M A N - L I K E M A C H I N E S

2012-01-26T07:22:00.001-08:00

So I have had to move back the shooting of Upload until March, but those dates now are settled and everything, including the android mask Shoggoth Assembly is making us, should be ready by then. I'm quite looking forward to finally actually splashing some light on some CCDs for this mug.

In the meantime, my new certainty on that schedule has allowed me to sign up for various positions working with the new W.E.S.T. crew that David Miller has put together here in the Portland area. This upcoming weekend, for which local stalwart Doughty will be doing the writing-directing, most of the slots were already full so I'm just signed up late as an actor and potentially as a grip, which is just to say, a hand. But I'm also signed up as an actor and/or DP for Peter and Tom Campbell's directing weekend in February, to act in Tim Lazimov's weekend later in February, and then also for my own weekend as writer-director-editor on March 4th and 5th, the weekend before the two weekends I'll be shooting Upload. Then in April I'm also signed up to potentially shoot or edit some other director's weekends. So I'm looking forward to getting familiar with this group and meeting some of the few of them I've not met yet extraFacebookly.

I've been thinking a lot about what to write for my weekend directing with W.E.S.T. There was a recent comment on the Facebook page about someone really wanting to shoot something adventure or action-based, and I mentioned that I'd similarly been wanting to shoot something like a foot chase or fight scene, and that I might try to take on the challenge. Before that, however, I had been considering using my old idea about a bunch of people who all get blown up by a pro-Life suicide bomber and who then have to figure out what to do when they all wind up in a weird little Moebius bardo space together, including the bomber. I think it's a really powerful piece that I've been wanting to make for a while, and I some months ago finally had a visual idea for how to deal with the background, the space they're in, cinematically. But, at the same time, that piece is a very heavy one to bring to actors who do not know what tone they're about to jump into. The idea I like best so far for the action piece, however, is also very non-standard-actiony, and would be essentially a comedy about a couple of friends having fast food lunch together when one of them gets the Broadway piece from McDonald's Monopoly on their cup, and the friends then end up farcically chasing and fighting each other, to extremes, over the piece. It would be cinematic action the likes of which I've not yet shot, but it also may be a little absurd for the tastes of those who were hoping to really shoot an 'adventure'.

At the same time, I'm still trying to get one of my next-novels started. I mean, I've started them all, but I'm not on the highway yet, really, with any of them. We're still stopping for gas and picking up snacks and going back for our printed-out directions that we left at home.

Earlier this week I composed my answers to an interview by book blogger Jean Vallestros, and I'm looking forward to seeing that published and getting to read her review of Bob later this month. From what I glean by her tone, I think she liked it.

2012-01-18T08:52:00.000-08:00

Being a self-initiated artist can be a real psychic challenge sometimes.

Every morning my wife leaves to go teach Fourth Grade and I sit down at my home office to work on my various projects. I'm directing a short film in Boston next month, and I need to visualize what that production process will require (green screens, lights, etc.). I'm also trying to start my next novel, though I keep waffling between which of my next-novels I want to really focus on this year (the Bob sequel Archlich, the Histories, Zooville), and am having trouble getting started on the real prose-meat. I also have a vision for a new album of sparsely arranged covers of songs by women, and having just gotten my microKorg back from the repair shop, I've been spending some time the past couple of days getting back into recording sounds.

At the moment, in my life, I am lucky enough to be able to focus solely on my own creative projects. The idea is that I will be able to build a professional career out of it, selling novels and albums and ideally in the future getting paid to make movies.

However, at the same time, my ideology paints the profit motive as against-virtue. Ideologically it feels wasteful to try to make art with a goal of making money. True progress would seem to be guided by that which is edgy, which flouts convention and expectations-- the kind of work which is often unsuccessful on the large- or immediate-scale.

I've probably made under a thousand total dollars from my independent creative work throughout my entire life. It is extremely easy to let my confidence fall and see myself through how I presume others could easily see me - a masturbatory, pretentious asshole producing ignorable work that no one else is interested in.

It's also hard to know how much to balance the production of my actual work with the promotion of it.

Right now I kind of feel like I'm engraving the inside of my coffin.

