Morning Work Session: 11/2/2011

A quick and dirty diary of what I did and what I was thinking when I did it.

* Wii Fit was a success. Down a couple of pounds, worked out for 35 minutes. Feeling a little smoother, but, damn, gotta stay away from the Halloween candy at work. And the wife made brownies with Butterfingers bars. Life’s a struggle, I tell you, and then you diet.

* Realized that there are directors who made only one musical, with uneven results, and started a list. Woody Allen (“Everyone Says I Love You”); Peter Bogdanovich (“At Long Last Love” a notorious bomb so bad that it’s not available on DVD, although there is this clip on YouTube); and John Huston (“Annie”). Also threw in “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut” because it’s the most clever vulgar movie I’ve ever seen.

* Copying a bunch of quotes from John Lahr’s book, “Show and Tell,” about Woody Allen, David Mamet, Frank Sinatra and others. Woody comes off as much sharper and less neurotic than you’d think. In fact, the guy’s damn smart about his life and his career, and I wish I had learned this advice when I was younger:

As an aspiring playwright in my late teens, I would meet some comedians, and I was taken by the fact that they all seemed to have a million distractions. I thought to myself, The guy who’s gonna come out at the end of the poker game with the chips is the guy who just focuses and works. You have to just work. You can’t read your reviews. Just keep quiet. Don’t get into arguments with anybody. Be polite, and do what you want to do, but keep working.

“Keep working.” That should have been my life.

* Got a copy of Ike Reilly’s “Hard Luck Stories” as recommended by Steve Almond on Marc Maron’s “WTF” show. Almond was promoting his upcoming book of short stories and kevetching about his inability to reach a wider audience, the common fate of many literary writers. They also went on about reaching people to be more compassion and despair, but the music is what I keyed into.

* Reminds me that I listened to “Girl On Guy with Aisha Tyler” last night. (Did you know misspelling her first name gets you pron links? I’m shocked.) She was talking with this guy I wasn’t into ? didn’t know anything about him ? but I have a rule that if I don’t know something and I have it in my hand, I should read it/see it/pursue it ? even a little bit. Picked that up from Bill Gates. Because, the theory goes, you’ll learn something that’s outside your comfort zone.

In this case, it worked. The guy — Sal Masekela — his dad is a longtime musician living a musican’s life. The guy grew up in New York (cool melting pot) and Connecticut (uncool white-bread world), got into skateboarding, then was moved to California, where he picked up on surfing, and then he got into the good stuff, like at 15 meeting Paul Simon and working the pussy patrol while on his “Graceland” tour (that’s when you’d stand off-stage, and when one of the musicians ? I assume Paul was not part of this ? pointed out a girl in the audience they wanted, he’d get into the crowd, give them backstage passes and round them up for a party after the show.

* David Mamet not only has a website, but his contact menu has a 1-800 number that I’m kinda scared of calling, and a feed for something that I put on my butt-ugly google reader.

Here’s a story from the Lahr book about Mamet and his attitude toward Hollywood screenwriting:

Mamet once handed Zollo (his producer) a copy of “American Buffalo” to do as a movie. “Have you adapted it for the screen?” Zollo asked. “Adapted it?” said Mamet. “Have I fucking what? I’m going to adapt it right now for you.” Mamet demanded the script back. “He crosses out ‘A Play by David Mamet’ and he writes “A Screenplay by David Mamet,” Zollo says. Mamet is fortified in his truculence by the lesson of his poker playing (“If you’re smarter than the other guy, be smarter than the other guy”) and by a favorite dictum of the English critic William Hazlitt, which he paraphrases as “Don’t try to suck up or even be nice to your intellectual inferiors. They’ll only hate you mroe for it.” He adds, “Having read that makes my life a little easier.” About two years ago, Bob Conte, of HBO, gave Zollo a few pages of notes to give to Mamet on his “Lansky” script, which is finally being produced this year. “Essentially, almost all of our notes concern the following issues: Chronology, Clarity, and Character (alliteration unintended),” Conte wrote.

“Tell him to Suck My Dick,” Mamet told Zollo. “Alliteration unintended.”

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