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Friday, December 19th, 2003
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12:16 pm - Little Pink Houses
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| Thursday, June 19th, 2003
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11:06 pm - The Art Garfunkel Of War, or: A Boy Named Sun Tzu
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INT. NURSE'S ONE-BEDROOM APT. - TOWERING APARTMENT BUILDING - THE HEART OF INDUSTRIAL YOKOHAMA - DAY
NURSE enters, covered in dirt. She puts her purse down
on her tiny couch and enters her cramped bathroom. She turns the shower on and tests the water on her hand. She rubs her face with the water, smearing her makeup. She begins to unbutton her top. The doorbell rings. She buttons her top back and crawls out of the bathroom. She opens the front door. NURSE'S SON, 16, stands, holding a video cassette and a white plastic bag.
EXT. CONNECTICUT FOREST - HOLLYWOOD SOUNDSTAGE - NIGHT
CARY GRANT and KATHERINE HEPBURN search for a leopard. CARY GRANT falls down a hill, causing KATHERINE HEPBURN to burst into laughter. She then falls down after him.
INT. NURSE'S ONE-BEDROOM APT. - DAY
NURSE'S SON sits very close to NURSE on tiny couch in front of huge flat screen television, which has 'Bringing Up Baby' playing on it. NURSE and NURSE'S SON laugh at the movie. NURSE'S SON leans forward, unblinking, transfixed by the movie.
NURSE'S SON (in Japanese)
Wow. These old comedies are amazing. Can you think of anything built in 1938 that still works?
NURSE (in Japanese)
Not in Japan.
NURSE'S SON looks back at NURSE from the movie, then back at the movie.
NURSE'S SON (in Japanese)
Oh yeah. Wow. Eek. That ruined the whole evening, didn't it? The War and everything. Ug.
NURSE'S SON picks up a bowl of noodles from next to the couch. He offers some to NURSE, who declines. He eats some noodles, watching the movie.
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1:24 am - What was with Pink licking that chick's face at the MTV Movie Awards?
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EXT. HOSPITAL GARDEN - RURAL JAPAN - EVENING
The sun sets behind the cherry blossom trees. Red shadows scatter across the DOCTOR, the NURSE and the GRAVEDIGGER, who stand around the open grave. Next to them is a huge pile of dirt. The grave is twenty feet deep, reinforced with wooden planks. At the bottom is the coffin, a glass oil lantern illuminating a sign in black paint on the lid of the coffin. The sign reads (in Japanese): DEAD, SPRINGTIME, UNNAMED, WOMAN AND CHILD.
GRAVEDIGGER (in Japanese)
Do we have any music?
DOCTOR (in Japanese)
Nurse?
NURSE (in Japanese)
Doctor?
NURSE points to a flute on the ground next to the DOCTOR. The DOCTOR picks up the flute.
DOCTOR (in Japanese)
I didn't see it.
GRAVEDIGGER (in Japanese)
Give us a song, then. We're losing the light.
DOCTOR plays 'Isn't It Romantic' on the flute. NURSE stares at DOCTOR, who is moving his body to the music as he plays. DOCTOR sees NURSE. DOCTOR stops the song. He begins playing 'Love In Vain'. The NURSE and the GRAVEDIGGER pick up shovels and push dirt into the hole. The lantern at the bottom of the grave is slowly covered with dirt, glowing beneath the dirt before going out.
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| Tuesday, June 17th, 2003
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10:07 pm - Give Me The News
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EXT. HOSPITAL GARDEN - RURAL JAPAN - DAY
DOCTOR stands in front of a white plaster wall, four feet wide and ten feet high, in the middle of a grove of cherry blossom trees. He has a palette on his right hand and a paintbrush on his left. Next to him is a metal surgical table with an open pine box casket on top. The pine casket lid leans against the side of the table. PREGNANT WOMAN, dead, is in the box, covered in ice cubes. Water vapor rises off the casket. DOCTOR paints the woman's chin onto the wall. There are several angles of the woman's face on the wall, in various stages of discoloration. NURSE walks up to the casket from the hospital carrying a basket of ice. She dumps the ice into the casket. She steals a look at the pictures on the wall. The DOCTOR looks up at her and she walks quickly away. She passes a GRAVEDIGGER in grey cotton overalls, digging a grave under a willow tree by the side of a stream.
