But don’t worry, I took a nap and it went away.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

I just received a very elegant looking letter in the mail, “You’re Pre-Qualified for an unsecured personal loan of $500 to $3,000!” from the good folks at Brookwood Loans (a MetaBank company.) Wow. Cool. In looking over their offer, I notice several wonderful benefits, very well presented in their well written sales letter: Approval in 24 hours; Money the same day; Manageable payments; No Prepayment penalty and Fixed simple interest rate. And they make it very, very simple, log on, enter the code from the bottom of the letter, fill out your information and submit your request. “It’s just that easy!” they say in bold text. That is easy, I can hardly wait to get my money.

Then I read the exciting news under the “Fixed Simple Interest Rate” section: “Your rate of interest will not change. Loans have an APR of 96%.” 

Wait, what?

96%?

I actually had to read it three times before it registered as anything besides a misprint or a joke.  96%?  Are they insane? And they list this in bold as if it were a good thing for their customers. (Emphasis not added.)  And they actually have higher rates for approval applicants that choose their manual loan funding process, whatever that may be.

Vinnie must be visibly palpitating with orgiastic glee while doing the Snoopy dance all over South Dakota.

That means if you borrow $1,000 on a 36 month loan, by the time it’s done you will have paid back $3072.24. As the song goes, nice work if you can get it. Where is that carpenter who tumbled the building all over the money changers when you really need him?

I hope no poor, desperate fool falls for this scam, although I know there are all too many out there who will never realize they now owe their soul to the company store, which is run by Vinnie in his $5,000 dollar Armani suit and diamond encrusted pinky ring. The address listed for the bank is a P.O. box. I’m not surprised, they’re obviously too smart to want anyone actually knowing where their offices are.

I hope Brookwood and MetaBank fall into a pit somewhere and dissolve into useful molecular components such as nitrogen that can be used to replenish our ravished farmlands or do some other actual good on the planet. I hope Vinnie realizes loansharking will only end in tears and enters the clergy where the only harm he can do is to small children.

So, no thank you, Brookwood, I decline your kind offer of a loan. I’m good.

Hmmm.  Maybe I should move to South Dakota.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

In the far distant future, I expect someone will invent a way for the text message to become an actual spoken conversation between two people in real time. I would call this innovation “two-way voice interaction”. Although the technology needed for this revolution does not yet exist, never underestimate the cleverness of mobile phone company R&D departments.

I apologize for writing this email to you, but I need to express it to someone and you are as good a person as any.  I am a little in my cups at the moment and you can completely ignore this message if you want, I don’t mind in the least.

Over tea the other day, you asked me what kind of movies I want to make and my answer to you was wholly and completely inadequate.  Here is a more accurate answer.  I want to make moves that are simple.  I want to make movies that are complex.  I want to make movies that make people sob, and make them guffaw and make them think.  I want to make movies that are so beautiful they open your mind to new possibilities and movies that are so ugly they hurt your eyes to look at them.  I want to make movies that are logical and those that make absolutely no rational sense.  I want to make Un Chien Andalou and The Grapes of Wrath.

I want to make movies that incite people to violence and movies that incite people to examine and change their lives and the world for the better.  I want to make movies that are wonderfully surreal and movies that are so real you disappear into them and fall out at the end wondering why and where you’ve been.  I want to make science fiction and romance and noir and western movies, silly comedies and political thrillers.  Movies in unparalleled color and in gritty greys and ambers.

I want to make movies that rely on clever, witty dialogue, and movies that rely on complex visual imagery, movies in the tradition of Preston Sturges and in the tradition of Robert Altman.  In the tradition of Walt Disney and of Salvador Dali.  Movies with great poetry and those with jarring syntax.

I want to make movies that raise spiritual awareness and those that simply raise the level of enjoyment in a room.  I want to make spectacular movies and movies confined to a single, simple location, movies that confound and movies that enlighten.  Movies that glorify the human condition and those that examine how it has been debased.

