daily prompt

Daily Prompt: For Crying Out Loud

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I’m a damn sap.

Sometimes it’s the television ads. There are some that get me every time. “Aw, they’re getting a new kitten!” (Never mind what the ad is selling.) Or if a character in a movie—at any point in the movie—says something about wanting to “go home,” and at the end of the movie they walk through their front door and say they’re “home” and the music swells and the credits start rolling, I’m a goner.

In most every movie, the emotional climax comes with a montage of clips from earlier in the film, bringing us up to date and sending us along with the hero towards the repercussions of their fateful decision that will save the world, or their relationship, or their job. Or the emotional climax comes when the hero, who has felt apart from the world for so long, at least the first half of the movie, walks down a crowded street and espies happy couples and children and watches all the little things of life that he or she has been missing out on for so long.

Here’s that precise scene in the movie, “A Thousand Words,” an Eddie Murphy vehicle that did poorly at the box office:

I may hate the film, I may despise the performances, I may have been on the edge of my seat about to walk out from the first minutes, but these predictable, tear-jerking scenes will always do their work on me and jerk some tears.

Ceremonies get me, too. Graduations. Weddings. Funerals. Thus if a movie would depict a new graduate going home after a funeral, that might be the most teary-eyed you will ever find me.

So I guess if one would could combine these elements: advertisement and graduate going home, that would really get to me. That should be the topper, right? And indeed, the trailer, the ad, for “The Theory of Everything,” the soon-to-be-released film biopic about the cosmologist Stephen Hawking, provides us with an experiment for my theory. Yes, I have cried, well, teared up, watching this:

Worse, I tear up at the ends of things, whether or not they are tear-worthy. It could be a goofball comedy, but once the credits start rolling, I feel like I am about to lose it. Maybe I feel like we, the audience, are now graduating together from the experience of watching this movie together. Maybe it’s just me.

I possess a big, bright red EMPATHY button in my psyche, and most everything in the culture seems to stomp on it like it’s a cockroach at a square dance. I suppose I can blame my upbringing for installing this tear-jerk response, the fact that I can answer Yes to the WordPress Daily Prompt for today, September 5, which asks, “Do movies, songs, or other forms of artistic expression easily make you cry?” (Yeah, they do. They sure do.) It goes on, “Tell us about a recent tear-jerking experience!”

I had not cried for over a decade by the time I got sober in 2010. For years, I did not cry over anything that happened to me; neither professional, personal, or romantic success or personal, professional, or romantic failure moved me. I claimed, for the sake of getting dates, to be “in touch” with my emotions and “easily moved,” because I read somewhere that one ought to be and I thought that getting teary-eyed every so often counted. (Like many humans, I, too, possess ocular salt water in my head and it has to leave somehow, at least once every year or so.) Usually, when a famous ballplayer would retire, that would move me to tear up, especially when they were from my generation.

That Eddie Murphy vehicle that I showed a clip from, that bomb of a movie, “A Thousand Words,” broke my streak and my shell. The premise is clever enough: a typical rattle-mouth Eddie Murphy character is cursed and learns that he has precisely 1000 words left to speak before he dies. The longer it takes him to not get to words 999 and 1000, the longer he will stay alive. A tree grows in his yard with 1000 leaves on it and one leaf will drop for each word he speaks. When he speaks the last words, it and he will die.

The movie flopped because of the misfire of casting speed-talking Eddie Murphy in an essentially silent role, as his character continuously avoids speaking, but that question resonated with me: What will my final 1000 words be? (Uh oh, gonna tear up now.) When one is an emotional kindergartner, as I was in early sobriety, this is the kind of question that is going to feel vital and deep. Once upon a time, my last words were going to be, “I’ll have another” or “Can I crash here?” What will they be now?

I watched the movie with my girlfriend in 2012. I will not spoil its ending, even though it is easy enough to guess. But Murphy’s character’s last few words (of course the filmmaker frequently cuts to shots of leaves falling from an ever-barer tree branch) got me; I was gone. Tears successfully jerked, I was bawling like a kid. In front of my girlfriend. (She remains my partner to this day, a couple years later.)

Sometimes, even a movie you do not think will, can, or should do it will surprise you by being a real jerk.

Daily Prompt: Casting Call

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 4 asks, “You’ve just been named the casting director of your favorite television show (or movie franchise). The catch: you must replace the entire cast—with your friends and family. Who gets which role?”
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Molly Bloom in “Ulysses” is James Joyce’s beloved wife, Nora Barnacle. This bit of casting was no secret, even while Joyce was at work on his masterpiece. Several voices in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” are said to be quotes of some of his wife Viv’s statements, and some women’s lines in the poem were written to meet her editorial suggestions. Thus she knew till her dying day that she was in a great work of art.

These are two of the exceptions in literature. Many characters in famous books, plays, films, and poems are “based on” people from their creators’ lives; imagine the havoc that would be visited on those creators’ lives if the real people knew which creations they may have been the inspiration for …

What if Gollum was based on a schoolmate chum of J.R.R. Tolkien’s? Upon learning of this, that person would never have let Tolkien leave the house without forcing him to rewrite every scene Gollum appeared in.

Say that “The Matrix” franchise is your favorite set of films and your family and friends learned that you were hired to “imagineer” a re-boot, at least for a writing assignment like this one. Every one of your nephews and brothers-in-law would be texting and instant messaging you, auditioning via annoyance for the part of Neo. No work on the reboot would even get started as you handled all the messages, and you would be fired.

An even more difficult conversation: How do you, a happily married and suddenly important casting director in your imagination, explain to your wife that she is not your Trinity?

