meant to be.

Neil Gaiman, a hero of mine - writes everything in longhand, I told myself. I know this because (@)Neil himself confirmed it to me on Twitter.

It was near my birthday. I just bought The Graveyard Book. It was like the greatest birthday present ever that Neil Gaiman (who I appreciate more for his non-comic book stuff, though Sandman was pretty fucking cool), directly shared his process with me. It works for Neil and my image of him sitting in front of a massive blank tome by candlelight like the monks in Eco's "The Name of the Rose" except without the killing and what I'll assume is a lot less Sean Connery (connerie meaning bullshit in French btw).

If you wonder why I blog  - why I often lay my soul bare on the Internet about writing and all the things I manage to do when I'm not trying to write -  well it's because of Neil Gaiman. Discovering his blog basically changed my life. There's a link on the blogroll.

I couldn't get my momentum back Friday or Saturday despite the comfort of a back up computer.

I go through phases. I like notebooks, but until I found my Midori Traveler's Notebook I basically bought every notebook I saw, wrote a few sentences, and the minute I didn't like those sentences I bought and/or started a new notebook. New idea, new notebook used to be my way of thinking. I sort of got around my bad habit by buying myself a notebook I love. If you want to know why, read you can read my rave here.

And that's the thing. I use my notebooks. I collage. I write longhand. I use index cards (à la Nabokov). I use blank sheets of paper; yellow legal pads; post-its galore to draw, write phrases, type phrases with an old manual typewriter. I have a lot of "methods" because I admit I'm falsely obsessed with the Muses, inspiration, blah,blah fuckity blah.

I hate my own conneries and excuses. I hate that I'm unable to discipline myself the way I have in the past to get shit done. 

I am filled with this sort of dread that because writing hasn't come easily to me, as many other things have, that I'm never going to get it done. It's why I'm superstitious (i.e. why I talk to my computer like she's Christine when actually she's not a she at all as HAL is genderless). It's why I struggle. It's why I'm constantly looking for answers to how to write although I know that there are no answers. It's like I don't trust myself, so I need to affirm this with the words of real writers, of which I am sad to say despite advice that if I'm simply writing I am a writer, I do not feel I am.


So here is my affirmation for today. Sundays are generally the days I wake up late and then Coco comes for his English lesson. I try to make a lot of coffee and stay in the swing of things after the lesson is over, but it's tough. I have just asked Monsieur Redacteur if he can't go to Coco's house to give the lesson. He gets it. I'm chomping at the bit.


And maybe it's just a bit of Sean Connery, but sometimes things like this help.


"I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.."

          Dear Writer:

          Although it must be a thousand years ago that I sat in a class in story writing at Stanford, I remember the experience very clearly. I was bright-eyes and bushy-brained and prepared to absorb the secret formula for writing good short stories, even great short stories. This illusion was canceled very quickly. The only way to write a good short story, we were told, is to write a good short story. Only after it is written can it be taken apart to see how it was done. It is a most difficult form, as we were told, and the proof lies in how very few great short stories there are in the world.

          The basic rule given us was simple and heartbreaking. A story to be effective had to convey something from the writer to the reader, and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, there were no rules. A story could be about anything and could use any means and any technique at all - so long as it was effective. As a subhead to this rule, it seemed to be necessary for the writer to know what he wanted to say, in short, what he was talking about. As an exercise we were to try reducing the meat of our story to one sentence, for only then could we know it well enough to enlarge it to three- or six- or ten-thousand words.

          So there went the magic formula, the secret ingredient. With no more than that, we were set on the desolate, lonely path of the writer. And we must have turned in some abysmally bad stories. If I had expected to be discovered in a full bloom of excellence, the grades given my efforts quickly disillusioned me. And if I felt unjustly criticized, the judgments of editors for many years afterward upheld my teacher's side, not mine. The low grades on my college stories were echoed in the rejection slips, in the hundreds of rejection slips.

          It seemed unfair. I could read a fine story and could even know how it was done. Why could I not then do it myself? Well, I couldn't, and maybe it's because no two stories dare be alike. Over the years I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.

          If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.

          It is not so very hard to judge a story after it is written, but, after many years, to start a story still scares me to death. I will go so far as to say that the writer who not scared is happily unaware of the remote and tantalizing majesty of the medium.

          I remember one last piece of advice given me. It was during the exuberance of the rich and frantic '20s, and I was going out into that world to try and to be a writer.

          I was told, "It's going to take a long time, and you haven't got any money. Maybe it would be better if you could go to Europe."

          "Why?" I asked.

          "Because in Europe poverty is a misfortune, but in America it is shameful. I wonder whether or not you can stand the shame of being poor."

          It wasn't too long afterward that the depression came. Then everyone was poor and it was no shame anymore. And so I will never know whether or not I could have stood it. But surely my teacher was right about one thing. It took a long time - a very long time. And it is still going on, and it has never got easier.

          She told me it wouldn't.

    1963

That was written by one of my other heroes, the writer John Steinbeck. 

 


I love this newspaper clipping. "America was proud of its front porch until John Steinbeck showed the backyard".

I still remember when I realised that this cartoon was actually referencing Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men":

I still remember the first time I read "The Pearl". I remember struggling through "Grapes of Wrath", feeling pretty bedraggled by the words that seemed to my 14 year old self heavy and covered with baked earth that hid from me some meaning that I somehow understood of hardship and futility like tilling soil that blows away like the wind and isn't even strong enough to hold on to something by its root.

That lonely desolate path that Steinbeck speaks of isn't that lonely or at least it has never seemed that way to me. I've always sort of seen myself as a would-be hero on a quest. I imagine the end will be something akin to the ending of Michael Ende's "Neverending Story". I will find out like Sebastian I am making a book come to life. Then I'll soar around in my fantasyland on my luck dragon, wave to a tortoise, and see Artax again.

Tickity-tock, goes my cat plate clock. I have five minutes to tell you a little story, about this cat plate. It's a plate with different cats in various poses around the lip that the old Chinese man who owns an odd little shop on the Place de Torcy (Paris 18e, Marx Dormoy) turned into a clock. It is now three minutes to a grey tabby or, as other people might call it, eleven-fifty seven.

This clock was originally intended to be a Christmas gift for someone who turned out to be a real bitch. It sat around the house, it's mechanisms threatening to break, and so I finally put it up over the door for safe keeping. She really was/is a bitch and I now consider the cat clock my compensation for bitchiness inflicted.

I am going to, as we say in French, stop des conneries.

In the words of The Thing, one of Stan Lee's genius characters from the Fantastic Four, "it's clobberin' time!"

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