A Field Guide to LgN Productions

Most catalogs get organized by year, or by genre, or by whichever award sounds best on a poster. This one doesn't sort cleanly that way, and it shouldn't. What holds LgN's work together isn't a category — it's a set of obsessions that keep resurfacing: memory that won't stay buried, complicity that hides in plain sight, and the gap between what people say happened and what actually did. 

A war anthem written from inside the mud. 

A weapons dealer whose real crime isn't the one you think. 

A public-access relic that turns out to be the whole company's origin story, thirty years hidden in a box.

This is a walk through that catalog by throughline, not by résumé.

Before the beginning. LgN Productions — originally "Last good Nerve Productions" — was founded in 1993 for a single public-access documentary about Lost in Space, produced on borrowed equipment with a crew of friends. Films now on either YouTube or at the LgN Screening Room.

JZ Murdock served as its uncredited executive producer, writer, and editor. 

The LIS documentary aired twice on Seattle cable in early 1994. During postproduction the tape editor at the Viacom studio on Roosevelt Street in Seattle, broke mid-post, most of the music dropped out on broadcast, and then the company went dark for over two decades for a variety of reasons, mostly personal.

When Murdock started making films again decades later, he didn't start a new company. He picked LgN back up. 

Everything below is what happened after that.

The Features

Pvt. Ravel's Bolero (2022; remastered 2025) is the anchor of the catalog, and its festival run — 80-plus wins — is the reason there's now a deliberate policy of not listing all of them. A visceral anti-war meditation, it imagines composer Maurice Ravel forging the relentless rhythm of Bolero while serving as a truck driver amid the horror of World War I. Built from archival imagery, surreal overlay, and Ravel's internal reflections, it refuses the polish of a conventional documentary in favor of something rawer and harder to look away from — a tribute and a warning at once.

The film has its own footnote in history: in February 2022, a Ukrainian festival selected Murdock's horror short Gumdrop as an official selection days before the invasion began, and within a week a Russian festival nominated Bolero — an anti-war film — for Best War Film. Two governments moving toward war; two festivals, on opposite sides of it, choosing the same filmmaker's work. It's the kind of coincidence that says more than a mission statement could.

"Gumdrop," a short horror (2020) picked up 17 awards of its own, and it earns its place next to Bolero on theme, not just as a genre pairing. Sampson, a meticulous underground weapons supplier, moves product through clients using a coded word — "gumdrop" — while flashbacks from a fractured childhood bleed steadily into his present. What looks at first like a portrait of a damaged middleman turns, in its final act, into something rooted in crimes that once existed outside of fiction. It's a film about what a person can normalize when the alternative is remembering. From the short true crime story, "Gumdrop City" (2012).

The Frontier

Two of the newest additions to the catalog don't fit the fest-circuit mold of the shorts above — they're closer to experiments in how a story gets told at all.

Light Snowflakes: America's Second Orbit (2026) builds an entire immersive documentary around a single object: a rare 1962 vinyl record carrying the unedited audio of astronaut Scott Carpenter's Aurora 7 mission. Restored footage, research, and context surround that recording, educating the viewer so thoroughly that by the time the raw audio plays again at the film's end, it lands differently than it could have for anyone listening in 1962.

Travels (2025) is the outlier on purpose. An experimental short built from AI-generated stills and an AI-composed score, guided by a screenplay Murdock wrote at university in the early 1980s, it follows a woman moving through shifting, dreamlike landscapes where memory, technology, and selfhood collide. It's less a departure from the catalog's themes than a stress test of them — the same questions about identity and buried history, run through tools that didn't exist when the script was written.

World Explorers Program (2026) goes back further than any other title in the catalog — to a set of records Murdock received as a child in the 1960s, part of a monthly series that introduced kids to different countries through vinyl, printed materials, and small keepsakes. He kept them his whole life. 

The film doesn't illustrate them with new footage; it turns the original audio itself into the image, using oscilloscope-generated waveforms so the sound becomes something you watch as much as hear — voice, music, and narration rendered as a moving trace across the screen. It's restraint as a formal choice: no modern imagery standing in for a childhood that arrived entirely through listening and imagination. As a kid, Murdock never knew whether these recordings captured real travel or a studio reconstruction of it; decades later, restoring them, the honest answer turned out to be both at once.

(LgN's catalog isn't limited to film — Murdock also publishes prose under LgN Press, including the award-winning Death of Heaven. That's a separate story for another day.)

Unproduced

The Teenage Bodyguard, a screenplay grounded in a true-crime basis, has picked up 17-plus awards on the strength of the page alone — proof that a script doesn't need a camera behind it to prove itself. It's the clearest evidence that LgN's throughline lives in the writing first, production second. Two producers are interested if the money can only be found. It would have been made three times with three different directors that one name producer found, but they just didn't have the right...vision.

What's Next

Three shorts are currently under consideration at Life is Short and HorrorHound TV: 

Eagles & Crows, a Fable (a 4 min allegory), "Gumdrop", a short horror, and The Rapping. 

Eagles & Crows is a minimalist allegory — loosely drawn from the symbolic roles of eagles and crows in Native American traditions — about a forgotten act of kindness between the two birds that calcifies, generations later, into a ritual no one remembers the reason for. 

The Rapping, shot in stark black and white and built partly from real NASA InSight Mars lander audio, follows a man alone with an insistent, rhythmic sound he can't place — inside his house, or inside his head. Elements of it were later folded into Gumdrop, linking the two films into a shared psychological universe.

Alongside the submissions, a film companion book to Bolero is being considered at a UK publisher — expanding the film's found-poem approach to Ravel's war into something longer-form.

A Body of Work, Still in Progress

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

The "One Big Lie" of Science Fiction

Bend one rule boldly, but make everything else obey reality.

Or as it’s often said in writing circles: “You get one big lie.”
Or, “Change one thing and explore its consequences.”
Or even, “Suspend disbelief once.”

Writers like Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke (my childhood heroes in the 1960s, among others…followed this principle instinctively. But then I titled my first sold dystopian fiction story as an homage to Asimov’s first autobiography as, In Memory, Yet Crystal Clear.

While they might break one law of physics — faster-than-light travel, positronic brains, time distortion — but everything else in their worlds remained grounded in logic and internal consistency. That’s what made their stories so enduring: readers believed in them because they made sense.

I try to base all my own writing on the rules of physics (or quantum mechanics, or whatever framework the story demands). But eventually, every tale reaches that edge where the science stops supporting the fiction. What then? Do you throw it away and lose all that time and effort? Or do you keep going — bending the rules just enough to reach the best conclusion you can imagine?

I say it’s up to the author or filmmaker.
If the story’s heart still beats with truth — emotional, moral, or existential — even beyond scientific boundaries, then it’s worth the leap.

Your audience may not thank you outright.
But if they’re still thinking about your story hours, days, or weeks later?
You did your job.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

Why AI Privacy Matters for Health and Creative Work

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to share sensitive material with AI systems like ChatGPT. On the one hand, these tools are powerful collaborators — whether you’re working through health challenges, brainstorming a story, or hashing out a screenplay draft. On the other hand, the moment you type something in, you have to trust that it won’t end up somewhere you don’t want it.

For many of us, the stakes are different. Some of it touches on health information (where HIPAA comes to mind). Some of it touches on creative and professional work — intellectual property, future contracts, and the legal landmines of collaboration.

So let’s unpack what really happens when you share something with an AI today, and what an ideal model might look like in the future.

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How It Works Today: Thin Client, Thick Server

Right now, services like ChatGPT are built on what’s essentially a thin client / thick server architecture.

• Your browser or app is just the window.

• OpenAI’s servers hold your history, memory, and the text of your sessions.

