And We Shall March

Reading This Reminds Me Of Our Trying to Decide if We Should Institute A "No John Cusack" Rule. Ultimately We Decided No To, For Obvious Reasons..

We called it Talking In Movie, something I've written about around here sometime in the past, but I don't feel like searching my own blog right now. Update! Here it is. Though I don't do TiM anymore, I do miss it. This fab essay reminds me just how glorious this trilogy is.

Say Anything opens with a conversation about love, followed by a high school graduation, while Grosse Pointe Blank concludes with a 10-year high school reunion that ushers Martin into an existential crisis and emotional rebirth. The two films are also linked by two key speeches that serve as character arcs as well as social commentaries. Lloyd’s heartbroken admission on Diane’s answering machine that: “Maybe I didn’t really know you. Maybe you were just a mirage. Maybe the world is full of food and sex and spectacle and we’re all just hurling towards an apocalypse, in which case it’s not your fault” returns in Grosse Pointe Blank (when Martin tells Debi’s father what his life has consisted of the past ten years) as: “Six figures. Doing business with lead-pipe cruelty. Mercenary sensibility. Sports. Sex. No real relationships with anybody.” The speeches also articulate the horror Debi feels when she discovers Martin’s true identity, for Martin personifies Lloyd’s elegiac description of late 20th century life.

I Know That I Am Obscenely Behind On Updating Here, So How About A Bit Of Tom Waits As Delaying Tactic Filler?

Related. Back soon. Promise!

My Mother Knows My Phone Number And Uses It Often, Actually, But There Are Times I Get The Big Picture Vibe Behind This Song

Continuing with the using of videos as filler thing as I work behind the scenes on getting real content in shape for posting. Sweet Honey in the Rock is one of my fave vocal groups on the planet.***  I've only seen them perform once in person, and will always remember it.

*** A selection from my other fave ever group/band/whatevs here, and another especially here ... the latter of which apparently was written without any knowledge of Me or James ... which is weird only if you deny the general Indifference of the universe and the concept of Sounding ... because 'fair' is not a concept the Universe pays any mind to, what with being busy elsewhere ... and Sounding is one of the many Invented Things created to help Deal with that Truth.

! Death 40-Feet Tall ! Needs Only $966 More To Get To The Hollywood Fringe Festival, And That Moola Must Manifest By 8 p.m Pacific Time Zone On March 16, 2011. Details, With A Bit Of Dog Attack Drama And Secret Project Revelation, Within!

Update! Make that $661 $577 $492 $417 $422 $342 $192 $172 NEGATIVE $127 more to go!

To be clear, the Negative $127 thing means I MADE IT. Provided, of course, that all of the credit cards clear at 8:06 Pacific on March 16.

OMFG I am a nobody practically speaking and I PULLED THIS OFF.

Explainer for $417/$422 bit: Sometimes you lose backers for whatever reason. I was warned about this ahead of time by others who have used Kickstarter. That it happened to me is no big deal. More on this in the wrap-up post to come.

This information I planned to share only once I got to 75% funding in my Kickstarter effort. Since that happened sometime Saturday while I was at work,* time to spill the last of the beans!

As you know, Bob, at any donation of $25 or above you get a gorgeous letterpress show poster created by Amos   Kennedy   Jr., on the back of which I will write a custom story just for Your Beautiful Self based on either one thing you tell me about yourself, or a 3- to 5-word prompt you will provide.

Thing is, these will not be entirely random stories.

My Secret Plan from the start has been to take however many micro-stories I needed to write for the $25 (and above) Kickstarter backers and stitch them into one complete narrative. I do this not because I am Insane (no matter what you've heard), but Because I Can! I am a writer, and a good one. This big-story-created-from-random-Kickstarter-input is a challenge I very much want to meet.

I don't know what the story will be about. I need to first get the data from all of my backers once this effort ends, see what I have to work with, and let it flow from there. I also haven't yet decided if I'll release the complete work to backers via the restricted-access production diary, or if I'll simply tell them that each story segment on their individual posters is but one part of a whole and let them Suffer wondering how their prompts play into it. You know, kind of like how Michael Bay hired an asteroid expert from NASA and then completely ignored him, which is my fave commentary track on the Criterion edition of Armageddon.

