The Well

My man and I have been at it a while -- and by 'it' I mean marriage and by 'a while' I mean four years. We're also doing it on our own terms, in a way I never thought was possible. It's so good it's... like, X-Files level spooky.

The crouching, really, is the secret to a strong relationship

All of which makes me so grateful. And now for a poem.

The Well (4.)

This one is burrowing, cocoa-powdered,

worm-turned.

So deep now, dear, and

keep going down, now, deep you hit rock – keep chipping in

bloodying down, shoveling deep, swinging axe, so dear now, splintered

nail, shale ringing so chipped, so stone shrieking deep,

cracking now – so cracked – dear you

break through deep, you

hit water.

So thirsty, I come home now, keeping dear, 

cresting the hill, this one.

What is these momz

A couple weeks back I sat on a porch with about ten completely rad women, 9 of whom were momz. I know them, I know their kids -- in fact, I know some of their kids better than I know the momz in question. (Why? Well, because I volunteer, and the kids are cool with recognizing that I am one of them, just in a bad, very short adult disguise.)
In real life, I'm going to be 30 this year, and this is... AWFUL. I cannot be 30. I CAN'T. This is a real problem.
My sister and I were talking about this a while ago, and she divulged to me this theory that maybe people have a "true age." This was her theory, because she felt like she was arriving into her true age; that is, she noticed she was feeling happier, more at home in her body, and more fully herself than she had ever felt. In fact, she guessed she would reach her true age in a couple of years, because she was at that time becoming a mom and finding so much meaning in that work.
YEAH. SOUNDS NICE.
I'm pretty sure my true age is... 7.
It makes sense if you think about it, since I'm basically doing my damnedest to make a living using my IMAGINATION. If you were wondering, people stop calling your powerful imagination a good thing sometime around age 8, and they try to beat it out of you. So age 7 makes sense as a time when I would have peaked.

Actual portrait of T, age 7

But all this is old news, as anyone who knows me can tell you.
Anyway, let's talk about Zootopia. I give this movie a C. Cute animation, and a good (if heavy-handed) metaphor-vehicle about prejudices and racism. I thought Ginnifer Goodwin did a pretty kick-ass job voicing the little bunny, but Jason Bateman fell victim to lackluster writing for the fox and also seemed to be high on cold meds during most of his voice-performance. The structure of the movie seemed solid to me, but it just didn't have any sparkle.
In fact, the whole thing just needed the volume turned up. The climax is so... blah. OF COURSE the fox is going to pretend to "go savage" at the end. OF COURSE that damn tape recorder carrot pen is going to be someone's undoing (even though, OF COURSE, I totally want one.) It was such an exhausted plot device by that point... yarg. Built-in marketing much?

And the evil mouse empire takes your money

Right. Well, if you're surprised by my hash criticism of this movie, then so was I. Why does this bug me?
Because I don't have that thing. I'm not a momz. That mom thing, whatever it is, I don't have it. I very well might end up someone's mom someday, I'm not saying I won't, I'm just saying the idea of pregnancy and birth and especially parenting doesn't thrill me, and it never has. But you know what idea does thrill me??? Giving something better than Zootopia to the next generation. YO. I'm effing TERRIFIED of being 30, but it's because I want/need to leave something behind, and I suspect it's not going to be a tiny human or two. That might happen, and I'm sure I will love the stuffing out of whomever they turn out to be, but whatever I do, I also have to make the world a better place for the tiny humans that already exist to grow up in, and they deserve EXCELLENCE, ya'll. EXCELLENCE! Which, to me, looks like, I don't know, something like Up that will reduce you to a heap of emotional rubbish in the first 15 minutes, or at least as something as gorgeous as Beauty and the Beast, or at least anything constructed with even a shade of the precision as Finding Nemo. Hell, I'd even settle the manic, flight-of-fancy of the Lego Movie.
Momz, I'm sure you know: these films are more than partially raising your kids. And that, in a weird way, is how I am one of you.
Although not. But I can recommend some really, really good books and movies for your kids, k? Keep doing THE GOOD WORK (tm).

What the Effingham, Illinois I am working on

I got to catch up with a friend last night at the Three Clubs in H'wood (my world got ROCKED yesterday when I tried to Google Three of Clubs and found out it isn't called that... WHAT. But it's only ONE club, I don't get it), and as I plopped down for what turned out to be a pretty impressive improv-ed play, she asked how I was doing. I surprised myself by answering, "Amazing!"

