Start Here (More Beginnings…)

8 Mar 20188 Mar 2018 Dana Smith1 Comment

Starting Here — Clipper Cove on San Francisco Bay

I’ve wanted this portal, my main link to the outside world to speak more immediately, about things that concern us both today. My main concern is that this evening is road dog night. Jump from downtown Los Angeles back up to Northern California. So there is that.

But, what you have come here for may be for a great many much more grand purposes than to find out where the seat of my pants is going to be placed somewhere after sunset. I understand how you feel.

Here we go. Let’s try connecting a few dots. Show business first and foremost is to be found right around this page. You can visit my highlight reel link just above where you’ll find a short piece of Dana Smith in Edmonton from a few years ago. Shot, edited and to the extent possible Alan Plotkin tried to be sure to annoy his subject matter by including certain moments of resistance the entertainer encountered while playing to his crowd. So there’s that.

You can check out my novels by clicking on the link. You can sample some of my blog posts. You can contact me and last of all once you’ve put yourself through all these digital contortions you can grip that mouse in your hand firmly click and depart for virtual experiences near and far, better or worse, few I prefer to believe a good bit less bent than mine.

I’m wrestling with some new writing on the topic of street theater. Have a boat I’m getting ready for sailing off the coast of California this summer. I’ve been threatening to mount a new performance titled the World Emergency Full Catastrophe Climate Change Comedy Show. It’s not like I’m just sitting here counting my lucky stars. I’m working twice as hard as the next guy and getting half as far. Artistic endeavors are seldom achievements we can measure as going lightning quick. More like they take their own good time, arrive as they will, when they’re ready. Sort of like this website change. I want to welcome you here by keeping it real and fresh. I’ll be back soon enough with more for you to see and chew. Until then eat more vegetables, drink more water and try to get some sleep.

Books

Time is Slow-Eternity is Long

31 Oct 201731 Oct 2017 Dana SmithLeave a comment

Five hundred miles later I arrived in Ajo, Arizona pitching my tent first- answering questions later.

My RV pull-through host didn’t disappoint packing a small sidearm while collecting my site use fee.

“You’ll want to pack the tent and be out of here by 8.” His tone of voice allowed me to crawl inside my own personal spaghetti western.

Sizing the hombre up I met his bid. “Partner, if I’m still here likely you best call the sheriff. Tell him another camper didn’t survive the night.”

He almost smiled, almost.

I found a town crawling with tarantulas, sun faded storefronts and bargain made in the basement tacos. I found much to recommend or not.

There exists in this frontier outpost an accelerant, a built into the equation escape velocity only to be impeded by highways blocked by checkpoints manned by Border Patrol Agents urging me to exercise my mother tongue before reluctantly waving the native born liberal mercenary through.

From the spoils of this southern quagmire I rolled into the Santa Catalina Mountains where at 8000’ I’d go hike by day and hole up in a cabin by night squaring a few circles with a stubborn yet still quirky open-minded friend.

The circumstances of my being on sabbatical and quarantine were mostly prose-induced and ‘civilization closing in on me’ fed. You heard of Eat-Sleep-Pray, this was more akin to Drink-Brag-Bray.

Fresh air and cheap whiskey possess medicinal qualities. My doctor urged me not put a lot of faith in one half of that equation.

In some quarters even possessing half a heart is better than none. I mean by shopworn insincerity you are in worse shape than me if that sorry half-heart is a winning hand.

But, whether I vent my spleen, spit out a lung, or bust my ass sometimes even the better of us mixed in with the rest of the rot have to belly up and fight off the demon slothful misery of self-pity and get back to the barricades.

If you are not feeling the vital juices of rejuvenation too damn bad, we are all on aching notice from the ticking clock that time goes slow and that soon enough we’ll all learn that eternity is long.

KOLD-TV Antenna for Tucson, Arizona

My Broadcasting Career and Welcome to Work Sign

Books · Uncategorized

Skydiving without Parachutes

3 May 20173 May 2017 Dana SmithLeave a comment

heart of coin — Adrift in a sea of change….

About those Scenes

Many of us, not all, taste our first sip of love from our mother’s heart. Depending upon the woman and her emotional circumstances this is a first glimpse into the unconditioned embrace of being alive we’ll later seek in our grand search across the universe for connection. Seeking love is narrative, finding it is finale, writing beyond the heart struck sweet bliss is pure fantasy. Not all of us have the same capacities, some of us find little love in the world while others find too much, each comes with its own set of awkward circumstances and fates. What a character does with their heart helps us cheer them on or if they fail, the painful demise helps us feel the same human anxiety haunting us all. And we haven’t even talked about the hot sex yet!

Women of the Oak Savannahs… A Fragment

Jessica and Tyler ceased moving, stopped speaking, her cheek set on her pillow, his cheek on his, she searched one eye then his other. Tyler did the same, dialing in, finding they were on the same wavelength, the two had been a tight fit from the first. Every minute or so one or the other would take in a deeper breath and then exhale. With each tick of the clock Jessica’s confidence increased. Pulling her arm out of one sleeve and then the other, she threw Tyler’s t-shirt off the bed, feeling more sure, coming in closer, skin to skin, pregnant, filled with expectation, Jessica left no room for doubt, the time for second guessing was over.

