I can say Wednesday (with some difficulty)

For a person to say they're a poet seems anachronistic. I had a "professor" at Columbia College Chicago who tried to convince her class that rap was poetry. Perhaps there's some that is, but I never had any interest to spend time wading through all the "gangsta," "bitch, suck my dick," "pop a cap in yo ass" idiocy to find it. In any event, I keep journals regularly; they are comprised of story ideas, "brilliant" one-liners, snippets of dialog that may fit into one of my stories, doodles and poems. Hmm, I'm going to err on the side of "if I write poems even though I'm not in a poetry class, I'm a poet."

In any event, I believe that this fairly rambling pre-amble is just an advertisement to get you, dear reader, to pop on by my new blog. Don't worry, this one's not going anywhere -- as "the other blog" serves a different purpose from this one. This one is basically about keeping you posted on my film and writing projects, whereas the new one, called Personal Juice, is essentially a virtual version of the journals I was just describing. Anyway, check it out if you are so inclined. It is here.

All right, onto business. Progress on the TITO documentary has been slow (mostly due to having to deal with selling my dying car and buying a new one [a work in progress]). However, I just submitted TITO to the Fantastic Film Festival, which I hope accepts my little film. On Monday morning, Chris Alexander, the Editor-in-Chief of Fangoria magazine accepted my first article for Fango. And although for some reason I'm not feeling the nostalgia value of the acceptance (probably due to being pre-occupied with the car situation [and my mom's concern thereof]), I grew up reading Fangoria magazine and, in fact, had wallpapered my bedroom with the mini-posters of monsters, make-up artists, and grotesqueties that they portrayed.

In fact, when Chris read my article, he gave me the same feedback as Ogre had [reference is to an article I wrote after interviewing a childhood hero: lead singer of the band Skinny Puppy]; they both said that the articles were "fantastic." So, that's definitely good news.

Beyond that, I've been gradually molding several stories, which are in various stages of development, for future film projects -- including the biker film that I originally wrote with my late father. I've also been tinkering with some musical recordings and may spring something fairly interesting on a most-likely uninterested public in the near future.

Until then, I've got plenty of work to do, so I bid you peace and good day!

One, two, three...Wednesday.

All right, it's been about four months, so it's time for another blog post. Who says I'm not regular?

Let's see here, at the top of the heap, there's Tuning In, Tuning Out, my short film, which I FINALLY put the finishing touches on about a month or so ago so that I could submit it to more film festivals; the cut that I screened at the premiere party in November had a couple of glitches (the frame rate was off in one scene and the sound was slightly out of sync and poorly mixed in another) and things that I wanted to change (specifically the length of one or two shots and at least one sound effect).

Now I've only yet to finish my work on " The Making of Tuning In, Tuning Out" documentary, so I can package these babies up and send them out to all of my incredibly patient investors, actors, and crew members...and then I can begin work on my next film project, whatever that may be. Oh, and speaking of documentaries, the doc I made about the cross-country Harley trip that I took is now in consideration at several documentary film festivals. The trip was taken on the 2005 Road King that I inherited from my dad, and the documentary was kind of a "trial run" for a more expansive documentary road trip film project which will also be a tribute to him.

In the literary world, editing Diabolique magazine has given me some very interesting opportunities. The theme for the current issue, which I brainstormed with Brandon Kosters, is Rock and Horror. After coming up with this theme, we pushed around some ideas; I wrote a bunch of outlines and assigned them to a pretty awesome stable of writers, and ended up with nothing short of a brilliant edition. For this issue I reviewed Dan O'Bannon's book on screenwriting (which was very entertaining and inspiring), and I interviewed Kevin "Ogre" Ogilvie from Skinny Puppy. If you've never had the opportunity to speak with someone whose work you loved (or of whom you used to have a poster when you were a teenager), I highly recommend it. Anyway, Ogre's projects have always been fascinating to me from thematic and production-based perspectives, and I'd never really read anything about band members Ogre or cEvin Key that answered all of the questions that I had about the methodology of their work. Ogre was very candid and spoke to me at length about his inspirations, his stage shows, and his work in film. He also supplied me with a bunch of really cool images that I ran in the mag. I am told that this issue should be in stores in a week or so, so make sure you get a copy before they're all snatched up!