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| Two groupies admiring that consumate vocalist, Carl 'Alfalfa' Switzer. |
By BRAD WEISMANN
"Success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblances to merit . . . They confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud." Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
"Success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblances to merit . . . They confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud." Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
"It's better to have done something bad than to have done nothing." --Preston Sturges
Hey, how’s it going? Mind if I ask you something? What if
you’re a hack? An artistic fraud? A waste of time and money?
Guess what – it doesn’t matter.
For years, I strove (strived? stroved?) to make it. Too arrogant
and idiosyncratic to follow any normal course of employment, I went from acting
to comedy to radio to journalism to social media to, hopefully finally, writing
and editing. I wasted a lot of time trying to achieve that supposed moment when
popular acceptance would be mine and I would be another cultural icon, embedded
in beneficence and solvency in the firmament of collective consciousness.
It didn’t really work out. And now, it doesn’t have to.
It’s important that every person of artistic bent collide
with the real world, at least initially. The first thing you learn is that
everyone is talented, and that talent doesn’t have much to do with success. Starting
out at the bottom, working crap jobs to stay alive, learning how to be a
functioning part of a larger whole, all important skills. Learning that truisms
such as showing up on time and ready, with an open mind, put you miles ahead of
others, or that you have to know how to take orders before you can give them,
or that the worth of your commodifiable skills are not identical with your
inherent worth as a person.
It’s instructional to see business deals blow up, projects
collapse under you, bosses make choices that doom you and others to
unemployment – to see how many ways thing scan go south. Your work can be scorned,
ignored, or simply not show up on society’s radar. However, at some point, if
you are still capable of producing creative content, you can stop standing in
your own way, cease worrying and just get the work done. Your standards are too
high.
Have you ever tried to write something popular? Has it ever
worked? (I’m not talking to you, Nicholas Sparks.) No one knows what will be a
hit – either now or in the scope of human history . . . hey, might as well aim
high. Critic Anthony Lane memorably read and reviewed the literary top 10 of 1945
in 1995; the results were ghastly and involved books no one now remembers. OK –
my grandpa had a copy of “Forever Amber” stashed on a high bookshelf – I heard
there was sex in it and dashed eagerly through its pages, unsatisfied.)
You can never tell. It is a truth in standup comedy that
generally, the jokes you’ve written that you really love don’t get a great
response but that the ones you aren’t so crazy often click with the crowd. If
you have a bone of self-preservation in your body, you keep the jokes that work
and toss or rework the ones that won’t. But how many of your darlings do you
have to kill to make it? I try to balance my desire to write about whatever the
hell I want with the need to craft something interesting and readable to
humanity at large. I am still often wrong. Oddly enough, when I stopped
worrying, I started selling more stories. My voice got stronger. I could hear
myself instead of my anxieties. You need to express yourself, whether there’s a
check at the end of the trail or not. It’s a crap shoot.
And even when you get to that point, there is still the
concern about if the work will speak to the masses, if it will “endure.” Come
on. Really? When I was younger, I and the rest of my fellow struggling, resentful,
well-drink-slurping comics in the back of the club hated the comedy hacks that
always got time in the clubs, even though they did the same banal crap over and
over. I used to scorn TV shows and TV writers, the whole shoddy
lowest-common-denominator bunch.
Now, I find that many of my friends write for and produce these
TV shows. They do it well. They have houses, spouses, kids to put though
school, and they earn every penny of their salaries. They are highly
intelligent, talented, and tough people -- who sometimes have created forgettable
entertainment. So what? Once I learned about these people’s work weeks, my
respect for them went stratospheric.
If you have been alive for any length of time in this world,
you need a little mindless distraction. Crap in our entertainment diet is good
for you, roughage for your aesthetic digestive tract. For all that I grew up on
high-falutin’ films like “Children of Paradise,” I needed “Abbott and Costello
Meet the Mummy,” too. I needed Miro and Matisse, AND Famous Monsters of
Filmland and Tales from the Crypt. As Patton Oswalt put it in “Silver Screen
Fiend,” “If people need bread and circuses, better it be bread from the finest
flour and springwater, and circuses under the cleanest canvas with the
healthiest animals.”
