$20,000 Flash Fiction Contest Entries

Did you hear about this absurdly great $20,000 prize for a 100 word story? I wrote three "stories," though you can only enter two. Thought it would be fun to share them. They're all pretty stupid. Here they are!


Two Poets

Two poets sat arguing about how their words would change the world.

"My words are so beautiful that they will inspire the people to overthrow their oppressors," said one.

"No, my words are so haunting they will drive people into each other's loving, warm embraces, where forever they will linger," said the other.

"Romance is a low aim of poetry," said the first poet. "My poems will bring justice!"

The second poet laughed. "What are you, a virgin?"

The first poet, deeply embarrassed, silently nodded yes.

"It is okay," said the second poet. "I am too. Like all poets."

Squirrel Birthday Party

I saw a squirrel in a jar. How did it get into the jar? Did it climb in, searching for the last bit of peanut butter? Was it stuck there by a sadistic child?

I let it out, and was surprised when the squirrel turned to me and asked why I had removed him from his resting place.

"I was trying to help," I replied.

"Well, sometimes things are best left alone," said the squirrel. "Don't you know glass jars are the best places for smelling your own farts? You ruined my birthday!"

I apologized and put him back.

Paws Off!

“Paws off!” the girl whispered to her dog. She had taken him to the art gallery with the explicit understanding that he was not to touch the paintings. “But it looks so real,” said the pup, admiring a still life of a fish and basket of fruit. “You should know better,” chided the girl, “your father was an artist.”

“My father was a drunk with a paintbrush”, the dog said bitterly. The girl thought maybe he was just saying this to sound interesting and decided to ignore the comment. “Let’s get a snack in the café”. The dog wagged his tail.

Comedy Boom Boom

Although stand up comedy has been an identifiable form of entertainment since at least Lenny Bruce in the fifties and sixties, and Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, and George Carlin elevated it to a beloved art form in the seventies and on, it didn't come into its own as an industry until the early eighties.

There weren't comedy clubs until then, but when entrepreneurs realized how much potential there was in building bar/theater hybrids where comedians could play to several mid-sized audiences every night, they sprang up all over the place. Now we sort of take them for granted as an entrenched part of the American entertainment business landscape, so much so that lots of people have stopped going, and many legendary clubs have become unprofitable.

The comedy boom held strong throughout the eighties, when most of the well-known comics of today made their bones. Jerry Seinfeld, Marc Maron, Louis CK, Dave Attell, and countless others came up in the eighties (in Seinfeld's case, the very early eighties), playing legendary clubs that don't exist anymore, making hundreds of dollars every night. A big part of the appeal of a show like Maron's popular WTF podcast is hearing old salts from a bygone heyday recount how much fun it was to be breaking into an industry flush with possibility and opportunity.

All booms end, eventually, in a bust, and the comedy boom was no different. In his WTF appearance, Louis CK recounted how the comedy boom ended for him in dramatic fashion, as he got in a motorcycle accident, lost his hair, and saw many of the clubs that provided him hundreds of dollars a night close their doors all in the same brief time-span.

Still, countless careers and reputations were made, carrying countless comics for twenty years. After a fallow period, it feels like there's a bit of a comedy boom happening again now, but with the wrinkle of a this generation of boomers finding their comedic endeavors demonetized and devalued.

It's not quite the same as what's happening with music--rock and roll is dying, if not dead, because it just isn't interesting to young people today. Play them a really fantastic guitar part from a classic punk rock song, let alone an actual classic rock song, and they most likely just won't get it. They won't like or dislike it--they'll just regard it the way a grizzly bear would regard a Frisbee or something. They've moved on to other kinds of music more appropriate to the post-human future we're hurtling toward.

But comedy is as popular as it was in the nineties, maybe even more so. Comedy podcasts (search turns up 7.5 million results), comedy festivals, Last Comic Standing, entire radio stations devoted to comedy, slews of sitcoms. Comedy, comedy, comedy everywhere you look. The interesting thing is that comedy is possibly as popular as it has ever been, yet comedy clubs are shutting down. Sure, some sitcoms, like The Big Bang Theory and Modern Family are about as big and popular as any sitcom has ever been, but they aren't at the sweet spot of mass appeal and critical consensus that shows like Cheers, Seinfeld, Frasier, and even Roseanne and the early seasons of Friends managed.