Everyone who hears you are a writer/casting director/stagehand imagines himself the hero of your forthcoming Hollywood epic. Today’s question from the Daily Prompt prompters presupposes that being something important like the casting director is what matters to family and friends who learn you are going to Hollywood, even only in your mind. I once worked with someone whose best college friend wound up as a personal assistant to a famous, Oscar-winning director. It was a strong enough connection (read: college friendship) that my co-worker actually attended the Oscars a couple times and met some famous famous people. It was not a strong enough connection to get movie ideas sent to this busy Hollywood director, or auditions booked with him or his people, no matter how many attempts I watched people make. (We were clerks in a college bookstore, and when this matter became known every so often, impromptu auditions would happen at the checkout line. I did not audition, as I was too busy trying to unimpressively impress the writers who would come through.)

Everyone thinks of himself as a star in movies they are not making.

I have experienced this in reverse, too. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine and I were introduced to a film actor. My friend has a life story about which everyone says, “That sounds like a movie.” Upon hearing it, the film actor said, “That sounds like a movie.”

“How soon can you come out to Los Angeles?” he actually asked, out loud, with words. “I will be there next week, shooting” (insert name of television show) “and I’ll talk with” (insert name of famous famous actor whom he knew very well) “before you come out here. Of course,” (famous famous actor whom he knew very well) “will want to play YOUR part, but I will let him believe this, so it will get fast-tracked.” We exchanged phone numbers and handshakes and hugs and my friend and I got to work. “I will be back here in New York the week after next and let you know how it went,” our friend told us. “Be ready to fly out at a moment’s notice.”

I was sure that I was going to be in Los Angeles for the first time ever in a matter of weeks. I wrote an outline and emailed it to our important but close personal actor friend Captain Hollywood. No reply came. I expanded it into the bare-bones start of a film treatment, probably a very unprofessional one, but does the look of a PDF matter when the story “sounds like it ought to be a Hollywood movie?” Captain Hollywood was going to handle the formatting, anyway, and also serve as our personal key to unlock the Golden Door. No reply came to that work, either, and the promised return from our friend “a week or so from now” came instead six months later. (His television show had been picked up for a full season, so he had been busy.)

When we saw him again, he did not mention our shared project. I half-heartedly brought it up, and he replied, “You’re still working on that? I remember that one. That’s a good story. It sounds just like a movie. If you get anyone’s attention in Hollywood, maybe I can help you find a place to stay.”

Daily Prompt: A 1000-Year Project

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Five hundred years from now, Jem Finer’s Longplayer project will have recently passed the half-way point in its 1000-year-long performance.

Longplayer is a musical composition that is calculated to take precisely 1000 years to perform from beginning to end and has been in performance in England continuously since midnight on December 31, 1999. This means it has been going nonstop for 14 years and 246 days as of today, September 3, 2014. You can tune in at any hour and listen. In my limited understanding, the composition is six pieces of music that are interlinked, with each one serving as a trigger to start some of the others at set intervals. They overlap. They trigger each other. The calculation provides that these intervals will allow for the first-ever repetition of music at midnight on December 31, 2999.

If you do listen in live, you will notice that you are not encountering anything like a “tune” or a piece of a song; for reasons that are very understandable, this is slow. This is not hum-able. You may only hear a note or two, made by someone touching a Tibetan “singing bowl”—a very ancient instrument—and then a shift up or down from that note. And then that note drifting into silence. It is a human-made project that is attempting to become environmental and outlast its creator(s).

One of the challenges for any 1000-year-long project is the knowledge that we can not anticipate what technologies will be in use a millennium from now, which languages will be common and how they will develop, or how to make certain that the project will not be forgotten, soon or in 1000 years. Less than 15 years after its launch, I currently own a laptop that does not recognize the Longplayer Live app (get on it, Google Store); thus the anticipation of technology is hugely important and it must be ignored all the same.

The anticipation of social customs, too. Five hundred years ago, the English language was undergoing the “Great Vowel Shift,” which brought the language from the Middle English of Chaucer to the Modern English of Shakespeare and Kim Kardashian. “The vowel in the English word ‘same’ was in Middle English pronounced ‘psalm’; the vowel in ‘feet’ was similar to ‘fate’; the vowel in ‘wipe’ was similar to ‘weep’; the vowel in ‘boot’ was ‘boat’; and the vowel in ‘mouse’ was similar to ‘moose.'” English speakers of the era did not know they were a part of a great change; to this day, we still deal with the Great Vowel Shift in some of English’s odd spelling rules and in the accents and dialects that did not shift, such as in Scotland. Linguists did not identify this change until about (“aboot?”) 100 years ago. Might we right now be in the midst of a similar shift in the language, or at the beginning of one, one that linguists will not be able to identify for centuries? Five hundred years from now, will people understand the instructions for performing Longplayer?

To meet the almost certain changes in language and technology, Longplayer’s creators set out to include all such anticipations from the start; they call it a “social and biological strategy of survival.” Whatever new technology comes into existence, the Longplayer project will be available on it (except a Chromebook, obviously). Whatever social rules or laws people of 1000 years live under, if art is still legal, then …

No matter what, the composition is 1000 years long, by design, so if Longplayer is forgotten and then rediscovered, the discovers can pick up the performance from where it ought to be based on calculations.

So can this song to the future that won’t ever leave the here and now last its 1000 years? This is certainly not knowable, but with the amount of attention and support it has gotten in these 14 years, it seems likely it will play continuously for several more generations. Jem Finer has programmed into it as much adaptability as possible.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 3 asks, “Five-hundred years from now, an archaeologist accidentally stumbles on the ruins of your home, long buried underground. What will she learn about early-21st-century humans by going through (what remains of) your stuff?”

Certain things may last 500, nay 1000, years. My yoking together Shakespeare and Kim Kardashian in a sentence might wind up as one of them.