the awesome/terrifying freedom

scratch one of my minor complaints about the new ipod. setting your video files to bookmarking is as easy as setting the audio ones - control click the title, and choose 'bookmarking.'

the thing is brilliant.

i'm in the airport in dalllas. the south is a foreign country. i could tell instantly who on my flight would be getting off in dallas and who would be continuing on to the coast.

just finished harry potter 3. holy crap that book is brilliant. more later.

30 is a big year.

which means the party can't end so quickly.

i'm going to la for 5 days tomorrow. the adventure will be fully documented.

thanks to the housemates and their incredible generosity of apple gift cards, i'm also the proud owner of a brand new ipod. the first thing i did was upload my short films to it - and they look fantastic. also downloaded the coldplay video for 'fix you,' which is fantastic.

i only have very minor grumbles about the device:

* when watching a video, it does not bookmark your spot so that it picks up where you left off, which is fine for music videos and shorts, but if i download an episode of lost, i'll have to fast forward every time i go back to it.

* the center button is the same height as the rest of the click wheel, reducing the tactile sensation of finding it while navigating. it's a tiny thing, but makes a big difference - similarly, if someone smoothed off the tiny ridges on your 'j' and 'f' keys on your keyboard, it would be an annoyance, minor, but an annoyance.

* the device just barely fits into the soft stretchy case it comes with, and has to be inched out.

now the nice things:

* compared to the photo ipod (which had a smaller screen than the original, the video screen is -huge- and the resolution is amazing. the text of the credits in my short films is fully legible.

* it's so markedly slimmer than past iterations, that the word 'pod' no longer seems appropriate. the rounded, friendly corners of the previous designs have been truncated in this model, making it feel more like a slab. there is something so surreal to see such brightly backlit, sharp video come out of it - it looks like it's been bluescreened into your hand, like a tricorder on star trek the next generation.

* a plus and minus together - the ipod no longer supports firewire, which had me severely worried. my 4G ipod updated considerably slower with the usb cable than it did with the firewire, so i would use the usb cable at work, just to charge the battery. is it really worth the sacrifice in weight and thickness to lose firewire support? and i gotta say yes. it does update slower than with firewire, but not by the same considerable amount as the previous model. it's noticable, but it managed to upload my 1500 songs in about 7 minutes.

i haven't tried outputting to tv yet, which looks very fun, but other than that, what you're really getting is 10 extra gigs in a slimmer model that happens to play gorgeous gorgeous video. for the same damn price. i really don't understand what the grumblers are complaining about.

apple just announced that they're replacing the new ipod for almost any reason, including damage that might be considered abuse. the fear is that there is some newly revealed hardware failure and apple is trying to avoid a class action lawsuit over - similar to the one claiming the nano cracks and scratches easily (apple is liable because you scratched it? whateva). as i did for my last one, i created my own form fitting protective film with clear packing tape, a transparency, and a clear mailing label (one day i will be macguyver) - ensuring that the surface will be blemish free when i sell this baby off to trade up for the next model.

My blog is worth $2,258.16.
How much is your blog worth?

from marissa. how humbling. i wonder what it was worth during the clay aiken heyday.

i'm almost willing to let this slide because of my undying love of clive owen. it's also a subtle variant, but the fact remains: TRAJAN.

this reprint of an old apple ad is on the front page of apple's website today.



aw, c'mon apple. go ahead. photoshop an ipod into her hand.

fine. i'll do it.

do you remember 'just one of the guys?'

it was on tv last night. i hadn't watched it since it was run in marathons on hbo and comedy central (ah, same owner, coincidence?) all through high school. i loved this movie growing up, and i never really figured out why until last night. it's so obvious, really.

unlike other body switching/mistaken identity movies of the time, this one didn't find it's humor in the usual, cliche places (see 'just one of the girls' or 'ladybugs') - and joyce hyser's performance as terry is a surprisingly credible girl-playing-boy transformation, up there with hilary swank. joyce really deserved a better career. where is she? i can't even find a current picture of her - all i get on google image search are pics of the famous 'titty flash' at the end of the film.

