Wednesday, July 14, 2004
Tuesday, July 13, 2004
The Dwarf in Entertainment Weekly
Amazingly, word has reached the EW staff on the screenplay adaptation I wrote that's now making the hype rounds. From the July 16 edition, on newsstands now, on page 16:
"...The Station Agent's Peter Dinklage is ideally cast in The Dwarf, an adaptation of Swedish writer Par Lagerkvist's dark 1945 novel, which, according to producer Marc Rosen, is "the Huckleberry Finn of Sweden." Dinklage's character is the tough enforcer for a prince in Renaissance Italy, and in the end, Rosen promises, "the body count is Shakespearean." Which means it's high; the Deal Report looked it up."
We'll see where else it pops up...
"...The Station Agent's Peter Dinklage is ideally cast in The Dwarf, an adaptation of Swedish writer Par Lagerkvist's dark 1945 novel, which, according to producer Marc Rosen, is "the Huckleberry Finn of Sweden." Dinklage's character is the tough enforcer for a prince in Renaissance Italy, and in the end, Rosen promises, "the body count is Shakespearean." Which means it's high; the Deal Report looked it up."
We'll see where else it pops up...
Sunday, July 11, 2004
Blast From The Past... Old Stories, Part One by Scott Stein
Bass over Athens
He turned away from the blue domes and cracked plaster minarets of the Byzantine church bubbling forth from the shoreline, smooth and naked on the bleached rocks like some form of rain-smoothed mineral deposit.
He turned his head away. Crouching in within his crumpled grey jacket, leaning into the dusty yellow wall. His poly-something hood was pulled over his head like a giant blinder. He stared at dusty yellow brick.
He had seen the two-headed fish. It was there.
He dared not move, because two-headed fish floating above Greek Orthodox churches tended to make him nervous. It matched the color of the domes, that much he could tell. It was a big fish, a grouper or bass or something—or maybe it was a tuna...oh, who cares. It was a big floating two-headed fish. Name and make didn’t matter.
He was crazy, wasn’t he? He was goddamn insane, that’s what he was, for seeing this fucking two-headed fish while on vacation on the coast of Athens. He needed help.
I mean, for God’s sake, at least these visions shouldn’t come while he was on vacation.
At work, okay. He’d dealt with that in therapy. Wrapping meat for Pathmark can do that to you, he supposed. I mean, day in, day out, stretching Saran wrap on chunks of cow...it got to you, after a while, it got annoying. But fish? Big, floating two-headed fish? It should be a giant filet mignon, or at least a Roumanian tenderloin or a good piece of veal. Maybe even a two-headed cow. But a fish? Maybe this was a calling to be working in Seafood.
And it was always the same type of two-headedness. Of course, one wouldn’t think there are many ways to be two-headed, and neither did he, until he saw this particular version of two-headedness, all unnatural and optically incoherent as it always was: two fish head/torsos, joined at the midsection by a ring of splayed and angular fins. They always looked in opposite directions, and one was always right-side up, while the other was upside-down. It looked like a cruel science experiment, or a demented fusion of leftovers.
The fish, on the other hand, never looked the same. Sometimes, it was as small as a minnow, darting in front of his vision as he groped the top shelf for rice Chex at the supermarket; on other occasions, it was large and grotesque, appearing blatantly and glaringly as he rounded a bend, hovering over a parking lot or lazily weaving between skyscrapers, as graceful as a blimp as it beat its great frayed and molding fins in the air that shouldn’t have held it up. It appeared, then it vanished, not by vanishing but by swimming out of his line of sight, and he could never touch it, and whenever he began to block it out of his mind enough to forget about it, it appeared again.
Oh, cruel fish, what was thy purpose? He kept his head to the wall in fear, ignoring all the passing tourists. Let them stare, goddammit. He wasn’t going to lift his head back towards that Greek church. He didn’t want to look into that fish’s eyes again. They were wide-open dead, great and grey and sluglike, unblinking and accusing. They were the stare of the African frog he had once seen on a field trip to the Bronx zoo, that day when Mrs. Firestorm or something like that took them all to the reptiles and amphibians building, and he had come walking alone to the frog tanks, and every one seemed empty; then he came closer, pressing his face to the glass, and remembered something about natural protection when he saw it, right in the open, fat and ugly and utterly terrifying, and staring straight at him the whole time. Reptilian and carnivorous, he thought as he jumped backwards and nearly knocked over a father of four. And intelligent. No, it knew something. It knew something he did not, and it was spying on him, goddammit, that fucking frog was spying on him...
