My City

Maybe it's premature to write about this at the moment, but I felt the need to get something down.

Today there was a terrorist attack in my hometown of Boston. As of yet, there are two confirmed deaths and many, many more injured. Some have lost limbs, and while I hope dearly that no one else dies, I think it is unlikely that this will remain the case.

I got the news while sitting in a diner on Pico. I saw their television was showing footage of a reporter with a familiar Fox 25 news microphone, and who seemed to be shouting about something happening. In Boston, 25 is Fox's channel, where I grew up watching the Simpsons, so I knew that something big had just happened in my home town. I checked my phone to discover that there had been a bombing.

As a child, one of our annual traditions was to head out to Beacon Street, near Newton City Hall, to watch the runners come by during the marathon. My sister and I would stand there with paper cups filled with water or orange slices for the runners to take if they needed them.

It's a great big gathering, where people bring their kids. The marathon itself is something more than a race. Sure, you get the real athletes out at the front, who actually intend to finish first, but the marathon is, for most people, just a self-challenge, and a way to be part of the Boston community. Just as the runners contribute by racing, we felt part of the action by cheering them on.

There is nothing ugly about the marathon. The competition is perfectly friendly. I remember that there were even a number of people who ran the marathon as a way to entertain. I distinctly remember a man who ran the entire thing with a hat that held a beer can suspended on a wire in front of his face, and he acted like a cartoon character, chasing that beer all 26 miles.

I left home for college when I was 18, and while I spent summers there, Boston has always been my city of childhood innocence. Sure, I know that it is not a perfect utopia, but the image of it in my head is one of that simpler conception of the world that one has as a child. To me, Boston was the city. It was the place where you went to see more exciting things, to experience culture or the grand events that only a big city can pull off, like First Night at New Years or watching the fireworks over the Charles River on the 4th of July. I spent many a Saturday at the Museum of Science, or the Children's Museum. My mom would walk us around the Freedom Trail.

I do not know who died in the attack, though I am deeply sorry for them and their loved ones. I am deeply sorry to the people who were hurt there, who may have injuries that will stay with them for the rest of their lives. I am sorry for everyone who shared in my deep love for Boston, who saw an act of violence against our city and an act of violence against our most innocent pleasures.

In time, we will move on. The city is not about to crumble because of this. The shock of the event will wear off, and Boston will continue to thrive. When the smoke has cleared, and when hopefully everyone else is saved, we will begin to search for whoever was responsible for this cruel and unconscionable act.

And people will misinterpret, and people will capitalize. People will be disrespectful or misguided. I know that that is what happens after these sorts of things.

I only hope that we do not allow this crime to drag our hearts and dreams and memories into darkness.

UCB Sketch Class and an Attempt to Get Better at Posting Here More Often

I'm currently taking the introductory sketch comedy writing class at Upright Citizens Brigade, which I signed up for half on a whim and half because I had been thinking about it for a while, and figured I might as well go for it.

My circle of friends growing up was, if I may say so, a really funny group of people. Now granted, everyone thinks their friends are hilarious, and I'm well aware of the fact that I could simply be seeing this through my own limited perspective. At the end of High School and throughout the summers between college years, my friends and I put together a bunch of movies in what we called "Genetically Delicious Films," our mock-production company. These movies were done on the absolute cheap. Oftentimes, when I mention these to people, they treat it as if these films were some kind of indie production with actual crews, and they will ask me if I've ever submitted the films to any festivals. I don't think I'm able to translate to people who react this way just how low our production quality was.

Yet I had a hell of a time making these things, and even though they were pretty much made to only be fully enjoyed by the people who were in them, I look back at them with a lot of nostalgia.

The thing is, my own writing is rarely comedic. I don't know if it's just that I'm an overly-serious person or that I've been burned too many times by people reacting more with a "huh?" than laughter to what I think is funny.

So a comedy class seemed like a good challenge to myself. Don't get me wrong, I'm still doing my Dispatches from Otherworld, still working (slowly, very slowly) on my novel set in the same universe, but I'm trying to push myself just a hair outside my comfort zone.

