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iPad brothers and sisters and nonbinary siblings, i have joined you
Some time has passed since my last newsletter, and once again, you people are being disgusting about it. I woke up to a rock being thrown through my window. Luckily, it did not break through because I live in a multi-million dollar home that I built myself, and I ensured that most of the millions went towards making the glass on the windows super thick so that nothing could break through. Unfortunately, that also means that the glass is so thick that it’s become nearly opaque, and no light gets in. But that’s good, because as I’ve gotten more wealthy and high status I’ve also become incredibly colorist, and if I tan even a little bit, I freak the fuck out and start firing a gun randomly around the house.
I skipped one or two newsletters or something because my sister was in town, staying with me for a little over a week, and then we visited our friends in San Francisco for a few days. That city is so beautiful, I love to sit down to write in a gorgeous coffee shop while growing increasingly anxious about the technological monstrosities being coded around me.
I’m kidding, please don’t think less of me. Ultimately, I wish I could smash together the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles. I think SF could benefit from getting a little more human, and LA could do with some diligence.
Right now, I’m reading a big stack of books. Many of them are craft books, which I’m using in reference to the projects I’m working on: books on directing, acting, video game writing, balanced out with a bit of fiction. One of the books is the famous and weird, famously weird, “An Actor Prepares.”
I have always been averse to reading books about acting because I mostly think that books about life are books about acting, and books about acting are books about how to be annoying. What I didn’t realize though, was that books about acting can also be books about being less annoying, because much of the advice about acting is, to me, essentially, lessons about how to push through anxiety.
Essentially, acting technique is the instruction of how to exist authentically and effectively amongst the pressure of observation- which can be equally challenging on stage, on set, and on the back patio of Zebulon. I’m moving slowly through the book, because it’s a Frank Herbert level of dense and weird, but where I’m at right now, the protagonist talks about creating circles of concentration on stage. He says choosing a small circle of things to focus on, and practicing concentrating one’s attention intently on that which is in the circle, experimenting with widening it and manipulating it, can help you get past self consciousness. It is good advice for an actor, and has also made parties much easier.
I’m reading “But What I Really Want to Do is Direct” By Ken Kwapis as well. I got this book at a film festival in Wisconsin last year, where Saltwater was screening. This festival was part of a university film department, and thus had a few amazing movies screening; one of which was The Cameraman by Buster Keaton. Ken Kwapis was there introducing the movie, and then was selling and signing copies of his book outside, and I got one. It’s a great book, which starts out with lengthy commiseration on how much Hollywood sucks, which is how I know to trust someone writing about Hollywood.
It’s been a great book to read as I have started directing and producing my Richie Gets Money series. I think with the Hollywood close calls I’ve had recently, and my Los Angeles foundations finally feeling firm, I don’t feel like I can wait for the opportunities to get on set any longer. I’ve always felt that this time would come, and a few months before I turn 25 just makes sense to me.
Whether it’s pure coincidence or fate dangling an omen in front of my eyes, I’ll never know, but I recently saw Dev Patel’s Monkey Man in theaters. As anyone with eyes ears and a brain could tell you, it’s cool. It was not entirely perfectly polished- it had some rough edges as any movie, especially a feature debut, should have. That said, it was unreal entertaining, visually ambitious, and clearly helmed by an incredible actor and mind. Selfishly, it was affirming to see something so directly inspiring- he is an Indian guy who made a big, bold, messy project without waiting for permission.
In many interviews, Dev talks about how hard it was to get the movie made, which seems to be real on every level of filmmaking. It’s so fucking hard to make movies. It requires not only obtaining a lot of money, but also being good at an incredibly difficult artistic skill set. Obtaining the amount of money necessary to make a movie is hard, and developing talent is hard, and that’s why great movies are such diamonds in the rough. And why people who want to spend their life making movies are so weird at parties.
But enough about movies. Now I want to address the elephant in the room, which is this dope new header for TWIRL.
As I mentioned in the first ever TWIRL (of which now there have been 34), this newsletter was inspired by one that I ran in college, TWIST: This Week In Student Theatre. That newsletter would take me hours to put together, and at least one of those hours was just spent dragging and dropping all the correct graphics where they belonged. I always wanted to have graphics for this newsletter, and for projects like RGM, so I finally crossed the threshold into becoming an iPad kid.
I took a graphic design class in college that I had loved, and we mainly used the WACOM drawing tablets. I got a cheap WACOM in college, but it didn’t really hit the same to have to connect all the wires and shit. I had wanted to invest in becoming an iPad kid for a bit, but held off because, well, my screen time is high enough as is. But visual art has really flourished for me in the past few years. In the last couple years, I’ve noticed myself using fewer words in real life, but using more in TWIRL, and putting more of myself into the work on my bedroom walls. I love visual art, even and especially when it’s at its silliest, so I wanted to share with you guys some physical drawings that I’ve done recently.
This is a comic I made for Richie Gets Money. The first thing I ever wanted to be professionally was an astronaut, the second was a comic book artist. Recently, I realized how similar comic strips and films are. I’ve always known I wanted to return to the medium, and doing it through Richie felt like a great way to start.
Something I appreciate about LA is that everyone does a lot of different shit to make money. I think of the people I know, and the stuff they do, as superheroes. This goes out to them.
I got these woodless colored pencils recently and started scribbling, and eventually this drawing came about. I added some layers with marker and pen to make it more distinct. I like when a drawing finds itself through abstract work, and when what ends up being created exists somewhere between abstraction and figuration. In this case, it’s mainly a lot of blue and green and scribbling, but also is the Earth exploding. I don’t think the Earth is going to explode or anything any time soon, but it looks cool to me. I like drawing planetary stuff, that’s been an interest of mine since I was a kid. Today, I’m still drawn to the idea that human beings are on Earth, and look up at the sky. Fuck I can’t believe I didn’t write about the eclipse. But also I don’t have much to say about it besides that it also looked cool to me.
This is some kind of ogre pig man playing football in his underwear and he’s very scared. The stands are packed and the pressure is getting to him. I’m not sure if this is actually happening to him or if its a dream. He’s not wearing pants or a helmet, which indicates dream, but it came out of my head so it feels like it could exist in a reality all its own? Unless it’s his dream, of course. But isn’t it, as an interpretive vision of reality from my own head, inherently my dream? I don’t know. His haircut kinda looks like the haircut I got recently though. No pictures. I’m a private person. As you can tell from my somewhat biweekly newsletter.
Birthday card for my friend in San Francisco.
Other side of the birthday card which I forgot was there when I gave it to him.
I started doodling this on the way back from SF when I was waiting for my plane. Lately I carry a notebook and pens around to doodle when I’m bored and that’s been really useful for my idle time. I started drawing this plane in the airport but then got scared that people would think I was nuts or a terrorist or something. I’m always at least kind of minorly aware that people might think I’m nuts, because I’m definitely a little nuts, but in an airport I get worried because nuts + brown + airport = terrorism. So I pivoted to drawing a face, one that was scared about the plane crashing, and thus probably wouldn’t be drawn by a guy who intended to crash a plane. Unless he was having second thoughts about crashing the plane. Bam there’s a short story… writing that down. Right now actually. Truth be told, I didn’t follow any of the Boeing stuff. I’m honestly not that current these days, because I spend most of my time reading or writing or drawing things that other people might think are a little bit nuts. I gotta try podcasts or something.