Starting From the Top Trip Review: Skies

Survival Skills

I haven’t been posting much because I have been on the road, but don’t worry – I am ok thanks to finding this invaluable survival pack:

The kit doesn’t come with instructions but you can pretty much gather from the photo on the display that you can survive anything, including the scratchy trees and aggressive wildlife of the Australian outback, using a four-piece manicure set.

As long as I make it through the next twenty-four hours without having to file a kangaroo to death, I’ll be back in the regular world soon, loaded with stories of Michigan, Ohio, and Kentucky and all the blurry road signs in between.

The Road

Internet and cell phone reception has been spotty. I’ve been able to upload pictures here though.

So far I have seen two different deer families. Total deer count is at seven. One  crew of four in my parent’s back yard and another pack of three on a dirt service road. How do I know they were families? I guess I don’t, but they seemed to be together. Maybe they were deer gangs. Orphaned deer that form a makeshift family after the circumstances of hunting season have left them to live in a small space where seven deer have to stop being polite and start getting real.

We met some friends for dinner tonight at a place in the northern burbs. We took roads like “Duck Lake Road” and “Cooley Road” and “Bogie Lake Road”.  The sun was going down pretty quickly (it gets dark at 2:30pm here) and we had to swerve around trucks on the side of the road because so many dudes (and maybe some gals) had stopped for a post-work hunt. We saw a few people wandering in the woods with their guns and their orange vests. Orange vests over business casual wear. I like that image. Reminded me a little bit of living in California and how all the surfers parked along the highway to have an evening surf – it was kind of like that expect the shooting animals and tying them to the back of your truck part. Somewhere in the world there is a post-work-surf-hunt hybrid activity going on.

I like the post-work activities here in Dearborn:

More later. Due to the internet connection, the chances of this post posting before December 2012 are slim.

Library Book of The Week: Feline Stars

Another astrology book! This one is cat themed and has beautiful, or should I say, purrrrrfect illustrations of housecats and their corresponding zodiac sign.   Some of you may recognize this from my instagram – but I really wanted to show more pictures (no filters needed). Ladies and gents, I present to you STAR CATS!





Cats are just like the signs of the zodiac! Individual temperaments and interests. Like my sign, Cancer, or the Chesterton cat, enjoys water and sand creatures. TRUE.





Look! The Chesterton has a clipped ear! Sign of a cancerian fighter perhaps?
Some Sagittarius cat dog-eared a page! Typical.



Cats, cosmic relationships, and comets:



I really want to meet the author, Lesley Ann:

That’s it for now. I’m on the road! Holiday road trip! I’m such a Chesterton.

Lazy Bloggers Make Lists

A list from the week:

• My favorite Pinterest boards are these.
• Mercury is in retrograde so of course my old desktop (kept alive since 2005 and used to download things from unreputable sources) crashed on Wednesday. I hope to resuscitate the hard drives. If I can’t, I won’t be posting for weeks because I will be crying that whole time. Did I leave precious photos and writing and video memories on there? Yes. When is the last time I backed that up? 2005.
• I started taking a pottery class because I need something sensible to fall back on in this economy – I feel like handicrafts and the plumbing trade are sure bets for the future. My interest in clay isn’t completely unfounded. I have a thing for Beatrice Wood and I studied what they call “fine art” in undergrad. I took many ceramics classes and I was very into pinch pots. This new class might be one of the best things that happened to me all week! It is during the day at a community center in a suburb of the city so can you imagine who is taking a pottery class in the middle of the day in a southern suburb? If you said the cast of Steel Magnolias – you are right!
• We put a new behind-the-scenes video up here from The Keepers. It is from one of the pre-production tours we took with the incredibly darling primate keeper. If you are a feeling human being, you will be charmed. If you are a chimp you will be like, “Yeah. Whatever. I can do that.”
• I was a week late renewing my car registration and it didn’t even cost me one penny extra. I wish I would have pushed this further.

Have a hellofa weekend.

Ahhh-merica

I love election time and cotton season. That up above is from my trip to class last night.

Library Book of the Week: Election Edition

Chill out y’all. I have it on good authority, as in – from a reference book (don’t even THINK about checking it out from the library – it has to stay there), that in 2012 – the incumbent will win the election.