All I know is that you will TOTALLY want to be in on that, but the only way you can is if you hit up the Kickstarter page and donate at a level of $25 or above. As much as I want to create the ultimate story,  I also know it will not happen unless I close the final gap of $966 to get ! Death 40-Feet Tall ! to the finish line.

That said, every single penny counts with this Kickstarter effort, which is why my incentive offers below the $25 level are cool. Below the $25 level I'm offering postards from Kennedy and downloads of John Boswell songs. We live in times of recession-fueled economic scarcity, which is why I very much appreciate any little bit someone throws into my project. My incentives are structured so that even if you have only $5 to spare, you will get something quite nifty.

I am only $966 worth of donations from reaching the goal a.ka. I'm 25% out from complete funding. OMFG. 

Kickstarter is all or nothing - you come up $1 short? You don't get any of it. Over this past month I have done Absolutely Everything I can think of behind the scenes to successfully cross that finish line (deets of which I will discuss in a post once this is over - not matter the final result). I believe I can get there, but the practical side of me is fully aware that whether or not I do is partly out of my hands. It's up to you reading this, or the Signal Boost notes sent on my behalf by an astonishing array of folks, for whom I am Grateful.

Here is my Kickstarter page. Here is a video of me telling a geekly Christmas story from childhood to demonstrate my Live Storytelling skills. Here is an FAQ answer to a common question about that video, and related to the effort. Here is the background on that video shot last month. Here is the FAQ answer about the posters.

Whatever you can or choose to do, I appreciate it muchly!

 ---

And now I go back to nursing my wounds. I got attacked by a neighbor's crazy dog while walking back from the grocery store this morning, and dealing with the fallout from that delayed the writing/uploading of this entry.

On the upside, I now have rather impressive (if still bleeding) fang punctures in my thigh, which I can turn into a more interesting story than what actually happened! Downside, that dog ruined the one pair of jeans I have that fit perfectly!!! I got those jeans at the FiDM scholarship store downtown, they are alleged to be designer jeans** and they only cost me $5!! The way FiDM stock turnover works I will not be able to replace these jeans. #$%^$#$%^!!!!! I'm going to try and repair them, but the damage has been done.

Further upside (now that I think about it typing-from-top-of-head), I'm glad I have quick reflexes and a calm head when in crisis. Once I realized too late that the Crazy Dog's gate was open for some reason and he was racing through it right at me, I flung Moiself back as he lunged, which is probably why he left only punctures in my thigh instead of taking out a chunk of my flesh. I also KONG yelled and swung my canvas grocery bag at him during the attack, chasing him back into his yard/Territory, closing the gate after him. Then I let the family in the house next door to the House Of Problem Dogs that witnessed it all provide post-attack help, even though I was three houses away from my own and already knew what I was gonna do to tend to Moiself. (Sometimes it's nice to let somebody similar to your Mom fuss over you.)

Once home I cleaned the wounds and made a compost from aloe plants in the yard and vodka in the freezer. Lathered that onto a gauze and taped it onto my leg with duct tape. Within two hours the Not Insignificant swelling was gone.

And yes, I did call the Dog Police - aka animal control - to report the attack, but as suspected that call was futile. At this moment of posting it is just over 9 hours since the attack and despite their claims of We're On Our Way, nobody from the dog police has shown up.

But since it's been over 30-years since there's been a case of dog-related rabies in Los Angeles, at least I'm not worried about having to put up with rabies shots.

* I found out I'd hit 75% via a text from The Goddess who monitoring my page. I didn't fully comprehend what she was telling me remotely until I got home in the wee hours and could see for myself.

** Like I know from designers. I'm taking the word of the student salesgirls that the jeans are designer. All I know is that they fit PERFECTLY.

Year Four

This should have gone up at 6 a.m., but apparently when I programmed it in a week or so ago I forgot to move it out of 'draft'. Oops.

For many this song is between the individual and god. For us, this song is an expression of gratitude between Us for the discovery of the other.

Or, more accurately, was.

 

It Gets Better V.2: Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles

V.2 is my internal shorthand for the videos (which have not stopped by the way) that rolled out after the initial set. Basically the difference between V.1 and V.2 is production values and scope.

