Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
Fuck you.
I’m so sick of your stupid shit. Your customer service system is, in a word: Byzantine. Your rate structures are total garbage, and the only redeeming feature you had was not hassling your internet users…which has ended.
But the birds…oh jesus, the birds.
I actually had a friend working at Telus when the original “Stupid Animals” advertising push started, and according to that friend, they had the campaign made for them, and then dropped the company that made it. They’ve done all the updates to it in house. And it shows.
I’ve hated it since day one, but I understood why they ran with it: it appealed to a lot of people. And Telus was a company that desperately needed to appeal to the consumers of the world. At the time, they were viewed as an Evil Empire of corporate shit-heads, who’d weaseled into a service previously run by the government, and were preparing to knife-rape our bank accounts into submission. These clowns needed to dazzle us with bullshit. And dazzle they did.
That was 12 FUCKING YEARS AGO. I’m begging you to stop. You ass-faces are in total control now. Grab the red batphone off the wall, and dial up Johnny CEO and tell him to stop stroking the thigh of a fat korean boy for 10 god damn seconds and approve a new advertising budget. This offends every sensibility I have.
I’ll tell you what, pay me 50 bucks, and I’ll come up with a new campaign for you. IN fact, I have it, here it is…for FREE.
“Telus: We promise to stop fucking your mouths”
DONE.
Thursday, May 8th, 2008
A little while back, or probably more like 3 years ago, somebody asked me who my writing influences were.
At the time I didn’t really have an answer that made any sense. I sort of muttered a number of non-committal things, made a strange and possibly incorrect reference to the works of William Burroughs, and then chugged the rest of my Rye & Coke. I’m not sure if I have a better answer now, but people have asked me again, so the issue is moving to the forefront once again.
When I was 15 I would have told you that I wanted to be Robert Heinlein. BE HIM. Not be LIKE him, I mean scoop his brain out, remove my own, and place it into my meat-shield. I would have been pretty happy with that…well…for like 20 seconds or something. I loved Heinlein. He represented a stream of thought that was so free, and in line with my own hearts desires. He was a writer who had actually thought about the Taboo’s, Laws, Emotions, and Failures of humanity, and had drawn conclusions of his own. He had thought of things that transcended the canalizing effect of apron string knowledge, and try to think in a way reconcilable with logic and compassion.
Sometimes he won, sometimes he lost, but he played the game his own way.
But life is a slow release from ignorance, and the fact is, I’m not Robert Heinlein. And more importantly, if I valued the idea of thinking for myself, and breaking free from the indoctrination I received in my formative years, than my final lesson had to be overcoming those same things from my mentor. The student surpasses.
As I got older, I found myself drawn to a lot of separate sources. In the end, my own twisted mechanism fell in with a writer that many of us aspire to be as crazy as: Hunter S Thompson. So much so, that I found I emulated his writing. For a time I was content to think of the world as a Mechanism that had no respect for the Process. A harsh playground, populated with cold-hearted pimp/bullies, who shook their fists in the air, and bellowed at me for control. A piss filled crevice, lorded over by cheap, fuck-off politico’s with gilded whores on their arms, pumping our wallets to feed their appetites, and leaving the Common Man, raped and worthless on the street corner.
But that was always a little too hardcore. I still feel amazed when I read Thompson. He was a high-powered scientist, with a jeweler’s eye for politics and the theater of life, capable of distilling complexities with precision, while consuming that which was distilled. Those who envy him, often envy the hard line he walked, and assume that to achieve the same Gonzo Power, you need to be as twisted as Hunter was. Sadly, they are wrong, and I’ve mentioned it before. Hunter was a journalist of immense talent, and his daily grind and snort was the past-time that helped him endure his tour of duty in the emotional hurricane of Journalism in the time of Agnew, Nixon, and the Powers That Be.