DOCTOR (in Japanese)
How is the grave coming?
GRAVEDIGGER (in Japanese)
It's hard work, doing this all by myself. Won't you roll up your pant legs and pitch in? There's a nice cool wind over here.
DOCTOR (in Japanese)
Is it very muddy over there? By the stream?
GRAVEDIGGER (in Japanese)
Yeah, it's muddy. But that's all right.
DOCTOR (in Japanese)
What? Speak up!
GRAVEDIGGER (in JAPANESE)
IT'S MUDDY, BUT IT'S ALL RIGHT!
DOCTOR (in JAPANESE)
Then stop complaining and do your work! I don't pay you for the conversation. See what you've done? I've ruined her chin now. I'll have to paint over it.
GRAVEDIGGER (in JAPANESE)
WHAT?
DOCTOR (in JAPANESE)
You deaf twit, I said YOU MADE ME RUIN HER CHIN!
The DOCTOR paints over the chin with white. He puts the paintbrush down on the table and looks at the wall. He picks up a piece of glass sitting against the bottom of the wall. He leans over the coffin, looking at the PREGNANT WOMAN'S face through the glass, which has a numbered grid painted on. He looks up from the coffin at the wall. He puts the glass down and begins painting again.
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| Monday, June 16th, 2003
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1:01 am - Mise this en your scene and smoke it.
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EXT. FOREST ROAD - RURAL JAPAN - MORNING
PREGNANT WOMAN, covered in dirt, dried blood on her hands and dress, stumbles slowly down the road, sobbing. She falls down on the road and crawls foreward, pulling herself with her arms. Leaves stick to her dress. She stops crawling and cries quietly with her head down. KOJI drives up in his pick up truck. He gets out of the car and picks up the PREGNANT WOMAN. He carries her to the truck and puts her in the passenger seat. She is not moving or making sounds. He gets in the truck and drives down the road.
INT. WAITING ROOM - RURAL JAPANESE HOSPITAL - DAY
DOCTOR stands before KOJI, who sits, watching a soap opera on the television set behind the doctor.
DOCTOR (in Japanese)
She's dead. The child is dead too.
KOJI doesn't respond. He is still watching the soap opera.
DOCTOR (in Japanese)
She lost too much blood. I am very sorry. How did you know her?
KOJI looks away from the television, around the waiting room, then at the doctor.
KOJI (in Japanese)
What? Oh. No, I did not know her. Can I go now?
DOCTOR (in Japanese)
Yeah, sure.
KOJI (in Japanese)
Do I need to sign something?
DOCTOR (in Japanese)
No, it's all right. She has no identification, and she died from complications from pregnancy. You are free to go.
KOJI stands and bows to the doctor, who bows back. KOJI leaves.
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| Sunday, June 15th, 2003
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1:24 am - Fingers, don't fail me now!
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A couple of years ago, I wrote the beginning of a TERRIBLE short story here in this LiveJournal, which you can still read if you hate yourself or you want to feel less intimidated by me (if that were possible). And hey, if it embarrassed me once, why not go for a two-fer? Here is...
THE POST-BY-POST NEW STORY FROM YOUR FAVORITE INFANT, ANDRE!
EXT. CONSTRUCTION SITE - RURAL JAPAN - NIGHT
MATSUMORI KOJI, 31, tall, balding, wearing glasses, carries a 2x4 on his shoulder past a flaming barrel. He wipes sweat from his glasses with the fingers of his free hand. Flaming barrels surround the frame of a church, casting shifting shadows on the surrounding forest. KOJI carries the 2x4 up a thirty foot tall ladder to the frame for the roof. He slides the 2x4 into a slot in the frame where a strut was missing, completing this side of the roof. Standing on the ladder, KOJI looks across at the opposite side of the roof, completely empty of struts. He looks through the empty roof, up at the night sky. The moon is a shining sliver. A screeching comes from the opposite direction, from the road. KOJI looks, but doesn't see anything. He hops down the ladder, three steps at a time, stumbling and recovering near the bottom of the ladder. He runs past the flaming barrels, past the pick up truck loaded down with lumber, to the road. As he reaches the road, the screeching stops. He turns around and is nearly run down by a PREGNANT AMERICAN WOMAN, covered in blood, crying out in pain. KOJI runs after her and catches her in a full nelson. He pulls her, struggling, back toward the construction site. She kicks him in the balls. He collapses, holding his balls, covered in her blood. She runs back to the road and off into the darkness, screeching like the doomsday whistle.
