NowhereInMulberry.COM

For the Birthday Girl!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY WIFE!!!

MEESA LOVE YOU!

Happy birthday to the woman that truly knows that I got nuthin'.

cept' you!


I love you.

Thanks Dad

So I ask my Dad today if he's listened to the Podcast. He'd only listened to the first episode and now doubt not all of it. I asked him what he thought. He mainly only had things to say about the music he'd written for it and how the poor quality of audio I had chosen to encode the show in had caused the music to sound crappy. It was of poor sound quality. I explained that we'd done 3 more episodes and were learning with each episode and I believed made an improvement each week. He then went on about other things and I stopped defending the show and simply was ready to get off the phone.

I don't want to seem petty or like a big baby but all I wanted him to say was, "Good Job son, Good work son, Neat show son, Not bad son, Anything son." I'm being a bit dramatic most likely but I hung up thinking, "What the fuck?" It reminded me of Kindergarten of all things.

This is very hazy but I assure you this did happen. This was while we lived in California in Redondo Beach. My Dad was picking me up from school. Kindergarten at Washington elementary. We'd done wood working that day. I was 5 years old. I remember painting a piece of wood red with paint and then hammered nails into bottle caps on the top most flattest area and called it a boat. I was very proud of my boat. The projects all of us had done sat in the sun to dry so that we could take them home at the end of the day. I can still remember waiting impatiently from inside the classroom staring out the window at my Boat. I couldn't wait to take that home. I couldn't wait to stick that nasty piece of wood with old bottle caps and nails into the bathtub when I got home.

Later, after Kindergarten was over and we all filed out I picked my now dry Boat off of the newspaper that laid on a slab of concrete outside. I was giddy with excitement. I got in the car and showed my Dad what I had made with a huge grin on my face. My Dad didn't hesitate to say, "Why couldn't you have made something like that?" He pointed at a boy carrying a wooden Bi-plane with a propeller that he was flicking with his finger showing it off for other kids.

I was deflated as I am now. You never did know how to boost the ol' confidence did you Dad?

In my Dad's defense he did give some helpful hints and such but my point was that I just wanted some positive confirmation at the work I'd done on this project. I do want it to be the best possible and I want people to like it and I love doing it.

I love my Dad and at the same time he drives me insane.

Giant sized ~Nowhere in Mulberry Episode 4!

It's a rip-snortin' hellzapoppin' jampacked show this week!

We talk about alot. This show I was more prepared than ever before almost too prepared but I think I've found a happy medium of 'kinda prepared' hehe. Once again Bill outdid himself in the editing room. Good joerb Bill! I'm having alot of fun doing this show and I think I know what I want to do for the rest of my life. I'd appreciate any comments on the show from ANYONE and I mean anyone. I thank everyone who listens it's alot of fun to do and I hope at least that comes across in the show.

I know it's a long show but we have to cover all the new shows and talk about them we never run out of content hehe. This is the kinda show you listen to when you have an hour and a half commute. Check it out! We need Feedback!

Nowhere In Mulberry Epsode 4

Monday of the Dead

I know that people suffered tragedy in the wake of Hurricane Rita but I am thankful it wasn't near as devasting as Katrina but who am I to comment when I am sitting here in my own home. All I'm saying is I'm glad it wasn't as destructive a force as everyone had feared. People still lost homes and power etcetera but it still wasn't as bad.

I took a week off from the blog like a lazy bastard I'm at a time now where I'm just thinking about the show nonstop and I'm sure that can get old real fast. Just ask my wife, Hehe. Seriously though I think that by the time we get to episode 10 we will be rockin'. Episode 4 was recorded on Saturday evening and it turned out better than I thought it would be while we were making it. I would like right now to thank Vanessa, Stephen and Bill for such a great job they are doing! Bravo guys *Cue Applause*.