Have watched hundreds of them since the launch, and among my faves gotta say this one is really high up there for a variety of reasons (but the V.1 one with the cop and the Marine is still in top spot).

 

! Death 40-Feet Tall ! At The Inaugural Hollywood Fringe Festival: Wrapping It Up With Bullet Points And Pictures

Okay, with the novella-length full report off to the Official Mentor, for the rest of you it's either random notes or nothing, due to time constraints as we launch into prep for CCI.

Though ! Death 40-Feet Tall ! is framed around my attempts to become an extra in the first Transformers movie while exploring the meaning of Optimus Prime, it's mostly about my relationship with my best friend.

Overall this my first stage show was a thrilling/terrifying/exhausting experience that was TOTALLY AWESOME. I learned so much! And now that it's over I realize that not only did I create a good show, but I had a really great time.

Photos from either the CrackBerry or the laptop, which can take pictures, even though it takes pictures backwards for some reason, which I discovered once I looked at them. Click to embiggen.

View from the stage on the night of the last show, taken five minutes before The Emperor, aka The Most Amazing Tech Guy In the Multiverse, opened the house.

I was based in the cute ballroom at ComedySportz Los Angeles, of which I have nothing but praise for everybody there, especially The Emperor. He explained the whole Get Off The Stage And Go In The Back When I Turn Out The Lights The Second Time thing. How he delivered that bit of detail to 101-level Me was hilarious. Now that I think about it, so was the deft way he handled my pre-show tech, when it was clear I had no idea what tech actually involved and almost freaked out when he said "let's run through it"...and so we didn't.

Which meant he did not know what I was going to be doing on stage until my opening night, after which he was all Let's Talk. I was all, you can do that really? So he again patiently explained What It Is I Do As The Tech Person until I got it. Thus, the main sound file that I didn't know how to make work and so didn't mention it became part of the rest of the run.

Seriously, I could rave about that guy all the live long day. One reason I think my performance got better as it went on was because of his input, which was above and beyond his duties. As I explained to people who were all omg the look of it with the lights was incredible how you did that? That had nothing to do with me. That was all him throwing down at the light wall/board thing. All I was doing was trying to get through 50-ish minutes of first line through last line without screwing it up.

Except for the 11 p.m. show, after surviving each performance I went out for drinks with friends. (l-r) Opening night with Kitty & Celtic; Celtic (who gave me advice that night which I executed throughout the run) in the badass jacket from one of his badass jobs; second show with a group of lovelies who came a long way; fourth show with a friend who got locked out of that show because the poor dear got trapped in traffic and arrived late.

       

Closing night I took friends to Fringe Central to show it off and introduce them to the fabulous sangrias, but I forgot to take a picture.

Fringe Central was based at Theater of Arts. It was the administrative hq of the Overlords and came with an outdoor bar. I loved going there (l-r) The sign; ABBIE MISTRESS OF SANGRIAS and one of the worker bees; a bit of decorative detail; the bar; rare shot of the place empty.

         


Ben, the Fringe Overlord, holding the very first iPad I'd ever seen in the wild at one of the fundraising parties (omg Me!). Ben & Stacy, the Fringe Mistress of Publicity, discussing details of the awards ceremony.

   

I met Young Danny during the first class I took with Prather. Here he is on his opening night, along with his fabulous GF, who ran his tech. 

   

Danny is primarily a stand-up right now, but he has so many talents and works hard that he'll be busting out in who knows how many realms soon. He doesn't yet have a website, but enjoy these photos, which capture a bit of his energy. I had no idea he also worked as a model, but it doesn't surprise me.

The awards ceremony was super fun! I covered it live on the other outlet, but the nature of that space is it all vanishes into the ether after it happens, so no link. Here are a very few of the tons of photos I took with the laptop.  (l-r) Nik Coppin, who is amazing,  Kimleigh Smith, top overall winner at the Fringe, overlord Ben Hill; Les Kurkendaal and Jacquetta Szathmari, both of whom are wonderful and had great shows; Abie Philbin Bowman whom I was just thrilled to meet because of his work with his award; Fred Blanco of the gab Stories of Cesar Chavez and his lovely GF.

       

I'll get around to uploading the full set on Flickr later sometime. There's lots of them.

