Finally — I just finished the essay — which I’m calling “Time is a Predator” — on the Braddock trip I went on in July with the BrokenDayton Art Machine. It was due at the end of last month, but between a rather large technical difficulty and the assignment turning out to be far more challenging than I’d anticipated . . . yeah, let’s just say at this point that I’m just happy as hell the damn thing is finished.

I need to give it a final once-over tomorrow, and then I’ll be ready to send it off. Dunno when exactly it will be published. Possibly later this year, though I’m not sure if my tardiness will have caused that timeframe to be pushed back any. But rest assured, when I find out, so will you.

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I’ve not had a chance to watch the whole thing through yet, but CASEY JONES: THE MOVIE looks promising. It’s a gritty fan-made short film about the hockey mask wearing badass from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies and cartoons.

Here’s the trailer, which I am automatically inclined to dig since it features music from 1990′s original and most awesomest TMNT movie:

A pitch for an as of yet unwritten movie called ONE RING TO BIND THEM:

A hilarious romantic comedy in the vein of THE HANGOVER, MY BEST FRIEND’S WEDDING, and THE LORD OF THE RINGS comes — ONE RING TO BIND THEM.

Set over a weekend in San Diego, the story opens as a wedding is being put together at a Comicon-like fantasy convention. The bride and groom, two die-hard Tolkien enthusiasts, are having a cosplay ceremony, and the entire wedding party is decked out in their finest Middle Earth attire.

When the bride-to-be’s wedding ring is accidentally mixed up with a replica of the One Ring the morning of the wedding, the Best Man and the Maid of Honor — neither of whom can stand the other — have to put aside their differences and form a Fellowship of their own to track down the missing ring.

As they quest their way across the convention center floor together, enduring a number of hilarious encounters and mishaps with all manner of geeks, romantic sparks begin to fly and their mutual dislike begins to transmogrify into something more.

High fantasy has never been this much crazy fun as they search for ONE RING TO BIND THEM…

Well, that’s my pitch. Hollywood producers, please drop me a note in the comments section if you wish to throw obscenely huge piles of money at me in return for a script.

Kind people at the Tolkien estate: Please don’t sue me.

Made it back home from Pittsburg late Friday night after departing a little after 21:30. I stayed for the “I Am Immortal” opening reception, threw my shit in the car, then hit the road.

Like the whole sweaty week in general, opening night was a lot of fun. There was food and drink, a fair number of people in attendance, a remarkably pretty sunset that looked like it was assembled from pixels –

– and Nick’s only somewhat giant Giant Face even made an appearance.

I had written several blog posts during my stay, and was going to combine them into one fairly long post, but then thought better of it. A lot of the content dealt with the very same stuff that will be going into my essay-thing, and I figured it would be silly to write about it in two different spaces. So it will be available later this year, whenever the chapbook for the show goes live. Once I know when, I will of course be sure to note so here.

Things on this end have been relatively quiet of late, hence the lack of posting. Not to say I haven’t been keeping busy; just that I’ve haven’t been up to anything really post-worthy.

There are a few things I’d like to put down, though, mostly for myself, so future-Josh doesn’t have to rely solely on my sad, crappy memory to recall these sundry events.

This week I am in Braddock, Pennsylvania, embedded with the members of the BrokenDayton art collective as they prepare for a show they’re putting on called “I Am Immortal.” Here’s the premise behind it:

Ohio-based artists Nicholaus Arnold, Ian Briedenbach, Ren Cummings, Phillip Evans, Ashley Jonas, and Frank Travers will present work in different mediums exploring the resurgence of art and culture in Braddock, PA.

A highlight of the show will be a time capsule available for public participation. Guests are invited to bring items from their lives for inclusion in the piece, which will be buried on site during the closing reception on July 22nd.

The show starts Friday and runs through next week. I’m following them around this week and taking notes as they transform the performance space into their own. Afterwards, I’ll be writing up a piece detailing my experience for eventual inclusion in a chapbook or something they’re planning to publish later this year.

