Bryan Joiner

Why then I
June 12, 2007

Best Ending Ever

Point the first:

The oft-quoted line from Bobby Bacala: “You probably don’t even hear it when it happens, right?” and his follow-up about how everything just goes black. Well, everything went black Sunday.

Point the second:

I’ve read other interviews in the previous days where David Chase seems to be angry that fans either mishear lines of dialogue or misread parts of episodes. Everything is meticulous, and everything is there.

Point the third:

Chase’s said that the ending was meant to be “entertaining,” not audacious.

Point the merely anecdotal evidence:

The actors seemed pretty content with what went down. Chase probably explained it to them. Michael Imperioli was particularly supportive. That probably wouldn’t be the case with a completely ambiguous finish.

Add them up, and I think Tony is dead and that it is clear. I hope I worded that right this time and the substance of the argument comes through.

It was the perfect ending. Chase has been excoriated for insisting on doing things “his way,” and breaking conventional TV storytelling rules by letting Tony live, but he is anknowledged student of the well-defined gangster genre in which the boss dies. In an interview with NJ.com, he writes:

I’m the Number One fan of gangster movies. Martin Scorsese has no greater devotee than me. Like everyone else, I get off partly on the betrayals, the retributions, the swift justice.

Chase did things “his way” not by flipping the script, but by tweaking it; he bypassed the Scarface/Sonny Corleone “hail of bullets” scene for something worthy of his show. The (anti-) hero died in silence, just like everyone else. You don’t end the best TV show all time without a bang. But who says you need to show the bang?

What finally convinced me — and it took awhile — spurred from my initial reading of Bill Simmons’ thoughts on the show: he had no problem with an ambiguous ending, he wrote, but he thought that there was a better way to execute the ending than to make everyone think their cable went out. Which we did.

I agreed with Simmons right up until I didn’t. It would have been less confusing for me in the short term if the screen went blank for merely two seconds, but there was a reason it didn’t: the black screen was the final shot of the series, not the absence of a series. The blank screen was the absence of Tony; millions are screaming that they “don’t get it” straight into that void, but Tony can’t hear you. He’s dead. The construction of the entire scene was perfect, and will be studied in film schools starting yesterday: we’ve seen bloody murders before and we didn’t need to see them again. If you needed a resolution, the void was it. If you needed to see it, you’ll never be satisfied. But either way, he’s gone. You can sleep again.

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June 11, 2007

Ziti For Thought

“I believe in America” — first line of The Godfather

“Don’t Stop Believing” — series-ending song for The Sopranos; episode title was “Made In America,” fellow diner had “Made in USA” hat, A.J. wants to join the Army, etc. I just watched the last scene and I forgot that the music kicks in right when Carmela comes through the door, then they exchange some small talk. She says Meadow is switching birth control just as the music gets tense. There’s plenty more after that. I love it.

I must say, I am fascinated by the “readings” of popular TV shows. I am so fascinated that I can usually follow them without watching the show. I did see last night’s episode of The Sopranos, and it was great for what it was: a paean to the America that created and nurtured Tony Soprano. I think last week’s episode was better overall: it was one of those hours that was so good, I felt privileged just to watch. The larger point is I love super-critical discussions of anything, and literature lends itself to debate more than most television programs or films. The Sopranos is a wonderful exception. The reason I have the friends that I do is that we have the types of discussions everyone America is having about The Sopranos about everything, every day. “If an ending works better the more you think about it, that’s another way of saying that it worked on ‘an intellectual level,'” writes James Poniewozik in a positive Time.com blog entry, “which is not the level people generally want to watch TV on.”

Here are some others:

• The Times’ take. They read the ending differently and call it “perfectly imperfect.” Sounds like something I would say.

• A popular theory that Tony is dead.

• Roush Dispatch. A noncritical recap.

• Deadspin. Very well-thought out response from a disappointed fan.

• Rod Barajas. I expand on the America stuff.

