David Milch - David Milch - The Idea of the Writer (Day 1 Part 1/2) lyrics

David Milch lecture #1 WGA Theater December 12th, 2007 82 minutes Transcript Day 1 Hey Gabi, did you like the script? Written long before the deadline. Actually I sent that script in it was like 7 minutes after 12. We writers are unlovely creatures under duress. We're no day at the beach under the best of circumstances but… Hi Bernadette. But you know now I'm thinking “these miserable ba*tards, there's gonna be a grievance, I'm seven minutes late and I'll probably be brought up on charges.” That's kind of an index I think of our predisposition to project into the other whether the other is our ostensible leadership in the union or the bosses, a malice and a kind of punitive attitude toward us which probably is at least four to five percent legitimate. And I think “now watch they'll bring me up on charges for being seven minutes late.” But I think that that's because what kind of qualifies us to do what we're doing, or certainly makes us eligible if it doesn't qualify us, is a certain ambivalence toward order in any manifestation. Somehow the doubleness…[starts talking to Scott in the audience, whom we can't hear] Now see that's an ostentatious placement back there. Is that Scott? That's pa**ive aggressive Scott. Come up here, come up here! You have to watch what? Why what's it gonna do, walk away? Damn you! See Scott works for me and it's typical of writers once they get into authority they're the most miserable, critical… And so what I started to say and it's probably two parts, two sides of the same coin, what makes you eligible to be an artist of any kind is an experience of the structures of order, which, for one reason or another, predisposes you not to accept them as a given. Or, if accepting them as a given, to project into them an authority over us of which we disapprove. And which we feel justifies us in postulating an alternative order. Sometimes that alternative can be a country of the imagination. Sometimes... You know, when I graduated from college it was the time of the Vietnam troubles. I had gotten a teaching fellowship at the Writers' Workshop in Iowa, so I was out there. They had a very nice place for me to live as part of the fellowship. The guy whose house it was, I had a basement apartment down there. He was a puppeteer, this guy, as well as he taught cla**ical literature or something. And I was drinking pretty good. I was also doing research in other areas. And periodically I would come upon his puppets, and it would f** me up. In fact by way of validating this thing about... you know, projecting into whatever the source of order is, you know, having a kind of malicious... a predisposition to posit them as not out for your own good, I said: “Sure, he's putting the puppets there to drive me a little f**ing nuts, this guy.” Dr Arnad(?), I just remembered his name. (5:49) At college, the thing about being a writer, I am of an age where the whole idea about being a writer was how well did you hold your liquor — and write. It was a given that you were supposed to be drunk. Because Hemingway was a drunk, Faulkner was a drunk, Fitzgerald was a drunk. All my teachers were drunks. Richard Yates - big drunk. Kurt Vonnegut - tremendous, tremendous consumer of cannabis. And I was an alcoholic anyway. So now the order that I was given could not have been more benign. I had to teach a course twice a week, and it was… Iowa at that time, they weren't that good at football. Great basketball team, Downtown Freddie Brown, John Johnson. “Oh really?” Now they both had very good professional careers. But the point was, part of my job was to teach these guys. And the way that the department made sure that you understood that these athletes were not to be judged too harshly was you got an additional ten bucks an hour for every one of these guys that you tutored. And you could tutor as many of them simultaneously as you could find. That's like 120 bucks an hour, right? Believe me those guys did well. So in terms of the benignity of the circumstance, the puppets notwithstanding, I had a place to live; I was making a good buck; I had sold a novel. The downside there was I sold it to a number of different publishers. And of course that bespeaks, again, a certain ambivalence toward the contract - the whole concept of contracts - which is one form of order. Plus, I was sh**faced all the time. It got very quickly to where I never got home. I went six months, I never got back to that apartment. While the weather was good I'd sleep in the streets. It was a small town. But even so it got a little nippy. You'd find occasion: “You know, I wonder if I have a drinking problem? No…" And then in the winter I would stay at this place, very inexpensive place, The Hotel Jefferson. Three bucks a night, or something. And there was this one-armed elevator guy (9:11) and he was f**ed up on something. The way the bars worked, the regular bars closed at eleven and then there were places that served beer, that didn't care