Chapter 3: I'm always ready to go

I'm always checking the clock, I've always got my bag, my traveling gear, I'm always twitching in my seat. That's the life of the commuter. It's sad, sometimes, I've had some far-too-abrupt goodbyes in my time, especially this year, but I need the commute now more than ever.

So this is where I'm at.

Two papers due Tuesday. Not unfucked for them.

Slipping into some bad habits. Squandered my lead time on the film paper. Work this weekend, plus a family birthday. Where did your focus go, Scotto? You've been doing really well.

Have gotten a good number of papers back, will marks all on target for what I think I should be doing, well up from last semester proving that my downward slide from last semester was not irreversible. But it won't do a damn bit of good if I don't get these papers made.

I've had a lot of ideas flash through my head lately. Ways of properly framing stories I already had, fleshing out ideas I already had in slight detail, and ideas built from the ground up. So when I got home from school today I was more focused on those, because the moment is the moment, as detrimental as it is to my scholastic pursuits.

My own fault.

This week was such an uneventful week at school, I can barely bring myself to remember it. It's just zipping by lately. The most interesting thing didn't even happen to me, it was described to me by a friend who goes to another school. He was taking his recycling out and he ran into a pretty girl bringing her laundry down to the wash, so he gives her a smile, as a courtesy. He returns for his recycling bin later to find a red thong in there. He asks me what to do in this scenario. The answer would be beyond obvious if it weren't for the fact I left out: he has a girlfriend. So, using my writerly skills, I coached him on what might be a good way, if he should see her again, to defuse the situation. Or is it diffuse the situation? Like a lens diffuses light. (Dictionary.com says defuse.)

I've been in my own head a lot this week.

Been thinking about TV laugh tracks. They're disappearing, as TV writing gets smarter and less quip-based, with better stories and characters. This, after watching NBC's Thursday night lineup, which consists (as it has for years now) of four single camera-style shows, three of which are top-notch.

Shows in this format have a lot going for them. It's a form and content question. Laugh track shows are mainly descendant from stage plays, single-camera shows from movies (the first show of my generation to embrace this format was Clueless. M*A*S*H was single-camera, but had a laugh track and was filmed rather conventionally.) You get scenes in a single-camera show you couldn't or wouldn't, do in front of a live studio audience. The humour takes a less obvious "look at me I am being funny" stance, because there is nobody in the immediate vicinity that needs to be amused. But take last night's episode of Community, where a game of pool ends up as a strip showdown, or the Office, which had a montage of Dwight dismantling Jim and Pam's kitchen. Can't do that on a stage with a hundred audience members waiting for the shot to be set-up.

This is the entire plot of the second series of Extras.

Really, there's no reason to assume people are all that attached to the traditional multi-camera sitcom with a live studio audience anymore. We still have them, though. Some of them, like Two and a Half Men, are lame. Big Bang Theory, I happen to like, because it works both within the form of the multi-camera and as a subversion of it, just by virtue of how unique the character of Sheldon is (an extreme sitcom archetype with his own set of internal logic, Kramer for the 21st century. One episode deftly deconstructs the concept of the sitcom lie. The show is not un-self-aware.)

Interesting hybrid, though, How I Met Your Mother. It's a multi-camera sitcom not filmed in front of a lie studio audience (*the laughter, apparently, comes from an audience shown a tape of the final episode.) This allows for better usage of the show's flashbacks, variety of settings and plotlines. It's a relatively complex show, yet all in the name of an extreme level of conventionality, elevating the norm to an artform.

It's all a matter of artifice. Despite its less stilted approach to dialogue, character and story (you can follow characters anywhere and let them say anything, going deeper than mere quips,) the single-camera show involves a more considerable level of construction, of heightened form: editing, music, often some kind of third-wall-breaking narration of talking head. The multi-camera, for the most part, has a simpler nature. Given its relationship to the stage play, it usually plays through one scene to its end, to enable the audience to fully comprehend it.

From a production styandpoint I can see how the multi-cam is preferable, but from a finished product, there's no denying that the best single-camera shows are superior. There have been crummy single-camera sitcoms *(Kath & Kim comes to mind) but when you consider how many lousy multi-camera shows appeared for a brief period before cancellation between 2000 and 2005, when HIMYM and The Office both debuted, it's hard to deny that multi-cam was a dying form.

The shame of it is, many really strong single-camera shows fell by the wayside as the audience needed time to acclimate to this trend. Andy Richter Controls the Universe is my main example. There may be another one. Arrested Development hung on by its nails for its entire existence, but at least it got a fair run.

Anyway. It's more complicated than "The network wants to tell you when to laugh" *(although there certainly was that element.) After all, laughter is a community activity: don't you feel less self-conscious about laughing when others are, too?

Well whatever. My computer's running lamely. I uninstalled McAfee and put AVG on, per my dad's instructions, so I'm hoping that isn't the cause, that suddenly my computer's gonna get all laggy again. I was listening to Joel Plaskett's Three. I don't necessarily buy into the idea that that album represents an authentic personal expression as much as a mythologizing of drifter idioms. That said, it's a fallacy to prize "authenticity" in pop music anyhow (this is something I had thought of before, and was recently brought up in Pop Music class.) That said, there most definitely seems to be a distinction between those songs that come from personal experience of the performer and those that are merely constructed and performed. It's an impressive production. I think it probably could've been several tracks shorter, but that would've messed up the entire conceit (three discs of 9 tracks. Here you have construction and representation and artifice at play again. I am such a university student.) I could say the same for Locksley. They so brilliantly ape that pre-Rubber Soul era when the Beatles weren't much singing about themselves in particular.

Everything's made up. I always wonder about those questions I got after Half-Past, wondering how autobiographical it all was, and I had to observe their mild confusion when I admitted "Uh, none at all? It's a work of fiction." What you do, if you're a good writer, is put real feelings into stuff that never happened.

I'll never forget Rayter's words: Just because it really happened doesn't make it good writing.

I've never read a James Frey book, but I imagine there's a brilliant proof of that statement in there (in that people were more willing to consider A Million Little Pieces a work of genius when they thought it really happened.)

One of my many ideas for a new project is heavily based off things that happened to me in life, but recontextualized in a way that it becomes fiction.

Read Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" for a brilliant examination of the phenomenon.

I'd better get to bed. I've got to take penance for my procrastination tomorrow.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto