Plugging Myself, I guess (painful/impossible)

Apparently my piece about the ND/NF After-Party is up and, according to my editor, Movie City News has linked to it.

You’d think the Armond interview would be more popular.

But whatever.

Here’s the piece entitled: “Ambience and Ambivalence at New Direc–Aw, Screw It All, Let’s Get Hammered.”

As always, leave a comment there if you can. It makes me look good to my boss.

P.S.- I sent the interview to Armond and he called it “very entertaining”, although he excoriated me for my typos.

“Spell check, man! Spell check!” He told me.

I finger-point at my editor and look the other way.

:p

Pre-Movie-Meltdowns and Video-Game-Dreams

I wrote the title of this before I wrote, well, what I’m about to write.

So I don’t know if what I’m going through qualifies as a pre-movie-meltdown or just, well, pre-movie life.

Or a pre-movie “life-down” for that matter.

That sounds cooler, anyway.

Again, I find myself having spent the last three days drinking. Not always so crazily, but drinking nonetheless.

Every night there’s a reason, but then again there always is.

Friday, it was Langston’s birthday party. Langston is a good guy, easy-going and I was happy to come out there, even though he was going to a vegetarian restaurant (Quantum Leap) which, stangely since I’m an almost-vegetarian, I tend to deplore. But the nachos, which in terrible-manners-manner I snarfed as soon as I found them on the table with little competition, were pretty yummy, soy-whatever or not and pretty soon my aversion to vegetarian food was alleviated by the news that I could get Garlicky French Fries with my burrito.

“Fries with my burrito?” I asked the waitress, teary-eyed.

She nodded.

I felt like standing up, gently stroking the back of her neck, then maybe making out with her for a few minutes.

But I was content with eating my burrito when it came.

That night was a chain of parties where I went from Langston’s dig at Quantum Leap (2-for-1 Miller High Life: the champagne of beers) to International Bar (4-dollar whiskey-shot and a Schaffer’s) to some place I don’t even remember where someone bought me a drink and I drank it (so drink for free, I guess). The usual dramatics were involved, girls, disappointment and romantic mistakery, but someone had given me a unopened bottle of 3-Buck-Chuck Chardonnay that I’d stuffed in my jacket pocket as I walked down the street and besides I got home early.

Saturday was another night of parties touring around with some buddies between a party with some blog-backlash and Rubulad, the party which I revere. That night I found myself playing my first games of flip-cup (yet another piece of evidence that I’m a case of arrested development) and drinking from a 24-oz Coors while someone extolled the virtues of Dan Clifton to me as “the only person who will be successful from our year”. Thanks.

Rubulad proved decent, but after more romantic mis-haps (non-haps) and a reminder of the previous night’s drunkeness, I told my friends I was going and the threat of being abandoned in the black hole of Brooklyn proved compelling enough for them to follow.

Finally, I went out to my “job-party”, the swankster after-party for New Directors/New Films where the most common question, “Do you have a film in the festival?”, caused me to fail like a failure when I had to smile and say no as the term “blogger” would cause them to move on to whoever else they could find. Langston again did me a solid coming with me and unexpectedly, Jeremiah Newton from my school who I plugged for earlier, helped me out greatly in trying to find people. Plus the food was free and good and so were the drinks (less good, but free).

But again I woke up with the taste of alcohol in my mouth and disappointment waiting for me. I had missed a friend’s film at the festival, which she called me on rightly.

Which made me think about the cascading things in my life. It was one of those moments–suddenly it all hits you.

I’m the sort of person who goes to do the right thing politically at a film but short-shrifts a friend.

I’m the sort of person who people think of as a film, space, writer and not a film-writer.

I’m the sort of person who has more romantic disentanglements than entanglements in the first place.

I’m the sort of person who has gotten drunk the past three nights when I vowed I wouldn’t drink at night if I was hungover in the morning.

Who was I and who was I becoming?