I wish I had more relationships with colleagues, other artists.

Upload

2012-01-06T09:45:00.000-08:00

The next film project that I'm working on is called UPLOAD, and pre-production is happening this month and next.

The actors - Christine Hunt as the wife and Reza Breakstone as the husband - and I will be doing a couple of weekends of rehearsal/blocking, and then assuming Eric Anderson of Shoggoth Assembly is ready with the mask for the android character to be played by Derek Brigham, hopfully we'll shoot the thing in Boston in the month of February.

The plan is for this piece to be the first really powerful, beautifully-recorded audiovisually, moving and fascinating piece to send out to real-type film festivals. After our first rehearsal in December, I'm extremely optimistic about the possibilities, as both Reza and Christine are excellent actors and have already helped me evolve the notions of the story that I brought to them. That and, since shooting my last movies The Rejection last summer, I've upgraded my equipment a peg, so this should be the best-looking thing I've ever cinematographed.

Updates will continue as the project moves forward.

2012: A

2012-01-06T08:50:00.000-08:00

January 6, 2012

Bubble nuzzles his face into my armpit.

It is Friday of this first week, and tonight we are playing D&D again. Since Thomas has been back in town for the holidays, we’ve gotten two good sessions of gaming in, and this will be the third. Before everyone gets here tonight, I need to figure out what is in this Elven plantation they’re raiding at a bandit leader’s recommendation.

I could never capture with a camera the epically sweet moments that Hannibal and I share sometimes, when he is on my lap and wants some love. He will push his head against my typing arms until I stop to fluff his ruff. Once I am doing so, often he will look backwards up at me with such loving blue eyes, his majestic Santa-beard billowing out around his face. I know that even if someone else sneaked into the room in such a moment with a camera to record the beauty of it, he would not behave the same way. It strikes me that often the delicate natural beauties in life are thusly uncapturable or reproducible in art; they are too fine.

For months, now, it seems, I’ve been struggling to start my next big project. I have Neurophreak, which had been Nobody, which I love and feels like my next movie after Upload, but I also keep worrying that to do it justice I would need more filmmaking resources and skill than I presently have access to. But at the same time, I can see a version of it which seems like it would be fairly shootable. I’ve also got Archlich, the Bob sequel, which I have much of planned out but which somehow I’m hesitant to jump right back into. Writing comedy is fun, but I’m also eager to write something that feels substantive and important -- not that Bob didn’t have its aspects of such, but they were certainly buried among its more irreverent folds. Then there’s Zooville and The Histories, two other novel ideas that I enjoy a lot but that are daunting to start work on. I’ve been considering taking a number of the stories I’ve come up with as novel ideas and working them into short stories, since I don’t have time to write every novel I’ve conceived … and that thought is recent and continues. I’ve also got a number of nascent ideas for next films, including one where a group of D&D players start to try their hands at petty crime together, and another where a bunch of people all end up confused in the Bardo together after being blown up by a right-wing pro-life suicide bomber.

Still, I keep feeling like the next thing I need to be working on is not one of these projects, but something that’s still little more than an accretion disk in my mind. I want to do something Dickian, interesting and about worthwhile concepts, like Neurophreak but wider, weirder and more surreal.

I’m’a let it keep accruing, and try to write here once a week this whole year.

The End of the World

2009-12-03T07:26:00.001-08:00

I was just looking through a CNN list of eight movies to watch this holiday season (the result of a train of thoughtless just-brought-up-my-browser autopilot choices). The eight were broken up as if by genres - Avatar under Sci-Fi, Nine under Musical, The Lovely Bones under drama, New Moon under Romance ... but then I came across The Road in, as if it were its own genre, Apocalyptic, and that struck me as funny. But that got me thinking about the millennium and 2012 and such and fundamentalist religion's constant apocalyptic focus, and wondering if there might be a stronger apocalyptic awareness now than in other times, like around the previous Gregorian calendar millennial point in 1000.

Each movie had a What, Who and Why description, and the others had Whys that explained their context within the scope of current cinema and people's tastes and awards season and such, but all there was under Why for The Road was "It's the end of the world as we know it."

