Sunday, March 30, 2008
Suburban Lawn Care


The great thing about living back home in the suburbs for a while is everything I do can be used in my books (since they are all set in the suburbs).

I am going to some high school theater productions this spring, which I couldn't have done in New York City, (or I could have but it wouldn't have been the same.)

Even something as innocuous as mowing the lawn becomes useful. Tomorrow there will definitely be a "mowing the lawn" scene in my new book!


Saturday, March 29, 2008
Opening Night in Portland


Cool picture taken by journalist Anne Marie Distefano who went to opening night here in Portland. I love the grey sky with the black wires in the background. Very Portland.


Wednesday, March 26, 2008
HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL


I'm working on this new story about a girl who hangs out in the Drama Department of her school (but isn't in any of the plays). I don't know what plays kids do nowadays so I had her school do PAINT YOUR WAGON since I remembered it from when I was a kid.

I was bor-rn
Under a wan-drin' star
A wan-drin'
Wan-drin'
Star

So I rented the movie of it and watched it and decided to just keep it in the story. Then I kept going and decided to have the girl work on another play so now I have to watch OKLAHOMA! I don't mind the musicals, they're sort of fun to watch. They are just so alien to my particular GEN X sensibilities. Gen Xers just aren't that happy.

What other plays do high school kids (or junior high school kids) produce nowadays? Maybe they do High School Musical. (I saw that too, thanks to my nephews James and Misha.)

If you have any thoughts or ideas email me. In the meantime you will find me at the local high school watching the kids do AS YOU LIKE IT.



FRESH AIR w/ Terry Gross


Got some interesting trips coming up so I am trying to get back in the habit of bringing my camera with me and doing more regular blog entries.

A very fun thing today: got to do an interview with Terry Gross for FRESH AIR. that was a thrill. That is a little like seeing PARANOID on Ebert And Ropert in the sense that I feel like I've been listening to Fresh Air my whole life, and now to be on it is sort of surreal. Needless to say, Terry sounds just like she sounds on the radio. Very soothing and calm and so interested!! Surely I am not that interesting! But she somehow makes you feel like you are and so then you start waxing philosophic on various subjects. I was very nervous before hand. Every once in a while I totally go blank in these situations, but I felt like I was okay. And then afterward that nice feeling of having done something significant and which you will probably remember your whole life.

Otherwise, things are good in Oregon. The wind blows in the trees. The mud sticks to your shoes.

The paperback of PARANOID, which I now LOVE has sold out everywhere, (it wasn't a huge initial printing so that's not quite as impressive as it sounds) But still, that is a good sign.


Friday, March 14, 2008
EBERT


Here's Roger Ebert's newspaper review of PARANOID PARK:

"Paranoid Park" is graced with those peculiar Van Sant touches of discovery and absurdity, delightful because they're at once so right and so inscrutable. Like the touching and funny scene with Alex's younger brother in which he sits on Alex's bed and incomprehensibly recounts scenes from a movie (see how long it takes you to figure out which one). Or the slow-mo shot in which all the skater kids are called to the principal's office and they line up in the hallway, striding toward the camera like a secondary-school "Wild Bunch." Or Detective Lu's clueless reference to a mythical group he calls "the skateboard community." Or the quotations from Nino Rota's circus-like score for Fellini's "Juliet of the Spirits" playing against the rainy chill of a Northwest day.



St. John's Skatepark


Going back to my roots this afternoon, digging up some old Skateboarding stories from various websites, the same ones I used to do research when I was writiing PARANOID PARK. I'm digging them up for some projects for kids in Chicago I am visitiing later in the month. The problem is in the the three years since I wrote the book, all the skateboard sites have gotten rid of their "skateboard stories" sections, mainly because people can upload videos of themselves and don't need to describe the things they did anymore. There used to be hundreds of these sites, now there are a few here and there.

