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Don’t say you weren’t warned. What started out as a sardonic joke has materialized into full-color, three-dimensional, dice-rolling reality! As of April 2, 2008—the day AFTER April Fool’s Day—the feature film Broken will be available as a Special Deluxe Edition complete with a board game based on the film. In the tradition of classics such as Candyland®, Sorry® and Life®, Broken the Game takes players on a careening journey through the world of Todd Kellogg. Will you make it to the Dairi Quik to pick up a bag of Pizza Things? Will you ever find something good on TV? Why does it feel like you’re always moving backwards? These questions will all be answered (or at least asked) when you play the one board game that demands that you stay on the couch and have another beer.

Available exclusively from www.pedxing.com.

In keeping with the month ending lamb-wise, the hotly anticipated DVD release of my feature Broken saunters lazily onto Amazon.com today, March 20, 2008. I was thinking about working a sidewalk sale across from Greeley Square to push a Genesis reference (because, really, you can’t have enough Genesis references) but I figured, A. It would be way too cryptic and, B. I’d have to contend with the pirates who have the entrance to the Manhattan Mall pretty well occupied.

But back to Broken, the DVD features the complete cut of the film, trailers, production design samples and a conversation between Paul Phipps and I. Damn, that sounds so good, I might buy one myself. Seriously, I’m extremely pleased with how it came out and fairly confident that “if you get it, you’ll dig it.”

And, as an extra special bit of supersized madness, Amazon.com soon won’t be the only place to find the DVD. Within the next 2-3 weeks, Broken will be available directly from the Pedestrian site: www.pedxing.com… as a Deluxe Limited Edition with Board Game! Yes, you read that correctly.

Stay tuned.

March 19, the baseball season is scratching at the door and I’m visited by that stringent brew of optimism spiked with a stiff dose of unbridled hatred. Hatred for the Yankees, of course. Since moving to NYC ten years ago, my natural dislike of them has ulcerated into an eternal flame of malice. I’m sure it’s not healthy. It’s certainly not sensible, especially in the two-titles-in-four-years reality of Red Sox Nation. But, fuck it, that’s baseball. Try explaining–in cold, clear-eyed terms–Walter O’Malley’s insurmountable development obstacles to someone raised in Flatbush in the fifties. Baseball is about love and rage and heartbreak. There is a certain degree of holistic logic to it all anyway. An emotional attachment to the names on the back of the jerseys and an antagonism to enforced tradition is, after all, how I became a Red Sox fan in the first place. Long story, some other time… maybe when the smell of freshly-cut grass has taken hold.

Ought eight is getting off to a frenzied pace. A couple weeks ago I received the initial run of the Broken self-distro campaign—10 crates of DVDs—which now stand as a quaint half-wall in the apartment that I share with my new bride. Two weekends ago, I flew cinematographer David Wexler out from L.A. so we could start work on a New Radiant Storm King video for a song from their upcoming album… and discuss the logistics of the “still-in-infancy” project Days Between Driveways (a film that, quite honestly, won’t resemble anything ever seen before and may be the most outlandish, misguided idea I’ve ever attempted). I’m running on stale caffeine and fumes. But it feels good.

As 2007 drew to a close, I came to realize some superficial similarities and stark differences in my favorite album and movie of the year. 

Band of Horses’ sophomore release for Sub Pop Cease to Begin opens with Is There a Ghost and closes with Window Blues–as disparate as two songs on the album could be–and in between are the peaks and valleys of a band growing increasingly more confident. Ben Bridwell’s vocals, while still haunting, aren’t nearly as awash in reverb as they were on Everything All the Time and the guitars are prominent and clean, creating what truly feels like an epic record, in spite of its 35 minutes.

No Country for Old Men continues the Coen Brothers’ facility for crafting precise film-length set pieces. Essentially a monster movie wherein the monster is a hit-man armed with a cattle stun gun, the film creates a bleak, beautiful landscape where everything is fair game. Much like the experience of watching Miller’s Crossing, where each shadow, sound and piece of scenery is expertly placed, “No Country” feels like a two-hour film class (but in a good way). 

The similarities are pretty evident to anyone with an appreciation for both the rugged, Neil Young-flavored indie rock of Band of Horses and Cormac McCarthy’s dry, Texas desolation. There’s a sparse loneliness to both that speaks to a rural terrain both idyllic and painful, inhabited by nothing but dust and phantoms. On the Coens’ side, much of that is due to Richard Deakins’ masterful cinematography, an aesthetic that harkens back to the classic grandeur of John Ford, yet filtered with a trailer-park vérité. For Band of Horses, its a progression of roots music stoked by bands like Uncle Tupelo and Eleventh Dream Day.

What I’m starting to find more interesting are the differences, primarily in the unapologetic sense of hope running through Cease to Begin, as opposed to the coal black cynicism evident throughout No Country. When Bridwell sings, “…the world is such a wonderful place,” you get the sense that he’s trying, really trying, to convince himself. This is a world unrecognizable, even ironically, in the Coens’ scrubland of west Texas–illustrated in screaming, 72-point type as Tommy Lee Jones pontificates on facing the kind of evil that goes beyond understanding. Humans will do bad things to one another, that’s an incontrovertible truth.

