SelfAdoration.com

“No. You’re wrong, punk.I’m the real plastic Jesus!”Photo by: Esparta Palma

Now that’s a manly topic! That’s not a joke, either. Poetry is leadership, and, accordingly, art is always a man’s job. Marxism triumphs by eviscerating fatherhood, and one of the most important duties for a self-responsible father is to introduce his children to the right art – the art that will show them how to grow up to be self-responsible parents.

John Wayne, John Galt and John McClane can’t do that job. Each one, considered as archetypes for their thousands of fundamentally-identical clones, is in fact a retelling of the self-sacrifice of the Nazarene. Whatever you may think about that kind of story, pushing your problems off on the other guy is the polar opposite of self-responsibility.

Do you want to tell me that you enjoy the explosions in movies like Die Hard? Totally get it. You like seeing trash-talking bad guys meet up with slow-talking vengeance? Good on ya. Your secret dream is to rub your hands together, saying, “I am not either an obsessively solitary evil genius! Just for saying that, I will stop the motor of the world!” Whatever floats your boat.

But: None of those stories moves the ball down the field. In terms of cultivating better future parents, they’re as nourishing as the popcorn you wolf down with them. If at this moment you wish to quibble with me about the moral lessons taught by the zombie armies of Nazarene-lite swaggerbots, I will remind you that the actual moral lesson to be drawn from each one of those yarns is this: It’s safe to run away from your problems as soon as the Homicidal Batmaniac shows up.

It gets worse. A successful social or political movement is both evangelical and prolific. Both. The movement actively – avidly – recruits new members, and the members have lots of babies, who are raised within the movement. Our three (more…)

The Iron Law of Television: There is no better television than television-about-television. Program accordingly.Illustration by: Diego Albero Román

A gadfly local-TV news reporter falls from his station’s and the public’s grace when he unfairly attacks the high school’s newly-hired turnaround principal.

For his penance, he must take charge of the troubled-teens class – actually composed of odd ducks and attention-seekers. Recalling his own Jesuit education, he turns his students’ blustery challenges into assignments – then turns those into a daily streaming-TV news show.

Think ‘Dangerous Minds’ meets ‘School of Rock’ – with the Toastmaster idea of every kid doing every job on the show over time.

Everything turns on underfathering, of course: It’s what’s troubling the teens, but it also impedes the growth of the reporter/teacher. The arc of the story is his redemption, goaded by the principal as well as by his students.

There’s a love-interest parallel story, Mister Maybe to Mister Willbe, and I like his back-story told in flashbacks, with the opening sequence being him in a gradually waxing cacophony reflecting on how he came to be enmired in this chaos. Pure benedy from there.

Hugely visual, montage rich, ripe with interesting development opportunities for young, pretty characters. I like it as a 60-minute serial dramedy, as a movie-of-the-week/streaming/telenovela yarn or – in edgier form – as a film.

That’s Idcs to Disc or even Dsic, which is why the story needs both the principal and the love-interest to make his change believable.

There’s DISC drama in a every kid in the classroom, too, which is what makes this idea so extensible – so serializable. That risks both preachiness and iterative repetitivity, but the inherent rudeness of news – amplified gossip – makes our classroom an enduring Ds mutiny against received wisdom – the Ci world of education and of officialdom generally and the Ic social world of high school.

Meanwhile, the high school setting (more…)

Pulling a hundred “Rocky” stories out of one broke gambler.

Not all of them are benedies, of course – I’ve only been thinking this way for four years, and I’ve only had the terms benedy and maledy for two – but many of them are built to tell you a movie-like story in just one short scene.

An example? “A father for Christmas,” a story I’d love to see as a Christmastime movie-of-the-week. You can swap in anyone you want for Willie in the script, but that encounter at the bus-stop can be the chorus for the whole film, with the story of the father told as back-story, side-story and front-story – projections of the future.

There are whole swaths of stories that could be sliced off to form serial franchises. The Traindancing stories are written with that in mind, and the entire back-story of The Naso Diaries has never been explored.

Individual stories present franchise opportunities, too, especially of the streaming telenovela kind I talked about the other day.

