Brackenbeatzzz the Rapping Secular, Anglo-Saxon Male

So as I alluded to yesterday but maybe didn't explain properly - my head is just fuggin' buzzing with ideas for a new project, as well as the monologues and an older idea that has found new life in my head as a potential series of webisodes (and this isn't including a hoard of other, more tangential notions for this and that). Essentially it can feel like someone just dumped a bunch of pop rocks into my brain pan...in a good way, mind!

This kind of glorious thing pretty much always leads to plenty of long, highly detailed dreams that I can remember very easily the next day.

Last night I had the second in what seems to be maybe a series of dreams wherein a friend of mine whose name begins with "R" and is a writer shows up...and hijinks ensue.

This second dream involved me wandering through a webcomic convention that was cobbled together from pieces of the one I went to earlier this year and my high school gym. Quite soon, I found myself at Ryan North's table...which was more like a large desk. He was all excited about something so I came over and asked "What's up?". "Oh man, Oliver, I totally have a new thing that I'm working on and I'm so stoked about it!" he said. I asked if it was a new book or a new web project and he told me it was the former. "Here, you can see this preview copy" he said, then pulled one out from under the desk and plopped it right there in front of me.

The title was "Why Does Anybody Tell Jokes to Italians?" in this really ugly, yellow font. As I pored over the cover, which was the title overlaid on a fuzzy photo of Michelangelo's David, Ryan whispered "Just between you and me, I was only able to get twenty pages out of that idea so the other hundred pages are just filler". I turned to page twenty one and was greeted by another full-page, color photograph. The photograph was of "Grove St." which I knew in the dream to be the most recognizable street in all of Compton. Overlaid upon this picture was a grid of smaller photographs, evenly spaced, of dogs done up like the various members of NWA - though I swear one of them was Heartbeatzzz The Rapping Dog. "So, what do you think?" Ryan asked and thank goodness I woke up at that point because I may have had to tell dream-Ryan that his book was sub-par at best!

The previous night is not as clearly remembered, but I gather I was standing in a field not far from a school I was attending. I had an essay I needed to get done and it was due soon, but I'd only written a single page. Rob Near walked up out of the surrounding mists and offered to help out. I handed him the essay and as he put it behind his back with one hand, he pulled it back out again with the other. "All done!" Rob told me, before starting to walk away. Looking at the cover of the paper I saw that he had written on the cover sheet, in pencil, "This is basically a perfect 'C' grade paper and does not deserve any less". "Well" I thought "a 'C' is better than the fail I was going to get" and turned the cover page. I very quickly saw that Rob hadn't written the rest of the essay for me at all! He'd just inserted his full name, in 72 point font, in-between every other word and thus inflated my one page into five.

But as I looked up to chase after him, he was just stepping into the mist and the next moment he was gone. I had a brief flashback to when he carved his name eighty-two times into my ruler in grade five, then woke up.

Ah well!

Today I'm reviewing a short script by Mark Z, the fellow who was my other half in making the trailer the summer before last. It's nice to have someone to not only put that kind of trust in me as a person, but in my abilities. After that, more brainstorming for the project that came out of yesterdays crazed conversation...

When you get drunk and party inside it you're allowed to call it the "Diefencrunker"

So!

I just got back from the second go in front of the camera and my first monologue that I can feel decent about. I'm sorrrrrely tempted to post the actual text, but I'm going to raise my testicles into the "steely courage" position (they're like aircraft landing gear, ladies) and wait until a rudimentary edit is put together that I can then upload for feedback.

The other nice thing is that my collaborator and I got chatting afterwards about our mutual desire to film something in the Diefenbunker before we die of old age and it led into a spontaneous brainstorming session of the absolute best kind - one that produces tons of interconnected ideas as well as an intense enthusiasm to get working on them. So with that, I must now fall into my fat green notebook and not crawl out for a few hours.

Oh darling, I think I'm about to peak (oil)

Minus the oil part, that used to be how some folk in olden days used to announce to their partners that ejaculation was along the way. True story!

While researching details for a monologue connected to peak oil, I stumbled across one of the stupidest things I've read in a long, long time. I'd link to the blog I'm copying this from, but do not want to start some sort of pathetic blog war. So feast your eyes, if you dare, on THIS...

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9. THE FEMALE PERSPECTIVE ON PEAK OIL

Some peak oilers think street lights are a waste, and should be eliminated. I couldn't help but think how this would come into conflict with, for example, on-campus feminists who want to *increase* the number of street lights as a countermeasure against rape and sexual assault.

Peak oil has a strong male bias. They want to get back to basics and eliminate wasteful electrical appliances. Guys: you may not need that appliance, but how does your wife/girlfriend/mother, who actually uses it, feel about getting rid of it?"

It reminds me of the program "Frontier House" which I saw on public TV. In that program, a number of modern families were selected to go back and live on the land in Frontier style for a summer. No make-up, no conveniences, no energy other than that available to the pioneers (wood and kerosene, I believe). You can read about the program here:
Source

Anyway, the eye-opener about that series was how hard the women's work was in those days. They were washing dishes/clothes, fetching water, cooking, sewing, milking, cleaning-up non-stop from dawn to dusk everyday. It was totally exhausting and monotonous and they complained about it. The men, on the other hand, were outside chopping wood all day and building, and generally enjoyed it and had a favorable view of the whole experience.

