Pre History #3

Every U down in Uville liked U.S. a lot,
But the Binch, who lived Far East of Uville, did not.
The Binch hated U.S! the whole U.S. way!
Now don’t ask me why, for nobody can say,
It could be his turban was screwed on too tight.
Or the sun from the desert had beaten too bright
But I think that the most likely reason of all
May have been that his heart was two sizes too small.
But, Whatever the reason, his heart or his turban,
He stood facing Uville, the part that was urban.
“They’re doing their business,” he snarled from his perch.
“They’re raising their families! They’re going to church!
They’re leading the world, and their empire is thriving,
I MUST keep the S’s and U’s from surviving!”
Tomorrow, he knew, all the U’s and the S’s,
Would put on their pants and their shirts and their dresses,
They’d go to their offices, playgrounds and schools,
And abide by their U and S values and rules,
And then they’d do something he liked least of all,
Every U down in U-ville, the tall and the small,
Would stand all united, each U and each S,
And they’d sing Uville’s anthem, “God bless us! God bless!”
All around their Twin Towers of Uville, they’d stand,
and their voices would drown every sound in the land.
“I must stop that singing,” Binch said with a smirk,
And he had an idea–an idea that might work!
The Binch stole some U airplanes in U morning hours,
And crashed them right into the Uville Twin Towers.
“They’ll wake to disaster!” he snickered, so sour,
“And how can they sing when they can’t find a tower?”
The Binch cocked his ear as they woke from their sleeping,
All set to enjoy their U-wailing and weeping,
Instead he heard something that started quite low,
And it built up quite slow, but it started to grow–
And the Binch heard the most unpredictable thing…
And he couldn’t believe it–they started to sing!
He stared down at U-ville, not trusting his eyes,
What he saw was a shocking, disgusting surprise!
Every U down in U-ville, the tall and the small,
Was singing! Without any towers at all!
He HADN’T stopped U-Ville from singing! It sung!
For down deep in the hearts of the old and the young,
Those Twin Towers were standing, called Hope and called Pride,
And you can’t smash the towers we hold deep inside.
So we circle the sites where our heroes did fall,
With a hand in each hand of the tall and the small,
And we mourn for our losses while knowing we’ll cope,
For we still have inside that U-Pride and U-Hope.
For America means a bit more than tall towers,
It means more than wealth or political powers,
It’s more than our enemies ever could guess,
So may God bless America! Bless us! God bless!

I worked hard on my camera dolly this weekend, and I caught up with a couple of people last week who are quickly becoming new friends. It was a good weekend, even though I didn’t yet edit. I’m trying, but I just can’t motivate myself. This week. It’s my goal.

Anyway, the youth of the City sleep under the weight of their summer’s last night as I type. Tomorrow begins another semester, another year, and a countdown until next summer.

It is with that renewal in mind that I mention a Renaissance of my own–this one a phoenix-like rise from flame of WriteClub–details forthcoming.

I’ve gotta sleep now, because my eyes are closing down… *snore*

That’s all.

In related news, I put up some fliers yesterday that may or may not make it into the show, so we’ll see. They look like the image on the right, so watch the show and look for them. You won’t find them, however, until at least the third episode, maybe the fourth. Maybe never. It’s hard to say. Anyway, this is TV trivia in the making, and you can say that you were there.

Still no editing on the Rooftop Project, but today or tomorrow I hope to dump the sound to a big file. We’ll see what happens with that. I feel like I should return Jen’s Minidisc recorder, so I really should do it.

I think I’ll be picking up some new speakers tomorrow or Monday (having them shipped then, anyway). It’s finally time to complete my surround setup. I have the money and the inclination, so it’s time. Besides, my brother could use the minis.

Oh, and I wrote some really cool stuf for the new comic project (currently going by the title DSFS-Codicspace Comicbook Project), although I don’t know how Allan liked it yet–we’ll have to see.
That’s about it for now. Thanks for reading.

Sometimes you feel like a nut…

Feeling very industrious, I managed to scan and post some pics from LAST Tuesday’s shoot. I haven’t begun editing yet, nor have I finished the voicework, but there’s some proof now that we did something. The script is going up, too. This is a pretty big update to the site, I guess.

