In Pittsburgh, Writing About A Guy In Pittsburgh Writing About Pittsburgh

I finished Mysteries on Friday, as pleased with it this time around as the first. There’s a very nice section as the three main male characters are drinking Rolling Rock and shooting tin cans off a fence where they talk about the “will to bigness,” and though they describe it as the desire to be do things of a gigantic nature it seems to be based just as much in desire t do as fear of not doing.

It’s a good book.

Then I watched the movie. If I hadn’t been in such a melodramatic mood and properly drunk it would have been unbearable, and even so it was an incredible piece of shit. The director, who also wrote the script and is best known for directing Dodgeball, decided to combine the characters of Cleveland and Arthur Lecomte, and even with this addition managed to flatten the character to a simple street rat in leather. He also switched much of the plot about Phlox over to Jane Bellweather, but not her characteristics, which is confusing and unpleasant. And fucking Nick Nolte is Joe Bechstein, who is now not just a numbers guy but an actual gangster of the first order. Did I spell Bechstein right?

It was just disheartening to see that Mysteries got turned into such a shit movie. After all, Wonder Boys got turned into a great movie — actually I just looked it up and the guy who wrote the adaptation for Wonder Boys went on to write all the Harry Potter movies except for the 5th, weird. In any case, his script for Wonder Boys was pruned expertly from the book. He took out a few great minor characters and a large section about a seder, but he did so while keeping the same essence that the book has. He simplified, which is always needed to send a book to film, but he didn’t flatten. I wonder what Chabon things about this.

It’s Like the Fucking Great Deluge in Here!

Last night at two in the morning, my best friend and I left the house of another friend, who lives in West Philly, because it was fucking two in the morning and everybody was tired. unfortunately, by this point it had been raining for at least a couple hours straight, and of course off and on for days. Now, normally it takes 20 minutes, a half hour if you drive safe, to get from West Philly back to the neighborhood I grew up in. I didn’t get home till 3:30. The sheets of water were so thick that we couldn’t see stop signs until we were right up on them and we had to drive in the 15 MPH region. When we got on Girard Ave., which was a feat in and of itself, we started going through massive puddles at every low point, and they kept increasing in depth until we were spraying walls of water higher than the car, and the bumper of my friends tiny little 97 Saturn was somewhat submerged. At one point we drove on the trolley tracks in the center of the road because there was no way we could’ve made it in our own lane. We took a hint and made no effort to try to take West River Drive home. We stuck on Girard until we got to Lancaster — after an abortive attempt to turn on Belmont where the water got real deep, real fast, and we decided to take the long way — and took that slightly less puddly road to City Ave. We planned to go to Ridge, because it’s, you know, a ridge, and it probably wouldn’t be flooded out. When we got across the bridge we saw some people trying to go down Lincoln, so we followed, slowly, and eventually made a u-turn because there was muddy water on the road the tail lights ahead of us stopped, then started flashing. Ridge worked out well, and here I am safe and sound; I have to say though, seeing Girard so flooded out put a little fear of God in me. Nature wins, every time. This is what we get for paving over everything with impermeable surfaces.

In any case, I finished my very last piece for the City Paper this morning, a capsule review for Drive, a new movie coming out next Friday. It was horrible — the movie, not my review, which of course was stunningly well written, even moving. And now all I have to do all day is sit on my ass, watch movies, read (I’m taking a second go through with Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon), and wait for it to be socially acceptable for me to have a beer. I’m thinking 3ish, with a late lunch. I love coming to Philadelphia.

I’m going to go make soup. It’s soup weather.

Free Red Bull Day at the Office

A woman wearing a burka (burqa?) got on the bus this morning, and while of course all I could see was her eyes, it certainly did seem that she was white. I wonder how many women of European descent end up taking that kind of veil.

In other news: what I had meant to write about yesterday, before I was so rudely interrupted by a dress code, was The Rum Diary. I finished it in about a day and a half; it’s a breezy read, and entertaining. When he started writing it in 1959, Hunter Thompson was 22. Fucking 22! His character, however, was 30, and obsessed with the idea of going “over the hill.” I’m not one to require honestly in fiction, but given the fact that I knew his age at the time of writing, and have read probably too much of his interpersonal correspondance from that age, I was bothered when Thompson’s character Paul Kemp talked, sometimes at length, of feeling like he had experienced it all. It’s a relatively autobiographical novel, so when Kemp spoke I heard Thompson, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that the author’s ego was a little out of hand. I’m not sure why this bothered me; Hunter was 75% ego and 75% id, I should have expected it.

It also stood out to me because of a habit I’ve started when writing fiction. The “campus novel,” like The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, can get a bad rep as unserious or youthful (pejoratively). So, I simply bumped my characters’ ages up to 23 or 24. Instantly they can be taken seriously. I get the feeling this is what Thompson did, that he felt the things he was writing about but knew it didn’t make sense for a 22 year-old to be saying the things he wanted to say. The problem is, it didn’t really work. Just by saying Kemp was 30 didn’t make his voice any less that of a 22 year-old. And now I’m afraid that’s how I’ll sound. 24 is much less of a jump, but still.

They’re making a movie out of it, too. Johnny Depp, of course, plays Kemp. Weirdly enough, they took out one of the major characters. Weirdly enough, they did the same thing for the film version of Mysteries of Pittsburgh. It bothers me when they do that for book-movie transitions. I judge adaptations against movies like Wonder Boys and Stand By Me. Wonder Boys was masterfully trimmed; taking out an entire character, like Cleveland in Mysteries or Yeamon in Rum Diary, seems like sloppy work, intended not to fit the story into a film but bluntly rewrite it as a film.

Click Here to Read a Fax by Hunter Thompson. His letters are always fucking wonderful. This one starts “Okay, you lazy bitch…”

I’m coming up on 500 words, which I’ve made my post limit, but I want to write about people’s formative years. It’ll be up soon, I hope. I’m on my second free Red Bull and I’ve been typing like a motherfucker.