» Fringe Blog – Writing on Film, Culture, and Things on the Fringe

Grounds Zero Title Sequence

jelewis8 — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 21:30:48 +0000

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The Nudes

jelewis8 — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 06:11:11 +0000

Many times he tried describing their curves. The task was monumental, too captivating. Photos only hinted. Words suggested. Even actions–painting, stroking, feeling, breathing–fell short. What would capture the essence?
He never tried loving them, until glaucoma took his eyes. Memory suffused meaning. And love–that came. In time.

The Changing SEO Landscape

jelewis8 — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 16:02:11 +0000

I wrote a guest post for IanFernando.com on how the SEO landscape is changing. Go check it out. I’d love to hear your comments and thoughts on the subject.

Proceedings

jelewis8 — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 14:42:10 +0000

She discovered the note in his jacket on route to the dry cleaners. The week before they had camped in Wautseka under the stars, made love as tendrils of night tickled their skin. They had dogs, for God’s sake!
Divorce would have lasted as long as her trial. Murder one.

The Hows Of Love

jelewis8 — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 08:11:44 +0000

Where was I? Leaving some of you panting with curiosity, or possibly just thirsting for a strong ipecac. Ewwww! Love! He’s in love! What’s next, a save the rainforest crusade? Essays on the Free Trade coffee movement that will save mankind? Why not just an all-”Hello Kitty” Fringecast to top off the nausea?
But you know you really love the juicy stuff, especially when it has to do with yours truly. The funny thing is, even a year ago I’d have been mortified that anyone knew I had a sweetheart. It’s a mindset I somehow developed whilst still in the womb that girls were creatures to be admired and appreciated from afar, and if one had to be “in a relationship” with one, it must be conducted with the utmost secrecy. Harriet Tubman would have had fewer secrets than I, were I to be thrust into a relationship with a girl. And God forbid the news get out. In my minimal bug brain, I thought if everyone knew, it would be the beginnings of social asphyxiation for me, and you know what that would mean…I’d lose sight of the sun. Friday nights would become the purview of the dreaded woman-beast that had me willingly committed to her every whim. And of course, the endless mockery of my single friends, who would know the utter stupidity of my predicament, chittering like locusts whenever I stepped out of the room to conduct a one-on-one phone convo with the girl of my dreams.
Sigh. I was such a moron [And he says it like it was all so long ago. --Ed. Hey, how about a little support from you from time to time?].
So I’m a little reserved about my love life. And it’s made doubly painful by virtue of the fact that my love life weighs 450 lbs. and watches soap operas all day from lack of exercise. I show it off sometimes as a circus exhibit. People think I’m weird. But really, it’s just to pay the bills.
Anyway.
Without delving into the science of it all, what chemicals bonded with which protein packets to form endorphins which swirled into my brain like a swarm of attacking dingoes, I will say I’ve known Emily since my latter college days, and from the moment I first saw her, was smitten with an infantile, schoolboy crush that I naturally suppressed with a little pill I like to call Avoidance. You see, when you’re attracted to someone and you don’t know how to handle it, you make like they don’t exist. If they enter your sphere of habitation, then you make amends as soon as is socially responsible, hasten to your room, and wish you had the balls to talk to her. Oh, how you wish. But you don’t. And you probably never will, because you are a male and she is a female–an attractive one at that–and she could never see you as the kind of sensitive, non-gun toting, wannabe writer that you sort of want to be (at least in theory).
So I hid. And cried myself to sleep. Okay, so not quite that bad. But I was apparently oblivious to her interest in me, even back then, to the point of having my roommate imply to me that she had already expressed interest in me. Which played out, not like a romantic movie in which the lovable loser eventually gets the girl through a series of wacky adventures, but more like the failed romance writer’s short story of the guy who was oblivious to a cutie who came around every once in awhile, and eventually, they lost touch. The End.
There’s a reason romance movies feature exciting people with exciting lives…kissing. Boring people don’t kiss. Boring people give up after half a try. Fun people take chances, and eventually end up in bed together. Or if they are chaste, share an appropriate kiss and hold hands whilst walking down a Paris lane listening to the French maids singing about their formerly provincial lives.
Good Lord, have I written this much without saying anything at all?
Well, time flies when you don’t have a clue. But here’s where the juice gets interesting. My film career actually brought us together. Emily happened to be at the Progeny Film Festival in Blacksburg, where my film Red State (Buy the DVD!) was being screened (Winner, Best Sound, 2006), saw my name associated with that amusing mess, and remembered her schoolgirl crush on me, which led to a frenzied rush to her computer where she Google-stalked me, discovering that I have no privacy whatsoever.
No, in truth, it was a slow process of occasional contact via IM, email, and eventually phone, leading to what can only be described as a resurrection of the same feelings I’d experienced as a younger, less experienced lad. But this time backed by a bit more knowledge and understanding, I felt far more confidence in a friendship with her.
You know when you just click with someone, it just works, everything slides into place, and the result is a harmony that defies description or categorization. It’s different for different people, and everyone has their ideal. So I won’t attempt to write all the feelings I went through to arrive at the point where I realized I didn’t just like Emily as a friend. Besides, they’re none of your damn business. Why am I even telling you all this?
Because I love you so much, dear readers, I can tell you this much: Love can happen when you least expect or want it to. I’m not saying you don’t have a choice. I’m just saying when the choice comes, what are you going to do? Run up to your room? Hide away and imagine some romance of the senses?
Or do you fly to New York and try something risky?

