(not)Walkabout Thoughts #97d - A Teen's College Tales from 1973

Still on the strength training. 91 degrees here today.

Yesterday, I kind of went down a rabbit hole that took up most of my day. I found a blog I wrote in 2010 about my experience at the UW in 1973, in trying to get in there, taking my SATs, and time I spent the night before at the Zeta Psi frat over Christmas holiday vacation, with the frat's president and treasurer. I'll never forget it.

One night in 1973 at a UW Frat house

Zeta Psi Fraternity, University of Washington, Seattle

I jist thought I'd read it to see if I had forgotten things. I'd forgotten a few things. This is why after all, we write, film, or document our lives so we can remember what really happened. 

So I thought I'd edit that 2010 blog, add some things, and repost it.

I knew I had taken photos back then and thought I'd update the blog and add those photos. So I went through my old photos today and found them. I scanned them in, they have always been pretty foggy or not great due to bad lighting. I enhanced the photos as we now have the capability to enhance them in ways we did not have in the 70s.

I put them in the blog. When I looked at them, I was quite pleased.

I had been wondering when I had gone to the UW to take my SATs. Something I had never planned on, never studied for. In looking at the photos, however, I solved the case. Christmas decorations were up at the frat house. I was leaning toward thinking it was the Thanksgiving holiday, but apparently not. Case solved. 

I find little things like this very rewarding. 

I've never been a "tech bro" or a "frat boy" type. I'd never have considered joining a frat. It wasn't my idea as the blog attests to. But once I got involved, and checked it out, it seemed to my 18 year old self a pretty interesting idea. An adventure. 

I've always been into adventures. It's how I got into Civil Air Patrol Search and Rescue in junior high. I think all the sci fi books I read when I was young. Those my grandmother used to read to me before I could read. I was just into the adventure. Into an alternative to my boring life in 1960s Tacoma, Washington. I could do more in life, I wanted to do more.

Actual friends from the screenplay  ©1973 me

In my true crime/drama screenplay, "The Teenage Bodyguard" people (the producer & interviewed directors) who kept misunderstanding the main character's orientation that: "He just wants the girl," or "it's about sex", or "it's a teen romp", were the typical orientations. However, it was actually just about, boredom. Seeking adventure. Escape from a boring life that kills a person's life. The photo above has the protagonist on the right (the "teenage bodyguard"), and his friend on the left. 

The problems as I've experienced it in life weren't the adventures or even the dangers, but the misadventures. 

But that's part of the charm. Escaping the boredom into adventures, even "adventures" many perhaps wouldn't label as such, escaping from the dangers, or misadventures the adventure can turn into. Often because of ignorance, Selective Ignorance (there is good SI and very bad SI: MAGA), ill will, or simply the stupidity of others. Much as we see in politics today. 

And that's the issue. 

Anyway...it's an interesting blog on an late teen's adventures into the university and fraternity system.

Cheers1 Sláinte!

One night in 1973 at a UW Frat house

Walkabout Thoughts #91

Thoughts & Stream of Consciousness, rough and ready, from an award-winning filmmaker and author you’ve never heard of, while walking off long Covid, and listening to podcasts…walking day: Tuesday, June 25, 2024.

Weather for the day… nice day, starting out, 62° with no wind and blue sky 71° when back at home.

Podcast is WTF? Marc Maron with Jewel Episode 1550 - Jewel
I have to say, I loved Jewel when she first hit the airwaves. Great voice, attractive, talented. She seemed to disappear for a while, off and on. I saw her recently on a Roast of Rob Lowe from 7 years ago when she was awesome (Nikki Glaser kicked ass, as usual), and now on this podcast. This is an amazing person and an amazing podcast episode! Fell in love with her on this podcast all over again. Intelligent, wise...very interesting interview.

Also this: Ride with the Devil (film) 1999 US revisionist Western film dir. by Ang Lee starring Tobey Maguire, Skeet Ulrich, Jeffrey Wright, Jewel in her feature film debut, also Simon Baker, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, James Caviezel
Based Woe to Live On, by Daniel Woodrell, 

I wrote in my last blog about Jason Lockhart playing the role of "Rowan" in my film "Gumdrop". a short horror. I was saying how he was fulfilling the function that the character Luca Brasi did in The Godfather. So I messaged Jason on Facebook and he wrote back saying that he thought it was his best work as an actor in my film. I also really liked his work other works with Kelly Hughes, especially their short film Green State.

Anyway, I worked with Jason on a few of Kelly’s films. I think my most enjoyable and memorable one was Kelly's seemingly never-ending project he started years ago that I believe he had titled "Suffer of Witch" (or was it "Mephisto Box"?), but it has had several titles.

We had a day of shooting at a church on Capitol Hill in Seattle. Prior to that Kelly and I had held auditions for potential actors at a venue in Seattle El Corazon (it was the Off Ramp when I used to go there in the late 1980s. I’ve never taken auditions from actors before although I had been sent out on them myself.

We had a baby and needed some extra money so I signed up with Mode Talent Agency back in 89 or 90, who sent me out on some auditions. One was for a thug character of three. Tyne Daily of Cagney and Lacey after that series had ended in 1988 was going to be in a movie, Face of a Stranger. She played a homeless woman that another woman, Gena Rowlands, befriends. In the film, Tyne gets beat up by three street thugs. I was vying to do that. I thought, how cool to be in a movie where you get to beat up "Lacey"? Alas, I didn’t get the part. 

I remember another audition for I think Maxwell House coffee? It was for a guy having lunch in a restaurant and the gig was that he turns around and gave a really strange look at somebody. This was my first audition ever so the producer said to face the wall (that threw me off), and then to just turn my head around and look at the camera and give me the weirdest look I could come up with.

I was ready for just about anything, but that one left me stumped. But she was very nice and repeated herself saying to just give a weird look, don't worry about it, just have fun with it. So I did it. She had me do it a few times and then said thank you and the next person came in and I headed out. I didn't expect to get the gig. I was correct.

It was a while later while I was watching TV when I saw the commercial. The guy they chose for the part did a good job, I’ll give him that. But how fun would that have been?

Anyway, I didn’t last long with Mode Talent. But it wasn't anything I did wrong.

The owner and lead agent had to take a trip to New York or somewhere. He was gone for a week or two. He left the company in charge of his two female underlings. Big mistake.

According to hi, they really screwed his business over. The first time I went in there he said he really liked my look. He took a headshot got some info about my skills, and experience and put it on the back. He said, you know I really think we could send you to the Stephen Seagal people. As a stand in or something, you look just like him from the back. I said, Yeah? Well, whatever.

It was a few years after that when I was commuting to and working in Seattle. I was walking to work along 1st Avenue from the ferry (to Bainbridge Island, we lived just off there in Suquamish) when one of those “duck “amphibious vehicle tours vehicles (now defunct) that we used to see around Seattle. I heard the loudspeaker saying something to the tour group as they went by about Steven Seagal. I had a ponytail at the time as I do now. I looked over and everybody was looking at me. It honestly didn’t make me happy.

I was once a big fan of Steven Seagal, back when his first movie, Above the Law (1988, Director, Andrew Davis. Writers, Andrew Davis, Steven Seagal, Steven Pressfield) came out. Partially because he was an Aikido master. Also because he was bodyguard to the stars (how he met his second wife) and how he got a introduction to being in a film.

I know a lot of people thought his action on screen was fake. It was, but it wasn't. As I heard it, the reason he looks so weird on camera fighting is that they had to slow his action down so much since the camera wasn’t capturing what he was doing, which subverts your technique. They had to come up with another form of fighting which was unfair as far as critiquing his fight scenes.

My understanding of him now is he seems to be kind of a bully. I had first taken Aikido 1980 as a gym class in college. I had done various martial arts, initially Isshinryu Karate which I had started in 1965.

The thing that made me love Steven Seagal so much when I first saw him in a movie, Above the Law, was that I was so sick of the lazy screenwriting and situations where the good guy comes into a bad guy with a weapon at an innocent hostage's throat or a gun or whatever, and tells the cop to put their gun down. Then the cop puts it down! Give me a break!

Seagal was in a scene like that, but then he just kills the criminal! The first time I saw that movie I literally cheered in my living room. Having studied Aikido, I knew what he was doing in his films. Some of my friends made fun of what he was doing and I'd have to tell them it may look weird or wimpy, but it's highly effective. 

Years later, I was finally living near an Aikido dojo for the first time. We were living in Squamish, Washington and my wife saw there was one nearby in Kingston, where one of the the ferries were. The dojo had started at the community center but eventually, moved to Poulsbo, which was 4 miles from our house back then.

