Tomcat in Love

This is a really good book. I'm glad I read it. That's all I really wanted to say, well that, and I met Tim O'Brien years ago. He is quite the bar fly.

George Carlin is Dead

:(




A brilliant comedian, a frustrating defeatist. He, more than anyone, shaped my view of religion. I'm not going to cry, but I feel a sense of real loss here. He was a philosopher, a curmudgeon, a truth-sayer. He has been proven right about a great many things, but his death, it reminds me....
It makes me fear his final judgement of humanity all the more: that we are doomed. I have never hoped more that a person be proven stone cold wrong.

Her apartment is cramped

Her apartment is cramped.

I’d leave it at that if I could, but I’m writing a blog, and there is an expectation that I say things. If this were a poem I’d leave it at that really:

Her apartment
is
cramped.

I’d give it a pithy smart-ass title, something excessively longer than the content like “Waiting for My Girlfriend of Five Years to Dump Me after a seven hour drive” M. lived on the second floor of a two story building at 215 Lovelace drive. I like that name, Lovelace, very provocative. I hear Lovelace I think super-spy with red hair, a tight blue shirt hugging a pair of DD breasts the envy of every mainstream comic book artist and pornstar. No matter what she wears, shorts, jeans, a skirt, she’s got a garter belt just above the see line, hence her code name.

What I don’t think is three cats, an ice cream maker, a long distance boyfriend, and a wooden staircase that is begging to be THAT staircase in Psycho, where every step carries the risk of a knife, the inevitable fall burned in celluloid, THAT staircase in Abigail, vibrating with King Diamond’s thrashing falsetto, dualing guitars fight for the scraps of your soul, THAT staircase on the 6 o clock news that sent little Timmy tumbling down into the afterlife when he broke his neck on the third step from the top. He just forgot to tie his shoe!

Law and Order Conventions

1. There MUST be a smart ass cop on every episode. Sometimes he is a streewise hard ass too.
2. There MUST be a streewise hard ass cop in every episode.
3. Gender of 1 and 2 is irrelevant; but, if female, costuming, make up, haircut will aspire to a
masculine haircut.
4. Female lawyers may be hot, but the true power of their cleavage is never to be revealed.
5. "You're too emotionally involved in this case!"
6. If a guest star is a comedian; he will be unbalanced. He will be the criminal.
7. Old ladies on telephones discover dead bodies.
8. The best episodes will have the careening plot structure of classic Simpsons.
9. The worst episodes will have the careening plot structure of classic Simpsons.
10. Dick Wolf

Searching for Survivors

In my never ending battle to find other survivors I've learned:

1. Surprise! The overwhelming majority of sexual trauma survivors are female (shock!)

2. I am desperate to connect with more people who've survived, I have this need to
build...a context, a reference point.

3. It seems the vast majority of survivor/victim blogs are one time howls
One, two, three entries tops, then they disappear into the techno ether.

4. Uh, I'm not going to name blogs, but I don't think everyone is working on all thrusters.
I contacted one blogger who compiled stories on rape, it's a worthy goal, but I was a bit put off
by her phrasing of "rapists and their allies" In respect to the United States and Canada this seemed like paranoia. A suspicion that was not alleviated when said blogger, cited a unsourced comment as proof, that level of gullibility is dangerous. There are people who will say anything, lie about rape, pregnancy, even their own last name. (I had an ex who did all three AND lied to me TWICE about where she went to school.)
Challenging such claims is difficult though since you're likely to run into blog rules such as "no denying the experiences of others." Sigh, trauma studies means well, but censoring truth in favor of affirmative speech is not one of it's strong points (also has a bad habit of constructing binary oppositions.

5. If these websites were people, I'd want to choke out 90% of them. Part of it is the Trauma Studies vocabulary, which can sound like a bad self help manual. Also, I find most of the blogs alienating. I think, regretfully, this is because of the target audience: women and the most likely publishers: women. A few of these pages are excruciatingly frilly or a Neil Gaiman cosmo-fart, that's not a knock in and of itself, just a disconnect with me. Maybe it's connected to my experience as a victim maybe it isn't, buuuuuuuuuuuuttttttttttttt I'm thinkin' "I'm a guy, I've been emasculated, effectively feminized, what do I need? A huge dose of girl power!" After all, I did dive headfirst into martial arts.

The Games People Play

I've been reading a few sex worker blogs. Why? Dunno something to do with Ms. Breslin. Maybe I'm just a tad nostalgic for the old wild west days of AOL when I was a gun slingin' chat host with gag power and a big ole' emoticon smile. Maybe my search to connect my remote island in the middle of the blogmuda triangle to the rest of the sphere took a wrong turn at Albuquerque or Detroit or Tallahassee---yeah, it was probably Tallahassee. "Ah Florida," Patton Oswalt said, "where the air smells like rape." Tastes like it too.

Anyway, I've learned a couple of things in my wanderings. One, I am apparently the only one whose not on the verge of a book deal. Two, there are a couple of folks out there with something worth saying. I see a lot of potential in The Panther in Pumps but the web teems with three things:

1. Men pretending to be women
2. Assholes who think they know everything about movies,
but haven't seen anything made before their D.O.B
3. Mutual Appreciation Societies

Category 3 is the only concern, once you fall pray to the horrors of groupspeak, you might as well go Republican. I've commented a few times, not intending to stir the pot, just offer a different perspective on the material, pointing out what I see as the strengths and weaknesses. Quite honestly, I considered my approach to be mild; neverthless, one or two commenters acted as if I spat in her face. Oh well. I thought about just saying you know, I'm a :::censored:::: there are things I can help you out with that most commenters can't, but I've decided against it. It's her blog, I'm not trying to jockey for some sort of authority position, certainly not on someone else's web space. As much as I disdain the groupspeak dynamic, vying for an authoritarian space of my own wouldn't do her much better, and it would ruin the spirit of blogs.

