I made many attempts with tired clichés, but I couldn’t make anything work as a cohesive story. Until I thought about writing a story about a detective, like one of those old movies. At that time I’d never heard the term noir. I just remembered movies like Casablanca and Maltese Falcon and the atmosphere in those films. So I wrote my little detective story, used every clichéd scrap of language I could make up or remember, and turned it in.

The day came when he was reading out the stories, and I remember feeling slightly disappointed mine didn’t make it. Towards the end of class, he shut the lights off and turned the projector on in the back so it made a makeshift spotlight up front. Then he left the room. We were all quite puzzled and fidgety. When he came back in, he was wearing a fedora, a trenchcoat over a rumpled suit, and a lit cigarette. He walked to his desk at the front, leaned back in his chair and put his feet up.

Then he began to read my story. He read it while the smoke from his cig curled up around him. He spoke like Bogey. It was the most awesome moment in my high school career, and to this day, remains one of my best memories from those days, and began my appreciation for noir.

So when I saw the movie “Brick” I was blown away.

I absolutely loved this movie. The anachronistic use of noir-speak in a modern setting of high school was incredible. A loner kid tries to help his tragic ex-girlfriend who’s in trouble. He still loves her you see. Then she ends up dead and it becomes his mission to solve her murder. The movie’s got gangsters, thugs, dangerous dames, and beautiful tragedy. It was dark, it was funny, it was highly detailed and intricate.

See this movie. It’s fantastic.

For the past few months, I’ve been enjoying time with the decade channels on my XM. I was on 50s for several weeks before switching to 60s - got way too tired of Chicken Man and Motormouth making his listeners proclaim their love for his show and really they should just call it the Beatles channel for as much as they focus on the Beatles there. (Not that they aren’t worthy mind you, I lo-o-o-ove the Beatles.)

And now I’m on the 70s, after much resistance. I’ve mentioned my aversion to the 70s before. The clothes, the music… My peception of the decade I was born in is not good, and so I associate 70s stuff with unpleasant memories. Until we started doing Music Madness where I discovered that a great many songs that I love actually came out in the 70s. Go freaking figure. Songs like ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Lights’ and ‘Don’t Bring me Down’ by ELO. I loved those songs and similar ones as well. Listening to the 70s channel has lengthened the list of songs I need to grab on iTunes from that decade. The problem is, the 70s channel neglects whole chunks of the music scene in that decade in favour of the more popular and expected disco shite and Foghat-type stuff.

Oh sure they play the occasional Bowie or Marc Bolan. But just the popular tunes. Bowie has his whole glam era in there that they ignore. Most Glam is ignored on the whole. Also the late 70s brought the birth of punk. Completely ignored. I realise that the channel is playing to your average person’s perception of the 70s (mine included really. Will the 70s ever NOT be associated with disco?) but I believe that if you’re going to tout yourself as a decade channel, you need to play all genres from that decade. Not just the popular stuff.

It doesn’t need to be sprinkled in throughout the day. It would just be weird to go from The Carpenters to The Sex Pistols. But you could totally put together a show dedicated to specific genres. look how hugely popular Matt the Cat’s Harlem show is. A show dedicated to rhythm and soul music of the 50s. You won’t hear Buddy Holly in there. Why not have a show dedicated to some big music movements from the 70s? Glam and Punk? It wasn’t all about doing lines at 50 back then you know.

/end rant

I don’t know. i’m babbling now. All I do know is my head hurts and when I feel like this I don’t have any desire to, you know, move. No matter. Shannon took the car to work today, so I’m stuck home anyway.

