May 2004 Archives
Wow. You guys have to check out the motion graphics demo reel of Steve Seeley, a designer based in Calgary. He's got a couple of years on me, but that's pretty much exactly the kind of design work I'm looking to be doing someday. Very impressive, and I love his style.
It's a little after midnight here in Chicago. It's cool and wet outside, and we've got the windows in the apartment open, so there's a nice cool breeze a-blowin' through. I just got back from hanging out with one of my friends from college, which was an absolute blast, and now I'm sitting here in a clean apartment (one of my major accomplishments for the day) thinking about what I'm going to do tomorrow and about how much this city is already starting to feel like home. Which made me start thinking about love letters to cities, which made me think of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, which then made start thinking about how cool it would be if Italo Calvino had a weblog, except, you know, he's dead.
So I started thinking. Who would you most like to see have a weblog? I mean famous people. We can lean on our friends to start weblogs, but who are the big names you'd like to read every day online? Two of my favorites, Adam Duritz and Neil Gaiman, already have weblogs. Who else?
- Italo Calvino (from beyond the grave)
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Stephen Spielberg
- George Lucas
- Robin Williams
- Dave McKean
- Jim Henson (also postmortem)
- Jonathan Carroll (who had one, but now only has an intermittently-updated site, which doesn't count)
That's a start. Who would you most like to read everyday?
OK, I'm going to demonstrate how much of a spaz I can be with this post, but what the hell. One of the things that's made me insanely happy this week was a sort-of-reunion with an old friend. Kinda.
When I was over at the University of Exeter, in a fit of homesickness I went to this big plant fair that they were holding up on campus. Me, the guy who managed to kill even the most diehard bachelor plants, went walking through all these rows and rows of houseplants that kind of reminded me of my home back in Ohio, where Mom was an absolute garden nut. I'd always resented gardening because she made me spend hours on my knees, picking these teensy tiny little weeds out of the dirt, which seemed like an almost Sisyphean task to an eight-year-old. Now, though, I wanted something to green up my place.
Insanely, I wound up walking back to my apartment downtown with a five-foot-tall yucca palm balanced precariously on my shoulder. I'll never forget the looks I got from people on my way back. It was great. I must have been huge with that thing up there.
Man, let me tell you, I loved that plant. Seriously. I couldn't kill it. Palm trees are insanely forgiving if you forget to water them for a while. They're the perfect bachelor plant. Green, beautiful, and freakin' resilient. I spent hours in that room, studying or working on my laptop, and that plant made the whole place feel more like home. When it came time to leave England at the end of the year, I couldn't take it with me, so I gave it to the housekeeper, who'd remarked on how beautiful it was.
As dumb as it sounds, over the next couple of years I kept my eyes open. I couldn't remember what kind of plant it was, embarassingly enough, so I couldn't ask for one. But I kept looking, whenever I'd go to a nursery or a greenhouse. I never found one.
Until last week. Talon and I went to IKEA to look for coffeetables and bookcases, doing research for the last couple of missing pieces for this place, and then, lo and behold, there was my plant. Seriously. Same size, same three primarily trunks in the pot, this was my plant.
Now, twenty bucks later, there's a beautiful yucca palm sitting in the corner of my room. Talon insists on calling it "Mr. Yuk", but whateversville. I still grin every time I see it. I know it's not the same plant, but what the hey. It makes me really happy nevertheless.
And yes, I know I'm a dork. That doesn't bother me. What bothers me is the idea that I might be slowly turning into my mom. I swear, if I find myself starting to research perennials and planting color-coordinated window planters, I'm seeking professional help.
Enh, whatever. It's all good. I mean, come on -- how bad can it be? I've got my tree back!
One of the things that's going to take a little while to get used to is this wacky Chicago weather. Hot in the day, positively freezing at night, and really wet. Actually, I really like it – it reminds me of England or the Pacific Northwest, two of my favorite places I've been. A man could get used to this. Kinda wish I hadn't sent a bunch of my sweaters home to Ohio, though!
Well, the apartment studio is definitely coming together (definitely not a studio apartment – the new place has two bedrooms, a living room, another room with a fireplace, and the kitchen and the bathroom, all for a price that's staggeringly affordable compared to life back in D.C.), and now it's time to play catch-up on the client projects that I'd been shirking. Hey, what can I say? Transporting oneself across the country takes time, not to mention healing from one of the most horrific sicknesses I've had in the last bunch-of-years. Suffice it to say that the sore throat led to inner ear pressure, which led to a ruptured eardrum, which has led to my basically losing hearing in my right ear for four to six weeks. It's coming back, though, which is making me feel incredibly relieved, and it no longer hurts like crazy and isn't leaking anymore, so all things considered, I'm doing okay.
