Top 10 Top 10

Top 10 rabbit + crow Top 10 Lists

1. 10 Words Never Used By The Queen
   
2. 10 Things I Like About President Bush
   
3. 10 New Star Wars Planets
   
4. 10 Best Medieval Movies
   
5. 10 Anagrams For "Doctor Phil"
   
6. 10 Things I Love About The Film Industry
   
7. 10 Most Irritating Things To Get Stuck Under Your Eyelid
   
8. 10 Movies About Scientists
   
9. 10 Favorite Assassinations
   
10. 10 New Orleans Horror Movies
    

Sitting

Surf Board or Jet Ski?

Surf Board or Jet Ski?

In Voluptas Mors

by Philippe Halsman, in collaboration with Salvador Dali, 1951

Ping Pong

Live!

Top 10 Best Names from Edgar Rice Burroughs

One of the great talents possessed by the sci-fi-adventure novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs was the effortless creation of elegant, illustrative, poetic - in all ways perfect - names for his fantastic characters, places, creatures.

Here are ten of his best:

Banth

Barsoom

Dejah Thoris

Kerchak

Mahar

Pellucidar

Phutra

Sabor

Tars Tarkas

Tarzan

Read 'em & weep, GEORGE LUCAS! Who's your daddy, beeeeeaaatchhhh ?!!!

Matterhorn

Mountain of the Imagination - podcast

EPISODE V

Unable to evade the terrible Terrible Lizards lurking outside my Tunnel of the Imagination, I decide to take an alternate route across Eye Sockets Island - the treacherous mountain route.

Treacherous it is. And mountainous.

Did I mention it was treacherous?

Click HERE
to listen to this week's treacheriffic
rabbit + crow podcast.

Featuring:

• Again with the Terrible Lizards
  
• Mountain climbing handbook
• The heights of idiocy
• Aiyeee!
• I'm a Mountain Man

← Episode 4 of the Imagination | Episode 6 of the Imagination →

To subscribe to ALL rabbit + crow audio & video podcasts paste
http://rabbitandcrow.libsyn.com/rss
into "Subscribe" under your iTunes "Advanced" menu

Gilbert Sorrentino (1929 – 2006)

Obituary of writer Gilbert Sorrentino, quoted in full from today's LATimes.com:

Gilbert Sorrentino, 77; Avant-Garde Novelist, Professor

By Elaine Woo, Times Staff Writer

May 24, 2006

Gilbert Sorrentino once wrote, "If you make a better book the world will build a mousetrap at your door."

With one exception over a five-decade writing career, the mousetrap was always at Sorrentino's door.

The author of 15 novels — including a parodist's feast called "Mulligan Stew" — Sorrentino was a master of avant-garde fiction whose work was admired by other writers. That the world never beat a path to his door did not unduly concern him. That most critics found him hard to peg bothered him more, but their neglect made no appreciable dent in his prolific career on the imaginative rim of American letters.

"Sorrentino was an American master," novelist Don DeLillo said Tuesday of the longtime Stanford University professor of literature and creative writing, who was 77 at his death Thursday in New York City. The cause was complications of lung cancer.

"His work has humor, anger, passion and deep-reaching memory. But he wrote against the times," DeLillo said, "against the pressure to be commercially successful. There was an edge in his work that wasn't always easy to accept."

Said Bradford Morrow, a novelist and editor of the literary journal Conjunctions: "I think of him as a contemporary Swift. Writers adore him. He just didn't do the right move to get famous, like a Norman Mailer barroom brawl. Sorrentino was very retiring. And he was not going to court the culture he was attacking."

Sorrentino's novels could be surreal, erotic and always humorous. His characters were surface-deep, the better to mock their motives, desires and dreams. As befitting a postmodernist, he chose forms that contrived to puncture expectations, leading readers into what one reviewer called "one hall of mirrors after another."

Sorrentino wrote eight volumes of poetry in addition to the novels, and also had worked as an editor. He founded a literary magazine called Neon in 1956 and was an editor at Kulchur magazine in the early 1960s before joining Grove Press, where he edited Alex Haley's "Autobiography of Malcolm X."

