11.30.2006

New Smoking Aces Trailer

Windmills of Your Mind Lyrics

Round, like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel.
Never ending or beginning,
On an ever spinning wheel
Like a snowball down a mountain
Or a carnaval balloon
Like a carousell that's turning
Running rings around the moon

Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes on it's face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind

Like a tunnel that you follow
To a tunnel of it's own
Down a hollow to a cavern
Where the sun has never shone
Like a door that keeps revolving
In a half forgotten dream
Or the ripples from a pebble
Someone tosses in a stream.

Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes on it's face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind

Keys that jingle in your pocket
Words that jangle your head
Why did summer go so quickly
Was it something that I said
Lovers walking allong the shore,
Leave their footprints in the sand
Was the sound of distant drumming
Just the fingers of your hand

Pictures hanging in a hallway
And a fragment of this song
Half remembered names and faces
But to whom do they belong
When you knew that it was over
Were you suddenly aware
That the autumn leaves were turning
To the color of her hair

Like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning,
On an ever spinning wheel
As the images unwind
Like the circle that you find
In the windmills of your mind

Pictures hanging in a hallway
And the fragment of this song
Half remembered names and faces
But to whom do they belong
When you knew that it was over
Were you suddenly aware
That the autumn leaves were turning
To the color of her hair

Like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning,
On an ever spinning wheel
As the images unwind
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind

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Counting Crows Lyric of the Day

"When I ain't drinking baby
You are on my mind."

- Blues Run the Game

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11.29.2006

Coke-Cola GTA Ad

Last one for the night:

Xbox 360 Fingergun Ad

This makes me laugh everytime:

XBOX 360 Cops and Robbers Ad

I just get a kick out of watching this ad (and yes, I wish I could play cops and robbers like that only with Nerf guns added to it):

11.28.2006

Curse of the Cellular Ringtone

Good rant/editorial by Devin Faraci at CHUD on theater behavior. Need to find John Rogers writing on the topic now.

Watchmen quote

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes.

Who watches the watchmen?

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It's Alright by Black Sabbath

Told you once about your friends and neighbours
They were always seeking but they'll never find it
It's alright, yes it's alright

Where to go and where to see
It's always been this way and it can never be
It's alright, yes it's alright

Give it all and ask no return
And very soon you'll see and you'll begin to learn
That's it's alright, yes it's alright

Don't you know that it's so good for you
You can be making love and see it all go through
But it's alright, yes it's alright

Pulitzer Allows More From Online Sources

How long before we have bloggers winning Pulitzers? Blogs have some of the best independent journalism right now.

Papi Van Winkle Bourbons

Counting Crows Lyric of the Day

"I got this nasty little habit
of peaking down the shirts
of all the little girls
as they pass me by."

- August and Everything After

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11.27.2006

Toys

Yes, I will be 32 in a couple of weeks, and I still ask for toys for Christmas.

Nerf weaponry. You can't go wrong with Nerf weaponry. My laser sighted Nerf gun is just the first step in the eventual Nerf arms race.

Legos. The little packs. Fun to build with.

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Stye

Virgil's Aeneid

Some miscellaneous things

A good chef's knife.

A nice set of tumblers.

Safari (cologne and aftershave, not a trip).

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Books

Live and Let Die

Moonraker

Bond On Set

Any other books relating to Bond films or books.

Everyday Italian

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DVD's

The Laptop Bag I want

My Old Man and the Sea
Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea
Tourist Season
Double Whammy
The Thinking Fans Guide to the World Cup
Five Fists of Science
Scott Pilgrim, Vol 1: Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life
The Mind of the ModernMoviemaker
Batman Year 100
Stardust
Twelve Sharp
The Deep Blue Good-By
Nightmare in Pink
A Purple Place for Dying
Sanibel Flats
Maximum Bob
Hitchcock/Truffaut
Skin Tight
Native Tounge
Demon of the Waters
Conversations With Wilder
America's Victory
Hard Rain
Casion Royale
Fletch
Getting Stoned With Savages
Strip Tease
Stormy Weather
A Princess of Mars
A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies
The Tempest
Lucky You


Yeah, so looks like I didn't complete a book since September. Had a rough go of it. I have started a lot of books, but I have not finished any of them. My main goal right now is to get through the rest of Hiassen's books before the end of the you. Also want to fiish Roving Mars and read The Sex Lives of Cannibals and Sailing Alone Around the World.

