Jefe's House

I was thrilled to return to the thickly verdant and lonely shadowland that is the New Jersey Pine Barrens for Labor Day weekend. Three days a’campin’ in the sasquatch-infested Bass River State Forest where I went a’hikin’ and a’fishin’. I kept a big pickerel and threw back a coupla baby cats along the squatchy shores of Lake Absegami.  No cryptids — neither a squatch nor his winged cousin the Jersey Devil (pictured right) — reared their ugly heads, and I searched in earnest, including a night walk around the lake and some daytime recon along the Barrens’ many isolated footpaths for my next visit.  Bigfoot had given me the brush-off, but I did find some sasquatch scat on the Batona Trail. Or was it a load of horse shit? I never can tell.     

More to the point, summer ended with a lovely weekend outdoors.  

Some visual foreshadowing above Lake Absegami. The cloud fish foretold of my...

 *

...reeling in a keeper moments later.

*   

*   

*   

*[photos via coasttocoastam.com, cryptomundo.com, and me]

See?  I told you sasquatches are real.  I’ve known this ever since my Class C encounter with one a few summers ago in the Blue Ridge Mountains.  Now finally there’s proof in what’s being called the McKenzie River video (you can watch the whole thing here).  The mysterious “McKenzie River figure” is most certainly a Bigfoot, this is indisputable. I’ve done my own thorough spatial-velocitoanalysis (I zoomed in and slowed it down) and can confirm as much:

On second thought, I see a doddering old man with a cane wearing a yellow or khaki colored cap walking on a path along the riverbank.  Rats.

(Absurd how if two humans go by in a boat the Bigfoot community can’t first assume that a third figure enjoying the scenery from the shore might also be a human.  This is a well-traveled area.  It might not be Grand Central Station but it’s a well-traveled area.)

"Everyone knows how against cocaine I am." Yeah, right up against it. So close she leans on it.

Maybe Paris Hilton’s Bible was hollowed out and that’s where she kept her coke; you know, the Bible she started conspicuously sporting  as a fashion accessory just before her sentencing 3 years ago for a parole violation related to a drunk-driving charge?  She carried around that and a copy of The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, both of which I’m guessing she traded for Oil of Olay and skin oranger as soon as she wound up in the big house. 

*

*

*

*

I wonder if she’ll buy new copies to carry during her October 27th court appearance for being caught with blow last Friday night.

I’ll be holding a special prayer brunch for Paris this Sunday right after church.  If you can’t attend you can still join in by praying the Paris Prayer with me at exactly 1pm EST:  God, grant me the Percocets to accept the things I cannot change, the cash to change the things I can, and the lawyer to know the loopholes.  Amen.

 [photos via bestweekever.tv and speedselling.com]

A look at how Christians behave on sacred ground:

*

From Youtube’s lefthandedart.  “A man walks through the crowd at the Ground Zero protest and is mistaken as a Muslim. The crowd turns on him and confronts him. The man in the blue hard hat calls him a coward and tries to fight him. The tall man who I think was one of the organizers tried to get between the two men. Later  caught up with the man who’s name is Kenny. He is a Union carpenter who works at Ground Zero. We discussed what a scary moment that was for him. I told him that I hoped it did not ruin his day.”

———

Now for sale, Jefe’s Rubber Crosses for Rubber KKKhristians. They Bend! Collect all 4. Celtic, Latin, St. Anthony’s and Patriarchal!  

1. ’You shall have no other gods before Me.’

*

*

*

**

2. ‘You shall not make for yourself a carved image — any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.’  

  *

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

3. ’You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.’
 

  * 

4. ‘Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.’
Except for skipping church to honor our Lord at a protest, like on Sunday, August 22, 2010.

*

5. ’Honor your father and your mother.’
Just don’t honor anyone else’s fathers and mothers, especially the dozens of Muslim civilians who worked in the Twin Towers and were killed on 9/11, plus at least 8 (continue reading…)

This private school entrance is also spatially not in service. I checked.  But when they get it fixed I’m outta here.

How Serge Becker treats his neighbors and customers.