With two classes through, we've learned the absolute basics of the UCB sketch philosophy. The basic idea is that you have a premise - such as "a man finds out his closest family and loved ones have been lying to him his whole life," and then find a "game" to it, wherein you find a unique way for that premise to be explored. The example we got, in "The Truth" by Charlie Sanders, is that the lies he's been told go from fairly believable to utterly ridiculous, such that by the end, we realize that he is just incredibly gullible.

Now, I've probably butchered what the "game" is there, but hey, I'm still in the 101 class.

My first sketch written for the class involved a space alien arriving on Earth. The premise was that the alien's culture caused many difficulties in forming a friendly rapport with the humans, but the game of it was that that culture was one of acting like a mooching, obnoxiously inconsiderate friend. The alien moves into the human's apartment without asking, invites a bunch of other aliens over to get stoned there, steals and wrecks the human's car, and finally reveals that he is sleeping with the human's mother - all in the name of establishing a friendly relationship between their two species. The problem I ran into (that was pointed out in class) is that the initial beat, in which the alien throws a rock at one of the humans' foreheads by way of greeting him, and the last beat, where the alien benevolently removes the aforementioned human's brain as a kind of medical treatment, don't really fit the game.

Sure, this violence against the human is not what we would consider friendly, but it doesn't fit the overall game.

Still, I got some laughs, which were a little few and far between in the room (something about writers not wanting to validate each others' work? I don't know.)

The Series Adaptation and Surprise

Like what I imagine is the vast majority of its viewers, I saw the first season of Game of Thrones before reading the Song of Ice and Fire books upon which the show is based. I had heard of them, knowing them to be a popular fantasy series, but I knew next to nothing about the plot until I saw the show. However, upon finishing season one, I quickly read through the existing books, the last of which, A Dance with Dragons, came out the same year (or perhaps the year previous) to the television show.

I did manage to spoil the biggest twist at the end of the first season for myself accidentally, but for the most part I was seeing everything with fresh eyes.

Of course, it's unlikely that I will see any more of the show without knowing at least roughly what's coming, unless they make huge changes to the narrative.

The thing that inspired me to write this post in the first place is that last night, a new episode aired, but I'm not in the middle of a mad rush to see it, even though I fully intend to see it at some point, hopefully before next week's episode comes out. Ultimately, I do know what's going to happen, pretty much, and I feel ok to even read spoiler-filled reviews of the episode online because it's not like I'm going to find much in the way of plot that will be spoiled for me, and typically a thousand-word review is not going to delve deeply into any expertly filmed scenes any farther than simply saying "look out for this."

The question, then, is whether this harms the enjoyment of the show. Would I be more engaged if I didn't know where Arya was going to eventually head, or what was going to happen with Mance Rayder and Jon Snow?

Lost, for instance, was an amazing experience to watch, even if in retrospect there were some flaws or characters who got sort of soap-opera-y drama injected into them for the sake of conflict. There were so many mysteries going on that it was a whole lot of fun to just speculate. Now granted, George RR Martin (what is it with fantasy writers with two Rs for middle initials?) hasn't finished the series, and especially after Dance with Dragons there are a lot of things to speculate about, but for the show itself, anyone who's read the books has about a two or three-season lead.

There is, of course, always danger in adaptation. By adapting a book or other original work, you actively invite a comparison between yours and theirs, and even though they wisely went with a television format to accommodate the dense plotting and multitude of characters, things still need to be cut out for time and budget reasons.

So you inevitably get the "it's not as good as the book" complaint, which I honestly think is usually a knee-jerk reaction, even in cases where it's true.

But setting aside that usual problem, there's a paradoxical element to an adaptation like this: we are happy to see visualized what we had only imagined in our heads, but we also are, by necessity, less surprised, awed, or shocked by the events of the story. I can't imagine I would feel the slightest bit let down by the use of the Wild Fire in the second season's episode about the Battle of the Blackwater if I hadn't read the book and been hoping to see the Bridge of Ships and the armies clashing on the ruined vessels clogging the bay.

Now, I really hope that announced American Gods series wasn't just a fantasy or a cruel joke. I want to see who they cast as Mr. Nancy!