And I scoffed at first. Because I assume the intent of the writer was to make a pop culture reference to mask his lack of anything substantive to say about the movie or fun reasons to go see it (since it is, from what I hear and hope, astoundingly bleak). But then, in the vein of my recent adoration of looking for all the possible contextual meanings of bits of words (particularly free and fun with concise, contextless groups of words), I considered it as not a pop culture reference and merely a declarative sentence, and that made me realize that in many ways, thinking in terms of these decades around us in both directions as where we are temporally and the few thousand years of recorded human history in comparison, it could really be said to be the end of the world as we know it, and I think that in the zeitgeist right now there is a really powerful subconscious sense of that.

Experiential existence

2009-09-14T13:46:00.000-07:00

All is experiential; there cannot be said to be anything that isn’t experienced. In fact, even things which cannot be said to be material in any way can still be experienced. Experience is the fundamental matter of existence.
Similarly, experience is innately experienced by a self. There cannot be said to be anything experienced that is not being experienced by some self. Experience is the verb of the self subject. They are logically tethered and inextricable.
There cannot be said to be anything else with any kind of logical proof or reason. While the experience is always that there seem to be many selves out there experiencing a variety of perspectives, it will never be possible to prove the existence of another self than one’s own.
Experience equates to distinct information, which is to say – the experience of all information in one moment is meaningless; it equates to the experience of nothingness in one moment; both are meaningless. Whatever the sum of reality happens to be, omniscience of it would be no more experiential than a complete lack of experience. Experience requires a shattered eternity and incomplete perspective of self.

You will never experience a self not-your-own. We can expect a future where the potential for brain-computer interface will allow brain-information to be broken down into data, and those data to be transferred potentially from one experiencer to another, meaning that you may, at some point in the future, be able to switch from the input of your brain to the input of someone else’s, or to a non-brain input. But the experiential self will still be you.

So what distinguishes you from me? If we could swap experiential inputs briefly through technology, including the full complexity of the brain’s ‘ego’ and ‘id,’ we each might briefly experience what it truly was like to be the other. Presumably there would need to be something that might capture some essence of where my experiential process had just been in my brain and bring it over into my experience through your brain so that while I’m there I might have some sense of having just moved from mine to yours, to give me a perspective upon which to find your experience different, and then some also some kind of cache of what I had just experienced there to bring back into my own brain-processes when the switch was over. But if such experiential smoothing did not exist, the switch might not be noticeable by either of us at all. An instant switch from my brain’s experience to yours would simply put me instantly into the experience you are having, without the context of where I had just come from, such context existing only in my brain. We would switch experiences, and ‘I’ would briefly be ‘you’, and ‘you’ would briefly be ‘me’, and when we switched back, we might not know that anything had just happened. Unless there is more information than the brain through which we experience input, some spiritual or etheric dimension equally existent to the brain, but which science has not yet explored. But then, wouldn’t we eventually create spiritual technology to do the same thing as the neural-switch technology had allowed? No matter how much unknown geography of experiential information there may be, at the end of it is the invisible, non-existent (and yet fundamental) experiencer.
It seems we each must be that same fundamental experiencer, looking at the world of information through its many self-eyes. This seems very similar to a notion of God, however omniscience equating to experiential emptiness, standard notions of God are obviously wrong. Really, it is just Us – not the sum, but the network, of all experiential perspectives.

sweet new webpages

2008-05-29T16:46:00.001-07:00

I'm in the process of updating the pages of the website, and feeling satisfied with the result for the moment. I still need to figure out how to edit the metadata for my mp3 files, so that they can be downloaded with all the information for iTunes or whatever already there. Anyone who knows how to do this on a Mac should please let me know.

It is an auspicious day!

2008-05-01T15:41:00.000-07:00

It is an auspicious day; new Portishead! And it is fucking boss. I was just saying something to Annie about the amazingly surprising choice Portishead makes with their shit (I had to pause Third to play the beginning of Cowboys for a moment, to remind her of what I was referring to in making that point), but how just fucking brilliant it becomes once you get into it. Mmm; damn.