Big Bang and Modern Family are well-written, well-produced shows that are easy and fun to watch, but there's no mistaking them for cultural artifacts that will still be discussed and revered twenty years down the line, like the strongest NBC shows. NBC's attempts, and failures, at reestablishing their sitcom superiority during this present comedy boom are fairly fascinating. There was last year's big swing and a miss of The Michael J. Fox Show, which was essentially just placing a big 80s sitcom star in a show and hoping that simply having him around again would get people to watch out of comfort and habit. Didn't work out.

The more recent, compelling example of NBC's inability to do something that should, given the current cultural climate of comedic conduciveness, is Mulaney. Plenty has been written about its intentional debt to Seinfeld, down to Nasim Pedrad's hypercharged, psychotic take on Elaine Benes, John Mulaney playing himself as an NYC showbiz type, and all the rest. Mulaney's standup comedy is more or less universally liked, as Jerry Seinfeld's was.

The disjunction is clearly glimpsed in this NPR blog entitled "Please Don't Judge John Mulaney by 'Mulaney.'" We like John Mulaney, just not the single best career opportunity available to a person such as him. We like him, but not in a way that will allow him to earn money, like people in his exact position could do twenty years ago. We like him, but the apparatus around which liking someone could allow that person to benefit and create more of what we like has been dismantled (by us).

Is the sitcom still a viable context for comedic entertainment? It seems like it would always be--it's a chance to hang out (sort of), with really funny, familiar people. That is basically what has propelled the podcast boom. It's a more direct, unfiltered version of what used to require huge staffs and production schedules to achieve, and better yet, it's pumped right into your ears, oftentimes several installments worth a week. Stripped of all artifice except the indomitable will of an energetic, opinionated human to shove their view of the world in your direction, comedy podcasts are hailed for their rawness and realness. But the realness doesn't extend to appreciating how the purveyors of this raw entertainment in great volumes make a living (or, more accurately, don't make a living). We want something real, coming from a distinctive place and point of view, but we don't want that place to be one that can afford to not live with its parents. The privilege of offering content-hungry people their hard-created content should be compensation enough!

Here we can see a symptom of the much vaunted openness that internet pervasiveness into every last crevice of the entertainment industry--tearing down without building up. Sure, it was great when all music ever became immediately available to everyone free of charge. But what replaced the record industry was the YouTube lottery: now anyone can record themselves singing and post it to YouTube. Some have gotten popular and made it, only they get a fraction of what a real music star got back in the day. The odds have gotten even longer, and the payout has gotten worse. As this article points out, YouTube is responsible for 70% of music consumption, but under 3% of revenue.

Perhaps one explanation for the current glut of young people going into comedy, fueling the comedy boom, is the lack of legitimate employment options available to the exponentially growing pool of students earning degrees from unprecedentedly numerous (and increasingly valueless) institutions of higher learning. Do a few open mics, and see how many people there have at least Bachelors degrees, and how many even have graduate degrees. Simply going out and saying things on a stage is considered as good, or better, an option as any other available.

Chris Rock, possibly the biggest comedian of the 1990s not named Jerry Seinfeld, has been in the news a lot lately as he ramps up the marketing push for his new movie, Top Five. This fawning New Yorker piece by Kelefa Sanneh was fascinating for a few reasons, but mostly for how it bent itself up into a pretzel trying to rationalize Rock's inability to produce anything remotely as compelling, beloved, or relevant in the past nearly twenty years as his 1996 breakout standup comedy special Bring the Pain.

Interestingly, Sanneh cites the a huge chunk, verbatim, of the standout joke from that special--you know the one--comparing "good" African Americans to "bad" ones. It's as if she needs to remind us, and herself, why Chris Rock is still being given such a string of high-profile chances after all this time. There are some laughs in the joke that hold up all these many years later, but ethically, the joke really shows its age. But that (fairly huge) issue aside, isn't Chris Rock's continuing relevance, despite over a decade of making nothing but forgettable stand up and films, at least a bit puzzling? Even so discerning a publication as the New Yorker is hellbent on figuring out a way to rationalize giving so many turns at bat to a comedian who, even by its own admission, is in his enviable position today for writing one very resonant joke nearly twenty years ago.

