Synecdoche, New York

The play's the thing...

Charlie Kaufman has done it again. He wrote (and directed) a movie all about what it's like to live inside my head. The first time he did it was with the movie Adaptation, which tells the story of a screenwriter named "Charlie Kaufman" who is trying to adapt a book about orchids into a Hollywood movie. When I saw Adaptation, I felt like Charlie had been listening to my private thoughts and transcribing them onto the page. It was eerie how much the struggles of the character "Charlie Kaufman" mirrored my own. I wondered if anyone else would appreciate a movie that seemed to be directed at me personally.

I've written myself into my screenplay.

Now, Charlie (the actual person) has come out with another movie reflecting the inner workings of my not-so-spotless mind. It is called Synecdoche, New York and it is about a playwright and director named Caden, played by the brilliant Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who creates a play about his own life. But not just any play. The play that Caden creates is an actual, full-scale, real-time depiction of the everyday events of his own life. The play is staged in a massive warehouse which replicates in minute detail the streets, buildings, shops, houses and apartments of Caden's world. Naturally, this replica includes a replica of the warehouse which in turn also replicates Caden's world. And that replica contains another warehouse. And so on.

We're actors. We're the opposite of people.

Of course, the replicas are populated with actors who play the parts of the people in Caden's life, including his wife and daughter and himself. As the play goes on for years and years, these relationships change and grow, both outside and inside the play. Eventually it becomes quite confusing as to who is playing whom. The line between reality and theater becomes blurred to the point of non-existence. Eventually, Caden enters into the world of the play, taking up the part of a minor character. Though, as he puts it: "None of those people is an extra. They're all the leads of their own stories."

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

In the play Hamlet, the main character, Hamlet, decides to put on a play to ferret out the murderer of his father. Hamlet tells the actors that the purpose of the play is "to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature." For a long time, this was the Holy Grail of not just theater, but art in general. Painting, sculpture, literature, photography, theater, cinema, etc., have all sought to reproduce as faithfully as possible the realities of our world and in so doing reveal life's truth. But reality isn't always the truth.

Truth is for suckers, Johnny Boy.

Plenty of artists have taken a very different route from the 'mirror up to nature' one. Picasso wasn't exactly going for photorealism in Guernica. Waiting for Godot doesn't even attempt to portray the world as we know it. Slaughterhouse Five bounces around from one time period to another and even transports two of its characters to a distant planet. But each of these works manages to convey some essential truths.

Let us not waste our time in idle discourse!

Perhaps the 'mirror' is the key. I have a mirror in my bathroom that is normal on one side and magnified on the other. When you hold the magnified mirror up to nature, are you seeing more of the truth or less of it? And what about those mirrors in your car that say 'objects may be closer than they appear'? Sometimes the mirror is lying.

Half of what he said meant something else, and the other half didn't mean anything at all.

In one of my favorite plays, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, two minor characters from Hamlet become the leads in a kind of mirror image version of the original play. Instead of focusing on Hamlet and all his tribulations, this play focuses on the two college buddies who have been invited to Elsinore to cheer Hamlet up after his father's death. Although, once they arrive, they realize they have really been called in to spy on Hamlet to find out why he's acting so crazy. Right from the start, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern begin to notice that the world has stopped making sense. The laws of physics and probability have gone out the window. Logic and reason fail them. They don't know where they are, why they are there, or even which one of them is which. The only person who seems to know what's going on is a character known as The Player, who has been brought in by Hamlet to stage the play-within-the-play that will help Hamlet catch his father's killer. The Player alone seems to realize that they are all caught up in something beyond their understanding, headed for a final act which always ends the same way.

Audiences know what they expect, and that is all they are prepared to believe in.

Synecdoche, New York reflects a world where reality becomes theater and theater becomes reality. A playwright mounts a production dramatizing every moment of his life, spanning nearly two decades, consisting of dozens of sets and hundreds of actors and including a play within a play within a play within a play, and on and on, like a never-ending house of mirrors. And in the end, the main character becomes a bit player and the bit player becomes the lead. Because we are all leads in our own stories. Just like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players...

So, therefore, I am living in Synecdoche, New York. As are we all. We are all mounting productions of our lives and playing our parts on the world stage. And each of these productions is like a mirror that reflects what we think is the truth. Whether we are from Synecdoche or Ilium or Grover's Corner's or Mayberry.

The Color Purple

"I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it."


