The doom of our time
Jan 31 2005 - 8:52 a.m.

You know what? January sucked. I mean, I guess January always sucks. Actually, in my case, I think it's February that's more prone to being the "dark month," the month where SAD and other factors all collide together in a fruity pot pourri of depressing evil. This year, January kicked and fought its way to the top with little or no resistance. It was a bad, bad month; it was emotionally and physically destructive and exhausting.

I'm doing very well at this point. I had one really awful week, where it seemed like the lights were turned permanently out and everything just came to a standstill. (When I was younger, my worst nightmares were always the ones where I could turn the lights on, but the lights were always too dim to make a difference.) That was a little over two weeks ago now, and like a good kick in the pants, it was a necessary reminder of the importance of mental discipline, and keeping all your shit in a row. Since then it's only been a matter of surviving this unbelievable cold that has been clinging to Toronto - a couple of days of really frigid weather I can handle, but twelve in a row is pushing it - which has kept me indoors a lot more than I'd like, and virtually eliminated walking from my roster of de-stressing activities. Now that the cold is finally broken, I'm finding that I have more energy than I know what to do with.

February's shaping up nicely, which translates to "busy;" I've got a good gig on the horizon, a music video (!) to shoot, subculture standing over my shoulder as usual, a new script to write methinks, and I'm still waiting to hear back about that Charles Street residency, which would be quite the icing at this point. I've been doing a bit more journal research than usual, going over some old files and filling in gaps in my personal history. Add to that the fact that I finished my York University DVD last night, which has everything from '95 to '99 except for Separated (my Super-8 projector broke on Saturday night) and St. Lawrence Market (wait for the documentary). I'm going to get Infinitely Brown Productions Vol. 5 done tonight or tomorrow, since it's almost done anyway, and then Vol. 2, and then maybe take a break from DVDs for a while and actually get something new made, yeah?

I'm doing my damndest to find a good copy of The Art of the Empire Strikes Back. With the end of the road coming, it's the only major gap in my collection. In the meantime, I have my grandfather's pipe, and spring's coming.

Satiation
Jan 30 2005 - 4:01 p.m.

I've been putting this DVD together of my York projects, which lead to me watching The Positively True Adventures of a Teenaged Girl in Love, which my sister both starred in, and helped write. And ladies and gentlemen, my sister. Wow. I'd forgotten almost the entire movie, but lordy lordy there's some funny shit in there. She's asked me to put her in this year's 1-minute movie because she wants to see herself on the big screen... I might just have to take her up on that.

I was talking to Dave this afternoon about filmmaking and writing and whatnot, and something that's been on my mind lately is that for the first time in three years, I'm not actively writing anything right now. I came up with an idea for a quickie feature film about a week ago, but immediately restrained myself from writing it, because I didn't want to head down another dead end street writing something that I might never finish.

Uh... hum-nu? Matt, are you in there?

Yeah. I gotta get back on that horse. I can't believe that the thought process above ever even tracked through my mind. I'm busy right now; I still haven't started the subculture shot list, nor heard back from CSV, and February's already stacking up fairly tall, but still. An hour a day. A coffee shop. This shit ain't hard.

It has lately become a fascination of mine to try the eggs benedict at every breakfast-serving establishment I can get my hands on. I'm not sure what the purpose of this is, as I am not recording my responses in any cogent fashion, either here or in my journal. Thus far, the best benny I've had has been at Sharky's, although the second time I had it was far less successful than the first, so the recipe might have been changed, or one or the other might have been a fluke. At some point in the next couple of weeks, once my long-delayed roast chicken is behind me, I'm going to be trying to make both my own mayonnaise and my own hollandaise, so I'm sure home-cooked benny can't be far away. And then, who knows what will become of Operation Benedict? Does this sort of mission ever have an end?

Close the Book (Part 1)
Jan 30 2005 - 10:44 a.m.

I finished The Lord of the Rings this morning, which would make my score 48 days; I suspect that this not only beats my previous readings by a sizeable margin, but probably beats previous readings of the individual books. This would have been my third time through the complete text, and my fourth time overall (owing to my habit of reading each book in the summer preceding their film's release), and it was easily the most enjoyable, not just in the ways that the various characters and backstories have finally been made clear to me by Peter Jackson's trilogy, but in all the little nooks and crannies that have nothing to do with the films, but into which I could now fall with a full understanding of what they meant and where they were leading.

Chris was writing something similar to this the other day, too, and for me it's just as real: I'm coming near the end of all this. I mean to make my second attempt at The Silmarillion in the spring, and the timing for that task seems perfect, but I think that I shall not read The Lord of the Rings again for many years, or more likely, many decades. It's part of a distant future now, when more will have changed than I am capable of imagining.

End of an ERa
Jan 29 2005 - 9:37 p.m.

It was a long, slow decline, but I can now authoritatively say that I don't give a fuck about E.R. any more. In fact, I'm actually starting to dislike the show rather intensely; I certainly don't have the time for it, and the three episodes that piled up on my PVR this month are proof that I don't even start to miss it when I haven't seen it for a while. If I could level even half of the excitement I feel every week while waiting for a new episode of House against my former favourite medical drama, maybe I'd still have something. But fuck, I don't even care enough to find out when the episodes are new these days.

I spent a lot of time tonight trying to get my second-year films on DVD, which proved damn near impossible thanks to a resoundingly uncooperative computer, but the timing was apt, given that 2nd year was the year that all five of my films carried the "Emergency Room Productions" closing card. And man, I have rarely in my life been so enthralled by a television program as I was by E.R. back then. I was ass over teakettle in love with that show. I wore the clothes, hummed the music, stayed up for 24 hour shifts just to see if I could do it. Good times. I wish the end had been more decisive, rather than five or six long years of feeling less and less interested with each passing day.

I was gonna call this post "Apparently today is all about Dakota Fanning" and then talk about how much I hate that kid. And then I quailed because picking on an 11-year-old, no matter how freakishly unnatural, is mean.

C'mon, internet, give me something cool to do....

Apparently today is all about Paul Giamatti
Jan 28 2005 - 8:56 p.m.

I am becoming intensely disturbed by people who say that they identify with Paul Giamatti. It happened so many times after American Splendour that I began to become genuinely concerned for the mental health of my friends, and now it's happening again with Sideways. In both films, Giamatti plays a physically repulsive, underachieving, self-loathing toad who hates just about everything and everyone in the universe, except for the single narrow frame of understanding with which he defines himself as a person. The Hope Davis character in Splendour is the same thing along different lines, a manic, frantic, bipedal anus with the worldly charms of an overripe turnip. And all the time I hear people compare themselves to either Giamatti, or Davis, or both. This is how these people see themselves? Are there really so many folks wandering around out there with such abysmally low self-esteem that not only do they like these characters, but they feel represented by them?

Yikes. And also "ugh."

I mean, I'm sure Giamatti's a nice guy in real life. But as an actor, he's made a cottage industry out of playing the lowest rungs of the human ladder, not in the usual neo-nazi child-molestor sort of way, but in the simple denial to ever even attempt to connect with anything more real than a comic book or a glass of Pinot Noir, and an utter ongoing refusal to make any effort at self-betterment. We're supposed to be more than that. All of us deserve to be. And anybody who looks in the mirror and sees Harvey Pekar's face looking back might want to seriously consider making some changes.

Apparently today is all about Jennifer Garner
Jan 27 2005 - 4:15 p.m.