And, I realize, on this New Years Day, January 1st, 2009, if I don’t start now, I will be dead before I make any movie at all.  I have a commitment to co-write the second season of a web series, but once those episodes are completed and approved, I want to make a movie.

Happy New Year.  May yours be filled with glorious creative possibilities.

Geoff

There is one manufactured issue that crops up every year, (and has, I find from my study, for over a century, with some variance in particulars) and that is the supposed “War on Christmas.”  In the last several years, this banner has been hoisted mostly by a television commentator and pundit by the name of Bill O’Reilly, who is offended, OFFENDED, by the fact that some folks have decided to be more inclusive in their holiday greeting and say “Happy Holidays” instead of the more traditional “Merry Christmas.”

There is so much wrong with this stance that it’s difficult to know where to begin.  At a store, the time of year is, by definition, a buying season, not a religious one.  The more people you include in your greeting, ipso facto, the more people available who will shop.  Also, most of the Christmas iconography (Crèches aside) are pagan, or at the very least secular, not Christian.  It can be argued (and has, often, by many Christian scholars) that The Christ was actually born in the spring and that the day of Christmas was chosen to mollify locals in Northern Europe in the Great Conversion.

Okay.  Enough logic and seriousness.  Even I am susceptible to the need for outrage.  (Damn it, why, Lord?  Why?)  In the spirit of anti-outrage, we have created something that, I think, finally brings the War on Christmas home.

http://WageWarOnChristmas.com

Now.  Let’s see if we can all become angry about something that really matters.  Like wearing pants below your underwear to show off your boxers or combing your bangs straight up to show off your forehead.

If I have a muse, she seems to have fallen asleep. I wish her good dreams. That she can convey to me once she wakes up and has her first cup of strong coffee. I’ve had my coffee and my pen is poised for the flow of genius.

What interests me about the creative process as much as those times when you can’t stop creating are the times when you don’t seem to get much done. I used to get nuts when I was in that seemingly stagnant place until I realized that it was a necessary part of the process, that I’m always creating and in those times it’s just more subtle. A gestation, perhaps. There are several stories and a couple of novels coalescing in there. Am I mixing my metaphors? Ah, well. As Walt Whitman said:
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

I am also, I fear, repeating myself. Old Walt has conveyed my feelings on a number of diverse occasions. His passage seems more elegant, somehow, than Emerson’s oft quoted dictum about a foolish consistency being the hobgoblin of little minds. It’s also much more apt to the subject at hand.

Yes, now I am simply rambling, using other poets words to appear knowledgeable and creative, and doing it without any orderly theme or plan. Of course, A. A. Milne said, “One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.” And as soon as my muse awakens, I’ll convey some of those discoveries to you.

I graduated from college with a Bachelor of Arts degree in theatre. The plan after college was to spend a year in Northern California with my brother and his wife while getting acclimatized to life outside of school, then move to San Francisco and disappear into some rep company or other and spend my days happily ensconced in a life in theatre.

I often visited San Francisco with my brother and sister-in-law, seeing plays, visiting museums, drinking in the Bohemia of it all, preparing for my eventual move there. As Robert Burns said to the wee mouse, “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/Gang aft agley…” Okay, so my schemes weren’t all that well laid out to begin with, but they did gang a bit agley.

Soon after lighting in Northern California, I got a job at the Round Table Pizza parlor at Brunswick Plaza, half way between the small towns of Grass Valley and Nevada City. I was quickly promoted to assistant manager and moved into a tiny house in Grass Valley. I didn’t have a car, almost everything I needed I could get to by walking or riding my ten-speed bike. Everything but movies. There was one movie theatre that served both towns. It had three screens and was fairly close to me, but their usual fair tended to ooze a little too much testosterone for my taste. The nearest alternative was in Sacramento, a forty-five minute drive down the highway. If I wanted to see something that didn’t have Sylvester Stallone in it I would need to find someone else who wanted to go who also had a car.

