A while back I shot a music video for my song “Apricots and Afterthoughts”(directed by Steven Christopher Wallace and starring Ashleigh Taylor-Silverman.) I posted it here previously without any explanation.
This video was shot entirely on actual Polaroid Spectra film (not the new Fuji Instamax or the “Impossible Project” replica type.) Given that they no longer make this stuff, it had to be purchased off of eBay at great cost (about $40 per pack of 10!) Because the film was expired and came from a wide variety of individual sellers, a good portion of the film was simply unusable. Many full packs of film had to be discarded. I found out the hard way that 2004-2005 seems to be the cutoff expiration date in terms of whether Polaroid film will still function or not.
We ended up with maybe 17-20 cartridges which were mostly good, and we were fortunate enough to have a great model. She photographed so well that we were able to use 95% of the pictures taken of her, which made us able to complete the video without having to resort to using additional fillers or patchwork.
It was shot completely in my living room. I have some actual HD video footage of the shooting which I will edit and post at a later date.
Music promo for Brandon Adamson’s new single, “Apricots and Afterthoughts” on Uncharted Records. Featuring Ashleigh Taylor Silverman, directed by Steven Christopher Wallace, sound mix by Daggrr. Shot entirely on discontinued Polaroid Spectra film.
Well. I finally got the keys to my place. I plan on moving in sometime this weekend, but I have to paint and do some work on the floors first, and make the place look as mod as possible. So I will be spending most of this evening painting, and most of tomorrow. I’m not much of a handyman, so I expect plenty of Pink Panther cartoon moments to happen as I venture into the uncharted world of home remodeling. I really have no idea what I’m doing.
Something odd happened while I was in the food court at the mall the other day. I was sitting there eating my chicken enchilada, daydreaming about the cosmos, and there were some girls far away who kept looking over and giggling at me…for like a while. I didn’t think too much of it “What, haven’t these chicks ever seen a lame dude eating his dinner before?” Get over it. Well a short while later, I discovered I had a message from some girl on OkCupid that said something like “Hey I’m pretty sure I saw you just now. Creepy huh?” And she said the reason they were laughing is because she was going to send me a message that said “Hey, we’re watching you right now.” That would have been sort of creepy but still great.
I went out for my birthday with Bill, Steve, Florence and Jeff. Everyone bought me drinks, and a fun time was had. There was mostly nonsensical philosophizing going on(between all of us the phrase “boner rage” was thrown about 500 times in the evening.) I met some girl and got her number, but she’s moving to Portland in like two weeks and didn’t seem all that interested anyway…so I don’t really see that going too far, but it’s nice to make a new friend. Some dude I know, was into Florence and tried to buy her a drink, but she refused…even though she was interested. So then I went and talked to him and tried to hook it up, and she accused me of being a saboteur….even though when the guy attempted to buy her a drink she was the one who refused! I merely tried to fix it! The more I try to understand girls, the more confused I get. All in all it was a good birthday.
So I’m working on the screenplay for Steven Christopher Wallace’s new feature film. He had a completed script for it, but some of the actors fell out of the project…and so due to my minimal approach to things I’m basically in charge of writing a new story which will require less people. The more tangibly complicated a script becomes, the less practical it is to be able to film without millions of dollars. So I think it’s better to make it more complicated conceptually. The bulk of this film will be shot on 16mm and Super 8. It should run about 90 minutes and is a SAG approved film. I usually don’t pursue working on movie related crap because when people tell you they’re making a movie it’s almost always bullshit that never goes anywhere. BUT Steve’s other film “There May Be Pleasure” screened in London and Milan as well as several other prominent European cities so he has some cred.
The realm of possibilities is a ginormous place, filled mostly with things that turn out not to be the case.
So so so. Friday night I trimmed my beard so it was all symmetric like and hung out with Bill Cole and J. Sakas in Tempe. Some girls came up and wanted to meet Jonathan and I, using their gay friend as a liaison. We talked for a while, but they never followed up so I can only assume we disappointed them, and they just had a case of new guy syndrome.
Saturday night we went to the one night only Cheap Thrills at the Q. It got off to a slow start but soon was jam packed. They had Ninja Scroll playing on a projector screen outside, a movie I only remember for that disturbing, rockman rape scene. Also, I found out the hard way, that the bathroom doorknob sticks when you lock it so you end up getting essentially locked in there. I twisted the doorknob handle for dear life for about 10 minutes until luckily it magically opened. It was funny watching the same thing happen to nearly every person that went in there.