Yep, not only did I see Elektra today at great reluctance and end up really enjoying myself, and then come home and write a review for the film that I would call one of my personal favourites over at least the last year, but I also got all caught up on Alias last night. I'd fallen about three weeks behind because everyone kept telling me that the episodes just weren't very good. Well, fuck that - they were in fact mighty, and the Jeffrey Bell episode - his first for the series, which he of course both wrote and directed - was actually fairly brilliant. Bringing in Kelly MacDonald as the lead guest star was a master stroke, and Vartan just kicked some major ass dealing with the Lauren aftershocks. Their scenes together were way beyond the levels of emotional complexity I've come to expect from the show, and just further proof that when you get two good actors together at a table and have them just play a scene, it doesn't matter if bombs are going off or the fate of the globe is at stake - tension is in moments, it's in eyeballs, it's in the way people talk. Mesa very impressed. If we can't have our Whedon, at least we've still got our Abrams (and his Whedon-groomed task force of hunter-killer writers).

Shooting Unabridged! is going to be a bit more complicated than I thought. I didn't like what I got today. It's okay, though; I've got 8 more copies of the Now issue, and a hell of a lot of time on my hands.

Hungry
Jan 26 2005 - 8:13 p.m.

The word they use is "hungry," and it refers somehow to youthful ambition, and the do-or-die zeal that the young apply to their goals. In my line of work, it's the sort of ferocity that got El Mariachi made for seven thousand bucks, or caused Coppola and Lucas to form American Zoetrope in San Fran on the assumption that they could make American filmmaking work outside the Hollywood system. This concept has been on my mind lately, probably because I've been watching 70s-era DVD supplementals (THX, Duel), and because I'm mounting my first feature film this year, and because I'm seeing remarkably varied colours of hunger and desperation among my entire circle of friends, from lurid reds to wan greens. More towards the latter. I'm not seeing much hunger any more, and compared to the vigour that explodes recklessly out of The Jig Is Up (heading to DVD as we speak), I'm barely feeling it myself, although it remains at least solidly represented; the difference is that I'm no longer willing to throw down literally anything to get subculture made. If I win the lottery this weekend, I'll buy a house and a car, and take care of all of the debts, and get my future lined up, and go on various vacations, long before I'd even attempt to tackle my feature, although I still think it'd go to camera this year. The urgency isn't there, nor is the certainty that this is the one thing I'll spend the rest of my life doing. Maybe it'll come back. Maybe I don't need it. Maybe it doesn't matter. I'm more balanced like this; I just took a walk in the freakish cold to find Now Magazines before they're replaced by tomorrow's issue, but if I hadn't found them, it wouldn't have been the end of the world. My pace is slower, but I'm noticing the detours and the side roads and the alternate plans of attack a lot more than I used to. There's less dogmatism and more pragmatism, but sometimes I miss the racecar rev and the feel of the setting sun on the highway. As I walked, I thought about the lottery. I thought about my friends. And I thought about being hungry, and who is and who isn't, and whether it matters.

Analogy
Jan 26 2005 - 6:36 p.m.

Last night I dreamed that I was shooting a new movie - possibly my new Unabridged! movie - on 500 asa colour film stock. I was in the lab processing the film and things hadn't come out quite as I'd wanted, but I was pleasantly nostalgic about the little film boxes and the smell of the chemicals and the feeling of the wet celluloid between my fingers. I was also somewhat bummed about having ended my 7-year no-film mandate so unceremoniously; so bummed, in fact, that when I woke up this morning realizing it had just been a dream, I actually smiled. And then I realized just now that this was actually the second time I've had a dream about this in the past week - at some point on the weekend, I dreamed that I was visiting Kodak, and was given a short end of (again, for some reason) 500 asa colour film stock to test. It was a new stock, a Fuji stock (rather uncongrously) and I was excited about it, but again bummed about the implications of the imminent end of my digital megalopoly. Something is clearly on its way to happening.

I picked this droid.

I finished The Two Towers today and strode straight into The Return of the King; there are less than 270 pages left in Lord of the Rings before I'm done, making this - at just north of a month - easily the fastest I've ever read the tome. I could have done it far faster, too; I meandered through Fellowship in well over three weeks, but once the narrative throttled down and started actually moving (Khazad-dum again), I started taking the story in massive 100- and 50-page chunks. Once I'm done this, I get to do my day-long Lord of the Rings movie marathon, and start my Star Wars books, which I am titanically excited about, beyond reasonable measure. It's becoming clear that I really oughta read Jedi Trial and Dark Rendezvous, as well, but I'm going to get through these two first.

The great tide of Star Wars obsession (pun intended) is rolling higher and higher with each passing day. Nothing between today and May 19 - except, maybe Celebration III - is anywhere near as important as that. (And as for Celebration, my documentary now has a title. And it's hilarious.)

Meanwhile, the biggest problem with the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels is that people think I really give a fuck. I recently described it thus: with POTC 1, I never expected nor needed to enjoy the film. I got a great, enjoyable film for free, under the most unlikely circumstances, and against the greatest odds. I am by no means stupid enough to think that lightning can be caught in this particular bottle twice, or a third time. Will I see POTC 2 and 3? Of course. Do I want them to be good? Sure, it'd be nice. Do I think it would be absolutely hilarious if Mark was in one of them? Yes, clearly. Do I give a rat's pinkhole about the casting of Chow Yun-Fat, Stellan Skarsgård, or even Keith Richards? Yaddakadeedaka no. Good lord no. What difference does it make?

GWL
Jan 25 2005 - 10:54 p.m.

There have always been a few things in this life that have had a bizarre ongoing hold on me, and this image is one of them. It's George Lucas on the set of THX-1138, demonstrating to the robocop just how he wants him to malfunction. I can't imagine when I first saw this shot, but it was probably when I was 12 or 13. It's lingered with me my whole life. It's my very favourite image of "what a director does." I've recently hung a copy outside my bedroom door, near the "This is what we do to the films that suck" snapshot. It's a wall of artistic intent, that.

On the subway on the way to the Metric concert the other day I saw a visual that was interesting enough to make me think that it might be just about time to stage my next Unabridged! short tomorrow. Yet another instance of "I should always carry my camera," but I think I can re-stage the event successfully enough to pass.

River-Pussy Blogging Evenstar
Jan 25 2005 - 4:21 p.m.

My ass is freaking killing me. Yesterday I thought up a slogan for a Nintendo snowboarding game: "All the snowboarding, half the ass-pain." Because yeah. Sitting on a couch playing video games makes your ass hurt, too. But not like this.

So: the TTC can afford to put a series of hi-definition televisions in Bloor Station to run CP24 without the sound on, but they can't afford to fix the token machine at Pape. They're looking at doing another fare hike to cover costs, yet they can apparently afford to run a third series of banner ads proclaiming their various employees to be heroes. Give me a fucking break. And on that last point, let's put this in plain writing: TTC employees are not heroes. Or if they are, the six-odd miscreants that the administration has picked for their hero campaign definitely are not. How unbelievably degrading is it for our entire species, when this organization is lauding its employees for doing what any sane or reasonable person in the situation would do? Calling transit control because a baby is choking on your subway does not make you a hero; nor does radioing your boss after seeing a crazy guy on your bus twice in the same day. This is called common fucking sense. In fact, it's more accurately called the least you can do. For this, Dave Kemp and Mbari Hogun are given movie-poster-sized pictures of themselves in every station, proclaiming them to be among the best of the staff? The whole goddamned organization should be burned to the ground.

Let's all cheer up by watching some Teen Girl Squad! It nicely incorporates my love of teen girls with my hatred of teen girls. And if I didn't know better, I'd swear that the voices were all done by Nini.

The Oscar nominations are so apalling, I will probably not watch the show this year, for the first time since.... I 'unno, ever? Yep, I'm going to throw it out there: anyone throwing an Oscar party in '05 is a loser. Fight the power! Fight the power!

