Archive for the ‘egocentric’ Category
Highpoint: Crow Wing County.
Ascent: August 30, 2009.
Mark Ness, one of two people to successfully highpoint all the counties in the state of Minnesota, called Crow Wing County’s summit “one of the most remote in the state.” He is very right about that. There is virtually no chance of driving right up to it. The way to claim the high point is to trudge through the woods and sidestep the swamps.
It was daunting for my first county highpoint, but I had to do it, since Crow Wing is my home county.
Each of us is a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal.
For years and years, and many viewings, it took me until LAST YEAR to be able to parse the differences of Brian Johnson’s letter from the beginning of the movie The Breakfast Club, and his final draft.
Each of us… each of us.
EACH OF US!
I’ve seen John Hughes’s movie at least 25 times [it was one of my sister's VCR tapes on heavy rotation], and yet the subtly of this escaped me. The point of the entire movie. What happened? Did I see it when I was too young and then I only paid attention to the off-color jokes upon repeated viewings? Did I just zone out as soon as Simple Minds’s “Don’t You Forget About Me” started playing behind John Bender’s triumphant fist-pump under the football crossbar?
A great, great screenwriter… John Hughes… disarming us with laugh-out-loud humor, and then reeling us in like a guffawing big-mouth trout to absorb the drama underneath. Someone who was an example for me as I tried in the mid-90s to be as prolific as I could putting stage direction and dialogue to page on my Commodore 128.
He holds the record for fastest time writing a screenplay: 2 days for Weird Science.
Two days! 120 pages?! Most writers only crank out 2-3 pages a day if they work 8 hours at it. I can imagine John at his typewriter, right next to a percolating Mr. Coffee. Pounding away for hours and hours and coming up with the funniest lines in movie history, establishing the smart-ass teenager movie as a genre, letting the caffeine help transcribe the movie in his head.
I finished my first screenplay in 8 days back in 1994 – Night on the Edge. I thought to myself… wow, this is great. I can do one of these a month! So many ideas! I’ll have a stack of scripts by the end of the year!
Well, that proved to be an exception. As a matter of fact, the most recent script I completed took 12 years!
I don’t think I could have matched the frenzy of completing The Breakfast Club in 3 days, or the week spent on the first draft of Mr. Mom. His scripts, all comedies poked with sentiment, and done the right way – National Lampoon’s Vacation, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink,
and my favorite Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, where the most lasting moment is when Cameron closely examines the famous pointilist painting by Georges Serrault, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte: it is an illusion made up of millions of dots.
John Hughes gave spirit, humor and intelligence to his teenage characters, and it is sad that he should die at the young age of 59 – influencing some great screenwriter-directors like Judd Apatow and Kevin Smith, (me too, maybe, someday?) With the whirlwind of my life as a teenager, I probably figured out way too late [into my 30s!] that I was a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal.
The Red Vineyard.
What is the difference between an artist and an entertainer?
The entertainer is a capitalist – plays for his bread – like a busker at a bus station, filling his hat to the brim with quarters. He lives on his work with the pressure to please and to put time – most of his time – into his magnum opera.
The artist knows eventually no one or others may reap financial benefit from his work. He toils in part-time labor he detests, or he must be supported by the government or a patron. There is no deadline or pressure, except for time passing into oblivion.
All performers are some ratio of the two, but most are mainly artists, as the horde of “art” collects in the corner of a room while the artisan is away, using his hands, not his head, to maintain a living wage.
News: Dan Touchette’s Timebox is finished.
It is done.
The DT Log story formerly known as “The Future Will Hold” in 1992 has been reprocessed into a 31,000 word novella.
***
As a note, I have also decided to privatize the pages on the Timebox blog until I decide what to do with this project.
If you would like to read the story, please let me know and I will send you a link to the Google document.
Poem: A Prodigal Artist.
For a couple of years, I took my focus off writing. I attempted to study business, corporations, marketing. Something, I realized, held me back. The desire was still burning to create, and once I went back through my notes and files, I made a decision to write and market myself again. I intended to read this at a poetry night in San Diego, but I never had the opportunity.
It’s April again. Everything happens in April. My next 20 years of being a writer starts today. Please enjoy this poem.
I am sorry to disappoint you Googlers.
Maybe I shouldn’t look at the stats to Dan Touchette’s Timebox:
I don’t think you can accuse me of keyboard spamming, because this was the passage that probably brought this search term to my dashboard:
Honestly, Troy and Andrew were most excited about this. They were the ones who networked their computers together and played Doom all weekend. Troy was practically fondling the Timebox to suppress his excitement. Andrew told him to knock it off and give to me.
So I had the Timebox in my hands, which were attached to arms around a cute red-headed girl who was, for all intents and purposes, jailbait. The only thing I needed was a day off tomorrow to enjoy this a little bit longer…
Maybe this contraption would make her boyfriend disappear.
I think you can see here that I’m only commenting on the romantic age difference of 20 to 17, which does carry some sort of guilt and delicacy. There really isn’t anything sexual about this scene other than the fun and innocent flirting I remember from 14 years ago.
So if people are scouring WordPress pages, in search of underage girls,
well, I hereby apologize you had to read my little sci-fi story and left unsatisfied.
DT Log 1: AR (remixed).
The following has been edited for clarity, legibility, humor, intelligence, grammar, and redaction of embarrassing facts or opinions.
THIS MAY OR MAY NOT BE A TRUE STORY.
DT Log 1
Wednesday 29 March 1989.
Day’s Grade: B+
“AR”
Uh-oh.
It’s a fast-forward, rewind, fast-forward, get frustrated and say what the hell we’ll start in the middle job for Coach O’Malley. Though we can’t see the absolute confusion behind his sunglasses. Maybe if he took the sunglasses off, he’d see the VCR better. Oh well, I guess he’s just not used to being indoors and seeing all the lazy students sitting around instead of running laps or doing pushups.
DT Log 20th Anniversary: Verses written on the dry-erase board in Dan’s bedroom.
1989:
News: Serial novella Dan Touchette’s Timebox nearly complete!
This is big news, because I have been working on this for two years, and the end is in sight!
I have just posted Episode 7 of Dan Touchette’s Timebox.
My original plan was to force myself to write and edit and publish every two weeks back in May 2007 – but then I learned I just don’t work that way.
So I’ve taken my time, and I think I’m more satisfied with the result.
The end of the story is coming soon!
***
In order:
2. A simple plan.
3. Terms of service.
4. ßiography.
And the new episode.
7. Something no one else can give her.
As always feedback is appreciated and acknowledged. I still consider the story rough,
but above all, I am writing this to be a light, fun read. Please enjoy!
Dan
Link: Hello, (cruel) world.
Well, I have added a CSS sheet to o, MacGuffin! and now I can present it to the world. Sort of.
I’ve been having all sorts of problems adding blogging software. In a perfect world, I would be able to use WordPress,
but NOOOOOOOO – you have to lay down $1100 the first month to become a VIP WordPress user in order to accept advertising.
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o, MacGuffin! is Bronwynn and my attempt to create commercial content on the Internet to alleviate some of our expenses at home like ivory backscratchers and NFL Sunday Ticket. Maybe we can get a few hundred dollars out of it each month, and that will help.
