On A Break

I've decided it's time to give this blog a break. I haven't been keeping up with it lately anyway and blogger has been a pain in the ass to log into. If I have anything to rant about, I'll put it up on my "My Space" blog. Those of you who know me, will know how to find me on there. I leave you with the poem that inspired Stephen King's "Dark Tower" saga. Call it a requiem for my puppy...

My first thought was, he lied in every word,
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye
Askance to watch the working of his lie
On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford
Suppression of the glee that pursed and scored
Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.

What else should he be set for, with his staff?
What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare
All travellers who might find him posted there,
And ask the road? I guessed what skull-like laugh
Would break, what crutch 'gin write my epitaph
For pastime in the dusty thoroughfare,

If at his counsel I should turn aside
Into that ominous tract which, all agree,
Hides the Dark Tower. Yet acquiescingly
I did turn as he pointed: neither pride
Nor hope rekindling at the end descried,
So much as gladness that some end might be.

For, what with my whole world-wide wandering,
What with my search drawn out thro' years, my hope
Dwindled into a ghost not fit to cope
With that obstreperous joy success would bring,
I hardly tried now to rebuke the spring
My heart made, finding failure in its scope.

As when a sick man very near to death
Seems dead indeed, and feels begin and end
The tears and takes the farewell of each friend,
And hears one bid the other go, draw breath
Freelier outside ("since all is o'er," he saith,
"And the blow fallen no grieving can amend";)

While some discuss if near the other graves
Be room enough for this, and when a day
Suits best for carrying the corpse away,
With care about the banners, scarves and staves:
And still the man hears all, and only craves
He may not shame such tender love and stay.

Thus, I had so long suffered in this quest,
Heard failure prophesied so oft, been writ
So many times among "The Band"--to wit,
The knights who to the Dark Tower's search addressed
Their steps--that just to fail as they, seemed best,
And all the doubt was now--should I be fit?

So, quiet as despair, I turned from him,
That hateful cripple, out of his highway
Into the path he pointed. All the day
Had been a dreary one at best, and dim
Was settling to its close, yet shot one grim
Red leer to see the plain catch its estray.

For mark! no sooner was I fairly found
Pledged to the plain, after a pace or two,
Than, pausing to throw backward a last view
O'er the safe road, 'twas gone; grey plain all round:
Nothing but plain to the horizon's bound.
I might go on; nought else remained to do.

So, on I went. I think I never saw
Such starved ignoble nature; nothing throve:
For flowers--as well expect a cedar grove!
But cockle, spurge, according to their law
Might propagate their kind, with none to awe,
You'd think; a burr had been a treasure-trove.

No! penury, inertness and grimace,
In some strange sort, were the land's portion. "See
Or shut your eyes," said Nature peevishly,
"It nothing skills: I cannot help my case:
'Tis the Last Judgment's fire must cure this place,
Calcine its clods and set my prisoners free."

If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk
Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents
Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents
In the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk
All hope of greenness? 'tis a brute must walk
Pashing their life out, with a brute's intents.

As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair
In leprosy; thin dry blades pricked the mud
Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood.
One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare,
Stood stupefied, however he came there:
Thrust out past service from the devil's stud!

Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane;
Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
I never saw a brute I hated so;
He must be wicked to deserve such pain.

I shut my eyes and turned them on my heart.
As a man calls for wine before he fights,
I asked one draught of earlier, happier sights,
Ere fitly I could hope to play my part.
Think first, fight afterwards--the soldier's art:
One taste of the old time sets all to rights.

Not it! I fancied Cuthbert's reddening face
Beneath its garniture of curly gold,
Dear fellow, till I almost felt him fold
An arm in mine to fix me to the place
That way he used. Alas, one night's disgrace!
Out went my heart's new fire and left it cold.

Giles then, the soul of honour--there he stands
Frank as ten years ago when knighted first.
What honest men should dare (he said) he durst.
Good--but the scene shifts--faugh! what hangman hands
In to his breast a parchment? His own bands
Read it. Poor traitor, spit upon and curst!

Better this present than a past like that;
Back therefore to my darkening path again!
No sound, no sight as far as eye could strain.
Will the night send a howlet or a bat?
I asked: when something on the dismal flat
Came to arrest my thoughts and change their train.