The only delights were seeing the two best scores of the year receive nomintaions, in spite of the fact that nominating John Williams is so twenty years ago, and that nobody liked The Village. Oh, and Brad Bird getting a screenplay nod for an animated film was pretty cool too, even if it had to be The Incredibles.

And then there's this. McFarlane has picked up a license to do Simpsons toys, and is starting soon. I'm sorry, but the Playmates Simpsons line just belly-upped after five years, and regardless, I don't personally see how it can be improved upon anyway. Those toys were tight. Why is this being attempted?

I'm thinking of doing a recurring feature about the best words in the English language. I was already thinking about it before Bex espoused upon mucilagenous, but she put fire under my arse.

Yesterday, Jeff coined the following:

"There are two types of the people in the world: Blog writers, and blog readers."

He blew my mind.

Every single Jedi is now an enemy of the Republic
Jan 23 2005 - 4:07 p.m.

"I don't seem to remember ever owning a droid."

LIAR!!

Jason and I hit the Zellers on the Queensway today after brunch, and picked up the last-ever Star Wars preview figure wave ever ever ever. Yup, I'm putting Star Wars on my credit card. Like, as a concept.

I grabbed Obi-Wan's droid first, just out of luck; for "just another droid," it's a pretty frickin' sweet droid. Grievous is predictably excellent, as is Tion Medon (my second Bruce Spence action figure in under a month? Zuh?), but the Wookiee really surprised me - the fucker is so large, he can't stand on top of my monitor while wearing his helmet. Massive, weighty, and very very cool. That's scale, baby. I love scale.

Metric concert tonight (yeah that's right, and I'm crankin' it right now, twist that in your mind) and then sweet, blissful, freeze-your-sweet-everlovin'-ass-off snowboarding all day tomorrow. My mom stocked me up with all kinds of boarding-friendly warmies over Christmas, so I'm really looking forward to seeing if they can resist the -25° wind that will do its very damndest to knock me clear off the top of Tranquility Peak. At the very least, the deep green fleece vest is stylish as hell.

Gonna go cook Nuclear Risotto for my girl, which makes me happy. Keep it chilly, nuthuggers.

Bea happy
Jan 23 2005 - 1:44 a.m.

Yeah that's right, Mer got me a Bea Arthur t-shirt.

A long time for the last time
Jan 22 2005 - 9:27 a.m.

I woke up before time today; the wind still pulling the cloud of snow around the house in an endless circle. The windows were spackled with it. As I stood in the kitchen waiting for my tea, the pots hanging from the rack began quietly tapping out their own bizarre rhythms, point and counterpoint, Yunluo beats being performed telepathically by Buddhists half a world away. When I woke up I immediately felt like writing - this, among other things - but the first few sentences out were enough to stall me. I should be keeping a laptop in bed with me, like Robert Rodriguez; the computer's warm-up time is always enough to throw a blanket on the smoke. I compelled myself to write because I had that dream again, the dream I might continue to have for the rest of my life regardless of reality, the dream where I'm watching the next Star Wars movie for the first time. Tonight's dream was the first time I really had a measure of the intensity of looking up at that screen and knowing that it was the last time it would ever happen. Maybe I dreamed it because I was watching the mangled director's cut of THX before bed; maybe I populated it from guests at Lise's party, or maybe it was the complete guest list of my life - why else would Jonatha and my Aunt Cathy be there? It was a massive banquet hall arrayed with tables, and the whole point was the waiting - the last piss (with Chad in a men's room that looked like a boys' change room from high school), the anxious arraying of coats and jackets in the seat (as Jason became Mark while Adam critiqued the process), the wondering if I should buy a ticket for the show immediately following, but no I can't, because it's Christmas Eve and my parents will want me home. So if this ramble bears no relation to the place I just inhabited, I'm sure the blog gods will forgive me, because the only real message or point of this is the thing I've known since I was seven years old: all this is going to end. And after that, who knows?

Oblogation
Jan 21 2005 - 10:34 p.m.

• TTC employees don't do their jobs
• Toy hunt emotionally enjoyable but a resounding failure
• 106 pages of Two Towers in a single day
• Leon Marr exercises on DVD; insert Earthquake still to right?
• Welldigger's bum
• "Every single Jedi is now an enemy of the Republic"
• Point Pleasant pilot embarassingly awful from the moment the first impossibly-"gorgeous" character opens their mouth
• Good but tired; weekend looking sweet; snowboarding Monday
• purple monkey dishwasher.

Just buy me a day pass and call me a Ranger
Jan 21 2005 - 11:05 a.m.

"How many toys do you think, Gold 5?"

"Say about four toys. Some on the surface, some on the towers."

Tally-ho!

She's so lovely
Jan 20 2005 - 2:28 p.m.

Holy shit!

And the race is on: the One Minute Film & Video Festival web site gets a facelift today, and a brand new theme for the 2005 films. Check it out!

Now we're getting somewhere
Jan 20 2005 - 1:09 p.m.

All right, we can start making the movie now: Tederick has acquired its very own wheelchair, for the low low price of finding it in a ditch outside an old folks' home. It belonged to a woman named "Hazel," and her fate cannot be ascertained. Otherwise it's in good shape; the tires are a bit flat, but it'll clean up nicely. I've just saved the flick $400 in Steadicam Jr. rentals. And when I found it, it really did feel like "okay now we can get started."

I was in Urban Outfitters yesterday and I realized that when I did the vagina post last month, I left a key term off the list o' vag-slang, and it's one of the most offensive such phrases in the language: "down there," the golden haven for blushing schoolgirls, irresponsible parents, and the sexually repressed the world over. I knew I'd forgotten something important! Bah I say.

Richard Hatch, Tederick.com's Man of the Year in 2000, has pleaded guilty to tax evasion for not declaring his Survivor winnings. My only real response to this is: "yeah, and?" I'm just kind of astonished that it took the authorities this long to figure out that Hatch - the most visible million-dollar winner of the past half-decade - hadn't declared the loot. Where were they in April 2001? Watching Survivor 2?

And animated Spaceballs? Meh. I watched the last Family Guy last night; this would make me all caught up on this show. I still (to shocked cries of disbelief from Mark and Adam) call it a wildly uneven show, but there's no denying that the sucker's occasionally got punch.

Fear not, ladies, there is another.

Bloggin' it up on American blog show
Jan 19 2005 - 10:03 a.m.

So it turns out that all these years, there has indeed been an Easterling action figure, which I've been yearning. It's just completely sold out and damn hard to find. Yay. Ditto for Faramir: hidden right under my very nose. Well, I can wait.

Free Comic Book Day has landed; it's on May 7 this year, which I guess means it's following the release of... what? Pretty much nothing. I'm stunned that they haven't tried to tie FCBD into the release of Fantastic Four, Batman Begins, or Sin City. Well, whatever. There's a Star Wars book, as usual, along with a lot of other great titles... check out the deets here.

And to continue the downward trend of backdoor directors on the franchise, Warner Brothers has officially signed David Yates to direct Harry Potter 5. Due to his complete inexperience and lack of any kind of an industry name, the press release reads like a comedy routine. What are they trying to achieve here?

Teabag my balls
Jan 18 2005 - 5:55 p.m.

Just got back from a Loblaws shopping spree, wherein I did indeed spend about double the amount of money I had intended to... but in the plus column, I now have my own Port Salut. Take that. Meanwhile, I've been sucking back Earl Grey Green Tea all day like nobody's business. I think my usual mid-January anti-oxidants kick is safely in full swing.

No rest for the productive; Chris has been celebrating the completion of his CSV application by watching movies all day, but I've been in the throes of updating the 1MFVF site for the 2005 season - the changes, including the announcement of this year's theme, will be online by Thursday - and now I've got to do a bit of monkeying around on the Tederick Films site, too. I'm not quite ready to start designing a subculture site yet, but when I do, you'll know it's game on.

