Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Terror etc..

When I was growing up, there were always rumors about videos that were kept behind the counter at video stores. Not that sassy ones with the naked ladies, but the secret ones that the video store wasn't supposed to have. Tapes made by random people with too much time on their hands and too much video and audio recording equipment at their disposal. Embarrassingly produced corporate promotion videos that were never supposed to see the light of day. Test footage or final cuts of movies that were killed before the studio ever released them. These were the stuff of urban legend, but everyone knew someone who knew about the tapes and if you found the right kind of video store you could find those tapes. 

Then came Hollywood Video and Blockbuster Video and the mom and pop rental places started to go under because they couldn't keep up the way the big stores could. The videos all disappeared from view for a while, but then the internet showed up and brought us the analog quality digital conversions of the videos that used to only be available if you knew that day that one video clerk was working and you told him your friend's older brother sent you.

The other day I found an article on Wikipedia about what was practically a unicorn in the world of duplicated VHS tapes, a movie called: Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead Part 2. 

"I wanna lay you out on the floor and plow into you like a caboose, but a gentle caboose baby a gentle caboose." -Black Guy in movie

I remember hearing about this movie growing up a lover of zombie movies and VHS tapes, but never actually saw it. It was one of those things I chalked up to missed opportunities of my youth (like having a birthday party where all the invitations were custom made slap bracelets, or gotten a school picture with lasers in the background, or an over-sized pair of light up shoes). Of course when I thought that the internet wasn't the mass storage space for every pieces of media ever created accessible to those who look. Thanks to the ever diligent elves of the internets, someone got this movie on youtube.  

Our Feature Presentation in SHOCKING 2-D

What I love about this movie:

Anytime you watch George Romero's original Night of the Living Dead, it is interesting to see how zombies as a movie trope have evolved since this movie. The Romero zombies aren't completely lost to the brain rot. They smash the headlights of the guy's car, they know how to use weapons, they seem more interested in killing their victims, and eating them seems to be an after thought.

This is not George Romero's movie though. This is what happens when nerdy film students from Jersey get together for a film project that they are pulling out of their ass at the last minute. It is a re-dubbed version of Romero's movie. It is filled with strange clips spliced into the feature of some found footage with the narrator telling some schlocky joke over the footage. There are also times when there is a phone ringing in the background that no one seems to answer until the narrator yells at someone and there is a jump cut in the narration. The jokes are over the top slapstick, crude, and incredibly dated as reflected by the frequent use of 90s slang and insults.

I can't remember the last time I laughed this much at a movie. The plot is rewritten so that the zombies aren't undead, but rather overworked and under paid wage slaves who have lost it and decided to fight against the "normals", aka people who don't have to work long hours for shitty pay. It's like they had an idea for a zombie movie, but had a budget of less than $100. 

Movies and found footage like this always feel like I'm watching the secret video-diary of someone who didn't really expect the world to be paying such close attention. It's endearingly heart-felt art in that way, but without that filter in the creative process of tailoring the work to an audience to make it be anything other than honest. Albeit in this case, the creator's honest art is a re-dubbed version of someone else's work filled with corn-ball jokes and poop humor.

Poetry Post: Too Early For a Family Reunion

The sun is not even out of bed
but my family to shows up for a surprise reunion.
This is especially impressive
with home three-thousand miles away.

When I cough the dusty sleep
out of my lungs
I hear my mother in the rasp of my throat.
I un-tuck my face from under my hair,
my father's younger self smirks at my genetics.
Hidden in the angle of my nose
is a fist mark the shape of my brother's anger
Peaking out from the corners
of the blue in my eyes,
is a smile my sister and I have shared since birth.
And bad habit justifications sound
like my littlest sister's grand plans of
nothing out of the ordinary.

The sun creeps out of bed,
breakfast is a childhood memory
 of my mother's oatmeal
drowning in the strong coffee
of my father's forty hour work week.
I have never felt far away from them.
Someday I hope to learn to miss them.

The Year Ahead

This is normally around the time of year people are supposed to come up with their new years resolutions for how they will change their lives over the next calendar year. This is typically a reflection of all that didn't get accomplished the previous year. All the projects that weren't completed, or ever started for that matter. It's letting go of regret about what we couldn't do by fooling ourselves into thinking we'll change through long term goals we will put off until we forget about them.

