Traveling to Seattle again this week for work and shenanigans. Putting together new articles, games, and books as quick as I can. New project ideas are coming fast, now, so please send me your spare or gently used minutes and hours so that I might have time to write them all down.
All the best,
Will
All the best,
Will
I'll be in Seattle sometime tomorrow as part of my build-up to a weekend full of PAX. Just saying.
I admit, I forget about Suicide Girls for weeks at a time. But here I am, procrastinating on revisions on a short story and checking in with all you fine people. I'm back home, living in Chicago again, and looking for things to do, places to see, events to crash, foods to eat. Local? Got advice for me? Do tell.
Shh. I've kept my SG account open because, honestly, I forgot to shut it down. I may have to, yet, but I'm here for now. Here, by the way, is now Chicago. I'm back home, only it barely feels like home so far. Give it time.
This is it. Money's too tight to keep Suicide Girls around, and I never succeeded in making friends here anyway. What with my recent discovery that I'd forgotten about SG for almost a month, and with us about to sell our house and pull up stakes, I think it's time to walk away from Suicide Girls. So it goes. Maybe I'll be back one day.
There are a handful of people here that I've communicated with, that I won't be able to find again without SG, and I wish you the best of luck in the future. Keep Wil Wheaton company for me.
Cheers.
There are a handful of people here that I've communicated with, that I won't be able to find again without SG, and I wish you the best of luck in the future. Keep Wil Wheaton company for me.
Cheers.
Superstition proliferates among the powerless. When we have no control over our writing, over the machinery that enables us to sit down and produce work that we can like and be proud of, we voluntarily turn power over to muses and furies. We characterize the random surges of inspiration and assign made-up systems to the unknowable mechanisms with power over lives — because clearly something has power over our lives and it is not us.
To take command of your own writing, you have to demystify it. A certain level of mysticism may always surround the work, but you have to at least illuminate the switch that turns on the writing machine. You have to know how to begin. You need access to those controls.
This is my semi-annual update to my SG blog.
To take command of your own writing, you have to demystify it. A certain level of mysticism may always surround the work, but you have to at least illuminate the switch that turns on the writing machine. You have to know how to begin. You need access to those controls.
This is my semi-annual update to my SG blog.
A quick, semi-annual update:
The next Gameplaywright Press book, The Bones, is delayed until after Gen Con. Sorry about that, but our authors are still toiling and we're choosing not to rush it.
Meanwhile, I'm in the midst of founding a new company to print various geeky things, from indie RPG materials to T-shirts and fiction. I'll tell you the name and the first product when the paperwork is all filed.
In other news, Jet Pack is go.
The majority of my time spent workshopping stories according to strict processes of prefab questions and rote exercises has not been real helpful. Mandatory, systematized criticism in a ring of folding chairs has always looked washed-out and florescent when compared to dog-earned notebook paper passed around a Dennys at midnight, the window lit by streetlights and neon.
But most of the writers I know dont live near me, so we needed another solution. Here it is: The Internet can be the new Dennys, and it is always midnight there.
So this isnt a magazine. This is the showroom of our writers workshop, the part with the big steel doors we open to the street so passersby can eyeball our wares. Its also the loft space where we sit around scratching in our notebooks, or typing on our notebooks, and plan a big reading party that never happens because people can come by and read us everyday. And also it is a midnight diner. Because this is the future and everything is more than one thing.
I just wanted a place where writers can be read, where readers can find a variety of short and crazy stories, where writers can workshop together instead of toiling alone, where feedback is quick and lively instead of nonexistent. I want to talk shop. I want to read what my comrades are cooking up in their insane skulls. I want to be a better writer by visiting a shamelessly Bohemian intelligentsia cafe with a wicked genre fetish, and Im willing to do it online in the absence of the real thing.
Think of Jet Pack as a writers gallery, where we hand out red pens at the door. Let us know what you think.
Thank you both.
The next Gameplaywright Press book, The Bones, is delayed until after Gen Con. Sorry about that, but our authors are still toiling and we're choosing not to rush it.
