I just watched the movie Gilda, because seemingly I've seen everything that's actually up my alley and am now just watching movies that are classics of one type or another. I liked the Rita Hayworth movie The Lady From Shanghai, but that had number one best dude Orson Welles behind it. Gilda is seemingly better-regarded though. It was directed by a guy I never heard of, but there is that bit of film history that cares more about movie stars than I do.

Casablanca is directed by a guy whose name I can't remember either, very much a studio film, and I don't like that one at all- I don't like the quotes associated. There are little scraps of dialogue in Gilda that I think are amazing, which is why I'm writing about the fact that I saw it. "Statistically, there's more women on Earth than anything else." "You can only die once, and he committed suicide three months ago." These are paraphrases.

I mean, most of the dialogue is impossible to follow the train of thought and meaning behind it, because it's just ridiculous and circling around points. But there are these little bits of straightforward lucidity. :

"and think about- would it be corny to say your sins?"
"yes it would."
"well, I said it anyway."

and those bits are amazing. I'm sure that if I watched it multiple times I would be able to quote from it as casually as any song lyric or good season of The Simpsons.

It's almost comparable to lyric writing in the way it works- Really inconsistent, but pitched at this certain high level so the bad is kind of atrocious, but you go with it for the moments it works- the punchlines and the choruses. And maybe these isolated lines don't work so well on this page, stripped of context, the same way "I'm out for presidents to represent me (say what) I'm out for presidents to represent me (say what) I'm out for dead presidents to represent me" might not work without inflection.

All talking about rap is done at least halfway for the benefit of Sam Hockley-Smith, who links to this blog from his sidebar.

But yeah seriously, pretty much any Orson Welles movie is better than any movie it would ever be compared with- even if the comparison isn't one of genre and shared star, but just time period and quality. If you were to compare The Trial to Psycho on the basis of Anthony Perkins being in both, I would assert that The Trial is better.

I'm not going to talk about music this go-round, I'm going to talk about cereal. These new Choco-Nilla Cocoa Krispies, where half of them are vanilla flavored, are killer. I am a sucker for vanilla in cereals, remember my talking up the Vanilla Creme Frosted Mini Wheats, but vanilla is a pretty good bean.

HOLY SHIT NEW BLOG TEMPLATE

I think I've mentioned my fondness for the Spank Rock record Yoyoyoyoyo on this blog- At the time I did a best-of-2006 records list, I had only heard half of it, but it's come up as being a contender. I'll say this now- For what I've heard, it's my third favorite/"best" hip-hop record of last year.

But this is funny- It got a lot of negative reviews and hand-wringing over perceived misogyny. Maybe it's because the first person I knew to actually say "Holy Shit Spank Rock is amazing" was a woman that I don't really think much of that. It's just kind of frank and occasionally goofy- it's talking about sex, but it's certainly not violent or in any way off-putting. It's a party record.

Meanwhile, other rap records with way more offensive content get a pass- The crack rap, with all the violence a life of drug dealing implies, gets shitloads of praise. I imagine it's the same type of thing as in movie rating, that people are much more comfortable with violence than they are with sex.

And the beats, which were praised, still may not get enough credit for their ability to actually develop- "Sweet Talk" and "Bump," as dance songs, both have these shifts towards the end in speed which are pretty rewarding, which delineate them firmly as songs while still seeming like shifts in a DJ set in a way that having numerous switches into and out of a different tempo for a chorus or something wouldn't work.

I kind of think of it in the same terms as Girl Talk's Night Ripper, without all of the annoying samples that show up around "Friday Night."

What's odd is that I haven't written a Kurt Vonnegut obituary here. I've been bringing up his death to people, and getting kind of meager responses. Maybe people felt guilty, as I did, for not having read the majority of his work- He was a prolific dude. And, after a certain point, you feel like you get it, you get the thing. This seems insulting, but really, no. I think his work was incredibly successful in what I think art is supposed to do- communicate a consciousness and a point of view.

The awful Fox News obituary is hilarious because of the way it misses all of that for how it's tied in with politics. Because Vonnegut was political, but his politics were tied to his humanism, and what he valued in such a way that to talk about him simply as being liberal or Socialist or whatever is to miss the point, because political party is all just gang affiliation. With Vonnegut, the politics were never as poorly thought out as all that, they were deeply felt based on principles of what human beings deserve.