A sudden little river crossed my path
As unexpected as a serpent comes.
No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms;
This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath
For the fiend's glowing hoof--to see the wrath
Of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes.

So petty yet so spiteful! All along
Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it;
Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit
Of mute despair, a suicidal throng:
The river which had done them all the wrong,
Whate'er that was, rolled by, deterred no whit.

Which, while I forded,--good saints, how I feared
To set my foot upon a dead man's cheek,
Each step, or feel the spear I thrust to seek
For hollows, tangled in his hair or beard!
--It may have been a water-rat I speared,
But, ugh! it sounded like a baby's shriek.

Glad was I when I reached the other bank.
Now for a better country. Vain presage!
Who were the strugglers, what war did they wage,
Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank
Soil to a plash? Toads in a poisoned tank,
Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage--

The fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque.
What penned them there, with all the plain to choose?
No foot-print leading to that horrid mews,
None out of it. Mad brewage set to work
Their brains, no doubt, like galley-slaves the Turk
Pits for his pastime, Christians against Jews.

And more than that--a furlong on--why, there!
What bad use was that engine for, that wheel,
Or brake, not wheel--that harrow fit to reel
Men's bodies out like silk? with all the air
Of Tophet's tool, on earth left unaware,
Or brought to sharpen its rusty teeth of steel.

Then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood,
Next a marsh, it would seem, and now mere earth
Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth,
Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood
Changes and off he goes!) within a rood--
Bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark black dearth.

Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim,
Now patches where some leanness of the soil's
Broke into moss or substances like boils;
Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him
Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim
Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils.

And just as far as ever from the end!
Nought in the distance but the evening, nought
To point my footstep further! At the thought,
A great black bird, Apollyon's bosom-friend,
Sailed past, nor beat his wide wing dragon-penned
That brushed my cap--perchance the guide I sought.

For, looking up, aware I somehow grew,
'Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place
All round to mountains--with such name to grace
Mere ugly heights and heaps now stolen in view.
How thus they had surprised me,--solve it, you!
How to get from them was no clearer case.

Yet half I seemed to recognise some trick
Of mischief happened to me, God knows when--
In a bad dream perhaps. Here ended, then,
Progress this way. When, in the very nick
Of giving up, one time more, came a click
As when a trap shuts--you're inside the den!

Burningly it came on me all at once,
This was the place! those two hills on the right,
Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight;
While to the left, a tall scalped mountain . . . Dunce,
Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce,
After a life spent training for the sight!

What in the midst lay but the Tower itself?
The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart
Built of brown stone, without a counterpart
In the whole world. The tempest's mocking elf
Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf
He strikes on, only when the timbers start.

Not see? because of night perhaps?--why, day
Came back again for that! before it left,
The dying sunset kindled through a cleft:
The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay
Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay,--
"Now stab and end the creature--to the heft!"

Not hear? when noise was everywhere! it tolled
Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears
Of all the lost adventurers my peers,--
How such a one was strong, and such was bold,
And such was fortunate, yet each of old
Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.

There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! in a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew. "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came."

-- Robert Browning - "Childe Roland To The Dark Tower Came"