Now I feel like I’ve actually started to touch my own voice, and it contains within it some of the elements of those mentioned above, and others that have crossed my path. I love reading, and I love to feel the skein’s of thought that authors and ‘wrights take us all on. Writing Panda Girls, and working on the novels I’ve been chewing up for the last few years (Two of them, and they are whores who do not love me), I’m searching now for the joy of writing, and trying not to worry too much about changing anybody’s life.
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
I’m getting my ass kicked right now, so my updates have been few and far between.
I saw Iron Man with Axe yesterday, good shits. My only complaint is that a lot of comic movies craft the origin part of the story well, and then take a big shit closing the loop on the film. This one was pretty good, but still felt anemic; like they got done filming and realized “Holy shit, there’s only five minutes of the movie where the struggle takes place”. I was happy leaving though, and look forward to another Iron Man (preferably called “Iron Man 2: More Iron, Less Man”.
Oh, Rosenbaum is leaving Smallville, I guess somebody around there finally grew a fucking brain. Run Michael… you run your ass off.
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
I’ve been in the black for the last little while.
With Axe creating a new Panda Girls structure, I’ve been trying to make a new treatment of it happen in record time. Truth be told, I’ve been sandbagging the last year, it’s bullshit that it takes me so long to get our work done. A big reason for that has been a lack of love in my work.
I’ve always loved writing, but when it became a job, I got bent outa shape too easy. I lost some of my faith in just having fun while bashing out words, and more importantly, I lost my zeal for just giving ‘er shit. Stream of consciousness writing isn’t always the best, because inherently it relies on your latent intelligence to get you over some of the logical gaps in whatever subject you’re working on. If you haven’t noodled out some of those gaps, you’re going to crash when you hit them.
But we’ve been thinking about Panda Girls for 2 years, working, talking, structuring, writing, re-writing, crying like assholes. So it was time to quit being cautious.
When Axe got the new structure done, only one thing came to mind.
“In the immortal words of the Doors: The time for hesitation is through.”
Fucking A.
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
I haven’t done a Vlog (video blog) in a while.
Like…6 months. In fact I think THIS is the last one. There’s been a lot of shit flying around since then, and it’s also frustrating that I’m still where I was then. The treatment of the film. Ugh.
Axe and I have to fight a lot to not become depressed with our progress on the movie. The fact is that we’re not classically trained in screenwriting or script development…anything. We taught ourselves. So there tend to be a lot of pitfalls that somebody has already managed to fall into when they were back at Juilliard or whatever hell they attended.
As such we tend to run into walls, and then backtrack, all the while time keeps on ticking. Well…yesterday we realized we’d finally run over a huge hump. Axe recently did a new draft of our structure, and he took some long strides. His new structure pulled together some character arcs in a really tight package, and gave answers to a lot of our logic questions. They aren’t perfect answers, but they’re a good footing to launch from. And then I stepped up.
And crushed the bitch. After a little while with the new structure, I essentially pulled the rest of the story together, and last night when I explained it to Axe, he did some backflips. The rest of this week, our Production Hours will concentrate on Treating the new structure, and by the end of next week, it should be completed.
We’re close.
Sunday, April 20th, 2008
A lot of writing pundits suggest setting aside time to write. I agree, it’s really handy to have a specific block of time each week/day/whatever to work. That’s great if you’re a pro, and writing is the only job you have. Sadly I started out my working life in a slightly different path, and now I’m working towards the professional writing gig. So… a lot of the time I have to sneak writing into my work day.
When I worked in an office, it was easy. I’m sitting at my computer typing anyways, I just got really fast with alt-tab, and could shift in between my work and my writing easily. Hell, my job was so simple that I often could just blatantly be writing and nobody would say anything. I could do 5 hours of writing in a given day and have no qualms.
Now I work in a bikeshop. And while it’s my brothers, and he’s fine with me writing during down time, there isn’t a lot of down time to be had. Now my window for writing at work is a lot smaller. Sometimes it may be a few minutes, sometimes a single minute. So I ninja in some of my work during the day, slipping into my gdocs and dropping little word-shuriken whenever I can. It would be great to write as my day job, so I could have the time to seriously work on a topic or project, or storyline. But I may suck at this, the determination has yet to be made.