Also, I had been playing a lot of Pokemon.

(Again, arrested development.)

What can I say? The Platinum edition came out.

Pla-ti-num.

That’s like.

Better than Gold AND Silver.

I should know.

My dad was a metals trader. He used to bring me back small pieces of metal from trading conventions which I would then suck on my mouth because they tasted interesting (I didn’t swallow them, no).

I guess that explains a lot.

But playing Pokemon, like playing all video games for me, is a way to turn off your brain, to not think about things, to put the motion of your mind in idle without killing it. A wave of utter distraction. Yet I find, even as I’m playing, whiling away on my cool-Black Nintendo Double-Screen, all of the associations I’ve had with playing Pokemon in the past. I feel like I’m in high school, middle school. I remember my old GameBoy, GameBoy Color, GameBoy Advance.

These are not happy memories.

And when I wake up in the morning, for the moment I can remember past dreaming into wakefulness, I’m playing video games in my dreams, not living them mind you, like exploring the world, but I dream like I’m still sitting, playing the game, like WoW players must feel going on sleep-walking raids.

And all this with my movie in two weeks and the anxieties there.

On Saturday I met with the actress playing Leslie, Donnie’s mother, the mother of my loser-protagonist of my loser-script. We went out to Daisy May’s BBQ, a place I selected since she said she lived in Hell’s Kitchen and that was the only decent place I’d known to eat there. I had been agonizing too on how I’d talk to her, along with getting over my hangover for that morning. I remembered my conversation with Sarah-Doe, talking about actors and working with them and wanting to not to offend them and trust them and mold them and my head just flooded and felt shut.

When I went to talk to her, to eat lunch, I drank a Diet Coke and felt better. I talked with her, my Leslie and she told me of playing for Edward Albee, a hero of mine and auditioning for him and what that fun was, along with the joys and perils of a public pre-kindergarden education. When I tried to explain to her, to not explain to her, to tread lightly but to get my point across, I fumbled as we went from lunch to walking down Hell’s Kitchen-11th Avenue with it’s Car Washes and Chryslers Big-big-buildings.

When we got past her house and walked back towards it, I just asked her:

“Well, how do you think this’ll work?”

She smiled, un-nervous.

“Well,” She told me. “I suppose, we’ll do the scene. And then do it again a different way. And maybe even one more time if you like. And you can give a note or something and… tell me what you want.”

And I blinked. I’m an idiot. Well, b’duh.

“Oh.” I said. “Yeah. That could work. Yeah, that sounds good.”

And we shook hands and I left.

Maybe I’m making too much of all this, too much of Pokemon, parties, boozing and broads.

Some days I feel like my life’s a mumblecore movie, which when I described what that’s like to Dan Pleck, he commented: “Who the fuck would ever want to watch that?”

But some days I just feel wound-up all-tight-tight-tight and if I just let it go, then maybe the tension from my neck will release and I can have– well, I can have a day.

Those days, I write.

Where Our Hero Talks To Armond

Check it out on FilmLinc.

I have to say, I’m pretty proud of it.

Leave a comment, too if you can.

It makes me look good.

-Feitelogram

Petty Things, Lincoln (b)Logs and Jersey Sleep-Over-Time

I’m pretty sure Tom Petty just sucks.

I mean, maybe not that he “just sucks”, but that’s he’s just, well, a mediocre musician.

To call him a poor man’s Dylan feels almost insulting to Dylan, but you can’t help making the comparison given the stylized singing and the bouts with the harmonica. Sure, he’s a little more country too, just as Springsteen’s a little more rock-and-roll, but the comparison’s still there.

He’s just not very good. His lyrics are kind of vague or boring or just weird.

Like for instance “Won’t Back Down”. Alright, so we know that you “won’t back down”. You won’t be “pushed around”. You’ll “stand your ground”. And also, again, you “won’t back down”.