Meanwhile, I'm in the midst of founding a new company to print various geeky things, from indie RPG materials to T-shirts and fiction. I'll tell you the name and the first product when the paperwork is all filed.
In other news, Jet Pack is go.
The majority of my time spent workshopping stories according to strict processes of prefab questions and rote exercises has not been real helpful. Mandatory, systematized criticism in a ring of folding chairs has always looked washed-out and florescent when compared to dog-earned notebook paper passed around a Dennys at midnight, the window lit by streetlights and neon.
But most of the writers I know dont live near me, so we needed another solution. Here it is: The Internet can be the new Dennys, and it is always midnight there.
So this isnt a magazine. This is the showroom of our writers workshop, the part with the big steel doors we open to the street so passersby can eyeball our wares. Its also the loft space where we sit around scratching in our notebooks, or typing on our notebooks, and plan a big reading party that never happens because people can come by and read us everyday. And also it is a midnight diner. Because this is the future and everything is more than one thing.
I just wanted a place where writers can be read, where readers can find a variety of short and crazy stories, where writers can workshop together instead of toiling alone, where feedback is quick and lively instead of nonexistent. I want to talk shop. I want to read what my comrades are cooking up in their insane skulls. I want to be a better writer by visiting a shamelessly Bohemian intelligentsia cafe with a wicked genre fetish, and Im willing to do it online in the absence of the real thing.
Think of Jet Pack as a writers gallery, where we hand out red pens at the door. Let us know what you think.
Thank you both.
Eight or nine months later and it's time for a new post, just to keep shit, I don't know, "real." As you know, I do most of my blogging in other corners of the Internet. The best way to peek in on my geek antics, lately, is to check out my Tumblr joint: The Mooncalf. I'm posting old stories, new essays, and longer musings, still, at The Gist, and I'm still (again) haunting the Atlanta Metblog. And of course, my newest book is still new: Things We Think About Games
The thing I don't get? Friends lists. Here, Facebook, wherever -- I don't know what to do when strangers want to befriend me. (Actually, that applies to real life pretty good, too.) I'm trying something new, though, and I'm adding folks here if we have something in common, even if I don't yet know the person. See how that goes.
Content! Let's make your visit worthwhile. Since the sad sinking of Everywhere magazine, I've had this piece sitting around without a home. Since it involves porn (or pr0n!, if you like), I offer it up here for y'all. I hope you enjoy it:
"Porn-Star Karaoke and Cadillac Hats"
I admit it: When I was living at home, I snuck peeks at my brother's porn stash. It was, I'll say, formidable. I don't know where he got it, but he got it.
So I shouldn't be surprised, exactly, when I'm out visiting him in LA and he says, "Tonight we'll go to this Mexican place nearby and then head over to porn-star karaoke." Oh, of course, I think to myself. Porn-star karaoke. Sure.
"Is that something people do?" I ask.
"Sure," he says.
He and I grew up in the Midwest, but he was always meant for LA. Snow was his nemesis. Writing for the screen was his calling. LA was his home. He just lived in Illinois for a while.
Porn-star karaoke turns out to be held in a dive bar in a strip mall in Burbank. To one side is something like a discount housewares store. To the other is, I don't know, a salon. Ordinary things. In between them, behind the opaque black slabs where windows used to be, something is happening with porn-stars and karaoke. I'm picturing them up on a small stage, rocking out to a cheering, drunken audience of other porn-stars.
What's the percentage of porn-stars to regular people, I wonder. Desperate to look like I'm not wondering that, or anything else, I keep my mouth shut and shuffle ahead with the rest of the small crowd edging through the door.
Dudes in black T-shirts check your ID at the door, and I thought maybe your cred, but they let me by, so I guess it's just the IDs. Inside on the first floor, the place manages to also be a basement rec-room. Fake wood paneling. A mirror crowded with stickers, wedged between overfull shelves of beer, liquor bottles, and chotchkes. The trick, though, is in doing all of this without any references to modern Hollywood. After about thirty or forty years, when something becomes cult or kitsch, then you can put up a poster or a doll. Otherwise, I suppose it's just advertising.