Gawker writer Brian Moylan trashes Vogue editor Anna Wintour for trying to run Serge Becker out of town on a rail and for saying of him, rightfully (and I speak from first-hand experience), “I know the kind of places he’s involved in and the kind of people that he brings.”  Like I said, she’s exactly right, and he’s been getting away with it and will continue to do so for years.  Follow the [bribe] money.  Becker has a long history of utter disregard and contempt for his neighbors and a pattern providing employment opportunities and hangouts for unrepentant drug addicts and hoodlums. His establishments are little more than glammed up crack houses.  Don’t take my word for it, do your own homework.  

I hate it when a jackass hipster posing as a journalist describes the residents of a neighborhood as “pesky” for not wanting their blocks turned into eternal street parties and crack dens for his over-privileged moron friends.    Damn you, pesky citizens, for not rolling over and playing dead so coke-addled, pretentious suburban kids can live out their NYC glam fantasies and turn your residential block into a shithole.  

Wintour’s dead right about Becker and the crowd he runs with — convicted drug dealers, thugs, crackheads, crooks  – and that’s just the front-of-house staff.  Becker hand picks scum like this to be the public face of La Esquina, then wonders why no one wants him in their neighborhood? Gee Serge, what gives?   Wintour and her Greenwich Village neighbors might be “tony” but that doesn’t mean everyone who wants Becker’s slime pits shut down is in her same income bracket, so stop making sweeping generalizations.  Maybe she just doesn’t want to see her neighbors beaten, dragged, manhandled and have lit cigarettes tossed in their faces. 

Where do you live, Moylan? Please tell us so we can come by and party Becker-style outside your place, ‘k? No complaints, now, junior, or we’ll brand you a NIMBY.

Big Frank bagged a cryptid.

 ”I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Hood County, Texas animal control officer Frank Hackett, so naturally he shot and killed the stray dog.  “It looked ugly, real ugly,” he said, but he won’t go on record as calling the dog a chupacabra.   Can someone please investigate this so-called officer and put him on suspension and for god’s sake take his gun away before he shoots someone? Where’s PETA when they can actually serve a purpose?

Big Jack shows off his meat stick.

Complainant Jack Farr is glad Hackett shot and killed the dog for wandering onto his property and for being ugly, even though “it didn’t seem alarmed by me at all. It almost acted like the neighbor’s dog.”   Meanwhile down the road a piece a rancher also shot and killed one of the dogs recently for walking while ugly.   Now that all three men have proven their manhood and made up for their small penis sizes by using rifles and long pokey sticks on thangs that just ain’t as purty as them, maybe they can go ’round back behind the outhouse, rub their bellies together and make love like true warriors.  

Perhaps these potatoheads took twisted inspiration from North Carolina’s Tim Peeler, my new hero, who tried calling coyotes onto his property and instead got a  hulking sasquatch which also made him feel insignificant and have to reach for his pokey stick, but at least it stopped there and this true mountain gentleman didn’t feel the need to grab his gun and open fire on a creature he found strange and frightening but also ”beautiful.”  Instead he  just “rough talked him” and ran him off.  Good for him.  Take that, Texas barbarians and go, Tar Heels, for knowing how to treat your cryptids.   

Peeler Demonstrates How Best to Handle a Cryptid:  

[photos via yahoo/nbc, video via Youtube]

BP Buys Google and Yahoo Search Words to Keep People Away From Real News on Gulf Oil Spill Disaster
by Maryann Tobin, reposted from examiner.com

“In their most tenacious effort to control the ‘spin’ on the worst oil spill disaster in the history, BP has purchased top internet search engine words so they can re-direct people away from real news on the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe.

“BP spokesman Toby Odone confirmed to ABC News that the oil giant had in fact bought internet search terms. So now when someone searches the words ‘oil spill’,  on the internet, the top link will re-direct  them to BP’s official company website.”   CONT’D

[In fairness that examiner.com headline does seem a little alarmist to me.  It's indeed a lame and desperate move from BP but the BP link is clearly marked on Google as a Sponsored Link in a different colored field to offset it, the same as when I google "riding crop" or "cotton candy machine" and tons of sponsored links pop up before the real links.]

