Dying is Easy, Comedy is Hard

I love comedy. Seeing funny people be funny is one of the purest joys I can think of besides awesome sex and cheese fries. I have, in my studies, decided that there is a huge gap between being a funny person and being able to harness the funny into something reproducible.

The easiest level of comedy, I think, is to be the "funny one" in any group. I think most people have a sense of humor. This will not be controversial but different people find different things rewarding. For athletic kids, it is the praise they get from winning a game or scoring a goal. For smart kids, it is the praise of a good grade. For good-looking kids, it is awesome sex and free cheese fries. For funny kids, it is getting others to laugh.

I remember reading jokes out of Reader's Digest and then repeating them back to a woman who cut my hair when I was a kid. I liked remembering them word for word. When the Comedy Channel (later Comedy Central) came along, they showed clips of comedians doing bits all day long. This is where I realized that word choice, inflection, cadence and a host of other factors went into making a joke funny. My cousin still marvels that I memorized whole stand up routines when we were kids. I mean, other kids knew baseball stats, I knew Larry Miller's five stages of drinking.

Like so many other things I owe in life to my childhood best friend, Kirbie introduced me to Monty Python in elementary school. To this day, an absurdist joke still kills me. Also, jokes taken way too far until they pass from funny to unfunny and back to funny again. I saw my first Saturday Night Live in middle school and went to see Dennis Miller perform a year later. Comedy movies, comedy TV, stand up, improv, I was exposed to all these things early on. I remember seeing Furman's improv troupe the same year I saw Dennis Miller. And I still remember someone suggesting a movie title "Apocalypse Never" and one of the performers doing a McCauley Culkin imitation (trust me, at the time, huge) "Why oh why won't the apocalypse come?" And the audience loved it.

I set out to be the funny guy in my group of friends. But then I realized I don't like hanging around with not funny people. So I got a group of funny friends to hang around. We all made each other better (or in some cases, raunchier...I remember poor Bob getting in trouble when his mother found a story about two of our teachers rubbing their penises together). To this day, I would prefer having funny friends to friends who just find me funny.

When my friend, John, said he wanted to start up an improv troupe, I volunteered. Mostly, I wanted to be better friends with the people who also volunteered. It wasn't until a magical dude from Minnesota moved to Greenville that we actually got started. His name is Todd and he is a very talented improv performer who taught us quite a bit about the craft. All of us were considered funny people but I know I had never focused it into a performance before.

Lots of people say improv is too intimidating to do but they are really just scared of performing in front of people I think. Once you know the basics, and if you have any sense of humor, improv is relatively easy. Short form games, in particular, are designed to deliver a quick laugh. If your brain doesn't freeze up around other people, you can do short form improv.

Long form improv is, I would say, the next hardest thing to do. In successful long form, you can't just be a funny person who doesn't freeze up. You have to understand the fundamentals of improv and/or be in a group where you know and trust each other implicitly. Having seen long form several times at the Upright Citizens Brigade in New York and now with the KCIC in Kansas City, I have seen long form that goes nowhere and reeks of flop sweat as well as long form that has me laughing like an idiot. It is a dangerous tight rope that some people can walk with the greatest of ease. I think, at my best, and surrounded by talented cast mates I can achieve funny long term improv (maybe). This is the highest level to which I have climbed.

[For an example of funny long form, watch the Upright Citizen Brigade's Assssscat! on Netflix]

I think comedic acting is probably on a parallel track to improv. With films and TV, you get to retry lines or tweak things that don't quite work. Without the live setting, you have a powerful safety net. Some comedic actors are hired because the director knows they will liven up a shitty script with some riffing. I feel like the acting muscle is the important one for comedic actors. I feel like (and I may be wrong) you can take being the funny one in your group and achieve huge stardom if you learn how to be an actor as well. A lot of comedic actors have training in improv, which has to help. Bill Murray had no scripted lines for these scenes...

The caveat to that is improv acting. Like Christopher Guest movies or Curb Your Enthusiasm, you create an outline of a plot and then craft your character within those parameters. Again, I think acting skills are required, but not as much as improv skills. I think improv takes the funny person in a group and makes them performers.

The hardest type of comedy, in my opinion, is writing comedy/stand up. In stand up, there is a performance aspect that makes it harder than just standing up and reading jokes. I don't think acting classes or improv can help you be a stand up. Thick skin and the willingness to fail are integral to stand up. Improv is neat because you can't really fail. If a bit doesn't work, guess what? You are never doing it again so who cares? With stand up, if a bit works, it becomes part of the act. And you will be doing that bit over and over again.

Louis CK is considered the king of the stand ups at the moment and for good reason. Besides being a very funny guy, he produces a new hour of material every year. Some comedians are still coasting on the hour of material they put together in the 1990s. I know people like Aziz Ansari feel the need to keep pace with CK and I think it raises the whole industry if everyone aspires to that kind of output. Let me tell you, there is nothing worse than seeing a comedian twice (three years apart) and hearing the exact same jokes (Zach Galifiniakis, looking at you). Bands don't stop with one album, comedians should have to keep producing, too.

But it is seriously hard to write funny things. Woody Allen's short stories make it look effortless (oh, just throw in some absurd references and you have a funny story) but they are difficult to emulate. And short stories have the advantage of being re-writable. Harder still, sketch comedy.

The reason I am writing this whole thing is because I saw a sketch group perform in KC last night. As a fan of comedy, I recognize that sketches are usually premises and then as many jokes squeezed from those premises as possible (if you can get to an ending, more power to you). If you have ever watched Saturday Night Live you know they have allowed all sorts of thin premises on air. Sketches that just wither and die because there is nothing to them are hard to watch. Last night, although the audience was into most of it, I sat through some truly thin sketches. Twerking for Tweakers was basically just the name and no real jokes. The opening bit about how pop songs can be repetitive was, again, just a premise and no real jokes. This happened again and again with a couple disagreeing about the definition of role-playing (some jarring vulgarity did provide a laugh in that one) and a "what if people in covered wagons had to take their vehicles to a modern mechanic?" premise yielding an ending where the group drew attention to how unfunny the bit was.

