Portland update

So many people asked to see pictures of my wife being pregnant that I had to send a follow up.

Unfortunately, my camera is broken.

That's okay. I can still show you a picture of Ruthann's belly:

)

Oh wait. That's mine.

Hers hasn't really come in yet. But her boobs are getting
bigger:

?

That's the side view. Here's the front:

ooOO
beforeafter

Mine are getting bigger, too:


..oo
beforeafter

Do you know anybody in Portland?

Sorry I haven't sent out one of these missives in a while. There's a lot to report.

First of all, I'm pregnant. Not me, specifically, but my wife and me, which may as well be me because so far, I'm the one with the protruding belly.

You know how they say getting pregnant makes you see things differently? Wow. It's true. Take LA. I mean it. Take LA. I don't want it, not anymore. It's a tough place to be a grown-up. Can you imagine what it must be like to be a kid there?

Sure, there's so much to expose a kid to. Crack whores and homeless guys. Sig Alerts. Valet parking. And I know there's no better place for my child to learn how to tag.

Still, I'm willing to give all that up—to deprive the fruit of my loins, as it were—in order to give him or her a childhood replete with. . . well, boredom.

Hell, it was good enough for me.

No, I didn't grow up in Portland, but that's not the point. My kid is going to have the childhood I wish I'd had. Where apples ripening on the tree hang just above the picket fence for easy picking. Where you can buy a taco after six without being propositioned by young men in mini skirts.

Where it rains.

Call us impulsive, but we went and bought ourselves a house. One with not just an attic but a basement, too, for crying out loud. And a porch. A real, live, porch where you can actually sit on a swing and wave to your neighbors.

And where your neighbors wave back, neither you nor them feeling the need to calculate which one of you might be better connected to David Hasselhoff's ophthalmologist's cousin.

I'm not saying all this to brag. I'm saying this with a sense of astonishment. Places like this really do exist—or seem to anyway. I shouldn't be that surprised. I've traveled. I've shot in Istanbul and Buenos Aires and Detroit. I should know that there are people who don't live like we do. Like we did. Like we intend not to.

And I know that there will be things about LA that I'll miss. The chicken at Versailles, for one thing. The sunshine. Some really wonderful people.

Which brings me to the point of this diatribe. We don't know a lot of people here. So far, we know five. Which is a great start, but we wouldn't mind knowing more.

Is there anyone you can think of who lives in or around Portland that we might get along with? Someone creative, audacious, artistic, opinionated, and fun? Someone who cares deeply about something, whether it's global warming or snowboarding?

If you can think of anyone, please introduce us. Send them my e-mail address, or send me theirs.

Thank you.

Back to crass self-promotion

I had a pretty good week.

First there was the Winner Take All Screenwriting Competition. I won. All.

Not sure all of what, but so far I've gotten two books and a really swell trophy and apparently there's more to come.

Then there's the Masters of Color Photography International Color Awards. I won First Prize in the Nature category, Third Prize in the Fine Art category and this one's so cool it deserves its own paragraph...

Photographer of the Year.

I like the sound of that. Photographer of the Year. Wow.

There's going to be a book (with seven of my shots in it, thank you very much), an exhibition in Brazil, and gallons of expensive champagne--which knowing me, I'll pour into one of those snazzy camera filters I invented and shoot through.

I know I'm not supposed to have favorites, but isnt that just damn neat?

Besides, I've won lots of screenwriting awards. Thirty-one, so far, not even counting all the film festival awards I won for films I wrote and directed.

Which isn't to say I haven't won plenty of photography awards. Last year I was Apple Computer's featured artist. And I won First Place, Third Place, and twelve honorable mentions in the International Photography Awards.

Kind of makes you wonder, though, doesn't it? I mean, seriously, what's really more impressive?

Here's one way to look at it: A picture's worth a thousand words; my liquid filtration photography portfolio has 36 pictures. That comes to the equivalent of 36,000 words, which is just about 50% more than what an average screenplay runs.

Then again, I've written five other screenplays.

But I also have two other photographic portfolios.

This is getting too complicated.

Canada, the new Brooklyn

After spending the better part of the past two months directing projects in Canada (I've been working in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Ontario), I figured out something amazing about Canada.

It's Brooklyn.

Not Brooklyn the way it is now, mind you. I'm talking the Brooklyn that was. Bubbie and Zadie's Brooklyn. The Brooklyn where hoodlums used to play stick ball in the streets. In fact, just the other day when I walked out the door in Moncton, that's exactly what I saw. Okay, sure, the hoodlums are on skates. And everybody's got a stick. And the ball is a puck. But you get the idea.

Remember New York bagels? Where can you even find a decent bagel in New York any more? Sure, there's H&H. But when you get past them there's... Well, there's that crappy roll with the hole in it you can buy off a cart.

If you've never been to Canada, you're not going to believe this, but the bagels here are--and I'm not exaggerating when I say this--better. Sorry. You New York die-hards are just going to have to suck it up.

And lox. As in Nova. As in Nova Scotia, which is where amazing smoked salmon comes from. The last time a salmon swam up the East River was what? 1837?

You've heard of Montreal smoked meat? Turns out it's made out of pastrami. Or is it corned beef? Whatever. It's every bit as good as the stuff they used to serve at Jewish delis all over Brooklyn. And you pay for it with money that actually looks like money, unlike the goofy new bills they're passing off as money in the States.

This is so remarkably clear that I figure it has to be part of a plan. I mean, we're exporting freedom to the Middle East, the Chinese have the booming economy we used to be famous for, Iceland consumes way more Coca-Cola per-capita than we do, and Argentina's basketball team won the Olympic Gold Medal in 2004.

And suddenly I get it. It's brilliant. This is part of our war on terrorism.