if you smoked reefer inside until two. This place, Little Bill's. I couldn't drink beer, but I would, y'know… Actually, I was not a good consumer of reefer, but any port in a storm as the sailors tell us. So at that point I'd make my way to The Hotel Jefferson and then inexplicably I would conceive an overwhelming desire for candy. The elevator operator was this one-armed guy. He was the night watchman and he was the elevator operator. And I felt the need to explain to him... It wasn't enough that I would explain to him: Oh, I had this ma**ive desire for candy; I had to conceal my felt sense that he might find out that I was a drunk and a f**ing tea-head. I'd just buy the candy one bar at a time and then I would find a pretext to go back. I'd say, “Look, can you hang out for one more second? This is crazy; I wanted the Clark bar, but I also want a Zagnut.” (10:39) Now I go back there and I say, “Do they have 3 Musketeers?” He says, “Just get in or off the elevator!” Which is to say, that we project into... Now this elevator operator was not an apostle of order, except the fact that he operated the elevator. But after a while he knew it was me. But I was projecting into him an ability to judge me. On the other hand I couldn't get back to the apartment. So if I was really that concerned about appearances, here I am sleeping in the streets, but then I'm trying to explain to the elevator operator why I want my fifth Zagnut. So we're kind of selective about, or idiosyncratic, or subjective, let's say, in our sense of our relationship to whatever we identify as the ordering authorities in our life. [Mutters: now I'm thinking if I should tell you this horrible story. Once I got back to my apartment... Ugh, no I'm not gonna tell you that story.] So here's the thing: now there's a strike going on and we feel at once, I suspect, generally depressed because we who have this very tentative, and kind of provisional, and ambivalent relationship to order, to the structures within which we operate. Including the structures of imagination. Now for reasons which we don't completely understand and probably don't fully endorse, our bridge to the world just got shut down. All sorts of antisocial behaviour occur as a possibility in response to that. Like after I lost my deferment after the first year there in Iowa, and I had a low number for the draft, I'd been accepted to Yale Law School. So I go back to Yale Law School. But I had also been issued a credit card, a Gulf Oil credit card, on the back of which says you can stay at Holiday Inns. (14:00) And again in terms of having this imperfect understanding of what constitutes a contract, what constitutes legal obligation, well these idiots sent me a credit card! So I moved in to The Holiday Inn. The idea that you had to pay for a credit card, it just wasn't something that I understood. Also I became a thief. But I like not to judge myself too harshly in that regard because I didn't understand the idea of property that well. If you've had your boundaries violated one way or another, y'know. So anyway I'm in law school. I was on acid. I was on acid consecutively for more days than everyone in this room together has taken it from birth until today. Trust me on this one thing. I go to school, I didn't go much... The guy who wrote a book called The Greening of America, evidently forty years too early, Charles Reich was one of the teachers there. (15:22) President Clinton was a cla**mate. Hillary was a cla**mate. Clarence Thomas was a cla**mate. I didn't know this at the time because I didn't meet any of my cla**mates. I had one friend who would trip with me as much as I would but he weighed 270 pounds and so he metabolised it a lot better than I did. Bobby Uptight was his name and he went on to become famous as the ba** player in a group called Root Boy Slim. Anybody ever heard of them? No. Anyway at that time he was also in law school to beat the draft. He had been drafted third by the Miami Dolphins but that was not a draft-able commitment. We would be loaded all the time and we both had motorcycles. Me on a Norton 650, glued beyond recognition and on acid. We'd go up by the East Rock and we would play this thing called Random Particle. At night. You close your eyes, you open the bike as far as it'd go and the first guy that opened his eyes was gay. He went off a cliff, Bobby went off the cliff. I will tell you how I came to leave law school. Bobby got caught wrong by his bride. She goes back to Chicago to divorce him. They had a small child as I recall. He's saying, “Well what should I do?” Y'know I say, “Well, what you wanna do?” I said, “Well you think you might want to save the marriage?” He says, “Possibly.” I said, “Well you'd better get back there right?” He says, “Will you watch my apartment?” I said, “How can you even ask me that?” I mean I'm staying in the Holiday Inn, it doesn't make any difference to me. So I'm in his apartment. Now he's from the South, his great grandfather somebody was in the civil war. So I'm going through all of