There were two sketches of the night that interested me. One was about a "good-guesser" who is really omnipotent. The premise was strong enough to carry a good sketch but then it fizzles out by adding another layer (bad guesser equals stupid) to the joke that wasn't needed. The last sketch of the night was my favorite. The idea was that there is a man who has a mental condition where he thinks days last 30 seconds. So he keeps coming in and out of the scene, eating breakfast, and going to bed. The scene escalates and escalates until there is just a frenzy of action on stage that is pretty funny. In my facebook post I referenced Slovin and Allen...their time machine bit is what the sketch reminded me of.

[Can't find a youtube clip of Slovin and Allen doing their own bit, just other people copying it...here is a funny Mr. Show sketch]

And yet, I would not call the sketch group I saw a bad sketch group. They obviously have talent. There were jokes in the performance. I just recognize how hard it is to write good sketch comedy. Think about it right now. Try to think of a premise not predicated on current events or pop culture (SNL's fall back). Try to think of an engine that can produce between 3 to five minutes of jokes before sputtering out. It is damn hard.

My friend, Dale, does an MST3k/Rifftrax kind of thing with bad movies. Ask anyone who has watched a shitty movie with me and they will agree, I can mock a movie with the best of them. But the trick of good movie mockery is to write down the jokes. I have watched the 1989 piece of shit movie Shotgun Jones more times than I have seen the Godfather and I there are still huge stretches that I can't comment on. Now, sitting beside Dale and watching it, I was cracking wise the whole time. Sit me in front of my laptop with a blank word document and a window showing the movie? I am useless.

It occurs to me, this is all about confidence in your comedy. I need immediate feedback to know whether or not an idea I have is funny. I need to know it is making people laugh, now. Writing a joke and then performing it, no matter the capacity, implies a confidence in your comedic ability. That's the hard thing about stand up, going up with material you think is funny and bombing with it. What makes you laugh in private might not translate to a group of strangers.

Likewise, hats off to people who write sketches, TV shows and comedy movies. If you'll notice, most are written by a group of writers who can bounce ideas off each other and refine them. Comedy alone in a vacuum is tough.

That was a long way of saying, thanks to all the people who make me laugh. Life is so much better with good comedy. If you are reading this and don't like comedy, go look for something that makes you laugh. Laughing is great.

Of course, I did get sidetracked picking videos for this by watching the Farting Preacher over and over.

Failure

I am writing tonight from a place of failure but not of depression (I mean, no more so than my usual baseline sadness). My cousin reminded me that this is the last weekend of July. You would think I would be acutely aware of that fact but I was somehow in a kind of dazed dreamland about it.

OK, not so much a dreamland but definitely a daze. Long time readers of this blog will probably not believe me when I say that what happened over the past week and a half was not a suicide attempt but rather good, old-fashioned stupidity. You may recall me writing about my gnat problem. I was getting very sick of having gnats all over my room, buzzing my ear, littering my furniture and walls with their tiny corpses. So, I went to the store and purchased a Hot Shot No Pest Strip. I thought it was one of those things you hang (and you can hang this) and flies get stuck to it. The container said it was odor free, for use indoors, etc. I read the warnings, I swear to god I did. I remember it saying to not leave the device where pets or kids could get to it (check). It said not to install it in a room where food is prepared or stored (fine). What I don't recall reading was the warning that said not to store the device in a room that is inhabited by humans more than 4 hours a day.

I had this thing in my room for over a week and a half. Plus, I have barely left my room for a week and a half. I have been getting runny noses and headaches, which I thought were allergies but I hadn't been outside. When I woke up gasping to breathe a couple of night ago, I realized something was wrong beyond the norm. I decided to do some online research and realized I had been poisoning myself with an odorless vapor for over a week. I immediately moved the contraption (I left the one I bought for the bathroom because I am not in there more than 4 hours a day no matter what some of my exes may tell you) into the garage/laundry room. The gnats are back in my room but at least I am starting to breathe easier again.

If you hear about my lungs collapsing into a bloody paste or my head swelling and popping, just know that this was not a conscious attempt on my own life.

So back to the failure. I can't believe July has come and gone with no success at finding a job. I have had all of two (2) interviews since being fired. I have applied to dozens of security firms, investigation firms, law firms, comic book companies, temp agencies, staffing firms, video stores, gas stations, multi-national conglomerates and even put out a few escort ads on Backpages.  I have earned not a cent since June 5th. I even narrowly missed winning $40 in a trivia contest last weekend.

Moving back in with my parents at the age of 28 was very depressing. Moving back in with them at the age of 35 I have to ask what the fuck am I doing with my life? I have failed at becoming an adult. I mean, I surround myself with objects of my adolescence (comics, videogames, DVDs, etc.) because they bring me comfort but I also wonder if they don't hold me back. I haven't found a mate yet, and ignoring loneliness for a second, it would be useful to have someone to share the bills with and back me up. I haven't had kids yet, thank god, but having someone else's  life in my hands would maybe motivate me more to go find any old job. If I had a kid, I could see myself flipping burgers again to make sure that kid gets what it needs. The only person I have to keep alive is me, and I don't even like me all that much. I don't have a career, security or a house to call my own. No savings, no plans, no potential. I swear, I am not down as I usually am when I write this (I am in a pretty decent mood actually) I just realistically have failed in just about every category in which a man can fail.

The most frustrating thing is, I don't actually think it was  mistake to move here. I could see myself making a really cool life here with a decent income. I was already becoming active in the improv community. Besides Megan, my pre-friend, who I have had some really great times with here, I had made friends with Dale and Tim and John and Sarah and a bunch of other people I enjoy hanging out with. I can see myself getting active in the comic community (organizing it like I did in Greenville). I can see myself getting in shape and writing more. I really wanted this opportunity away from Greenville to get my life together. You know how you avoid your high school reunion until you have something to be proud of? That was my plan for returning home. When I moved back to Greenville it would be as a happy, successful, relatively contented human. Instead, I return in disgrace and failure.

