Looking for something to do in Chicago on a Saturday Night, why not go see a show.

White Rainbows
A Vibrantly Monochromatic Gay Sketch Comedy Revue

Written by:
Matt Utter

Directed by:
Kelly Beeman

Starring:
Stanley Chong
Armand Fields
Becca Levine
Kevin Reader
Matt Utter
Arianna Wheat

Playing at the Gorilla Tango Theater,
1919 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago, IL 60647

For only 2 more nights!!

Its Funny! Go see it!

For more info, go to
http://whiterainbowschicago.wordpress.com

I think I'm going to make this journal a little less self indulgent. Initially I was thinking about starting a new blog and stick to a more professional, journalistic even, approach of posting. Instead I'm opting, to just keep this account alive and update it with more outward reaching content than the usual inward silliness. Stay tuned for updates. Or better yet, not, as my update history would suggest you'd be waiting a long time.

~David

Do you ever walk a long way to get some where and when you get there you realize that nobody there realizes or cares you walked, they all just assume or expect you drove there? Sometimes life is that way.

~D

The best part of waking up…
Is a handgun in your mouth…

No… that didn’t rhyme at all…
I figured if I was going to go out, my final words should be a little more thought out…
I racked my brain to find something to incorporate the gun at my head and the classic Foldiers slogan…
Nothing…
I looked to other forms of destruction…
“Toaster in your Tub” was the closest thing I could find…
But that sounded like way to much effort…

I finally got tired and put the gun away…
Decided to get on with my day…

Yeah…
Why did that have to rhyme.

Nice obscure reference someone made that only a handful of people will appreciate...

Recent strips of Mallard Fillmore have got my attention... they've been about something some frineds and I have talked about somewhat recently about Men earning more than Women in the workplace. The overall question was whether it was really a discrimination issue or just a bent statistic. Tinsley's working the latter and citing this article as his source. Now, I'm not saying these are set-in-stone facts... but at the very least its worth a look at.

I keep thinking about Sin City and how in love I am with the idea of the extended universe... or concurrent story telling... or whatever you call that type of writing. Its idea that a bunch of characters basically all play in the same sandbox, but freely travel between (semi)unrelated stories. The type of thing can be seen in Pulp Fiction, Kevin Smith's films, Captain Harlock and the rest of Matsumoto's tales (despite continuity differences), most mainstream comics, and in a more closely connected fashion in books like Catch-22.

Whats funny is I don't understand what makes the idea so appealing. I think it has something to do with established familiarity. Its the same thing that draws us to sequels, prequels, and alternate universe tales. Its like seeing an old friend. That sort of "Hey!!! I was wondering what ever happened to you". Its a good feeling.

I think more importanly though, from a writing standpoint, it prevents redundancy. Especially in action/adventure stories where there really only seem to be a few character archtypes you can have before you start repeating yourself. Whats the point of coming up with a new character that serves the exact same purpose as another if you've got a perfectly good one already created? Using the old one not only prevents that repetition but gives the observer something they're already familiar with, which can help avoid alot of filler needed to explain the character. Not only that, but it unifies the other works, creating relevance where there may have not been any before. It turns what would have been an anthology at best in to a complete and possibly complex work. And I like that idea.

So somewhere here i wanted to actually build my own extended universe. Although as of now, I haven't really decided from what. Oddly enough, I planned to condense my super hero comic series to a single piece, and not following suit with Marvel/DC comics and boiling it over into a million different series. Hasen and I have talked about connecting all our wild anthology ideas together... and we may still. When i had planned to make a fighting game, it was my plan to build the story line like that... each character having their own story that still fit in with everyone elses storyline. Theres also the horror movie script/story/(comic?) I have in the works that may work with that, but may not... its not solidified enough to tell. Plus theres a few other ideas i had when i was a youngster that I may try to conform to the idea, like the superhero thing, just to do.

Well, who knows... the point is... I love the idea. And at somepoint I will write something like it. Unfortunatly, my writing is more talk than actual work but that will change at some point.

Next time, I'll talk about trilogies. Actually not, but I have a similar love for those... so its bound to become a pointless ramble like this one eventually.

Sometimes I feel like biting down on Cupid's revolver and splattering the back of my head all over the bedroom wall in the shape of a heart... then making you scrape it off with a Shoebox Greeting.

This is what i hear whenever Bono's ugly mug clouds up my tv screen hawking iPods.

"Heres the deal folks, you do a commercial, you're off the artistic roll call... forever. End of story. You're another corporate fuckin shill, you're another whore at the capitalist gangbang, and if you do a commercial, theres a price on your head, everything you say is suspect, and every word that comes out of your mouth is now like a turd falling into my drink."

-Bill Hicks.

I am under the impression that our presidential candidates, and perhaps most if not all candidates for any elected office, no longer believe in democracy. With all this talk about swing voters or swing states and such it would appear that campaining has become nothing but an attempt to secure votes. Of course the electoral process may be to blame for a lot of this, since the results are the same if a candidate gets 51% or 100% of the votes in a given state. But i'm getting off my point.

The idea behind democracy is to allow the people to choose their political leaders, and therefore choosing the candidate best suited for the job by majority vote. Candidates today i beleive have lost sight of this and are too concerned with winning the election themselves. The point of campaining should not be to "win votes" but should be to educate the public about their platform and let the people make an informed decision.

Granted I realize that each candidate believes that they are the best for the job, but when they go so far to simply "beat the other guy", i begin to think something is amiss. Theres too much public manipulation and misinformation being thrown into the process. Democracy is suppose to be about letting the people decide what they want, not who they want. It shouldn't be a competition.