Bugs.

"Bugs" is actually a totally sweet name.

Tubach

Someone should get on this:
Write all tuba arrangements of some Bach pieces (might I recommend quartets as a place to start), get them recorded, and then remix the result with all Tupac vocals and some beats. Gold. It's all gold.

sad family issues vs. all-out rumpus

The Hollywood film industry is like a friend of your dad's who seemed super awesome when you were growing up, but that you're old enough to really understand people you can see that he's a misinformed lecherous mess and you don't really want to deal with him most of the time, but also sometimes when he comes to Thanksgiving he gets drunk and hits on your aunt and then punches a cousin and passes out in gravy and that can be (though it doesn't have to be) pretty funny.

Right now we're having a feud, the film industry and I, where it has decided to go through my childhood and ruin everything I loved, one by one. A few examples: Transformers, Indiana Jones, Willy Wonka, Rocky and Bullwinkle, GI Joe, and the Wild Things.

It is my hope that perhaps we can push this trend to the extreme and start making things that are clearly based on my (and our collective) beloved childhood, but are not even a little bit trying to recapture it. Let's own that we're ruining things and push it as far as we can. Here then is my pitch for the next film I would like to see come out of this:


Gummi Bears: the (live action) Movie

The gummi bears should be portrayed by people in foam suits, a la Teletubbies, but with the actors' faces uncovered. All sets should be scaled up to make these people look small, and anyone portraying a person should be green-screened in to seem huge. The ogres should be a muppet/cgi combo.

The plot will focus around Duke Igthorn trying to become invincible and immortal and it should include the Barbic Gummis, Lady Bane, and a wizard. Things should blow up, and there should be battles that feel like they belong in the Lord of the Rings. Also Cavin should come of age. There should be some really uncomfortable sexual tension.

Cast -
Cavin: Michael Cera
Igthorn: Christopher Guest
Gruffi: Dean Stockwell
Zummi: Dustin Hoffman
Grammi: Kathy Bates
Tummi: Zach Galifianakis
Sunni: Ellen Page
Cubbi: Emile Hirsch

A sad sad story

I went to a flea market today. A man was selling some old cameras including a nineteen-forty-something 8mm motion film camera that so small I could palm it and you would not know it was in my hand. The lens (and by lens I mean the entire mechanism, not just the glass) had a diameter of about two thirds of a dime. It was amazing. And adorable. I was admiring it and the man came over and first told me that it was too old to be used to take pictures, and then told me that he wanted twenty-five dollars for it. I had been thinking more along the lines of fifteen (though, of course, at this point in my life money has a pretty inflated meaning for me, so even fifteen is a lot), so I did not purchase the camera. I got to thinking later, though, that it must be sad for a thing like a camera to become something that is worth more to a person operating as a collector as an unwanted collectible than to a person operating as an artist as a tool for creation.

I hope, of course, that someone who wants to shoot 8mm finds it and buys it and loves it. I don't want it to spend any part of its productive life not living up to its potential.

a flash mob?

Here is a fun game to play with friends:

You will need a place where people are at. I like tourists. Anywhere with a crowd (but it is nice if that crowd might have some cameras). You will need, also, several friends. You and your friends will go to the place with your own cameras (also you need cameras) and you will take pictures of each other taking pictures. The goal is to get as many pictures of the other players taking pictures as possible without being noticed by the people you are photographing. The secondary goal is to notice anyone who is taking a picture of you and make sure they do not get a shot of you taking a shot.

Go. Play.

On compliments.

If a person is one in a million, wouldn't that mean that there are almost seven thousand other people exactly like them?

patron of the everlovin' arts

Someone should make a website in the social networking style wherein artists may sign up for a page and show off what they do. They could maybe sell their work from there, in the name of strict capitalism, but that is not what it is really about. Also people may find work they like and make direct contributions, which would be really nice, but also is not the meat of the site. The meat is where rich people who love art can find artists they want to date and try to woo them on the internet.


This is a really good idea. If anyone wants to make it but wants help with figuring out details, I'm all over giving you a hand.

Which side are you on?

Kettle corn vs. unicorn.

A line of dialogue for you to use.

"He's a real dick in wolf's clothing."

It has taken me a long time to get here.

I have, for as long as I can remember, been the unwilling recipient of a few specific adjectives (or descriptive phrases): unique, full of potential, strange, idiotic, and a few others in a similar vein. I reject (and have forever rejected) them all.

However, I have, in the last few days, while watching videos that film students have made and placed on the internet (presumably because they were proud of them) come to accept that I do have a different aesthetic than many (perhaps even the majority of) other people.

Sadly, it is impossible.

You know what would make an amazing film?
An early-career Bill Murray obliviously following and irritating a depressed late-career Bill Murray.