If you Google it, there are no shortage of random charts with no data and/or dubious sources to back them up that prove what I'm saying:

I don't want to be statistic fodder this year. If the type of grand plan thinking involved in New Years Resolution worked to accomplish my goals, I'd have been the #1 best selling astronaut rock star billionaire writer who owns the world's first solar-powered perpetually-flying house by age 10 (a resolution I made when I still didn't understand that resolutions weren't like birthday wishes; or the unreliable nature of birthday wishes for that matter). Trying to use that type of thinking is only giving myself a chance to fail at a task I probably don't really want to do anyway. This is usually because of the overwhelming immensity involved in what I set out to do or I set the bar so low the accomplishment isn't really worth mentioning. Though last year's resolution to find a better smelling body wash has paid off pretty solidly.

My old resolutions have always involved changing various habits (write daily, work less, exercise daily, eat less junkfood) yet even with those type of resolutions I have a hard time acting on my desire for the change. Resolutions by their very nature tend to be immense life changes that are all or nothing situations. I've never considered myself a cold turkey kind of habit quitter, so I can't imagine I'm the type to pick one up similarly.

That's why instead of making an overwhelming demand of myself in the guise of a New Year's Resolution, I'm planning to try to affect more subtle daily changes to my habits. Give myself room to improve rather than be disappointed in myself for not accomplishing the overwhelming goal I'd originally set out to do. Looking at it this way gives me a chance to improve on plans I make depending on how they work out without the worry-weight of a huge decision. 

What's this feeling I've got? Did I have too much coffee today? Not yet I don't think. Wait a minute, I remember this. It's that same feeling I had heading west from NY after college. It's optimistic hope for the weeks ahead. Hope, welcome back to my guts.

Embracing my Inner Nerd

15 year old me would be so proud

I like to read books about wizards and shit. I like to watch TV and movies about space adventures and zombie apocalypses, but damn it sometimes the protagonist is doing it wrong and I know I could do it better. Not always, but sometime the protagonist is a badass and just has a touch of the douche-face that is spoiling (I've turned off movies less than 5 minutes in due to Eric Balfour being in the movie for any amount of time. I'm sorry, but being a Skeet Ulrich knock off, who in turn is a Johnny Depp knock off, is no reason to be put in front of a camera).

When I was in middle school, my friends and I had a routine every weekend. We got together under to play role playing games and gorging ourselves on junk food. I don't remember actually playing most of the games. I think we mostly made characters to use to adventure through whatever world we were hoping to explore and then got distracted with talking about what badasses we were gonna be when we actually played. We mostly made references to awful B-movies and then got too annoyed with one another to get to playing. Eventually it stopped being cool to play nerd games on your weekends and my friends bailed on our routine for other stuff.

Except none of us shaved our heads and ODed on Percocet...at least I didn't

What with one thing and another 15 years passed and my interest in telling collaborative stories with characters controlled by other people has started to peak my interest again. The major problem I had was trying to get other people to agree to try to play games with me.

Far from it indeed.

I said role playing games and very few people had positive images about the amount of fun they would have. The more I pressed with my friends the more I realized their hesitation was typically with a fear of not knowing exactly how to play the game and not being able to get into it. People became a lot more responsive when I started calling them collaborative fiction games. I'm still the only person I know that enjoys them enough to learn the rules and teach them to other people and get them to play the game, but willing players is a step in the right direction.

My conclusion: I think this is really all leading me to needing to start a blog about this type of gaming. Not only the things I do, but reviews of games. I've got hundreds of PDFs I've collected over the years of all kinds of games, from the worst to the best that were executed poorly. I usually talk my friends heads off about these games if I have them cornered long enough. Maybe it'd work better if I just blathered endlessly on the internet about instead, seems to work here at least.

Cheap books and someone else's efforts to be heard

I had an English professor early on in college that gave an impassioned, albeit well rehearsed and repeated as his opening day starter for every course he taught, speech about books that always stuck with me. He urge us all not to sell our books back at the end of the semester. The college gives you a terrible price on the buy backs and who knows when you might find use for them later. Just one more way colleges screw you over, he said.

Bitter old English professors aside (or realist ahead of his time?), I have always loved used books. The more tattered the pages the better. Books that look like they had gone every where with someone. Passages underlined, notes in then margins, dog eared pages, evidence of another reader. I always felt books picked up extra meaning beyond the words on the page when you could see the wear on the spine and someone's words in the margins.

That is the mindset I that has always kept me from getting a Kindle. While I'm sure I'd love an ereader, I feel like it disconnects me from the book too much. There is a lack of permanence in the way the feel. A delicate nature that makes it hard to live in the words the same way as a physical book. Letting it pick up who you are as a reader as it travels with you. Those lived in books always felt handmade to me.