And this fish was the same. It kept spying on him, coming after him, and it didn’t belong her, it didn’t belong out of the water...
Okay. Composure. Catch your breath. It’s just a fish...a floating...fish...
No, it’s not. It’s more. It’s two-headed, and it’s intelligent, and it knows something, and it’s following me around, and it’s swimming out of water, and it scared him out of his mind.
Okay, time to face the music. He was seeing fish.
And he had been for some time. He always tried to forget it, rationalize it, pass it off as a dream or a lack of sleep or poisoned air, but the crucial thing was, he saw such things. And he shouldn’t be.
Therapists told him he was deluding himself, but he was really deluding them. He hadn’t told them all the whole story; he only told them some things, that he was afraid of fish, that he saw fish—but they were coming after him. Yes, they were, to warn him or kill him or tell him something that they were going to do—but they wanted him.
He didn’t know if anybody else had seen the fish.
Well, he would have to know that—if he would or wouldn’t be alone in this, that is. Well, he had to run down some sort of checklist.
His therapist—well, he doubted it. Therapists were purportedly stable.
His wife—probably not. Besides, he didn’t think he could ever tell her. I mean, he hadn’t so far. How could he, after all? Honey, I’m seeing flying multi-headed fish—but don’t worry, I don’t think it’s serious.
His coworkers? Perhaps. He’d have to ask them next time he was in work. It might be the meat, or some chemical in the packaging—or a lack of oxygen. Maybe those cold temperatures drowned the oxygen, or forced it out of the refrigerated workroom—who knows what vile measures Pathmark practices. He’d read that Jungle book by Sinclair Lewis. He knew the whole story about those places.
He had to ask others. He had to find other seers, if there were any. Group therapy, consolation, who knows—it would be better than his therapist’s self-referential “swim in lake you” crap. Self-reference didn’t help, and neither did those drugs he gave him—Prozac? Thiamine? Methychloro-di-somethingorother. It was bullshit. No pill could kill these fish.
He had to get home, now. Shit, why did he go to Greece? It was sunny, but he didn’t know his way around here...there was nothing in English, you know, and it was so cold here in the sun...
There had to be shops. He didn’t know how to call home. He had a wallet, and he could ask for a phone book, and maybe the shopkeeper would know something about these fish.
He began to look around him, at the crowded streets and cramped buildings. Small angry cars honked and people shuffled busily, without stopping to look at anything unless it was particularly interestingly gruesome. Greek police blared away somewhere nearby. Maybe his therapist told them about him. His therapist didn’t want him going anywhere, because he said it might disturb his bearing on his superego or some shit like that. Perception. Can’t live with it, can’t live without it.
He looked at his feet, surrounded by halos of cigarette butts and old flattened sculptures of frozen chewing gum. His shoes were untied, again, but he didn’t remember forgetting to tie them. Then again, he didn’t remember putting on his shoes. He bent down to tie his shoes, and with a sudden thumping impact some city-blinded pedestrian collided with him in a way that left the pedestrian upright but sent him sprawling. He heard a distant and unconcerned “sorry” as his face fell on the stubbly concrete slowly, like run-down footage. He felt his cheek rip, and he exhaled. He watched feet glide past him like urban kelp, schools of two-headed fish darting between them like an aquarium tank. The fish were there to remind him again—of something. Everything was crucial. That man who knocked him down spoke English.
A conspiracy, he thought, picking himself up and stumbling down the river of people until he came to an open door, an awning, racks of potato chips—a store.
The rush of the river faded away with the sound of a door closing, and the chime of a rusted bell.
He wandered to the deli counter, out of breath and suddenly very terrified.
A man approached the other side of the counter, staring at him strangely.
A native. He tried to communicate desperately, even though he didn’t know any Greek, throwing together whatever mythological names he could think of, Greek dishes, and mentionings of the word “fish,” hoping that would do the trick.
“Sir...can I help you?”
Oh, thank God, a native speaker.
“I’m...I’m really scared, you see...I was just knocked over on the street, and I...I’m having these messages, or hallucinations, I’m not sure which...and I’m trying to call home...”