So consider “A peek inside the head of a Headliner.” I summarized it before like this:

A down-on-his-luck gambler turns a grungy job driving a cab into a career as a headliner in a Las Vegas casino comedy club – with a shot as his own sitcom.

That’s “Rocky” in Vegas with jokes, a sweet 90-minute benedy, and I would love it on Netflix just like that, the story the Headliner tells to Willie rendered as a movie.

But the Headliner’s story is a story of stories, and each one of those events, and many he implies or omits entirely, are also interesting.

So a 1,500 word story could become a 90-minute movie – or a season-long telenovela – or a five-season telenovela arc.

As before, I hate repetition. The way to make this work is not to sell the same thrill over and over again but to sell the character’s transition through time. Each stage of his progression is interesting, and each can be propitiously mined for stories.

Let’s say an hour of television is 5,000 words. That seems kind of sad, but film (more…)

“You and what army, Harvey?”

That’s funny, considering that I’ve written at least a hundred stories about a serial character – Brother Willie.

Even so, serial fiction bores me pretty quickly because, unlike a Willie story, a ‘series’ story is really just the same story over and over again.

It’s a labor-saving device for the writer: Why tailor a new suit every time you go out when the same old duds will do? But it’s a labor-saving device for the reader, too: Why bother to break in a new outfit when the old clothes are still so comfy?

I’d hate to have to think of all the different ways I hate those notions. I’m never at risk of having to write that way: A consolation of my obscurity is that I am from every side unassailed. But I hate it all on the receiving end, too. I can take the first telling of a serial yarn, sometimes even the second, but as soon as I start to feel worked – pandered to – I’m gone.

But: I like the telenovela format. Not the soap-operatic stories you see on Spanish-language TV, but simply the idea of telling one big story over the course of one season of television programming. Not the same story over and over again, season after season, like “Mad Men.” One story, one season, one work.

That format works as broadcast TV, but it works even better for binge-pimping stream-programmers like Netflix or Amazon.

Witness: “House of Cards” would be more satisfyingly surprising with the normal seven days between episodes, to give you time to forget the repeated tricks and tropes.

But a true telenovela – a novel-length story told in 15 or 25 hours of TV episodes – is the perfect format for binge-watching: It rewards continued attention without annoying repetitions of story arcs and plot devices.

Here’s one I’d love to see as soon as possible:

“Thriving through Harvey – Texas is why they made Texans.”

There are hundreds of wonderful benedies in last week’s news – including this one about the delightful exuberance (more…)

I have good news: The world outside your mind is a a glorious paradise of infinite possibilities. The right kind of art will show you – and your children, and everyone’s children – how to see it that way from the inside.Photo by: Josh Pesavento

Full disclosure: I am one of the underfathered. It’s good odds you are, also. Your own parents, too, probably, and certainly mine. The Marxist war on fatherhood predates Marx, which is saying something in the brisk world of global atrocities. By undermining and eventually eliminating the father’s moral authority over his family, the Marxists have all but succeeded in eliminating the Hoplite freehold – the actual bedrock of Western Civilization and the last redoubt against tyranny – returning humanity to its pre-Hellenic glory of satraps and slaves and mountainous mass graves.

How did Marx go one-up on Archimedes? By moving the Earth the other way, for spite. But give the Marxists their due: It’s a devastating accomplishment, particularly taking account that it was done entirely by subterfuge, right under everyone’s noses.

Where do self-responsible adults come from? Self-responsible fathers. Let us deny mothers nothing, but we deny fathers everything when we refuse to take notice that the less fully-committed fathering children have, growing up, the longer they take to, you know, grow up.

Not always, not everyone, blah, blah, blah. Why are our kids so fat, and why are they fatter year-by-year and generation-by-generation? Why are they so scattered, unfocused – lost? Why aren’t they raising self-responsible kids of their own? Why are only the least-fathered among them even half-fecund – allowing for all the abortions? Why do our children grow up to be adult babies?

The father too much absent from our minds will now say: “Duh!”

Easy problem to fix, though, right? Just put dad back in the driver’s seat. It’s his romance from the first, necessarily, and his marriage, his offspring, his family, his freehold, his estate. This is the way monogamy works, and it is the (more…)