Colin Marshall

Fifteen reasons James Franco owns you

I'd heard rumblings that James Franco wasn't your average silver-screen heartthrob, but I figured that just meant he's read Proust or paints with gouache or owns two wineries or something. Turns out no. He's actually some sort of superhuman artist-academic. Alex Mann passed me this profile of him by Sam Anderson, my favorite New York Magazine writer. The fifteen choicest bits follow:

1. "We’ve just finished listening to a lecture by the performance artist Marina Abramovic — a talk Franco introduced"
    
2. "He’s trying to nail down the details of an art show that will be based, somehow, on his recent performance on the soap opera General Hospital."
    
3. "He has class every day — since he’s enrolled in four graduate programs at once"
    
4. "most of his student films, he tells me, have been adaptations of poems"
    
5. "Was he flirting with me, or metaflirting — making a sly reference to all the gay rumors swirling around him"
    
6. "An unusual actor — he overprepared for minor roles, read Dostoyevsky and Proust between takes, and occasionally drove colleagues crazy with his intensity"
    
7. "He persuaded his advisers to let him exceed the maximum course load, then proceeded to take 62 credits a quarter, roughly three times the normal limit."
    
8. "He’s engineered his life so he can spend all his time either making or learning about art."
    
9. "This is, no doubt, mildly insane, even if it’s a form of insanity many of us might want to have."
    
10. "He’s not a savant or an obvious genius — he’s someone of mortal abilities who seems to be working immortally hard."
     
11. "One of the central points of Franco’s art and career, as I read them, is that adolescence isn’t something we should look away from, a shameful churning of dirty hormones. It’s the crucible of our identity, the answer to everything that comes later"
     
12. "Once he gave up trying to control his acting career, everything kind of came his way."
     
13. "as he slides further along the continuum from Gyllenhaal to Warhol — his entire career is beginning to look less like an actual career than like some kind of gonzo performance piece"
     
14. "For an earnest guy, Franco has always been ragingly addicted to meta."
     
15. "It’s either hypocrisy or complexity, self-delusion or radical self-acceptance. It’s the defining fault line of his career, the source of much of his energy. Were he to resolve it in one direction or the other, he might cease to be so interesting."

Pillow talk

If you want the key to my cinematic sensibility, whether as a viewer or as a maker, it is the pillow shot. A filmmaker's willingness to use pillow shots says a great deal about whether I'll enjoy or be able to draw inspiration from their work. But what, pray tell, is a pillow shot?

For the answer, you need look no further than Yasujirō Ozu. The creator of what are now thought of as the most Japanese of all films from the late twenties to the early sixties, Ozu mastered many elements of cinema. Most of all, he mastered the pillow shot. This is so much the case that to define the pillow shot is simply to describe Ozu's use of pillow shots. Usually capturing some element of the natural or architectural environment — or, best-case scenario, both at once — pillow shots appear in a narrative film while having nothing at all to do with the narrative itself. Their purpose is entirely rhythmic and aesthetic.

An adept use of pillow shots indicates, to my mind, that a filmmaker's priorities are in order. That is to say, they're not out of order. It's easy to see a director dismissing the very concept of pillow shots because "everything in a movie should move the plot forward," but isn't that like insisting that everything in a movie should, say, advance its aesthetics? Or that everything should be subordinate to the rhythm? I'm pretty damned suspicious about assertions that every element of a film should serve the same end, especially if that end is jerking characters around.

I've thus started making use of pillow shots in my own movies. In fact, I can't imagine not doing that. And for pillow-y ideas, there's no finer place to go than the Ozu-devoted ozu-san.com, which maintains a pillow shot screen capture archive. Some of my very favorites follow. I just want to get high-res versions of these, print them, frame them, and hang them around me as an undrying fount of cinematic inspiration.

Gimme

Pretty much everyone like me (and probably like you) has wondered what it would be like to get woken up early in the morning by a call from the MacArthur Foundation. "You are teh genius," the voice on the other end might say, though it would more likely call you "a recipient of this year's John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship" or something. They're called "genius grants" colloquially, but the foundation seems to play that down.

Enabling these idle fantasies, Jim Collins wrote about his own phone call in 2005:

I received a call. The person on the other end of the line asked if I was Jim Collins and if I was alone. For a moment, I thought I was receiving an obscene phone call.