[Turns out the same thing happens on Yahoo, too.   The BP-sponsored links are clearly marked as Sponsored Results in a separate shaded area. In fact one of the main stories right now from the AP on Yahoo's front page is about how BP's been lying about the amount of oil leakage, so if BP's paying Yahoo to spin the news then it should demand a refund because Yahoo's not delivering the goods.  In fact, this whole Examiner piece turns out to be a silly load of crap, a non-story.  How embarrassing. I can't believe I took the bait. I guess examiner.com took a page from Fox News' playbook.

Sorry to have wasted your time, readers.]

Now that Hillary Clinton is beating the drums of war and calling on the entire world to rise to its “duty” to respond to North Korea’s supposed attack on a South Korean warship and the murder of 46 crew, a flood of frightening analogies and comparisons come to mind. The most obvious one is that this is strikingly similar to how US involvement in Vietnam began in 1964: with a US-faked attack by North Vietnam on the US warship Maddox, which by the rules of our SETO treaty gave Lyndon Johnson the legal greenlight to take military action in Southeast Asia.

Is South Korea’s Cheonan to USS Maddox as North Korea’s “torpedo sub” is to North Vietnam’s nonexistent Tonkin ghost ships of ’64? Let’s hope not.

The recent events surrounding North Korea also call to mind how Bill Clinton found a way to win the world’s approval to remove mega-mobster Milosevic from power by having NATO bomb Europe (and, by the way, use depleted uranium weapons in Kosovo even after he promised not to do so — way to “help” the Kosovo Albanians) by citing the Kosovo Liberation Army’s faked massacre of 45 Albanian civilians allegedly by Yugoslav police at Raqak, Kosovo in 1999. The American public swallowed it hook, line and sinker even though it was repeatedly discredited as a hoax.

Of course, neither Democrat Lyndon Johnson nor Democrat Bill Clinton have anything on Republican George W. Bush’s trickery to get us into Iraq, ostensibly to remove Saddam from power but at the loss of hundreds of thousands of civilian lives.

Have Hillary and Obama learned from these masters how best to position a US — I mean South Korean (right) — bombing run into North Korea to get rid of the latest Milosevic, Kim Jong Il? We’ll soon find out. I hope I’m wrong.

Sure KJI is evil and crazy, but let’s hope our aggressive rhetoric of late won’t result in hundreds of thousands of dead North Korean civilians we’re supposedly liberating from oppression, over a relative handful of dead South Korean soldiers.

Hillary’s lustily rattling her sabre, and South Korea’s president Lee Myung-bak is cocking his rifle, and our big trade partner Red China is pretending to be on the fence but leaning heavily toward siding with the US.   The North Korean leadership is just as full of hype as the rest of these players but they’re still calling this whole mess a “wild provocation.” Are they right? If they did torpedo the ship then why be bashful about it? Something’s not right here.

I had to look elsewhere to find out some apparently objective facts beyond all the hype and rhetoric coming from the the West and its flunkies via our mainstream media. The following is culled from South Korea-based pro-democracy news organization NKnet, the Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights –

Despite North Korea’s rhetoric that “all communication links between North and South Korea are severed,” and “the North-South Economic Cooperation Council Office in the Kaesong Industrial Complex is being frozen and abolished, and all South Korean workers are to be immediately deported,” … the North Korean military authorities granted entrance to the Kaesong Complex for South Korean personnel this morning. Movement into and out of the Kaesong Complex is continuing normally, while fixed line telephones connecting the Kaesong Industrial Complex and parent corporations in South Korea are operating without any problems, too. This appears to display North Korea’s underlying desire to continue operating the Kaesong Industrial Complex.” 

These don’t seem like the actions of a small country eager to go to war against the US, Japan, China and South Korea.

It seems no one over in this hemisphere, in our government or in our media, is interested in reporting such hopeful signs that this will be resolved peacefully. Why is that the case?  It’s more fun, and more lucrative, to beat the drums of war.

Something’s up, y’all.