Ugh. I do have other things to talk about, honestly, but the headache is distracting. Anyway, the second season of Buffy Between the Lines begins today. Very exciting! For those of you who know me, My little scene will be in the 4th episode which I don’t think will be coming out until some time in October (they release the episode, and the next week the release that episode’s commentary, then there’s a 2 week break while everyone except me gets to go to Dragon*Con, then they resume.) I got a chance to hear the scene and it was cute. I’m not saying much about it though because I think Tabz (The Joss) would, you know, kill me and stuff

So yeah, I’m just on the actor side of the show the one time. But I’ve worked on every episode doing a lot of editing, so if you’ve got an extra 40 minutes-ish ever couple of weeks, throw it on the old iPod and listen to the audio drama BBtL 2 takes place between seasons 2 and 3 of Buffy. She has taken off to LA to deal with her grief at having to kill Angel, and the gang is left in Sunnydale to take up the vamp-killin’ slack. Also if you check out the commentaries, yours truly hosted the commentary for episode three.

In other news, My lovely co-writer and I finished our script for the first episode of Angel Between the Lines and we released it into the wild (well, we gave it to the beta readers anyway.) I’m very nervous. I’ve never written a script before and it was definitely a challenge. But it was a lot of fun too. Now the betas will fine-tooth comb it and give it back to us, we’ll make changes, and then it’s out of our hands for good. It will be so cool to hear it acted out though. I’m very excited about.

All right, I’m going to stop for now and go lie down.

But a lot has been going on, both at work and at home. Music Madness is keeping me plenty busy, and is so much fun to handle, I’ll miss it when the tournament is over. Sometimes I can’t believe people pay me money to do the things I love to do. Seems too good to be true.

We’re losing our awesome video guy though, which kind of sucks. He’s going to go into the wild and wacky world of bar ownership, which I find odd, but somehow fitting for him. I guess it just seems weird to completely 180 on your career like that. But he seems really excited about it, so I wish him the best. This means the paper is hiring back our other videographer who was laid off recently. Luckily, he’s cool with coming back, and he’s also pretty good so that means we don’t have to spend time training someone new as we head into a busy sports season.

At home, the kid is finally just about done making Kelly’s veil. It’s turning out so pretty. Kelly will look beautiful in it. Also saw some pictures of the spot where they’re getting hitched and my god - it’s freaking gorgeous. It’s on a congressman’s property in Big Sur (he will also officiate) and is just at the edge of a beatiful cliff looking out over the Pacific. It’s stunning.

The wedding is coming up faster than I expected. My poor sister is subconsciously stressed about planning a big wedding on the other side of the country from her (she won’t admit it, but she beat the crap out of her laptop the other night, so I’m thinking, yeah, stress.) so I keep asking her if, as main of honour, I can do anything to help out and make things go smoothly but so far there’s nothing. I’m cracking the whip on the veil though.

Let’s see what else… Ah, my Swedish lessons continue. I’m loving it, but just when I think I’m doing really well, my underbara teacher lets loose with a huge conversational sentence and I just gape at him. Don’t think I’m going to master the language any time soon But I can say things like, “Hur mycket kostar det?,” “Jag har gått vilse,”  and “Kittla inte mina fötter,” which will come in handy if I’m ever lost and wondering how much it would cost to have someone stop tickling my feet.

Swedish is interesting to me because when you look at a simple sentence, it looks completely, well, foreign. But sometimes, when you say it out loud, the sounds are very similar to English, as if you’re speaking English with a bizarre accent. I love it. I’m told I’m picking it up pretty quick so that’s good. Love languages and always wanted to learn others apart from French. I know a smattering of Spanish, a titch of German and a few Russian words, but learning/becoming fluent in more languages is on my Do Before You Die list.

For the past 2 days I’ve been listening to the 70s channel on XM. I finally got tired of Fred on 44 which played Bauhaus’ ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ just one time too many and switched to the 50s channel. But other than Matt’s show each night, I’m not fond of the other DJs or their shows. So I switched to 60s which was cool. Listened to that for quite a while before I decided I couldn’t take one more episode of “Chicken Man” and so now I’m the 70s. This one’s a little harder to take. There is a ton of 70s music I could go the rest of my life without ever hearing again. But as I’ve discovered doing Music Madness, there is actually a lot of 70s stuff I always loved but never realized it was from that decade. Go figure. So I’m enjoying it for the most part, and tuning out when something crappy comes on.

