June 2007 Archives

If you're making me a smoothie
don't make the yuck face when you
look in the cup

right before you put on the cap
and hand me

the smoothie.

Like a lot of kids, I grew up dreaming that one day I'd write a song about "accretion" (defined by Merriam-Webster's as "increase by external addition or accumulation, as by adhesion of external parts or particles").

No, I was told. No, that wouldn't happen. Couldn't happen. They didn't say it shouldn't happen. Or bloudn't happen. But they might as well have.

Well guess what? Dreams really can come true. Assuming your dreams relate to writing a song about accretion. Take that, naysayers!

This latest addition to the Virtual LP features vocals, keys, 'n drums. It's partly influenced by my absolute favoritist record of the last few months -- Harry Nilsson's extraordinary Nilsson Sings Newman, from 1970. Holy cow does that record have fantastic harmonies. I can't claim to match, but it did inspire me to close this track out with a few waa-oh's and ooh la la's.

Thanks for listening,
-Cecil

time: 1:44 seconds; specs: 1.6 mb
Press Play to play.

This is it! -- the last week!

Although I'm still woefully behind (in fact, I'm pretty sure I'm the most behindest of all the many folks still marching), I've really enjoyed all the comments. This has been one of the best 'marches yet ("I bet you say that to all the 'marches"), and I'm hoping youse consider coming back for a future jaunt.

I 'spect the next one will be Octoberish. Not sure what we're going to read so please feel free to keep suggesting ideas. I'm pretty sure it won't be a 20 week/1000+ pager this go around. I'm open to the new notion that's been floated of doing a few books by one author, at a book every two weeks, or somesuch. Or perhaps some 600-page humdinger.

And then there's this: mugs!

When you hit the back o' the book and post your comment (assuming you've posted on most threads, yada yada) please be sure to drop me a line with your shipping address so you can get your very own "I Surivived the AtD DM Mug."

Saturday 6/30: We bring it all home.

(Which is to say.... please use this thread to comment on anything up to the inside back cover. Aim to finish reading and to comment on it here by end o' day next Saturday, give or take. Me, I'll be more on the "take" side of that equation.)

Pugnax!
-Cecil

Image copyright (c) Dan Piraro 2007.

Dan Piraro's Bizarro was first syndicated in 1985 and currently appears daily in around 250 markets on four continents. Bizarro won an unprecedented three consecutive Reuben awards from the National Cartoonist Society for “Newspaper Cartoon Panel of the Year,” in 1999, 2000, and 2001. Since 2002, Piraro has been nominated each year for their highest award, "Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year." In 2006, Abrams Books published Bizarro and Other Strange Manifestations of the Art of Dan Piraro, a retrospective that includes cartoons, fine art, commercial illustration, and images from his sketchbooks and comedy shows.

Piraro’s one-man stage show, The Bizarro Baloney Show, is a multimedia performance featuring stand-up comedy, songs, puppets, cartoons, animation, audience participation, and onstage improv drawings. In 2002 it won "Best Solo Show" at the New York International Fringe Festival. Piraro also works as an activist for animal welfare, public health, and environmental concerns. In 2007 he became a regular contributor to Veg News Magazine, with a monthly humor article on vegetarianism, veganism, and animal rights. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Ashley Smith, a full-time animal welfare activist. They both sit on the board of Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary in Woodstock, NY. (woodstocksanctuary.org)

Dan Piraro on the Web: bizarro.com, fine art gallery, Bizarro and Other Strange Manifestations of the Art of Dan Piraro

Cecil Vortex: What do you think is the key to good cartoon writing?

Dan Piraro: I have this ongoing effort to create humor in fewer words because I'm very wordy. I always have been. I was that way in school. When a teacher would say to write a 500-word paper about something or other, I would write 750 just because I'm a wordy person. So something that I've done over the years, especially in recent years, is try to reduce the number of words in my cartoons just because I think it's funnier to say things simply and quickly than to over explain. But my cartoons still tend to be pretty wordy.

One of my favorite cartoonists in the world is Sam Gross. He's most notable from the New Yorker magazine. His work is just fantastic and he rarely uses words. And when he does, it's almost never more than three or four. I'd love to be able to do that, but it's just not the way I think.

CV: There's some kind of irony in somebody who feels they write too much creating a single-panel comic.

Here's another libretto that spilled out of my soon-to-be-seven-year-old son. He sang this one last weekend while puttering around his bedroom. To me, it sounds sort of like something written in 1200 BCE and then translated in the 1950s.

I should also mention that I told him I'd be posting this and asked him what he wanted his "Vortex" name to be. (My daughter is codename "Shonny Vortex," my brother adopted "Jake Vortex" when he played sax on a couple of tracks a while back.) So anyways, he considered "Fire Vortex" and "Ice Vortex" before settling on "Power Vortex."