“Are you here to buy anything? Do you want a sandwich?”
“Oh, jeez, I’m afraid I don’t have the currency...”
“I’m sorry, sir, but if you don’t want to buy anything, I’m afraid you’re going to have to leave...”
“But can’t I use the phone?” He began to really panic now, because he saw a big trout in the display case, pressed against the glass, staring up at him.
“We don’t have a phone. Look, I would appreciate it if you left now...”
“But I...God, why are you people so cruel to tourists?” He paced the room rapidly, boxes of Cheez-its and Oreos circling past his eyes, then bottles of soda. He couldn’t focus. And if he did, there might be fish.
“I’m sorry, but you can’t buy anything without money...” the man behind the counter looked at the man closer, then turned harsh. “You were here last week. Get the hell out.”
“No, I’ve never been in Greece before...stop, you’re confusing me...” He turned around, facing the crackers and soda, trying to latch onto reality with his eyes. “Please, I just want to go home...I need to get home...”
“I’m giving you ten seconds to find your own way home, or I’m calling the cops.” The other customers froze still a long time ago, eyes latched onto the event as they collectively converted to TV mode. “Sorry about the commotion, he’ll be out of here shortly,” he addressed the customers. And then they all turned to him, fixed on him, wordless, pitiless, just watching and waiting.
“Oh, come on, please, I need to...God, stop doing this, please, I don’t know what’s going on...I don’t know where I am...please...” But he could say nothing else, and when he saw the man behind the counter reach for the phone, he left.
He fought upstream against the river, shouting for help in English as a giant fish hung in the air above like a the Goodyear, ethereal fins whipping the air into breeze as its eyes watched the spectacle unfold further. He groped and pushed and fell and bled until he saw the Greek church, and he ran to the wall and around it, stopping at the overlook to the shoreline, falling to his knees, crying, hands dug into pockets and gripping the fabric until he pulled and clenching turned them inside out, hoarse horrid screaming sobs cutting through the air, assaulting nobody because nobody listened. God, the fish had done this to him! Those fucking, evil fish...where was he? Where do I live?!!
He saw a slip of paper flutter to the sidewalk as he unclenched his hands from his outturned pockets, picked it up in his hand, read something about unknown name or localized loss, it meant nothing. He had done this before, he realized. That man was right. He had done this before.
He stood by the wall for some time, looking at the perfect church in Greece despite its fish because the fish and it were reality, constants, and he knelt and prayed to Greece day after day, with nothing else left to do; but one day there was a tear in Athens, and the tear grew bigger until eventually Greece peeled off the wall, and as it blew away down the street he realized that neither the fish nor Athens were real. And so he sat down, staring at this place he knew utterly nothing about, and he cried for a longlonglonglong time.
He turned away from the blue domes and cracked plaster minarets of the Byzantine church bubbling forth from the shoreline, smooth and naked on the bleached rocks like some form of rain-smoothed mineral deposit.
He turned his head away. Crouching in within his crumpled grey jacket, leaning into the dusty yellow wall. His poly-something hood was pulled over his head like a giant blinder. He stared at dusty yellow brick.
He had seen the two-headed fish. It was there.
He dared not move, because two-headed fish floating above Greek Orthodox churches tended to make him nervous. It matched the color of the domes, that much he could tell. It was a big fish, a grouper or bass or something—or maybe it was a tuna...oh, who cares. It was a big floating two-headed fish. Name and make didn’t matter.
He was crazy, wasn’t he? He was goddamn insane, that’s what he was, for seeing this fucking two-headed fish while on vacation on the coast of Athens. He needed help.
I mean, for God’s sake, at least these visions shouldn’t come while he was on vacation.
At work, okay. He’d dealt with that in therapy. Wrapping meat for Pathmark can do that to you, he supposed. I mean, day in, day out, stretching Saran wrap on chunks of cow...it got to you, after a while, it got annoying. But fish? Big, floating two-headed fish? It should be a giant filet mignon, or at least a Roumanian tenderloin or a good piece of veal. Maybe even a two-headed cow. But a fish? Maybe this was a calling to be working in Seafood.
And it was always the same type of two-headedness. Of course, one wouldn’t think there are many ways to be two-headed, and neither did he, until he saw this particular version of two-headedness, all unnatural and optically incoherent as it always was: two fish head/torsos, joined at the midsection by a ring of splayed and angular fins. They always looked in opposite directions, and one was always right-side up, while the other was upside-down. It looked like a cruel science experiment, or a demented fusion of leftovers.