Next comes an update to the Venture site–Issue4 is no longer in question, but production.

My thanks to Andrea and Vincent for again being great sports about the whole thing–they’re the best!

With my new gig starting I’m going to try to get back to my roots in computer work and edit Rooftop #2, scan some long-needed pictures and maybe consider my clustering setup and reinstall Linux as my nwew webserver. We’ll see. I don’t want to mess up a perfectly good system, but I like the idea of having a Linux router. First the cluster, then the router. I think it’s time to install Morpheus, too.
Just FYI.
If you’re not using it, start. The more people that use it, the better off we all are.

The rest of the day’s weirdness followed immediately. I got a call from my uncle who lives in London about five minutes later, telling me that he was in NYC and wanted to pick me up and take me up to the country to see his new place, my cousin, and just to relax for a few days. That sounded fantastic (I love the country), but between my new gig (that was about seven minutes old) and my weekend plans (which are shaping up to be really complex), I had to to decline. I did ask if they were going to eat, and it turned out that they were eating immediately on the upper east side, so I headed up there quick. Lunch was nice–I got to see my uncle, Janice and Antonia and talk awhile with them.
On the way home, I got shat on by a pigeon. So I washed my shirt in the bathroom sink at work and wandered around in a tee-shirt.
Anna called me while I wandered and asked if I’d be around this weekend. I told her that I would, but that there were unbreakable plans out on the Island with Kim (who you may remember from earlier posts, in fact) for her going-away-to-france-to-study-more-french-and-meet-more-hot-french-boys party on Saturday. I’m still not sure how I’m getting there, but that’s just a detail, really.

Anyway, I’m boggled at the fact that this week has just been really insane. I owe people calls, e-mails, notes, everything, and have failed to get in touch with people that I really should find.

In other news, I’m dreaming up ways to create an indie label for my comic ventures, and I think I might be able to be a little successful with it if I work. We shall see.

The meeting with Kurt went so well that I brought him back with me to help on the Rooftop shoot. I like having him around, especially since he was one of the two stars of Carpe Noctem, my first attempt at real film work.

The weekend went well, and I have Jodi to thank again for letting me in on the party. I got to see Anna again (which is always a treat) and Andi (who said I could call her that and I think it’s extremely adorable) and Bridgett (my apologies if I’ve misspelt her name – I’ve never seen it written). Also there were Kris, Matt and David, bringing the total group all the way to nine (I brought Kurt). A good time was had by all (as far as I can tell).

The reading went really well last night, too. Andrea and Vincent showed specs of genius as they read–it was inspiring. I really have a feel for the success we’re going to have with this thing, and I hope that with my shooting and editing I can live up to the high standard of exellence that Russ, Andrea and Vincent are setting.

I’m off for Princeton tomorrow night to visit my bro, and then to Philly the next day to visit my mom and my sister. The REAL reason for my voyage is to have a head-to-head with Krol, artist extraordinaire and driving force between the artists’ collaboration on issue4. We’re going to go into character detail big time and hopefully get some really strong stuff out of it so we can bring the book home strong through the last four books.

I’ve been working hard on the Rooftop Project and there’s a reading tonight at the Pantheon. We’ll be getting our writer and our small cast together and will be reading the scripts to two and three. Likely as well, we’ll set up a shoot date for the near future as well.

Friday and Monday on Max Bickford went really well, and I actually got a bit of swag to augment my meager paycheck. Sometime, I’ll post a picture of me in my “Better dead than coed” tee shirt that, presumably, will make a debut on TV sometime this fall. Basically, the TV thing is good stuff. There’s also a picture of Russell Crowe on the 411 board (board 18, actually) that I got from this crazy (but very nice) hairstylist on Monday as well.

As late as this update is, if I make it any longer, It’ll be even later. There will no doubt be more to mention later.

It went well today. I ran into a guy I worked with in ’98 on Vanilla Fog/Simply Irresistible, and we were both dumbfounded. He’s still almost a second assistant director, but not quite. I’m not sure what that means about the shelf life of a PA, but it’s great that I met him because that means that tomorrow I’ll give him my info and ask him to think of me first when he needs additional PAs for the set.