Later that night I found a full pack of Parliaments, but I don’t smoke cigs so I gave them to a cute girl…so no one can ever say I have nothing to offer. Around 3 AM the cops came and broke everything up so we had to leave. I gave Steven Christopher Wallace a ride home, and that was that.
Sunday night turned out to be the best night. I took a 6 hour nap in the afternoon, then woke up and went to Casey Moore’s where I hung out with Brooke Taylor and Laura Donovan along with a bunch of people I didn’t know. I told Brooke that I just recently figured out she was one person. I had always thought she was two different people, because sometimes she wears glasses and sometimes she doesn’t. But when she wears glasses, her entire look changes to that of a librarian or something. And then without them she looks more like party Brooke. So for the longest time I literally thought they were two completely separate people. Like I had no idea that the girl who works the door at Adult Swim was the same as the one who did Cheap Thrills. It’s like a Superman/Clark Kent thing. I only started to figure it out when I saw picture of both on her Facebook, but still I wasn’t completely sure and found myself wondering…”why does she have a picture of the other girl as her default photo…they must be really good friends.”
The weekend was action packed. Friday night I decided to check out “Crotch Rockitt,” the night hosted by Tiffe Fermaint, Austin Head and some other dudes. Someone from “The Faint was DJing. It’s at the place (that used to be?) known as Anderson’s 5th Estate, but it seems like it’s called something else now. There were a lot of people, but the problem is the place is so big that it just never looks that full. I ran into, of all people, the attractive girl named Anna who had accidentally burned me with her cigarette the night before at Casey Moore’s. She apologized profusely, but I never got a chance to tell her that I didn’t really care and that I just used the whole minor ordeal as a cheap excuse to talk to her and that really it was a lucky thing that it happened.
Sunday was the first Adult Swim pool party of the Summer. They have it at the Days Inn this year. Last year it was at the Wyndham, a much nicer hotel, but they moved it probably so they could get away with more debauchery, play louder music…have it end later and greater etc. The alcohol was certainly cheaper($2 beers) which means I was able to get good and drunk fairly quickly. I managed to drag filmmaker Steven Christopher Wallace with me to the jam. Hung out mostly with him and a shirtless Jonathan Sakas. We went in the hot tub at an inopportune time when a bunch of cute girls were just getting out of it, and a boatload of dudes were just getting in. I know not whether we were the cause of this. Jonathan thought I needed to show more skin, but I tend to melt away into dust and bones like Vincent Price at the end of “War Gods of the Deep” when my skin is exposed to daylight on the Earth’s surface. I did take my pants off though, which was a mistake, since when we went in the hot tub, we didn’t have towels or anything so I had to put my dry clothes on over my wet body, which was very uncomfortable and caused me to have unfulfilled fantasies of being able to blowdry the damply wet seat of my pants for the rest of the evening.
It’s always weird when you go out and recognize random people that you know online from Facebook or Twitter or whatever. You just never know if they recognize you back, so you just exchange awkward looks and never quite acknowledge one another . The internet has certainly added the dynamic of a kind of “fourth wall” in real life social situations. Very rarely is it broken as successfully the way we became accustomed to seeing Zack Morris pull it off a zillion times in Saved By The Bell(“Timeout!.”)
Adult Swim was super fun, but kind of a bust romantically(no pun intended) as most of the bikini clad women either had boyfriends or (like moths to a flashlight) were only interested in having their picture taken. I did get a girl’s number at the very end of the night though. I recognized her from the pool party last year. I have such a great memory, I remember someone’s face(if I’m interested in it) when I’ve seen it for a few moments. The reason I remembered her is because when I noticed her last year she looked super pissed to be there, and her friends were having fun, but she was just standing there. My friend and I had debated for several minutes whether we should go hit on her, but then she left unexpectedly early and I got distracted by some other drama. Anyhow this year I decided to chat her up and when I talked to her she was kind of a sarcastic bitch at first, but warmed up to me after a few minutes. At first she thought I was lying when I said I remembered her, but when I was able to describe the exact circumstances in detail I could tell she really did believe me. And thus a certain mutual bond of respect and flattery was formed. Anyway she didn’t really seem too interested in hanging out though, but hey who could blame her for that? certainly not anyone who reads this site on a regular basis!