For most of my life, politics has essentially been a spectator sport. And like most other spectator sports, I only become interested in it when the stakes are high, like the World Series, the Super Bowl, or the Olympics. I am currently going through a phase of fairly intense interest in politics, although I still treat it as a spectator sport. I watch it on TV, read about it on the internet, talk about it with my friends. Although last week, on election day, I did get a chance to participate. And I was surprised at how fun and exciting it was.

I first became interested in politics during the 1972 presidential race. Most of my eighth-grade classmates were for Nixon, and therefore, so was I. Not that I actually knew anything about Nixon or what he stood for. I just wanted to be like everyone else. I had one friend, however, who was a staunch McGovern supporter. His name was Cliff and his dad was the minister at our church. As far as my classmates were concerned, McGovern was a Communist. And that was the worst thing that anyone could be. But one day, Cliff sat me down told me about McGovern and the things he stood for. And it turned out that I agreed with McGovern. And then Cliff told me about Nixon and the things he stood for. And I totally disagreed with Nixon.

Cliff took me downtown to McGovern campaign headquarters to learn more. I read their literature and immediately got on board. Soon, I was handing out buttons, silk-screening posters, and putting up flyers like a true believer. I got caught up in the excitement of the campaign and as November drew nearer I had high hopes for our candidate. I remember very clearly that it was raining that election day and Cliff and I thought that maybe the rain would deter some of the more complacent Nixon voters.

It didn't.

In high school, my political activities were focused on environmental issues. As a Boy Scout, I had gained a deep love and respect for nature and felt compelled to do my part to protect the earth from the ravages of pollution and overdevelopment. I joined the Ecology Club at school and signed up to take part in a protest march to help save the Red River Gorge.

The Red River Gorge is a beautiful and unspoiled area in the foothills of the Appalachians where the winding Red River has carved its way through layers of sandstone to create a spectacular series of canyons, arches, cliffs and waterfalls. It was one of my favorite places to go camping and hiking. But the Gorge was being threatened by a proposed dam, and the Sierra Club and various other radical tree-hugging organizations were fighting the Corps of Engineers to try and preserve the Gorge's unique ecosystem.

It was my first protest march and it was a doozy. We loaded into a bus for the trip to Frankfort, singing songs and swapping stories on the way down. I got to know some of the other Eco club members, mostly hippie types and other outcasts. The march was huge. It proceeded down a main thoroughfare in front of the state capitol, where we stopped to chant slogans and hear speeches and generally do protesty things. It was loads of fun. And it worked. The plans for the dam were shelved for further study. In 1993, the Gorge was declared a federally protected area, preventing any further threat.

The summer after my junior year, I got an inside look at politics when I attended Bluegrass Boys State. Boys State is a program sponsored by the American Legion that provides kids the opportunity to learn about state government by setting up and operating a mock government, all in the space of one week. We had a mock legislature, where I learned about parliamentary procedure, Robert's Rules of Order and bureaucratic paralysis. We had a mock election, where I learned about cronyism and deal-making. And we had a mock trial, where I learned how much I enjoyed showing off.

The mock legislature was revealing for two reasons: first, those who knew the rules were able to get a lot done, and second, very few people knew the rules. During the mock campaign, my friend Gary allied himself with one of the more popular guys and when his candidate was elected mock Governor, Gary got appointed mock Attorney General. And when Gary got appointed mock Attorney General, I got appointed mock Deputy Attorney General. That meant that at the mock trial, kind of a finale to the week's events designed to teach about the legal system in action, I got to get up on stage and prosecute the case for the state.

And I was awesome.

With our appetites for politics sufficiently whetted, Gary and I decided to run for class officer our senior year. Actually, Gary decided to run for Class President and convinced me to run for Sergeant at Arms. I had no idea what a Sergeant at Arms was, but I figured no one else would either. Unfortunately Gary was defeated. I, however, was elected to office and proceeded to serve with dignity and valor. My main function was to produce the senior class play (we did "Oklahoma") which turned out to be one of the hardest things I ever did. Also the most enjoyable.

In college, my radical side resurfaced and I joined a group of hardcore leftists to protest the building of a gymnasium on the sight of the student killings at Kent State University. But, whereas the trip to Frankfort with the Eco Club was all camaraderie and folk songs, the long bus ride from Wesleyan to Kent State was more about conspiracies and paranoia.

When we arrived at Kent State, the mood was ominous. Heavy clouds darkened the sky and tensions were high. The rumor was that the long rally and march was to end at the site of the proposed gymnasium where we would storm the chain link fence and occupy the sacred terrain. Supposedly, the FBI was there to keep an eye on us, as the gymnasium site was protected by Federal Order. These were not the glassy eyed-hippies of the environmental movement, but rather the wild-eyed remnants of the anti-war crusade.