One afternoon I decided I needed to see a movie but no one I knew wanted to go. My friend Vern, however, who lived right across the street from me, offered the use of his car. I decided on The China Syndrome, which was playing at one of the bigger complexes in the outskirts of Sacramento, gathered up the keys and journeyed hence.

The movie, staring Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas, Jack Lemmon and Wilford Brimley, was a political thriller very loosely based on the Three Mile Island incident. A young, naive reporter (Fonda) accidentally stumbles upon evidence that the safety inspections for the building of the local nuclear plant were fudged and those responsible ranged from the halls of corporations to the government. The script was tight, the direction flawless. The tension built slowly but steadily to a fever pitch. Jack Lemmon, an actor I always admired, was never better. I was moved. Stunned might be a better world. On the ride home in that borrowed car, I decided I wanted to be part of an industry that could produce something so powerful. The next day I put my notice in at the pizza parlor.

I saw the movie two more times that week, convincing friends they had to go. None of them seemed as moved as I was, but they humored me. It wasn’t until the third viewing that I realized that there was no background music in the film, only incidental music occasionally coming from a car radio or in a party scene. How tight must a movie be to not rely on music to manipulate your emotions? How courageous must a director be to make that choice? If I’d had any doubts about my impending relocation, they vanished.

I bought a car, a Ford Grand Torino station wagon, bright orange, that I named Stanley (two points to anyone who can guess why), loaded all my belonging in back and literally a month after that initial viewing of the movie I was on my way to Los Angeles. I lived in the car those first few days, parking on side streets in this unfamiliar town, until I tracked down some friends from college and camped out on their living room couch. I stayed with them until I found a small room in a building just north of Hollywood Boulevard, got a job at an answering service and became a Los Angelian. Before watching that movie, it was completely unpredictable that I move to this town, one I’d never even visited. I liked San Francisco. Whenever I visited there, it felt like home, yet here I am. I tell people I was headed for San Francisco but took a wrong toin at Albuquoique.

That was in 1979. My acting dreams have transformed, I am now a writer, but I still live quite happily and productively in Los Angeles after all these years, working in and around the industry that made such a powerful film. I look upon that evening in a movie house in Sacramento as a major turning point in my life.

To answer the question posed by the radio show, yes, I say. Art does have the power to change one’s life. I often wonder what that original trail would have been like, but the one I chose has thus far been wildly diverting.

P.S. Along with this, a sad goodbye to Paul Newman, one the greats, who will be remembered for his incredible body of work, his humility, humor and dedication to contribution to humanity.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

Well. Seeing as how Americans can get up in arms so quickly about silly things as to send death threats (and, by the way, offers of marriage) for a humor piece about shoes and vociferously obscure reasoned debate over a manufactured misunderstanding, I figured the best way to become known in the general population is to piss someone off. And to do that, I must create a controversy. 

I realize I must choose wisely, not just any controversy will do. It would seem that it must go to the heart of some widely held, deeply felt ideal. On closer inspection, however, admiration of plastic shoes may be felt deeply, but is not very widely held. There are many options. Questioning the patriotism of a true patriot wouldn’t work, a true patriot wouldn’t need outrage, so there wouldn’t be any controversy. Questioning the patriotism of a rascal would do the trick. Samuel Johnson famously said, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” And outrage, it seems, is the scoundrel’s idiom.

That, however, is too easy, too often used, and wouldn’t get me noticed at all. I could come out against broccoli, but that one was already taken and I actually like the stuff. I could defend the vegetable content of school lunches because they contain catsup but that barely raised a stir when a well known politician tried it.

I think I have it:

People who blog are idiots.

If that doesn’t bring the juices of the on-line community (the most virulently vociferous community around) to a rolling boil, I would be greatly surprised.