I, of course, am looking forward to spending time with my wonderful friends again. I have missed Kirby, Kells, Jack, John, Aubrey, James, Lily, Adam, Shawn, Brendan, Evan, Richard, Max, Beth, Amanda, Marcus, Madison, Betsy, Joe and probably a dozen other folks I am currently forgetting. But I don't know how I am going to face them. I hate being an object of pity but that seems to be the feeling I encourage most in people right now. If you read this and you have a hard time getting to see me when I get back in town, please know it isn't anything to do with you guys I consider my friends. I am going to need some time to adjust to being a bit of a loser. So please have patience with me and I guess I will be seeing you Greenvillians soon enough.

If any of my KC people read this, I really wish we could have hung out more. As a white male in the US, I am not used to failure so please excuse the whining nature of this post. And if anyone has any ideas for a next move, I am all ears.

Powerful Politics: Superman

My friend, Andy, is the editor and chief of a great little review website called the Comic Book Bin. I would write occasional articles for the site but the grind of weekly reviews on titles I don't feel passionate about can be a real slog. The site offered specialized columns as well but Andy himself already had the only one I was interested in, the political column. I hope most people are past the idea of comics as kid stuff by now. What started that way has grown into a market of fiction written for adult consumers with adult sensibilities.

However, like dinner party conversations, comics are usually careful to stay away from politics and religion. When these realms do intersect, they seem to do so in the most conservative and inoffensive way possible. A few years ago, DC did a mini-series called Decisions that was written by their most outspoken writers from both ends of the political spectrum. The idea was to define where the superheroes stood on political issues. The big dodge of the whole thing is that they wouldn't allow Superman to be pinned down one way or the other because everyone wants to think of him as representing their idea of America. Therefore, they stuck to all the non-shocking character revelations (Green Arrow is liberal? No shit).

Three icons of liberalism in one panel!

An idea has been gnawing at the base of my mind for a couple of months: comics are essentially conservative. I don't know if that is true or not but I would like to look at some examples both recent and in the past. This is the first part in a god-knows-how-long series about how various characters and storylines have reflected the political zeitgeist throughout the years.

Lots of people know the origin of the origin of Superman. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were Jewish kids, the children of immigrants. There have been all sorts of scholarly works written on Superman reflecting the immigrant experience, Superman as Moses and pretty much any facet of the lives of the creators of Superman have been read into the character himself. Something that Grant Morrison (a modern day Superman writer) likes to talk about is the Socialist origins of Superman. When he first started, he was a defender of the defenseless. Factory workers, abused wives, the poor, the destitute; these were the people Superman fought for. Greedy corporate interests and corrupt politicians were his foes.

Superman causes the housing crisis!

You have to remember, the Soviet Union was an ally (or at least the enemy of our enemy) of the U.S. before they became our arch-enemies. Before the Cold War, communism was openly discussed as a political alternative to capitalism in the U.S. Now, even socialism (the watered down version of communism) is considered a forbidden word in political discourse. There was nothing alarming or subversive about a superhero representing socialist ideas.

However, I would be willing to bet that, if you asked people these days what Superman represents, most would say conservatism. Let us look a little more at Superman's history to see where the turn came in.

As the comics code authority took hold in the 1950s, any sort of subtext was scrubbed from superhero comics in general. The most controversial thing they would stand for is obeying your parents and staying away from icky girls. This kind of neutered, silly view of Superman (and the entire industry as kids stuff) dominated until the 1980s. Artist Curt Swan became so associated with Superman, his rendition of the Man of Steel's face became the "official" way to draw Supes.

Official and boring...

The majority of Superman's history was spent as an iconic symbol for Truth, Justice and the American Way. Black and white morality, a refusal to kill, stories that revolved around playing elaborate jokes on Lois Lane and really goofy side-effects of Kryptonite became the hallmarks of the Superman mythos.

Oh, and his dickery.

In the mid-1980s, DC restarted their fictional universe. They wanted to lose the image of being "just for kids." Superman, over the years, had found himself as a best friend of Batman and caretaker of a menagerie of refugees from Krypton (Supergirl, Krypto the Super Dog, the Bottle City of Kandor, Beppo the Super Monkey, Streaky the Super Cat, Comet the Super Horse, etc.). DC did away with all that and brought Superman back to his essence...making him a kind of blank slate that a powerful writer could place his stamp on.

Did you think I was joking about the animals?

John Byrne, a very gifted artist who made his name drawing the X-Men for Marvel, was given the task of recreating Superman for the 80s. While I can't speak to his intentions, he seemed to be at least giving lip service to the socialist roots by transforming Superman's long-term archenemy, Lex Luthor, from a mad scientist into a Corporate Master of the Universe straight from the movie Wall Street. Luthor was now above the law, because he was wealthy. And that is a perfectly legitimate way to define a hero, through contrast with his villains but Byrne seemed to have a hard time filling in the personality traits of Superman himself. He was still a Kansas farm boy (although he had never been Superboy in this new telling) who believed in Truth, Justice and the American Way. Which is all just vague enough to leave your most iconic hero a bit of a cipher in the new, morally ambiguous world of 80s comics.

Where Byrne kind of (in my opinion) whiffed his chance to define Superman, Frank Miller stepped up and did it for him. Miller wrote one of the two defining graphic novels of the 1980s, the Dark Knight Returns (the other being Watchmen, of course). Although the Dark Knight Returns is mostly about Batman, his arch-enemy (or his antithesis) is set up as Superman rather than the Joker. Shown as a tool of Ronald Reagan, Superman in Miller's vision is so beholden to The American Way that he is a puppet of the government. He is a stooge with no mind of his own. Spoiler alert for an old comic but Batman kicks Superman's ass (but uses the fight as an excuse to fake his own death). I really think this marked the ascension of Batman as DC's #1 character and reduced Superman to #2 (prior to Dark Knight Returns I would have put them as equals).

And this became the only official way a Superman/Batman fight could go down.

