MonkeyFight

Writing Horror

My most recent screenplay contains some horror elements. There is a fair amount of blood and mayhem in it. The experience taught me a lot. For example, when writing in the horror genre you have to make sure the reader knows your intent.

Instead of writing: John looks out the window. Moonlight washes across his face. 

You should write: John looks out the window. Moonlight washes across his face. It's eerie.

The project was especially satisfying because I was able  to incorporate some of my experiences as a new parent, something dear to my hear.

Here's the trailer for the film. It's called 'Baby Laugh Alot On your Grave'.

  

The Big Busk

The Boy started moving his body to music around the age of 6 or 7 months. I couldn’t even believe that his early wiggles were related to music. I thought he was somehow engaged in some early form of Pilates, working his core muscles in preparation for crawling. I really did. 

But it's now clear that he dances, particularly when I put on The Isley Brothers. So to nurture his interest in music The Wife and I brought him to Billy Bragg’s Big Busk on Wednesday at Lincoln Center. Billy Bragg is super cool. The show was basically a hootenanny. The audience was invited to bring instruments and play along with him as people onstage held up chord charts for guitar - he called it a kind of folkie karaoke. This is pretty much what I do with my Middle Brother whenever we see each other. We hunch over sheets of music and hack away at our intstruments at a dirge like tempo to tunes like Folsom Prison Blues and Angel from Montgomery. It's fun. I wish I did it more often. And I loved seeing Bragg doing the same thing with an audience of thousands.

This was the rehearsal in the afternoon.

 

And this was the performance later in the evening. 

 

People who brought instruments were also allowed to busk around Lincoln Center before the show. It brought a bit of a grass roots vibe to Lincoln Center Plaza. As I watched the different people playing to the I got to thinking about how hard it is for most people to stand in front of a crowd, let alone sing to a crowd. I mean, some people might make fun of this fellow's resemblance to Molly Ringwald but I consider him a courageous man. He faced the bustling, disinterested crowds of Manhattan armed with a tiny ukele and a handful of hearfelt songs.  

I noticed some smirks on the faces of passerbys that day. It made me realize that I'm no good at busting balls any more (unless you fuck with me). It's too easy to make fun of someone when they take a risk or do something different. Besides, I wish the streets were filled with people playing ukeles and accordians.  

I've found most people, including myself, wish they would take more risks. Even small ones. Have you ever stood on the edge of a dance floor feeling paralyzed from the hips down (apologies to anyone reading this who is paralyzed from the hips down). Have you ever watched your friends fearlessly sing karaoke while you stifle the little Japanese song bird in your heart?

So I applaud all those who brought their instruments to Lincoln Center to participate in The Big Busk. And I applaud Billy Bragg for spending the time and energy on something communal and inspiring.

 Molly Ringwald would be proud.

 

Introducing The Bliss Archive

The Bliss Archive is pretty self-explanatory. It’s a place for people to upload moments of bliss. Whatever that means for them. People have posted dramatic rare experiences and ordinary every day moments that somehow became not so ordinary. So far there’s a story about a rainstorm in Laos, a Fats Waller song that changed someone’s day, a photo of a little girl riding her bike for the first time, a sighting of humpback whales, a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a drawing of a hug.

The site was inspired by The Ignorant Bliss of Sun and Moon, a short film I wrote that screened at the Tribeca Film Festival. That film is about a down and out guy cycling between misery and inspired clarity. In a lot of ways the film is about these fleeting moments in our lives when all the stress and pain and general madness clears away and we’re able to get some perspective on life.

One of the barriers to doing this has been a certain embarrassment I feel around it. I mean, this is some earnest stuff. Where’s the irony? I’m a liberal, secular, Brooklyn-based, brown haired, glasses-wearing white guy so I’m supposed to approach my day with a delicate blend of local, organic cynicism and irony. I was bred to be a sarcastic prick. But there’s not a trace of cynicism to be found here. The Bliss Archive is free from the tyranny of irony and snark.