In the meantime i was searching local skateparks and noticed that most of the local skateparks in Portland are not covered. This is why Burnside was so great, you could skate even on rainy days. This is a weird aspect of Portland architecture and design. Nothing has a roof on it. You are always in the rain. Of course it is considered uncool in Oregon to shield yourself from the rain in any way. People don't have umbrellas, they just walk and get wet. It is like some weird Eco-purtianical phenomenon. No cover from the rain. The rain must touch us. Bring the rain, for it is good.

Meanwhile, the skate park stands empty because you can't skate on slick cement.



hawaii


Went to Hawaii for a week, to celebrate everything, or really to rest from everything. I went with like one shoulder bag, thinking I'd get some stuff there. Like some new VANS. but they don't have them in hawaii, actually they do, but i didn't see any I liked. Mostly there, I surfed. Mostly at Waikiki, which is the easy surfing spot. i was out there for hours, every day and then collapsed into my bed every night. nothing like being exhausted from good old physical activity, sun and fun, etc. lot better than staying up too late on the computer . . .


Saturday, March 01, 2008
ART FORUM WEIGHS IN


You're probably wondering what ART FORUM thought of the PARANOID PARK film. Here's some excerpts from the review of by Amy Taubin. (For any first time visitors, I write Young Adult novels, one of which was made into the film PARANOID PARK by Gus Van Sant.)


. . . While the voice-over gives us access to Alex’s subjectivity, Paranoid Park is hardly a first-person film. Indeed, Van Sant goes out of his way to introduce, into what is essentially a collage structure, expressive elements that are almost surely outside the boy’s frame of reference. Portrait painting is a touchstone here. It can’t be accidental that Van Sant cast Nevins, a Portland-area teenager with no acting experience and modest skateboarding skills but whose face bears a striking resemblance to the subject of Correggio’s Portrait of a Young Man, the similarity emphasized by the way Nevins wears his turned-around black baseball cap with the back pulled down over his forehead and his light brown shoulder-length hair fluffed out beneath. Last Days was a portrait film too, but it was burdened by our knowledge of the actual iconic figure on which it was based; it was as if a third term—Kurt Cobain—had inserted itself into the dyad of artist (Van Sant) and model (the actor Michael Pitt).

Despite the fictional narrative of Paranoid Park, the aesthetic problem that Van Sant is grappling with here is precisely that of portraits, whether painted or photographed, in which the subject is anonymous: How does the artist represent the exterior so that it speaks to the mystery of interiority? And whose interiority—the artist’s or the subject’s?

. . . Paranoid Park is an exceptionally delicate, refined, and affecting piece of poetic neorealism. Van Sant takes real kids and real places (Paranoid Park—actually, Portland’s Burnside Skate Park—with its sloping cement walls, darkened pipes, and billboard-covered skyline, is as scary and alluring as in legend) and represents them in ways that defy codes of film realism. Cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s shadowy nightscapes and the sensuous rhythms of his camera movement suggest that, although Alex could never admit it even to himself, the danger of Paranoid Park is a libidinal lure, and his experience in the railroad yard has undercurrents of a sexual initiation gone very, very wrong. But it is Leslie Shatz’s sound design and the daredevil balance of spontaneity and precision in Van Sant’s editing—the seemingly effortless way images and sounds gather over time—that make Paranoid Park extraordinary. In a film that rests on close-ups of a fifteen-year-old boy’s milky-skinned face, heart-stoppingly poised between childhood and adolescence, one sequence, like the campfire scene in My Own Private Idaho, is unforgettable. It occurs soon after the death of the security guard is finally played out in detail. Alex is in the shower, the camera tight on his face, which is mostly obscured by his hair. As the water beats down, he leans his head on the tiled wall and slowly slides down. The sound of the water merges with the cries of birds, as if the birds on the wallpaper above the tiles had come alive. The pitch and intensity of the sound rises until it becomes a shriek—the shriek that Alex hears in his head but can’t let out and from which he will have to defend himself for the rest of his life. Van Sant, who ten years ago directed a peculiar shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, pays homage to the master of guilt and punishment but, in keeping with the formal freedom of Paranoid Park, graces this fragile protagonist with an open ending.