And besides, what harm does bad art cause? Someone I can’t
call to mind at present insisted that artists’ errors are unimportant as,
unlike doctors, chefs, or politicians, when an artist screws up, no one dies.
In fact, horrible artistic efforts have spurred even greater ones – think of
Mark Twain being inspired to write merely by reading James Fennimore Cooper
until he couldn’t take it anymore? And in fact, Cooper began writing in
reaction to the even worse popular literature of HIS day.
And is it every really definitively crap? The 12-cent superhero
comic books we treasured bloomed into a mythos that has sold billions of
dollars in movie tickets. Jerry Springer became the subject of an avant-garde
opera. John Kennedy Toole wrote “A Confederacy of Dunces,” killed himself in
1969, won the Pulitzer for it in 1981. Stick with it – you never know.
You have very little, if any, control over how your work
will be taken, or utilized. Sometimes, like a favorite character actor, you may
find yourself as that familiar ace in the corner of a movie screen whose name
can never be summoned. Even Boris Karloff, typed if ever an actor was, said
this:
“One always hears of actors complaining
of being typed – if he’s young, he’s typed as a juvenile; if he’s handsome, he’s
typed as a leading man. I was lucky. Whereas bootmakers have to spend millions
to establish a trademark, I was handed a trademark free of charge. When an
actor gets into a position to select his own roles, he’s in big trouble, for he
never knows what he can do best. I’m sure I would be damn good as Little Lord Fauntleroy,
who would pay ten cents to see it?”
Within the confines of what we are capable of and what
people can absorb from our work, we can make magical things happen. It just
never goes quite the way they told you.
And hey, what about having a life? That’s all the stuff that
happens every day while you are waiting for the universe to tell you that you
are loved. That is important. When I get published, I get a spectacular rush –
for about 10 minutes. Then I got back to whatever else it is that’s on my desk
to be done. But my wife and kids and family and friends and pets and nature and
God and music and baseball and good Mexican food and IBC root beer . . . these
things stay with you far longer. Pay attention to them.
If things go as they have been, I need never worry about the
pitfalls of popularity. Here’s how it works: I write first, I sell it after. (The
few major-media gatekeepers left standing aren’t guarding much of anything; and
their choices are as always dictated by budgets, not an altruistic desire to
exhibit your genius to all and sundry.) Nothing gets wasted; I can always
rework something that doesn’t move commercially and post it myself. Maybe I’m
an arteeste, but the only thing that gets me through a work day is craftsmanship,
discipline, and a good will to forge ahead. Writing a story can be as complex,
tedious, and ultimately rewarding as building a cabinet.
You never know where your obsessions will take you. After
years of just keeping my head down and writing no matter what, I found that a
lot of work that I thought was random coalesced into themed groups – and that I
had pretty much written the sample chapters for four books, which I am now
peddling. Will they sell? I don’t know. But they are there, and they weren’t
before.
And what are awards and pans but ways of categorizing and
controlling creatives? You have no control over that, either. What if your work
doesn’t get read? What if someone, just one person, finds it hundreds of years
later and gets something out of it? In my researched pieces, I find this all
the time – as if someone long dead was thinking of me and left some
information, some guidance I needed. Love is as strong as death, but writing is
stronger.
And what if your masterpieces aren’t just scorned or ignored
but lost? Destroyed? Your laptop’s hit by lightning, the studio burns down, the
recordings get thrown out. Once during a period of volunteering at the local
Goodwill store I had the extremely sad experience of seeing a cache of 19th-centry
family photos, and 78-rpm records, smashed and thrown into the trash because no
one could conceive that they might have some value, or were worth preserving.
Who knows what works of genius, of irreplaceable memories, have gone out with
the trash?
I believe that the effort to create, even if unrewarded, works
on some spiritual level as a counteractive to the more selfish and hateful
impulses that drive this world. To glean meaning from a seemingly random and
unfair world is an assertion of worth and significance.
In the end, you’ll be dead. It won’t matter if you will end
up rivaling Shakespeare or you wind up the poet laureate of East Jesus, Nebraska,
if even that. Do not waste your time wondering where all this is getting you,
and don’t listen to those who wonder it out loud for your supposed benefit. It works
for me.