• You can toggle “Chat History & Training” on (so chats are saved and may be used in training) or off (so they’re deleted after the session and not used in training).

This system is convenient: you get to scroll back through your old conversations in the sidebar, and the model can pick up threads across multiple days.

But it also means the persistence of your data lives in the cloud, not on your machine. If you want maximum privacy — for health notes or sensitive IP — you have to turn off history, which kills continuity.

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The Ideal Future: Thick Client, Thin Server

What would be better?

A thick client / thin server setup.

• The server would only do the heavy lifting: run the model, generate responses, and send them back.

• The client (your computer) would store all your data locally — your history, your drafts, your “memory.”

• Each time you opened a new session, your client would send only the relevant context to the server. When you closed it, nothing would persist beyond your machine.

This is the best of both worlds: continuity without ceding control. Your health reflections never leave your computer. Your creative drafts remain your intellectual property, with zero risk of leakage. The AI still works, but the model never “keeps” your work behind the scenes.

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Where Things Stand for Creatives and Health Concerns

Until that architecture exists in mainstream AI products, here’s what we can do:

• Health information: You can share personal reflections safely for your own use, but don’t put in identifiable patient data if you’re a clinician. The current platforms aren’t HIPAA-compliant.

• Creative work: You keep full IP ownership of everything you write here, but if you don’t want drafts to linger on servers, flip off “Chat History & Training” and save the transcripts locally.

• Hybrid use: Keep two modes — “history on” for casual, low-stakes work and “history off” for sensitive or professional projects.

For the ultra-private route, you can also run local LLMs (like GPT4All, LM Studio, or small LLaMA builds) directly on your computer. These don’t touch the cloud at all. Many professionals are starting to draft locally, then bring only what they’re comfortable sharing into ChatGPT for refinement.

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Why This Matters

If AI is going to become a true collaborator — in health, in writing, in film, in law — then the foundation has to be trust.

I don’t want my medical reflections slipping into a training set. I don’t want my unpublished screenplay ideas floating around in some server. And I don’t want to give up continuity with my AI partner just because I choose privacy.

That’s why the next leap in AI design isn’t just about bigger models. It’s about architecture: giving users the ability to keep their data local, private, and theirs, while still tapping into the model’s power.

Because without that, we’re always weighing usefulness against risk. And for many of us — in healthcare, in the arts, in professional collaborations — that’s a trade-off we shouldn’t have to make.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

Val Kilmer: A Legacy Of Talent & Resilience – Mamet, 'Spartan'...& A Spy’s Game

RIP to Val Kilmer.

"Kilmer died Tuesday night in Los Angeles, surrounded by family and friends, his daughter, Mercedes Kilmer, said in an email to The Associated Press. Kilmer died from pneumonia. He had recovered after a 2014 throat cancer diagnosis that required two tracheotomies. The New York Times was the first to report his death." - AP

My introduction to Val Kilmer was in Top Gun (1986), and I did not like him (that character, anyway, as I came to realize later). Then I saw him in Real Genius (1985). I liked him a bit more. Then I saw him in Top Secret (1984) and I thought, yeah, he's much more likable here. 

​Val Kilmer, the versatile actor known for his roles in films like Top Gun, Batman Forever, and The Doors, passed away on April 1, 2025, at the age of 65 due to pneumonia. His daughter, Mercedes Kilmer, confirmed his death, noting that he had previously battled throat cancer since 2015, which had significantly impacted his health. 

Kilmer's portrayal of Jim Morrison in The Doors (1991) showcased his dedication to his craft, as he immersed himself in the role by singing all the concert sequences himself. His performance as Iceman in Top Gun (1986) and as the titular character in Batman Forever (1995) solidified his status as a Hollywood leading man.

Throughout his career, Kilmer was known for his intense approach to acting, which sometimes led to a reputation for being difficult to work with. Despite these challenges, his commitment to his roles left a lasting impact on the film industry. ​

Kilmer has narrated a few films. One of the notable projects he narrated is The American West (2016), a documentary series that explores the history of the American West. Kilmer’s deep, distinctive voice adds a powerful layer to the storytelling, making his narration a memorable part of the series. Additionally, Kilmer has lent his voice to various other projects, both in narration and voice acting.

In addition to The American West, Kilmer also narrated The Mutant Chronicles (2008), though it is more of a feature film with a documentary-style approach. However, for a more documentary-specific project, Kilmer is also known for narrating Cinema Twain (2015), a rather good documentary that focuses on the life and legacy of Mark Twain.

"The Mutant Chronicles universe was first a Pen and Paper role-playing game published by Swedish game studio Target Games. There were also several boardgames, a set of tabletop wargaming rules (with associated lines of miniatures), as well as comic books." IMDb

In his later years, Kilmer became more politically active and even considered running for governor of New Mexico. He also authored a memoir titled I'm Your Huckleberry: A Memoir in 2020, providing insights into his life and career.

Kilmer is survived by his two children, Mercedes and Jack, who have both followed in their father's footsteps in the entertainment industry. 

But I don't want to talk here about those films that have been discussed so much.

One of his, if not standout performances in a film for me, but one of my favorites is Spartan (2004) from David Mamet. Their only collaboration and a film kind of panned by reviewers, but still one of my favorite Kilmer flicks. But then I have an orientation that leans into espionage, both non-fiction for most of the first part of my life, and the fictional. But I've always preferred as realistic as possible. Either in its reality or in the feel for that. Which was why my favorite spy novelist long was books by Len Deighton. 

While I was not in my father's life, or he in mine, I was given the last book he was reading when he died, and it was Deighton's spy series, Game, Set, Match. Which, rather oddl,y when I received that book, I had just finished what I thought was a very good BBC series of the same name with Ian Holm as the inveterate character of Bernard Sampson (pronunciation of his first name BERNard, forever misspoke by "Yanks").

Deighton was famous for his books into films starring the late Michael Caine: The IPCRESS File (1962), Funeral in Berlin (1964), Billion-Dollar Brain (1966). Caine's character of spy Harry Palmer was my favorite fictional spy after James Bond and before the satirical Derek Flint (James Coburn). I loved those films and Michael Caine ever since them.

Oddly enough it took me forever to find the DVD set of the Game, Set, Match series because writer Deighton hated Holm's performance and he tried to kill their existence. I finally found a copy in Australia. That Game Set Match series is a trilogy of a trilogy of books: Deighton later wrote two more trilogies continuing Samson’s story:

• Game, Set, Match (Berlin Game, Mexico Set, London Match)

• Hook, Line & Sinker (Spy Hook, Spy Line, Spy Sinker)

• Faith, Hope & Charity (Faith, Hope, Charity)

But I (quite obviously) digress...

I've been a fan of Mamet's since my playwriting class days at university, and full in after I saw House of Games (1987). But even before that, with The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), The Verdict (1982) with Paul Newman, and definitely with The Untouchables (1987).

How can I justify my appreciation of Spartan?

I don’t really need to justify liking Spartan—but if you want me to defend it against its lukewarm reception, there is plenty to work with. 

Here’s why I think it stands out:

1. Mamet’s Signature Dialogue & Tight Script

• Mamet’s stylized, clipped dialogue can be divisive, but it gives Spartan a unique, almost poetic rhythm. It’s efficient, stripped down—no wasted words.

• The storytelling avoids spoon-feeding the audience, trusting them to piece things together, which makes rewatches rewarding.

2. Val Kilmer’s Performance

• He’s at his best here—intense, understated, and believably lethal. Unlike a typical action hero, he plays Scott as all business, which fits the tone perfectly.

3. Unconventional Spy Thriller

• No over-the-top set pieces or glamorized espionage—this is a brutal, procedural look at special ops work, where success often comes down to ruthlessness, not flash.

• The film’s twists feel earned rather than forced, and it respects the audience’s intelligence.

