Wow! I waited less than a month this time!!! Just wanted to post a quick pet peeve...

Now, in my approaching old age, I suppose I've come to accept the fact that many people - okay, most people - tend to have opinions that differ from my own. Keep in mind, I said accept, NOT understand. While I might find this entire concept both offensive and confusing, it is apparently the way of this cruel, cold little world.

Recently, my mother, god bless her, bought her first DVD player. To go along with this purchase, she picked up several movies, none of which she'd ever seen. Of course, I love my mother, but why the heck would you buy DVDs of movies you've never seen??? Why not buy something you know you love, such as, in my mom's case, Titanic or, I don't know, Steel Magnolias (the quintissential "mom movie") or something?

"Because I hate watching things more than once."

Jeez! Why buy DVDs at all then? Why not just use this DVD player you got for rentals??? Alas, I learned many moons ago that logic does not apply to arguments with my mother, and that I will always lose said argument, no matter what. So I let it drop.

However, one of the movies she got was Sideways, something from last year I'd heard wonderful things about but'd never gotten around to seeing myself. So, noticing that after a good two months it still had the plastic wrapper on it, I took it home and watched it last night.

What a wonderful, beautifully-told story! Great writing, directing and acting all around. Accept. Well, it was in FREAKING FULL-SCREEN!!!

Yup, that entire lead-in was just for me to bitch about stupid full-screen DVD's.

Why do they still produce these atrocities? Why? Obviously, their sales justify their production. So, who, aside from my mother, god bless her, buys them? Apparently, the majority. So, the majority of you purchase DVDs in which 1/3 of the total screen image is cut out. Just because you don't like the "ugly bars" on your screen.

Well, if there's any justice in the world, at the very least you're all buying Kangaroo Jack in full screen. Because you all deserve to watch it over and over again as punishment for your lack of taste.

Because Han Shot First, Damn It.

I’m only writing this because I’m sick of getting e-mails from the prodigal Sang S. Kim, Esq., asking why I haven’t updated in so long. You can’t find anything better to do in all of San Francisco? Jeez.

Well, two months since the last posting, and spurn finally ended its run a good month ago. Saints be praised. It was one of our better productions, with the new mixed-media presentation, but it was a hell of a road getting there. Happy to hear the positive audience reaction, though. That and lots of beer just about makes it all worthwhile.

My wife and I have since gone on our very late honeymoon, to Mexico, which was perfectly relaxing. In fact, though I’ve been back for over two weeks, I have a strange feeling that my brain jumped ship and stayed behind, and is now lounging on the beach, downing tequila and beer. The traitorous little bastard. Well, that or I’ve just grown incredibly stupid since returning, which is much more likely.

As if it wasn’t bad enough when I started hearing Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life”, the best song about heroin addiction ever, in Carnival cruise line advertisements, now I have to cry in shame whenever I hear the Ramones or the Clash advertising cars and cell phones. At least they waited till most of them were dead.

What’s new? It’s hotter than hell here in New York City – last few days have been just shy of 100 degrees along with that damned high humidity. Splitting my time at home between the air-conditioned bedroom and the extremely hot, windowless living room to get my mandatory GTA: San Andreas time in… I feel that if I neglect my little game world, all the territories I’ve won through gang warfare will be taken back by my rivals when I’m not looking. Curse you, Ballas!

By the way, everything’s better when hip-hop is added, isn’t it? Because the kids love the hip-hop.

Speaking of which, here’s today’s topic – groupthink. Something I mentioned in a previous post, I know, but I still can’t get it out of my head.

group·think
n. The act or practice of reasoning or decision-making by a group, especially when characterized by uncritical acceptance or conformity to prevailing points of view.

Name more than two or three good television shows (on network tv, HBO doesn’t count). Looking at any weekend box office, name more than one movie opening each week that looks even halfway decent.