his stuff y'know and I find a civil war sword. So I start to destroy all of his furniture, all of his clothes, and everything. For no particular reason. But again the idea of order: the f**? Now I find a shotgun. I find shotgun shells. I'm Jewish but I can a**emble a shotgun. I'm out in the street with my shotgun, with my shotgun shells. Boom! Boom! I blowing out every goddamn streetlight on Whitney Avenue. And because I'm on acid I'm thinking, “Look at this, the gun goes off - the street light explodes. The gun goes off - the traffic light explodes. The gun goes off - the bubblegum machine on the police car keeps coming.” Evidently I missed. So I stash my shotgun under a car, I mail my shotgun shells, I go running up to the cops I say, “Jesus Christ! somebody is bullsh** back there!” They say, “We know, we got the report, get outta the area!” So now I'm thinking, “The Kid, bulletproof!” So I go fifty feet. Now, the dramatic inadequacy of reality sets in: “YOU DUMB DAGO ba*tardS! IT WAS ME!!” Here they come. Bing! Bang! Boom! So I'm arrested. That could obviously be construed as shooting… y'know. So that's how I left law school. I had to plead to a felony which made me ineligible for the draft which was after all the purpose of the exercise. Meanwhile, what happened to my novel? Well one thing was, by this time I had sold it to a couple more publishers. So that was receding as a realistic possibility. My relationship with the structures of order was deteriorating. Some of you I'm sure will be familiar with this expression: I know that I'm about to hit a bottom when my circumstances are deteriorating faster than I am able to lower my standards. (21:00) So I wound up at a Port Authority bus terminal and was saved probably from even more compromising behaviour by this guy I see coming through in a top hat and an opera cape. And I'm looking at him, it's Floyd! This guy I knew, we were undergraduates together and he dropped out when he was a soph*more. He says, “I am gonna be become the biggest acid dealer in America.” I said, “God love you, good luck.” So now it's like three or four years later and there he is in an opera cape and I say, “Floyd!”, not having many alternatives. Now people who are criminals or artists or... How many have read Crime And Punishment? In Crime and Punishment, the guy trying to prove God's existence, commits a murder. Which is a way to say that there's again that doubleness... So Floyd, it was very important to Floyd to prove to me that his decision to drop out of college had been proved out because this guy had made so much money, I'll tell you what he said, which actually I wound up taking as a challenge, he said, “I have made so much money that even you can't piss it away.” Well, I had a new job: pissing away Floyd's money. Elvis was making a comeback in Las Vegas and I said, “Well let's see about that project, pissing away your money and we'll check out Elvis.” So we go out there. I lost a number of hundreds of thousands of dollars before Floyd came back from having a Coke. And I never got to see Elvis. But I did get to meet all of the Ike-ettes, Ike and Tina Turner's backup group. They were working in the second room. I've always believed I came out on the long end of that transaction. Now we know that I turned out to be a writer but I think it's also clear that... And then things started to get bad after that. I wound up in jail in Mexico and so on. Now I graduated first in my cla** from Yale; I sold a book as an undergraduate; I was a bit of a fair-haired boy. Lillian Hellman, y'know, and all these people, I was the new flavour there for seven minutes. And yet here I was, in jail in Mexico: ambivalence towards order. That comes from having a mixed experience of order when we're young. Now, so here we are again back at strike central. I like to think that wherever I am is central. This is the thesis that what's called self-centred fear: I am the piece of sh** at the centre of the universe. There is a sense of panic and disempowerment and desperation which I suspect is kind of percolating into the consciousness or the unconscious of a lot of writers now, because the secret suspicion that we, if we don't nourish it, at least we cohabit with it, is: I am very lucky that I have had any kind of employment at all. If they ever knew what's going on in here not only would I be unemployed, I would be institutionalised. (26:11) And probably should be. Now if that's the case and now we are asked to go out on strike. We hate our guild leaders. Or we love our guild leaders and we hate the bosses. In either case it's the Stockholm syndrome where we identify with those we perceive as our captors. Because our idea of those who legislate the order in our lives is wounded and distorted. When I talk to writers who are more or less within the walls of the city and they piss and moan about: I take notes from morons all day long and I have to do it because they're my bosses. What I hear is: I'm home. I get to do my work and I get to resent the organising force in