Anyway, so, yes. The new place is coming together nicely – for the first time in almost three years my work area is no longer in my bedroom, which is one of the few ideas from Feng Shui that doesn't make me snicker. That's definitely a perk. And living with one of my best friends on the planet is also a major perk. I'm a lucky guy – I go from living with one best friend to living with another. God help me if I ever need to find a roommate that's a total stranger. I don't think that's happened since my freshman year in college.
And, today I finished one of those things I've been trying to do for a long, long time: added credit-card payment as an option to Dreamsbay.com. Thanks to the beauty of PayPal, I can now have my clients pay with plastic without it costing me an arm and a leg. I'm thrilled. One more step towards professionalism. Someday, when I actually get an office, I'll look around and say, "Hey! I made it!"
At which point, knowing me, I'll probably throw in the towel and change my career to something silly like Olympic figure skating, or something equally impossible.
So, yes, that's what's happening here in Chicago. Again, apologies for the intermittent updates. There's just so much to see and do that I don't feel like being attached to a keyboard any more than I can help it. One of these days I'm going to take the old camera out and go to town, though. There's a ton of neat stuff around here. Oh, well. As I seem to be saying a lot lately, "One day at a time."
Onward!
Forgive the spotty entries here lately, folks. I'm still getting the network up and running here at the new home studio in windy Chicago, Illinois! Between the packing and driving and unpacking and all the other malarkey, I haven't had a lot of time for updates. Suffice it to say that I'm here, trying to get everything sorted out, trying to find the grocery stores, et cetera, et cetera. More to come!
My personal site will be half as cool as J.K.Rowling's. Lots and lots of fun stuff to play with in there – hint: use the eraser!
Jeez. It's distressing me no end that they cast Keanu Reeves as an Americanized John Constantine, and that this movie could have been so cool, but what the hey, I'm a sucker for this stuff. The new Constantine trailer is right this way.
Yet another good New York Times commentary, from John Rockwell: In the Arts, Tech for Tech's Sake Can't Compete With Originality. A nice little essay chiding all these special-effects movies for not doing anything really original. Seriously, that's the entire essay. And he's right, of course... It makes me think that some of the best special effects I've seen lately were the little touches in Amelie when the characters in her bedroom came to life – special effects that are truly special, not like the rubber critters in Van Helsing or Hellboy.
Don't know where I'm going with this, particularly. Just making mental notes for myself, for someday.
Surefire indicator that I am still under the proverbial weather: I can't seem to stay awake for more than a few hours at a time. This is from a man who chronically only grabs about six hours of sleep a night and never naps. Now it's bang bang hammer hammer clunk zzzz, snort snuffle bang bang hammer hammer clunk zzzz. Repeat as necessary.
Am growing understandably annoyed.
There's a lot in this post from Scott Andrew that I've come to agree with. Especially the anecdote from Ani DiFranco. Once again I find myself thinking, Right on, Ani.
It's definitely time to move.
This morning's New York Times is running a story on how Graydon Carter, editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, got $100,000 for suggesting a movie. There are some people howling about how Graydon is being 'bought', and how the magazine is turning favorable towards those who line his pockets, but speaking as an editor myself I can tell you that a huge part of an editor's job is simply knowing people. I've published Bill Coughlan's work in these pages pretty regularly for a while now, and last week I took on the role of producer for a short film he was producing. (Well, I did until I got sick.) Graydon produces a magazine all about the shiny people – it shouldn't be surprising that he would befriend and take on projects with some of them. Vanity Fair is a glossy mag with occasionally very in-depth articles, not a pinnacle of reporting journalism. (I'm not going to give examples because I don't want to start off on that debate.) Until there has been some actual proof of truly false, slanderous work being published in its pages at the behest of some of Carter's friends, I don't see any evidence of wrongdoing.
Did anybody else see the series finale of Frasier and think, "Hey, wasn't there supposed to be one more act?"
The Friends finale was kind of like that for me too. Not a lot of closure in these episodes.
OK, so I've been in various degrees of pain for almost a week, ranging from mild aches to searing spikes so sharp they'd double me over with accompanying man-screams. This has necessitated the use of some staggeringly powerful painkillers, which resulted in one night where I literally didn't know where I was, everything was so foggy and hard to hold onto, but I was still in pain.
