A recent investigative report alleges that the online retail giant is subjecting workers to sweatshop conditions. According to the report, “Workers said they were forced to endure brutal heat inside the sprawling warehouse and were pushed to work at a pace many could not sustain.” The report goes on to describe the following scene: “During summer heat waves, Amazon arranged to have paramedics parked in ambulances outside, ready to treat any workers who dehydrated or suffered other forms of heat stress. Those who couldn’t quickly cool off and return to work were sent home or taken out in stretchers and wheelchairs and transported to area hospitals.”

Based on these appalling allegations, the invaluable watchdog group American Rights at Work has called for a holiday season boycott of Amazon. This will clearly run up against our consumerist desire to save time and money — but each time you’re tempted to click the purchase button, remember what’s at stake for the people who make the wheels of Amazon’s empire turn.

Like most boycotts, this is a terrible idea. A boycott needs a specific demand that can be won in order to lift the boycott, and an institutional commitment to building the boycott. “Until Amazon gets the message to stop the exploitation, and start respecting workers…” is not a specific demand. (With rare exceptions, it’s hard to demand that someone “get the message.”) Whether American Rights at Work has any institutional commitment to building the boycott or reforming Amazon beyond collecting an e-petition is an open question.

Asking people who use Amazon for a considerable portion of their shopping to sign a pledge without giving them any evidence that it will make a difference in anyone’s life is a recipe for exhausting sympathy, not building power.

In general, progressives are quick to call boycotts as a response to wrongdoing rather than as a tactic in pursuit of a goal. (Remember the Obamacare-related Whole Foods boycott?) Without a plan to win, they erode credibility, especially when taking on a nationwide giant like Amazon. Aesop has one lesson about this. But I prefer Omar’s.

Share on Facebook

He picked it up and turned it around for us to see, and there it was. A big red LED rectangle, like a bedside alarm clock. Counting down the minutes left in the set.

We all cheered. I think we got it. It was a little tug at the thread, at the lie of rock and roll. The Dionysiac infinities that have to end on schedule, get rolled up and loaded out to accommodate the long-suffering Hollywood Hills neighbors who can never be transported away from the traffic and the noise, no matter how expansive the moment, how much reverb on the guitars.

I looked at the display, running backwards, and I said to my wife, “Someone better defuse that bomb.” It was the tenth anniversary of 9/11, so it was funny.

She said, “What?” She was in it. So was I, in my way.

I listened to the National from the beginning. My friend Alec started their first label, Brassland, with guitarist Bryce Dessner. I would have friendly conversations with Bryce when I ran into him at Alec’s house or saw them play, and I bought everything they put out on Brassland. The first time I saw them play live was in the smallest, shittiest room at the Hollywood Knitting Factory, in an audience that might have numbered 25. I was surprised to see how skinny a body Berninger’s deep, sad voice lived in.

My favorite song up until that point was “Slipping Husband” off of their second album, Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers. At the end of the song, Berninger repeats to the title character, “Dear we’d better get a drink in you before you start to bore us.” (Rivers of booze run through National songs.) Three times through, Berninger half-mutters, half-sings the line in his gloomy baritone. Then he unleashes it one final time in a painful, unsustainable scream. The scream is disproportionately powerful, revising every other measure of the song, claiming a vaster, darker musical space than the daylit rock and alt-country gestures that made up the rest of the corpus.

In concert, Berninger couldn’t wait to get to the scream – he let it loose on almost every song. It lost some of its power through overuse, which I mentioned to Alec. He told me to tell the singer. I chickened out.

The next time I saw them was at Spaceland, with easily ten times the crowd, after they had left Brassland and had released Alligator on Beggars Banquet. It’s still one of the best shows I ever saw in Los Angeles, or ever. Their sound was already way too large for the venue. The Dessner twins had figured out the spacious grandeur of the guitar arrangements, swirling around surprises in the rhythms and delicate orchestrations by Padma Newsome, Bryce’s partner in the indie chamber ensemble Clogs. I asked Alec if they were trying to be U2. “I don’t think that’s it,” he said. I had a limited body of musical references, but there was something in there – the majestic sweep, the inviting seriousness.

Not long after, the National went on another tour, supported by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Following a Pitchfork endorsement, buzz-drunk fans filled clubs, only to empty out after Clap Your Hands Say Yeah finished their set and leave the ostensible headliners haplessly playing to thinned-out rooms.