Eventually, I ended up on their board of directors for the nonprofit educational school, dojo. Very nice group of people and I much preferred Aikido over any other martial art I've done. Yes, there may be tougher ones. But then you don’t understand the history of it the history of its founder Morihei Ueshiba, O’Sensei.

I had read everything about Aikido I could get my hands on. I became the dojo historian of sorts by default. When our Sensei was instructing a class and referred back to something in Aikido history, he got into the habit of looking at me to expand on what he was saying and I would tell the class what I knew about that technique or history. 

Eventually, I redesigned and ran the website because I was doing that for a living, as well as being a server administrator and other things back then for a four state Blue Shield company.

Getting back to Steven Seagal, my first break with him as a kind of martial arts or filmic hero was when I heard he had married Kelly LeBroc. eveEry guy I knew after Weird Science came out was a fan of hers, for obvious reasons.

The fact that Steven Seagal had married her, gave him big points with all of us. Until they divorced and she was interviewed on some news show on TV. When asked about what happened to her marriage, the distant blank look on her face said it all to me.

Something very bad had happened to this woman. And that I believe fell directly on her ex-husband. Over the years I kept hearing some very impressive or disturbing things about him. His history in how he ended up in Japan is fascinating. He married the daughter of a sensei who owned a dojo and held his own in Japan. Which especially back then was a hard thing for a white boy from Lansing, Michigan to do.

I kept hearing reports of him on film sets, basically being an abusive Aikidoist. Stuntman didn’t like working with him because he didn’t seem to know how to pull his punches. Or maybe he just didn't want to. I get the feeling he enjoyed it.

When you watch the documentary put out by his dojo, they talk about the hardstyle he taught in Aikido. Stephen Seagal himself says he followed O’Sensei’s original harder style. Originally having any evolved out of the martial art Samurai used. As opposed to my original Isshinryu Karate from Okinawa which was designed to protect legally disarmed farmers who were forced to use farm equipment because that’s all they had, inorder to occasionally protect themselves from fully armed samurai.

I don’t know if Seagal could’ve ever been a great actor, but he could’ve been a great Sensei had he not had such an ego. Some of the reports of women speaking out against him and men complaining about him seem to have to had some truth in it.

I can’t even watch his movies anymore, not for decades now. I liked his first few movies done by Warner Bros. Once he went independent, there’s a good movie here or there, but I lost interest. His reality TV series, Steven Seagal Lawman, was interesting about being a cop. 

Starting mile two, it's starting to get warm out.

Anyway, getting back to Mode Talent Agency. While the owner was gone, the two women were apparently borrowing money from clients and not paying them back. Bad enough they'd borrow money from clients, but to not pay it back? Sleezy. 

My wife at the time, my oldest son's mother, was an artist and a gourmet cook. She had painted a sweatshirt for me that I wore into Mode Talent one day. One of the attractive women running things in the owner's absence, really liked it. She asked if my wife would paint one for her, of her. So I went back and asked my wife who said sure, for $50. I told the woman and she agreed. My wife painted it and one day handed it to me and said not to let it go until I had money in hand.

I got down to Mode and I gave the woman the sweatshirt who just loved it!. She started to give me a line about how she’d pay me later. But I said I can’t and that I was told not to release it without funds in hand. She tried to parlay into paying as little as possible. But I stuck to my guns. Reluctantly, she wrote me a check and reluctantly, I accepted it. But I'm happy to report the check did not bounce.

After I hadn’t heard from Mode in a while, I called them and the owner answered. I said I hadn’t heard from them in a while and he profusely apologized saying things were a mess. He explained the two women he left in charge had been fired and he was trying to salvage the mess they had left him with.

He said they had pretty much ruined his business and told me some of the horror stories of his clients who had gotten ripped off. I told him my story about the sweatshirt and assured him I had been paid, but only because I refused to release the sweatshirt. Eventually, we hung up, amicably. I liked the guy. I never heard back from him, and that was the end of my audition career. I wondered if they had just gone out of business.

On that Kelly Hughes audition day in Seattle, I found pretty interesting and educational. He had been doing auditions of actors since the 90s when he had a weekly half-hour movie of the week that he produced at Viacom public access cable TV on Roosevelt Street, just north of Seattle.

Which was how we met online when he found that I had produced my Lost in Space documentary there around the same time he was starting to work out of there around 1993.

I had recently met my next wife-to-be back then, unbeknownst to me at the time. Just before I had finished editing my film. I would get off work downtown Seattle and drive up for an edit session and then make the commute south in the dark, to Auburn where my girlfriend was living. I had moved in with her as I seemed to be there all the time anyway, and eventually got rid of my apartment in the Sand Point area just up the street from Magnussen Park. 

I finished my film and in February 1994 by contract, it was cablecast around the greater Seattle area, twice.

When Kelly saw online at Stage32 (a member since 2012), a site for indie filmmakers, that I had also worked at Viacom, he said I should come to meet him and Jason and another actor Greg, at CryptiCon. It was at the Seattle Hilton in SeaTac, south of Seattle. I had been there for the 2nd  ZomBcon (previously having attended the 1st ZomBcon in Seattle with my oldest son), which was also at that Hilton. So I felt familiar.

I did and we had a great time and the rest is history.

Getting back to the auditions… Kelly had me and another guy. I think it might’ve been his friend Spanky from Dead Vampires a band from the 90s. 80s and 90s maybe?

Kelly was doing interviews/auditions by himself and had us standing downstairs greeting and wrangling the actors as they arrived. Until I went upstairs and said that I’m not there as a gopher but to learn about auditions from the director's perspective.

He seemed surprised but said, OK have a seat. I’m glad I did that because it was fascinating and he has a good hand for picking unique actors. One got stuck in reading a scene and Kelly gave him a way to act that broke the actor out of his stall and he did a great read. I was impressed by that. He had few good actors. In particular one established actress. Also, a few brand-new actors who turned out to be very good. We had the late great Jennifer True on that set. I used her as voice actor for some off-screen vocals in my own film later on ("Gumdrop", a short horror). Miss you Jennifer...

There was one actress with her mother who was watching us like hawks and didn't want to leave her teen daughter in a room alone with us. We offered for her to stand in the hallway, out of sight of her daughter's vision, with the door open and that satisfied her. You just don't want a parent messing up an actor's reading because of being self-conscious or something. Plus, the director needs to feel free enough to work with the actor without feeling self-conscious themself. The girl did really well and got used for the film.

Kelly had picked one actor, Noel T Austin, who was a very interesting character. He also did body suspension art. And he was interesting-looking guy. 

I remember Kelly’s friend who played the doctor in the film, Ernie (Ernest Rhoads, AKA, "Hellen Bed") and I were in the main part of the church upstairs. while Kelly was filming a “group therapy session“ in the basement. I think I played two characters in that group therapy scene. I just changed my clothes with one of me wearing a hoodie on my head with my head down the whole time and holding myself and a coffee cup like I was strung out.

While he was doing that, we were trying to give Noel directions upstairs. He was sitting in a pew with a straight jacket on, stressing out a bit about how he was going to act out the scene. So we offered him some advice basically trying to help him relax.

So when Kelly finally shot the scene, we thought Noel was very good. Kelly thought it all well very smoothly, until I mentioned to him the 45 minutes Ernie and I had spent with prepping him.

I also acted as "sound" on set that day. That church had no heat on. There’s one scene where the doctor (Ernie)  and a character are walking down a flight of stairs. You can’t see below their waist, but if you could, you would’ve seen me lying on the ground with a digital recorder, recording the dialogue and steps as they walked.

A couple days later, I got really sick from being on that set. For whatever reason. We do suffer for our art, if we do it right, at times. But I'd avoid the suffering when possible. Research has shown it's just unnecessary. At least we don’t let it stop us, which is doing it right. It's just how you have to do it.

I still haven’t auditioned any actors for any of my films. I used to run the projector and show our family films when I was a little kid, did any splicing needing to be done. I’ve always been fascinated by film and cinema. Got a great education of sorts from the European auteur director's movies who were shown on PBS in the 1960s and early '70s.

My first film I produced at Western Washington University on phenomenology for two of my psychology professors. My second was the Lost in Space 25th anniversary documentary I did at Viacomm. I could’ve used their equipment, but I used my own. Again, I should’ve used their equipment, but you had to sign it in and out, as massive pain in the neck. Especially if the equipment was unavailable when you needed it.

And then digital editor broke and they had to ship it to California. It didn't come back until a month later. When I showed up to edit one day, they said just to use one of the other editing bays, but none of the other VHS editing machines would work with my master tape. So I had to wait. I should’ve seen the signs.

