Que Escandaloso!

I have a personalized piece of Hipster Grifter/Kari Farrel correspondence. I was bored and sent her a blank Mad Libs template that I sometimes send to friends who like to receive physical mail. She filled it out and sent it back; her answers are predictably crude albeit kinda hilarious. So...

Do I release it onto the world? I think it's pretty entertaining to read. Or, do I keep it to myself, thereby denying this horrible girl any more credibility. Her answers are kinda baited and the type of shit people who follow this love.

Thoughts? 

Still so into Lykke Li. She's so beautiful, crazy and Swedish--certainly a manic pixie dream girl. Pretentious one-take, B&W photography from Christian Haag doesn't hurt either.

Eeep! Photos from our forthcoming Web series.


So stoic.




Would it be an AV Club production without guns? 



Nice wide-angle. We look kinda professional.



Mock-up posters. We really liked the second one - color scheme is perfect -but then we realized it was too much like Tom Goes to the Mayor.

But things are falling together! Can't wait to show you when they're done.

I can't tell you how fun it is to go through my old High School tapes. I mean, some of them date back to almost ten years ago, and you can practically see me and Schlegel growing up onscreen--almost as telling as finding a journal. I've begun putting them on youtube (it's so funny, because a lot of these predate the notion of youtube), and I've refused to re-edit them; I think a lot of their charm comes from their shoddy editing, stunted acting (on my part) and awkward staring at the camera.

For example: 
Anyway, you can see a lot more at my youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/spideratemybrain

You know those nights?

Where you just lie in your mom's basement, in the bed where you first got some, looking at the lone light for so long that the peripherals go black, all while the cool, summer-ending air and spiders from the storm drain crawl around you?

And then you think is this something the internet really needs to know?

Then you think yeah, because it could definitely use some more positivity.

I just drove a large, handicap-accessible van from Phoenix to SLC. 11 hours long, I was terrified the whole time. It was actually some quality-bonding time with Dane (little brother), but I just can't relax while inside that unwieldy beast. Highway 89 is beautiful, but incredibly varied and only two-lanes--unfortunately, there are no interstates that connect N.AZ and S.UT. Also, the van is made for a quadriplegic, so it has all these hand levers that get in the way (although it's cool that I can now say that I've driven one of those things).

However, it made me want to take a weekend and just stay at a shitty motel somewhere in south-central Utah. I'm thinking Hatch--there was this really deserted, orange place that looked really fun and kinda creepy. It was called the New Bryce Motel: 



I dunno why I think walking into a potential horror movie is so appealing to me.

I feel stupid.

I entered this writing contest organized by a fellow named Brandon Gorrell (http://brandon-alien-fine.blogspot.com", a friend of a friend. I broke my number one rule and paid a entrance fee with my submission, but since this guy is basically in the same boat as me (mid-20s, writerly-aspirations, unemployed), I figured "what the hell, I should support him/independent writers". Also, a fraction of the entrance fee goes to the winner, along with a lot of small-press books (which I should really read more of).

So I paid. But then doing some internet-investigation, I've come to learn about his affiliates--most notably Tao Lin(http://heheheheheheheeheheheehehe.com) and Muumuu House (http://muumuuhouse.com), a small press. This Tao Lin is notorious for his deceptive, cheap methods of self-promotion (http://gawker.com/5040697/how--tao-lin-made-a-quick-twelve-grand-selling-a-novel-he-hasnt-written), which Muumuu House seems to condone in all its writers. Look a little further into its "authors" blogs and you'll find that most writing is similarly self-indulgent, quasi-intellectual meta-writing (look at me go!). It's like they have a penchant for selling LiveJournal shit. They also all have the same fucking format on their blogs. Definitely not something I should be supporting.

Gah.. I feel had.

EDIT: Sorry for the non-existent html formatting.

Sorry for the blurriness... but  Devil's Spring doesn't lie. It's scary how fast you get drunk off this. It was forged in the fires of Mt. Doom or something.



Also, I rewatched Death Proof and liked it a lot more the second time around. I think seeing the four-hour Grindhouse was a little exhausting, but it's still admirable what they were trying to do.

Even though there was a lot of excessive dialogue, all the girls are very pretty and Kurt Russel is so badass. Plus, the car scenes at the end are so good. Just long takes and crazy stunt driving. No fast editing--it makes the talking worth it. Zoe Bell on the hood of a car during a chase...