So if there’s any advice I could ever give about transitioning from Dog Catcher to Writer, it’s to cherish the small times you have to write. If you do have the opportunity to set aside a block of time, do it, it goes a long way. If you don’t, well, that can be even better sometimes. When you have 5 hours to write something amazing, you spend 4hrs 34mins trying to work it out.
When you have a single minute, procrastination has no foothold. You become like a revengeful ghost.
“If a samurai’s head were to be suddenly cut off, he should still be able to perform one more action, with certainty. If one becomes like a revengeful ghost, and shows great determination, though his head is cut off, he will not die” - Hagakure
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
The above title is the worst pun I’ve ever made. I hope each of you was prepared to be sullied by it. if not…too bad.
My colleague, and wheel-man, Axe, is a ninja with a pencil. When the film, Panda Girls, first started up it was because Axe had a cool idea, and needed some muscle to kick its ass. I was working a brain dead job, and pretty much inching towards a fantastic homicide/suicide scenario. I didn’t plan to kill anybody, but when you think about the most magnificent suicide the world will ever know, there’s bound to be some kind of collateral damage. Sorry everybody, no harm, no foul.
At any rate, I had contacted him about a plan we’d barely formulated a few years earlier in a 20 minute conversation we had in the corner of a loud party we were both uncomfortable at. We thought, perhaps, that we would make a comic. We were unsure of how to distribute it, but that is a mediocre concern in this day and age; producing it was the clincher. The plan had fallen through, and we hadn’t really spoken to one another since. On a lazy afternoon, during my planning session, I chanced to ask him (since he was on MSN) if he’d thought about giving it another go. He hadn’t really, he was far too busy, but he wanted me to have a look at some work he’d done.
Specifically the work he’d done on some pages for the Army of Darkness comic. I was stoked. I’ve always had a place in my heart for Ash, and his troubles. He was my kind of hero: not a hero, but ready to fuck shit up when he was pushed. I checked it out, and it was cool. Axe does awesome work. It lead, inexorably, into our meeting about another idea he’d had (re: Panda’s). Those first couple meetings were interesting, loud, sometimes angry, and often full of cool ideas. In the end, of the four who began the meetings, two remained. Us. One didn’t believe in the concept, the other was too busy. But sometimes I think it might have been Fate.
Now Axe works on OUR comic (there’s only a few done so far, we were mostly beta testing the idea. It failed somewhat), Panda Girls concept art, Axe and Crom concept art, and the new adventure: Painting.
He’s broken it down into 500 posts he plans to do, and coincidentally it’s called: http://500posts.com/
If you’re into painting, an aspiring artist, or just like cool shit, you should keep an eye on what he’s doing. He’s the real talent in this operation, I’m just the organ grinding monkey.
Sometimes literally.
Monday, April 14th, 2008
Jesus. Is there even anything that needs to be said?
I get hit with them like crazy. Requests out my ass, and it has to stop. I don’t give a shit about whether my friends fit into a stock portfolio, or roleplaying a vampire via text; these are all things that were around in the days of the BBS, and I got sick of it then.
That was 1994. Holy Shitz.
TO the people who keep writing these fucking things: Stop. You’re just making us all look like shit heads.
Thursday, April 10th, 2008
So what is lurking on my nightstand? Aside from my alarm clock, which is a heartless bitch…
Here’s what I’m reading right now…
The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler - Axe threw this one my way. Originally published in the middle sixties, Koestler took on the insane task of articulating the process of creativity, focusing on humour. The read can feel like wrestling sometimes, but Arthur always tries to keep it as simple as the concept will allow. Whenever I delve into these meta concepts I always feel a little punch-drunk afterwards. The flavor reminds me of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but slightly less mind bending. For anyone who wants to be a creator, I recommend tasting this one.