KOJI (in Japanese)
Son of a bitch! Oh my fucking God! That cunt! She kicked me right in the balls! Jesus Christ!
KOJI writhes on the ground. The wind blows out the fire in all the barrels.
KOJI (in Japanese)
And now I can't see. Son of a bitch.
Well, that's the first scene. It was done with no notes, no forethought, just one letter at a time, not knowing what was coming next, who the characters were, where they're going or what they are on Earth for. Maybe we'll find out.
P.S. It's not anime or a samurai melodrama or anything. I feel like we'll be going lots of places with this thing.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Friday, June 13th, 2003
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8:22 pm - Script
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The new script is done, if anyone was wondering. I worry that it's a little too much like 'Benny and Joon'. If you read it, tell me what you think.
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(4 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, June 11th, 2003
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11:00 pm - Chirashi
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I went to Sushi-Masa with Sasha tonight. She had sashimi. I remarked on the shaman and the rahja's pasta. That last part was just me having fun with words.
I had so much fun. I think I understand how some people are able to update every day with silly little nonsense. Living is so easy now. I haven't felt like this since I was a kid. I have almost no responsibilities. It's my first honest vacation since I graduated from high school. This is how 19 is supposed to feel. Kids my age in 1965 were hanging out at the drive-in, drinking root beer floats, sneaking cigarettes behind the bathrooms. Hell, they were probably smoking IN the bathroom.
All the restaurants here have smoking sections. I feel like Tony Mottola every time I walk into a restaurant, knowing that I could be smoking as I walk in, if I want.
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| Sunday, June 8th, 2003
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10:18 pm - Sparkle!
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That last post, back in January, is out of date. Lauren and I got back together almost immediately afterward.
So, secrets. Right. Lots of secrets that I can't tell any of you. Well, I could tell some of you, but I won't. I'd like to get a new journal and not tell any of you, but that wouldn't be nice or affordable. But who knows, maybe I already have? Ooooooh. Yeah. I've got you there, haven't I? Am I not the clever one, with my fancy grammar and question marks? Speaking directly to you like I do. Makes you wonder, it does.
I'm back in Greenville for the summer. I helped my mother move out of her boyfriend's house yesterday. She came over afterward to watch a Richard Lester movie and I ended up throwing her out of the house. She was stealing linens and seashells. She didn't have any at her new apartment. I saw her again today at my grandparents' house for lunch. We didn't talk about the argument.
Tonight I split a bottle of champagne with my father. We watched Mr Hulot's Holiday.
That's a lot of quotidienne, though it hardly makes up for six months of radio silence.
P.S. If any of you are in the Greenville area: first, you poor soul, I'm so sorry; second, I'm making a movie and I need your help. Act in my movie and God will personally deliver you to paradise in a chariot of fire.
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| Wednesday, January 15th, 2003
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12:03 am - Dip
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Lauren and I are done. Disappointment, fatigue, hunger, boredom, guilt, nouns, intangibles, real-live nothing.
Spent nearly a week completely alone before my suitemate Emilio got into town tonight. I don't know him very well. He's Puerto Rican, but looks white, so he does well with women who want something foreign, but not ethnic. Like Taco Bell. I want a burrito, but I don't want to feel guilty for exploiting an imperialized culture. That kind of girl. Not that he's a bad guy, I'm just talking about his audience, his targeted demographic. Emilio's swell. Smart, good taste in music and movies, smokes. More fun than Tim, my roommate with the moisturizing powder for his feet and separate silverware from the rest of the suite. So that's Emilio.
I'm going to try to shoot a short this semester, God help me. I'm a fool for trying and a coward for refusing to start over as a car salesman or a television repairman. Maybe next year.