Give A Little Bit

I must say it's been an odd week... the fact that I'm up at 1:30 in the fucking morning is testament to that... There are just a lot of things that have been going on and my brain seems to be having a problem shutting down tonight... It started last week with HWMNBN. He and I had a long conversation last Thursday night. We discussed how things had been going between us and he finally came to a realization that I had reached awhile back, but didn't really want to admit. Things are just not meant to be for us relationship-wise. We had both been trying too hard to make things work out between us. It came down to us just being stubborn and neither of us wanting to call the flatline, but we finally did. Time of death, Thursday March 9th, 2006 about 11:00 PST. It was for the best. Now we can both get on with our lives and hopefully salvage a friendship out of the ashes of our doomed attempt at trying to be more than that... The timing actually turned out to be really good for the both of us. I talked to him today and it seems he met someone over the weekend that he's really into. That's good. I hope it's not just a reaction to things ending between us, but I don't think it is. He seems to genuinely like this girl, and I've met her, and she's great. I could see things working out between them if he behaves himself and doesn't fuck it up... here's hoping for him anyway... I must admit that I also have my eye on a new guy. It's too soon to know if it's going to go anywhere, but I see potential... How crazy is that? I soooo don't need to get involved with anyone right now. I barely have time for my life, why in the world would I want to throw a new guy into the mix? Because I'm a raving lunatic apparently... More on that if/when events progress. For now I'm keeping my mouth shut in the vain hope of not jinxing this before it even gets started... S-boy has paid me a visit at work the last two days. Things are really rolling for him. He's got a new agent and has been to a dozen big auditions in the last 2 weeks. He's gotten several of the parts too. Yay! for him! I'm so happy for him. He's a really good guy and has worked hard to get where he is in this town. He's shooting an episode of "Bones" on Thursday. He gets killed and is so thrilled with his death scene. Dork. I love him for his enthusiasm though. He hasn't become a jaded Hollywood asshole yet and hopefully that's a fate he'll avoid for a long time to come... I talked to TNI briefly today too. I really, really miss him and he was in a major funk so on top of missing him, now I'm worried about him too. I hate not being able to wave my magic wand and fix things. I also hate that I'm not there to tell him in person that everything is going to be alright... and it will... I have faith... Meanwhile, I seem to be charity-girl all of a sudden. In addition to the hockey thing in Seattle last weekend for the Ronald McDonald House, I'm now involved in this fundraising thing out here for a guy named Shen Hsu. He's an acupuncturist and general healer who has worked with a lot of big names out here in LA. He's also one of my bosses best friends and he's dying of a rare liver cancer. We're raising money for his treatment and have a big event at The Key Club on April 3rd. There is a raffle and a silent auction and the Hollywood community has been really great about donating all sorts of memorabilia and services and whatnot. Hopefully it will all be enough. Our goal is to raise at least 80,000 for him. Doable, but still a lot of $$$. If anyone is interested, go check out the website (www.saveshen.com). Ok, enough for tonight. I have GOT to get some sleep or I will be totally useless at work tomorrow. Hope everyone is having a great week!

"Charity is the power of defending that which we know to be indefensible. Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate." -- G. K. Chesterton

Digital Convert

I kicked and screamed and resisted buying a digital camera as long as I could. I felt the technology just couldn't do what I needed to do for a reasonable price. Sure, I could have shelled out a couple grand for a digital SLR a few years back, but it really wasn't in my budget. Well, a couple of months ago I got asked to shoot this charity hockey tournament up in Seattle and knew I'd need to shoot like 10 games over the course of two days and the thought of dragging along enough film to do that wasn't really thrilling me. So I caved and bought a Canon Digital Rebel. It's the digital version of the camera I already have so all my lenses and stuff work on it. I played with it a little before I headed up to Seattle this past weekend but didn't have a chance to shoot any hockey with it before I went. I brought along some regular film as back up, but decided to take the gamble and just shoot with the digital. I shouldn't have worried. Some of the shots I got are unbelieveable. I cranked the speed up to 1600 and the results are crisp, clear images that I never would have gotten with 1600 speed film. Don't get me wrong, I still love film and for my black and white work, my nature photography, and the more "artsy" stuff I do I'm sticking with real film, but for my sports stuff I'm a total digital girl now. I'm shooting a horse show the end of this month and I'm excited to see what kinda shots I get. I'm going to do some black and white "atmosphere" shots at the event, but for the action stuff I plan to shoot all digital. It should be a lot of fun... So as far as the Seattle trip went, I had a fucking blast. The weather was beautiful. (It was cold, but it didn't rain.) I hung out with my friend Liz who I met at last year's event and with her friends Tricia and Brian who had flown up from Florida for the games. I shot like 600 pictures, 200 of which I took during the celebrity game. I met Jason Priestly (who was very nice) and got to hang out with the brothers Rosenbaum. Michael was not his usual, jovial self. He was not feeling well and was kinda grumpy as a result. Still, he was great with all the kids from the Ronald McDonald house and I got to at least talk to him for a little while. I ended up spending most of my time after the game with his little brother Eric though. I had met Eric at last year's game but didn't really know him all that well. I must say he is now one of my favorite people. He is really sweet, he's funny, and he's a hell of a hockey player. He's also living in LA now which rocks! I need a hockey buddy in this town and now I potentailly have one. He loves minor league hockey like I do so I'm going to try and get him out to an Ice Dogs game before the season wraps up. Aside from his brother, he doesn't really know anybody out here so he's kinda in the same boat I am in that respect. We totally "bonded" over the whole spontaneously-moving-to-LA-for-no-real-reason-thing. He's a really cool guy and hopefully I'll get a chance to hang out with him some now that he's living here... So yeah, I would call the trip a success. It's going to take me days and days to go through all these shots and get the good ones sent back to the powers that be at the Ronald McDonald House up there, but the hard work will be soooo worth it. I got my name in the program for the event, I realized how much I miss shooting hockey, and I met some really amazing people. I call that time well spent :)