We’re being housed in a gorgeous convent next door to the space. It sounds odd at first to think one is being quartered in a domicile that used to be inhabited by nuns, but you’d be surprised at how rapidly you get used to the idea. More on that tomorrow.

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This past Saturday I went to see THE LION KING at the Schuster Center. I’d been wanting to see one of these live-action Disney musicals for years, and this was my first real opportunity to do so. It didn’t disappoint. The music and performances were phenomenal, as expected, but what really impressed me were the tricks they used to bring the Savannah wildlife to life. It’s kind of mesmerizing seeing a person move across the stage with canes strapped to their hands and feet, doing a damn good approximation of a giraffe’s body language.

My sister tells me BEAUTY AND THE BEAST is coming to Cincinnati in the late fall. I would really like to see that one, too.

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Dunno if anyone’s noticed, but last week the new site theme went live. I’ve been working on it off and on the last month or so. I think this is the 11th redesign I’ve done since this blog’s inception nearly ten years ago. That may seem like a lot of redesigns, and it kind of is, but I enjoy poring over and editing lines of HTML and CSS, so it’s really never a chore — though at the end I always feel a little burnt out. This new theme still needs a little tweaking, but on a whole I rather like the new, warmer look. I hope you do as well.

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The next month or two is looking to be busy as well, which pleases me to no end. Aside from this BrokenDayton gig, I’ve got another exciting project in the works: designing a website for a Real Live Client. I’ll hopefully know more about that one in a few weeks. Web design and getting paid for it is something I’ve been looking to get into for some time, so being able to add this to my pre-existent portfolio can only be a boon.

And then sometime in August, Kristin, yours truly and a couple of her friends, are taking a road trip to Hilton Head for a few days of relaxation on the beach. I’ve never been to Hilton Head before, and I honestly don’t care where we’re going so long as it’s warm there and I get to relax on a beach. This should serve to fulfill those needs.

So yeah. Interesting times these are.

My latest DVD review for Examiner.com’s Dayton edition is now live. I review MUTANT CHRONICLES, and quietly weep that such a badass and fantastic role-playing game was translated into a truly terrible film.

Here’s the opening paragraph:

There aren’t many movies out there based on role-playing games, and the quality of what few there are is debatable — DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, anyone? But then there is MUTANT CHRONICLES, which does not a thing to elevate the RPG-to-film genre.

Please check it out, and feel free to leave your thoughts in the comment section over there.

A couple of weeks ago I applied for and got a freelance gig writing DVD reviews for the Dayton edition of Examiner.com. I’ll be writing a couple of reviews a week for them about whichever movies I should feel like writing about.

“Cautiously optimistic” best describes my attitude about all this. It’ll be nice to actually produce content for something other than my blog, and to receive some financial compensation for it. If it goes well, then in theory my hope to parlay this into other jobs as well.

But we shall see.

I mention this to you now because my first review went up today, wherein I discuss my thoughts on THE TOURIST, specifically that with all high-caliber talent involved, it should have been a fantastic movie, instead of just being, well, mediocre. Here’s the opening line:

THE TOURIST is a film that tries to hearken back to an earlier era of glossy, romantic thrillers — the era of Grant, Hepburn, and Hitchcock — but doesn’t quite know how to get there.

Check out the rest of the review here, if you like. In fact, I would sincerely certainly appreciate it you did. And if you wish to comment on it, well, the more the better. Just please do so over on Examiner.com, so that my new overlords feel like they’re getting their money’s worth.

Hope you all like it.

Managed to get back onto the wagon that is the Project of a Novelish Nature today. I sat down in front of my laptop, fired up Dark Room, and a couple of hours later 2,000 words had magically vomited their way onto the screen.

I’ve slacked off the last couple of months and not really done much in the way of writing. Something about the summer months always seems to throw a wrench into my writing plans. Been that way for the last five or six years. I think it’s because I tend to be more active socially in the warmer weather. It’s like in the beginning of June someone flips the switch on my back from Hermit to Social Butterfly, and it manages to stay that way till the onset of fall.

So to reward myself for doing the electronic version of putting pen to paper today, I’m heading over to my friend Ryan’s in a bit to watch CASINO ROYALE on Blu-Ray.

