Merriweather Notecard Euphoria

Good Evening!

Per the title: Merriweather Post Pavilion, the new album from Animal Collective is absolutely destroying me.  This is a very good, very defined band hitting apotheosis--this is their Kid A, and I couldn't be happier for the challenge.  Buy this as soon as humanly possible.

I'm into the Boarding phase on Apartment Hunting: this is where I take my Scene Log and convert each individual scene into notecards (NC's).  The NC's not only delineate location, but short and extended descriptions, specific conflicts (further demarcated by +'s and -'s, ><, conflict is an important backbone even in the less harrowing scenes) and other important tidbits.  Then--I'll arrange them chronologically on a large tack-board (divided into act 1, 2 and 3) hanging on the wall directly in front of my desk.  This is totally the Bees-Knees of Screenwriting tools serving a myriad of purpose: I can make sure everything is flowing succinctly, where there's gaps in the story, if certain parts of story are too Top-Heavy (what Blake Snyder calls Laying Too Much Pipe) and generally just see the Story for what it is BEFORE we get into the writing process.  Because immersing yourself in the writing before having all this shit sorted out, then going back to the drawing board is the equivalent of locking your keys in the car, in a less than desirable neighborhood, wearing a sandwich-board covered in racial epithets... So afterwards I'll go into the Treatment phase and then the actual writing will begin.  For fans of the word Pang, there can be Pangs of redundancy orbiting around, but I find it essential (and fun) to hammer out the Fictional-Culture you're willingly obsessively-compulsively building, brick by narrative brick.

As we're less than three weeks (my 29th Birthday, February 16th) from the first complete (by complete I mean one that will be registered with the Writers Guild and sent out for critique) draft, I'm going to (for fucks' sake I hope more consistently) include some entries on me and my personal backstory/motivations/tastes when it comes to film.  But for now, I have some notecards to fill out.  

Cheers!

xoxoxoxo

Relationship>Person

Good Evening!  I just ate a mediocre dinner:  toast, wasabi mayonnaise, 2 tomato slices sprinkled with sea salt, 2 eggs sunnyside up, and on top of that some left over sprouted-wheat pasta and shelled edamame.  At least it was kind of healthy.  Im an incorrigible Obsessive-Compulsive when it comes to my diet, eating healthy, balanced, and the like.  Before I get back to work on Apartment Hunting I, after some aberrations in my behavior, wanted to postulate one of the central themes of the screenplay: Relationships trump the individual (R>P).

In the story the protagonist Thomas, against all his faculties and general common sense, pushes on to search for an Apartment with his girlfriend Jane amidst the convergence of death threats, stalkers and a very pressing deadline at his high-profile job (lead game designer for a fictional video game company).  Why not just put it off, sort things out?  Because the innate needs/wants to rush-in, domesticate, make this Relationship bona fide has twisted our hero's logic...

Do we get lost in the idea or habitual comforts of the Union that the salient qualities of our parters, of our loved ones, are obfuscated beyond repair?  Are we inexorably tethered to each other by familiarity: sexual, olfactory, conversational--whatever, but where do You end and I  begin?  Be apprised I'm not trying to rain a Pessimistic Shit-Storm on our romantic picnics on the beach, but the fear, the torrential anxiety arising when something goes wrong, when mistakes are made, after hurtful things are said: are we salvaging the Individual or the idea/reality of being in this Relationship?  I love my Girlfriend but I'd be pulling your collective Leg if I didn't admit our Union/quality of life/day-to-day lifestyle wasn't nestled in the back of my mind when the Seas of Love find themselves less than traversable.

Back to the lab I go.  And Congratulations to President Obama!

Sad Sack

This is usually how it begins: some interruption/event/mini-catastrophe/bender-gone-wrong and the creative slate is wiped clean, before it can truly blossom.  If you'd prefer we can correlate this with depression, although I feel said prognosis is a slippery-slope.  But the disruption rears it's head from that crawl space underneath the porch you never found the time to fix.  And if you find my analogy prosaic: fuck you.  Because The Disruption is a real, tangible entity.  My qualms with the depression-lumping--at least 100%--is I don't necessarily feel it's one's happiness, or stability per se, but your credulity, your focus; I could drone on, but the paramount factor here is the ardor and wherewithal to visualize your transformation, your improvement, your great leap in this field, this aesthetic--and somewhere, there's a connection, there's a trajectory manifesting itself around you, but it's not always enough, not omnipresent like we need.  And you're left with this vision, and for sanity's sake's hopefully percolating into some remnant of a belief, a creative ethos, and the layers coalesce, coagulate, correspond and gestate into the fecundate self-culture/self-reality you so desperately need.