Groupthink gave us The World According to Jim. Groupthink gave us reality television. Groupthink gave us Van Helsing, for god’s sake. Every single time a focus group pops up and decides that adding scenes containing B, C and D to movie A will make it appeal to a much wider audience, well, an angel weeps. A kitten is sacrificed. And a lot of other bad things, too. Its not that I’m demanding all film, and certainly not all television, needs to be “art”. But I seem to recall, in that somewhat distant past, when media like this used to be at least somewhat challenging. Didn’t it? Or was it always like this, and I was just too young to realize?

No, it has gotten worse. Look at the Star Wars prequels. All the great characters, all the witty banter of the first trilogy, whittled down into an easily-digestible, kid-friendly format for a new generation of sheep. And then they even had the nerve to go back and re-edit those perfectly wonderful original movies to be more suitable to the mainstream. That’s why I won’t buy that damned DVD set. Well, a few reasons really – including no cast commentary in which all the original stars get to make fun of Billy Dee Williams, and because Han shot first, damn it.

But one of the wonderful side effects of groupthink is to make us docile, because we’re never really challenged anymore. We’re stuck with bland PG-13 mush designed to be as inoffensive as possible to the widest group possible. So now Han doesn’t shoot first.

Bullsh%t! I’m going back to San Andreas and shooting people in the face.

By the way, in case you haven’t realized, I’m back in production. On a new musical entitled “Genius Famous”, written by spurn’s own sound designer and premiering at this summer’s annual NYC International Fringe Festival. God help me. God help us all.

A lovely, hellish two months later...

Ahhhh yes... spurn! Oh, how I spurn thee.

Wow, the last two months have been a peach. spurn's been kicking my butt, Richelle and I moved (to a great place), my mom went through some more surgery for her neck, and I got a promotion at work. All of which is very nice (sort of), but I truly wish it didn't all have to happen at the same time. Ugh. I'm sick of getting home at 11pm every night.

The good news is that the show looks like it'll be great. We're in a huge new theatre, Off-Broadway, finally, and we're incorporating video pieces into the production for the first time. Which could either be very cool or a f*cking nightmare. I'm leaning towards very cool... we'll find out during Tech rehearsals in a week and a half.

All I really want to do is grab a six pack of some cheap beer and park myself on the couch for about a week. Alas!

Elon James White, who happens to be a very large black man (http://www.elonjames.com/aboutme/) from Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, thinks he can tackle me. I say he's welcome to try. The big p*$$y.

Yeah, I called you out, James.

I feel the need to rant. I don't know what the hell "neo-con" means, but I know what conservatism is supposed to mean. Increased states' rights = a smaller central government, i.e., conserve. To me, this means individuality over groupthink (though I know some liberals who I'm sure would disagree with me). Anyway, what does it mean when a seated Congress, at the behest of the President, convenes an emergency midnight session to pull a court case out of the state court system and into the federal system? Well, that's taking away state's rights, now isn't it?

a.) the federal (a.k.a. central) government should have no business telling its citizens when they are allowed to die... and, incidentally, who they can f*ck or who they can worship when they're alive, but that's a different issue. All of this should be decided on a state-to-state basis. So, if California wants to make same-sex marriage legal and you don't like it, move to a red state.
b.) the "neo-cons" have managed to spin this Schiavo case as an issue of morals, and by doing that, they've done the most amoral thing imaginable by turning this woman's very existence into a circus sideshow. Good job, guys. Way to take one for the team.

Conservative my ass. More like pandering to the moral majority. Kerry probably would've been a pretty useless president, but the one we're saddled with now... ugh. Rant over. I should probably try and say something funny now, huh?

Um... nope. Fresh out. spurn took it all. Sorry. Guess you'll just have to come and see the show, which opens in TWO WEEKS!!! Breath, breath... stop hyperventilating...

Oh, wait! I thought of something - I've posted it below. See? That's funny!

I'm surprised my wife hasn't beat me for not being around our first 5 months of marriage! Curse you, spurn!!!

