The Dude Abides

Rediscovered the sport that is bowling last night. I enjoyed going bowling every other weekend when I was a kid. My parents were both in leagues so I spent a lot of time there when I was young. I even joined the Bowling Club in junior high school. But I haven't been on the lanes in over ten years.

There's a ghetto bowling alley 20 blocks from my apartment that my brother and his friends found last weekend. Went with them last night and we bowled until 3 in the morning, and got pretty drunk in the process. It was a lot of fun.

Jeremiah and I joined up with my brother and his friends after we plotted out a script idea for our entry into the Channel 102 short video series. I look forward to shooting it in the next few weeks.

Saw the Russian vampire film NightWatch (Nochnoy Dozor) tonight and really enjoyed it. Good story. A little heavy on the "cool visuals", but very entertaining. I just love me a good action/horror film now and then.

Maybe someday I'll find a way to rewrite my Vampirates script so that it doesn't seem like a total Pirates of the Caribbean knockoff. (Vampirates was a supernatural pirate film I started writing back in 1997, because they were two genres I wanted to see "mashed up". Unfortuantely when Pirates of the Caribbean came out in 2003, there were many similar story aspects and I had to scrap a huge chunk of what I'd already written. There really are no new ideas out there and chances are quite good if you are working on a story, someone else is writing the same thing. I guess if you follow Plato's theory of eternal forms, we are all tapping into the same consciousness for our ideas. It just comes down to who gets it out to the world first!)

A fun improv class tonight. We did scenes in the style of David Mamet, using terse, expletive-filled dialogue and shady characters and really focused on using that style as a way to speed up the pacing of your scenes and get to the heart of the scene quicker. Which is a good thing to have in your bag of tricks when doing New York-style improv, which tends to be very quick and fast, something I've had a tough time grasping. Too much time spent living in the South I guess. I've gotten very slow in my thinking and reaction time.

And on the train ride back home I playfully flirted with a pretty blonde girl sitting across from me. We spent the entire time sneaking glances at each other and smiling and laughing to ourselves when we caught each other checking the other one out. We didn't speak to each other because we both had our iPods on, providing us with that safety net, but when I got off we both paused, looked at one another and smiled politely, then went on with our own lives. It was nice.