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A Warning

Going to be doing some Christmas list blogging today. Mainly for me so I can put mine together tonight. So feel free to peruse and see what my list is (I might even post the whole thing tomorrow). But that is why you will see lots of links to things I want.

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11.22.2006

More of CHUD on The Fountain

11.21.2006

Another Chud Interview with Aronofsky

Holding off on reading this interview until I see The Fountain. I think I am going to just spend Thanksgiving going out to the movies. Already got plans to see Casino Royale. Still want to see The Departed, The Prestige, and Marie Antoinette. Be nice to see Babel and The Queen as well.

Russ Fischer interviews Darren Aronofsky.

Devin Faraci of Chud.com will also be interviewing him later in the week. He interviews Rachel Weisz here.

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Zadie Smith on Reading

I have seen this both at BoingBoing and now at William Gibson's blog:

From an interview with novelist Zadie Smith on KCRW's Bookworm program:

"But the problem with readers, the idea we’re given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, 'I should sit here and I should be entertained.' And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don’t know, who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That’s the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It’s an old moral, but it’s completely true."


And, Gibson writes in response:

I would add that talented writers begin as talent readers, though I've scarcely heard it remarked upon.

The two activities are not only fundamentally similar, they're the necessary halves of a single human activity.

The reader completes the arc.

If there is no reader, there is no text.

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Hellboy Via Bob the Builder

11.18.2006

The Vesper

The Vesper

3 measures of Gordon's gin
1 measure of vodka
1/2 measure of Kina Lillet

Shake until ice cold and serve in a deep champagne goblet with a large thin slice of lemon peel

I Am Armed

With a laser sighted Nerf pistol. The arms race has begun. One might also arm their self with a Nerf sniper rifle or a Nerf rocket launcher. Also, when you see what appears to be a Nerf ball, remember that is not a Nerf ball; but rather it is a Nerf grenade coming your way (small ones get a 3 foot kill radius, large ones get a 5 foot kill radius).

Warren Ellis on Bond

There are pretty much two things I care about this weekend. One, I want to get through the first act and into the second of my Tempest screenplay. The second is seeing Casino Royale. In honor of this being James Bond Weekend, I present yet again my favorite piece on Bond:

Bond

There are very few existing properties that I’d be interested in writing. I like making up my own stories. As far as I’m concerned, that is in fact the job description of “writer”. There aren’t many pre-existing characters that I could be tempted with. I’ve resisted the temptation to do 2000AD properties I remain fond of; I couldn’t do JUDGE DREDD better than John Wagner, and, in fact, neither can anyone else, so I’ve denied myself the pleasure of solving story structures by having a huge bastard in green boots walk in and kill everybody. A JUDGE DREDD/TRANSMETROPOLITAN crossover book was suggested to me by DREDD publishers Fleetway once. I told them that it would be precisely one page long. Spider Jerusalem lights a cigarette. Judge Dredd shoots him. The end.

But if someone asked me to write a James Bond film, you wouldn’t see my arse for dust.

Sad, innit?

I’ve read most of the Ian Fleming novels, seen most of the films once they’ve come to TV. I’m not a fanatic by any means. But James Bond exerts a terrible fascination nonetheless. I even did an interview piece on how I’d write Bond for a Texan newspaper a couple of years ago. So did Bruce Sterling, who offered a disturbing opinion about Bond as a shaven-headed Ibiza DJ. You’re going to hell for that one, Bruce, and you will discover that Satan is English.