Eventually, the editor came back and my master tape worked on it. When it was cablecast, I sat at home watching it and about 80% of the music I had put on the soundtrack couldn’t be heard. Then in the credits, there is a big list of music which had to leave people wandering...WTF?

So that was seen by the public in early 1994. An art film and a documentary under my belt at that point. Then in 2019, my oldest son was living downstairs with his girlfriend in basically a separate apartment in our big house I was renting after we sold our home of 15 years. I suggested we shoot a film. He thought it would be fun.

So I wrote an eight-minute film. Just a POC, proof of concept that I thought I could actually produce. It was a lot of fun. Two years in that house, then he moved to another town and I moved a mile away to a smaller house that was cheaper and where I got the idea to shoot Gumdrop.

Getting back to auditions, I skipped them and simply stole some of Kelly‘s actors and friends. The guy who took care of my rental house when I moved to Bremerton, Tom, we got to be friends. He’s the one who found the house I live in now, because he lived in it years ago.

The previous tenant they kicked out of here before me, hadn’t paid rent in months, had three big dogs that destroyed the yard and wrecked the house. So Tom and I spent July 2018 remodeling the house. I moved in and started paying rent in August.

Skipping forward to Gumdrop, Tom and I got to be close working for a month on that house in the heat, sweating and painting, fixing things and going to lunch and talking. 

Actually, I had used him as a voice actor on my audiobooks at the previous house. So we kinda got used to working together on my having him read my writings as I directed him. He had actually studied voice acting in school. Kelly Hughes had studied, I think something similar in school. His podcasts, Rising Star are well done. Both of these are after they graduated high school

Tom was interested in acting in the film and suggested his son, who he suggested his kids. As I'd acquired some of Kelly’s stable actors, no auditions needed.

I have to say I was amazed how good Tom was and double surprised about his son. I love the scenes of the two of them together in the film. I almost feel like there were two lead actors.

So that’s my situation with auditions. I have been on them professionally. I have experienced them through a Kelly Hughes production. I do believe the quality of your actors as well as the quality of your soundtrack music really elevates your film without you doing any extra work.

Starting my 3rd mile...

Damn voice-to-text and the notepad on my phone are pretty problematic. I tried to go to the top to type something as I have trouble getting there, I have to scroll forever up (or down). Just simply touched the screen and suddenly I was at the top of the screen. Then had to scroll all the way back to the bottom.

Or I have voice-to-text issues that I cannot get right and I have to do it manually. One of my biggest issues in editing this when I get home is correcting voice-to-text errors. Granted, some of those are my fault. Some of those are because of ambient noise or wind but a lot of times it’s just me wishing for better software.

And I do now do this using my Apple Airpods.

Apologies to Jewel and Marc Maron on their podcast episode today. My listening to podcasts on this thing just kind of happened. I couldn’t think of things to say for a blog so I thought I’d listen to podcasts and when I had a flash of a thought, I'd write it out to share with people. 

That worked out really well, except for the political podcasts in post-production editing made me think I’m somebody’s crazy uncle. The confusing thing for some is sometimes I use satire and it’s not recognized. Or I go over the top because I’m annoyed by how abused reality has become. We all make mistakes But then whatever I find is incorrect. I correct it

I’m hoping as all should, that in this election Trump loses, and hopefully goes to prison. Preferably to end his life there, one way or another. I can drop the political podcasts then, although I will still stay apprised of what’s going on in the world. We have to. And then I can find more art and creator-based podcasts.

I’m a fan of the show Hacks, as you may know and I listen to their podcast, which is awesome. Non sequitur...

I got up this morning to watch The Daily Show. Very much looking forward to seeing Jon Stewart again on his Monday show that I watch on Tuesday morning, off my DVR. And guess what? This time no Jon Stewart!

I thought the episode was very good but there’s only one Jon Stewart. So where the hell was he? The thing that really annoys me and I believe is one of the tenets of Purpleism is when you’re going to do a switch on your audience, have the decency to address it with them! And on the last night's show, they didn’t mention a word about where Jon was.

On the health front last night, I was watching “Crime“ the Scottish police procedural with Dougray Scott. Series two is getting good. I wanted something to munch so rather than make a whole bag of popcorn, I have these tasty crackers I use for meat and cheese. I just munched on a few of those.

Then I woke up too early this morning. Didn’t take any melatonin last night to get to sleep, which is a success. Though I woke up too early. I put on NPR to doze to and then woke up again later and felt very weird.

Very weird like am I dying, weird? Wasn’t anything intense, but I could feel the blood in my veins and it felt like my heart was beating slow and low maybe? I couldn’t tell if it was high blood pressure. I didn’t think so, but something was not right.

I thought, what the hell, take half of Benadryl, which is my go-to remedy. The feeling I had at the time was if I had to go to the ER or have the paramedics over for a visit? I didn't think Benadryl could fix this.

But within 10 or 15 minutes? I felt normal again. So it was I guess histamine levels and the Benadryl did their magic. A lot of Covid has to do with histamine issues. For more on that you can read my book “Suffering Long Covid“. My son told me today their store just sold out of them and so I ordered them some more. I also got notified my screenplay "The Teenage Bodyguard" was an official selection at the Cinematography and Photography Awards in London. Two very nice things today. Moving on...

While I feel like I’m over long Covid now, I'm unsure. Is it one of those diseases that goes away by half-life? If you know anything about atomic structures, if something last for 10 years, its half-life is five years, and so on and so forth by half until...who knows?

If you keep doing that, there can be no end to it. It just gets so minimized that for all intents and purposes it no longer exists.

The alternative is that long Covid is gone, but damaged something or tweaked something, typically a dormant virus and so now you’re stuck with that issue.

Certainly, some people have been damaged by Covid and died from it or are permanently damaged by it. Either their brain, or heart, their vagus nerve, or blood system, or some organ(s).

I think I addressed this the other day that the scary things about long Covid is the unknown and having no effect to reproduce a remedy. Oddly Benadryl has often proven to be that remedy.

Another eminent one is hydrating yourself. When I started feeling better on the Benadryl this morning, I drank some more water. I had drunk some water but it didn’t do anything. After the Benadryl can only help.

I just passed 2.5 mile marker...

My last blog went live at 6 AM today which is the normal time. I blasted it out to social media, the title, the link, a few hashtags and trying to figure out how I get people to understand what my walkabout thoughts blog is about and what each individual episode or article is about. That’s been a real conundrum. You can put tags in each blog posted. I also put hashtags in most of the time when I posting.

I was looking at the analytics on my blog today, which are new to me, they'd updated them, and I went back and looked at my blog and scrolled down and on the right. I forgot I had a word cloud. I got this idea of. I’ll take a screenshot of that and included with my social media blast for today’s blog.

So we’ll see how that works out. I mean, if you’re kind enough to click on my link to my blog but don’t know who I am or what the blog is about, right at the top. As you know, it says this is just random shit from some crazy person walking and listening to podcasts. But it’s also turned a little bit into an autobiography of my life and craft.

My son and I have long been talking about AI and being able to talk to miss loved ones who have died. I know he could use it. It would be nice if he had me talk to after I’m gone. I do believe AI will be able to be pointed at something online or feed it a bunch of data and it will be able to re-create a person from that that will seem oddly and disturbingly real.

I've forever wanted to submit all my writings and see what the common thread would be according to be analyzed, but I can’t afford that. But AI would be doable. Soon, I'm sure.

I've put a lot of my beliefs and understandings into this blog since 2010. Eventually I could point an AI at my blog alone and have it generate a reasonable favatar of myself that my sons could one day talk after I’m gone.

I don’t think that would be possible for me with my grandmother who was my primary ethical and intellectual guide and mentor. Or my mother who, as I grew up, seemed to fade after the loss first of her dad, as she was a daddy’s girl...he was never around, always traveling the world. Then losing her youngest son, my younger brother which seem to snap her mind. It was ugly and took a year or two of his dying from liver cancer, five years before the first successful liver transplant.

And then her mother died, my grandmother, second mother, and sometimes primary in many ways.

We don’t have lots of data and information about people like that online or available. That was before the internet. I was on the Internet in about 1987 and then I worked in the internet and IT field for nearly 30 years. I may be a contender for an AI avatar. Perhaps one of the first cohort viable for that.

Anyway, we’ve got interesting things coming to us all soon and it’s going to hit us faster than we expect.

I think we need a new law t ofhat orders any political party to have to have a platform with some basic tenets country before party, because all the Republican Party is now is party before country, Trump before party. It’s killing democracy, it’s killing the cohesion among citizens and it’s seemingly trying to end America.

