Loquacious is one of my favorite words in the English language. I am not necessarily a fan of loquacious people though.  Part of the problem is, I am one of them.  I tend to go on, as you’ll note by the length of many of my blog posts, and I don’t really know how to stop sometimes.

I used to be much worse.  College tends to do this to you, as you learn to extend the length of your page-mandated papers by saying in three sentences what it takes to say in one.  I did take a Business Communication class in college, which emphasized short sentences and constantly preached “as few words as possible.”  At the time, I found the approach somewhat stupid.  These short emails we drafted often seemed to be missing details and, whatever you made up for in your dearth of words was negated by the fact that an email only one person needed to see was CCed to 34 others.

As a speech nerd, a student of film criticism, and someone who tended to do well in writing classes, I thought I knew better.  I marched into my first real world job as a Hollywood assistant, convinced that my ability to write clear script coverage was an indicator I may be wordy, but I was effective.

It took about three weeks before my boss called me in to her office. She couldn’t take it anymore.

“Jessica.  We spend all day reading words, thousands upon thousands of them.  You are one of the people I communicate with the most each day.  You have to cut down how many words you use to talk to me.”

This was also followed by a rant about my MLA-induced habit of putting two spaces after a period (something that has since changed slightly in the MLA style guide, but at the time was still pretty universally taught).  I thought this was my “Swimming with Sharks” or “The Devil Wears Prada” moment.  My irrational boss making insane demands.

While I maintain my love of the two space period, I would painstakingly go through all my correspondence in that job and remove it after the fact.  I would look at my sentences and take out unnecessary words and phrases. And I would dream of the day when I could stop.

Once I got out of Hollywood and went to grad school, I was free to be wordy me again.  However, I now had freshmen students as part of the program.  Freshmen students who turned in papers and assignments.  Then I realized what my not-so-evil Hollywood boss was talking about.

I can only hope I was less transparent at lengthening my work in college than my students were.  They could write the same sentence six ways, then turn it in on wide rule paper where the words never got within an inch of the margin or on typed paper in the absurdly large Courier font with two-inch margins.

This is also when my hatred for passive voice, the present perfect, and many other word verb tenses really took root.  More words does not equal more communication.

One more time.

More words does not equal more communication.

“I checked the mail.”

This is a clear, concise sentence. Idn’t it purdee?

“I went to check the mail.”

This is two words longer than it needs to be.

“The mail was checked by me today.”

Do you see how this is basically a sentence written in reverse? It is like a tiny game of “Clue”. What is happening to the mail? Who did the checking? Was it in the billiard room?

Five years removed from grad school, I find I have become my Hollywood boss.  She is right.  We read all day, every day.  As a result, my patience for wordy people wanes.  I draft emails specifically asking for yes and no answers.  I get novels in return.  They are not even novels that answer my question.  Much like my students at IU, they are novels trying to dodge the fact they don’t know the answer or know I don’t like what they have to say.

As the old-fashioned senior citizen on the inside that I am, I long for the days of paper.  I enjoy the convenience of ease and email.  I agree that it encourages literacy and reading on a level we haven’t seen in a couple of generations.  However, the great thing about paper and pens is that they are finite resources.  When you draft a letter or a newspaper column, they are very real and physical space restrictions that get you to think about what you are going to say.

As a result, we don’t bother to think before we word spew all over everything.  As my friend Dave wisely pointed out, even though you are writing less words, until you train yourself otherwise, it takes more time to be less wordy.  And time being a precious commodity, laziness kicks in and effective communication falls by the wayside.

As this increasingly lengthy post will attest to, the internet has space in spades.  Other than title and SEO description limits, there are very few restrictions on length or character limit.  That doesn’t mean that we need to get biblical in our post length though.  

The more you say, the less I hear it. Be direct. Be concise.  And remember that space on the internet may be an endless resource, but a person’s time is still finite and precious. Respect it.