[photo via infowars.com]

Aristotle's Just Alright With Me

Since December of 1999, every time I teach Intro to Screenwriting I wrap up the semester with this article because it ages like a fine wine, every year getting better. It’s from the dawn of the new filmmaking millennium (right).  Bracketed comments are mine.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY Cover Story, November 1999

1999: The Year That Changed Movies [audacious title, eh? let's see if they're right]

by Jeff Gordinier

You can stop waiting for the future of movies. It’s already here. Someday, 1999 will be etched on a microchip as the first real year of 21st century filmmaking. The year when all the old, boring rules about cinema started to crumble. The year when a new generation of directors — weaned on cyberspace and Cops, Pac-Man and Public Enemy — snatched the flickering torch from the aging rebels of the 1970s [people like Cassavetes, Scorsese, Coppola, et al]. The year when the whole concept of ”making a movie” got turned on its head. [really?]

Tom Cruise in Magnolia

Skeptical? [yes] Consider the evidence: The whirling cyberdelic Xanadu of The Matrix [traditional 3-act plot structure and familiar 'hero's journey' character arc].  The relentless, rapid-fire overload of Fight Club [3-act plot structure]. The muddy hyperrealism of The Blair Witch Project [ok, 1 point for Entertainment Weekly so far]. The freak show of Being John Malkovich [3-act plot structure].  The way time itself gets fractured and tossed around [you mean via traditional flashbacks and flash forwards?] in Run Lola Run [3-act plot structure]. The spooky necro-poetry of American Beauty [3-act plot structure] and The Sixth Sense [you mean with its traditional O. Henry ending and 3-act plot structure?].  The bratty iconoclasm of Dogma [maybe]. The San Fernando Valley sprawl of this winter’s Magnolia [finally, yes they're correct here].

”It’s like 1939,” marvels director Alexander Payne, whose dark satire Election [3-act plot structure] represents yet another escape from the fuddy-duddy format [no it doesn't]. ”There’s a bumper crop of movies that, even if they’re not perfect, are interesting and intelligent” [I agree, and they do indeed have unusual SUBJECT MATTER, but they are extremely traditional at the end of the day – often a white male protagonist, a clear antagonist, a precise 3-act plot structure].

Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick in Election

Like Keanu Reeves’ hero in The Matrix (aptly named Neo), members of this new breed — backed by stars like Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Bruce Willis, and Cameron Diaz — are wondering whether the rules that have governed the silver screen for nearly a century amount to little more than an illusion. ”Hollywood narrative film is in its death throes right now [no it isn't] and people are looking for something else,” [no they aren't] declares R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, who produced Being John Malkovich [then why does it have a 3-act structure?].

The Matrix gobbled up $171 million at the ticket booth and has become a Blockbuster [no surprise, it's a very traditionally told tale following a 3000 year old plot structure].

If the last wave of Hollywood rebels (Coppola, Scorsese, Rafelson) drew their creative sustenance from the global titans of the art house (Fellini, Truffaut, Kurosawa), the new brigade is just as likely to find Parnassus in a Game Boy [frankly I think that's insulting to the new generation of filmmakers]. Films of the new guard dart and weave; they reflect the cut-and-paste sensibility of videogames, the Internet, and hip-hop [it's true; we do live in fast times in terms of the moving image, but that's why they're called motion pictures].

Syd Field reveals movie magic's greatest secrets.

These days, the jumble of data chunks may be the very meat of the story–the hallowed Beginning, Middle, and End.  how to catch up to things really quickly. A lot of times you come into something halfway through and you have to think, ‘Well, why are Ross and Rachel fighting about this?’”

Which leads to The Blair Witch Project. A year ago, if you had told a studio suit that a murky, herky-jerky, starless $60,000 horror flick would wind up trouncing Tom Cruise at the summer box office, he’d have set you up on a blind date with Andy Dick. “I’m grateful for its existence,” says documentary director Bennett Miller, “because it reminded Hollywood that it doesn’t know everything.” [true; so did The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and many other films] .