One of the reasons for these walks is to get back in shape after four years of Covid and long Covid and certainly aafter a bad winter and spring for me this year. But also the blog in  speaking and recording and editing. It’s a lot of editing to put this blog online and I’m only doing one readthrough… but that’s also getting me in shape for creative works. It’s making me want to finish my film companion book for my documentary and that’s really important, because I have a lot of new projects I want to get working on. I just need to wrap up the previous ones.

OK, I’ll shut up and listen to Marc and Jewel.

Well, this is interesting. Marc is talking about doing a show in Seattle because he’s based in Vancouver, British Columbia now for shooting a movie. He goes home to LA every once in a while. But he said he’s walking around Seattle this week and saying that it looks trashed and beaten down, or maybe it’s just where he’s located

Maybe?

Seattle’s always been that way in some areas. With some pretty parts. But one of the reasons many of us moved out of Seattle, and I really loved living in Seattle, and my oldest son was born there. But what we’ve seen because of Amazon and Google and others... many of my friends ended up working there… they turned the city into what it is today.

Many of us who still live there, or those who moved out, have complained about how the once cool spirit of Seattle is kind of gone while now it’s all shiny and such. I don’t know, bro culture? Not really but you get the idea. Gentrification everywhere. Many of the cool venues are gone now replaced by shiny new buildings.

Almost has that coolness anymore replacd by the new and shiny factor.

So I’m wondering was Marc downtown by Pioneer Square, maybe south of that? Because that’s like industrial and it’s kind of cool but a different kind. That’s down by the Seahawk's stadium and the Safeco baseball field. Maybe. I don’t know, they keep changing the names.

Marc's second wife came from Seattle. I didn’t know that. So he knows it a little bit from the past. He says he loves Seattle, but they broke up and it wasn’t good, so there’s that.

Then he said Lynn Shelton, his late girlfriend who died was from Seattle. So he’s also got a lot of mixed feelings about Seattle but does say he loves it and knows he has a lot of fans here. I’m sure he’s had a lot of shows up here.

Well, I know this is my fault today jabbering so much with WTF? on pause, but Marc finally got around to talking to Jewel. I spent almost the entire walk just jawing my way through. Talk talk talk talk talk. I’ll have to save this podcast for the next walk.

On that note, I’ll bid you adieu…and leave you with that. It’s noon and time for lunch.

Cheers! Sláinte!

America's Slumbering Giant Awakes... And Brother, She's Pissed!

Interesting to note, I'm seeing some positive things happening. Like Black Lives Matters and Defund the Police. Or, Refund the Police, to redistribute some funds and services to more effective agencies and a more enlightened mindset. 

August 11, 2020 update: We're back at when Obama got elected the first time and had to stop the Bush train running over a cliff. Now Biden has to stop a train running toward a similar but entirely different cliff with flames at the bottom. Nazi types along the cliff edge. 

Did it the first time, it'll get done again.

I do however think we should finally be tired of so much assault and battery and blame from the right, while that's who's pulling their Republican backsides out of plummeting downhill into flames, along with the rest of us and yet ...they continue to abuse while they ridiculously call it...patriotism.

Isn't it time we stop just being upset and finally do something to end this nonsense? Just a thought.

Kamala might be the beginning of that. One can only hope!

#Vote...Now back to our regularly scheduled program:

Those groups mentioned above have been pointing out we need to rethink, be wiser, seek to fix a still broken police and judicial system. Look around, it's not that radical and even police over past decades have pointed this out. They're overworked, overused, and many times ill-used. 

I've watched for decades who police aren't as well trained, well manned, or regularly retrained as they are in some other countries. So much of our infrastructure has to do with a lack of funding. We want 100%, the best quality, as long as we don't have to pay. While one conservative business-oriented political party doesn't even want taxes at all and take what there is and consistently redistribute that tax money to those who don't need it... because they are so wealthy. And that translates back to them as, power.

I have time and again given my educated, informed opinion on all this and it is now finally being supported by even die-hard, life long Republicans supporting what I've been saying. It's amazing, astounding, and we have a long broken Republican party that has morphed into a Donald Trump GOP. 

And it is so bizarre. But at least we're beginning to see reality seep in and decency seep out. By a few anyway, but more and more on a daily basis. We may be seeing the end of a very bad road America has been on since the Reagan administration. 

One Republican is a former Republican strategist, political consultant, and author, Stuart Stevens in his new book, "It Was All A Lie". You can see/hear him on Amanpour and Friends, talking about what is going on today. How they knew exactly what they were doing. And now, through the "Lincoln Project" these people and Stevens, are speaking out. Against what has come of their decades-long efforts. 

LISTEN to these people, because so much now is being driven by ignorance, the uninformed and the purposely disinformed.

There has been much knee-jerking by conservatives, by racists, and bigots about "Defund the Police" which simply isn't about having no police. Rather, effective social services and effective policing. Not simply old-style, anachronistic, and conservative type abusive punishing.

Instead, we have dysfunctional practices that do not benefit a functional social structure or productive and effective system and are simply giving Republican, and sometimes progressive types, power and the rest of us concern, and at times disbelief. Abuse never fixes anything. Wisdom, consideration, facts, knowledge, experts appropriately applied,  do. 

We simply cannot keep doing the same ineffective practices and expect things to get batter. 

Cannabis. Abuse is hidden very often and around for so long it's now hard to even see.

Paul Begala (political consultant and political commentator) pointed out recently that he has finally woken up on the cannabis topic somewhat late to the game and pointed out that studies have now shown that in 95% of our counties that have more than 1% of blacks, they are arrested 364% more for weed than whites. They don't USE it more, they are simply ARRESTED more. 

So it has been a pretty useful tool of systemic racism and to populate our prisons including for profit prisons. Joe Biden too has got to wake up to this, as Paul points out. And he very well may. But it surely isn't going to happen with a Republican president any time soon. 

So yeah, kind of a disparity and a very good reason for #BLM to work this into their agenda. As Meghan Daum (author, essayist, and journalist.) said last Friday, they need to roll this legalize cannabis, anti-war on drugs message into their overall action. 

I'm amazed this hasn't either been included in the BLM message. Or for that matter eliminated from our country's legal system! We all have GOT to wake up! 

This has been one of my primary issues with Biden. Others I have with him could be easily alleviated (eliminated?) in choosing Susan Rice as VP. But I hear him too, he wants someone he can feel a camaraderie with, unlike what happened with John McCain and his nightmare VP candidate, Sarah Palin. Vet completely, then choose! 

Under current circumstances (with our First Criminal Trump and cohorts), I'm really not too worried about Joe. Just as Obama had "evolved" on gay marriage. And sure, some of that should have to do with the electorate and supporting what they elected you for, but you also have to LEAD as a Leader!. I am hoping Biden and VP, in not being Trump or the GOP, also will evolve on this topic, as well as a few others.

With Democrats, we do have hope. 

With Republicans, we're simply damn well LOST. 

Seattle, for one, is thinking about, instead of continuing to abuse and constantly move their homeless portion of their city, using social services and placements, and other ways to actually do something positive. Instead of just shifting them around the city, pissing off homeowners and businesses...as well as the homeless. 

At times, traumatizing those homeless who are already vulnerable and in dire straits. These people are not living the high life, they are disadvantaged and as we've seen, this can happen to just about anyone. Also, finally enforcing previously failed efforts to get Seattle's high tech massive corporations to pitch in

What do you do with a kid who is acting badly or a mental patient or a prison inmate who is out of control? Yes, sure. You can drug them, or punish them. But frequently lowering the lever of stimuli is helpful. As it is with sexual performance issues, which has proven effective through techniques like "sensate focus", by removing erotic stimuli and then reorienting. You wouldn't however, punish someone to help. You'd...help.

Our government has been broken now for decades.

The Republican party (now Trump Christian Republican party), has been broken for decades. Adding divisive religious issues simply disrupts functionality even more, which should be a private thing, as it used to be. Not the least in part because that backfires so often. 

The Democratic party is not broken (as conservatives like to say, from their own broken platform). Yes, they do seem to be too often ineffective. But that's not broken (like the GOP is...and again now, the Trump GOP). When someone uses underhanded means and you refuse to stoop to that level, sure, you appear ineffective. Because crime pays. It's WHY we HAVE laws and law enforcement because crime is easier and if we don't control that, chaos ensues and not in any good way. 

That's where we are today with Donald Trump. A man now stressed to stay in power before he is arrested, just as Vladimir Putin is doing, to avoid prosecution. But Russia is not America. WE have a good chance. Still. But not for much longer if we don't pay attention and ACT.

America has been in a gigantic TIMEOUT between the abuses of the Trump administration (supported by Russia) and Trump's GOP. Specifically so much by the actions of (really, the INactions of) Sen. Mitch McConnell and his Republican Senate. Trump's mostly Republican Senate. 

