Gone Fishin' (Well, Hiking, Writing and Internet Decompressing)
Hey Everybody!
If you hadn't guessed from my Twitter updates, I'm on vacation! It's the first one I've had in almost two years, which is pretty crazy when you think about it. The first half was hiking and hanging out on the Colorado Plateau and the second half is me hiding out, finishing up my screenplay so my producer will stop leaving me threatening voicemails. I always liked how when the school year ended, everything was put away and you started all new things when school started up again in the Fall. That's what I'm trying to do with this vay cay. Here are some things I want to do when I come back:
Update tMR to Version 3.0.
Short story/month project.
Develop a live show about my religious roadside attractions road trip.
Put together some kick ass videos for BCBGMAXAZRIA.
Reach out to some new publications.
Write some awesomeness for the pubs that already give me love.
Put together the upcoming Mobile Media Workshop (and play with ideas I'll pass on!)
I had a chance to catch Tarsem's (The Cell, R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion" video) new self-financed film, The Fall at the HAMMER Museum a couple of weeks ago. It's a dazzling grown-up fantasy about Alexandria, a young immigrant girl (CatincaUntaru, destined for Haley Joel Osmet-ish adoration) who is told a fairy tale story by Roy Walker, a suicidal paraplegic stuntman (Pushing DaisiesLee Pace) in an early 20th C. California hospital.
One woman at the QnA gushed to Tarsem that the film was an arrival on the order of the Beatles coming to America and while the film is fantastic, it's not that good. Still, it's a visual feast for the eyes, having been shot on location in over 24 countries. Tarsem said that he kept shooting until continuing would have meant selling the house, at which point he said "we're finished". The result is my favorite kind of story: a story about storytelling. Roy, awash in self-pity makes a terribly unreliable narrator and Alexandria's youth makes her a sometimes maddeningly confused listener. This explains such wonderful turns like Alexandria's vision of an Indian being a grand warrior of the subcontinent, while Roy goes on about how he has "had many squaws".
Interesting side note is that Tarsem's sort of evil. Since the film was shot before Pace's lead turn on Pushing Daises, he was an unknown (his most notable role was as transexual Calpernia Adams in Soldier's Boy) and the director told his cast and crew that Pace really had no use of his legs. One wheelchair-bound crewmember refuses still to speak to Tarsem, but he stands by his decision, saying that it "changed the whole tone of the set in a way that made the film work".
I'm one of like three people in the world who hated Pan's Labyrinth, a movie this film will draw inevitable comparisons to. But while both films feature young headstrong girls living in both a thrilling fantasy world and a dark everyday reality, The Fall's Alexandra has a plucky gumption that you root for. She's not content to be seduced by her imagination. She wrestles with it, with Roy's adult self-pity and without embracing sentimentality (the film is rated, rather unfairly, an R in the States, while Germany for instance, gave it their equivalent of a G rating) the film manages a life-affirming tone. It's a beautiful film that wisely gives the audience enough breathing room that really can get lost in the fantasy.
Music Exclusives: Real Tuesday Weld (and "Mixtales")
I've been playing around with Muxtape, the roll your own mp3 mix tape site and it's inspired me to do a project I've long wanted to do: Write a series of short stories--each inspired by a different song. I've always been a big fan of using musical structures in stories and the idea of a creating an "album" of tales really appeals to me. Starting in June, I'll launch "Mixtales" here on the site, with a new short story and Muxtape each month.
In the meantime, check out my May's start of summer-ish muxtape at japhy.muxtape.com. Put it on with your first pair of sandals for the season. As a special treat, it's got an advance track from The Real Tuesday Weld's newest album The End of the World, out in May. Also, one of the songs is the first track for the Mixtales. If you've got a guess which it is (or a suggestion for a song to write a story about), stick it in the comments
Click here to go to May's Muxtape. Sorry-- there's no Fall Out Boy here. I just think a photo of Pete Wentz crowd-surfing socialites is pretty rad.
I'm so copping out on new material here. I've been really busy the past few weeks-- shooting a couple of videos for BCBG, writing articles, doing some work on the comic book and finishing up a screenplay, so it's been a YouTube palooza here. Now I'm cheating another way-- by answering your emails via blog:
Greg writes: Just saw that you are a BSG fan. So glad to hear it! I have been coming to you site off and on for about 5 months now and have always found it to be a great place to get a fresh look on things or reaffirm what I was thinking already. Now to also see that you are a fan of the re-imaged Battlestar Galactica makes me just giddy. Have you watched it from the beginning or did you recently start watching it? I also have to agree with you on whining Lee Adama versus HOTT Sam Anders; in my mind there is no competition. Are you a fan of any other kind of sci-fi?
Hey Greg! I joined the BSG phenom about halfway through Season One, which meant a lot of catching up on the miniseries. Like most people, I thought a show about robots named "Battlestar Galactica" sounded stupid and like everyone, I was hooked after an hour. There are no BSG-haters, just people who haven't seen the show yet. That said, the final season is driving me nuts. They've taken serialization as far as you can go and I feel less like I'm watching a one-hour TV show and more a giant movie that's been cut into hour long segments. That said, I'm glad to see that Lee's found a way to make a career out of his whining. And Anders-- still waiting for the badass Cylon side to come out. Hopefully, the arrival of Leoben on Starbuck's cruise ship from hell will light a fire in him.