The place is a single big room, crammed with people, shoulder to shoulder. It's so tight, there's no polite way to enter or reach the bar. At first, I think there's a sunken area in the middle of the room, and presume that the men with the big hair and the busty women sitting down there are porn-celebs. It turns out they're on the same (linoleum?) floor we all are. They're just sitting on low couches and plush chairs. Everyone else must stand, except for a horseshoe of single men at the bar.
There are two buxom brunettes up near the microphone, trying to coax people on stage to sing Metallica or something by offering up T-shirts with adult-film company logos. These are the kinds of girls who play the best friend of the female lead in romantic comedies. They announce that the prizes for some kind of drawing or scoring or something include DVDs. I think. They're waving them up over their heads and then tossing them back into a cardboard box like they're free. They all have colorfully busy, nasty covers.
For a long time, no one goes up there. The girls' energy level does not waver.
My brother knows some of these girls. He points them out to me. "That's Sunny Lane," he tells me, gesturing. Google her at your own risk. (NSFW.) She was voted the best adult-video newcomer that year.
The guy in front of me turns around and we're so close that the brim of his cap hits me in the glasses. He leans back, like I'm the jerk, and I see his blue hat has a Cadillac logo on it. I don't know what that means. "Excuse me," I say.
"Hmphoughagh," I guess he says. He shoulders me aside and heads for the bar.
On the far side of the room, puncturing through the atmosphere, is the cold, dead shine of fluorescent lights and what I presume to be the bathrooms. I resolve never to go over there. Not only would it be a two-hour roundtrip through here, but I am quite sure that they'd just have one of those troughs for a urinal. That kind of place. Also, I don't do coke, so I felt like I'd have to stay out of all public restrooms in LA.
"You want a beer," asks my brother.
"Yeah, but I'll get it," I say, already forgetting my oath not to piss here. I head into the crowd, having to rub against walls and people to get by.
On the way, I bump into Cadillac Hat again. No, wait. This is a different guy in a Cadillac Hat. "Pardon me," I say to his huge gold necklace and oversized jersey, and he raises his Pabst Blue Ribbons up over my head.
The bar is a big, almost blonde U-shaped thing on the far side of the room from the stage. I can't figure out how the bartender gets back there, and he doesn't look too happy. Dusty bottles, crammed into little shelves on either side of a big, varnish-flecked mirror, show off their stock.
Someone's stepped up to the mic. He's almost shaking he's so nervous. He is not a porn star. He is hoping to be hip or brave. He is not pulling it off. I think he's singing something by Van Halen.
Only losers end up on the mic. I was a fool to think that we were sneaking in on some weekly event where porn-stars just happen to get together for karaoke. The porn stars are just here as the spectacle, and the karaoke is a pretense. Everyone's standing around, drinking 'cause it's cheap, and waiting for something to happen.
I point at Newcastles, wave three fingers at the bartender, and get three Pabst Blue Ribbons, the coolly ironic thing to drink. I have to point, because the bartender can't hear me over the very-much-not-porn-star rocking the mic and the bar is jammed like the LA freeway with guys who came to tease themselves with professional sex artists and then started drinking alone. One of these guys is wearing his Cadillac cap backwards.
That's three guys in Cadillac caps. What is it with the guys in Cadillac caps? Is this just something that's happening in LA? Or did Cadillac get a ball club together and it's doing really well?
I head back with the beers. I spend most of the time talking to my brother's friend, a crew member on a popular sitcom with a look like a famous military writer. We're doing that thing where you lean in near the one's ear, shout something vaguely witty, and then the other one nods, only sort of sure he heard you. I can't tell if he's out of his element here, too, or if he's just being sympathetic. Can this room be anyone's element? Shouldn't part of the fun be the absurdity, that you're brushing shoulders with porn stars (or that you get to be a porn star being gawked at and admired by your fans) in a casual anywhere-in-America environment?
Except, of course, this isn't anywhere in America. This is Los Angeles, and the aura is palpable. It's in the hiply crappy clothes and the swagger on people. Everyone's a peacock. Everyone's tail is all fanned out.
