High Maintenance
Oct. 22nd, 2021 06:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraI did get dressed yesterday, but didn’t leave the house, and as the day went on, I felt paler and paler, and more and more loitering (as in, O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms) until finally, in the early afternoon, I took to my bed, and there spent a cozy afternoon, reading, dozing, talking to the cat, watching High Maintenance and feeling vaguely guilty. As in: You have a To-Do List to check items off from!
I have a kinda/sorta theory that one of the reasons people get so sick that they have to stay in bed is that they really want to stay in bed, but the pressures of contemporary life are such that they can’t really justify it.
I have a hard time justifying it, too.
But whatevs. It’s clearly what body and spirit wanted to do yesterday, however rebellious the mind.
###
Ichabod misrepresented High Maintenance.
He told me it was mindless entertainment—that’s what I’ve been craving recently, mindless entertainment—whereas, in fact, it’s pretty high-level entertainment.
High Maintenance is thought-provoking.
Not in the portentous way of—gag—Ted Talks or the other “mindful,” sermonizing little rants-cum-podcasts that are so popular today, and which I have always thought were a kind of processed Buddhism, stripped of all sustaining nutrients, kinda the way white flour is stripped of all sustaining nutrients.
No, High Maintenance really makes you think, kind of the way that eavesdropping on strangers’ conversations makes you think.
Most filmed entertainment is loosely structured after novels.
But each High Maintenance episode is a short story.
Short stories are actually a much higher art form than novels. Whereas novels can sprawl, short stories have to be tight. Novels are narratives; short stories are moral dilemmas that get resolved—one way or another if they’re written well—in their last couple of paragraphs. In this regard, short stories are rather like jokes, and y’all know how much I love jokes: They always involve an epiphany.
Short stories are much, much harder to write than novels, and there is a much smaller market for them, so practically no one writes them anymore.
I am actually a very bad short story writer.
I can’t quite seem to choose the right details. The right details are always there in what I write but they’re crammed in with a hundred other details, so it isn’t until I’ve lost all sense of ownership of a short story, forgotten the actual writing process, that I can actually see it, say, This one, not those.
And by the time that happens, the impetus is gone, and I’m no longer interested in writing the story.
###
Among the High Maintenance episodes I watched yesterday afternoon was one about a middle-aged couple that goes to visit their daughter in impossibly hip Greenpoint. At one point, they are scoring dope from The Guy—the itinerant marijuana bike salesman who provides continuity between the episodes—and the middle-aged man asks, You got any Thai stick?
Thai stick? What’s that? asks The Guy.
This kind of reminded me of a conversation I had with a young Vietnamese-American activist a couple of years ago during which I referenced the Grace Slick song White Rabbit.
She was young, maybe 24, 25?
White Rabbit? she asked. What’s that?
It’s a well-nigh impossible truth to wrap your head around that all those little pieces—Thai stick, White Rabbit—you balance your theory of the world upon, the little cultural Legos as it were, will turn to dust much, much sooner than you think.
Leaving what exactly?
Ah! That is the question.
Anyway, I haven’t run across too many pieces of….—Well. Let’s call it “art”—that tackle that particular bittersweet eternal truth.
But High Maintenance did. And it did it very well.
I have a kinda/sorta theory that one of the reasons people get so sick that they have to stay in bed is that they really want to stay in bed, but the pressures of contemporary life are such that they can’t really justify it.
I have a hard time justifying it, too.
But whatevs. It’s clearly what body and spirit wanted to do yesterday, however rebellious the mind.
###
Ichabod misrepresented High Maintenance.
He told me it was mindless entertainment—that’s what I’ve been craving recently, mindless entertainment—whereas, in fact, it’s pretty high-level entertainment.
High Maintenance is thought-provoking.
Not in the portentous way of—gag—Ted Talks or the other “mindful,” sermonizing little rants-cum-podcasts that are so popular today, and which I have always thought were a kind of processed Buddhism, stripped of all sustaining nutrients, kinda the way white flour is stripped of all sustaining nutrients.
No, High Maintenance really makes you think, kind of the way that eavesdropping on strangers’ conversations makes you think.
Most filmed entertainment is loosely structured after novels.
But each High Maintenance episode is a short story.
Short stories are actually a much higher art form than novels. Whereas novels can sprawl, short stories have to be tight. Novels are narratives; short stories are moral dilemmas that get resolved—one way or another if they’re written well—in their last couple of paragraphs. In this regard, short stories are rather like jokes, and y’all know how much I love jokes: They always involve an epiphany.
Short stories are much, much harder to write than novels, and there is a much smaller market for them, so practically no one writes them anymore.
I am actually a very bad short story writer.
I can’t quite seem to choose the right details. The right details are always there in what I write but they’re crammed in with a hundred other details, so it isn’t until I’ve lost all sense of ownership of a short story, forgotten the actual writing process, that I can actually see it, say, This one, not those.
And by the time that happens, the impetus is gone, and I’m no longer interested in writing the story.
###
Among the High Maintenance episodes I watched yesterday afternoon was one about a middle-aged couple that goes to visit their daughter in impossibly hip Greenpoint. At one point, they are scoring dope from The Guy—the itinerant marijuana bike salesman who provides continuity between the episodes—and the middle-aged man asks, You got any Thai stick?
Thai stick? What’s that? asks The Guy.
This kind of reminded me of a conversation I had with a young Vietnamese-American activist a couple of years ago during which I referenced the Grace Slick song White Rabbit.
She was young, maybe 24, 25?
White Rabbit? she asked. What’s that?
It’s a well-nigh impossible truth to wrap your head around that all those little pieces—Thai stick, White Rabbit—you balance your theory of the world upon, the little cultural Legos as it were, will turn to dust much, much sooner than you think.
Leaving what exactly?
Ah! That is the question.
Anyway, I haven’t run across too many pieces of….—Well. Let’s call it “art”—that tackle that particular bittersweet eternal truth.
But High Maintenance did. And it did it very well.