Monday of the Dead is actually a title I had written for a short story in 1990 while eating lunch everyday while on my break at the Bankrupt craft store. I'd sit at Whataburger eating my lunch and imagining what it would be like if the dead had come back to life and I'd have to get back to work. Haha reading it now I wonder why I thought for a second that the real me would even go back to work. I obviously had no life at the time of writing this story. Back at the store I and other employees would board up the store and fortunately a customer had left a bunch of their guns in the store because they were having them framed in a shadowbox which is a frame with depth to fit objects. We of course had no bullets but that's ok because a Delivery truck a day before had accidently delivered parcel intended for a gunshop and we had plenty of Ammo. Hehe convenient.

I never got much past that scenario but sometimes I miss those days of a lunch break from work and just chilling alone and reading the paper or perhaps listening to talk radio. It's great when you can look back on times that you didn't think were necessarily great and smile knowing that it was a much simpler time.

The times that I continue to say that I wasted at Bankrupt Crafts led to mosts of what I have now. I would most likely never have met my wife and I would never have met my best friend. I never would have met many people that I still reflect back on fondly. Of course there's always those few that I'm glad that I will never see again, but there weren't many.

For awhile we were having get togethers with the old employees of the store and it was fun but it was only the most recent employees all of the the people that worked there when I started were gone. The people that were my age when I started moved on and the employees were getting younger each day as I got older. Everyone had moved on while I stayed at this job that I should have moved on from long ago. Thankfully I had no other choice but to move on once the place shut down for good. Cheers.

Oh Shiznit!

Here comes Rita! My Wife was born in Houston and still has lots of family there and now things are hitting much closer to home. There are names to the faces now and I hope that all of them get here safely. They are all coming up here in our neck of the woods in the Dallas/Ft.Worth area. I hope that their posessions are not destroyed but most of all I just hope everyone is safe, not just in my Wife's family but everyone. Get out of there!

Also I hope we don't get too hard either, gulp.

Nowhere in Mulberry Episode Three is out!

Get it while it's hot! I really think we are getting better with each new episode. This episode was a major pain in the ass to record with all sorts of technical dificulties and I just wanna thank Bill right now for turning a piece of coal into a Priceless Diamond! Thanks Bill you rock!

I'm really hoping you guys dig the hell out of the show and that you go to Odeo and Itunes and Podcast Pickle and subscribe to us. I'd love to get a nice audience going. I appreciate any input.

I had a fun vacation but I am happy that I am back cause i'm really getting into the show and want to make it all work.

Beachside 2

Beachside 1

WallyWorld

Vacation part 2

Vacation part 1

I'm about to take off...

I'll leave Audioblogs for the rest of the week. Please check out Nowhere in Mulberry while i'm gone.

I'm hoping there's broadband where I'm going. Gulp.

Hope you Dig it!

Here we go!

Well Episode 2 of Nowhere in Mulberry is in the can and I haven't even got Episode 1 out yet but I will put them both up very shortly. The problem is that I have been busy cause I am going out of town tomorrow until Thursday.

It's family vacation time and we are going to Port Aransus a beachside type of place that I have never been. I can't wait to see the beach and hope that the weather is good. We've never been on a family vacation before and we are very excited. Of course I am taking a laptop with me and my cellphone so that I can audioblog the entire time I am gone so check here everyday with new audioblogs. In case something goes wrong with no signal and I can at least get dial-up I will post in text.

Now to find a host to put our show up and to finish the site. Most likely it will be barebones until I get back. Hope you like the show when you get to hear it. I have a feeling that it will evolve every episode until we are comfortable with each other and what we are doing.

Waiting...

A couple of weeks ago I went to the movies and in front of the movie mixed with the plethora of Coca Cola and Car ads was the trailer to a new comedy coming out in the next couple of weeks. That movie is called 'Waiting...' A film about the waitstaff of a Bennigans type of eatery and their exploits in a day in the life waiting on difficult customers while putting on a happy face. This is what I got from the trailer.