The key lesson: Kids are wired funny. [huh?] Blair Witch might’ve induced motion sickness in many a potbellied boomer, but it felt as cozy as a Pikachuplush toy to any tot raised on a steady diet of When Animals Attack. “Kids today are growing up with camcorders in their house,” says Aronofsky. “I’m sure a lot of kids run around their neighborhoods making horror films and stuff, and they saw something in Blair Witch that they could really connect to.” It’s no accident that Wes Bentley’s sensitive brooder in American Beauty had a camera permanently attached to his palm [yes,the one weird teen in the neighborhood; he is depicted as an oddball, not a typical "kid"].

If Fight Club and Being John Malkovich have anything in common (and from an aesthetic standpoint, they don’t), it’s a nagging impatience with the old way [not really; unusual subject matter, yes, but told in a very traditional manner].  Plenty of art forms–the novel, chamber music, painting–have gone through a series of stylistic earthquakes over the past century. Although Hollywood has absorbed creative shocks from the likes of John Cassavetes, Andy Warhol, Robert Altman, Jim Jarmusch, and David Lynch, the bedrock form of a mainstream movie has stayed pretty much the same [yes].  Agents and producers still preach the Gospel According to Syd Field; budding hacks clutch tattered copies of Field’s Screenplay and The Screenwriter’s Workbook, handy guides that boil down classics like Chinatown into the sort of paradigm charts you’d study in a Harvard Business School efficiency seminar [I'm guilty as charged]. Ever watch a movie and get the feeling that you know exactly what’s going to happen? [yes, in a bad movie; are you suggesting Chinatown was predictable? come on].  Well, you’re supposed to.  A teacher and lecturer, Field isn’t famous for writing any landmark scripts of his own, just for telling Hollywood how to do it. [no, he's just pointing out what the great movies have in common, not offering any kind of new narrative method he claims to have invented; guess what? Aristotle wasn't known as a great playwright either when he wrote The Poetics;  Field is just reiterating what's been around for millennia; he's just good at making the traditional structure understandable to novices; there's nothing wrong with reading his books, it doesn't make you a hack; go for it, kids].  ‘These movie-executive people and producers–bad producers–I think they’re aware of the silliness of Syd Field, and they like to think that they are breaking out of that mold,” [no they don't, they're terrified of breaking out of that mold] says Boogie Nights director Paul Thomas Anderson. “But all they are doing is propagating it.”

Mena Suvari in suburban melodrama American Beauty

Hollywood’s never going to abandon the three-act structure–it’s been around since Aristotle’s mega-pic deal with DreamWorks–but it’s amazing to hear how many filmmakers are bored stiff with the dogma  [really? which ones? 99% of the people you've mentioned here use it religiously]“.  The whole school of Act 1/Act 2/Act 3 is destructive to a thriving, growing cinema,” says Election‘s Payne [THEN WHY DID YOU USE IT? This man is lying to you here. I love this movie but he's lying when he says it doesn't have a traditional 3-act structure; it's got it square on the nose, you can time it with your watch]. “I think that for the last 20 years American films have lived under ideological restrictions which are as stringent as–if not more stringent than–the restrictions on Eastern European films under Communism [talk to an Eastern European filmmaker sometime, this is ludicrous and insulting to people who would be sent to prison for making movies that the government didn't approve of; this is an absolutely moronic remark for him to make; he is a naive American fool]. You know, the hero has to triumph. The lovers have to reunite. The so-called liberal freethinkers running Hollywood are extremely conservative” [this is true; when it comes to money they are extremely conservative, they're very careful and usually avoid risks].

A lot [a lot?  doubtful] of young directors just keep their eyes wide shut to the orthodoxy. “I’ve never read a screenwriting book,” Anderson says flatly. When he was composing the arc of Magnolia, Anderson borrowed a model from an unlikely source: the Beatles. “I had a really ridiculously ambitious and presumptuous goal: I looked to Sgt. Pepper and the White Album for inspiration,” he says. “I tried to structure my movie after ‘A Day in the Life,’ how it would sort of build build build build build build build [like the traditional obstacle-anxiety-relief cycle that I taught you during the second week of class?] –fall off a cliff  [you mean a CLIFFhanger, i.e., a major reversal?] and then start building back up again. I took more structurally from that song than from any movie I’ve seen” [ok, if you say so but you're describing a very traditional way of storytelling].

