ABOUT a thousand words, to introduce
ABOUT this web site
It’s time to sell some stories.
ABOUT any web site
Around Halloween 2007, The Daily Telegraph (the original telegraph itself a pretty good example of genius in action) listed for our consideration “the 100 Greatest Living Geniuses.” Sharing the Number One slot was the inventor of LSD along side the inventor of the World Wide Web. The LSD genius, a 102-year-old Swiss chemist, died the following spring around the time he was to have been Guest of Honor at the World Psychedelic Forum — thus leaving them high and dry and abandoning the www genius to top the genius list all by his lonesome (with Quentin Tarantino, Dolly Parton and the man who gave us the Swatch anchoring the other end of this chimerical list).
Really, though, we don’t need a London newspaper to tell us the World Wide Web is pure genius. In one deft stroke, the heretofore unrivaled genius of both Gutenberg’s printing press and Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” were swept to the shores of The Quaint right along with Senefelder’s lithography, Bell’s original circus posters, 19th century London sign twirlers and, of course, Ginsberg’s original computerized punch card dating service.
As evolution stimulants or kill-the-dinosaurs meteors go, you just can’t beat the www for sui generis genius… Today’s billboard industry squeezes its “outdoor” ads onto GPS-equipped golf cart screens. Pixilated pixies pop up profiles asking to be our “friends.” Sex b/4 Date 1.0? CAM2CAM! No IM, no hit-me-back? Get a realtime GPS accu.trac bootyhunter speed+direction w/optional mobile hotspot locator mashup to actually iball realtime where in holy hell that hot new bf/gf is really at!
Love 2.0: century.21\risk=0\options: ∞
But wait, there’s more. Not just our food and shelter and fun and love have been migrated to the new upgraded cross-platform paradigm, but… Thanks to the wired-for-wireless omnidirectional everpresence of it all, existence, its own sweet self, gets morphed. Being & Nothingness becomes Online or Nothingness.
Being 2.0: i.url.//i.am
So, here, now, I offer my billboard, my proof that I exist, my “official,” unspoofed, unphished, unbeta-blocked, unbeta-tested… URL.
ABOUT Peter Cook - Writer
I live in Pasadena with my wife, a brave and brilliant and beautiful woman I met about 5,000 days ago at midnight in a bar in Vermont (an urban escapist playland whose boosters are wont to vaunt “the west coast of New England“) as she and her 6’8” tall boyfriend joined the revelrous congeries of yuppies and farmers and hippies and bikers in kicking up the sawdust on the floor to the twangs and strains of a pretty decent cover tune band — the only show in town at that hour. I postponed my return to L.A. on hope I’d see her again in the coming days. A week later I asked her to marry me; one hundred days after that I was married to my Canadian soulmate dreamgirl in a cozy, little wedding chapel by a Filipino Justice of the Peace near Vermont Avenue in L.A.’s Koreatown.
We enjoy two cats, two cars, two bicycles, two good bills of health, no priors, no library books overdue, no debts. I hesitate to sum, to pith, to recapitulate or to say it out loud at all — but… Gun to my head? I’m a very, very lucky guy.
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Screenwriting, like panning for gold, brooks no satisfying explication for onlookers; Martians, suit-n-tie college buddies, fathers, landlords, et al. — all your kneejerk furrowbrows — chafe at what they see as an obdurate insanity. Camus pinked it best when riffing on Sisyphus’ imbecility: we must imagine the poor bastard happy.
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It’s time to sell some stories.
I was twelve the first time I ever tried to sell a story. The teachers had been trying to peddle us kids this M.A.D. story for too long. Their Bert the Turtle character needed to meet his match. My father had recently bought me a typewriter and taught me how it to use it. It was a nice complement to his teaching me my ABC’s, the difference between paradox and irony (fire, paradox; the flamethrower, irony) and, of course, how to hit it on the sweetspot from any bad lie.
This arms race nonsense, though, bit and wouldn’t let go. Mutual agreement by strange men to blow up my town bit clean to the bone. This was no mere tickling and gibing as before with the aerodynamics of Santa’s sleigh, the cookies-n-cheap wine transubstantiation thing, Columbus “discovering” something new where millions and millions had already been living and loving and singing and hunting and killing for twenty thousand some-odd years… The leg-pulling and Silly Putty brainstretches from Columbus and Santa and Jesus could be not be stopped. But these unnamed pricks aiming to vaporize my town? They must be stopped.