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(6 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, December 11th, 2002
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8:06 pm - Grief
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I feel like shit and I have no one to talk to. It's time for a LiveJournal update.
Lauren and I had a fight. 'Who's Lauren?' you might ask if you haven't seen me in a while. 'Lauren's a girl,' I might say, because I'm a dick. What I would say if I weren't a dick is 'Lauren is the girl I fell in love with a couple of weeks ago.' I was in the middle of a lucky streak, so she liked me nearly as much as I liked her. It was very nice.
A girl asked me in high school, 'How do you know that you're in love?' I said, 'Because it makes me feel bad.' She didn't appreciate this, though she should have. Lauren and I got into a fight because I was an asshole to a friend of hers and refused to apologize. I've known her friend for a while, and the next time I see this friend of hers, we'll probably laugh about this whole thing. I don't think Lauren's going to laugh too much about it. You can read her LiveJournal, too, if you want to hear her side.
One other time Lauren and I got into a fight when I explained what I believed to her. When Zen is taken to its logical conclusion, it can be pretty bleak, and she was insulted by the implication that since I admired Zen (which teaches one to abolish desires and values) then I didn't desire or value her. Specifically, she thought it meant I didn't love her. I defer to my comments in the previous paragraphs.
I hope this does turn out to just be a silly fight we can get through. Nothing I could tell you here would give you any idea of how important she really is to me. She might be reading this or not, or maybe no one will see this. Whatever, I just thought you'd all like to hear from me on one of the worst days I've had in a very long time. And it was going so well for so long. Nothing lasts forever, I guess. Especially happiness. <--Forgive me for writing something like that, but it feels sincere. I've always had trouble telling exactly when I was being sincere and when I was just being intellectual or snotty. It's a little much to ask that other people be able to tell when I have such problems.
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| Saturday, November 16th, 2002
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10:09 pm - Score!
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Tonight I won 55 minutes of color 16mm film at a FujiFilm promotion on campus. Last night I won chocolate body paint at a campus event called Porn Night, which a certain special lady licked off my chest a couple of hours later. This certain special lady has also invited me to spend Thanksgiving with her at her family's house. All this happened because I missed the bus to Philly. If I had spent the weekend with Eric and Sasha, as was planned, my life would be measurably worse than it is. Blue skies...
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| Thursday, September 12th, 2002
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6:44 pm - The Altogether
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It's been very windy lately, and while this alone is a horrible way to start an entry, you should know that the wind is the only thing I love. I remember the most beautiful moments in my life and the wind that swept past my face. Smelling burnt leaves in the autumn with a warm jacket, walking with a smart friend and hearing her laugh when she gets my jokes, a girl I'm not in love with and the wind that makes her hair sparkle in the orange sunlight at seven in the evening. If this is too hokey for you, go fuck yourself, because it's the truth and it's about time you knew about something about me that wasn't a lie or a complaint. When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time in the long, cool fall months of South Carolina playing in the woods behind my house in a light jacket, breathing the wind with my nose and thinking that if I could just breath forever, I wouldn't care if nothing else mattered. Later my family moved upstate and got a house in a subdivision, and there wasn't a forest, and it was too cold in the winter, and there wasn't as much wind because we were closer to the mountains. And I got asthma, so breathing wasn't the joy it once was. Sometimes, though, I would be doing something awful, like talking to someone or thinking about something or keeping my eyes open for any amount of time, and the wind would pick up, and it would be September, and I would be in love again, and I would remember my life when there were still things that made me happy sometimes. As I write this, it's nearly seven o'clock and the sun is setting behind the buildings here in New York. I don't get that orange sunlight here because the sunset is blocked by the buildings that impress me so much. I could go to Central Park, but for that matter I could go back home, I could go to my childhood home, where another family lives now. My goddamned family doesn't even live in my house anymore, not any house. My father lives alone in the five-bedroom house in Greenville, my mother lives with some cocksucker who can't speak English, my brother's on some army base somewhere and I'm in the biggest goddamned city in the world crying my fucking eyes out. I'm honestly crying like a baby right now. There's a song by The Cure playing, I feel like such a stereotype. "It's Friday, I'm In Love." And I am, but it isn't, so it's not the truth, so it's a lie, so it's hideous and wrong and ridiculous and a horrible fucking awful lie.