Keanu takes the hero's journey in The Matrix.

A star can get an executive to snap to, but even that’s no guarantee when you’re making a movie that involves puppets, lesbian lust, and psychic portals. “It was a total fluke that this movie got made. It was a struggle up until the very end, even with this cast,” says Being John Malkovich‘s producer Sandy Stern. “There was a studio head who asked us, ‘Can it be Being Tom Cruise?’” Charlie Kaufman cranked out the script five years ago, but he still remembers the knee-jerk reactions from the Hugo Boss contingent: “‘This is very funny. This is the funniest thing we’ve ever read. This is too weird. This will never be made.’ That was the conventional wisdom” [I totally agree; I love this movie; I just hate the bullshit in this article, most of these people are really shoveling it here].

“Ten years ago, Being John Malkovich wouldn’t have been set up somewhere,” says Columbia’s Strauss.

“Even five years ago,” says Giannetti [I agree wholeheartedly; it's very cool that this movie got made, a rare thing for Hollywood].

Thomas Haden Church and Paul Giamatti in Sideways

Which suggests that five years from now, we might wind up getting lost in a forest of cruddy shaky-cam movies narrated by puppeteers and dead people [was he right? flash forward to five years later -- the 2005 the Oscars for Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay went to Million Dollar Baby, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Sideways, respectively, all of which have a traditional 3-act structure;  the 2005 so-called "Independent" Spirit Award winners for Best Feature, Best Director and Best Screenplay went to Sideways, Sideways and Sideways, respectively,  meaning 1999's supposed iconoclasts with any staying power were only Alexander Payne and Charlie Kaufman, two talented originals who also adhere religiously to the 3-act plot structure even if Payne won't admit it].

“Always in Hollywood, it comes down to what’s going to sell,” says Weng. “I go to a lot of meetings, and people are always like, ‘Oh, I’m looking for the next American Beauty, I’m looking for the next Being John Malkovich.’ It’s going to get tapped out. Like teen films were huge, and that got tapped out” [teen films got tapped out? when?].

Indeed, just because the Neo Turks have awesome technology at their fingertips doesn’t mean they’ll all be talented enough to do something awesome with it. “I think there’s going to be this wonderful, explosive glut of mediocrity,” Miller chuckles. “It’s going to be horrible. You know, big ideas without a lot of preparation. The technology invites a certain carelessness, because it’s easy to let your guard down and not be disciplined.”

Then again, we might wind up with a masterpiece or two.

NB:  My point here overall is simply that there’s nothing wrong with the 3-act plot structure. I like good movies (“good” being subjective, of course), and I hate being bullshat, that’s my only point.

When something is old that doesn’t mean throw it out, writers.  The
formula’s been around for 3000 years because it works. It’s a highly effective way to engage an audience brought up in a westernized culture. It’s not just the basis of good screenwriting, it’s the basis of what our culture considers good storytelling in general, be it a novel, a children’s book, a folktale or a joke.

There are infinitely many ways to not follow the 3-act structure, but any writer who thinks it’s for hacks, well I defy them to try it first. The truth is, it’s a challenge to write a good 3-act script. It’s akin to writing a villanelle or a sestina or a sonnet.  Sure, it’s easy to skip all that and write any old thing and call it a poem, but try rising to the challenge and writing within a form that forces you to perfect a sense of control and discipline with your words, with your storytelling, that forces you to cut to the bone.  It won’t be easy. Can you handle it?

Once in awhile in the US there is a breakthrough film that doesn’t follow the three-act structure (The Cider House Rules, No Country for Old Men, Magnolia, Inglourious Basterds, et al), but 99% of every film you will ever see, either Hollywood or independent, wonderful or awful, follows the old structural rules, and there ain’t nothing wrong with that. There are good scripts and bad scripts no matter how you choose to construct your plot and no matter the genre.