The Cutting Room Floor

It's inevitable that any piece of writing - even one as expansive as Planet Simpson - is going to have to undergo some substantial cuts before it's ready to publish. My first draft probably weighed in at somewhere near 250,000 words, before being (expertly) trimmed by my editor, Anne Collins, to the fighting weight of about 200,000 that you (hopefully) now own. Anne's edits were mostly masterful, and I wouldn't put any of this stuff back in even if I could, but anyhoo here are a few of my favourite bits of debris from Planet Simpson's cutting-room floor.

1) Here's a paragraph from the Homer chapter that was rightly deemed repetitive, but meant cutting a reference to one of the all-time greatest Simpsonian consumer products - the Good Morning Burger:

Sure, there's plenty of ambivalence to Homer’s character - it's all a rich tapestry - but he does of course embody some characteristics of his age better than others. In particular, as I've already pointed out at some length, he's got some kinda appetite. He's a clearer symbol of the consumer age than Ronald McDonald in Gap khakis and a pair of Nikes sucking back a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, a case of Budweiser and a pack of Marlboros. And Homer's locked in a symbiotic relationship with a society that's just as impulsive and gluttonous and self-contradictory as he is. There's no better example of this than the scene in Episode 8F22 ('Bart's Friend Falls in Love') where we find Homer sprawled on his ass-grooved couch watching a feature called "I'm Okay, You're Too Fat" on Kent Brockman's investigative-reporting program Smartline. As Brockman lists the gory details of America's obesity epidemic, Homer quickly grows impatient with the lack of pure entertainment on his TV screen. His remote control, though, is just out of reach. To avoid the abhorent exercise of getting off the couch and fetching the remote, he decides to keep watching. Smartline goes to a commercial break - an ad for a fast-food restaurant. The voice-over: "We take eighteen ounces of sizzling ground beef, and then soak it in rich creamery butter. Then we top it off with bacon, ham and a fried egg. We call it . . . the Good Morning Burger." This, of course, earns Homer's undivided attention. And neither Brockman nor Homer takes note of the obvious connection between the subject of Smartline and the product being hawked by the show's sponsor.

2) In the Bart chapter, I kinda went off a bit about the vagaries of moshing. "Not sure we need a history of the mosh pit," wrote my editor, then ran diagonal lines through the next page and a half. We truly didn't need said history, of course, but here it is anyway:

This was certainly true at the most pit's birth in the British punk scene of the late 1970s, when punk audiences - unwilling or perhaps unable to dance to such blisteringly fast-paced music - took to "pogoing," bouncing up and down in time to the music, often bumping into each other as a result. In the 1980s, it jumped the pond, reimagined as a far more aggressive ritual of intentional collision – "slam-dancing" – in the audiences attracted by American hardcore punk. These were bands like Black Flag, Minor Threat, the Dead Kennedys - whose connection to Nirvana and its core audience were much more direct than any of the first wave of U.K. punk bands. When Nevermind's success hauled the scene into the mainstream, the mosh pit came with it, and it eventually became, like the music, a mere fashion detail. You could feel it change.

It was still there, the communal aspect, at least as late as the Toronto installment of Lollapalooza in the summer of 1993. Here were 10,000 people, more, drawn to a huge field north of the city to see a day's worth of artists, many of whom had heretofore played only tiny, grimy clubs. Case in point: Dinosaur Jr, fronted by the ultra-laconic guitar god J Mascis, veterans of the college-radio scene of the late 1980s, their music a melodic, punk-paced child of Neil Young & Crazy Horse. Mascis was nearly immobile on stage, a slacker statue, but somehow lightning-speed riffs and amphetamine-blues solos poured out of his guitar. The mosh pit filled a stagefront space the size of a football field, bodies packed tight, bouncing off each other like agitated atoms, limbs flailing. I was in the middle of it, midway between the stage and the back edge of the pit. I took a shoulder check and let myself lurch to the right. Didn't see the half-buried pipe there that was guarding the cables running from stage to soundboard. It was slick with mud. I was down in an instant, face against grass, looking at a blur of rising and falling boots. I rolled onto my back, near panic, hoping I could somehow get back to my feet before a Doc Marten buried itself in my face. But in the long moment it had taken me to fall and roll over, a half-dozen people standing in my immediate vicinity had formed a circle, arms locked together against the tidal flow of the crowd, clearing a space for me. As soon as I was back up, the circle broke, and everyone turned back to the stage, back to leaping and thrashing violently into one another again. This all went down without a word. This was automatic. It was standard operating procedure in every mosh pit I'd witnessed to that point. And it remains among the most profound feelings of community I’ve ever felt.

By Lollapalooza 1995 – same venue, similar assortment of bands - this had changed. The pit that year was flat-out dangerous: careless elbows caught your cheekbones, the flailing boots of endless crowd-surfers cuffed you in the back of the head. It was just a crowd now. No one was looking out for you. No one was paying attention. But the fact of its demise doesn't, for me, negate what it once was.

3) Burns chapter. Discussion of the response of the world's leaders to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Lost about a page of overkill in my rant about the vacuousness of political rhetoric in contemporary America:

It was a response so repulsive, so utterly empty of insight and so overflowing with self-interest, that it shook my faith in Fukuyama's beloved "Western liberalism" to its very core. And it seemed a technicolour illustration of the crisis in leadership - moral as well as political - created by the surrender of power by public institutions to private interests. Among the many changes wrought by the tragic attacks of September 11, they utterly vapourized the validity of the market-populist argument. It had been years - perhaps decades - since the citizens of the Western democracies had understood so clearly and in such great numbers the supreme importance of public institutions: of fire and police departments, of mayor's offices and Congresses and Parliaments, of foreign-policy think tanks and emergency-planning committees. And, moreover, the enormous import of choosing leaders wisely.

Even a year later, the leadership vacuum remained. Indeed the first anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center was marked with a kind of elaborate oratorial monument to the dearth of new ideas about the point of the Western-liberal project, as three of the leaders chosen to speak at the ceremony at Ground Zero read aloud from the speeches of great American leaders of previous generations. New York Governor George Pataki weighed in with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, New Jersey Governor James McGreevey stepped up with a rote reading of the Declaration of Independence, and New York City's new mayor, the free-market hero Michael Bloomberg, read a passage from Frankin D. Roosevelt’s "Four Freedoms" speech. And all of them stated - subtextually - that they were so far beneath these legendary men as leaders that they couldn't even muster up the courage to try to meet the momentous occasion with an inspirational speech of their own. As for the day's other major speaker - President George W. Bush - his facility with simplistic metaphors and infantile moral pronouncements is too widely known to require further elaboration here.