What would my amusing Treehouse of Horror credit name be? Nothing ever as simply elegant as James Hell Brooks, certainly, and Matthew Centipede Brown has been done to death. Maybe Matthew "I C. Dead People" Brown. Or Matthew C. Brown Like The Cold Cold Ground. Oh hell, I dunno.

The zombie mushrooms of the eighth dimension
Jan 18 2005 - 1:01 p.m.

We don't hear enough about zombies anymore. I mean, maybe we do, with the spate of zombie movies lately (Resident Evil, 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead), yet I don't feel there's enough zombie in our culture right now. I had a zombie character in subculture at one point but I think he isn't in the current draft. I was going to play him myself, but now I'm playing the dead guy at the end, so that's out. But yeah... there should be a zombie in that flick. Or maybe eight.

Last night, Kate put into words something that's been bugging me for the past few weeks, but hadn't really coalesced in my mind: the blogs all pretty much suck right now. I mean they don't "suck" as in "the bag," but there isn't anything really blowing my skirt up, either in my blog, or the blogs of others. It's all tame, competent work, with very little exception. (The exceptions are out there, but I don't want to name names because people will get pissed off at me. Or pissed-er off at me.) I'm theorizing that everyone kind of blew their gaskets in the last few weeks of 2004, and the beginning of '05 has been a bit of a blah season for everyone. Myself, I've written about three posts since January 1 that I actually entirely like. The rest are way too hit-and-miss for my favour.

I'm going to combat the phenomena the only way I know how: with more bloggy goodness. And "goodness" in this case may be entirely subjective.

Last night was our first soccer game of the new season; it's an indoor season for obvious reasons. And it was something else, man. Actually, most of all it was like combat, or like the closest combat analogue I've been exposed to in my life, which is paintball. It happens way too fast; you're constantly reacting to things that happened three moves ago, instead of what's happening right now; and when that kill stroke comes, you're not even going to see it. It's a lot to get used to. And it's being played in a ratty old high school gym, and you know how smell is the number one key to unlocking memories in the human brain? Well stick me in a pair of bright red gym shorts with a grey t-shirt, because I was a fucking grade 9 again last night. Only without the furtive glances around the changeroom to chart my position on the "Pubic Hair Growth-o-Meter."

I got Labyrinth of Evil in the mail this morning, a week before it's supposed to be available; the nards at Chapters shipped it separately from Cestus, by, like, three hours. I literally got the first shipping confirmation e-mail ("We were not able to ship your items together, as one is currently unavailable; we will ship it when it arrives in our warehouse") and then got the second one the next time I checked my e-mail ("We have now shipped your second item; your order is complete"). I hate watching resources be wasted in my name.

Whoa this is getting long. Sorry.

Yesterday was Zam's 2-year anniversary with me! And not only did I forget all about it, the only significant activity I did with her all day was trimming her nails! When I trim her nails, she actually begins doing the best Linda Blair impression you'll ever see on this earth. She hisses, she spits, she spasms violently, she seems to be trying to regurgitate her entire digestive tract through her nose. If she could spin her head all the way around, she'd do it. It's not like she doesn't try.

Family Guy finally has a date: May 1 2005! Set those PVRs! And Peter Jackson has confirmed Lovely Bones, at long last. Already more excited about this than Kong. (But I'm pretty fucking excited about Kong.)

Shoulder Cat is hurting me
Jan 17 2005 - 2:12 p.m.

3QF is a beehive of activity, as Chris and I are squaring away our respective last-minute Command-Zed proposals. I wrote mine in the high art intellectu-whore style, before I realized that such a style did not gel appropriately with the intended tone of my piece, so I wrote in a few jokes. I'm giving them Sensitivity and VCR as my support materials. They'll get the idea. Unless the idea sucks.

And yesterday I actually wrote my first real professional budget. It almost gave me a boner. The budget is $894.30 after contingency, but relies largely on allotments provided by the residency, so it probably won't cost me more than a few hundred bucks if I get picked. Lawrence Green would be so proud of me. Or maybe he'd be "who the hell are you?" on account of his never really having had any idea who I was.

Riker
Jan 17 2005 - 10:57 a.m.

Who doesn't love Riker?

You can't mistake a vagina
Jan 16 2005 - 1:09 a.m.

No one waved their coochie in my face at any point tonight, which is a shame, because (as Tederick.com readers are aware), I'm fond of the puss. But fortunately, the 3QF dinner/screening/evening/dealie went very well. My vegematarian chili turned out a hell of a lot hotter than I expected it to, which is dumb, because I basically quadrupled the spice (I usually only double it) and the results should have been plain. Still, for vegematarian, it's pretty fucking good chili. For my film, I showed Centipede, and it's amazing to me that the cut to Edith right at the beginning can still get a gigantic reaction from a crowd, even if that crowd has never seen Edith before at all. Chris actually said that the film was superior to Night of the Centipedes, but then, he'd drank quite a bit of mead.

Brenda showed a fascinating Butoh movie shot in downtown Toronto; Brandy showed her Mosquito movie; Dave tossed up both his Mosquito flick and his On the Fly film; April, being not a filmmaker, showcased some of her art; Steve brought nothing. (He's an editor. Maybe it was a statement.) Samara was a surprise guest and brought The Absence of Emily, while Chris premiered his LEGO super-flick, starring my very own kitty Zam, ZamBot27. It was a little like watching 2001 for the first time. Daniel, meanwhile, brought the film he'd cut for the Vs. series, a comissioned group of films where a performance artist videotapes themselves doing their bit, and then the tape is turned over to one of the filmmakers to re-edit. Since the process is entirely one-way and (in most cases) largely destructive, my response was "why do the editors get to win?" I'd love to see a second series where the artists get their tapes back and get to fuck with the editors a bit.

Daniel was also instrumental in giving me one last gasp of hope at this CSV residency; the flick will probably be called either Command Zed Override or This Is What We Do. Of course, to make it work, I'm going to have to haul ass for the next 39-odd hours to make the deadline, which is probably impossible. It's late and I'm tired and tomorrow's a mess. But we'll see.

Twilight of the credit card
Jan 15 2005 - 11:05 a.m.

Well, it's started. Mark the date, because my Revenge of the Sith buying frenzy officially started today.

Yep, the release of the cover art for three of the "big four" hardcover Star Wars books I'll be buying in the spring (I think the Visual Dictionary cover was released last month, no?) prompted me to do a little backstory clean-up; I bought The Cestus Deception, a Clone Wars adventure for Obi-Wan, and Labyrinth of Evil, the hardcover novel that ties directly into the prelude for Episode III. (Like Obsession. And Clone Wars Season Three. And every other goddamn thing in the entire Expanded Universe for the next five goddamned months.)

There's no way around it, the Star Wars excitement is rolling in on me bigtime, for the very last time ever. It's lovely. And it's actually kinda nice not to have Serenity between here and there, because now, I can focus. And if the "Twilight of the Jedi" Post Note didn't get Hyperspace members excited (with my very favourite George Lucas direction ever, "So, be sure to twist your body this way, swing the lightsaber back that way, and shout out as you go down. Don't be afraid to scream."), how about the name of the opera that old Palpy is seeing at the Galaxies Theatre: Squid Lake? Will there be a Watcher in the waters, me wonders?

The other day I mentally budgeted about $500 for Star Wars spending after Indianapolis. And then I laughed merrily to myself and realized that it would almost certainly end up being closer to a thousand, if I'm stingy.

But really, it's only money. And I am only a geek.