He eventually left publishing for academia, teaching at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University and the New School for Social Research in New York before Stanford hired him in 1982. "He had a sharp wit and did not suffer fools gladly," recalled Jonathan Mayhew, a student of Sorrentino in the mid-1980s who now is a professor at the University of Kansas.

He stayed at Stanford for 20 years, despite a strong aversion to California culture. On his arrival, he grudgingly learned to drive — at age 53 — but remained "completely bollixed by the suburban lifestyle," Sorrentino, a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker, told Publishers Weekly a few years ago. "The happiest day of my life was when I sold my car" just before returning to his native Brooklyn in 2002.

"He was like a fish out of water in California," said his son, Christopher, also a novelist. Sorrentino is also survived by his wife, Victoria Ortiz; another son, Jesse; and three grandchildren. A daughter, Delia, died three years ago.

The son of a Sicilian immigrant, Sorrentino grew up in a working-class environment. He attended Brooklyn College for two years, which were interrupted by service in the Army Medical Corps from 1951 to 1953. By then he knew that he wanted to be a writer and embarked on what he later described as "this massive, hopeless novel," which remained in the drawer after he finished it.

He put out two volumes of poetry — much of it inspired by New York and its people — before turning out his first published novel, "The Sky Changes," in 1966. A story about a miserably married couple on a trip across America, it is told out of sequence because "there really is no past that is worse than the present and there is no future that will be better than the present," Sorrentino told the Grosseteste Review in 1973.

His later novels continued to experiment with form. "Steelwork" (1970), inspired by Sorrentino's Brooklyn childhood, "is made up of 96 separate but interlocking dramatic vignettes, scenes which, in their arrangement within the novel, scramble chronology," critic Jerome Klinkowitz wrote. His last novel, "Little Casino" (2002) has unnamed characters and stops arbitrarily at 52 chapters — the number of weeks in a year. "All form is utterly artificial," he declared in an interview.

Such departures from convention annoyed many critics, such as Jeffrey A. Frank, who wrote in the Washington Post in 1990 that Sorrentino "is an acquired taste."

In "Mulligan Stew," Sorrentino pulled out all the stops. A mulligan stew is a mishmash of ingredients, little bits of lots of things. Sorrentino's novel combines what critic Michael Dirda described as "morsels for every literary taste," parodies of forms including cheap detective fiction, the western, bad poetry and pornography.

Critics called it his masterpiece.

Kenneth John Atchity, writing in the Los Angeles Times, said "Mulligan Stew" was a "singular event in the history of wit and imagination." Dirda, in the Washington Post, wrote that it "contains some of the best parodies since S.J. Perelman at his most manic, and perhaps the most corrosive satire of the literary scene since early Aldous Huxley." John Leonard, in the New York Times, wrote: "There is a very real question as to whether avant-garde fiction can survive Gilbert Sorrentino's new novel." The New York Times Book Review named it one of the best books of 1979.

The main character is a writer of middling success named Lamont, and the novel contains Lamont's novel-in-progress. The surreal aspect is that Lamont's characters lead their own lives when Lamont leaves his desk. The well-read reader would glean their heritage: One character, Ned Beaumont, is from Dashiell Hammett's "The Glass Key"; Daisy and Tom Buchanan are from F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby"; and Dick Halpin once worked for a "Mr. Joyce" — in a footnote in James Joyce's colossal "Finnegans Wake."

When Lamont's novel collapses, his characters abandon him.

Such utter failure may have been Sorrentino's fear. He received 28 rejection notices for "Mulligan Stew" before Grove embraced it in 1979.

He was famous for a brief period, then fell into obscurity again, publishing 10 more novels with small presses that were barely noticed by critics.

"He just didn't care … if people didn't get it. He was always his own man," said Morrow, who knew Sorrentino for more than two decades.