I am broke. BROKE. But as we speak, the ideas cooking in my head are smelling pretty tasty and promising. Yes, I am amazing. But the crazy part is that it will be a while from now or it will be never that you, dear ones, will get to read or see what I've got simmering on my brain stove. My friend asked why I was doing so well, and dutifully I tried to launch into an explanation of my projects... have you ever tried to talk to someone about what you're writing? No?

Well, I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and I'm happy to state I finally won out over it.

Yeah. It's not a thing I would recommend doing in public. I don't know how much "writer mumbo-jumbo" I actually believe... are the stories already out there, like radio waves, and we just tell them? Do you invent characters or do they find you? How concrete is this other world where writers go when they write? Clearly it's potent enough to drive most of us batshit...

But I also know that screenwriting is a particular brand of this madness, because IT'S NOT LITERATURE. Think about it. If you are literally any other kind of writer -- poet, essayist, novelist, short fiction writer, journalist, biographer, etc. etc. -- then your writing ITSELF is the end goal. Your writing ITSELF has value. Even a playwright gets respect for the text of the play itself; you can go to the library and check out a play, you can win a Pulitzer for a play -- hell, you can win a Pulitzer for MUSIC -- but you can't win one for screenwriting. It's true. Look it up.

Asshole.

And, yeah, I get it. By the time a screenplay makes it to you, the viewer, it's not a screenplay anymore. By then, it's a movie, and hundreds maybe thousands of people have worked on it and you can hardly be said to be its author anymore, at least not in any sense that matters. But without the screenwriter, there is no such thing as a movie. The screenwriter is the spark, the ignition point -- ain't no fire without us, baby. And that -- the very ugly nature of this beast called filmmaking -- is what shunts screenwriters to the side and invalidates them as WRITERS, worthy on the fact that they access the same magic and practice the same sorcery as other writers and walk the same road -- a road paved with, I don't know, unicorn horns and hot lava.

...and they're still all one person, right?

Anyway, the whole thing goes back to my post about processing work and the nature of creation. S was talking to me last night after the play, and he mentioned that, because he has been working with a writer on developing/writing a screenplay, he has been starting to get a taste of what my life is like in terms of the pleasure of creation. My friends, creation is pleasure.

When S gets behind a camera and starts shooting, then there's pressure. Then there are high stakes, because there is money involved, and you're getting to the step where people might actually see what you're doing. But when you sit in your office/living room/coffee shop and you put words on paper, then you're free again to explore and create untethered. To be honest, there isn't a lot of pressure -- especially when you're broke, like me, and only writing on spec at the moment, like me, so there isn't money and there's virtually no chance of ANYBODY ever seeing what you're working on -- because being a screenwriter means you're operating on the very fringes of what people consider to be art/literature, so CREATE AWAY.

And be amazing. It's not a fair world, the world of the screenwriter. My mentor and friend, let's call him J, constantly writes, spending years developing scripts, doing drafts, making compromises, fighting with actors, fighting with producers, fighting with his own writing partner, and then he pushes his projects out of the nest and he gets to watch most of them go KERSPLAT on the pavement 90% of the time. The ones that do find their wings half the time don't remember who their mommy is, or they have had just too many mommies, so J then loses his credits in arbitration, so even if you have seen one of his movies, you probably don't even know it. This is a dude who was nominated for TWO OSCARS -- and that's the highest award we give, no Pulitzers for you, puny mortal screenwriters -- because somehow enough of his words made it into the mouths of Anthony Hopkins and Will Smith, and even if you've seen his movies, which you probably haven't, you STILL don't know who he is. And that's pretty much the best future I can hope for.

I still want it. This is the life I picked. It's pretty fun! If you think about it. Or don't. Just don't think about it. I may have made a wrong turn back there somewhere.

I'm not in the documentary business and facts are for SISSIES

There has been a big hullaballoo lately about a lack of diversity in movies -- and particularly in Oscar-nominated movies. This post is not about that, not really. This post is about history. QUICK DICTIONARY TIME. For this post, we'll define history as: stories about people who are all dead now. I know, I know, history is always happening all around us all the time, so a lot of people are still alive at the moment that are important to history, but we gotta start somewhere, so we'll say that history is about dead people, kk?

