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Monday, October 27, 2003 "Mediocrities, I absolve you." So ends the play Amadeus, which we went to see the other night. And I wondered, afterwards, was it only me, or was anyone else thinking, De Niro-style, "You talkin' to me?" Peter Shaffer makes it very clear he's talking to the audience by various means, including shining a light on them at one point, to really bring his point home. To which I say: "Fuck you, Peter Shaffer." And: "Playwright, absolve thyself." That was a mediocre play, I'm sorry, I talked to one of the actors afterwards and she said Shaffer keeps rewriting it, they got a rewrite halfway through rehearsals, and how old is this play? 30 years? Moreover, she told me all the actors thought the play sucked. It's ninety percent voice-over. It makes a couple of valid point about art-- that it's important, and you need talent-- and that talented people sometimes suffer-- but, really, we knew all that, and this production, at least, squandered a golden opportunity: to play some of Mozart's music. They played a snatch here and there, but the whole play should have been drenched in it. That would bring the point home. Mozart was assured and suffused with the joy of living and creation like no other composer I know. p.s. re the actor, she was quite attractive, and I made a scene, of course. What's an evening without Dave making an ass of himself? I talked to her for about half an hour. Pam hardly noticed. I'm getting sick and tired of her lack of jealousy so finally I called across the whole bar: "Hey, Pam, I've been talking to an attractive woman for half an hour, and you don't even notice? How come you're not jealous?" "I was mortified, and so was she," Pam informed me, the next morning. "Ah, come on, Pam, it was just a joke..." But back to the play. I don't know about you, my dear blog reader, but I-- at age 42, 8 years older than Mozart when he died-- am still seeking excellence in my work and fame in the world, which is why I'm keeping today's blog short. Gotta get back to work on Overexposure, my masterpiece, my Don Giovanni. Thursday, October 23, 2003 Yo. It's weird to think some people are actually reading this (hey, Ian). I tend to write it like a diary and forget it's possible I could actually hurt some people's feelings by dumping on shit or whatever. Let me clarify something from my last blog, I enjoyed working at my last job, it was very, very good to me, but I have some other work to do now. I'll probably fuck that up, too, but as Samuel Beckett says: Try. Fail. Try again. Fail better. I want to fail better than sucker writers who think their shit is dope; but it's wack... I bumped into L. McLaren at P. Pearson's book launch (her book's called Playing House, and it's really funny, pick it up) the other night. She has a fan in me-- L. McLaren, I mean. I haven't been reading the Globe-- I just can't stand it, it represents everything smug & bourgeois & lazy & boring & obvious that kills me about Toronto, the city I love, that's always been so full of interesting people but none of them have columns in the Globe-- except Leah. She came up to me when I was talking to another beauty, Stacy from Random House. "Hey, Continuity Girl," I said, naming the name of the book she's writing. "How did you know that-- oh, right, I forgot, you're one of those Book TV people now..." "Yeah, I read it on the wires. I'm not there, anymore, though..." "Oh, really? Why'd you leave?" People always assume that a man of my genius and world-historical accomplishments (scintillating books published in numerous languages, screenwriting career about to supernova, etc.) leaves jobs of his own volition. Quite the opposite is the case, unfortunately. Now, I did not say, but I implied, that leaving was my idea. I'm only human, right? And Leah M. doesn't want tot stand around talking to a loser. She wants to hang around winners. "Well, I thought I could be a superman and do that job and also write, but that turned out to be a fantasy, so..." At this point, her boyfriend, M de Carlo, came over. de Carlo's cool and he's getting cooler every day-- thanks in part to L. McLaren's ministrations (he's got kind of a groovy white-guy afro now, which she told me later was her idea). She definitely traded up from that little shit Pyper. "Yeah, and you have kids, too, right?" "Yeah." I don't like to enter the kids into the formula. The kids are here, and I have to write around them. I can write with kids-- just not with a job. "How many, now?" "Three." "Jesus, what are you doing? This isn't some trailer park in Kentucky." "Hey, man, it's got nothing to do with me, I'm just fulfilling Pam's will to procreate. I'm like the drone that services the queen, then dies..." The show started, and the speeches. de carlo drifted away. I chatted with L. a little more. She's very charming. And beautiful. It was a pleasure to talk to her and she charmed the pants off my friend Liz, too-- so she appeals to men and women alike. Her talk is peppered with observations about the international fashion world, so I asked her for news about my ex-girlfriend, Bronwyn. She knew her, sure enough. Bronwyn's the features editor for British Vogue, now. Or she was. She scored a giant advance for her next book, a history of what people wear to the Oscars, and quit, or retired. She thinks I'm wasting my fucking talent living in the provinces and writing my books, with their teensy-weensy advances, invisible to the naked eye. Maybe I am. All I can say, Bronwyn, is: life is long, ideally, and I'm a stubborn, persistent motherfucker. I'm a Capricorn, baby, we're tenacious motherfuckers. Plus, devoting your whole life to clothes, well...I'm trying to be kind and forgiving to everyone, so I'll merely say "no comment." She's got a new boyfriend, also, who's really skinny, apparently. "Skinny people are boring," I said to Leah. "Yes, I'm not interested in being skinny. You should see the women at these shows..." Here she made some point, I don't remember what it was exactly, because she was pointing to different bits of her body to demonstrate and sort of wiggling them around at the same time, I got a little distracted. I was, like, "hmmm, you're kinda hot." No disrespect to de Carlo. It was just a brief glimmer, then I went back to considering her in the abstract, as it were. drink, drink, gurgle, gurgle, chug, chug... Pam showed up at the very fag-end of the evening, when most people were drifting off. she chatted with various characters a bit, including Ms McL. Then it was time for those two to be off. Kiss, kiss. L.M. kissed Pam on both cheeks. Two statuesque babes, one blonde, one brunette, I couldn't help myself: "Why don't you two give each other another little kiss?" "Oh, Dave! That's so bad!" Leah said, seeming really quite shocked. "Did I say that out loud?" "Oh, I don't believe it, you men," she said, or something like that. She still gave me a little kiss-kiss goodbye, but I felt I shocked her and was probably crossed off several of her mental lists. Ah, well. It's best for should just stay here, alone in my office, or hunched over a computer in an Internet cafe, an urban hermit, cowering from the world. Never leave the house. When you ;leave the house, that's when you get into all this trouble. I'm gonna give that de carlo a call, though. I like him. Friday, October 03, 2003 So, yeah, I don't "work" anymore, since a month, I put the word in quotes because it was a joke, not really work, a terrible waste of time, an entire year of my life-- and we men only get, on average, 70 of those, the first twenty are wasted, the next ten you spend getting your shit together and trying to break into your profession, between 40-50 you have to make sure you're in, because you'd better be coasting by 50. Nothing sadder than seeing a gu in his fifties still trying to break into his profession, though the truth is that could be me. If it is, it is, it's happened to writers before. Some of my heroes-- like Bukowski and Miller-- didn't really get anywhere until about age 60 (like me, late bloomers, late starters). Well, I'm 42, I've got two books under my belt, but that's all starting to feel like the past, no matter how you slice it I wasted a very critical year of my life, earning money. Oh, well, what can you do, some people waste their whole lives like that, anyway I've got three kids, I had to do it. The ideal of course is to earn the money with the books. How the fuck do people do that? Last night I was uot with my investment banker friend B. and he had read Cad by our mutual friend Rick Marin, all about his bachelor exploits, and it led him to conclude he should write a book about his own shenanigans with women. "Sure," I said. "You'll probably be one of those annoying guys who tosses off a book and it becomes a best seller." Like Scott Turow. He writes on the train on the way into work, he doesn't even need his day job (lawyer) anymore, he just keeps it because he loves it. Annoying. Meanwhile, I'm killing myself, taking crappy jobs to support my lousy writing habit. Has it ever brought in more than 10 grand in a year? If so, that was a good year, that was a red-letter year. I'm killing my whole family. A conclusion once reached by none other than mario Puzoi, author of The Godfather. He wrote a couple of literary novels, they went nowhere, and he realized: "I'm killing my whole family." Then he decided to go genre. He wrote a book-- I don't know if you've heard of it-- The Godfather? I'm not going to go genre-- anyway, I'm genre enough, roantic comedy-- or rom com as it's known in the biz-- but after lengthy study I have come to two conclusions: or rather three conclusions: 1) write a script; 2) crank up the sentimentality, the feelings (woah, woah, woah, feelings) in my crappy, horrible writing. I've been coming down on the comedy too hard. Got to wrap it in a bit of schmaltz-- like Don Rickles: hey I'm a nice guy; 3) fucking churn it out. You've got to churn to shine. Which is why I'm in an Internet cafe with my coat wrapped around my shoulders (it's fucking freezing in here), paying $2 an hour to write my own shit, rather than sit in a studio, as I did for a year, making fucking TV, the most collosal (sp?) waste of time in the history of humanity. Did you know it takes at least an hour to make a minute of TV? Well, it does. Usually more, if you count all the thinking and the fucking meetings. I was making the worst kind of TV-- the kind no one watches. An unholy waste of a key year of my life. But I needed the 43 grand, and I'm smarter, tougher, faster (and a little bit more tired). So here goes. I want it all: nice family, sexy wife, nice house, cool car, and a writing career that pays. I want to be really annoying... Oh, and a great social life, with lots of smart and witty friends. I almost have it all, except the career. You haven't heard of me. On the other hand, I am talented, and I haven't given up. I want it all! Why not? How many lives do we get?
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