Also, for the world out there that only knows what I write in this blog, I should add that Julie and I finally got our check (though it was made out to Julia and George Hanrahan, so we're having to get it recut). We are in the process of setting up a casting session at the end of the month, and I'm hoping to shoot in June or July, depending on sheduling. So, it's on.

And I'm going to spend a week with Joe in Elkhart at the beginning of June. Can't wait. Miss that dude.

illuminating letter to Joe

2008-03-22T21:12:00.000-07:00

Hey man. We haven't talked in a while. How are things? I just had my first interview, at last, yesterday, though it wasn't even really for a job so much as for a staffing agency, though the guy seemed really excited about me and the potential to get me something more like a graphic design or marketing assistant position, though he focuses on data entry/administrative assistant type stuff, which he feels doubly confident he could get me if not the other, so ... he got me feeling optimistic about what he could find for me. We'll see. It was nice to feel like I was seeming impressive. Also, on my way walking to the interview, I was stopped by this gruff middle-aged guy who said, "You got an eccentric look," then told me I looked like Rick O'Casek (don't know how to spell it, lead singer of the cars), then told me that he had just gotten out of a stint in prison down in Boston for two counts of bank robbery, and that he was from Southie (South Boston), which was why he had no upper teeth (bared the lack), cause he was Irish, and all they know how to do is box, and by that point I was like, "Hey man, I'm diggin your story, but I'm on my way to an interview," and he was like, "Ah, well," and just called out to the next guy who was passing, "Hey buddy.." Who knows what he was gonna ask me for, but the truncated experience I got was lovely. It was nice. I said, "Hey Man, sorry, but it was good to meet you," and went on.

So, I am still expecting the money in "a couple of weeks", Julie insists its a sure thing. But I've also gotten in touch by email with a friend of Justin's, the bartender at his restaurant, who supposedly is also a writer and interested in directing, and has a show he's written that might be getting picked up, and he knows JJ Abrams, supposedly ... but anyway, I got his email and he finally got back to me, and he's teaching a filmmaking class for teenagers, and they're shooting a short film next Friday which he invited me to come hang out for, which I'll try to do though I'll have just had my wisdom teeth out on Wednesday, so we'll see. But if I could, I could meet some teenagers interested in film and/or acting, with casting for IWJAD in mind. Julie's also going to talk to Kieran's counselor about getting in touch with drama people or whatever at Waynflete, to try to find actors or figure out how to spread the word. Because it struck me recently that, with the mic on the camera being fine for non-movie stuff, for hearing if the sound isn't excellent, we can do casting, and then even rehearsals and camera blocking before we get the mic and fully finished editing system and such. So Julie and I are going to press ahead with casting how we can. So one thing I am going to need to do soon is talk to Allen Baldwin, filmmaker friend here in town who's made one movie, and who can help me set up a casting session at a space here called Space.

Annie and I just saw 10,000 BC, which was fun but bad, but I love Cliff Curtis, and it made me think about how I love him and Keith David and Tony Todd in the way that PTA wante to work with John C Reilly and Philip Baker Hall, and how I really want to write good roles for these guys. Then I was thinking about Dmose in bridges and what Will being black adds to the character, and it suddenly struck me that there's nothing in the script that couldn't be tweaked keeping Will from being in his thirties or even fourties, and that in some scenes maybe that would add some real gravitas and believability to it, like when he's reading his poems and such, or whatever, and how Will (A) is still self-destructive the way he is, even at that age ... I started imagining Keith David in Bridges scenes as Will and FELL IN LOVE WITH THE IDEA. Think about it, dude. With a minimal but real type budget, I bet we could get him...

We should talk soon. I miss you, man.

G

Phase Transition

2008-03-03T08:20:00.000-08:00

There seems to have been a significant phase transition going on over the past couple of months or so, and it feels like it is finally moving into view of the next phase. I am speaking vaguely, astrologically, personally, macroscopically, of course. But the coming phase, for me, I can already feel. I should be getting the money to start filming within the next few weeks, my work is out there being reviewed by The Bollard for issues later in the year, my artwork is coming along nicely so that I may have enough for a show this summer, and my planning with Annie for our wedding has finally made some headway. (We are going to be married on Sep. 27 of this year, out in Casco Bay.)