what really sort of subliminally grabbed me as a kid while watching this movie was that, at the time, it was the closest thing to a gay romance on television. the film spoke directly to the high school experience of being gay, and falling in love with your straight guy best friend. joyce made a convincing boy - and she slowly falls in love with rick, "terry's" best friend. she tries to help rick get dates by updating his wardrobe, giving him a new hairstyle, and helping him find his inner confidence - all in a very 'queer eye for the straight guy' kinda way.

clayton rohner's transformation as rick is almost as surprising as hyser's - he goes from bland to knockout in ways that are usually reserved for 'she's all that,' 'take off her glasses and she's beautiful' plot points. and rick didn't even have glasses. clayton has worked a lot, and was in 'weeds' on showtime as the soccer coach.

and of course william zabka, blonde bad boy of the 80's. who didn't love seeing him get face kicked in karate kid, and who didn't secretly want to be attacked by him? ok, maybe just me. he now has a music company and was nominated for an oscar for screenwriting. here he is now:

also notable, is that this was one of sherilyn fenn's first films. i loved sherilyn fenn, especially after twin peaks, and i thought she did a great job as elizabeth taylor (that is, until i rewatched some of it during a lifetime rerun). in any case, she's another one that should have had a better career. she works a lot, but everything she does goes straight to video.

but back to the film - there was something gratifying as a closeted gay high school kid about seeing a 'boy' in a mainstream film go through the necessary steps to hide his true sexual orientation. he loves his friend, but can't show it. and it comes out in unexpected places - as when terry brushes rick's hair out of his face. and what homo didn't have the fantasy of being able to finally, at the prom, blurt out to -that guy- just how much you've loved him all along? the gender bending is of course, part of the point of the film, but deep down, it was a disappointment that terry was a girl at all. an equally compelling and humorous movie could have been made about a 'real boy' (how pinocchio does that sound?) going through the same things.

the new powerbooks are out.

i just put a gig of ram in my 12in powerbook, which has since been running very smoothly. it's all i need for now - but higher resolution screens at that size would look just awesome. it's not quite worth it to upgrade yet. i think i've got another year, year.5 with this baby before trading up.

i'm trying to get out of the habit of holding onto technology until it becomes a dinosaur, getting left in the dust, then upgrading suddenly and slowly disappearing into obscurity again. i mean, i was one of the last people to switch to system 10. i still had a beige snap-top box when everyone else was on a slick candy colored imac.

what this means is i have to take better care of my gadgets, and quickly resell them while i still can. thanks to the ipod tattoo stickers, my photo ipod is still in pristine shape - all ready for some lucky craigslister.

macintosh has been with me since 1984, the beginning. i remember when my dad brought home a mac plus, and i played for hours on macpaint. the black and white screen, with pixels that seemed absolutely tiny at the time, was intoxicating. i realized early on that despite being black and white, graphics looked so much better on the mac because the pixels were square, rather than rectangular as they were on pc's and apple 2's. there was also a flight simulator program that was amazing. then the game dark castle. there's a fully functional mac se in the garage at home. one day when i have a house, i want to have it running in the corner, as a museum artifact.

thirty is an alarm clock - not the horrible entry into the depths of adulthood i feared, but a simple marking of time; a calling to wake up, and get the hell to work. i'm really looking forward to all the things that will happen in the next year, in the next ten.

the party was awesome - if you missed it, you missed seeing me get spanked in the bar with my bithday paddle, signed by the party attendees. at about whack #25, the paddle broke, a scene which drew quite a lot of onlookers. i like the broken paddle. it's like narsil, the broken sword of elendil. if you know what that is, i love you.