4. Dark, Political Edge

• It subtly critiques power structures, government corruption, and the expendability of even high-profile individuals.

• The conspiracy at the film’s core isn’t outlandish—it feels frighteningly plausible.

5. Rewatchability & Cult Status

• Like a lot of Mamet films, it’s aged well. Its methodical pacing, sharp dialogue, and ambiguous moral compass make it more rewarding the more you watch it.

The fact that critics weren’t all on board actually makes it more of a hidden gem. Some of the best films aren’t universally loved at first but develop a loyal following over time—Spartan is one of those.

Val Kilmer’s career is celebrated for his iconic roles in films like Top Gun and The Doors. Known for his talent and charm, Kilmer has faced personal challenges, including a battle with throat cancer. Despite these hurdles, his legacy continues to inspire, leaving a lasting mark on both Hollywood and his fans.

Compiled with aid of ChatGPT

Walkabout Thoughts #91

Thoughts & Stream of Consciousness, rough and ready, from an award-winning filmmaker and author you’ve never heard of, while walking off long Covid, and listening to podcasts…walking day: Tuesday, June 25, 2024.

Weather for the day… nice day, starting out, 62° with no wind and blue sky 71° when back at home.

Podcast is WTF? Marc Maron with Jewel Episode 1550 - Jewel
I have to say, I loved Jewel when she first hit the airwaves. Great voice, attractive, talented. She seemed to disappear for a while, off and on. I saw her recently on a Roast of Rob Lowe from 7 years ago when she was awesome (Nikki Glaser kicked ass, as usual), and now on this podcast. This is an amazing person and an amazing podcast episode! Fell in love with her on this podcast all over again. Intelligent, wise...very interesting interview.

Also this: Ride with the Devil (film) 1999 US revisionist Western film dir. by Ang Lee starring Tobey Maguire, Skeet Ulrich, Jeffrey Wright, Jewel in her feature film debut, also Simon Baker, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, James Caviezel
Based Woe to Live On, by Daniel Woodrell, 

I wrote in my last blog about Jason Lockhart playing the role of "Rowan" in my film "Gumdrop". a short horror. I was saying how he was fulfilling the function that the character Luca Brasi did in The Godfather. So I messaged Jason on Facebook and he wrote back saying that he thought it was his best work as an actor in my film. I also really liked his work other works with Kelly Hughes, especially their short film Green State.

Anyway, I worked with Jason on a few of Kelly’s films. I think my most enjoyable and memorable one was Kelly's seemingly never-ending project he started years ago that I believe he had titled "Suffer of Witch" (or was it "Mephisto Box"?), but it has had several titles.

We had a day of shooting at a church on Capitol Hill in Seattle. Prior to that Kelly and I had held auditions for potential actors at a venue in Seattle El Corazon (it was the Off Ramp when I used to go there in the late 1980s. I’ve never taken auditions from actors before although I had been sent out on them myself.

We had a baby and needed some extra money so I signed up with Mode Talent Agency back in 89 or 90, who sent me out on some auditions. One was for a thug character of three. Tyne Daily of Cagney and Lacey after that series had ended in 1988 was going to be in a movie, Face of a Stranger. She played a homeless woman that another woman, Gena Rowlands, befriends. In the film, Tyne gets beat up by three street thugs. I was vying to do that. I thought, how cool to be in a movie where you get to beat up "Lacey"? Alas, I didn’t get the part. 

I remember another audition for I think Maxwell House coffee? It was for a guy having lunch in a restaurant and the gig was that he turns around and gave a really strange look at somebody. This was my first audition ever so the producer said to face the wall (that threw me off), and then to just turn my head around and look at the camera and give me the weirdest look I could come up with.

I was ready for just about anything, but that one left me stumped. But she was very nice and repeated herself saying to just give a weird look, don't worry about it, just have fun with it. So I did it. She had me do it a few times and then said thank you and the next person came in and I headed out. I didn't expect to get the gig. I was correct.

It was a while later while I was watching TV when I saw the commercial. The guy they chose for the part did a good job, I’ll give him that. But how fun would that have been?

Anyway, I didn’t last long with Mode Talent. But it wasn't anything I did wrong.

The owner and lead agent had to take a trip to New York or somewhere. He was gone for a week or two. He left the company in charge of his two female underlings. Big mistake.

According to hi, they really screwed his business over. The first time I went in there he said he really liked my look. He took a headshot got some info about my skills, and experience and put it on the back. He said, you know I really think we could send you to the Stephen Seagal people. As a stand in or something, you look just like him from the back. I said, Yeah? Well, whatever.

It was a few years after that when I was commuting to and working in Seattle. I was walking to work along 1st Avenue from the ferry (to Bainbridge Island, we lived just off there in Suquamish) when one of those “duck “amphibious vehicle tours vehicles (now defunct) that we used to see around Seattle. I heard the loudspeaker saying something to the tour group as they went by about Steven Seagal. I had a ponytail at the time as I do now. I looked over and everybody was looking at me. It honestly didn’t make me happy.

I was once a big fan of Steven Seagal, back when his first movie, Above the Law (1988, Director, Andrew Davis. Writers, Andrew Davis, Steven Seagal, Steven Pressfield) came out. Partially because he was an Aikido master. Also because he was bodyguard to the stars (how he met his second wife) and how he got a introduction to being in a film.

I know a lot of people thought his action on screen was fake. It was, but it wasn't. As I heard it, the reason he looks so weird on camera fighting is that they had to slow his action down so much since the camera wasn’t capturing what he was doing, which subverts your technique. They had to come up with another form of fighting which was unfair as far as critiquing his fight scenes.

My understanding of him now is he seems to be kind of a bully. I had first taken Aikido 1980 as a gym class in college. I had done various martial arts, initially Isshinryu Karate which I had started in 1965.

The thing that made me love Steven Seagal so much when I first saw him in a movie, Above the Law, was that I was so sick of the lazy screenwriting and situations where the good guy comes into a bad guy with a weapon at an innocent hostage's throat or a gun or whatever, and tells the cop to put their gun down. Then the cop puts it down! Give me a break!

Seagal was in a scene like that, but then he just kills the criminal! The first time I saw that movie I literally cheered in my living room. Having studied Aikido, I knew what he was doing in his films. Some of my friends made fun of what he was doing and I'd have to tell them it may look weird or wimpy, but it's highly effective. 

Years later, I was finally living near an Aikido dojo for the first time. We were living in Squamish, Washington and my wife saw there was one nearby in Kingston, where one of the the ferries were. The dojo had started at the community center but eventually, moved to Poulsbo, which was 4 miles from our house back then.

Eventually, I ended up on their board of directors for the nonprofit educational school, dojo. Very nice group of people and I much preferred Aikido over any other martial art I've done. Yes, there may be tougher ones. But then you don’t understand the history of it the history of its founder Morihei Ueshiba, O’Sensei.

I had read everything about Aikido I could get my hands on. I became the dojo historian of sorts by default. When our Sensei was instructing a class and referred back to something in Aikido history, he got into the habit of looking at me to expand on what he was saying and I would tell the class what I knew about that technique or history. 

Eventually, I redesigned and ran the website because I was doing that for a living, as well as being a server administrator and other things back then for a four state Blue Shield company.

Getting back to Steven Seagal, my first break with him as a kind of martial arts or filmic hero was when I heard he had married Kelly LeBroc. eveEry guy I knew after Weird Science came out was a fan of hers, for obvious reasons.

The fact that Steven Seagal had married her, gave him big points with all of us. Until they divorced and she was interviewed on some news show on TV. When asked about what happened to her marriage, the distant blank look on her face said it all to me.