For a variety of reasons, I have met more than your average number of celebrities in my life.  It started back in high school.  I spent the bulk of my high school years in Kentucky, but for reasons that are too long to go into, I did spend my sophomore year at a prep school in the San Fernando Valley.

The school happened to enroll a number of child actors and athletes, as well as children of actors and athletes.  One celebrispawn teen in my Computer Science class even went on to a reality show in which she and another celebrispawn briefly lived on a farm in Arkansas.

For some reason, I never got terribly starstruck around some of these big name celebrities coming to pick their kid up.  When I advanced to college at USC, the story stayed the same.  I would meet some notable people in my class, but I was rarely left tongue tied to interact with them.

This cool exterior helped me out in my days as a Hollywood assistant, where I had to keep calm around our notable clientele.  In poker, it helped me cover up the enthusiasm I had seeing some of my favorite pros for the first time.

This is not to say I never got starstruck.  However, I wouldn’t nervous around the likes of Jeff Golblum, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Billy Bob Thornton, George Lucas, or any of the other very talented people I was fortunate enough to meet.  My nerves were reserved for celebrities with a more…acquired taste.

We were lucky enough to have Sidney Poitier speak to our class. My roommate needed me to clarify who he was, which I did between hyperventilating breaths.  In 2001, I ran into Jon Favreau in a campus Starbucks. This was back when Mr. Favreau was not much of a director and was best known for being Rudy’s friend in “Rudy”, and, of course, “Swingers”.  I stammered like an idiot and kept my cool long enough to return to my dorm room and run up and down the halls yelling, “I met Jon Favreau” followed by yelling the answer to the question, “Who is Jon Favreau?”

My most embarrassing moment with a celebrity came during my year in that California prep school though.  I was one of three performers in our theater department’s production of “Greater Tuna”.  If you’re unfamiliar with the play, it is typically performed with two actors each playing a dozen characters. We added in a third and divvied the roles up.

My teacher and director, Mr. Boles, was a fantastic man who thought I was doing some of the best performing he’d ever seen from me.  He was also familiar with my obsession with old movies.  So, he decided to do something very nice for me.  He invited his friend to a performance.  His friend was Richard Beymer.

Who is Richard Beymer, you ask?  If you know him at all, you either know him from “Twin Peaks” or, more likely, for his role as Tony in the film “West Side Story”.  The Robert Wise-directed musical has been a favorite of mine for almost two decades.  At the age of 15, I knew every word of every song and even committed a substantial amount of the choreography to memory.

When I learned Mr. Beymer was coming to see out show specifically to see me, I pretty much had a coronary.  I spent the time leading up to the performance glancing out the stage door to see if he was walking into the theater.  During the show, I spotted him in the front row.  He was filming some of the scenes with a camcorder, which in my mind was a clear indication I was to be his new protege.  I thought he certainly would notice when, in a scene in which one of my characters, a Southern grandma, dances with joy, that I incorporated some of his Tony choreography into my moves.

The show ended and I saw him standing and applauding as I took my curtain call. Life was amazing.

After the show, Mr. Boles told me I should come meet the man, the myth the legend.  I came in from the back of the theater, prepared to descend the stairs with the grace and flair of Rita Moreno to meet one of my heroes.

I made it one step.

Then my foot slipped on the edge of the step and I proceeded to tumble down more than a dozen stairs, landing at Mr. Beymer’s feet, a crumpled heap.  As he tried to help me up, concerned about my well-being, all I could say was this:

“You’re Richard Beymer.”

The stunned silence didn’t last long. He gave a bashful thank you, then proceeded to compliment me on the performance.  Then I unleashed the word vomit including my adoration for “West Side Story” and “The Diary of Anne Frank”.  I even mentioned my incorporation of the choreography. He admitted he had no recollection of the choreography of “West Side Story”. So I did the sensible thing. I performed it again, as if it would jog his memory.

Needless to say, that was the last I heard from Mr. Beymer.  Mr. Boles assured me he was impressed with me and even told me that his health wasn’t great and it was a feat that he even left the house for this at all.  I can only hope this wasn’t poppycock to cheer up a sullen, vintage-obsessed teenager.  Because with this story and several dozen more viewings of my worn VHS of “West Side Story”, I was able to recover from one of the more pathetic moments of my life.