Well, totally meant to go to bed early for once, and blew that with a rambling-about-nothing bedtime blog

A random sampling of my spastic tweets and IMs to Kelly:

• Somehow I knew tainted love would be in this
• Omg THAT’S what soft cell dudes look like?
• Do the HUSTLE!
• Ohhh yeah, Taco’s Puttin’ on the Ritz is the best song ever. Gene Wilder’s version excepted.

Go, enjoy. Get your nostalgia on.

Not the best pic, but then it wasn’t taken with my spiffycool digi Will post better ones later.

I’m pretty sure the translator I used butchered what I said there, but that’s ok. So wtf did I say? “Hi everyone! Why am I writing in Swedish? Because I can! I am learning the language and it is fun.” Or something. I met someone in Sweden who is teaching me a few words here and there (and is very patient with my horrible pronunciations.) It’s a fun language though! I heart the interwebs!

Other than that I don’t have a whole lot to report. Saw Batman last weekend and loved the ever-loving hell out of it. Heath Ledger’s performance was disturbingly awesome and Christian Bale is just amazing. Thing about him is, I don’t believe he’ll be stuck with a stereotype for playing a superhero in a blockbuster film. He already has an impressive catalogue of quirky movies to his credit (American Psycho, Little Women, Swing Kids, Equilibrium to name a few) and he’ll go on to more like that. He’s doing the new Terminator movie which, yeah, another blockbuster type but man does it look bad-ass.

Anyway, so yeah, saw Batman. What else…. Oh! Got asked to host the episode 3 commentary for the second season of BBtL. Should be fun! And my co-writer and I have finished writing our scenes for the first episode of Angel Between the Lines and all that’s left is to put our halves together and make it flow, do some tweaking, and then hand our baby in. Over a month ahead of the deadline too yay us!

Speaking of writing, I seem to have lost the plot a bit on my CherryPop story. And by that I mean, I haven’t wriiten anything in a month apart from one ficlet sequel. I need to focus on that. Watching all these Twitter updates from people at Comic-Con this weekend meeting their favourite authors and thinking that I would love to be someone’s favourite author someday. Won’t happen though if I don’t kick myself in the ass and get into it. I will find a way though.

I’ve been working a big project at work, sort of Movie Madness redux, this time with music. I’ve been on my own as far as figuring out how to power this thing and make it fun and I don’t think I’ve done too badly. It’s drawing over 5-600 pageviews a day so far. Yay! So that’s taken up a lot of time.

Between movies I must see, BBQs, family visiting, and a new addiction to Second Life, Blogging’s just been on the back burner. But no more! I’m looking forward to jumping back in on all of the blogs. So this is a sort of “I’m back” post. More will be coming, for I must review Dr. Horrible and Batman

Now, I hate the 70s. That’s an entire decade that makes me cringe. But I have “issues” that I’m now coming to terms with and I’m starting to give up some of that hatred. It was brought home to me while preparing for Music Madness at the paper when I realized that there are a rather large number of songs from the 70s that I actually love. In my defense, I didn’t know they came out in that decade. Most cases, I never heard them til i was older and more aware of music which didn’t happen until the early 80s for me.

But I digress. I was talking about Frampton and the Bee Gees and Aerosmith and Alice Cooper, all of whom appeared/performed in the movie. Now, my mother was a huge Beatles fan, and listening to her old records growing up sort of made me mildly interested in them. It was seeing this movie that cultivated that interest. It came out in 1978, when I was 7. I don’t recall whether I saw it in the cinema, but I do remember it being on TV. I was fascinated with it. I was sort of developing a bit of a crush on Peter Frampton and Shaun Cassidy at the time. Nothing major - I mean, I was 7 for frak’s sake. (Sorry, been watching Battlestar Galactica.)

I loved the music in the movie. The Bee Gees were HUGE back then so I guess that’s the sound I was familiar with. But most of all, I loved the story. They made real characters out of songs! That amazed me. Billy Shears. Mr. Kite. Strawberry Fields. The Hendersons. Mean Mr. Mustard. Basically it was like they were dabbling their toes in the video waters that were to come along in a few years.