At least the NRA is losing its iron grip on our Congress and may soon be dissolved because of the criminal actions of Wayne LaPIerre and his three friends and the rest of their 72 person board. Personally, I would love to see a new organization to replace the now lost NRA to do what they did for so many decades until the corruption of LaPierre. It was once about safety and sanity. Like the American Government. 

We desperately need a return to a sane and rational America. And one of a new compassion.

We may very well be starting to rise out of our decades-long mental and social illness greatly brought on by this extremist, conservative-led GOP. A political party who has become an extremist group of late. Who have allowed their opposition at all costs to the Democratic party, to necessitate the Democratic party themselves to lean back merely in order to balance things out. 

Extreme? Yes. Perhaps we could lighten up a bit? Yes?

To seem to have gone too far left...merely to keep the ship that is America afloat. While the far right-wing has constantly and disingenuously claimed them to be TOO FAR LEFT. When they simply are not. Projecting their extremism onto those who are merely trying to neutralize the extremism coming from the right's side of the aisle. 

It's a mess, to be sure. As one can see simply in describing it. 

It is a national mental illness greatly brought on by the conservative movement into social and mental illness. Win, at all costs, no matter who or how many are harmed. Harm them more and you have more control. It is, madness! It is selfish conceit and greed now personified in Donald Trump in the White House and Mitch McConnell in the US Senate. 

But, are we beginning to see that change? America, to wake up from it? 

We very well may be seeing the end of this massive abuse from this conservative Republican Trump administration. A global pandemic, and Republican's and Trump's failure, could be the best thing that has happened to America for some time. All the truly unnecessary deaths notwithstanding, but that being said, in order to get her back on a sane and productive path once again, it's good to note that something good MAY come out of all this misery and suffering. 

An end to decades-long abuses. And a return to the American dream. The real dream. One that we can all attain and not just a kleptocracy, and one supported in many ways by a Russian Oligarchy which they took their notes from. 

No sane person thinks having the greatest number of citizens in prisons is wise. 

No sane person thinks fixing the economy is done by throwing trillions of dollars to a bloated military-industrial complex. One that now includes corporations. Global multinational corporations, just as we were warned so long ago to not do post-WWII...and then, we did it. Some corporations with bigger annual profits than that of many small countries. Sometimes several countries together. 

Is America finally beginning to bet the mental healthcare it needs? Finally? Even while refusing to supply healthcare, mental healthcare, and social health care to herself?

It may well be. It seems so and one can only hope. For we deserve better. Much, much better. We are American citizens who are being beaten and shot in the streets (being shot with a rubber bullet, that requires many reconstructive surgeries, or NOT, is still being SHOT), and accosting US with poisonous gas, not even allowed to be used anymore in wars. Yes, police count, but they are also doing the abuse too much of the time and yes, they too need consideration. They are also caught in the crossfire far too often. 

We are American citizens and we cannot let them forget that. And they cannot forget that themselves, but we have to hold them accountable. Even Ammon Bundy supports Black Lives Matter! 

Does not politics make for strange bedfellows? Indeed it does! 

But first thing? We need to fix our conservatively infected government, our corrupted Office of the President, and all the damages they have done. Then, deal with Trump's extremist conservative Republican party. Perhaps dissolving them much as may hopefully be done to a very corrupt NRA who has done vast damages to America.

As well as all those foreign AND domestic enemies who are aiding in all this.

#Vote? Yes, to be sure! But also, ACT! 

Now is the time. Do not let up. Do not stop.

The Beatles 1966 Concert in Seattle at The Coliseum

I recently watched the Ron Howard documentary, The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years (2016). If you're into that sort of thing also consider the new two part documentary, Rolling Stone: Stories from the Edge. A fascinating documentary about an important American magazine on American culture.

Okay, back to The Beatles....

In the beginning it is stated that this may be the first time the remaining Beatles have ever actually heard what they sounded like in concert from those years. I can definitively say I fully understand what that means. The sound in the concerts in the film are excellent and a far cry from what my slightly older sister and I heard when we saw them ourselves in Seattle at The Coliseum (now called, Key Arena), August 25, 1966.

They had been to Seattle in 1964 which was famously documented and covered by the media.
When I saw them I was in sixth grade. My sister was in ninth.

As I understand it, my older brother had tickets but heard no one could really hear the music over the screaming girls at other venues, so he didn't want to go. And so my sister got the tickets and I got asked. I was beside myself in not only going to such a grown up thing (and I was surprised when I arrived I was more grown up than most of the audience), but also to actually get to see the Beatles!.

Seattle Times 1966

I remember the place being packed with screaming girls. We were on the left of stage mid way up above and I seem to remember the banister right before us. So lower mid level or lower upper level. But we could see them well enough though I wouldn't have wanted to have been any further away either.

According to this we must have been in section 42

I had my ticket stub until a couple of decades ago when I realized that I had the wrong end of the stub and it had no indication on it whatsoever so I tossed it.

Not my ticket stub but example

What |I remember most is The Beatles coming on stage and the girls screaming. My sister leaned over and complained that if the girls would stop screaming we could actually hear them play. We were both upset that we came to hear a concert and we weren't getting to.


I looked around me and I didn't see a girl not screaming. My sister was sitting there like me, steaming over not hearing the band well. If I listened closely, I could just make out what song they were playing, but not consistently throughout the song.

I remember noticing the size of their amps. Simply not sufficient for this sized venue. See, my sister and our older brother had a band themselves, Cindy and the Barons, in Tacoma, WA. I was used to band practice every Thursday night from 7:30PM to 10PM (curfew times).

Cindy and the Barons

It was obvious to me even at eleven that they didn't have big enough amps or PA system. I couldn't then and do not now understand as this wasn't their first concert, how they (someone) couldn't have figured out they needed more equipment. I suppose they probably saw it as a cost analysis decision. The fans don't care about the music, it was an Experience. And in a way, they were right.

As for Ron Howard's documentary, it is an excellent documentary and the Rolling Stone documentary is an excellent companion to it.

Lost in Space - a documentary (1994) Viacom Public Access Cable by LGN Productions

"Studio 100" presents...

Lost in Space - a documentary (1994) - now in IMDB.

I noticed I do have a YouTube link. There's been copyright issues and there is about a minute lead in of station requirements, silence, test pattern, etc.

For more on this, see below.

This was the first and only project produced by LAST good NERVE Productions (founded 1993, also known as, LGN Productions; AKA, Lateral Geniculate Nucleus Productions).

The show was only shown twice on public access cable in early 1994.

I was the uncredited executive producer on the project. Why that is, is a long, long story....I'll tell it to you some time, possibly over drinks. I had shot one previous video in college up at Western Washington University for my professors in phenomenology.

Now that project was a nightmare. No editor. If I wanted to put music into the reel to reel black and white video tape recorder I had to solder connections. At one point I put myself on camera as I had no actors. That led to my becoming an instant celebrity on campus when I later found that my professor had shown the film to all his classes!

For the next several weeks I had women stopping me between classes to talk about the video making me late for my next class. One time I was asked in class if I was "that guy", the "guitar man" in the video. I was tired of it by then, so I said, "No." She said, "but you look just like him." I said, "I hear that a lot." Then my professor walked up, gave me a stern look and said, "Yes, that's him."

I learned then and there I liked fortune over fame.

Back to the LIS documentary, a project that we made over twenty years ago. This, is its story.

Lost in Space - a documentary

This show was cablecast for the first time on Saturday, February 19th, 1994 at 8PM Pacific Time and for the last time about a month or so later.

The link goes to Dropbox. Too bad I can't just put it up on YouTube like we used to be able to. From Dropbox: "When you share a link to a video, the recipients will be able to stream up to 15 minutes of it on the preview page of the Dropbox website. To view a longer video in its entirety, they'll need to download the file or watch it using one of our mobile apps."

Pre-production began at the end of Summer 1993.

First a little background about how all this blog on it came to be.

I was recently contacted by Jeffro Brunk on Facebook. That's him on the right below. They are making a documentary about early 90s public access cable productions.

"Channeling Yourself" documentarians: JoanE O'Brian, Judith Card, Jim Yaeger and Jeffro Brunk (right)

Jason Hughes and Kelly Hughes (not related)

Jeffro had been told by filmmaker, Kelly Hughes, about our project. That's Kelly above on the right..

About Kelly and crew

Kelly contacted me on Stage32, a web site for people into film productions. He invited me to his showing about his films at Crypticon 2015 hosted at the SeaTac Hilton on the weekend of May 22nd. So, I went and I had a really great time. I also met some talented actors like Jason Hughes (no relation to Kelly), Noel Austin and Stephanie Lee and the rather amazing 76 year old Betty Marshall, representing actors from Kelly's newer and older works.