Look! Some history! Sorta!!!!

Let's talk about Hamilton. Wait. Back up. Let's talk about "historical accuracy." A few years ago Clint Eastwood made a movie called Flags of our Fathers, which was about the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima and what happened to the guys in the picture after the picture got famous. Clint Eastwood (who, it is becoming obvious, is kind of an asshole and maybe not even a great director, but definitely the father of some foxy, foxy kids) at the time got a lot of criticism for not having a single African American soldier in the movie. (He also cast Michael Pena as Native American Ira Hayes, which I can't remember if people didn't like or not.) Anyway, back then, Eastwood's main argument was that he was going for HISTORICAL ACCURACY, SPIKE LEE, OKAY?, and there weren't any black soldiers in the movie because in WWII the units were segregated and the fact was there actually weren't any black marines present at the flag-raising in real life. Spike Lee and others did not like this, for obvious reasons, and eventually Spielberg had to get involved to break up the old-man fistfight, because I guess he's like everybody's mom.

Flash-forward to 2015 and Suffragette. Now, if you've been following along, you'll know that Suffragette got into hot water for almost exactly the same reasons, only here there was no Spielberg to sort it out with milk and cookies. Suffragette, which about the women's right-to-vote movement in the 1912ishes in England, doesn't have any people of color in it either -- doesn't have any women of color participating in this otherwise kickass lady victory. And then there was this t-shirt thing. Not great.

What do we want? HISTORICAL ACCURACY! When do we want it? ALWAYS!!!! unlessit'snarrativelyinconvenient

See, that, to me, was the extra-crazy part about the Suffragette debacle -- they actually went with the Eastwood party-line of WE ARE GOING FOR HISTORICAL ACCURACY, so no black people. And, yeah, they're right; there WEREN'T many/any women of color involved in this particular part of the suffragette movement in history, but that's because they were being deliberately excluded, even then. Admittedly, England wasn't super diverse at the time, but definitely around the world, women of color, like Ida B. Wells, were fighting this fight while all of this was going on and they were being persecuted for it, even more so than their white sisters -- even sometimes by their white sisters.

But my point that I'm trying to get to in all of this is: WHO CARES. Here is a friendly reminder, say this with me:
"What is history?"
History is stories.
"Who writes the stories?"
The winners, the owners, those who have power.
"What happens to the losers in history?"
Their stories are told for them or forgotten.

Then say it again and again until it starts to sink in. HISTORY IS STORIES. The winners write the stories. The losers' stories are told for them -- or forgotten.
HISTORY IS STORIES.
No, wait, you say, movies are stories. History is facts. NO. History is stories, told by the people who live to tell them, who pay to tell them, who have the power to tell them. So history is fluid by nature, subjective by nature, OPPRESSIVE BY NATURE.

Enter Hamilton. If you have been paying attention, you don't need me to tell you that Hamilton is the shit. It's everything. But one of the reasons it's everything is because it gives zero fucks about good ol' historical accuracy. Let's rap about the founding fathers! Let's cast WHOEVER in it -- in fact, let's make the only white guy in the show the King of England. Let's be incisive, let's be crude, let's be unforgiving. In fact, let's bring the women to the front -- the women who were ACTUALLY THERE -- YOU KNOW WHAT, THERE'S SOME HISTORICAL ACCURACY -- instead of brushing them under the historical rug. In fact, Hamilton is damn accurate -- more accurate than most of the "historical" stuff we make.

Bitches be accurate af

But it doesn't have to be. That's what I'm getting at here. People calling Hamilton a "reimagining" are ignoring the fact that every piece of fiction -- book, play, movie -- based on history IS a reimagining. Actually every history book is ALSO a reimagining. Think about THAT. Is our history that precious? Or is it that when we hide behind historical accuracy, we're just showing our true colors? Is our view so narrow, our footing so precarious, that we are still walking on the eggshells of the past, still afraid of the long, long dead ghosts of the former winners, the ex-owners, the men (always MEN!) who used to have power???

