The Freelancer’s Journal: Tales from the Writing Trade (No. 3)

August 24

I got a call last week from a woman in Rochester with an extreme tale of woe. She raised a son born with muscular dystrophy, and he died at 15. She has another son, an Army officer, who developed a neurological disorder following a tour of duty in the Gulf War. He continues to undergo treatment, although his doctors are still baffled by the condition. It has left him severely debilitated.

The book, as she envisions it, would also include flashbacks to experiences she had as a young Holocaust survivor. And there’s more: her older sister, also a Holocaust survivor, suffered a stroke 10 years ago and has since moved nothing but her lips, right index finger, and eyelids. Supposedly she has all her feeling and comprehension but is “locked in.” When discussing her sister, the woman perked up.

“She’s the primary motivation behind my wanting to write this book. I want it to give hope to others suffering from incurable illnesses. I also want to create a page-turning story that makes the reader feel like he’s reading a novel. Ultimately, my concept is for a book that weaves together tragedy, self-help, and humor.”

“Humor, really?” I said, failing to detect any in what she had just told me.

“Life can be humorous under many strange circumstances, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Yes, absolutely. I know what you mean. I think the book you’re proposing sounds extraordinary.”

She got the idea in the middle of one of her typical days—taking her son to the hospital, visiting her sister in the nursing home, waiting at the pharmacy to get a prescription filled.

“It just hit me, a voice inside that said, ‘Is this it? What’s the point of it anyway?’ It made me so depressed, but then I realized all of this would make a great book.”

It still surprises me how wildly different these stories are in their details but basically the same in their motivation. They’re part of the endless quest for alchemy and redemption, the urge to make something out of nothing. In this case, transform an obscure, miserable life into a compelling tale, available to the public.

I’ve been led astray and disappointed so often by these people, so I don’t get my hopes up when I hear from them. Still, it’s impossible to remain blasé. There’s a gravity to their schemes, no matter how ridiculous. Any writer who got involved would bear an immense responsibility—giving value to someone’s pain, even facilitating their catharsis.

“Every life needs a mission,” I said to her. “It seems to me this book is yours. Do you have a budget in mind for the writing?”

Not surprisingly, she didn’t have any cash. When I gave her my terms, knowing it was hopeless, I felt something more than pity. I felt remorse, which was unusual. Here’s a woman, I thought, who has more pain than she (or anyone) has room for. Without a book, an absorbing diversion, where’s it all gonna go?

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The Freelancer’s Journal: Tales from the Writing Trade (No. 4)

August 26

I had an interview for a job writing an infomercial for a “naturopath” named Dr. Sharp, peddling something called the Total Health Matrix (THM). He got my card from a bulletin board at the Soho Wellness Center. THM, I learned, is “a complete system, a new approach to optimizing health, nutrition, and life.”

I visited Dr. Sharp in his modest West Village apartment, where he greeted me almost as if I were a close friend returning after years abroad. He shook my hand robustly while holding half an unlit joint in his other hand, then put his arm around me and led me into the living room.

The place smelled like pot and incense, with an underlying odor of a vitamin store. Rows of blond-wood shelves, filled with potions and pills in bottles of all colors and sizes, occupied the otherwise sparse apartment. It felt less homey than functional.

Two people were already there—an attractive woman, about 30, with black hair and black clothes, including a miniskirt and lace-up boots that went past her thighs; and a big rustic guy with a beard, wearing blue jeans and dirty beige hiking boots.

We sat on a blue leather couch that clashed with the spartan digs. Dr. Sharp sat in a straight-back chair in the middle of the room. He was big, about 50, maybe older, with straight blond hair down to the middle of his back. His feet were bare and he was dressed in faded blue jeans and a loose white cotton shirt. He was sprawled in the chair, legs spread, holding the joint loosely between his thumb and fore finger.

“Thanks for coming. This is Sandi and Roger.” We all nodded hello. “Sandi’s going to produce the infomercial and Roger’s doing the tech. We’ve been building up to this project for a while. It’s a synthesis of everything I’ve been doing for the last five years or so. Let me tell you, the Total Health Matrix is about to ERUPT—it’s ready to explode, man. It’s just the start, too. We’ve got plans in the works, lots of stuff happening.” He smiled conspiratorially at Sandi. I noticed his hands were always moving, but in a relaxed, loose-wristed manner. He was at ease; he had held forth like this before.