I've calmed down a little now. I'm sorry about that. I'm not going to delete it because it's the truth and I don't get a lot of chances to see something like that in real life.
Here's another bad opening; I had a dream the other night. I was kissing a girl, and just kissing her. It wasn't Marie (not her real name), but it was a girl I've mentioned before on LJ. One time we spent a day together, and it was one of those moments I wrote about earlier, when the sun and the wind make me think life is good for a few seconds. It felt so good to kiss her and hold her and touch her face, and I don't care that it was dream. I'm just going to remember it like it was real, because I need a good memory. It was really one of those French movie, album cover, piano music and strings kind of dreams that's really a letter from my brain telling me, "Isn't she great? You should be with her. Do something about it when you wake up. You're in love with her. You are. Trust me." If I could make movies like that, I would be loved. Straight girls would see my movies in high school and go to college and right about my movies in their application essay. Straight boys would see my movies and turn them off ten minutes in because no one was carrying a gun. Gay boys would see my movies and want to fall in love. Gay girls would see my movies and be indignant, but they're always indignant. Just kidding. I love all of you, my beautiful children.
I had another dream the next night. I was dying of cancer, very slowly, and my father had to take care of me. We got into an argument and he threw me out of the house. I died, a waste of a body, in the street, wet and thin. Maybe it wasn't cancer, maybe it was AIDS. I used to want to have AIDS when I was in Elementary school, so that I could have something special about me. It was second grade, I remember, and I had figured out that since AIDS only allowed other diseases to kill you that normally wouldn't, it wouldn't be a big deal, because I would just have to keep myself really clean and not get paper-cuts and I would be set up. My child-life aspirations to victimhood were never realized, except in the manner in which you are now a participant and accomplice.
God, pretty dark entry today. Glad that's out of me. Now I can enjoy myself this weekend. Matthew Bright's Ted Bundy movie is playing at the Cinema Village on 12th St and 2nd Ave. It means skipping a couple of days of eating, but I won't get another chance to see it in a theatre. (See how that victim thing works?)
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| Sunday, August 25th, 2002
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1:27 am - La vitesse (or Speed)
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I've had this girlfriend for the past five months, or at least that's what she tells me. She picked me up at work and took me back to her place where we very nearly had vaginal intercourse on several different occasions. She believes in God (oh help us all) so she didn't want to "go all the way" without waiting for something, anything, just so long as she got to believe in a value like waiting. She calls me long distance. She complains that I don't let her know the real Andre. She doesn't want to get hurt. All kinds of other nonsense comes out of her mouth, but I'll be damned if I remember a single bit of it the second after I hear it. I'm not terribly attracted to her. She's very very average. Blond, Aryan girl. Her name is Laura Carter, and she may or may not be related to Jimmy Carter. She has none of the qualities I look for in a woman except that she knows a lot about movies. She has a predilection for Italian horror films. Other than that, average such that Wonder Bread won't melt in her mouth. Incredibly boring, the way she's so obviously in love with me. She has low self-esteem, but with no excuses for it other than self-awareness and reasonable standards. Normally the low self-esteem would be a plus, if only it weren't completely appropriate. I want to break up with her. The problem is, I have no reason to. She is so low-maintenance that I could go the rest of my life, have thousands of relationships with every other person on earth, never give her a present on her birthday, she'd still booty call me at 10 PM on a Thursday and ask me "Why don't you let me into your heart?" I try to explain Freud's idea of the id to her, and that if she knew what I was really like she'd just see an animal with none of the wit and high cheekbones she likes in the Andre she's so desperate to know. Oblivious. She's so dim. Ugh. Oh well. Maybe she'll catch me with some guy in my dorm room, if I call her and arrange the shocking encounter ahead of time.
That's my update. I know you all missed me.
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| Sunday, July 28th, 2002
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9:54 pm - Update
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Going to shoot a script I wrote in about three hours instead of the one that took two months...
A certain love of my life got accepted to a prestigious program at a foreign university (Yea!) ...
Only recently began to think about the implications of my parents' divorce (Will she get remarried? To her Mexican illegal alien boyfriend? Will I have a little brother or sister? Named Rodriguez or Lupe?)...