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June 8, 2007

Fiction And The Personal Essay (largely unedited)

I read a fascinating article in The New Yorker last night about the Ransom Collection at the University of Texas Library. It is, by the account of the author, the single biggest repository of the collected papers of fiction writers in United States and probably the world. It includes the papers of Don DeLillo, Normal Mailer and Ezra Pound, among thousands of others, many of them British (It was something of a big deal in British literary world when native archive materials began retiring in Texas). The author, D.T. Max, focuses helpfully on the extensive collection from DiLillo, a contemporary author who uses a typewriter, and who thus creates far more printed material than most writers. He uses the typewriter to create single paragraphs which he pencil-edits on the page, typing the “corrected” paragraph immediately below it. He sometimes repeats this process for four or five pages until the paragraph is, in his mind, ready. His entire thought process is recorded on sheets of 8 ½ by 11 inch paper.

Tom Staley, the director of Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, studies the minds of literary “masters” the way some people study law or, say, podiatry. The difference is that in law and podiatry, there is a right and a wrong answer to every question (insofar as he have mastered the study of foot medicine), whereas in literature the rules are created by each individual author. The study of literature is not one text compared to another; it is the study of each text itself. At some point, every book, newspaper or magazine you’ve read was a dead tree. To see literature as a science, and not as a form of entertainment, is to see how the human mind creates stories. Does the perfect story exist? In Jorge Luis Borges’ story “The Library of Babel,” the central character, the librarian, is searching through the infinite space described by every possible letter combination in every book. There are books that vary from each other with only one keystroke, and books composed of nothing but gobbledygook. He searches because in the library, there is said to be one book that perfectly describes all the others. The study of how literature is created — the author’s search for the perfect story — is the search for that book, but with the prior knowledge of what’s in it. The book describes the search for the book itself. The study of literature is without end.

For this reason, the process of creating fiction differs decisively from the creation of non-fiction. As someone who has never had a fiction class, and has spent a life writing non-fiction, the immediate differences between the two processes are striking. (Or, at least, DeLillo’s process is far different than mine.) DeLillo first molds the sentence like “Look at the kid with the with the empty pockets”; it becomes “Look at the kid with the lively eyes,” then “glimmerglass eyes,” the “shine in the eyes”, then he completely changes its emphasis. “He speaks in your voice, American, and has a shine in the eyes that’s half hope, half fear” he writes, and “half hope, half fear” eventually becomes “halfway hopeful”. The process we are witnessing is his search for the perfect sentence, the sentence that will get his reader one step closer to Borges’ fictional perfect book.

This is the mystery of fiction. It’s unpredictable, dangerous and sexy. The danger in non-fiction has already passed, no matter how compelling the situation (Non-fiction on a life-threatening basis is ‘journalism’.). In non-fiction, every sentence is the author’s attempt to describe in something that happened in the right words; the process of creating a non-fiction document is the process of combining words with research and memory. In fiction, words describe both one’s imagination and one’s process. The study of non-fiction is similar to the study of law; it can be done correctly or incorrectly. Fiction certainly can be done poorly, but nothing is ever wrong. None of this is to be an assault on non-fiction. I read mostly non-fiction. When it comes to fiction, I’m picky. I only read novels that are recommended to me, or ones that garner such critical acclaim that they cannot be ignored (The Bonfire of the Vanities would be a great instance of these two lines intersecting). I’m learning when I read non-fiction. When I read fiction, I’m doing something else.