Who am I to argue with a boy named "Power"?

Do You Love Bad Guys the Best?
by Power Vortex

Let us live and win the battle.
Let us lie under the stars.

God, why is this happening?
You say no to everything.
Please let us win the battle.

So when will you say yes?
Then we'll win the battle.
Or do you love bad guys the best?

Is it for the good and the bad?
Is it for the bad and the good?

Kids write the darndest verse. A while back I posted a poem or two by my daughter Shonny. Here's one from my six-year-old son. He doesn't really talk like this, but every once in a while he'll belt out a non-rhyming song, sort of like a libretto, and these words will come out from somewhere, and I'll scramble to write them down. He tells me this one is about dreaming.

Dawn in the midnight.
You see the voices far.
You see the big flying voices
and the beautiful light that I guard.

It's very like life.
You see the beautiful midnight sky
and the beautiful voices.
You have lots of fun but...

you don't know the ways
of your life and the voices so far.

Oh beautiful sky.
Yeah, dawn in the midnight!

Photo credit: Meredith Heuer 2006.

Welcome to the second half of this two-part interview with Daniel Handler, author of the best-selling An Unfortunate Series of Events, a collection of books for children, as well as three books for adults: The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth, and, most recently, Adverbs. If you haven't already read the first part of this interview, in which Handler talks about making the switch from poetry to prose and why he loves it when things are going badly, you can find it here.

Daniel Handler on the Web: Adverbs: A Novel, lemonysnicket.com

Cecil Vortex: The plot for A Series of Unfortunate Events is incredibly rich. How did you approach plotting the series and how much of the plot was worked out before the first book was published?

Daniel Handler: Some of it was planned. And then more and more of it was planned the more I wrote. I'm a big outliner and note-taker, so I had a bunch of things [worked out in advance], but I also left myself room to improvise. I didn't want A Series of Unfortunate Events to feel like a coloring book that I had to fill in for the next few years.

So I would think, "Well, the twelfth book is going to take place in a hotel, and it's going to have this kind of revelation and this kind of action," and then I would say, "Okay, that's enough that you know. That's five books ahead or four books ahead." Every so often I would make a note of something specific that I wanted to put there. But I tried to discipline myself to be undisciplined. I wanted to get there and feel like there were all these vistas to explore, and not that it was a specific path that I'd already assigned myself.

CV: Reading the last book in the series, which deals in part with the trade-offs between security and personal freedom, I wondered if what's been going on in the real world was informing that?

Photo credit: Meredith Heuer 2006.

Daniel Handler is the author of the bestselling A Series of Unfortunate Events (under the pen name Lemony Snicket), a collection of books for children. He's also written three books for adults: The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth, and, most recently, Adverbs. In addition to his writing, Handler's an accomplished musician and has played accordion on a number of recordings including the acclaimed 69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields.

This is the first part of a two-part interview. You can find the second part, in which Handler talks about plotting A Series of Unfortunate Events and how real life influences his work, here.

Daniel Handler on the Web: Adverbs: A Novel, lemonysnicket.com

Cecil Vortex: Do you remember the first thing that you wrote that you felt, "Well, that's something"?

Daniel Handler: By the time I was in college, I was writing a lot of poetry that was being published in tiny journals and was winning little student prizes and things like that. And I think that was probably the first time that I began to think of myself as a writer who was producing work that was of merit, at least for the age that I was.

I actually visited my high school literary magazine yesterday -- I grew up in San Francisco. And they had found some of my old poetry on file and given it to me. And it was pretty interesting to read. It was lousy of course. But I felt like it still had some respectability to it.

It was two poems that I had written shortly after I had started having sex, and so they're both about love and sex. And so of course they're mortifying. But they have an air of detachment, I guess, and one of them rhymes. And it's interesting to me that I was already trying to find an acceptable format for perhaps embarrassing ideas.

CV: Do you still write poetry?

OK, so it's a Thursday and I'm yet I'm not late posting. I love this new system! Now we put our two knees close up tight, we swing them to the left and then we swing them to the right. Can it be done? Can. It. Be. Done? (And by "it" I mean, can we continue to lurch our deathmarch-posting-days over to the right, so as to land on Saturday 6/30?) I think Van Hagar put it best when they observed: "Only time will tell if we can stand the test of time."

Friday 6/22: Shall we meet at the bottom of page 1039? "Thought you're gonna ask."

(which is to say.... please use this thread to comment on anything up to page 1039. Aim to finish reading that part of the book and to comment on it here by end o' day next Wednesday, give or take)

Pugnax!
-Cecil

Third grader 1: [wistful] I love my new catch phrase.
Third grader 2: What is it?
Third grader 1: When I'm happy I say: "I feel happy inside." When I'm sad I say: "I feel sad inside."

