www.nothingexceptional.com

Check out my friend Yana's art. Once upon a time Yana did a kickass job acting in my movie Nothing Exceptional, and now she's selling paintings for grownup prices.

The Bloomington, Indiana label Secretly Canadian is the home of Antony and the Johnsons, Jens Lekman, and lots of other modern bands I've never heard (too old to keep up). Now they proudly present their first two reissue releases: Bobb Trimble's albums Iron Curtain Inocence (1980) and Harvest of Dreams (1982). Real heads know the deal -- this is the reissue event of the year. I may be biased because I'm a person who tracked down Bobb's friend Kris Thompson about three years ago and have been hanging around ever since, buying pizzas and maintaining his website.

Bobb Trimble is often referred to as "the greatest psychedelic musician of the 80s," which is reductive and misleading but basically true. Inevitably the question follows, "what is psychedelic music?" and I still have no better answer than to say that I know it when I hear it. Bobb's music is definitely psychedelic, but not because psychedelics were used in its creation (nothing stronger than coffee), and not because you need them to appreciate it. Rather, Bobb's music springs from his inner consciousness in cinematic bursts -- as evocative as the best of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, or Bruce Springsteen. These albums are too good to be called "outsider music," but they come from such a singular place that that's exactly what they are (proving once again the insulting nature of that term). The melancholy in this music is too much for most people, but I agree with Aaron Milenski when he writes that these albums are "proof that rock and roll music is as valid an art form as any other, that it can open up new worlds as well as help explain ours." Aquarius Records in SF put it best by saying "If you like 'em at all, chances are you'll LOVE them."

There's a lot more to say about this reissue and about Bobb Trimble, but I'm hoping to make a little project out of that. I will say that the release of these classy reissues represent victory in a long-term battle against Radioactive Records, who bootlegged one of Bobb's albums along with 200 others. Credit to people like Rick Noll, Kris Thompson, and stores like Other Music NYC -- who have a simple "no boots" policy and stopped offering Radioactive when they were informed what the company was up to. Radioactive is out of business now, but Radioactive co-founder Steven Carr went right back to work with Fallout Records, a company with Radioactive's same exact MO, and it begins all over again. We'll put this company out of business too, and the next one after that. Carr -- how do you sleep at night? Anyone in England reading this willing to kick this guy's ass for us? Write to me for details.

I spent the last couple days editing old video footage and putting dumb, dry stuff on youtube, with lots more to follow:

I've been in New York and Boston for the past two weeks, seeing friends and family and buying lots and lots of records at the WFMU fair and elsewhere. Tomorrow I'll be back in LA and back to work.

I want to share some some aforementioned artwork from an ongoing project -- Nature of the Beast. NOTB is a screenplay and graphic novel I've been working on with my friend Adam Mansbach for the past several years. It's the story of an alligator trainer who saves the world from aliens and a Rupert Murdoch / Lex Luthor type villain. There's a real logline but I'm not going to write it here. NOTB is high concept, violent, imaginative, bizarre, hilarious, stupid, brilliant, exciting, expensive to make, and hard for development chumps to wrap their heads around. A representative from Bruce Willis' production company told a producer who was shopping the project around that he "should have sent a bong and a six pack" with the script, while others insist no such thing is necessary in order to get it. Without exaggeration NOTB has the potential to be the coolest movie ever made, something like Star Wars meets Passion of the Christ meets Animal Planet. I believe in modesty and moderation, but when it comes to this project it all goes out the window, because this is the one. This is the sort of thing which, if marketed with the same zeal as with a piece of shit like Transformers, could alter the course of history (maybe).

Well anyway, since doing the rounds and learning just how unlikely it is for Hollywood's community of douchebags to stick their necks out for any kind of original material in this budget range, we realized we needed to do what Steve Niles did with 30 Days of Night, a graphic novel I have not read and a movie I am not planning on seeing. Niles was a frustrated screenwriter who could not get his material noticed, so he published it himself as a comic book. This was the start of a small comics empire, and of course, Hollywood came to him because once a piece of material gets published -- even self-published -- it's 'real,' all the better when it comes with little pictures. Without knowing about Niles we arrived at the same strategy and found a truly amazing artist named Langdon Foss to work on the book. His work speaks for itself. We're looking for a publisher. Please click on the thumbnails.

