What the hell is PEOPLE MAKING DANGER? Super question!
This is an announcement, of sorts (given the world at the moment) . . .
Hey, I’ve got another book coming out, which means another opportunity to explain myself begins in . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . Hello! Great news!
Review copies of the short story collection PEOPLE MAKING DANGER are free for a limited time at AdamFike.com.
Highlights include a suburban thriller, a sci-fi satire, a western with cars, a magical musical history and antihero redemption story. All reviews are welcome at: Goodreads.com.
Fine, you say. But, before I bother, what is it, really? Everything online needs an overall category, does it not?
Evidently.
So, I’m going with the term Lowbrow Postmodern, based, at least, on my own interpretation of what those words mean.
In this case, lowbrow refers to the elements and postmodern is what I did with them. The medium is words in the form of short stories. Yay!
Please note: I am likely very wrong. So, how about I tell you the basic idea and you tell me if I got there or not?
SO, WHAT IS LOWBROW?
In 1979, Rip Off Press published a book called The Lowbrow Art Of Robt. Williams because the idea of highbrow really stuck in the painter’s craw.
(Also, evidently the name Robert has the coolest abbreviation ever.)
Though here he was, reaching into their chests with a towering scream painted from their own insane culture, critics called his work cartoons, pure entertainment, anything but art.
One way to sum up Williams’ reaction to this point of view is that if your personal cultural measure doesn’t have a notch for his kind of thing, feel free to go fuck yourself (and a little love would be nice too). There is a terrific documentary about him on Amazon.
As a kid growing up around antique race cars on dirt tracks, my Dad had a ’32 Deuce Coup stock car and the sound was pure magic. One afternoon, he walked through the flea market and came back to the Winnebago with this poster:
It was the first time I saw something that looked how I felt, or maybe just wanted to feel. I had that poster through high school and college, until it succumbed to a combination of basement floods and hotrod enthusiast mice. Doesn’t matter, though. That painting is forever in my mind. Notice, none of the wheels are touching the ground.
The idea for PEOPLE MAKING DANGER is to operate as simply as possible, with familiar elements, and to get out of the way of the stories. To let the thing talk directly and skip the fancy rationalizations and references. To strategically break certain rules because that’s when it all takes off and flies around the room. Hopefully.
Some things you might notice: There are no quotation marks because it’s always the narrator talking. The stories are broken into three acts because there’s a human rhythm to that which people recognize. Characters are often named for their function and those names are capitalized as proper nouns. And the stories are generally told in the present tense.
FINE, THEN WHAT IS POSTMODERN?
Postmodern primarily means popping the classic balloons of objectivity: reason, morality, reality, truth, whatever you got. Einstein proved that time is both subjective and subject to a level of physics we may never completely understand. So are people. So are their stories. It is whatever you want it to be, combining every historical event, every cultural moment and all the methods of craft you can muster, plus medium and commerce, with some random memory from your fifth birthday. Only you can inform your art, because the whole world is inside you. At least the parts that matter. Also, only you can prevent forrest fires (see: Steven Wright).
For instance, the familiar elements I repurpose in PEOPLE MAKING DANGER include genre and a variety of cinematic tropes. Ideally, the results include unreliable narratives, antiheroes and a whole lot of irony. Telling a story this way means taking everything apart and resorting it in order to, maybe, find a more accurate truth, utilizing the difference between face value and the underlying choices.
Which, you say, is, by my own definition of the thing, impossible. Aha!
To which I say, yes, so, if you’re going to do the impossible, why not make it fun? But I wouldn’t throw a big aha at you like that. I’m not an animal.
The universe is a cloud of balancing numbers. Humans create their gods. It’s not that there isn’t an objective view somehow, somewhere. It’s that, as human beings we can only get a glimpse of it by standing on one foot, with an eye closed, focusing on the abstract . . .
. . . or possibly, as Zimmerman wrote, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free.
SO . . . LET’S JUST RELAX
These stories did begin life as movie scripts and are meant to perform for you. Construction, presentation and the delivery are all part of the idea. The trickiest part of all this is predicting human reactions. I personally find making things a whole lot easier than showing them to people. Unfortunately, it makes no sense to create for no one or to aim only for some highbrow opinion.
Capturing someone’s attention is a complex thing. Much more luck than skill. The simple proof is every movie, book, TV show or song that should have been really good but really wasn’t. And also Saturday Night Live.
What happens in that moment when people pause their show and never come back? Is it cumulative? Is it pacing? Is it tone? When did they put the book down? What page was it? Too much talking? Not enough?
Exactly.
There are no answers to any of this, just a whole lot of trial and error. I certainly wish there were nice, clear guideposts and can testify that this kind of circular inner conversation will make you crazy.
HERE’S WHAT I DO KNOW:
To say a complicated thing simply, you need a good head start. Folks need to have an idea of what they’re looking at before they completely know what it is. They need time to settle in, a little structure and as few groaner moments as possible. It’s all Aristotle. All anybody wants from their entertainment is catharsis. To take a quick ride through someone else’s story, hopefully an engaging one, to maybe learn a few things, have a couple laughs, cringe a bit and move along with their day, happily unattached.
So, then, what’s the difference between art and entertainment? Who cares?
Lowbrow, meet postmodern: PEOPLE MAKING DANGER
More here: www.adamfike.com.
Meanwhile, don’t forget to check out our library of original comedy and music on Wyndotte Street (www.yndotStreet.com)