I wish I had the attention span and literary chops to throw down a manifesto proper.

When making a film (or video for the internet, even), it is not important to show life as it is. We all know it. Show life as it happens post-processing; after the brain has finished considering and tainting it. That is what makes the film a necessary step in the storytelling.

True story.

I drove past a playground today and a bunch of little girls were waving at all the cars, so I honked and waved and they were totally pumped. Yesterday I was messing around on youtube, as one sometimes does, and I discovered the appallingly boring world of tween girls making "the and show". There are a TON of them, and not one of them knows what they're doing. One of the videos I watched a bit of (I could not make it all the way through any of them) featured two girls on a front lawn, presumably to do a half-thought out bit when they are distracted by tenuous and fleeting interlocution with a passing clutch of golf players.

It is stunning how much merely making contact with other people is exciting for young people. Where does that go? How can we harness that? There's so much art to be had in working with strangers.

A bit of dialogue for you to (fix up and) put in something:

1: So, the marathon you're running is three days long?
2: Not quite. It's three marathons on sequential days. They're a tournament.
1: Won't everyone be too exhausted to run in the second and third race?
2: Sure, yeah. That's part of what makes it hard. The first day we have four marathons with anyone who enters. The top fifty in each race compete on the second day in two marathons of a hundred people, and the top twenty-five in each of those run in the Master Race on the third day.
1: You're calling the final marathon the "Master Race"?
2: Yeah.
1: You might want to rethink that.

A play with elderly puppets:

Paunch and Droopy.

I said this one time and I stand behind it.

Science: the Religion of Magic.

I have always thought I was prepared.

I assumed that no matter where or when I would be ready to take on a creationist who wants to make arguments against evolution based in "science". If they resorted to faith, I know, I would not be able to argue, as they'd be in an arena I am unequipped to enter. But fake science I am all over.

Joining a gym has provided a few new opportunities for me. For instance, last week I was hit on while naked for the first time ever. A guy ogled me in the shower, and then tried to take me home (while still in the shower, and then again in the locker room). It's an ego-boost to have someone interested in you for your fully exposed body, but also it's a little weird.

Tonight went a tiny step further when, while I was sitting in the steam room the only other guy in there started talking to me and masturbating a little. I looked away to indicate my lack of interest. I think steam rooms are a pretty legit place to pick someone up, so I assumed he was just seeing if I was interested, because he stopped when I didn't respond favorably. There are pretty basic rules of conduct. No reason to get offended unless you indicate lack of interest and a guy persists in automanipulation. After all, if there were naked girls in the steam room and I were in any way comfortable propositioning a strange girl, I'm sure I'd try to pick people up in the steam room, too. There's something tantalizing about being hot and wet and not able to see very far. Maybe not if you're myopic and lost in the everglades.

When I didn't go for the flesh, he switched over to congenial conversation mode, which I am pretty much a sucker for, so we talked about what exercises we do, and then he told me about how if you don't use your leg muscles your body starts to die, which I countered by talking about this totally fantastic article I read the other night about how monkeys have way long toes and we don't and there are a bunch of scientists who think that the only reason our toes would have evolved shorter is so that we can run extreme distances. I think that's great, that we evolved to run all day, and to chase down animals to eat. He sat up and told me that they haven't proven evolution and that's why it's "just a theory".

What? Really? You were just masturbating to see if I was interested in anonymous gay sex and you're a conservative christian? How does that even happen? In my confusion, and also due to my wanting to relax after some exercise (hence the steam room), I didn't jump to my defenses and correct his swapping of the vernacular bastardization of "theory" (which we probably should put an end to) for the much more stringent scientific actual definition of "theory". "Just a theory" doesn't make a thing unproven. "Just a hypothesis" does.

I learned today that I am not always ready to take on the confused. Because sometimes I, myself, am confused.

That sounds like the beginning of a secular sermon. Are there science churches? There ought to be. Where really charismatic people talk about dealing with issues and coping with the world and also science. Neal Degrasse Tyson would be a great minister of science.

Mondays and Thursdays are a dollar a string.

I have been bowling sidearm for years. It's the only way I know how. I'm not a very good bowler. Sometimes my father tries to show me how it's normal to bowl and I can't seem to do it. No matter what I think I do he says I'm still swinging way out to the side.

Last night, between the two strings we bowled, he said to me, "Jim, when you only have a few pins left you seem to have more control." That is because when there're only one or two standing I throw underhand instead of sidearm. I told him this. "Then why don't you just throw underhand all the time?"

My second score was more than twice my first.

Things I learned in college:

If you are going to be a mess, you might as well be a hot mess.

Voicemail I left for myself on a fifteen mile walk the other night: 2.