I already did my post on the movie “Flight”, but it did get me thinking about a type of movie that I really just can’t enjoy. It isn’t a genre really, but it is a trend you see in a lot of entertainment these days, most notably in comedies, but also in a lot of dramas, including one television show I refuse to watch.

Everyone talks about “Breaking Bad” and how amazing it is, but I won’t watch it. Why? Well, my understanding of this show is that the protagonist of this show is a high school teacher who sees his life come apart and he eventually becomes a meth dealer.

I don’t avoid “Breaking Bad” because I think it is going to be a bad show. I’m sure it is just as well-crafted as you guys are making it out to be.  However, I can’t handle watching a character make bad decision after bad decision. Yes, it makes for good drama, but as someone who enjoys shows by emotionally investing in them and becoming sympathetic and empathetic with the characters, it is too much for me to handle.

It sounds crazy, but I become so anxious watching characters make bad decisions, that I can’t enjoy the movie or TV show anymore.  Take “Meet the Parents” as an example. Most people find this movie hilarious, but I can’t get through it without feeling miserable. Watching Ben Stiller’s character dig himself into mess after mess after mess isn’t funny to me because I am so stressed that he can easily avoid the situation by acting differently.  I literally squirm in seat, physically uncomfortable with what is happening before my eyes.

I understand how strange I sound, trust me. I wish I could watch “The Talented Mr. Ripley” without squirming or see the humor in the depressing demise of the heroine of “Bridesmaids”, but I can’t.  I don’t need happy endings, I don’t an absence of conflict, and I can even handle one or two bad decisions.

It seems like these avoidable descents are becoming increasingly popular in movies and television these days. So, what has been a type of movie I can easily avoid is increasingly becoming a popular trend in American popular culture. I see the effectiveness of the drama and the realism that comes with these descents without redemption.  I am aware this is my issue, not the movies. Nonetheless, it has me thinking why people seem to have such an appetite for something I have no stomach for–the relentless suffering of someone caused by their own poor judgment.

Before I get going, let me warn you that if you want to go into the Denzel Washington movie “Flight” blissfully unaware about the general gist of what the movie is about, you should stop reading. If you want to believe the movie bears resemblance to the previews, this is not the tumblr post for you.

In other words, SPOILER ALERT.

When I taught Public Speaking at Indiana University, I used to show the following video to get the point across to my students that introductions are incredibly important, as they set the scene for your entire speech.  This is a fake trailer for the horror movie, “The Shining”:

If you haven’t seen “The Shining”, please disregard what you just watched. If you have seen “The Shining”, I hope you found this as amusing as I did.  My students typically enjoyed it and it drove the point home well, especially because there were always one or two kids with no frame of reference for the film who were shocked to hear it is actually one of the scarier and creepier movies ever made.

Recently, I went to see “Flight” because I am generally a fan of director Robert Zemekis and because the 30 second trailers I saw on TV piqued my interest. It looked like a film about a mysterious plane crash, the ensuing investigation, and a man who may not be what he seems.  The blurb about it on Google Movies added to my enthusiasm about the film:

“Whip Whitaker, a seasoned airline pilot, miraculously crash lands his plane after a mid-air catastrophe, saving nearly every soul on board. After the crash, Whip is hailed as a hero, but as more is learned, more questions than answers arise as to who or what was really at fault and what really happened on that plane?”

I guess, on some level, that is what this movie is about.  In reality though, this is your standard movie about an alcoholic’s descent to rock bottom with a plane crash serving as the inciting incident.  The crash itself is relatively irrelevant.  This is 90 minutes of Denzel Washington’s character, pilot Whip Whitaker, dealing with his alcoholism and drug addiction.

