Monday, June 27, 2011

From My Black, Black Heart

Big doings this month, you beautiful fuckers.

First off, the long-awaited and oft-fellated noir issue of Black Heart magazine is now available right here. For a lousy three bucks, you get a couple dozen short-short stories and poems that are so suicide-inducing, you'll want to live forever. Published by the lovely Laura Roberts and guest-edited by the not-quite-as-lovely me, this issue features more than a double fistful of your personal favorites, such as Kieran Shea, Cameron Ashley, Keith Rawson, Matthew C. Funk, Nik Korpon, Jonathan Woods, Dan O'Shea, Josh Converse, and many, many more exclusive hits by the original artists. With a cover designed by those RSquared cats, Brian Roe and Ronda Pattison, you know you can't go wrong, especially at the cost of an average comic book. Now, get some!

Second off, the celluloid trashcan continues to overflow over at the Let's Exploit Everybody! quartet. While all four are not banging away on all cylinders at the same time like a well-oiled machine, we've at least got a couple pistons pumping. In one of those rare instances of timeliness at Let's Kill Everybody!, Alec Cizak serves up this piece on 1981's Graduation Day, just in time for dad or grad. And then your humble editor and narrator, James Dean Callaway, touches on a subject near and dear to his heart--nerd persecution--and finds that 1984's Revenge of the Nerds is less about revenge than it is about justice in this month's Let's Fight Everybody!

Third off, I had another book review go up over at the Pop Matters and found out my objectivity has kind of a double edge. See, I wrote a fairly favorable review of Shann Ray's debut collection of short stories, American Masculine, and I still stand behind it. The stories in the book are a serious, no-frills look at the state of masculinity in this country today, a subject I feel goes overlooked far too often. When my friend and yours Matt Funk read the review, he became convinced he would also find this collection to be satisfying and phoned me up to ask if he could borrow my copy. Thing of it is, even though I gave the book 8 out of 10 (which I fucking hate doing by the way, rating stuff like that. I give the act of rating stuff 1 star out 900,000), I still didn't bother holding on to my review copy, having that day sold it on Amazon for six bucks. So even though I highly recommend it, I can't be bothered to keep it. Yeah, I dunno what I'm on about either over here.

Fourth off, I've shown you loves out there a handful of short films now featuring myself and my bowling team, but--and how rude of me--I've never bothered to introduce them. So before I present to you our latest effort, "Pig's Ear," allow me to correct this oversight on my part. E. Charles Jensen, Jr. (or Chuck, as we call him [give him a screen credit and he thinks he's DeMille, this guy]) have known each other since high school, when we bonded over professional wrestling and shitty movies. For a while, Chuck pursued an education in film, but pragmatic as he is, he switched over to a business major when we went back to school (and to be fair, the film program at SDSU is pretty lame, it would seem). But Chuck continued to keep film as a hobby, and has got this really nice camera, editing software and stuff. It'd be a shame to waste all that, hence the shorts. Pretty boy Eric "The Roc" Rochester is another original member of the gang going back to our high school days. Since hurting his shoulder a while back, Rochester had to totally change up his bowling style from a straight ball to more of a curve, but it works for him most of the time. Since he's so easy on the eyes, Chuck and I often write him into leading parts (that or I'd just rather play guys that get killed each time). Chris Fields didn't go to high school with us, but he may as well have. When we all started going to punk shows every weekend, we often went to see local favorites Jon Cougar Concentration Camp, of which Chris was the leader. Over time, we got to know him and discovered our mutual love for The Twilight Zone and beer. Soon enough, our buddy Dave Swain was playing in Jon Cougar and Chris was inextricably linked to a bunch of goofs from Granite Hills High for the rest of his life. That'll learn him. Also featured in this new short are Amanda and Max Macke, two absolute dear hearts who are also in fact newlyweds. When Chuck came up with this little script, I figured (correctly, as it turned out) that our meager acting talents paled to our bowling skills, and what we'd need for this project are a couple who have actually done some legitimate acting. Also, this was the first time I'd gotten to hang out with either Max or Amanda in years, so that in itself was worth the effort of putting this thing together. Anyways, enough of my blah-diddy-blah. Ladies and gentlemen, the Fighting Unicorns bowling team presents to you: Pig's Ear



Fifth off, stay tuned to this station for a fairly big-deal announcement next month. I love you all dearly and sincerely hope that all your dreams come true, except for the ones where I get run over by a bus.