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Monday, October 16, 2006

"Just got back from vacation! Spent it down Root Canal!"
- "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" - Warren Zevon

"You figure out how to thrive in the world."
- Adaptation


anybody awake? watching some movies. listening to music. finally a day off. bought a avacado but it turned out to be hard as a rock. and guess what? you can't eat those things like an apple. just got real thirsty about an hour ago and had to cross the bridge to satisfy my craving for a strawberry/banana type drink. everything was closed except Sheetz. god bless 'em. also tried their car wash since i never went through one at 4 am. it's kind of spooky. i enjoyed it. i paid for the longest wash, turned up the music and drank my strawberry/banana smoothie thing while crazy robots washed my car Jetson's style. so let's talk music, books, and movies to get my fingers loose. what else is there to talk about anyway?

the new Showtime series "Dexter." anybody see this? i thought it was real good. even though it's a HUGE rip-off of the movie "Suspect Zero." here's the similarities in case anyone doubts this even for a second. both have a serial killer...killing serial killers. both have an omnious, unseen uber-killer who stays ahead of the law (and Dexter) by doing his killing and insanity and feces grafitti in a big refridgerated truck. uh...and more stuff i can't remember right now because it's late. however, in spite of the blatant theft, the show's got the right tone to it. happy Florida sights and sounds with jet skis and aliigators and parties, mixed with wisecracking cops and a dark, deranged hero voice-over. very cool opening credits sequence, too. it's like this violent breakfast montage. and the first three episodes have set shit up nicely. maybe needs an snappy opening song though. like "Sopranos" and "Entourage" have, instead of just the unmemorable theme music they got right now.

finally bought "The Proposition." it's the Nick Cave western. i've been watching it in 10-minute lumps since i'm barely here these days and the TV's never on, but i'm savoring every lump. imagine walking past a nice big piece of coconut cream pie and taking a quick bite each day. for a month. see, you can make that slice last forever! if a piece of pie actually lasted a month, i mean.

picked up the new Killers cd because all the neagative reviews compared it to Bruce Springsteen, and, if there's one thing that sucks me in every time, it's bad reviews about someone trying to go all "Springsteen" all the sudden and get in touch with their inner "Thunder Road." a perfect example:

Prince. "Little Red Corvette."

a song with more car/fuck metaphors that Springsteen's entire double album "The River" (which i think has no less that 427 songs about cars on it) and it's a song that's complelely critic proof. who doesn't like that song? i'll wait.........no one? see, that's what i thought. another example, Meatloaf. maybe not. did i say that out loud? oops.

also got the new Hold Steady album, but i haven't had a chance to listen to it yet. everyone's gushing about his lyrics again, but we'll see. it's gonna be tough to beat Primal Scream's lyric-of-the-year off "Riot City Blues":

"got caught giving head to a priest, the fucker choked on his rosary beads..."

to the three people that asked, the western script "Pigiron" will be done this month. i figured out a way to make a bunch of progress real fast. i have calendars in each room for no good reason, and i was changing them all (three months forward since i forgot i had 'em) and i realized that i'd gotten this antique gun calendar specifically to help inspire me to work on the western script a loooong time ago. so, since i saw there was only two months left on it before it would get tossed in the trash, i took it down and went through all twelve guns on each month and thought up back stories for each one that combined the actual facts of the gun in the photograph with some crazy folklore bullshit that i made up. then i made a main character in the script lay out all these guns to use one each month, sort of like his own calendar, and explain to his son something about each gun because you gotta have that scene in a western right? right?! example:

"This is February's gun. This is the first
.44. It was first made in 1870 and called
the “Model 3 American.” This weapon was was
a prototype where the firing pin rotated
instead of the cylinder. No more guessing
what chamber had a bullet in it, if you
were one of those boys that liked to spin
it after loading. This particular gun
killed 27 people...all during games of
Russian Roulette."

radio show going well in spite of a complete lack of listeners lately. the only time anyone called is when i was asking about anyone seeing the exclamation point on the news headlines on TV that screamed "Plane Strikes Building!" and how, if you turned up the volume, they were carefully explaining that it was NOT a terrorist attack. which of course begs the question, why the exclamation point? like i was saying on the air, i can't remember the last time CNN had an exclamation point on a headline. even if they said something like:

"Man Stranded on Deserted Island...Eats Own Head."