My point is, I wasn't there. Neither were you. Neither was the main character of Suffragette, by the way, whom the filmmakers have said is a "hybrid" character. Oh, so we fictionalized that, but we couldn't fictionalize a single suffragette who wasn't white? Oh man. The past isn't coming for you, creators. We are the ones telling the stories now. Realize you were raised with blinders on, and seek at every turn to cast them off, seek at every turn to stop to stop telling the stories you think are "true", and start telling the ones you want to MAKE true. Yes, it is good to find the badass people in history who were always bucking the systems -- like the suffragettes -- and yes, PLEASE, try to tell their stories. But also go after the systems themselves, the systems that are still feeding you the lies of what you can and can't make, the systems that are still teaching you that you can somehow break or dishonor the dead. They are dead and we are alive and our only chance to speak is NOW. You know, I'm just saying (to myself as much as to you or anyone): don't throw away your shot.

Getting Meta on Star Wars for the Love of It, with Professor T

To say that I was excited about Star Wars… well, the word understatement is an understatement. I had a couple dreams about it. As I’m sure most of you also felt, waking up on Star Wars day was like waking up on Christmas morning, except if you had been waiting for Christmas for like… most of your life.

And yet when I try to articulate why, I run into trouble. Am I an uber-Star-Wars nerd?? No, not really. I am a fan, for sure. But I can’t name every single character and planet in the expanded universe, or even most of them. In fact, I had to Google that term. (Expanded universe… is that right?? Extended universe? No, expanded. Cool. Apt, considering the universe is always expanding both literally and metaphorically, amiright?? Anyway…)

But I was SO excited to see the movie. And I am so excited even now that I HAVE seen it, now that it’s out in the world and this franchise is continuing for the next generation. Do I think The Force Awakens is a perfect movie?? NOPE. Not even close. It is a good movie, even a very good movie, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and both the craft behind and our enjoyment of a movie are influenced in every way by the world from which it is born—in this case, America, 2015.

I’ll attempt to articulate further. S and I had ENORMOUS problems with Jurassic World (because we have taste, duh), but mostly because it felt to us like it either a) exhibited a stunning lack of self-awareness, or b) was nowhere near ironic enough. Think about that film and the franchise tradition it comes from. A theme park, designed to harness dangerous creative genetic power goes awry, and a mega-disaster occurs. Meanwhile, in real life, Spielberg invents—or rather, “stands on the shoulders of geniuses”, just like John Hammond in the movie—some incredible new technology, taps into a monster-hungry early 90’s market (there's a whole blog post in here or probably more like a book about why the market was what it was, but I'll skip it for now, sounds boring), and spawns such a mega-blockbuster series even he doesn’t know what to do with it. Literally and metaphorically, the monsters get loose and out of control— and we can see the ripple effects in Jurassic Parks II, III, and, I don’t know, like every other movie since then.

Fast forward a couple decades, and, in the Jurassic world, the park reopens. Now it is 2015, and we supposedly have better control over this genetic power and we have made it commercially viable again. Supposedly. But because the suits that run this park are so hungry for MORE money, MORE commercial potential, the latest and greatest thing, they have engineered a new, hybrid dinosaur. Do you get where I’m going with this?

You brought this on yourself, America. You're like the guy in Jurassic Park that gets eaten off the toilet because you wanted to have a coupon day or something.

I don’t want to say Jurassic World was always going to be a disaster—I don’t really think that. But in a way the movie places the blame for how bad it is on us, the audience. “Hey,” it seems to say. “You saw what happened last time. You know what happens when studio suits get their hands on the awesome creative power of a blockbuster-mega-franchise. They ‘wield it like a kid who’s found his dad’s gun.’ But if you want another Jurassic, okay. That’s on you.”

As B.D. Wong basically screams at all of us in Jurassic World, “You didn’t want reality, you wanted more teeth!” (Does Colin Trevorrow realize any of this about his own movie??? He must, right? I can’t tell if there used to be more obviously meta stuff in it and they made him take it out or if he really doesn’t know. Anyway, you’re here for the Star Wars…)

Which brings me to… How to Make a Movie Chapter in Possibly the Biggest Franchise in Modern Film History, 202, with Professor J.J. Abrams. (It’s 202 because Star Trek was 101, obvs; it’s a pre-rec for this class.)