I read a Vonnegut quote the other day worth sharing. This is from A Man Without a Country (Random House, 2005):

I have to say this in defense of humankind: In no matter what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got here. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these games going on that could make you act crazy to begin with.

And I'm not sure it was meant that way, but I find this idea comforting, the image of all us hopefully doing the best we can, but still basically looking around, trying to figure things out, once in a while going: "Sooooo...you're saying if I push that lever, it makes the whoosie go off? Every time? Crazy!"

It reminded me of some advice I got from a friend way back in high school. At the time I was sweet on a girl who lived across the world. And I was bemoaning her across-the-worldness to him, and he said, "It's not like she's going anywhere." By which he meant, mortality aside, she wasn't about to jump the planet. She was still going to be here, looking up at the same moon, gripped by the same gravity. So what was the big deal?

OK. So (1) no matter our age, we basically just got here. And (2) until we die, here is pretty much where we'll stay.

That works for me.

Photo credit: Jen Pollack Bianco.

John August's feature directing debut, The Nines, premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. As a screenwriter, John's credits include Corpse Bride, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Big Fish, both Charlie's Angels movies, and the upcoming Shazam!. He also wrote and co-produced Go, which debuted at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival. For television, August created the short-lived show "D.C." for The WB, along with pilots for Fox and ABC.

John is a frequent advisor to the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. He also runs a website aimed at budding screenwriters, johnaugust.com -- an exceptional and highly recommended resource accurately subtitled "a ton of useful information about screenwriting." Born and raised in Boulder, Colorado, John earned a degree in journalism from Drake University in Iowa and an MFA in film from the Peter Stark program at the University of Southern California. He lives in Los Angeles.

John August on the Web: johnaugust.com

Cecil Vortex: You've written an impressive number of scripts over the last several years. Were you always this creatively productive?

John August: I've always written, but it wasn't until I started approaching writing as a full-time job that I really felt any mastery of it. Sometimes I'm an artist, but mostly I'm a craftsman. I write for very specific purposes, and I can sort of switch it on and off. That came with experience.

I think "productivity" is a pretty limited concept. If you're writing a lot, but you're writing crap, that's not particularly helpful. I think what I hit in my early-to-mid 20s was a sweet spot between Getting Stuff Done and Getting Stuff Perfect. My first drafts are pretty strong. They feel like the final movie. Some writers do what they call a "vomit draft," which is long and messy, then edit it down. I don't. I write the script that could be shot.

I labor pretty hard over each scene in its first incarnation. I play the entire scene in my head, in a constant loop, until I really feel I know it. Then I do what I call a "scribble version," which is a very quick-and-dirty sketch of the scene, handwritten, which would be indecipherable to anyone but me. Then I write up the final scene from that.

In terms of the number of scripts with my name on them, that really comes from picking projects carefully. The frustrating thing about screenwriting is that you can spend a year working on a project that never gets made, and it's like you never wrote it. I like to say that my favorite genre is, "Movies that get made."

CV: What drew you to screenwriting, as opposed to other kinds of writing?

Still lagging behind the pack, but fortunately I've got two plane rides in the next few days, which seems to be the key to staying in this 'un. In fact, if I didn't already have those flights planned I'd probably have to come up with an excuse to go fly somewhere.

We've got a groundswell going for a wrap on Saturday, June 30th, which means slowing the pace down just a tad. Good news for laggards like me. If you find yourself twiddling your thumbs, this might be a good time to re-read and re-comment on the first 50 pages -- sort of the AtD equivalent of fighting me with one 50-page segment of the book tied behind your back....

It's a tricky maneuver, ending on a Saturday, but fortunately I've been slipping on my Tuesday-ness all along. Judo-style, my plan now is to flip that around and use the resulting momentum to our advantage.

This week's entry is on a Wednesday. Next week, let's meet on a Thursday. The following week a Friday, then the last week -- hey presto! It's Saturday the 30th. With all that said.....

Thursday 6/14: We dump the sand from our boots at the bottom of page 999, where "sod [is] giving way to shakes."

(which is to say.... please use this thread to comment on anything up to page 999. Aim to finish reading that part of the book and to comment on it here by end o' day next Wednesday, give or take)

Pugnax!
-Cecil

I was just getting quizzed by my kids about the tooth fairy, and her castle, and the fact that it's 100 feet tall and 5 feet wide and only has two rooms -- the main room and a bathroom. And my third-grade daughter asks, mouth full of toothbrush and toothpaste:

"Is it as I expected? Is her whole house made out of teeth?"