Taken together, both represent the culture of a damaged era. The question concealed within each is, “how do we heal?” That’s a tough question. Shit, it’s one for the ages, in fact. Personally, I’m discovering that the difficulty in the answer to that question is likely what’s been driving me to keep writing and making films. I’m sure it goes for others, as well.

Thus begins my campaign to get Andre Nolan Dawson into Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame. It’s time to ratchet this shit up, especially in light of this month’s Mitchell Report. Dawson was a major leaguer for twenty years, most—if not all—spent battling chronic knee inuries. He was named the National League Rookie of the Year in 1977, won eight Gold Gloves, four Silver Sluggers, played in eight All-Star Games and, along with Willie Mays and Barry Bonds, is the only player to have hit 400 or more home runs and stolen 300 or more bases. In 1987, a free agent and desperate to escape the concrete-like turf of Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, he offered to sign a blank contract for Chicago Cubs’ general manager Dallas Green, who promptly filled in the figures for the base minimum. Dawson repaid Green’s big-hearted generosity by hitting 49 home runs and winning the Most Valuable Player award, after finishing second twice before. And what’s most timely, this was accomplished before what now looks to be forever branded as the “steroid era.”

Okay, so he was my favorite player. He even managed to play for my favorite team briefly, if uneventfully. I never claimed objectivity (in the interest of fairness, he was responsible for one of the most inane malapropisms ever uttered). But fuck all that. If it weren’t for that satanic invention called Astroturf, Dawson’s two healthy knees would’ve braced him for the kind of statistical numbers in the eighties that we grew accustomed to seeing in the nineties. He would’ve been the pre-Barry Barry, sans supplements. But that’s alternate-reality shit and Hall voters steadfastly believe in “sticking to the numbers,” or so they claim. I’d like to see the theorem of how Ozzie Smith’s admittedly dazzling fielding acumen can cancel a putrid career at the plate. Then there’s Gary Carter and that shibboleth of the lazy sportswriter: “intangibles.” Being old enough to remember the Expos lineup in which Carter and Dawson both played, I’d proffer that the Hawk and Larry Parrish (later Tim Wallach) instilled more fear in opposing pitchers. And if I have to hear any more “career cut short” bullshit from Kirby Puckett apologists, I will set myself on fire.

Andre Dawson was as fierce a competitor as baseball fans will ever witness and one of the best athletes to play the game “the natural way,” to paraphrase former teammate and current Hall of Famer Ryne Sandberg. Give him a plaque.

There has been a dearth of posts on this godforsaken site since the summer and since I’m the one responsible, it’s time to come clean: I’m not very good at blogging. It’s unwieldy, time-consuming bullshit.

No, I don’t fully mean that, but it does require thought and time to type, two things that have been a scarce commodity this past year. I’ll avoid the self-indulgent ritual of listing the day-to-day obstacles that impede both my creative endeavors and the documentation of those same endeavors, but a lot has gone down this year. I’m aware that’s worded with ominous, bass-heavy undertones but the majority of the distractions have been fun. An anxious, turbulent kind of fun, but fun nonetheless.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the Hudson River School, it’s the profound irrelevance of a church when you can always find a cliff in the Catskills.

May was a pretty good month for “Quicksand Under Carpet”, the music video I directed for New Radiant Storm King. A week after premiering at the New Haven Underground Film Festival, it screened at the Florida Music Festival as part of the Indie Film Jam and—much to my shock—was awarded “Best of Fest”. I know, false modesty is for politicians and pageant queens, but if I had a vote I’d have been hard pressed not to cast it for Andrew Watson’s video for Bill Madden’s “Gone”. That said, I am grateful and appreciative. It’s a badass award from an up-and-coming film and music festival.

On Memorial Day, I was in Seattle to take part in the Seattle True Independent Film Festival. Quicksand screened in a block of shorts that featured excessive male nudity, masked demons and mindless violence, and that’s all within the sketch comedy of local duo Black Daisy. Seattle’s got a nice alt-comedy scene bubbling to the surface and it was good to be back in the PNW to get a glimpse, regardless of how brief. The festival also provided a rewarding opportunity to meet other New York-area filmmakers. It didn’t hurt that they were responsible for a couple of the better films I viewed while there: Jeremy Cohen’s “The Great Pretenders” and Steve Blahitka’s “Orgy Tonight!”

And that is the point, I guess. Besides the swag and the booze and the parties.

So this year’s New Haven Underground Film Festival featured a documentary by Lexie Shabel, entitled “WE LIKE TO DRINK: We Like to Play Rock’n'Roll.” The film’s title is lifted from a song by the subjects of the doc: The Unband. For those of you unfamiliar with that tenuous thread that can oftentimes separate full-on indulgence from benevolent mockery, The Unband, along with similar bands like Nashville Pussy and The Supersuckers, stagger along that line like a seasoned drunk at his eighteenth DUI.

I, for one, remember them fondly from that slice of my past in Northampton, Massachusetts. In a college town populated by hipper-than-thou poseurs and patchouli-drenched hippies, they were about as divisive as “local heroes” could be, and established a local notority long before taking their act out on the road, inexplicably with the likes of Dio and Def Leppard. Which is the point, not only of Shabel’s film, but the book written by Unband bassist Michael Ruffino, “Gentlemanly Repose,” as brutally funny a book as I’ve read since those halcyon days of Raoul Duke.

So raise a toast: there’s something to being unappreciated by one big chunk of American pop culture consumers while being grossly misinterpreted by another.