As you might know if you've been visiting for a while, I'm kinda obsessed with my show posters. They were made by Amos Kennedy, Jr. The Humble Negro Printer. They are gorgeous; a few unaltered poster shots here. (101 Learning Curve is why I had to alter the display ones, which killed me.)

I gave out unaltered large and small posters after each show to anyone in the audience who wanted one, and put tons up in the wild at various places throughout the strike zone. Often I walked the long way to Fringe Central because I just got a kick out of walking past my posters.

       
Amazing fact the first? 3/4 of those in the wild stayed up untouched for almost three weeks!! Amazing fact the second, which didn't hit until day after my show close? When people took them, they took the fancy ones. (Excepting of course the ones that were taken down and tossed.) On Saturday night after my show closed I did another round of visiting them, planning to take them all down the next day. But during removal roam on Sunday I realized no matter where I went, the fancy ones were gone yet the plain ones were still up! By my read that was deliberate, and whoever took them was just waiting. How cool.

Amos' posters are tough by the way. They looked just as good after nearly three weeks hanging in the elements as they did the day they arrived.

Okay, that's enough typing and photo uploading.

Dunno what I'll do for Fringe 2011, but I've got time to figure it out.

I still miss him every day.

! Death 40-Feet Tall ! At The Inaugural Hollywood Fringe Festival

Consider this the Official Announcement, containing stuff that's not in the Official Press Release. Roll out!

Tickets are on sale for ! Death 40-Feet Tall ! which is my first ever attempt at a stage production. It's a one-woman show taking place as a visiting production at ComedySportz LA, a fabulous venue that is ADA compliant and has a lovely patio along with has tons of street parking.

My show is one of the many offerings at the first-ever Hollywood Fringe Festival, which runs June 17-27 at theater venues throughout Hollywood. I encourage you to visit the Fringe homeport, click around, see what strikes your fancy and come out to see something! Truthfully, there is something for everyone on deck at at this festival, and I have been astounded at the variety of offerings and the diversity of the participants. When I'm not on stage doing my thing? I'll be sitting in the audiences for other people's shows with Much Enthusiasm. I can't wait!

Tickets for ! Death 40-Feet Tall ! are $10, available for purchase here.

When I first heard about this Fringe last year, my plan was to do the CCI thing and volunteer only. Through volunteering you help out and you get in for free, two things I love doing.

Then the thought eventually hit that the way the Fringe Overlords set this whole thing up, it's a wide open Welcome Mat! If you have something and you can pull it off? You are welcome to join in regardless of whatever credentials you do/don't have.

So I started putting together a show.*** For it, I commissioned Amos Kennedy, Jr. to do my posters, one example of which you see above. (Kennedy link one. Kennedy link two.***) No two posters Amos created are the same, and I love them all. I also commissioned John Boswell to compose two original songs for the show, and man are the tunes he came up with lovely. Both Amos and John hit it out of the park. I am thrilled and grateful.

My understanding is the Fringe Admin people have been working on making this festival Manifest for three years. I don't know what their pain has been like during that time, but mine has involved a shitload of writing and rewriting, an Everest-level learning curve, the mental difficulty of going back and forth between Creative and Admin, a lot of Bene Gesserit litany and two Complete And Total Emotional Meltdowns deftly handled by the CFE. Gotta say, that man has been like my personal M*A*S*H unit, only instead of bandages, he tends to fix things using combinations of chocolate, cabernet and sex, which is very effective, let me tell you.***

At more than one point I thought I'd just give up and simply walk away from the whole thing. But Molly, Goonan, the CFE, Grinder, Jane, Phil and John all stepped up out of the blue with encouraging words and advice. Essentially, in different ways, they all said Roll The Fuck Out.

Technically, I don't know what I'm doing. But I am bringing my best effort to this, my first stage outing, and if you come see it I hope you find it entertaining.

Because I'm so very Type-A OCD I'll probably be tweaking  the Official Blurbage right up until opening night, which is June 18th.***

More about the Fringe in the coming days.

*** Venue contract obligates me to say my show is a visiting production to ComedySportz Theater. One thing I love about Amos? I explained the Contractually Obligated Language to him during our LA-to-Alabama exchanges, and he seamlessly incorporated that into the poster design.