Which leads me, at last, to the third type of writing. The rules of fiction are not 100 percent different the rules of non-fiction; in both fiction and non-fiction, the writer is attempting to describe something external to the narrator. The world that is described has a place and time, be it real or imagined. Underworld or White Noise, though created in DeLillo’s head, occur in a place and time, just as Into Thin Air or Krakatoa, works of non-fiction, occur somewhere outside our brains. Fiction’s antonym is, instead, the personal essay. In the personal essay, noting is external to the narrator: it’s all about what happens in our heads. Fiction is the fruit of the writing process by way of imagination; the personal essay is the direct connection between the mind and the page. Stripped of outright lies about oneself, the personal essay is a perfect reflection of ones self-awareness .Your personal essay will only be as good as you can make it. Stripped of lies, it will be a perfect reflection of how well you are able to describe yourself and of how well you know yourself. If fiction is the search for the perfect book amongst a universe of imperfect ones, the personal essay is the fruit of constantly finding the perfect book to describe oneself. Once you find the book, it’s not perfect anymore. You’ve grown. Time to write again. I’m intrigued by fiction, with its incredible degree of difficulty and the enormous imaginative capacity involved, and in awe of non-fiction writers like Robert Caro, who have written works like The Power Broker, that are literally monuments to human work ethic and the printed word, but at the moment, I see no purer piece of writing than the personal essay. I’m not yet ready for fiction, the endless science, or non-fiction, its diligent cousin. I have too much to do here first.

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Feel free to leave comments and editing suggestions. All help is appreciated.

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June 7, 2007

Really?

To the guy who honked at me when I was in the crosswalk yesterday… really? I was walking across 29th street on my way to the park for lunch when I heard you honk. Since I’ve been on cold medicine all week, it didn’t immediately register that you were honking at me — there were several people in the intersection, and none of them were cars. When I got to the other side of the street, I looked back at you in attempt to make a snap judgment as to What Your Problem Was when I saw it: the address on your side door. “Etc., etc., Scranton, PA.”

So here’s the little backstory I invented while mouthing the words “Fuck You” in your direction: you don’t come to the big city that often, and you hear everyone else honking, so you figure, “Hey, let’s give this a shot.” Only here’s what you don’t realize: you don’t honk at pedestrians in the crosswalk. It is your job to sit there and Keep Absoluely Quiet, unless I’m on some sort of conveyance, in which case you have Mayor Michael Fucking Bloomberg’s permission to play that funky music, white boy (approved conveyances include a bicycle, segway or your mother). You probably learned your lesson from my stares and those of the other crossers around me, so hopefully you’re good to go from now on. Unless you’re just pissed off that NBC emasculated your hometown. Can’t help you there.

To my cold… really? Four days and counting? I could barely pull myself out of bed this morning and I’ve done nothing but mend to you since Sunday evening. On Monday I tried to deny your existence, because I had unimpeachably better plans that were a long time coming, but in the end I had to cancel them. Fine. I received a slight life Monday evening and Tuesday morning, leading me to believe you were a 24-hour bug… but no. The rest of Tuesday and all of Wednesday were completely hellish. All this for what, playing a little softball in the rain on Sunday? Please. That’s hardly fair (especially considering we won the game). Then I biked home, which surely exacerbated the problem. Would you rather that I had driven, destroying your Earthly paradise, God? (Or whomever?) I didn’t think so. Let’s cut me a little break here and end this right now.

To The Wire… really? You’re really this good? I started season three last night, and you continue to amaze me. I had watched seasons one and two at breakneck pace, which was a mistake. The Wire, it has often been said, is like a novel, and I burnt myself out on it too quickly. Now I’m ready to handle more adventures of McNulty, Stringer and the gang. It’s really the second-best TV show I’ve ever seen, and the least repeatable (The Sopranos is the best, but it’s more easily digestable). I took an hour break between the episodes last night, and that made all the difference. To top it off David Simon is a (far-flung) family friend, to the point where my beloved mother told me recently, “So-and-so Simon is doing this, so-and-so Simon is doing that, David Simon is still doing The Wire…” which was a hoot. I’m on it. Gotta love mom, though. Hi mom.

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June 6, 2007

Allergies

I just took an allergy pill. I have been taking allergy and cold pills for the last two days, as a combination sore throat and stuffy nose has sidelined me from any real activities. Thankfully there has been nothing to do at work – and I mean quite literally nothing – so all I’ve done is pester friends via chat and make updates to my Verizon phone plan. I need more text messages, especially when my voice sounds like it does. It hurts to talk, and every conversation quickly morphs into, “Wait, are you sick?” Given that I’m naturally verbose, I will respond with some babble followed by my standard answer: “Yes, but I always sound this way.” And I do. I have a naturally scratchy voice, as do both of my brothers, but mine is unsurprisingly the worst. Maybe the allergy pill will make it better. We’re about to find out.