The fish, on the other hand, never looked the same. Sometimes, it was as small as a minnow, darting in front of his vision as he groped the top shelf for rice Chex at the supermarket; on other occasions, it was large and grotesque, appearing blatantly and glaringly as he rounded a bend, hovering over a parking lot or lazily weaving between skyscrapers, as graceful as a blimp as it beat its great frayed and molding fins in the air that shouldn’t have held it up. It appeared, then it vanished, not by vanishing but by swimming out of his line of sight, and he could never touch it, and whenever he began to block it out of his mind enough to forget about it, it appeared again.
Oh, cruel fish, what was thy purpose? He kept his head to the wall in fear, ignoring all the passing tourists. Let them stare, goddammit. He wasn’t going to lift his head back towards that Greek church. He didn’t want to look into that fish’s eyes again. They were wide-open dead, great and grey and sluglike, unblinking and accusing. They were the stare of the African frog he had once seen on a field trip to the Bronx zoo, that day when Mrs. Firestorm or something like that took them all to the reptiles and amphibians building, and he had come walking alone to the frog tanks, and every one seemed empty; then he came closer, pressing his face to the glass, and remembered something about natural protection when he saw it, right in the open, fat and ugly and utterly terrifying, and staring straight at him the whole time. Reptilian and carnivorous, he thought as he jumped backwards and nearly knocked over a father of four. And intelligent. No, it knew something. It knew something he did not, and it was spying on him, goddammit, that fucking frog was spying on him...
And this fish was the same. It kept spying on him, coming after him, and it didn’t belong her, it didn’t belong out of the water...
Okay. Composure. Catch your breath. It’s just a fish...a floating...fish...
No, it’s not. It’s more. It’s two-headed, and it’s intelligent, and it knows something, and it’s following me around, and it’s swimming out of water, and it scared him out of his mind.
Okay, time to face the music. He was seeing fish.
And he had been for some time. He always tried to forget it, rationalize it, pass it off as a dream or a lack of sleep or poisoned air, but the crucial thing was, he saw such things. And he shouldn’t be.
Therapists told him he was deluding himself, but he was really deluding them. He hadn’t told them all the whole story; he only told them some things, that he was afraid of fish, that he saw fish—but they were coming after him. Yes, they were, to warn him or kill him or tell him something that they were going to do—but they wanted him.
He didn’t know if anybody else had seen the fish.
Well, he would have to know that—if he would or wouldn’t be alone in this, that is. Well, he had to run down some sort of checklist.
His therapist—well, he doubted it. Therapists were purportedly stable.
His wife—probably not. Besides, he didn’t think he could ever tell her. I mean, he hadn’t so far. How could he, after all? Honey, I’m seeing flying multi-headed fish—but don’t worry, I don’t think it’s serious.
His coworkers? Perhaps. He’d have to ask them next time he was in work. It might be the meat, or some chemical in the packaging—or a lack of oxygen. Maybe those cold temperatures drowned the oxygen, or forced it out of the refrigerated workroom—who knows what vile measures Pathmark practices. He’d read that Jungle book by Sinclair Lewis. He knew the whole story about those places.
He had to ask others. He had to find other seers, if there were any. Group therapy, consolation, who knows—it would be better than his therapist’s self-referential “swim in lake you” crap. Self-reference didn’t help, and neither did those drugs he gave him—Prozac? Thiamine? Methychloro-di-somethingorother. It was bullshit. No pill could kill these fish.
He had to get home, now. Shit, why did he go to Greece? It was sunny, but he didn’t know his way around here...there was nothing in English, you know, and it was so cold here in the sun...
There had to be shops. He didn’t know how to call home. He had a wallet, and he could ask for a phone book, and maybe the shopkeeper would know something about these fish.
He began to look around him, at the crowded streets and cramped buildings. Small angry cars honked and people shuffled busily, without stopping to look at anything unless it was particularly interestingly gruesome. Greek police blared away somewhere nearby. Maybe his therapist told them about him. His therapist didn’t want him going anywhere, because he said it might disturb his bearing on his superego or some shit like that. Perception. Can’t live with it, can’t live without it.
