I wouldn’t post this, but can’t resist sharing the last paragraph of the below letter, which I sent to my Utah House Representative (Cannon), and my Senators Orrin and Hatch.
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When I eventually finish a novel or novella, I’ll probably sell it at Amazon.
After/or follow(ing) the advice of this excellent book.
This entry used to ramble briefly about three books: THE ARTIST’S WAY, What they Don’t Teach you at Film School, and ZEN AND THE ART OF SCREENWRITING. I’ve moved everything relevant to my “creative resources” page at my wiki - and the pages it links to.
.. racism is related to.. depression.. according to a new study..
Do ya think?
Do we really need people to study this? .. I’m just being snide. Actually, it makes me feel alternating pity (for racism victims) and anger (at racist people). And now, there’s clinical data to support that it has adverse physical effects (sleeplessness). Whatever it takes in a world of too much reason and too little common sense, I guess..
Here’s a very short script. Anyone who wishes to use this for any purpose is welcome to. I know people who do the things depicted in this script.. well, maybe not the boss, which might make a good strangely stylized angry monologue.
INT. - OFFICE COMPLEX - A CUBICLE
A SOMEWHAT GEEKY MALE WORKER is at his desk programming. He moves his mouth in dry smacking and squinches his nose. He pries the inside of his nose and dislodges a few small dryly gooey boogers. Examining his fingers and looking around his desk for some tissues, and finding none, he surreptitiously moves his fingers toward his mouth.
INT. - OFFICE COMPLEX - HALLWAYS
LOUD ALARM SOUNDS BLARE and RED LIGHTS BLAZE in alarm.
INT. - OFFICE COMPLEX - CONFERENCE ROOM
All the employees of THE COMPANY are seated around a table. THE BOSS stands and shouts at the geeky male worker:
INT. - OFFICE COMPLEX - A CUBICLE
The same cubicle the fired geeky worker occupied is now occupied by SOMEWHAT GEEKY MALE WORKER #2. He stands up.
INT - OFFICE COMPLEX - MALE RESTROOM
SOUND OF TOILET FLUSHING. Geeky worker #2 leaves the toilet stall and heads for the door. On the door is prominently posted:
WORKERS: WASH YOUR HANDS
The geeky worker opens the door and steps through.
INT. - OFFICE COMPLEX - HALLWAYS
LOUD ALARM SOUNDS BLARE and RED LIGHTS BLAZE in alarm.
THE END
I’m making it a project to read these two fictional blogs. Oh my heck, I think they are funny.
It started here at cougarmolly.blogspot.com, and branched out in June 2005 to ponderingpeter.blogspot.com.
As a note to myself I’ve read both to their June 8th entries. Sadly they both seem to have been abandoned.
I look at these as inspiration on the weird/dippy side of mormondom (though I need a lot of research) for a writing project.
[Update: I no longer think the matter which prompted me to write this is innapropriate. Also, someone pointed out it’s a bit presumptious to draw the conclusions about the anonymous writer which I did. While I only did that for comic effect, I guess that’s not the entire effect, so I see the point.]
To introduce the concept of the LDS temple prayer roll to anyone who may not know, it’s a list to which attendants can submit names of “..people for whom there is a special concern or relationship..” for the temple patrons to ask the Lord to bless.
So what do you do when you see “Pres. Bush” written on the prayer roll in the Provo Temple? This is not the question to a question-and-answer joke, but it could be. This is a real question based on something I actually saw. So if the qualifying criteria for placement on the roll is “special relationship”, do they actually especially know Bush? Or does a special testimony of Bush as God’s President (among mormons who too closely blend religion and politics) qualify as having a “special relationship”? Questions that ran through my mind. I find the former unlikely and the latter disturbing on levels. I do think there’s a sort of sacredness in any office related to freedom: I think political freedom is a blessing. But if Bush is God’s President, shouldn’t LDS republicans just put the whole Democratic party on the prayer roll, because Jesus said to pray for your enemies? And no question, there’s a special relationship of addicted antagonism there. Maybe I should write “Overzealous LDS Republicans” on the prayer roll.
Someone’s got a photo posted of me at the LDS film festival. They don’t know it’s me - I’m just sitting in an event. I’m sitting on the far right, and I look like a vaguely mopy dork. Britani Bateman (The RM, Mobsters and Mormons) is standing on the left.
I read this newsletter saying to market yourself as an actor using one or two “types” (mythical types probably based on Joseph Cambpell’s work). These are: The Innocent, The Regular Guy, The Explorer, The Sage, The Hero, The Outlaw, The Magician, The Lover, The Jester, The Ruler, The Caregiver, The Creator.