Last night I went to the closing party for Mondo Video on Melrose. It was very sad, particularly because the other cool video store in the area, Jerry's Video Rerun, closed without warning last month.

I first visited Mondo in the summer of 1995, when they were located on Vermont Avenue, back when that street was actually cool. To call the store a shocker would be an understatement. The walls were covered with posters for porn, horror, and other lurid amusements. The cash register was covered with obituaries that seemed to suggest that all the interesting people were dead now. The store specialized in B movies, discarded Hollywood product, and sexploitation of every stripe. They might stock Schindler's List, but they'd put it in the "War Is Hell" section between Johnny Got His Gun and some forgotten Charles Bronson movie. There were also sections with names like "Young Boys," "Psychodrama," and "Robots."

Walking into Mondo, you'd usually find someone smoking, with an ashtray made from the plaster cast of a real vagina. It always seemed as if at least one customer in the store had down syndrome. The monitor would be playing Wally George, or Darktown Strutters, or a video of last week's party. Eventually the Mondo would get into producing its own porn, often taping in the store after hours. If the place sounds juvenile and repulsive, it was. I won't miss the filing system of dirty shrinkwrapped covers folded around pieces of cardboard, which were never cleaned no matter how many grubby hands touched them. (Covers were often xeroxed or handwritten as many videos were homemade, taped off TV, bootlegged, etc). The thing was, Mondo was the only place to get the complete works of Radley Metzger, Jess Franco, or Russ Meyer, to name just a few of the directors with their own sections. This was no dilettante operation; beneath the veneer of sleaze, this was a truly adventurous cinefile's paradise. The sleazier aspects of the store never bothered me. Mondo's authentic bad attitude seems like an expression of a true joie de vie far removed from today's blandly fascistic mainstream vulgarity.

Around the late 90s, as Vermont began to gentrify, the record store next door closed, and Mondo started getting harassed by other tenants via legal threats and cut power lines. Today there's a Pinkberry franchise where Mondo once stood; now that's really offensive. When Mondo moved to Melrose, it was supposed to be the start of a boom for the area that never happened. The old store had thrived off of pranking unsuspecting pedestrian minds, and there were no pedestrians at the new location. And so here I was, dressed for halloween as a hippie wizard. Mondo clientele, as a rule, are punks, and punks, as a rule, do not like hippies, so I flashed a friendly smile and the peace sign to anyone who looked at me the wrong way. Don Bolles and crew were setting up to play, and I looked around in vain for some sort of appropriate souvenir. Of course the ashtray was gone, as was the photo of "Stumpy Spice" (don't ask). I was too tired to dig out videos and haggle with the people behind the desk, something I'll no doubt regret. There was nothing to take away from the experience except those memories of Mondo Nights, but that was more than enough.

Before too much time passes I'm gonna try to get some pictures and video up from last week's trip to Merida, Yucatan and points south for Daniel and Amy's wedding and my first real, absolutely no-work vacation in several years. I'm feeling extremely refreshed and inspired by the natural beauty of the place, its people, its wildlife, and all the adventures I had with the Hacienda Nights crew. No computers, and we found an alligator in our back yard. It would have been hard to come back to LA even if the city wasn't on fire.

The wedding was beautiful, I saw old friends from New York and elsewhere, the whole thing made you want to fall in love. There was a collective freakout in the grotto that I shall not attempt to describe here, except to say that it was the high point of 2007 for sure. The last day we were there we went to Uxmal, site of one of the prime Mayan ruins. Like everything else about the trip, I didn't give too much thought to it before getting there, so as not to be disappointed, so as to be surprised. The ruins were powerful to say the least. My few pictures hardly do them justice, so I'm hoping to post much more here after we all have a reunion / picture party and I get some stuff to post from the rest of the group. If anyone is thinking about getting away, this is a trip I would recommend, and it can be done on the cheap.

After hellish week-long flus over the past two winters I decided to take my first flu shot. Hope it was the right thing to do; your comments please if anyone has strong feelings on the subject...

I watched a couple new DVDs in the last couple of days -- We Are Marshall, Year of the Dog, and Knocked Up.

We Are Marshall -- I don't care what anyone says, I like McG, and not just because we share the same name. "Fauxteur" is a relatively new term seemingly coined for three directors, all of whom came up out of the music video world: the talented-but psychotic Michael Bay, the talentless-but-charismatic Brett Ratner, and McG. I can't even imagine what kind of disregard for craft it takes to call McG a "fauxteur," because his Charlie's Angels movies are sexy and funny and never boring. I would rank the scene were Crispin Glover kicks the Angels' asses in part one and the motorcross chase in part two as two of the best action scenes of all time.