The movie’s basic plotline is this: Sgt. Pepper and his band came from a town called Heartland, and their music and their instruments were imbued with some kind of peace-making magic or something. Anyway, the band enjoyed over 50 years of happy times and good music until the tradition was passed on to Sgt. Pepper’s grandson, Billy Shears (Peter Frampton) and his friends, the Henderson brothers (the Bee Gees.)

Now, Billy is in love with a girl named Strawberry Fields, who is sweet and pretty and wholesome and the whole town and it’s citizens are right out of Mayberry. Until the boys get a telegram telling them that some bigwig in L.A. heard their music and invites them out to record an album. The band goes, and are soon exposed to all manner of corruption - drugs, sex, lots of money. At first the boys are overwhelmed and succomb.

Meanwhile, back in Heartland, the town has been taken over by Mean Mr. Mustard, a corrupt real estate agent who turns out to be under the thumb of F.V.B. he turns the town into a hotbed of arcades, hookers and foreclosures. His main goal though, is to steal Sgt. Pepper’s instruments which are housed in a museum at city hall. F.V.B. orders him to take each intrument to other corrupt people, which he does.

Now, Strawberry Fields has left home (’She’s Leaving Home’) to find Billy and tell him what’s happening. When she finds him, she gets jealous when she sees the chick from another band (Lucy and the Diamonds) draped all over him. But eventually, she tells him and the band sets off to recover the instruments.

I know I said “basic plot” but I’m finding it requires a longer explanation. It’s a weird movie

They get the instruments back (and we get a couple great scenes in which Steve Martin, in his film debut, plays a psycho plastic surgeon, Dr. Maxwell Edison, and his performance of ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ is fun, and Alice Cooper plays a brainwashing ex-crossing guard called Father Sun, and he performs ‘Because’ in a trippy, acidic way.)

Anyway, the band holds a benefit (for Mr. Kite Kite is played by George Burns who is the town’s mayor and the film’s narrator.) for Heartland and Earth, Wind & Fire perform. But Mr. Mustard, who’s in love with Strawberry, kidnaps her and takes her to F.V.B. The boys are in pursuit.

Now, F.V.B stands for Future Villain Band in the standout scene that was my first-ever exposure to Aerosmith - and they scared me. Yes Aerosmith is F.V.B., and while Strawberry is tied to a wobbly electric dollar sign up on a platform, Aerosmith slither up the stairs singing ‘Come Together’ - and it’s fantastic and creepy and slightly sexually uncomfortable.

There’s a big fight between Billy Shears (Peter Frampton) and Steve Tyler and in the end, Strawberry is knocked off the platform and killed. As a seven year-old used to happy endings, this shocked me. It made me sad then, and I still get a little misty at this scene and the following scenes of her funeral (’Golden Slumbers,’ ‘Carry that Weight,’ and ‘The Long and Winding Road.’) I’m afraid I always have and always will associate those three songs with the death of Strawberry Fields.

Gosh this is longer than I intended. Anyway to wrap it up, just as Billy is about to jump off a building to commit suicide, a Deus Ex Machina appears in the form of the town’s weathervane monument coming to life with magic powers to set everything right - including bringing Strawberry back to life. It’s actually Billy Preston performing ‘Get back’ and doing a nifty little boogie around the town square. Everyone’s happy again and for the finale, a plethora of Big 70s stars stand on a bunch of risers and sing ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.’ Some big names in there too - like Tina Turner, Keith Carradine, Donovan, Carol Channing, leif Garrett (dreamy sigh - hey, I was 7!), Heart, Dame Edna, Bonnie Raitt, Robert Palmer, WIlson Pickett, Sha-na-na, and Wolfman Jack.

Now, I know I’ve made this out to be a very cool, very exciting movie not to be missed. I left out that it’s unbelievably cheesy, silly, requires some major belief suspension, and at times, kind of stupid. I revisit it every couple of years or so and it holds up for me, though some may beg to differ. But I will always love it.