I've been thinking a lot about the DIY and crowd sourcing communities. The idea of building it yourself by hand instead of having someone glaze over your efforts with the gloss of expensive print jobs. At the same time letting the community that invests in choose help the projects develop into their full potential. In still piecing together my mission statement for a project I'm going to begin working on soon. If I can get a central idea to umbrella all my efforts under first, then I'll be able to really push myself into it and get it done. If I start trying without that idea solidified in my head fist I'll just waste my efforts trying to figure out step one for an unfinished idea. That wouldn't end up helping anyone.

What does it mean to want to be published in a book?

So it happened again. I submitted a poem I wrote to an anthology being put together by someone I know and it got accepted. You can find my poem along with countless other poems by some of the most talented poets in Southern California in the book A Poet is Poet No Matter How Tall an anthology by Raundi K. Moore-Kondo. While I'm honored to have been a part of the anthology, I don't think my name on the table of contents is gonna sell any books to anyone besides my parents. If I'm honest, I don't even have a clear recollection of which poem I submitted. I've missed most of the book release events that have happened lately. I've been adjusting to the hectic Fall 2013 season of Andyland: new job, new schedule, the changing weather affecting my sleep.

Raundi is one of the most motivated and talented poets I know. She loves the written word and teaches poetry to groups of home schooled kids. She invites poets from the area to help teach her classes and share there work. She has a website too. Oh what's this: http://www.theloveofwords.com/ a link to her website where you can find out about taking your Southern Californian children to so they can learn about poetry and expressing themselves through written verse? Why yes it is. How convenient for those that are interested in not raising Philistines, but instead well rounded individuals.

It feels strange to be published in something. I don't feel a connection to this new anthology, which was also the case for the last one. I suppose part of it has something to do with not getting to the book parties and events, but at least with this one I feel like my poem belongs in the anthology.

I still regret the poem I submitted to the other anthology. Now my poem about gifts to give loved ones who've died is in a book of poems about zombies. While reading humorous poems about the zombie outbreaks you run across mine; which just makes you feel uncomfortable in the context. I always felt like it shouldn't have been accepted, but the guy publishing it knew me and I'd kind of written the poem off a prompt he gave me in a writing group he'd run and he liked it a lot so he just put it in. I'm grateful I got to be associated with the book and the press, but I feel like I could have written (and subsequently did write) a better zombie themed poem.

The whole thing had me question a lot of my previous motivations in my work. I'd always wanted to have my name on the cover of a book. Not on the cover page of an ebook, but a physical object to have on a shelf. I am not sure that's a motivation I can follow anymore. I don't think there will be a sudden revival of people not buying shiny new tablet readers and instead spending more money for actual books. This doesn't mean I don't still want to get my work out there. I've just got to rethink my approach. I think 2014 will be a better year for me than the past few have been and it'll make my attempts at getting my work out there much easier. Now I just need to spend the rest of this year figuring out what my new approach will be.

Keeping up with my sleep

When I find myself laying in bed wishing I were more tired than I was, I'm reminded of days when I used to wish I had more time in the day to get everything in I wanted done. I used to stay up until the sun came up over the weekends just out of habit. I always found my most interesting ideas came to me in the middle of the night. I'm not the only one who thinks so. It's a popular idea.

From a man of few written words, Rives:

Society's sleeping habits have changed dramatically over the past century. Compensating for all that giant populations bring to a city. Competitive job markets, 40 hour work weeks, commuting, and getting up at the crack of dawn the following day to fight for freeway space early to avoid the slow crawl of traffic. People 100 years ago had a lot more free time on their hands to set their own schedules. Of course they also had child labor, no safety standards, and no indoor plumbing. I imagine that meant many of their free hours were spent avoiding dying rather than spent on leisurely activities.

I've always thought about changing my sleeping pattern in some way. I thought of going to bed extra early, waking up for a few hours in the middle of the night to read or write, then back to sleep until dawn for the day. I wanted to try some crazy Uberman's sleep schedule in college. My main hesitation was that everything I read said that kind of change to your sleep schedule typically involved a period of adjustment of about 10 days where you wanted to kill yourself from lack of regular sleep; and who needs to deal with that for any days let alone 10?

Since I don't have any trust fund money headed my way, and I'm not counting on any lotto winnings rolling in to free up my time to have a ridiculous sleep schedule. I'll just do what I've always done: celebrate day light savings time in all of it's brain tricking weirdness. This year my day light savings resolution is to use the extra day light I have in the morning to help get me use to waking up AND being functional early in the morning. I'm gonna use the extra night hours to trick my brain into thinking it's the middle of the night. That's kind of the same thing as a dramatic adjustment to your sleeping pattern, right?