over a year ago i posted my tattoo design - i was all set to get it too, but backed away at the price, and the reality of it. i decided last week that the time had come, so i booked an appointment at rising dragon tattoo, below the chelsea hotel, which i thought was a fitting historic place (sid stabbed nancy there!) to get my historically derived tattoo, on a big day in my life.





this is a blurry picture of c-jay. c-jay is very cool, in fact everyone at rising dragon was cool - the receptionists were helpful and friendly, understanding that it was my first tattoo, the attitude was laid back, but not sloppy. i had previously gone into a tattoo shop in 2nd avenue where the attitude was condescening, where every effort seemed to be taken to make me feel uncool and unworthy. whateva. no business from me.





these drawings were hung up in c-jay's workstation. he's been doing tattoos for 11 years. he said he got into it because he couldn't afford art school.

it was at about the point that he shaved my leg and applied the template that i started to get a little nervous. once, i passed out after having blood taken, and i'd passed out once in junior high watching a play about a guy getting a spinal tap. i don't think of myself as queasy, but my body begs to differ sometimes.



c-jay set up little plastic capfuls of ink, and showed me the sterile needle, fresh from it's packaging. i asked him what it felt like.

'dude. the only way to describe the pain is to just feel it, man.'
'oh.'

he flipped on the needle. buzzz.

he asked, 'you didn't happen to read the news this weekend did you?'
'no.'
'ok, good.'

and he went back to setting up.

'wait,' i said, 'um, what was in the news?'
'oh. this guy in brooklyn was getting a tattoo and he got up and he passed out and he fell through a glass case and cut his neck and died.'

and he went back to setting up.

'oh. shit.'
'yeah. don't worry. we don't have any glass cases.'

i wasn't sure if he was kidding or not.

'tell you what i'm gonna do. i'm gonna do a dot and you can see how it feels.'
'ok.'

bzzzzt.

'that was a dot.'
'oh. wow. ok, that was easyyyyyyyyowwwww'

bzzzzzzzzrrrtzzztt.

'that was a line.'
'woah. phoo.. ok.. ok, i can handle that.'
'you sure?'
'yeah, let's go.'
'you've got a lotta lines on this design, dude.'
'i'm good. let's go.'
'alright. you feel light headed, you let me know.'
'ok.'



the first fifteen minutes were the toughest. it was a very strange, specific, electric pain.

filling in the color wasn't nearly as bad because i'd gotten used to the sensation by that point. when it was over, it felt like a sunburn.



when i got home i googled the story. holy crap, freaky!

were you a cloudmaker? does that phrase mean anything to you?

cloudmakers were the global group of people who came together via the internet to solve the mystery of who killed janine salla, sentient machine therapist, as a tie-in to the movie 'a.i.' the movie was not great, but the game was an amazing, transformative experience. clues were dropped in newspaper ads in l.a., new york, tokyo - only a global effort could put it all together. phone numbers would appear coded on websites, call them, and you'd be able to listen to character's voice mails. hundreds of priginal websites were designed for the project, containing hundreds of pages of text, writing out a story far more compelling than the movie's. the game reached its finale shortly after the film opened, resulting in a stunning climax explaining how the globe became encased in the ice that blankets the planet at the film's close. the concept was sheer brilliance.

'lost' seems to be launching a similar game - one was also in play for 'alias,' but from what i hear, no where near the scope of the a.i. game.

http://www.thehansofoundation.org/

check it out.. then go to:

https://www.thehansofoundation.org

go to the suggested site.. enter the title of that site into a morse code translator and you get: sometimes a polar bear is just a polar bear.

i can't freeze my screen at the moment the red dot appears between the bears. what's in there?

meanwhile, i like 'lost' more than i thought i was going to. the coincidences and the 'mystery' irritate me more than intrigue me, but i still like it. the production team is great and the storytelling is good. they're all dead ya'll, they're all dead.

die posters, die!

ok, so it's better than i expected. it will play all your videos. i better unload this ipod photo before the resale value is totally shot.