Really, this was not so much a reimagining of Superman as the ultimate conclusion to the characterization of the 50s to the 80s. Miller is obviously no fan of Reagan and his rhetoric. Barred from putting any overt political commentary in comics for decades, Miller hit at the time when he was finally free to express the Nixon-engendered distrust of the government. Superman was painted as naive enough to obey his commander and chief no matter how corrupt the orders were.

This image kind of tainted the popularity of Superman for years. All sorts of gimmicks came up in the 1990s to try and break him free from the perception of being a lame tool of the status quo. After marrying him to Lois Lane, and gaining zero traction in the grim and gritty world of 90s comics, the powers that be kicked off a horrible trend in comics by killing him off and replacing him with darker, edgier versions of the character. None of these caught on either.

Say hello to...sigh...Cyborg Superman...

Various writers have tried since the 90s to put a new spin on the Man of Steel. Mark Waid made him a symbol for innocence and justice in his Kingdom Come series. Joe Kelly argued for his essential decency being his primary character trait in his Action Comics run. Mark Millar showed that Superman would have been just as big a tool under the communists in his alternate reality work, Red Son. I am going to credit Jeph Loeb with this next bit but I may be wrong. I know he wrote most of the stories in this arc. If Superman is too closely tied with the government (which most people don't trust) how do we make him an enemy of the government? Easy, make Lex Luthor the president.

I think a lot of writers were troubled by the outcome of the 2000 election and this was reflected in their work. While Marvel had people like Bendis writing a more multi-faceted approach to politics, DC just went ahead and made the president pure evil. No subtlety here. Superman's long-time friend, Pete Ross, becomes the vice-president as a way to kind of balance Luthor's villainy. However, whereas it would have been unheard of to have Superman fighting against the government of the U.S. in the 1960s, here he was labelled as a public enemy in the 2000s.

Granted, I don't think this rehabbed his image any. I can't help but feel conservatives had to be kind of offended that Luthor happened to be president at the same time as GW Bush. There was a storyline called Our Worlds at War about several alien invasions on the Earth. Luthor manipulates the situations to his own advantage. It is all pretty thinly veiled metaphor for how skeptics were looking at the conflicts in the middle east. Now that I think about it, fans of small government could just overlook the timing and see the Luthor administration as an indictment of the corruption inherent in the government.

But, I hadn't finished the crossword!

While a bit ham-handed I think the idea as an approach to Superman is fundamentally sound. He has god-like powers and could easily rule the planet. The inherent decency instilled in him from his red state parents gives him a strong moral center that he applies to a variety of increasingly complex dilemmas. He gave in to capital punishment once and then vowed to never take a life again. Once he becomes the authority figure, the ultimate judge of morality, he loses any interesting character tension. To set him against the powers that be is always more interesting than seeing him work for them. Now, he has another potential enemy to keep an eye on, the U.S. government.

Ultimately, the best statement about the character was made in one of his worst recent stories. In the Grounded storyline by John Michael Straczynski, Superman decides to walk across the U.S. to get back in touch with the common people. Along the way, he encounters a host of common problems (drug dealers, people with heart conditions, etc.) that are meant to humanize him. Instead, they illustrated how far the character has come since smacking around spousal abusers in the 40s. He is too powerful a character to get involved with micro-management of morality. He burns down a drug dealers stash house with the knowledge that another dealer will be in that neighborhood in a week. The storyline was meant to show that Superman can inspire normal people to stand up for themselves but, of course, they don't have the benefit of superpowers to help identify and destroy drug supplies.

In the final determination of whether or not Superman is conservative or liberal, I would have to cite a long-standing argument between Superman and Lex Luthor. Luthor believes that Superman represents a safety net for humanity. Why should anyone struggle to achieve or take risks when Superman exists as this unreachable standard or last minute savior? Growth comes through trying and failing to achieve so why should anyone try if they can't be Superman and how can anyone fail if he is there to catch them? Lex embodies the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" and free market competition of conservative thought. If you put Superman in opposition to this way of thinking, then he has to say "I don't trust humans to achieve on their own, so I will help you tards along." No one would like him much then. But you can't have him agree with Luthor because then he would just retreat to the Fortress of Solitude and never help anyone with anything in the name of letting humans fend for themselves. Thanks to his parents, Superman has a healthy chunk of "with great power comes great responsibility" along with that black and white morality. He is in a unique position to help others and can't deny that. But by helping others, he is interfering with the fate of indigenous humans.

In writing this out, I have come to the conclusion that Superman kind of represents an idealized government. One that balances the power to make a difference with the ideas of personal achievement and responsibility. A centralized government can act in ways a collection of states cannot and to ignore the responsibilities that come with these powers would be irresponsible. On the other hand, to meddle too much in the destinies of the people would undermine the growth of the people. If Luthor is the conservative side of things, wanting Superman to fuck off so humanity can find its own way, then Brainiac or Zod are the opposites. They represent the elimination of free will, the intense meddling of an all-powerful government to manage every aspect of one's life.

The nanny state personified.

Wow, I had no idea these were going to be my conclusions but it seems I have led myself into believing that Superman represents the best of both parties. His enemies often represent the extremist views of either end of the political spectrum. He must act if it is in his power to help others, but he must not limit the freedoms of the people he protects. I'll be damned. No wonder he is such an enduring character. In a time when it seems like politics have to be all one way or the other (blue state and red state) I would like to think Superman moves so fast you can only see a blur of purple.

What do you think? Is Superman a godless commie or a capitalist pig? Both? Neither?

In the future, I will be looking at characters (like Batman, Captain America and X-Men) as well as storylines (the Civil War, Dark Reign and more).

Good Person?

I went to see a play tonight. It is called "To Make It Right" and it was only an hour long. I found I probably could have watched a longer version. It was by, I believe, a first time playwright. It focused on a gay man who had previously left the seminary. When his cousin dies, the main character is asked to conduct the eulogy, since he is the only person in the family with any public speaking ability. Over the course of the play, things come to light and some speeches are made. The whole thing wrestles with attempting to reconcile your sexuality with a religion that says who you are is wrong. It seems to act as a call for understanding and forgiveness, and I think everyone can get behind that. It is pretty fair to religion, even if it undercuts sexuality just a bit.