How come so little went so far in the nineties, while so much counts for so little today, when the means of production, and distribution, have been so radically democratized and horizontalized? Weren't those things supposed to help us? Tell one very good joke in 1996, and you're making million dollar movies twenty years later. Tell one hundred very good jokes in 2014, and you should be grateful that anyone heard them, and go happily on your way to your day job.

The problem is that, in embracing the possibilities digital media provided us to dismantle corporate hegemony, we performed the perverse neoliberal maneuver of energetically thinking of ourselves as our own mini corporations. Stay on brand, bro.

All of this is to leave aside the most fundamental question: is it right to buy and sell the most physically tangible manifestation of human joy? Should it be so bandied about and wasted? What would be a better use of that energy? Laughter is a waste of good happiness, transferring it into a surface, disposable level. It isn't real happiness, which can be meditated upon inwardly and used to sustain a person throughout the unending moment by moment onslaught of dull gray nothingness which constitutes the essence of the experience of life.

Does it really feel good to laugh? Laughing is an unconscious experience--I forget I did it almost before I'm done doing it. It evaporates immediately as it happens. We can laugh hilariously, deeply one moment and be perfectly miserable the next. It augurs neither ill nor well particularly for our daily mood. It is a violent, overbearing, relatively isolated experience, occurring when an aspect of externality invades our consciousness so abruptly and manipulatively that we emit an unintentional, really animalistic noise. Deeply miserable people can laugh hilariously, and indeed often laugh the loudest and deepest, as they are more susceptive to being stirred by life's absurdities.

Does laughter benefit the person who caused the laughter? Comedians are well known for being among the most miserable and darkest people alive. Perhaps they have access to some version of happiness that is beyond the reach of mere mortals, but I doubt it. It seems like being in the trenches where laughter is generated on a full-time basis grinds them down into nubs of wretchedness.

The cliché "everyone's a comedian" is generally mocked for (besides being a cliché), being weirdly bitter about people partaking in an activity that generates a response (laughter) which causes smiling. Its bitterness seems to imply that the energy people expend toward generating laughter in others could, and should, be spent in more worthwhile, less ephemeral pursuits. Laughter is a momentary experience of inexplicable physiological response. Its popularity perhaps comes from the ability to abandon oneself to this momentary physiological response. Love of comedy is in this way a desperate, untenable form of existence--stringing together moments of surrender, crawling from one opportunity of being overpowered to the next.

It might be that a more humane, decent society, in which human life was taken seriously as a valuable thing that ought to be given firm direction and purpose, would have little, or at least less, use for comedy. It seems a cynical world in which every public experience of truth is permitted only because it is always leading to a punch line. Everyone is bored until they have something make them laugh.

Comedy is the most potent form of cultural information ever devised--it shakes you so that your throat makes an involuntary noise. Only a society as accustomed to, and in love with, doing nothing, would have such a deep, unending need for comedy. A healthy society would have little need or time for comedy.

Nightcrawler, Taxi Driver, & Cinematic Claustrophobia

Already drawing comparisons by more than a couple outlets to Taxi Driver, especially in what it can do for star Jake Gyllenhaal as that film did for Robert De Niro, the new film Nightcrawler is certainly an impressive, tight little thriller. Nightcrawler is probably as close to that riveting study of contemporary sociopathy as we are likely to get nowadays, but other than being a sustained depiction of an intensely Other young man desperately trying to make his way in this cruel, cold world of ours, they are completely different animals. The ways in which they are different are fairly instructive with respect to the evolution of film in the last thirty or so years.

Gyllenhaal's Lou Bloom speaks in rapid-fire, pre-packaged LinkedIn profile self-summaries, usually without blinking his enormous eyes. His intense self-promotion is rewarded fast, as the film charts his meteoric rise to the top of the grimy Los Angeles crime scene news footage hustle. There's a whole world of bottom feeders who rush to midnight crime scenes and car crashes to get raw footage to sell to local news stations--they have the advantage of prowling the streets, glued to police scanners, while their union counterparts are sleeping. The prominence of local TV stations does make Nightcrawler feel somewhat like a period piece--aren't they all mostly on their last legs, at best? But their desperation for outrageous footage that will pull in big numbers plays right into Lou's career goals.