I’ve only shown the site to a handful of friends. Now I’m inviting the entire world wide web to participate. So take a look at the site. Read, watch, listen. Click on the Follow button.  And Post something - a distant memory you'll never forget or something that happened today. You can post pictures, music, video, anything that helps you share a moment when you were reminded of how you want to live or just that it feels good to be alive. 

And in case you've got some of that embarrassment I mentioned - don't worry - it's anonymous once it's on the site. 

We all have our own personal archive of bliss - we just don't tend to share it. Start here.

Notes From the Festival

I've been attending the Tribeca Film Festival this week with The Ignorant Bliss of Sun and Moon, the short I wrote and produced with director and friend John Hyams. It's been a great experience so far and I still have two more screenings. They do an amazing job of getting people out to the screenings - even for the short films. We've been playing to sold out shows so far.

Some other highlights: We had some audio trouble with our tape but the tech people at the festival handled it really well, so only one screening was painful. Stolichnaya is a festival sponsor so my organs are in a nice vodka marinade. I've seen Elton John perform. I've seen DeNiro mumble through a few words at a podium and give his signature eye-brow raise.

My friend Jason LaMotte won the Special Jury Prize for his short film The Terms. It's an excellent film adapted from a short story by Mike McCormack.  We're discussing turning it into a feature. When Dennis Leary announced the prize he said, "This film is about a father who's going to shoot his son in the head...and it's a comedy." Then he said, "I'm Irish. I thought it was a documentary." Check out the trailer here: http://www.thetermsmovie.com/

I met Jason last year at the Palm Springs Film Festival and we quickly hit it off partly because we had a shared creative sensibility and partly because we both had our first babies due within a week of each other. His was bornin late August and The Boy was born in early September.  I've only been to three festivals but each one has resulted in great things. At Aspen Shortsfest I met Adam Collis who eventually bought one of my scripts, and my friend Matthew Bonifacio who I'm collaborating with now on Brickhead. At Palm Springs I met Jason and also Sharon B., the woman who programs the shorts for Tribeca. If I hadn't met her I have no idea if The Ignorant Bliss would have made it into the fest because they receive nearly 3,000 submissions so it's easy to get lost. And now at Tribeca Film Festival I've been able to hang with Jason some more and I've met several New York filmmakers and producers who I will follow up with over the coming weeks. So the take away: do stuff and show stuff and talk to people. Then do it for about ten years and see how it's going. Then keep going. 

More later.

The Monkey Fight is On

I’ve been meaning to change oinkbird to monkeyfight for months. I’m sure you know what that’s like. When I imagined doing it I saw a coordinated effort involving graphic designers, branding consultants, and loads of fresh code written by people in foreign lands. But fuck it.  I gotta start somewhere. So I’m just changing the name. Bang. Just like that. I certainly don’t want to be half assed about it but it’s never going to get done if I don’t do it in pieces.  So I’ll start here and gradually it will become what is inside my head, which is monkeys.

About 15 years ago, I was introduced to the image of monkeys in my head by a woman who taught yoga in New Orleans. (This is the same woman who put me in a position that made me feel as if my back was breathing but that’s another story.) She said during class one day, “Try to calm the monkeys in your mind.” And suddenly all the monkeys in my head got a little worried: “Oh shit. She spilled it. He’s onto us.” It was one of those moments that resonate in a way that make you pay attention enough that you might actually learn something new. I didn’t. I mean, it caught my attention but I didn’t do much about it:  "Oh right." I thought. "Sometimes I’m generally distracted and unclear about what I’m supposed to do with my life so perhaps I should- hey look at that piece of string.” Monkeys love string.

I did mange to hold onto a thought though; not exactly beware of the monkeys, but be Aware of the monkeys. Point is – I think it’s gotten exponentially more difficult to focus on things of importance with the speed and density of distractions these days. High speed monkeys. I mean, I check my email thirty five times a day. I look at my phone over a hundred times in a day. And honestly, how did we used to spend the minutes we now spend on Face@#!ck? Literally, what did we do in the days when 'status update' and 'feed' were boring technical words? Don’t get me wrong – for all I know people were choking kittens before and now they’re harmlessly looking at pictures of people they wanted to have sex with when they were 17.

