Monthly Archive for March, 2005

I’ve often described my Attention Deficit Disorder as “multitasking.” I’ve learned over the last 20 years to do what computers call “timeslicing.” I keep at least three things going on at once, and when my attention wants to wander, I switch to one of the other things, rotating in order. It’s not something I recommend unless you have years to prefect the process, as I have.

I think that’s why I went into radio. It used to be that you had at least five things going on at one moment. You had to listen to what you were playing, watch your VU meters, cue your next song on a turntable, pull the carts for your next spotset, and keep paperwork. And if I do say so, I didn’t do a half bad job at it back when DJ’s meant something.

Anyhow, just as I’ve developed techniques to deal with ADD, I’ve also found ways to deal with being manic depressive. (I think they call it “bipolar” now, but fuck that. It’s manic depression.) I have very big highs, and correspondingly very big lows. My closest friends have seen me at both, and have seen how I’ve coped with the down times (like most of 1989, for example).

The trick with dealing with manic depression is to learn how to use your “manic” phase to its best. I’ve just come out of one of my deeper lows (lasting about two weeks and coming hard on the heels of several months’ worth of minor depression). Then, a week ago, the conditions that pushed me down hard were alleviated and I swung hard upward, kicking into the “manic” stage.

Where for the longest time I was producing my show each week literally on deadline, shipping it out a couple minutes before the last UPS pickup time the day before its first airing, I suddenly found the energy to get a show done a few days ahead. Then I did another. And finally another. Now, where I would be struggling to finish most of the work for my March 25th show, I’m now casually and peacefully working on the show for April 8th and planning April 15th to do them both this weekend. The others are already burned to CD and shipped, or encoded as MP3′s and ready to hit the net for affiliates. If I needed to, I could take the next two weeks off and still be ahead of the game.

I’m also setting a deadline to finish writing my play and move on to another writing project. I’m going to milk this manic stage for all it’s worth before I level out or head back downward. That way, if I find myself needing to retreat for a month or so, I won’t get too far behind.

And this, thank you, is without any meds. My belief is that if you CAN manage your problems on your own, you should. Fewer side effects that way.

Oh, and to close out this entry, some words of wisdom from Mark Silverman.

“Don’t stick your dick in a blender, boy, and don’t ever shit where you sleep. Don’t have sex with your girlfriend’s mother and keep your bedroom neat. Don’t buy land from a Spaniard, don’t get a drunk tattoo, and don’t tell somebody you love them unless you really do.”

Haven’t updated in quite some time. Been busy.

In addition to my usual hectic schedule, I have a new project that’s starting to percolate that hopefully will result in a funny movie-like-object.

Back in 1992, Ronnie Motta, Alex Chauvin, and I shot a sketch for our TV show Edited For Television. We went out to shoot the sketch having nothing more than a shitload of props and a three word concept dreamt up by Alex: “Foreign Object Basketball.” We shot about 15 minutes worth of footage, which Mike Nelson and I took into the editing room and patched together into a four minute sketch. The footage was shot more or less at random with only a few vague notions of what we wanted; the sketch was literally made in the editing and our voiceover “play by play” was almost entirely ad-libbed. It was a great experience.

Later on, Mike and I were talking about repeating the process on a grander scale, and doing an entire episode of EFT that way. It would be a pastiche and parody of badly-dubbed martial arts movies, which we would call “Edited For Tae Kwon Do.” Since EFT was cancelled fairly quickly, we never made that episode.

Now I have a few friends who I had mentioned the concept to, and they love the idea, and agree with me that it could work. So, as an experiment (and a lot of fun) we’re going to try it on an even grander scale: a feature-length movie.

The idea is to use digital video cameras, and shoot somewhere in the neighborhood of 6 or 7 hours of random footage in as many locations as possible, with as many actors as possible, using only one or two random characters and a “hero” interacting with most of the combinations as linking devices. The idea will be to shoot as many “dialogue” shots and cover shots as we can, and some well-choreographed bad fighting sequences which we can digitally undercrank to make them look much faster.

Once we have enough, I’ll take it into the editing room (actually, onto a PC most likely) and string together enough footage as I possibly can to make it look like something that has — or could conceivably have — a coherent plot line. I’ll then gather together a crack writing team to watch the silent version of this creation and help me write a dialogue script. Then I’ll get some voice artists together (most of the actual performers I imagine) to dub the new dialogue over the footage, just as foreign films are dubbed. (One catch would be that no actor would be allowed to dub his own voice; if I’m the one “speaking” on the screen, I won’t be the actor to record the dialogue for example.)

The next step is to start scouting locations, and lining up performers. Any ideas, let me know.