Immersion

So when a film is hyped this much, there can't be any way possible for it to live up to it, right?

Wrong.

Predictable story aside, James Cameron's Avatar might singlehandedly save the cinematic experience. There are films that you simply wait for on DVD, and some that you can take or leave in the theater. Avatar absolutely must be seen in the theater, and if possible, in 3D IMAX. DVD will not do it any kind of justice.

This is the most gorgeous and immersive theatrical experience I've ever seen. Cameron has synched up his story of Jake Sully's immersion into an alien world with the audience's complete immersion in the film experience. The gap between visual effect and visual reality is narrowing to near insignificance, something I thought could never happen. While Avatar is the first of its kind, and represents a foray into brave new territory, subsequent films in its mold will yield more and more visually arresting scapes that will defy human discernment. The virtual reality film is right around the corner, and at that point there will be no appreciable difference between generated worlds and our own.

I'm excited and intrigued, and maybe a little apprehensive.

Go see Avatar in the theater. Watching it on DVD would be like the difference between seeing a photograph of a glorious dawn and actually greeting the sun.

Flirting with Disaster

We Were Warned says the tagline of 2012, the latest disaster porn to infiltrate movie theaters. Indeed, we were warned...when this movie first came out under the title The Day after Tomorrow...which first came out under the title Independence Day.

I know I know. I spent the money, and what did I expect? And to be totally honest, the movie accomplished more or less what it set out to do: simultaneously thrill and repulse me with breathtakingly realistic visual demonstrations of the horrifying annihilation of Earth and billions of human beings.

Truly, for sheer destruction, I have no idea how 2012 will ever be topped. Perhaps it isn't wise to invite calamitous imagineering, but short of seeing the planet and its every inhabitant gradually consumed by a massive black hole or smacked into the sun with a god-sized baseball bat, what's left? Watching Los Angeles convincingly fall into the ocean more or less ends the fun for me.

Yet why, I wonder, do I not-so-secretly get excited by apocalyptic scenarios? Why do we so enjoy blowing the hell out of ourselves on screen?

This past weekend I was leaving a friend's house in Hollywood when we heard what sounded like artillery going off somewhere nearby. We joined other confused neighbors in rounding a corner to try and see what it might be. Of course, it stopped right as we got a clear look.

Intrigued, I left my friend, jumped in my car, and went several miles out of my way to get a look. I anxiously flipped through radio stations to see if there were any early reports of gunshots fired or a previously unknown chemical plant in the middle of the Fairfax district exploding. I could see what looked like a plume of smoke rising up from the south, and circled around to discover...

...people leaving from The Grove after the Christmas Tree lighting ceremony, with fireworks finale.

And I felt a small twinge of disappointment. It took me a moment to notice the hordes of people streaming away from the Tree Lighting, enjoying an event with their families and loved ones. When I finally did, I returned to myself, ashamed at my dark desire for calamity to spice up my otherwise normal life.

So I suppose that despite 2012 being so formulaic that you could darn near edit together the same movie from pieces of ID4, Day After Tomorrow, and Poseidon, and despite it being downright insulting in the casting of Danny Glover as the President of the United States (who sounds like he just woke up from being whacked with a sock full of quarters), I guess the simple truth is that it appeals to something intrinsic within me, and I daresay us.

Whether that something is good or bad I don't know.

Fried Banana

This morning I ate a fried banana. I don't know why.















I like cooking with plasticware.


I traveled via dream last night to a farm town. For whatever reason it seemed familiar. There wasn't much to the town. In fact, it seemed to occupy no more than a couple square blocks before giving way to lush, rolling farmland. There were grain silos and fields of corn right up to the town's edge.  It was a lovely summer day, and there were people out enjoying the perfect twilight. I suspected that there might be a baseball game in town that evening; there was a tangible buzz as daylight waned.

I knew I had been here before, and for some reason I thought I could walk the rest of the way to wherever I was going. So I got out of my car and went into a small shopping center, which featured a TGI Friday's on my right as I entered. There were diners inside, and also on a strange outside patio ahead on my left that seemed disconnected from the rest of the restaurant. Still, everything about it was familiar, including the odd staircase that bisected the restaurant. It led down to another pub--its name began with an M--and to an exit on a lower level.

The shopping center seemed to vanish upon descending this stairwell, and I began walking back through the town toward my car. It became more familiar with every step. At once I realized I was in central Illinois. I believed the town was called Hamilton, and sure enough, at that moment I passed a small green sign that said Hamilton, although the HA, MIL, and TON were all on separate lines.

