Mysteries and Secrets

Neil Gaiman

.

Neil Gaiman is an incredible treasure of storytelling, whom I can appreciate largely due to the years-ago efforts of

Expatriate Dave

to make me experience as much of Mr. Gaiman's work as possible. Since that time (around age 17, this was) I have consumed every iota of his work that I could, and his work includes comics, other literature, movies, a

daily 'blog

and numerous odds and ends besides. If you don't know his work, you should, even if you don't consider yourself a fan of fantastical fiction. He has very good ideas, and he steals awfully well. By which I mean that one of the things I love about his work is the way he can tie together disparate old ideas and stories with new ones and make something appreciably unique. This could be considered a decent description of what any artist endeavors to do. Neil Gaiman is an artist.

I decided to write about him today because I have noticed many disparate ideas and stories coming together for me lately that point his way. In brief:

• I'm reading a book about him I received for Christmas.

• He was just on "The Colbert Report," which I stayed up to see (WAY past night-before-open-call bedtime).

• He just made Wife Megan's esteemed list of Famous People With Whom She Would Like to Have a Conversation.

• I've been enjoying the fiction-writing process of late, especially with Friend WHftTS.

• Expatriate Younce actually confessed some writerly desires to me the other night -- a victory for the cause of Fiction, I assure you.

• He recently experienced a personal loss that makes me wish I could do something for him, as he's done so much for me.

I had an opportunity to share a word or two with Neil Gaiman a few years back, when he was in town signing copies of his short-story collection,

Fragile Things

. He was interviewed by John Hodgman, which was hilarious and insightful, and then took a seat at the back of the room to sign hundreds upon hundreds of signatures. I waited my turn in line with my and Megan's books, and I thought about things. I had a signed copy of his novel

Stardust

that I had won in a costume contest back in my home town, and it seemed unbelievable that I was going to watch him sign a book from my very hand. I wondered what I would say, and suddenly the whole thing felt eerily familiar. Looking back, I realize the panic I felt was the exact same feeling I have waiting for an open call. Suffice it to say, I thought of a million things I could say. When I got to the table, I squeaked. Something. I don't know. I think I've since blocked it out. But I know it was squeaky, whatever it was.

The Zen Buddhists believe that the elimination of desire is a key to enlightenment. When I want something as much as to be cast off-Broadway, or to get into a discussion about mythology with Neil Gaiman, I can see their point. It can be crippling.

Mythology, as a concept, is a very interesting way of looking at our lives. Obviously I would say so -- see name o'blog -- but a few thousand years' worth of actual mythology may be said to back me up on this as well. I used to think of mythology on the whole (and prepare for more sweeping generalizations here) as a way of devising answers to difficult questions. I was taught that these stories came about because primitive peoples needed an answer to things like lightning storms, death and babies. I won't argue against that theory, but it is only one theory. The more I learn about them, the more I see the enduring mythologies as stories and beliefs that return people to essential questions, rather than direct answers. Moreover, I see mythology not as giving us guidelines or neat morals for our living, providing context, so much as it

changes our story

. Stories influence other stories, and one person's life can be said to be a (hopefully) long, largely sequential story. What I realized while standing in that line was that Gaiman's stories had profoundly affected my life, my story. In fact, just at that moment, it seemed entirely likely that his stories had had the most influence on mine, out of all of them. Thus: Squeak.

I don't know if myth and mystery have any relation, etymologically speaking, but I find them to be very closely related. Brothers, almost. In his famous

Sandman

graphic novels, Gaiman resurrected DC Comics' versions of Cain and Abel as the keepers of mysteries and secrets, respectively. According to that particular mythology, a mystery is a mystery because it was meant to be shared, a secret a secret because it ought to be forgotten . . . if it can be. Mythology, fiction, stories, they all confront unanswerable questions in one way or another, and it's by sharing them that we fulfill their functions. So I hope you'll share in some of Gaiman's, because it's no secret that they're uncommonly good.

And the Award Goes To... (3)

As If You Care.

is a sardonic sort of title for a 'blog. I recall that when Friend Younce started it, I was so out-to-lunch on the whole 'blogometric phenomenon that I thought,

that's odd; if he disdains the medium, why is he engaging in it?