Here's another blog with more on Kelly and crew.

Kelly produced “Heart Attack Theater,” in 1991-1993, that showed a new 30 minute narrative film each week of locally produced horror. I got a chance to meet and hang with Kelly and associates at Crypticon 2015 here in Washington and we had quite a day and evening getting to know one another.

From Heart Attack Theatre

From a write up about Kelly:

"Kelly Hughes: "HEART ATTACK! The Early Pulse Pounding Cinema of Kelly Hughes. From 1991-1993, while Nirvana and Twin Peaks made the Pacific Northwest hip, Hughes quietly created an unprecedented body of work on Seattle's public access TV. His weekly series Heart Attack Theatre was the video equivalent of grunge rock. Aiming for a classy Twilight Zone style suspense anthology, he ended up with a John Waters-esque shock-a-thon, shooting most of his footage in and around his apartment near the University of Washington. In this documentary, Hughes interviews his actors to reveal a pre-YouTube era of do-it-yourself film-making. And showcases his native Seattle in all its trashy glory."

Now, about Jeffro and crew. 

They are working on a documentary about early 90s Seattle area public access cable producers and filmmakers. Jeffro and associate's documentary on Seattle's 90s cable public access is titled, Channeling Yourself. 

Both Jeffro and Kelly had displayed interest in seeing our LIS documentary, so I decided to dig it up. I found the original tapes, burned them to DVD, ripped the video from it so I could use it to make the show available to the public and finally, tried to upload them to YouTube as I mentioned above. But I got an array of refusals due to copyright infringements. Well, no surprise there, really. However it was something we didn't have to worry about in our not for profit public access cable TV productions.

I challenged the claim with YouTube about rejecting this video under fair use laws. Here is my challenge to YouTube submitted 5/27/2015:

"This is an historical document that was legally aired as it is here, on public access TV in 1994 and published here merely for historical purposes as related to cable television history. No money has ever or will ever be made from it. Those who own copyright are only receiving free advertising in a positive light by the existence of this document being made available online. Only bits and pieces of media are being used and not in their entirety. Credit is given at the end of the film as best as was known during the period of it's original airing.
"The published or unpublished nature of the original work is only a determining factor in a narrow class of cases. In 1992, Congress amended the Copyright Act to add that fair use may apply to unpublished works. See 17 U.S.C. § 107. This distinction remains mostly to protect the secrecy of works that are on their way to publication. Therefore, the nature of the copyrighted work is often a small part of the fair use analysis, which is more often determined by looking at the remaining three factors." http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/fair-use"

Here is a screen shot of the alleged copyright infringements on YouTube:

Rights issues with posting on YouTube

And here's their response to my challenge (I got a few of these emails covering all the disputes):

Hi JZ Murdock, 
Good news! Your dispute wasn’t reviewed within 30 days, so the copyright claim on your YouTube video has now been released by FOX. 
Video title: "Lost in Space - a documentary (1993) Viacom Public Access Cable TV Seattle" 
- The YouTube Team 

Awesome! And here's some other responses to my challenge:

"Hi JZ Murdock,
After reviewing your dispute, UMG has decided that their copyright claim is still valid.
Video title: Lost in Space - a documentary (1993) Viacom Public Access Cable TV Seattle
Copyrighted song: Force Majeure
Claimed by: UMG
View claim details
Why this can happen
• The copyright owner might disagree with your dispute.
• The reason you gave for disputing the claim may have been insufficient or invalid.
- The YouTube Team"

Okay that one wasn't so awesome. Since Fox dropped their claims on the video clips of LIS here's what it looks like now on YouTube:

latest rights issues Fox relented it seems

I could remove the music altogether (and with the editing issues I had regarding music, why should this surprise me?), and then I could post the video. Decisions, decisions....but what this tells me is the [Merlin] Beggars company are kind of jerks.

If I could make money on this video on YouTube, they're welcome to it. I got this also from YouTube:

"Appeal reinstated claim
Are you sure you want to appeal?
You will be required to provide your contact information to the claimant.
An appeal will result in either:
the release of a claim on your video
OR a legal copyright notification from the claimant. In this event your video will be taken down and you will receive a copyright strike on your account. If you have received additional copyright strikes, this may suspend your YouTube account Learn more"

Nice. Well, I'll let it sit there and see what happens over the next few weeks. My brother said this happened to him once using Pink Floyd music. Then a few weeks later his video simply went live. So, who knows?

Then the next day I received this email:

"Hi JZ Murdock,
After reviewing your dispute, SME and WMG has decided to release their copyright claim on your YouTube video. However, there may be additional copyright claims on this video.
Video title: Lost in Space - a documentary (1993) Viacom Public Access Cable TV Seattle
View claim details
- The YouTube Team "

So hey, I don't know....

As far as I can tell now I only have to wait to see what happens with the [Merlin] Beggars group.

Regardless, the LIS video is available on Dropbox (see above) and I can still after all, show it privately.

Anyway, because of the editing issues (see below...somewhere) only a few of the many songs I used as background music are actually present anyway. I am assuming they are still actually on the master tape, I just can't hear them on a regular VHS player, so the possibility exists that at some point, I could see (and hear) the original version of this that I had edited.

Songs included (thanks to our music director, Joaquin Olson): Coil, Tones on Tail, Clannad, Brian Eno & David Byrne, Wang Chung, Tangerine Dream, Berlin, Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, Julie Cruise, Soft Cell, Chris Isaac, James Horner, and Peter Gabriel. Also with "Love All The Hurt Away" (duet with George Benson) by Aretha Franklin, which was the music on the music video of LIS scenes which we got from someone else and is a funny and entertaining piece.

After having spent hours going through my boxes of media before and completely expecting this to happen this time too, I opened the first box in storage and there were both tapes, sitting right on top and together!

I watched it for the first time in many years as I was burning it to DVD and realized that Jeffro and Kelly were both right. That regardless of the issues and errors involved, I really should make it available to the public and most especially fans of LIS, as well as those interested in early public access cable TV shows.

the burned show to DVD

History of the project and LGN Productions

In the summer of 1993 I was looking for a project to do. I had separated from my son's mother and I needed something to capture my attention other than dwelling on my rather miserable life at the time.

I had previously tried to start a magazine, "The Journal of Extraordinary Diversions", which later became a web site under that title starting in 1994. And it's still up and running, though mostly unused for historical purposes just because it's been online for so very long. It was started as a web site for film productions and writers and extraordinary pursuits in general.

It is one of the oldest, continuously running web sites still on the internet. It has a Martial Arts section that won a couple of awards in the 90s.

I built another site, no longer running that I sold on eBay years ago. I set it up for my wife (my daughter's mother) who was a horse trainer. I called it, "The Equitation Station". It became internationally known and respected until she got out of the horse show industry (Arabian horses) and I sold it off sadly, to someone who only used it to direct people to their sales web for something un-horse related. Had I known that, I wouldn't have sold it to them. People were disappointed for a while over that.

Later yet, I tried to start an online company for displaying all restaurant menus in the Seattle area (of which there were more than 5,000). Start up money was an issue as were technology issues. This was an idea before its time. Something I keep running into in my life. Like with my screenplay, Ahriman, of which I didn't see some concepts used in that screenplay, in films for nearly ten years after initially writing it in 1984 in college.

The magazine software I had been using kept having issues, crashing repeatedly and requiring rebuilding until I just gave up. Such was the hardware and software back then with a dual 5.25" floppy disk drive system. Once the OS floppy filled up, that was it. I would lose whatever I had done. Once on that system, I lost what I felt was the most perfect short story I'd ever written. Though I tried to rewrite it immediately, it was just never the same.

Having just had a new born son, I finally and begrudgingly gave up on the magazine. On the restaurant company, I was going to call it, Cafe Menu. But as I said, it was just too soon technology-wise as I would have had to use BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) software which required people to dial up on slow modems and use a phone line for each connection.

Later on several years later the company Sidewalk.com (1995) picked up my idea on their own and went with it. It has since morphed into other sites and now basically is Yelp.com. But Sidewalk.com had not done as good of a job for what I had planned out in researching and developing it out, in how to give people a restaurant experience specific to each restaurant. Nor has Yelp although their customer review concept has worked out quite well for them as a business model.

I had been told about the Viacom public access cable channel 29 and so I started watching it. It was crazy. I loved it. My friends loved it. Essentially, it was the Wild West on cable. The Seattle PI newspaper has done an article on it that talks about the new Channeling Yourself documentary.