One thing the allergy pill will almost certainly do is knock me the fuck out. Every day for the last three days, I’ve taken one of these pills in the late afternoon, and every day I’ve taken an involuntary nap that has ended around 8 p.m. I’m beginning to think that this particular dosage – for “Extreme Allergies – is less of an allergy cure than a full-blown sleeping pill. Okay, now I’m fairly sure that it is a full-blown sleeping pill: I have to rest my eyes between every sentence. It’s a beautiful day outside, and I would like to spend it doing something, but no: I’m pasted to the couch. In the long run, I’ll be happy I did this. But in the short run, it’s quite galling.

Now I’m losing it, quick. My allergies have almost gone away completely, which is great, but any sort of movement is hard (I paused between “great” and “but” to rest). At least I know dinner will be cheap tonight – there’s no way I’m going out to get anything. I’ll make do with whatever mishmosh is around here. That means rice and beans, macaroni and cheese, canned vegetables or cereal. I realize that at age 29 I should not be eating cereal for dinner, but it is so easy and delicious that it’s hard to resist. Of course, all of this is contingent on my getting off the coach. This is not likely.

(Whereupon the author fell asleep for two hours)

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Also, just as quickly as it was created, The Sox Page was deleted to make more time for Barajas.

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June 1, 2007

New Stuff

I think I am a reasonable person, so yesterday I started a Red Sox blog called The Sox Page. It was my intention to write on the site every day. We’ll see. I only say “we’ll see” because minutes later my friend Ben and I began Rod Barajas, a sports-humor blog, that has the potential to really monopolize time in its overwhelming awesomimity. Please check them both out if you’ve got the time. I promise at least Rod Barajas will be worth it, unless you don’t get the joke. Then it will be a bunch of nonsense.

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May 31, 2007

Great Quote – Sam Walker

From Sam Walker’s Fantasyland:

Rotisserie baseball may be the most ridiculous duplication of effort in the history of human affairs, but that’s hardly a concern. For the next four days our universe begins with Paul Abbott and ends with Alec Zumwalt.

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May 31, 2007

Process

It is Wednesday night, and I was going to write this tomorrow morning at work, until I realized that I absolutely abhor writing at work. The tripe I write for our magazine doesn’t count – I could do it in my sleep. I mean writing – stuff that you’d be proud to show your mother (hi mom!) or wife or girlfriend (hi everybody!) without the feeling of – what did I feel at the Chronicle? – complete and total existential dread. Life is good now, as long as I keep work and the real writing separate, which is why it’s good to have a job that doesn’t make me, when I see my computer at night, want to take a pickaxe to it in latent work frustration. Come to think of it, I don’t even own a pickaxe, as far as I know (there’s a shed out back, and God knows what’s in it).

With nothing else really to talk about, let’s have a short discussion of how what you’re reading – this – ends up on your computer screen. It goes a little something like this: after coming home from work, I will decide to write at times it appears that my roommate will not be home within the hour. These days, that’s pretty much all the time, so tonight I had the “luxury” of doing the necessary two loads of laundry before eating, showering and taking out the computer. The specifics may vary, but that’s pretty much the prelude. I will write in one of three places: on the living room table, facing the television; in my bed or on the sofa, as I am writing now. Once settled, I will attempt to come up with a topic but will usually end up writing about what happened to me today or what I’m thinking at the moment and go off on a tangent (see?). I will write nonstop for about 20 minutes and wrap it up in somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes. That’s when the real fun begins. That’s when I get to play with the flash-drive that’s on my keychain. When I first bought the drive it didn’t work with my computer, because it includes software that’s only readable on newer models, and this baby’s an old clunker. Sorry, lovable old clunker. A friend had to remove the software for me, but the drive still didn’t work, only this time it was a result of jamming the stupid thing into the USB jack like any sane person would plug anything into a USB jack. My flash drive must be inserted gently, and only into the bottom jack, and hee hee har har, isn’t that a hoot? I usually get it on the second try, and the thing lights up to tell me I’ve done a good job. Then we order dinner (just kidding).

