Packing for a funeral. Well, not the funeral itself – what could I possibly need?* But I will be up north for a few days. Winging it really.

While waiting for stuff to charge I was reading The Tokyo Montana Express by Richard Brautigan. Here is something he called The Tomb of the Unknown Friend:

I saw somebody on the street yesterday that I almost knew very well. It was a man with a kind and interesting face. Too bad we had never met before. We might have been very close friends if only we had met . When I saw him I almost felt like stopping and suggesting that we have a drink and talk about old times, mutual friends and acquaintances: whatever happened to so and so? and do you remember the night when we…?

The only thing missing was that we had shared no old times together to talk about because you have to meet somebody before you can do that.

The man walked by me without any recognizing expression. My face wore the same mask, but inside I felt as if I almost knew him. It was really a shame that the only thing that separated us from being good friends was the stupid fact that we had never met.

We both disappeared in opposite directions that swallowed any possibility of friendship.

I’ve been overwhelmed – truly overwhelmed – by the correspondence I’ve had over the past week. I’m glad something in what I wrote helped a few people and am humbled by the response.

I’m still working my way through and replying. Thank you.

* I guess you could crack wise and reply “a black suit”. I don’t own one. I’m winging that too.

“My other band wrote a song from the perspective of a band playing in the Pope’s bed chambers, you know, writing a song like ‘don’t give up hope – you’re the Pope, like when you’re down sometimes things get in your way like science but you gotta, you gotta like lift up your staff even if its heavy, and you know, put on your hat even if its too big and you gotta be the pope’. You know, we wanted to inspire him…”

Harry and The Potters reflecting on criticism from the religious right

In this town people who had never had money before were suddenly truly rich, and they didn’t care what they paid for the things they wanted. Rolls-Royce did better here than in India in the days of the Raj. And money was pouring in from all over the world, as old regimes collapsed. In a few years Los Angeles was going to be the most expensive – and corrupt and dangerous – city on the face of the earth.

from Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorpe 1979

It’s more or less Monday in LA. Interesting weekend and the week is shaping up pretty well. Lots of new people to meet. Slightly rocky start when I got into my hotel room and decided that a new one was in order seeing as I wasn’t here to shoot a porn movie or hang out near the pool. Lovely concierge by the name of Jessica suggested I check out one of the fourth floor suites and passed me a key card. On opening the door I was greeted by a framed photo of the Rat Pack and was happily surprised to find each wall displaying a poster or photograph of Sinatra and co.

Seeing as I’m here because of my own Ocean’s 11-in-space it would have seemed churlish not to take the room.

I’m listening to a lot of John Zorn to dilute the Vegas vibe and the mini bar has remained closed.

Haven’t had a chance to use my camera yet, but when looking on Flickr for photos of the hotel I found the one above taken by someone I know on Twitter. It’s a small world and Hollywood is well trodden.

The quote is taken from the novel that was later adapted into the screenplay for Die Hard. I’ll be swinging by Nakatomi plaza later this week.

Two conversations I’ve had say a lot about the city. The first was with a homeless guy (Dave) who stopped me to talk about music after he clocked my Dead Kennedys shirt – a genuine and warm conversation about the failures of punk rock and why it doesn’t matter. The second was with a music executive (let’s call him Ellis) who gushed about the music station whose logo is on the shirt I wore this evening – I didn’t let on that KAB RADIO 1340 was the station from John Carpenter’s The Fog, but did mention how happy I was that they had bounced back after ‘the incident’ in 1980.

City of angles…

And the terrorists were over-zealous, But it was sweet when they killed Ellis!

from Die Hard by Guyz Nite

Photo credit: from the floor by iced soul (CC license)

The last theme this blog had featured a quote from Hunter S Thompson up front. Not one of the over used (online at least) quotes about drugs and alcohol or indeed anything from Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. It was from a letter he wrote in 1990 and you can read the whole thing here. The part I quoted was this:

Suddenly I had my own gang. My own army, my people, my friends, my warriors… They came from all points of the compass and all points in time, and we stomped on the terra like champions. It was something to see, folks, and beautiful to be a part of…

When I first started this blog it was mostly me railing against the world. Complaining about the things and people that annoyed me. By the time I came to plant that quote up top I’d fallen sideways into social media and the focus of the blog changed somewhat. Sure, there was still a lot of complaining, but there was a lot more sharing too.

Those few lines of Hunter’s just sang to me when I reread them in Songs of the Doomed and it seemed important to wear them here like a badge.

I think the last year or so has taught me the real value of having like minded people to stomp on the terra with and I don’t think I need the same daily reminder of that. It’s still one hell of a quote though and it felt important to have it somewhere in the guts of the blog again.

The value in a writer like Hunter I believe is not just in his style. That’s proven every time I read something by some fuckwit who thinks mimicking his sentence structure while talking about a drinking problem puts them in the same camp.

What you take from Hunter is passion. Or to clarify that, his passion comes through so strongly that it makes you wish you cared about something in the same way. And when you put the books down for a moment you realise, of course, that you do. It’s why I read all his sports columns even though I didn’t give a damn about the teams or indeed organised sport of any kind.