Now, I hope everyone knows, I am not religious or gay so you wouldn't think there is much in this play I can relate to. That is not the case, however. I don't wish to go into specifics (some secrets don't just belong to me) but there was a chord struck with one aspect of the play that got me thinking on my ride home...what does it mean to be good person and am I one?

I know, this blog is just a solipsistic mess but when my company is mostly me, myself and I; I digest all my experiences back through the four chambers of the cow stomach of my own experience (that metaphor got away from me). So, everything I have to say is pretty me-centered here but maybe you'll see something of yourself in here, too.

When I was a teen, developing my own theory of religion, I got hung up on the idea that there is no real afterlife. I have heard, and I am finding it hard to locate solid info about this on the internet (where every bit of info seems to have an agenda), that your brain is flooded with chemicals at the time of your death that are only present in low levels during your life. I didn't know that when I came up with my afterlife theory but it fits. My theory was that you learn early on in life a belief system (like Christianity or Hinduism or something) that creates a moral scaffolding in your brain. Even if only subconsciously, you are aware if you are doing the morally "right" or "wrong" thing as you go through your life. Even if you can justify your actions on the surface, deep down, you know if you are a dirty sinner. So, when you die, your brain uses that scaffolding and all the subconscious decisions you've made about your own actions to place you in an "afterlife" tailored by your ideas of what that afterlife should be.

For example, your parents are hardcore Baptists and raise you as such. Even if you later reject the church, the scaffolding is in your moral center of your brain just as language and mores are. You go through your life, helping others sometimes and being a real dickwad at other times. At the moment you die, your brain tallies up your own votes and sends you to whatever you imagine heaven or hell is. As we all know, your mind can dilute your perception of time. Why not live out an eternity between your last two heartbeats? And if you consider this idea blasphemy, just assume it was intelligent design that made our brains that way.

In that case, you are a good or bad person based on pretty early learning processes. You can overcome those initial scaffolds of morality but it is like learning to write with your non-dominant hand times 1000. Doable, but taking a lot of time. Plus, you are moving from a phase of your life where adults are planting "THE TRUTH" in your head to later years where you realize no one really has a clue what is really going on. So you aren't changing these "facts" with new, solid info...just doubt as to their veracity.

But who chooses to be a bad person? There are sociopaths, who have no regard for any morality. They would be labelled as evil but they wouldn't really care about such labels. That leaves me with people who know the difference between right and wrong and choose wrong. Back in college, I learned that we have all these coping mechanisms that keep us from believing we are doing something horrible. Justifications, excuses, compartmentalizing, rationalization...all these things are ways to keep us from feeling evil.

Without getting into the details, I wronged someone close to me when I was very young. I carried intense guilt around with me for years and years. Finally, I asked for forgiveness and sort of received it. Through therapy, I was able to forgive myself. Coming home from the play I wondered, is that old guilt still hiding in the back of my brain for judgment day? Did I really forgive myself or have I just wallpapered over my sense of responsibility for hurting someone else?

Then I began thinking of other things I have actually done wrong or had planned to do wrong if I knew I could have gotten away with it. I have made some hurtful decisions throughout my life but been lucky enough to be surrounded by people who don't hold them against me (or at least not for long). But how long will I hold those same bad decisions against me? Will I punish myself? Am I punishing myself?

There are people who will love me no matter what I do. I am almost 100% certain that I could walk into my mother's house with a severed head in my hands and she would ask what the person had done to deserve it. There are friends who have lines I can't cross. Some are really basic (like I can't tell them the truth about how I perceive their behavior or they will get defensive and yelly) and some are more forgiving (like, I can make some pretty major mistakes and still be welcomed back). Some, I apparently crossed a line years ago and, to this day, have no idea what I did to piss them off so.

If you strip away your rationalizations and justifications and look back on your life, did you do more good than harm? Does anyone think they have really lived a sinless life? I have never done anything as bad as the thing I did when I was much younger but I have done plenty of bad things. I have never felt more guilt than I could bear or live with (obviously, as I am still alive). Do these things accumulate in my soul? Do I even give myself credit for the good things I do?

Lots of questions tonight. Probably uneasy sleep in my future. Be good to each other.

My Musical Taste: An Evolution

Although my first two loves will always be comics and films, music is a very special part of my life. Lately, I have been marveling at how jingles from my childhood get stuck in my head and will never leave. I think a lot of our musical tastes are predicated on what we are exposed to as children. One of the things that probably shocks people about me is that I really don't give a shit about the Beatles. My parents never listened to them when I was a kid. I have no siblings who could introduce me to them. The radio never really played them (or at least not the stations I heard). My friends never talked about them. They never had videos on MTV. I honestly don't know how I was supposed to find out about them. By the time I got around to hearing them, I had heard tons of music that they had influenced. So guess what? The originators sound like the rip-offs when you grow up listening to the actual rip-offs.

So who did I hear? My father is very, very set in his musical ways. In a lot of ways, my personality has been defined by trying to rebel against my father and his tastes. There are some deep-rooted psychological reasons I won't go into but, whatever he liked, I was determined to hate. This led to me being exposed to country music at a young age. In retrospect, the country he liked was way better than the pap I currently avoid. He would play Hank Williams Jr and Waylon Jennings. He liked Creedance Clearwater Revival, the Allman Brothers and more obscure acts like Hot Tuna. His record collection fascinated me because he had Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and the Who. Pretty much a classic rock, outlaw country and southern rock enthusiast. Occasionally, he would embrace the novelty of a hip-hop song. He loved Tone-loc and Coolio's Fantastic Voyage. To the point, I would have to hear them over and over again.