At the rally, we heard from several speakers, but the one who really stood out was Mark Rudd, founding member of the SDS and basis for the Doonesbury character Megaphone Mark. Rudd had been underground for years due to his association with the Weathermen, but he still spoke with the raspy conviction of those turbulent times. He got us all riled up, chanting the slogan, "Long Live the Spirit of Kent and Jackson State!" It was one of the more eye-opening aspects of this trip to learn that ten days after the killing of four white students at Kent State, two black students were killed in a similar protest at Jackson State College in Mississippi. For all the news and uproar surrounding the Kent State killings, I had never heard a peep about Jackson State.

The Neil Young song "Ohio" was played over the PA system as the rally evolved into a march. As rumored, we wound our way through campus and ended up at the gymnasium construction site. There were thousands of people gathered there, chanting slogans, fists raised. Rudd and the other leaders wore bandannas over their faces. I noticed several men on nearby rooftops pointing telephoto lenses in our direction. The word was passed around, "you don't have to cross the fence line if you don't want to." But when the fence came down, we poured in by the hundreds. There were police standing by, but they didn't move to stop us. We massed in the center of the site, where bulldozers and dump trucks were already waiting to erase the past. We heard more rhetoric, chanted more slogans, and eventually, peacefully, left the area.

That trip was quite a dose of radicalism and it left me stirred for more action. A few months later, I found myself back with the leftists, occupying the office of the president of the university. We were there to protest university investments in South Africa. Most of the other students I knew didn't really care too much about the issue, they were more concerned with grades. But the issue seemed important to me, especially when I learned that many students didn't believe that we had the right to protest at all. Of course we have the right to protest!

Unfortunately our protest didn't get much attention. Repeated attempts to attract the interest of local TV stations were answered with the disheartening comment, "call us if someone gets hurt." The sit-in devolved into a series of frustrating meetings reminiscent of the paralytic bureaucracy and stifling parlimentarianism of Boys State. We did, however manage to encourage the university to review its South African investments and begin the long slow process of divestment. As it turns out, one of the students who was with me in the president's office during the sit-in is now there on a daily basis as the current president of Wesleyan.

By senior year of college, my political activism had just about run its course. I voted in my first election only to see Jimmy Carter get clobbered by Ronald Reagan almost as bad as Nixon beat McGovern. I wasn't buying in to the Reagan mythology. His whole idea of "what's good for business is what's good for America" has been around literally since the pyramids. And it always ends up the same, the rich get richer and the poor get screwed. As a college graduate, I bounced from one meaningless job to another waiting for the crumbs to start trickling down my way. Meanwhile, stockbrokers and lawyers were getting fat and happy.

I finally took the advice of a friend and went straight to the source, taking a job in a law firm in Washington D.C. There were crumbs aplenty for sellouts like me in Reagan's America, but I couldn't help noticing the throngs of homeless people camped out across from the White House in Lafayette Park, victims of the Reagan budget cuts. No crumbs for them.

Living in D.C. during the Reagan-Bush years completely soured me on politics. It was all sound bites and voodoo. Eventually I stopped participating altogether.

I did get a little jolt when Bill Clinton was elected, although as an unregistered malcontent, I hadn't actually voted for him. But Bill managed to tarnish his image (as well as a certain blue dress) and once again I felt that politicians were a bunch of weasels. That feeling was exacerbated when the King of All Weasels, George W. Bush, was elected. Well, the first time he wasn't so much elected as appointed by the Supreme Court. But to see the same clown get elected again was really discouraging. Didn't like him in 2000, didn't like him in 2004, don't like him now.

But this new guy I really like. I'm even reading his book. He's smart as hell. And he's cool. Will he live up to expectations? That may be impossible. But I'll say one thing for him, he's got my interest. And after all this time, that's no small achievement.

Mile Swim

It's hard not to be distracted these days by all of the hype and hoopla surrounding the election. It's a historic event. It's an important decision. And it's interesting as hell. But, meanwhile, life goes on.

One of the best ways I have found to clear my head of external distractions is to go swimming. Spending forty-five minutes with my face submerged in water is a great way to block out the world. My main focus when swimming is on my breathing. That and counting. It's pretty basic. When you pare down your conscious processes to just breathing and counting, you are pretty close to a state of pure being. Plus it's great exercise.