It's about time I started looking in a different direction.

On Safari

I've been a bit more adventurous in my choice of blog reading. Mostly, it's been political blogs, wrestling, blah blah. Since reading a darn good defense of GTA 4 I've been checking out The Reverse Cowgirl. Definititely worth a read, although I don't know if it's something most survivors of sexual trauma care to indulge

God damn font tools, obey me!!

Long Time No See

I'm happy to report to my army of none, that I'm not dead, allow me to bring you up to speed.

1. I'm studying for the GRE
2. I'm applying to grad programs in Creative Writing
3. My dog has had several haircuts
4. I'm afraid I'm going to lose my girlfriend.
5. I'm trying to drastically overhaul the way I do conditioning work
6. Food Poisoning whupped my ass
7. The Writer's Strike is over (hooray!)

The following have not changed:
1. I'm STILL a white belt in all disciplines
2. I still attend martial arts classes with near obsessive devotion
3. I'm still haunted by the trauma
4. George W. Bush is still a petulant mongoloid fuck
5. No one reads this blog but me


Will try to get back in the once a day habit, and maybe even expand on some of the changes in the former list...but don't count on it.

T-day

There were no casualties over the thanksgiving break.

Discussions between the studios and the wga are supposed to restart today. Will blog more when I learn more.

More notes on the strike

I learned through unitedhollywood.blogspot.com that the average writer is pulling down
62,000.00 a year. Wow. So much for my conservative estimate. I thought most of them would of had low six figures (when working) and it was the duration between gigs that was really killing them. That figure is simply unacceptable.

BTW unitedhollywood is an excellent page to learn more about the strike.

Change of direction: the writer's strike

Well, unless you are culturally retarded or—you know—actually retarded you’ve heard about the writer’s strike in tinsel town. I know this ain’t worth much in the grand scheme of things, but I support the writers 100 %. This is supposed to be a blog about sexual trauma, and coping with life in its wake. Well, art, particularly good art, makes that process a little easier. So as far as I’m concerned this is a viable topic for my little island in the web.

I’ve been reading around, mostly on huffingtonpost.com and a few other sites, trying to understand the issues at hand: why the writers are striking, why the studios don’t wanna play ball, the sentiment of commenters, trolls, random passersby, et cetera et cetera.

What I’m finding is that most of the folks who support the strike understand the lay of the land—the rules of Hollywood, specifically why writers have residuals in the first place.

For most folks in La La land employment is never certain, every job is a temporary job. Some jobs just last longer than others, depending on how successful the product (movie/tv show) is. Just like fighters, who are only as good as their last fight, writers (and actors and directors, everyone) are only as good as their last film (or tv show). Now there are a few exceptions, but these apply to A list movie stars and A list directors, who have accrued some political capital. (And for the record I have NEVER heard anyone referred to as an A list writer).

Screenwriters, who haven’t seen an increase in home movie sales since 1989, are hurtin’ pretty bad. To my knowledge there hasn’t even been adjustment for inflation. Combine that with the problem of living in or around Los Angeles, a very expensive town to live in even when the economy is good. And for those of you keeping score at home we’re in the middle of a housing crisis and a gas crisis. Things look to get worse in the foreseeable future. I’m not a number wiz, but I reckon the cost of living is about seventy thousand just to make ends meet—most likely by the way my estimate is conservative.

Now the people—I’m excluding film execs et al—who have crapped on the strike don’t seem to have a realistic idea of how Hollywood works.

“Fire the writers and hire a whole new crop! With better ideas! And imaginations!”

Huh? Ok guess what, most of the people who want to work in Hollywood are already there. Where is this magical “new” crop supposed to come from? The market is already saturated. And those fresh faces out of film school? Hmm. You’ve got to be pretty fucking stupid if you’re a NYU graduate and you burn your alumnae network. You will NEVER get to work with Spike Lee, Ang Lee, or any other highly connected NYU alumnus because THEY WILL BLACKLIST YOU. And as for “better ideas,” it’s not that the overall body of writers is poor; but collaborative art and the economics of collaborative art, are labyrinthine. Write 100 great scripts. Now turn them into MOVIES. Five of them might be great, 20 will be middling, 10 will be poor, 10 will be god awful, and the rest will be stuck in development hell. Outsourcing won’t do a damn thing.

“These guys are greedy who do they think they are blah blah”
See above. Really, I won’t type it again.

“This isn’t the studios fault. Things are out of their control”

I recognize the studios can’t see the future; however, they have the resources to approximate the future impact of technologies, and quite frankly if studio execs make bad deals they should be fired. Screw golden parachutes, golden bungee cords, golden showers, a side of effect their departure should not be exorbitant bonuses. As in other corporate structures wealth is overconcentrated at the top—this is not to say that studio execs shouldn’t be paid well, this is a volatile, dangerous executive position in a volatile fickle market—I don’t have a problem with golden handshakes, within reason—they deserve performance based bonuses and penalties. If the studios are as strapped as they claim, having a treasure chest for a rainy day by way of performance based pay, might have provided them with some bargaining wiggle room.

Suffice to say, I’ll be keeping a close eye on the strike.