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yo-

so i tried doing the "post on my blog/post on LJ thing". well, tbh, it sucks. IT'S LAME. waste of time.


if you wanna know what i'm up to go to http://flameape.org/blog.

i will post comments to your blogs though. ciao!

So I've been a bit on the low end of low lately- and this video I found meandering on the innertubenets made me smile. maybe because old-time punk days were fun, raw and uninhibited. maybe also because I like the security camera, out-of-sync DIY nature of it... mostly the goofy dancing and all- let's all do belly rolls and dance like fucking strippers in reckless B&W VIDEO ABANDON!!!

Quote the YouTube entry:

"This is a little video tribute to Laurel Rudy, the dancing waitress from Marsugi's, the coolest alternative music divebar that ever existed in San Jose, California. As May 27 is Laurel's birthday, I've decided to share this little clip today to celebrate her 29th birthday, seeing how I missed it the first time around. The music on this artsy-fartsy, no-budget black and white video clip doesn't actually match the video of the band, but who cares? Can Frank Novicki and Ken Schick pretend to be Flipper to sing "Sex Bomb?" Why the hell not? "

Common Craft - Explanations In Plain English

So I got to this site by trying to find out how to do some stuff in twitter, I'm http://twitter.com/flameape, BTW. Okay so I goto to this Common Craft site because of their video, " Twitter in Plain English", a video which promises to help the viewer understand in 2 and a half minutes what and why and who twitter is. and they more than succeed! so run there and find vids like:

Video: RSS in Plain English (433)

Video: Wikis in Plain English (375)

Video: Blogs in Plain English (261)

Just a quick copy/paste/send and no more wasting yer time explaining shit to your geek-deficient friends. Oh and did I mention that the vids were Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States? HMM? HUH?

I have done a bit of filmmaking and animation in my day... here's a few now posted to my blip.tv account. blip, BTW, is really so much better than youtube, i digress. take a look- lateroonio.

Started writing again- this time pure fiction without pictures. Might do a bit more...

STEALING THE BELLY-FLOWER IN THE LIGHT OF THE FUTURE

(work in progress)

by Greg Giordano

Haruku/i Shimada exploded out the door of the Bank Du Japon- his breath was like the panting of dogs chasing the rabbit at a dog race. But in truth he wasn't the dog- he was the rabbit. Several security guards and Parisian Gendarmes pursued him with earnest. The potted plant in his arms was large; the size of a canister vacuum from the 60s; or an oversized vase. Clumps of dirt and wood chips  jumped out of the pot and litter the pavement. The plant- a tiny palm tree sapling the size of a pear was hastily shoved into the pot by Haruku as he ran from the bank- the original plant- some unfashionable and ugly office fern- was ripped out by Haruku to make room for his tiny possession. He. pressed on with an intensity that was normally not his way. Haruku/i was a transgender-designated androgynous-fashion editor for a Akihabara Newsite called YESYOU.JP -a portal to trend obsession, famous people and gadgets- Haruku/i was a self-admitted lazy coward and prided “him-self” on not caring much at all for anything difficult or important. Parties, cellphone-of-the-week, fashionistas and drugs were “his” life. All that changed- she thought. All that was over.

S/he had the quality of desperation that you would associate with people beneath s/his stature. Addict-thieves, or the insane. Or those American women who kidnap and steal children from pregnant women's bellies. Haruku/i read on the Manichi report that the way these insane American women do it is to kidnap some suburban pregnant mother at a shopping center or supermarket and without anesthesia- cut the baby from the mother's belly. These in-utero baby-nappers then run off – bloody newborns in there arms; swaddled in whatever can be found- like a black leaf and lawn bag or even some freshly purchased percale towel from Bed Bath and Beyond. That was what Haruku/i Shimada imagined he looked like, running around the corner from the Bank Du Japon in downtown Paris at 1 P.M., like one of those crazy women who had just cut a fetus from it's mother and dashed off, police in short pursuit. He imagined the potted plant soaked in blood and amniotic fluid; trailing a tooth-cut umbilicus- slipping on the mess as he ran in his 237,000YEN Perseus Kamchatka lambskin espadrilles. Haruku imagined the onlookers as intrigued, aghast, dumbstruck- which was the case- sliding on birth-gore as he ran in the Perseus Kamchatka's- shoes that he stole two days ago, because he couldn't allow himself to part with them at the boutique on Rue San du Blanc. He couldn't afford them on his fashion editor wages- but as Kiku said so many times to him on their “shopping sessions”, “...if God didn't want us to be a kleptomaniacs, then he wouldn't have made expensive shoes, darling, WE DON'T PAY...”. The blood and birth sac bounced up in the air then underfoot splashing and she skidded to the left, as he ran. That was because it wasn't his imagination; the emergency-potted, prized Encephalartos woodii, probably one of the rarest plants in the world- was cut from the belly of Haruku/i's target; his “client”; he cut it from the belly of a sumo wrestling, fat-fetish internet pornstar named La LUNA, aka. Ikumi Sakamoto under her understandably loud protestations in the ladies room of the Bank de Japon's Safety Deposit Box vault.