“Eventually we’re gonna have resorts, Sharpville resorts, where people are gonna pay a lot of money to stay. Right now I’m working on a few video projects, and of course there’s my private practice. It’s about calculated steps up this plateau of a unified vision. There’s no doubt it’s gonna happen. This is just one step, a big one, but there’s a lot ahead and I’m gonna need people I can work with in different capacities, like you for example, as a writer. I’m gonna need PR, packaging copy, speeches, other scripts. It’s gonna soar, man, and my people are the wings.”

“Cool,” I said.

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The Freelancer’s Journal: Tales from the Writing Trade (No. 5)

August 26 [cont.]

Dr. Sharp spoke slowly, stretching almost every syllable to its limit, but within the mellow cadences unwavering conviction resounded. He continued to tell me about his growing operation as Sandi interjected details about the infomercial, or, as she called it, “paid programming.” She spoke in purposeful staccato sentences.

“We’re gonna go with a three-camera setup—probably use a Steadicam for the walk-and-talk. The display’s gonna be framed by a flashing call number, with purchase ops every seven minutes, interspersed with some real people. We’re gonna do alternate versions, too, ‘cause the Spanish market is crucial. As far as the writer‘s concerned, the copy really has to hit the product. Ultimately, though, we’re looking to go network.”

“Yeah, network, of course,” I said.

She and Roger, who had been quiet to that point, had a brief jargon-filled aside: post-production, online/off-line, Avid fully loaded, zero-gravity jib arm, flicker-free video. Then Roger said he had another appointment and Dr. Sharp showed him to the door.

We resumed our interview and I foolishly admitted that I had never written for television. They would have found out soon enough, though. My attempts to answer Randi’s question, “What approach would you take to the infomercial?” were sadly inept. I was mired in ignorance, too deep for my impromptu bullshit to even dog paddle. I kept repeating some variation of the phrase, “I think we should orchestrate Dr. Sharp’s charisma.” I foundered deeper: “As I see it, the dialogue should cloak the pitch in entertainment,” I gesticulated sharply for emphasis, “and Dr. Sharp’s engaging presence.”

It didn’t matter at that point. I knew the man was a sham, unmitigated. But I enjoyed listening to him. His voice was soothing, his rap was infectious . . . He spoke as if success was a birthright, and that struggle was for suckers only. I could have listened to him for hours. Maybe it was that slow, uncannily self-assured way he tossed off essential THM dictums: “Just let it happen, man. Don’t worry about it, dig?” Or his parables, a sham(an) raconteur’s stock-in-trade.

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The Freelancer’s Journal: Tales from the Writing Trade (No. 6)

August 26 [cont.]

“I was at this Hollywood party, right, and I saw this cat I knew. He had two fine girls with him, really hot. I would like to have thrown either one of ‘em over a chair,” said Dr. Sharp. “He came up to me and said ‘Rich, I need you to help me out. I need you to get me in to see Spielberg.’ ‘Cause he knew I knew him. I said ‘Okay, I’ll get you in to see Spielberg, but you gotta do me a favor.’

“He said ‘What is it, Rich? What’s the favor?’

“I said, ‘You know, just do me a favor. I get you in to see Spielberg, you do me a favor some time.’ And the guy said, ‘What is it, Rich, what’s the favor?’ You know, he kept asking me. So I said, ‘Just a favor. I’ll get you in to see Spielberg, but you gotta do me a favor.’ And the guy said, ‘Yeah, Rich, you know, anything, but what favor?’

“‘All right, listen. If you see me lying on a park bench in filthy clothes, I want you to buy me a jelly donut.’ And he said, ‘Rich, if I saw you on a park bench like that, I’d buy you a big gourmet meal.’ So I said, ‘No, I wouldn’t want a big gourmet meal, I’d want a jelly donut, because you don’t see many people in parks buying gourmet meals, but I’d sell that jelly donut and I’d get 10 more, and I’d sell jelly donuts to every asshole like you who comes to the park, until I’m a millionaire.’ And he stared at me, the guy just stared at me.”

He chuckled and looked at me with a mischievous smile that said, You know what’s up. We’re kindred spirits. You’re not like the Hollywood asshole. I laughed along with him, but whether at the Hollywood asshole or Dr. Sharp’s quizzical logic I wasn’t sure.

“Don’t think, act,” he said, as he pointed to his head and wiggled his thumb as if cocking a pistol.

“So, I was in L.A. the other day, talkin’ with Tom Cruise, right. He had a cold. Yeah, he had a bad cold—couple weeks. It was really messing up his work. He said, ‘Rich, man, you gotta help me. Only you can clean me up.’