Well kids, nothing's constant, and everyone's a little/lot fearful; in all my self-assertions and supposedly protean abilities I too find myself reprising the role of Big, Giant, Quivering, PUSSY.  These varnish-stripping proclivities and left-brain/right-brain civil-wars are what's prosaic for you earlier critics of my pedestrian analogy.  Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to go take a bath...

-m

Z-Pack is the Free Pack!

Fever...holy Fucking Fuck did I have an ambitious fever/sinus infection/Bonaroo-like 3-day-Bacteria-Music-Festival inside my body--it was ugly.  And while relegated to an infantile state my mind--fever induced--was at the loquacious state when one does too much blow; the point being I couldn't sleep, just lie there and feel the way Roland Burris must feel all the time now...

My Girlfriend (yes, we're back together in a very awesome way) saved me with a combination of meticulous care and the "Z-Pack": a 5-day antibiotic course which I'm a big fan of.

I even missed work yesterday--first shift in 11 days due to Holiday Break.  This means I have, literally, no money.  I'm supposed to pay for the latter half of my writing class @ Second City this week...gonna have to wait.  I did ask one of my closest friends to borrow some cash, which makes me feel as worthwhile as the Chicago Traffic Authority employees (people in neon vests who yell and wave orange sticks at cars, even though there's these crazy gadgets called stoplights looming above them) feel when their day comes to a close.  It's moments like this that make plunging myself--egregiously--into the restaurant industry (I'm a part-time waiter who's sadly very talented in fine/contemporary dining ) more attractive.  And by attractive I mean the venue to exercise some potential--albeit the whole dramatic 'this isn't what I want to do with my life!' potential--and have a modicum of stability.  Thankfully I'm in it to win it, as they say.

But I feel unscathed for the most part.  Apartment Hunting is shaping up better than it ever was intended on being and I'm confident putting several eggs in this basket.  The sense of urgency however is at its limit--I need to move forward with my life and it's tethered to this Project.  In just over a month I'm going to be 29 years-old and the Talent/Potential/Age-ratio is getting too close for comfort.

In other, more light-hearted news, I've recently been wooed by an animated series called Frisky Dingo of Adult Swim fame: absolutely brilliant!  Their (the creators) previous effort was 'Sealab 2021' which made a ginormous impact on me earlier in the decade (feels neat to say that...decade).

Cheers!

xoxoxo

One Nation, Under Cod...

Happy New Year everyone!  Somewhat belated, but just in time to send the temporal shout-out with Roland Burris being blocked from the Senate floor and Benazir Bhutto's daughter releasing a Rap-Tribute to her Mother.  A rap-tribute.  There's a primal, almost bloodlust-worthy satisfaction if someone, anyone, made a Rap-Tribute, for any reason, for me.  Yes.

It's 2009 folks, the year of years, the optimist's 1st-prize-shopping-spree through the Candy Store, and a call to arms for this guy (pointing to myself, well rhetorically, because i need both hands to type).  I've, for what it's worth, actually got Apartment Hunting on track, in a very good way.  I sort of ripped the whole thing apart, like one of those We'll remodel your shitty house for you for the sake of good, poignant Television programs--because when it came down to it the skeleton was unnecessarily antiquated to my original idea/purpose for the whole project.  And the masturbatory stigma is looming in the foothills, setting up shop, but as stated, this Beast is read, being fit for Armor as we speak.  This will be finished by my 29th Birthday, February 16th, 2009.  There, the proverbial gauntlet has been thrown, and if I don't live up to it, we can throw a parade of shame down Milwaukee Ave., from Bucktown to West Town.

My film-watching has been hustling and bustling, and a full review of Oscar-y stuff will be posted soon.  But on the home video front, I caught Labyrinth the other day with my girl, and while the Nostalgia washed over me in an awesome wave (brett easton ellis, 'American Psycho') I noticed one small, or not so small, thing: The Bulge in David Bowie's tights is larger-than-life.  I mean little cod pieces could orbit around this thing.  For as hot as Jennifer Connelly is now, she HAD to have noticed/been turned-on/intimidated...something.  Or Jim Henson, The Producers, The Director...anyone?  This puts me to shame in a lovingly acceptable way, because who doesn't love David Bowie.  So I've been polling all my friends about 'The Bulge' and apparently it's ubiquitously loved/acknowledged/engraved in the pantheon of tangential-movie-factotum.  If it wasn't between his legs we'd have a tumor worthy of The Mayo Clinic.

That is all...