This is one of those things about Los Angeles. I get a feeling that everyone else is in on something _ that they're all avoiding the crass conversations about business and what's fashionable, but trying to project that they know what's up. They're standing around with the pride of folks who work on things you've heard of. Like their shirts are giving off light and their pants are broadcasting. "I'm in the know," comes the signal, mingled with a dozen other overlapping signals. "I am one of us. If you talk to me, I'll be cool about it. Unless I'm better connected than you, in which case screw off."
It reminds me of Washington, D.C.: another company town where people wear rank and clearance badges declaring their importance and how much money they make. The system on the subway line is this: You bitch to equal-ranks about your superiors (never by name) and you mock the ones below you (always in a stage whisper). In LA I feel like the system is similar, but telepathic. They're all doing it. I just can't hear it.
Actually, not everyone. The porn stars are dressed much more casually. I can recognize one of them coming toward us by the way she walks behind a couple of guys who part the crowd, no problem. She's in sweats and a T-shirt. Not the hipster sweats, not a tacky gangster sweatjacket, but genuine sweatpants and a sincere T-shirt. She looks like somebody's sister.
Now I realize that this is Sunny Lane, newcomer of the year. As she's walking past us my brother sticks out his hand. I miss exactly what he's saying _ all I hear is the crowd and my own buzzing astonishment _ but it's easygoing. It's a compliment, without any fanboy gooberishness. He knows how to talk to fame. How to talk like a regular person when he's faced with a (adult) film star.
A quick nod, a quick thank-you from her, and without breaking the momentum of the guys parting the crowd, she's off again. She smiles and nods at me, 'cause I'm The Guy Next to the Guy, and she's gone. Vanished back into the netherworld of famous people that lurks just beneath the surface of Los Angeles.
Then, as if we'd done what we came here to do, we start wrapping it up. Maybe it's because I've never moved more than twenty feet from the door (the distance from bouncer to bar), maybe it's because my brother and his buddy have to work tomorrow. But a few moments later we're passing bouncers, who I thank without knowing why, and then we're back on the strip-mall sidewalk. Against all natural laws of LA, we walk back home.
Outside, now, Burbank feels much more mundane. The sodium lights that glow on the overpass are the same as sodium lights everywhere. The bank buildings are the same as bank buildings everywhere. The intersections are intersections. No big deal.
[ © 2008 Will Hindmarch ]
The thing I don't get? Friends lists. Here, Facebook, wherever -- I don't know what to do when strangers want to befriend me. (Actually, that applies to real life pretty good, too.) I'm trying something new, though, and I'm adding folks here if we have something in common, even if I don't yet know the person. See how that goes.
Content! Let's make your visit worthwhile. Since the sad sinking of Everywhere magazine, I've had this piece sitting around without a home. Since it involves porn (or pr0n!, if you like), I offer it up here for y'all. I hope you enjoy it:
"Porn-Star Karaoke and Cadillac Hats"
I admit it: When I was living at home, I snuck peeks at my brother's porn stash. It was, I'll say, formidable. I don't know where he got it, but he got it.
So I shouldn't be surprised, exactly, when I'm out visiting him in LA and he says, "Tonight we'll go to this Mexican place nearby and then head over to porn-star karaoke." Oh, of course, I think to myself. Porn-star karaoke. Sure.
"Is that something people do?" I ask.
"Sure," he says.
He and I grew up in the Midwest, but he was always meant for LA. Snow was his nemesis. Writing for the screen was his calling. LA was his home. He just lived in Illinois for a while.
Porn-star karaoke turns out to be held in a dive bar in a strip mall in Burbank. To one side is something like a discount housewares store. To the other is, I don't know, a salon. Ordinary things. In between them, behind the opaque black slabs where windows used to be, something is happening with porn-stars and karaoke. I'm picturing them up on a small stage, rocking out to a cheering, drunken audience of other porn-stars.
What's the percentage of porn-stars to regular people, I wonder. Desperate to look like I'm not wondering that, or anything else, I keep my mouth shut and shuffle ahead with the rest of the small crowd edging through the door.