Sleeping has become some strange obsession, as I am always on the verge of nodding off and yet getting through a solid night of it has been proving impossible. I wake up with a yell as some pain spike drives itself into my head, roll over, grab some painkillers from the bedside table, then gingerly roll back over and try and get back to sleep.
At one point I was chilling so hard I could barely walk, lurching instead from room to room like some bizarro mummy in a bathrobe. Taking my temperature has been like some absurdist lottery game. The little digital thermometer's screen is placed just far enough out that I can read it as it's calculating, so every time I take my temp I find myself trying to guess what the final number will be. "C'mon, 98.6! 98.6! 96, 97, 98... Oops, no, there it went, damn, okay, up to 99, okay, you can stop now, 100, 101, 102... C'mon, dammit..." The final numbers have ranged from 99 to 104. I have yet to win this lottery.
So, yes, there's been all of this, plus I've lost some of the hearing in my right ear (temporarily, I assume/hope). I'm even hesitant to actually leave the house because I am unsold on the quality of my driving ability at the moment. But, there is an upside. Believe it or not, through all of this, there is an upside.
Since the last time I weighed myself, I've lost ten pounds. I am planning on writing what will obviously become a bestselling book: "THE MISERY DIET: How to launch yourself into swimwear season through pain and disease!"
Jeezus. I'd like to extend a special thanks to the Nicks, Kate and my mom for putting up with me for the last week. This has sucked on so many levels.
Sweet! There's apparently a new Legend of Zelda game on its way which looks way more grown-up than The Wind Waker. Don't get me wrong, Wind Waker was fun, but this just looks incredible. Check it out!
CNN.com is running a story on the return of 'The Dick Van Dyke Show'. Check out this passage:
Reiner, who Van Dyke credits as a "genius," says that the medium has changed too much for him to consider returning to television writing."That's a whole different ballgame today and different rules, I don't know. ... [I]t's a different time with different expectations. I don't know of anything I would want to do. Time passes by and you get older and it's tougher," he said.
Malarkey. The sitcom these days is in serious trouble. Friends is gone, Frasier is almost gone... I want M.A.S.H. back!
C'mon, Kate, Hollywood's waiting... :)
So I mentioned that I was taken out of commission on Saturday with a 104-degree temperature and a sore throat, which I chalked up to the flu. Thanks to some nurturing from Kate, I was back up and running by Monday afternoon. I even felt well enough to go see Van Helsing with Ferraro, which was good dumb fun, just the thing you need when you've been feeling under the weather. I thought I was home free.
I was wrong.
Yesterday morning I woke up with the worst earache ever. Serious megapressure building up in my right eustacian tube, intense spikes of pain from my ear. Something was clogged or infected, and I spent the day pretty much writhing in pain. I used to get these all the time when I was a kid, and I'd forgotten how excruciating ear infections can be, because there's so many different types of pain involved. The dull throb. The waves. The spikes. The jabs when you brush your fingers against the edge of your ear. The ringing, and the burbling, and, as this morning, the intense searing pain as your eardrum finally ruptures and starts leaking the pressurized fluid from inside.
I have antibiotics and I'm all set to spend yet another day in bed trying to shake this off, but I haven't been this sick in a long, long time. Getting my wisdom teeth out wasn't this painful! This sucks.
So as you know, we drew 'mystery' for our genre in the 48 Hour Film Project. Which got me thinking -- when was the last time you saw a mystery movie in the theater? Seriously?
I have a theory that mysteries these days are the realm of the 1-hour TV show, like Law and Order and Monk, but that the general public doesn't have the patience for 2-hour mystery movies in the cinema. Just a thought.
What was the last mystery movie you saw in the theater? Post in the comments!
So I just got my new PowerBook back from the shop. Yes, friends, my new PowerBook just spent a month in rehab because, apparently, its logic board went bad. Yeesh. Luckily, it was under warrantee, but I still had to make do with my old machine for a long time, which sort of kneecapped my productivity there for a while. I was just lucky said old machine still worked and was only mildly broken, not completely destroyed.
Words of wisdom: always keep a backup computer. Never, ever sell your spare.
Anyway, I use a POP client for my email. I know, I know, a webmail client would be much more useful, yadda yadda yadda. Whatever. One way or the other, I just set about downloading a month's worth of email. This is not something you ever want to see:
Note that "2295 new messages" alert is after Mail.app's spam filters had their way with things. Another 2231 messages were sent straight to my junkmail, for a grand total of well over four thousand new messages. Jeebus!
UPDATE: So I whittled down the number of must-reads to 632. That means I get over 20 pieces of important mail a day. No wonder I always feel so behind! :)
I've done a lot of things in my life, and last weekend I added another new experience: I produced my first indie film.
