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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.

I’ve known Matt Hunter since our days toiling away in the offices of an “alternative news weekly” In Western Massachusetts and we had often discussed the possibility of a music video collaboration with his band New Radiant Storm King. Nothing ever really made it beyond the yammering stage until he completed the score for my feature Broken (along with Liz Bustamante) in the fall of 2005. I was finishing the final digital effects for the film and NRSK’s first record for their new label was pending in February. So, eager to feed off the momentum from Broken, I rented space in a haunted former Tampax factory in Three Rivers, MA and we got all up in the dark arts of the green screen.

The raw footage for the guts of the video—the newspaper/microfilm segment—was all captured on consumer-grade mini-DV cameras, composited and heavily filtered in After Effects, rendered out in 12-15 second chunks and edited in Final Cut Pro; a process that I mistakenly thought would be painless and straightforward. After months of negotiating an obstacle course of marathon render times, system crashes and mock-headline Photoshop tedium, I came to the belated conclusion that I was in dire need of an upgrade. Yeah. And that is where I’m at right now, to quote venerable mic jockey Dicky Barrett.

…as did 4 other filmmakers in 2005 (according to IMDb). At the time, I thought the title would be both novel and appropriate, maybe I’m stupid that way. Fuck it, I should’ve gone with Ben Hur, that’s got some legs. For whatever it’s worth, some of the other Brokens sound pretty interesting. I’ve seen the trailer for Alex Ferrari’s and the cinematography is stunning, and this one is a surprisingly dark short by Danica McKellar (Winnie Cooper from Wonder Years). So I guess there’s something for being in good company.

Info on my Broken can be found here and its MySpace page is here. It’s a twisted mess of a dark comedy, and certainly an acquired taste, but I’m pretty pleased with the final product. Frankly, I’m growing tired of blathering on about it, trying to explain what it is rather than what it’s not, not to mention my growing suspicion of diy self-promotion. The need is self-evident but I’m finding the process can be dangerously myopic and corrupting.

So much for all that. Sometime this summer, I’ll move forward with DVD self-distro plans and it will be in the hands of the viewing public. Oh, that crazy viewing public.