People who blog assume that the very act of blogging makes them an expert, that having a blog makes their opinion more weighty than those without blogs. Without benefit of any journalism school or experience, they assume their investigative techniques are superior to those of “mainstream media” (a pejorative for reporters who actually get paid for their opinions, and whose opinions are actually read by more than just a handful of like minded blog writers.) People who blog spend countless hours pontificating to their keyboards and monitors, mindless of the fact that keyboards and monitors are not enlightened by their infinite wisdom. People who blog are probably all impotent and have problem sweat. People who blog wear Crocs. I dare you to find evidence to the contrary, evidence that I couldn’t repudiate with a swift stroke of my ergonomic human interface device.

I now await my deservedly brutal thrashing. (And any proposals of marriage you may be willing to send my way.) As the son of a broccoli hater once said, “Bring it on.”

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

I have a friend, I’ve only known him a few years but we seem to have a history or connection that is centuries old.  I’ve written about him before, in my trifle on the theory of six degrees of separation.  I know him to be an actor, it’s how he makes his living, and, although he hasn’t hit as big as he hopes (he seems to end up cut out of more films than seems quite reasonable - I’ve suggested he stitch together all these cut scenes and post them on YouTube - “The Unkindest Cut” sort of thing), he lives well.  I’ve seen evidence that he is probably a wonderful director, both theatrically and cinematically, and suspect when he pursues that he will have a career on the heals of Jarmusch or even the Coens. I’ve read some of his writing.  It is compelling and odd.

He recently posted some of his music on-line.  I knew he sang, he’d told me as much, but I had no idea.  The breadth of his talent just keeps getting broader and broader.  I wonder what next incarnation he will thrust upon the unsuspecting world.

His influences seem to be all my favorite people, Laurie Anderson, Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits, The Beatles, Jacques Brel, Leonard Cohen and more.  His poetry is surprising, his music is refreshing and his voice is easy and rough with an edge that compels you to listen completely.  I had no idea. Where has this facet been hiding?

With the variety of songs he just posted, it seems probable he’s been recording them for some time.  Why have they been hidden?  Does he know how good they are?  He is?  Has he just recorded them to get them out of his head, then moved on, not thinking about them or how they might affect a listener somewhere in some small, provincial town yearning for the romance of SoHo cafés of a previous decade?  Has he not attempted a recording contract?  If so what idiot could have rejected them?  Him?  I had no idea.  I want the CD.  CDs.  All of them.  I want him in my collection, sitting on the shelf right next to Joni Mitchell and Simon and Garfunkle and Zoe Lewis.

So far, he has posted six songs.  Of these, my favorite is “A Little Less”, a heart-wrenching song written to a long time lover vainly attempting to analyze and explain his love that seems almost painful in its intensity but incomprehensible in its changing aspect.  Would that someone might write me such a song or loved me so well.  I also very much like “Crazy Hannah”, a Jacques Brel-esque portrait of a sad homeless woman, one like many we have all seen and from whom we have averted our eyes.  “Mouth of a Lion” – Laurie Anderson in male drag – seems to be about a gay wedding, but probably is not.  It’s dark and fun.  “When Harpo Blows the Blues” deserves its place in the pantheon of the best of folk-rock-blues songs.

He deserves a listen.  He deserves some notice.

Oh.  His name is Ezra Buzzington.  Of all things.

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend

As unexceptional as it is for me to think of myself as gay, the process of coming out was a long and circuitous one. (What, you may ask, should I have expected, that the path be straight?) It was not, I’m sure, as arduous as that of numerous other gay men and women, but it took many, many years. I knew I was attracted to men even before I really knew what sexuality was. I grew up in a tavern in a small town in northern New Jersey and most of the patrons were blue collar men. Trust me, I noticed a lot of them.

I have no idea when I first knew what a homosexual was, but I remember quite clearly when I started to realize there may be something wrong with being one. My older brother, who was perhaps thirteen at the time, told me that the way they treated homosexuals was to show them pictures of naked men at the same time as giving them an electric shock. He didn’t call it aversion therapy, I’m sure, but it seemed to me at age ten a rational way of dealing with the issue. I also wondered when I would have to have the procedure.