And the secret is to make your movie with LOVE. SO. MUCH. LOVE. So much love that you risk your entire career on it. So much love that you insist on final cut. (This is a legend, admittedly.) So much love that you cast non-mega-stars in the lead roles. So much love that you PUT A FEMALE PROTAGONIST IN IT (which, according to the suits means box-office death). SO MUCH GODDAMN LOVE THAT YOU END UP BASICALLY MAKING EPISODE IV OVER AGAIN BUT WHO CARES BECAUSE STAR WARS.

Look, if you look real close you can see J.J. in there!!!

In The Force Awakens, Abrams IS Finn and Rey and Poe, all three. He is young. He is reckless. He has made some mistakes. But he is willing to climb into the most daunting cockpit in the world—the cockpit of the crashed “garbage” Millennium Falcon Star Wars machine and try to get it back off the ground. Fly it right out of the graveyard of downed Star Destroyers and Episodes I, II, and III. Don’t think that imagery is in there for no reason. Sure, you’re gonna hit a few bumps along the way, but J.J. understands all too well that this is America, 2015, and what we want now is just something to remind us why we love movies in the first place. Not even Star Wars, just movies in general. Just give us back our first love. And that’s The Force Awakens.

In the movie Ratatouille, the rat, Remy, is trying to figure out what the hell to serve the hateful critic Anton Ego. He could make anything. He could try to be new, impressive, cutting-edge. But what he makes, instead, is the title dish, ratatouille—a humble, peasant’s dish of vegetables and herbs. And he is able to touch even Ego, the most hardened critic, because when Ego bites into the dish, he is transported back to his own mother’s kitchen, to when he fell in love with food in the first place.

I don’t think The Force Awakens is sacred. I think we can dissect if you want, and maybe I will—later. Right now I’m too busy seeing rebirth happening right in front of me, and just too damn busy loving movies.

On killing and The Killing

THIS POST IS FULL OF SPOILERS.
It is also not well-researched. It's like the kind of thing I would say to you at a party.
Ahem.

S is the least political person I know—including myself, and I would say I'm not very political either. If I had to explain it, I'd say we try not to have strong opinions about things until we have all the facts... and where politics are concerned, who could possibly have all the facts??? We don't trust the media, or anyone with a microphone, really, and the country and world are so enormous and full of so much shit that politics seems like a war no one could ever, ever win. We try to make art, instead, and if that seems like a cop-out it's because it definitely is.

So current events don't get discussed much in our house. Sometimes one of us will say to the other, "Hey, have you noticed this thing is happening?" and the other will say something like, "Yes, it's crazy, the world is crazy," and that will be about all. But yesterday, S came home, flopped wearily onto the couch and said of the San Bernardino mass shooting: "Oof. This really just... opens up the existential gulf between you and... everyone. It just reminds you that people can't ever really know each other."

Full disclosure: after that, he also said something about gun control, but that's not what this post is about. This is about The Killing. 

Yes, the TV show. This morning I found myself once again mentally walking around in the too-short-lived AMC/Netflix series, walking with detectives Linden and Holder beside me, opening the cupboards of memory and taking down each episode of this show one by one, as though I was looking for something. (Do you ever do this? Our stories comfort us, and they sit around on our literal or metaphorical bookshelves until we need them.)

As I wandered around in that show again, I realized that it a show firmly placed IN the existential gulf S mentioned, and I appreciated it even more. To be succinct, The Killing did not save us. In the first season, the honest politician was corrupted, the grieving father was drawn back into violence, and even Holder betrayed us. Later, the show did not save Kallie or Bullet or Ray Seward or Kyle's sisters or Linden's relationship with her son, and it did NOT STOP RAINING, not even once. In fact, the only thing it did save was Skinner's reputation, and it turns out he'd murdered 19 teenage girls.

Of course, The Killing is fiction. Because in real life, it does stop raining, at least here and there. But when you really settle into that gap, that universe-wide tear between you and everyone else, then you realize that it isn't outside of you at all, but that it is made by you, and as much as part of your fabric as your blood and bones. When, at the very end of season 4, we realize that it really was Kyle the whole time—that this teenage kid really DID crack and brutally murder his entire family, including his eight-year-old sister—we only realize this as Kyle does, too. He didn't know. He didn't remember. After all, the point of The Killing is that you can't out-clever darkness. You can't logic it. You can look around all you want to in the daylight, but ultimately all is concealed from us. Darkness doesn't have to be clever. It just waits in the corners to envelop you when you can't see it or stop it or even know about it.