The answer to my question was, of course, that he didn't disdain it at all, and understood it immediately, and saw possibilities for using it to his own ends and by his own means. He just wanted to be funny about it. That's how Dave is. And though it might not be immediately apparent from reading about his awesome family and game theory and distinction-making and his intense appreciation of a vast, ecclectic variety of (sub)pop music, Dave is also a mastermind type with strong creative leanings. This mostly gets expressed through gaming and online collaborations to produce real-world community and more game play, but to my mind, Mr. Younce will always be an aspiring author of fiction. Even if he never publishes a word of it.

I've known Dave since time immemorial. Well, since high school, at any rate. But we weren't exactly friends in high school. We had a few classes together, and were both involved in the theatre department, but the actual friendship didn't really crystalize until after graduation, when I suppose we both thought,

Hey, wait a minute. I knew some much cooler people in high school than I've met so far in college

. Thus was a really cool collaboration formed. Yet the roots extended back to that final year in the school of high, when even then there was a hint of the underlying creative current that would stick with us through college and missionary assignments and {shudder} adulthood. The photo atop this entry is from a project Dave did in that same time reinterpreting characters from the

Sandman

comics. At some point we geeks (we happy geeks) were backstage during some show or other discussing some thing or other, and Dave had this wild idea of people preserving their bodies past their normal lifespan by encasing themselves in a sort of radioactive gold. This in turn led to me having the idea of people who exponentially increase their intelligence by training themselves to experience a year's worth of living in a single night's dreaming. We discussed the possible overlap of our ideas, and Dave said, "You should write that."

I still haven't.

However, this kind of idea-swapping and assignment tradition continued as Dave and I reunited in the summer after our freshman years away at college. I didn't know it at the time, but the whole three months were extremely formative for me, as a person and as an artist, and Dave was around for a lot of that, giving me books to read and music to listen to and assignments to complete. It was reciprocal, this creative tête à tête, but of course I remember what I was assigned and absorbed more than what I offered up. Frankly, I remember being challenged by the effort to return in kind when it came to assignments and influences. Dave was, and is, a very focused thinker, yet seemingly without being overly linear, and the result is that he can pound out ideas and improvements upon those ideas while one is still sitting at the keyboard contemplating how you're supposed to punctuate "tête à tête." More recently, Dave has worked to connect me with the gaming community (see

5/12/08 & 5/7/07

), which I was resistant to and which probably stands alone as the experience most encouraging to my creative processes since reading the

Sandman

comics

for the first time (also Dave's doing).

Expatriate Younce has moved to jolly ol' England, which is bad for me, but great for

As If You Care.

Now, in addition to never knowing quite what you'll get when you sign into his 'blog, you also never know when it might be something wicked cool that you wouldn't have thought of today without it, like new random generators, observations on information diagramming or photos of Dave's adorable progeny clambering about on the heath. I'm particularly fond of Dave's

five-word movie reviews

. If Dave ever does become an author, he will probably remind us of

Hemingway

in the efficiency of his prose, crossed with a

Gaiman

esque sense of humor and a

Stephenson

ish complexity of ideas. Dave himself is a big fan of

Eco

and

Pynchon

. Mercifully, he does not sound a bit like either. (You could write a respectable epic poem about Dave's efforts to get me to read

Gravity's Rainbow

. "Don't you understand the amazing things this guy's doing?" "No Dave, I don't.") For all those influences, Dave writes things like, "When I was a young, cynical LDS missionary on the hardscrabble streets of LA, I would often see black plastic bags floating along the ground or in the air, or fluttering helplessly in a tree, and I would daydream of having a Nature-channel special that would follow them around, while a British narrator in hushed tones talked about what they were doing."

And so, this award goes to Dave Younce.

Writing Wild

I have been seized by a powerful urge in the past week or so to write short plays. I explained last week (see 8/8/08) that Friend Nat had inspired me to write from start to finish a short play, and that I was rather proud of this. At the time, this led me to re-examine my progress on other creative projects I had professed on this here 'blog. One of my usual excuses for failing to follow-through on projects is getting distracted by bright, shiny new projects. I'm not exactly a fickle little magpie, constantly collecting projects that glint at me from below, but my joy for life does seem to flow from these occupations, and so I rarely refuse them. I consider being distracted by a new project, so long as it proves fruitful, a more-worthy reason for abstentia from older ones than, say, needing to find out what happens next on So You Think You Can Dance? Just as a random example.