Well, I mean, that’s all well and good, but really, who the fuck cares?

You know when Dylan disses someone he gives them a poetic roast. In fact sometimes it feels like just about half his songs are just hater-ballads. Here you just say you won’t back down. Who the fuck is asking you to back down? Me, maybe.

We know in his songs there’s an “American Girl” who seems to be very naive, “raised on promises” who then later dumps Tom Petty (presumably because he breaks them, thus the band name–”The Heartbreakers”) which then later causes him to be “Free Falling”, thus we can assume, reneging on his promise of not “backing down”.

But for some reason when “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” (one of the most inexplicably terrible music videos I have ever seen) comes on my radio, I can’t turn it off. It’s enjoyable, even it’s about that same “American Girl”, or Weed or America generally speaking.

I have no idea. All I know is that he sucks compared to so many people I listen to. But he’s like a corn husk you can’t get rid of.

As a New Yorker, that befuddles me.

***

As I mentioned, I’ve started blogging for Film Society of Lincoln Center. It’s kind of like working for the man, but the New Directors/New Films festival (the one I’m covering) is a worthy cause and it gives me a chance to do little jumbles about films in a micro-easy form that I can just spout out in 15 minutes and have them ready pressed.

Here’s my newest post on their site, the first one listed if you go to their page as well. Right now, I’m trying to swing a gig interviewing iconoclastic film reviewer Armond White, who is introducing a film there. Unfortunately, my editor is at SXSW (a place I’d love to be right now) so we’ll see if she can get back to me in time. Otherwise, check out the festival (or at least my stuff).

***

For the next three nights after this one, I’ll be in a land where zombies walk the earth enslaving debased humans as their vassals; some for menial labor and others for nourishment, farmed for their flesh before their bones are tossed casually into lakes of chemical refuse, melting instantly as they hit the surface of the viscous pools.

This place is, of course, New Jersey.

The shoot became progressively jersey-er as I found out more about it. First the director, a friend, begged me to come on as Script Sup, which I told him I probably couldn’t. Then I said I could because I like the guy and he’s working for me later.

Then I found out he was sort-of-directing-it-sort-of-not.

Then I found out that I wouldn’t get to meet the director till set.

Then I found out we had half a crew.

Then I found out I would have to sleep during the daytime in Jersey as well.

Sigh.

But I hold out hope.

It’s hard to be hopeful facing 2 nights in Jersey, but I shanghai’d my friends into coming on set with me last night telling the director “get them drunk enough and they’ll come” and, luckily, my scheme was a success.

So at worst I’ll be in Hell with Friends, which is not so much of a hell at all.

But those sleep-needy daytimes in Jersey.

They’re sending shivers down my spine.

***

Finally, an update.

My frien Lauren Hamilton is one of the two best comedy writers of my age I’ve met and a fine-looking woman, who I was very disappointed upon meeting her to find out she was a lezzie.

“You sure?” I asked her. “You even tried? Cause, I mean. Well, you know. Might be fun.”

“Been there done that.” She told me.

End of story.

I call her Boss now, most times, since she cast me in a web pilot.

But now she’s got her own thing going on in LA, so I’m adding it to my blogroll.

Think of her as a black, hip, lesbian counterpart to my blog.

(That’s fucking impossible.)

But actually, it’s just a soul in the world trying to find love, meaning and the right “your mom” joke from time-to-time.

Enjoy.

Plugging (your mom)

For those who are NYU-Film Students, here’s some information that might interest you–a note that I wrote about where to find private rental insurance. If you have any more experience, please post it there so people can see it, or just share it with other people.

Also, for those of you who want to see more of my blogging, I am now working part-part-time for Film Society of Lincoln Center writing about the New Directors/New Films festival. For any of you who are students, it’s 10 dollars a ticket or a 5-pack for 35, a good deal. ND/NF usually has some real gems and, if you’re interested, check out the blog here.

Gracias.