“This is Tom Cruise, right, I mean his time’s money. This guy’s time is money. Listen, he makes—I figured it out once—he makes 35 grand every 45 seconds. Look at the guy, he’s money. He had a cold. When Tom Cruise gets a cold, that town stops, all right. The whole town just stops. So, being a naturopath to the stars, I said, ‘Listen, I’ll help you out, Tom. I’ll help you out, it’s no problem ‘cause I like you. I like your work, I like what you do, I like what you’re about.’ So I gave him my patented tincture of echinacea with a cinnamon infusion. Very good stuff, worked like a charm.

“So he said, ‘What do I owe you Rich, let’s settle up.’ I said, ‘Tom, you don’t owe me anything. ‘No Rich, I insist,’ he said.

“‘Okay, here’s what you owe me: Next scene you do in that movie you’re working on, you just think of me, and when I see the movie, I’ll know what scene it is. I’ll just know. That’s worth it to me.’ Tom Cruise, he’s money. Guy gets a cold, the town comes to a standstill. When Tom Cruise gets a cold, that whole fuckin’ town comes to a standstill. You know what I’m sayin?

“When you got your health you got everything. Health and money, yesssss. Let me tell you something, I knew J. Paul Getty; met him about five years before he died. J. Paul Getty was the richest man in the world for a long time. Nowadays, you got Bill Gates, Oprah, all these other billionaires. But there was a time when J. Paul Getty was the only billionaire around. There was no one who had a billion but him—he was the man.

"You know what J. Paul Getty said to me? He said, ‘Rich, I have two billion dollars, but I’d give a billion dollars to take a good shit.’ He had really bad constipation, J. Paul Getty.”

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The Freelancer’s Journal: Tales from the Writing Trade (No. 7)

August 26 [cont.]

Sandi was making a long phone call while Dr. Sharp told his tales. We talked a little while longer, or actually he talked and I listened.

“You’ve probably never heard of me before, but I’ve been doing this for years. I’ve been all over TV, the daytime talk-show circuit; in magazines too. I have lots of famous clients—actors, musicians—so I got this reputation as a doctor to the stars, that kind of deal. A guy from a magazine was over here once, interviewing me, and, you know, he’s thinking I’m this celebrity doctor with this crazy life, and he asks me, ‘So what do you do to relax or for excitement?’ And you know, the guy’s expecting to hear like hang gliding or rock climbing or African safaris. And I said, ‘Hey man, I like to stay home and watch TV.’ His jaw dropped, I mean he was stunned. It’s true. I just like to watch TV, smoke a doob, you know, maybe have a girl over, play for a couple hours, kick her out and watch some more TV.”

I would have stayed longer, but he said he had patients to see and bid me farewell. The last thing I remember him saying, in the same mellow but deeply commanding way, was: “I’m gonna win a Nobel Prize and a Pulitzer. I don’t know when, and it might be thirty years between them, but I’m gonna win both. Believe me, I’m gonna do it.”

August 27

I’m not too confident about the results of my meeting with Dr. Sharp, but I know he’s someone I want to work for. For the money and personal amusement certainly, but a part of me also wants to become immersed in his enterprise. At the very least I could hone my promotional skills.

Fearing the worst about my interview, I wrote him a letter anyhow:

Dear Dr. Sharp:

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to meet with you and Sandi about the infomercial. I imagine you’ll probably go with someone more versed in the form, which is understandable, but I hope this won’t preclude me from further participation in your sprawling empire to-be.

While I realize that selling products is your primary objective, I think it’s crucial that you employ your charisma to the fullest extent possible. Perhaps this charisma will come through no matter who does your writing. Please keep in mind, though, that I am attuned to the strength of your rhetoric and its potential appeal to a wide audience. I would welcome any future opportunity to contribute some of my ideas to the cauldron of excitement that is the Total Health Matrix.

To be continued . . .

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Becoming Unreal: The Artist’s Duty in a World of Illusions

Art is the lie that tells the truth.

—Picasso



Showbiz Postures: The Grammar of Celebrity


Part of what makes an artist (read: artist/entertainer) different, part of what makes him an artist and not a normal person is that he has an audience. This is true especially when the artist becomes an icon or a celebrity, present where- and whenever his work is consumed. The icon accrues meaning and symbolic value from those who invest him with their hopes, dreams, and suppositions about who/what he is. His being, then, is dynamic and amounts to an unfixed sum of all that everyone brings to him.