Dudes in black T-shirts check your ID at the door, and I thought maybe your cred, but they let me by, so I guess it's just the IDs. Inside on the first floor, the place manages to also be a basement rec-room. Fake wood paneling. A mirror crowded with stickers, wedged between overfull shelves of beer, liquor bottles, and chotchkes. The trick, though, is in doing all of this without any references to modern Hollywood. After about thirty or forty years, when something becomes cult or kitsch, then you can put up a poster or a doll. Otherwise, I suppose it's just advertising.
The place is a single big room, crammed with people, shoulder to shoulder. It's so tight, there's no polite way to enter or reach the bar. At first, I think there's a sunken area in the middle of the room, and presume that the men with the big hair and the busty women sitting down there are porn-celebs. It turns out they're on the same (linoleum?) floor we all are. They're just sitting on low couches and plush chairs. Everyone else must stand, except for a horseshoe of single men at the bar.
There are two buxom brunettes up near the microphone, trying to coax people on stage to sing Metallica or something by offering up T-shirts with adult-film company logos. These are the kinds of girls who play the best friend of the female lead in romantic comedies. They announce that the prizes for some kind of drawing or scoring or something include DVDs. I think. They're waving them up over their heads and then tossing them back into a cardboard box like they're free. They all have colorfully busy, nasty covers.
For a long time, no one goes up there. The girls' energy level does not waver.
My brother knows some of these girls. He points them out to me. "That's Sunny Lane," he tells me, gesturing. Google her at your own risk. (NSFW.) She was voted the best adult-video newcomer that year.
The guy in front of me turns around and we're so close that the brim of his cap hits me in the glasses. He leans back, like I'm the jerk, and I see his blue hat has a Cadillac logo on it. I don't know what that means. "Excuse me," I say.
"Hmphoughagh," I guess he says. He shoulders me aside and heads for the bar.
On the far side of the room, puncturing through the atmosphere, is the cold, dead shine of fluorescent lights and what I presume to be the bathrooms. I resolve never to go over there. Not only would it be a two-hour roundtrip through here, but I am quite sure that they'd just have one of those troughs for a urinal. That kind of place. Also, I don't do coke, so I felt like I'd have to stay out of all public restrooms in LA.
"You want a beer," asks my brother.
"Yeah, but I'll get it," I say, already forgetting my oath not to piss here. I head into the crowd, having to rub against walls and people to get by.
On the way, I bump into Cadillac Hat again. No, wait. This is a different guy in a Cadillac Hat. "Pardon me," I say to his huge gold necklace and oversized jersey, and he raises his Pabst Blue Ribbons up over my head.
The bar is a big, almost blonde U-shaped thing on the far side of the room from the stage. I can't figure out how the bartender gets back there, and he doesn't look too happy. Dusty bottles, crammed into little shelves on either side of a big, varnish-flecked mirror, show off their stock.
Someone's stepped up to the mic. He's almost shaking he's so nervous. He is not a porn star. He is hoping to be hip or brave. He is not pulling it off. I think he's singing something by Van Halen.
Only losers end up on the mic. I was a fool to think that we were sneaking in on some weekly event where porn-stars just happen to get together for karaoke. The porn stars are just here as the spectacle, and the karaoke is a pretense. Everyone's standing around, drinking 'cause it's cheap, and waiting for something to happen.
I point at Newcastles, wave three fingers at the bartender, and get three Pabst Blue Ribbons, the coolly ironic thing to drink. I have to point, because the bartender can't hear me over the very-much-not-porn-star rocking the mic and the bar is jammed like the LA freeway with guys who came to tease themselves with professional sex artists and then started drinking alone. One of these guys is wearing his Cadillac cap backwards.
That's three guys in Cadillac caps. What is it with the guys in Cadillac caps? Is this just something that's happening in LA? Or did Cadillac get a ball club together and it's doing really well?
