Category: Ramblings

How To Transcend A Cliché: Friday Night Lights

Recently, I began streaming Friday Night Lights on Netflix. I had heard such buzz about this show while it was on, but somehow never got around to actually watching. After all, it was about football in a small Texas town, two things that are completely foreign to me. I was never exposed to the game and always found it too complicated when people tried to explain it. (Also, I think I must suffer from some type of spatial dyslexia because whenever I think I’ve witnessed a great play, it turns out that I’m looking at the wrong part of the field.)

Anyway, I finally got around to watching it and I’m completely hooked. I’m talking addicted as in staying up till 2 a.m. — and I take my sleep seriously. If anything, I look forward to learning more about Coach Taylor, his wife, and, of course, Riggins, Street and Lyla. How did such an improbable show reel me in?

Warning: Spoilers after the cut!

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12 Ways of Battling Setbacks

tantrumelephantWriters have to deal with a lot of rejection. Even those of us with tough hides experience moments of doubt. The worst is when you get a triple whammy: your article was killed; you got a surprise bill; and your dude told you he wants to see other people. Times like these try our resolve, but that’s life, right? Oh, if only it were so easy to go Zen. When life seems to have given me a special seat at my own private shit show, some of the strategies below help me cope. Basically, they all boil down to one thing: treating yourself as you would a beloved 7 year old kid who’s had a tough day.

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A Rant About Reality in Art

alice-flamingoI like movies that are an experience, that take you to a different emotional realm, whether  through visuals or narrative. I’m not into reality. In fact, I don’t consider “realism” a valid criticism unless I’m making a documentary. But I don’t make documentaries. I write stories.

When I was a friendless kid with an abusive stepfather and being teased relentlessly at school, I didn’t want to live in reality because it was unbearable. There was not a waking moment in which I wasn’t reading (even if it was the back of an aspirin bottle), watching a movie, or creating my own intricate movie in my head. Books, movies, and daydreaming saved my life. If it sounds melodramatic, then you don’t remember what it was like to be a kid. Children lack all perspective because they’re experiencing everything for the first time. So, yes, childhood experiences are truly intense and over the top. This is why you have to be so very tender with kids; every experience they have is magnified times ten.

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Random Thoughts on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl

Lately, Zooey Deschanel has gotten a lot of flak for being girlishly cute or “adorkable”. Some have even nominated her as the reigning queen bee of all Manic Pixie Dream Girls, a term that Nathan Rabin defined as a madcap film heroine who serves to inspire the hero to shake himself out of his funk, embrace life’s mysteries and get on with his life. She is a wacky, enchanting gossamer creature and figures such as Katharine Hepburn in “Bringing Up Baby” and Ruth Gordon in “Harold and Maude” have been pegged as such. The MPDG is accused of being a passive agent of the hero’s desire, a plot device more than a character, a tendency that has earned it general scorn. (What female archetype in mainstream movies isn’t, though?) She plays at being a pretty, wacky, free spirit solely to attract male attention. Worst of all, she is accused of blunting her power by being forever child-like, even infantile.

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Analog Muses

Last Friday, the last Brother typewriter manufactured in the UK rolled off the assembly line, thus marking the end of an era.

My Olivetti Lettera 32.

I remember the thrill of getting my first typewriter. My grandmother took me to a dusty store near the Plaza Bolívar and bought me a manual model that sported an ñ, a ¿, and an ¡. I can’t remember the manufacturer, but I do remember typing a lot of my term papers on it. I lived dangerously, waiting until the last day before the deadline and then I’d dedicate the entire night to writing them. The clackety-clack of the keys hitting the paper was hypnotic and released all of my ideas, while the annoyance of correcting errors — having to roll the paper up a few inches and getting just the right amount of white-out on the little brush so that it would dry quickly and not leave an ugly gob on the page –, kept me focused. Some years later my stepfather bought me an electric model which, thankfully, was not altogether silent. The rhythm shaped my sentences, giving them a hard-boiled musicality that made me feel a little like Hammett. Of course, with time I graduated to the computer keyboard, but I still missed the musicality of typed prose.

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