It seemed then that this town was near where my ex-fiance grew up in Illinois, explaining its familiarity. Her town was where I had been headed originally, yet walking there was out of the question; it was several miles down a country road. I began to search for my car.

Meanwhile I walked the edge of the town. It was a peaceful stroll. I passed a resident of the town and his young son. Grass broke apart the sidewalk, and there was gravel along the curb.

1st Draft Finished

The first draft of Tracks is completed, and I'm really stoked about it.

There is work to be done, and it remains to be seen if it's too ambitious. But hell, it's done. THAT is a victory for me.

Next up is some note taking and minor revisions, then a table read.

Really excited...

Flow Writer

Over the past four days I've spent over 13 hours working Tracks. And while today wasn't progress toward finishing, it was well-spent on tightening some areas of the script that had been bothering me. I'm also spending a lot of time away from the computer thinking about the storyline of Tracks, which isn't necessarily unusual or productive for me, except that I'm rapidly taking my ideas onto the page.

Both facets are important steps for me, given that I've been gestating so many ideas for so long--yet not getting them onto the page--that I've seen many of them wither on the vine, disappear into the crevasses of my memory, or escape into the world to show up under someone else's name. Four months ago Tracks wasn't even on my radar, yet since I've turned my attention to it, I've been flowing.

Whether the flow is yielding good writing or not remains to be seen. I'm optimistic.

I have had some challenging moments in Tracks, especially when I've dropped my heroes into difficult situations which will take ingenuity to escape. I'm not really all that resourceful when held captive in the middle of the enemy stronghold, I've never been in a fight with three men with my hands zip-tied behind my back, and I've never been on the roof of a train about to collide with another. So I'm having to be creative to save my heroes--and my screenplay--from falling apart.

I'm learning that I work best when I just let the story go for a while, see where it takes me, then reel it in a bit if I find myself in a corner. I've known this about my writing style for a while, yet ever since a debacle in my childhood, I've been gunshy about doing it.

I was writing a science-fiction novel when I was around 11 or 12. Basically it was Star Wars on Earth, with some rebels running around from the "federalists." All of the characters were based on my friends or erstwhile crushes. And of course the mysterious hero was based on me. There were also a lot of robots and laser weapons and rumors about a City in the Sky (one of the names of the book...it changed a lot).

It was really cruising along, actually. I was into the 9th or 10th chapter I think, somewhere around 120 pages in, when all of the sudden - poof. I just stopped writing it. I had hit a dead end where I couldn't see what was next. I remember the last scene was between a girl and her Artoo Detoo-esque robot named XL-CO, who had rocketed the girl to safety into a foreboding canyon (I imagined a little droid with propulsion long before the Star Wars prequels retroactively gave it to Artoo). They crash-landed when his fuel ran out. They both survived, but the girl was soon shocked that she could sense that XL-CO was in pain, and moreover that he seemed to have a very human essence to him. The implied revelation was that XL-CO--and all robots--were given intelligence by using the downloaded personalities of dead people.

But the story just died right there. I had no idea where to go next. 120 pages! Down the drain.

Anyhow, I've been worried about having that kind of thing happen to me again, and the result has been that I've mercilessly edited myself while trying to include all possible pathways and avoid all possible loose ends.

Only once did I break through since then, when I finished my first screenplay Lost Time (which will mercifully be lost to time if there is a God...I mean, it had some good parts, but more than anything I was just glad to finish it). I recall the feeling of total elation when it wound its way to a rather satisfying conclusion in 127 pages.

As I close in on the completion of Tracks, I am proving to myself that I can finish the job, and even the danger of writing myself into corners is just a way of connecting to my heroes.

If they can get out tough jams, so can I.

That Old Song

Today I sang. A lot. I greeted the month of November and the blessed fallback time change (it's like a six month sleep loan that you pay back in April) with a 7:30 AM call for two All Saints Day services at St. Matthew's. If you've never heard of a necrology, you don't want to. Yet even still, I love going to St. Matthew's and singing with that choir. Just love it!

Then later I attended a rehearsal for Michele Weir's Christmas Singers, at which I learned that since last year I leapfrogged a number of other tenors to go from bottom rung alternate to first call. I'm told that's fairly uncommon, and in any event a welcome surprise. I could use as many gigs this season as possible.

Most surprising, though, is how my range has continued to grow into my 30's. Somehow, over the course of the last twelve years or so, I've gone from being a bona fide bass II to nearly a legit tenor I. I'm comfortably singing notes now that during high school and college I would never have dreamed of hitting (well, actually, I did dream of hitting them). And not punching them but floating them, controlled and on my breath.