The Astrological Chart of the United States was published in 1976 (maybe as a bicentennial gift?) by Stein and Day. That is the author Gar Osten up there. Down below you can see how he has charted out some of the major events of the United States of America.

But here you see where he puts all of this information to use. The book has general social trend  and political predictions, sectioned in two year increments, for the US that date up until 2141.

Check out this take-it-to-the-bank prediction for 2011-2012:

If you missed that:

I am assuming Obama’s people already know this astrological fact. BUT – do they know THIS:

Re-election followed by a two year period of impeachments and assassination attempts.

Of course, we should consider the source, this prediction has been slow to come to full realization:

I don’t know though, being “chosen” as the outer space channel would explain the upsurge in reality television programming. Hey-yo!

So that is your library book find of the week. Have a good election day, vote if you feel like you can change the destiny of something already determined by the stars (and superPACs). I leave you with two of my favorite library images -  the telephone and the little scrap paper holder:

Weekend Insider

The weather in Memphis this weekend was a bright and breezy golden-kissed howdy-do-fall handshake with mother nature. I spent probably 80% of it indoors watching movies at the Indie Memphis Film Festival.

I saw some good stuff, went to the wrong place a couple times, chatted up strangers, drank full-on HFCS coke, cried while watching a documentary about video games, and even lightened up on my punch-people-who-look-at-their-cell-phones-during-movies policy (hey it’s a festival – people are on a schedule) for a little while. 

I did walk out of two movies, I don’t walk out of many movies (I won’t even let my friends leave baseball games until they are officially over, no matter how many extra innings they run) and I won’t tell you which ones, but I can tell you that no one would walk out of any of my movies because I have a couple built-in foolproof mechanisms that ensure this would never happen.

These safeguards involve techniques like having some kind of intro title that says, "Stay in your seats, we have someone coming around to hand out a special surprise!" Another strategy has my friends pose as violent security officers at the doors refusing to let people out. Or maybe my mom, or any midwestern mom for that matter, standing at the door catching folks trying to walk out, asking them, “Oh did you need something? What do you need? Can I scramble you an egg? Go back to your seat. I’ll bring you something. Do you need a blanket?”

If there is one thing I learned from the festival panels these past few days, is that you have to think about these things. This is a new age of entertainment. We have a new kind of audience. Their brains are disintegrating! Film is interactive! You can’t just hand your ideas over to some producer and think they are going to make it happen. You have to believe, be smart, and follow through to the end – all the way to the doors of the theater.

I’m not sure if anyone said that in those precise terms, but it is what I gleaned from their body language and eye movements.  It’s just a gift I have. I know what people mean instead of what they say.

And - speaking of being gifted, I happen to have a true gift of enthusiasm for teaching, but a gift that I don’t have is: interest for the giant m-effing stack of essays that these classes seem to produce every other week. Like the one I am looking at now. Who is assigning this sh*t?! I need to stagger these due dates. Where is my TA? What else can I write about to procrastinate getting started?

Topics I am interested in and considering rambling about instead of getting to work right now:

1. LA Lakers – Why do they control my boyfriends mind?
2. Guy at the Hop-in who ID-ed me and said “whoa” when he looked at the date
3. The good movies at the IMFF
4. Sympathetic magic: similarity and contagion
5. Mumblecore – trends I drank through
6. Joyce Jillson
7. Arkansas PBS Show – Squirrel Enchiladas
8. Media literacy in this day and age
9. Oxblood – trendy color or medieval beauty treatment?
10. Camo photography gear (as seen on Arkansas PBS Show)

I’ll save those for later and get down to business (for now). Hope y’all had a happy weekend.

Oh - If you were wondering – I heard from Sargent Sparkle today. She’s already teaching the Afghani’s the cupid shuffle. More later.

Our New Pitch Video

Our ten-minute preview for The Keepers is awesome, but too long, and almost too “complete” to be a pitch video so we made a new one that explains why we need the dough:

An Explanation from True Story Pictures on Vimeo.

http://www.indiegogo.com/thekeepersmovie