...is so striking. It kind of makes you want to drop everything and write a car-chase movie. I'm gonna watch Planet Terror and see if it is better by itself also. The only thing missing from the Grindhouse experience is Edgar Wright's brilliant trailer for "Don't"


SOBER EDIT: Apparently, drinking that vodka also makes you write like a 7th grader doing a movie review :)

Me and the other Vice intern Ben had nothing to do today, so I thought we should start emailing interns at other publications to see if we could hang out. We hit up Gawker, RollingStone, Fader and Spin with this email: 

Now, I don't know what disturbs me more - the people who consider Susan Boyle a whore, or the people who threaten to MURDER the people who do.

I think that maybe he was thinking that since he was corresponding with Vice, he had to put on his offensive, edgy tone and this got me thinking of the magazine I work for. I've found that Vice certainly has a negative tone, content-wise, but that doesn't fit the personalities of anyone who works there. Some people come in for interviews and they're surprised that peeps aren't doing lines off the floor and whatnot. People with hip, snarky attitudes never end up getting the jobs. Besides a couple dicks (who are dicks because they have uptight, stressful sales jobs, not because it's not how they carry themselves), everyone who works for the magazine is warm, smart and funny.

However, there is still the writing. It IS negative and mean and I feel that I have to compromise myself a little whenever I want to get blog posts on. I feel a little small-townish here, but it's completely the opposite than writing for the City Weekly. Perhaps it's because I'm now pretty good friends with Jamie (music editor) but I feel like I can be playful and silly to whatever extent and she'll support it. It's refreshing cuz I feel that that's my natural demeanor.

And it's not only Vice. You look at blogs and other web publications and all it 's all filled with Snark and Cleverness. I think it's called desktop journalism - where people provide content without any sources or having to talk to anyone. It's sort of the way things work now; everything is opinion and cynical.
 

Drunk weekend.

Got 3 hours of free beer at a listening party on Friday night.

Wine tasting turned into bottle-drinking on Saturday. We partied on my friend Ally's L.E.S. rooftop and watched the sun set. It was so damn pleasant - the kind of thing that makes you fall in love with the city again. I thought I was over NY and looking forward to moving west, but then the spring fever hits and everyone is in such a good mood (plus, rooftops are my Achille's heels).

Sunday was unlimited sangria brunch, which turned to bar-hopping. I was wasted by 7. Lindsey is house-sitting in the Upper East Side and she bribed me and chris to keep her company with pizza. I woke up this morning at 4 am hungover and sweaty on a tiny couch, so I left (without glasses or contacts, mind you). I didn't make it to Brooklyn until 5:30 and saw the sun come up. It was a little romantic.

Really good way to start a morning.

My brilliant friend Natanya happens to be a professor at the University of Utah and she bought more copies of Horror Business than my mom to pass out to students/faculty. One of her students read it and had this to say:

I feel stupid not having written a response to this, struggling with the Ben Marcus. I would recommend this for anyone remotely interested in the horror genre (mostly movies, but the story plays out like any generic horror tale). I hadn't been that immediately drawn into a story since I was a kid. It's a horror/romance/comedy about a boy, Jason Nightshade, who is a complete horror geek. Recently, kids have started disappearing in his small town, his twin brother being one of them. The story is paced between his narration, the recordings left on a supernatural camera, and the script of his work-in-progress horror tale. His story is awesome, glorified in cliche and gore, and mirrors expectations around him and his brother. It plays on well-known movies like 'Fight Club', 'Donnie Darko', and others. Also involved is a rabid dog, a grave yard make out, a shark, a grisly car wreck, out-of-town parents, alcohol, dead animals, sex, disgruntled/violent/vengeful policemen, creatures in the night, and a violent psychopathic bully. It all plays out in a playful way, playing off genre expectations and cliches the whole way through. It was one of the most enjoyable reads I've ever had. 5 out of 5 corpses

I was in the middle of high-fiving myself when an ex-girlfriend got on the ol' gchat and had this to say: 

todolist9: ryan!

I'm slowly coming up with my next plan of action. Nothing is set in stone, but I may be trading coasts this summer. Biggie to Tupac.

