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Monday, 24 March 2008
Twinks, Tweenies and Why Dan is so NOT the Man
So, between jobs (finished the transfer of Vol 1's MS and half-way through correcting the last pad of Delaney) and felt like writing a blog.
So, what'll we talk about then? The full horror of watching La Vie en Rose then Control one after the other? Or a comparison of the OC versus One Tree Hill?
The latter, I think.
I'm a teen junkie. Can't get enough of that teen fiction (figuratively speaking, of course. I don't read the stuff.) I love teen movies, teen TV – all grist to my voracious and unnatural teen appetite.
It has to be grown-up teen, of course – not Marybelle & Ashley, or whatever they're called.
Having watched all the series of the OC, I was looking for my next TV project – and the only other things I wanted, like Entourage 2 or Prison Break 2, were all still too dear – when the opportunity to get One Tree Hill presented itself in Tesco's. They had them cheap in the sale so I, uncharacteristically for something untested, bought the first two series.
I've just completed the first and am starting on the second. And the differences?
Hell, a whole world apart. And not just in wealth either.
First, the OC is a million miles ahead in scripting, location, characters and fashion. Secondly, it has Julie Cooper.
On the plus side, One Tree doesn't have Marissa. The joy of that is hard to replace.
I neither love nor hate Mischa Barton – she does, after all, make a fabulous clothes-horse, being so tall and thin there are no actual body parts to get in the way of drape or line. She's a sort of walking coat hanger. But her character… Dear God, the pain. If there is a more annoying Californian brat out there I've yet to 'virtually' meet her.
Marissa pouted and snivelled and flounced her way through (3?) entire series before we got rid of her. She was the proverbial Scots 'Lang dreep o' misery' (long drip of misery). She wasn't so much a drama queen as a wet sponge. For some reason whenever she came into a scene it went all soggy, like pastry left out in the rain. Even when she was smiley-happy there was something innately whingey about her.
And her on again/off again affair with Ryan… To repeat, dear God, the pain.
Ryan was the second worst thing about the OC, and his combination with Marissa just about made them The Toxic Couple to be Avoided at Parties – or just about anywhere else, for that matter. (Someday I will delight you with an essay on the semiotic metaphor of Ryan's wife-beater vest. I kid you not.)
It didn't help that he only had 2 expressions – scowl 1 and scowl 2 – and after a while of watching him schlump and sulk his Brando-lite way through another We're-so-over/We're-so-not scene with long tall Sally I would gladly have fried my brain as a welcome release from pain. They were even giving Smallville's Clark & Lana a run for their money in the most annoying Hollywood would-they-make-up-their-fucking-mind pairing. No easy feat.
Despite this being the most overused plot line in US television, and despite it annoying a large amount of viewers, they still trot it out often enough to cause motion sickness.
Yelling at the TV doesn't help either. (And yet, I do. I do.)
One Tree has been no exception to this sadly used-to-death-please-kill-it-already rule, having an on again/off again pairing between just about everybody, including the parents from hell, Mr Man-breasts himself, Dan the lug-nut head, and Mrs I-fucked-your-brother-but-I'm-innately-decent Deb.
Oh Dan, Dan, Dan – he is such a cunt, and with probably the ugliest fucking haircut that ever made it into a square-jaw soap opera. What is with that fucking fringe?
But our hero, Lucas, in One Tree, is definitely cuter than Ryan, even if he is distinctly simian in appearance. But he can act, tearing up as often as Demi Moore, with about as much expertise and glycerine beauty.
I admire that in any actor, and even more in a 'teen' boy actor. Yes, he goes at it like an old pro.
But his girlf of choice, the truly so NOT artistic Peyton (even the name's wrong)... What is with the fucking Bubble perm? The poor kid looks like she's stuck in some 80's teen flick. They've given her a leather jacket and a terribly Chloe Smallville bedroom, right down to its counterpart arty version of the Wall of Weird, but the girl does not have an artistic bone in her body.
I've known a lot of artists, some of them scatty, some shrewd; some rebellious, some conformist; some Bohemian, some frumpy, but I have never ever known one who is a cheerleader, who looks like a cheerleader, and who dates sports jocks.
I'm guessing here they thought, "Oh, off the wall. We gotta be off the wall. We need an angle, something new, fresh. She can't be geeky, gothy, nerdy, bo-ho – they've all been done before. I know, let's make a her a cheerleader."
Oh, for fuck sake, there's subverting the genre and just being plain daft. It's like casting a Greenpeace veteran as the president of the United States, or a vegetarian as the new head of the Meat Marketing Board. I mean, technically, why not? Just a job, right? But we all know it doesn't happen.