"Carpe diem! Rejoice while you are alive; enjoy the day; live life to the fullest; make the most of what you have. It is later than you think." -- Horace

The Best Of A Bad Year

2005 was not a great year for movies. Studios speculated endlessly on why that was, but the truth of the matter was there just really wasn't anything worth seeing. In 2004 I saw 121 films. Granted, I was on a personal mission to average 10 movies a month for that year, but I'm soooo glad I picked 2004 instead of 2005 to set that little goal for myself. I never would have made it. In 2005 I saw 46, which when I counted them up, kinda surprised me. I thought I had seen way less than that. That's not to say there weren't some good movies. There were several. (Many based on comic books I might add. "Batman," "Constantine," and "Sin City" leap quickly to mind.) There just weren't any truly GREAT movies. So the Oscars this year don't hold as much excitement for me as they usually do... which is fucked up and unfair since I'm finally back in Hollywood for them again... So, here are my predications in the major categories for tonight's awards. For the first time in a long, long time I haven't seen a lot of the nominated films, so a lot of these are pure speculation on my part.

Best Supporting Actress - I'm going with Rachel Weisz. I love her and I actually saw "The Constant Gardener" and thought she was great in it. Although I do think that Amy Adams could be the dark horse canidate here. All I ask is that it doesn't go to Michelle Williams...

Best Supporting Actor - Gotta be George Clooney. He's nominated in like every fucking category this year, but this is the one I think he gets. Paul Giamatti could get it to. He wasn't great in "Cinderella Man," but voters may want to make up for the fact that they fucked him out of a nomination for "Sideways" last year...

Best Actress - This race is a toss up. I could see either Reese Witherspoon or Felicity Huffman winning it. Personally, I'm pulling for Reese.

Best Actor - I'm so torn on this one. As you all know, I LOVE Joaquin Phoenix. He was #1 on my "list" for a long time and he's still solidly in my top 5, but I just don't know if he can beat Phillip Seymour Hoffman... and I don't know that he should. PSH is an amazing actor and is way overdue to win on of the little gold guys. I'm happy with either one of them walking away with it.

Best Director - If anyone other than Ang Lee wins this I'll be very, very surprised.

Best Picture - The general consensus seems to be that this'll go to "Brokeback Mountain." It probably will... but I'd like to see "Crash" pull off the upset just because I'm sick of Brokeback winning everything... and besides, "Crash" was a damn fine film. All the nominees in this category are a little weak this year. None of them scream "Best Picture" to me and I'm disappointed that "A History of Violence" didn't get a nod.

So there you go. My predictions for what it's worth. Honestly, the category I'm most interested in is Best Animated feature. I'm hoping "Hauru No Ugoku Shiro" ("Howl's Moving Castle") takes it, but "Corpse Bride" or "Curse of the Were-Rabbit" would be fine choices as well... I do have to say that it's odd for me not to have plans on Oscar night. Two years ago Lindy and I were out here for the big ROTK Oscar bash and it was amazing. We had a lot of fun, but that year aside, we always at least had our own little Oscar night gathering. By last year at this time, things had already started to get weird between us, but we stuck to the tradition and still got together to watch the awards. I miss that. I'm sad to have lost that, but it seems to be the way of things. I can't pinpoint any one moment where things went irreversibly wrong, but it must have happened. I never understood why people who had been married for a long time could suddenly find themselves in the middle of a divorce, but now I have a better idea of how it can happen, and sometimes you really don't even see it coming. Things just happen so quickly that you don't have time to repair all the damage and before you know it, it's just over. That makes me sadder than anything else. To know that maybe it was just meant to work out that way. It was ka's plan all along that you come to this particular fork in the road and each of you is destined to take a different road to your destiny... Wow, look at me being all reflective and shit all of a sudden... enough of that... No darkness for me today please and thank you... I'm off to the book store and the comic book shop and then am going to settle in to watch the Oscar festivities...