The Boy is over seven months old – 231 days to be exact. He’s got two teeth on the bottom of his mouth and two coming in on the top. He’s found some syllables: “da-da” and “ga-ga” - both timeless classics. He’s not crawling yet but he can sit like a champ. I played catch with him this week; he would throw a little tiny ball and I would throw it back in his lap and he would pick it up and throw it again. It didn't exactly go in my direction but it seemed a little early in life for coaching. This went on for about five minutes and I could have done it a lot longer if he’d let me. Yesterday I took him into Manhattan – just the two of us - to pick up my filmmaker swag bag from the Tribeca Film Festival. Naturally the chicks swarmed him (ie me). I fed him a bottle, he fell asleep, and then I requested a meeting with Sony Pictures Classics. He ate his first noodle last night – whole wheat elbow macaroni.

Every parent says it goes fast. They even say it in the same way, shaking their head with a sort of breathless disbelief, “It goes fast.” My hope is that monkeyfight can slow things down a bit and help me stay connected to the things that matter most to me. That's the fight. And make no mistake, I love me some monkeys - I just don’t want them running the asylum that is my head. And besides, monkeys can play catch with the best of ‘em once they’re tamed. So if we play our cards right we might even be able to field a team in the end.
     



       

Cracking Chat Roulette

A short film by the Neistat Brothers’ inspired me to explore Chat Roulette a few nights ago. For those of you who don’t know: Chat Roulette is a site that allows you to video chat with random people all over the world. With the click of a button a person appears on your computer screen. You can either chat with the person or move to the next person with the click of your mouse; this is called ‘nexting’ someone. Chat Roulette is largely populated by lonely guys hoping to glimpse a woman and/or expose their johnsons.  So there is a lot of nexting going on.

 I went on the site and watched a few faces appear and disappear as if my screen was an eye that conjured someone new with each blink. The experience was perfectly dehumanizing and potentially depressing.  There’s also something about the aesthetics of communicating with single anonymous guys via webcam that makes you assume a johnson is just around the corner. 

On a whim, I wrote an opening line - ‘I REFUSE TO NEXT ANYONE! ANYONE!!’ - to paste into the text box before I could be nexted.  It felt like a defiant gesture - some sort of dare.

 I watched the first guy read the sentence.  It seemed he was translating the words in his head. He could be anywhere in the world after all. Then he laughed and gave two thumbs up. Turns out he was Argentinean, sitting in his living room in Buenos Aires.  He told me he was new to Roulette and was glad to meet good people.  When we were done chatting he flashed me...the peace sign. Then I chatted for a while with a 16 year old kid in China who told me his English was not strong. I told him I once taught English to Chinese students in Brooklyn and then referred him to some ESOL sites. He told me I was an excellent teacher. I love Chinese students.  Next I chatted with a guy in Maryland who loved my opening line so much he vowed to spread it across Chat Roulette. I encouraged the idea but asked for a footnote.

I was a bit uncomfortable about it, but in the name of science I even put The Boy on camera at one point. Onscreen were a few 20-something guys who had the sort of amped energy that went with chugging beers and beating nerds but not necessarily in that order. Score one for humanity: when they saw The Boy they cheered and said he was cute. I like to think The Boy saved a nerd that day.

I still got nexted a lot but mostly by people who disappeared so quickly I couldn’t even send my message. And I had less success with a pink stuffed animal and a guy who was dangling from a noose above an upturned chair.  But for the most part people responded well.

The funniest encounter happened when the screen went completely black and these words appeared on my screen: get naked.

I responded in kind: I REFUSE TO NEXT ANYONE! ANYONE!!

The conversation continued as follows copied verbatim from my screen. My responses are in CAPS:

get naked

I WON’T NEXT ANYONE!