What makes it worse, is that the actress so can't handle that part of her role. Every time you see her doing something 'artistic' (bless…) she is colouring in. The poor bitch only ever gets to put tiny finishing touches, with Tippex and big, safe marker pens, to already completed projects. They are so uncertain of her talents that they don't even let her draw a big line or whack paint on a wall. I'm surprised they didn't issue her with plastic scissors to stop her cutting herself.
And what about Haley, who turned into Mormon girl? "Yes, I want to have sex with you, Nathan, it's just that it's important to me…" (soulful eyes) "I need to know you care." (I do, I do, he cries, uselessly.)
What the fuck was that all about? If they were trying to sell teens on the idea of being careful, they failed miserably. Worse, if they were trying to make it look like self-respect, they killed that concept dead in the water – and then beat it with a shovel. She came out looking like some mad, deranged frigid old-woman-teen who collected recordings of the Sound of Music and had a crush on the local priest.
These kids' shows can never resist the siren call of sanctimoniousness. You never get very far into any plot line – particularly if it is dark or 'controversial' – before it sinks into a morass of judgmentalism, often throwing little things like plot and characterisation right out the window to do it. Middle American must not be upset.
But the worst thing about One Tree has to be dear old pancake-face Nathan. No, of course we don't ever notice that his face is four shades of orange darker than his neck, desperately trying to cover up those nasty teen acne bumps, nor that he can't even rustle up two expressions – just the one.
An actor straight out of Joey's smell the fart school of acting, he flounders around like a beached whale when asked to do anything not involving balls (basket, not gonad). It physically hurts me to watch him trying to squeeze out an emotion. Any emotion.
I honestly do not know how he got cast. Sure, he's tall, dark and nondescript (and somehow so gay – that teeny toy nipple ring he coyly sports doesn't help), but after that he's a total non-starter.
So One Tree Hill versus the OC then?
Entertaining enough, but some serious acting flaws, too many square-jawed TV soap stars to be truly engaging and, sadly, with nothing else to offer us as shiny and beautiful as Orange County to save its duller moments.
Anybody want to buy two box-sets?
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar (on the Blogspirit site) or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet discovered the wonder of The DANNY Quadrilogy? You can check out all the volumes in print now at Poison Pixie where you can read an extract of Volume 1 for FREE! Or start your collection on Amazon here where you can also buy a print sampler, entitled CULT Fiction, containing an introduction to the DANNY series and an excerpt from Volume 1, for only £2.99.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads) here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
00:15 Posted in Blog , Books , Film , Leisure , Shopping , Web | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Tuesday, 18 March 2008
And Then There Were 5
In the process (just started actually) of re-editing Volume 1 for the 'new' (i.e. American) edition. Oh, how I wish I'd been less of a maverick and just stuck with the literary conventions. But, oh no, I had to make it 'accessible' (well, that one sure as hell backfired). I had to write it like people actually talked and moved and thought. I had to keep the flow, the speed, the momentum.
Arse-wipe. I needed my head looked. Now I have a loft full of an edition I hate and no way to get rid of them other than by selling them one by miserly one.
Part of me wants this second edition, because I get to do good things, like reinstate the original opening, fix things I could have said better, spot little shifts in paragraphing that time has clarified – stuff like that.
But part of me hates it. I want to get on and get the rest of the books out, be done with it. Well, get on and write 5 and be done with it.
Oddly, tired as I am with all things DANNY, right now I really want to write 5. Suddenly it's become kind of pressing – and I've got a hell of a long time before I get to indulge that creative urge.
I'm doing a really dangerous thing here, have been for years – I'm fucking with the creative urge.
Stephen King and I see eye to eye on a lot of things, having (from a craft point of view) a lot in common, but the one thing I am with him on 110% is Never Fuck With the Creative Urge.
If you want to write, you gotta write. It's like needing a shit – you have to do it when you have to do it, or you are in for one very unhappy gut. Ignore it too often and you might just fuck up your gut altogether.
So I'm postponing and postponing the cathartic dump of DANNY 5 to get the other books out there, all the time aware that I might be fucking it up entirely. Bad idea.
I do a kind of trade-off thing with my psyche. I'm always saying to it, "Just hang on in there. Not long to go now, and I promise you can write 5 till your heart's content. Gives you some time to think it through. Here, why don't you write down some ideas? Yeah, take a note of that. That's good. We could use that." It's like bargaining with a sulky two-year-old – and just as likely to end in tears.
Of course, none of this is being helped by the fact that taking the MS back from Quark into my computer has lost all the italics formatting (of course – why does it do that?) and I have the option to work from my hand-revised final draft that was corrected straight into the Mac (and which is buried in the loft) or work from the Mac-converted-back-to-PC version I had been going to use, but then I have to reinstate all the italics from the paper book by hand. If you can follow that. Just writing it is time-consuming.