I never thought that Vonnegut's narratives were the best thing about his work- The metafiction conceit of Breakfast Of Champions worked the best for me, but the more straightforward stuff always felt almost hampered by its plot convolutions. I also don't think I ever laughed out loud reading his books- There's a sense of humor, but the jokes aren't laughers, at least for me. The jokes are nonetheless a part of what makes it all work, though. Because the thing that makes Vonnegut so successful is related to the jokes, and his humanity- It's the moments of clarity. Vonnegut saw the world so clearly. There's always this single point of view, but it's always so right on in its sense of humanity and dignity. Part of that is the acknowledgment that humor gets us through it. I can't even talk about it. Basically, I think that to not like Kurt Vonnegut is to be a bad person. He's dead, and you have his books, which really do say all he had to say and map out his consciousness.

The tragedy of his death is that we no longer have the best dude who is right all the time to say what is right. We have people who can do it, of course, but there's a power to around-the-blockness. In Man Without A Country, it's discussed that Bush is the worst president America's had, worse than Nixon and Reagan. He says this as someone who lived during the time of a truly great president- Franklin Delano Roosevelt- and who, at the time, didn't even vote for him in favor of voting for the Socialist candidate in at least one election.

In the same way as there are people who are willing to claim Christianity for the side of conservativism and people to claim Jesus as a hippie, there are people who argue where George Orwell would stand on the war on Iraq. We know where Vonnegut stood on the current set of world affairs, but maybe that clarity will get lost to time's future history. That's one of the tragedies. The other is simply that the world lost a good person.

This new Wooden Wand record, James And The Quiet, is pretty good. Alex says it's great when you're drunk, which seems really likely. There's this country vibe at work- According to the MySpace, Wooden Wand lives in Tennessee now, and I had been under the impression that he used to live in Brooklyn. There's this summertime humidity, sweet tea on the porch feeling.

It's not my favorite Wooden Wand record- There's this CD-R from a tour last Spring that's all demos and covers that's sparse in all the right ways. It's got songs on it from his tour partner, Hush Arbors, including one where high notes are hit and sustained in a way that's unnerving and seems really loud, and that unlistenability works really well with the rest of it, and its cold lonely nights. The Flood, recorded with The Vanishing Voice, is really good as well- That's like a jammy concept record. When I say jammy, that brings awful music to mind. It's not jam band music- There's none of those bass tones that people only do the worst dancing to. There's limited chords and a lot of call and response, and it goes on for a while, but the noise apocalypse is summoned with acoustic instruments.

This is more straightforward. It's twelve songs. There's harmonies, which I had heard on Wooden Wand demos at the house of a guy who worked at 5RC who would've lost his job had said demos ever been released. They were amazing there, but I feel like I maybe imagined them, sitting in the dark around a campfire after a backyard barbecue. This record would work well in that context, which is a really good memory. People from Sonic Youth play on it, and it remains a country record. I don't like Neil Young, but it works for me the way some of those records work for other people, but there's a deeper voice and no unpleasant connotations.

The title track is by far the high point. That's what's playing right now. It's hard to point to a high point on a record like this, where there aren't really singles, and there's limited variations to what's overall a mood piece. It's the next to last song on the album, where the energy picks up a little, but the arrangement remains stripped down, with no drums. The phrase sung in refrain is "the shame, shame, shame of love; James and the quiet and the stars up above." Sometimes "stars up" is replaced with "angels." That sums up how it all works. To continue to work it out: Wooden Wand's real name is James Toth, and the song hits direct.

I've never seen the MTV show My Super Sweet 16, so the most offensive thing I've ever witnessed on TV would have to be an anti-smoking ad. It begins with the statistic that 86% of teens would prefer to date a non-smoker. It then shows a girl saying she'd date whoever, including a smoker. The viewer is supposed to be disgusted by this girl, and so, theoretically, if they have high standards, they won't smoke so they can have their pick of the dating pool. The girl shown isn't actually that bad-looking. She is, at worst, just a normal person, and could even be described as kind of cute. She has glasses and an overbite. That's about as bad as it gets.