Something very bad had happened to this woman. And that I believe fell directly on her ex-husband. Over the years I kept hearing some very impressive or disturbing things about him. His history in how he ended up in Japan is fascinating. He married the daughter of a sensei who owned a dojo and held his own in Japan. Which especially back then was a hard thing for a white boy from Lansing, Michigan to do.

I kept hearing reports of him on film sets, basically being an abusive Aikidoist. Stuntman didn’t like working with him because he didn’t seem to know how to pull his punches. Or maybe he just didn't want to. I get the feeling he enjoyed it.

When you watch the documentary put out by his dojo, they talk about the hardstyle he taught in Aikido. Stephen Seagal himself says he followed O’Sensei’s original harder style. Originally having any evolved out of the martial art Samurai used. As opposed to my original Isshinryu Karate from Okinawa which was designed to protect legally disarmed farmers who were forced to use farm equipment because that’s all they had, inorder to occasionally protect themselves from fully armed samurai.

I don’t know if Seagal could’ve ever been a great actor, but he could’ve been a great Sensei had he not had such an ego. Some of the reports of women speaking out against him and men complaining about him seem to have to had some truth in it.

I can’t even watch his movies anymore, not for decades now. I liked his first few movies done by Warner Bros. Once he went independent, there’s a good movie here or there, but I lost interest. His reality TV series, Steven Seagal Lawman, was interesting about being a cop. 

Starting mile two, it's starting to get warm out.

Anyway, getting back to Mode Talent Agency. While the owner was gone, the two women were apparently borrowing money from clients and not paying them back. Bad enough they'd borrow money from clients, but to not pay it back? Sleezy. 

My wife at the time, my oldest son's mother, was an artist and a gourmet cook. She had painted a sweatshirt for me that I wore into Mode Talent one day. One of the attractive women running things in the owner's absence, really liked it. She asked if my wife would paint one for her, of her. So I went back and asked my wife who said sure, for $50. I told the woman and she agreed. My wife painted it and one day handed it to me and said not to let it go until I had money in hand.

I got down to Mode and I gave the woman the sweatshirt who just loved it!. She started to give me a line about how she’d pay me later. But I said I can’t and that I was told not to release it without funds in hand. She tried to parlay into paying as little as possible. But I stuck to my guns. Reluctantly, she wrote me a check and reluctantly, I accepted it. But I'm happy to report the check did not bounce.

After I hadn’t heard from Mode in a while, I called them and the owner answered. I said I hadn’t heard from them in a while and he profusely apologized saying things were a mess. He explained the two women he left in charge had been fired and he was trying to salvage the mess they had left him with.

He said they had pretty much ruined his business and told me some of the horror stories of his clients who had gotten ripped off. I told him my story about the sweatshirt and assured him I had been paid, but only because I refused to release the sweatshirt. Eventually, we hung up, amicably. I liked the guy. I never heard back from him, and that was the end of my audition career. I wondered if they had just gone out of business.

On that Kelly Hughes audition day in Seattle, I found pretty interesting and educational. He had been doing auditions of actors since the 90s when he had a weekly half-hour movie of the week that he produced at Viacom public access cable TV on Roosevelt Street, just north of Seattle.

Which was how we met online when he found that I had produced my Lost in Space documentary there around the same time he was starting to work out of there around 1993.

I had recently met my next wife-to-be back then, unbeknownst to me at the time. Just before I had finished editing my film. I would get off work downtown Seattle and drive up for an edit session and then make the commute south in the dark, to Auburn where my girlfriend was living. I had moved in with her as I seemed to be there all the time anyway, and eventually got rid of my apartment in the Sand Point area just up the street from Magnussen Park. 

I finished my film and in February 1994 by contract, it was cablecast around the greater Seattle area, twice.

When Kelly saw online at Stage32 (a member since 2012), a site for indie filmmakers, that I had also worked at Viacom, he said I should come to meet him and Jason and another actor Greg, at CryptiCon. It was at the Seattle Hilton in SeaTac, south of Seattle. I had been there for the 2nd  ZomBcon (previously having attended the 1st ZomBcon in Seattle with my oldest son), which was also at that Hilton. So I felt familiar.

I did and we had a great time and the rest is history.

Getting back to the auditions… Kelly had me and another guy. I think it might’ve been his friend Spanky from Dead Vampires a band from the 90s. 80s and 90s maybe?

Kelly was doing interviews/auditions by himself and had us standing downstairs greeting and wrangling the actors as they arrived. Until I went upstairs and said that I’m not there as a gopher but to learn about auditions from the director's perspective.

He seemed surprised but said, OK have a seat. I’m glad I did that because it was fascinating and he has a good hand for picking unique actors. One got stuck in reading a scene and Kelly gave him a way to act that broke the actor out of his stall and he did a great read. I was impressed by that. He had few good actors. In particular one established actress. Also, a few brand-new actors who turned out to be very good. We had the late great Jennifer True on that set. I used her as voice actor for some off-screen vocals in my own film later on ("Gumdrop", a short horror). Miss you Jennifer...

There was one actress with her mother who was watching us like hawks and didn't want to leave her teen daughter in a room alone with us. We offered for her to stand in the hallway, out of sight of her daughter's vision, with the door open and that satisfied her. You just don't want a parent messing up an actor's reading because of being self-conscious or something. Plus, the director needs to feel free enough to work with the actor without feeling self-conscious themself. The girl did really well and got used for the film.

Kelly had picked one actor, Noel T Austin, who was a very interesting character. He also did body suspension art. And he was interesting-looking guy. 

I remember Kelly’s friend who played the doctor in the film, Ernie (Ernest Rhoads, AKA, "Hellen Bed") and I were in the main part of the church upstairs. while Kelly was filming a “group therapy session“ in the basement. I think I played two characters in that group therapy scene. I just changed my clothes with one of me wearing a hoodie on my head with my head down the whole time and holding myself and a coffee cup like I was strung out.

While he was doing that, we were trying to give Noel directions upstairs. He was sitting in a pew with a straight jacket on, stressing out a bit about how he was going to act out the scene. So we offered him some advice basically trying to help him relax.

So when Kelly finally shot the scene, we thought Noel was very good. Kelly thought it all well very smoothly, until I mentioned to him the 45 minutes Ernie and I had spent with prepping him.

I also acted as "sound" on set that day. That church had no heat on. There’s one scene where the doctor (Ernie)  and a character are walking down a flight of stairs. You can’t see below their waist, but if you could, you would’ve seen me lying on the ground with a digital recorder, recording the dialogue and steps as they walked.

A couple days later, I got really sick from being on that set. For whatever reason. We do suffer for our art, if we do it right, at times. But I'd avoid the suffering when possible. Research has shown it's just unnecessary. At least we don’t let it stop us, which is doing it right. It's just how you have to do it.

I still haven’t auditioned any actors for any of my films. I used to run the projector and show our family films when I was a little kid, did any splicing needing to be done. I’ve always been fascinated by film and cinema. Got a great education of sorts from the European auteur director's movies who were shown on PBS in the 1960s and early '70s.

My first film I produced at Western Washington University on phenomenology for two of my psychology professors. My second was the Lost in Space 25th anniversary documentary I did at Viacomm. I could’ve used their equipment, but I used my own. Again, I should’ve used their equipment, but you had to sign it in and out, as massive pain in the neck. Especially if the equipment was unavailable when you needed it.

And then digital editor broke and they had to ship it to California. It didn't come back until a month later. When I showed up to edit one day, they said just to use one of the other editing bays, but none of the other VHS editing machines would work with my master tape. So I had to wait. I should’ve seen the signs.

Eventually, the editor came back and my master tape worked on it. When it was cablecast, I sat at home watching it and about 80% of the music I had put on the soundtrack couldn’t be heard. Then in the credits, there is a big list of music which had to leave people wandering...WTF?

