Thursday November 30, 2006

This is a photo of you and me. Or not you and me, but someone very much like you and me. Or really someone not like you and me at all in that when he was alive he lived on the streets, used heroin, and had the word “FUCK” tattooed on his forearm. He also had ideas—dare I say solutions—about homelessness that seemed rational and achievable. But this passport photo of Stuart Shorter didn’t look at all like the Stuart I had imagined in my head. I mean really, he looked like the kind of kid I might have seen at the britpop club I used to go to in Hollywood in my early 20’s. I don’t know what I expected, but those eyes and the expression that says nothing except maybe, “hurry up and take the goddamn picture” felt more familiar than I was ready for. He just didn’t seem like the angry and troubled guy you get to know in Alexander Masters’s spectacular biography of Mr. Shorter, Stuart, A Life Backwards. The “life backwards” part takes the same approach that Stephen Elliott took in last year’s crushing S&M/child abuse novel Happy Baby—start in the present, then work backwards to find how we ended up here.

But what really excited me about the book and gave me ideas I’d like to steal some day was the openness of the process. From the first line, “Stuart does not like the manuscript,” Masters is continually upfront when things are not going well. There are scenes where Stuart yells at him, scenes where Masters is lost in a pile of research notes and post-its scattered on the floor, and this passage where all the behind the scenes exposure pays off and gives you something about Stuart you’d never get otherwise. Stuart’s talking here:

No, but that’s what I keep saying to you. I never looked at things in that way. That weren’t how I lived. Because you’ve lived such a different, fucking straightforward life, you’re asking me to think like you’d think, and put perspectives on things. I can’t do that. I can’t even say I knew of any purpose I had in life meself.

When there’s a reason for it, it can be really thrilling when the seams show. Like that moment in the documentary My Architect when Nathaniel Kahn desperately books a last minute interview on a pay phone. It’s certainly not the kind of thing we want to do all the time in radio, and I realize that in some ways it’s a cliché (think of the camera panning out to show the set at the end of an SNL skit or a radio reporter acknowledging the presence of the microphone in a story—guilty!). But used sparingly it’s a clever tool. Jad Abumrad uses the technique often on Radiolab to put you in a place without having to say, “And so I went to blah, blah, blah.” And it’s what’s happening in the Pray episode of This American Life when Alix Spiegel breaks down and calls Ira Glass for advice.

Like any other device, I suppose it’s about being smart enough when using it that nobody even notices the device is there.

N.B. Maureen Corrigan’s Fresh Air review where I first heard about Stuart, A Life Backwards.