A few days later I remembered to look up the movie online and found the trailer to watch again. The movie stars Ryan Reynolds, Anna Faris and Justin Long (Warren Cheswick!). I loved all three of those actors so already this was Casting Gold! The trailer gives the impression that this is a Clerks style comedy where we can join the employees while they laugh at those damn customers. Which I love, I've worked in retail for over 13 years straight and waiting on people sucks! I don't care how much of a people person you are there are some difficult and rude people out there that just suck.

I've always been into who directed what in movies and wanted to know who wrote and directed this. Rob McKittrick wrote it and this was his first film and I soon discovered that he had his own Blog as well, So I checked it out. Rob's blog is quite entertaining as he let's us in on how much of a pain in the ass it was not only getting this film made but how hard it is dealing with the 'suits' in the industry and giving a first time director his shot at his own Script. The events of all of this are still playing out as he recollects past events with a humorous slant. I almost wrote APLOMB I shit you not! Holy crap what is happening to me?

I love his take on suggestions from others on re-writes. Let me tell you something about myself. I've wanted to be a director and a writer of movies in my life and I've written a few screenplays. All in all I like some of each of them and hate a lot of all of them. BUT I cannot take constructive criticism very well when it comes to my scripts. That's why Blogs rock! We don't have editors nor are we expected to have one.

Back in the day which would be the early 90's I had friends who went to UTA and were in the Video program. I say Video and not film because it had yet to develop into a full fledged Film workshop but it was slowly leaning that way. I attended classes without even being a student and worked on many student projects. You can immediately see that the majority of people that want to make films have nothing to say whatsoever as you go through an onslaught of bad short films about Date rape and children finding guns in their parents bedside table and homeless people not getting any help. It's all there every social commentary that you can think of and none of them are interesting at all. They are so devoid of editing and use of tone and structure that you want to rip that gun out of the kids hands and end it all for yourself.

BUT, There are some people there with talent and they stick out like a sore thumb. And everyone gravitates towards them. They want to work with them and they want to be them. My friend and his select clique all had some talent and we had a great time making fun of the other bodies at work there in the department. I wasn't even a Student there! Yet I hung out with them and was up there in the editing suites with my bud all the time. I'm sure that some people that I saw each day believed that I was a student. Even a couple of the instructors met my glance a few time knowingly. It was like a right of passage to discuss Kubrick and Scorsese and Coppola cause let's face in any type of film school situation we are all wannabes. Truthfully i've never been a big fan of any of those guys I always dug the Sam Raimi's and James Cameron's back then.

We made many different projects taking turns working on each others shorts. But an uneasy feeling was setting in. I was taking the weekends to help these people make there mostly mediocre movies with sometimes bright spots but I was not in anyway getting any of my ideas across nor was anyone interested in any of my ideas. Including my pal who encouraged me to write a short script for us to make together. Finally. I was excited and wrote a silly short script about a group of budding musicians that suspected their roomate was a psycho serial killer. It was a comedic romp that I was proud of. It wasn't great re-reading it but I was proud of myself for finishing it in record time. I turned it over to my pal who had already made several video projects and knew how to get things done and was good at recruiting fellow students to help.

A few days passed and he finally told me he'd read the roughly 30 page script and thought it was pretty cool. I was very relieved that he enjoyed it and he added that he'd like to do a rewrite to punch things up. Now this is my best friend who I shared all of my film knowledge with, We'd talk for hours about movies and favorite directors and such. I was excited that we'd actually be working on something togther.

And then Pulp Fiction came out.

A few months pass by and I'm fighting the temptation everyday to call him up and ask him what is up with the project. Finally he shows up at my apartment with the script in hand and he wants me to read it right then. I agree as I can't wait to see what he has done with my characters and plot structure.

As I read I notice that none of the character names were the same as mine. I notice that now there is an elaborate time structure the events in the story start at the end go to the beginning shoot to the middle to the end again and back to the beginning. It was about a Fighter throwing a boxing match and Micro film hidden in a Take Out Pizza Box and a set of hitmen. This mother fucker all of a sudden thought he was Quentin Tarantino. There were even references to Reservoir Dogs for chrissakes! I turned page after page of this ridiculous fucking script that in no way whatsoever resembled my script at all and was trying to hold back my anger.