This ad is awful for a number of reasons- The first thing that jumps out at you is its assertion that this completely normal looking person should be considered disgusting and unlovable. Then there's the larger fact that these anti-smoking ads are only targeted to teenagers who are underage- Once you turn eighteen, the only thing telling you that smoking is a bad idea is the Surgeon General's Warning. Said Surgeon General's Warning make a much better anti-smoking advertisement than those shown on TV, which I believe in general are subsidized by tobacco companies. Even the whole fact that all of these ads for teenagers are targeted so much towards shallowness and seeming attractive and relationships is kind of offensive- Like the anti-pot PSAs which make a big deal about how you will eat more and thus gain weight.

Although again: I have no problem with the Souther Salazar anti-pot ads. I think those are great.

Earlier I was reading this book, a collection of lectures talking about music and sound design in film. I put it on my contract after I came across it in the stacks of the library. It's awesome. Basics of film-making come up, and so does the minutiae of sound. It's illuminating. The only bad thing about it is this: I started reading it just thinking in terms of sound design for this thing I'm doing that's going to be really odd. The first thing I read was Carter Burwell's piece- He does the soundtrack for all the Coen brothers movies. It's interesting for a number of reasons, but early on, within the first paragraph or two, he convinces me that this thing will need to have music in it. I didn't want to do that, because I'm not a musician and so can't compose things. But he talks about how the place of music in film is to create this blanket of affect and emotion, to create feeling, and suggest things going on beneath the surface that you can't see- And because these things are suggested, music leads to increased suspension of disbelief, because you feel things intuitively and tie them to what you see. So now I think that my weird and ridiculous thing will need music to guide the audience towards emotion when faced with this weird ridiculousness rather than away towards revulsion. It makes perfect sense. My previous stance was that music was this thing in movies that throws up an aesthetic more forcefully than anything else that will occur, and thus will alienate some people. I'm not going to renege on this opinion now, but there's certainly a truth to what Burwell says.

I'm listening to this record, 'Blue' Gene Tyranny's "Out Of The Blue" from 1977. I guess he was an avant-garde composer, but this is his "pop" record, which is still four songs long, with the last one over 26 minutes long, with the shortest six minutes long. It's occasionally pretentious, especially on this last track, but on the whole, it's interesting and kind of moving. A lot of the pretention is just this long-winded and digressive way of circling around things, without stating them, because the things in question are hard to state, but they're no less universal than things found in other pop songs, probably. The last song is a letter that spends a great deal of time talking about consciousness. It's an alright album for one in the morning, which is true for a lot of experimental droney stuff and a lot of folk music as well. It's neither of those, but you know.

"Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke" and "Don't sweat the small stuff... and it's all small stuff" might just be different ways of saying the same thing.

About a week ago I had a dream where I went to Boston, a city I've never been to, and is by all accounts a racist shithole. The dream of Boston had nothing to do with Boston and my knowledge of it so much as just a dream image of a city- It was amazing, all high bridges and cheap foreign restaurants, and music stores going out of business and offering things for dirt cheap, and nothing to fear because there were other music stores nearby to take its place.

Last night I had another dream, one so exciting that it got my heart to beating faster and woke me up. In that dream I was reading Ian Svenonius' The Psychic Soviet, and read an essay that started off by saying "If Olympia Washington is Fort Thunder, which it is, in that it's away from everything and you can do anything you want to there;" I got so excited that I ran around on an office chair in the parking lot in front of Grocery Outlet, where Rainy Day Records used to be, singing the Pavement refrain "I'll try and I'll try and I'll try and I'll try and I'll try, I'll try and I'll try and I'll try and I'll try" until the dream reality could no longer sustain itself.

The truth is closer to the dreams on the edge of sleep where you're reading imagined Batman comics and want to say the dialogue aloud into a tape recorder, because they have a certain weird poetry to them, but the ability to be able to operate a tape recorder and talk can't coexist with the ability to read the comics that only exist in your head.

Menomena's Friend And Foe arrived in the mail today. Seemingly, the version I've been listening to has the wrong tracklist. But I think I prefer that wrong tracklist to the one actually being used in terms of its flow. Perhaps that's just me being used to the incorrect version.

