SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTON
So a couple of quick things:

One, I'm still working on the book, so updates to this space aren't going to come with the regularity you have long ceased to expect from your friendly neighborhood spiderman. Also, I know there are a couple of bad links over there. My net access is extremely limited, thanks to the move, and I'm full of whiny excuses about it, so it's best I leave the whole mess alone.

Especially since I had a great weekend. On Friday night, at the show, I got a phone call from a director friend of mine who said they had written a role for me in the "Spontaneous Combustion" fest and could I do it?

Spontaneous Combustion is this sweatshop theater operation whereby a bunch of writers hole up in a theater (in this case, Manhattan Theater Source) and write a bunch of short plays on a Friday night, bring in actors on Saturday to learn and rehearse, and then they open the show on Sunday night. Ed McNamee, Doug Silver and Andrew Frank had written a song which turned out to be gorgeous, an operetta duet in which I was an old French chocolatier whose family had been selling chocolates for centuries, and his last employee, a comely young French wench, hits upon a way to get the flagging operation back on its feet. It's a very sexy song (it ends with both of us covered in chocolate syrup, which fulfilled a fantasy I didn't know I had), and I really, really hope to sing it again (the worst part of the whole operation is that the play closed last night, and there's no plans to run it again, although the resulting monologues and one-scenes were fantastic audition material, and a couple of them could easily be fleshed out into fringe festival-type pieces).

There's been talk of recording the song, of publishing the pieces in a book, and of doing Spontaneous Combustion on a monthly basis. All of these are easily doable and would rock. I really wanna do this kind of thing again. Every one was working at a level that I've not really been used to in my short stage life, and I'd love to work with, not to mention keep friendships with, these people again.

This is not standard showbiz kizazz Mervism, neither. Just hadda say that.

I think it feeds into the same must-catch-lightning-in-a-bottle concept that that novel project from last month did. (The NYC Wrimo wrap party went great - I'll post details when I get pictures.)

Now, I gotta get off the line, and maybe get some sleep, or maybe write some more. I'm not quite well, and I hate not being quite well, and I get the distinct feeling this feeling is going to linger until the book is done. Which sucks. But oh, I had a lovely weekend.

CROSSING JORDAN
Michael Jordan's personality disorders were never a secret to start with. Rumors of gambling addiction, clandestine power brokering and imagined revenge fantasies cloud his storied history like a chili fart in the elevator at the Waldorf.

(A hypothetical: if, in 1992, NBA Chief David Stern had thrown Michael out of the game for a couple of years to get his gambling habit under control, there would have been rioting in the streets of Chicago, not to mention a massive Madison Avenue backlash and a drop in the value of the entire sport. But if he "retires" for a couple of years to try out baseball, it's considered a noble experiment, and hey, Houston gets to win some championships in the middle of what was a golden age for basketball anyway. Lose-lose becomes win-win. I'm not saying that's how it happened. I'm just saying. I didn't come up with this theory, neither.)

And now that his third career is kind of going bust (his Wizards stink and aren't getting better, he's hogging shots and minutes and getting hurt), that bitterness and callousness is coming a little more to the fore. Michael's never been a loser before. Not in the only arena that mattered to him. He's the most competitive person on the floor, on the golf course, in the boardroom. He's never not been the man. The stories about him cheating in card games with his kids and betting insane amounts of money on golf holes are symptoms of a larger problem he has with the world as it is. It's almost like he had to push his luck one too many times, and now it looks like he's finally thrown craps. With his team in the tank (it's him & a bunch of kids who watch him hog the ball) and his knees falling apart, he's blaming everyone else for problems he's involved in.

Some people are more successful in the business world than others. Michael should have been perfect for it, by rights - no one would ever question his savvy, his intelligence, his ability to strategize, or his killer instinct. But that competitive spirit, once so revered in the greatest player ever, is hardening Michael Jordan, way past his playing prime and fading fast, into a bitter, powerful, angry, very rich old man.

NEVER PURE, AND RARELY SIMPLE
I've had the distinct displeasure of staining my hands with the filth of the papers over the last weeks like everyone else. They all make it into the office I work at, and most days I don't read them. It's all spin now, anyway, and no one's thinking much anymore. It's just hawkist rhetoric and inflammatory spin disguised as "patriotism." I know better than to think they'll change their minds. Moral outrage sells papers, and other opinions (let alone compassion, or a more inclusive worldview than that of white republican america) are treason, pure and simple.