See? This is funny. I mean, who really, really needs to buy this? 

If you're happy, you're DEFINITELY not paying attention!

Independent/Off-off Broadway/Fringe theater, whatever you want to call it, is officially dying in NYC. Well, it's been dying for some time, an agonizingly slow one. Not anymore. Now it'll be quick. And painful.

There is a block here in midtown Manhattan, 42nd Street between Dyer & 10th Aves., that is commonly referred to as Theatre Row. Several buildings along the south side of the street form a literal catacomb of at least 30-40 small-scale theaters. It is by far the largest concentration of less-than-120 seat houses in the country. And it's being torn down this summer for - what else - luxury condos. There are literally hundreds of theatre troupes, spurn being one of them, that simply cannot afford the step up to "Off-Broadway", i.e., theaters w/more than 120 seats. The price jumps from about $1,500/wk to about $5,000/wk. So, much like the film and music industries - challenging, off-center, non-traditional theatre that is not immediately guaranteed to make its money back and/or appeal to the widest possible audience of bland America, now has no home.

Obviously, this puts a slight snag in the current and any future productions of spurn. Goddamnit.

And, we just found out that another one of our castmembers is unable to be in the current production as well. He got a job. In Connecticut. So we have to recast a man as well as a woman, potentially adding another two weeks to pre-production. Goddamnit.

I told you spurn would kick my ass in the last post.

How the hell has that greasy, dirty hippie-looking guy from Counting Crows dated so many hot women? Ditto for that dude from Soul Asylum. Why do I care about bands that were barely relevant ten years ago?

Just read an interesting article on Secession in modern-day America. Terribly amusing to think about. I mean, it'll never happen, but it's still terribly amusing to think about. Not in an "I'm an anarchistic little punk asshole that wants to watch the whole thing burn" sort of way, more in the sense that I think this country, particularly its painfully centralised behemoth of an unchecked government, is leading its citizens down the wrong damned path.

Anyway, this article/essay stressed Vermont as a key player in any future Secession movement. It has the strongest state gov't, the least federal taxes, and the most "fearlessly individualistic spirit". It also has the least paved roads of the the whole country, miles of untouched forests and mountains, and some of the highest gun sales anywhere, making it the perfect place to mount an entrenched guerilla war. For some reason, this is just funny to me. I don't know why. Perhaps it explains Howard Dean. Go Vermont.

Finally, I like the new Battlestar Galactica series on Sci-Fi. And I really like the Rome: Total War computer strategy game. My geek status is officially cemented. Thank god I'm already married.

A new year almost upon us...

Hmmm. Once again, I see that I've neglected to post for over a month. Obviously, I'm not cut out for this blog business.

Christmas has once again come and gone, and, consequently, for the fourth (or is it fifth?) year in a row, I am here at the office the week between Christmas and New Year's, and no one is freaking here. What a shock. Also, I have a nasty cold, complete with fever. Ah well, so much for a nice little Christmas vacation.

This also represents my first Christmas married. Things are near perfect. In fact, I can't report any real difference between pre-married and post-married life. Which I consider to be a wonderful thing. So I'll stop going on about it, because we all know that if everything is great, it makes for boring stories. On that note...

spurn is officially going to beat the hell out of me from the New Year on. This is quite literally my last weekend of respite for the next two-three months. I do love producing theatre, but sometimes, just sometimes, I wouldn't mind the legal right to kill people on site. Thank god for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. A great tension-reliever. I can't wait until we hire a new director. There's nothing better for disrupting an already tenuous working relationship in theatre than trying to garner the whole production crew's throughts on a new director. My goal is not to please everyone, just me (and possibly my co-producer, Ross). Because there is not one soul on the planet whose qualifications as a director would please the entire spurn board.

Got two new computers. Having a bitch of a time trying to put the hard drives from our two old computers into the new ones... apparently internal hdd mounting brackets are near impossible to find in a city as large as New York. I guess I just don't know the right people.

