If you, the reader, and I have shared a conversation in the last couple of years, or, at the very least, you happened to stumble upon this blog and its inconsistent posting schedule, then you’ve likely heard about an independent film I co-wrote called, “Zeus”.

It’s about a dead gym teacher and a few of his former students, who reconnect in Western New York to pay tribute. Well, the film is finished, and we’ve set up a Kickstarter campaign to help raise funds to get it into some festivals. Here’s a link to our Kickstarter page, where you’ll find everything you want to know about the film.

We’ve set an ambitious goal to raise $3,000 to help cover entry fees into festivals and pay back my writing buddy’s sister, who pitched us a grand and a half for film insurance. So far, our friends and, humbly, a few strangers have donated more than $1,500 toward “Zeus”. This on top of the $700 folks donated during our three screenings in Olean and St. Bonaventure University (Those funds partially covered the cost of film insurance, which was $1,500 total).

For those unaware, Kickstarter is a wonderful asset for DIYers trying to fundraise for projects that would otherwise be fiscally impossible. It works like this: Artists set the target dollar amount for their project as well as various incentives for donors; people donate; only after the goal is met does the artist get any of the money.

With that said, we are currently at the halfway mark of both our targeted goal and our 30-day deadline. This means we have 15 days to raise another grand and a half.

Friends, we need your help to meet our goal. Consider making a pledge – $1, $5, $500,000, whatever. Or, at the very least, send this message along to your friends and tell them you know these two, rad Olean and Hinsdale, NY, artists, who dig their hometowns so much they wrote a goofy movie about it. And, get this, the movie that they wrote and filmed for basically nothing, casting their friends as “actors”, is actually PRETTY DAMN COOL, particularly the soundtrack, which was written and recorded by this dude in his apartment on Garage Band (Speaking of which, have you downloaded the soundtrack? It’s free right here ).

By making a donation, you directly help us get “Zeus” out there and get some sweet shwag in the process. Please consider getting involved and pass the word along. We’d appreciate it.

Thanks for reading,

Lou

The end of December is when I skim through my book journal (Yes, I have one. Shut up), scroll through iTunes and – new this year – pull up our house’s Netflix catalog for the reads, listens and movies that meant the most to me in 2011. Most were not, in fact, released in 2011.

Onward!

All things being said of a great 2011, it was a bad year for reading. Not nearly as much time to read this year and the majority of books I did manage to finish were merely so-so or, in the case of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”, about as enjoyable as passing Skittle-sized kidney stones. (As for the lone “new” book: allow me to state for the record that, despite receiving literary fellatio from countless periodicals — except from the NYT’s Book Review, strangely — Murakami’s “1Q84″ is so incredibly, tragically, epically dull.)

On to the books:

#1                          #2                       #3                         #4                      #5

“Atlas Shrugged” is the hands-down winner. Epic, philosophical, poignant, eye-opening, wrist-splitting, all of those things. This was my second read through “Underworld” and enjoyed it more so the second time around. Delillo still occupies the top spot as my favorite author, and his 1998 novel, walking through 50 years of Cold-War era America, is simply put a staggering piece of art. “Malcolm X: Life of Reinvention” provides insight into the complexity and brilliance of a man most know through his seminal autobiography. A hard look – flaws and all – at an influential American orator, writer and leader. “The Imperfectionists”, a book for any print journalist, a novel consisting of 10 or so newspaper men and women of varying levels of proficiency and tact, struggling to find their way at a fading newspaper. “Homer and Langley”, a short book about two reclusive brothers living in downtown NYC, who try their best to shut out a changing America and fail.

Films. We’ll keep this brief.

     #1                          #2                         #3                          #4                       #5

1. Sarah’s Key 2. The King’s Speech 3. Social Network 4. Get Low 5. Biutiful

Music. It’s always a good year for tune-age. With so many bands hawking records, it’s never been easier for the casual music fan to sit back and let the best records float to the surface.

I remember as a teenager scouring mp3.com (anybody remember those days?) for unknown pop-punk bands. Those days are long gone. Technology changed, and so did my priorities. Today, I do little searching; great records – and the buzz that precedes them – find me. A couple of the newer records on this list, for instance, were placed in my hands by friends who insisted that I give it a listen. Bon Iver, Joy Formidable, Justin Townes Earle, M83 were records that friends (sometimes persistently) threw into my lap.