I read about this, with sympathetic dismay, from a beach house in Massachusetts, where my first wife and I had retreated together to get out of Los Angeles and to try and make art. I was writing and recording songs on a laptop and making my first attempt at building a screenplay. She was writing a novel and a long piece of art criticism. The beach house, empty and exposed in October, was our second stop on the sabbatical. The first stop was a commune in southern Colorado, not far from the Great Sand Dunes, where I played Alligator for her for the first time and we mostly managed never to run out of red wine.

We get possessive about bands. When they get too big, when they go from small clubs to big rooms to Saturday Night Live to Staples Center, we get jealous. “I knew them first,” we say, to no one who cares. It’s unseemly that all those new people think they’re having the same pleasure that we had when we first encountered them. It’s ridiculous. We had a personal relationship to occult knowledge; they’re nodding along to the latest hit.

For the most part, this isn’t my problem – I’m happy for my favorite bands’ success, and mostly I don’t catch on until they’re popular anyhow. (They Might Be Giants might qualify as an exception.) I would have been happy to share The National with the world. But I wasn’t entirely ready to share them with my wife.

In Massachusetts, she fell under her writing, became pained and withdrawn. I thought I could help but my emotional arsenal was limited, at the time, to a range of clownish cheer-up routines. She took a final month away from me back in Colorado, and drove back and forth between the commune and town, listening to Alligator on repeat, enduring the CD skips from the rough dirt roads. When she came back to Los Angeles, the album was all hers. My voice is similar in timbre to Matt Berninger’s baritone, but everything I said pushed her a little bit farther away, while his songs invited her deep under the folds of his black veil, into their own dark, lonely bedroom fort.

It was blindingly obvious that her experience of The National was more profound than mine. I could no longer listen to it in the same space as her. Before long, I could do little of anything in the same space as her. She moved out of our apartment. The National came through town, and I asked Alec to hold her a spot at the door when they played the Troubadour. He put me down for a plus one, and I had to explain to him that I wasn’t going.

I have a new wife now, and, happily, as far as I know, my ex has a new partner. I keep a playlist for my wife called “Ruined Songs for Heather Joy” – the tracks that I want her to have, but I can’t really give her, because they’ve been too much a part of my life up until now, too much played on the soundtrack to the last love’s end, too much placed on seducer’s mixes during the brief, manic months before I met her. She, also, is alert to Berninger’s invitation to crawl in under the black veil (and I finally understand that antic cheer is not an invitation to crawl back out). When he sings, “Sorrow found me, sorrow won,” she says that’s as accurate a picture of depression as any she’s ever heard painted. When I took her to see The National perform at The Wiltern, she fell all the way in love. I was happy to introduce her to the band. It had already been taken from me once. I barely even noticed the second time.

On the stage of the Hollywood Bowl, Berninger had left the clock to face the crowd. We all knew the show had to end. But he picked it up once more, and threw it over backwards, and time stopped so they could keep playing. They played “Terrible Love” off of High Violet. Repeating “It takes an ocean not to break,” singing and screaming, perfectly screaming, Berninger wandered out along the outer lip of the Bowl stage and into the crowd, clasping outstretched hands, surfing on the warm sea of his making. He pulled us all down towards him, through the colossal hillside amphitheater, into a room smaller than Spaceland, where we all fit.

We all crawled into the fortress together, where I remembered that the sound contained blackness but wasn’t contained by it. There was light under there. There was profound, ordinary sadness. There was triumph – not U2-sized triumph, but something more human-sized, the kind of thing you could take along with you without having to pretend all the time you were in a movie. There was tenderness, there was communion, and there were all the notes I’d heard there before I let others, lovers, listen for me. At some point, the clock must have reached zero, the bomb must have gone off, and we all got to be there forever.

Share on Facebook

I did credit the source in my interview, but it, along with my other two, more emotionally trenchant pieces of advice were edited out, fair enough. I first gleaned this from either the novelization of Summer of ’42 or its sequel, the novelization of Class of ’44. Neither is text-searchable on Amazon or Google Books, sadly.

Take it away, Frank.

Share on Facebook

I watched Kick-Ass last week (Big Josh: it doesn’t suck), but left it out of my Monday Movies gig because I was short on time and I had this exercise in mind. A screenwriter’s “beat sheet” is a list of significant moments – less detail than a list of scenes, more detail than three-act structure. I’ve been in screenwriting classes where we were asked to do ten-point beat sheets. Screenwriter Blake Snyder, known for Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot but better known for his screenwriting manual Save The Cat!, compiled a fifteen-point beat sheet, believing that the exact same beats should fall not only in the same order but arriving at roughly predictable page numbers of a screenplay. (For better or worse, his work has moved from observation to prescription.)