Not much else going on. Am still toiling away at my new screenplay, set during the fall of the Roman Empire (and most likely will for at least a year or two more), and I'm hoping to get a bunch of work done on Genius Famous, a musical I'm producing for (hopefully) the '05 Fringe Festival, in the next few days. And play games on my new computer. Oh, and drink myself stupid on New Year's. So it'll be a busy couple of days.

And, pathetically, I'm eagerly awaiting next Wednesday, and the premiere of Alias, Season 4. Richelle and I have blown the better part of the last few months trowling through the first three seasons on DVDs pilfered from Ross. What a great, fun show! Although Season 3 did slip a bit. Hoping the new season picks up the slack.

So much for once a week!

Hmmm. It's been over a month and a half since my last posting. Pathetic. Well, in fairness to me, I did get married. Which was quite a time-consuming occasion, to say the least. A hell of a lot of fun, though. Ah, marital bliss. Funny, it's just like it was before we were married, except now we have an officially stamped piece of paper.

Incidentally, For an excuse to get together with all your closest friends and family to partake in excessive drinking, gambling, and general happy revelry in Vegas, I highly suggest annual wedding ceremonies. It should be a law.

The new spurn has officially been pushed to March 2005, which is a tremendous relief to me personally. If the December show went ahead, I would have been severely under-represented as one of the writers, which is something my ego just can't handle. And so, the Great Director Search of 2004 (the goddamned third one this year!) begins anew. Like casual sex-based relationships, my hope in a new director is someone the cast can collectively go out and get college-drunk with, then wake up next to him/her the next morning and not be utterly repulsed. Yup, my standards have gone up.

And Bush is still president.

Speaking of politics, on a slight tangent, I read this week that a news producer at CBS (or whatever network it was) got fired for having the utter, absolute nerve to interrupt the last ten minutes of CSI: New York to announce to the world that Yassir Arafat had died. When news of one of the major political figures of the last 50 years, the only admitted terrorist ever to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, whose death leaves a tremendous leadership vacuum for Palestinians and points to major upheavals in the Middle East, interrupts the last ten minutes of a second-generation spin off television show, they damn well better fire the producer who made the decision to cut in! Damn him for allowing most of America to miss out on the identity of the killer in a show that got re-run later in the week anyway. Damn him straight to hell.

Jesus, prioritize people! Sometimes, just sometimes, it sucks to live here.

I should probably do this more than once a month...

The first presidential debates were last night. Not only did I watch them, I was actually engaged by them for the full 90 minutes. Amazing. Seemed to me, in my completely biased and inexperienced viewpoint, that Kerry slamdunked Bush. Then I looked at the papers this morning, and most are calling it a tie. Damned liberal bias in the media!

The wedding is rapidly approaching... less than five weeks left. Can't really say I'm getting nervous. More to the point, I'm very much looking forward to the wedding, particularly the party, but I am nervous about paying for this thing. Saving money is a bitch! I sincerely hate hate hate being in a financial situation where I can't just go out and have a beer, buy a DVD, put money into spurn, pay rent, etc. But then again, I am ridiculously spoiled. I swear, DVD's are the glorious, silvery designer drug of the modern era - crack for pop culture addicts. There is no earthly reason for me to own Krull: Special Edition.

A new spurn in December is looking less and less likely. Seems that hardly anyone, myself included, can really get motivated beyond the bare minimum required to get the bare minimum amount of production stuff done. I guess everyone's got more pressing responsibilities in their non-spurn lives. Ross (the current co-producer) is pissed.

As this is the 5th morning in as many days that the furry little bastard has decided to wake us up, I believe killing him is now officially sanctioned. Waking me up at 5:am every morning sure as hell warrants being killed in my book. I can't believe a freaking cat lives in my apartment. Cats suck.

Damned cat-loving soon-to-be wife!!!