Anyway, as part of preparing myself to be the guy that I am going to need to be as I start making some short films and have an art show and my first novel and Headphoneboy albums get their day in the reviewer's mouth this summer, I am realizing that I really ought to keep up this blog better. My original idea behind it would be that I would write in it near-daily, giving at least some kind of pinhole view into the mind of a working multi-media artist. But I've barely even updated it when I have new material lately. So I will try to be better about this. It's a little bit hard to figure out how exactly it is I'd like to write in a medium like this, since obviously I want to be eloquent, but I can't spend my time going back and editing second and third drafts of blog posts. It's sort of a disposable text medium, but not entirely. Getting my fingertips around it.

So as far as what I'm working on right now - I am currently uploading seven new mashup tracks that I finished last night, some of which I am very fond of. One is a mash of Tarheel Slim and Lil Annie over Roger Waters' Sexual Revolution, which I am adoring right now. Also a crazy mashup of Busby Berkley Dreams by the Magnetic Fields over a Cypress Hill song. Check em out - www.man-likemachines.com/mashups.html

I'm also continuing to work on my drawings, and just the other day I perfected the script for I Was Jesus and Dracula such that I feel I've addressed all the issues various people brought up with me about it. And I storyboarded it a bit in my head as well, while making some music decisions. Looking very much forward to getting that money so I can buy that equipment and get these motherfuckers filmed. It is going to be fun and a wonderful challenge, something I need right now. Some do or die shit.

Oh right, and I'm also right now working on a book for Lulu, a full-color square book of my artwork that should be under 20$ once it's done. I just need to scan the I'm In Cloud Futures drawings I made for Julie.

Kitten-Like Machines

2008-02-22T07:29:00.001-08:00

So I have somewhat overhauled the Man-Like Machines website with a new frontpage/menupage and such. Getting happier with the way that it looks. For a while I hadn't been able to upload new files to the site, but now I can again, which is good. This also means that there are seven new mashup tracks available on my mashups page. Just produced them the other night; very happy with several of them.

My kittens are wrestling across the apartment, biting each others' faces and kicking each others' stomachs.

Generalizations

2007-12-14T07:14:00.000-08:00

To move off-topic for a moment from this blog which tends just to be about me and what I'm working on ...
A small thing:

I was just reading an article about how the deputy leader of Al Qaeda made some comment recently against some Mideast peace meeting in Annapolis at which members of various 'Arab states' are present, and it struck me that it seems very inappropriate to refer to these nations this way. Saudia Arabia, Syria and Egypt were listed in an appositive as being these 'Arab states', but isn't that sort of like calling the United States a 'white nation' or something like that? These nations are obviously not entirely Arab. They are, perhaps, nationally Islamic, but that ought not intrinsically be connected with Arab.

It is just an example of the way that generalizations are bad. It seems to me, specifically in journalism, one ought never to generalize, but rather always to be specific and correct.

Oversimplification might be the greatest sin (and one of the few), in my book.

Anyway.

le sigh

2007-11-13T09:06:00.000-08:00

So I just read today that two of my friends who are also musical artists just got their songs reviewed in The Bollard, a local independent magazine. Ian, one of those friends, explained that the reviewer just found his work online through Myspace and asked him if he minded the review, and being featured on some webradio thing. I am finding myself extremely frustrated and jealous, naturally, at this news, as my stuff is up on Myspace too and has gotten no such media response. I don't know what it is I should be doing to get my work out there, and it is making me feel negligent, and like I am wasting time continuing to work on all these projects before I get something I've already finished at least to be recognized by the world.

So I am still continuing to finish The Subtle Physics and have been posting my mashups on mashup bulletin boards. Julie and I had been in talks about setting up a production company, but right now our main goal is just to get a shotgun microphone and a copy of Final Cut Pro so that we can shoot some shorts first. I find it strange how much bad feedback I've been getting regarding my mashups on the mashup boards; as if people on those boards are unwilling to give a chance to songs that are fully layered on top of each other as opposed to just being the lyrics of one over the music of the other (which is far less interesting, as far as I'm concerned).