Looking for Love

Books

Velocity of our Change

2 May 2017 Dana SmithLeave a comment

20170501_163047

Jacaranda Petals Healing the Velocity of Life

Out Loud…

Long fiction, scene by scene, attempts to decode the workings of our ever smaller world. Politics, culture and commerce bombard our nervous system from the mundane to the uninvited digitized global events we view on our media devices. Individual freedoms in this interconnected phenomenal life are proving to be illusory and failing that within just an instant forgotten then irrelevant. The long fiction writer is scrubbing the temporal landscape, we depict neural networks, free associating matrices that flicker-light through the shadows of our daily lives. Pace of time, velocity of attention, the sense that our ability to think through the circumstances we are folded into becomes scattershot and piecemeal. Neither at the beginning or end of this technological revolution, we are lost in the chaotic Dadaist like midst of a world disrupted. Because the event horizon has accelerated the long fiction writer has to work quick to speak to the moment or have the next moment overtake what he has spent so much time preparing his readers for.

Dialogue from the new novel

“See that, try to sign me up and you end up getting picked for an inside job.”

Like Piper, Jessica filled her jeans full to temptations brim, the activist felt safe enough with Piper’s companionship, looking at Jo she said, “You’re going to be the best. The big boys are going to be pleading for mercy once they find out what kind of woman they’ve run up against.”

Tyler, Ronnie, Piper and Jessica were gangling guiltlessness, mercurial mischief makers. Jo knew among her three friends that, “none had had their chests cracked in two, hearts half eaten, left for dead on the side of the road, none had found that kind of love, not yet.”

“Come on, Dudes, lets go have a swim party…” Tyler said.

“Go on, go, all of you…” Jo could smell the hijinks. “Running around a swimming pool in my underwear with you two? That would just piss me off. Go on, get,” she clapped her hands, “you don’t need any adult supervision.”

Books · Uncategorized

Grappling with the Tease

26 Feb 201726 Feb 2017 Dana SmithLeave a comment

ignacio-spring-home

Where Words Live

We are editing Women of the Oak Savannahs. I’ll miss the syntactical twists that must be removed, the favorite phrase that has to go. You come up with a fascinating vein, you milk it too long, you cut the clever idea back until from the twenty sentences you started with you are down to one and the thing means nothing and the whole matter is dropped. That can take most of a day.

The paradox of being a good writer means you are a rule breaker. You know what you want to say then find doing so within the rules of grammar is a confinement resembling an unhappy marriage. You want to go have an affair with words you should not be sleeping with. Writers are riven with weakness but will the stubborn and suspect remain faithful to their craft.

There are moments of inspiration followed by hours of grappling hand to hand, rock to rock, word to word. I have been wordsmithing a snappy teaser to my latest novel. I’ll leave it here and be finished with you.

Hundreds of thousands of trees are felled by Napa Valley’s wine barons in collusion with campaign contribution compromised politicians. The bitter defeat of the still powerless majority proves to be the crack in the wall of ever dwindling support for an industry that has finally gone too far.

Books · Uncategorized

Into the Wilderness

1 Feb 20171 Feb 2017 Dana SmithLeave a comment

BABY IT’S COLD OUTSIDE

Our negotiators didn’t put their thumb down on the scale of who would benefit most from trade agreements they pressed their middle finger down. The damage has exasperated citizens while further enriching the very wealthiest among us. Nice work if you can get it, and party hardy until the social upheaval hits the ceiling fan installed somewhere over Kansas.

If we had set policy so that our workers, our moderate income earners, our middle class benefited most… more than Wall Street, more than the Big Banks, more than the transnational corporations, we would not be in the fix we are in.

Two specific broken policies. Our negotiators broke their promise to invest in worker retraining programs. Higher education instead of going down in cost went up. Instead of scholarships and grants for displaced workers those funds were cut from the Federal budgets.

The second broken promise? Workers and communities harmed by new trade agreements were promised funding to help rebuild the impacted communities and to assist workers who needed relocate to new communities where new jobs were being created.

Not a day goes by… Not a single day…

The heavyweight big money boys continue to pulverize to smithereens all the lightweight small change best idea girlie girls. Instead of setting enlightened policy for the workers we have installed a vulgar liar that results in evermore chaos, solving nothing, while looting, pillaging and profiting from the spoils of their partisan victory.

Practical solutions are not fueled by this much anger. They just aren’t. We have turned over the keys to the car to a vast trove of men temperamentally unfit for high office. Our problems are only going to become the best problems we have ever had. They’re going to be huge problems, the best, biggest, hugest problems many of us have ever seen. And they’re going to make us pay for their problems. Not Mexico, not some global elite. We are going to pay.

“Why not be the best version of our self right now, starting today? I see you. I see the best version of you, something better keeps reaching out, something inside you keeps trying to touch something inside of me. That’s what I want. I want what we have.”

Women of the Oak Savannah’s

Books · Performances

Comedy as Balancing Act

17 Apr 201317 Apr 2013 Dana SmithLeave a comment

Comedy requires concision. As I’ve been building my story I’ve had to battle filling in enough narrative to make the mind’s eye see the scene while maintaining the pace of the story so as not to derail the momentum. It is a brutal dance of first building the chapter and then removing anything that does not propel the plot or is not funny… There is a degree of difficulty here that I would not have been capable of understanding had I not written two bigger novels.

HOT SPRING HONEYMOON

“Always use a high roller at a card game,” Fletcher said.

“Poker playing, men play cards all the time.”

“Mormon’s don’t…” Gage said.

“Give a Mormon half a chance,” Fletch said, “and they’ll be most hung-over rooster crowing at sunrise.”

“Enjoy a game twice as much,” Keefe said, “and be three times as ashamed.”