When I’ve finally got the “green light,” which is actually orange, I drop the word file I’m using onto the icon for the drive. Sometimes the word file will be a single entry, sometimes several of them, but I’ll tag them all as UNEDITED so y’all can’t read the shit without my cleaning it up first – which I will do in the following day whenever I remember I have them, which could really happen at any point between 8:45 and 4:45, and maybe not at all, given my general spaciness when I’m in an office. Strangely, the more work I have to do, the more likely I am to remember. That’s the way I’ve always been: the more on my plate, the better I am at dividing up my time both while completing the project and when taking a break. An idle mind, plus the Internet, makes for a playful day for me where I can accomplish almost nothing except to work myself into a lather over the rosters of fake sports teams in my name and take breaks from this excitement by getting coffee or having instant chats with friends peppered across the city. The only thing I will both create and post at work are the Great and Funny Quotes you’ve doubtless seen by now – I say doubtless both because my readers are loyal and there is a great quote posted just above this entry. I read it on the way home from work today and knew it was a keeper. Why I’m reading a book devoted to someone competing in a ruthless fantasy baseball league is another question altogether, though it would seem to be happily akin to a priest reading the Bible, and despite my hazy knowledge of religion I am fairly sure this happens. In the book – not the Good one, the good one – there is an anecdote about a pastor in Arizona who routinely wins his fantasy baseball league because all the spring training umpires use his church, so I guess God does play games. But you know what? If there are two things I shouldn’t be talking about (and for completely different reasons), it’s religion and fantasy baseball, so it might be time for me to fall back on the third foundation of this country: taking pills. This has been an absurdly bad allergy season, and as my bedroom is virtually outdoors and my new office is caked in dust, I’ve been getting killed every day. Today was just about as bad as it gets, and after a long weekend-plus of staying up late – I had a 9 p.m. basketball game yesterday – I’m gonna pop a Benadryl Severe Allergy and let the antihistamines work their magic.

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May 29, 2007

Funny Quote – Barstool Sports

The proprietor of barstoolsports.com, upon learning that the site was blocked by the City of Boston:

This is clearly a violation of the 5th Amendment or one of the amendments about free speech and all that shit.

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May 29, 2007

Memorial Day By Numbers

Stripping bartenders, sleeping in the grass, rainy disco parties at the beach – it must be Memorial Day weekend! And let’s recap it, in numbers!

2 (number of celebrity sightings, Friday)
I woke up early Friday, still in pain from the night before, when our softball team went out for drinks. A friend was coming into the city from Atlanta, and as she does not know her way around the city very well, I was to meet her at the Port Authority despite my hangover (she offered to let me sleep in, but as I was already awake, I decided against it). I acquired a Dunkin Donuts Iced Coffee on the way to the train and sat all the way at the front, which put me off at 40th street for the 42nd Street station. I was walking on 41st Street when I saw Pete Milano, a friend from SpotCo., a company that handles many aspects of Broadway play advertising (a fellow softballer, he too was iced coffee-ing). This was celebrity sighting number one, the appetizer, as he was filming a Rent promo with Tamyra Gray of American Idol, season one. Now, I wouldn’t know Tamyra Gray if I used her as a toothpick – which I could have done, because she was the thinnest person I have ever seen – unless someone pointed her out to me, as Pete did, and I moved along quickly to my waiting friend at the Port Authority. Flash-forward: lunch has just been completed with said friend, and we are walking into Central Park via Columbus Circle, where we have just visited the Borders in the Time Warner Center. I got a free Nantucket Nectars pomegranate juice there – don’t ask me how. Anyhow, we’re waiting to cross the street when I see a platinum-blond, tube-topped woman with a stroller on my left, and it’s none other than Gwen Stefani with her once-famous husband and children. Now THAT’s a celebrity sighting. No doubt.

