Renegade Folk Activist Bitch

Can be found here: http://www.youarebulletproof.com/cammilacomicbook.jpg

My first attempt at stencil art after checking out this tutorial:

Tycho from Penny Arcade has, today, basically summed up my philosophy of life:

"Optimally, one isn't stabbed or shot. Optimally, one eats some cake! But there are times when cake is not available, and instead we are destroyed. This is the deep poetry of the universe."

In four simple sentences, he has summarized my view of reality for all of you. Consider yourselves informed.

Two things to bring to the attention of people which I'll probably forget to mention in person:

1) My song of the week is Harrowdown Hill, by Thom Yorke. Good god, listen to his solo album. It blows my mind up.

2) Check out this and this. I learned a lot about Al Gore from the first one, and from both of them I gained a great excitement for his upcoming book, The Assault on Reason. It comes out Tuesday. I normally gag at the thought of reading politicians' books, assuming they are self-aggrandizing and light on policy, but as the article points out, he's not a politician anymore. And he's just too damn smart. So it's all policy, and seems incredibly thoughtful.

-End transmission-

"Doesn't it cost more to keep trees alive than to cut 'em down and make 'em into paper plates?"

Well, I was wrong. Again. That makes two times ever.

The new Nine Inch Nails album, "Year Zero", is really fucking good. I still contend that Survivalism was a stupid track to release as a single, but it sounds much better in context. But everyone should check out this album. It's so different from "With Teeth", for those who are haters. It's basically like "Pretty Hate Machine" combined with "The Fragile", to great effect. And I think Charlie will be very into this, because he and Trent are on a pretty similar wavelength this time around.

I'm just waiting for all the reviewers (cough Erlewine cough) who will write a review of the viral ad campaign and the concept and Trent, and not even bother reviewing the album, which is incredible. But who knows - maybe they'll prove me wrong this time.

Anyone want to go see The Hold Steady at the Magic Stick, Tuesday, May 15? Tickets go on sale on Wednesday. Let me know.

"Civic Theatre Actors Can't Save Tepid 'Tempest'"

I hope he's happy with that witty alliterative turn at the end of the headline. Read our inglorious review for yourself.

In my time-honored slacker tradition, here is my belated 2006 Top 10 Movies list - in order, no less! Stay tuned for my Top 6 Biggest Disappointments list, my 2007 Top 10 Most Anticipated Movies list, and possibly a 2006 Top 10 Albums.

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10. Crank
     Crank is the movie that Snakes on a Plane could have been. The pitch is almost as pure as SOAP: "Okay, it's like Speed, only it's Jason Statham instead of a bus." And really, what's the difference between Jason Statham and a bus? It redefined "over the top," and surprised and delighted me over and over. Where Snakes on a Plane pushes the boundaries of good taste in a gross-out way, Crank pushes them in more of a moral sense, and I found that much more appealing. I'm starting to wonder if I suffer from ADD just like everyone else, because I loved the ridiculous video-game-esque way this movie was edited. Everything about it was fresh and invigorating.

9. The Science of Sleep
     I'm not sure what pushed this one over Little Miss Sunshine and Thank You For Smoking. I feel an abiding fondness for Michel Gondry - I'm one of about twenty people who've seen Human Nature. In general, I think I just appreciate the strangeness of Michel Gondry more than the solid but not remarkable work in Little Miss Sunshine and Thank You For Smoking. The Science of Sleep captures the feeling of dreams almost as well as Waking Life, but it has more of an emotional connection. It was poignant, and earned extra points for being very reminiscent of Charlie Slick.

8. Brick
     I can't believe this came out in 2006! It seems like forever ago... although I guess we are well into 2007 now, so maybe it was forever ago. If you missed our whole Brick craze, borrow it from someone or rent it. Now. "But don't come CRYIN' to me... if you don't put me in the game!"

7. Stranger Than Fiction
     This one was just really good. Touching and engrossing and satisfying. This is Will Ferrel's Eternal Sunshine, and I guess I don't hate him anymore.

6. Children of Men
     I may not have seen it in 2006, but that's when it came out... barely. This was solid throughout - in my opinion, a much more likely portrayal of the future than something like Minority Report. And then, that long un-cut scene at the end... wow. Check it out.

5. Half Nelson
     This was the quintessential indie drama of the year. So it makes sense that I was tipped off to it by Mr. K. Ken Wilamowski. Look no further than the soundtrack to discover why it's on this list: it was composed almost exclusively of Broken Social Scene songs, and they make an incredible impact.