Nevertheless it was with a lot of trepidation that I attempted to watch McG's third movie, the barely-released We Are Marshall, a feel good football movie about a Virginia college town coming together in the wake of a tragic plane crash that takes out their entire football program. This movie blows about as hard as you would expect. It insists that football is important, racism doesn't exist, and that all the people in this particular village are decent and soulful, and I mean all of them. The thing is, like everything else, McG turns the treacle to 11 -- imagine Spielberg + Shyamalan + The Natural times a million and it's still cheesier. Here's to hoping that McG gets back to blowing shit up real soon.

Year of the Dog -- My buddy Andrew B. is the only person I know who went to see this, and he gushed about it. I didn't get it, and I don't get the appeal of Mike White, the sensitive person's Kevin Smith. I mean, I get the premise, the idea of giving up on people in favor of the fantasy of being with animals, but any five minutes Grizzly Man has more insight than this entire movie, with the added bonus of being real, and without the precious Penguin Cafe Orchestra music and twee Wes Anderson centerpunch framing.

Knocked Up -- I want to hate Judd Apatow, but I can't. His movies are about as carefully considered, market researched, test screened and focus grouped as anything, but they're sold and consumed as something you could call the "New Honesty" if you were inclined to think of the world in terms of a bad New York Times Magazine article. Apatow is the latest in a tradition that started with Ernst Lubitsch and Preston Sturges and continues today with James L. Brooks and Cameron Crowe. All of these guys succeed by affecting a veneer of edginess while toeing the all-American line, playing off whatever they consider to be the public's best tendencies, always flirting with controversy but never actually courting it. Lubitsch occasionally made some movies with real heart, particularly Heaven Can Wait and To Be or Not to Be, and Brooks made at least one rugged classic with I'll Do Anything (which it's worth noting was a musical with all the musical numbers cut out), but basically all these guys could have and probably should have gone into politics instead. They don't really like people, but they are really good at pretending they do, and they really want you to believe them, even if it means lying a little.

Well, I call bullshit on movies that insist that people are basically decent, because it's not true. Apatow mercilessly pokes fun at our foibles without ever once hitting below the belt. He wrings our ugliness for as many laughs as he can without ever showing the true ugliness of that ugliness. Compare ostensibly humanist dramas like The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up to downmarket cartoons like Kingpin and Freddy Got Fingered, and the difference is immediately apparent. If you are trying to go truthful with your comedy, you cannot really do it without either a. going dark or b. going broad or c. better yet, both. Billy Wilder knew this and Frank Tashlin knew this; the Farelly Brothers know this and Dave Chapelle knows this.

All that said, I was thoroughly charmed by the extraordinarily implausible Knocked Up, a movie that really captures the zeitgeist in all its reality-denying glory, at least if you're a white person who lives in southern California (which is after all more a state of mind than a place). Incidentally, the best and most honest scene in the movie -- which any viewer will recognize as the doorman scene -- is the only one with a black person, and the only one where the movie stops pretending to take place in any version of the real world.

Here's a scene from Freddy Got Fingered, a movie which makes absolutely no claims on authenticity...

Right now I'm working on my second work-for-hire feature screenplay of the year. The working title is The Joy of Killing, and I'm very happy with it. People will not be able to deal with this script. I'm writing it to be so easy to make that if the person I'm writing it for doesn't want to do it, I can and will do it myself.

In a couple weeks I'll be getting back to work on a high concept script that is the only thing I've ever done that gets people's attention the way Nature of the Beast does. And NOTB is still a going concern. We're putting it together as a graphic novel with the help of an amazing artist named Langdon Foss. I'll put up some art from this the next time I post.

Let's see, what else... I taught an after school video class and made a very weird and wonderful zombie movie with the students. They created their characters, improvised the story, and even created the music. It was quite an eye opening experience to work with such genuine and genuinely creative people. I wish I could show it to fests but it was impossible to get releases from the parents. I shot some music videos. Hopefully I'll be getting a panasonic HVX200, the most awesome camera ever.