Every engagement between the artist and his audience highlights the unbridgeable gap between creator and consumer. The artist may sometimes communicate with or “touch” his audience, but it’s usually an illusion. Despite any apparent communion between them, the artist and his audience are estranged by the privilege that defines the artist’s life. His activities, his work product, his apartness are the foundation of the wall separating transmission and reception. The audience’s relationship with the artist and his work is vicarious.

At the crux of the artist/audience dialectic, more than any notion of pseudo-intimacy, is how the audience elevates the artist, how it magnifies his scale and makes his life extraordinary. The artist in turn inhabits the thoughts and dreams of his audience. This is what it means to be “larger than life.”

The artist’s natural aloofness from his audience and the fact that this same audience is the source of his power creates a basic tension. The artist has followers, but whether and where he chooses to lead them is ambiguous. This raises questions: What is the artist’s purpose, his duty? What “social good” can art accomplish, beyond aesthetic pleasure or passive critique? How does the artist, if at all, transcend mere culture?

In a world pervaded by intricate fictions at all levels of exchange: interpersonal, official, commercial; and defined by growing monopolies on experience — via received language, media conglomerates, and the technology that’s behind everything — the best art reveals itself to be honest, at least, if not morally superior. That's because artists have no need to disguise their masquerade; their artifice is upfront, as opposed to the sanctioned world where artifice wears the garb of truth. The artist’s brand of authentic unreality, rooted in his traditional role as the alien within and his natural aversion to official reality, can be a vital force. When it aspires to something beyond diversion, art can be a corrective or at least suggest an alternative to certain malignant and/or wrongheaded values and ideologies.

The savvy artist, who wishes to put his work in the service of progress and enlightenment, soon finds that it is beyond his capacity to illuminate the murky dreamscape that has become the “real world.” In this atmosphere, “the matrix,” creative endeavors, well-orchestrated opposition, the combined power of every artist — an impossibility besides — could never hope to counter the forces of illusion on their own terms.

This obvious imbalance is lost on some, most glaringly those cadres of celebrities who venture into politics or “good works” and try to assert their moral authority. The reason for this is clear: when artists get involved in civic affairs they abandon the very qualities that make them who they are. As earnest, virtuous citizens or would-be pundits they cast a pale shadow over the culture, versus their otherwise luminous (or garish) presence. Artists who feel compelled to do good works and respond to the world at large fail to see that the genuine good of which they’re capable stems from their real work. This work, even the crassest, most candy-coated variety, does not merely entertain and provide diversion, but also expands the kingdom of life, beyond the mundane. This is the promise of the artist’s gift, the manifestation of his vitality.

The artist in the realm of world affairs comes across as a fool, invariably, because what makes him potent, as an elevated spirit among his audience, is the fact that he is divorced from reality — above the crowd, beyond the fray. The audience welcomes this, adopting the artist as a surrogate for the unobtainable, expecting him to fulfill his role as a vehicle of artifice. This is the essence of their bond, because deep down the audience believes artifice provides the means to a higher truth.

With consensus reality becoming ever more illusory, the artist must keep pace and maintain a clear distance from this dubious condition. Becoming unreal then means becoming more genuine. For this there are many avenues available: satire, fantasy, abstraction; varieties of synthesis, and whatever else the imagination can muster.

Some artists are capable of putting their privileged lives in the service of higher aims, while retaining the mystique that sets them apart and makes their work vital. Artists achieve this — whether intentionally or by accident — because their work changes the audience; like the best art, it breeds awareness and heightens or transforms perspective.

The artist forges a deeper connection with his audience when they believe that he “lives his work” — being enmeshed in a constant cycle of creation; fashioning life and art into a distinct flow, a bold statement that invigorates their own beliefs. In such cases the artist is a living testament to possibility, a paragon of the way things can be.

The most profound, lasting way an artist can respond to the world is to sustain a regimen of life and work characterized by honesty, apartness, and ferocious discrimination. The artist must live as an antidote. This is how the artist nurtures his power and can best serve his audience. This is how art actually changes the world.

Peak Songs

Peak Songs. The affect is powerful, distinct: flushing, tearing, breathlessness — physical changes . . . a totality of feeling — SUBSUMED, abstract and concrete merging . . . Usually induced by a certain strain of dulcet female vocals.

What is the anatomy of mystique, the blueprint for the sublime? Ask Neko Case — it seems she can plumb the emotional depths at will, with that singular voice. Chills EVERY TIME! Who else can do that? (Did you ever hear a song on the radio, for the first time, and literally run out to buy the CD? I did, she made me.) “Haunting” or “aching” or any words can’t describe the frissons she unleashes.

More Peak Songs