Gatsby Memories

jelewis8 — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 15:10:48 +0000

I fell in love in New York. Not with New York, though I do have the makings of a small affair already with that city that I may need to break off before Los Angeles finds out and kicks me out of the house. Please don’t tell her–it’d break her heart. No. I fell in love in New York officially, though I’d been getting all the indications earlier that it was something serious. The trip there was entirely to ask her opinion on the subject and to see if she’d want to make a go of it, 3,000 miles and change between us notwithstanding. She was with me one hundred percent, and so now I’ll have to change all my business cards so they no longer read “I’m single, ladies, so get me on the way up!”
Her name is Emily.
But first, the Bay House portion of my trip. I went to the Bay House this weekend, compliments of the Clark family, whose wholesome and generous nature are keystones of the entire cabana experience. It’s a house on the Chesapeake Bay, though I’m never sure if it’s located on the Maryland or Delaware side. I think it’s Maryland, due to the fact that other than Baltimore, the state really has nothing else going for it, and a sister needs some charity from time to time. Delaware, on the other hand, has a really fantastic screen door industry (props to those who get the reference).
A typical bay weekend involves drinking, dancing, smoking, listening to rock ‘n’ roll, and even the occasional co-ed skinny dipping, which is all done, somehow, and ironically enough, with all Christian morals protected in a fuzzy lockbox of virtue, so it’s all mostly scandal-free, though we can be loud at three in the morning with several Cosmos and glasses of wine as social lubricant. Among friends, it makes any activity so frictionless we free slide over metaphor and cigar smoke as easily as Raul Castro on his brother’s dime.
This weekend, we had the added pleasure of a fourteen foot powered boat and a jet ski, which was fun enough for me until I realized the sun’s fun rays also contain a deadly toxin called Sunburn. I had lathered myself with lotion which supposedly has anti-sun agents working hard upon your skin, staging mini-battles right there on the epidermis. Unfortunately, the bloodshed and the lack of field coverage resulted in a slight reddening up my back, on my forearms and hands, and even on my legs. Fortunately, the attrition was not so terrible that I was in pain. The redness diminished after a few days and settled into one of my better tans. How ironic, or perhaps just pathetic, that I didn’t get a decent tan until going to the East Coast.
Saturday I smoked a vintage cigar, birthday compliments of Evil, and by vintage I mean sixteen years old.
AH-MAZING.
Combined with a sweet wine buzz, surrounded by wonderful friends, some of whom I’d not seen in over a year, with a great dinner tucked away, the Delaware shore of the bay glowing, lights out on the water blinking and undulating, and the night sky pierced by the occasional shooting star–the beginnings of the annual Perseid meteor shower, I believe–it was a captivating and perfect moment of pure ease, the kind of ease only a Gatsby in his happiest of moments could relate to. Those moments are fleeting, but while they last, they have the low treble of fluted leisure, a sublimity of sureness and comfort. You can’t take those moments with you into traffic–they pass like the wind with the first stopping of the flow–but you can write of them with fond remembrance, and know that there will be future bay weekends. It’s all a perspective thing.
The same thing goes for love at long distance. But this has gotten long without me knowing it, and the day stretches forward. I have a career to pursue, unfortunately. Tomorrow the next, and arguably more intriguing section of my journey to the East Coast. Until then…