Or, as Halpin says to his fellow characters before he deserts Lamont: "To you other cats and chicks out there … a shake and a hug and a kiss and a drink. Cheers!"

Lawrence of Amphibia

Top 20 Director/Actor Collaborations

There is a dazzling variety of life-long partnerships between film directors and their favorite actors. In the case of those listed below, it would seem that almost any one name could be dropped and replaced with another. John Mills, for example, was in more of David Lean's films than Alec Guinness, but I believe that, in the masterpieces that Lean and Guinness made together, each artist was essential for the other to do his best work, and the films they made would have suffered without the presence of both. Likewise, Max von Sydow was famously Ingmar Bergman's male lead of choice, but I would argue that Bergman's collaborations with Liv Ullmann reveal the deeper talents of both director and performer in ways that neither could match alone. And, again, one might insist that Federico Fellini's greatest collaboration was not with Marcello Mastroianni, but with his wife, Giulietta Massina, but Marcello - he is more than just an actor, no?

I invite you to submit your own choices - or to shoot down mine - in the Comments section.

With that in mind ...

The 20 Greatest Director/Actor Collaborations

1. Woody Allen / Diane Keaton
2. Ingmar Bergman / Liv Ullman
3. The Coen Bros. / John Goodman
4. George Cukor / Katharine Hepburn
5. Federico Fellini / Marcello Mastroianni
6. John Ford / John Wayne
7. Jean-Luc Godard / Anna Karina
8. D.W. Griffith / Lillian Gish
9. Akira Kurosawa / Toshiro Mifune
10. Werner Herzog / Klaus Kinski
11. Alfred Hitchcock / James Stewart
12. John Huston / Humphrey Bogart
13. David Lean / Alec Guinness
14. Mike Leigh / Timothy Spall
15. Bruce Robinson / Richard E. Grant
16. Martin Scorsese / Robert De Niro
17. Don Siegel / Clint Eastwood
18. François Truffaut / Jean-Pierre Léaud
19. Wong Kar Wai / Tony Leung Chiu Wai
    
20. Zhang Yimou / Gong Li

I Done Went To Disneyland

Yep. I done done it.

I happily went to the Happiest Place on Earth - or the happiest place in Anaheim - this weekend with a Friend On The Inside - a Disney employee. He was able to say the secret password which got us into the park for free and got us discounts on everything in the park.

Yes. Discounts! Oh, such happiness!

So a $6 hotdog became a $4.50 hotdog. But I don't mind paying $4.50 for a hotdog, when I'm saving a $300 admission price.

I exaggerate - as is my custom. The Disneyland entry fee is nowhere near $300. It's actually $200...per person.

I exaggerate again.

It's not really $200 per person.

It's $79.00.

And I'm not exaggerating. No, not this time.

True, if you're not old enough to go to the restroom by yourself it is cheaper. But I am old enough to go to the restroom by myself - and have been for two or three years now. I'm happy to have not had to spend that money.

But that $79.00 does admit you to both amusement parks.

Yes, BOTH parks.

Disneyland has a new companion park. "California Nightmare" it's called - or something like that. It's entirely devoted to providing you with the experience of going to Los Angeles - Hollywood specifically - without having to perform the upsetting and unpleasant task of actually having to go there. Any tourist who has actually spent a day on Hollywood Blvd. will tell you, "This wasn't what I expected. It's a bit of a let down. I got jabbed with a dirty needle."

There has been a concerted effort to turn Hollywood Blvd. into a more tourist-friendly avenue - or boulevard - with some success, but it's been an uphill battle. Disney's "California Land of Horrors" gives you a Hollywood Boulevardish experience that preserves - maybe "conjures" is a better word, as there really is little there to preserve - the illusion of Hollywood glamour. The park presents a clean, crack- and booze-free row of shops and eateries, utterly absent of cars - or bikes, or anything with wheels - where Raymond Chandler and all his wretched kind have been exterminated forever...

...or have they?