Some public access cable producers like myself (no I didn't do this) would stare at the camera and scream their frustrations. And people would call back in and yell back. There was a couple on a garden show that eventually went on to more legitimate (pay) cable channel. One woman would read interesting and weird stuff and dance naked around candles (“Goddess Kring,” Shannon Kringen, 1996 – 2011, Access’ most recognizable poet and artist. Best remembered for dancing and self body painting while reciting verse, often partially naked.).

Then, there was hot tub girl. What a riot she was.

Donna Marie on Hot Tub TV 1996

One fan favorite was Donna Marie who held a talk show at a different person's hot tub every week around the Pacific Northwest. Basically, hot tub, bikini and drinks. It was all pretty fun, intriguing and sometimes questionable, but always fun and fascinating. Donna went on to become a minor celebrity whom I would see in years later from time to time on various other shows including the Howard Stern Show.

So, I found out how to become a public access cable producer. I started talking to my friends John and Gordon about doing a documentary, my brother Marvin and my friend Joaquin. John, wasn't very into the idea however.

Still, I signed up. I attended the required class and was given access to the studio and equipment. Pretty cool. People were signing up to be on crews. I was, a bit shy about it. Dumb. Just dumb.

Anyway, the end result?

Lost In Space - a documentary (1993)

We decided to give the show overall a title of "Studio 100" in case our hopes that it might develop into other topics as it was with LIS, might eventually come to fruition. I had hoped for the first show to be on Star Trek, but John wasn't a big fan of that idea so that wasn't going to happen. Besides I didn't have the wealth of knowledge about Star Trek like John did about Lost In Space. We talked about several possibilities for topics but I always avoided Lost in Space. John didn't bring it up either because he didn't think about it, or thought I would reject it outright.

LIS Fan Tech Manual

Which was when it dawned on me that with John's being such a big (huge) fan of LIS, and with his having been an active fan and contributing to LIS fan Technical Manuals about the show, it would be an obvious draw for him.

As I remember it John got screwed over by one of the guys making one of the tech manuals. I seem to remember something about John submitting drawings and the guy redoing them (and not as well) just so he could claim credit or something like that, thereby cutting John out of it. Pretty low if you ask me. I don't remember if the one displayed above was the one John was working on or not, but it does look familiar.

Anyway, you get the idea.

Over the years we'd had many hours of enjoyable if pitched, but friendly debates over the importance of Star Trek vs Lost In Space, and TV sci fi in general. It was our favorite pastime.

So one day I pitched the idea to him. Even though he still was difficult about joining the project, I knew from the beginning that he would do it. Not that he made it easy. Then again, no one else wanted to get in front of the camera, either. And I know I didn't want to. I'd been there, done that. So I have to give him credit for at least doing it.

Half way through post production, I happened to meet the woman who would become my (next) wife. She is mentioned in the end credits in thanking Carin Anderson. We married in 1994, divorced in 2002). So I ended up moving out of Seattle and in with her better situation than my Sandpoint studio apartment ("You can see Mt Rainier...if you stretch and look hard), which made finishing the project more difficult than it already had been.

I would to stay late in town after my day job at the UW Personnel office in order to edit, sometimes until late into the night. I was seldom alone in the editing room. The next morning I still had to get up and commute that miserable I-5 commute from Auburn, Washington to be at work on time, bright eyed and well... you get the idea. And my boss was a stickler for being on time. This was after five years of working at the UW in MCIS on a VAX mainframe at night, autonomously, with "God" control of the Radiology and Pathology mainframe for two major Seattle medical centers.

It got to be a problem to finish the project so that at times, I wasn't as sharp in the editing bay as I needed to be. And due to various other issues I was the primary editor.

Had I not met my wife to be at that time, I originally had all intent of doing other shows. That just never happened with my new living arrangements. And so, "Lost In Space - a documentary" became our only production.

Once I had finished post on it I took it down to the cable production office and submitted it for an "air" date. On the Saturday night on which it was to show, and it seems to me that was a couple of weeks or so from my submission date, I sat down to watch it at my girlfriend's apartment. We were living on an expensive horse farm owned by the wife of a local construction company magnate where she was the junior trainer at that time on the White River in Auburn, Washington.Anyone who knows horses around there, knows who I'm talking about.

Now, if you used the Viacom station's equipment you had to air your finished product at least once, though you could submit as available for other cablecasting dates. Although I used my own miserable tripod without a fluid head which is readily apparent in the video, and I used my own VHS camera, I did use their editing equipment.. The tape I used was high quality half inch TDK brand HDX-pro (high def) 120 VHS video tape in my standard full sized VHS camera, similar to this one below. The same tape I'd used in college only now it was color and not reel to reel. And it worked.

I was also using an SLR still camera tripod, a typical rookie mistake. There is nothing like a good fluid head tripod for shooting video for that smooth panning action. You can see why in the first shots of John talking outside at NOAA as the jerking of the shot distracts you during the panning action of the camera in following him walking back and forth. Which I had told him not to do because of the tripod. But he was so nervous, he said he couldn't stop doing it. He WAS doing it, so there wasn't much I could say.

Sharp VHS Camcorder/Player; Model VL-L280C Photo

Also, as Viacom used public bandwidth, they had by law no editorial license to tell you what to or not to put on their cable channel. Which was AWESOME. I wish it still existed like that. Thus, you got to see some very interesting shows on public access.

For more, see Jeffro's upcoming documentary about it or visit some of the links I've supplied here about it.

A few things became readily apparent on my viewing our project on live cablecast for the first time. These were issues with the production tape that went on to be cablecast, which had slipped right by me.

Allow me to explain. Mid-post production I had shown up to edit one night only to be told that they had sent MY (okay, THEIR) Panasonic VHS to VHS editor to California for repairs. They said to just use another editing bay. So I signed in on another editor and immediately realized it simply wasn't working right.

That one editor sent off to be repaired had to have been haunted or something. Because my master tape wasn't working as it had on that other editor.I couldn't hear some of the music on the other editor.

I came to realize that I either had to start all over or simply wait for the old editor to be repaired and returned. Which is what I decided to do. See I'd had to use various VHS tapes from John that he had acquired over the years, for bits of scenes that I used and then returned the tapes to John. As well as various audio tapes. It was all pieced together on the master VHS tape. In case you don't know, many audiophiles back then thought video tape was superior to audio tape and recorded their audio on video.

So to start over would be a complicated mess. Not to mention resynching all the music... again.

I dropped by the studio several times, but no editor. It was delayed for some reason. So I started to call instead and about a month or so later (seemingly forever), the editor was finally repaired, returned and I was able to get back to editing. Which I did. I then applied the end titles on the rolling title machine in the back corner of the editing bays..

It wasn't however until it aired that I realized that most of the show didn't have any of the underlying background music that I had so carefully edited in. You can see the list in the end titles of all the music that I'd included. Why I chose Tones On Tail's, "Christian Says", which you can hear in the first part of the documentary (the part done before the editor broke) is quite beyond me. Other than I simply liked the tune and the tone of it. That band's name by the way (Tones on Tail) came from the tones they always heard on the end of their studio master audio tape's tail end.

The music issue was beyond my control.

UPDATE: When Kelly Hughes read this blog he had this to say about my background music issues, which I found interesting:

"I think anyone who made programming for channel 29 can relate to the technical nightmares. I would always add my music to a separate track. And the playback operator needed to know to have a certain switch turned on. Otherwise, there would be no music. So every time I turned my tape in, I included a note. Since I had a weekly time slot, I think they got the hint after awhile. But it was pretty nerve wracking not knowing if your show would be presented the way I intended. I did have episodes where they didn't turn on that switch. And my music was missing. The playback deck was a Panasonic S-VHS. The identical deck to what I edited on at home. So luckily, I was pretty familiar with it."

Well nuts, who knew? I wasn't familiar with it. The studio employees possibly knew but I was shy and didn't ask for much help beyond my own crew. Who knew less than I did.

Anyway....

In reflection I can see now that I should have played the production tape once on another machine. Like mine, at home. But it hadn't occurred to me and I figured the station's players were far beyond the quality of my home player (which may prove the point, but hey, too late now). But why would it dawn on me to check the tape elsewhere? After all it worked fine as far as I could tell.

However there were other issues that were fully on myself in my editing. For instance?

My number one mistake is in the after-title description where it says clearly on screen in a superimposition.

 "Lost I Space"

Not "Lost in Space". "Lost "I" Space". Good grief. Face palm. Head banging on desk.

Sigh....that was my first sign something was going terribly wrong while I watched its first cablecasting from home that February of 1994.John watched it from his home. There was an after airing phone call. It was, interesting. Not fun, but interesting. I mean, we're both kind of perfectionists.