Hell, it’s the reason I have the last line he ever wrote tattooed on my arm.

I guess that’s another reason why I don’t need the other quote somewhere permanent, like the header of my blog.

From David Lynch Foundation Television (Beta)

I’ve always been very vocal about my feelings towards Facebook even at times when I’ve been in danger of adopting the Kevin “I never knew fear until I kissed Becky” McCarthy plan of running into oncoming traffic. But I did enjoy the Facebook News Feed Edition of Hamlet by Sarah Schmelling:

Polonius says Hamlet’s crazy … crazy in love!

Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Hamlet are now friends.

Hamlet wonders if he should continue to exist. Or not.

Hamlet thinks Ophelia might be happier in a convent.

Ophelia removed “moody princes” from her interests.

Hamlet posted an event: A Play That’s Totally Fictional and In No Way About My Family

The king commented on Hamlet’s play: “What is wrong with you?”

Polonius thinks this curtain looks like a good thing to hide behind.

Polonius is no longer online.

Looking for a David Warner as Hamlet pic lead me to the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project. Man, I love the Internet. So now we have Philip as Hamlet and a bonus link to Canadian Shakespeareans in Space which has this revealing quote from the original Adama, Lorne Greene, about his role in Bonanza:

“They told me that they wanted a new series, a one-hour weekly western. They wanted it to have a strong father-and-son relationship because they were concerned that American soldiers’ defections in Korea had been traced by some psychologists to Momism, the strong identity of U.S. kids with their mothers. Also, they were sick of American movies in which fathers were depicted as bumbling dolts.”

You learn something new every day. Or to put it another way: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…

This is interesting:

This website follows Bryony as she attempts to make the world’s first UGC zombie movie.

What’s a UGC movie?

UGC stands for User Generated Content. That means it’s a film that’s made entirely by contributions from the online community…

So what’s the BBC’s involvement?

The Zombie movie is entirely up to Bryony – we’re just following her as she makes it…

The Beeb are actually doing a bit more than that. By choosing to follow the project and committing to having a documentary by the end of it the BBC are in many ways legitimatising what Paperlillies is up to. At least in the eyes of BBC viewers who think YouTube is nothing but a place to watch old episodes of Doctor Who or ‘that video with the monkey’ (take your pick).

It’s an interesting step for a channel like BBC 3 and I think the correct one. Just recently I watched Adam Buxton’s MeeBOX and while I’ve always enjoyed his work and he’s obviously very in tune with the Internet  this came across as a tad dated and way too obvious. Disturbingly he also suddenly looks a lot like Documentally.

The other show that promised to play in the world I live and work in was Delta Forever:

This was a pilot for a proposed show about an online community whose lives revolve around a very Harry Potterish series of novels. Some things the pilot got absolutely right (the Scottish character defending the original title of the first novel over the bastardised American version rang some serious bells for this Dark Materials fanboy), but the most obvious failure was the idea that these kids needed a visual cue to help them stand out as Internet nerds. The cast had to suffer a tedious amount of OTT makeup. Horrible to watch, which was a shame for the few good performances that got buried. But there was something there that to me at least warranted further viewing and I’d be interested to watch the concept develop if it gets picked up for a series.

That may of course have more to do with the pilot revolving around an advance geek screening of a film that the fans will either love or loathe. Something I have a certain familiarity with…

The zombie project though is an entirely fresher idea. First and foremost this is a project developed by an already popular online community member and something that was set in motion before the Beeb swung a beam on it. I think an organisation as big and respected as the BBC getting involved at this stage of an online madcap idea is very important and the payoff for everyone involved is accumulative.

There is of course the danger that if handled improperly the YouTubers will come off as a little irregular, but to survive on YouTube you need to be pretty thick-skinned so I’m not too worried with that angle. It should be win-win for the Beeb as this kind of thing makes them look web savvy at a time when they need a leg-up in that area. The worry is that they’ll cut corners on this in the way they have with the iPlayer (great concept, horrible realisation – note the two show links above now have nowhere to go which will now instead send you straight for a torrent).

What they could have on their hands is something as vital as say the upcoming We Are Wizards or at the very least an interesting companion piece to it. It also comes at a time when Joss Whedon is putting a fork in this space too.

Oddly enough this seems to be the summer for home-made zombie projects. I’ve been made aware of a small pile of them currently in production with budgets ranging from the very modest to the very respectable. This however is by far the most interesting. The plot for once is the least of my concerns as I’m far more interested in how a community comes together to pull this kind of project off.

It’s the kind of thing that was talked about a lot in the early days of Seesmic but it came to nothing. While some of my more succesful recent projects have been built in a similar way by finding the right people with the right skills in my own social media backyard (which handily stretches across the globe), but nothing quite on this scale.

Getting the right people together to land an interview with Stephen Spielberg is one thing. Beating him at his own game is quite another…

The saddest line in any wikipedia entry has to be “This article is about a person who has recently died”.

My mother tells this story that when I first went to school, I thought I was going to help the teachers. I didn’t realise I was going to get educated.

Moon Unit Zappa