I'm thinking about starting another blog, one with more focus, and that talks for longer lengths. Something put out into the world with a bit more deliberateness than this thing. I am completely in favor of haphazardness and self-sabotage, but maybe it's getting to the point where trying a bit and "marketing myself" would be for the best. I put the phrase "marketing myself" in quotes because it really does strike me as distasteful. But maybe just applying my energies to something other than nothing is enough.

The last book I read was Anthony Burgess' Tremor of Intent. It's the first novel I've read in awhile, and it did a thing that I really wanted to witness, and hope to internalize. It had a plot, with twists, and it had this kind of construction, and there were thematic things going on which were clear and tied to the characters. I'm writing some books, but the characters don't actually do anything. When they do, it's more of a reaction to general things. It's not well-constructed or thought out at all. It's something I hope to get past at some point.

Tremor Of Intent is a book about spies, written in 1965. It doesn't have the weird psychedelic pulp glamor that you might want out of such a thing. It's not that kind of a book. It's its own thing, something smart. It's out of print, but it's not a tossed-off genre exercise.

Burgess' Napoleon Symphony is also out of print, and the next thing I plan to read. It's apparently Burgess' favorite work. That's a bit more experimental, but I'm hoping it will still have the stuff I'm trying to teach myself.

The last novel before Tremor Of Intent I started to read was John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy. Before that, the last novel I actually finished was, I think, Thomas Pynchon's V., which, although it's awesome, doesn't really do the point-a-to-point-b thing. I love it, and I love Joseph Heller's Something Happened, which is barely a novel for how little happens, but I don't want to write like that exclusively. They're too very different books- One kind of hops from one thing to another, based seemingly mostly on what the author wants to talk about, and the other is extremely focused. But there are books that split the difference, and are focused on a variety of things as they move from one to another, and these things tend to be quick reads, but I just haven't been dealing with them for awhile. I think the trick is to read shorter things, one after the other. I'm trying to learn what forward momentum looks like, because right now the writing is going slow, and I think it might be tied to my not knowing.

It's worth noting that a lot of my favorite books don't really go anywhere, don't fit the mold. The argument is that post-modern blah blah blah. However! One of my favorites, the cartoonist Kevin Huizenga, is kind of aware that he has problems as well. His are the same as mine, with regards to narrative, and characters that are distinct entities. I talked about him, and his problem, (self-diagnosed) when talking about the top comics of 2006- I said his were the absolute tops. But I also said that his best story, The Feathered Ogre, actually had a plot that developed and characters and the whole bit. Or Else 4, The Wild Kingdom, is great, and it is totally free-wheeling and abstract like poetry, and captures a whole lot of things. But he wants to push on, and hopefully break through to the thing.

I mean, yeah, the truth is, you don't need to do the thing, and you can still be great. A lot of comics, because of the nature of serialization and their being long-running, don't go anywhere or do anything. They're good for the territory they mine within that, the aesthetics and point of view at work. Honestly, if I wrote a book that ended up the prose equivalent of Calvin And Hobbes, that would be just as compulsively readable as a novel. Maybe even better, for its rereadability. But it seems like this classic mold of storytelling, where the finale reveals the point, is nothing to scoff at. Maybe I'm wrong, and plots are kind of dumb, and a distraction from what I'm really interested in. But it seems like it requires more thought, so it's probably not that stupid.

So this is maybe something of a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence: I think the Oscar committee got it right. My favorite movie of 2006 remains Idiocracy, but The Departed is amazing enough that I'll agree with that "Best Picture" bit. Granted, I didn't see the movie it was based on, Infernal Affairs, starring Tony Leung, and I'm sure that had its charms and that if I had seen it The Departed might not gleam as it did.

But for a suspense drama- I just kept on eating Doritos. Not to stay awake, but as a compulsion that just kind of developed as I got into it. Like the idea of a popcorn movie. Kind of an awesome premise. There's one moment where a twist comes that's kind of unforeseen, and I actually felt let down, because it seemed to negate the perfect symmetry of the dramatic tension, but then it doesn't matter at all almost instantaneously.

It's kind of a dad movie, in that Oscar-winning way of being really tightly well-done crime genre drama stuff. My tastes might run more towards some Michel Gondry Science Of Sleep whimsy parade, in general. But yeah, I just thought this worked really well. It's the type of movie that has Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin, and Jack Nicholson in it, but I like all those dudes. I felt it, I went along with it. The jokes worked.