Several years later, and on the other side of the continent, my mother decided to have a “talk” with me. I had no idea of her agenda, of course. We had decided to take a drive to visit some family friends who lived in a big, old house on a scraggly piece of land in a small town about two hours drive from us. We often visited them on a moment’s notice, both families enjoyed each other’s company. It was a little odd to me that it was only Mom and me going, but what the hell, I was fourteen or fifteen and not that inquisitive about such things. We had a nice visit. Then, on the way back, my mother initiated “the conversation.” It was obvious she was having a hard time starting, but I didn’t help. In fact, I didn’t say anything. After a lot of hemming and stammering, she said she thought I might be (might be, mind you) gay, that she didn’t know if I’d had any overt experiences, that I could talk to her any time and that, if I needed it, we’d find a good therapist.

I didn’t say a single word the entire ride home, which couldn’t have made her task any easier. Thinking back on it, it must have been excruciating for her. What if she’d been wrong? What if her supposition put the thought into my head for the very first time, made me question, then experiment, then BECOME gay? My silence couldn’t have eased her trepidation, yet I remained silent. Being a parent can’t be easy sometimes. When I got home, I went downstairs to my room, dragged out my dictionary and looked up the word “overt”. I was disappointed. I’d thought it was something sexual. To be truthful, “overt” is the only actual word I remember from her long talk, the rest is only a vague sense of extreme discomfort and the sound of my heart beating fast.

I hadn’t had any overt experiences at that point, though. My first was when I was seventeen, with a twenty-eight year old relative of that same family, ironically, at their house during a weekend visit. My heart beat fast then, too, as I recall.

Many years later, again in another corner of the country, I finally “came out” to my mother. I was in my mid twenties and living in Los Angeles. I had moved here in part to have a big, anonymous place to figure out what all this sex stuff was about. I told myself and others I came here to be in the movies, which was true to a point, of course. I’d been here a few years by then, living in a house in the Silverlake area. I called my mother long distance (back when long distance actually meant something momentarily) and this time it was I who hemmed and stammered. Which I did for some fifteen minutes before I got out the operative sentence. I’m sure my mother figured out within the first two seconds what was up, but there wasn’t much she could say until I actually said, “I’m gay.” She said, “I know, honey.”

I cried and said the thing that hurt the most was the thought that I would be with someone who wouldn’t be welcome in her home. She said, “Oh, Honey, anyone you love I love.”

She proved it, too. When I was with Jerry, my one long-term boyfriend (if two years can be considered long-term), we took a trip up to her cabin in Idaho. One day I’d been out doing something in town with mom’s husband. That night, Jerry told me that my mother had asked him if he felt like part of the family.

“Of course, Toni,” he’d told her.

“Good,” she’d said. “Could you pick up all the coffee mugs in the living room and bring them into the kitchen?”

He said he’d felt very welcome, indeed.

The one thing she asked of me was that I not tell my great aunt. She didn’t want any blowback from that side of the family. I did anyway (many years later, of course, I said it was a long process.) Aunt Lou’s only comment was, “Well, do you have a friend?” I said I had lots of them and she said that’s not what she meant. I told her no, I didn’t have a friend and she told me I’d find someone and then changed the subject.

As the years progressed, my mother began wearing a pin that said, “Straight but not narrow”. She called me her fairy god son, and once asked if I were bothered that she had used me as an example when she showed the documentary Pink Triangles, about homosexuals in Nazi Germany, to her YWCA luncheon group. One of the group had said, “Gay people are disgusting.” My mother was horrified and said, “That’s my son you’re talking about.” I gave her retroactive permission and told her she could use me to enlighten someone anytime she wanted.

Oh. By the way. I’m gay. Did you know?

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Geoff Hoff is co-author of the best selling satirical novel Weeping Willow: Welcome to River Bend