Out of the two options, working from my hand-corrected draft seems the 'easier' option as, at least, that's in red ink, and so not so easy to miss things and make mistakes. But either option is an added drain on time and concentration – and I've barely got the energy to get through a day's work as it is.
On top of this I've got a partially corrected edition of our 'intro to the quadrilogy' paperback 'Cult Fiction' which has been sitting out of stock on Amazon since last year because I can't get the content right.
I know some of you have ordered this from Amazon UK. I promise I am working on it and you will get it – some day. I wrote two new pieces for it which are both geared to 'Will I like DANNY?' The first is almost a social (or maybe a psychological) profile of A Typical DANNY Reader, the second a list of Movies that 'if you like this you'll like DANNY'.
They are an attempt to give strangers a handle on DANNY so that they can feel more confident buying it, but I don't know if I'm really opening it up to more people or niche-marketing it to death.
Hellish. I seem to have turned overnight (if only – it's been a long, slow decline) into an uncertain, bottomless well of I-have-no-idea-what-I'm-doing-and-now-have-the-self-esteem-of-a-gnat. Quentin Tarantino would be ashamed of me. I don't blame him – I'm ashamed of me myself.
And I've caught a bug. Some lousy thing that makes me profoundly dizzy, falling over in shops and hanging onto the trolley like an old woman, staggering when I walk along the street, pitching on my noodle when I bend over or look up at the sky. It's accompanied by more brain fog than a-six-pack-of-Mars-bars-in-one-sitting where I spend five minutes trying to remember the word for dog.
I don't know what little fucker gave me it but I'd like to hunt him down like said dog and feed him his own testicles. Twice.
Must be my addled and dissipated life of promiscuity, bisexuality and endless (prescription) drugs catching up with me. Should never have done that porno in Rio. (No, never really did that. Did one for California though – shot in London, somewhat dully.) Hepatitis C would be easier to deal with than this.
Any other news apart from my cataclysmic moaning? Mr Scratchmann almost has an agent for his Orkney book. She's working with him piecemeal where he does a bit, sends it in and she critiques it back. Sort of writing by (very small) committee. I admire him immensely for his endurance and determination. Me, I'd probably have started a fight or thrown a hissy fit or at least a major huff by now and queered my chances. He's also tanking along doing freelance work again.
We needed the money (and then some) and he decided to send out a mailer to all his old editorial contacts and landed work within a fortnight – for the Guardian, no less. He did a piece for them (On Malcolm McLaren) then landed the commission for a monthly series. It's got club in the title but that brain fog has guaranteed I've forgotten what it's actually called. (Just asked him. Hasn't got club in the title at all. It's in the club section and is called All Ears.)
Anyway, if you read the Guardian he's in it right now. He's also got a children's book publisher interested. Somewhat bizarre, given his normal work, but, hey, what the hell.
We also got the offer to be the arts/culture presenters on a local radio station but we turned it down. I know, but it was too much work, having to go round seeing everything and interviewing people then putting the show together. But I was rather seduced by the idea of the two of us like Richard and Judy. You gotta love that.
So, that's about it. All there is to know about me and mine.
You do realise that if I do ever get as far as 5, and haven't forgotten how to write, that DANNY will actually be able to qualify as a sextet (4 single volumes and a two-parter [3]). How good is that?
The DANNY Sextet. Just can't get away from sex at all.
How droll.
Not.
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar (on the Blogspirit site) or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet discovered the wonder of The DANNY Quadrilogy? You can check out all the volumes in print now at Poison Pixie where you can read an extract of Volume 1 for FREE! Or start your collection on Amazon here where you can also buy a print sampler, entitled CULT Fiction, containing an introduction to the DANNY series and an excerpt from Volume 1, for only £2.99.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads) here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
17:40 Posted in Blog , Books , Leisure , Shopping , Web | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Saturday, 08 March 2008
An interminably long intellectual blog of no interest to people whose homes have a number plate, and whose family tree is all on one branch
Quitting. That's what I need to do.
Been saying it since before Christmas, but the trouble is I don't know what to quit.
Quitting is not admired. Think of all those maxims. "Nobody likes a quitter." Well, actually, that's the only one I can think of off-hand, but you know what I mean. Winning is all. Winning… well, wins.
Now, me, I believe in quitting. I come form a long line of quitters, although most of them would deny it. My mother's family in particular – quitters to a man.
None of them did conventional jobs, although they all dabbled at them. My grandfather was a trumpet-player and a wide-boy, dealing in dodgy goods on the side and black marketeering during the war. He bought and sold at auction, repaired clocks and watches, and generally spivved his way through life. He always knew someone who knew someone who could get you what you needed. Or he'd die trying.