So that was seen by the public in early 1994. An art film and a documentary under my belt at that point. Then in 2019, my oldest son was living downstairs with his girlfriend in basically a separate apartment in our big house I was renting after we sold our home of 15 years. I suggested we shoot a film. He thought it would be fun.

So I wrote an eight-minute film. Just a POC, proof of concept that I thought I could actually produce. It was a lot of fun. Two years in that house, then he moved to another town and I moved a mile away to a smaller house that was cheaper and where I got the idea to shoot Gumdrop.

Getting back to auditions, I skipped them and simply stole some of Kelly‘s actors and friends. The guy who took care of my rental house when I moved to Bremerton, Tom, we got to be friends. He’s the one who found the house I live in now, because he lived in it years ago.

The previous tenant they kicked out of here before me, hadn’t paid rent in months, had three big dogs that destroyed the yard and wrecked the house. So Tom and I spent July 2018 remodeling the house. I moved in and started paying rent in August.

Skipping forward to Gumdrop, Tom and I got to be close working for a month on that house in the heat, sweating and painting, fixing things and going to lunch and talking. 

Actually, I had used him as a voice actor on my audiobooks at the previous house. So we kinda got used to working together on my having him read my writings as I directed him. He had actually studied voice acting in school. Kelly Hughes had studied, I think something similar in school. His podcasts, Rising Star are well done. Both of these are after they graduated high school

Tom was interested in acting in the film and suggested his son, who he suggested his kids. As I'd acquired some of Kelly’s stable actors, no auditions needed.

I have to say I was amazed how good Tom was and double surprised about his son. I love the scenes of the two of them together in the film. I almost feel like there were two lead actors.

So that’s my situation with auditions. I have been on them professionally. I have experienced them through a Kelly Hughes production. I do believe the quality of your actors as well as the quality of your soundtrack music really elevates your film without you doing any extra work.

Starting my 3rd mile...

Damn voice-to-text and the notepad on my phone are pretty problematic. I tried to go to the top to type something as I have trouble getting there, I have to scroll forever up (or down). Just simply touched the screen and suddenly I was at the top of the screen. Then had to scroll all the way back to the bottom.

Or I have voice-to-text issues that I cannot get right and I have to do it manually. One of my biggest issues in editing this when I get home is correcting voice-to-text errors. Granted, some of those are my fault. Some of those are because of ambient noise or wind but a lot of times it’s just me wishing for better software.

And I do now do this using my Apple Airpods.

Apologies to Jewel and Marc Maron on their podcast episode today. My listening to podcasts on this thing just kind of happened. I couldn’t think of things to say for a blog so I thought I’d listen to podcasts and when I had a flash of a thought, I'd write it out to share with people. 

That worked out really well, except for the political podcasts in post-production editing made me think I’m somebody’s crazy uncle. The confusing thing for some is sometimes I use satire and it’s not recognized. Or I go over the top because I’m annoyed by how abused reality has become. We all make mistakes But then whatever I find is incorrect. I correct it

I’m hoping as all should, that in this election Trump loses, and hopefully goes to prison. Preferably to end his life there, one way or another. I can drop the political podcasts then, although I will still stay apprised of what’s going on in the world. We have to. And then I can find more art and creator-based podcasts.

I’m a fan of the show Hacks, as you may know and I listen to their podcast, which is awesome. Non sequitur...

I got up this morning to watch The Daily Show. Very much looking forward to seeing Jon Stewart again on his Monday show that I watch on Tuesday morning, off my DVR. And guess what? This time no Jon Stewart!

I thought the episode was very good but there’s only one Jon Stewart. So where the hell was he? The thing that really annoys me and I believe is one of the tenets of Purpleism is when you’re going to do a switch on your audience, have the decency to address it with them! And on the last night's show, they didn’t mention a word about where Jon was.

On the health front last night, I was watching “Crime“ the Scottish police procedural with Dougray Scott. Series two is getting good. I wanted something to munch so rather than make a whole bag of popcorn, I have these tasty crackers I use for meat and cheese. I just munched on a few of those.

Then I woke up too early this morning. Didn’t take any melatonin last night to get to sleep, which is a success. Though I woke up too early. I put on NPR to doze to and then woke up again later and felt very weird.

Very weird like am I dying, weird? Wasn’t anything intense, but I could feel the blood in my veins and it felt like my heart was beating slow and low maybe? I couldn’t tell if it was high blood pressure. I didn’t think so, but something was not right.

I thought, what the hell, take half of Benadryl, which is my go-to remedy. The feeling I had at the time was if I had to go to the ER or have the paramedics over for a visit? I didn't think Benadryl could fix this.

But within 10 or 15 minutes? I felt normal again. So it was I guess histamine levels and the Benadryl did their magic. A lot of Covid has to do with histamine issues. For more on that you can read my book “Suffering Long Covid“. My son told me today their store just sold out of them and so I ordered them some more. I also got notified my screenplay "The Teenage Bodyguard" was an official selection at the Cinematography and Photography Awards in London. Two very nice things today. Moving on...

While I feel like I’m over long Covid now, I'm unsure. Is it one of those diseases that goes away by half-life? If you know anything about atomic structures, if something last for 10 years, its half-life is five years, and so on and so forth by half until...who knows?

If you keep doing that, there can be no end to it. It just gets so minimized that for all intents and purposes it no longer exists.

The alternative is that long Covid is gone, but damaged something or tweaked something, typically a dormant virus and so now you’re stuck with that issue.

Certainly, some people have been damaged by Covid and died from it or are permanently damaged by it. Either their brain, or heart, their vagus nerve, or blood system, or some organ(s).

I think I addressed this the other day that the scary things about long Covid is the unknown and having no effect to reproduce a remedy. Oddly Benadryl has often proven to be that remedy.

Another eminent one is hydrating yourself. When I started feeling better on the Benadryl this morning, I drank some more water. I had drunk some water but it didn’t do anything. After the Benadryl can only help.

I just passed 2.5 mile marker...

My last blog went live at 6 AM today which is the normal time. I blasted it out to social media, the title, the link, a few hashtags and trying to figure out how I get people to understand what my walkabout thoughts blog is about and what each individual episode or article is about. That’s been a real conundrum. You can put tags in each blog posted. I also put hashtags in most of the time when I posting.

I was looking at the analytics on my blog today, which are new to me, they'd updated them, and I went back and looked at my blog and scrolled down and on the right. I forgot I had a word cloud. I got this idea of. I’ll take a screenshot of that and included with my social media blast for today’s blog.

So we’ll see how that works out. I mean, if you’re kind enough to click on my link to my blog but don’t know who I am or what the blog is about, right at the top. As you know, it says this is just random shit from some crazy person walking and listening to podcasts. But it’s also turned a little bit into an autobiography of my life and craft.

My son and I have long been talking about AI and being able to talk to miss loved ones who have died. I know he could use it. It would be nice if he had me talk to after I’m gone. I do believe AI will be able to be pointed at something online or feed it a bunch of data and it will be able to re-create a person from that that will seem oddly and disturbingly real.

I've forever wanted to submit all my writings and see what the common thread would be according to be analyzed, but I can’t afford that. But AI would be doable. Soon, I'm sure.

I've put a lot of my beliefs and understandings into this blog since 2010. Eventually I could point an AI at my blog alone and have it generate a reasonable favatar of myself that my sons could one day talk after I’m gone.

I don’t think that would be possible for me with my grandmother who was my primary ethical and intellectual guide and mentor. Or my mother who, as I grew up, seemed to fade after the loss first of her dad, as she was a daddy’s girl...he was never around, always traveling the world. Then losing her youngest son, my younger brother which seem to snap her mind. It was ugly and took a year or two of his dying from liver cancer, five years before the first successful liver transplant.