The caller then told me I had been selected as a MacArthur fellow. I laughed, convinced this was another well-orchestrated prank by one of my former college roommates. The caller tried to reassure me, and eventually gave me a number to call to confirm the award. The number had a Chicago area code, the home of the MacArthur Foundation. Maybe this was legit.

I called the number and was assured by the folks on the other end that I really had been selected for the award. They then told me I couldn't tell anyone, except my immediate family, until the announcement in a few days.

That night, my wife and I told our young children about the award. Our daughter quickly chimed in that she too was a genius, but her brother was not, because he didn't know all of his colors and he could count only to 10.

Every year, the MacArthur Fellowship unconditionally awards 20-40 Americans $500,000 each for "exceptional merit and promise for continued and enhanced creative work." Examples: Alex Ross won one in 2008, Terence Tao did in 2006, Johnathan Lethem did in 2005, museum of Jurassic Technology creator David Wilson did in 2001, and David Foster Wallace did in 1997. It's difficult enough to figure out the rhyme or reason of Fellowship assignments — the board decides in secret — that it's a total mystery how to position oneself in its way.

One thing you seem to have to be is over 30, or maybe more like over 40-ish. Ben Casnocha, a man full of ideas, thus proposes a sort of Junior MacArthur Fellowship:

There needs to be a MacArthur Foundation that focuses on emerging talents. It should give no-strings-attached grants to emerging talents in the same way MacArthur does for established talents. The grants would be given regardless of type of talent, though it would emphasize those demonstrating extraordinary creative potential yet who do not have much money.

His case study? A certain Colin J. Marshall. Flattering, certainly, though it also raises a whole suite of issues I find interesting to think about. Many of these are brought up by the post's commenters. Here's a selection:

I am extremely disturbed by the lack of awareness that he even exists. This fact, more than any other, has persuaded me that “if you build it they will come” is completely, utterly false.

Maybe Colin wouldn't be so intimidated by the dark, occult art of making money if he made a sea-change in his thinking. Here are the phrases in his comments that jump off the page: "the impossible dream, "I have... disdain for myself," "I've got enough self-loathing as it is," "how I picture my tombstone," "I live in awe and fear," "I am gripped by a mortal terror," "I have long lived in terror," "I whine endlessly." This is not the kind of thinking that will get him where he wants to be, unless it's an early grave.

Isolating a guy like Marshall from the grubbier things could have some downsides.

Maybe he should apply for a feature journalist in some leading dailies or magazines, for a limited stint, as a career-experiment. Maybe there's a future Malcolm Gladwell into making; the New Yorker awaiting him. Maybe he should run for a job in reputed Ad agencies. We are in dearth of sensible marketers in this world, who don't just sell products, but also beautiful ideas to live by. Maybe he should write a book and get it published. A book is a tradable token of collective, cohesive, extended human thought, with an overwhelming, timeless physical presence and that sells well.

Your friend sounds like an extremely talented guy with a promising future, but I can't help thinking his disdain for the McJob could harm him not only financially but also creatively.

As an artist, isn't it dangerous to become too far removed from the concerns of Everyman?

You know what I call uber-intellectual, non-sell-out, can't fathom working a McJob/fallback career people? Bums. Pretentious bums at that.

All have sound points. Even if I weren't among the recipients, I like do Ben's idea. I've often pondered what the results might be from a Y Combinator-type organization that, rather than funding young groups of tech startup founders, funded young individual creators. That's not exactly "no-strings-attached," but it's in broadly similar territory of enterprise. Then again, funds granted with only a "Do what thou wilt" might prove more effective in the long run.

Yet, as several commenters pointed out, there is a danger in patronage. When you're not sustained by the (loaded phrase ahead) "real world," you run the risk of isolating yourself from it. When I make things, I make them not for my own amusement but to be received by the rest of actual humanity. I want what I make to not only be for the world, but of the world and in the world as well. Ivory towers, both the well-known ones and those that spring asymptomatically up around you, are the bane of my existence. This explains why I take pains to avoid professional academia when it comes calling — or, why I would take pains to avoid professional academia if it ever were to come calling.