(Btw, odd how two relationships I thought would last forever despite the obvious abnormalities split up messily at the same time. William Robert Thornton, I am so disappointed in you. Angie deserves better. For shame, Billy Bob. For shame.)
Discovered alternative comics for the first time (Bleu Finnegan lives!)...
Had a bike and a really nice camera stolen from my house while I was asleep (God Bless Charleston)...
Sleater-Kinney is playing in New York in October and I WILL see them, as God is my witness! I'm a bit of a fan...
Ellipses are overused...
Self-referential humor is underused...
Irony goes unnoticed...
Pining for New York City like dead parrots pine for the fjords...
Python references are so lame.. What am I, ten? Get a life...
"Get a life" both underused and meaningless...
Chris Elliot references are much cooler, but much more obscure...
Joke running long...
What this post lacks in content it makes up for in vertical mass...
It's like a skyscraper or a radio antenna, a monument to human achievement, or at least the human capacity for getting cricks in our necks...
If I were any further off topic, I'd need a passport...
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(9 comments | comment on this)
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| Sunday, July 21st, 2002
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8:32 pm - Wicked!
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Woo-hoo!
I'm a hero for women everywhere - even if I'm a little scary.
...wait.
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(comment on this)
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| Sunday, July 14th, 2002
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7:28 pm - Blind
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My dog died. She had gone blind from cataracts while I was at college, and lost a lot of weight for some reason. Could have been cancer, or a parasite, or just stress from the blindness. My parents never bothered to take the dog to a vet. Too expensive.
Boo-fucking-hoo. Just a stupid dog. Real human beings die every day, do they get online obituaries? Nope. Didn't even have a cool name. My mother got the dog from the people across the street, so she named it. "Precious." Stupid name for a dog. She said it was either that or Shotzi, the name of Hitler's dog. What a freak she is.
The thing was about the size of a child's football. Black, thin, long fur with dark grey bits on the snout and feet. In her old age grey spread to the rest of her body, making her look her age. My friends, when they would come to visit, would say she looked like a giant rat. She had asthma, and when people she didn't know visited, she would hyperventilate and dance around at their feet.
A lot of really rotten shit has happened so far this summer. If the movie gets made, that'll be one good thing, but I doubt it. No one wants to play the lead. What is it about the character that makes people not want to play her?
A girl I made out with in New York is going to quit her band and transfer to NYU London to be with a girl she likes. If you think you might be gay, just arrange a meeting with me. If I'm attracted to you, you'd better shave your head and buy some boots, 'cause you're living a lie otherwise. I am, so far, 5 for 6 with girls with whom I've had romantic experiences. For my ego's sake, I'll believe that I am unconsciously attracted to unusually masculine women, and not that I drive women into "the family," as one ex has called it.
I'm sick of only complaining to you, so here's something happy.
Give me a second.
Hold on.
Here goes.
Right now.
Positivity.
Happy ending. All right.
Here it comes.
Shouldn't be this difficult. I don't feel particularly bad. Don't feel much of anything except dread, but that's not out of the ordinary. Sorry if I disappointed you. I bet I didn't. I don't surprise anyone. Boo-fucking-hoo. Poor me. Nevermind.
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| Wednesday, July 10th, 2002
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10:37 am - Renaissance
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I bet a lot of you forgot me. I've been busy getting this movie made, so I haven't been able to post. I just finished casting. I wrote most of the script for college-age or older, but there aren't any actors in Charleston during the summer. I have to use a bunch of local high school kids. It's going to look like Ingmar Bergman's Bugsy Malone. I see nothing but failure in the future.
Some fucked up shit went down with Marie (not her real name), but she reads this so I can't talk about it.
My parents got divorced, finally. They've been building up to it my entire life, and now that they've done it, it's a great relief. My father didn't deserve a vicious selfish whore like my mother. He's a good guy. Maybe he'll find some nice lady to keep him company. He's a looker, too. Shouldn't be that hard.
I'm living rent-free with Joseph (not his real name) in Charleston, in a house that is slowly collapsing. It's survived hurricanes, floods and fires, but it won't survive the landlord it has now. The guy has never driven a car sober in his life. I think there's a permanent imprint of the Miller logo emblazoned backwards on the guy's palm. He constantly drinks, is what I'm trying to say, and he's cheap.