Because the plant was soaked in blood and amniotic fluid; trailing a tooth-cut umbilicus; he was to say the least, easily found in the teeming masses of Paris' business district. WHERE THE HELL IS ROY'S VAN?!, s/he thought, grabbing the Pharos 3470 HTC GPS phone from a fashionable and super-convenient jacket cellphone pocket, find me-find-me-find me!

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As you may or may not know, Bronze-age comics writer, Steve Gerber- creator of "Howard the Duck", "Omega the Unknown", "Nevada", "Foolkiller" and "Thundarr the Barbarian"; writer of "Son of Satan"," Morbius the Living Vampire" ,"Lilith, Daughter of Dracula", "The Defenders", "Man-Thing", Tales of the Zombie and many others, passed away Sunday, February 10, 2008 in Las Vegas. He was 60. Jeff Lester of THE SAVAGE CRITIC blog offers the following eulogy:

Saying Kaddish: The Passing of Steve Gerber.

posted by: Jeff Lester @ 6:33 PM

It's been said by much smarter men than myself (Jules Feiffer and Gerard Jones being but two) that Judaism is perhaps the real secret identity at the heart of the superhero experience--one doesn't have to look much farther than Lieber and Kurtzberg, who built Marvel comics under the pen names of Lee and Kirby, to make a case for it. Of all the many things I've thought about Steve Gerber--and believe me, I've thought about him a lot since learning of his passing earlier today--what sticks with me is that Gerber was the hero without the mask, the guy brave enough to forego the secret identity. I grew up in whiter-than-white Humboldt County and even I could tell that Gerber was Jewish: his stories were always of outsiders (outsiders even by Marvel's standards) and usually focused on defiant, frequently angry, guys who viewed with both bemusement and amusement the world surrounding them. By the time I got to high school and started reading Malamud (a little), Bellow (embarrassingly less), and Roth (a whole shitload), I could see how Gerber and his work belonged as much to their tradition--that of the soulful shit-stirrer--as to Stan's patented mix of soap opera and winking carnival barker. The term "patented" is almost more than cliched hyperbole, by the way. What makes eulogizing Gerber difficult--and it will be even more difficult when other writers of his generation pass on--is that his most substantial work was done while stylistically imitating someone else. Every writer passing through Marvel in the '70s had to write in Stan's house style and now that styles and mainstream tastes have finally progressed, I find it's a bit of tough sell to convince younger readers--and more than occasionally myself--that there's good writing buried underneath all the labored rhetoric, and the expository diatribes and the "Dear God, no!" melodramas, and those last panel captions that read, "And somewhere, in the distance, comes the gentle weeping...of a clown." One of Gerber's achievements--and I'm not sure if someone who doesn't know the period can really appreciate what a strange achievement it is--was to develop his own voice while immersed within that of another: within the Stanisms were the Gerberisms, the things you found only in Gerber's work, that held their own spell, bdspoke their own worldview. Cults popped up regularly in Gerber's work; so did supporting characters who would get fed up and leave the story; plots would expand out and then suddenly collapse in. The rich tapesty of the multiverse would unfold but always in the periphery: in the Florida everglades, in the park on a quiet day, over the Cuyahoga River burning at midnight. And at these places, you'd find an angry but decent guy--Richard Rory or Jack Norris or Howard the Duck--aware of his relative powerlessness, frustrated and bitterly amused at that powerlessness. As I said, I recognized that guy in Bellow's Tommy Wilhelm, in Roth's Portnoy and Zuckerman. (With Wilhelm, the recognition was semi-literal: when I read Seize the Day for the first time, my mental picture of Tommy Wilhelm was Colan's interpretation of Howard the Duck as a human man.) Another Gerberism was the keystone for the idea of superhero as Jewish myth: Superman. At Marvel, Gerber created Wundarr the Aquarian, the superhero who is rocketed to Earth from a dying planet--except Wundarr arrives on Earth full-grown, with the intelligence of a child. With Mary Skrenes, Gerber created Omega The Unknown, a character that riffs equally on Superman and Captain Marvel--Omega is a hero come to Earth with a strange bond to a boy orphan. Later, Gerber went on to do several offbeat Superman projects. My favorite was the final issue of DC Presents where Gerber packed his entire pitch for Superman into one baffling Hail Mary: an insane Mr. Mxyzptlk destroys Argo City such that Metropolis is layered with a fine mist of kryptonite, and Superman, his power reduced, must live in pain and discomfort whenever he's Clark Kent, treading over the kryptonite impacted sidewalks of the city. In fact, at the heart of Gerber's best work is Superman and Clark Kent: the powerlessness lurking in the heart of the powerful and, equally as important, the power lurking in the heart of the powerless. (After all, it's usually Rory and Norris and Howard who are the tipping point in the battle between good and evil.) Such paradoxes transcended the two scoops of ego gratification and bathetic male self-pity served up in the work of Stan Lee and most of his successors. While far from immune to such weaknesses (Gerber's worst work is like reading Harlan Ellison at his most histrionic), the duality of power-in-powerlessness and powerlessness-in-power which Gerber returned to thematically was a genuine belief in the world, founded on the way he saw it work: cults and corporations collapsed under their own weight; the little guy, though screwed, could still wrest victory from the jaws of defeat if he just kept at it. I could type another ten thousand words and not get at the power of these and other achievements. (I didn't even start in on that awesome Daredevil storyline where the villain is an intelligent malevolent baboon whose pheromones make every woman his slave and who slugs it out with our hero on the roof of the White House, to say nothing of Starhawk, the first transgender superhero, Angarr The Screamer, the showgirl and the ostrich, KISS, Doctor Bong, etc., etc.) But what I should say is, Steve Gerber kept at it. He kept at it after Cat Yronwode (I believe) wrote an editorial about how his work no longer moved her; he kept at it after Jim Shooter cruelly (and inelegantly) mocked him in the first issue of Secret Wars II; he kept at it after Nevada was unceremoniously dumped, after Hard Time was canceled, after Marvel published Lethem's Omega The Unknown miniseries over Gerber's initial objections. Steve Gerber kept at it six days before he died, working in the middle of the night working on his current assignment, Doctor Fate. I'd like to believe in an afterlife, and Steve Gerber is there, keeping at it, seeing his stories end the way he wanted them to, when he wanted them to. If such an afterlife exists, it would be a world Gerber never spent much time considering, a world he never made--which would bring him, I hope, both bemusement and amusement, even if it meant he was finally the angry outsider no longer. Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled and honored, adored and lauded be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, beyond all the blessings and hymns, praises and consolations that are ever spoken in the world; and say, Amen.