Lurking at the back of this nausea-inducing pseudo-H'wood is one of the few "California Adventureville" thrill rides. As you turn right on Sunset Blvd." - which is impossible in real life, but in this freaky Disney-universe Sunset Blvd. is perpendicular to Hollywood Blvd. - you are struck by the sight of a large decrepit hotel - taller than any hotel actually in Hollywood. And from this hotel, you hear screams - hideous human screams of terror! There's the Hollywood I know and love!!

The "hotel" houses a very good - and scary (hence the screams) - free-fall ride with a Rod Serling "Twilight Zone" theme. The Tower of Terror, it's called. Standing in the long line to board the ride you are invited to contemplate a crumbling, cobweb-ridden hotel lobby which certainly was modeled on the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel, the venerable Hollywood landmark just west of Disney's El Capitan Theater (in the theme park, the El Capitan only appears in a background painting - apparently that is one part of Hollywood that Disney would prefer you visit in person).

"Barton Fink" is one of my favorite movies about Hollywood, and what Disney has done with the Tower of Terror is create a fine Barton Fink ride - Hollywood as decay, delusion, addiction, the cracks wallpapered over but always there. Even the ride operators' magenta bellhop costumes remind you not of "Hey, welcome to Hollywood! You're going to be a star!", but of Steve Buscemi's bellhop character, "Chet", who repeats his awful name ad nauseum. Then writes it down for the newly arrived Barton Fink. Then underlines it.

The Tower of Terror saves Disneyland's "California Adventure" park from being an obscene tourist trap and turns into a work of art.

CalifoRNia Adventure

Day Planner

I'M

GONNA


DISNEYLAND ! ! !

Super 8 at 18 at 18:00

When I was young, my dad and I did more than one tour around southern Europe - the classical highlights primarily - Paris and Athens and, of course, Florence/Rome/Venice.

In those days images were captured on photographic film. Here is an example:

Feed The Shark

Quick! You have to Feed The Shark 5 things! What will you feed him??

Me, I'm feeding The Shark:

1. a sandwich (cheese & watercress)
2. old tires
3. human flesh
4. all those magazines we have lying around the house
5. melba toast

Tunnel of the Imagination - podcast

EPISODE IV

Marooned on the mysterious Eye Sockets Island, I seek safety in a tunnel while fanged Terrible Lizards lurk outside. The cave is damp and darkish and scrawled with the most upsetting graffiti imaginable. Fortunately, I have brought my Jude The Obscure series of action-adventure novels.

Click HERE to listen to this week's harrowing rabbit + crow podcast.

Featuring:

• Terrible Lizards
• "Jude The Obscure" series of action-adventure tales
• Caving & claustrophobia-phobia
• Lascaux & the depressed Neanderthal
• Bats
  

← Episode 3 of the Imagination | Episode 5 of the Imagination →

To subscribe to ALL rabbit + crow audio & video podcasts paste
http://rabbitandcrow.libsyn.com/rss
into "Subscribe" under your iTunes "Advanced" menu



rabbit + crow Odeo Channel (odeo/24ad1316bcd077b1)

Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics

Those of us dedicated to creating quality stories of action-adventure, sci-fi, horror - heck, any genre that features more than talking heads - must devote ourselves to careful study of Tom Rogers' very fine essays on Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics (ISMP) at intuitor.com.

In Tom's own words:

Technonerds go to movies strictly for entertainment, and of course, the most entertaining part comes after the movie when they can dissect, criticize, and argue the merits of every detail. However, when supposedly serious scenes totally disregard the laws of physics in blatantly obvious ways it's enough to make us retch. The motion picture industry has failed to police itself against the evils of bad physics. This page is provided as a public service in hopes of improving this deplorable matter. The minds of our children and their ability to master vectors are (shudder) at stake.

Check it out.

Do You Know The Way To San Jose?

Do you know the way to San Jose?
I've been away so long. I may go wrong and lose my way.
Do you know the way to San Jose?
I'm going back to find some peace of mind in San Jose.