Oh yeah, I filed and won my first small claims lawsuit, against Lovecraft Biofuels. $3400 I will probably never recoup. Long story. I should say that they're under new management now and that my dispute was with the previous boss, a guy named Brian Friedman, who is now calling himself "Brian Lovecraft." If anyone wants more information about this, you can look here, here, google lovecrap, or feel free to contact me. If anyone is thinking about doing business with Brian Friedman, here's my advice: DON'T.

I am really going to try to get back in the habit of writing here, and to be less precious about it -- shorter, more frequent posts about what I'm watching and reading, reactions to the news and that kind of stuff. Since I just moved to a new apartment, one thing on my mind is junk mail. I found a service called 41pounds.org. They claim that the average household receives 41 pounds of junk mail a year, and that they will prevent 80% to 90% of it for five years for the price of $41. I haven't signed up but I probably will. As time goes by, this sort of waste seems more and more inexcusable, and I hope that someday physical junk will elicit the same sort of scorn as spam. People who clearcut forests to make circulars ought to be clearcut themselves, and you can quote me on that.

I just watched On Her Majesty's Secret Service for the second time. This is the single James Bond movie with George Lazenby, from 1969. Most people have never seen it and it's considered the stepchild of the Bond series. The people who write this one off are the same people who hate Yoko Ono without hearing her records.

In fact, OHMSS towers over other Bond films to an almost ridiculous degree. Released at the height of the counterculture, the movie wisely sidesteps the contemporary milieu and makes no attempt to be "with it." Lazenby is younger and smoother than his predecessor Sean Connery, but unlike other first flights in the Bond series, this film doesn't seem desperate to update the formula.

But of course, everything is different, and beyond Connery's absence it's easy to see why audiences rejected the movie as too strange. For one thing, Bond falls in love. Without giving too much away, Diana Rigg of The Avengers is the love interest here, without a doubt the most beguiling Bond girl, and the most complex. Her character, the wayward Countess Tracy Di Vicenzo, gives the series a Shakespearian weight that utterly shames the halfhearted attempt by the recent Casino Royale to bring a little human drama to what is essentially a live action cartoon. Of course this movie is a cartoon as well, but an operatic one. Rigg's first appearance the story is truly weird and wonderful. When she disappears for more than an hour midway through, her absence is keenly felt, and Bond's dalliances with other women seem criminal. When she returns, and you will know she has returned when you see her gold ice skates, it is as if a dream has come true, and the series has finally broken the formula for once and for all. Bond is in love, and it seems much more important than the usual cloak and dagger stuff.

In fact the entire movie seems, unintentionally, to work on a sort of dream logic. Scenes and dialogues repeat themselves, and even the action scenes have a surreal flavor. Significant characters appear and disappear without explanation. The players are driven by obsessions and inner demons; they're impulsive and lack the usual deliberate cunning one associates with Bond heroes and villains. Savails' Blofeld is the chief villain and the inspiration for Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movies. This evil genius lives in a germ warfare laboratory at the top of a mountain in Switzerland, and in the context this seems perfectly believable. He is an unkillable monster, seemingly above mortal law. Towards the end, during the second of three chases down the mountain, there's a moment where the music swells and we see the scene from the extreme distance. Knowing at this moment how it all ends brings such unbearable chills that it's difficult to watch. This is a tragic, cosmic love story. Check it out.

Here's a video shot in 1983 by Lillie Farkas for Bobb Trimble collaborators The Prefab Messiahs. Kris Thompson asked me to help restore the video, which required some slight recutting to get the master recording to sync with the very aged and stretched out videotape. Hopefully my work on this is invisible..

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Last and least, here are the first three videos I uploaded to youtube. They're pranks to see if I can get people to watch tedious stuff. Don't ask me why, I don't know.

Spent the evening reading about Peter Ivers. This probably won't do much for you if you haven't heard his insanely great album Knight of the Blue Communion, or recently reckoned with the brilliance of the song 'In Heaven' from Eraserhead, but maybe this clip will inspire you to want to know more...

Did you know you can stop 98% of all advertising from appearing on your computer screen if you're using Firefox or Safari? It's true. Click here and follow the instructions. It may seem complicated for a second but just read the instructions and it will make sense.

I'm finally migrating my web service away from globat.com. I don't recommend them. By the way, if anyone wants to set up a blog, or needs a simple "business card" type website, I can hook you up real cheap. For the moment my email is down, but should be up in the next 36 hours.