My art-heart is sore from rejection and loneliness, I guess is what I'm trying to say. But I gotta struggle to go on lovin' nevertheless, even if it is currently just in masturbation-form.

I Am Again the Hephaestus of Sounds

2007-10-22T19:07:00.000-07:00

Found an old CD of an earlier version of Sound Forge that looked like it ought to be too scratched up to work, but it did work, so I am once again rocking Sound Forge, this time on the tiny VAIO. I no longer have a desktop computer, all laptops. I wonder if I ever will again. Doubt it. Anyway, with Sound Forge available again, I have produced eight new mashup tracks, at least five of which I really like, three of which I think are particularly dope, and one of which totally rocks my loins (guess which ones among the six I have posted on the Mash-Up section of the website are which!).

So, continuing to work on The Subtle Physics, now also going over the Bridges script for tiny little changes and also to break it down scene by scene and figure out how many scenes are in what location and what actors are, and all of that stuff, so that Julie and I can begin to break the film down into a budget. And intermittently working on mashups.

Oh, and today I set up my Headphoneboy compilation album (a sort of best-of from the eight albums) The Invisible Truth to be available through CDBaby and iTunes. I need to send them the five copies of the CD that I made today, but once they're received and registered and everything, my newest and best tracks will be available through iTunes! Woohoo, right?

this damn thang

2007-10-09T18:08:00.000-07:00

So I've got this big idea about what I want to have done. My great work, the vision of all that shit that would be so unfortunate to not to have been made that is so alive and wonderful in my head. Already a number of movies and scores of nascent others, several novels (one of which is done and another of which is haunting me, nearly done), music as it comes (I'm momentarily frozen there, Sound-Forge-less), et cetera. Whatever continues to come to me/us.

I'm feeling it coming, building up toward a climactic inciting incident of some sort. Julie and I recently took part in a gathering of filmmakers at the Institute for International Film Financing's panel discussion on financing independent films, and it gave us an incredible energy and momentum for getting something put together to actually get this film (Bridges, firstly) to get made. So while we're working on a business plan for a film production company to make Bridges and information to present to investors, I'm going to be working on some shorts that can show my ability to form and shoot scenes and such (since I yet have pretty much no real reel to show). But it's gonna happen, and somtime next year Bridges is going to get made. I know it.

kittens

2007-09-30T17:20:00.000-07:00

So the big news for me right Now is that Annie and I have decided to get a couple of kittens. So very soon, no doubt by my next post, there ought to be a fuzzy kitten on my lap when you imagine me here typing, and I will be all twitterpated.

I'm presently trying to figure out just how the Man-Like Machines website pages for Enlightenment and The Future need to look, and what kind of shit needs to be on them. Ideally I will have at least a few interesting things on those pages before I really start putting out advertising/propaganda for the website, as obviously those are two of the fundamental parts of what it is I want to be doing with this whole Damn Thang. So I've broken down my ideas into a series of Titles of Articles, and I suppose the next task for me is to actually write them. But just writing the Title is a huge part of that, so, I'm sort of half way there. For The Future, I feel I will need a much more significant amount of input from Joe, who, with his wife Stephanie, has the majority of the badass futurist and/or post-capitalism concepts.

Oh, also, just last night, I collected the best of my mashups onto a single CD mix and made some cool artwork for handmade all-paper CD-case CDs that say WE ARE FREE on them that I am thinking about leaving in circles out about Portland some night once the above-mentioned sections have a little more meat on their bones.

Now that I look to my left (where it sits between me and the window) I realize that I have also been doing a great deal of work over the past few days on this big sharpee drawing that I began for Justin's birthday back in June and worked on some at the Island this summer. It's like a big portrait of a map of a side-scrolling video game level, while also being art. I'm diggin it.

At last!

2007-09-19T09:45:00.001-07:00

I have gotten my Man-Like Machines website up. After years of planning to do so, I have finally got a place where people can potentially access all my various work - the writing, the music, the artwork, the films, soon.