"So, what do you think?" he asked with a shit eating grin on his face. I decided not to answer the question but to ask my own. "Where's the script we are working on?" He responded. "This IS the script." "Oh, well it doesn't resemble my story in anyway." He took the script out of my hands and flipped through it like I was insane to say such a thing. "There's a character named Dane just like in your story. He's the hitman." "Dane in my script is the drummer to a wannabe band that is a moron and you've turned him into Vincent Vega."

"No one is gonna watch a movie about people who think their rommates a serial killer." Oh ok now the criticism was coming out, before he said it was great but now everyone wanted to see gansters I guess. This was a pretty painful scenario and It made me hesitant to show my writing to anyone else. I decided not to trust these fucks and to stop working on their movies. I got bitter.

Cut to 5 or so years later and I'd written a full length script for a movie all about a fictional film school where plagerism and pretentiousness was rewarded. It had more to it than that but you get the idea. I got back in touch with one of those UTA guys who I told about the script. This guy was a very talented director who's only drawback was that he continued to make spoof films of all of his favorite films such as The Shining and Dirty Harry and avoided straight narratives. All of his films were silent with only music and a few sound effects. I told him that he should try a straight narrative and he agreed. I finally got my script to him and he loved it and he got all the jokes about the school and the inner circle of Kubrickian wannabes that we knew. He said, "I want to make this!" As our President once tried to say and failed, "Fool me once, shame on you." "Fool me twice, shame on me."

We spoke on the phone for hours while I took notes on things he thought I should change and started working on a new draft. By the time I was happy with a draft to show him I sent it to him via Stephen. Stephen was reading each new thing I added to the story and was a great cheerleader to keep me going. We'd debate over what this other guy wanted to change. At times we'd disagree which happens. I would protest bad ideas and he'd protest my ideas. Then called and told me that this was exactly what he wanted that he was laughing his ass off at the script and that he wanted to add his voice to the script as well while he would be typing it in to his specific screenwriting computer program. Cool I thought.

At one point in the script Man of La Mancha is mentioned, just barely is it mentioned. He jumped on to the symbolism of Don Quixote and decided that our main character needed the name change of Daniel Coyote! WTF?!? I protested over and over and finally he agreed that it was too much. Months passed until he let me know that it was finally done. Stephen went to go and pick it up while I was at work at Bankrupt crafts.

He called me up at work. "Uh Dude?" "Hey Stephen what's up?" "Oh man Dude you're not gonna want to read this." "Oh man Dude." I believe a flop sweat began. "What do you mean?" a long breath. "Dude he completely re-wrote everything." "I mean everything!" "There is not a single line of dialogue that is the same, and guess who main character of the story is?" I sighed. "Don't tell me, Daniel Fucking COYOTE!?!" "Yep. that's the one." Wow I was fucking livid and I called him up right away and asked him why after all the talking we did over the phone and all the smoke he blew up my ass about my writing was he completely rewriting everything making it into a completely different story altogether? Why?

I may be biased but his version of the script was fucking unreadable and it was so bad hitting you over the head with symbolism, "Hey everybody look it's Daniel fucking Coyote and he's kinda like Don Quixote and instead of windmills it's Film School!"

Cut to years later after Stephen and I had traded different writing projects back and forth to each other and had become comfortable telling each other different criticisms he proposed and idea. "Hey why don't we coloaborate on a script?" My pulse began to race, my forehead dripped with sweat and my blood shot eyes met his. "Not like that not like that!" "what I mean is that you start witht the first 10 pages and I do the next 10 and we go back and forth." "It's a writing exercise!" I breathe a sigh of relief and set the machete down and agree that is a cool idea.