L.A. is a great big freeway.
Put a hundred down and buy a car.
In a week, maybe two, they'll make you a star
Weeks turn into years. How quick they pass,
And all the stars that never were
Are parking cars and pumping gas.

You can really breathe in San Jose.
They've got a lot of space. There'll be a place where I can stay.
I was born and raised in San Jose.
I'm going back to find some peace of mind in San Jose.

Fame and fortune is a magnet.
It can pull you far away from home.
With a dream in your heart you're never alone.
Dreams turn into dust and blow away,
And there you are without a friend
You pack your car and ride away

L.A. is a great big freeway.
Put a hundred down and buy a car.
In a week, maybe two, they'll make you a star.
Weeks turn into years. How quick they pass,
And all the stars that never were
Are parking cars and pumping gas.

I've got lots of friends in San Jose.
Do you know the way to San Jose?
Can't wait to get back to San Jose.

lyrics by Burt Bacharach

Birthday Girl

Today is my wife's birthday.

She is great.

I love her.

She has not yet figured out that I married up.

Happy B-day, JTW!

Top 10 Red Movies

Ten Best Movies with "Red" in the title:

1. Deep Red (1975)
2. The Hunt For Red October (1990)
3. Little Red Riding Rabbit (1944)
4. Raise The Red Lantern (1991)
5. Red Beard (1965)
6. Red Dawn (1984)
7. Red Desert (1964)
8. Red River (1948)
9. The Red Shoes (1948)
10. Trois Couleurs: Rouge (1994)

Honorable Mention: Red Scorpion (1989) (written & produced by Jack Abramoff!)

Outstretched

My Green Hero

This morning, I was introduced to my new hero.

I was waiting for the bus, staring at the sidewalk, thinking about my wretched life and insurmountable financial problems, and how I have to live in Los Angeles where the weather is always 72 degrees, and how if it were up to me the world would be very different and how I know for a fact that if everyone just did exactly as I suggested we would all be a lot happier and there would be only peace and prosperity and brotherhood for all, and how the hell did I get stuck with a wife and family who love me, when suddenly ...

... a bicyclist - a girl in green, on a green bicycle - rode past and ...

... WHAM! hit the asphalt!

As if her bike was a pissed-off horse, or camel, the bike upended and threw her down hard into the middle of the lane.

I stared for a second or two. Not as stunned as she was. But pretty stunned. I think I was waiting for the next car to flatten her and her bike and finish the job. "What is that going to be like?" I almost wondered, "when the next car comes. This I gotta see."

She started to get up.

I peeked out into the road to see if the coup de grace auto was approaching. It wasn't. Traffic, seeing the accident, had slowed, watching, waiting.

The girl picked up her bike and her helmet and her packed-full backpack and one of her wide-size slip-on shoes and her granola-hip handbag, all of which had found different touch-down points in the road. And she drug them all over to the sidewalk.

(I should say "she dragged them", but it doesn't quite capture it. I must stick with "she drug them")

She drug them all over to the sidewalk.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

She didn't answer. Or if she did, I didn't hear her.

Her face was white and red with upset. A heavy belly peeked out from under her green top. Did she have on a green headband?

She leaned her bike against the graffiti-scratched bus stop bench and commenced recovery of the bike's "black box", opening her investigation into the cause of the tragic downing of this mode of transportation so essential to our American way of life.

I observed.

Her knuckles and elbow were painted with mauve scrapes, themselves still too shocked to begin bleeding. I imagined her knees and legs were the same.

"Are you alright?" I asked again.

"Yeah," she answered, not looking up, limbs trembling.

Next Thursday, May 18 is Ride Your Bike To Work Day. My wife told me that last night.

I thought to myself: "Should I take a picture?" I never go anywhere without a camera.

But I felt too much sympathy for her. Sometimes symphathy can induce a photographer to start shooting like Rambo. But not in this case. Not for me. I'm not a dyed-in-the-wool photojournalist. I wish I had that singleness of purpose, but I don't.

Her investigation revealed the following:

She had been wearing a lightweight green scarf. The had scarf descended into the spokes of the front wheel. And that, as they say, was that.