I do, at this point, have some confidence that I could make good things with the kind of resources a Junior MacArthur-style grant could provide. But is it wise to pile a lot of time into projects your next meal isn't coming from? The world may never know.

We are cinema

I spent last weekend shooting my first narrative short film. But because cinema is such a deeply collaborative medium, it doesn't quite make sense to say that I did it. Madelaine was my assistant director, two young friends did the acting, and Kyle provided pre-production hookah consultancy. (There is a hookah in the movie.)


We shot the project, which doesn't have a title yet — aw, that won't become an issue until the first festival deadline in, uh, a week and a half — mostly on high definition video and partially on Super 8 film. This is the HD camera I rented, the Canon HX-A1. Despite certain small wonkinesses — this is the only device for which I've had to consult the manual's "How to Plug it into an Outlet" section — I quite liked it. A+ WOULD SHOOT WITH AGAIN

I was initially hesitant to go with a high-resolution format like HD video, because it usually looks too much like reality. Sure, you can dick around with it in post-production by applying filter upon filter, but there's something lame (and system resource-intensive) about that. I was hell-bent on going with standard definition video at first, until I got talked out of it. If I dropped the boom into a shot or something, SD probably couldn't tolerate zooming in to get it out, and I would be scrud. So I bit the bullet, went HD, and tried to make it look as gritty as possible.

In addition to her assistant-directorial duties, Madelaine snapped some "production stills." You can see that I've adhered to my long-professed small-crew sensibility. At its largest, the entire team came to four: Madelaine operating the camera, me holding the boom (and since we shot 80 percent of the thing silent, I barely had to do that), and two actors acting. This is the most populated still I can offer.

This is my favorite shot. I kinda wish it was part of the movie. These two ladies happen to be the entirety of the cast. On the left is Marley, whom you might recognize from From Girls to Girls. We met in a City College production class. I realized she had good aesthetic instincts when she mentioned she liked Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe. (Also, we are both members of the pro-Limits of Control club. The club includes me, her, and J. Hoberman.)

On the right is Lyndsey, who's more interested in visual art than in acting. That is to say, she's not interested in acting at all. Yet she did what I consider to be a sterling job. A sterling unpaid job, too. I guess I owe her a drink or something.

Conferring with said cast about how to look properly (and ambiguously) dread-filled. I did manage to achieve this architecture/sky contrast in the film, though it's in black and white, so this is the only chance you'll get to see the neato color.

Marley's character fixates on this marginal wooded area, taking Polaroid after unrevealing Polaroid of its various features, some striking, some trashy. It's a fun conceptual challenge not only to shoot someone themselves shooting things, but to do it in seven or eight different shots and keep it interesting. I've tried; you'll decide (when the damn thing gets edited, that is).

All creation is war against cliché, but for some reason I couldn't defeat the cliché where you shoot through a chain link fence. My defense is that elements suggesting the urban in Santa Barbara are few and far between.

Told you there was a hookah involved. So consumed is Marley's character with this site — the site of an unseen but freaky and Super 8-y event — that she can't even enjoy a late-night hookah session. And here I thought there wasn't a man, woman, or child alive who couldn't enjoy a nice glob of melon mint tobacco.

Lyndsey's character, on the other end of the couch, was not so affected by the incident. She pokes fun at Marley's character, but can't snap her out of it. Tom Tykwer said something on his Run Lola Run DVD commentary that has never left my mind. Discussing casting the role of Jutta, the mistress of Lola's father, he mentioned that he had to have the actress Nina Petri because "her face was so interesting." You'll notice that both of these ladies have interesting-looking faces, which has become by number one requirement in an actor. (Note that "interesting" is distinct from any other traditionally movie-ish qualities.)

Building the Big Wall O' Polaroids. It still stands in my apartment. I don't know when I'll have the heart to take it down. If I become the next Peter Greenaway, I'll put all the photos on eBay.

I don't even want to tell you how hokey an effect I busted out for this series of shots where some ominous presence surrounds Marley's character. Nobody (meaning the other two at that day's shoot) seemed to believe that it would work, but now that the editing's about 60 percent done, I can tell you that it looks remarkably convincing. I'm still waiting for the lab to send me the Super 8 footage I'll be splicing into the sequence, but presumably when I get it in there I'll have an Avatar-killing game-changer on my hands. Puke all over every game but this one.