period. even with that headline, which could probably use some extra punctuation, they'd STILL use just a period. but this time! they! just! had! to! do! this! how obvious is that scare tactic? anyway, i tried to have people think of songs with exclamation points in the title because all i could think of was Hold Steady's "Hornets! Hornets!" couple people woke up and stumbled to the phone and/or stopped crouching ominously in the corner of their bedroom flipping their light switch on and off to actually call and request some music. so it wasn't all bad. just need to take more sugar and caffiene with me next time.

hey, if anyone wants to give it another chance, i finished a new revision of long rambling story "Flies on Shit." it was workshopped, succesfully i guess. some people surprised me by tuning right into the frequency of the story, and some people surprised me by being confused about the most obvious stuff. and, even though it's a little off subject, some people in that class really surprised me by turning out to have not developed a healthy sense of humor at this point in their life. never mind when someone tells you they aren't easily offended. that's almost always bullshit. turns out they're afraid of words just like the rest of them. tragic. anyway, the best thing i got out of the workshop was a name change. now it's Sharks with Thumbs. and very likely it'll be the first chapter of a new book. i think i'm ready to put the last book under the couch for now. it didn't get published, probably because of the wacky structure of it (yeah, right). it jumped around from the '70s to the '90s and bounced between the fiction of the story to the "true" stories that the characters kept telling. some exerpts i stuck on the site, but the majority of it has only been seen by people i've never met, which sucks because i wasn't there in their cubicle leaning over their shoulder when they opened the envelope, hurrying them through the parts that embarrassed me, and making sure they slowed down where i thought it got good. here's the contents page before i bury it in the yard, er, i mean, stick it under the couch:

ROADSPORTS & ROCKFIGHTS

Table of Contents

I. Road (March, 1975)
2..........Driving
13.........Flying
21.........Spying
36........Ride The Ride
50........Glass Car Crash

II. Last Rock Thrown (True Stories, Part I)
72.........Rock Wasted
79.........Shades
89.........What’s Worst?

III. Bad Sports & Blood Sports (Summer, 1999)
105........Suckerpunch
149........Skinned Knees & Scratched Basketballs
188........Good Games & Grass Stains
288........Nosebleeder

IV. Last Rock Caught (True Stories, Part II)
313.........Lying
319........What Are You Thinking?
329........Overtime

V. Sword (October, 1975)
338........Fighting
363 .......Squirt Guns & Firing Squads
383........Crying
392........Keep Your Elbow Up

the last agent to read this book said she was all into it, but her boss wasn't a fan. which would be fine, if, by him not liking it, he had NOT stopped anyone else from getting a chance to not like it, too. but look at the contents page up there. is that really so confusing? good or bad, i can't tell. but don't tell me something's confusing. that's the only thing that's not my fault. seriously, that wouldn't be so hard to follow, would it? the 1975 stuff is the boy and girl and how they met, the 1999 stuff is the stories of their three sons and all their nosebleeds and hemophelia and fucking up in high school sports, THEN surrounding that are all the stories (urban legends, "friend of a friend" stories etc.) that they've told other people, but written as if those stories were the only things that actually happened in the book. of course, by feeling the need to explain it at five in the morning suggests that subconsciously i do realize the structure is flawed. maybe that's why the apparent effect of reading my novel is kind of like a trip to the dentist. which would be fine if it was Bill Murray's trip to the dentist in "Little Shop of Horrors." But maybe it's more like "Marathon Man."

but enough about the old book. working on the new book! and because it's new, i can declare it's the best thing yet, goddammit. even if it's not. the section i'm on (which will stand on its own as a story like every good chapter should) is "Calling All Eunichs!" the title of an imaginary buddy/cop flick i made up. by the way, the exclamation point is in the title, not my sentence. i've decided to use the car chase list i made years ago and change all the movie titles to fake ones (for example, "Mad Max" becomes "Mad Mex," a goofy Mexican version of that series) and i'll use this list as sort of as a framing device. this way i didn't waste all that time making that list back then. in fact, i plan on cannibalizing a lot of this website for parts. why not. since the new book is in first person AND present tense (which one professor seemed to think i could not sustain for the length of a novel) i think some of these posts would fit in pretty well. the voice in the book might just have to be my voice (or the voice of an asshole, like it usually is on this site) after all, and if somebody could hopefully mistake that for a complicated fictional creation, so be it! gonna use the fist fight list, too. some of those movie titles are harder to change to imaginary ones though. why change the titles? because it's fun.

whoa. birds are chirping. got to try to sleep.

::: david - 6:38 AM [+] :::
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