The Production

John had begrudgingly agreed to be the host and narrator. Gordon, the interviewer.

The interviewer was so talkative and aggressive because John needed to be prompted. As I indicated, he didn't really want to be the one interviewed but he had all the info and he knew it only made sense. I didn't think his screen presence was all that bad either, it just needed practice. Though he had to be prompted initially at the beginning, just to get him going, he then picked it up and did quite well.

I had wanted to do rehearsals but John wouldn't hear of it. He just wanted to get it over and done with. Well, I'll give him credit for actually doing it, and getting it done. Even if it did mean we couldn't reshoot some scenes.

For instance, I wanted to reshoot the part in front of NOAA (the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, at Lake Washington in Seattle. That is at Magnuson Park in the Sandpoint area of Seattle. It looked futuristic and not a building everyone knew. Meaning, it wasn't like the Space Needle or the famous Seattle Science Center arches, or something.

There is a scene where John is kneeling down with a model of the Jupiter 2 in hand. At first you don't even notice the model. He was holding it too low. I wanted to reshoot it, but he didn't want to. It works, but just barely.

That happened a couple of times but there were a few times we did reshoot right after, making the initial shoot a rehearsal. Such as his NOAA opening which I think we redid about three times. Each time he was getting a little more annoyed but he also did better each time as he was getting more relaxed and more into character in front of the camera.

There is a SUPERIMPOSITION on screen where we used the single word "SMEG" to offset a new section: The Interview. It was an obvious nod to Red Dwarf on printed plates and followed with other plates of printed commentary introducing that section. We had discussed that it was obviously off track from LIS and somewhat disruptive to the LIS focus. But hey, we were such fans of Red Dwarf we felt we simply had to add it in... somewhere.

The SUPER saying that the interviewer was "rabid" and that there was only one mic was an after thought. We just thought we needed to explain why he didn't have a mic at times and why he talked so much. Which again, was all to try and keep John on a roll and upbeat. You can see a few times where John is getting irritated but then he pushes on..We may have reshot parts of the interview as he was home and felt more comfortable.

John's "studio" for the interview segment was actually his apartment on Capitol Hill in Seattle at the north end of Broadway, about half a block north from the Harvard Exit theatre. We thought it would look on screen like a production company office or his personal art studio.

During the interview there is a short section that is repeated. First of all we realized we needed an interview. There was just too much info to get out and an interview was settled on for the most natural way to get it out. I also wanted the audience to get to know John better considering all he knew and had done in fandom. He just wasn't getting the recognition I thought he deserved.

Artistically we didn't think that would be such a bad thing having a few seconds of a previously shown section repeated, as it was a short middle of a bigger and previously unseen\unheard part framing it. But it was later realized to have been a mistake and should have instead had a jump cut skipping that repeated part as it simply went on just a bit too long for it to be reasonably ignored and seen as stylistic.

The shots of the interviewer (Gordon) were also an afterthought when it was realized that the audience really needed to\should see who was talking because of how much he ended up talking overall. Some shots of the interviewer could also have been held for maybe a second or so longer. These pick up shots were done after the interview had been shot.

In the interview John got more relaxed requiring less and less prompting as he started to get into it. But by then the interviewer was getting too used to talking so much and a few times goes on a bit long. The one mic situation at times only making things worse.

The reason we did the LIS doc was that I just wanted to produce something and I wanted John's help. I wanted to do something with someone and a close friend was most desired. Besides, he had a wealth of info on LIS and though he wasn't at all interested in doing a production, I realized LIS would or could suck him into the project.

Indeed, when I came up with the proposition to him I think he knew at that moment that I had him. Though he continued to grumble and needed to be led into it (dragged, coerced, threatened....). But honestly? I think he enjoyed it. Now? He doesn't seem to want anything to do with much of anything from those days, sadly.

Now for myself, I didn't exactly want to do a LIS documentary. But it was a meeting of the minds on that, which got it to happen. So that became the project. As it was, John was hesitant and took a lot of convincing (coercing? promises?) throughout the project and he threatened to walk a few times. Though I'm not sure he really would have, he certainly threatened it. It was a struggle for control between producer and talent. Bet that never happened before or since, right?.

John didn't seem to get that the interviewer needed to play ignorant as a process of an interview, to prompt him to talk about what he knew, to set him up with softball questions so that in his being asked for instance, who produced LIS, you can see the annoyance on his face in actually having to say the name, his hero, Irwin Allen. It was so obvious, but was it to the viewers? So he realized it was info that  needed to get out, to be included and to be exposed in an orderly fashion as the interview went on.

Though I was actually a fan of both (that is to say, I WATCHED LIS as a kid as much as it annoyed me at times and as much as I wanted Dr. Smith to die, Die, DIE, so very, many times....), I was a essentially for all intents and purposes a die hard Star Trek fan.

John was obviously a big LIS fan. For years prior to this we had many arguments over which was a better show, etc., in friendly confrontations that after years became a more cliche thing between us and lasted less and less time as we had grown a short hand in debating the issue. We already knew what each would say ahead of time.

Almost as if we were practicing through much of our lives to do a documentary on LIS.

Dr. Smith annoyed me so much during the show that I came to have a love \ hate relationship with the show overall. But in Star Trek, it was pure love. The first time I ever missed a Star Trek episode my mother and grandmother had taken me with them to return a vacuum. I watched the clock in the car with my grandmother while my mother was in the store, seemingly forever. I was maybe in 7th grade at the time and was in tears by time my mother returned to the car as I knew that the show had already started and for the first time, I knew I had missed the opening scene of a Star Trek episode. I never had that reaction to Lost in Space.

We got home that evening half way through the Star Trek episode and my younger brother was lying on the floor watching it. I was pretty upset. My mother said, "Well, you can watch the last half of it anyway." Not helpful mom!

Not understanding that would ruin the show for me, I left her in the living room confused and headed upstairs to my bedroom instead, hoping someday I'd get to see the full episode from the beginning. Not having any idea the show would last only three years... or, that it would go into syndication purgatory nearly forever. Or spawn other Star Trek TV shows, or films, or reboot films.

I had no idea I was watching the birth of franchise history in action. Lost in Space, but obviously, lesser so.

With John, LIS was pure love, perhaps as it was his first sci fi TV show. He was at the right age for it to imprint. I was older than him by a few years and grew up with more of the 50s early 60s sci fi films and TV shows. So I was a little more advanced when LIS hit the scene and then more so with Star Trek which he may have been too young for at the time, though he grew to love it in later years.

After LIS's first half season (we figured after the initial five or six original episodes, which were pretty good, Star Trek pretty much blew LIS out of the water... in my mind anyway.

But not John's. But then he is wrong. And, after all this is my blog and not his. He can write his own recount of history. No worry John, if you read this. I love you brother. He's since moved out of state years ago and we don't talk too often anymore.

I'm still hoping there is maybe a possibility to get a fully functional copy with all the music included, but then perhaps not. One of the great things about technology as it advances, that things that weren't possible only a few years ago, can suddenly become very possible.

As for Jeffro's documentary, I'm looking forward to seeing Channeling Yourself. I've given Jeffro and his crew (JoanE O'Brian, Judith Card, Jim Yaeger), a chance to hear about this project of ours and to view the documentary itself and we shall see what we shall see.

As for Kelly Hughes, I hear he's coming over to visit next week to do some location scouting for a new project.

20 Years, 5 Lessons

What I learned through our LIS documentary project:

- Preparation. The more you prepare, the less trouble you end up having.
- Know your equipment. First and foremost, know (learn) your equipment and use the best and most appropriate equipment available to you
- Volunteers. Use volunteers, but if they are trouble lose them (and as soon as is reasonable but finish the project if you can). Then if they were trouble in your last project, don't use them on your next project.
- Help. Don't shy away from asking for help, or finding it. You will always need more than you think you do.
- Resources. Use your resources in your studio, crew or talent. The quality of the end product is what is important, the viewer's experience. Make it as easy on the viewer as possible so they will want to view your work the next time.

In closing... whenever you get a chance to do something out of the ordinary such as we did as public access cable TV producers, I'd suggest you go for it.

Many thanks to John, Gordon, Marvin, and Joaquin, all who are mentioned in the end titles. As well, thanks to the Viacom station crew at the time, Erik, Patty and John: Jeffro was a part of that station crew at some point but I don't remember ever meeting him. Thanks to him and his crew and Kelly and his.

End titles thank you

To all of those cable employees, crews and producers from back then... hey, look how long we've lasted and all these years later our stuff is still being seen and enjoyed!

Cheers!