*** I learned of Kennedy from writer/artist Eddie Campbell, who had to nudge me several times about the guy because at the time he first tried to tell me about him I was in Trauma over the death of Michael Jackson. Don't you judge me.

*** I didn't put that bit in that bit in the press release.

*** I've already changed it twice! But you wouldn't know that unless you've been around for a while. Heh.

Death 40-Feet-Tall: Roll Out!

I've been waiting for a particular GO signal from behind the scenes before I started blabbing, and we got that just before I left for the desert.

So, here we GO!

The first ever Hollywood Fringe Festival launches June 17 - 27 at venues throughout a square-mile radius in Hollywood. I have always wanted to go to a fringe festival, so was super excited hearing the news last year that one was coming! At first I was going to volunteer only. But when I got to thinking about it? I've been training at iO West for almost two years now (it's taking a while due to scant funds and day job/other job demands) and I've started going to some of the storytelling venues with mostly Wild Unicorn Herd material - because that's my life - and held my ground in front of audiences who are not of the Geek Tribe. Which was astonishing.

I realized what I really wanted to do was put together a show, and the fact that I have actually never done something like this before seemed a minor obstacle. I'm the hands-on type who learns by doing, so what better way to learn to produce a show than to seize the opportunity offered by the open-door approach of the Hollywood Fringe? Yes, this would be a steep learning curve, but so was accidentally becoming part of cast at Faire, and I pulled that off. Plus - and I'll get into this later - the people at Fringe HQ and the venues are there to truly help you throughout the process.

Decision made, thus began many, many intense months of writing, rewriting, testing material, a couple of wee panic attacks and only a single itsy bitsy DefCon-1 complete & total meltdown.

And it was glorious. I can't wait to do it again ... once I've recovered from this one.

I have written two versions of D40FT. One is largely this (primarily pulled from the overly-long set reports like this one buried among those many pages), with a touch of other stuff thrown in. That one is a solo performance involving 14 distinct characters. It is also still tragically 1.5 hours long. Between not yet being strong enough as a performer to pull off 14 characters all by myself, and no one needs to endure 1.5 hours of OMGIRANFROMINVISIBLEROBOTSFORTWODAYS, I will not be performing that version for this inaugural Fringe.***

The other version is about Me and James, the man who is my personal Optimus, but sadly was no on board with the whole Michael Bay Is Awesome thing. This one is 50-minutes long, does not require me to be 14 different people, and is a more personal story about two best friends, their geek life, and giant robots. That's the version Moi and my Adorable Cast will perform for the Fringe.

I've brought my best effort to this, my first time out doing a complete stage thing. If you come see it, I hope you leave entertained and happy.

I will share more about this project in the coming weeks. There's why my ADA-accessible venue and the admin people at ComedySportz are fantastic. There's an opening night audience gift thing, and a smaller-scale audience gift thing for each of the other four shows. There's bunches of other stuff.

I'm also going to talk about the other shows I really want to see (and the ones I've already seen that you should, too).

That's later. For now, purchase tickets here, and enjoy my Fabulously Tacky save-the-date notice!

*** I am going to keep working on that piece, murdering it down to a reasonable length and working on my performance skills in between in order to bring A-Game needed to pull off the myriad of characters. I've already discovered parts of it work great as contained 5- to 15-minute story chunks! If you're in LA and you visit the storytelling outlets, you might very well see me working out the material live at various places throughout the coming year. Once I get it down to something manageable, we'll give the solo version a new title and throw it up somewhere around town. (I won't do the solo version for next year's Fringe. I'd rather do something completely different for Fringe 2011.)

INTERNET(S)! HELP ME FIND THIS SONG!

I swear to you there was once a mash-up between David Bowie's  Space Oddity and Peter Schilling's Coming Home. I don't know who did this remix, but I heard it several times. It was an industrial piece. Loud. Very good.

If you have ever heard this song and know who created it and where it can be purchased, ever so grateful if you'd hit up my email with links or more information.

Thank you!

Update! (The You People Scare Me Edition): This remix was most likely created by a band called Stayte, as some sort of limited release or promotional item. Here's their no contact information homeport. Here's their no outside contact information Facebook. Here's their someone logged in today (May 2) Myspace. This is their last time we updated was April 15th Twitter. This is them on iTunes.