also: imac g5 with built in isight and remote control. jesus, we are living in the fucking future. so so cool. apple is the best ever.

yesterday was national coming out day.



hello...?

very shortly, steve jobs will begin his presentation announcing.. what? a madonna ipod nano? a video ipod? (apple says it's definitely not a video ipod, though you may have noticed that the itunes music store mysteriously stopped posting free music videos this month, which really can mean only one thing - we'll have to pay to get videos.. so it may be a music video ipod, but not quite be the dump-your-dvd's-and-porn-to-your-ipod ipod we've been dreaming of).. or a g5 powerbook?

see, if the itunes phone was remotely cool, like this,



or this,



people would care.

i only did it once. it was when i was in college. it was, you know, a time of experimentation. i swear to you i have NEVER done it since. we all have blemishes in our past.



die trajan die.

a very large penis is featured onscreen for an extended, unflinching period of time, as a plot point. rome rocks. i wonder how they cast the part. no pun intended.

favorite lines:
"large penis is always welcome."
"a little bloodlust suits you octavian. doesn't he look handsome? oh, i wish caesar were here. if he could see you now, he'd put you on his staff."

meanwhile, for the fraternal greeks, it appears that the real crime is not being gay, but being effeminate. (from towleroad)

sigh. that's always been the case hasn't it? 'if you act like us, we'll treat you like us': a rhetoric that has existed since the beginning of culture, an attitude of 'assimilate for acceptance.' i suppose it's a step - there was a time when a gay kid would be ostracised whether he was effeminate or not.

memo to the world: anderson cooper takes feather-boa-bedecked limp-wristed skips through daisy fields.

to some, this may not be news at all; to others, a pleasant surprise; to a few, scandalous.

it's interesting to watch semi-closeted gay journalists work - lots of feature stories about gay kids who are either discriminated against or who achieve some level of success or acceptance despite being openly gay in school.. i'm thinking particularly of stories on abc and mtv news by anderson cooper and john norris. (if you didn't know john norris is gay, believe me, he's gay.)

i admire these guys, using the power of television to give gay people, specifically gay kids more exposure; to make commonplace on television that which was not in their own childhoods.

i hate the notion that being gay or straight is part of your 'personal life,' and off limits to questioning. who you're dating or not dating certainly falls into that category, but the larger question of sexual preference should be as open as a person's ethnicity or gender - apparent, and inconsequential.

it's annoying that cooper has gone from being 'out and proud' as his bio for marshalling a gay pride parade once proclaimed, to mysteriously cagey about his sexuality in a ricky martin kind of way.

remember the first season of 'the real world'? remember norman korpi? when i was in high school, he was it. the only openly gay person on television who was remotely close to my age. i studied every episode of that show, waiting for anything norman might do or say, hoping for some guidance, some clue, some information about what it means to be out, gay, and living outside the protection of school and home.

so here it is: i love anderson cooper. i believe he will become our generation's tom brokaw. and i intend to do for him what i once did for clay aiken - inform the world of his not-so-closeted gayness. because it's important. because he's respected and admired, and his visibility as a gay person is extremely influential to the same gay kids that he profiles in his reports.

if he's not gonna say it, the world needs to know: anderson cooper is gloriously gay, or as a gawker message board proclaims: "anderson cooper is a POWER BOTTOM. this is the truth."

which brings me to my previous question: why do we care if he's gay? because straight men want to know if he's competition. gay men want to know if they could sleep with him. and women want to know if he's their snarky new best friend.

well, my blog has never been comment heavy anyway - and in the past two days i've been inundated with comment spam. those fuckers! so if you gots something to say, email me!

her name is patty and she's from nutley, new jersey.

i don't know where this came from, but it was forwarded to me by my producer friend john, who got it from one of his director friends. it hasn't yet spread virally through the internet, but it soon will, especially among the theatre circle. the city, the world, is FULL of people like this woman.

the audition.