I consider myself very fortunate to be surrounded by talented friends. They are often great sources of inspiration and allow me the pleasure to promote them. I met Riki Lindhome about seven years ago when she came to a party we threw out our house (the very same party in which some drunk asshole peed in my guitar). She was brand spanking new to Los Angeles and had come out here to be an actress. We got to talking and discovered she lived across the street from us. We quickly became friends and I even ended up casting her in my very first short film…a film that no one will ever see due to its mind-numbing badness (no fault of hers, all fault of mine…yikes!).

Riki went on to play some pretty great roles in some pretty great flicks. She was Hillary Swank’s sister in Million Dollar Baby, The evil nurse in Changeling and bad girl, Sadie in The Last House on the Left .  She’s done plenty more of the whole acting thing, but I’m actually here to promote her band/musical duo. Cause they rock. And are hilarious.

Garfunkel & Oats is best described by me as two girls armed with guitars, keyboards, ukuleles, keytars, and flutes, sing funny songs that can be  heartfelt, topical or of-the-wall. Playing Oates, to Riki’s Garfunkel is Kate Micucci who you might best recognize for her role on Scrubs. Together they have been charming live audience all around the Los Angeles area as well as maintaining a growing YouTube channel where they post songs and music videos. I highly recommend checking out their website for music and show dates: Garfunkel & Oats, as well as their youtube page for videos: rikilind. The video I have posted here is one of my favorite songs from them. Enjoy!

Much love 

Travis

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Today is Wednesday, and Wednesdays are when I talk about films that few people know about but deserve a greater audience due to their greatness. Today I come to you with an independent Canadian zombie film, Pontypool. I knew very little about this gem going in which was nice. It is a very simple story, yet incredibly intelligent, well written and beautifully acted. It’s hard these days to make a zombie film feel fresh, or even scary for that matter. Pontypool succeeds in both, mostly due to its attention to characters. I implore you to support this film. Movies like this prove that even in the toilet bowl of summer, you can still roll up you sleeve and reach down past the Transformers and Terminators and find a film worth leaving the house for.

Much love
Travis

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Productive Streak

Well, well, well. Where the hell have you been? So you think after however long it’s been that you can just waltz back into my life? You’re lucky you’re so damn cute.  I’ve missed you, and I’m glad you’re back. It’s kind of nice looking back over the projects you and started ages ago but never finished. We were filled with such inspiration! But then you started looking around. You were bored with me. I caught you staring at other projects while I was at home slaving over the ones we had already started. Pretty soon, you were dipping your honey stick into so many pots that I had to throw my hands in the air and say, “enough. I am not your whore, productive streak!”

After that, as you will recall, we both went our separate ways. Some nights I would lie awake and worry that you were somewhere dead in a ditch, or wandering the streets looking to trade blow jobs for plot ideas. But mostly I just found solace in short form thrills and stories. They fed me for a good while, dulling the pain of your memory. 

Then recently you showed up at my place looking beat to hell. You were unshaven and your breath stank of sour hops and barley. You didn’t apologize, you just set your dirty hobo-stick down and went into my office. I decided not to say anything and see where you might be going with this. Before I knew it, we were working together again. You and I, we were actually writing, and better still, we were enjoying. I got you cleaned up and something to eat and we dug in even deeper. 

We never have apologized to each other, but I think that would just be a bit redundant, because the scripts we are turning out together seems more than enough.

Much Love

Travis

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This episode was loosely inspired by the fact that I feel like I’ve been at my job for long enough that calling it “Hell” is more than appropriate. Each new day is like a knife twisting under my ribs. That being said, recently I have been able to look around at all the positive things in my world. There are others out there suffering far worse than this whining artist.  I have a lot of great things going on at the moment and I want to stop taking them for granted. After all, my pen pal from Hell has it much much worse.

Much love

Travis

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My diet has always been nothing short of horrible. I was raised in a Dairy Queen, for my father owned it. My childhood was made up of hot dogs and blizzards. I fought against anything green or remotely healthy. I ate so much fast food as a kid, that I think it sabotaged my taste buds. Present day, try as I might to eat healthy, I just can’t seem to do it. I simply do not like the foods that are good for me. The only vegetables I like are corn and asparagus, I never eat salads, I like fruit but don’t really eat it. I live on meats and starches. Cheeseburgers, pizza, potatoes, hot wings, tacos. These are things I put in my body every week. I slather foods in mayo and extra bacon and I’ll wash it all down with a Dr. Pepper or a beer. My poor heart must be pissed. 

Before my girlfriend moved in with me I was eating fast food 5 or 6 times a week, sometimes for both lunch and dinner. Today I average once a week, which is super great, but sadly my diet is still pretty bad. Just because I’m not getting my food from a fast food chain, doesn’t mean I’m not eating the same shit. Even at WholeFoods I gravitate towards the burger, the pizza, the Cajun chicken sandwich with cheddar, swiss, bacon and Cajun mayo! AHHH! So Delicious! Occasionally I will go for the sushi or some turkey, but who cares when you down a pint of Ben & Jerry’s right after it.

The fact of the matter is, I do not like the taste of a good many foods. My taste buds betrayed me early on and only allow me to enjoy the worst of the worst. I do try to take baby steps towards adding healthier foods to my diet, but it is a slow and painful process. I found it much easier to give up smoking than I do the bacon double cheese burger. 

Much love

Travis

Discussion: Read 6 Comments »

Pepsi

My girlfriend and I happen to live in an apartment that faces a large office building. This building is one of the many unfortunate structures that is plagued by the new (and ugly as fuck)  trend of full building banner advertisements. While I do not like them, over the past couple years, my lady and I find a bizarre excitement in seeing what new ad we’ll get to stare at for the next month. On the rare occasion we get lucky and a cool movie ad will go up. But mostly they are always horrible eye-sores. 

