Saturday, December 29, 2007

CageMatch 12/27/07

The last CageMatch of the year was a non-title affair, as half of the challenging team was comprised of visitors from out of town, namely Corey Brown and the artistic director of the UCB, Anthony King. Since the title was not at stake, the storyline I came up with was that Oh Double-P decided that Espionage A Trois was getting a little lazy over the holidays, and so she brought in an elite team of former agents to give the squad a special training session. (Well, it amused me anyway.)

I haven't been in a very productive mood lately, so the video was cranked out in five hours the day of the show. Couldn't have done it without the fabulous performance by Corey Brown, who really understands my vision of CageMatch as an old-school wrestling show with an ongoing storyline. He gave a great promo that really made the video.

Check out the vid here and the identity screen shown above here.

Little Batman

Oh my fucking god, this is the best thing EVER. Some guy made an homage to the old 1960s Batman show, but with kid actors! The boy doing Batman is GREAT! The costumes are amazing, the attention to ridiculous detail is hilarious, and the Batmobile...my go, the Batmobile. I would've killed for that when I was a kid.

Check out Little Batman: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

I want to make movies now.

Monday, December 17, 2007

Random Stuff

* Just came back from filming for Beatbox in Chicago. That was fun. Very cool people. Wish I could've seen them perform in their natural element. Jenny and Neil particularly impressed me with their rap ability and presence. I can't get enough of Dave Ries in da b-boy stance. Zach was very kind to bring me along to work with the Beatbox folk.
* Rene Duquesnoy is a very good host. We had a faboo party in his palatial estate, got taken to some great places to eat, and generally shown the best parts of the city. And I sang Bon Jovi on Rock Band.
* Got to see Halsted Street. All my life, as a wrestling fan, I was always led to believe that this was the toughest place in the world, the only place that could've turned out such beasts as The One Man Gang and The Road Warriors. Imagine my surprise when Rene laughed and told me that was the gay district. (Which is where we had an amazing meal at a diner. They gave us bananas. Heh.)
* Found a great retro toy store that I could've spent major cash in. They had a Fisher-Price Airport new in a sealed box for $100. Geez. I was amazed to find they had a basket of figures and vehicles for a buck apiece. I bought all their wood figures, along with another Sesame Street Susan. Some of these looked brand new. Amazing.
* Had my first Chicago hotdog, as well as my first real Chicago pizza. Both were good, but the pizza was comparable to the frozen Home Run pizza (they were both quite good). The Chicago hotdog is a completely different animal though... delicious. We stopped at a real dive to get the dog, and I amused/disgusted Rene and Zach by eating a french fry out of the trashcan.
* I love the way Chinese restaurants celebrate Christmas. These blinky-light pastel musical trees on top of a restaurant in Carrboro amuse me.
* I took Monday off of work to recover from the trip. Turns out I needed it. I was completely wiped and wasted the whole day. I'm gonna need to be a video-making machine for the rest of the week.
* The security chick at Chicago's Midway Airport informed me that my driver's license had expired in October. Oops. They didn't catch that at RDU. (I'm glad they didn't--I would've been worrying all weekend about getting past security in Chicago!) Got a new license today, and it was very easy. The folks in Carrboro are courteous.
* Amusing thing heard at the Driver's License office: Two girls claiming to be sisters were there to get licenses. One said she was there to get hers reinstated after being revoked. The other said she was from out of state and her purse was stolen with all her id information. The DMV woman asked her if she had ever gotten a license in North Carolina, and the girl's "sister" replied, "She's gotten pulled over and got a ticket in North Carolina." Yeah, that'll help, baby.

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

I told my mom last week that my fondest Christmas memory was when I was nine and she made me an advent calendar out of hollowed-out walnuts that she rubber-cemented back together with crackerjack toys inside. So yesterday she showed up where I work and brought me a NEW walnut advent calendar---made from the SAME walnuts she used thirty years ago!