Kirby Heybourne I think would be an Innocent Jester. Britani Bateman is totally a Lover Caregiver. What would I market myself as? Lets work from that picture. Again, I look like a vaguely mopy dork. I think that translates to The Regular Guy, and mixing this with I’m guessing my often heckling reputation at this forum, I’m probably an Outlaw, too. This translates in non-mythical terms to “An everyday jerk”. I think I’d better change that 
but at least I can be relieved that the archetypes aren’t so specific as “Jerk”. Or “Obsessed Maniac.” I’m also that. Except I’m not - I’m a Regular Outlaw.
I’d like to work in elements of The Explorer, The Hero, The Sage, The Magician, and the Creator.. but then I’d have to cast off heckling pretensions! Ahem. I mean I’d have to cast off Regular Outlaw.
Until then, in this photo I’m smiling, at least..
Following is a message which reputedly a man from an LDS Signles Ward left on a single woman’s answering machine.
(download .mp3 - approx. 700k)
OVERBEARING!! Oh man, I would totally freak out if someone left me this message.
“I don’t want to make you feel uncomortable..”!? Then don’t flatter me way beyond even what someone who was dating me for a long while might, set up a pretext of spiritual predestination that would undermine my agency, refer to me repeatedly (or at all) as “cutie” just after you’ve met me, talk about me like property, disclose far more of your emotional pains than even your dog might want to know on a good day (much more be out actively dating at all when those pains predomenantly persist), speak in those endless negative drones, play out this message far more than its welcome.. oy. This is a long list of Don’ts - but I’m guessing the Dos would be way beyond this guy..
DO NOT CALL HIM BACK!
I previously wrote but didn’t post here this relevant (to my interests) review of the LDS Film Festival. Here is a link to the back post of it. It’s part one, and I haven’t written part 2 yet.
Also, I’ll gather and post notes from the abundant forum conversations generated by my post Discourse in Art.
I think many folks will enjoy this film more than I did. I enjoyed this film about half the time when I was able to look past things that were bothering me.
As I noted in part one of my review of the LDS film festival, the writer/producer/director Ron Hensen said in surveys of audiences at test screenings they got positive responses from every demographic except mine - the 25-35 year old age group. This review I hope will give him a window on some possible reasons.
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Cast this one to the rhetoricians:
The very existence of any question as to whether anything exists is always a positive. Does this thing exist or not? Whether it does (in the reality we observe or believe in) or not, there is the concept of the thing in our mind, positively existing as a concept. This is because the mind is the universal in which all things can exist. The proof of that is that whatever we think of, we can, so far in our experience, always find one thing more which is different from everything previous we have thought or observed. Whether any of those things that exist in the mind exist outside of it as well is a matter of proof - but the mind is proof itself of the existence of everything, so that everything exists and nothing does not exist - at least as concepts.
Nominalism asserts that things exist only as concepts, not connected with any universal (let alone themselves being universal). But to say that nothing exists universally is to say universally that things do not exist universally, which disproves the very ground. Interestingly, the assertion effectively separates from a universe of universal wholes and becomes its own universe, where everything is only universal on its own arbitrarily presupposed terms. Which is the path away from the infinite whole to the infinite broken. To cast that in religious terms, I would say it is the path from holiness to damnation. As well, where we have no proof of the apparently arbitrary absolutes which our finite minds cannot measure or prove against infinity, it becomes a matter of faith to decide which absolutes you believe in. The same logical problems apply to relativism.
Human beings are beings of universal absolutes, and all the attempts to disprove it are always grounded in the very pretext of universal absolutes which they attempt to disprove.
This was actually inspired by this blog entry which I ran accross for some reason, and which I wanted to comment at but I’m way too amateur and now way too late.
Okay, I may have seriously burned any bridge to Deseret News/Book, and this following loose fiction (and farce) is what I should have sent, not that long lambaste. I am a devoted consumer of both and appreciate all the good they do.
If you don’t like introductions skip this paragraph. I wrote the following before the LDS Film Festival (which I beg you to believe, because I can’t prove it), but was afraid to post it because a)Since it is loose farce, it may offend some Mormons b)It shows the true depth of my insane devotion to both Richard Dutcher and John Moyer c)It may break new ground for “weird” and d)I’m just generally terrified of putting out there what I’m really inclined to write, which sometimes is things like this. I also want to point out that there are some strangely similar points in this which in my view emerged both in the way Haddock of the Deseret News reported the LDS film festival (I think she may have unintentionally attributed an idea to Dutcher that wasn’t his, and I thought it seemed her opinion hung on it) and in what Richard Dutcher said at the Festival (about balance). May the farce be with you..
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