For what little joy we get out of having a brand new ad, you, Pepsi, have squashed it. I was totally fine when your first obnoxious ad went up. It was abrasive and unattractive, but it was also colorful and had a fun word on it. POP! So I dealt with it. Hell, it’s only a month. After that I was hoping I might get the Drag Me to Hell poster! What I got….sorry, I’m fuming a bit….what I got was ANOTHER DAMN PEPSI AD! Why? What is the point? Why not just leave the old one up another month? Why tear down one and put up another, only this time exclaiming, HOORAY! Trust me, your product does not cause this amount of cheer into my daily vocabulary. You can take your HOORAY and POP it up your ass can.

This letter comes to you in the form of a threat. Give me back my monthly rotation of variety, or I shall sit in front of my window every night and drink Coke-a-Cola Classic. I swear to God I will. 

Much love

Travis

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Troma films get a bad rep. They aren’t ALL terrible. Here’s proof! Cannibal! The Musical. Written, directed and starring the South Park boys before they were big. Check out my Rough Cuts episode and the trailer. After that, (or before. I ain’t here to tell you what to do and what order to do it in) click on the link to hear a very insightful podcast interview on the state of cinema today by Troma President and current chairman of the Independent Film and Television Alliance, Llyod Kauffman. Interview courtsey of Green Cine Daily.

The interview

Much love
Travis

Discussion: Read 2 Comments »

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Jan Svankmajer is a Czech surrealist who makes some of the most interesting live action/stop motion blended films ever. One of my favorite works from him is a modernized version of Faust, in which a man is tormented by puppets and clay beings as he searches for the Devil in order to gain knowledge and power. This movie is responsible for a large part of my inspiration for Lo (my own feature about demons). Svankmajer also adapted a version of Alice in wonderland in which he surrounded a live action girl with an array of horrible and fascinating stop motion creatures. 

The short film above has always made me happy and is a great introduction to his style. If you enjoy this then I recommend you check out one of his feature films.

Much love

Travis

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I’ve always oddly been fascinated by the legend of the vagina dentata…or to put it poetically, a pussy with teeth. When I was a young boy-like creature I remember watching the gore classic, Blood Diner , were two crazy brothers hold a ritual to raise a Goddess from the dead. When they actually succeed, she has this amazingly enormous vagina dentata and bites off a dudes head! From that moment on I was changed.

Just last year, another indie film made a few waves  about this topic. Teeth
was a coming of age story in which a young girl has to face more than the typical horrors of high school. She also has one of those pesky dentatas. Recently, my girlfriend (who shares a love of the dark and bizarre with me) decided that the world needed a website devoted to the glorious beast that is the fur burger chomper. Hence, DENTATA.net was born. WARNING: images on dentata.net could disturb and horrify a large percentage of the population, causing eye bleedage and (for the fellas) penis inverting. Click at your own risk.

My lady, Shannon Hourigan, used a collage of her own photographs as well as others and blended them together to create a variety of women whom all suffer (or are blessed, depeneding on how you look at it I guess) from a case of vag-teeth. It’s a surreal world she has created in which the monster is accepted and on the loose!

When she showed me the site I got excited. It was so sick and twisted that I simply had to put my own thumb print on it. “Let me write a vagina dentata comic strip for this site!” I said with a exclamation mark. She agreed and I soon gave birth to my VERY short lived comic, Polly and Virginia. It followed the “adventures” of a young woman named Polly and her sass talking, dick chomping vagina, Virginia. The strip went for four episodes before I abandon it, but I still think it could be a pretty funny strip if I ever had the time and maybe someone else to illustrate it.

To clarify, this is not a site devoting to male hating or bashing. It is, in fact, a very humorous and artistic look at one of mythologies most horrible creatures. Check out the site. It’s a lot of fun and TOTALLY suitable for work (cough cough).

Dentata.net

Much love

Travis

Discussion: Read 3 Comments »

I have six words that are irritating me right now. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.  Ummm…does anyone see something very wrong here? Anyone? Could it be the simple fact that these mammals and dinosaurs NEVER co-existed together? Look, I realize it’s just an animated movie for kids. I even read a thread where someone was saying, “leave the time-lines for the classroom”. Sure, I mean I’m all for having fun and stretching reality a bit to entertain…but what about all those kids out there like me? The ones who only half listened in class and got a good portion of their knowledge from the ol’ moving pictures? What about those unfortunates who will think the damn dinosaurs came after the ice age!?

WARNING: Before you read further into my rant I feel I must let you all in on the secret that I am pretty damn sure that the characters find a pocket of surviving dinosaurs and that it’s not about them co-existing together on a normal timeline. That being said, I still find it cheap and lame and the use of the word “DAWN” is enough to make me rant anyway…so suck on it.

So yeah, DAWN of the dinosaurs implies that it is their time in history. This is when they began to walk the earth. It is their DAWN. Their beginning. Man had his DAWN when he started learning about fire and wheels and microwavable macaroni and cheese. So, how does this movie have the balls to use that word in the title of a movie that takes place 66 fucking million years after the actual DAWN of these creatures. There are two explanations: 

1. They don’t give two shits, like the title and know it will sell tickets.

2. They REALLY don’t give two shits and are actually ignoring history.

I’m pretty sure it’s the former, but if it does turn out to be the latter than I may just blow my top. If this is the case then I can already see the next string of these movies fed to young, impressionable minds:

Ice Age: The Dawn of Man. Ice Age: Hangin’ with Jesus. Ice Age: Meeting Ben Franklin. Ice Age: Vote Palin. And finally, Ice Age: The Four Horsemen.

Much love

Travis

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