I’m on week two of three at TheFilmSchool screenwriting intensive and I’m having an excellent time in Seattle.  I haven’t found too many adventures outside of class except for my first week here I was stupid enough to loan twenty bucks to a guy off the street.  I don’t think I’ll see the cash again but the karma paid off later when I met a masseuse at a crosswalk.

Class has been illuminating but I’m a little emotionally sapped from all the group therapy it involves.. finding my wound, unique voice and whatnot.  I am warming to the idea of doing some serious screenwriting.  I’ve got some ideas and I’m picking up on the language and pitfalls.

Yesterday we had the opportunity to sit down in a small group for several hours with Jessica Bendinger, screenwriter and director of the recently released gymnastics film Stick It.  If anything describes her personality it’s her first screenplay which was about a hit girl and started with the irreverent line “Fade In, Bitch.”

Jessica really knows the business and was as candid as they come.  She also swears more than anyone I’ve ever met.  It was fucking awesome.  I hope she can break away from being a ho-bag script doctor and really write some more personal films since it appears she’s in a position to really do whatever she wants as a writer.
The picture is of my classmate Scott wearing the shirt he won for asking smart questions and answering First Daughter trivia.

He’ll probably kill me for mentioning it but he was in Cheerleader Ninjas, probably the most painful film I’ve ever stuck in my eye.

It was raining a lot last night. The rain falls down from one roof to another right outside my window. The gutter has fallen off eons ago and it just pours out loudly. It must have been about 11pm when I decided to open my broken window and crawl out on the roof. I wanted to adjust the Water Muffler (a tilted and mossy plank o’ wood) to absorb the noise. Suddenly I hear a loud BANG! It’s Pat giving me an odd look through another window. The light was in his eyes so he couldn’t tell it was me. Appearently I scared the shit out of him because he turned the corner and all he saw was some mostly naked guy trying to “break into” the apartment from the roof in the rain.

The Armenia part of my trip began as fabulously as England’s beginning was hideous. As soon as I arrived at 5 AM on Saturday morning it was obvious that I was in a different country, or at least a different time. To be fair, I really don’t know what a US airport was like in the fifties, but this is how I imagine it; people smoking freely and nearly all the men doing it, small stark airport with styles that would have been trendy in the fifties, a decidedly patriarchal tinge on everything, a little on the chaotic side, plus there was a slight feeling that just being there, in the airport, raised your status some… The chaos leapt to the forefront and it was obviously another country as I exited the airport. I had a dozen offers for a taxi yelled at me before I even reached the crowd greeting those escaping customs. Lucky for me Armenians in general tend to be somewhat short and Masha is not vertically challenged in the least. She was easy to find in the mass and we quickly escaped to the dead streets of early morning Yerevan. We drove to a diaspora built overlook to watch the sun fulfill it’s morning ritual. The city of 1.5 million people has little in the way of industry, but the air belies the fact, smoggy from heat and dust. The outline of Mount Ararat, a dominant symbol in the area, some 30 km away was barely visible in the distance. After the sun finally made it up, we went back to Masha’s place and took a nap. A perfect welcome to Armenia…

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The trip that had a troubled start turned, as the English would say, lovely. The first set of bombings hit London four days before I did. Needless to say I was a tad concerned, not really so much for my own safety, I mean, they didn’t America or Spain with a follow up attack, so I decided to put that part out of my mind (smart move, eh?). I was more concerned with what it would have done to the city. Would they be cancelling Les Mis because it was somehow a target? Would they search me every time I got on the underground? Would he tubes even be running? Anyway, I spent way more time watching the London updates than I shold have and I didn’t get much sleep trying to get all of my work done before I left (which I failed to do, sorry Pat).

I arrived in London rather tired at 11:30 or so at night after a nearly sleepless journey. After my quickest trip through customs ever and armed with reservations and directions to a cheap and well located hostel, I set out on the London Underground. Unfortunately the bombings and the late-hour kicked me out of the tubes only halfway through my journey and my tired mind fled from the complicated bus schedule. An exorbinate taxi ride later, I ended up with a crabby hostel desk attendant who stuffed me in a loud, hot, and packed room where I tried to sleep through my first night in England. I was not having fun. Three hours later at 5 in the AM, I decided that any more sleep would be impossible for the time being, so I started wandering. The troubles of the previous night dissappeared, I was in London! My two days there kind of run together, but I saw so many things, theatre, art, grand churches, ancient buildings, wide parks filled with people from every background, and the history was intense, everything there had such an incredible amount of the past associated with it. Besides some tube redirects, the bombings didn’t slow them down hardly at all, I decided that I really liked the English people.