Director and assistant director hard at work. I've been hearing a lot of wild rumors that these two are romantically involved, living in sin somewhere in upper Southern California. This is the only still Madelaine made it into, because it's actually one of the Polaroids Marley took on camera. Or, in this case, at camera. We are cinema.

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 38. Robert Ashley's Music with Roots in the Aether (1975)

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Music with Roots in the Aether. 102:43 min., color, 1975. Listed under Robert Ashley. Ubuweb's description:

Music with Roots in the Aether, an artwork by Robert Ashley, is comprised of seven two-hour programs featuring noted American experimental composers, created during the 1970s. Each program is two hours long and consists of one part Landscape / Interview (one hour) and one part live performance (one hour).

I'm not sure where of if Music with Roots in the Aether was originally broadcast or distributed, but I like the concept. Not only does Ashley's vision accommodate both performance and interviews, it also uses a visual style meant, as he once wrote, "to watch as closely as possible the action of the performers and to not 'cut' the seen material in any way — that is, to not editorialize on the time domain of the music through arbitrary space-time substitutions."

Though this episode on one of his own pieces doesn't contain an interview, it definitely adheres to that aesthetic. The handheld camera roves around, getting as close as possible to its subjects, and the only cut comes between the two segments. The first segment is the more elaborate, with Ashley himself and a small cast of oddly period-costumed performers laying down some piano and electronics while text appears and disappears onscreen. Like the cast's dress, the words have a historical feel that seems accurate at first but then deeply askew. Much of it is biographical data about various figures: "Guglielmo Marconi, Father of Mass Communications," "George Washington, Father of Our Country," "Whistler's Mother, the Mother of Whistler". The designations and the biographic data get stranger and stranger, until we're talking about the "inventor of the bolognaphone" and Colonel Sanders. (Preceding all this, I feel I should note, are recipes for tuna noodle casserole and pear jello salad.)

What to make of this? I'm not really sure, though the electronic music is pretty cool. The production is dated 1975, but something about its look and feel keeps me from fully believing that. I expect text a lot more public access character generator-y from that era; this stuff looks like something out of the 1990s. And the music itself also seems ahead of its time, though perhaps that's just the way of forward-thinking composition. All the while, the slow-moving camera has a lot to look at (and sometimes focus on) in what comes to nearly an hour, given the eccentric clothing and all the music gear and just plain weird stuff on stage. I mean, I've always know that there were such things as commemorative plates; I guess I've just never seen them before.

The slightly shorter, comparatively minimalist second segment begins with just a semi-tacky framed picture of palm trees and an island in silhouette. The camera slowly zooms out to reveal the one Stoic-faced suited man. Eventually, it reveals not one but two of them. Over Enoesque background music, the men stare straight ahead and communicate — though not, apparently, to one another — with a form of sign languages that sometimes looks real and sometimes looks totally made-up. The camera drifts to the faces, to the hands, back to the faces, and so on, and so forth. Speech seems to happen on the soundtrack, but it's not exactly speech, or at least not intelligible speech.

Verdict: while you could definitely watch this, you could even more definitely freak people out a little by projecting it on the ceiling of your next house party. I look eagerly forward to the next Music with Roots in the Aether episode.

Great men of difficulty

Published today on The Millions, it's my primer on the formally daring, drawn-straight-from-life novels of the contradictorily traditional 1960s/70s avant-gardist B.S. Johnson:

Though they get conflated, Johnson’s novelistic Weltanschauung has two planks. The first is that the novelistic form has ossified, thus preventing closer alignment with substance. The second is that fiction is by its very nature dishonest, and to that extent immoral. While the latter seems a function of personal ethical cosmology and is thus difficult to comment on, the former rings a little true. It’s a distant ring, but a lingering, plaintive one nonetheless; once you’ve heard it, it doesn’t fade. The suspicion that he may well be at least half-right brought me to B.S. Johnson’s work.

But [Nick] Hornby didn’t buy Johnson’s package, even in part. Comparing Johnson and his quest to separate himself from the “what-happened-next brigade” to the school inspector in Hard Times, he writes, “Like communists and fascists, Johnson and the dismal inspector wander off in opposite directions, only to discover that the world is round. I’m glad that they both lost cultural Cold War.” But I’ve felt so often that novels do still, in the main, clutch for dear life to the forms of plodding, pandering relics. I’ve wondered if our compulsion to find out the next step in some made-up causal chain at least a little juvenile, a little squirrely, a little intellectually atrophic. Haven’t you?