In other words, this is “The Lost Weekend”, “Days of Wine and Roses”, “When a Man Loves a Woman”, “The Man With the Golden Arm”, and “Leaving Las Vegas”.  In particular, it remings me of Billy Wilder’s “The Lost Weekend”. Most of the movie is Washington by himself, struggling with his desire to drink. There is no mystery to solve, within 20 minutes everything is exactly as you would expect it would be.

That doesn’t make “Flight” a bad movie.  It isn’t great in my opinion, as it treads over all the familiar tropes of these previous films, adding very little save for the question of if Washington’s behavior can be excused in this instance since he managed to save a plane full of people from what should have been a crash that killed everyone on board.

It is interesting question, I suppose, but it doesn’t make this otherwise run of the mill flick rise to exceptional status in my book.  I will say that Washington’s performance is exceptional.  This is Oscar bait and the Academy should predictably  bite and award him with a well-deserved Best Actor nomination.  But Best Picture? I certainly hope better flicks than this will come along this winter.  

I don’t know who came up with the marketing plan for “Flight” that makes the crash seem like the centerpiece of the film, but I think they could stand to hear my lecture to my students on introductions.  This movie was not terrible, but because this flick and I got on the wrong foot with this misleading introduction, it left a more sour taste in my mouth than it would otherwise.  This movie went from B- to C for me because the experience was so marred by my expectations.

This isn’t the first time. Remember “The Family Stone”? Let me refresh your memory:

Looks funny, right? It kind of is at first. Until the major storyline involving one of the characters having terminal cancer comes into play.  As someone who lost a parent to cancer, I kind of like to know when I am going to stumble face first into a movie about it so I can mentally prepare.  I would think people with drug and alcohol problems or friends or family with drug and alcohol problems would want a similar warning before Flight. So that is what I am doing, giving you the heads-up. If you want to see a kind of depressing movie about a pilot with an alcohol problem with some great performances from Washington and others, go for it, I think you’ll like it.

If you want to watch something about a mysterious plane crash, this isn’t the place to find it. Maybe you can rewatch Season 1 of Lost instead.

In their recent discussion of “Argo” on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, the crew of my favorite podcast hit upon how I have longed to describe spoilers but could never find the words to explain.

Linda Holmes, whom my friend Jeff is still convinced is me in a disguise, explained that just because we know something is going to happen doesn’t mean that a movie is spoiled.  Take “Titanic”. We know the boat is gonna sink. Me telling you “hey, the boat sinks” isn’t spoiling anything for you.  Even though we know the outcome, how the action unfolds is where the suspense lies.

I am the weird breed that could care less if I know the surprise twist of a movie.  In fact, I frequently self-spoil on purpose, reading the last ten pages of a book when I am only halfway through it, looking up plot summaries on Wikipedia thirty minutes into a movie, and checking twitter to find out who gets kicked off “So You Think You Can Dance”.

If a movie or TV show is worth its salt, it is going to be good whether I know what happens or not.  If it needs the surprise of the twist ending to redeem an otherwise boring 90 minutes (I’m looking at you, The Sixth Sense) then the problem isn’t that someone spoiled the movie for you.  The problem is that the movie just isn’t very good.

So, I am often baffled at how people can be so riled up at perceived “spoilers” on the internet for several reasons.  First, unless I am calling or texting you as you are walking into a movie to specifically tell you “He dies in the first act”, I am not the one spoiling. You are. Don’t go on the internet if you don’t want to know how something people are currently watching and discussing turns out.  You only have yourself to blame.

Chuck Klosterman (my hero) already hit on another problem of the “no spoilers” phenomenon sweeping the internet.  If I tell you Rosebud is a sled, have I ruined Citizen Kane for you?  This movie was made in 1941. You may not have seen it, but is it really fair to assume that people can’t make Rosebud jokes 71 years later in case someone hasn’t seen it yet?  The question becomes–how long is a reasonable amount of time to wait between a text being released and people feeling hey can speak freely about the plot points?

Most people wouldn’t care if I reveal this pivotal plot point of Citizen Kane, but would tell me I am being insensitive if I were to Tweet plot points of Argo or Paranormal Activity 4 or some other movie that has only been in theaters two weeks.