The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins - Dawkins is a raging asshole. Bottom line. The book has some interesting flavor, but I am often disgusted by the unilateral bullshit that Dawkins unleashes on everything. I cheer anytime somebody takes the Christian Fundies to task, but trying to relate the nature of an asshole, by being an equally loquacious asshole, does not make sense. Dawkins has excised anything spiritual in his life, and holds anyone who hasn’t done the same to be a fucking retard. Sorry Rich, but you don’t get my vote. That road is the death of hope.
Things I would LIKE to be reading now: System of the World - Neal Stephenson (read the first two, gotta get in gear), The last Wheel of Time novel (it hasn’t been written yet….excuses!), Hagakure (I had a copy a few years ago, but somebody dropped it into a sink of soapy water).
Catch you on the flip side.
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
I refuse to watch Cloverfield.
I will go to my grave without watching that movie. If I wake up some morning, and a paramilitary group has kidnapped me, and plans to force me to watch the movie, I will swallow my own fucking tongue.
I watched the trailer with apprehension, because I hate JJ Abrams and all things associated with him. The trailer angered me, as have all his works. It began with Alias (I was never a fan, but I understood the appeal), and then transfered to Lost.
Fuck Lost. I can’t stand the abuse of the “gap”. It’s a crutch, and even if he’s using it like the ancient techniques of the master, Hitchcock, he fails to close the loop with anything near the same flair and intelligence.
But let’s return to the current object of my scorn: Cloverfield. There are two important points that must be noted about movies like this, and their failure.
#1: Like the above example, you cannot fail to close the Gap. He set up the mystery for us “What is it?”. That mystery at the beginning of the story is paramount. You must have it. Lewis Black, the comedian, talks about the gap in his pseudo-autobiography “Nothing Sacred”. In the book, he discusses his first forays into the world of Stand Up Comedy (capitalization makes it MORE important!), and in a particularly shitty bar, following a punk rock band, the room was deafened. Black lamented the murmur of the crowd, roar of bikes outside, and pinball machines in the corner. Why?
Silence. It’s an essential component of public speaking, because in silence, you find the tension (re:gap). And tension is what the Gap is all about. Whether its a joke, a thriller movie, a mystery novel, everything is a slave to the tension. What people who don’t rant about this all day call “suspense”. First, the tension must build, and then, when the moment is right, it must be released. As Axe is known to say “You can’t show a gun, without it going off”. That is why I want to kick Ol’ JJ in his dick: he doesn’t turn the tension. There’s no release. You leave the theater, or turn off the tv, and you are frustrated. And because the Television nation is constantly anesthetized, they confuse that frustration, with emotional involvement.
Dear TV Nation: You are being tricked. Please stop giving this asshole your money. It enables him to continue shitting on our lives.
#2: The camera. Fuck. I thought they had learned the lesson when they made Blair Witch, but apparently whoever greenlit that piece of shit, somehow made an impression, and producers still think it’s A-Ok. Let me explain something to the people who make movies (and why am I the one having to tell YOu this? What the FUCK):
We know they’re fake. yeah, I know this comes as a shock to you, but the viewing public understands that they’re seeing a movie. The reason the Blair Witch managed to pull anybody into their little game, was the hoax surrounding the footage. They told us IT WAS REAL. With that assumption in hand, we made our way to the screen, and some of us were pulled in. BUT… The rest of us were too busy thinking the same thing “Jesus christ, hold the fucking camera still”. The effect in BW and the effect in Cloverfield yields the same result: I am so aware of the camera moving, that I can no longer focus on the narrative of the story. You have broken the spell, so that quality or quantity of the content you are presenting means nothing anymore. My emotional wall is back up. You fail.
The bottom line is that film is a visual media that requires a very specific look to tell a specific story. The thought “hey, what if we made this look like handheld footage!” is a novelty, and has some juice. The problem arises in that novelties have the annoying tendency to wear off. Anybody old enough to remember He-Man is well aware of this fact.
Mahalo