A Little Rain with Your Day?

What a miserable morning. A call time of 6:30am to south street sea port. Trains are crap in the morning, donkey crap. It took an hour and a half, then the bonus of pouring rain. The kicker is the first two scenes are exteriors. The sooner this day is over and I'm back under blankets the better.
In other news I've been doing smashingly well with my writing goals. I breezed through 350 pages of deadland to finish my share of the edit, then I wrote installments for both Thorne and Airi. Then I wrote my query letter for "Paparazzo." Now I'm working on the pilot script for the "Dead Land' animated series. A lot and a lot of accomplishment right there. Creatively I'm kicking ass. I also am borrowing a piano keyboard from my parents. I've been wanting to learn how to play for a while and I'm finally getting around to it. I've already started recording my first piano based song, which I've been told has a 'the good, the bad, and the queen' feel to it, which I accept.
Its seems lately that I'm just being happy for people around me: my father, my sister, Kalju who should finally be finished with the army soon. Their happiness brings me some happiness. Eh, time to hit the rainy streets, every day can't be cush.

Pack Your Bags

A UN panel confirms it. We are fucked. The world is anyhow. Drastic loss of species in Europe, massive water shortages in Africa, furious heat waves and drought in the U.S. Levels of the sea rising, sinking coastal cities. That's the forecast for the world. Congrats human-kind! We're doing it. We're fucking over ourselves and every other living thing on this planet. Unless of course, we take immediate and drastic action now. But we won't because, let's face it, no one really cares if we fuck over the world. So let's keep it up, I want to see the world go to shit myself and I'm guessing if I die of old age I only got about 45 years left. So go buy a gas guzzling SUV for me and bring down this stupid planet, so we can all just get it the fuck over already.

In a hundred years Dead Land will be like the science fiction of the 1950's. Ain't that a hoot.

The Pen is Mighty

It kind of feels like I've just been trudging through life lately, trying to stay positive about shit while becoming a little more closed off to the world in actuality. I spent the weekend upstate. My grandfather on my father's side died last week. It was difficult for eveyone because he died in a house fire and we weren't really sure if he suffered or not. Not to mention it was covered quite a bit in the news. Fortunately after his autopsy it was found that we was not breathing during the fire. Still there was a loss in the family, horrible circumstances or not. I wasn't extremely close to him, he didn't seem very interested in any of his grandchildren to be honest about it. But I inherited his name and his passion for music. My grandfather didn't want a funeral or a wake and so some family convened at my father's house to celebrate his life. He was always easy to pick on, since he went by "Dick" instead of Richard or Rick or Rich, and at one point my step mother confessed that the week had been wearing and she was indeed wiped out on Dick. That's my family. Yesterday I just spent getting everything back in order since it was my first full day back in the city. I will say this: HSBC can suck me. I spent way too much time setting my affairs back in order, because they did not cancel my account when they should have. I made an awesome Salmon filet, I exercised, I wrote a bit. It was a pretty productive day, just what I needed after a few days of not getting much done upstate.
Writing is really the best thing for me right now. Life seems perpetually confusing and out of order no matter how I react to it and just not what I want it to be. But somehow when I'm writing it doesn't get to me so much. And so I work on 2 more Dead Land chapters, and then the Dead Land pilot script and then my animated concept. Yup, its all set up. And while I am doing this I will be exploring ways to present "Paparazzo" my most recent script and the Dead Land series. It's good to have a plan.

STRIKE!

For those of you not in the know, the Writer's Guild have called a strike. They will mostly likely carry this out tomorrow. You may have caught a blurb here or a headline there threatening late night show reruns and such if the writers do strike. Well when you're in the biz (that's right I'm cool like that) striking unions affect you directly whether you are a part of that union or not. The amazingly wonderful thing about film and TV is the amount of artists that are brought together to create it and if missing even one element, there is no finished product. So without writer's, actors soon are out of work because there is no material. So the writer's strike had certainly been a concern of mine. Not to mention that I consider myself first and foremost a writer and I plan on joining the WGA at the point. So their stances will some day actually BE my stances. I am in full support of the writer's strike. Bring that shit on I say. These people are not asking for the absurd here. All they want is to update their contract to account for new technologies that are bringing money into the producers exclusively. And these producers are trying to say they aren't sure internet downloads will become popular and dvd's don't generate much profit for them. Are you fucking kidding me??? Really! I'm gonna me some magic markers and a placard, I tell you. Point me to a picket line!!!

Cell Block C

So Friday I spent the day in jail. Riker's Island to be specific. Law and Order: Criminal Intent if you really want to know. I was playing a mentally fucked prisoner of the Riker's Island facility. They had the whole rainbow of types: biker dudes, Aryan looking skinnies, Hispanics, Blacks, an old white guy with glasses and two crazy-looking skinny white dudes. The beginning of the day was shit. It was a long bus ride to the Island, getting checked in by production and then by the prison. No breakfast. Waiting outside in the cold for wardrobe to give me a bag full of costume(yes, it really was cold, I'm not being a pansy.) Being harassed by the prisoners while waiting in that line. The pants were unreasonably tight around my waist. I was half-expecting my legs to fall off by the end of the night. But once we got inside and settled it wasn't quite so bad. I realized that I knew someone there and he just happened to be the OTHER crazy white dude. It wasn't long before they brought us to set, a prison cafeteria. The scene was unforeseeable fun! I rarely EVER have fun doing background. I mean sometimes it's fun working with friends and stuff, but the actual performing is never really fun. I mean how fun can doing a cross or pantomiming to someone else really be? But this!.... Crazy#2 and I were seated at the same table as the principal. The principal has an altercation with a guard or some authority figure and we have to react, and when we're not reacting to that, we just have to sit there and be weird. -I- can do THIS! I quite good at being weird. So I decided that my thing (since i had a tray of fish sticks and peas in front of me) would be I was intent on transporting all the peas individually from one side of the tray to the other with my spoon. Occasionally I would get upset with a pea and squash it with the spoon, warning the other peas the same could happen to them. Crazy2 meanwhile is biting his nails and twitching. Then another person comes over and we both become protective of our trays and shift away from him. It seemed like this was a little too much for production to handle and I thought the a.d. was going to come over and tell us to tone it down, but instead he wanted me to pretend that I had a dirty prison-bitch love thing going on with the guard the principal was speaking with. So when he walked away with the principal I looked over sad and longingly. And this was ALL going on right behind the main action. It was quite hilarious really, I was having trouble keeping a straight face. Especially when in between shots were we using plastic cups to try to dial 911 and an assortment of popular figures and tossing peas and consulting them like they were bones. The day ended up being incredibly amusing. Crazy2 and I had like senses of humor so we were constantly joking around for about 8 hours straight.
Yesterday was all about catching up with errands and chores. Today is about relaxing and finishing up some chores and Monday- Thursday I am working on a TV pilot. I think so anyway, I'm missing some details.