She inspected the scarf, wound and tightly coiled round the front tire and spokes like a well-ensconced python.

I wondered if anyone had a knife or scissors on them. Should I ask? Should I go up to a stranger on the bus stop line and ask: "Do you have a knife on you? Or scissors? Or some kind of blade?"

And if I did find one, would it be wise to approach this traumatized girl with gleaming sharpened steel in my fist?

I stayed still.

She worked meticulously, coaxing, unknotting the scarf from the spokes and wheel. I would have said it couldn't be done. But she did it.

I didn't see the moment when the grappling prehensile tailtip of scarf at last gave up its hold. I had been trying to look away most of the time. And as I looked away I would find myself looking back, wondering if I should help. Wondering what I could possibly do to help. Wondering what I would want. What would I want if I were in her slip-on shoes? I would want to be left alone, that's what I would want. I thought I might suggest to her that the next bus could convey her down the street if she couldn't get the bike back in working order. I imagined myself - practiced it in my head - asking the bus driver on her behalf to give her a ride down to wherever she was headed.

A healthy cluster of commuters had gathered at the bus stop, all of them putting much effort into not watching her.

The green scarf was put away.

The bike chain had jumped the tracks as well. She stared at it. She touched it, as if to wake it up, as if to see if it was still breathing.

From her backpack she produced a folded sheet of paper with printing on it that could have come from the packaging of some recently purchased product. She consulted the page, and what was written there was helpful. Putting the bike on end, she managed to get the chain back on track.

Her scrapes were bright red now with newly seeping blood.

She dabbed at them with some crumpled tissue paper from her backpack. I heard her sniff too. She might have wiped her nose or her eyes. She deposited the tissue paper into an overflowing bus stop trash can.

I prepared to say to her, as she readied herself to get back on the bike: "You're going to have a great day from now on."

But I didn't say anything.

I watched her strap on her helmet. Watched her hoist on her heavy backpack. Watched her pull up her too-long green skirt so she could mount the bicycle seat.

And she rode off.

I waited for the bus.

The bus came.

I got on and didn't have to pay. An orange-red covering over the fee accepting robot seated at the driver's right hand declared technical problems, or perhaps a sudden socialist turn amongst the bus drivers union.

I got the camera ready.

And when we zipped past the girl in green, who was waiting at a corner, I got off a single shot through the window.

Too late. I missed her. I got a picture of the road just in front of her instead.

It's Red

Sure, I like the color green. Who doesn't?

But I must confess I'm really starting to like red a lot these days.

I liked red when I was a kid.

Red and black.

That's what it's all about when you're a teenage boy. It's all about the red and the black. Hence the special appeal of the Nazi aesthetic to wayward teenagers (see the most recent podcast "Eye Sockets Island of the Imagination" for more hilarious observations on Nazis and teens).

As I entered the 20's, the red began to fade, and it became mostly just about the black. Black and white. That's all I wore in my 20's. Big white shirts and black pants and black shoes. In fact, people would say "Neal Romanek? Isn't he that guy who dresses like a waiter?" True story.

After the nightmare that is the 20's passed, color began to seep back into my world. I stopped my nightly attempts to drown in my own vomit and that really did wonders for my nervous system. Colors began to pop out at me like weasels on meth. And blue became wonderful to me. And I came to very much love the greens. All the various greens. The green is great. "Great Is The Green" (hmm...novel title? or is a stage play? Perhaps about American middle-class malaise?).

But lately, yeah, been thinking about red.

They say that red is often a color of youth. Chinese brides have traditionally worn red. In Asia, so I've heard, white is the color of death. Red is fresh cuts and fresh fruit. Red is fire and brimstone. Red is rage and revolution.

I've been seeing red. I've been seeing red more often. I don't know if red has seen me yet.

I have been photographed wearing the red shoes.

I have photographed my own damn self wearing the red shoes.

I like the red shoes.