Everybody knows about American manufacturing jobs going offshore. That was just the first step. Now we take everything else that's quintessentially American and move it somewhere else, too.

India gets technology. Chile gets apple pie. Russia gets capitalism. And Japan gets baseball. And the automotive industry. And consumer electronics.

Next time those Al Qaeda bastards try to take down America, they won't find any America to take down. Instead, they'll find an entire country full of fat, lazy, cultureless consumers up to their eyeballs in debt.

Now that's what I call strategy.

Stuff I'm thinking about on my birthday

Today is my birthday. I'm not in much of a mood to send out another self-promotional career update. I'm being reflective.

I've been thinking about the adjectives people use to describe old people and now that I'm a lot closer to old than young, I figure it's time to give some thought to the ones I want the young whippersnappers out there to apply to me.

‘Spry’ isn’t bad. Neither is ‘eccentric’. And I wouldn’t complain about being called ‘wealthy’. But if I had one adjective, I think I'd want it to be ‘dangerous’.

I’ve never been dangerous.

In junior high, I discovered Led Zeppelin. I'd close the door to my room and crank them up full blast, listening to them over and over as I stared up at the ceiling. Not as some pot-induced psychedelic experience, but because songs like Kashmir were so incredibly innovative, both melodically and rhythmically. I was a band geek.

In high school, I was arrested for dealing drugs, but the cops had to let me off because the vial of white powder I was caught with was actually potassium nitrate. (Yes, potassium nitrate is one of the critical components of gun powder. But I wasn't even making gun powder. I was making smoke so I could analyze the vortex in a tornado chamber I'd built for the science fair.) I was also a science geek.

I never tipped a cow, though there was this one time that I tipped a waiter pretty badly. He took a half hour to take my order, never filled my water glass, and put mayo on my sandwich even after I asked for him not to. I still left him 10%.

The question I ask myself today is whether it's too late to change. I am middle aged, there's no disputing that. So I wonder whether I can spend the second half of my life doing what I didn't do in the first half.

I'm thinking of starting smoking. I want to drive without wearing a seatbelt. I want to carry a gun, or at the very least a Leatherman.

It's my birthday, after all. I can do anything I want.

I think I'll have two pieces of cake.

No, you have not reached Marlo Thomas

Let me start by setting something straight: I'm sick.

Not figuratively sick, which may well be the case. But literally sick. As in, I have a cold. The worst cold I've had since the one two years ago.

The one two years ago was brought about by a 19-hour flight, sitting next to a man who only stopped coughing long enough to swig from a quart bottle of cheap Moldavian vodka.

Two days later, I had his cold, and it probably would have stayed pretty benign if only I’d tried his course of medication. Instead, I ended up tromping around the Baja California desert for 28 hours at a shot, working on 'Dust 2 Glory'.

'Dust 2 Glory', in case you haven’t seen it, is a documentary film about the Baja 1000—an off-road race through the Mexican desert run by dune buggies, dirt bikes, and super trucks with engines so huge and powerful, you can hear them coming from five miles away.

The drivers of those trucks asked me to keep my coughing down.

Is this cold worse? Hard to tell. This time I have a voice, though it's not mine. It's Marlo Thomas'.

In my head, it's actually kind of sexy. But I'm so congested that it's really about the only thing I can hear. It's fascinating the way a single word like 'phlegm' reverberates off the walls of my skull, and I entertain myself for hours by doing little experiments, repeating the same word over and over in different ways to see how long it takes for the echo to die down.

Then I start coughing.

I don’t know if other people do this, but when I get sick, I lose my perspective. One time when I had strep throat, I became convinced that the only thing—the only thing—that was going to make me feel better was popcorn. I singed my eyebrows off in that adventure, and almost set my apartment on fire, but that was nothing compared to this.

This time, the thing that I needed—the only thing that would make me feel better—was 'Lethal Weapon'.

My wife was thrilled. I’m not much for being pampered, and this gave her an opportunity to do something to help me feel better.

It took her six hours to find a store that rents or sells videos in L.A., but she didn’t give up. And when she walked back in the house, I noticed she was wearing ear plugs.

I think she wanted to understand my suffering, to feel how congested I must feel.

She loves me that much.

As usual, if you don't want to receive these sporadic updates, please hit the Safe Unsubscribe link and I promise not to send you any more. Really. I hate spam too.

Ah, winter in Montreal!

Greetings from Montreal, where it’s currently minus 15 degrees.

I happen to know that it’s minus 15 degrees because not 20 minutes ago, as I was chipping icicles from my eyelid so that I could look through the camera’s viewfinder, a helpful person opened a window and called out, “Espese d’idiot! Qu’est-ce que tu fais dehors? Il doit faire moin quinze degrés!"

In case you don’t speak French, this translates, loosely, to, “Kind sir, I hope you are warm enough because the temperature is currently minus 15 degrees.” At least that’s what my assistant Gil tells me.

I like Montreal. People are nice here.

But right now, I think you should think about visiting Arizona.

Remember those commercials I shot for Arizona tourism? Well, they’re running.

I want those spots to work.

Not that I don’t think they’ll work. The ad agency (Moses Anshell) does exceptionally fine advertising and I’m not just saying that because they hired me to direct this campaign of spots.

But after having scouted and shot all over the state from Tuscon to Lake Powell, I can say with some authority that Arizona is a magnificent place. The kind of place that not only deserves to have lots of people come visit, but happens to have plenty of wide open spaces to put them in.

Vast and not cold, that's Arizona. Even the ice in your margarita can't get down to minus 15 degrees.

As usual, if you don't want to receive these sporadic updates, please hit the Safe Unsubscribe link and I promise not to send you any more. Really. I hate spam too.