Lou starts and ends the film as a complete psychopath--this shot is from about a third of the way in, and is a reaction to hitting a snag in his plans for exponential career growth. Does Travis Bickle ever go that insane? If he does, it certainly wasn't because of a hitch in his personal career growth outlook.

Unlike Travis, Lou never attempts to engage with another person on any level that isn't entirely manipulative. Everything he knows about the world comes from trawling the internet for information and taking online classes. The rest he fills in with sheer intensity and mastery of careerist buzzwords. The world eventually comes around to seeing him for the talented psychopath he is, and rewards him accordingly with his own company, Video Production News, complete with his own set of eager interns.

My favorite scenes in the film are between Lou and his clueless employee Rick (Riz Ahmed), starting with an appropriately awkward Craigslist-facilitated diner interview. Rick "sells himself" in the interview as someone who just wants a job, any job, and will do whatever he is told. Having grown up in and around Los Angeles, he knows how to get around, and has a phone with GPS on it, so Lou hires him on the spot. As their working relationship evolves, Rick becomes self-assured, and takes care of all the little things, freeing Lou to dive maniacally into the seedy world of guerilla TV news. Lou shows himself to be a fine mentor to Rick, despite being a complete sociopath. Lou offers plenty of great advice to his feckless employee, coaxing surprising levels of professionalism and tenacity from the wishy-washy stoner. The lesson is clear--you can, and indeed probably should, be a sociopath in order to successfully grow your own business in today's economic climate.

Capitalist critique is latent in Nightcrawler, but it's never didactic or explicit--it's more focused on showing how removal from human feeling, severing all connections to anything other than a laser-focused drive to improve your own business, are qualities that are quickly rewarded. The key to being successful in 2014 American capitalism is to whittle away as many human qualities as possible. To Lou's great advantage, he doesn't appear to have had very many of those to surmount in the first place. All he needed was a direction, an industry, in which shameless ambition and self-reliance could be rewarded.

Lou has no connections to anyone in any industry that could offer him a chance to start a career. He starts the film by begging for a full-time job at a scrap yard to which he just sold a bunch of stolen metal. (The scrap yard owner tells him he doesn't hire thieves). For most young people (meaning pretty much anyone between 22 and 35, the generation that employment forgot), this desperation to merely get your foot in a door, any door, is pretty close to accurate.

Unless you know someone who can help you get your foot in the door, or if you are already doing the exact thing that a job requires and get poached by another company, there is no chance for you to start your life. The only option is to find an industry that you can enter into on your own and scratch out success through your individual obsessive effort and undeniable dedication. Earning a living in a decent job is the luxury of rock stars only.

The aporia is familiar enough to be a cliche at this point, but it's no less dauntingly true: you need experience to get a job, but you can't get experience without having been given an opportunity. So you need to carve opportunities out of the universe by any means necessary. Are you psychotic enough to make it in America?

Travis Bickle was a lonely Vietnam vet back from the war trying to fit into society. He made earnest attempts to get involved with Cybil Sherpherd's Betsy, going to the campaign headquarters she worked at, and taking her to a movie (a porno movie, yes, but still, it was an attempt to create a shared experience of some sort, that he very wrongly thought she would like). For me, the truly compelling parts of this most ballyhooed of De Niro's performances are when he tries to pass, to be a citizen who could share his life with someone as well-adjusted and desirable as Betsy. When this fails, he gets caught up in his hero fantasy of murdering the pimps and lowlifes exploiting Jodie Foster's adolescent prostitute Iris. Of course, he carries those fantasies out in a real life killing spree, but prior to that he did try to engage with society on society's own terms, in an earnest attempt to be a decent citizen.

The way the latter half of Taxi Driver plays out, viewers believe that Travis is an evil psychopath who will meet a deservedly grisly, undignified end. But after killing the men he hates, to save the "innocent princess" Iris, Travis is unexpectedly lauded as a righteous vigilante who was the only one brave enough to take necessary action to clean up the filthy New York City streets. This is one of the key similarities between Nightcrawler and Taxi Driver, in how indulging your most ruthless, anti-social tendencies leads to acclaim, promotion, and success in American society.