Thus far, this one is proving more fruitful than I had dared hope. When I wrote the initial short play, it was very much a stand-alone scene, meant to explore my thoughts on death a bit (it's a comedy; don't judge me). Then, aided by a little research, I found myself fairly excited by an idea for another short play with a similar theme, and it connected itself pretty naturally with the first. Now I have four first-draft short plays, loosely connected either by character or, er, object. I've also got vague ideas for two more scenes, which would give me six in all, which -- length-wise, at any rate -- would give me a pretty full little evening of theatre. Hoo-rah, say I. It remains to be seen if the scenes provide some sort of satisfying arc once strung together, of course, and there's always the stage of revision, which is sort of my kryptonite when it comes to these things. Still and all: hoo & rah.

My writing this time around is reminding me of a lot of specific influences, and I feel variously pleased and confused with them. Friend Daryl is just bringing to a close a production of Keith Reddin's All the Rage at the Manhattan Theatre Source, a show for which I auditioned but did not achieve casting. I read the play in June to prepare for the audition, and it too is a somewhat loosely-strung (though not nearly so loose as mine) set of scenes revolving around darkly humorous themes. In the spring, I checked out a lot of Martin McDonagh plays from the Lincoln Center branch of the NYPL, having enjoyed The Pillowman on Broadway and curious about all these other plays for which he was more renowned. His boldness with a morbid and macabre sense of humor have definitely helped me justify some of the areas in exploration in my little efforts of late. There's even a good dose or two of Ben Jonson, Neil Gaiman and Adam McKay, though you'd probably never notice those, mired as they are in my own concepts and interpretations.

A writing experience is best for me when it gives me moments of feeling guided by the material itself, rather then my steering of it. Similar to the enjoyment of watching a play that I haven't read (movies are exempted utterly for the most part, as we're inundated with previews that seem hell-bent on spoiling at least one surprise for us), when I write something that has a will or energy of its own, part of what keeps me going forward is wondering what this or that character will do next. It's entirely up to me, of course, but occasionally they (I) surprise me (myself). This may seem at best naive, at worst indulgent, but I would argue that at least some portion of this feeling is necessary in writing something original. One of the best bits of advice I ever got on writing fiction was given by a speaker at a writing conference I attended back in 2001. He was narrating (aptly enough) his process in writing a story set in a hospital. He had a choice of three things happening next to his protagonist, three ideas. The first two were something like the character would flashback to memories of whomever he was there for, or he could have a talk with someone else in the waiting room, but the third was that he receive a telephone call on the hospital payphone . . . from his deceased mother.

Perhaps it's needless to say that this particular writer chose option three. At the time, thinking of it only as a writer of short stories and the like, I remember thinking about how pervasive fantasy is; it barely qualifies as a genre name, there are so many distinctions (besides swords and dragons) for its use. Now -- flashing back, if you will -- I'm struck by two things this illustrates. The first is an acting lesson to be found in this "other" medium. As an actor, one is often faced with two or more choices that work, that adhere to the givens and move the action along. We explore them all, and generally take the one that's most interesting; that is, the one that heightens conflict or develops character and/or, if we're lucky, surprises. The second strike is a reflection on both fiction and acting (and painting and cycling and governmental science, I'm sure), and has to do with risk. My sustained engagement in these writings and my apparent influences from recent reading are both results of remaining open, exploratory and loose, during my writing process. It's risky to release control, to give oneself up to the possibility of failure (or, perhaps worse, gratuitous exposure), yet without it what are our chances of creating anything fresh or effective? This is a not-uncommon thought here at the Aviary. Still, I enjoy finding it anew in corners I wasn't expecting to.

So please do forgive, Dear Reader, if the Aviary is a little lacking in posts this week and next. It is because I am enjoying the exploration. Worry not. I shall return. (Undoubtedly when I should otherwise be revising whatever I've cranked out.)

This is the Way we go to Work

A "work ethic" is an interesting instinct. In point of fact, I'm not sure it is a pure instinct. I'm more inclined to believe that the so-called work ethic is as-much-or-more a product of environment than personality. I can't deny that some people just seem more energetic and driven from the moment they spring from their mother's womb--briefcase in hand and tearing the wrist watch from off their delivering doctor--but I also feel that everyone has within them the power, with a little discipline and determination, to say screw that and spend eight straight hours watching a

Mythbusters

marathon on Bravo.

Not that I speak from personal experience here.

My work ethic has been on my mind a lot lately, what with making curious headway in my professional life as an actor even whilst

being dropped from a show

and

losing my primary source of income

. Actors typically, I believe, work some very long and hard hours. They're just hours of constantly changing gears, so it often seems we're not concentrated, or disciplined. It's a little bit like we're each and every one of us a working mother, at least at this particular level. We work our "day job," and while we're at our day job our child (who, by now we hope, is a little more capable of taking care of itself) is in constant contact. We make phone calls on its behalf, we take lunch breaks to visit, or facilitate later time spent with the kid. There are no weekends, no evenings. There are games, and homework, and constant surprises. We feel guilty for not devoting ourselves enough at "work"; we feel guilty for not spending enough time with the boy/girl/meaning-of-our-life.