I head back with the beers. I spend most of the time talking to my brother's friend, a crew member on a popular sitcom with a look like a famous military writer. We're doing that thing where you lean in near the one's ear, shout something vaguely witty, and then the other one nods, only sort of sure he heard you. I can't tell if he's out of his element here, too, or if he's just being sympathetic. Can this room be anyone's element? Shouldn't part of the fun be the absurdity, that you're brushing shoulders with porn stars (or that you get to be a porn star being gawked at and admired by your fans) in a casual anywhere-in-America environment?
Except, of course, this isn't anywhere in America. This is Los Angeles, and the aura is palpable. It's in the hiply crappy clothes and the swagger on people. Everyone's a peacock. Everyone's tail is all fanned out.
This is one of those things about Los Angeles. I get a feeling that everyone else is in on something _ that they're all avoiding the crass conversations about business and what's fashionable, but trying to project that they know what's up. They're standing around with the pride of folks who work on things you've heard of. Like their shirts are giving off light and their pants are broadcasting. "I'm in the know," comes the signal, mingled with a dozen other overlapping signals. "I am one of us. If you talk to me, I'll be cool about it. Unless I'm better connected than you, in which case screw off."
It reminds me of Washington, D.C.: another company town where people wear rank and clearance badges declaring their importance and how much money they make. The system on the subway line is this: You bitch to equal-ranks about your superiors (never by name) and you mock the ones below you (always in a stage whisper). In LA I feel like the system is similar, but telepathic. They're all doing it. I just can't hear it.
Actually, not everyone. The porn stars are dressed much more casually. I can recognize one of them coming toward us by the way she walks behind a couple of guys who part the crowd, no problem. She's in sweats and a T-shirt. Not the hipster sweats, not a tacky gangster sweatjacket, but genuine sweatpants and a sincere T-shirt. She looks like somebody's sister.
Now I realize that this is Sunny Lane, newcomer of the year. As she's walking past us my brother sticks out his hand. I miss exactly what he's saying _ all I hear is the crowd and my own buzzing astonishment _ but it's easygoing. It's a compliment, without any fanboy gooberishness. He knows how to talk to fame. How to talk like a regular person when he's faced with a (adult) film star.
A quick nod, a quick thank-you from her, and without breaking the momentum of the guys parting the crowd, she's off again. She smiles and nods at me, 'cause I'm The Guy Next to the Guy, and she's gone. Vanished back into the netherworld of famous people that lurks just beneath the surface of Los Angeles.
Then, as if we'd done what we came here to do, we start wrapping it up. Maybe it's because I've never moved more than twenty feet from the door (the distance from bouncer to bar), maybe it's because my brother and his buddy have to work tomorrow. But a few moments later we're passing bouncers, who I thank without knowing why, and then we're back on the strip-mall sidewalk. Against all natural laws of LA, we walk back home.
Outside, now, Burbank feels much more mundane. The sodium lights that glow on the overpass are the same as sodium lights everywhere. The bank buildings are the same as bank buildings everywhere. The intersections are intersections. No big deal.
[ © 2008 Will Hindmarch ]
In his essay, "Hissy Fit," Steven Martin said, "Los Angeles is a city of abundant and compelling almosts. [...] As the surface is unpeeled, a deeper level is revealed, but just beneath that, the surface level appears again." He said the city is constantly offering "evidence of something richer that has just been missed."
People come to Los Angeles thinking the angels have made promises. Faith in yourself. Not confidence, but faith _ like a member of your own congregation, come to LA to find the executive or the director or the producer who will preach the gospel of you, give you your testament and proselytize your virtues. You're looking for the PR priest who will craft your word and the rag that'll spread it. Where once you were blind, now you shall be a Star.
The Star is a pilgrim until she becomes the symbol of her own faith, deified by her agent, a would-be Pope. LA is the Jerusalem for the young zealot, and a million holy wars are being waged here all the time, generals strategizing over hands-free cell phones. It is the Holy Land, the City of Angels, broadcasting love and joy and situation comedy to all the world, but so too is it smothered 'neath smog and lust and pills.
