As Dan noted (save above photo and print so you can say you knew him when!) in his "Demetri and Me" post, I am indeed struggling with writing about fame and its malcontents (F.A.I.M! – a.k.a. Dan and me and most people in America) so far without much unifying success. I have written about friendly acquaintences of mine who, oddly enough, are acquainted with Dan’s friend Mr. Martin – funnymen/writers Eugene Mirman and John Hodgman (this link for JH is a wikipedia entry – is that the latest measure of arrival? having a wikipedia page in one’s name? or a hot youtube series? remember the good old days when we used to just count our google hits? won’t someone write me a wikipedia enty? then I’ll be satisfied, I just know I would.). I’ve greatly enjoyed getting to know both of those gentlemen a bit but I’ve also felt that ugly twitch of envy at their success, the envy of the success of others in fields not so different from my own, even though I couldn’t do precisely what they do and wouldn’t even want to. Oh the paradox and hypocracy of that particular envy, the envy of good folk doing good work.
I’ve written about my friend Annie Duke, who’s kind of to me what Demetri Martin is to Dan, an old school chum who’s become a star (in her case, at professional poker, not alternative comedy). I’ve written about various interactions I’ve had with famous people, from peers to elder statespeople, some of them strangers I’ve happened to meet or whose work I’ve loved and thus wanted desperately to have them know or like me and my work. I’ve written about friends who’ve become or are becoming famous or at least successful and semi-famous in the arts – a singer-songwriter, a director, a cinematographer, an artist – some of whom have disappeared from my life, some letigimately, some less so, into their new worlds, some of whom have stayed close, and a strange couple of whom I hardly knew before they were famous, who’ve been unexpectedly more open and eager to know me since their rise, as if they’ve gained a certain grace (I suppose the cynical could call it noblesse oblige) along with their success that serves as a very successful resentment shield.
Before he posted on Demetri Martin, Dan emailed me to ask if his post was on-topic enough for the blog (which Hayley touched in her comment). I think the issue of fame/success/envy is very much one for M.A.I.D., for while fame envy, let’s call it, is not an inherently male subject, it is attached to issues of comparison, of size, of weight and power in the world that are typically considered masculine.
With that then, I will present, over the next week or so, stuff relating to fame and envy and me as a man. For starters though, I’d like to offer a bit from my fame behemoth that touches on Dan’s Demetri exploration and something I found interesting that Dan and Patrick and Hayley all touched on, as Hayley puts it, “. . . the notion that real commitments to family, friends, and a manageable lifestyle are the benefits of being middling.” I have always spent a great deal more time and energy on friends, family, etc., than on pursuing a writing career, per se, but I’ve never felt that I was choosing one over the other, just that I’ve been procrastinating horribly for the past, oh, twenty years or so (and, in my guilt, haven’t been fully able to enjoy the choice I’d made to spend the bulk of my free time among people instead of words). It would be a relief to feel that my socialiality over solitude is a choice, and a worthy one, especially since I don’t think I’ll ever choose the writing over people in any substantive way, no matter what success it would bring. Yes, I realize it isn’t an all or nothing deal, but I would argue, and do all the time, that I spend less time at this machine than most writers, and that if I spent more time alone, well, I’d get more done, duh.
The Fame document thang that I’ve been working on has somehow taken the shape of a dialogue, a fictional interview written as a Q&A. A man, known only as Subject #263, an anti-heroicized version of myself, sits in a motel room answering questions, ostensibly to make three-hundred bucks for taking part in a psychological study he saw advertised in his local weekly: answer questions about fame for an hour, make some easy cash. But the situation becomes quite absurd and involved as it becomes clearer that the interviewee, my stand-in, is clearly, in a good old-fashioned meta/mod/postmod way, writing the entire scenario that’s taking place as he goes along, and yet, somehow, the situation often gets out of his control. One of his interviewers turns out to be the actual Carrie-Anne Moss as Trinity from the Matrix in full-on skin-tight black vinyl get-up, a fantasy of his, but she’s not quite as, er, friendly as he would’ve hoped, even though he’s created her. Thus, even his fantasy of touching fame though her is beyond his control. Here, re Dan and Demetri, is the end of the section in which #263 discusses how he came to know and appreciate and envy the Hodgman figure in his life, whom he calls “Humorist”:
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A: Humorist, in short, is a friendly, engaging fellow who has succeeded because of his creations, his perseverance, his integrity, his wit, his luck.
Q: But you also resent him? Why?
A: Because I deeply crave, feel I should have, exactly his kind of success. That audience, that bunch of colleagues, that money that niche-, long-tail fame – no more, but not this much less. I obsess about it when I see him on TV, when I hear his name mentioned. Actually, here, I wrote this the other day:
I sit in the car waiting for The Guy I kind of Know Who’s Recently Gone from Becoming Famous to Just Plain Being Famous to come on the radio. He’s going to come on sometime in the next half an hour. I am sitting in a supermarket parking lot. It is raining. He will be interviewed, say things I’ve heard him say more than once before, will tell jokes I’ve already laughed at, read the stuff from his fictitious history of the hoboes in America that I’ve both read and heard him read before. I am hungry and tired and once I stop waiting for The Guy I Kind of Know to come on the radio, I have to go out in the rain, buy the food, drive quite a ways home, and cook it. And still I wait. The dog sits beside me, waits with me, stoic beast. The announcer, Norman Adams or Coley Flintlock or whatever his name is or one of the other NPR guys comes on, introduces The Guy I Kind of Know . . . , begins his interview by saying “This Guy That Guy in the Car in the Supermarket Lot Kind of Knows is a very funny man.” He then plays a clip from The Guy on a TV show, another from one of his dryly comedic Apple computer commercials, and then Flintlock interviews him. During the interview, Flintlock is immediately charmed, at one point is laughing so hard he can’t ask his next question. The dog and I watch the rain. The five minute interview ends, the show moves on to its next segment on the demise of the independent Christmas tree farm in America. The rain continues. I say “stay” and “I’ll be right back” and make my way to the store.
I don’t begrudge people luck and connections as I did when I was younger. Luck counts. Who you know counts (and “whom” you know counts even more). That’s life. And I do believe he’s worked harder and more thoroughly than I have, so I have no reason to begrudge him any of it. Humorist is round-faced and bespectacled and owlish and bookish, his shtick is to parody just such a person, an “expert.” I couldn’t be that guy, and shouldn’t get his gigs, he’s perfect for them, and I don’t wish I wrote what he writes, either, I’m not jealous of some genius talent of his, I don’t see him that way, either, and yet . . . .
Q: And yet what? You seem pretty okay with his success.
A: And yet, like a villain in a silent movie, I get this creepy feeling inside me, I feel that what he has, it should be mine, all mine (readers: insert evil laugh from sound effects disc, and also you should be thinking of “And I would’ve got a way with it too, if it weren’t for those damn kids!”). Fame is like some awful . . . I don’t know what. It brings out my very worst. It stifles my creativity, makes me think bad things about good people. I resent him not only for his fame that I lack, but for my own wretched desire to be attached to him because of his success, for my revulsion with myself at this desire. And then I hate him for my self-hatred, for bringing it out in me.
Q: Wow. Sounds like a lot.
A: Yeah, but it’s like indigestion. Take the right pills and it passes.