4. Pan's Labyrinth
     It had the most realistically graphic violence that I've ever seen in a movie (though according to Bobby, I'm a big pussy), but it was still amazing. I was expecting a completely different movie, so it's a testament to how engrossing Pan's Labyrinth is that I enjoyed so much despite my mistaken preconceptions. It was magical and terrifying, and the Spanish language has never seemed so exotic.

3. The Prestige
     Cammila said it best when she gave her one sentence review: "David Bowie as Nikola-fucking-Tesla." The second best comment was from Tom Brazelton: "I can't look at the movie without thinking that Batman is having some kind of magic contest with Wolverine!" Yes, there were many great actors in it. And a great director. And a great premise, with great writing. Great cinematography, costumes, and sets. And as you might hope, it all adds up to a pretty sweet movie.

2. The Departed
     Holy mother of God, what tight editing! Rarely does editing really jump out at me, but in The Departed, it was almost distractingly brilliant (and, coincidentally, the Academy agrees with me). I don't think I can say anything here that hasn't already been said about it. If you're not super-squeamish about violence, you have no reason not to see this movie.

1. The Fountain
     I'm so sick of reading about how Darren Aronofsky failed at his perceived goal in this film. I couldn't disagree more, but I also don't accept the premise of using such postulation as justification in a review. This goes back to an ancient argument between Cammila and me regarding director's intent (though this argument didn't come up for this film - we both loved it). To summarize: how presumptuous is it to assume that you know exactly what a director intended? If all you have to go on is the piece of art he's just shown you, why not take it at face value? Leave the artist out of it. Let's not get caught up in the tumultuous process it took to bring the film to the screen, or what was cut from the director's original artistic vision. Is a cake any less delicious if you know that it was originally supposed to by twice as large and four times as expensive? For me, the answer is no. Apparently, some people feel differently.
     As far as I'm concerned, The Fountain was a resounding artistic success on every level. It is neither linear, nor literal in any fashion. Like Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, it is an impressionist painting in motion, drawing the mind around in circles. It is a feeling painted with the brush of narrative, delicately suggested across 96 minutes of music, images, and words. An epic visual poem about death and rebirth, immortality, and the insignificant significance of a human life, it is far and away the best film I saw in 2006.


Runners-Up
They didn't make the Top 10, but they are all very much worth seeing.:

Little Miss Sunshine, Thank You For Smoking, A Scanner Darkly, Clerks II, Trust the Man, An Inconvenient Truth, Casino Royale, Marie Antoinette, Keeping Mum, The Illusionist, Scoop, The Queen

I wrote the following for our annual family Christmas letter, and I thought I'd post it here because, hey, that's what here is for! Let this whet your appetite in anticipation of my top ten lists for 2006.

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       I must agree with the postulation that Time is circular, for I find that all things in my life move in cycles. I am not a linear man, doomed to march forward lock-step to the ponderous ticking of God’s ungainly pocketwatch. The oblique, I seek; we all flow according to the whims of the Great Magnet, but of course our initial velocity and trajectory across the fabric of time with respect to Him will influence His effect.

       Thus, we shall not be surprised to find that the ebb and flow of Time have led to rebirth and renewal in some areas of my life, and the slow fade of the pale waning moon in others.

       The band has been reborn from the ashes once again, better than ever before, this time as a more pop/rock oriented outfit – myself on guitar, Cammila on vocals, and Ryan on bass, and our new friend, and best drummer yet, Bobby Covert keeping time. (Ryan moved back from Minneapolis in June, taking Cammila’s room in our apartment.) We have dubbed ourselves Bulletproof – we have seven songs written, and we will record them and have our first show in January. We will be famous soon.

       On the improv front, however, the year began with a meteoric rise, and then a great fall. And then kind of a rise again. In February, I was cast in an incubator troupe at the Improv Inferno. We called ourselves Swayze, and the future looked bright. Indeed, we were offered a two-month primetime run at the Inferno in the fall – one month on Sunday nights, and then one month on Fridays and Saturdays. Enter the villain, the Inferno’s mad landlord, Andy Gulvezan. For literary effect, I will here repeat rumor as fact, with no remorse. A former cocaine dealer who burned his own restaurant to the ground in the 1970’s, Gulvezan, fire and acid pouring from his gaping, reptilian maw, demanded the Inferno pay double the rent they had been paying or vacate the premises by the end of the month. When the Inferno closed its doors, he would not even let them take their own sign from over the door, threatening to slay and consume all the progeny of the Inferno’s proprietors. A villain and a blackguard, if ever there were one.

       Luckily, the Inferno has reopened at Live at PJ’s, a club on the corner of Huron and First, and is slowly regaining the audience it had built up. In addition to performing there, I now house manage the theater on Saturdays and Sundays.