Though I'll never forget his books, I'm more surprised by the way B.S. Johnson the man has haunted me. The other night, I'm pretty sure I woke up terrified that I'd wind up like him. Here was a writer doing for the novel just what it so badly needed — notably, without retreating into academia — yet he ended up broke, frustrated, separated from his family, and dead in the bathtub. This does not diminish the body of work he left behind, a shockingly substantial one given his short life and constant clashes with gatekeepers. But he was living proof that dedication won't save you.

Hence his appearance in The Plight of the Social Maladroit, Part IV. B.S. Johnson was by no account a particularly easy man to deal with. I myself go along to get along much more than he ever did — something I keep telling myself — but then again, would I have had the literary guts to demand my books published with holes cut in their pages, with invented punctuation marks, or in 27 separate pamphlets?

Donkey Lips' third-in-command

I used to be fat, which sucked. This is no strike against the fat; I just hated being it. The worst thing about the fat condition, as I recall, was the constant burden of avoiding being conspicuously fat. Nervous concerns about how to sit, stand, act, dress, eat, and comb my hair so as not to call attention to the fat knocked everything else at least a couple rungs down the priority ladder. This was actually exacerbated by the fact that I wasn't quite the class fat kid, though I surely would've been sworn in if the four or five fatter kids were to suffer fatal heart attacks. Maybe when you're Donkey Lips, you own your size, but when you're the borderline — Donkey Lips' third-in-command — you obsessively front like you're on the other side.

Before biting the bullet and burning the weight after junior high, I'd often fantasize about my glorious post-fat future. Oh, the question wasn't about what I would do after being fat; the question was, what wouldn't I do? This gave me a certain amount of motivation, but in retrospect it was a recipe for grand mal procrastination. I pushed everything into the then-speculative after-fat era. Should I play music? Nah, I'll do it when I'm not fat. Should I act more? Nah, I'll do it when I'm not fat. Should I maybe make some more friends? Nah, I'll do it when I'm not fat. Now are you gonna pass that tray of peanut-buttered bagels, or aren't you?

The alert Alex J. Mann linked me up to a Hacker News post from Paul Graham about what changes when you get rich:

One thing you learn when you get rich is how few of your problems were caused by not being rich. When you can do whatever you want, you get a variant of the terror induced by the proverbial blank page. There are a lot of people who think the thing stopping them from writing that great novel they plan to write is the fact that their job takes up all their time. In fact what's stopping 99% of them is that writing novels is hard. When the job goes away, they see how hard.

By the same token, the younger me blamed his lack of achievement on being fat. The period right after losing the weight was, to be fair, fantastic. (Chalk up a point to my half-baked theory that life's best times are all openings-up of new vistas.) I almost immediately got together with a girl who, in appearance if nothing else, seemed to have been crafted from my mental image of The Girlfriend the World Has Long Owed Me. Yet the episode taught me a remarkably ill-serving lesson. It encouraged the delusion that progress in life is held back by some single obstacle whose defeat will allow everything to automatically fall into place. (I suspect another sketchy video game metaphor at work.)

Just like suddenly getting rich, this proved to be more of a distraction than a real advancement. Cut one obstacle down, and two more rise in its place. These obstacles can take any form. Just do a find-and-replace on Graham's words: "One thing you learn when you stop being fat is how few of your problems were caused by being fat." "One thing you learn when you get enough time is how few of your problems were caused by not having enough time." "One thing you learn when you get more information is how few of your problems were caused by not having more information." "One thing you learn when you get a significant other is how few of your problems were caused by not having a significant other."

For all the discomfort and self-consciousness, being fat had the advantage of giving me that single obstacle, that boulder in my path to fixate upon. If I was feeling down, I could just daydream about what might be behind the boulder. It was quick a pick-me-up that didn't require me to get up and, y'know, move the boulder. I've never stopped feeling the weenieish instinct to do the same about other simple problems: I'll do it when I know more people. I'll do it when I live somewhere bigger. I'll do it when I'm more fired up. I'll do it when I have better ideas.