The books are notably less spectacular and far more low-key than the films. Dr No was a crazed guano millionaire and had no nuclear missiles, spaceship-eaters or any of the good stuff we associate with Bond Villains. Tiger Tanaka’s great test of Bond was making him compose a naff haiku. It’s often quite bland stuff, great long travelogues and pages describing banquets and furniture. In the guts of it, though, is Bond as a scarred man with clear psychological damage, often on the edge of being removed from service by M on mental health grounds. It’s made stridently obvious that being on the 00 detail of the Secret Service is a job that fucks you up.

Bond is not a superman. He prevails because he is quite simply nastier and more determined to wreak utter bloody havoc than the next guy. In some ways — and I don’t think Fleming was unaware of this — he is what Allen Ginsberg called “bleak male energy,” causing and taking immense damage in single-minded pursuit of what he wants. At the conclusion of YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, the front end of his personality essentially rubbed out by torture, drugs, multiple trauma and a sequence of horrible mental hammerblows, there is an almost disturbing glimpse of an amnesiac Bond as gentle, open, devoted, and almost sweet. And his lover dreads the day that he recovers.

He is England’s blunt instrument of international assault — the spiteful, vicious bastard of a faded empire that still wants the world to do as it’s bloody well told.

Most importantly; he beats people up and makes stuff explode.

The films try to recoil from Bond the bastard, most obviously in the later, parodic Roger Moore horrors. But in Connery, in Dalton and even in Pierce Brosnan, Bond’s essential ruthlessness comes through. Wolf-eyed Timothy Dalton had the best shot at being truly frightening, but he was hamstrung by some horrible scripts, and I’m surprised he lasted as long as he did. Clive Owen is pretty much the only choice to take over after Brosnan, and I’d assume that a serious overhaul of the franchise would have to accompany that.

I can be contacted via agent Angela Cheng Caplan at The Cheng Caplan Company, if there are any producers on serious medication out there. Because both me and Bruce were right; James Bond needs to reflect his times.

But I wouldn’t make him a DJ.

And stuff would blow up really good.

Yes.

I think maybe I need another drink now.

(Originally written in 2002.)

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11.15.2006

Frank Darabont Interview

11.12.2006

Kinky Friedman Lost

Kinky Friedman lost his bid to be governor of Texas. He said on Imus in the Morning:

"Texas turned it's back on the cowboy. And the Indian. Makes you want to give up on the state and the horse it rode in on."

Kinky of course will not give up on Texas. I can't say I will give up on Texas either, having spent enough time there visiting and living, and given that it is the country my son was born in, I will never give up on the state. I truly hope Kinky does set up his shadow government.

I was excited about the election on Tuesday. And then Wednesday there was the excitement of Rumsfeld being replaced. Then Thursday the hangover began and so did the dissatisfaction begin.

First off, the humans in the northeast elected two of the most anti-free speech and video game candidates on any ticket: Clinton and Lieberman. The two of them could partner with Tipper Gore and we could watch as the First Amendment is stripped down to meaning free speech only for old, white people who still think Lawrence Welk is hip 9and he was never hip). Second, several states told gays they could not be married. This is moronic and unfair frankly. As Kinky said in his campaign, gays should have the right to be just as miserable as straight folks with marriage.

I have no real faith the Dems will do anything great with the power they have. I am happy to see a check and balance to government, but if the dems don't come in and re-establish Habeas Corpus and repeal the President's new found right to declare martial law at will, then they will have failed and failed early. I also believe the vast majority of those who have been there longer than one term are corrupt anyway.


So no, I don't think this is some great change in politics coming. It will be more of the same, only with the money coming from different billionaires (or in some cases the billions will come from the same place the accounts will just be different).

I hope at some point we have some leaders I can believe in, but right now I don't think I really see any I care strongly about in this group.

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Center for Cartoon Studies

I loved this piece from The Beat on The Center for Cartoon Studies. You can find out more about the Center for Cartoon Studies here.