Get Naked

DONT BE A COWARD. BESIDES I AM NAKED. MY SKIN LOOKS LIKE FLANNEL [ed. I was wearing a flannel]

Get naked

YOU ARE BLACK AS NIGHT - NO OFFENSE

let me see your dick

I LOST IT - WHERE ARE YOU?

next me - my mouse doesnt work

I REFUSE. I TOLD YOU I REFUSE TO NEXT PEOPLE. BESIDES I THINK WE'RE GETTING ALONG WELL.

next me

FOR CRYING OUT LOUD - YOU SHOW UP TO CHAT ROULETTE

next me

WITH NO CAMERA & NO MOUSE
AND YOU ASK FOR DICK?!
SORRY CHARLIE, YOU'RE GONNA HAVE TO REBOOT YOUR COMPUTER. WE'RE IN THIS TOGETHER
im on on my ipod

THEN IT'S A STARING CONTEST. WHERE ARE YOU?
in new mexico. cmon next me

OK I'LL CUT YOU A BREAK BUT YOU HAVE TO SAY PLEASE
Please

NEXT

My adventure with Chat Roulette was exhilarating. I felt like I’d made an inroad into the dynamics of the site and it ultimately reinforced my love of the humans. By telling people I wouldn’t next them I was essentially inviting them to take pause. I was letting them know I would give them a chance. Stay awhile. I was also poking fun at the compulsive nexting everyone was doing. People seemed to appreciate that too.

Unfortunately, women can’t really expect to go on Chat Roulette without being aggressively harassed.  If a woman were to attempt this same experiment she would get a glimpse into a perverted corner of the male psyche that would either boggle her mind or confirm her worst fears.  Someone should figure out how to do a Women’s Only Chat Roulette.  Just footnote me on it. 

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

  

 

...

 

 

THE IGNORANT BLISS

It looks like Jamie Stewart, the guy who did Man in a Blizzard, is having his day and then some.  His story's a good reminder to artists to stay active and do the work despite the challenging speculative nature of it all.  Here's a guy who went out with his camera in the middle of the blizzard when nobody was telling him to or paying him to do it and it's proving to be his big break.

When I wrote of Stewart's film I mentioned that both my recent walk in the blizzard and his film made me feel all warm and human inside. So I thought I'd use this opportunity to post the short film I made with John Hyams which premiered at Palm Springs International Shortfest this year. It's called The Ignorant Bliss of Sun and Moon.  For me, it's always been a film about the human experience - or less pretentiously said - all the ups and downs and confusion of it all. The title refers to the occasional moments of bliss that catch us off guard and stir us in one way or another, make us feel small but in a good way - or make us feel small and big at the same time.

As a new parent, I occasionally wonder how I might talk to The Boy about topics such as these - topics revolving around inspiration and consciousness and his place in the universe.  Maybe I'll start by getting some life-sized toys in the house so he doesn't think he towers over elephants and lions. I mean, is he going to forever think he can put a hippopotmus in his mouth?  Isn't this preceisely why there are so many deadly hippo attacks in the wild?  Babies who play with tiny toy hippos must grow up to be clueless tourists in Africa who attempt to hug the adorable and murderous animals.

In any case, The Ignorant Bliss of Sun and Moon is in some ways about a guy struggling with his place in the universe.  Like a lot of people (i.e. me) he's a bit confused and overwhelmed by it all so he cycles between bouts of self-destruction and momentary bliss.  So if you've got six minutes to spare...

 

 

Man in a Blizzard

I took a walk in Prospect Park by myself during last week's blizzard. It was one of those blissful experiences I try to hold onto and duplicate as often as possible. 

Sometimes when you find yourself alone you're in trouble. Particularly when that moment occurs in a bar between the hours of 3-4am and you can smell gin when you cough or sneeze. But sometimes when you find yourself alone you're doing something very right. That night in the blizzard was one of those nights. I walked for 30 minutes through blinding wind and snow headed toward the tree where my brothers and I spread my father's ashes a year and a half ago (unless that's illegal in which case I've embellished the story for dramatic purposes).  My dad was born and raised in Brooklyn, a few blocks from the park.  I currently live 1.1 miles from the building in which he was raised by his Italian immigrant parents. When I was growing up, he would occasionally declare, "I grew up in Prospect Park!" He would say it with pride even though my brothers and I had no idea what Prospect Park was.  I know what Prospect Park is now.

