Tools o' the Trade

The Guardian Unlimited has an ongoing section called Writers' Rooms which features photographs of various writers' workspaces. Will Self, AS Byatt, Sarah Waters, and a dozen or so others have been showcased so far. There is something strangely fascinating about an artist's studio - the environment in which a work is given life. Matter of fact I generally would rather see a photo of an artist's workspace than of the artist himself.

There was a collection of photography that came out in the eighties called The Faces of Science Fiction which depicted numerous notable SF writers, often at their desks. Flipping through the pages, I found it was always the arrangement of desk, chair, window with view, cluttered bookshelves, wall hangings, etc, that caught my eye, much more so than the likeness of the author. And I would then entertain thoughts of what I would rearrange were it my own space. I suppose a portion of the fantasy of becoming a writer is having some territory of your own in which to do your scribbling - the romance of Raskolnikov's dusty attic garret and all that. Possibly a version of the same drive for identity that makes high school kids decorate their lockers or draw heavy metal band logos inside their algebra textbooks.

JG Ballard's workspace features an old desk containing a portable manual typewriter. In the accompanying blurb he mentions that he writes mostly in longhand. He then goes on to make a rather idiotic assertion: "I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing. I don't think a great book has yet been written on computer."

The reason this makes me flinch is because it attributes the value of art to its tools. A writer captures the ideas pouring out of the brain. What difference does it make whether those ideas are recorded with computer, typewriter, fountain pen, dictation, quill, bloody finger, or chisel and clay tablet? If Ballard finds writing by pen the most effective for his craft, more power to him. But to suggest others must follow suit is a little too Stalinist for comfort. Might as well claim no good poetry can be written lefthanded.

I'll wager that following the invention of the typewriter, a few squinty crustaceans grumbled that no great book could be written on one of those either.

Pull My Daisy

This weekend Tip My Cup Productions put on a 24 hour theater festival under the moniker of The First Annual Tip My Cup Quickie. What typically happens at these things is a collective of playwrights are given some specifics based on a predetermined theme and sent to their respective corners to come up with an erudite script within a few frenzied hours. This they pass off to their assembled squad of actors who sleeplessly rehearse during the morning and afternoon, and, with any luck, have the thing polished and perfected in time to perform it during the evening in front of a paying audience armed with fruit in varying stages of decay.

Playwright kamikaze Sean Michael Welch decided to get involved in the project for reasons known only to himself. He was given the topic of a Craigslist Missed Connection with the heading "I accidentally spilled my grandmother's ashes on you." He was also given two able-bodied actors to work with. However, finding comedy often works best in threes, he somewhat foolhardily wound up, once the script was completed, making a call to the actors to inform them, "I'm going to have to come in for rehearsal with you. I've written myself into the script."

The festival was held in an upstairs backroom at a yupperific gay bar in the West Village. There was a two-drink minimum which was rather, er, enthusiastically enforced. The audience seemed already well-lubricated before the show began and there was nary an empty stool in the house.

Count on alcohol to make things funnier, but these were pretty funny to begin with. The plays all went over well, and laughter and applause mostly drowned out the electronic hoedown music issuing up the stairs. There were four pieces in total at the session I attended - the other three concerned a haunted toaster, a turtle enthusiast with a darker side, and two glamorstruck roommates with a bit too much interest invested in the life of Angelina Jolie.

Sean's contribution, entitled A Very Bad Play, has been posted on his website for the enjoyment of all. Feel free.

Bring Out Your Dead

I've been keeping a line on the various cultural landmarks that have come crashing down since I landed in the Big Onion. The list is growing unfavorably long.

As everyone knows, CBGB bit the dust last autumn.

Coliseum Books shut down, reopened in a new location, and shut down once again.

The building which once housed McGurk's Suicide Hall was torn down to make way for a condominium.

Cedar Tavern has been closed for renovation for many months. Some are skeptical they'll ever reopen.

Onetime speakeasy Chumley's is closed indefinitely after a chimney collapsed. It has been speculated that the building will have to be razed.