And then her mother died, my grandmother, second mother, and sometimes primary in many ways.

We don’t have lots of data and information about people like that online or available. That was before the internet. I was on the Internet in about 1987 and then I worked in the internet and IT field for nearly 30 years. I may be a contender for an AI avatar. Perhaps one of the first cohort viable for that.

Anyway, we’ve got interesting things coming to us all soon and it’s going to hit us faster than we expect.

I think we need a new law t ofhat orders any political party to have to have a platform with some basic tenets country before party, because all the Republican Party is now is party before country, Trump before party. It’s killing democracy, it’s killing the cohesion among citizens and it’s seemingly trying to end America.

One of the reasons for these walks is to get back in shape after four years of Covid and long Covid and certainly aafter a bad winter and spring for me this year. But also the blog in  speaking and recording and editing. It’s a lot of editing to put this blog online and I’m only doing one readthrough… but that’s also getting me in shape for creative works. It’s making me want to finish my film companion book for my documentary and that’s really important, because I have a lot of new projects I want to get working on. I just need to wrap up the previous ones.

OK, I’ll shut up and listen to Marc and Jewel.

Well, this is interesting. Marc is talking about doing a show in Seattle because he’s based in Vancouver, British Columbia now for shooting a movie. He goes home to LA every once in a while. But he said he’s walking around Seattle this week and saying that it looks trashed and beaten down, or maybe it’s just where he’s located

Maybe?

Seattle’s always been that way in some areas. With some pretty parts. But one of the reasons many of us moved out of Seattle, and I really loved living in Seattle, and my oldest son was born there. But what we’ve seen because of Amazon and Google and others... many of my friends ended up working there… they turned the city into what it is today.

Many of us who still live there, or those who moved out, have complained about how the once cool spirit of Seattle is kind of gone while now it’s all shiny and such. I don’t know, bro culture? Not really but you get the idea. Gentrification everywhere. Many of the cool venues are gone now replaced by shiny new buildings.

Almost has that coolness anymore replacd by the new and shiny factor.

So I’m wondering was Marc downtown by Pioneer Square, maybe south of that? Because that’s like industrial and it’s kind of cool but a different kind. That’s down by the Seahawk's stadium and the Safeco baseball field. Maybe. I don’t know, they keep changing the names.

Marc's second wife came from Seattle. I didn’t know that. So he knows it a little bit from the past. He says he loves Seattle, but they broke up and it wasn’t good, so there’s that.

Then he said Lynn Shelton, his late girlfriend who died was from Seattle. So he’s also got a lot of mixed feelings about Seattle but does say he loves it and knows he has a lot of fans here. I’m sure he’s had a lot of shows up here.

Well, I know this is my fault today jabbering so much with WTF? on pause, but Marc finally got around to talking to Jewel. I spent almost the entire walk just jawing my way through. Talk talk talk talk talk. I’ll have to save this podcast for the next walk.

On that note, I’ll bid you adieu…and leave you with that. It’s noon and time for lunch.

Cheers! Sláinte!

Walkabout Thoughts #89

Thoughts & Stream of Consciousness, rough and ready, from an award-winning filmmaker and author you’ve never heard of, while walking off long Covid, and listening to podcasts…walking day…Sunday, June 23, 2024


Weather for the day… nice day, starting out, 57 broken cloud cover, cool, a bit too windy 65° when back at home.

Podcast is The Playlist episode about The Bike Riders interview with Jodie Comer, who is one of my favorite actors since I saw her in

I'm editing this on Monday, the day I walked and listened to Rachel Maddow's podcast Ultra. I'll mention it in the next blog. However, I wanted to mention its episode, Malmedy because everybody should listen to this entire podcast. And the previous season. It's our history. It's currently. It's a great example of how what is happening today, has happened before and we should be concerned, aware, and understand, it can't happen again, or where it failed before, it needs to fail now.

My Instagram post today using Everlast for music.

Listening to the podcast about cinema, he got me to thinking about my own films. My preferred orientation and film would be cinematography, as in the films of Peter Greenaway and others heavy on the visuals.

I think my own little film on a shoestring budget, “Gumdrop “, a short horror. There’s a lot going on in that film, which has been recognized by some of the awards it’s won at film festivals around the world. My favorite being an award for Best Director. What else did that win? Best Noir Film, Best Horror, Best Thriller.

Well, some of my local Indie Director friends are using a single lens with a zoom on films while on my films I use specific prime lenses with an occasional zoom lens when I want to flatten out the depth. I prefer much more specific, while time-consuming on set, in designing their most effective capabilities to change the lens as required for its desired affect. 

Focus (pulling) is always an issue with a single crewmember production…that being, the filmmaker, the director acting as producer, screenwriter running the camera, sound, being key grip, gaffer, cinematography, etc. etc. It’s exhausting.

I've taken film production seminars, like by famed Director Stanley Kramer back in the 80s. Studied screenplay at University in team script writing and classes on lighting a film set.

Film production is collaborative. So on a one-man film set you’re only collaborating with the actors. They can have valuable input. They can also bog production down if you do not control your set. Of course, in post-production, I collaborated with the soundtrack composer. On Gumdrop, Andrea Fioravanti.

Wow, walking into the wind is really screwing up my voice to text transcription...

I just hit my turnaround point at the half-mile marker so now the wind is on my back and I can transcribe easier.

MTV News Website Shuttered, Archives Deleted

Been listening to an indie director for a while about making films. Interesting guy: 

My No-Budget Documentary Made over $20,000 in 4 Months | J. Horton Films

On my "Gumdrop" film, I had my Master Shots book always at hand, and referenced it constantly. Before beginning the shoot the film, I was worked out shot setups and which lens I was using and why. I was concerned with lighting. One scene in particular, where a hitman "Rowan" (played by Jason Lockhart), enters the house and stands with his back to the front door. I must’ve spent, an hour trying to get the lighting set up so there weren’t any shadows and so it wasn’t too bright. 

Jason Lockhart as "Rowan" and Tom Remick as "Sampson"

In the end, I couldn’t get it the way I wanted, but even though it stands out in lighting from the rest of the film, I kind of like how it turned out. Almost like it was showing too much reality/intensity in that scene. That character was supposed to be the most professional hitman in the film. 

That character kind of reminded me a little bit of the big dumb lurking hulk/fixer & hitman for Don Corleone in the first Godfather movie, "Luca Brasi", portrayed by Lenny Montana, an ex-wrestler and former bodyguard and enforcer for the Colombo crime family. Who has an interesting choice in being in that film and fit the role perfectly. While Kelly Hughes has used Jason in a variety of interesting projects, Jason is an actor. But his portrayal was exactly what I was looking for.

Anyway, film is a visual medium and in my mind, although the soundtrack may be 1/2 or more of a film in many ways, visuals should be as perfect as possible. Sometimes you want ugly visuals, just make them as perfect as you can. Rough can be good but sometimes what comes out rougher is a beautiful shot. 

I know David Mamet thinks you just get on camera and say the words and don’t worry so much  about the acting. I know he doesn’t exactly mean that, but he actually said it. That’s why his movies seem stiff in the dialogue. The spoken dialogue, not the written dialogue. I mean, I do love me some David Mamet. Perhaps an acquired taste.

Getting back to the podcast and Jeff Nichols' “The Bike Riders “, the host is saying Jodie Commer is the heartbeat of the film. I saw the first commercial for it last week on TV and my first thought was well, I’m not gonna watch that film! Seems like not my kind of film.

But that happens with trailers. And typically the director doesn’t make the marketing campaign or the trailers. But the host of this podcast is saying it’s one of his favorite films this year so, I will certainly give it a look, and the director's film catalog is certainly a decent one.

