"Wolf Dreams" is up!

In Dreams I Walk With You, a mixed media painting by artist Jen Storey, inspired by Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are.

My short story "Wolf Dreams" just went up at the Toasted Cheese Literary Journal website. The painting above inspired the tale -- it reminded me of how much I loved wolves when I was a teen at the same time I was beginning to realize that I'm gay. In the story, the character of René is very much based on me. Just about everything in there about how I felt about wolves is also true.

I really did fall hugely in love with another boy in high school. Unfortunately, he was straight, but we were still good friends for a while. "Wolf Dreams" is how things might have gone for us had he loved me in return.

"Wolf Dreams" (Toasted Cheese Literary Journal)

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Capturing the Magic of Childhood

Somehow I missed this great review of WTWTA by Marshall Fine when it first appeared. It talks about the way the film portrays childhood, but doesn't get quite as, um, morose (too serious? or can one be too serious about play and childhood?) as my earlier interpretation. Both views speak equally to the greatness that is WTWTA. This isn't a movie that is easy to pin down, that's for certain.

...Jonze has made a career out of subverting genres and expectations, whether in “Being John Malkovich” or “Adaptation.” In this case, Jonze and Eggers have written a film that truly captures what it’s like to be a 10-year-old, in all its mood-swinging glory. This film is fueled by imagination, not driven by plot or built around structure. It’s a film about play and the sudden shifts it can take when someone gets upset or hurt or hatches an unexpected idea.

Beautiful, and absolutely correct.

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Tell Them Anything You Want

Okay, someone needs to tell Spike Jonze that I can't take more than one movie in any twelve month period that leaves me all broken up inside, and WTWTA already has that honor for a few more months. Sheesh! I just watched Tell Them Anything You Want, the HBO documentary about Maurice Sendak made by Spike Jonze and Lance Bangs. It's only 39 minutes long, but I was all tied up in knots by the time it was over (and I could have watched another hour of it). I remember the Sendak documentary Mon Cher Papa that was run on PBS' American Masters series in 1987. That film moved me deeply, too. Is there something about Sendak that speaks to whatever it is in me that is creative? Hell, I dunno. But this HBO doc is wonderful. Get this DVD and watch it! Watch the extras too, especially the Q&A with Sendak and Spike.

I love Sendak's dog. I love the shot of Maurice with the box on the table next to him that has an image of a medieval Virgin Mary icon on the side, and a Mr. Incredible doll behind it. I love the life-size Barack Obama stand-up in Sendak's living room. I love his crankiness. I love his drawings. I simply love this man.

And Spike looks pretty darn sharp with a beard, eh?

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Shawn Records and the Capture of Now

I've been trying to think about how I might explain the ways that Spike Jonze's movie Where the Wild Things Are has affected me, not only on a personal level but on the level where I create and appreciate art. I didn't expect the amazing movie that I saw on the screen, and that movie, along with Spike's two previous films (which I finally caught up with after seeing WTWTA), shook up my thinking about art, writing, painting, sculpture, music, films, photography, and so on. It's not easy coming up with that kind of analysis directly derived from the effect of the film itself, and one runs the risk of explaining too much and taking the magic away from the movie. So, let's look at the periphery instead -- in what ways did WTWTA change, affect, or influence the way I look at artistic creations?

One of the things that really stood out was discovering the work of Shawn Records. For an obvious reason connected to WTWTA, I looked up Shawn's work at his website and studied the pictures to see what sort of art he created.

And I found myself liking Shawn's work.

This is after I saw WTWTA a couple of times, of course. To understand, you have to realize that for me, photography used to be all about the human figure, interesting animals, big dramatic moments, and great, stirring landscapes. Shawn's pictures are not like that; they focus primarily on the ordinary, on things we see around us; on cloudy days and wet streets and power lines. Look at this picture.



I love those trees, but if I had taken a picture of this scene, I would have tried desperately to remove the power lines from the picture, either in the original picture or in later cropping. I would have despaired otherwise -- why, there are power lines ruining my tree picture! And yet, by drawing the background of the everyday into the picture of the tree, Shawn has done...what? I'm not sure, but I only know, as I looked at the pictures on his site, that I liked them.

I would not have paid much attention to them a year before.

Look at this picture.