That's part of the male bias of peak oil. Men think it's fun to rough it and go back to nature, and shoot guns in a Mad Max scenario. It's like playing cowboys and indians. Women, on the other hand, don't like it, because they can see themselves in the backdrop of this male fantasy, getting raped or rubbing their fingers to the bone on a washboard.

So my point is this: It may very well be that an energy surplus is a precondition of emancipating women from household slavery. So when we lose that surplus, how are you men going to explain the need for drudgery to your women? They may *demand* that you fix the problem by finding more energy, not by rationalizing how important it is for them to be a drudge again.
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Addendum: It's nice to know that the idea of using a nuclear fucking bomb to get at the oil in the Albertan sands was seriously considered more than once.

So er uh hey what about them things that don't make sense when you give them a cursory analysis?

Wow...

So yesterday involved a lot of barking my shins up against familiar and unfamiliar obstacles in both the writing and the performing side of things. This is good, really, since it's always better to get as much of that out of your system as possible - in general, but especially during the planning stage.

It also drilled home the fact that I hadn't seriously written comedy in well over a year - in fact, all my big writing efforts while in England fell into horror, dystopian and post-apocalyptic genres! These are not genres that are generally known for Big Komedy Laffs (with some notable exceptions). It also reminded me how much easier it is to write something that is character or plot driven rather then pure, uncut humor. When I mentioned this monologue thing to some folk over the weekend I was told by some that I'd basically just have to rant off about whatever, to just "be myself" for a few minutes and hey presto an episode.

But I'll tell ya, the time to space-filled-on-the-page ratio is easily the most unforgiving for writing a comedic monologue...or so I was finding yesterday. I'd wager this is at least partially because a story will always suggest several next steps while a joke does not come with this guarantee. Oh sure, it might lead into more general blather on the topic being dealt with but maybe not a joke. However, a lot of the grunting involved in the process was probably mostly due to my having to work out the kinks in my komedy muskles.

Not to mention that I was trying to write a broad, non-topical bit when my strengths lay in anecdotal, topical humor. Luckily my collaborator and I hit on that last night and as soon as I was able to unclench and let myself know that the latter style would be suitable...the ideas starting coming a lot easier. That being said, we're keeping the episode length to between two and three minutes, at least at the start. That may make it sound like ADD theater to some, but pay attention to the length of something like what Rick Mercer does or ZeFrank. An awful lot can be said in that time.

We're filming again on Thursday with the intention of getting at least one workable episode put together. As we're not concerned with a big launch, per se, y'all may very well get a preview of what is to come sometime not long after (depending on how much the holidays get in the way).

The style is still being refined, but let me show you someone whose set design I considered imitating and whose interview style I just plain admire - Charlie Rose. More and more I find myself digging through his archives on YouTube, his calm and friendly manner is a rare treat amongst all the screaming on TV these days.

In this clip he talks with Edward Norton about the High Line, a section of railway in New York that displays what would happen if nature was allowed to start taking back the domains of man. They show some clips but you can also check out a gallery here.

The Isolation of Yesterday's Storm Got Put To Good Use

So yesterday I finished polishing the latest draft of "Radio Days" and, after receiving the initial (thankfully positive) response from my collaborator, I continue to feel like it's a strong improvement - even if it's now seven pages longer. Originally the goal was to keep it to no longer than fifteen minutes as my collaborator (Myspace Man) had informed me that this was a standard length for UK festivals. Now it sits at twenty-three pages and with the rough [one page = one minute] formula being kept in mind...well I'm sure there are other "weight classes" for festival submissions. Plus one to three pages could end up being pruned if only through my thinning out the scene descriptions.

Due to all my earliest writing forays being short and long stories, a tad too much prose can wind up in the aforementioned descriptions which in turn can artificially bulk up the assumed running time (i.e. it only takes a moment to show a complex background that may have taken "fifteen seconds" to describe. How much the viewer will pick up in that moment is another story). That being said, I wonder at what point you draw the line regarding highly stylized films where the world is as much of a character as the people in it?

Now I'm going to spend the day attending to something folk have been telling me I should write since long before I even decided that film was the avenue I wanted to go down - comedic monologues. I still have my sexy Belkin iPod widget that lets me record my jabberings in the time-honored style, so I'm going to have a go at that while keeping a list of topics and sub-topics I doodled out last night under my nose. This will probably feel particularly apt after having watched Adaptation last night for the first time since it was in theaters.



Let us all take a solemn moment to remember those who have fallen in the battle between technology and horse.

Some people find peace of mind through meditation...

...I find it in my six year old, tri-testicled, phallic cactus. Small red flowers have started to spring up around the tip, so I can only reason that it has been messing about with those filthy girl cacti that hang around street corners during the late hours.

If I ever find myself impotent, I'm going to grind this thing up and snort it.