One of the most inspiring parts of the article for me is the part about renovating the old buildings. I would love to do that and help create another Zeitgeist here in New Orleans. And not even really a Zeitgeist, but a place for filmmakers and those interested in film, to come and really out about films and how they are made. There are so many great building available right now, and the city is ripe for a nice cultural explosion (just look at the Musician's Village that Habitat for Humanity is working on).

Some would claim this is gentrification, but really it would just be the city once again adapting and mutating. And of course the more things change here, the more they would stay the same since New Orleans never really changes, it just absorbs in the new groups. This city could truly become the art center some think it is or was.

I always find it funny that in Austin, I tried so hard to get a film production job and never could. If you are a film lover though, Austin, TX is a great place to be. They have the wonderful Alamo Drafthouse theaters, the Austin Film Fest (which is based around screenwriters), and South by Southwest. The Austin Film Society is also constantly doing premiere screenings with filmmakers or the talent involved present. And there are arthouse theaters all around the city.

In New Orleans though, we have Canal Place for arthouse cinema and that is about it. The New Orleans Film Fest does a decent job, but they had limited resources it seems before the film fest it seemed, and I am sure now they are even looking for more. There is the Zeitgeist and Hollywood Cinemas out here in Kenner does show Indian movies. The film viewing scene here though still seems anemic. The film production scene though is booming and there is plenty of work to go around right now from Shreveport to New Orleans.

So, I would love to have a place for film lovers to just go and watch films and learn about them and discuss them. I also want a place for filmmakers to go and share ideas and work on independent films and have a creative space.

That's my dream for today.

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Piece on Language in Comics

After I get done with the New Yorker piece on Will Wright, I will be reading this piece on language in comics (found through the Beat). Yes, I spend Sunday mornings reading in depth, scholarly articles. I know I am a nerd.

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11.08.2006

New Creature From The Black Lagoon Book!!!!

A Guide to Lockpicking

11.06.2006

Child's Play

The site for this year's campaign is up. I will write more about it later.

A Daddy Book

11.03.2006

Will Wright Articles

Chris Moore Directing in New Orleans

Almost upset I won't get a chance to be on this:

By Borys Kit and Nicole Sperling

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Producer Chris Moore, who notoriously ripped apart novice filmmakers on the reality TV series "Project Greenlight," is stepping behind the camera to make his directing debut on "Killers," a horror-action movie.

"Killers" revolves around a group of close friends who visit a remote vacation home to celebrate their college graduation. While there, they are put to a horrifying test by a mysterious killer who forces them into a game where they have to kill each other in order to survive.

It will star Agnes Bruckner ("The Woods"), Taryn Manning ("Hustle & Flow") and Patrick Flueger (Sci Fi Channel's "The 4400").



Moore was a producer on such films as "Good Will Hunting" and the "American Pie" series before co-founding LivePlanet with Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Sean Bailey. The company was behind the "Greenlight" TV series, which gave filmmakers a chance at Hollywood dreams. Moore gained a reputation for butting heads with his directors on the series.

Moore said he plans to act accordingly.

"I'm trying to behave the way I wish the directors I had my run-ins with would have behaved," Moore said. "I want to be open and will try to listen to others. I get to make a lot of decisions as a director but there are people who are financing this that I still have to listen to."

As to why he chose "Killers" for his debut, he said he "wanted to do something that was pretty contained, and something that I could work with actors on.

"And I really thought the script was clever. All of us wonder who would we be in extreme situations, whether it's a natural disaster or if someone came after your family. Would you be Rambo or disappear in a corner?"

The script was written by Kelly C. Palmer, a Los Angeles-based corporate lawyer.

Principal photography is set to begin November 13 in New Orleans. Lionsgate will distribute domestically.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

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11.01.2006

HaloWiki

Exactly what it says. A place to gather knowledge about the Halo, which by next weekend I aim to be playing again.

Anyone see today the US intelligence community has a Wiki? They call their's Intellipedia. A pretty good idea in my book.

Ten Interesting Books

More on The Fountain