I didn't come straight to Charleston from NYC. I spent some time in Greenville, being "friends" with some kids from my high school. Why the Hell they keep calling me, I will never understand. They're the most aggressively flavorless nothings to ever listen to Weezer, and that says a lot. I guess they like to keep me around for the same reason Dennis Miller was on Monday Night Football for so long.
I'm working 16 hours a week at Ben & Jerry's, in the tourist area of downtown. You all know how much I love to make people happy. Especially little kids. Here's hoping those Arizona wildfires get a little ambitious and make a break for the East Coast.
But why should I complain? It's beautiful in this part of the country. A little lonely. There isn't any nightlife, and all of Joseph's (not his real name) friends are hand-me-downs from his older brother, twenty-five year olds who still don't know what they want to do with their lives. I don't know what Marie (not her real name) ever saw in Joseph (not his real name). He's socially retarded and has thus-far been unable to hold his point in any argument for more than a few seconds at a time. Some people might not like to argue, but this kid takes it to unheard hyperbole.
I was totally off about at least one of the girls I thought was in love with me in New York. Well, not totally off. I had a clue to the truth, but I believe what I prefer.
It seems that I classify and report my life through the people I know. Nothing really has been going on with me except this movie, and that only barely. If anyone wants to read the script, e-mail me or post here.
What kind of Drug Addict are you?
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| Friday, April 12th, 2002
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11:14 pm - Infamy
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I'm going to complain about something that doesn't matter.
I don't work well with others. When I was in kindergarten, I would do well in every measured subject, except two: Plays Well With Others and Respects Teachers. I resented the holes these deficiencies left in what was, at that point, my otherwise spotless academic record, but since then, have not made much effort to change my attitude.
I'm in a group in my production class. It is my belief that groups produce nothing but conflict, and certainly not the "good" kind of conflict that makes a story work. Rather, this is the "bad" kind of conflict, as in a logical conflict. Take, for example, the conflict between my desire for the project to be good (that is, since it is a comedy, funny) and the qualities in my group-mates that run against this desire. One of these qualities, shared by all three of the dismal artistic failures with whom I am partnered, is the inability to crack a joke with a pick axe. In the group, everyone was assigned roles. I was initially assigned the job of "writer," whoopty-do, but this is meaningless, because my trio of mindless co-authors decided (against my protest) that "everyone would be responsible for everything." Art cannot be created by committee. Art can barely be created by a single person, and the thought of spreading out artistic vision amongst four people makes me yen for the days when filmmakers got into the business through nepotism and money. Now, normally, I would be able to deal with this. This is because, normally, I associate with people who are clever or funny, or both. Any hopes I had that the rest of the crew would be more than seat-fillers were scattered when I heard my "director" say "Storytelling wasn't funny. That show Street Smarts, that's funny." In my mind, I went through a check list of the different ways the Russian nobility tried to kill Rasputin. So I write a script, they don't get the jokes, I write a different script, they don't get the jokes. It's like pitching The Larry Sanders Show to a team of trained mice. I say, "So you don't like the jokes. What should I write instead?" "Hey, I'm not a writer, this is probably funnier than anything I could come up with. The jokes just need to work better." Some child with Kool-Aid dripping off his upper lip is telling me "I don't know what comedy is, but this isn't it."
I swear, I must have been Franco in another life to deserve these people. Eventually, they decided to do a documentary instead. Praise be to the Lord. You can't write a documentary, you have to go and make it. Which means I'm not Coffee Boy, a job with infinitely less likelihood to drive me to violent crime.