The really poisonous part of this behavior is that it gives you an easy avenue of self-sabotage. If you suspect that, having cleared the boulder, you won't actually be able to realize that envisioned potential, you can always treat the boulder as insurmountable. This is just what Richard Yates wrote about in Revolutionary Road: claiming to dream of the amorphous expat writer's life in Paris, the thoroughly suburbanized Frank secretly relishes every one of fate's ostensible cruelties that prevent his "escape." He anesthetizes himself with the vision of, and desperately fears the reality of, what James Wood called "an invisible 'creative' life that he is too unimaginative to envision."

I've recently come to believe that, if I'm performing below full potential — though, as with perfection, the approach to full potential seems to me asymptotic — it's because my social connectedness is somewhat thin. I'm insufficiently networked, a marketing guru might say. While I do, in good faith, see this as the largest stone in my road, the trick is to avoid succumbing to the delusions that it's immovably large or the only one in my way. Both are so very pleasing, but not as pleasing as, uh, making something out of life.

You're doing it wrong

The question: could I create one of the most popular Ask Metafilter threads ever? The answer: yes. The thread's question: What in life did it take you a surprisingly long time to realize you've been doing wrong all along? The thread's answers: mostly about long-standing mispronunciation of words like "segue" and "awry." (Metafilter, you see is filled with people who grew up lonesomely learning words through books and books alone. Also, they're surprisingly confused about the location of Hawaii.) But there are also fascinating and/or funny ones, my choicest selections from which follow.

As I've gotten older, I've spent a lot less time listening to what people tell me they think they want, and engaging them in conversation to help them find out what they actually do want — because most people don't really know.

I pronounced breakfast with an extra "r" (breakfrast) until I was in high school, when friends started teasing me.

I used to think small talk was the most boring, pointless thing ever, until I realized it's often a way for people to feel more comfortable with one another before continuing the conversation. It's like handing someone a small familiar appetizer before bringing out one's personal plate of weirdness. Makes things go down a little more smoothly.

It took about ten years of casual biking to realise that you shift gears down to go up hills, not up — I always thought I was just really bad at slopes.

It took me a while to realize that people don't want to hear me yammer on about whatever I'm interested in, or give them unsolicited advice on whatever I believe I know more about, and that you becomes a lot more likable when you really listen and ask questions about another person's interests, rather than focusing on how they relate to you.

Thinking Seattle was the capital of Oregon.

It turns out it's more important to be pleasant than smart. (Both ideally. But as soon as statistical or ideological perfectionism starts trading off with being friendly, you're losing.) I always thought smarts trumped everything else. It took me a very long time to realize that getting buy-in and building relationships are far more important and effective than being clever.

When I first learned the word "defenestration" it was using a cat as an example. For the longest time, I thought it could be used on cats and on cats alone.

Until last year, I thought the spread of bagels and other snacks on movie and television sets was universally sponsored by Kraft, and therefore called the Kraft services table (rather than craft services, for people in the craft of production). I used to idly wonder how they won this contract and why so many actors were eating Velveeta.

It was until I was 8 or 9 — even after spending my childhood listening to the Beatles — that I realized that Ringo Starr was not Sinbad the comedian. When I saw Ringo on TV I thought he looked so much like a pirate that he must be this "Sinbad" I'd heard about.

You know how we get Vitamin D from being in the sun? I thought until my mid-20's that this was because the sun beamed it into us from 93 million miles away.

It took me many years to discover that it is more useful to be liked than to be right. That people almost never say what they mean or think, but what they say is a clue to what they think, if you can only decrypt it. (I was a little Aspergery when I was younger.)

For a long time I thought blog was pronounced "bee-log" and was short for bio-log or something like that.

There are two things I've done wrong for most of my life. [epic follows]

I was a freshman in college before someone told me that "anyways" isn't a word. That same year I learned that telling people something isn't a word isn't a great way to make friends.

If I'm envious of someone's success, it's because I haven't put enough time in on my own shit. When I'm doing the work, someone else doing well doesn't eat at me at all.

Even up to the time I was in the fourth grade or so, I thought the word 'ass' referred to the male genitalia.