But while Travis struggles with the choice, before eventually concluding that it was the only option left to him, Lou is as bloodthirstily ambitious from minute one as he is at the end of the film. He never has to try to pass--he just has to present the full force of his psychopathy to the right industry gatekeepers. The subtleties of growth, development, and change have no place in the socioeconomic environment of 2014 America--one must know who they are, embrace their strengths, and find any outlet for building their empire and, to quote our main deity, put a dent in the universe. You can't make a real dent in the universe if you don't know exactly who you are, if you aren't marshaling all of your resources to aid you in the bloody fight.

So it's Gyllenhaal's movie, but how are the other performances in Nightcrawler? Aside from Riz Ahmed's excellent Rick, Rene Russo is really the only other player of note. She is back in a big way here, after what felt like a long time just doing Thor movies and veering into something of a Viggo the Carpathian territory looks-wise. As the news director of the station Lou sells his slimy footage to, she excels at first being impressed by the exceptionally eager young footage hound, to eventually being intimidated by how completely he has mastered the seedy local TV news game, figuring out a way to manipulate her, a seasoned, wily veteran, into giving him exactly what he wants.

Even she, necessarily cutthroat and self-focused after a career of perpetually being at the mercy of the latest ratings book, can't quite fathom Lou's career goals. She even offers him a coveted foot in the door as an entry level production assistant, but this is not nearly enough for him. He wants to build his own business, dammit! Working for someone else is not good enough, because some other very ambitious young psycho could come in and hold him hostage as he did her. It's a good performance, but she has fairly limited screen time, and not much of an arc beyond reacting to Lou's aspirational maneuvers.

Bill Paxton could have been the real standout, if he had been in more than two or three scenes. In his very limited screen time, he dials in a truly vintage Bill Paxton performance, letting loose in the way only he can, channeling the raucous Aliens era Paxton. As rival crime footage scrounger Joe Loder, Paxton imparts some vital wisdom to Lou and exemplifies the pirate lifestyle needed to succeed in that field, but dies early on. The movie, like the Los Angeles nightcrawling game, just isn't big enough for both of them.

Nightcrawler has no room for anyone but Gyllenhaal, really. Maybe that's the point--to succeed in our desperate, post-employment economic environment, there is only room for yourself and your necessarily outsized ego. But compare the lack of other indelible performances in Nightcrawler with the at least four classic, career-altering performances in Taxi Driver. Obviously, Travis Bickle is probably the biggest De Niro role ever, and he is probably the most famous actor ever. But it also put Jodie Foster on the map and launched her multi-decade career as a huge star. Cybil Shepherd made a permanent impression as Betsy, and went on to having a long career and being a household name. Harvey Keitel as the vicious pimp Sport blew audiences' minds, and took his already promising film career to the next level. You could even say the film was a huge boost for Albert Brooks, in a smaller but key role, as the wary Tom.

How come there was room for so many classic performances in that film, and no room for anything but one giant fat star turn in Nightcrawler? Where did this cinematic claustrophobia come from?

Maybe it's a product of our hyperfast, hyperselfish American moment--there was no room in Nightcrawler for anyone else to make an impression, and there was no time for Lou to change. All there was room for was one man doggedly assaulting the universe until it submitted to his will. In our economy, subtlety and personal growth are luxuries you can't afford.

So don't contemplate who you are--just dig in with both hands to whatever you suspect your identity may be, play up your most aggressive tendencies, and start battering down everyone and everything in your way, until you reach an unimpeachable position. It's funny how an unrelentingly bleak film like Taxi Driver is absolute peaches and cream compared to its contemporary equivalent.

Hiroshima, Mon Amour: You Make Me Really Want to Fall in Love

A restoration of the 1959 French New Wave film Hiroshima, Mon Amour is screening at the wonderful Film Forum, and I was lucky enough to catch it as it entered its final week. I decided to see it because I knew nothing of it, other than a passing familiarity with the lofty reputation of its director, Alain Resnais. I think it's important to engage in cultural experiences that are mostly unknown--we know too much of everything before we do it nowadays.