It seems like I would like Pan's Labyrinth more, because that's a bit closer to fun times. But no- I thought the stuff that worked best there was the more serious historic drama stuff, with the monsters all ugly CGI. It also didn't really integrate the parts enough for me- It became too easy to read the fantasy stuff as literal fantasy. It never becomes magical realism, and the closest it gets is just having characters exhibit magical thinking. It's no The Science Of Sleep. It does seem likely that it is better than every other Guillermo Del Toro movie, but does anyone really care about that guy?

The Prestige works a bit better, in its slow progression from historical fiction that's kind of ridiculous in its premise to full-blown fucking ridiculous elements. That just feels a lot like a Batman Begins companion piece to me. Although- First movie I'd ever seen Hugh Jackman in, and he's pretty insufferable and not really all that fun to watch. I actually don't think I like any of the actors in that movie, in terms of them being fun to watch on their own. Some have just earned some goodwill from other movies. Oh wait- David Bowie as Nikola Tesla. But that's not really an awesome performance or anything.

Who's up for a post about writing?

Yesterday I told a kid to quit!

I hadn't read any of his writing. But in the brief chat, he outlined a whole lot of things that are awful, starting off by admitting that he says things he doesn't mean for the sake of saying things. And then moving on to say stuff, probably vaguely informed by philosophy, about "text" and whatnot and how the only thing we as humans have is language to recognize each other and - I don't know, it's pretty easy to tune someone out once they admit that they say things for the sake of saying them.

His philosophy was, essentially, the opposite of that found in that writing class at Evergreen that I had. But I'm sure it was informed by stuff he'd heard in another writing class, I think one taught by a guy I don't like because of my experiences with him in another program. Anyway, the other philosophy is that writing is all about truth-telling. Objective truth-telling, and that by editing that's what you get at. My argument against that was that fiction was lies and subjective and that's not really a bad thing.

Basically I would say that people write about their thoughts, which is informed by both subjective and objective thoughts, for the sake of communicating empathy with other people. And when I say write about their thoughts, I mean communicate or make art etc.

But why I'm writing this is because it makes sense that the other positions would be found in academia, by writing types who aren't really that successful. Because their stances are really isolating and insulating, from criticism. Both exist so that saying "I don't like it" isn't really valid, because it's beside the point. Saying "I don't like it" to reportage of the truth doesn't matter. Saying "I don't like it" to someone who doesn't really care about what they're saying doesn't really harm them.

But "I don't like it" is a pretty valid response to art, or people.

Not to make too big a deal out of this, basically my "I don't like it" or "You should quit writing" lines are the type of thing designed for the sake of being unpretentious, not really grand statements, so much as they are the type of thing that could and would be said by a sarcastic talking dog. Which I think is basically how the things I say should be taken. I quote cartoon characters more often than I quote philosophers.

So, about a week ago, I took acid. I'm not much of a drug user, but I think I romanticized LSD since tenth grade, or thereabouts. It's pretty easy to do when everything you like is described as psychedelic. I'd never done it because it was never offered to me for free.

Usually, I find the discrepancy between people's perception of me and my own view of myself kind of annoying. Sometimes, however, it's accurate. Most people view me as straight-edge, which is something I would never assign to myself- Because from the time I was in tenth grade, everything I liked was described as psychedelic, or made by people who were high. But pretty much any time I do a drug, I don't enjoy it, and kind of regret it.

This is not to say that my experience on acid was terrible. I think a lot of people will try to frame it in those "it is either totally awesome or completely terrifying" terms, because of how intense it is. But sometimes things are just intense but don't really make a strong impression. Like the movie INLAND EMPIRE.

It was kind of fun for the first hour or so, before it kicked in and when it started to kick in. I turned off the bright light in the living room and listened to Enon's Believo! and J Dilla's Donuts. These are both really good records. I started to have visual hallucinations I guess towards the beginning of Donuts. Sadly, they were not Blue Meanies and other imagery from the movie Yellow Submarine (which I love), but just little kaleidoscopic light patterns on the carpet. Also, my thought seemed to move faster- My own internal train of thought. That was fun, although those thoughts didn't really go anywhere. They just moved at speed high enough to be completely unable to slow down and then articulate to another person, which I really wanted to do, because communication is a pretty big part of life.