Granted, it's only an eight-minute short for the 48 Hour Film Project, it was really the baby of Bill Coughlan, my "assistant producer" Kate Gibson probably did more actual producing than I did, and I got totally floored by a 104-degree temperature on the actual day of shooting, but it was a great, wonderful experience, and now I have the bug in more ways than one. While I'm still flat on my back with whatever this virus from Hades actually is, I'm mentally making plans for creating another short film, and then maybe another, and then maybe another...
Heh. Lots of my friends have been bitten by the dramatic bug, but I think I'm only one of a small handful that has no interest whatsoever in appearing in front of the camera. We'll get Kate and Jess and Talon and their friends to be in front of the camera, Bill or Shannon to direct, David Seitzinger to do the effects, Andy Rozsa and Scott Andrew LaPera to do the music, I'll do the writing, Kate and I will produce... I love having creative friends. Onward!
Wow. I think the look on the face of King Abdullah II of Jordan in this story sums up our popularity everywhere: The New York Times > Washington > Bush Says He's Sorry for Abuse
of Iraqis, Then Backs Rumsfeld.
Can you imagine the sigh of relief that will go up from liberty-loving people everywhere when Bush isn't reelected this fall?
I'm so buying one of these for the new apartment, if for no other reason than to constantly chuckle at the image of a fuzzy Neil. That's awesome.
I should mention, by the by, that my own picture up there is outdated, as I have changed over to my Summer Look. As in, clean shaven with short, kind of spiky hair. I'm not entirely sold on it, because it feels way too J. Crew and not quite fun enough, but it's okay. I'll try and get another pic taken and up sometime in the near future.
So I just got an e-mail ad from J.Crew about their patchwork madras shirt. I'm not sure if this is really cool or really ugly!
Personally, I'm totally intrigued by it and am seriously tempted to buy one! But, knowing that my designer sensibility is a little, um, out of touch with the rest of the world, I thought I'd throw this out there for all of you guys. What do you think? Cool or ugly? Vote in the comments!
How nice would it be if you could have your scanner do a quick photo of what's on its scanning tray, instead of having to essentially do an entire low-res pass just to tell you where the edges are of what you're trying to scan?
Apple just posted a new iPod commercial which is pretty cool, but as I was watching I thought, "Hey, you could DO that! You'd need to post the ads on some flatscreens and embed RFID tags into the iPod, or at least some Bluetooth sensors, but..."
Like I said before, I need to sleep more.
Hey, wouldn't it be cool if someone wedded the social networking apps like Friendster and Orkut to the Amazon Reommendations engine, so that the system could go out and find people that like the same stuff that you do? Not just this silly "click on one thing you like" thing that Friendster does, but seriously goes out to find someone that likes, say, 85% of the same stuff?
I just took a break from client stuff to add one more chapter to the Bones of the Angel work-in-progress section. This brings you just about up to where I am at the moment. This latest addition, Chapter Eight, is the first chapter of Part Two (I'm plotting out three Parts) and is one of those chapters I mentioned before, where it's pretty much all dialogue. I hope this one doesn't drag on too much – as always, please leave comments with feedback if you get a chance to leaf through it!
I just realized that the entries I'd posted to my Work-in-Progress section over on the BOTA minisite was way out of date, to the tune of over 11,000 words behind. That's a lot of words. So, I'm posting two more chapters now, and will post some more as soon as I get out from under some of these client projects. These two bring readers up through the big shoot-out scene I mentioned before. Let me know what you think!
(Also, the Journal section for BOTA has been rendered useless by this larger writing journal. I'll probably remove it when I next rework the site – take that out, remake the way the work-in-progress appears, and add an illustrations section. Ah, projects!)
I just realized that the entries I'd posted to my Work-in-Progress section over on the BOTA minisite was way out of date, to the tune of over 11,000 words behind. That's a lot of words. So, I'm posting two more chapters now, and will post some more as soon as I get out from under some of these client projects. These two bring readers up through the big shoot-out scene I mentioned before. Let me know what you think!
After that last post, I thought I should follow up with some clarification on where I'm going with this novel. Bones of the Angel is, if anything, an "art house action" type of story. Yes, there are things blowing up, lots of high-tech gadgetry and some supernatural elements flying around, but it's also got a very deliberately herky-jerky approach to its plotting. The aforementioned "special-effects shots" are interspersed with long periods of people just talking, primarily about the things that shaped their lives (like Michael explaining his history with one of the might-be-a-villains to Pi) and about how each character is spiritually reacting to the discovery of a fossilized angel.