Also, I have finally gotten a very nice HD camera (though the card for shooting in HD costs like $700, so it's regular DV for a while). All I need now is a good shotgun mic and I can start seriously shooting. Although the version of Final Cut Pro that I got with this new Mac specifically for editing is now asking for a serial number that I was not given (bought the whole thang as a package deal on EBay). I sent the guy an email and am hoping passionately that he gets back to us and gives us the serial number, though I'm concerned because he's no longer on EBay.

Anyway, now that I have the website up, I am going to try to keep this blog at least moderately up-to-date. I shall try to write in it at least every few days, no less than once a week. Hopefully, it will also keep me on task for all the various projects I have going, which I will list now:

www.man-likemachines.com -- I still have lots of work and writing to do for this site to be all that I want it to be, and I keep working on it daily. I have a lot writing on enlightenment and art and copyright and such to fill out sections that are currently filled merely with excuses.

The Subtle Physics - the book continues to push forward. I am near finishing the 22nd chapter of 33, and have a better and better understanding of how this is all going to culminate. Also, I am currently working with my sister Julie on editing Chapter 20 (Folly Not Failure) to be submitted to various publicationst hat publish novel excerpts.

Headphoneboy - Alas, the current album-in-the-works, You're Dead, must be put momentarily on hiatus as I no longer have a computer with Sound Forge (I need to find a new copy somehow). But I have been working on getting more of my music available on iTunes, and with that in mind I have compiled a sort of best-of album of Headphoneboy work so I can have what I feel are some of the most likeable songs from across my seven albums available for purchase, including three songs from You're Dead which I think are awesome.

Filming - I need to get a microphone soon, but once I do I have a few ideas that I will hopefully start filming, including a commercial about harpies and a short about an accidental time-traveller from the year 2000.

Other stories - I've also been writing Bob Waczowski, Necromancer recently, and very much enjoying working on a pure comedy piece.

Anyway, I am going to return now to Chapter 22 of The Subtle Physics, in which Norman attempts to channel some higher version of himself while Laura is out buying him donuts.

Nascent Projects

2007-03-12T20:55:00.000-07:00

So I am deep in The Subtle Physics as well as working on new music for an album I have titled You're Dead, and I am still trying to sell my car (none of the people I showed it to called me back) so I can buy a camera to shoot Bridges, though I have begun the process of bringing people onto that project with the hope that I might be able to shoot that this summer.

Meanwhile, however, I have been thinking of future projects. There are all these stories with Joe that we have discussed beginning - near future stories of the three diasporas of human evolution and the storytelling android. But I am also seriously thinking about The Accident in terms of a novel and really getting excited about that. I gotta admit I've even been giving serious creative thought to rapping under a new musical pseudonymn (potentially 2LAB).

I've even been thinking about buying a single color and white and black and picking up my brushes.

Death of a Disco Dancer

2007-02-26T11:37:00.000-08:00

I recently returned from Colonial Williamsburg with Annie. Over the weekend I met with three different people about buying my car. So I have spent much of today researching cameras. I messaged Allen about getting together to discuss cameras and working with me on Bridges, which he has said he wants to do. He has offered to DP for me (and I don't mean double penetration).

So I have been working on a cover of the Smiths song Death of a Disco Dancer, and I spent about half an hour today singing the chorus over and over, trying to figure out how I want my version to sound. Peace, love and harmony. Peace, love and harmony. Oh, very nice, very nice, very nice, very nice. But maybe in the next world.

Trying to work out how the website will need to look, also. It struck me while Annie and I were looking at award-winning websites that simply a set of pages connected by links is no longer a sufficient website, and I don't know how to do much more than that. I will have to research Flash animation, I believe, or perhaps just buy a cutting-edge website creation program and really learn how to use it. Or find someone else who would be willing to work with me on it.

Hopefully, sometime this week or next I will be getting together separately with Chris Keister to record him on guitar and with Galen to record some of his circuit-bent machines. Looking forward to both of those, not only for the sounds I'll get out of it all, but also to begin really collaborating again in my art. It strikes me that, aside from drawing with Annie, I haven't worked with anyone else artistically in some time.

I miss Joe.

