Snakes

Posted April 25th, 2006 by Sean Williams

It has been so long that Blogger didn’t recognize me when I showed up and I had to dig up a login and password. Which doesn’t quite put me in the historical bad bloggers of all time, but it does mean that people who check infrequently might not check again for another week.

I should start by apologizing for not writing. I saw some friends two weeks ago who confessed that they read my blog, which simply didn’t occur to me. Two of the funniest guys I know said they like my blog, and to the both of you, Nate and Anthony, I would like to say, in short, I never liked either of you. You can both swing on my sack. Deb’s my only friend.

I’ve mentioned a Kafka quote on here before, one which I can’t seem to find verbatim and my wife hid all my Kafka books because she’s tired of me “getting all pouty”, but in it Kafka talks about how his writing stares back at him, mocking him “like a drop of ink on the side of the page that refuses to be cleaned” or something like that. There is an imperfection in the written word as it works for someone like me, and for most of my generation. *Delivery* is so crucial in an ironic age, and our sensibilities are increasingly ironic, to the point where they almost feed on themselves.

“Snakes On A Plane” will fall on deaf ears, and how do you explain it? Celebrity culture is embraced in the *opposite* way it was in years past. I don’t know when the switch was, I don’t know how to explain it, but I know that, as a kid, I went to see Steve Taylor, a terrible croonie Christian rockstar, and my friends and I have pictures of us kissing his tour bus. I’d never heard a single note of his music.

Older people wonder what our fascination is with stars that are totally devoid of talent, how we can make stars out of hopeless plastic fools, and the only explanation is that we are laughing *at* them. Not a single person wants to sit down and eat a meal with Britney Spears, and we take it as a given that her music is fun and danceable because of the team of straggly haired guys in their late forties who grew up listening to KC and The Sunshine Band and Stevie Wonder and they take a month’s worth of vocals, put her in a latex suit in the video and let us point and laugh.

We’ve struck a deal. “Snakes On A Plane”… we trust that there is a group of guys who came up with “Die Hard” and they know we’re gonna laugh at the stupid CGI, and we’re gonna laugh at the stupid dialogue, but that they will also give us what we’re paying for. And Sam Jackson knows it too. He wouldn’t let them change the name, he knows we want to watch him kick some snake’s ass on a plane. Every single movie in this genre is “product”, recycled ideas, recycled heroes, recycled crap, and Sam Jackson said “No, this is crap, this is the same crap, but instead of terrorists, it’s snakes, and instead of a high rise, it’s a plane. I’m gonna be Arnold, and the bad robots are gonna be snakes. Fucking call it ‘Snakes on a Plane’, ’cause that’s what it is.”

So. Anyway. It’s hard for a guy like me to keep a blog because I write in my voice, which is totally dependent on delivery. Even if you know me well, if you haven’t spent time with me in a while, you’re gonna start reading this in your voice. Which you should, you’re reading it. I should be a better writer, I should be able to write in the way that makes sense. But these blogs stare back at me, mocking me, like an ink stain that won’t be cleaned up.

The original idea behind this blog still remains. It gives me a chance to create characters that are reacting to things happening in the world, which hopefully will help inform the characters I create and the music I write. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the less I write in this blog, the less happy I am with the music I’m writing. I’ve felt really cruddy about some of the music I wrote for Air Guitar, and last night the three of us finally broke down and admitted that the opening song of the show sucks (for an opening song). (What do I know, it might suck as a song…)

So, I’m gonna try to be more diligent about writing. I would ask that if you find me being a total asshole on here, please understand that the show we’re writing now is full of assholes of different stripes. Oh, and also, I can kind of be an asshole a lot of the time.