It's something you might see while walking along on a cloudy day. "Look at the pretty flowers," I might say before I went closer to take a picture of the red flowers on the table, their blood-red color filling the frame. Instead, Shawn has stepped and shown us the grey day and the two shots of color like eyes, like wounds, like another time breaking through the grey.

I love grey days, but I would never have thought to compose a picture like this. A year ago it would have been all about the flowers. Who needs the rest of that boring grey stuff? And yet, the misty skies, the roads winding away in the distance, the ordinary people or the lack of them; secure in loneliness; haunted by the everyday.

How did Shawn influence the way I see photographs, even the way I take my own photographs? Look at two pictures I took recently, back in December of 2009.



This one was taken on the Plaza, a shopping area in Kansas City. It is not a picture I would have even thought to take a year ago,. and yet I love this picture; they grey feel of the day and the empty tables and chairs. Now look at this:



I've always loved the ways snow lines up in patterns on wooden pallets; but of course when you have pallets, you also have trash bins and loading docks. I would have never taken a picture like this a year ago, except now I see how the entire scene works together. And instead of always focusing on the most interesting thing I can find, I see a way to step back, to take in the context, to even make the context the subject of the picture.

Look through Shawn's pictures at his website. Sometimes you find interesting juxtapositions; sometimes you see stories, with Shawn as the silent recorder of life --



-- sometimes you find whimsy --



-- sometimes you find beauty evocative of personal memories --



-- or surprising beauty out of everyday objects.



I didn't expect to like this. I didn't expect to find beauty in pictures like this. And a year ago I wouldn't have found such beauty here. Something crashed through my mind, made me see. A lot of it came from WTWTA.

Honestly, it has more to do with than just Spike's movie -- some other realizations about myself and life contributed to this. It all happened about the same time, though, and I wonder if the end result would have been the same had the events and realizations occurred in a more spaced-out timeline. Either way, WTWTA was jarring, a look into human reality (the pain of childhood) in a way for which I was not at all prepared. There are other ways WTWTA affected me; I'll see if I can't get those emotions down into words and try to relate them as well.

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(Except for the two identified as mine, all pictures are by Shawn Records.)

About How Much It Hurts To Be a Child

(Photo by Shawn Records.)

What makes Where the Wild Things Are difficult to watch is that it's not just about the happiness of childhood, like most children's movies.

It's about the pain of being a child.

It's about the loneliness and the long nights crying; it's about not knowing who you are in a world where everyone else seems to have figured that out already; it's about not knowing if you can trust the grown-ups in your life, or even if you should, or even if they really know everything about life, like you always believed they did.

In WTWTA, Max begins to see all that goes on inside the people around him (through the wild things he lives with), but I also see a boy finding his own space, defining his own life, because no one else is going to do it for him.

I love Max's mother in this movie. She's willing to let him be who he needs to be (despite his wildness, and maybe I only see that because I didn't have that kind of understanding when I was growing up), and that is a strong first step toward letting the child become who he or she needs to be. I grew up slotted into a role, and no one understood or even saw, when it was obvious, that I was breaking out of that role whether I (or they) liked it or not. I didn't want to be different, but in the end we all must be; both Max and me, and all of us. The wisest parent realizes that their child is another life that must be allowed to grow. Part of the pain of being a child is finding out that every parent's imagination is limited, because few of us can encompass in our minds the amazing universe of another person's life set into our hands to shape and nurture. Parents fail; children fail. Somehow, we all come out okay in the end...most of the time.

WTWTA is about finding out who you really are, and how much it hurts to realize that, ultimately, you're on your own.

This movie really speaks to me. I grew up gay and in hiding, and there's not one thing "gay" in this film; and that is certainly not the only tale being told here. But I don't think I've ever seen another movie that captures so well everything about what I went through while I grew up and dealt with all of what I had to deal with; not on so deep and universal a level as this. If you don't see your own childhood in Max's tale, then maybe you didn't have a childhood yourself. You grew up; that's all. Real children, like Max, live, and hurt, and survive.

I'm not alone. If you're in touch with what you were when you were a child, if you aren't just another face in the crowd, if you really know what it means to be alive while trying to find out why...this is your story.

That's one take on all of this, and maybe it's just my take. Let me know what you think. More to come.

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Young adult lit comes of age

A great article in the LA Times about the popularity of YA fiction amongst adults.