Today's case in point - Abdul Hamid, formerly John Walker. A lost teenager from a suburban liberal family. Like many lost kids, he tried on a few ideologies until he found one that he could live with. It just happened to be a certain brand of Islam. I'd be shocked if he was the only kid this happened to. I bet there's more than a few of them over there doing the same thing, and they just haven't been found yet.

And yet this kid (what were/are you doing at 20? Hmm? I was living in a Volkswagen hippie van in British Columbia, busking for the ten bucks a day I needed to survive, and shoplifting books from WH Smith for something to do, oh and writing shitty poetry, reams and reams of ugly lines, so really, I can understand that this kid wanted to actually do something with his life and chose something he thought was meaningful) is crucified in the press. In the first two pages of the Post, he's called, let's see, a "rat" (the word "rat" is used five times on the cover page alone), "a despicable traitor who deserves to be shot," "a dirtbag," "human filth" and "vermin." This is the kind of shite that actually makes it onto El-Jazeera and into the papers over there, and convinces the Muslim people that we all hate them and want them dead. Way to prolong the war, jackasses.

Something else that bugs me, maybe more than anything else: he changed his name to Abdul Hamid. That's his name now. One of the rights every human being has is to decide what their own name is, and for some cloistered columnist to ignore that change and keep calling this guy John Walker because his Islamic name is somehow distasteful to them is openly racist and deliberately ignorant. (Compare: Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, or even World B. Free or The Artist Formerly Known As The Artist Formerly Known As Prince.)

Look. The followers of the Taliban, be they Afghani-born or from a suburb in California or anywhere in between, are not vermin. They're not dirtbags. They're human beings, who have grown up in a very different place than most of us (If you're reading this weblog, you're something like 500 years ahead of most of the Taliban supporters.) The braying idiots who spew their moral outrage every day about these things that ultimately don't matter are continuing to show themselves for the ignorant cowards they are. Wouldn't it be more useful to maybe show how this kid arrived at the conclusion that switching sides in this ideological conflict was worth doing? Or does anyone even have a clue?

Because hey, if no one knows, then it'll happen again, and again, and again, and papers will keep selling, and we'll always be enemies, blowing each other out of the sky and off the earth. Thanks for advancing that legacy over one of peace, you uninformed twits.

DELUSIONS OF OMNIPOTENCE
So yeah, I'm back.

The novel I've been working on for the last month (Hey look, ma, I won something for it already, and it's not even finished! Along with about 600 other, erm, winners, but still! A winner is me!) is still sitting on my head like a big rock, but that's not going to stop me from throwing a party for it, so if you're in the city somewhere this Friday night, come on down to the Sidewalk Cafe (6th St. @ Avenue A), where I'm playing early and staying late to drink with Kate and Peter and Jon and hopefully a few other people and revel in having written 217 pages of primo liddeture in a single month. (That's about 58,000 words.) I have about 20,000 more to go before the first draft is done, which I'm thinking is realistic for the end of the year. (I could definitely use an experienced editor or two to have a look at it after that.)

The thing is not nearly as autobiographical as I thought it was going to be (but yes, I swear, you're in it, don't worry, I might have changed a couple of details about things you said and did, but it's unmistakable that it's you, and I did paint you in a positive light, too, you'll see), although that'll change, I still bet.

One thing I was constantly thinking about as I was writing it was the camera angles. For whatever reason, I couldn't help but think about movie rights for this book, even if the end product kind of sucks, because really, if they're going to adapt some pieceashit pulpbrick about (wait for it) New York hipsters who can't get their life together (I swear it's not autobiographical, I swear) and make some kind of starfucker vehicle for, let's say Jane and John Cusack, Ewan Macgregor, Janeane Garofalo and Kirsten Dunst (I'm just throwing semi-appropriate names out there) in the main roles, then lawdy, let it be my pile, sweetheart.

As you can see, I've been spasming between hubris-induced delusions of omnipotence and the stultifying air of desperation that comes from feeling completely incompetent.

And I haven't mentioned my move to a new larger apartment in Midtown, or (or!) the VH1-Letterman gig. If you wanna hear about that stuff, fine - I've been bragging too much already, and dammit, there's a ton of ranting about the war-action situation and holiday crap and music crap and other crap that I have to get off my chest.

Anyhow, thanks for continuing to check this space in the face of yawning inaction.