Take, for example, the pride I take in the post previous to this being my 200th. I feel pride over quantity, which is really nothing more than my work ethic at work. In addition, I feel some guilt. What? Guilt, you say? You mean over the hours you've spent 'blogging that could have been spent ending starvation, or resolving the myriad religious conflicts currently tearing our culture apart at the seams? No. No, I mean I feel guilty over not writing more here. Out of nearly 400 days I could have entries for, I have merely half.

Neil Gaiman

would shake his tangled locks at me in sheer disappointment.

No: I did not intend to pun there. (Go back. Look. It's there.) I'd rather it were a promised fart joke, but what can I say? There's no escaping genetics.

I'm reading a fantastically enjoyable

book about Buster Keaton

right now. I can only guess at its accuracy; it seems to have been compiled mostly from interviews of Keaton by the author, and I don't get the sense that said author was in the habit of cross-checking Buster's memory. Still and all, it makes for a great read. Buster Keaton started out just as early as he could get away with in vaudeville, with his family, and by the time he got to films he already had a tremendous amount of skill and experience behind him. From struggling as part of an ambituous family act, to being aprosperous and famous act, to breaking into film and becoming a star, Buster worked like a dog. The only thing that slowed him down was succumbing to alcohol in his middle life, and even through that he was all about the work.

It's hard to make money, do good work and get what you want from life. Maybe even particularly hard for someone living that ol'

The Third Life

(r). But it's no Depression-Era struggle, or walking away from a broken neck (yeah: he did), so getting down about it can seem pretty silly in perspective.

Brass Monkey

Pursuant to

Friend Dave's recommendation

, I caught an $11.75 matinee of

The Golden Compass

yesterday. To be honest, this was also pursuant to not working, having a cold and being pretty certain that I'd do myself worse financial disadvantage if I had two hours more out amongst the Christmas fairs of New York. But I digress (shamelessly [and at great length {mostly as an excuse to ((ab))use proper parenthetical structure}]), and the title of this entry has not merely to do with ripping off

Friend Davey

's 'blog conceit.

The Golden Compass

, in my opinion, has two highly effective devices on which most of the success of the movie rides. The first has to do with the first half of the movie. Everyone's soul, you see, in this imagined world, exists outside of themselves as a sort of animal familiar that never leaves their side. Nicole Kidman's familiar (or daemon) is a monkey, with oddly metallic fur. Upon her introduction to the plot, the metastructure of the story goes a little something like this: Hey, look at how pretty our film is, how fantastical, isn't it all so calming and utopian and OH MY GOD WHERE'D THAT SCREAMING MONKEY COME FROM!? I am not kidding. There was this one time when, I swear to you, the monkey popped up from the bottom of the screen from out of nowhere. I mean, he didn't even have something he could realistically be standing on in the environment, and there he was again, screaming. If I had been one of the animators on this, I would have saved the file, program, whatever, of the monkey, for use in startling my coworkers for years to come. Just imagine sweating through your 2007 TurboTax when, from out of absolutely nowhere, a screaming golden monkey juts his head into your screen. In all fairness, the movie should have at least been

sub

titled

The (Screaming) Golden Monkey

.

Oh yeah. The other highly effective device can be summed up in two words: Bear and Fight. Bear fights. Fo' reals. Keep your eyes peeled. This could be a whole new sub-genre of action film. And if so, I am there, I am wearing the t-shirt, I am learning the terminology (

ah, the classic Rips-Lower-Jaw-from-Body technique...

) and I am enrolled in the Bear Fighting fantasy camp. Stick some giant foam paws on me. I am ready to rumble.

When the fur settles, and the dust as well, this is pretty much a good-time, only-enough-pathos-to-justify-some-violence Christmas movie. Lots of snow. Talking animals. Cute kids. And two of the most gorgeous adult actors on the screen these days, for mom and dad. (In fact: Hey: I know that movie casts often repeat themselves, but weren't these two just in that

Body Snatchers

reremake? This reminds me of the

Batman Begins

/

The Prestige

and

The Matrix

/

Memento

phenomenon. Not to mention the unholy trinity of Willis/Jackson/Travolta. Spread some of the love around, Hollywood.) They even clipped off the ending of the first book in order to make the film conclude a bit happier, which actually upsets me more than sucking the supposed Atheism out of it.