The Episode III preview wave of toys is expected to hit within the next couple of weeks, and then it's a fast frenzied race to the first two proper waves in April, and the spendapalooza that will be Celebration III. Actually, I'm not planning on spending much money in Indiana, beyond food and videotapes; my intended experience has an entirely different purpose than the big Star Wars freak-out that it will be for most people. But we all know how poor my judgment can be in these areas.

Happy geek.

I never wanted truth at 24 frames per second
Jan 14 2005 - 5:52 p.m.

So long in the making I've literally lost count, Infinitely Brown Productions Vol. 1 is finally done and burned to DVD. There are still a few kinks to work out in the layout, but that's easy money compared to the unending turmoil it's taken to get this far. The disk spans 1990 to early 1993, and the crowning achievement of that span, Centipede, will be shown to a disbelieving group of (soon to be former) fans of Night of the Centipedes tomorrow night. It was our first movie that really felt like a movie, and if it's complete assgarbage now, who cares? It still makes Mark and I jump up and down like 15-year-old boys, and you can't put a price on that sort of thing.

Vol. 2 shouldn't take anywhere near this long; it only covers the Royal Flushes, along with the blooper reel and Stanley's Christmas Carol. Once I clear up some drive space, we'll be good to go.

I had my first grapefruit today (not ever, just this season), and I can already feel the clouds beginning to clear. I've also upped my yoga to thrice weekly; Kate and I are supplementing our solo sessions with occasional duo fun at her apartment, which is way better than doing it at 3QF, because a) there's an actual floor, and b) there's a bit of leg room. And if there are cats who occasionally like to run up my back during Upward Dog? So be it.

At Kate's we're at the mercy of Diane Bruni; this woman's a freaking menace. I've seen calm yoga instructors, but if Bruni isn't a robot, I'll eat my left testicle with my coddled eggs. She never moves her face. Ever. As she segued into commercials at one point today, she suddenly busted out this horrifying forced smile, as though her producer had told her, moments before, "Diane, you never move your face. You need to move your face." Well trust me Diane: not so much.

I've modified my chili recipe for tomorrow night; it's now "Uncle Matt's Burn Your Face Off (With Vegetables) Vegematarian Chili." And I actually set the range on fire while making it. Success!

Back to sexy
Jan 13 2005 - 1:47 p.m.

After Operation Poo, Kate and I came back to 3QF and made an ungodly amount of pasta primavera; our over-enthusiasm was forgiveable, because at the end of the day, there is no cure for a week of horridly "bleh" January anus-greyness than a gigantic bowl of pasta emblazoned with primary-coloured vegetables. And it was superb, and actually succeeded in lifting my mood fairly spectacularly. And it was the first time I've successfully cooked anything more complicated than cinnamon toast for my veggie girl, so I'm feeling good about that.

And after spending the final commercial break of Lost quiety explaining how and why Shannon was not dead to an unbelieving audience of three, I finally feel like I could actually write for professional television. Not that I'd particularly want to write for anything other than Lost, of course, on account of that TV sucks, and The Simpsons ain't TV.

I had a physical this morning; it was my first physical... ever. Well, since the pediatrician days anyway. It seemed like a good idea to finally get one going, especially now that I've got the double-threat thyroid situation coming from both sides of my lineage. Now both of my arms hurt, the left from the tetanus booster, and the right from all the blood draws. But there's no way around it: I am completely and utterly obsessed with blood. The nurse took four vials; I wanted her to draw a fifth just so that I could take it home and play with it. But I kept my vain lusts under control.

The Kate Bosworth / Lois Lane news weighed heavily on me, but there ain't a House fan alive who won't be glad to hear that Hugh Laurie is on the road to playing Perry White in Bryan Singer's Superman. He'll be joined by my favourite X-man, James Marsden, as Lois Lane's pre-Supe love interest. Sounds good to me.

Meanwhile, the Vanity Fair article has spun me once again. No matter how many times Lucas has evaded expectation on how and why this story is going to play out, there always seems to be a new surprise waiting around the corner. Images of hell are one thing, but an actual trip there? Who is Anakin going to follow into the underworld? (Well, duh...) And with the inherent results of his attempt to "make a deal with the devil," the Isis & Osiris imagery is looming large. Who knew, ten years ago when we were doing I&O on stage, we were acting out the death and rebirth of Skywalker...?

Well, someone should have figured it out. (coughs)

Must master two DVDs today. I yearn for the pipe-lore of my grandfathers.

I'm a Derek. Dereks don't run.
Jan 12 2005 - 11:14 a.m.

Mark was in and out this morning, sat down for fifteen minutes and recorded a nothing less than brilliant commentary for Centipede, which is going on the forthcoming Infinitely Brown Vol. 1 DVD. It was the first commentary he and I have ever done together; now I can't wait to do Bone Daddy 2. That boy's ferocious with the commentating.

Twice in the past two weeks, I've been exposed to information that I've never had in ten years: that Claire Danes brought down My So-Called Life. The efforts to save the show halted because she wasn't willing to return for a second season. And it's amazing that a whole decade (nearly to the day) after that last episode aired, hearing this news still actually hurts.

I woke up today feeling strange and distant and not at all happy, but I'm trying not to make it a chronic thing. Some yoga oughta help. Bex's swami says she needs to get grounded to regain the feeling in her legs; maybe we all do. Maybe we're all without feeling in our extremities right now, just ducking and covering and running without looking up, for fear of seeing a Tomahawk closing on you with a belly full of anxious gunners. I watched Bad Taste yesterday, and immediately afterward, I wrote some very small and private things in my journal that I won't reprint here, but that I might have to have tattooed somewhere on my body in an unreadable language as a sort of reminder of their perspective-nurturing simplicity. None of this is actually hard.

"It's like Oz at half-mast."
Jan 10 2005 - 10:02 p.m.

Chad and Matthew and I got together tonight to eat pizza and spitball basic hondacularction requirements for subculture, and just sort of set our minds in where everything is at. A lot of good ideas came out of the thing, and some fairly inventive solutions too. (Can't come up with a good costume for Mrs. A? Get rid of the costume! Can't find a producer? Do we really need a producer?) There's quite a bit left for me to do at this very rudimentary level, but I'm already casting my mind forward to the storyboard, because that's where the fun is. I put together a quick shot list for the first episode of Bone Daddy: Animated today, and it was the most fun I've had in a while.

No wait: the most fun I've had in a while is when I got to write this under "Makeup Effects" on my initial subculture script breakdown:

• Edible baby leg

For a moment, it was Night of the Centipedes all over again.

Speaking of BD:A, here's a pair of concept sketches from Chad, for our favourite white black guy:

BD:A Episode I, "Bone Fu," is going to be a hell of a learning experience, but I think it's also going to be a hell of a lot of fun. And we finally get to do Black Belt Jones with Bone Daddy. With lightsabres.

Hey look: other people make movies too! Here's a good interview with Jim Cameron about Battle Angel, even if the whole 3D thing still makes him sound like a complete fucking lunatic. And here's a release from New Line about His Dark Materials that nicely shows up just how completely wrongheaded their entire approach to the project is. Man, I can't get my hands on that son'bitch fast enough. They need me like Shirley Owens needed the Shirelles.

As she did with I Have a Hibachi at my Wit's End, Chandra has provided the kernel of another great script idea, this time for the CSV proposal. I think this one will probably be called Zed Command and the Oblivions, but we'll see. Too bad that Legions of Havoc thing is already taken.

Might write; might watch Bad Taste. Not sure yet.

I one the sandbox
Jan 10 2005 - 12:16 a.m.

I had an annoying feeling all day Friday that I had to go to the Silver Snail, but in light of everything else I had to do, I didn't. Yesterday, I got down there after my irritating shopping excursions across the downtown core, and picked up my Boromir figure at last - and turned it over to discover a picture of this on the back.

Fucking hell.