Fringecast On iTunes

jelewis8 — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 07:06:44 +0000

Fringecast is now available via iTunes. If you love monkeys and/or hobo fashions, you could do worse than to jump on and see what the fuss is about.

The Excuse Is Gone

jelewis8 — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 01:03:52 +0000

Whoa. Two days without posting anything! I feel bad, and I have no excuse. I owe you all a rundown of my weekend on the East Coast, which was a blast. I hope to have that up by tomorrow. Honest and true.
I sort of got sucked into another project that has kept me busy, in addition to getting a lot of work done for one of Essejnet’s clients, Floyd County. It’s been interesting, to say the least.
All this is to say, bear with me, don’t go away, don’t die, and don’t give up on me! I swear I’m still here.
I’ll also have some cool 50 Word Fiction and new poems, and some assorted what not. I’m considering starting a video blog and/or a podcast. I’m still mulling ideas. If you have any, I’d love to hear ‘em.
Oh yeah. Red State is now viewable online. Let me know what you think. It’s a 55mb download. Or you can wait until I post the hi-res Quicktime 7 version. Or you could wait for the sweet DVD, coming out November 27. Whichever.

Elemental

jelewis8 — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 10:53:27 +0000

Night sits in His chair next to mine, and we argue
over the nature of morality. He believes in one Absolute.
I believe in two. He makes a strong case.
But I’ve seen both Night and Day. Could I possibly choose?
Silence swam with me the day I was in the river.
When She talked, it was like the water flowing.
I listened, but I could only hear the wind.
When I looked about me, I was alone on a rock.
The water moved on.
Temperance pulled up a stool next to me in the bar.
He didn’t say much, just ordered a few rounds and
smoked a cigarette. When he went to the john,
I took the matches he was using. The cover read “Stop.”
What a joke.
Love sang as I was passing by in my rusted Chevy.
The road was dusty, the tall weeds flowered yellow-white.
I heard the song again, but it was just an old robin.
Its breast was faded from orange into grey.
But I loved it anyway.
The City groaned and sank within herself. She was troubled.
“What’s the matter?” I asked her, and she sank some more.
“Indigestion,” she sighed, and let out a bloated burp.
“And I’m a little dehydrated,” she said.
I told her I sympathized. But I didn’t. Not really.
There was a little Ghost in the circuitry, a pesky thing.
I watched it flit about in its little ghost country of wires
and bones. It touched a synapse, a metal relay, and it
jumped back as the blue snap of electricity singed the
air with ozone. I’ve seen how these things work.
The Year passed by and waved. I waved back.
But the next Year, I pretended to have something in my eye.
The Year waved, but I rubbed my eye until it was gone.
Now, I just ignore them. They all look the same anyway.
They keep waving though. I keep getting older.
There goes Sex. Wearing another low-cut dress.
Always touching someone, making everyone look.
Slut.
Why do all the sluts look so hot?
A Poem woke me up. I sat up in bed and in the darkness
She spoke. She told me to write.
I told her it could wait.
I’ve still got the crimson mark on my face
where she slapped me.

Best Live Action Short, Best Animated Short

jelewis8 — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 05:00:07 +0000

Not interested, but I’ll leave my comments snark-free for those who love this sort of thing…
Jeremy Irons is an enigmatic figure, but he’s got comic timing.
For the winner of Best Live Action Short: I hope she drinks Guinness.
Dude for Ryan is INTENSE! I’m kind of scared by Lorenzo Lamas look-alikes anyway, but I like his ending. Good stuff.