Bloglander

Jet back to when punk was new in L.A.  Novelist Janet Fitch will take you there tonight at 7 pm at the Bing. Fitch, who teaches at USC, will discuss Paint It Black and take questions. In her long-awaited follow-up to her Oprah pick, White Oleander, Fitch gives voice to Josie, whose brilliant boyfriend has shot himself -- and now Michael's mother is blaming Josie for her son's suicide. Visit ewu.edu/getlit.

"A yoga enthusiast, a community college Spanish instructor, and a vegetarian (except for bacon)."  That line drew the biggest laugh at Saturday night's Jess Walter-Richard Russo reading at the Bing. Walter shared a story about a 34-year-old unemployed, divorced loser in Spokane who tries to make something better out of his life. (The bacon-eating vegetarian is Cole's latest girlfriend.) Walter's story, "Pompeii" -- the narrator imagines future archaeologists unearthing the bandages and broken bones of Cole's teammates on his pretty-damn-awful men's rec-league basketball team (which plays at Glover Junior High) -- is part of a series of stories that he and Sherman Alexie are trading. Alexie's writing about his set of  gym rats over in Seattle, Walter's got his over-40 beat-down ballers over here, and eventually (so the plan goes), they'll (fictionally) meet in a game somewhere around Ellensburg.

Or maybe Omak. (Walter joked that when he gives readings in Seattle and is introduced as a "Spokane novelist," the phrase is uttered in tones usually reserved for "Omak ballerina.")

Russo read the section of That Old Cape Magic in which the main character's feeble old father, lusting for a grad student, more or less traps himself into writing her dissertation for her. Walter had led off with "Pompeii," and then the pair took questions on their slowly evolving collaboration on the screenplay for Citizen Vince; their female characters; their sympathy for life's losers; and their writing processes ("metronomic, like an insurance salesman" for Russo -- as for Walter, he's "more of a binge writer").

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For some weird reason, I always feel like I kind of know Conan O’Brien. When I lived in Boston, I used to play basketball at theBrookline High School gym, where he went to school. I’m told his wife Liza used to work at Seattle Weekly, where I started out. And on and off for 17 years, Conan used to drop by my house late at night.

By the looks of things inside the INB Center in Spokane on Friday night — two days before Coco’s 47^th birthday — a lot of people feel like they kind of know Conan. He just has that effect on people.

As for the show, this was not only one of the best shows I’ve ever seen at the INB (and I have seen everything from Phish to Jerry Lewis in Damn Yankees there), if it was an episode, it would have been one of Conan’s best ever.

Flat-out, gut-busting hilarious.

But there’s more going on here than laughs. Conan started on the small screen, and once banished became a cause championed via the Internet. You could tell these were his peeps, as many furiously texted the scene to friends prior to the show starting. But this story arc ends up not by gazing into yet another screen punctuated by word fragments, but by going out and hanging out with 2,800 of your friends and neighbors. Yeah, Conan’s putting the old-school meaning of “social” in social media.

I guess I was trying to take this whole experience someplace profound and culturally significant, but then they brought out the masturbating bear. (To skirt fuzzy intellectual property issues, they gave him a panda head so he could legally get down to his dirty business.)—-

Great Falls native Reggie Watts kicked the evening off and lit a fire under the crowd. Next came the band, with the La Bamba-led horn section running through the audience, pumping up the volume. Then came Conan, introduced in the first of a handful of classic videos shown on the screen behind the band. “Mommy! Daddy smells like pee!” gives you a glimpse at the plot line.

After his monologue delivered in a Steven Gray Gonzaga jersey (“Why don’t they call them the Gons’?” Conan wondered. “Who got to decide?”), the show was off and running. In fact, it was humming at such a high level — Triumph the Insult Comic Dog (who gave a shout out to Nadine Woodward), Andy Richter’s fake ad for Dick’s Hamburgers (“With prices even the homeless can afford!”), a visit from a kitty-killing exec from some TV network — that the audience was actually a little worn out about 45 minutes in. But some choice scenes from Walker, Texas Ranger left most of us doubled over in laughter. (“Walker just told me I have AIDS,” says the cute-as-a-button 10-year-old in the clip. How that is funny is, in a nutshell, the genius of Conan.)

Most surprising is how much the show picked up where Conan’s last night with NBC left off — with his guitar. Conan likey being a rock star, and he led the band numerous times, in a rendition of “My Own Show Again” (to the tune of “On The Road Again”) and finally with “I Will Survive” (instead of “go on now go / walkout the door” it was “go on now go / get your freckled, Irish ass out the door.”)