The walnuts have the numbers 1-24 written on them, and you open up one each day to find a prize inside. This version has little folded-up strips of paper inside each nut, which might be puzzles, word scrambles, or pithy quotes. I particularly liked the quote for the first day, which was as follows:
Some days, doing "the best we can" may still fall short of what we would like to be able to do, but life isn't perfect--on any front--and doing what we can with what we have is the most we should expect of ourselves or anyone else.
-Fred Rogers
I can certainly relate to that...I get frustrated when things don't turn out as perfectly as they do in my dreams, whether it be an art project or a video production or the love for a girlfriend. It helps to sit back and remember that we can only do so much, as outside factors like time, resources, or the independence of other people can sometimes hinder our dreams. In any situation, we can only do our best.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Another Poster Design

Designed another action/thriller poster this week--this for the next Espionage A Trois show. Joe Stanton and John Loftin are "Extraordinary Rendition", and they have done several great shows together, starting with their excellent performances in this year's Dual Duel. I love the outfits they came up with for this photoshoot. Crazy tough bastards.

The backdrop behind the Extraordinary Rendition fellows turned out nicely. The whole backdrop of the poster is a gradient that goes from a midnight blue at the top and bottom to a slightly lighter blue in the middle. So on top of that, I threw a pic from iStockPhoto of a room with lots of plumbing and dials and whatnot ('cause we kept talking about waterboarding when we were doing the photoshoot). The room looked a little too antiseptic and pristine, but I fixed that. I had taken some closeup pictures of a train that was parked near the theater, and used a shot of a stained and rusted patch behind the engine to overlay on the room, which gave the PERFECT effect.

Remi looks fabulously evil, Jeff Scronch provided a fabulous photo of Espionage A Trois and Oh-Double-P, and even Scott Sullivan made the poster this time around!

FYI, I got copies of the Silence Is Golden poster printed at Zazzle, and they arrived yesterday. They're 20"x30" HUGE, and look AMAZING.

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

I'm Famous Again

It's been a weird couple of days...some great stuff, some surprising stuff, some wistful stuff... premieres, revelations, regrets, a lot of laughter, far too many tears, and more alcohol than usual. Overall, I think everything is going to be fine. There's lots more projects on the calendar for the near future, with special CageMatch shows, a dvd I'm producing, a music video I'm directing, and of course, Christmas and all the hoopla and merriment and family wackiness that surrounds that. So I have hope that things are going to be good.

The latest bit of positivity is that it turns out that Patton Oswalt DID see the Kinda Patton II: Werewolves and Lollipops project I did for Jason a few months ago. And now I have my own page on Patton's website! Chekkit out here. (Dig that animated header!)

And also this weekend, my friend Matt sent me a copy of the documentary they did on our old OMEGA wrestling promotion (as detailed here) and I've watched a few minutes of it. It looks like it's going to be really, really good. Tells the story of how a bunch of kids from rural North Carolina got together and made one of the best independent wrestling federations in the country. And best of all, I host all the segments of the documentary! I'm in the extras too, talking about how I met the boys and got involved. I haven't watched the whole thing, but I'm told Matt puts me over hard, which would be really cool. It's nice to have one's contributions recognized.

I also just got a dvd in the mail from Mr. Erik Martin that he wants me to produce a promotional video for, so that'll be fun. And this Friday I'm going to try to start work on a music video for Jackson's great song, "Cigarettes On The Ground".

Gotta stay busy, or you'll go insane. Believe me, I know.

Monday, December 03, 2007

Alcohol

If you really apply yourself, Woodchuck amber cider will get you fucked up,

Crazy Voicemail

So the other day I heard the Assistant to the Mayor laughing his head off. Turns out he was listening to a voicemail left by a guy who was very irate. We had to listen to it several times before we figured out what his beef was. Turned out he was upset at some referee call in a middle school basketball game or something. We thought the call was hilarious because:
  1. It's an amusing thing to get nuts over, a basketball call in a school game.
  2. Overreaction is always funny.
  3. Cursing is funny.
  4. We don't run the school system. And most importantly:
  5. He was trying to call the City of Durham. We ain't Durham.
Enjoy the call here.