Because I'm JUST SO VERY INTERESTING I know you're dying to know what's going on with me and so YOU GOT IT, BABY.
First, I just finished issue #4 of my TOTALLY BAD-ASS AND SUPER-POPULAR AND PROFESSIONAL WEBCOMIC THAT PEOPLE READ
Joe Bivins: Man Genius on Sunday. I'm going to do a proper write-up of it with the bonus images as I have done in the past, I just don't feel like doing it right now.
Second, and it is totally self-absorbed of me that this is the second thing I'm mentioning (FUN FACT: I am ABSOLUTELY that self-absorbed) but honestly I wasn't going to mention it at all because I don't have anything human-sounding to say about it (which is the reason I don't usually discuss family stuff in any detail here), but it seems wrong to side-step it when I'm talking about all these other things: my sister had a baby yesterday. What is it functioning human beings say about this stuff? It's apparently healthy and normal as far as we can tell, which is the first lucky break anyone in my family has had in a long time. The baby is a girl and like all babies (and people) she is a lump of pink writhing flesh. Except for people who are different colors, I guess. Humanity is a FRICKIN' RAINBOW of writhing lumps of flesh that eat and shit. This is how I see the world.
Okay, further human concerns, this weekend due to the impending birth of my niece and lack of transportation to the hospital I was staying over at my mother's house. I go over there every few weeks anyway to do laundry, when I stay over the room I sleep in has this shelf in it that I have repeatedly bashed my head into. It's at an entirely irrational height, it's slightly too high for me to see it in my peripheral vision, so I always end up leaning down to get at an end table underneath it and I get cracked over the head by the corner. And then I curse a lot and I forget about it until the next time it happens.
Well this weekend, THAT SHELF WAS OUT FOR BLOOD. It got me on Sunday night, I could tell it was playing for keeps this time, but foolishly shrugged it off and went to bed. Then Monday morning after my shower it got me again, and after the enraged screaming and cursing I noticed I was in fact bleeding from my scalp.
My camera sucks, so I have highlighted my scar here:
And a detail zoom:
NOT TO WORRY, READERS! While the gash is rather long and jagged, it wasn't deep at all, and soon stopped bleeding (after I sopped up a lot of blood with paper towels). I parted my hair back the way it goes, rendering the gash invisible and went about my daily business. But THIS HEINOUS ASSAULT WILL NOT BE FORGOTTEN. Thus far the police have shown NO INTEREST in prosecuting the shelf, claiming it's simply my word against his, and David Caruso isn't returning my calls (WHAT ELSE IS NEW AM I RIGHT?). And so my assailant WALKS FREE, or rather HANGS ON THE WALL FREELY. IS THERE NO JUSTICE?
Yeah, so anyway I fully expect this to leave a long jagged scar after it heals, no big deal as it is invisible under my hair, at least until I go bald (which my mother is CONVINCED will happen). Even if my hairline only recedes a little bit the scar will quickly go from invisible to QUITE VISIBLE INDEED. That should be fun, since it looks A LOT like a lobotomy scar, although I intend to tell people it's where the aliens inserted their tracking implant.
So last big thing going on, I've been doing my music lately, playing as a solo acoustic act at a local open mic. I want to do some other open mics but I want to check them out first to see if I think my stuff would work and I'm already pretty overstimulated even going out one night a week so I've been sticking to my comfort zone for now. I've finished writing the songs that will be on
Acoustafuckit Parte Tres (Part One and Part Deux available for free download or streaming now at my
Soundclick Page) and so I should've been rehearsing for it for a while but I was working on my comic last week so that was taking up my energy. I'm strangely torn now, though, because I was planning on working towards recording an album of full-band arrangements (because I can play all the instruments) for a sampling of tracks from the three Acoustafuckits (as predicted I have grown to regret that naming scheme). That seemed like a good modus operandi for the foreseeable future, play out wherever I can to hopefully build a following, thus getting people to actually listen to the music I put online, record minimally produced albums (I call them prototype albums) of all the songs I write, then take the best ones and periodically do an album with better production values that is generally better for listening to.
But there are as yet still sharp divisions in my music, a lot of my songs were written with particular projects in mind and so they are of drastically different styles. Played on a lone acoustic guitar it's hard to spot the outliers, but there's a batch of songs in my current set that were all originally intended for a project called "Dog's Breakfast", a sort of neo-prog rock thing I wanted to do when I was listening to a lot of Portishead and Pink Floyd and Muse. I was also in an astronomy class and a philosophy class at that time, thus imbuing my associative lyrical ramblings with a heavily metaphysical and cosmological slant. I've been doing these songs in my sets and I was going to put them on my full-band album, but I don't think they really belong there. (For the record the band name Dog's Breakfast is much older and I've been using it for various different things many of which are represented still at the Soundclick page for Dog's Breakfast. Except for Nothing and Indelible, most of those tracks aren't part of the incarnation of that project that I'm talking about now.)
I was also thinking a lot about what people are doing these days to promote their music, and YouTube seems to figure heavily there. Because I don't think there's anything remotely interesting about the sight of me staring at a spot on the wall and swaying while I strum and howl my obtuse lyrics, I started trying to think of what sort of a video I could make for any of my songs. Thinking about the Dog's Breakfast songs I had always had a number of images in mind to go with those songs, and as I'm a Pink Floyd fan I've often tinkered with the idea of a music film like
The Wall.
So this week I decided: I'm making a movie. Rather, Dog's Breakfast is making a movie. Dog's Breakfast is me, but DON'T TELL ANYONE IT'S A SECRET.
I have about an album's worth of actual songs, I've started writing some more and I'm going to figure out some instrumental pieces and reprises of things (I'm a bit fascinated by repetition these days (also repetition (and repetition of course))) and figure out arrangements. There's going to be some dialogue scenes in the film as well, so that will take up some time, I want it to be roughly feature length. Longer if necessary. Simultaneously I'm thinking about what the actual narrative of the thing is, since the songs aren't telling a story. I expect the film to be largely composed of dreamlike and nightmarish imagery ala David Lynch (who's great at imagery but couldn't tell a coherent story to save his life), with a surreal allegorical story running through it. I'm going to keep brainstorming and start designing and writing more concrete things as they emerge. I haven't decided yet if it should be live-action, animated, or a combination of the two. I'm probably not qualified to shoot either a live-action or an animated film, but right now I'm trying to get all the stuff I'm actually qualified to do together so I'm pretty committed to actually making the thing by the time I have to start getting outside help and dealing with people, which for me is borderline impossible. It's the main reason I gave up trying to be a filmmaker in the first place, that and the fact that I wouldn't have been very good at it. Better than Kevin Smith, probably, but that's not saying much.
I don't know what it's going to be called yet, obviously, since I don't know what it's actually about. It's going to be a rumination on Religion, human nature, emergence, entropy, life, death, thought, music, and the nature of reality. I want it to be surreal, and beautiful, and horrifying. I want to make one of those movies that if you caught just a few seconds of it when you were a small child it would haunt your dreams for years. They don't make movies like that anymore, at least I can't imagine the guy from the
Saw movies is really evoking that kind of primal terror. If these ideas sound like the ramblings of a madman, they absolutely are. I have gone off the deep end and while I'm there I'm going to make a movie.
Holy Vonnegut that was a long post. Nobody's going to read all that. I shouldn't have buried the lead, man. I lose the Internet.