How it felt: The girl who gave me the drug lived with another girl who did it for the first time recently and said it felt really sexual. But she didn't mean this in terms of being aroused. The way she described it ended up being the same way I felt, I think. Basically, muscles tighten up (I figure) and nerves become more stimulated. I would compare it to the feeling of metal becoming magnetized. Again, this was early on, when I was listening to the last few songs on the Enon record. Towards the end I pretty much didn't feel anything besides a vague nervous energy.

I couldn't eat food. I knew this was going to happen, but after I took it I felt hungry and wanted to eat before it kicked in. Alex was making a Boboli pizza. It hadn't really kicked in at the time it went in the oven, but by the time it was out, I took a bite and it was really disgusting. The intensity was off-putting. It was like I could taste the bacterial cultures that turned the milk into cheese and that caused the bread to rise.

Anyway, eventually I went completely inside my own head. It was neither awesome nor nightmarish, but basically like dreams I have had in the past. I couldn't communicate, even though I wanted to, and attempts fell apart into crazy person gibbering. That was probably the majority of the trip. Eventually I just went to sleep because all I was doing was pacing around the house having weird thought-loops.

There was a part when things got really internal where the records put on after Dilla just kind of scanned as the sound of synapses firing. These include Keith Fullerton Whitman's Lisbon and the first disc of Godspeed You Black Emporer's Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven. I really needed the fast-paced weird pop pace of the stuff that I put on to serve as a point of contrast with the speed in my own head, to keep track of things.

Part of the romanticization of hallucinations is the promise of imagination. No big breakthroughs were reached, no epiphanies were had. The day after I just felt kind of tired. Writing is as tricky as ever, just as slow-going. The reason I finally wrote about it now is that I was working on these books and thought that the stuff I was writing now is actually less crazy and weird and vibrant and funny than what I was doing before. I don't think this is going to be trend, like I somehow damaged my brain, so much as just a thing that kind of happened due to other factors, but I thought it was worth chronicling.

I regret it inasmuch as it's easy to attribute the feeling of tiredness to the drug, and to know myself as a sober person and act like taking acid throws that off. In time I'll forget about it and my thoughts will get weird again, I took the doing of the drug pretty much in stride.

Listen to Enon's Believo, that record is the shit.

This is the movie I made!

Here is a quote from a This American Life episode, "My Experimental Phase," taken from a thirteen-year-old's diary during a time of experimentation, to wrap up an entry: "I gotta' go change my tampon, at least I'm not pregnant yet!" I hope to say this as often as possible, as is appropriate.

So, I made a movie. It's called Sad Times Together. I made it with some people for the class, Art Media Praxis, that I got kicked out of. I worked absurdly hard on it, and in doing so, I learned a lot. It was a learning experience.

Tomorrow/today it's going to be shown to the class. The people I worked with are going to get school credit for it, I won't. That's fine- It's a learning experience.

The thing is that it's all fucked up. It's got its flaws. They're all over the thing, they're almost innumerable.

First off, I'll say what it got right. It's a comedy, and it's funny, I like the jokes in it. I can barely discern them anymore, because I've done the editing and looked all over, and some of the jokes are tiny and unnoticeable. I've looked at so many computer screens I don't even want to look at this one, right now, as I type.

Holy shit I worked so hard on it. It's part of an installation- One of the things in this installation is a cassette tape recording of a voice pressuring you to smoke weed, because that's something a character does to another character in the movie. The actor who played the weed-smoking character didn't want to do the voice. So I did the tape, I improvised for close to two hours, talking about smoking pot. Which I don't do. It's pretty funny. No one will listen to the entirety of the tape. I did that recording tonight, while the DVDs burned.

The character who pressures someone to smoke weed is named Jorge. The character is a guy of English descent speaking with an affected accent. One of the things I'm worried about is someone getting offended. Not because it's racist- I'm afraid of someone being offended because it's stupid, and couching their offense by saying it's racist. Which I don't think it actually is.

But I don't think I'll be able to be around to make this distinction. The teachers do not want me around, they might kick me off campus. The movie and the installation is mostly me, mostly my voice, and I am the loudest and most articulate person involved in its production, and so I really want to be there to say "hey wait, this isn't racist, this is just stupid, let's at least be honest here." I don't think I'll be able to.