Afterward, Steve and Jonathan and I went to Casey Moore’s where we hung out with Bree and Kelly S. and discussed a lot of disgusting and totally taboo subjects(vibrator repair, electric toothbrushes etc) but at that point all I wanted to do was go home and get out of my wet clothes and dream of lions at the zoo. On the way out of Casey Moore’s I saw some girl who was just at Adult Swim, and our eyes met like we were about to say hi, BUT then I wasn’t watching where i was going so I almost ate shit and crashed into my friend…and as we were leaving I could have sworn i heard the faint sound of playful laughter echoing off in the distance.
My friend Steven Christopher Wallace texted me today to tell me he had finally watched one of my favorite movies, “To Live and Die in L.A.” which he had never seen before due to extreme procrastination. The conversation brought on one of my childhood flashbacks. I remember in perhaps 1986, as a wide eyed, jean jacket wearing, mirror tinted sunglasses sporting, prepubescent 80′s kid, that one of the only times I ever bonded with my stepdad was one afternoon we sat on the couch and watched “To Live and Die in LA” in its entirety followed by a basketball game(the Chicago Bulls vs. someone.) It is one of the few memories I have of being a child where there was not some sort of anxiety or childhood trauma involved. And I use the word “trauma” loosely as in from the perspective of a child. Getting grounded no TV for a week for sneaking your football back from the 3rd grade teacher who unjustly took it from you…or having to sleep with the lights out with a talking Pee Wee Herman doll visible in your room is traumatic to a kid.
Speaking of the 80′s, whenever I hear popular 80′s songs I am reminded of how I comically misheard the lyrics to many of them:
Take for example the chorus of Madonna’s “Material Girl” which I heard many times being dragged shopping with my Dynasty era, diet pepsi drinking 80′s mom. Waiting hours and hours while my mother spent ungodly amounts of time browsing and trying on shoulder padded clothing and pantyhose at fashionation (a hip 80′s clothing store not to be confused with the porno boutique chain “fascinations”)
“everybody’s living in a material world, and i am a material girl”
is how it went, but I mistook the lyrics for:
“cause everybody’s living in a cereal world, and I am in a cereal bowl”
And I REALLY thought those were the words to the song.
another fine example was how I thought the song “The Heat is On” was really “Peter’s Uncle” (I had a friend named Peter, though why someone would be writing a song about his uncle and it subsequently playing on nationally syndicated radio was outside the bb gun scope of my logic at the time)
I still remember the disappointment while riding in a truck when I told my own uncle how “I really like that song that just played, “Peter’s Uncle” only to have him get briefly confused, laugh and then tell me “that’s not Peter’s Uncle” it’s “The Heat is on.”
And so it is. In the real world of material girls, here I am a serial boy, in a cereal bowl, living in a cereal world…kind of explains a lot. I’ve often wondered if I was perhaps the ONLY person out of the millions who heard these songs to interpret the lyrics in this fashion.
Following up on my entry, I decided to bust out with a deez nuts joke via text message to my friend Steven Christopher Wallace. It was the classic “Are you going to see bofa tonight” only he didn’t seem to get it . At first he thought “bofa” mean B of A as in Bank of America…. and I was like no its like how an ebonically charged black person(or other person emulating such perceived culture) would say “both of”…and Steve’s reply was “oh you mean ‘Boff a.’” I told him that I didn’t agree with his pronunciation. “Bofa” makes more sense as it rhymes with sofa, whereas “boff a” would be like “Jimmy Hoffa.”
I hereby submit as evidence, the authoritative website on these matters:
Michael Crichton died. Rest in peace. I know he is remembered mostly for Jurassic Park, and his later work challenging the neoscientific community in our Brave New World…but my personal favorite of his was always the 70′s sci-fi classic “Westworld.”
My friend Steve and I still quote it from time to time when we’re out and about “Sloppy with your drink? Get this boy a bib”
One of Crichton’s most poignant speeches was this one where he talks about environmentalism as religion, with the incorporation of religious thought processes into modern science. Environmentalism as Religion
And if you are or have ever been in a romantic relationship with a female, this insightful essay he wrote for Playboy Magazine in 1991 is a must read: How to Fight
I didn’t discover the “How to Fight” essay until a couple of years ago, but i wish that issue of playboy would have been available to me way back in junior high(for the articles!) . I could have had a much better record.
Oh and enough about the stupid elections for a while. Any moment now I’m expecting to be escorted off to my re-education camp so I’ll leave just leave it at this: Eight Wasted Years by John Derbyshire
My friend Steve just got back from London where his film, “There May be Pleasure” premiered at some film festival there. He thinks his name “Steve Wallace” is too common so he wants to change it, and I said if he wanted to be a star he should change it to “Steve Walrus”.