As to that (the Atheism)--I'm sorry, but I just can't stay off this topic (see

12/7/07

). Friend Younce posits in his

Comments

section that if the ultimate plot of this trilogy involves "killing God," it indicates not only a belief in God, but an actual finger, pointing to God, saying (yes, they'd probably have talking fingers in this sort of trilogy), "Hey look: It's God. I found him/her/it. He/she/it exists." I'm afraid I disagree, to a certain extent. The author, as any fantasy author may be accused, is clearly working in allegory. To "kill God" is in his allegory to eradicate the supposedly irrational belief in God from within ourselves. In fact, what will be really interesting as far as these movies go will be to see how they handle that little feat in the third film. The characters' "daemons" represent individualism, or Humanism, after a fashion.

I have a curious history with the books this franchise is sprung from. I have only read the first two, and those quite by necessity. It was toward the end of my first trip to Italy, in 2006, and I came down with a serious bug that laid me up with a high fever for almost a week. With nothing to do but lie in bed and either read, or try to learn Italian from their daytime television, I quickly tore through the novel I had brought:

The Mask of Apollo

. (A birthday gift from

Friend Patrick

, and the first Mary Renault book I ever undertook.)

Friend Heather

loaned me the first two books of

His Dark Materials

and I drank them up in lieu of the excellent white wines of Orvieto. I write about it now, similarly afflicted (though no high fever, thank...whatever providence may be), and acknowledge that my knowledge of the books is partial and drenched with fever-sweat.

I reiterate: Go Atheists. I've got nothing against them, just like I've got nothing against Christians or Muslims. Those for whom I do have something against (that made sense grammatically, I swear), is them what (that bit didn't, though) exercise their beliefs--any beliefs--by way of disparaging others'. Up with that I shall not put. It may seem only fair; the Atheists have had to deal with eons of persecution, I realize, but here's another thing I'd do away with: the symbol for justice being a beam-balance scale. Balance is good, but dichotomy is simply a deceptive paradigm for identifying anything. I'm all for clarity, but I aspire to understand all things beyond a simple yes, or no. All things are a part of a whole, in my humble opinion. Balance, in the theological, philosophical sense, cannot be expressed on a simple beam. I come around, by tender footfalls, to my point.

In my post of December 7th of this year, I mentioned in passing that the notion of "fate" is inescapable to me because it permeates every story we tell on some level. (Pullman, the author of the books in question, by the way, values stories above all else. Reminds me of

Gaiman

in that way.) Especially in theatre, fate, or some analogue of it, sort of makes the motor run. This goes for both tragedy and comedy. Similarly, I'm not sure one can tell a story without God entering into it. If we could, I'm not sure we'd want to. The storyteller is, after a fashion, God of the story. What gives the majority of humans meaning in their lives? God. Who determines meaning in a story? The storyteller. This paradigm (or matrix, if you will) manifests in our novels, movies and plays on conscious and subconscious levels. It's tough for me to point toward it in

His Dark Materials

before having read the third installment but, for those who know the series, might not the presence of "dust" (magical stuff from the universe that connects people to their souls, and their souls to the source of "dust") be a manifestation of a, albeit rather Universalist, concept of divinity?

Perhaps I am simply too influenced by what little classical education I have absorbed. All the Greek plays have a theme that can be summed up as, "Hey, you can mess with the Gods all you want, but after a few hours, they get the last word, machina or no." I agree with the Atheists when they tell us (calmly, without insult) to take responsibility for the here and now, and love humanity for being human. I'm just not sure that it's possible to kill God off entirely, in spite of Nietzsche and Pullman and the rest. Please, contest my claim; I'd love to hear theories, especially as relates to storytelling. Interestingly enough, Friend Dave is also a big proponent of role-playing games for which there is not necessarily a storyteller. In these, instead of a typical structure of a game-master, who tells everyone what's going on, the players themselves contribute to the narrative in different ways. Perhaps therein lies a way of retiring God. Perhaps, instead, it creates a pantheon of Gods.

Part of my holiday travel plans include venturing south to Friends Davey, Dave and Mark, to play this sort of game all together. It's an appointment a long time in the making, and I'm looking forward to it. These friends of mine are some of the best storytellers I know. I'll let you know what stories we create together.

You can bet a screaming monkey will enter into it, somewhere.