1. Bon Iver s/t – beautifully done. “Perth” is song of the year. 2. Refused “The Shape of Punk to Come” – Bratty, pissed-off hardcore. Timeless. 3. Justin Townes Earle “Harlem River Blues” – simple songs with strong melodies. The title track is classic. 4. The National “Alligator” – Gave this record some serious time this year. This band’s catalog is just stellar. 5. John Coltrane “Blue Train” – great dinner-making music, and the lady and I made plenty of dinners. Also made for smooth, trying-to-meet-deadline-on-this-f@%ing-school-board story. 6. M83 “Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming” – epic Euro electro-pop. This was my “I Wouldn’t Have Enjoyed This 5 Years Ago” Record of the Year. 7. Ryan Adams “Easy Tiger” – this was Year 2 of delving deeper into Adams’s stuff. At this rate, I should get to his newest record sometime in 2025. 8. Joy Formidable “The Big Roar” – I was hooked after “Whirring”. Loud guitar rock that’s not afraid to get a little shoe-gazy. Enjoyed this immensely. 9. Fleet Foxes “Helplessness Blues” – for a record that sounds so beautiful, it just doesn’t grab me. I’m baffled by this. Still, a few phenomenal songs on here. 10. Wu-Tang Clan “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)” – I listened to Wu’s debut for six months while applying for jobs. I owe them.

Honorable mentions: Miles Davis “Birth of the Cool”, Radiohead “Hail to the Thief”, Sam Cooke “Definitive Collection”.

Have a look. The Christmas Tree one is just precious.

Happy December. Be happy.

Little by little, though, my thoughts on the Occupiers collective efforts have softened a bit.

I had a conversation with a relative over the Thanksgiving holiday, and, passionate as he is about such things, this person proceeded to recite the usual reasons why the Occupy movement is useless, an aimless waste of time.

“What are they fighting for?” “What do they hope to accomplish?” he asked repeatedly.

After monopolizing much of the conversation, I changed the subject to something else. Afterward, mulling over his vehement opposition to basically everything, I came away thinking that whether or not Occupy embodies a unifying cause is beside the point. People are pissed off. That’s the cause, and frankly it’s great to see. We should be pissed off.

A few days later, I received a text from a friend who recommended Matt Taibbi’s masterful piece in Rolling Stone on Occupy Wall Street.

Sums up, I think, the feelings of not just Occupy sympathizers but the majority of us dulled by the impending arrival of what Taibbi so eloquently describes as “another turn on the four-year merry-go-round, and the thought of having to try to get excited about yet another minor quadrennial shift in the direction of one or the other pole of alienating corporate full-of-shitness [that] is enough to make anyone want to smash his own hand flat with a hammer.”

Hunter Stair and Matt Retchless, playing the Bros from Broduction Productions, in “Zeus”, which was submitted to SXSW this week. Pretty sweet.

Another exciting weekend in Olean last Saturday, as we wrapped up our series of hometown “Zeus” screenings with one at St. Bonaventure’s Murphy Building. We had another nice crowd – about 50 or so – who came out to see our little film, including the real Zeus – Mr. Gene Froebel, former Hinsdale Central Everything. He and his wife had heard about the movie from a fellow retired Hinsdale teacher, who had attended our previous JCC screening.

His one issue with our movie, in regards to the number of miles he used to run to school each day (we said three), “It was seven miles.”

We’ve been presently surprised at the word-of-mouth with “Zeus”. Most attending the later screenings heard about it through someone who attended a previous one. Shocked, too, at the shear number of teachers from around the area who came out and had some laughs. As more than one viewer pointed out, “Zeus” is a tribute to teachers and coaches everywhere, which, I don’t think was our intention when we set out to write and film this. Yet, that’s certainly true.

A copy of the film goes out to Hunter in California for color correction this week, and sound should be finalized by November 1. If all goes well, we should have this SOB on a DVD (and out to film festies) by year’s end. We’ll see. We know all too well the frailty of self-imposed deadlines.

With the summer’s end, it’s time to ramp up blogging efforts along with song-writing and, yes, another screenplay from your boys at the Buffalo Morose. Speaking of which, two more screenings are slated for this month in Olean – an encore showing at 7 p.m. this Saturday at JCC with another Saturday, Oct. 22, in Murphy Auditorium at our beloved St. Bonaventure University. For more info on this weekend’s JCC screening, click here for the Facebook event-posting thing.

This week’s been a pretty good one for solid internet content. Three articles to check out in your spare time are:

Grantland’s Q&A with my favorite author, Don Delillo, on the 60th anniversary of the Shot Heard Round the World, an event marvelously chronicled in Delillo’s masterpiece “Underworld”. I had the pleasure of re-reading the novel over the summer, and it reaffirmed what I already knew: “Underworld”, in my opinion, is The Great(est) American Novel, hands-down. Bleak, dark, expansive, epic, it’s all those things. Delillo, for me, has been one of the few authors whose words grab at the edges of my brain and pull every which way.

Then, there’s New York Magazine’s profile on Michael Lewis, author of “Moneyball”, “Blindside” and “Liar’s Poker”.

Finally, there’s a decent blog up at Filmmaker Magazine on microbudgets and the independent film revolution.

OK, gotta go.