my life. The only downside with that is: and I'm writing sh**! Well if that's the case that is a form, before we're out on strike, of what we were talking about when we all sat down — that's a form of despair. If you have to say that you're writing sh** for whatever reason you've lost the possibility that the bridge to the world of our art offered as a way back from our woundedness. Because that resentment and doubleness and antagonism and apocalyptic resentment of order, the structures of art offer us an alternative to. But we have to be brave enough, or something, to let that participation heal us. But people who've been abused one way or another go to the familiar. Y'know you ask a prostitute, I had a cousin who met one once. Part of the deal after you come: “What are you doing in this line of work?” the trick says as a way… this is how he begins to disengage. “What are you doing here?” I'll tell you a funny story. I had this guy, a good friend. Another junkie. By this time I was a junkie. Larry. He died. Larry died sober, but at this point Larry was a... he had multiple opportunities… I think he was a... he was certainly a junkie, he was probably gay and maybe didn't want to be. He was a compulsive gambler. And he weighed about 350 pounds. His act was he couldn't hit himself, I think because he was ambivalent about being gay, so the idea of penetration was a little rough for him. [Laughs from audience] Well that's funny unless it's not funny. So he would bring these prostitutes in and in exchange for him giving them dope they would hit him, they'd shoot him up. Then he would turn on a tape recorder and he would record himself rebuking them, “I just don't understand how you can do this to your parents.” Now the who*es would get all, [crying] “I'm gonna stop.” And he would say, “When are you gonna stop?” “Soon Larry. Thank God.” So you know it's win-win. That was a digression, what were we talking about? The idea of identifying with your captors, is that what we were talking about? I think we might have moved past that... Thank you! So Larry was in despair and he called… by now I was working out here and he was dying. He said, “I'd like to try and get sober before I die.” Oh I remember... Dick Yates, wonderful writer. Leonardo DiCaprio is making Dick's novel, Revolutionary Road, after all this time. A drunk. He was my teacher at Iowa and he was out here and I was... we had this strange sort of... A way he could keep his dignity was I hired him to do a film script, which he never did. It was like Larry and the who*es. We'd meet twice a month so he could indict me for having sold out my talent. Dick by this point was so f**ed up, I says, “Larry you're gonna drive Dick around.” So now both of them had a job. Actually it was a wonderful thing to watch because Larry represented everything... Y'know Dick was a working cla** guy who was smitten with Fitzgerald, and so Larry represented everything for which Dick had undiluted scorn. But he actually liked him a lot. Plus Larry would smoke these horrible f**ing cigars and he'd drive Dick around and they'd go to the movies and all this stuff and then Larry would review the movies. Now Dick was a guy of considerable repute and accomplishment and he would say, “I'm listening to this guy review James Bond movies. I don't like the movies, I don't like the reviews…" For the first time in years he was happy. And Larry was happy. Larry would come over to the house in the morning and he'd make our kids rice pudding, at about six in the morning. He was so happy to be able to meet his obligations. I'll be goddamned. Oh, so you're in despair. If you have arranged your life in such a way as to conceive of yourself as a victim, whether or not you are getting a pay cheque, you have lost the opportunity which the gift to you from God — which is your art — has offered as a way to heal and to lose your resentment of order. If instead of saying, “Look, I gotta write procedurals. It's the only thing that pays the bills, but I hate it, I wanna do character stuff.” As if those two things were necessarily in opposition. That's horse sh**. By which I mean... I was taught by people who took all my money, “Don't listen to what people say, watch what they do.” If that's what your doing and someone doesn't have a gun to your head, that's what you want to do. Because we do go to the familiar. And if we have a stake in believing ourselves victimised, we pursue situations in which we can conceive of ourselves as victims. What does all this have to do with the strike? Probably very little but I as they said in some film, “I know a way out of hell.” Which is to re-encounter the possibility of letting your art... And look all of us have had the experience, the flickering experience, of what art's possibilities are. Which is for just an instant you feel whole. For just an instant you feel part of things. And there's a wave that comes over you and you think, “I'm home. And nobody's trying to hurt me. I have a place in the world.” End OF CLIP (Day 1 Part 1/2) 37:40