I was around twelve when I learned there existed this widespread lunacy, this “serious” contemplation about and around vaporizing entire cities. The cake-taker was, as you might guess, when they told us that not only did our enemy have a list of cities to hit, but my puny, cowshit-semi-encircled, lakefront, middlewit college town was… On that list!
I remember Burlington, mostly, as picture-postcard cutesy in those days. In just a few minutes I could ride my bike down past the helicopter machine gun factory to the lake or out past the computer chip factory to the cow pastures and fresh fruit and vegetable stands. When I got old enough to have friends with cars, Montreal — our Paris/Vegas utopian Eutopia with its rock concerts and strip joints and museums and even a planetarium! — came into reach. Great times: Hope, kick-ass cool music, the Bicentennial with the Church Committee on TV and Nixon’s ilk flushed away once and for all!
On City Hall Park Square, two nuts converted a gas station into an ice cream stand, painted cows on the walls and were trying to sell a cone for the same price you pay for a gallon at the store. “Homemade?” Who cares? No one’s going to go for that. Hippy kids from New York, they were. Lots-a-luck.
By the end of the BellBottomHipHugger Decade, I sat in the park by the fountain across from that ice cream shop (they had, like, two more now... imagine…) and a bunch of us were talking about starting a weekly newspaper to counter the sell-out rag with its bullshit puff pieces and polished PR releases. One kid was about to inherit some cash from his grandmother and another kid could get us space in the back of his old man’s taxidermy shop. Ol’ Murray Bookchin showed up (his kids were high schoolers in Burlington, then, too). Had on his blue work overalls, front pocket bulging with pens, beret slouched to the side from brow wiping, held forth telling us all about Eugenius Warming, Eugene Debs, promised he’d write a regular column for us.
Whatever happened? The kid getting the money, when he actually got the money, seemed to get a pretty good talking-to to go along with it.
Note to self re Hollywood, life, etc.: Some good deals die. They just do.
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I was born on the 20th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor‘s bombing. Four decades later in Manhattan, a few days after the 50th Anniversary of the H-Bomb’s big bang birth in the Pacific, the H-bomb’s eminently ingenious designer and his wife sat in the front row at the birth of my play about the birth of the A-bomb. About the script, on his Council on Foreign Relations calling card he wrote, in the very same hand that designed Teller’s “Super,” “Thank you, Peter Cook Congratulations.” This artifact remains to this day among my most enigmatic objects.
I co-wrought the play with the biographer of Einstein’s protégé — the genius in the shadows who wrote the famous letter that Einstein signed and Roosevelt read. This famous letter, the letter that began the Manhattan Project and its rabid progeny, the uranium weapons industries, was a page and a half long — typed, single-spaced. Concision, while the meat axe of the intellect, seems nonetheless a necessity in our polity when hitting on the Big Boys about the big stuff.
Thanks to this surreal script collaboration, I found myself on a first name basis with this Cold War journalism veteran, former Washington editor for The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, senior atomic policy analyst for Congress’ investigative arm — the G.A.O… This… This guy who’s on a first name basis with Nobel laureates and luminaries of every shape and size from the Playboy Mansion to the Pugwash Conferences! And me? A scrawny C-student-on-a-good-day, three-time college drop-in…
Early on, I threw in a toss-off line predicated on one of the characters calculating off the top of his head — via Avogadro’s Number. My collaborator validated my punchline’s figures — by checking with a Princeton physics don who once served as arms control adviser to the White House! They say the Golden Age’s consummate insider-outsider, Samuel Goldwyn, would advise, “Give me a smart idiot over a stupid genius any day.”
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Another elegant truth from Mr. G: “I don’t think anyone should write his autobiography until after he’s dead.”
I agree.
On to selling some stories.
For consideration, perusal, option, sale, I’ve whipped up six illustrative pieces: Two wholly original stories; the screenplay from the stage play for the atom bomb story; a KKK/FBI true story thriller; a collaboration on a martial arts script with a Grammy Award-winning, Martial Arts Hall of Famer — and all-around nice guy; and a treatment collaboration for a dark comedy about reality TV which sprang from lunch with the man who sprang The Peoples Court on us.
Fun stuff.
Please have a look around the site. My wife built it. I thank her for… Everything. And I thank you for your time and interest.