I’ve not actually watched anything on Blu-Ray yet, but I hear ’tis a wondrous and marvelous sight to behold.

Plugged the first chapter of the Project of a Novelish Nature into the I Write Like analyzer. It informs me that, based upon a statistical analysis ran on my word choice and writing style, I write like Raymond Chandler.

Not too bad company to keep, I suppose.

I write like
Raymond Chandler

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I had a whole entry typed up last night, recapping what I’ve been up to lately, and it was all good to post . . .

And then my computer farted and reset itself, and my pretty little entry was gone. I immediately turned the computer off and went to read to a book, lest I do something I’d later regret.

So here I am now, attempting to recreate that lost entry.

Tuesday night, I conducted a small experiment involving a cheap bottle of wine, my computer, and my imagination.

And before anyone asks, no, it wasn’t anything like this:

Instead, I attempted to do something that I had never done before: get drunk by myself and write. I realize that drinking, especially with the intent to get drunk, with only one’s self for company, is not generally the most admirable or lofty of goals. In fact, such people are usually termed “alcoholics.” But I wanted to find out, a) was I even capable of being productive whilst hammered, and b) if I were capable, would any of that prose be good?

So around 22:30 Tuesday, I cracked open the finest bottle of $7 wine that Kroger sells, and stared at the computer screen.

Three hours later . . .

I finished the last of the wine, stumbled drunkenly to the bathroom to pee, came back to the computer, and surveyed the damage. I had completed some serious outlining of an upcoming section of the Project of a Novelish Nature, and written a good thousand words or so of that section. I AM TEH R0X0RS! I gloated to myself. Then I dicked around on the Internet for a while longer, and went to bed.

The next morning I checked out the prose, and it wasn’t bad. It needed a little fixing: I omitted a fair number of words, used the word “transmit” three times in a sentence, and almost exclusively used pronouns instead of character names, which made things a little confusing. Some really good dialogue made up for these negatives, so overall I was pretty happy.

All-in-all, I would call the experiment a resounding success. Apparently alcohol and writing mix very well for me, which is about the only thing that Hemingway and I have in common. Not that I plan on doing this sort of thing very often. Drinking, like sex, is much more fun when someone else is doing it with you. That being said, drinking and writing is a fun way to spend an evening, so I’m sure I will do it again at some point in the future.

Good afternoon.

I am writing this post at Boston Stoker, trying to work up the motivation to brave the cold and go home. Except for a bearded, corpulent fellow who is barefoot and reading a book, I am the only “customer” here. I put that in quotation marks because I finished my hot tea an hour ago, and am now more or less loitering.

Managed to write a little bit today. Not much, only 600 words. I’ve been fighting a damn cold all week and mostly losing. It’s been confined to my head, thankfully, so I haven’t been completely miserable. But it does seem to have fucked with my muse, a belligerent Brit who shouts at me, and I haven’t felt much inspired to write since Thanksgiving.

No, that’s not entirely accurate. I forgot that on Thursday I came up with a treatment for a short movie I’d like to make in the near future with Ryan. It’s called GENTLEMEN OF LEISURE for now. I’m going to let it percolate for a week or two, then write the script. It falls into the comedy/drama genre, which is much different from the sci-fi/urban fantasy I usually write. I’m going to have to stretch a bit to write it, and that excites me, which is reason enough to actually complete the script, even if it never makes it past the written stage.

There’s one more creative project that I’m entertaining doing: filming a live-reading of an old poem of mine called THE MONKEYS HAVE STOLEN MY CHEESE, but done in a “fireside chat” or Masterpiece Theatre style. I need to revamp the poem first before that goes anywhere. We’ll see if this one happens or not. At the very least, I think it could be fun to make.

It’s odd: the office closing and the intervening month seems like it has completely rejuvenated me, both creatively and in spirit. I want to make weird and fun things again, and hang out with people. I guess I never realized just how unhappy I had become over the last three years. Life has actually become enjoyable again, and being creative has been a large part of making it so.

Oh — the computer has just thrown up the low battery warning. Time to post this and scram.