According to True Detective season 1, "the light's winning." But according to The Killing, the light is NOT winning. It may some day, but at the moment, it doesn't have a prayer if we live in a world where it's possible for you to have murdered your entire family and not even remember it.

Or where a couple of gunmen can end your life like that —bang—for no reason.

In season 2 of the show, it is revealed that "bad guy" who killed Rosie Larsen, ultimately, was her aunt, who loved her, and who has been grieving for her and helping to put the family back together. In real life, this is often the case: that the bad guy is, in fact, not a bad guy, but a person. And that's something to remember.

None of this probably makes you feel less scared, but it actually does comfort me, did comfort me, this morning. In the final scene of the show, Linden's blue scarf comforts me. No, The Killing doesn't save us, it bravely doesn't save us, but we do survive it, and we pick ourselves up and survive all kinds of things, and we wait out each night until dawn again, and collectively we survived yesterday. And that's also something to remember.

Processing Work (Ten Years Later)

So I'm part of this "vocation group." Yeah, it sounds kinda self-helpy—and it is in some ways—but it's also awesome. We meet every couple weeks and, mainly, we just sit around and talk about what we want to be when we grow up, or why we don't want to be what we are, or etc. We are all grown-ass adults, but we're also hippies, so we we use a lot of language about "processing" and "wondering."

Us, having a wonderment.

I love this group, because there are always snacks, and because it almost always gets emotional. Like it or not, in America, in 2015, we basically think our vocation is everything. We name and identify ourselves by our jobs or our passions, or by the work we think we are meant to do. I'm pretty sure I'm part of this "millennial" generation thing, too, and people seem to think we have a sense of entitlement, but the truth is that we just don't wanna do stuff ONLY for money, and it was the generations before us that told us or modeled for us that we shouldn't.

Anyway, in this group, we are all very into love and peace and naming and breathing and listening and being thoughtful about stuff, but I'm also the only person in this group that would identify as an artist, probably, and I especially love having non-creatives to bounce some of these stickier questions off of. In fact, some of my fellow processors are straight-up normies, so I get to ask them what normal careers are like. I find myself saying things like, "What if I can't be a good person and a writer?" and "How do people compartmentalize what they do for money (we call this labor) and what they perceive their true work to be (some call this vocation)?" and "Is vocation permanent?"

For me, I've been a storyteller since I could speak and a writer since I could lift a crayon, so if my identity as such isn't permanent, then I sure as hell don't know what is.

But I also asked this question aloud, and it terrified me: "I have this stack of scripts at home." [Right now it's a dozen and counting.] "And they each took me months or years to write. What if no one ever sees them? What does that work MEAN?"

*silence* *some thoughtful murmurs* *someone passes me gluten-free pretzels*

No one had anything to say. And I guess I didn't expect them to. I KNOW what the work means... at least, I know what it means to me. Sort of. But I don't know what it means in the larger context of the world, or if it does mean anything. The crazy part is, even if it doesn't—and I don't even know what I mean by that—but anyway, even if it DOESN'T, I still don't think I could be doing anything else.

And even though I have no money, and no plans to get a "real" job, I still don't know what else I could be doing. Everyone else is drawing Venn diagrams about where the parts of their life intersect and come together to form this magical thing called vocation, but my life feels like one enormous circle and it all just says WRITE WORDS ON PAPER UNTIL YOU DIE, TRISH.

Right, okay. Okay. Here's a poem on sort of the same theme I wrote, almost to the week, four years back. Hope you like it. Let's hold hands next time we see each other.

+++

Ten Years Later (October 2011)

I am not better

than I was in high school. I know more

about the things that do not matter. That is all.

I am looser, I guess, my prismed pieces

shaken and tenuous now, like teeth

in a broken jaw. But I suspect that isn’t better.

And I try not to eat meat

anymore, but sometimes

I do, I eat chicken, and I think about all

the deaths we choose so we can keep going –

the mountains sacrificed to glaciers, the photographs

that must be burned, and even

moments we deliver stillborn.

Silent.

Their tiny eyes shut.

At least in high school I screamed when I should –