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| Wednesday, March 27th, 2002
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12:46 am - Soundtrack
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My sound production teacher asked the class to write out five moments from our lives and the music that defined them. This is the kind of homework I'm asked to do, for $40,000 a year. It's a remedial high school English assignment. But what the hell. Music is almost as big a deal to me as movies. I wasn't watching a movie when I had my first kiss, we were dancing to a Tori Amos song at some guy's birthday party. It wasn't even a movie that made me want to write my first screenplay. I heard that REM song "Nightswimming" while I was visiting my relatives in St. Andr? les Vergers and I wrote a nineteen page piece of shit about my friends back in Greenville. It was all dialogue, lots of in-jokes, lots of speeches and punch lines. Thank God I deleted it, and if any of you have a copy, I ask you to delete it immediately. (I left a copy with Daniel Hammond. Eric Rivera and Sasha Bishop read it. If you guys can see this, please forgive me for writing something that awful. I was too young to know the difference)
The emphasis at this school is "Be as creative as you can possibly be with the technical aspects of your films, but by God, if you don't write a three-act screenplay with a sympathetic hero who learns something about himself and changes his life, we'll kick you out of the state." There's less structure in the essay writing class they make us take. My screenwriting teacher hates my story because it ends in the middle of a suspense sequence and several of the plot threads are never resolved. But you know what? The security guard outside one of my classes told me, "Never make a movie where the audience knows what's going to happen before they see it. That's boring. You won't win Oscars, but after you're dead, they'll call you a genius." That guy knows what he's talking about. Of course, after I'm dead, they'll say "You know that Andr?? He was a bastard." Because I'm kind of rude to people.
There's a girl in my essay writing class who's been giving me the eye. She's a dancer. I don't know how I feel about that. Ever since I became dangerously thin (on account of the whole poverty-and-malnourishment diet) people have been saying I look like Guy Pierce. It's weird, but I think this girl (who is quite handsome, in a traditional sort of way) may actually be attracted to me. It's not something I'm used to, or even prepared to handle. It may be more likely that she just looks at me and laughs because I'm constantly telling jokes, but no one else does (except that other dancer, Corey. I catch him looking at me, too, but mostly with contempt). Let's have a poll. Is it OK for girls to be attracted to a guy because he's so hunger-ridden he develops great cheekbones?
At my job, I won the Oscar pool we had, but I gave the prize money to the second place winner (my boss) because she was closer on the tie-breaker (how many Oscars will Lord of the Rings win? She put 3, I put 8). I hold guessing numbers much higher than guessing winners. Any one Oscar has a 1-in-5 chance of going to whoever you pick, but Lord of the Rings was nominated for 13 Oscars. Anyway, that's my reasoning. Maybe I did it because I hate myself and I don't think I deserve to win anything.
I'm rooming with a guy next year named Tim. He's a friend of a friend, and he seems nice. Smart guy, always has cheese and wine. The girl across the hall, the improv comedian, she thinks he's infatuated with her. He calls her, and comes over without asking. I think he's just being friendly. He does bring bread every time.
The Butchies are playing the Knitting Factory in April, and even if I can't get anyone to go with me, I'm going. They are monsters of sensitive chick punk rock.
My mother called the other day, and I lied to her to get off the phone. It worries me how much I hate her. She's exactly like me. I can't hate her too much, though. She asked me to buy her a tee-shirt and send it back in the mail, and I did. The red and black CBGB's tee. It's funny how a piece of clothing can change. If some loser kid were to wear that shirt to an Unwritten Law show in Hoboken, he'd get his ass kicked. My mom's going to wear that shirt to teach Spanish classes to 7th graders at Tanglewood Middle School in Greenville, SC, and she's going to be too hip for the trip. Too cool for school, no doubt.
This summer I'd like to shoot a documentary about my parents' marriage. My father's a character all by himself. His accent is unlike anything documented. He walks around the house almost naked most of the time. He gets angry and shouts, he gets happy and laughs, he gets sad and pouts. He's like a child emotionally, but so much fun. And the way he and my mother argue, you'd think it were some kind of set-up. They're almost too cruel. "Close the garage door." "You do it, you fucking bitch. You left it open." "Goddamn you, you lazy cocksucker. All you do is sit around and drink beer and watch soccer." "I'm lazy? You're the one with the big fat ass. Why don't you do something in this house for once?" "You fucking asshole." *door slams* It's like French farce or something. If I could get some of that on camera, I'd have solid gold. Thank God they've never been able to communicate to each other. If I can't get it this summer, I'll have the rest of my life to work with. They're so considerate, the way they consistently provide me with material for psychotic repression and self-hatred.
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