My mother is probably the source of my love of pop music. She loved Billy Joel and Elton John, causing me to give piano-based rock more credit than it probably deserves. Reading between the lines here you can see I was closer to my mom growing up than my dad and I respected her musical taste more. She probably liked the Beatles a bit but I never heard it. She listened a lot to MY 102.5, the light rock station in my hometown. Her tastes coincided with MTV a lot more than my dad's as well. She was likely to enjoy a new top 40 hit and my dad was likely to shy away from anything made after 1980 (or sung by "fruity loops" as he calls homosexuals).

I was definitely a child of MTV. My own embryonic tastes were informed almost entirely by the videos I saw. While I was still in elementary school, I enjoyed listening to George Michael and INXS. In fact, those were two of the first cassettes I ever bought (Faith and Kick, respectively). The title track from Faith was as catchy as songs get and I got an early start on maudlin crushes when Never Tear Us Apart by INXS reminded me of the first girl I ever had a crush on, Megan (and I have totally forgotten her last name...for shame).

As I transitioned into middle school, my musical tastes were tied completely to my puberty. Prince's music videos had so much salacious content, I was hooked. Duran Duran were good for half-naked women, also. I remember this period of middle school music for a couple of different reasons. I went to Boston for the first time in 7th grade and listened to Weird Al's Off the Deep End tape over and over. I guess Nirvana had to have already come out but I was just as likely to listen to Poison's Unskinny Bop as Smells Like Teen Spirit.

Then, it happened. The forces of the universe aligned in such a way that I had my first full-blown "Holy Shit I love this music!" moment. I remember seeing a video for Mysterious Ways by U2 on MTV and thinking that I had never heard anything quite like it. Of course, I knew about U2 from their Joshua Tree stuff, and I liked it alright but it never grabbed me. I think the key was that I was entering my own irony-heavy period just as they were. My parents bought me the tape and I took it to Myrtle Beach. I listened to it until the tape broke.

I became obsessed with U2. I read books about them, collected all their older albums, looked for bootlegs, anything that could feed the desire to hear more of their sound. Waiting for the release of Zooropa was almost torture. At the time, I didn't have a frame of reference for their theatricality and the various European music they were allowing to influence their rock and roll. Four white guys with a guitar turned into synthesizers, Johnny Cash cameos, letting the guitar player sing, etc. Around this time, my best friend was falling just as madly in love with REM as I was with U2. This was kind of cool because the two groups were close friends as well. I remember, for Clinton's Inauguration in 1993, the rhythm section of U2 teamed up with Michael Stipe and Peter Buck to play as Automatic Baby (since Achtung Baby and Automatic for the People were both reaching heights of popularity).

My peers continued to influence my tastes but none more so than my best friend, Kirbie. Her older brother had really good taste and got to college as we were getting to high school. He was able to pass back his wisdom to us. Also, and I know I have mentioned this, Kirbie spent a year in the UK and brought me back a mix tape of Radiohead, Blur, Manic Street Preachers, Shed 7, Pulp and a ton of other Brit Heavyweights. While I resisted REM for years, I immediately gave in to the British Invasion of the mid-1990s. Pulp's Different Class, Blur's Parklife and Radiohead's The Bends were three of the best albums I ever owned. Oasis (though much maligned later) actually came out strong with Definitely Maybe. Like I said, I didn't really know enough about the Beatles to be offended.

As the high school years chugged on, I found my musical identity. I read Q Magazine religiously because those British reviewers were a little more in tune with me than the reviewers in Rolling Stone. I tried out a lot of the British hits. Some stuck and some didn't. In the US, grunge was really in charge. I dutifully got into Nirvana (although not as much as most of my friends). I never understood the Pearl Jam or Mudhoney obsession. I didn't like Soundgarden until their final album. U2's electronic experimenting, coupled with my examination of British music, led me down some weird paths. I was really into Nine Inch Nails in high school. Of course, back then I had begun struggling with my depression that I still deal with today. The Downward Spiral scared me and thrilled me in a way music hadn't. Of course, MTV still had its claws in me. Green Day and Stone Temple Pilots were among the first CDs I ever purchased. Most of my music is tied up in memories of girls I went out with or wanted to. In high school, especially. When I switched schools my junior year to get away from my first girlfriend, I met another Kirby. He was into just balls out rock and roll. Through our friendship, we discovered acts like Everclear and the Refreshments together. My pop taste and his rock taste found an area to meet in the middle.

My freshman year of college, U2 released Pop and I hosted a radio show at my college station. I have told this story many, many times so forgive me if you know it. In the press materials and interviews leading up to Pop, Bono was defending the incorporation of electronica into U2's rock sound. He talked about wanting to hear new music and a desire to keep pushing the boundaries of pop. Now, for him, that meant adding more effect pedals and making the Edge sound like he was playing inside a videogame. For me, it meant I should never stand still in my pursuit of good music. I should keep trying to find something I have never heard before. Forced to play certain albums in heavy rotation at the college station, I was exposed to more stuff (ska, indie rock, lounge music, etc.). I really embraced that ethos of wanting to hear something new. It didn't matter if it wasn't really new to the world, it just had to be new to me.

This is when I remade a group of friends in college. Eric, Stephen, Michael, Casey, Matty...these guys were essentially my tiny fraternity. We were all friends and we all lived together at different points. To this day, I consider Eric my best friend. All of them brought me various flavors of music I hadn't known before. Stephen and I had identical taste. He got me into Counting Crows, Ben Folds Five and many of the poppier things I still enjoy. Eric and Michael were fans of alt.country and, for the first time since I was a kid, I was open to hearing music with a twang. All of them were into Jump, Little Children. Jump, Little Children and the Dave Matthews Band kind of filled the same void for me. Both used unusual instruments not as some added spice to flavor up a track but as a matter of course. DMB's sax and fiddle combo were very unique to me. JLC used a cello, upright bass and a mult-instrumentalist (usually playing accordion or a tiny guitar or mellotron) to make their pop songs sound like nothing I had heard. In their early days (which I had a chance to experience but stubbornly missed) they incorporated Irish folk customs into their songs and they were beautiful.