Sturgeon's Law has a non-obvious implication: if 90% of everything is crap... 10% is good. Even country music. Even hip-hop. You just haven't looked. My taste in everything has greatly expanded since that dawned on me.

Had a girlfriend start spontaneously sobbing in the car. Eventually, she eeks out, "That's so sad, I've never seen a hearse built just for babies before." I looked in my rear-view mirror: a PT Cruiser.

In a Chinese restaurant, the fastest way to get a fresh pot of tea: take the lid off the pot and put it back upside down. It will be a matter of seconds — well, minutes — before they replace it with a new one.

Until very recently, I thought Gene Shalit was a fictional character created for The Critic. He looked so goofy and "Gene Shallot" sounded like a joke name!

Pretty much anyone who's any good at creating anything feels like a bit of a fraud most of the time. It's a byproduct of never being satisfied with what you've produced, which is the motive force behind most creative enterprises.

One thing I've learned but I'm still trying to perfect is that I don't have to be in every argument, and the phrase "You know what? I really don't know enough about that to make an informed comment" is really, really awesome.

As a kid, I thought earthquakes were caused by that ball that chased Indiana Jones around.

It was my girlfriend's brother who commented that the They Might Be Giants song S-E-X-X-Y was probably about someone with Klinefelter Syndrome.

I stopped being intimidated by people — bosses, teachers, professors, superiors, people who seemed completely self-confident, unlike myself — when I realized that all of them, the great and the meek, have to sit on the toilet, too.

The crème de la crème. Part one, from one Mefite:

When I was about nine, I heard the word "gangbang" somewhere. Naturally, I thought it described a big fight, so I happily used it this way until I was about 12, presumably mostly to other people who didn't know what it meant either. Then I was watching the Superbowl with my parents and about 20 players wound up in a huge pile. "It looks like the aftermath of a gangbang!" I said. My dad replied that a) it didn't and b) it wasn't really a word I should use. I later looked up gangbang in the massive dictionary at school (for that is what we did before the internet) and felt very silly and rather embarrassed.

To which another Mefite replied with part two:

You think that's bad? During my orientation for grad school, we had a "community building" afternoon where we did all sorts of cheesy games to get to know each other. One of the games involved the teams doing some sort of relay race that involved writing down ways we could get to know each other better throughout the semester. Anyway, there was a complete breakdown in the game about halfway through, when one of the students, a German guy, wrote...you guessed it, "gangbang."

Needless to say, many people were shocked, horrified, outraged, and I honestly think it hurt him socially, at least for that first semester. Later on, he and I became friends, and he brought it up. He really had no idea why people were so upset. And while we were talking about it, it occurred to me that, when he wrote "gangbang," he really meant "orgy."

What are the most prestigious grad programs for these

If there's one thing we Gen-Yers do, it's agonize over our choice of career. Having spent countless hours, nay, months, nay, years agonizing over my own, I have narrowed the field to this promising shortlist:

1. Raconteur
2. Provocateur
3. Polymath
4. Enfant terrible
5. Man of letters
6. Cultural titan
7. (or, failing that) cultural icon
8. Literatum
9. Intellectual impresario
10. Zelig

I wonder how the pension plans are for these? Luxurious, I assume.

The Plight of the Social Maladroit: coda

I've been interested by what feedback this series has brought in so far. Most of it comes from those who see their reflection in my descriptions of social maladroit-hood. ziqi writes:

I too, grew up as an only child, born in 1985. I was surrounded by video games, DOS games, tv, but didn't really notice my own lack of, I think for those learning tango, they call it "unconscious incompetence". I only started noticing it as I turned 15-16, I had difficulty getting along with others (especially girls). Only when I reached "conscious incompetence" did I realize how socially maladjusted I was.

His highlighting of unconscious incompetence prompted me to posit my own version of the Dunning-Kruger effect: is a true social maladroit so socially inept that they're unable, because they can't receive the relevant human signals, to grasp just how socially inept they really are? This at least gives me pause whenever I think about some disastrous, isolating behavior and mutter, with relief, "At least I'm not like that." How can I be so sure?

Jonathan M. writes:

B.S. Johnson? That's pretty much me. Rubbish at building bridges and pathologically averse to self-promotion of any kind.