As far as other sci-fi goes, yeah- I'm a big sci-fi dork. The screenplay I'm working on now is definitely sci-fi, though more in the Twilight Zone vein than anything else. That's one of my favorites to be honest and I've always loved the combination of noir and sci-fi. Heinlen's Stranger in a Strange Land is an important book to me and for some reason I seem to have watched both of Majel Rodenberry's shows, Final Conflict: Earth, who'se plotline about the Latino-looking aliens inviting men and women to become half-breeds in their sex pods, felt like the futuristic equivelent of Imitation of Life and that other show with Hercules on it. When I had the flu recently, I sat down and started to watch Firefly, but I thought it was self-important crap and was relieved to find out Joss Whedon wouldn't be directing an episode of BSG this season after all.
Imagine for the moment that instead of being a bloviating, gossip and porn-filled time sink, the Internet were a giant game with teams creating and re-appropriating content and services to find new and novel ways with connecting with strangers and you'll get an idea of what ZeFrank's latest venture, Colorwars 2008 is all about.
I've been trying to figure out how to explain Colorwars for a week or so now. Users sign up by following "teams" on Twitter and then engage in various contests. Games so far have included a virtual game of rock, paper, scissors, bingo and a nerd rap. Upcoming challenges include a Gogle Earth scavneger hunt and smack talk haikus. And there are prizes; Jet Blue gave out free tickets in a recent contest. But the point of the game, already a darling of Web 2.0 types is to get people to play with each other and instead of developing elaborate new tech to do it, use exisiting tools like Twitter and GarageBand.
That's the wonky explanation I've been trying to avoid. So let me just walk you through it.
Then I started playing games. For instance, there's a game called YoungMeNowMe where you take a picture of yourself when you were young and restage it. Here's my entry.
Another game invites you to design your own merit badge, which as an Eagle Scout, I couldn't pass up. Presenting the Irony Merit Badge:
And finally, one of the contests going on right now is to create remixes of the Nerd Raps. I was aiming for a Gnarls Barkley-sound (that's me doing an embarrassing falsetto), but sort of wound up with Moby. Someday I'll graduate to Cee-Lo. Click on the photo below to listen:
Not all of the contests are this involved, but while I love that my work requires me to use my creativity, it's a lot of fun just play around and goof off now and then. At the same time, I'm connecting to other like-minded people and seeing how they respond to the challenges. The YoungMeNowMe photos, for instance, are amazing.
Colorwars is ongoing and you can join with no commitment. If this sounds super-rad (it is!) I would love for you to join Team IKB, but you can join any team here. All you need is a Twitter account (which you should have anyway--it's this month's Facebook).
Here's some of what I've been working on this week:
An interview with Arthur Dong, director of Hollywood Chinese, a fantastic documentary about the Chinese-American experience in Tinseltown. I could have talked to Arthur for hours-- a really funny, fascinating and thoughtful guy. (The Advocate)
A QnA with photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya. Sort of got me thinking about how the media's job is to define and label things (this is a trend, it is about these kinds of people, it fits into this category) and fine artists are all about introducing ambiguity and challenging the nature of the boxes we stuff things into. Not that any of that shows up in the piece. (Popnography)
The 400 pound gorilla this week is my big feature story on "The Boys of Buzznet", Jeffree Star, Clint Catalyst and Matthew Lush. I'll probably write another blog soley about the backstory to this piece. For the moment, I'll just say I'm pretty proud of it and really thankful for my editor, Shana. (Out.com)
Ryan Adams has a blog. It's called "Foggy". He started the blog, it turns out, because he's very lonely now that everyone he's ever loved has rejected him. But he's okay with it. "I hope I die alone and under a lot of work" he writes, adding "I am better for myself and other alone." Other tidbits include the fact he never dated Alanis or Winona, that he's pretty sure he's going deaf and that he's been two years sober. As far as awkward self-confessional blogs, it's pretty good.
Unfortunately for us, blogging only made Ryan's loneliness more acute and yesterday, he decided to say goodbye to Foggy, and to us in the video message above, about how miserable he is, how he can never be loved, set to slow piano and intercut with barren trees in Rockefeller Center. Now, I love Ryan Adams' music. I love that he's pretty fucking sure he's the best rock star on Earth and I myself have been known to engage in some maudlin public self-excoriation from time to to time. But Ryan Adams really needs to learn the power of chocolate chip oatmeal cookies.
Hey New Yorkers, here's something for you. Up and comer Paul Mpagi Sepuya takes photos of his friends and associates. They're lovely, intimate and a refreshing shift from the usual way my generation likes to portray itself. Someday we'll learn the difference between expression and posturing, I swear. That said, a lot of his friends (some, like the dashing John Movius, seen above, are my friends too) are hot hipster gay boys, so the release party for his photo monograph Beloved Object & Amorous Subject, Revisted is at The Cock, naturally: This Wed night.
Hey New Yorkers, here's something for you. Up and comer Paul Mpagi Sepuya takes photos of his friends and associates. They're lovely, intimate and a refreshing shift from the usual way my generation likes to portray itself. Someday we'll learn the difference between expression and posturing, I swear. That said, a lot of his friends (some, like the dashing John Movius, seen above, are my friends too) are hot hipster gay boys, so the release party for his photo monograph Beloved Object & Amorous Subject, Revisted is at The Cock, naturally: This Wed night.