I had no idea this was even happening. I blogged about director action figures, what, two weeks ago? And I had no idea. And of course, the Snail had a couple yesterday, sold them both immediately, and doesn't know when they'll be getting more. I'm on the waiting list.

Anyways. I've finally finished The Lord of the Rings - listened to all the commentaries, watched all the featurettes, and in spite of my best efforts, it has, as usual, taken me a month to do so. (The 12th to the 9th, actually.) Now I think I'm going to have to have some kind of 16-hour featurette marathon this month, to coincide with my 12-hour trilogy marathon. It just feels right, especially given that the extras are actually longer than the movies.

Listening to the cast commentary pretty much made me feel like exactly what I am: an utter dilettante in the world of film acting. I never have any frickin' idea what I'm doing on camera, and the process is remarkably uncomfortable for me. I was doing some on-camera dialogue recording for Chris the other day, and I think I brought something to the material in some takes, but these situations were entirely coincidental. I don't have any craft, any form, any bag of tricks to fall upon in a crisis, and the process of acting for movies happens altogether too fast for me - I can never achieve any kind of focus or concentration on set where I'm actually able to contemplate my choices and effect a performance. It's basically just that whatever comes out, comes out. I got lucky with Thundercock, that's for sure.

I tried to write that script idea for the CSV fellowship yesterday; it didn't exactly flesh out as nicely as I had wanted. Today, while watching In Good Company, I came up with another idea and wrote a bit of it when I came home; it too didn't live up to my original notion. Well, meh. I've got a week left. I'm sure if I keep coming up with a script idea every day, I'll have something to put in a proposal sooner or later.

Our moronic downstairs neighbours have apparently decided that it's unnecessary for them to have a doorbell, so long as we have a doorbell, and their lunkhead friends can ring ours repeatedly until one of us comes down to let them in to the house. It's becoming quite irritating.

And this bugs me. Why on earth would they get rid of the traditional, toothpaste-style tube of KY? As my KY needs are not insignificant, I spent most of the last three months looking for the old tube, before finally discovering that they've actually gone and made this change permanent. It's bloody weird, and annoying.

Kate discovered the sex blogs, and I've posted about a couple, and since then, they seem to be popping up everywhere. Seriously: in the last couple of weeks, just about every blog I read has mentioned or linked to one of the sex blogs. Maybe it's like learning a new word and then noticing it all the time. Or maybe regular blogs are rapidly becoming a thing of the past in favour of the daily web journals of the "sexually exuberant." I'm considering starting my own.

Tonight while making dinner I broke a glass and put the shards in the garbage; I was then reaching for a pot when I saw a flick of bright colour appear on the stove. It was only then that I realized I was bleeding profusely from my index finger. The blood was rather remarkable in its depth of colour, really, though I resisted the urge to shake it into my pasta.

Raw egg and bacon
Jan 9 2005 - 9:48 p.m.

I've just tried Nigella's new version of her spaghetti carbonara recipe; it's a revised take on my favourite dish from How to Eat, presented in the new Feast book. She doubled the eggs, added heavy cream (of course), and futzed around with the preparation time. And you know what? Don't fuck with what works. The original concoction worked way better than this. Having been given a significant carbonara whammy by Kate today, I'm less than satisfied with my meal results.

The good news is, I made the best smoothie of my life on Friday. It was one of those situations where I improvised based on available materials, and wouldn'tchaknowit, it turned out better than anything I'd ever done. It had:

• 1 banana
• 1 cup mixed frozen berries ("wild jumbleberry")
• 2 tablespoons peach yogourt
• ½ cup cranberry cocktail
• ½ cup orange/banana/tropical juice

And it was bloody brilliant. I tried to replicate it the next day, but of course, the rare intermingling of ingredients had passed on, and the result was lacklustre.

The family ate at Square last night; it was quite excellent (though pricey). I had bangers n' mash as an appetizer (although the bangers were crab sausage, the mash was made with white chocolate, and the whole thing came topped with a slab of bacon which, when eaten in conjunction with all of the other elements, made the dish taste like sweet corn), and should have had venison as my main course, because when else are you going to get a chance to eat deer? But the mac n' cheese with truffles was a foul temptress for all the obvious reasons, and the result, though good, wasn't nearly experimental enough for my mood.

Sweet and weary
Jan 8 2005 - 4:20 p.m.

Today we lose another member of our family; Mark's grandmother Gwen has passed away after a long battle with Alzheimer's. I remember her as a classy, vivacious woman with a full and generous laugh, and have been priveleged in my life to witness the wonderful relationship she had with her husband, her daughters, and all of her grandchildren. The darkness of the last few years has faded. She was a grand lady, and she will be missed.

Watchmen From Hell
Jan 8 2005 - 11:40 a.m.

I slept forever last night. I went to bed at 12:30 and woke up in a puddle of pillows and comfy comfy comforters at 10:30. Then I just sorta lazed around for a while and played with my pussy (cat), who was surprisingly conciliatory due to her unexplained addiction to flannel. I guess my Day of Much Multi-Tasking tuckered me out in that deep, satisfying way that lead to long, satisfying snoozing. Who can complain? Sure, some idiot called at 1 in the morning and then there was another call at 11 that shattered my homespun reverie and forced me to forage for tea, but still. Still.

Now I must brave the white wilderness to try to find a little birthday somethin' somethin' for my father, who turns an indeterminate age tomorrow. This is always the way it goes for me: I finally come up with something reasonably clever as a Christmas present, and by so doing, completely hang myself for finding anything near as good for his birthday. It's quite frustrating, actually, but I've been feeling the need for a little downtown commercialism, so all's good.

How's this: I'm reading "The Council of Elrond" for the fourth time in my life, and for the first time in my life, I'm understanding every single word. It's almost a little scary. Am I finally ready to attempt The Silmarillion again? Is such a thing even possible? Jesus, I still have the page marked where I stopped reading Ulysses. Three chapters to go? What was I thinking?

This is for all my brothers out there who love a little pork with their sausage:

Met her on my CB,
Said her name was Mimi,
Sounded like an angel come to earth (come to earth)
When I went to meet her,
Man you shoulda seen her!
Twice as tall as me, three times the girth. (girth!)
Oh my fat baby loves to eat (loves to eat)
Big ol' Buddha belly and her breasts swing past her feet (feet)
My fat baby loves to eat,
My big ol' fatass baby loves to eat.

I got blisters on me fingers!

(I hope to someday perform this with Mark's band, with Mark playing banjo.)

I am a real person. (I am not Spock.)
Jan 7 2005 - 3:03 p.m.

Wow, the easiest GST return I've ever filed in my life! Tederick.com's total income for 2004.... $0.00! Now would definitely not be the opportune moment to start embezzling.

I'm in the midst of a massive multi-task day; buncha little errands run this morning, and right now I'm trying to delouse three more Infiinitely Brown movies so that I can finally put IBP: Vol. 1 on DVD in time for next weekend's party. To my great surprise, it's the Birthday Presents that are giving me the most trouble; Milena's is virtually unwatchable, Liz's has the worst picture quality I've ever seen in my life, and Nicki's is bullet-ridden. I'm sure someday, in the distant future, technology will exist that will let these things be fully restored; for now, I'm just doing the best I can.

The distant future is very much on my mind, having just been given info by Chris about an upcoming CSV fellowship, and having (of course) immediately come up with a rather grand and operatic idea for a script. The script has no title to speak of yet (a rather ill portent), but I'm going to try to put something together today, at least in rough form. It might be a work-till-midnight sorta day after all, but I'm energized and motivated, which is good, and fairly rare these days.