I've been stuck for so long with this book for different reasons. I'd been hung up on whether or not something like that could work, or even if it should. I'd been peeved that the original concept was done on The Simpsons, and the whole thing was feeling too much like an X-Files knockoff. I'd been flummoxed because Pi, the narrator character, wasn't cooperating with my attempts to flesh him out, and neither was Vicky, the love interest. I was annoyed because the names of the characters were themselves sort of silly: Michael Coldman, Pi St. John, Victoria Ravenswood and Simon Blacknail. I mean, c'mon, they sound like they're right out of a comic book, or a bad TV show.
Lately, though, I've finally managed to shrug all this off and say "Screw it!" I'm crafting the story I want to tell, and if it fuses all these weird postmodern cliches together and lurches forward, plotwise, so be it. It's going to be my little stew of weirdness, and I will love it and squeeze it and call it George.
And besides, then I can finally get on with things and go on to my next book!
One of the things I've been contemplating lately is how to start blending in some of these other narrative techniques into my storytelling. Interactivity, even simple illustrations, maybe doing a comic book or two. To that end, I've been doing more drawings of my characters from my novel, Bones of the Angel. There's a scene towards the end of the first 'act' where our heroes Michael and Pi charge into a house full of villains, guns blazing. Using the cover art from Ultimate X-Men Volume 2 by Andy Kubert as a reference, I created this:
It's funny how Michael is evolving visually. So far the art for him can be seen here and here. I'm going to have to create a subsection of the Bones of the Angel minisite just for artwork pretty soon now. At the very least, I need to start updating my illustration section of the portfolio – that is woefully out of date.
So many things I'd rather be doing than client work right now. Yeesh.
After that last post, I thought I should follow up with some clarification on where I'm going with this novel. Bones of the Angel is, if anything, an "art house action" type of story. Yes, there are things blowing up, lots of high-tech gadgetry and some supernatural elements flying around, but it's also got a very deliberately herky-jerky approach to its plotting. The aforementioned "special-effects shots" are interspersed with long periods of people just talking, primarily about the things that shaped their lives (like Michael explaining his history with one of the might-be-a-villains to Pi) and about how each character is spiritually reacting to the discovery of a fossilized angel.
I've been stuck for so long with this book for different reasons. I'd been hung up on whether or not something like that could work, or even if it should. I'd been peeved that the original concept was done on The Simpsons, and the whole thing was feeling too much like an X-Files knockoff. I'd been flummoxed because Pi, the narrator character, wasn't cooperating with my attempts to flesh him out, and neither was Vicky, the love interest. I was annoyed because the names of the characters were themselves sort of silly: Michael Coldman, Pi St. John, Victoria Ravenswood and Simon Blacknail. I mean, c'mon, they sound like they're right out of a comic book, or a bad TV show.
Lately, though, I've finally managed to shrug all this off and say "Screw it!" I'm crafting the story I want to tell, and if it fuses all these weird postmodern cliches together and lurches forward, plotwise, so be it. It's going to be my little stew of weirdness, and I will love it and squeeze it and call it George.
And besides, then I can finally get on with things and go on to my next book!
One of the things I've been contemplating lately is how to start blending in some of these other narrative techniques into my storytelling. Interactivity, even simple illustrations, maybe doing a comic book or two. To that end, I've been doing more drawings of my characters from my novel, Bones of the Angel. There's a scene towards the end of the first 'act' where our heroes Michael and Pi charge into a house full of villains, guns blazing. Using the cover art from Ultimate X-Men Volume 2 by Andy Kubert as a reference, I created this:
It's funny how Michael is evolving visually. So far the art for him can be seen here and here. I'm going to have to create a subsection of the Bones of the Angel minisite just for artwork pretty soon now. At the very least, I need to start updating my illustration section of the portfolio – that is woefully out of date.
So many things I'd rather be doing than client work right now. Yeesh.
Tonight the good Mr. Seitzinger and I went to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind at the new AFI Silver Screen cinema in Silver Spring. Wow, on both counts. Fantastic movie, terrific venue. I'm so annoyed that I hadn't taken advantage of their wonderful offerings before – they play all kinds of terrific movies, and the theaters are small with individual seats, very intimate and lovely. I'm wondering how many more movies I can cram in there before I move.
Oh, and Mom? Sorry I caught Eternal Sunshine without you – I'll be happy to take you to see it when you and Dad come out. It's a great movie, and I'd be happy to see it again. :)