       Other highlights of the year include: meeting my beautiful girlfriend, Bethany; going to Lollapalooza with dad; Lake Michigan with the family and friends; performing at the Dirty South Improv Festival in Chapel Hill with Witt’s End; working and performing at the Michigan Improv and Laugh Festival; performing at the Playground Theater in Chicago with Swayze; Tool releasing “10,000 Days”; going to Toronto twice with Cammila to see Tool, Bloc Party, and Broken Social Scene; seeing Wilco, Death Cab, and Minus the Bear live.

       The band rises, improv falls - I travel to Chicago and back two, three times; to Toronto and back twice. Cycles and circles. If I am being unclear, I recommend watching Darren Aronofsky’s brilliant new film, The Fountain. An epic visual poem about death and rebirth, immortality, and the insignificant significance of a human life, it is perhaps the best film of the year. It’s just like my life, only instead of seeking to defy the universal power of death, I’m just rocking out as hard as I possibly can.

So, I have work at 7:00 in the morning, but the new Bloc Party album, "A Weekend In The City," leaked and I just downloaded it, so I have to listen to the whole thing. It doesn't come out until February, but the new Incubus comes out in a week and a half and it hasn't leaked as far as I can tell. Go figure.

Ha! Kele just said "sudoko" in this song.

Okay, motherfucking asshole pieces of shit! All you fuckin haters who didn't believe me... who didn't believe IN me, I've got something to tell you.

"Wizard" really is a slang term meaning "cool."

I just heard Frasier use it in that context on an old rerun of "Frasier." He said to a kid he was babysitting "I may turn out to be more 'wizard' than you think."

So HA! I am not crazy, nor full of shit. You are those which are full of the shit! You are the ones who are the ball-lickers. Me: 1 Universe: fuck-all!

Cammila claims I never gush about movies right after I see them - well prepare to be gushed on, BITCHES. SPOILER ALERT: I will spoil a couple scenes below.

Crank is the most delightful movie I've seen since... I don't know. Since the last Jason Statham movie I saw, which was probably The Transporter. This is the new standard for over-the-top action movies. But not in a special effects kind of way - the few effects in the film are pretty cheesy. And not in a choreography sense, either. Just in sheer ridiculousness. How about throwing a Middle Eastern cab driver out of the car and shouting to a crowd of people "Al Qaeda!" Or a public sex sequence in the middle of Chinatown? And you thought the premise in The One was absurd? This is better. Statham is injected with a poison as the movie begins, and the only way for him to counteract its effects is to maintain a peak adrenaline level. This is explained in a deliciously blunt fashion, over and over, as the movie gets underway. It's like Speed meets Snakes on a Plane. It's what Snakes on a Plane should have been. SoaP lacked the pinpoint focus that Crank has. There are many sequences in SoaP which do not, in fact, feature snakes. Every sequence in Crank involves Jason Statham a) keeping up his adrenaline and b) killing the people who did this to him. I really can't express how good this movie is, and how important it is that you see it. It's really in a league of its own.

PS- How have I never seen Revolver? Starring Jason Statham and Andre Benjamin, written by Luc Besson and Guy Ritchie, and directed by Guy Ritchie. Jesus.

Dan Izzo announced tonight that, starting in October, several Inferno shows would go up at Live at PJ's - a venue on the corner of Huron and First, above Goodnight Gracie. Some old townies may remember this as the old Spaghetti Machine building. It's not a final solution, and it's not a perfect solution, but it will help support the Inferno until they can find a more permanent home. The deal which Dan struck with PJ's is for six months of shows, Thursday through Sunday every week. More details to come.

A quick reminder - this is the last week the Inferno is open for (probably) a long while. You can see us perform our last two Swayze shows there on Thursday at 8:30pm, and on Saturday at 8:00pm. We are not disbanding, however, so you will see us in the future at various other venues in the greater Detroit area. We just don't know exactly where or when.

If you're looking for me this week, I'll probably be at the Inferno... getting very drunk.

Instructions: Go to http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 . Pick the first five quotes that resonate with you and post them in your journal. You can reload the page as many times as you like, but don't get too choosy -- if you have a good reaction to one, run with it.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see.
- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Be wiser than other people, if you can, but do not tell them so.
- Lord Chesterfield (1694 - 1773)

The proposition that the people are the best keepers of their own liberties is not true. They are the worst conceivable, they are no keepers at all; they can neither judge, act, think, or will, as a political body.
- John Adams (1735 - 1826)

A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.
- William S. Burroughs (1914 - 1997)

Sane and intelligent human beings are like all other human beings, and carefully and cautiously and diligently conceal their private real opinions from the world and give out fictitious ones in their stead for general consumption.
- Mark Twain (1835 - 1910), Mark Twain In Eruption

It feels like fall, and I love the fall. So all of my cycles are resetting - I have these urges to watch TV shows and play video games, which happens going into fall. I can very highly recommend the new Aaron Sorkin show on NBC, "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" (SSSSS or S5 for short, Ryan and I decided). You can find the pilot on tvtorrents if you so desire. I also finally got around to watching "What About Brian," which is incredibly delightful. It's like Dawson's Creek for grown-ups... or 20- to 30-somethings at least. And it has Hot Girl from "Everwood."