I met Michelle at the beleagered Kings Cross station and headed north by train. Due to a bomb scare on a train in front of us, it turned into an epic journey. When we finally reached her flat in Harrogate, sleep was not far behind. And what a sleep it was, the best in several weeks, I can’t tell you how good that felt. I woke up at 7 in the morning totally refreshed and then added another hour just for good measure. Then Michelle kicked into tour guide mode, which, to be honest, caught me off guard. If you know Michelle, then you know why. She was actually really good at it, maybe when the agency is done with her, she’ll get a new job in the tourism industry. We did just about all of northern England: York, the city whose walls looked rather ineffectual (no wonder William Wallace sacked it); the east coast, Whitby and the ocean cliffs to the south, eating raw grains and marveling at the million birds along the great coastline; Skipton’s bizarre market where you can buy any kind of store-bought goods; the huge Fountains Abbey, where the white monks (cistercian) contemplated god; a surprise pops concert in Harrogate’s gardens; a variety of lively and lived-in pubs; the incomperable lake district, home of the best rainbow I’ve ever seen and the best terrain in England; a bizzare english flick while in Leeds; the over commercialized Alnwick Castle, of noted Harry Potter fame (Michelle will deny this part of the trip ever occured, but really it was interesting too); Bringham rocks, an amazing place to rock climb and watch the sunset and rabbits; and Cambridge, the pretentious university whose colleges try to charge you just to walk through them, luckily Michelle and I look enough like students that nobody asked us for money (it helps that we were a tad sneaky…).

It was a wonderful start to my European tour led by a terrific guide. You should book your own tours with her quickly though since she’ll be in Deutchland next summer. Hmmm, can anyone say World Cup?

I could wax poetic about each event, but I’m probably testing your patience even with this brief survey of my trip, so I’ll behave and wrap it up for now. If you really want to hear more, drop me an e-mail and I’ll dig into my scribblings for you. And stay tuned for Armenia: Land of Dust and Seasoned Meat…

Hello, just wanted to tell you a little story/update…I went canoeing over the 4th which ended up at a lake tubing behind a speed boat with sunburns and bruises… it was fun.

4 of us decided to go on a little canoe/float trip down the Brazos river outside of Fort Worth (90miles away). This part of the river started at Possum Kingdom Lake and ended out in the middle of nowhere. Byron and I went in a canoe, Lisa in a sea kayak and Scott in a whitewater kayak.

This trip started the day I returned from working with some graduate students on a deer fawn project where my sleeping schedule was awake at 1:30am and worked until 2pm then went to bed by 4-5pm. It was fun but hard. Switching sleeping patterns for 10 days and then switching back was interesting. Anyways we found
fawns (cuties) and tracked deer (stupid) and watched a lot of movies. Back to the canoe trip…

Nothing exciting really happened. Saw lots of turtles (map, red-eared sliders, mud, stink pots etc.) saw lots of fish and great blue herons, game wardens, and sun…lots of sun. There was no shade over this river. We made a silly mistake but not really a
mistake. We had originally intended on doing the 20 miles in 3 days. We put in Friday night around 6pm and pulled out to make camp at 8. I brought my GPS
(Im a geek) so I knew how far we went (3.3 miles). We were going to float all day Saturday and take out around 5pm or so and then do the rest Sunday….well
plans changed and we decided to push on doing the remaining 17 miles in one day. Reminds me of another trip I took in Alaska with harmony, gage, and joe…..but that’s another story. Anyways, this meant a long day where everyone was cranky and tired by the end. The decision to push on was due to Scotts parents own a cabin on Possum Kingdom lake where they have jet skies and boats and wake boards and fireworks and lots of food and drink. We all wanted to just swim and some of us really didn’t enjoy the kayaking (Scott). Lisa is from upstate New York and even though she is in the wildlife field she had NO clue how to camp, Scott is
from Texas and was a 21 year old going on 16. Byron and I were basically he “experienced” ones and so we did all the cooking and making sure the equipment was pulled out of the river and stored properly etc etc. I didn’t mind so much the first night but I think after a long day of canoeing I would not have been pleasant the second. They tried to help but were more of a hindrance.
I was really happy with the food situation we cooked chicken over a fire, just wrapped it in foil and put some BBQ sauce in with it to stay moist and it came
out juicy. We boiled some corn (would have taken too long to cook on fire) and then had some Mac&Cheese. Quite the banquet I feel.

The cabin at the lake was great. lots of food and good people. We went tubing which I found to be very difficult to get on and then we went and watched fire
works over the lake and saw lots of drunk rich people with their boats and pasties or painted on bathing suits. LOTS of drunk people. Went diving off a 15′ platform and saw some cliff jumpers and what not. You would never have thought you were in Texas except all of the southern accents, but my ear is used to thatnoise by now. Anyways all and all had a good time. Wish I could send a pic or two but just got back so don’t have them developed.

What I learned from this trip:

Never canoe with a New Yorker
Never take a white water kayak on a SLOW flowing river
You can use an oar to cut down grass
I should get a Sun hat, they are cool even if you look like a dork…they protect you from the crewl sun
Even deli turkey when soaked in water loses flavor and ends up tasting bad even though it has no flavor.
Paisties are never a good thing around water
Some people should wear underwear even on the water

Adventure is going out of the way to make trouble for yourself so you’ll have a good story to tell later. My story is that last night I slept in a cave.

Katie White, Aaron, Lou and I made plans to trek out Point Bridget and use the Camping Cove cabin yesterday. I was busy responding to a flood of email generated after the copyleft pin contest got posted on bOING bOING so when everyone was ready to leave I told them I couldn’t go yet and would just hike out when I was done …and there better be some Elk Tacos ready for me. I hadn’t been to that particular cabin before but I knew the area and had been to the Blue Mussel Cabin so I was comfortable hiking out alone even if it was going to be after dark. (more…)