Below the fold, I’ll read the Kick-Ass screenplay by Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn (downloadable via Simply Scripts) and see how it matches up to the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet, a/k/a the BS2. Each beat says what page Snyder believes you should find it on in parentheses next to it, and I’ll indicate in my discussion where it actually falls. The rule of thumb for translating screenplay pages to screen minutes is 1 page = 1 minute and I’ll indicate how far apart the film and the screenplay get.

(I’m not going on record saying that this or all movies should follow the BS2 exactly — I’ve been trying to internalize the lessons of Scott Myers’s Narrative Throughline and Christopher Vogler’s Writer’s Journey as well, both of which could be used to look at the structure of this and many other movies. I have not been trying to internalize this horse pill. Also if you have my copy of The Writer’s Journey I’d like it back.)

THE BLAKE SNYDER BEAT SHEET

PROJECT TITLE: Kick-Ass
GENRE:Superhero

1. Opening Image (1)

A costume-clad figure stands atop a skyscraper… and plummets to his death. The imagery clearly states that we’re playing with the superhero myth here.

2. Theme Stated (5)

Dave Lizewski’s monologue brings in the theme starting from page 1 with

Then follows six pages of establishing how unexceptional he and his life are, leading to this exchange on page 7:

This debate is the theme of Kick-Ass. It doesn’t quite get stated as a thesis until page 14, when Dave gets his first costume:

3. Set-Up (1-10)

According to Snyder, these pages should introduce every main character in the A story, and suggest that there are “Six Things That Need Fixing” about the hero. It’s a “full-fledged documentation of the hero’s world labeled ‘before’.” In Kick-Ass, we get Dave’s friends Marty and Todd. We see Chris D’Amico, the mobster’s son who will show up as Red Mist. We actually get a good set-up of the romantic B-story, watching Katie Deauxma look right through Dave. Dave’s main problem is that “like most people my age, I just existed.” He’s also incurably horny, and since his mother’s death, he and his father drift through life without too much connection. (In the script, the scene where they talk about cereal ends with the presentation of tickets to “Spiderman 8” – the film wisely cuts out the gift to emphasize that “life just goes on.”) Lastly, he’s an easy mark – he and his friends get their cash and comics boosted by thugs in the alley behind the comics store.

The first 10 pages all belong to Dave. The bottom of page 10 brings us our first look at the D’Amico operation, and our first allusion to Big Daddy and Hit-Girl: “This would be the guy who looks like Batman.” We don’t get to see Damon/Big Daddy and Mindy/Hit-Girl until page 14.

4. Catalyst (12)

Is the catalyst – known elsewhere as the inciting incident – when Dave gets the Kick-Ass costume in the mail on page 14? It’s unusual, because it’s an action of his own choosing. One hypothesis is that Hit-Girl is the protagonist, and Kick-Ass’s viral video is the inciting incident that gets Hit-Girl in the game. I like a provocative reading as much as the next guy, but I don’t buy it, not least because the video may accelerate Hit-Girl’s trajectory but it doesn’t really change it. I think there’s a non-traditional catalyst — the change in Dave’s life comes from within, from his idea. After all, “the comic books had it wrong.”

5. Debate (12-25)

From the moment he puts on his costume, Kick-Ass starts training. On page 22, he crosses the Rubicon: Dave spies the two thugs who laid him out in the set-up, and decides to take-them on. (In the movie this lands at minute 17, reinforcing the Page 17 Rule.)

6. Break into Two (25)

This is pretty clearly the moment where Dave, having almost lost his life to the thugs, decides to intervene on behalf of another man running from two thugs (page 33, minute 30). This leads to the Kick-Ass video going viral, bringing Hit-Girl and Big Daddy into play.

7. B Story (30)

Katie’s renewed interest in Dave starts on page 40, when she asks him to coffee. His friends assure him that it’s only because she thinks he’s gay. In the film the first date is here, but the underlying problem with the relationship gets set up in the debate section – a smart choice, because the mixed success (a girl finally notices him, but only because she thinks he’s gay) reinforces the disunity that helps move Dave into action as Kick-Ass.

