Musings on Breakfast, Sunshine, and Dangly Parts.
I’ll skip the obligatory “I haven’t updated this thing in awhile” triviality and get right to the meat and potatoes of this, my first genuine blog post in many days, weeks, etc.
I’m moving out of my apartment in the Richmond at the end of the month into a much better house on Hayes and Fillmore. While my room is definitely smaller, my new place makes up for this with 1.) a gas stove, 2.) a corgi puppy, 3.) hard-wood floors, and 4.) its ridiculous proximity to every good spot in the city. How I will scrape together the funds necessary to pay the move-in costs is another matter. Ha ha! Temporary destitution. The next two months or so will be good times, indeed - and Ramen filled.
I’ve distracted myself the last two weeks from actual musical composition by putting together a bunch of tasteless and hilarious mashups. I have promised myself that I will do better. Mashups are fun, but they’re like a sugar-coated cereal; you eat ‘em up right quick -- and they’re delicious -- but they lack true substance and you end up hungry for more food two hours later. Real composing, on the other hand, is like a breakfast made of eggs and hash-br-
I’m going to derail that train of thought right now… Let’s shift gears:
I’m writing again. This is good. It’s all in the noggin’ at this point, but the project I’m working on seems legit, and actual words-on-paper should be coming in the next few weeks. This project drops two very interesting challenges in my lap: 1.) this isn’t a concept I came up with and 2.) its concept is VERY similar to an old script I threw together a few years ago that I’ve come to associate with every mistake I’ve ever made in screenwriting. Okay, maybe that last part was a bit of an overstatement, but there’s a lot of truth to it. The script was overly wordy, devoid of structure, and dripping with angst-ridden melodrama of the cheesiest kind. So now I get to try the formula again 4 years later. And a lot’s changed in my life and my writing, so that’ll stir things up. Hopefully it’ll be better. Yay!
Other things:
I’m moving out of my apartment in the Richmond at the end of the month into a much better house on Hayes and Fillmore. While my room is definitely smaller, my new place makes up for this with 1.) a gas stove, 2.) a corgi puppy, 3.) hard-wood floors, and 4.) its ridiculous proximity to every good spot in the city. How I will scrape together the funds necessary to pay the move-in costs is another matter. Ha ha! Temporary destitution. The next two months or so will be good times, indeed - and Ramen filled.
I’ve distracted myself the last two weeks from actual musical composition by putting together a bunch of tasteless and hilarious mashups. I have promised myself that I will do better. Mashups are fun, but they’re like a sugar-coated cereal; you eat ‘em up right quick -- and they’re delicious -- but they lack true substance and you end up hungry for more food two hours later. Real composing, on the other hand, is like a breakfast made of eggs and hash-br-
I’m going to derail that train of thought right now… Let’s shift gears:
I’m writing again. This is good. It’s all in the noggin’ at this point, but the project I’m working on seems legit, and actual words-on-paper should be coming in the next few weeks. This project drops two very interesting challenges in my lap: 1.) this isn’t a concept I came up with and 2.) its concept is VERY similar to an old script I threw together a few years ago that I’ve come to associate with every mistake I’ve ever made in screenwriting. Okay, maybe that last part was a bit of an overstatement, but there’s a lot of truth to it. The script was overly wordy, devoid of structure, and dripping with angst-ridden melodrama of the cheesiest kind. So now I get to try the formula again 4 years later. And a lot’s changed in my life and my writing, so that’ll stir things up. Hopefully it’ll be better. Yay!
Other things:
- You Shall Know Our Velocity! won back my love in the last third of the story. Dave Eggers’s status as top-tier Charlie Rohrer Man Crush has not been damaged.
- Englanders are all gone. This continues to break my heart in tiny, manageable ways that I only notice when things get quiet.
- Some of my American friends leave for England at the end of the month. That particular sadness is slapped across the face by my memories of how awesome and life-changing my experiences were when I went there - until all the sadness is replaced with vicarious glee.
- American politics, I think, is making me age faster than normal. I want to tune out and ignore it, but I can’t let myself be the Apathetic American.
- Sunshine is worth seeing. I came out of it satisfied, but wanting more - but the more I think about it, the fuller its story seems. I thought after seeing it that the tonal shift during the last third was a bad change of direction, but now I’m not so sure. The writer-director team pulled that same move with 28 Days Later…, but be prepared to be angered by the ending of Sunshine if the ending of 28 Days Later… pissed you off, despite the fact that the movies are two completely different stories. 28 Days Later… transforms from JESUSFUCKFASTZOMBIES to a really dark story about the animal inside each of us, while Sunshine goes from hyper-realistic space drama to cheesy killer-thriller that also happens to take a really, really poetic look at humanity’s fear of death (in particular, the moment when we greet death - you can interpret the ending as atheist or spiritual - the filmmakers walk a fine line). Look at me getting all film-nerd! Yay!
- Work continues to kick my ass. Weekend kickball games and “official meetings” devoted to collegehumor.com? Yay again!