I have always loved the water. When I was a kid my family lived in a neighborhood with a swimming pool just down the road. We could easily walk there and on summer days we practically lived there. Back then, swimming consisted mainly of 'horseplay'. Jumping, diving, splashing, inventing games, anything to spend more time in the water. But the real fun was jumping off the diving board. And in order to do that I had to pass a test. One of the first real tests of my childhood: to swim the length of the pool.

Swimming The Length was a major rite of passage in my neighborhood. I still remember the day I did it. It was during one of the fifteen minute breaks each hour when the adults were permitted to swim and the kids had to cool their jets. It was a major event, because during 'break' all the other kids were sidelined with nothing else to do but watch you.

Gordy, the redheaded lifeguard, walked slowly along the edge of the pool as I made my way out of familiar shallow territory and into the exciting and dangerous realm of the Deep End. My Mom walked just behind Gordy, offering words of encouragement and a confident smile. I can still see the tiled wall at the far end drawing slowly closer. Below me, nine feet of water. There was no turning back. I was determined not to fail. Finally, I made it. I had swum The Length. Friends and neighbors applauded. Gordy congratulated me. Mom hugged me with a warm towel.

The next summer, I was persuaded to try out for our neighborhood swim team. I'll never forget that day either. My older sister Cindy was on the team. She was a great swimmer. My Dad had been on the swim team at Wesleyan. I felt like I had a legacy to uphold. Only I didn't want to be on the swim team. I liked swimming for fun, not for competition. I was a pretty scrawny kid and lacked the upper body strength for real swimming. I just liked goofing around in the water.

The first day of practice we swam a twenty lap warm up. It was a huge struggle for me. I barely finished. I felt like I was going to puke. I tried to get excused from the rest of the practise, but was pressured to continue. Things got a little better when we started racing. I was actually pretty fast in the short sprints. I even did O.K. in a couple of meets. But I never forgot the shame of that first practice. I just wasn't cut out to be on the swim team.

I never stopped loving the water, though. I spent as much time in the pool as possible during the summer. And on our family trips to Florida, I enjoyed swimming in the ocean just as much. At summer camp as a Boy Scout I even learned some lifesaving techniques. But there was one thing I was always afraid to try, even though I secretly wanted to. And that was the Mile Swim.

The Mile Swim is a merit badge awarded by the Boy Scouts, or "Scouts" as they now like to be called, for (you guessed it) swimming a mile. There are a few other requirements as well, but it's pretty much the swimming the mile part that gets you the badge. I remember passing by the pool at Camp Covered Bridge one day when they were holding the qualifying swim for the Mile Swim merit badge. I stood and watched as about a dozen boys swam lap after lap, still haunted my own humiliating performance at that first swim team warm up. I thought about how cool it would be to earn that merit badge with the little red seahorse on it. That would be some real vindication.

I never did try to swim the mile, though. It seemed impossible. A mile! Who could swim that far? I couldn't even swim twenty laps.

But all that was a long time ago and it's all water under the bridge, so to speak.

Several years ago, after injuring my Achilles tendon, I started swimming laps at a local pool as an alternative to running. I started off easy, swimming for about twenty minutes at a stretch, which was enough to leave me dizzy and gasping for breath. Over time I have gradually increased my workouts to the point where, earlier this summer, I was doing 1500 yards three times a week. It occurred to me that I was only 260 yards shy of the coveted Mile Swim. So, I decided to go for it.

It being summer, I was swimming on the early morning schedule Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. So one Sunday morning, I got up at seven a.m. to arrive at the pool by seven-thirty. The pool was nearly deserted, which is just the way I like it. I swam my usual 1500 yard workout and was feeling pretty good. I decide to keep going. Technically, I needed four more laps, plus another sixty yards, so call it six. Surprisingly, the additional six laps went by pretty quickly. It was over before I knew it. I had done it. I had completed the Mile Swim. This time there was no applause. No congratulations from Gordy the lifeguard. No warm hug from Mom. But there was a deep feeling of satisfaction. One of those little shadows from the past that had been lurking about for all these years had been turned into a halo. It felt good.

I decide to reward myself for my achievement, so I went on eBay and bought a vintage 1970's BSA Mile Swim merit badge. The one with the little red seahorse on it. The one I've always wanted.

Now that I have conquered the mile, what next? For a while I rested on my laurels, thinking a mile was plenty long enough for a workout. But after a couple of weeks, I decided to bump it up a little more. Now I'm up to two thousand yards. I still make a mental note when I pass the mile mark. It is no longer the unattainable goal of my childhood, rather simply another 'milestone' along my path. But it will always be a special one. It took me a long time to get there. And each time I pass it by, I will remember the journey.