Also, I gave my book to one of the Vice editors... we'll see how that works out. I'm getting pretty tired of being an intern - it's convincing me that higher-ups are either incredibly inept or assholes on purpose.

Holy shit:



They didn't fuck it up.

Heads up. Yet another blog, so get your bookmarks ready.

fridayfiction.blogspot.com

I'm gonna try and keep it up for a year.

Leave comments, tell your friends, and enjoy!

I'm pretty over the whole MGMT thing, but their video for "The Youth" was directed by Eric Wareheim and it's pretty great.

Let's talk about Watchmen.

I just saw it. I have to say that after a couple months' build-up, all that anticipation was brought down by pretty lukewarm reviews.

(I hate to admit to letting reviews dictate what movies I see, but at $12.50 a show, it's harder to go on every whim).

So, I go into the $5.00 show at the shitty theater by my house (they're pretty lax on bringing beer in) and get pretty much what I expect. I think most of the disappointment came from just being in the wrong medium. The symbolism, subtleties, juxtaposition that were so grand and revelatory in the comic become mechanical and forced in the movie. It's like they got the scenes right, but the pacing all wrong. And Zach Snyder still can't seem to get out of his commercial roots at the prospect of an annoying audio cue. Also, if you haven't read the book, you're going to be lost, which I don't think is completely fair.

But I didn't hate the movie. In fact, Rorschach is damn near perfect. Same goes for Nite Owl. And I also wonder, with the extended director's cut coming out on DVD, that it won't be better to watch in that version. It seemed like a lot of things that made the movie just alright could be fixed with an extended edit (yeah, it's 3 hours already, but it obviously suffers from trying to fit into that time frame).

Side note: they changed Rorschach's backstory a little, which I didn't like as much.

Anyway, enough bitching. It was good, and it could've been a lot worse. Patton Oswalt has a good blog that makes any naysayer feel like an asshole. And he's right: Zach Snyder did as good as we're gonna get to the Watchmen that we know.

But really? Setting the Comedian up to look like he shot JFK?

I came upon this recently and it struck me something fierce.

Now, I have little faith that this movie will be good. The concept is preposterous/farcical and the explanation for why there's a tiger in the house is pretty weak. The whole thing kinda stinks of Snakes on a Plane silliness...

But at the same time, I can't believe that a movie like this can be made in the major studio system (Lionsgate isn't small-time). If anything, it's unconventional in a so-simple-why-didn't-I-think-of-it way. And does a title taken from a William Blake poem mean that it's going to be subversive in any way? (Side note: Isn't there a Ray Bradbury story called "Here There Be Tygers" with similar elements?)

I'm also a firm believer that nature can be incredibly scary. I just think that it doesn't work well in film because animals (dogs and monkeys excluded) cannot be trained to act... which means that this movie will probably rely on non-scary CGI.

Found this email correspondence from 2/9/07

Ryan Bradford
I'm in bed next to you.

2/9/07
Jessica Bradford
i love you. (from jessica)

Sigh...

So, apologies if you've already seen the lobster book, but I'm extremely proud of it and feel it's worth whorin' around.

A couple months ago, I realized that I wasn't going to have enough money to give people gifts this year, so I wrote a holiday story and asked my friend Zandria Sturgill to illustrate it - then we could give it to people instead of, you know, gifts. Although we didn't make many copies (they were very labor-intensive; I spent 8 hours in kinkos just cutting them), Zandria made a special digi-version, which you can read here.

My gift to you: Christmas Follies of the Half-Jewish Lobster

A little about it: I just came up with a dumb little lobster story, but Zandria's art really brought it to another level. She worked for a good two months using mixed media to create the textured illustrations. I knew she worked well with grotesque things and sea life, so I pretty much gave her the source material and told her to do whatever with it.

It came out better than anything I could've imagined. A lot of people I've showed it to have said that it's a little scary for a children's book, which we both take as a great compliment. I think that children books are too harmless these days. Some of my most vivid memories are from reading Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, illustrated by Stephen Gamill. Gamill's pencil illustrations are incredibly gruesome, yet beautiful at the same time (look it up if you don't know what I'm talking about). But it's also supposed to be funny and I snuck a little bit of edumacational stuff in there as well.

So, enjoy!

Chris and I did this while enjoying semi-employment.



I blame my jacket for not letting me jump far.