Almost never in my life have I been without a pair of the red shoes. When I was a kid it was high tops. Now it's some English-made suedely bootlets with a rough & ready tread on the sole.

When I wear the red shoes, I am reminded that my blood keeps moving, moving, moving, no matter what I say or do.

I'm wearing the red shoes now.

But the laces are black.

Knowledge of Time and Space

Congratulations to Cheop The Cat on ONCE AGAIN attaining enlightenment.

This after eating an entire can of tuna fish (albacore, chunk) in 15 seconds (also a personal best!!).



We are all very proud of him.

Eye Sockets Island of the Imagination - podcast

EPISODE III

After days adrift on the Debris Raft of the Imagination I finally wade ashore onto Eye Sockets Island.

Come with me as I trek across the -pede infested jungle in search of a fruit, companionship, and a way home while avoiding and evading cute octopussies and coconut crabs.

Click HERE to listen. If you dare.

Featuring:

• Fruit crabs
  
• "Jude The Obscure", "Jude The Barbarian", "Jude The Druggist" ...
• "Triumph Of The Will" and other comedies
  
• "May you poo over a snake's nest."
  
• A moving hill
  

← Episode 2 of the Imagination | Episode 4 of the Imagination →

To subscribe to ALL rabbit + crow audio & video podcasts paste
http://rabbitandcrow.libsyn.com/rss
into "Subscribe" under your iTunes "Advanced" menu

The Dinosaurs Have Vomited

I have finally recovered the Libsyn podcast page from voracious Terrible Lizards.

They brought it up, unscathed, in a series of hair balls. Why Terrible Lizards have hairballs is anyone's guess.

In any case, you can go to rabbitandcrow.libsyn.com at once and celebrate by listening to rabbit + crow podcasts until you freak right the heck out.

Then check back tonight at 8pm Pacific Time for the newest ripping episode in Neal Romanek's podcasting adventuredom, entitulared: "Eye Sockets Island Of The Imagination".

In other news:

One of y'all had asked for more stories and not so many fruity poems and whiny political rants and breezy rambles about my day. Happily, in the next weeks I'm making available a few short stories. They'll be available here, and I'll also have links to them on the writing page at nealromanek.com.

I may even podcast them for those of you who can't read. And the blind too. I podcast for the blind.

We're still waiting for word back from the Comic-Con 2006 crew as to whether or not we will have our Writers Table at the show (July 20 - 23) - "we" being myself and Warren Hsu Leonard of Screenwriting Life. Apparently, Comic-Con have had a record number of applications and there is much back-log and log-jam and back-jam. But time grows short. I grow anxious. I may have to make some calls. Or at least call Warren and have him make some calls.

Comic-Con is a great place for artists and illustrators to meet other artists and illustrators. In fact, you can't swing a cat without scratching out the eyes of an artist or illustrator. But there is a dearth of good writers. There are lots of passable writers in comics. Not many good writers. So hopefully we'll be able to help out with that.

In two weeks, I'm going to formally announce my request for submissions from artists/illustrators to collaborate on the first rabbit + crow graphic novel.

So start polishing up your portfolios.

Again, check back tonight for the next " ----- of the Imagination" terror-cast.

Podcasting of the Imagination

Dinosaurs have eaten our podcasts.

We are dosing the scaly fellows with gallon upon gallon of syrup of ipecac in the hopes that we will reacquire the new podcast and have it up and running in the next 24 hours.

We urge you all to stay home and repeatedly check rabbit + crow Bits & Shows for this newest and very marvelously great new example of podcasting goodness, which we have expertly entitled ...

"Eye Sockets Island of the Imagination"

Please, please, stay off the streets. There are dangerous prehistoric animals about.

Inside Pitch Pitch

If you are a screenwriter and you aren't reading the Q&A blog for screenwriters called "The Inside Pitch" (http://twoadverbs.blogspot.com) by ICM's executive story editor, Christopher Lockhart, well, then...you just aren't reading it then are you?

I think that's a fact we can all be in agreeance on.