We face the same conundrum in poker.  During the summer, no one seems to care that our Twitter feeds, posts, live updates, and recaps are “spoiling” the TV coverage.  When livestreams aren’t involved, only delayed TV coverage, few people tweet about reporters “spoiling” the TV show.  However, once a near livestream is introduced into the equation, we the poker media seem to be unclear on what is the best way to cover the event.

I understand that with the near-liveness of the final table, the discussion of how to cover it on Twitter is going to come up. It is still funny nonetheless to think about the fact that we don’t bat an eyelash before tweeting who went out in 13th even though it won’t air on TV for nearly three months, but if we tweet about someone busting at a final table 12 minutes before it happens on TV, some would charge we have ruined the TV coverage.

In fact, the Facebook comments I see on the WSOP.com preview stories always mock the fact that we try to write “spoiler-free” previews of the upcoming episodes.  Each time Elisabeth Hille or Gaelle Baumann came up, fans would be quick to comment “you know they don’t make the final table, right?”

Yet, each week people still seemed to enjoy the coverage on ESPN even though we knew Ivey didn’t make it, the girls missed out on the final table, and we knew who the final nine were.  I return to Holmes’ point–it was not what happened that mattered in these shows, it was how it happened that made the program entertaining.

I am not trying to deny that people’s enjoyment of these live events seems to be more marred by these “spoilers”, but I just can’t pinpoint the explanation why. Why is it that knowing something for two months doesn’t affect our ability to watch these packaged shows, but knowing something 12 minutes in advance can effectively “ruin” the telecast?

I assume it has something to do with different expectations when dealing with something near-live vs obviously not live at all.  That perhaps us breaking the illusion of liveness is more offensive the sensibilities than breaking the news that will be shared on a packaged show.  I’ll have to mull on it some more.  Unfortunately, in this instance, I can’t flip ahead to the end and find the answer.

The enthusiasm of this Mashable article on scrolling text on the new iPad model disheartens me.  He can have his opinions, don’t get me wrong. I just hope his bold prediction about the future of books his wrong.

I guess I should explain what the author is so thrilled about:  in most e-readers, the current status quo is to simulate page turning. There is no technological reason for this, it is an aesthetic decision, designed to mimic the act of reading a book.

The new iBook reader has a different option: scrolling text.  Rather than divvy text up into pages, you just use your thumb to keep scrolling down as you go.  The author says it helps him get lost in the text.  I worry that the very medium of “the book” is getting lost in the shuffle.

First, I should make an important semantic distinction. When you are on an e-reader, you are not reading a book. You are reading a text that is often also published in book form.  As such, what you are reading is actually fundamentally different than a book.  Many reception studies theorists have touched on this point and, as a student of reception studies, I have to agree–the way in which you an encounter a text directly impacts how you interpret that text.

Let’s take fonts for example.  A font may seem like a relatively innocuous component of the book, but the author and publisher selected it for a very specific purpose.  That font does not translate in e-readers.  Nor does the initial page numbering, as you can adjust the font size to your liking.  As such, the text you are engaging in differs from people who read the tactile book form.

You may be thinking this sounds great, but hear me out.  Take a chapter of a novel.  You know you are reaching the end of it, because you see the blank space when you turn the page.  I know when I near the end of a chapter, I tend to read with more focus and perhaps a bit faster, because the conclusion of the chapter tends to pack more of a punch than the last sentence of a paragraph.  When you manipulate where the last page of a chapter stops and starts, you are potentially undermining the message of the book.

These page breaks are what immediately came to mind when I read this e-reader news.  The scroll eliminates that suspense on some level.  The visual impact of turning a page and realizing the end of the chapter is near is gone.  And I think you lose some of the meaning of the story in the process.

No one else really voices these concerns though.  The movement now is to produce texts that can be viewed in multiple mediums and things like when you turn the page are conversations of the past.  While this fluidity is good for the reader demanding flexibility, for the writer, not being able to take full advantage of the medium the text will be consumed in is one less tool in their arsenal.  Once again, it seems like the ease of access trumps viewing or experiencing a text in the way it is intended to be viewed.