Also, I won $45 in a poker game tonight! In a 12-person, 2-table game, I came out on top, finishing the game with pocket aces. All this despite our cutthroat friend, Dr. T. Ryan Hyde, who took his fair share of my chips early on. To be fair, he did spot me $4 of the $5 buy-in, and did pretty damn well himself - he came in fourth.

I always get these urges to go back to school in the fall, just because of how it feels. I've always liked the idea of school much more than the execution. Do you ever have shower thoughts? Things you think about so intently in the shower that you forget what you're doing and wash your hair twice or just stand there for a while? My most consistent shower-thought these days is about being a science teacher. Preferably a physics teacher, but you can't be choosy. I come up with great ideas for teaching kids about science - it's so easy to make it interesting, and yet so few teachers take the time to do it. Eli's thinking about teaching, and Ryan's already a teacher. I have a long track record of stealing other people's dreams - why not this one? I still feel bad sometimes about stealing Dan's rock band, though.

Bethany's got me into this whole Myers-Briggs thing. I'm a pretty solid ENFP (Extraverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving). Read some of the descriptions of ENFP's and see if they're not eerily familiar.

I'll also mention here that Swayze, my Inferno improv troupe, is getting some regular spots in the next two months - we've got Sundays at 7:00 all through September as a warm up to primetime: Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 in October! This is huge for me, and we've got a really great group, so hopefully everyone can come out and see some of those shows.

In addition to that, I'll probably have two Witt's End practices per week, plus Witt's End shows, Swayze practice, plus band practice once or twice a week, and I'm thinking about joining the Dexter Community Orchestra. So my life will clearly be pretty boring for a while. -yawn-

I'll leave you with a list of fall movies I'm especially looking forward to - do yourself a favor and check out the trailers at http://www.apple.com/trailers.

8/18 Snakes On A Plane
9/01 Trust the Man
9/01 The Illusionist
9/01 Crank
9/08 Hollywoodland
9/15 The Last Kiss
9/15 The Black Dahlia
9/22 Renaissance
9/29 The Science of Sleep
10/11 Running With Scissors
10/13 The Fountain
10/20 The Prestige
10/27 Babel
12/08 The Holiday

It's worth noting that two of these films, The Illusionist and The Prestige, are period pieces about magicians, while Hollywoodland and The Black Dahlia are both period detective pieces based on true stories of real Hollywood killings. There is no way all this shit is coincidental.

AHHH! My mind!

"10,000 Days" has leaked, and it's fucking half an hour away from downloading.

Fucking ducats, man.

I'm moody and lonesome and sad. And I know it will go away tomorrow or the next day because it always does. But the thing that always worries me a little bit is that this is my 'true' self or my default state of mind and the rest of the time I'm just fooling myself or distracting myself from reality.

I am not proud of myself when I'm alone. I know that in and of myself I am unaccomplished, that I cannot set goals or do anything I think I want to do. I am driven entirely by my interactions with other people. Nothing creative is satisfying unless I experience it as part of a group - that's why I do improv and music. Alone in an apartment at night, it seems silly NOT to wonder if I exist. I only really feel defined by other people.

Anyhow, that's why I can't move to Chicago. And that's why I can't go to parties full of strangers.

God, what cliche LJ horseshit. This is why I don't post. But we'll press on.

I don't remember if I've always felt like this. I know I haven't recovered from losing the band. I don't talk about, you know, how I feel anymore. Did I lose my trust through attrition when I loved Nicole? When I loved Abby? I get so distraught about these people who have lied to me, but I have lied to them, too.

I wonder vaguely if I would feel more fulfilled if I blew away the TV show partition on my harddrive, or if I threw out all the shit I own. Would I be better off if I stopped masturbating, in all senses of the word? So many of the things I do fall into this category.

But none of that is going to happen, because it's just like cutting and dyeing your hair, and then a week later you're like, "Well, fuck, what now?" At least that's my perception.

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On a related note, I'm sure that there are perfectly rational reasons for everything in the universe - I just don't find them aesthetically compelling. And for that, I am truly sorry.