He looked at his feet, surrounded by halos of cigarette butts and old flattened sculptures of frozen chewing gum. His shoes were untied, again, but he didn’t remember forgetting to tie them. Then again, he didn’t remember putting on his shoes. He bent down to tie his shoes, and with a sudden thumping impact some city-blinded pedestrian collided with him in a way that left the pedestrian upright but sent him sprawling. He heard a distant and unconcerned “sorry” as his face fell on the stubbly concrete slowly, like run-down footage. He felt his cheek rip, and he exhaled. He watched feet glide past him like urban kelp, schools of two-headed fish darting between them like an aquarium tank. The fish were there to remind him again—of something. Everything was crucial. That man who knocked him down spoke English.
A conspiracy, he thought, picking himself up and stumbling down the river of people until he came to an open door, an awning, racks of potato chips—a store.
The rush of the river faded away with the sound of a door closing, and the chime of a rusted bell.
He wandered to the deli counter, out of breath and suddenly very terrified.
A man approached the other side of the counter, staring at him strangely.
A native. He tried to communicate desperately, even though he didn’t know any Greek, throwing together whatever mythological names he could think of, Greek dishes, and mentionings of the word “fish,” hoping that would do the trick.
“Sir...can I help you?”
Oh, thank God, a native speaker.
“I’m...I’m really scared, you see...I was just knocked over on the street, and I...I’m having these messages, or hallucinations, I’m not sure which...and I’m trying to call home...”
“Are you here to buy anything? Do you want a sandwich?”
“Oh, jeez, I’m afraid I don’t have the currency...”
“I’m sorry, sir, but if you don’t want to buy anything, I’m afraid you’re going to have to leave...”
“But can’t I use the phone?” He began to really panic now, because he saw a big trout in the display case, pressed against the glass, staring up at him.
“We don’t have a phone. Look, I would appreciate it if you left now...”
“But I...God, why are you people so cruel to tourists?” He paced the room rapidly, boxes of Cheez-its and Oreos circling past his eyes, then bottles of soda. He couldn’t focus. And if he did, there might be fish.
“I’m sorry, but you can’t buy anything without money...” the man behind the counter looked at the man closer, then turned harsh. “You were here last week. Get the hell out.”
“No, I’ve never been in Greece before...stop, you’re confusing me...” He turned around, facing the crackers and soda, trying to latch onto reality with his eyes. “Please, I just want to go home...I need to get home...”
“I’m giving you ten seconds to find your own way home, or I’m calling the cops.” The other customers froze still a long time ago, eyes latched onto the event as they collectively converted to TV mode. “Sorry about the commotion, he’ll be out of here shortly,” he addressed the customers. And then they all turned to him, fixed on him, wordless, pitiless, just watching and waiting.
“Oh, come on, please, I need to...God, stop doing this, please, I don’t know what’s going on...I don’t know where I am...please...” But he could say nothing else, and when he saw the man behind the counter reach for the phone, he left.
He fought upstream against the river, shouting for help in English as a giant fish hung in the air above like a the Goodyear, ethereal fins whipping the air into breeze as its eyes watched the spectacle unfold further. He groped and pushed and fell and bled until he saw the Greek church, and he ran to the wall and around it, stopping at the overlook to the shoreline, falling to his knees, crying, hands dug into pockets and gripping the fabric until he pulled and clenching turned them inside out, hoarse horrid screaming sobs cutting through the air, assaulting nobody because nobody listened. God, the fish had done this to him! Those fucking, evil fish...where was he? Where do I live?!!
He saw a slip of paper flutter to the sidewalk as he unclenched his hands from his outturned pockets, picked it up in his hand, read something about unknown name or localized loss, it meant nothing. He had done this before, he realized. That man was right. He had done this before.
He stood by the wall for some time, looking at the perfect church in Greece despite its fish because the fish and it were reality, constants, and he knelt and prayed to Greece day after day, with nothing else left to do; but one day there was a tear in Athens, and the tear grew bigger until eventually Greece peeled off the wall, and as it blew away down the street he realized that neither the fish nor Athens were real. And so he sat down, staring at this place he knew utterly nothing about, and he cried for a longlonglonglong time.
Well, I'm Gone
From Sony Online Entertainment. My spirit lives on, however. Follow me to NY, and read more crazy news here. I'm not really departed at all - same address, same shit...that's the beauty of placelessness on the internet!