Regarding “Killing Eve“, I loved that series and was completely enamored of Jodie‘s performance and character. It was a darkly fun series.

To explain my attraction to “Killing Eve“ I’d have to say that I really like female assassin flicks or shows. I think some of that attraction is obvious, but some of it has to do with the necessity of exactness involved with these smaller then large musclebound types. 

I studied Isshinryu karate under Steve Armstrong in the 1960s when I was a kid. And we were taught that a fight theoretically shouldn’t last longer than 5 to 8 seconds and should end quickly with a killing blow. I just noticed this, there is a Steve Armstrong Memorial Open Martial Arts Tournament and Seminars. Apparently, Steve's family is involved, and potentially his sons who I used to work out with at the dojo in the 1960s.

That requires a kind of orientation, technique and skill set. It’s what kept me out of so many fights when I was younger, into young adulthood.

See, we were told as kids at the dojo to always warn the person picking a fight with you, if you can, that you are trained in the killing arts and you refuse to fight them. And if they push you into a fight, your goal is to kill them as quickly as possible. We therefore had a responsibility in being trained to kill, to not kill if possible. That style was just designed for a farmer in old Okinawa to go up potentially against an armored Samurai. 

Which is why I was so attracted as an adult, when I came across Aikido's "Art of Peace" orientation. With the samurai belief that although you’re a warrior, where your equilibrium is peace, not war.

I can remember a few guys when I was younger, who I thought would kick my ass, but after my brief but serious, due diligence monologue in warning them, they scoffed and laughed, but backed the fuck down. The first time that happened it was a shock to me.

Attitude. I think it’s the orientation. When you have a gun and aim it at somebody it had better be loaded and you had better be prepared to actually pull that trigger and be prepared to kill the person, in one shot if possible.

Because when you aim an empty gun at someone or you do not plan to kill them, you’re telegraphing that. You actually have to telegraph intent and reality. It’s highly effective.

About that killing attitude/orientation. I found that interesting in "Gumdrop". Except for maybe that one character "Rowan", I had the lighting issue within the film. I bought into him as a hitman. Don’t fuck with him. He seems simple, but don’t believe it.

Whereas the others assassin characters, I felt like although I bought them as assassins, using a rifle from a distance, maybe not so much with the up close killing.

There’s one scene where the lead character, "Sampson", it’s weird calling him a protagonist because he’s more of an antihero, if anything… A female assassin arrives to get a weapon and he gives them an additional small arm, a handgun. It’s an interesting moment of perhaps, compassion between two killers. 

That wasn't presented as compassion. However, it is if you think about it, conceptually. 
The woman didn’t have an order for a handgun. He was just reading into things that if something went wrong, she might need it.

Anyway, there’s a lot going on in that film. For instance, why does he give them a firearm with only a single cartridge? Why does one of them refer to that cartridge as that “magic bullet“?

As with all of my produced works, films, and writings, I like to create where you get more out of them with each revisit in reading or viewing them. I’ve not been able to survey people who have watched the film, because it’s been seen at film festivals around the world. Over 60. I would be curious to survey an audience to find out the things they were missing in each scene in the film. Like how many noticed “grandma‘s ghost“ in the background in a couple of scenes?

One time she’s out the window, kinda floating in the air outside the kitchen window. Another time, as "Sampson" crosses the living room she’s high up on top of a high stool against the wall, on the other side of the room. And that’s what you see of her until their interaction in the basement as dead grandmother.

Is he insane or is she a ghost?

I just made an Instagram video. I’ve made some good ones this past weeks, but they kept failing. This one seemed to post. I used to Everlast. I do like some of his music ever since I realized he did the title song for Saving Grace the TV show wit  Holly Hunter. I really liked that TV show.

Soo...I really like this 3 miles a day thing. PNW weather can be sketchy and intermittent. Which is why I grew up layering my clothes. You’d be cold in the morning and then it would get too hot and then it might cool down, or rain. Lately, I’m trying to get a walk in between periods of rain. Today I’m looking at some really dark rain clouds, but they’re mostly up north.

Anyway, the 3 mile walk, over a 5 mile walk, is a lot quicker and a lot better odds at missing any rain or decreasing chances anyway of getting hit with a sprinkling or downpour.

Having grown up in the 50s and 60s... 70s and 80s too, I guess...I was never much into Rap when it first appeared on the radio. Initially, I saw it as percussion with spoken word. It was about the beat and pacing. I remember getting into an argument with a (white) guy that Rap was going to go nowhere. But if they will add melody, it could take the world. They did, I was right, and it did.

Whereas in a lot of these Rap artists and superstars may all have some really great songs, I’ve always been more into blues and hard rock. I was very also as a kid into heavy metal until they started calling I Heavy Metal when I thought it started going downhill.

I guess Ozzy Osbourne refused to call their music in Black Sabbath “heavy metal“ because when they started calling it that it had originally been to label Black Sabbath music as bad "heavy metal" music, and caught on as a term.

I heard Eminem, a white artist rapper from Washington state of course, pulled in a lot of white people. Not that there weren’t a lot of white people into Rap music back in the day, which was actually kind of weird in the beginning. I think although Rap enthusiasts thought it was great that it spreading in the beginning but, white people? Yeah, I get that.

But I do like, I would say, the majority of music by Everlast. Not into all of his stuff and some of his concept albums are artistically interesting, but I really just like some individual songs. I’m boring like that. Not to say I don’t dearly love some of the concept of albums I grew up with like "Tommy" by The Who for instance. Or Thick as a Brick by Jethro Tull or they’re Too Old to Rock ‘n’ Roll, Too Young to Die album. Yeah, I was kind of into Prague rock (voice to text translation error). I don’t know about that. I meant. "Prog rock". Who knows, maybe Prague has some good music too. I mean, no doubt. Right?

I would say as a kid I had been into pop and rock music, classical, and certainly experimental music all through the 1960s. I liked Led Zeppelin and obviously Black Sabbath. I got their first album in 10th grade, but after my older brother got me stoned on weed in Mesa, Arizona in August 1972, it wasn’t until then that I really got into Led Zeppelin. Also Deep Purple. The Scorpions, which was really more during college starting in 1980. But Allman Brothers, some Southern rock, and so on...

I grew up listening to my mom playing 45s of old country music and some other things. I didn’t really like old country music. Twangy stuff. Until one day I started kinda liking it when my older brother said, yeah you like it because it’s basically country rock now, it’s not country/western anymore.

But what I came to understand and I think I may have developed this viewpoint from Professor Reese at Western Washington University in a class where he was teaching us about quality, creativity, and things like that in our psychology, major.

The thing is I like music. I like the creative arts... if it’s quality. So I can even like country music, if it’s good. Not a big fan of elevator music. But then we had people like Brian Eno who said, there’s no reason elevator music has to be shitty. Thank you, Brian. Check out his Ambient 1: Music for airports. Yeah, you may not like it. 

Starting mile three…

Just listening to the podcast and Jodie Comer is talking and it flashed me onto something… When I was going to turn 19 back in 1974, I ended up living with my older brother in Apache Junction outside of Phoenix, Arizona. [Next day while I was editing this I turned on "Bar Rescue" and they were in Apache Junction at Tumbleweed Grill & Gold Rush Saloon, how weird]. You go out to that main highway, and you can see the Superstition Mountains at its end.

My big brother was married to a woman who had two previous daughters. One day the kids were in school and my brother and his wife had an argument. He’s a big fucking construction worker. She’s a little tiny lady. They were disagreeing and he was suddenly hovering over her and shouted her down until she sat on the couch shriveling. I was off to the side of the living room kind of in shock. I’d never seen my brother act that way. Later she said she was used to it and it was annoying.