"YA authors are able to take themselves less seriously. They're able to have a little more fun, and they're less confined by this idea of themselves as Very Important Artists. That paradoxically leads them to create far better work than people who are trying to win awards."

I’ve written a lot of stories and novels with young people as central characters, although I wouldn’t classify any of them as YA – I like to reserve the right to use appropriate levels of sexuality, violence, and vocabulary in my work where needed. (You can understand why I so love Spike Jonze’s description of his film Where the Wild Things Are as a movie about childhood, and not necessarily for children.) And I have known for years that if you want a ripping good yarn with memorable characters and, very often, trenchant observations about life, you should give YAs a try. I felt quite vindicated when Harry Potter became a success. (I read them all, and loved them.) Expect more of this from my writing – the world caught up to me once, maybe it will do so again.



The article doesn’t mention one of the most popular adult writers who has crossed over more or less full-time (at present) into YA and children’s books, and that is the inimitable Neil Gaiman. Pictured at the top of the post is one of my favorite YAs, China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun, about an alternate world existing parallel/underneath the real London. Miéville cited as one point of inspiration for this book Gaiman’s Neverwhere, another book I love. Compare the two sometime.

Young adult lit comes of age (LA Times)

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I have visions of Carol smashing little gold statuettes...

"The Motion Picture Academy TOTALLY sucks!"

The True Best Picture of 2006: Brokeback Mountain
The True Best Picture of 2007: Ratatouille
The True Best Picture of 2008: The Dark Knight
The True Best Picture of 2009: Where the Wild Things Are

So when I'm not watching the Oscars tomorrow night, you'll know why. Oy...

Meanwhile, enjoy Chris Orr's Orrscars for 2009! Featuring awards like these:

The Dumbledore Award for Mystic Beardiness: Christopher Plummer as Tolstoy in The Last Station

Runner-up: Christopher Plummer as Dr. Parnassus in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Enjoy! And, tomorrow night, watch a good movie instead of the stupid Oscars.

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Okay.

On the surface, it's a story about a boy who runs away to a secret land with a bunch of monsters.

In the movie, it's a nine-year-old boy and a bunch of guys in fursuits. And there's some conflict, and there's some insight, and there's some reconciliation; blah, blah, blah.

So why is it that this movie makes me a total wreck every time I see it?

I tear up at all kinds of movies; even Die Hard gets me all verklempt at the end.

The first time I saw Where the Wild Things Are, I was wiping tears from my eyes after I left the theatre, while I was walking to my car. That was a first. And it still does it to me. Even while watching the closing credits of the DVD, I was shaking my head and wondering what the hell was going on...

I know this much -- you can find clues in Spike Jonze's awesome first two movies.

I don't know why Where the Wild Things Are does this to me; makes me a complete wreck. But I'm going to find out. It will take a few more viewings of the film. But I will dig down and figure out why this movie breaks me down, and why it has totally altered the way I see art and hear music and view films and read books. And the way I write.

Best freaking picture of 2009. Eff the Oscars. This is the one.

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P.S. And Max Records is freaking awesome. But you already knew that.

Today's the Big Day!

LET THE WILD RUMPUS START!

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Wild About Where the Wild Things Are

Picture by Shawn Records from the set of Where the Wild Things Are.

How much do I love Where the Wild Things Are?

THIS MUCH!!!

Follow this link to read the full story (with pictures!) of how I came to own possibly THE most awesome bit of WTWTA memorabilia evah!

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Spike Jonze and Where the Wild Things Are

It's almost here! Where the Wild Things Are comes out on home video this week! Spike Jonze's documentary about Maurice Sendak, Tell Them Anything You Want (made along with Lance Bangs) also hits the stores this week. Here's a profile of Spike from the LA Times.

The most vivid scenes in "Wild Things" are also the most physical: the rough-and-tumble brawls and dirt fights. In keeping with his skate-kid roots, Jonze is usually at his best when communicating his sheer love of movement. Think of the lead character's Dance of Despair and Disillusionment from "Being John Malkovich" or the ecstatic choreography in the videos for Bjork's "It's Oh So Quiet" and Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice" and "Praise You."

WTWTA blew my mind on many levels. I'm sure I'll have even more to say about it now that I can watch it over and over.