This isn’t the most well thought out rant, I admit. I am sure there are flaws in my statements and there are certainly more reception studies scholars to source to better support my point.  But I keep coming back to this subject these days and I want to start getting these thoughts down somewhere.  The pipe dream is some day to draft something akin to Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”.  Even though he wrote this before the age of computers, his lament about the loss of aura seems even more appropriate in this digital age where the consumers seems to feel more ownership and agency over texts than the authors who created them.

That is another subject for another time though.

The other day I was researching some poker history for work and I stumbled upon this.  It is the official coverage form the 1995-2000 Main Events.  Being a nerd for poker history, I had a field day looking through these notes and announcements. You could sense how small the poker community was back then. Even the chip count lists and payouts were peppered with inside jokes and nicknames, the transcribers seemingly unaware of how, in less than a decade, everything would change.

Far and away the best part of this discovery was uncovering the hand-for-hand action transcribed via shorthand by Tom Sims.  I was unfamiliar with Sims prior to this week, but now I am fairly certain he is my poker media hero.

Thanks to Sims, we are able to see how the legendary Stu Ungar played every single hand of the the 1997 Main Event final table.  As someone who had heard of Ungar’s genius, but never seen it in action, being able to get a sense of how he played was an incredible treat.

And we wouldn’t have that history were it not for Sims.  According to Melissa Hayden, Sims would speak the hands into a micro-cassette recorder and later write them up.  It had to be an arduous process, but Sims seemed to understand how you can’t really ascribe a value to having that information.

Another project I found particularly worthwhile was “The Andy Bloch Project”. Bloch agreed to play guinea pig for Sims as Sims tracked every single hand Bloch played in the ‘97 Main Event.  All 648 of them.  That number alone is very telling.  In the first level of play alone, Bloch saw 95 hands of poker.  No one is keeping such extreme tabs these days, but in the 2012 Main Event, I’d be hard pressed to believe someone saw 50 hands over the course of a two-hour level, let alone nearly twice that.

You would also think that 648 hands must have gotten Bloch pretty far in this tournament. In reality, it didn’t. Sims estimates that when Bloch busted during Day 2, he finished in approximately 44th place.  That year there were 312 Main Event entrants. The top 36 made the money, so to compare it to this year’s Main Event, Bloch basically made it to Day 3.

As the shot clock in poker debate gets some traction this month, this document helps to firmly illustrate just how much faster the game can be played. Again, I reiterate that we would not have this information and these precise numbers were it not for the diligence of Sims.

Which brings me to my point. In 1997 a man with a micro-cassette recorder created one of the most compelling, colorful, and thorough pieces of content I have ever seen. His efforts between the Bloch project and the final table, in my mind, have more long-term value than any of the coverage generated at this year’s series. Yes, we have our archived live streams, which capture the mood, people, and action of the final table, but, aside from the Main Event final table and the Big One for One Drop final table, documented by ESPN, we have no precise records of hands played, flops seen, cards shown down.

I think we have come a long way in poker coverage, don’t get me wrong. The early day action, the growth of chip count coverage, and the incorporation of Twitter all add a lot to the history books.  However, it is time we stepped it up with hand-for-hand of every major final table.  The WPT already does this and, as a result, they are able to offer a wealth of statistical information that can only be estimated on other tours and at the WSOP.  While we have gained a lot in our ability to immediately report what is happening, we seem to be losing sight that these updates are the official record of these events and have a shelf life and utility that extends beyond the day of the final table.

Opponents of hand-for-hand have told me “color” is lost in the shuffle and that staff restrictions make it too difficult to pull off.  This is why Sims is my new poker media hero.  His work from this era shows you how even a shorthand version of hand for hand can offer a wealth of color and historical value and that it can be done without a laptop.  All you need is a micro-cassette recorder and a willingness to document everything for history’s sake.