I’ve grew up a little scared of him, not that he ever gave me reason to be. But he’s seven years older than me. The brother, I grew up with never acted like that.

I once played the lead in a short film for Kelly Hughes something about don’t kill the grandpa something. I’ll look it up. Ah: Don't Kill Grandpa Until We Strangle the Babysitter

My first real actual acting role. Kind of. Hey, I was the lead actor! Really, I’m not an actor. But Kelly likes using normal people for his actors. As I did in Gumdrop where I used Tom Remick and his son, Luke, and Luke’s two kids. They've already grown so much since the film. The kids were kids on set. Often hard to work with, one was much more into acting than the other.

Luke Remick as "Jinx" & Tom Remick as "Sampson.

Tom and Luke are incredible actors, just natural talents. Anyway, we got done with one scene in Kelly’s movie and he came over to me and said, "You know what? I think I just saw you actually doing some real acting." Well, that was kind of cool.

I mentioned this because of that scene in Kelly’s movie. I was a grandfather. We shot it at my old house where my kids grew up for 15 years, for the most part and the longest place we'd ever lived in the longest job I’d ever had. Beautiful couple of acres in the back woods of Squamish, Washington, where Chief Seattle is buried (below):

Anyway, in this scene shot in my living room, the "babysitter" is sitting on the couch. I’m supposed to angrily walk over to the actor, and just start screaming at her, looking down into her face, hovering.

I think we both found it a very affecting scene. I could see fear in her eyes. I know, she was acting, but it was unnerving. I could feel the power of a man stealing autonomy from a small woman. I found it extremely distasteful. I’ve actually never done that in my entire life. I mean I’ve had arguments with girlfriends or wives where we got loud at each other, but those weren't violent, just passionate and we both knew that.

I grew up with a mother who would have some pretty violent and passionate arguments with our stepfather. She often saw him as stupid. I don’t think he was the brightest bulb in the pack but he graduated high school, went through the war in the Coast Guard while my mom only got through ninth grade, but she was also a very clever person.

Anyway, that scene in Kelly’s movie, it never occurred to me till just now that I might’ve been associating in the back of my mind, that situation in Apache Junction so many years ago when I was 19. A year later at 20, I entered the USAF.

It changed somewhat how I saw my older brother. I’ve had plenty of drama across 3.5 marriages, but I never experienced any violence or my trying to be overbearing on them like that.

I felt for just a few minutes in shooting that scene, that I experienced what men feel when they abuse women, at least, verbally. And I have to tell you, I didn’t like it much at all. Having been bullied as a kid, and really I don’t bullies, to be one to anyone else.

On the podcast now they’re talking about "Killing Eve" and Jodie Comer’s character, Villanelle, and her abrupt end, which was a little controversial.

Jodie‘s also on set now shooting "28 Years Later" with director Danny Boyle. I did enjoy the first movie not so much the second, so I have high hopes for the third. The movie is also with Ralph Fiennes and Cillian Murphy, long one of my favorite (esp., Irish) actors..

That’s interesting. The host says he really loved the first of those films. Kind enough not to say anything about the second one.

About my brother. I had three. In 1975 my youngest brother by my mother, by five years, died of liver cancer mere weeks away from his 15th birthday. I also have a half-brother through my birth father who I didn’t grow up with after my first three years who's a genius and artist and we’ve been good friends as adults. I hadn’t seen him since he was 11 but got reacquainted with his family at our dad's funeral. He had a mother, deceased now, and nine other 1/2 siblings. 

Then there's my older brother, seven years older. He once told me mom was a party girl. When she got pregnant, she got married. So we all have different fathers.

After I got married (the last time) and we were a couple years into it, when we had just bought our first house between us, I heard about my brother getting together with an ex-wife (he's had two, so I guess I won that "race", or he did, depending...) and it had failed pretty quickly for him.

I remember saying to somebody I don’t know why he finds it so difficult to stay married or keep a relationship going because all you've got to do is keep them happy. That didn't seem that hard to do (in my world, at that time anyway).

I started to realize the flaw in my logic when you reality you're married to someone who has mental and emotional issues. You’re possibly not gonna keep them happy.

In our last year or two of marriage, I had said to her that it seemed like nothing I did for her was ever enough. Her response was interesting because it shocked both of us. She said, "You’re right, that’s true." Well. That's telling.

At which point you have to think, "Wow. Well, this is over." Which it was. But we still tried nine months of therapy until finally, she gave up. I wasn't going to give up my son...marriage was over (they didn't get along very well).

Just passed my 2.5 mile marker finishing up my 3 miles for the day and The Playlist podcast is over, so I switched to Pod Save the World.

Oh no. Politics again!

They’re talking about why Putin went to North Korea. 

===

One of the biggest issues I'm seeing with those who lean toward Donald Trump in this election against Pres. Biden is their vast amount of delusional, ridiculously false-equivalencies between them.

Sloppy logic, misinformation, and confusion conflated with their misplaced frustration & anger. I offer this in example from a Face The Nation post:

"Raise your hand if any of you think about, for example, the state of our democracy. Does that concern you?"

 
@margbrennan asks our focus group of battleground state voters. 

"Donald Trump does not want what's good for America. He does not want democracy. He wants to have everything his way," Marlene says. 

"The same can be said about President Biden," Lydia adds. "He forced all the car manufacturers to convert to EVs."

===

Uh, NO! That's a ridiculously false equivalency.

While the Biden administration supports and encourages the transition to electric vehicles through a variety of policies and incentives, it has NOT forced manufacturers to produce EVs. Good grief.

You know, pathetic little shit national dictators need to stick together... and all that

The misanthrope misogynist autocrat club.

Remember when POTUS45 outed a CIA officer who did undercover work? No? Valerie Plame, look it up about "Plamegate".

You should read her book. Read her husband Joseph C. Wilson’s book. Or watch the movie about them, Fair Game with Naomi Watts and Sean Penn.

And there are some other books you can read that explain how our intelligence community kept telling Pres George W. Bush that Iraq was NOT involved in 9/11. But Bush (or VP Cheney, who was running a lot of stuff) kept refusing their denials until finally, somebody gave him what he wanted: manufactured evidence to allow them to attack Iraq, thus finishing up his father‘s business there from the Iraq/Kuwait invasion which led to George HW Bush's Operation Desert Storm.

Hey, where is our fictional narrative movie about a rogue SEAL Team Six who takes out a rabid career criminal misogynistic misanthropic POTUS, and his infectious viral Russian-oriented, political platform and party leadership? Where is that catharsis of a film? Are people still holding back on doing that because they’re afraid Trump might become president again?

Are we really stupid enough to elect Donald Trump as POTUS47? Where we actually elected him before as POTUS45 in the first place? Sigh...

How did America get that stupid? That delusionally disinformed and misaligned?

About a quarter of America needs a national psycho-social therapist and maybe we need to be put on some very heavy "psychosomatic" drugs before we continue with this self-harm and paranoia in seeing one another as existential threats.

Yes, we have some existential threats around, but the biggest of them is saying that those standing against them to protect America are the existential threat. It’s like a midnight nightmare movie.

Italian Prime Minister Georgia Maroney said as far as Russia's bid for peace: "It doesn’t make any sense for Ukraine to move out of Ukraine", since Putin wants to keep the Ukrainian land that he’s captured.

I know that Russia invading Ukraine is complicated. But it’s really not. If in your neighborhood one house invaded another house and took over a bedroom, would you say they get to keep that bedroom?

No.

I finished watching all of Shetland on BritBox (UK's form of Netflix, sort of), with a new season coming. Started watching Crime, set in Edinburgh, Scotland starring Dougray Scott.

Well, on that note, I’ll bid you adieu…and leave you with that. 

It's 9:30AM.

Cheers! Sláinte!