NYTimes Obit Here.

So I'm watching this movie- Al Pacino film- "Two for the Money". Pacino, Russo, McConaughey...anyway, I'm watching this film mostly for distraction, I won't go into details, but it's been a rough road for a few months now. For like 4-5 months now. Not gonna bore you with the details. So anyway, Pacino is telling Matthew M.'s character about his sordid, abused childhood when MM goes on about his alchoholic dad. So here he is- Pacino, spilling his guts- revealing same about Russo's. And here I am watching this and reflecting. That and watching all the newest episodes of HBO's new show about a therapist called IN SESSION.

I'm Watching these shows- and the movie- Pacino gets to this part where he says this thing. He says, "...EVERYBODY is FUCKED UP!" He says that after all the therapy, all the psychiatry, and the "meetings"(AA, NA,etc)- "...WE are all fucked up..." He sarts to scream out loud,"I AM FUCKED UP AND I'M NOT GONNA TAKE IT ANYMORE!!"

...

So yeh. I think I understand something more than I did before. Not perfectly- not with a blast of epiphanic life altering fucking change. Just a bit of understanding. See I'm in the midst of what my M.D. calls a "mid-life crisis". I'm 41- and I'm looking over everything, EVERYTHING, EV-REE-THIIINNNNG. Part of that stuff I'm brewing and stewing over is the past- and allot of future. Who I am , what I've really accomplished. What do I want to be during this next phase of my life.

I don't know why I'm even writing this, except to say something to myself. Hmm. I DO know why. BEcause if I don't write this down, it will swim in my head like a fucking cyclone. so there. Self reflection, doubts, turmoil... "mid life". So what did I understand? Just that we are most likely, on some level or another- fucked up. And I know that I'm one of them/you/us. And I don't feel quite so alone right at this moment. And that works - just a little, to alleviate this panicky pain in my chest and jaw- and the rest. Just a hair. Just a touch.

And I can hold onto that.

oldie but a goodie...

http://www.cybermoonstudios.com/8bitDandD.swf