8. Fun and Games (30-55)

This is the section of the movie that pays off “the promise of the premise.” The media attention to Kick-Ass falls under this (pp36-40), as does Kick’Ass’s first encounter with Hit-Girl and Big Daddy (pp46-52), though it’s not exactly light-hearted.

9. Midpoint (55)

The midpoint is the middle of the script and the middle act of two (most three act structures imagine a roughly 30-60-30 divide in the three acts. Which totals 110 pages. Keep up.) Here, the stakes are raised: it’s either an “’up’ where the hero peaks (though it’s a false peak) or a ‘down’ when the world collapses all around the hero (though it’s a false collapse).”

The victory, aided by Hit-Girl, against Rasul’s men is definitely a “false peak”. And directly following on page 53:

10. Bad Guys Close In (55-75)

Chris D’Amico hatches a plan to catch Kick-Ass (p61, m57). There’s a setback (due to Big Daddy and Hit Girl’s interference, p68-70 m63-70), but Chris persists in using the Red Mist ruse to find Big Daddy and Hit-Girl (p81, m80) leading to…

11. All Is Lost (75)

Big Daddy’s death (p 93, m91) definitely qualifies. According to Snyder, movies from Star Wars to Elf introduce “the whiff of death” here (Obi-Wan bites the dust in the former; in the latter, Will Ferrell ponders leaping from a bridge).

The whole script is only 104 pages (the film 111m), so we’re running late – my screenwriting teacher George Melrod once explained that he likes to think of movies as three acts followed by a finale, which may make more sense here.

12. Dark Night of the Soul (75-85)

This exchange (p94-97, m92-95) anchors this section:

13. Break into Three (85)

On p.97/m.96, Hit-Girl knocks on the bad-guys’ door (to a great Ennio Morricone riff), then cut to:

The script shows Dave finally jumping off a rooftop, aided by the jetpack. The film keeps the jetpack hidden.

14. Finale (85-110)

The assault on D’Amico’s office, p97-101, m96-107.

15. Final Image (110)

(p104, m110): With the Joker quote, a final ironic twist on the theme that reinforces an age-old comic book theme: if ordinary people become superheroes, ordinary people will also become villains.

Kick-Ass takes a while to get started, then has a compressed first half of Act II, a long second half, and a compressed Act III. Much of the structural idiosyncracies come from the Hit-Girl/Big-Daddy plot, which has much greater development than that of an typical ally. Strong scenes for the romance B-plot and the D’Amico/Red Mist characters also shape the structure.

Here’s why I don’t think the Hit-Girl plot qualifies Kick-Ass as a dual protagonist vehicle: while Hit-Girl’s problem is obvious — she’s been turned into a killing machine by her father at the cost of her childhood — the movie doesn’t really make that a problem for her. Instead, it’s part of Dave’s final puzzle: he has to be physically courageous enough to help her win the final battle, but the normalcy that he carries around for the entire movie is the even-greater gift he’s able to give to her at the end.

In the romance plot, Dave goes from invisible to wrongly perceived by Katie. When, on page 79, he comes out to her as both Kick-Ass and as straight, he’s really happy, and he’s achieved a great false victory — he’s stopped lying to Katie about his identity (on two fronts) and he’s finally getting laid. But that truth comes at the cost of one more lie, to himself: he promises her that he’ll stop being a super-hero, breaking the promise to himself that catalyzed his adventure.

Hit-Girl and Katie highlight what Scott Myers likes to talk about as the protagonist’s move from Disunity into Unity. Dave’s initial attempts at physical courage fall apart because they’re based on lies, and his journey requires him to accept be Kick-Ass while insisting on the value of his true, unexceptional self.

Share on Facebook

• Deadwood remains my favorite-ever show, though it was clearly less successful than any of Klosterman’s four.
• That ”the ultimate takeaway from The Wire was more political than philosophical” is a point in its favor, and David Simon’s critique of institutions is one of the most politically complex and philosophically interesting (and entertaining) things to ever appear on television.
• Breaking Bad is fantastic, but also unbearable to watch. I only just brought myself to finish Season 3 last week. If it were a feature, it would have released some tension by now. It never releases tension.
• The holy top tier is very boy, although The Sopranos has vital female characters and Mad Men’s are arguably more central to its purpose than its men. I think there’s a case that Six Feet Under doesn’t make this cut because of sexist bias.