I went to see JLC and DMB a lot. For a guy who has never done drugs, I sure was a big Dave Matthews fan. The flame was stoked by my freshman year roommate, Randy, and his obsessive devotion to DMB. As college went on, MTV stopped playing videos but HBO had a show called Reverb that showed live acts. Through that show (and through Eric's guidance) I found the Flaming Lips and Wilco. Both of those led me to Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. Talk about a revelation! Back in daycare, our teachers would take us to a skating rink once a week in the summer. Since it was a Christian daycare, they could only play two albums: the Dirty Dancing soundtrack and the Beach Boys Greatest Hits. I knew the Beach Boys as Little Deuce Coupe and Surfin' Safari. When I heard Pet Sounds, it blew me away. U2 started me off by asking, "why does rock have to be four white guys with guitars?" and it led me back to the 1960s where Brian Wilson (while going insane, apparently) answered.

There was a parallel development at this point where (perhaps because of the end of the millennium) the past was being pilfered for music. Moby took the field recordings of Alan Lomax and turned them into pop hits. Sampling moved outside of the realm of hip-hop and began to be incorporated into rock. Unfortunately, this devolved into nu-metal where every rock group had to have a DJ. Beyond that, Tarantino's rise as a powerful influence in hollywood created the resurgence of the pop soundtrack. He was able to put his hands on deep album cuts that were super cool and hadn't been popular in years (if ever). He opened doors to acts from the past just as I was trying to track down what song was being sampled here or there.

This period of high school through college was made up of many side trips into little musical niches. I discovered I liked Beethoven and Mozart during this period. I found out I liked the Sex Pistols. Johnny Cash and I became friends. Jurassic 5 and Public Enemy were my favorite rap groups. Try as I might, I never found a metal act that really spoke to me. Fatboy Slim, Squirrel Nut Zippers and other little outliers (from my main diet of rock and alt.country) filled in the gaps.

Towards the end of college, U2 released All That You Can't Leave Behind. Only their third album since I had become a fan and I was psyched to hear it. I remember listening to it and thinking, "What the hell is this?" I felt betrayed. Although, in interviews, Bono insisted that they were not retreating to the safety of their more popular sound; the songs themselves spoke a different truth. Even if the albums I had fallen in love with were watered down versions of more avant garde music, they were at least trying to stretch as artists and embrace a new sound. They had opened my eyes to a whole world of music and, a few short years later, decided to run away from bold experiments to go back to earning more money than god. At that point, I decided there would be no automatic loyalty to bands. They had to keep earning my respect with every album. Even to this day I judge each album on a continuum from each artist. For example, I can't say I love the direction the Strokes have taken but at least they aren't churning out copy after copy of Is This It?

I set out to continue finding bands and albums I enjoy. Living in Boston, I got to see amazing live shows by The Beta Band, Virgil Shaw, Mercury Rev, Ben Folds, Badly Drawn Boy, Flaming Lips, The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Eels, Alabama 3, Jurassic Five, Grandaddy, Spoon and a ton of others I am forgetting. Some groups flame out (like the Beta Band, Grandaddy) and others get bogged down in rewriting the same album over and over (Alabama 3, Mercury Rev, Badly Drawn Boy).

The only group that has continued to grow and stick to its guns, in my opinion, is Radiohead. After Kirbie got me into them with the Bends, they just kept changing. Even though their line-up stayed the same, they weren't comfortable sitting in one place. People keep asking them when they will make another OK Computer and I hope to all the powers in the universe they never do. I want them to keep making music that makes them happy. King of Limbs, maybe their weakest album since their first, still has songs of immense beauty that move me. Wherever they are going, I am going to follow because I know they make music I like to hear even if I don't know it yet.

Wilco was in the running for my favorite band for years and years. The evolution from AM to Being There to Summerteeth to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot to A Ghost Is Born is kind of mind-blowing to me. The roots rock of AM, made with some of the remnants of Uncle Tupelo, gave way to a broader sound in Being There that was just barely still alt.country. By letting Jay Bennett take a bigger role in the band, they produced two masterpieces with Summerteeth and YHF. Even after Tweedy kicked Bennett out, A Ghost Is Born kept pushing things in a new direction. Unfortunately, that new direction was a jam band. Sky Blue Sky, Wilco the Album and the Whole Love all sound about the same to me. There doesn't seem to be any stretching. Tweedy has found a group of musicians he is comfortable with and they have given up on being innovative. They just want to make comfortable rock that they are confident in. Which is fine, more power to them, but I don't have to like it.

Q Magazine moved on, getting new reviewers who didn't speak to me. I never got into Pitchfork. Most of my friends (who were my age) weren't getting into anything new. Every now and then, Eric comes through with a discovery that speaks to me (like Okkervil River or the Hold Steady). But he is also likely to continue attempting to get me into Iron and Wine (apparently not going to happen) or Bob Dylan (for sure not going to happen). Our tastes drift a little more every year.

After some "wandering the wilderness" years, I returned to Greenville and began making younger friends. Scott, Kells, Calder, John, Aubrey, Max, Richard and this crew of twenty-somethings who were all plugged into sounds I hadn't given a chance. I dismissed the indie rock of the present as dance pop. The New Wave had come around again and synthesizers were dominating music again. Piano rock now meant shitty bands like the Fray. Alt.country was treading water with no new voices beyond Bright Eyes (who I kind of hate). My new friends, combined with reading reviews from the AV Club, helped me realize there are still new bands making great music. It just doesn't sound like the music I grew up loving. I had almost fallen into the comfort trap of only seeking out things I knew I would like.

The past few years have exposed me to groups like Surfer Blood, Wolf Parade, Foals, Frightened Rabbit, Father John Misty, Generationals, Telekinesis, Titus Andronicus and Jens Lekman. A group I found on my own, The Weakerthans, remains one of my favorites. I have opened up to the sounds of the Decemberists, the Polyphonic Spree and a little project called Girl Talk where one man mashes up rap and rock in ways that always make me giddy.