Also, they want me Monday for the office. Office stuff is pretty easy, except I’m terrible at taking names over the phone. Always have been. I can recite literally entire conversations from memory but can’t recall at all the name of the person who’s calling. It also hurt things that I don’t know anyone that calls nor who they’re calling for.

Call time is at 11am, so that means that I’ll be working on Friday night until at least 10, which is a perfect time to go straight to the bars and never look back. I’m hoping that Heather decides to visit me, although I’m not holding my breath because I feel a little like it’s still up in the air. We shall see.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, EMILY!

That’s all, for now. Later, there will definitely be stuff about working with fantastic people on inspiring projects and about how little sleep I seem to be getting all the time. But now is just for wishing Emily a happy birthday.

She’s 18.

So stop it. Cut it out now. I mean it. Stop.

Anyway, She’s in North carolina at the moment, and will never see this wish, at least not unless you tell her about it, so I suggest you e-mail her and tell her happy birthday. If you don’t know her address, ask me, I’ll tell you. I just won’t post without her permission.

Jodi, Kris and Anna were good enough to visit me this weekend, keeping me from being lonely. Here’s a pic of the girls (from their first visit) BEFORE we went out and made fools of ourselves (Why the hell DID we write on your breasts again, Jodi?) I don’t have a picture of Kris, so he’ll just have to suffer from missing the fame that being on my main page can bring. Eventually, I’ll get the pic or two that I took this weekend printed, and that’ll go up, too. We hit the trifecta of bars in Bay Ridge that we never miss on Friday night and spend most of Saturday (ALL of Saturday for some, ahem) recovering. In the evening, we made a trade (Anna for Matt), and the result, while somehow less intimate, was not altogether unpleasant. Matt turned out to be a cool guy who even grabbed a copy of Venture. Sunday, we managed to limp into the city and spend some time, however, and it was good. I haven’t yet purchased khaki cargos for my “charcoal cargo project,” but that day is coming.

Also, for those interested, I think I’ll write a few sentences explaining in some deatail where I am in terms of work and employment, since I’ve been so vague recently about the whole thing. Thanks for reading.

Update! Here you go–the link to the insanity that has marked the last seven days of my working life. Click on the picture to go to the full account. Bring your reading glasses.

Also in the news, I avoided both virus plagues that went around over the past few days and managed to perform a few upgrades to my server (the conversion of the drive, finally, to NTFS, patches and upgrades, and the installation of another gig of HDD space) AND get the FTP site working. Who’s the man?

The Sci-fi thing with Andrew is coming along well, and Issue6 of Venture is nearly completely written. What I really need to do is re-acquaint myself with Flash–I’ve been watching a bunch of fantastic Flash productions on the web that just fire the imagination. Props to the guys at Panduck and Ninjai for all their hard work.

Most everything I do is in some way related to making movies, if only in my head. Examples: This has been a busy week, creativity-wise. I’ve been workshopping with my brother one of his sci-fi ideas, and working with him always makes me work harder than I wold work on my own because he’s so creative and so ecclectic and his ideas are so strong. This is a Sci-Fi world that is intended to become a film eventually, but it’s so fun to develop that we’re working on tangents and universe-related stuff as well as actual script-potential material. I’ve also spent a good deal of time (last night, mainly) getting my server ready to stream the Rooftop Project #1 (which should be complete this weekend) and preparing my workstation for capture/editing. There’s lot of digital work going on. I also have worked on the script for Venture, Issue6, hoping to complete it by the time Kurt returns from the beach. Venture will make a great movie someday.

Prague was succulent (to borrow a word), and there’s more to tell than I plan on typing here, at the very least. The city was beautiful, the weather perfect, the countryside breathtaking and the women gorgeous. There’s barely enough space on my hard drive for the praise I could heap, and nowhere enough to hold the things I learned, but I’ll put up a page in a couple of days that will hold pictures and a few notes that may be of interest to those involved or those who know me.