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you never called me
i am currently happy because there are new halloween toys already in the supermarket. i remember dressing up as "dark vader" when i was in nursery school, whacking at people's knees with my plastic lightsaber. i had fun last year answering the door to the little kids in rubber, it was the first time i didn't go out to a party or something, and i ran out of candy really early because there are apparently lots of kids around here so i started opening the door with chocolate smeared on my face and empty bags going, "doooooh! i ate all the candy! you walk up my stairs for nothing." you know what kids love getting in their bags? nyquil. lots of bottles of nyquil. they get so excited. newspapers, too can drinking too much dr.pepper give you cancer? so it goes without saying i doesn't cook very much. or, at all. in my last apartment, i think i used my oven on one occasion, i tried to heat up some frozen chicken and it came out all gray but i sadly ate it anyway because of the lame effort. so a little while ago in a stroke of ambition, i bought a three dollar frozen pizza only to discover that my electric oven here doesn't even work. i've lived here for a year and a half and only just now discovered that the oven doesn't work. so i told the landlord the oven doesn't work, and they hauled up a new one. after theyinstalled it and carted off the other one i realize that this one doesn't work either. then i discovered that ever since i moved in here, the fuse to the oven has simply been shut off. but i finally got to eat my pizza because i had spent three dollars on it.
she was my favorite
i now turn you over to robert may, who has recently made the move to the big scary world
of los angeles. you know him better as "jim." or to some of you, "that limping
person who smells of rum and is leering at my children."
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Well, I've got a fun story to share with you. By a quick show of hands how many of you are Los Angeles residents. wow that many. Well I'm new to this stinky land of frapachino's and tight black pants but I got my first lesson in good old street vigilantism last week. I was walking from my humble abode to the nearest donut hut around mid-night with a few friends. For those who know LA this was the exciting intersection of Lankershim and Cauenga. Just out of Hollywood. For those who don't know just pick a grimy neighborhood close to where you live and jam a few more billboards, overpasses, and OVERPRICED LIQUOR STORES in there and you get the picture. Ok. So I get to the intersection and two cars have stopped traffic. Each car pretty bashed up, both facing odd directions. After grilling the locals for info this is the story we received. A fancy black BMW traveling 60 down Cauenga Blvd scraped alongside an oversized sport Utility Van, then tried to speed away. The sport Utility Van turned left and pulled into a shopping center. The BMW flipped a U turn, but in the process hit another car head on. So the guys in the sport Utility Van hop out of their car and run across the street to address the gentleman in the BMW who just tried to get away. One of them pulls this guy from his automobile and holds him while his friend beats him senseless. The second car to be hit has drifted across the street and is now blocking the other lane of traffic. One of the guys pummeling mr. BMW heads back to his
Utility Van and emerges with a ROPE. The two guys strip Mr. BMW and HOG-TIE
HIM in the street. Of course this didn't exactly make the police happy as
they arrive on the scene. At this point my fries and donuts were done
so I went home. WHO NEEDS CABLE WITH NEIGHBORS LIKE THIS!!
after a very long saturday, bitter films has made its first step into moving into its own little studio space, with the transport and assembly of the as-yet-unnamed 35mm animation camera stand, a giant black industrial monster that sort of looks like a big insect. they used to shoot some of the old "peanuts" cartoons on this camera and you are constantly afraid that it may try and eat you when in its presence. it can transform into a jet as well as a fighter tank. arriving in santa barbara, we soon realized just how difficult it was going to be to get an 8 foot 700+ pound piece of iron up tim's narrow flight of stairs with just the three of us. we had it on a dolly, but whenever two of us tried to lift it from below with tim pulling on the other side, we only succeeded in tipping the extremely top-heavy beast over, thus crushing tim screaming underneath. after about a dozen attempts at this, tim suggested we try something else. we couldn't even lift the thing six inches to the very first step on the staircase, and there was no room for all three of us to get under it and lift together. so we came very close to surrendering and leaving it at the base of the steps until we could call a moving company or air-lift it through a wall when i had one last idea: this time to lie the thing down diagonally upon the stairs, with dolly underneath it taking the abuse... two of us would push from the base with our legs (stronger than arms), with the third guy two steps above pulling with a pulley/yoke we constructed out of ropes. and it worked! we slowly shoved the giant bastard to the top one step at a time on this makeshift sled. it was a lot like a beer commercial. right now my entire body is aching and it actually hurts to type. but now i have a new toy. and i feel like an 80 year old at 23, shooting on a 1940s animation rig (it's basically like a larger version of the 16mm animation camera we used back at school). but hand-drawn animation coming out of a computer still looks terrible (waving cane in air). as i write this i'm taking a break from the latest batch of charcoaling too many drawings, as well as spray-coating them with that chemical garbage that makes them smear-free but damages your nervous system like nobbbodyy'ss bbusiiness. i think i had something else to write but that will have to be later
i have a new display on my refrigerator of envelope labels. corporations have been sending mail here addressed to "bittersweet films" and "bitcher films." the current winner is "butter films." people are confused. i have been consuming alarming amounts of sugar. started work on "rejected"s finale, though other parts in the middle section are still sort of missing. i should be working on it right now but i am making happy gestures with my head because my computer foundnew music that i can't possibly live without. i rediscovered an old photograph that's one of my favorites from the old musty collections of world photography. how come the pages in all the oversized glossy coffee table books always smell bad? anyway it's called "suicide" and the name of the photographer escapes me. it's a grainy black and white from the early 1940s i think. in front of a new york hotel, the white blurred figure of a young woman who had just jumped out of an eighth story window is frozen in the air. her dress is billowing and her arms are spread at length in the middle of her fall - the shutter caught her by accident just a moment before she hit the ground. the photographer i believe was just taking an ordinary street picture. you can see a man relaxing inside a coffee shop window and there are people on the street who are calm and unaware of her. you can just make out her face within the motion and her eyes are closed.
shoes falling into pavement
i'm back in town after seeing a great concert, and drawing like a... uh... like something that draws a lot. well not really i'm sort of writing more and going through possible soundtrack music. "rejected" has now gone through three major changes since i started and i still have little idea how it's going to turn out. i have also been shopping around the past couple of months for various film gear in the process of setting up a little 35mm home for bitter films. i need to re-string my guitar. oh yeah - even though we now have a new mailing address set up, please, please, please, (i am begging here) please stop sending me your head shots. i don't understand why an actor would send an animator his head shots. i'm not going to try to draw you or something and it only makes my angry struggling actor friends laugh callously and try and eat your 8x10. on that note, it is also not a good idea to send me your random unsolicited scripts because i have no idea what you want me to do with them so i just give them out to homeless people. all right then. all other mail you send to me is happy. :) <--- see? i make happy face as peace offering. don
august 3, 1999
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