The thing was mine. A lot of the jokes are mine, not all of them. The characters- holy shit so much of it is me. I'm all over the fucking thing. I did the majority of the editing. But- I didn't do all of it. And I didn't really write a script, most of the thing's improvised- I fed people lines but still. There was one scene where a script was insisted on, I wrote one, and then it kind of got garbled and fucked up anyway. Stuff went unshot due to the unpaid actors being in a rush to get out and really just the constant fear of deadline.

I worked harder on it than my other collaborators, and I was the one least afraid of a deadline. I knew I'd be able to work on it and get it done. And I thought this as someone who'd never edited video before.

Because I'd never edited video before, I made a lot of first-time mistakes. Looking over the thing, it's ridiculously fast. Everything seems like cross-cutting, like things are happening simultaneously, due to the lack of establishing shots, or anything done for pacing- I think part of it was that I couldn't work out how to turn establishing shots into jokes.

For some reason, the movie Caddyshack ended up at the top of the Netflix queue and shipping. I started to know as I approached finishing that I would want to watch Caddyshack at the end of it. (Note: Caddyshack isn't my favorite movie by a long shot, it's my brother's, I kind of struggle to find the jokes in it.) I only watched a little bit, but- Yeah, like having a lightswitch flipped- okay that is how you edit a comedy and give it a pace. It's funny- Taking all the film theory classes and reading criticism etc. definitely informed the making of the movie, and making the editing and framing choices that I did make, but the major things that I missed and then learned got reinforced immediately while watching the first ten minutes of Caddyshack. (After that I tried to fall asleep, and failed.)

The movie i's a little less than twenty minutes long, and the thing was made in a little less than two weeks, pretty much. Which is an accomplishment- it is pretty long but it is just so rushed. My short stories and novels have the same kind of stupid pacing, but I think I can fix these problems in film after a few more tries.

Another reason my eyes burn is because I decided to send out MySpace bulletins out promoting it. I couldn't talk shit in it there, I didn't want to apologize for it. Although I need to, because it's so fucked up.

I didn't do all of the editing. I left four scenes to one of my collaborators. Those scenes have a somewhat different rhythm, there's a different eye approaching them. I think it's not unlikely I'll go back and reedit it to my own sense of rhythm, after tomorrow's installation.

I'm all over the place in this writing. I really am quite anxious, my insides feel awful.

I kind of wrote it, there are things in it that I wanted to say. But I left it to other people to say them, or at least I depended on them somewhat to know what I was saying, but I never articulated my point enough for it to be understood. And now it's garbled to the point of not even really being able to be discerned. I tried to put as much content as I could in the thing, but there's points where it just collapses.

God, collaborating. I like it a lot in some ways, but there's this problem- There's things that are too corny to say out loud, that you try to say with art, but in collaborating with someone else you kind of need to say them, to state what's important, to be honest for the sake of being on the same page. With every point a close collaborator misses there's a part of the movie that breaks.

I can fix some of the problems with editing- I can give it a more consistent tone and maybe a more measured pace but that's not the only problem. There's still the problem that if people think it's stupid, they're not wrong.

There's lessons and I learned them, but right now, I am dreading tomorrow to the point where I can't fall asleep.

I like the people I worked with a lot. I should say that. I think they're fun, and the movie wouldn't exist at all without them, and I need the movie to exist in order to learn what I needed to learn. The only issue is one I would probably have with almost anyone- The old unbridgeable chasm between two people. I don't actually think it's unbridgeable. But these people are my friends and I tried to keep it light and just say "hey this is a comedy" and the only question I will ever ask is "is this funny" and so something gets lost. It's the old shallowness to friendships that leads to me looking at MySpace as I send out these bulletins and wondering how many of these people I'm actually friends with and genuinely like.

They're also friends so I don't want to go insane with perfectionist tendencies and get mad.

The thing I'm most happy with about the movie is that the title is "Sad Times Together" and that's mostly (not strictly) a Hold Steady reference. And again, some of the jokes. This is not enough to massage my intestines to a state of flow and normalcy. I am going to go to the bathroom now, and hopefully after that I'll be able to sleep soundly.

There are parts of my mind that are already moving on to the next thing, something weird and private that I can trust.