Tower Records is gone, but I'm not particularly concerned about that. What'd they ever do for me?

Former Beat Generation haunt West End Café was rechristened Havana Central. I haven't been there since the reopening, so I don't know if they've retained the literary memorabilia on the walls.

Not sure what's going on over at the legendary Gotham Book Mart. The last two occasions I passed by, its gates were locked, windows dark, and a foreboding sign on the door stated simply "on vacation." The whole scene feels uneasily like the aftermath of a mob hit.

And now Tonic, one of my favorite venues for adventurous music, couldn't handle the increase in rent and was forced to take a powder. Marc Ribot, Beat Circus, Elysian Fields, and others will have to find a new home.

Unsettling trend. Who's next, I wonder.

Pennies From Heaven

"An old lady on Main Street last night picked up a shoe. The shoe had a foot in it. We're gonna make you pay for that mess." - Orson Welles, Touch of Evil

When a disembodied leg lands nearby on the sidewalk, one of your first inclinations might be to glance skywards as though expecting rain and wonder "where's the rest?" In the case of the hapless lawyer who recently swandived off the Empire State Building, the rest in question was found on a 30th floor parapet. The building tapers, you see.

I thought I'd once read somewhere that the observation deck was suicide-proof, in the form of an outcropping ledge below that would "catch" suicide attempts. This may be false information, since a hasty web search returned no results. Either way, our leaping lawyer defied any such precautions by exiting via an office window on the 69th floor. It seems he was in conference with a client moments before. "Pardon me while I step out for a smoke…"

At least one tourist was spotted snapping a picture of the argyle-clad appendage. Another memento for the photo album, filed next to the Naked Cowboy.

Tourist spot bedamned, the Empire is one of my favorite architectural structures in New York. Standing below, from across the street on 34th, gazing up at the sheer size of the art deco obelisk can be daunting - the amount of knowledge, skill, and utter fearlessness that went into the thing. And knowing the speed at which it was constructed - a floor a day at times, within a mere eighteen months from start to finish, rising brazenly into the stratosphere during the depths of the Great Depression, with the intent on claiming the title of tallest building in the world, and with a freakin' zeppelin docking station of all things at the crown - is more than a little impressive. A testament to what humanity is capable of. And let's not forget Kong.

If you're going to pick a building to dive off, honestly, you could do worse. Still, I feel bad for the patrons of Cafe Europa who had their lunch unforeseeably disrupted.

Metaphysical Warning Stickers

Evidently someone aboard the Brooklyn-bound subway train was feeling creative recently. Not to mention a touch dispirited.


Let's hope everything works out well for them in the long run.

So It Goes

Kurt Vonnegut's eight rules for writing a short story, culled from Bagombo Snuff Box - Uncollected Short Fiction:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things - reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them - in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Jumping Someone Else's Train

Police investigation in the Rockefeller Center subway station yesterday. The uptown F and V trains slowed to a crawl, diverted to other tracks for a stretch. As my train pulled through Rockefeller, I spotted yellow police tape blocking off an area of the platform and officers interrogating witnesses. But witnesses to what? A backlog of commuters squeezed into the train as the doors opened and it was difficult to make any sense of the doings in the station. When I reached home that evening I did some pointed googling but was unable to find any mention of the incident. Finally this afternoon the New York Post reported a (supposed) homeless man had jumped in front of the oncoming V train. Fortunately (or un-, depending on his intent) he landed in the trough and the train passed over him, leaving him relatively uninjured. Reportedly his parting word before the jump, addressed to a nearby woman, was a curt "bye."

Not sure why there was so little information on this in Internetland. When something irregular happens such as this, oughtn't there be somewhere you can look for the skinny? I recall walking past the Harvard Station in Cambridge one time several years ago and finding it swarming with firemen, the square clogged with fire engines and commotion. Obviously something noteworthy was going on, but there was no news whatsoever of it in any of the Boston papers or any websites that I could find. If something like that is going unreported, presumably to avoid alarming the public, it makes me question what else is being hushed up.