1 (number of birthday parties attended, Saturday)
I actually skipped a birthday party on Friday night because I was too tired to think. I was woken up late at night by some friends who were in our back yard, tending to Edgar, who had fallen asleep in the grass. I barely recovered in time for my friend Ryan’s birthday at Daisy May’s BBQ on the West Side. For our party of 10, we ordered two “Pork Butts,” which I learned is not in fact the rear end of the swine, but instead the shoulder (the actual butt? “Ham.”). After the festive feast – notable because the Red Sox were in the process of going 11.5 games up on the Yankees at the time. 11.5! – we went to the bar Circus, a free-popcorn-and-peanuts, cheap beer establishment that more than lived up to its name. To make a dreadfully – okay, extremely pleasantly – long story short, the bartender did a striptease, another bartender breathed fire off the bar, and Ryan and Ravi celebrated Ryan’s birthday by giving each other wrestling chops across the chest, a primitive, drunken act that is pretty much as entertaining as it gets. But I have said too much: you really had to be there.

7 or so (number of ribs eaten Sunday)
Sunday we had a barbecue in our backyard. I spent the first half of the day concerned that too many people were going to come, thereby lowering the number of delicious Casey-prepared ribs that each person would be allowed to enjoy, and the second half wondering if anyone was going to show up. In the end, we had just the right amount of food for everyone, and more than enough beer. Good times. Bonus good times for including our upstairs neighbors, with whom I wish to remain on good terms, and super crazy bonus Hellenic good times for learning that my only friend from Astoria is related to my next-door neighbors, a fact we learned when he showed up at their barbecue. As a child of a small, quiet town and of Mary Jo (who stressed good neighborly manners), I am always wary of making too much noise or generally riling my neighbors, but my inside source tells me they find Edgar and I to be “nice, quiet boys,” and even better, any knowing someone on the inside over there makes any possible problems that much easier to negotiate. I don’t mean to go on about it, but it makes me happy.

1 (number of rainy beach bars visited)
After the barbecue on Sunday, the party transferred itself to the Long Island City Water Taxi bar, the ingenious little three-year-old spot that faces Manhattan on Queens’ southwesterly most shore. It’s really just a large outdoor area with truckloads of imported sand, where you are free to drink (from their bar) and enjoy the best views of Manhattan maybe anywhere. On Sunday, there was to be (and was in fact) a professionally-run dance party, Turntables on the East River, a relocated offshoot of Turntables on the Hudson series, one event of which I attended last year. And it would have been great, except for two things: 1) it was pouring when I arrived, and 2) I was not on heavy drugs, which seemed to be the necessary condition for enjoying the party despite the rain (as the music was quite good for a dance party). I spent some time under the canopy that was set up for the DJs and live drum players, but moved back outside when the rain let up. I may have even cut loose for about 20 minutes on the dance floor with some members of our troupe, and there may be photographic evidence of this, before going home at the early hour of 1 p.m.

0 (number of any things really done Monday)
On Memorial Day itself, I helped myself to a cup of coffee in the morning and proceeded to use that energy to sit on my butt. It was off-and-on cloudy by noon, which gave me enough time to watch the film I had Netflixed but had laying around for two weeks, The Queen, which was hard to gather the muster to watch but well worth the wait. I then cleaned up a little before briefly entertaining Casey (he wanted to use our backyard, picnic-style, for lunch) and then starting a book I’ve had sitting around for weeks. A nap followed, some television after that, but things have finally wound down. It’s probably just in time. The critical number from this week/weekend is the number of dollars I’ve spent on God Knows What, and it’s time to bring it back to Earth. To that end, I went to the grocery store earlier and replenished the supplies around here. I had to make room for it in the fridge around all the leftover beer. Which leads us to the final number…

1 (number of celebratory drinks for a great time had)
Apple juice. Yep, it’s like that.

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