The Week in Review

This has been one of those weeks that bull dozes time. Been a busy week with the day job and Wood Sugars shows, with of course some after show boozing that made the early mornings the next day a little rough to get the day flowing. Our MILF show on Wednesday had a great turnout, with a quite a few randoms. Thursday's "One Night Only Show" was a lower turn out but I had a blast. We all drank some red wine before the show. I feel a bit funnier, loser the roll with the give and take of comedy performance with red wine trickling in my blood. After we went to a bar called Simon's with a weird old Swedish feel to it. I liked it. I had a little too many cans of cheap Genessee beer, I hadn't heard of it before but it was on sale and my wallet is thin so I gave it a shot. It tasted nice. But I felt a bit ill the following morning. When I arrived home after intense thunderstorms crackled.

My screenplay of Whiskey Pike unfortunately did not make it to the finalist round of the Nicholls Fellowship I had entered it into. Out of almost 7,000 entries 350 were selected for the final round of judging. I was certainly bummed but I spent some time looking back over the script yesterday and I certainly understand its imperfections. At the time I had submitted it I felt jacked that it was quite incredible but with my latest review of it, a little time and space between my last tear into, I do find there are a lot of fluff moments. I have the piece littered with little transitions, montage between scenes to show travel, whiskey biz development, etc. And on closer inspection these things are really just fat which at the time I thought would build a swell visual sprawl of the old time, wilderness landscape. And when it comes down to it a lot of that stuff is understood. And I'm again reminded that film is really tied together with the most important moments.

So I spent some time reworking it, and in a way I've been wanting to do for some time. I'm definitely interested and determined to shoot this thing out in the woods in the 5 year plan. Whereas I certainly don't think this piece will necessitate millions of dollars, being essentially a period piece, it's going to have some costs. And with film, its like holding up a microscope to the detail, which requires more money to fine tune that set and costuming detail. But being a theatre guy, having spent a majority of my time in Chicago studying theatre and putting on plays, my biggest interest in the production is the element of performance. The characters, the dynamic between the Bowermaster family members and most particularly the rivalry between Shane Bowermaster and George the Brewer, incited the new impulse in me to extract and piece together the scenes which focus on these relationships to develop what can an intense theatre piece that can still translate under a low budget. With theatre such period elements of costuming and set can be more representational and with the right lighting can take you to that place with more punch of ambiance perhaps film even can.

So this is my latest experiment with the Whiskey Pike script, tentatively titled The Whisky Infused Boom of Shane Bowermaster. I know I've gone back and forth quite a bit on whether I want to do this as a play or a film or what not. Sure I'm flip-floppy like a politician here, but it is an ambitious piece, and I want to make sure I put some good thought into how I want to commit to the first production of the piece. My next motion is to begin work-shopping the piece with actors and work towards doing a public staged reading of it in the near future to really hone the project.

This week I've also been getting pulled into watching CNN and CSPAN and MSNBC to follow the whole debt ceiling crisis. It's been like a riveting soap opera. We'll see what the dramatic conclusion is. As of this writing I hear there is McConnell bill that is "close".

Congressional Suspense, life imitating novella?

Since Congress is playin' games with the debt ceiling and budget plans, I don't feel so bad about exploiting all of this to promote my novella...or I kind of do feel bad because because it seems the ground work is being laid for things to actually happen which play out in the year 2032 in Turban Tan. I bring this piece up because what I wanted to reflect upon in this novella, I believe is becoming more and more important to acknowledge. I'm certainly not saying Turban Tan is the most important book ever written by any means, but I am biased and believe it's important enough for you to take a risk on by adding it to your pile of books to read, maybe even setting gently on top and cracking into very soon. I appreciate you taking the risk and thank you in advance for putting up with my tooting this piece during the "tense" congressional showdown.  But hey, they have an agenda, I have an agenda. They want re-election, and I want my book to be read and enjoyed. 

To grab a paperback copy -> http://amzn.com/1449918026

To grab a Kindle copy -> http://amzn.com/B003156PWI

or to explore it a little more and what it's about -> http://www.TurbanTan.com

Get lost in a good book. Thanks!

Econo-Rant

I agree that solving the Federal Budget deficit and debt ceiling is a complicated algorithm. I'm surprised that congress really hasn't seemed to acknowledge the people's cries for job creation. I would think that would be a good thing for their fiscal problem. Get more people working, making income, paying taxes. Trickle down economics is a phony philosophy that has proven not to work, only serve the accumulation of wealth of a small percentage. Solving this economic crisis is simple, get people working. They want to work. The government gets more tax money (without even having to raise taxes) to start paying down it's debt, keep itself operating, and people start buying goods and services which will then increase revenue for business. But the U.S. congress does not serve the people. It serves Lobbyists. Congress doesn't care about job creation, doesn't want job creation, because that will cut into the gargantuan profit margins of the Fortune 500, which will cut into their campaign contributions.

I think we're getting to a point in time when dealing with supply and demand that the word profit should be phased out and replaced with benefit. Profit doesn't solve. What is the physical benefit of doing business on behalf of the business owners, the employees, the customers? The delivery of a need somewhere in the pyramid of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. What does the human body do with profit? What does the soul do with profit? Perhaps I am being too literal and melodramatic here, of course money let's you buy your basic human needs; your hot dogs and potato salad for dinner, your toilet paper, your medication, and the items at the top, the self actualization, your yoga classes, scuba diving trips, hang gliding adventures. But money didn't really create that scuba gear or your prescription refill...materials did, human labor did. Material and human labor are churned through and tossed aside without much regard in the current economy, but the value of a dollar, how dare we let that slip on the index.

Commerce and governance continues to run via an engine of bullshit. The population grows, needs grow, global warming continues to bring us stronger storms than we've seen in the past yet we continue to elect and place our faith in leaders that cling to old Politcal philosophies and deny adaptation to the above. We currently have no innovators in the law making body.

I am okay with the U.S. defaulting on its debts. I am okay with all of Europe defaulting on its debts. I am okay with the value of Yuan sinking. Because maybe then, and only then, will everybody be forced to rethink how we pay for shit. The laws of supply and demand are not as fixed as the laws of chemistry, they can be altered. Hell, we can synthesize chemicals, we can synthesize buoyant economies with smart management of resources.

A little innovation, because commerce and governance continues to run via an engine of bullshit. Let's think benefit. Profit doesn't have the same ring as it once did.