Meaning

2007-02-15T07:02:00.000-08:00

Thinking a lot about meaning as I step out of the shower this morning. What it means to mean something. Like, a piece of art can be said to mean one thing or another, and perhaps it means something very different to a viewer than the meaning the artist may have intended (woe to the artist who attaches inflexible meaning to any piece). Or, similarly but very differently, in a causal sense one thing can be said to mean another, like in an if-A-then-B sense.

Anyway. I am thinking right now about all the various shit I need to be working on. I have not been as productive in the past week or two as I would prefer, though I have gotten my Headphoneboy songs into a collection of albums that I'm pretty happy with. The Great Masturbator is now broken into three single albums - The Great Masturbator (abridged), Listener, and what I jokingly called the Elsewhere Maxi-Single (or, The Great Masturbator, Aprocrypha). Then, there is the three act narrative of my other old work collected into three more albums - Act One, Act Two, and Act Three. The album in the works right now is You're Dead, which will include all the new songs I've been writing of late.

I have discussed with Annie the idea of setting up my Man-Like Machines website, which she agrees is necessary, so we are going to budget that together. I am in the process of designing the site and considering doing much of the artwork for it by hand, in black-Sharpee-on-white.

So also, obviously, I have The Subtle Physics to be working on (it has been a year now since I began it), and the futurist novel that Joe and I are discussing. I am giving a lot of thought to Bridges, as my car is officially posted for sale and I ought to have a camera in the next couple of months, hopefully.

Galen Richmond might be coming over tonight to record some of his circuit-bent keyboards with me.

Crazy

2007-02-05T09:10:00.000-08:00

So I've produced two new tracks of music that I am listening to a lot and considering lyrics for. I have ideas for each of them, one being called Morning Prayer to a Secular God and the other called Coccoon (unrelated to the film). I sampled a bunch of piano from the Buster Keaton movie The General and used some of those sounds in Morning Prayer. As I continue to make new songs I'm rethinking the albumization of them. My previous idea had been to just make a few new songs and slap them in with some of the best of my old shit, but now I am thinking that maybe I ought to leave my old shit all together, form a sort of best-of album out of them and then just let these new songs be building a new album. I had originally envisioned You're Dead as a whole new, unique album anyway. So we'll see. Working on it.

Also, events have occurred over this past weekend that have influenced the direction of my vision for The Subtle Physics. On Thursday, my mother was involuntarily committed to a mental hospital for having suicidal thoughts in regard to having lived her whole life with my father, who is often an emotionally abusive soul-leech of a man. She will be out soon, as she is fine when not in his company, and seems to be of a mindset to finally leave him. I have since been considering wrapping a fictionalization of such events around the climax of The Subtle Physics, making the final frustration at bullshit and fear for his poor, sweet mother be, sort of, the darkness before the surge in the final climax, which is to say - the last straw that sends Norman out into the Other to try to save the world.

An Artist's Blog

2007-01-29T09:02:00.000-08:00

This is to be an attempt at capturing my experience as a working artist.

I've been thinking about doing this sort of thing for some time. We'll see how it goes. The idea is that eventually this blog will be attached to the website that I need to set up for my wide-grasped art project MAN-LIKE MACHINES, which I conceived in 2001 with Joe Foster. Ideally, this blog will allow those interested in my work a glimpse into that work's creation.

I am working on many different things right now, which is part of why I wanted to start this blog - to keep track of my progress for my own purposes. For one, I am currently writing The Subtle Physics, my second novel which I am extremely excited about. It is about 370 pages old at this moment, still prenatal, just a file. But I can feel the great thing that I could be. It kicks hard.

Simultaneously at the moment, I am working on my music as Headphoneboy. I have recently recorded two new songs - I Am a Good Man and It Is the Future, which I am attempting now to upload to my Myspace artist profile. My idea at the moment is to inject these two new songs into a collection of some of the best of my other songs for a new album called You're Dead. I am presently in the middle of designing the album art for this new album and my old albums as well, and trying to figure out how best to get these albums available to the public. I think CDBaby may be the direction I'll take, which I believe will make my music available on iTunes (important).

So far today, I have watched two episodes of Star Trek, haved my insane beard down to insane chops, and washed about half of the huge pile of dishes in the sink.