The night of the blizzard, the park was completely empty, and in a densely populated place like Brooklyn that felt real good.  When I got to his tree I looked up at its branches, skeletal in the light of the park's old lamp posts.  I imagined my dad chuckling, shaking his head, and then telling me to get inside to warm up. So I headed home.

Tonight I watched this short video "Man in a Blizzard" (aka "Idiot with a Tripod") that was shot the very same night. It puts images to what I was feeling in the park. According to The Hollywood Reporter, it was shot in the middle of the blizzard by Jamie Stewart, a "random New Yorker" (aren't we all random New Yorkers here?). It's getting some attention thanks to the resilient Mr. Roger Ebert, who thinks the film should win the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short. I don't know about all that, but I did find the simple beauty of the video captured what it's like to wander around on planet earth. Check it out below.

Oh - I'd forgotten until now that when I got home from the walk that night I did a naked jig on our roof deck as the inches (of snow) accumulated. Not even Google could locate a video that reflected that.  It was sort of like if Jerry Lewis did porn. My dance was a bit less graceful and poetic than my walk in the park but equally inspired. I just hope there weren't any "random New Yorkers" pointing their cameras in my direction.

 

Great Song or Greatest Song?

As part of my effort to create more kinetic earnings as a writer, I’m penning a little gem in the romantic comedy genre.  Or as people in the biz say - romedy-rom-comedy-rom genre.

So I’ve been watching some romantic comedies in order to grease my romantically comedic  comedically romantic  funny bone.  I watched Pillow Talk last night with Mr. Rock Hudson and Ms. Doris Day. It’s about a guy who gets laid all the time by beautiful women who then decides he’d like to bag the beautiful, smart, lonely woman upstairs (Doris Day’s character). So he tricks her into falling in love with him so he can try to get in her pants. 

I've never been good at pitching a story but that's the jist.

Anyway, I enjoyed it and it left me feeling like I don't watch enough of the classics. These iconic actors like Rock Hudson and Doris Day (or Douglas Kennedy and Marguerite Chapman) really do have the old school chemistry, the magic that Ben Affleck has finally given up on so he can go from being a hugely successful actor to a hugley successful director. AFFLECK! Your unbridled, shameless success haunts me still!!

Anyway, the absolute best part of Pillow Talk comes when Rock and Doris are hanging at a piano bar and the piano player starts playing the song Roly Poly.  Doris Day is delightful - there - I've said it.  And it’s the best song I’ve heard in a while so I thought I'd share it. I'm thinking it should probably be the global theme song for 2011. I've played it for The Boy a few times now and if I dance around and get in his face while the song is playing he starts cracking up like it's the funniest thing he's ever seen.  So that's two recommendations by my count.

The image quality here is sucky but check it out:

   

    

Two Thousand Ten

 

My 2010 deserves a wrap up.  It was a big one. 

I got married.

 

The Boy was born.

 

   

 

And then I turned 40 without yet being obese or bald

(the bald one is Enrico).

 
 

On the work front...

Two TV pilots I wrote, The War Show (a one hour drama) and The Suite Spot (a half hour comedy), have been shown around a little town called Hollywood and have gotten a good to great reaction depending who you ask. The Suite Spot (which I developed with my friend & collaborator Mac Montandon) will be sent to networks in January. A short film I wrote (The Ignorant Bliss of Sun and Moon) premiered at the Palm Springs International Shortfest and is being considered for other festivals now. My feature film script Brickhead (which I developed with friend & collaborator Matthew Bonifacio who will direct the film) is well on its way to production, anticipating a July shoot date in Detroit.  We're partnered with producer Jordan Horowitz. Then of course there's this blog which has been a fun addition to my life. 

By most measures it’s been a big year.  I'm going to take a deep breath and head into 2011 with renewed energy to enjoy my family and my friends and do work that matters to me.

On With The Monkey Fight...