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Speaking of ‘Wild Things,’ love lost — and Mozart

One of the things that most intrigues me about writers and writing is influence -- what works on writers to make them create what they do? What fascinates them, encourages them, depresses them? Lots of people want to know from where writers get their ideas. Sometimes that is so hard to explain, but if you can find out what a writer loves, and hates, and fears, and finds joy in, then you will come closer to understanding what makes their imaginations tick.

Anyway, here's a fascinating article about Maurice Sendak and his loves and sorrows, called Speaking of ‘Wild Things,’ love lost — and Mozart. One of Sendak's great joys, as is mine, is the music of Mozart. There is much that is fascinating in this article, but I think I most love the conclusion:

But just a week before the interview, Sendak says, he began to come out of his depression. It started by picking up “Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens, followed by listening to Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.”

“I’m coming back to life — and the movie of ‘Wild Things’ and everything is life-enhancing,” says the author. “One looks for signs and symptoms of what is good and what is bad, what is pulling you down and what is holding it up. It’s Mozart, but I haven’t listened to him carefully for a long time. Now he’s back in my life with a vengeance. ... And there’s Charles Dickens.”

Max, of “Wild Things,” would be around 50 now.

“If I had a preference, he would be an artist,” says Sendak. “He would be an artist and it could be in any profession — in painting, in illustrating, in writing, in music. Oh, God, if he were a great pianist, I would be so happy!”

That tells me more about Maurice Sendak than anything I've ever read about him. I'm anxious to see the HBO documentary about Sendak, Tell Them Anything You Want, made by Spike Jonze and Lance Bangs, which is due out the same day as the DVD of WTWTA, March 2.

Don Giovanni is my favorite opera, BTW.

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The Wild Things

As you might expect, I read this and enjoyed it quite a bit. I had never read Dave Eggers before, but right after reading The Wild Things, I read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. It was, of course, staggering.

The Wild Things was lots of fun! I love the way Eggers gets completely into Max's head without irony or affectation, and some of the expanded glimpses of the characters were fascinating. There's a lot of psychological depth going on inside the wild things, as well as inside Max. And as a fine example of unpretentious but brilliant writing, this little passage near the beginning of The Wild Things is where I fell in love with Dave Eggers:

One might think that a boy who was out in the snow for so long would get cold, but Max was not. He was warm, partly because he had on many layers, and partly because boys who are part wolf and part wind do not get cold.

Lovely.

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Rolling Stone Loves WTWTA!

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gave WTWTA four stars! His review is terrific, and here's a great quote:

Jonze never belabors points about violence or the Freudian nature of identity and rebellion. Whether Max's cheeks flush with euphoria or rage, our identification with him is complete. Jonze brings all the senses into play. You can practically feel the animal heat when homesick Max falls asleep in a "real pile" of snoozing wild things. But the creatures don't coddle Max, and the film follows suit. By staring without blinking into the yellow eyes of these wild things, Max begins to recognize something of himself.

DVD & Blu-Ray come out March 2!

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Brand New WTWTA Review!

Here's a terrific little review of WTWTA, with this great note about Max:

Special mention has to be given to the performance of Max Records in his role as Max. This talented young actor is someone to keep an eye on in the future. If you consider that he has very little previous experience and that most of the filming was done with puppets and little human interaction, then his performance really is phenomenal. He's able to portray such a wide range of emotions from happiness, joy, and craziness to loneliness, anger, and sadness. He definitely does crazy well and could possibly follow in the footsteps of Johnny Depp or Robert Downey Jr. in the future by taking less mainstream roles.

"He definitely does crazy well..." :o) I love it! The next Johnny Depp? Who knows?

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The New Republic on WTWTA

Chris Orr of The New Republic really liked Where the Wild Things Are, and I really liked his review, especially this bit:

Where the Wild Things Are may not be a great film for children (or, at least, most children). But it is something rarer still: a great, and unsparing, film about childhood. I’ll eat you up, I love you so.

Check it out. The DVD and Blu-Ray come out on March 2!

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Bringing ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ to the Screen

Well, let's get started. Movie obsessions? Check! My favorite movie of 2009 is Where the Wild Things Are, which turned out to be excellent on many levels and in unexpected ways. I've been terrorizing my Facebook followers with hordes of articles and reviews about the movie, and here's one of the best -- a detailed article about the making of the film from The New York Times. Enjoy!

Bringing ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ to the Screen

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