Thursday, February 28, 2008

bleh

I sound like Wolfman Jack. This dates me, and if you don't know who I'm talking about, go get culturally educated. I feel fairly awful as well, although I am most definitely improving. Pema sent me a recipe for a cold busting tea that involved seeping six cloves of garlic, a couple inches of ginger root, most of a lemon and some ground red pepper in my tea kettle until it burst forth with a particularly ... powerful brew. I can't say I like it, but it certainly does clear the sinuses and I've had three glasses of it today. Many thanks to Jill, who brought over the ingredients on her way to work.

I clearly can't complain too much when I have beautiful women near and far aiding in my recovery.

Still, I have gotten very little work done, either job or personal. I just can't maintain focus or interest in anything active. Even video games get boring after a half hour. Normally, that's a sick person's godsend.

What I have managed to do, however, is read Thom Camp's novel and Brian Schirmer's screenplay. Both of which I utterly and totally enjoyed. Reading them, however, has made me even more frustrated that I haven't been able to scrape the focus together to work on my own projects aside from some basic email management.

Yeah, I know. I'm sick. I need to deal with it.

In fact, I'm gonna go to bed, right now... at 10pm....

I'm not old, I'm sick.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

too hot

I woke up yesterday with a mild case of "cold nose". Congestion, sneezing, a general "this sucks" feeling everywhere. I stayed home form work and slept most of the afternoon. I did, however, to go rehearsal. I was able to rally for 2 and a half hours, but I felt awful at the end of it. I felt slightly warm, as well.

This morning I woke up restless, hot, and with my skin as sensitive as dry parchment. I tried to sleep most of the day, but my visions were mild fever dreams and not restful at all. I looked in vain for my thermometer. Kitchen, bathroom, living room. Finally at 3pm, feeling loopy and concerned that I am not MORE congested than I am, I found it in my pencil drawer.

I have a 101.7 fever. I took it twice, just to be sure. I downed some ibuprofen, and will wait an your to see if it responds at all. If it doesn't, if it is 101.6 or higher, I will go to the hospital and have them x-ray my kidneys to be sure that I am not passing a stone. Or more to the point, that I'm NOT passing a stone, but that a stone would very much like to be passed.

I have a grim feeling about this.

Saturday, February 23, 2008

Home and Away

Last night was a small game night over at Brian's. Just three of us, but a lot of fun as Mateo had a lot of Halo game variants for us to try out. Playing with gravity can be fun, and the absurdity of it all kept us laughing all night.

I crashed at Brian's, since he had scored me a pass for WonderCon, which is this weekend, and it seemed foolish to head home just to come back into the city first thing in the morning. I had packed everything I might need, including my copy of Thom's novel that I *finally* printed out, and the laptop so I could do any editing of Radiostar if I found I had time.

I've gotten about a third of the way through the novel, but I didn't touch Radiostar until got back home this afternoon.

WonderCon is a decently sized comics convention, but after ComicCon in San Diego, it can't help but feel somewhat anemic. Brian and I walked the floor for about three hours, doing at least a cursory look over of every book and table. Comic conventions are curious things for me. I am very fond of the art form, and have enough comics and geeky DVDs in my house to make it quite clear that I am a fan. Still, I don't buy lots of memorabilia, back issues of comics, endless collections, t-shirts, or knick knacks. I don't feel at home at a Convention, but feel like I'm in the home of a neighbor. Close, but not really where I live.

I see actors from shows I enjoy, but don't feel the need to get autographs. This is true even for the actor who played Lita on DS9, who I had an enormous crush on (and still do.. she's still hot). I only really saw two things I was tempted to buy: a card game from Phil Foglio and a Star Wars print that was exceptionally well done artistically and elegantly funny. I may still get the card game, but I have nowhere to put the print (a very 1920's style print of Leia in her Jabba slave girl outfit, as if it were an ad for an exotic revue... with the word "cancelled" at the bottom).

For the most part, however, the Con, like all Cons, felt like an orgiastic geek consumer frenzy. More than anything else, I felt inspired to go home and edit Radiostar and play with the new Wacom tablet I just bought. I wanted to create art, not buy it.

So, home I went. I didn't play with the tablet, but spent several hours on Radiostar and took a few more halting steps towards improving my piano playing. (I can read some music now, and play the Cm and G7 chords with both hands)

I might have finished Radiostar, but tonight was Joseph's birthday gathering, and that was unequivocally the priority. The evening was, as to be expected, a delight. There was an unexpected amount of focus on the recent success of Sweetie Tanya, which surprised me more than it should. I don't see my friends nearly enough, and so in many respects the show feels fresher for them than it does for me. I start rehearsals for "Riches" tomorrow, and am much more aware of what lies ahead of me than what lies behind.

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Missed Adventures and Invisible Forests

I got an email yesterday that invited me to do something wild and impractical last night. I had made promises and commitments, however, so I postponed for a more scheduled wild and impractical event in a few weeks. A few hours later, the person I had made promises and commitments to called to cancel our plans due to personal crisis. This ate at me for the rest of the evening.

It is a point of honor to me that I honor my commitments. I am not perfect in this regard, but if I say I will do a thing, or be somewhere, there is a 95% chance that I won't back out on you. But still, last night's event *was* something that could be cancelled, but I chose a pleasant and planned evening over a wild and impulsive one.

This bothers me.

I don't mean that I want to become someone whose word cannot be trusted, or someone who can't be relied upon. But I do want to be someone who can say "this is an adventure, and *this* can be postponed" and embrace the adventure. I should have been on a plane last night, had dinner with a friend, and flown back a few hours later, just for the madness of it.

Madness.

Madness and Dreams are the themes of Antero Alli's new film, Invisible Forest. This is the film I grew my beard out to lengths that helped destroy my relationship with my then-girlfriend. The film I bleached my entire damn head for. It's strange, and beautiful, and meditative, and very much of a piece with my first project with him, "Hungry Ghosts of Albion" back in 1999.

It's showing at the ATA on March 14th. Here's the info:

Vertical Pool presents the San Francisco premiere of
"THE INVISIBLE FOREST"
(2008; 111 min., USA) A Film by Antero Alli

Friday March 14th, 8pm
Artist Television Access
992 Valencia (& 21st St), San Francisco
Admission: $6. Filmmaker and actors in person.

Venue contacts: 415- 824-3890. http://www.atasite.org
http://www.atasite.org/calendar/?x=2799
Filmmaker contact: 510-464-4640. antero@paratheatrical.com

A theatre director traverses the internal landscape
of his dreams in pursuit of the radical visions
of French Surrealist, Antonin Artaud.


The Trailer
http://www.fractalvideo.com/HTML/IFFV2.html

SYNOPSIS
A theatre troupe camps out in a forest to perform their director's vision of Antonin Artaud's magic theatre of ghosts, gods and spirits. During their forest experiment Alex, the director, is haunted by disturbing dreams where Artaud appears and mocks his theatrical ambitions. When these strange nightmares persist, Alex stops sleeping in an attempt to regain control over his mind. Sleep-deprived and with his sanity pushed to its limits, he seeks help from a Psychotherapist who suggests hypnosis as a means to discover the source of his problems. What follows is a journey through the internal landscape of Alex's subconscious memories and dreams, a sojourn that leads us to a place beyond belief, beyond words, and beyond the mind itself.


CREDITS
ANTERO ALLI, GARRET DAILEY, CLODY CATES, JAMES WAGNER, DAN WILSON, JESSICA BOCKLER, NICK WALKER, ROBIN COOMER, SYLVI ALLI, JOJO RAZOR, DAVID GAUNTLETT, and JULIET TANNER.

Cinematography by CHRIS RASMUSSEN (HDV), SEAN BLOSL (Super-8 film), ANTERO ALLI (DV). Edited by ANTERO ALLI (offline) and CHRIS ODELL (online). Written by ANTERO ALLI, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (excerpts from "Romeo & Juliet" and "The Tempest"), ANTONIN ARTAUD (excerpts from "New Revelations of Being" and "The Theatre and its Double"). Music by Sylvi Alli and others. Produced by VERTICAL POOL. Conceived and Directed by ANTERO ALLI

"The Invisible Forest" Movie site
http://www.verticalpool.com/if.html

Antero Alli -- Filmography
http://www.verticalpool.com/filmography.html

Monday, February 11, 2008

sweathog

"I've got a yoga class on Monday. You wanna come?"

I've talked about taking yoga for years. I was dating a yoga instructor for a while, for crying out loud. I've made plans to do weekly yoga with people. But it's never happened. Soooo, "sure!"

I'm a bit nervous. I know this is an intermediate class, and I'm sure to let her know that this is my first yoga session EVER.

One of my bosses is at the studio. I'm only half surprised. It's that he's at THIS yoga studio that is surprising, not that he's at A yoga studio. He asks, "you're doing the next class? Awesome!"

"Yeah, it's my first class, ever."

He pauses, grins at me, laughs. "Really? It's BRUTAL!"

The room is jam packed. My companion has never seen it so full. We haven't even started, and the room is humid and smells of sweat.

I am able to participate in maybe half of the poses and exercises. Some are physically beyond me, some I cannot due because of light headedness or head-rush headaches from all the up in the sky, down beneath your knees cranium action. My clothing is utterly and completely drenched. I don't mean that I have a good sweat going, I mean *drenched*. Some of the moves, even exhausted, I can pull off. They are very similar to things I've done in Suzuki class, and both the instructor and my companion are surprised and pleased when they see me rally. One or two moves I do fairly easily that even my companion has a hard time with. For the most part however, I am left to gasp and admire the power, grace, strength, and stamina of those around me.

It is *very* humbling.

If I am going to continue going with her on Monday nights, I will need to get a mat, and I will need a DVD I can do beginner yoga to during the week. My upper body strength is unimpressive, and my stamina is tragic.

But I got through the class. Tomorrow I will be a creeping cramp, but tonight... I got through the class.

Sure, I'll use them

I know some extremely cool people who do extremely cool things. One of them is Kalina Wilson, who does things like make shower curtains out of decommissioned boat sails.

I am not yet that cool, but I did make some purchases in a fit of optimism that I would actually utilize them. I.e. I got a wacom tablet and ordered some books on learning piano as an adult. The former item I've wanted for a while, as I'm rather sick and tired of doing Photoshop work and drawing by mouse. With my nifty new 1080p projector, doing art on my wall is a pretty pleasing proposition. The books are because of the 88 key Yamaha keyboard that I bought for "Sweetie Tanya". It lives in my home office now, and it's silly to have something so lovely and cool there if I can't play it.

These are possibly irresponsible purchases since I go into rehearsals for "The Riches" in a couple of weeks, and go back into rehearsals for the remount of "Tanya" two weeks after the Riches opens. Still, we had a piano in the house growing up and no one knew how to play it. I remember plinking on it every now and then, but it feels like an opportunity lost. I don't even know why the thought of taking lessons never came up. I played trumpet very briefly in grade school, but my grades dropped so they took it away from me. I played guitar in High School, but never really had a knack for it. Still, I love the idea of taking little breaks in my day and playing a song.

Most of my creative energies lately have been directed towards Radiostar, which seems like of like a lame excuse for not doing other things because I've been doing Radiostar for the last two years. Still, lately it seems like editing the shows has been taking up more of my time. What's probably more true is that I've been far more social over the last month than normal, so my creative time has seemed less and less.

That and the XBox 360. Stupid XBox.

Friday, February 08, 2008

China, Album, Wandering, and Cock

So, in about an hour I'm going to head over to 21 Grand for a screening of The Invisible Forest. This is the film I shot back in August for Mr. Antero Alli, where I grew my hair and beard out to insane lengths and then dyed it all white in order to play an actor who was playing Prospero. I've seen an almost finished cut of the film already, but I am very curious to see what a paying audience thinks of it. It's a very beautiful film, but I'm too close to it to know if it will make sense to people not involved in the project. Films about madness and dreams are funny that way.

The Sweetie Tanya cast album is limping forward right now, although everything is currently depending on me getting all four musicians into the same room at the same time so they they can jam the songs they have and get a feel for how they work with bass and drums. I've never sat in on something like this before, so it promises to be quite the experience.

I've just been asked to appear on the Jennifer Justice show on Feb 19th. This is a somewhat underground comedy-variety-interview show that Ms. Justice was doing out of 50 Mason until they had to close their doors due to some mysterious problem that most likely involves the Yakuza and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. All I know at this point is that I will be the guest for a segment called "Ask a Man's Cock". What my cock has to say will be a matter of great interest and surprise, especially to me. Normally all it tells me is that it wants to go into a nice, warm, wet, dark space and throw up. I wonder if it wants to vote for Hillary or Obama. Neither are normally its type.

I've started being a bit more intense about monitoring what's going on with Radiostar, since we're getting between 12 to 15 thousand downloads a month. I've already identified a couple of daily download robots and blocked those, but other potential non-humans are harder to target. One IP address downloaded the same show 43 times in eleven days, but there was no clear pattern in when those 43 downloads happened, and any remote site that has a Flash based medial player that is referencing our stuff could generate those kinds of responses. The fact that the IP address comes out of China adds another layer of mystery since my understanding is that everything online in China is being filtered through their servers before it gets to the end user, so 43 people in Beijing could very well be listening to our shows, but we're only seeing the government server they're passing through.

I'll continue to monitor shows that get extra high amounts of traffic and see if I can determine any other patterns, but for now I expect to see our "audience" shrink over the next few months while I remove access of the bandwidth sucking robots that are coming way to close to costing me extra domain hosting monies.

Life has generally been greatly improved since I started working at least three days a week from home. I get much more done here, and when I *do* have some down time, I can be much more productive with it. For example, I did laundry, swept, vacuumed, and mopped the kitchen during time I would normally have spent waiting for downloads to complete, or walking to and from the office. My home smells like pine sol.

Yesterday I took the day "off", since I had only about an hour's worth of work to do all day, and only about fifteen minutes work that I knew of. I ended up walking all over Lake Merritt and downtown Oakland with a new friend who lives nearby and who was also off work. It was a gorgeous day and I can't remember feeling so good and refreshed between 11am and 4pm on a Thursday.

Monday, February 04, 2008

Slack doesn't slack

More news about friends. Nina Bargiel got some good ink on her perspective as a WGA writer and a striker. It's worth taking a look at, especially if you're not really familiar with what this means for the average screenwriter.

cause she's bad-ass

Heather McCulley, the inspiration for "Sweetie Tanya" just demonstrated what a bad-ass she is.

Heather's story will make an excellent Lifetime movie some day. I hope to pen the script.