My grandmother was a florist, with a bent for everything artistic. Their sons variously ran away from home (to Australia, no less, disappearing for nigh on 30 years), took up joinery and forestry work, travelled, lived on obscure Scottish islands and, eventually, also took off for Australia, where one of them built roads across its untarred wilderness then bought a motor home with the proceeds and drove around in the outback for a year.
My mother, for her part, gave up being a seamstress, a tax inspector and, twice, teaching. My mother could quit for Europe. In fact, she 'injured her back' finally and has lived on sickness benefit ever since.
Wasters? Not a bit of it. Every one of them has had an endless facility for making money and getting what they needed. When my parents divorced guess who got the money? And the car? And the second home?
Yep, mum every time. My father couldn't possibly best such an efficient quitter, eye always on the main chance. (He was crap at quitting anyway. Preferred never trying.)
You see, quitting is a much-maligned and misunderstood force for progress. People think it means giving up in defeat, retiring to your corner, crushed and ruined. On the contrary, it means the opposite. It means getting what you really want, not what society says you should have, or others dictate you 'need'.
Quitting means retiring to Belize at thirty-three. Quitting means giving up banking to became a dancer. Quitting means dumping the family/friend/lover for a life of excess and indulgence – or Spartan meditation. Whatever lights your fire.
And I need to quit.
I've needed it for a long time.
I had someone recently (on MySpace) complaining, very backhandedly of course, that my blog (on His Heathness) was too long.
You know, because you've heard me say it often enough, that I don't get this. Too long to hold your interest? Then don't read it.
Apparently, however, that's too avant garde a notion. Apparently, they have a mechanism in their heads that prevents them from simply stopping and moving on to something else; the same mechanism that leads them to leave comments (taking up more time) to point out to me that they were bored/baffled/irritated or just perplexed (poor dears) by the length of my blog.
Well, you just added another ten or fifteen minutes wasted time right there. And I assumed you had something to do, too.
This 'criticism' – which, oddly, always seems to have a thinly-veiled resentment under it – is pissing in the wind of truly epic proportions.
Think of this for a moment. How many people do you think there are on the internet right now blogging about the most banal, puerile drivel? Millions, right? How many of them only run to one paragraph before they see a dust ball on the floor and run off to chase it? Tens of millions, right? So why – why, God, why? – given this abundance of short, snappy, Janet & John blogs, are these 'readers' wasting time even looking at mine, never mind reading it? The titles of my blogs, never mind the content, should tell you all you need to know. I haven't yet written about my pet, or X-box, or why Lex Luthor making out with Harry Potter isn't 'canon' (don't worry about it – it isn't interesting, trust me).
Which takes me back to quitting. Should I quit blogging, writing at all? Is it not really me? Am I an anachronism left over from another age? Should I really have been a Georgian essayist? (Can you just see me effing and blinding my way through a critique of Doctor Johnston?) Should I do more writing, write somewhere else, lots of places?
Should I quit the web, go back to magazines, demand huge fees? Should I write non-fiction books?
Hell, if they want me to be shorter, should I go longer, weave epic works on epic subjects?
Should I drop everything and go to America, blag my way into TV? How would I fare in the writing room of the OC? (Well, I'd be all by myself since the show's finished, but you know what I mean.)
Should it be Hollywood and movies? Europe and movies? Where would my strange perverted attraction to men really fit in in that bizarre world where one half of the population has been 'disappeared' and heterosexual means tits & ass? Hell, where sex means tits & ass.
Is it up to me to fight for it? Am I too tired to fight for it? (Yes.)
Should I stop publicising DANNY? Or at least stop worrying about publicising DANNY?
If the world's not ready for DANNY then how far do I let it go? Do I finish it quietly, docilely, like the Jane Austen of cocksucking, and resign myself to being ignored – or do I get extra specially strident and demand to be heard?
What part of my life is it I need to quit?
You see, this is the really important thing about quitting – you never get anywhere without it. Never. In order to move on, move forward, you have to leave something behind. Every step in the right direction, or the wrong, involves a step away from something. Quitting, in fact.
I'm stuck and have been for quite a while, but in order to move on I NEED TO QUIT!
If only I knew what……………
You can now read this blog at the following locations:-
To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar (on the Blogspirit site) or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml
Not yet discovered the wonder of The DANNY Quadrilogy? You can check out all the volumes in print now at Poison Pixie where you can read an extract of Volume 1 for FREE! Or start your collection on Amazon here where you can also buy a print sampler, entitled CULT Fiction, containing an introduction to the DANNY series and an excerpt from Volume 1, for only £2.99.
You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads) here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.
Lastly, there is an independent DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.
21:35 Posted in Blog , Books , Leisure , Web | Permalink | Comments (3) | Email this