Anyone who says that there is no good new music doesn't listen to enough new music. There is always someone out there, drawing inspiration from the past in order to pave a route to the future. Today, with no one definitive source of new music, kids are hearing all sorts of stuff I would have never been exposed to until college. They are all going to grow up and some of them will make bands. I can't wait to see what kind of music they make in response to the music my generation made.

Music goes in cycles, tastes (both public and private) change, but I encourage everyone out there to keep your ears open. There are lots of beautiful notes left to be played and heard.

Aaron Sorkin, Why Do You Make Me Cry?

Just look at this smug bastard...

I started watching the West Wing yesterday and it has been very difficult to stop. I avoided it for years because I knew it to be the longest running Sorkin show and who has that kind of time to commit? Turns out, I do.


My enjoyment of Sorkin began in college when I started watching reruns of Sports Night on Comedy Central. The show had one major flaw (in the first season) in that it was a one camera show, obviously filmed on a series of sets, that had a laugh track as if a giggling chorus of assholes was following the cast around while they filmed. For one thing, like all Sorkin shows, it is funny but it also has a lot of drama. So, trying to find a place to squeeze in a laugh track in a story about sexual harassment is kind of crass, to say the least.

Jeremy (on the far left) is my surrogate character.

At any rate, I found myself sucked into Sports Night. Which is weird, if you know me, because I don't care about sports. At all. At. All. The premise of the show is that it follows the support staff and on-air talent of a Sports Center type show.  Although team names would usually be accurate, specific athletes and coaches were made up for the show. I like to think all of Sorkin's shows take place in an alternate universe (the Sorkin-verse, if you will). In the end, Sports Night ends up being about sports like I've heard Friday Night Lights isn't really about football. The two anchors of the show within the show are single, one of them is in love with the producer of the show (Felicity Huffman). There are writers and assistant producers and researchers and all of them have their own lives and plotlines. It is like any other workplace dramedy in that respect.

The thing that hooked me, at first, was the rapid fire dialogue. Being a huge fan of Cary Grant in His Girl Friday, I love to watch fast, witty banter. You have to actively listen and watch the whole show because there are references and callbacks that make no sense unless you have been paying attention. It rewards non-casual watchers, which is what I am. I almost never turn on the TV just to have something on or to play in the background. If I am watching TV, that is what I am doing (or watching while I am on my treadmill, but, same thing). I found Sports Night incredibly witty. It is almost never belly laugh funny but it great for chuckles and wry, knowing laughter.

Then I noticed an odd phenomenon. After I got to know the characters a bit, I would find myself just weeping like a shithead at the end of almost every episode. I bought the DVD box set and watched the pilot for the first time, and that made me cry. I didn't want to look too closely at why. At various points in my life, especially when I have attempted to be stoic in the face of hard times or depression, the slightest emotional push from a movie, song or TV show could make me well up. Everclear songs, Woody Allen movies and (most inexplicably) any program where a character who doesn't usually sing has to sing...all these things have made me cry for little to no reason when I have been emotionally vulnerable. So, I didn't give it much thought when Sports Night made me boo-hoo because I figured, this must be one of those times.

My theory was further proven (a bit) when I began watching Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. I liked the cast and I was caught up in comparing it to 30 Rock like everyone did that first season. Studio 60 almost never made me cry. There were a couple of good ones in there but, by and large, it was kind of unlikable. Maybe because I knew that Sorkin was pouring some of his venom over a relationship gone wrong into the show, I found it hard watch characters who should love each other hating each other. It was still funny (if in an off-base way) but not Sports Night good.

I wanted to never stop punching half these people.

The Social Network really won me back over to Sorkin's side as a great screenplay. A topic on which I had no interest, again, was made to fascinate and pull me in. I watched the first episode of The Newsroom and realized I would probably have gotten sucked into that, too, if I still had cable.

This is the first scene from the Newsroom. I love the rant that ends this but it is an 8 minute investment.

Watching these first few episodes of The West Wing, the old waterworks are back. Now, granted, I have been having a tough time lately. However, no one who reads this blog would accuse me of being stoic or not expressing my feelings. I think, now that I am watching a pure intersection of Sorkin and politics, that I get why his writing moves me, emotionally.

As a liberal, you have to be kind of willfully naive about a few things. You have to be under the impression that people want to be good to each other, help each other. We may bicker, disagree, get angry but, at the end of the day, we would all stand up and do the right thing. Sorkin writes the best of all possible worlds. He writes where people behave as if they have honor and scruples.

There is a debate in the first couple of West Wing episodes between doing the right thing and appearing to do the right thing. In the real world, the appearance of doing the right thing (in politics) is the most important thing. In the Sorkinverse, his characters get to do the right thing and not pay the price for it. I realize, this is the kind of world I want to live in. Everyone is smart, well-informed, a little smarmy and ultimately decent to one another. If there are bad guys, they are kind of 2-d straw men to be knocked over by our fiercely intelligent protagonists. This is in no way a realistic or fair depiction of the world, Sorkin's is a world of black and white morality that pretends to dabble in the gray (but always veers back to a tidy conclusion).

Besides being moral and witty, the number one trait of a Sorkin character is selflessness. I have noticed that this makes me cry more than any other action depicted on screen. And I don't mean the selflessness of throwing oneself on a grenade or dying for what you believe in (not to be glib, but that is almost easier because you don't have to deal with anything after your sacrifice) but rather the every day little acts of decency that keep society from collapsing.

For an example of his worldview, in the pilot episode of Sports Night, most of the stories the team covers are about scandals and crime in professional sports. The episode ends with one of the anchors showing his son footage of a Nigerian man setting a sprinting record. The anchor just wants his son to see what sports can be at their best, triumphant and focused not so much on competition but human achievement. The rest of the series doesn't really hit that button again (it isn't a defense of sports week after week) but it sets the tone for all of Sorkin's TV work. That is to say, it is about acknowledging the harsh realities of the world but looking for the goodness in it.

I want to live in Sorkin's world, unless it is at Studio 60. Also, his best character on West Wing is named Josh, so...hurray for that!