The Reverend agent standing in line at Starbucks shouts through a glowing ear bud to the heavenly Star, preaching to her of rehab. He casts out heathen production assistants in the parking lot and forgives the pool guy of his sins. He draws his strength from her love, but keeps her faith in check so she doesn't get off the hook. He is her missionary to middle America, summoner of ratings, but he tells his bartender she can be such a cunt. He knows that they are each real only through their belief in her _ who exists through his belief and yet made him what he is _ but he takes her name in vain. He is always on the lookout for a new messiah. He thinks he'd like to buy a bigger boat.
Mike Doughty said Los Angeles beckons the teenagers to come to her on buses. Mike Doughty said Los Angeles loves love. She is the holy mother or the archangel, either summoning the supplicant visionary to piety or appearing in fire as the harbinger of the Star's destiny as the next pretty face, the next sensation, the next fabulous ass.
The Star shall be her own mother and her own messiah, the virgin talent that gives birth to her own glorious fame under her own gleaming star. Every movie theater shall be her temple, until her star finally settles on earth in a sidewalk slab.
Cocaine is their wafer. Sex-sweat is their wine. Bottled water is holy. The critic is the Devil.
The contract is a holy text, and the Star is but a simple carpenter, so she has the priests decipher its meaning. She trusts the priests to their faces, but knows that in each of their hearts is a pore through which the poisonous blood of Mammon seeps. So she turns also to the million morphing Gnostic texts of some other dogmas, brought to LA by golems or space aliens, in the hopes of raising her heart up near heaven again, while keeping her million-dollar ass down here near Santa Monica.
People come to Los Angeles thinking the angels have made promises. Faith in yourself. Not confidence, but faith _ like a member of your own congregation, come to LA to find the executive or the director or the producer who will preach the gospel of you, give you your testament and proselytize your virtues. You're looking for the PR priest who will craft your word and the rag that'll spread it. Where once you were blind, now you shall be a Star.
The Star is a pilgrim until she becomes the symbol of her own faith, deified by her agent, a would-be Pope. LA is the Jerusalem for the young zealot, and a million holy wars are being waged here all the time, generals strategizing over hands-free cell phones. It is the Holy Land, the City of Angels, broadcasting love and joy and situation comedy to all the world, but so too is it smothered 'neath smog and lust and pills.
The Reverend agent standing in line at Starbucks shouts through a glowing ear bud to the heavenly Star, preaching to her of rehab. He casts out heathen production assistants in the parking lot and forgives the pool guy of his sins. He draws his strength from her love, but keeps her faith in check so she doesn't get off the hook. He is her missionary to middle America, summoner of ratings, but he tells his bartender she can be such a cunt. He knows that they are each real only through their belief in her _ who exists through his belief and yet made him what he is _ but he takes her name in vain. He is always on the lookout for a new messiah. He thinks he'd like to buy a bigger boat.
Mike Doughty said Los Angeles beckons the teenagers to come to her on buses. Mike Doughty said Los Angeles loves love. She is the holy mother or the archangel, either summoning the supplicant visionary to piety or appearing in fire as the harbinger of the Star's destiny as the next pretty face, the next sensation, the next fabulous ass.
The Star shall be her own mother and her own messiah, the virgin talent that gives birth to her own glorious fame under her own gleaming star. Every movie theater shall be her temple, until her star finally settles on earth in a sidewalk slab.
Cocaine is their wafer. Sex-sweat is their wine. Bottled water is holy. The critic is the Devil.
The contract is a holy text, and the Star is but a simple carpenter, so she has the priests decipher its meaning. She trusts the priests to their faces, but knows that in each of their hearts is a pore through which the poisonous blood of Mammon seeps. So she turns also to the million morphing Gnostic texts of some other dogmas, brought to LA by golems or space aliens, in the hopes of raising her heart up near heaven again, while keeping her million-dollar ass down here near Santa Monica.
This, I guess, is my annual post at SG. As usual, it's also to put up a link to another new address for The Gist: thegist.wordstudio.net
At long last, I'm hosting the site myself. This is all part of my migration into the future, designing my own games, writing my own things, all with the shadow of White Wolf behind me. Wish me luck.
At long last, I'm hosting the site myself. This is all part of my migration into the future, designing my own games, writing my own things, all with the shadow of White Wolf behind me. Wish me luck.