Still, he’s right about the dazzling central feature of Breaking Bad, which is that Walter White is long past the sly gray area that Weedsinhabited for its first three seasons (so, I gather, is Nancy Botwin). Plenty of people have died because of Walter’s actions who didn’t have to; not only has his cost to society vastly outweighed the benefit of providing for his family, he no longer even has those personal stakes: he’s both beat his cancer into remission and racked up enough cash to serve that initial purpose.

But I don’t think Klosterman’s exactly right in his conclusion:

There’s a scene in Breaking Bad‘s first season in which Walter White’s hoodrat lab assistant Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) tells Walter he just can’t “break bad,” and — when you first hear this snippet of dialogue — you assume what Jesse means is that you can’t go from being a law-abiding chemistry teacher to an underground meth cooker. It seems like he’s telling White that he can’t start breaking the law after living a life in which laws were always obeyed, and that a criminal lifestyle is not something you can join like a club. His advice seems pragmatic, and it almost feels like an artless way to shoehorn the show’s title into the script. But this, it turns out, was not Jesse’s point at all. What he was arguing was that someone can’t “decide” to morph from a good person into a bad person, because there’s a firewall within our personalities that makes this impossible. He was arguing that Walter’s nature would stop him from being bad, and that Walter would fail if tried to complete this conversation. But Jesse was wrong. He was wrong, because goodness and badness are simply complicated choices, no different than anything else.

In the world of Breaking Bad, this argument applies more to Jesse than it does to Walter. Jesse is capable of horrible acts, but tortured by them; without Walter’s guidance, he’s a knucklehead, not an evildoer.

But Walter is native here, and to the manner born. Or at least sculpted long ago. Walter has a pulsing vein of barely tamped-down rage that cancer slices open like a box cutter on a vein. His boss at the car wash, the old friend who purportedly cheated him out of millions, his existence — something about the impersonality of cancer brings out something in Walter that is ready for bad and has no need of breaking.

Share on Facebook

I started a tumblr called It’s Class War! Your submissions are welcome at the link.

I began to tweet.

And I continue to write the Monday Movies at The Weblog.

Let’s not talk about Google +, okay?

Share on Facebook

But because his power allows him to absorb and control limitless energy, he easily shoots their firepower back at them.

Time Bandits: Evil is surrounded by the time cavalry: cowboys, hoplites, the odd space cannon. They give him everything they’ve got…

…and back it comes.

I think it’s a deliberate quote.

Share on Facebook

Comics have gone from being despised and derided to an art form. How did that happen?

I’d like to think Marvel had a lot to do with that. When I started, I worked for a publisher [who] used to say: “Don’t use words of more than two syllables. Don’t worry about characterization or dialogue. Just give me pages with a lot of action.”

And I did that for years, and then I got really sick of it.

So I started using a college-level vocabulary. I felt the reader would look it up in a dictionary, which wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, or get it by osmosis. The publisher really hated that, but it didn’t hurt the sales of the books. I also started playing up the characterization so you differentiated between one and the other.

My big run with Marvel was from 1984-1988, and reading comics increased my word power. Reed Richards was a great vocab instructor — I remember learning the word “amorphous” from him. I picked up “gangrene” from an episode when She-Hulk got her hand stuck inside a bubble of slow-moving time, which came with a complex idea about blood flow.

What did you learn from comic books? The ones for kids, if you’ll pardon the expression. Joe Sacco doesn’t count.

Share on Facebook

Don’t ever say: “L.A. doesn’t have any seasons.” Our seasons just don’t look like New England seasons. Instead, we have a season when the jacarandas bloom (right now) and a season when ash falls from the sky. We have a season of gloomy mornings (which isn’t in winter) and a season of Technicolor sunsets. We have a season when Mt. Baldy is covered in snow — and a season when you can’t see Mt. Baldy at all.

But I love The One AM Radio’s song “In A City Without Seasons.”

Contradictions! We haz ‘em. The new album, Heaven Is Attached By A Slender Thread, is my first real ear crush of 2011. It’s ambivalent about L.A. through and through — in “Plans” Hrishi sings, “Fuck this town and all the things I have been / I am leaving here as fast as I can” — and I’m not. But I love driving the streets to his despair at them.

Share on Facebook

This is all by way of saying yes, I’d love a copy of the new David Foster Wallace. Everyone lives like this? It’s a thing?

UPDATE: Oops. I forgot that I am actively reading The Ask by Sam Lipsyte. It’s so good.

Share on Facebook