Best of all, my voice is holding up through long days, getting stronger in fact. There was a time in college when I nearly lost my voice entirely, and since coming to LA, I more or less wrote off my singing voice as merely serviceable, and a skill I'd rather not utilize. Having gone away from singing regularly for years, I'm suddenly finding myself intensely singing at minimum four days a week, and getting paid reasonably well for it.

I've had some chats with people about this kind of thing. For instance, I  learned from a female acquaintance who is a masterful french horn player that she spent several years not even picking up the horn. Same for a buddy who is a virtuosic upright bass player. At some point their tremendous gifts for their instruments became something of a weight to bear, or they hit an unexpected speedbump, or they didn't want to lean upon that talent to get them through the door anymore. They stepped away from their instruments, only to return some time later to re-stoke their passion and re-energize their careers.

I'm coming full circle with my voice. I'm still committed to becoming a filmmaker and a screenwriter, among other endeavors. And I don't think I'll ever give myself over to rebuilding the classical solo chops and repertoire I once had. But I'm remembering the immense joy that choral and vocal jazz music once brought me, and craving it more and more. I've been hiding that light under a bushel for a while now, which has been quite a detriment to my self-expression.

Consequently, the more I re-visit that part of my life, the more I reclaim something of the youthful fervor and confidence that I thought had been suppressed by the vicissitudes of Los Angeles living. Turns out I was doing most of the suppressing myself.

A Sinatra song comes to mind:

We used to dance
Instead of walk
We used to sing
Instead of talk


But you forgot all the words
While I still remember the tune


JS

Tracks

Yet. Another. Blog.


I'm suddenly envisioning a far future in which a successor species is conducting extensive archaeological digs to learn about the long-extinct human race, only to find that somewhere in the early 21st century there is a complete cessation of any physical cultural record. They'll either think we were telepathic or illiterate, at least until they find mountains of fossilized screenplays in the Los Angeles dump and know for sure it's the second one.


 Here's what no alien or apian race will ever know about me:

• This Sublime Dance on AOL-Journals (out of commission...but don't worry, I have Word docs)
• An unnamed blog on MySpace (remember MySpace? How I'm filled with nostalgia for 2006)
•  Radical Transparency here on Blogger (all of two posts, intended to be anonymous and oooh, subversive!)
•  Will Busker on Xanga
• Side Work Online on Blogger
• AOL Shopping Trends & Advice (I get paid for this one if you can believe it)

How about some goddamn craziness to get this started off right? As I'm writing this, I recalled that I once had a Yahoo GeoCities homepage back in 2001 that boasted my first ever blog (before anyone ever called it a blog). Among other musings, it actually contained my thoughts and feelings about the breakup of my engagement.

I decided to see if I could dig it up and list it above, especially since I haven't visited it in at least four or five years. So I ventured over to GeoCities, only to find this notice. If you're too lazy to follow the link, it says that "GeoCities is closing on October 26, 2009." As in 9 minutes ago. 

You can't make this stuff up. Not that I'll really miss the content that was posted there, but one way or another it's gone for good, leaving no discernible trace. I'm slowly being erased...like Marty McFly.

Anyhow, my intent here isn't to evoke nihilistic head-slapping. No, quite the opposite: I want to once more drop a milemarker onto the (digital) landscape so I or anyone with a net connection can look back and notice a passage. 

And, if necessary, navigate a similar course.

Here's the latest:

• I am hard at work on a screenplay called Tracks, with an anticipated 1st draft completion date of November 2. Yes, next Monday. With the assistance of co-creator John Oropallo, I fully intend to have Tracks in the hands of a production team by January 2010. 

• I am performing with my beloved Ariana Hall on Tuesday, October 27, sometime between 8:30-10, at Room 5, upstairs at 143 N. La Brea in Hollywood. We're part of a Beatles tribute evening, with several of LA's best singer/songwriter talent paying homage to the greatest band in history. $10 entry goes to charity, come out and see us!

• Storeytime a cappella group continues to rehearse in anticipation of accepting more gigs around the LA area and forwarding the inspirational effort of Patrick Storey to become a professional singer with autism. We just completed recording our demo reel with 3-time Grammy winning engineer Anton Pukshansky at Beta Records. We made our debut recently at the 2nd annual An Evening for Autism benefit in Newport Beach.

• I sing on Sundays with the magnificent Choir of St. Matthew's Episcopalian Church, Pacific Palisades. Having been bred in choral traditions throughout high school and college, getting to sing with this choir is like returning home. That I'm a paid staff member is beyond a blessing.

That's all for now. I'm going to go tuck in my girl and prepare for another day full of possibility tomorrow.

JS