I want to write these books, but there are no words for them right now.

I had one of those days where a large chunk of your life collapses- Related to going to school, I got kicked out of the class I was going to. For real this time, for serious. I'm still working on a film project with other people in the class, but I need to do other things as well. Whatever. I've been taking that in stride since this morning, talk to me on the phone or in person and I'll explain what happened.

I did go to class today though, which is how they found me and told me to get lost. And before doing that I went to the computer center to print out my assignments. That was the most recent time I checked that e-mail account until just now, where I found another e-mail, allegedly from myself, that I did not send. It was titled "turn turn" and had text that said "Finally. I've been waiting my owl life to meet you."

In all likelihood this is either something attacking a bunch of hotmail accounts or it's someone who got onto hotmail after me because I didn't close things out properly. I don't think that happened, but it's possible.

It pretty much unnerved me, being on some last three David Lynch movies identity-doubling tip. Also there was an allusion to owls, which makes me think of Twin Peaks. "The owls are not what they seem."

But I switched my password up and I have other e-mail accounts. I will try to take this in stride.

I did a nice little bit of writing today, coming up with a crazy person's talking-to-herself monologue for the movie. One line of which is "It's too late in the day for a McGriddle and too early in the year for a shamrock shake" which I think we can all relate to.

The Sarah Silverman Program that premiered on Comedy Central on Thursday is my new favorite TV show, I'm pretty sure. When I saw Jesus Is Magic, I didn't laugh as much as I should've because I was familiar with so much of the material already, but this format works really well. A really great cast, and a really great creative voice, and in the premiere at least, there was really cool Rob Schrab animation. The tone forsakes ironic bigotry almost completely in favor of a tone that is basically that of the Stella TV show but with more obvious jokes. (And now that I think about it, the structure, with the larger supporting cast, helps it out too in contrast with Stella's focus.) And on the next one Zach Galifianakis plays a homeless person! I love it!

I also love the internet Maria Bamford Show:




I saw the movie Brick, which, at the time of its release, seemed like the criticisms people were having were pretty valid. Then it made some end-of-the-year top ten lists which made me check it out. I think it's a bit overstylized and kind of doesn't work in terms of actually creating a world. It takes cliches and then recontextualizes them into a place where they don't make sense.

I also got the Saturday Night Live Best of TV Funhouse DVD, which has a handful of great special features but is on the whole really uneven. If I were to take the time and go through the DVD I could probably edit together a sweet hour-long VHS tape, with all of the point of view and conceptual hahas and none of the unfunny sexual innuendo.

There's this new band called Au Revoir Simone, who I first heard on an mp3 from the Grizzly Bear blog. I liked the song, "Backyards Of Our Neighbors." Then Pitchfork linked to a music video for a song called "Fallen Snow." They are three women, with keyboards that sound like pianos and vocal harmonies. It's not overproduced. It's pretty music, really pleasant and calming, kind of like Beach House minus the organ drone and dynamics.

From the video it turns out they're pretty as their voices, which will probably lead to creepiness in the future from music message boards. Let me lead the charge, with something that I don't think is inappropriate. The songs sound like deep tissue massage, and they have these kind of release effects. Wink wink. But this is the music's power- blockages become undone and thoughts get free, it feels like drinking water. It gets me in the mood to write, it brings on some kind of clarity. Lavender Diamond does the same thing.

The power lies in the freshness, more so than in repeated listens, I think. I compare it to water and there's this never the same river twice quality to listening to things that are unexpected. It's important to note also that the Au Revoir Simone structures aren't so repetitive in terms of recognizable choruses. There's just melody. Lavender Diamond repeat and chant, which is its own power.

Right now I wish I had the whole album.

EDIT: Some of the other, poppier songs, lose the melancholy r in a way that is still pleasant but maybe off-putting as a general aesthetic.

I decided towards the end of last year that I should spend this school quarter making a little movie, a comedy. There was some conceptual framework, but mostly the idea was that it would be funny. We didn't have a plot. We had a meeting, came up with some jokes. Today we had another one, finalized a narrative. Anyway, it's filthy. It's not filth, it should be good but oh man we just got together and came up with things we thought were funny and they were mostly dirty. And maybe mildly retarded. You might see my junk. Get ready, it should be great.