"All right, fine. It's 'ka,' everybody's favorite whipping-boy. That's what the great unseen world is for, after all, isn't it?So we don't have to take the blame for our acts of stupidity?" -- Stephen King - "The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass"

Rubber Chickens And Great Tag Lines

So here I sit, on a borrowed computer in a house I probably shouldn't be in in the first place, let alone left to my own devices and all by my lonesome... I could find so much trouble to get into... if I were so inclined... but I'm not. I'll be good... I promise :) So I'm watching "Justice League" and this ep is too funny. Lex Luthor and The Flash have switched bodies. Poor Rosenbaum just can't get away from playing Luthor. Talk about type-casting... hehe... It was a weirder than normal week here in LA. I blame the rain and the Oscars. Traffic was a nightmare and the city's population I think doubled in size. Still, it wasn't all bad. I had dinner on Wednesday night with a producer/director who at the very least wants to read my script. I don't honestly expect him to option it, but at least it's getting read, right? Who knows, maybe he'll point me in the right direction for some financing options or something. The best part was that I got the meeting at all. I got this guy's phone # from a mutual friend, picked up the phone, and actually called him. What can I say, I was feeling ballsy that day... and for any of you that really know me, you know how fucking hard it was for me to do something like that. So woo hoo! A small victory for me on that front... Guerilla networking. It's going to be big... hehe... I'm in a weird mood today. I've got a friend in town that I haven't seen in awhile and he's going through some rough personal shit and so I've just been hanging out with him trying to be supportive and whatnot... He had to go out for a little while tonight so I'm just hanging out at his place watching TV. We did some running around this afternoon and I have decided that some people should not be allowed out to play with the general public. This guy is definitely one of them. We stopped at the grocery store to pick up a few things and in addition to getting milk and bread and other such staples, we also came away with a rubber chicken. Yes, you read that correctly. A rubber chicken. You would be right to ask, "Why?" I asked that question myself and was told, "How often do you find rubber chickens at the grocery store? How can we NOT buy it?" Ummm. Ok. Freak. Still, it wasn't really a point I could argue. He was right. How often do you actually find rubber chickens at the grocery store? I got some writing done the past few days so can I get a woo hoo! from the peanut gallery on that one? I would like to have done more, but I got kinda hung up and was spinning my literary wheels for awhile. I had planned to work on this "Samurai Champloo" meets "Kill Bill" meets "Memoirs of a Geisha" thing I've had running around in my head for the past few weeks. It's about this woman named Sukiko who becomes a samurai in an attempt to get her daughter back from these guys who kidnapped her, but it became startlingly clear to me that my knowledge of Japanese history and legend is woefully small so that one is now on hold until I have the time to do a little more research. So I worked on the Western (tentatively titled, "Black Canyon"). I'm about half-way through the outline. I also bounced some ideas off my friend for this sorta film-noir project called "Smoke." It's very much in the "Chinatown" or "L.A. Confidential" vein and I think it has potential. We also worked on tweaking my current script. (Originally called "F*cked" then called "Screwed," then called "Unraveled" and now I'm thinking of changing it yet again. This time to "The Widening Gyre." I know most of you haven't read it, but if you have, and you know the WB Yeats poem, "The Second Coming," then you know this new title soooo fits...) We didn't change much, but it needed a few little things done to it before I send it off to this producer/director on Monday. I also now have the perfect tag line for it. I can just see it on the poster. "Have you ever loved someone so much that you wanted to kill them?" I wish I could take credit for it, but that wasn't me. We were talking and he said it and I was like, "whoa. stop. let me write that down." He's like that. He just sometimes says things that you KNOW need to be in a script somewhere. It's part of the reason I like hanging out with him :) (He had another one that I'm soooo putting in a scene someday. We were talking about great sex and he said, "You know how sometimes you're with someone and everything just 'clicks?' That someone who makes you cum so hard that your eyes roll back into your head and you just know you could die happy?" Ok, so it probably won't be in a project for Disney or anything, but still, it's a great fucking line :) Ok, enough rambling for today. I didn't get in to the Vanity Fair party so I'll be watching the Oscars at home on TV like everyone else. That's ok. I'll try and post my picks tomorrow before the big event... Now I'm off to see if I can find a Chinese take-out menu. I'm soooo craving me some Chinese food tonight...

"Be careful with my head. That's where I keep all my one-liners." -- The Flash