Final image I will remember: Conan with his guitar in about aisle L of the main floor, high-fivin’ other pasty white guys and strumming his guitar — livin’ the dream, man.

The guy’s karma is a thing of beauty — choosing the legacy of Ted Turner over Rupert Murdoch’s; forging a connection with fans that can only be described as, well, real; and, most important of all, allowing a certain furry friend to continue to pleasure us all.

An explosion of billowing flame! The thuds of thugs hitting the floor! Our hero, iconic trenchcoat billowing in the smoke, steps out of the inferno, silhouetted against the deep red sky. He raises up a pistol — a pistol covered in blood — points it at his own head and...

Wait a second, let's rewind a bit.

"Let's rewind a bit." What an awful phrase for the direction of a television episode.

Catapulting us into the middle of an action sequence is a fine idea. Most every James Bond movie does it to great effect. It implies the characters are so heroic that there are big adventures that the producers never even bother showing us. (One recent Psych episode opened with a silly fake psychic giving one of his famous scenery-chewing it-was-you-who-killed-him monologues, perfectly playing on our expectations of formula.)

But starting the story with its coolest, most climactic scene? And then forcing us to rewind to boredom and banality? That's just unfair.   

See Human Target. Maybe hero Christopher Chance is, I don’t know, in the middle of a bullfight or something. But then we're, suddenly pulled out of the world of action and excitement to see Chance receiving his briefing.

Meanwhile... back at the exposition factory.---

Maybe it's my problem with flashbacks.   

See how a news story becomes that much more exciting when you write it in the present tense. “He shot at the thief” sounds like a police report. “He shoots at the thief” puts you there, flinching beside the gunshot. 

But an in media res teaser opening, like Human Target so often has, puts the whole episode in flashback. The audience spends the episode waiting, anticipating, tapping toes and twiddling thumbs until the episode catches up to the first scene. The most recent episode of Caprica spoiled a key plot development that doesn't take place until the end of the episode. (Note: FlashForward does this to its entire series.)

Worse is when they actually show us the full scene all over again.

Granted: There are times the teaser opening can be fantastic. Breaking Bad is the king of making a teaser opening odd enough — a burnt teddy bear floating in a swimming pool, bullet shells bouncing up and down, up and down on the hood of an abandoned car with the hydraulic systems left on — that it doesn't spoil the context. Same with the famed "Fizbo" episode of Modern Family. It begins with the teaser of somebody in the hospital. We don't know exactly how they got there. 

So the rest of the episode we're guessing what happened to put the person in the hospital. The writers gleefully play with our expectations and pack the episode with danger: scorpions and crossbows and ziplines and collapsing bouncy castles. The punchline is hilariously anticlimactic: The kid slipped on some beads. 

These openers work because they make us curious for the rest of the episode. Not impatient or bored.

Friday-night recap at Get Lit:

At the Bing for the triple short story readings, longtime Selected Shorts host Isaiah Sheffer amused the crowd (and made up for the lack of live musicians) by humming the theme from the Sunday-afternoon NPR show (piano and cellos both!). He made a joke about the show usually being recorded on New York's Upper West Side, but that traveling to Spokane involved journeying to the nation's real Upper West Side. (Sheffer and his two fellow readers have a similar gig in Missoula tonight.)

Sheffer explained that the Father's Day themed stories weren't going to be "sentimental stories about Dear Old Dad."

Then James Naughton (who played Ally McBeal's dad on TV) read John Updike's "Learn a Trade," about a man whose father had discouraged any sign of creativity in his younger self -- and who then finds himself being an old ant-creativity curmudgeon with his own children.

Susanna Thompson read "Creeping" from Maxine Swann's Flower Children, about a hippie father and his kids; Sheffer concluded with Roald Dahl's "Waste." The show will be broadcast in June.

Saturday morning at Auntie's:

Randall Platt read from her YA novel Hellie Jondoe, about a 13-year-old pickpocket in 1918 New York who gets placed on an orphan train and ends up in Pendleton, Oregon. (The orphan trains swept up homeless kids and plunked them down in the West, in an effort to find them homes; this went on for 80 years up to the Depression.)

Victor Lodato's reading made it clear that Mathilda Savitch is a New York/New Jersey girl with an attitude, full of spiritual pondering. A playwright, Lodato started writing a monologue in the voice of a 13-year-old girl -- it just came to him, kept getting longer and longer. Obviously, it wasn't a play, so he ended up writing his first novel. It wasn't until months later, after months of writing Mattie monologues, that she told him that her sister had died -- and that from there, he decided that the aftermath of the older sister's death would provide the novel's structure. Lodato says that he has both a new play and a new novel on his work desk back in Tucson -- but that the novel is winning out.