However, you are also depriving yourself of some essential information on your malaria-ridden, leech-infested, lost-without-a-machete slog through the quagmire of the screenwriter's life.

Recently, he addressed the following question from a Hollywood writer:


What is the proper etiquette for switching managers/agents, assuming you already have representation that doesn't seem to be working for you?

Read Chris's sensible and straightforward response.

Wilshire Blvd. on May Day

!EREH MA I

They are outside the door! With torches!

They are wanting to know where their rabbit + crow t-shirt for the month of May are!

The 1st of each month we present a new somewhat interesting and extremely unique design. This design has been slapped onto t-shirts and stickers and t-shirts, which we then sell you. And you buy them. And all of us are happy again.

But now it's the 4th! The 4th of May already it is! And I hear you cry "Where's my damn t-shirt? I must have it at once! For I am naked and cold!"

Here!

Here it is!

HERE!

800

30 Words To Describe An Awful Sore

30 Words To Describe An Awful Sore (or Lesion)

1. Awful
2. Pustulent
3. Throbbing
4. Runny
5. Bothersome
6. Enflamed
7. Gory
8. Streaming
9. Weeping
10. Fragrant
11. Gruesome
12. Burning
13. Septic
14. Flowery
15. Itchy
16. Irritated
17. Angry
18. Repellent
19. Crusty
20. Irregular
21. Contagious
22. Iridescent
23. Shiny
24. Scabrous
25. Perpetual
26. Lucky
27. Vermillion
    
28. Holy
29. Life-changing
    
30. Expanding
    

There Goes The Neighborhood

I spent a few hours yesterday evening photographing details of the May Day immigrants march down Wilshire Blvd. here in Los Angeles.

The turnout was impressive - almost staggering. Marchers packed Wilshire Blvd. from MacArthur Park to La Brea Ave. - almost 4 miles. Police and other emergency workers were on the scene in large numbers, but kept to the background, standing by on sidestreets.

The vast majority of marchers were of Latin American ethnicity - many proudly proclaiming their U.S. citizenship, others proudly defending their undocumented status. I also saw marchers carrying banners announcing Korean, Thai, and Muslim attendance, but the vast majority of the marchers carried U.S. flags and the message was clearly conveyed that all present believed they were Americans, or should be treated as such.

Most strange was the appearance of a single Israeli flag, flying high on top of a building overlooking Wilshire. A handful of men and women stood beside it, taking pictures of the crowd, talking on cellphones, watching the spectacle.

European- and African-Americans were also present. They had cameras. They were photographing everything in sight.

The only other crowd of comparable size I have seen in my lifetime would be the masses of people in the streets for the royal wedding of Charles and Diana in London, though yesterday's immigrant crowds - for good reason - were better behaved. In fact, the atmosphere was celebratory and cheerful. It was a family event - grandparents, parents, children seemingly present in equal numbers. And there were chihuahuas too. My guess is that if you were a member of any Latin American community in Los Angeles, you were not staying home yesterday without a note from a doctor - and how likely would that be?

Whatever your take on the prickly immigrant question, it would be crazy to deny that Latin Americans do some first-rate grassroots democracy. Those us who spend our evenings grumbling at the tv could take a few pointers.



click on the pic to see more

Debris Raft of the Imagination - podcast

EPISODE II

"After the tragic downing of the Dirigible of the Imagination, I drifted, clinging to the wreckage, for I know not how long. Night and day melded together into one gray continuum - a continuum I came to call "naghy".

"At length, 'pon the horizon, an island did appear, of most singular and foreboding character. The reef-racked currents ushered my flotsam sanctuary shoreward until the island's mighty rocky outcroppings outcropped above me outcroppingly.

"And so I began to podcast ..."

Click HERE to listen.

Featuring:

• Somewhere between Argentina & Kamchatka
• Mysterious rock outcroppings
• Lieutenant Guy Swimware & "Jude The Obscure"
• Shark vs. Scotsman
  
• It's a SKULL!

← Episode 1 of the Imagination | Episode 3 of the Imagination →

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