The film isn't long, but it feels about twice its 90 minute running time. There isn't an entertaining moment to be found anywhere in it. I've never seen such a resolutely un-entertaining film. It's quite a different feeling, watching something that not only has absolutely no interest in entertaining you, but that finds the very idea of people being entertained by a series of filmed images to be absurd.

Americans tend to have two modes: work and play. We get very uncomfortable when we're neither working nor being entertained. We need at least one or the other at all times, otherwise we start to feel odd. The confidence with which the film refuses to entertain you is the most striking political element it communicates.

As the title suggests, Hiroshima, Mon Amour is all about love, that most important, but least understood, aspect of the human condition. It starts off with a woman's voice (Emmanuelle Riva) talking about witnessing the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, while images of unimaginable but real life suffering assault our eyes. Her feverish musings are periodically punctuated by a man's voice (Eiji Okada) doubting the veracity of her claims. 

After a good long stretch of the woman's voice mixing with the truly garish images, we finally see the source of the voices. Riva and Okada are laying naked in bed together, tightly, greedily squeezing each other's flesh. The woman (who, like her male counterpart, goes unnamed) reveals herself to be a French woman visiting Hiroshima to play a bit part as a nurse in an anti-war film. She met the man, a Hiroshima native who speaks fluent French, at a bar the night before, and they've been rolling around smitten in bed all night.

As they both take their time getting dressed for the day the next morning, her in a nurse outfit, him in some casual business attire, she starts closing off and icing him out, if only just a bit. Understandably, as beautiful as she is, he tries to keep their effortlessly warm mutual flirtation going, while she keeps pulling away. It comes across mostly as the necessary putting up of a front after an intense, though initial, encounter. Her cavalier attitude toward commitment is attractive, playful, confident, and irresistible. It's a supremely healthy outlook on courtship, and exactly what someone as beautiful as late 1950s Emmanuelle Riva would do.

He refuses to allow the passionate night, which was probably among the most memorable and significant of his life, to be cast as a typical, casual thing to be treated with cool indifference. He has to believe that it was as good a thing for her as it was for him, and he doesn't believe that the night means as little to her as she's making it seem.

Later, they meet up in a cafe for drinks, and her defenses come crashing down. In a scene that by itself takes up about half the film, she tells him everything about her past. She was a teenager in a tiny town called Nevers in occupied France during the war, and fell in love with a Nazi. We see images of her younger self running around to barns, cabins, and fields with her Nazi lover, while she narrates to her Hiroshima lover. When the war ends and her affair is discovered, her parents lock her in a cellar for years, cutting her hair short, and depriving her of food. She takes to licking saltpeter from the walls to sustain herself, and claws at the walls until her fingers bleed. These are hard images to look at, as upsetting in their own way as the deformities caused by the nuclear bomb.

Her new lover makes it clear that he still loves her, indeed loves her more for sharing her dark past. She is nevertheless despondent. She takes to wandering around Hiroshima in a melancholic haze, while he trails behind her, giving her space to sort through her perma-gloom.

During her prolonged confession, she says the name of the town where she loved a Nazi and was later imprisoned over and over and over again, Nevers, Nevers, Nevers. He is enchanted by the name as well, saying it repeatedly, Nevers, Nevers, Nevers. It takes on a sort of mythical quality within the film, as a code word for a past that intrudes into every present.

When the film ends, it becomes clear to both of them that they won't be able to move forward with their relationship. Though she's free of her past now, she can't be free with the person who helped her escape. She's ready to live in the present, and had to fall in love to be able to do it. But it is a love that had to be used as a pivot point, a building block for future loves, not as a resting point in itself. It's a shame they didn't meet after she had already been freed.

We fall in love so we can be close enough to another person to express our hang ups and work through them--hopefully eventually this way reaching a point where we have a nearly negligible amount to work through, and can be empty of our past enough to build a future with someone else. We can't truly empty ourselves of our past through our own efforts alone--we need someone else to help us, but for them to help us as much as possible, they have to fall in love with us. But it is a cynical, goal-oriented love.

This is why he tells her, in the film's final line, that he will remember her as Never, after she tells him she will remember him as Hiroshima. To each other, they are representations of a time when they made real strides in being able to journey toward full lives. A doomed love, but a necessary one. Perhaps we need a certain amount of doomed loves to become who we are.