And I'm completing a very, very, very rough breakdown of the subculture script, in an attempt to get a rudimentary handle on shooting date blocks, crew requirements, and major outstanding hongdacularction elements, in time for an informal brainstorming session on Monday. As with five years ago this month (it's amazing how closely those five-year plans work out), it's all about a vast multitude of itsy-bitsy little steps. Ungol-ish, actually.

Apparently majudarrah is actually spelled M'jaddara, and since Amelia cooked it, I'm going with her version, even though I googled it and everything. The internet has once again let me down.

I got two cookbooks for Christmas, the lates from my brits, Nigella and Jamie Oliver. I've actually gone backwards a bit and am probing How to Eat in greater detail, trying to establish a baseline for some cooking projects this year. I made a clementine cake on Wednesday that turned out rather well, though I'm not particularly fond of citrus cakes as a matter of course; in a few days I'm going to make my first roast chicken. ("Roast chicken?!") In her new book Feast, Nigella Lawson (the dear woman) has even included a section on what to cook for a funeral... once I'm done with the bird, I might skip ahead and try the Food of the Dead. It suits my mood.

Hey look! A fourth Ginger Snaps movie!

Reform the lines...

I am not a real person.
Jan 6 2005 - 7:02 p.m.

Last week Kate, Chris and I were roped into some kind of a Molson photo shoot that was supposedly for a new "real people" campaign. At the time, it was pitched to us as being a done deal; we later found out that we did indeed need to undergo a selection process, and guess what? None of us are "real people." The dark view around here is that we're all too "real," but I choose to believe instead that I am simply too spectacularly model-gorgeous to ever be able to fool someone into believing that I am an average joe. "That's a conceit... but a healthy one."

I hate to fall for any kind of a gimmick, especially one as stupid and annoying as this, but that new buzzing Mach-3 blade that's been advertized up the yin-yang? Well, as my father would say, "that's one hombre of a close shave." Damn you Gilette for making the science fiction real, and doing it all in Romulan colours, to boot.

Further to my recent post about getting excited about Star Wars, feast your eyes on these mo'fuckahs:

That's good squishie.

I owe a dissertation on why women smell good, some description of my good Rogers experience today, and an article about leeches. But I'm way too nackered right now.

Blogga erratica
Jan 5 2005 - 4:57 p.m.

Matty Price has given us the Five Phases of Blogging, and now the Eight Subjects of Blogging. He's become quite the philosopher on the subject. To break it down succinctly, as I understand it, it goes like this:

The Five Phases of Blogging

1. New blog; purgation of backlog of random thoughts and opinions from pre-blog period.
2. Backlog expended; observing/commenting on new events only.
3. "I should blog something."
4. Collapse.
5. Rebirth as a mature blogger.

The Eight Subjects of Blogging

1. Opinions about the world around us
2. Recent/upcoming purchases
3. Weird shit that's happened
4. Weird shit that should happen
5. Events and experiences (places visited and people met)
6. Poetry
7. Observations
8. Observations about poetry

Interestingly, in terms of narrative strength, this list seems to go from strongest to weakest, whereas I would say that the previous list runs from greatest instability to least instability. (A blogger who quits in Phase One is the least likely to ever return; a blogger in Phase Five is the most likely to continue indefinitely.)

I think it's important to add a ninth item to the second list, because we all do it:

9. Blogging itself, and the blogs of others

That would make today's post a 5/ix, which essentially means that while it comes from the most stable point of blogging, it covers the least compelling subject of blogging. Which means I might be about to cruise headlong into that heretofore-unseen Phase Six. WHAT WILL BECOME OF MATT BROWN?!?!

Frankly, I wouldn't want you to locate, and spend any time in, the Temple of Doom
Jan 5 2005 - 3:58 p.m.

Here's me and Kate in our Hallowe'en costumes, in gingerbread, c/o the Bex:

It's the fine details that I like, such as Kate's Smarties bustiere, my enlarged cock, our green eyes, and the candy blood trickling out of our mouths.

I read Star Wars: Obsession #2 today, and it's officially the one thing that is getting me most excited about Episode III. The second issue was just as good as the first; Haden Blackman clearly loves Star Wars (how much of a geek do you have to be to include the original scripted version of Han's "I know" line from ESB?) and is, for all intents and purposes, capturing the best style and tone of the saga better than Lucas himself. Blackman and Genndy Tartakovsky oughta team up and take over the world. They know their shit.

I saw a whole bunch of spoiler images the other day, nothing too drastic, but I have now seen an image from The Birth, and know what happens to Dooku, and have seen Yoda doing something so un-Yoda-like, that the sky itself may very well be falling in the shot immediately preceding. It's all very interesting. Nothing would make me happier in the world than to be able to start my ROTS review with the words "This is the best Star Wars movie ever made." Of course, I'd put the chances of that as being incredibly remote - I expect it to be better than Clones and not as good as Star Wars, so (given my unique preference for Jedi as the best of the saga), I will probably end up liking each installment more than the number before it, from 1 to 6. But hey, sky's the limit on Sith, and I'm not counting Porgie out just yet.

I also read two of the "What Ifs" from Marvel - Daredevil and X-Men. Daredevil actually wasn't bad, as a follow-up to "Guardian Devil," until the story actually just stopped dead on the third-last page, as though they'd only come up with half an idea to begin with. X-Men was less successful, if only because that universe has been completely reinvented so many times anyway, there didn't actually seem to be anything too unusual going on.

Right. Must go grocery shopping; I'm attempting a clementine cake for tonight's Abramspalooza; might be a colossal failure but it's a good way to get rid of the little bastards now that the season's over.

Rich, creamery butter
Jan 4 2005 - 11:35 p.m.

Someone had damn well better explain this to me: why is it that whenever I mention Family Guy nowadays, one of the yonks who has been on their knees begging for me to watch the show for the past five years, gets really freakin' angry at me now that I actually like it? Yaddadikawhat?! The same thing happened with sfoo. I guess the same people who like to be Right All The Time also have a serious problem with having their advice followed, lest it Put A Crimp In Their Uniqueness. Fie!

Well fuck 'em. I'm buying a Stewie action figure and inviting everyone to come wipe its bottom. Circular motion, one finger! And don't you look at me....

Toronto's little science project, An Evening with Kevin Smith 2, gets its trailer right here. Stupid Kevin Smith stealing my stupid film festival stupid audistupidence stupid.

And good news: PJ and Phillipa Boyens have apparently confirmed that they will indeed be doing Lovely Bones, the best book I read in '04, after they're done with King Kong. There's been word of a WWI flick, but hopefully the Weta gang really will follow through on their promise to do something, y'know, small for once.

Had the pumpkin ravioli again. Watched Neil Patrick Harris do a line of coke off a naked girl's ass. Praise Jebus, Lost and Alias tomorrow...

Hayden and Ewan and Natalie and George and Yoda and Darth and Artoo and Threepio and Sam and Jimmy and Jar Jar and Christopher and Liam and Jake and Pernilla and Ian and Grievous and Billy and Carrie and Harrison and Chewie and Mark
Jan 4 2005 - 1:51 p.m.

Wow.

It's a real kick in the majudarrah
Jan 4 2005 - 12:27 p.m.

At Amelia's mother's place on Sunday night, the spectre of a North Toronto 10-year reunion was raised. Which blew my fucking mind. At least one of our number is dead, probably half of us are married, many have kids... it's been a spectacularly long ten years for some, it seems, while the rest of us may as well have graduated yesterday. Goals. Focus. Priorities. It's all somewhere between thick soup and thin gruel to me. Who knows, maybe the feature will be in the can by the time we reune, and everyone who knew me tangentially but not well can say "see? I knew that guy was going to be the next Steven Spielberg. It even said so on the back of his baseball hat."

