I found a trailer this morning for a new movie called I Heart Huckabees, which is billed as “An Existential Comedy” and looks like it could easily become my favorite movie since The Royal Tenenbaums. In select cities October 1; I am hereby sincerely, deeply hoping Chicago is a Select City.
Also! I am looking to catch a screening of Zach Braff’s Garden State as soon as possible. I am, if nothing else, a sucker for this kind of cinema, these little moments.
I am also now planning to reinstall two scenes into my novel which I’d previously cut because they felt too luxurious, because after watching Miyazaki’s Spirited Away again last night and realizing that my favorite scene is the one with the train slowly whipping over the ocean, I recognize that those are the moments I really love. Like the moments I’ve been shooting for in my short stories “Auld Lang Syne” and “Small States”.
I should warn all comers that the novel, Bones of the Angel, is going to be one weird-ass mishmash of the supernatural, the philosophical, the technological and the very, very human. It’s a story about loss and the ways we try to heal, or try not to. It’s part Neil Gaiman and it’s part Wes Anderson and it’s a whole bunch of other stuff as well. Just like in my last post, it’s a bunch of the stuff that I like, all wrapped into one. It’s the kind of book I’d love to read if I could ever find it at Borders, but I couldn’t, so I wrote it myself. And, after all, isn’t that basically what should fuel this kind of thing?
Storyteller, scholar, consultant. Loving son, husband and father. Kindhearted mischief-maker.
I'm the Director of the Games and Simulation program at Miami University in Ohio, where I am also an Assistant Professor in the College of Creative Arts' Emerging Technology in Business and Design department. I'm also the director of Miami's Worldbuilding and Narrative Design Research Laboratory (WNDRLab). I have a Master's in Comparative Media Studies from MIT and a PhD in Media Arts and Practices from the University of Southern California.
In past lives I've been the lead Narrative Producer for Microsoft Studios and cofounder of its Narrative Design team, working on projects like Hololens, Quantum Break and new IP incubation; in a "future of media" think tank for Microsoft's CXO/CTO and its Chief Software Architect; the Creative Director for the University of Southern California's World Building Media Lab and the Technical Director, Creative Director and a Research Fellow for USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab; a Visiting Assistant Professor at Whittier College and director of its Whittier Other Worlds Laboratory (WOWLab); the Communications Director and a researcher for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab; a founding member of the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT (now The Futures of Entertainment); a magazine editor; and a award-winning short film producer. more »
The opinions put forward in this blog are mine alone, and do not reflect the opinions of my employers.