Although B.S. Johnson seems to have burned bridges actively and self promoted aggressively but in the worst possible way. Therefore, if you're just not good at those things, you're still a step ahead of one of Britain's greatest avant-garde novelists of the 20th century. Not so bad!

FrF writes:

Poor old me could be an ideal case study for the correctness of your thesis in this installment's last sentence! [i.e., "If there's one thing I've realized for sure about the lack of interest in developing social adeptness and an inclination for broad engagement with the outside world, it's that, to the extent that someone doesn't straighten it out, they are so fucked.]

ed_rex brings Steven Pinker to the table at the conclusion:

Having concluded that (non-abusive) parents have little to no affect upon how their children ultimately turn out — he makes the case that happiness, success, beliefs &cetera are determined roughly half by genetics and half by one's peer-group(s) — he rhetorically wonders why a parent need bother treating his or her child well, why invest in the music lessons or sports equipment, or whatever it might be the child is interested in?

Simply put, Pinker's answer is Because they will have a happier childhood, that's why!

On her own blog, Janet Berkman synopsizes the series thusly:

Marshall discusses how communication today, particulary via the internet, including so-called social networking sites, has become "autistic", or non-collaborative. Tweeting, Facebook, blogging, he argues, are intrinsically one-way forms of communication and as such, we may be losing the ability to interact socially in a give-and-take manner, whether face-to-face or online.

That's pretty good, though I should clarify something about which I was a little muddled in the original. I doubt that social networking and such causes isolation and the loss of social and/or communicative abilities. I do think that the way people use social networking is an indicator of how bad we've gotten about all this, though, whatever the cause may be. I just don't want to come off like a jerky-kneed, tech-fearing trend-piecer.

* * *
Since completing The Plight of the Social Maladroit, I've been thinking about it alongside the lessons I've learned from interviewing. (That post gained a much wider readership, which I can only assume owes to my having written it close to the noble form of the list of n things.) If you want to get less social-maladroit-y in general, I can recommend spending years hosting and producing your own interview show. Then just apply everything you trial-and-error yourself into learning — stay curious, follow your guest, ask what you actually want the answer to, and for the love of YHWH don't bring a question sheet — back to "real life" interactions.

But I think the point most relevant to the social maladroit is "Reveal your ignorance":

Hey, it beats the alternative. There's no shame in not knowing what your guest is talking about; if you don't, chances are a lot of your audience doesn't either. I rarely cringe so sourly as when I'm listening to an interview and it becomes obvious that the host is bluffing his was through something for which he neglected to prepare. I'm not about non-preparation; by all means, prepare as much as possible. But you can't know about everything in heaven and Earth.

Besides, you're in this game to develop, aren't you? Nothing impedes learning, improvement and evolution as much as pretending you already know, have fully improved and are perfectly evolved. Let's not even get into the embarrassment of realizing that you're a thousand steps up your wobbly Jenga tower of half-truths, guesses and elisions with no safe way down in sight.

Describing the condition of "smart"-labeled children, I probably should have just copy-pasted the line about "pretending you already know, have fully improved and are perfectly evolved." Even outside the realm of the whiz kid, the harder I try to observe social ineptitude, the more of it seems explainable as protection. It's all starting to look like arms clumsily huddled around the Jenga tower. If you remain in isolation, after all, nobody else can knock it down.

When someone refuses to engage with people around them because they "don't have anything to say," that's probably a lie. At least I know I'm lying to myself when I make that excuse. Of course I have things to say; I can ask questions. What if "I don't have anything to say" means "I don't have anything to say that won't reveal what I fear is my ignorance"? Or "I don't have anything to say that won't shatter my carefully constructed illusions about already having determined what I like, what I dislike, where I belong and What Really Matters?"

Shed those illusions and it suddenly becomes a lot easier to communicate. Easier said than done, I realize, but if you no longer fear being effectively "called out," you're free to act in a way you formerly would've thought out of character; free to associate with people, places, and things that would've previously conflicted with your self-mythology; free to ask about things you formerly thought you should've already known. In the intensive Metafilter-combing that led to this series, I ran across a hell of a lot of users commenting that one the most charming, disarming, likable, interesting, etc. quality was being "comfortable in your own skin." I suspect a lot of that comes down to being comfortable with what you don't know.