Meanwhile, there's nothing like an emergency run to the all-night vet clinic to take your mind off the fact that one of your friends can't feel her legs. WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?! Just keeping all my shit in a straight line is proving harder and harder with all these landmines going off everywhere around me. And the daylight ain't getting any brighter. Fuck, '05, do you have to be such a bitch?

The only good thing I can say about 2005 so far is that it's been spectacularly cheap. Yep, four days in and I've spent just north of six dollars. This is a new personal record by about four thousand per cent. The annual DVD dregs will slow things up appreciably, as I'm only buying Kagemusha and Angel Season Five before the first of March, while trying to snake through the two-dozen-odd disks and boxes I have yet to watch. The Revenge of the Sith preview toys will mess my shit up in February, alas, but I've finally given up the ghost on the notion of wearing any kind of a costume for Episode III. My Vader jersey will do just fine, for Indianapolis and beyond. Call it a $700 upside.

I've cracked on Lord of the Rings toys, but the bleeding is slight. In December I bought the Black Gates gift pack, and the King of the Dead and the Witch King, but those were the big-ticket items. Next I'm focusing on the Men of Gondor, being largely this Boromir and this Denethor until someone at Toybiz gets off their ass and offers Faramir in his ranger outfit. Because that armour just looks stoopid.

Can't wait to soak my Denethor in a quartern of brandy and do what comes naturally.

Yesterday I wrote Swept, my spectacularly unhongdacularceable one-minute movie for 2005. I'm sure I'll come up with at least eight more between now and the submission deadline, so I'm unconcerned, but honestly... a gibbet? What was I thinking? It might be animation time.

Mer made a very enigmatic enquiry regarding Bea Arthur yesterday. My curiousity is piqued.

The river runs red
Jan 3 2005 - 5:30 p.m.

Crazy old demon lady next door just had me over to change a lightbulb. Her daughter is indeed perfectly half-demon: has exactly half the number of strange demon warts over her entire body that her mother has. There was talk of a granddaughter; I can't help but wonder if granddaughter has only a few tasteful demon warts in a few strategic places. In any event, I washed my hands afterwards.

Today was sucky in most respects. There's a reason I never wanted to be a producer, production manager, production supervisor, production assistant, or anything else with "produ" somewhere in the job title. These jobs just suck large ass. In fact, I'm never writing "produ" ever again. From now on I shall use "hongdacular" in its place.

At some point I'm probably going to have to start up some kind of a subculture web site with an actual subculture blog, written by members of the subculture hongdacularction staff. But that would of course depend on my finding a subculture hongdacularction staff. And explaining to them what the hell I'm talking about.

Working on the new 1MFVF web site for this year's call for submissions... the cat gets out of the pants on January 20th, or thereabouts. Until then, I'm off to look for brick walls and locked doors.

I kick ass for the lord
Jan 3 2005 - 10:37 a.m.

I was going to blog about Revenge spoilers, my whole lack of an Obi-Wan costume, and Lord of the Rings toys. And then I realized that it all sucked.

Man alive. Why can't I blog right now? Where is my blogjo gone?

Metal and wheels
Jan 2 2005 - 1:14 p.m.

I had an extremely unusual dream last night where I was the vice-president of the United States. Me and Bush were in some kind of damn parade down one of those numbered streets in Manhattan, although since I've never been to Manhattan I couldn't tell which one. I was trying to get to know George better, since we were going to have to work together for four years. Cheney was still in the picture somewhere, although he had ceased to be the vice-president in the wake of the general administrative admission that he was in fact Puppetmaster of the Universe, because there wasn't any sense in hiding it any more.

This was probably because of seeing the damn Time cover at Bloor Station yesterday. Or maybe some residual Dead Alive response after Kate and I watched it last night. Big zombie mother creature sucking a son back into the womb? Could there be a connection? God I hope not.

I realized with a bit of a thrill today that if I just buy Meet the Feebles and Forgotten Silver, I'll actually have all of Peter Jackson's films on DVD. I'm still about five away on Spielberg and have yet to buy Piranha II to complete Cameron, and with Hard Eight being out of print it's going to be difficult to finish Anderson. Everyone else is fairly pell-mell.

It's been a fine run through Return of the King special features; I'm getting near the end of the featurettes with two commentaries to go. It's all put me in a very good mood for my filmmaking ambitions in 2005; I'm thinking of starting another blog to cover it. In the meantime, here's a picture of a grizzly bear:

If I have a dragon on one arm I should probably have a grizzly on the other. There was recent speculation that there might actually be a bear on Hungry Island where my cottage is, but I've never seen one, and it wouldn't be a grizzly even if there was one. In his heart, though, Tederick is a grizzly. He's the grizzly of Hungry Island.

Welcome to the bandwagon
Jan 1 2005 - 2:12 p.m.

It's that time again, and nowhere to start with nowhere to go but here we go anyway. Yesterday I tried working up this end-of-year quiz thingie for my fine Tederick.com readers today, but I got mildly bummed by my response to one of the questions. In spite of the contrived list of things that I more or less "did" in 2004, I feel like most of them are the beginnings of things or the middles of things, and not necessarily the ends of things, which doesn't scream "accomplishment" in any kind of ringing voice. And the light in my bedroom yesterday morning was so unbelievably pale that it might very well have been the end of the world for all I knew, so I became somewhat blue, though not much further down the spectrum than that. Fortunately it was a magnificent day for a trek across Toronto's downtown core, which is exactly what I got, and then I had coffee with Mer (who I haven't seen in a non-festival capacity in forever) and we comisserated.

Last night Kate and I did New Year's as an innie rather than an outie, and that worked out better than any New Year's I've ever done; pumpkin ravioli and brie & porcini croustades pretty much put an end to any fear on her part that nothing she could ever cook me would compare with the steak at the Keg. Dinner was interrupted by Texas jumping out of the litter box and doing a front-handed butt-scoot across the floor to wipe a big turd off his ass; Gary (as usual) watched with an indulgent smirk.

We knew it was midnight when the neighbours started clanging on their pots and pans. If I could have put a phone call back to 11:45 p.m. on December 31 2003 just to tell myself what I'd got myself into, I never would have believed myself. But I guess I wouldn't have gotten through anyway; at 11:45 last year, Mer and I were calling Chris and trying to get his ass off the couch.

The next time I get a pair of cats, one will be named Egon, and the other will be named Sumatran Rat Monkey. And when I have enough sex toys, I'm buying a tool box. In the meantime, I bought this; my grandmother had a glow-in-the-dark Virgin Mary next to her bed when I was a kid, and that's exactly where I've placed mine. And mine is way better than little miss sex-with-God anyway.

(By the way, no, my Kate is not the nerdslut. Please be away from the gutter, you assumption-making Hickadoola.)

Meanwhile, I am completely and utterly betrayed by black socks. Every pair I have has developed holes in them. It might be because of my razor-sharp left big toe. It might be because of my boots. I don't know. But it's pissing me off beyond words.

I was way behind on my charitable donations in 2004; I gave a bit of money to Christopher Reeve, and a bit more to breast cancer research during the Boobiethon, and yesterday I gave as much as I could afford to the Red Cross for tsunami relief. The tsunami situation is essentially unplottable for me. My mind can't even wrap itself around destruction on that scale. I mention the apocalypse a lot on this blog; I don't have the personal capacity to imagine what it's like to actually experience one, on an otherwise sunny Sunday in southern Asia. It's beyond any sort of comprehension, so I'm going to bow out of commenting on it right now.

At the end of it, the last day of 2004 was a restless period for me. Lots of things waiting to start and no patience to speak of. But we're on the other side now, and I've got a list of tasks for Monday that could choke a horse, so hopefully, we'll be all of the good.

At last we will have Revenge. Bring me my Serenity.

The Deeper Well