We now have a blast trying to outdo each other with each new set of 10 pages and now I was having fun and I wasn't looking to be the next Kubrick or the next Scorsese of even Coppola I was just trying to make Dr. Pepper shoot out of Stephen's nose. And man it's fucking fun!

A day in the life of a volunteer

Read This.

Living in a fictional town...

Last Friday I went to a long overdue appointment with the Eye-Doctor. I use disposable contact lenses that are monthly. I have a bad habit though of continuing to wear my contacts well after the month is over. I get a years worth which is 12 pair and by the end of the year go to the Dr.'s and get a refill. Well this year my appoinmtent was in January, but I still had about 4 pair left so I didnt go and waited until just this week when I was down to my last pair which I've worn since july.

The Doctor wanted to know what I was doing without contacts for this long and I said I had indeed still been wearing my contacts just stretching out the wear time from 1 month to 2 months. He was very disappointed. He explained that my monthly lenses were meant to only be worn for up to 31 days and that after that my eyes were not getting the necessary amount of oxygen needed. That if I kept this habit up I would need to have a Cornea transplant. Worse case scenario. Gasp! hehe.

I told him that I didn't know this and that I would not do that anymore. He then looked at my eye balls and they looked fine. Schew! that was a close one. He told me if I kept it up I'd have to go for months at a time without contacts. OK DUDE I GET IT!

I had already told him that I didn't know about the oxygen thing and wouldn't wear my contacts past 31 days again but he kept telling me horror stories and what would happen if I kept on.

He gave me a new pair and next friday I have to go back and get my new years worth. I don't know why I seem to stockpile my contacts but I won't do it anymore. Every month I will throw away my old pair. I cherish my eye sight and had this guy told me about that whole eye breathing stuff I would have not endandered my eyes. Luckily I hadn't done any damage so lesson learned without harsh side effects.

Yesterday was the recording session for Nowhere in Mulberry which I can't wait to get out there. I swear our last practice session was better than that but we will get better. Ah it's not bad I just need to be more prepared. I get all antsy and just want to begin.

I still need to edit it down to less than an hour cause we went 75 minutes which is a chatting marathon. Wow we are full of hot air. There are things I want to add and change I think it's good that we finally figured out how to record correctly getting music and my Sister on the phone and movie trailers and sound drops.

The sweet sweet new tv season starts soon and I can't wait to see all of my favorite shows back. I will do a post this week on all the shows you should check out.

Surviving

I found this Blog today and had to share. Check it out!

It's a journal of survival by some men who are in an office building in downtown New Orleans. They've been writing a blog about what's going on and have a Live Cam with a shot of NO.

DirectNIC is the site. So check it out and may they all find a way out of this mess soon.

Lying Liars

I'm just gonna type, so bare with me.

I found this on Digg.com about how to tell when someone's lying. I think it's pretty neat. And so true! When you read certain give aways you will think to yourself 'Oh my God! That's so true!'

My wife borrowed a DVD Boxed set of a British mini-series called 'NEVERWHERE' a show that was created by Neil Gaiman and also turned into a book by him. I don't know which came first and don't care either. It was very strange and interesting with what you could tell was a low budget they seemed to do a good job at creating a different world. I'm gonna use the word Underbelly so get ready.

Neverwhere refers to the Underbelly of London where people live in the sewer in a completely different society worshipping rats and walking through subway tunnels. This show is pretty old I think it was made in 97' but i'd never heard of it. It was ok. I bet the book is better.

I watched alot of the aftermath of Katrina on tv last night watching as the people struggle in New Orleans and Biloxi. I noticed how each channel has their own stupid title for their coverage. "After the Storm." "Katrina's Wrath." "Katrina's Wake." "Katrina flipped a bitch switch." etc etc.

It's all really sad. I hope that they get help as quick as possible. Mother Nature sucks. Oh that's another one "Mother Nature has made her presence known..." Oh really thanks mister news guy. Fuckin' tool.

How'd it get September so quickly? Nice, c'mon cool temperatures and I will be nice and comfy.