The Jesus and Mary Chain are fucking awesome. There’s no real way to get around it.

In the interest of paring down unnecessary gear, I’m thinking of selling The Most Beautiful Guitar I’ve Ever Owned. It’s a guitar that sounds and looks amazing, but that amazing sound is not one that somebody like yours truly is really going to go to very often. It’s still in mint condition for a reason.

That’s not to say I’m done with lusting after guitars, however. I’ve wanted a semi-hollow body for longer than I wanted a Telecaster, and the recent acoustic purchase has only enhanced that desire. There appear to be some decent guitars in that realm avail for decent money (though they will require swapping out pickups). Hmmm.

In other news, writing TV is fucking fun — especially the kind of soapy/John Hughes-y kind of pilot I’m working on now. Something about the quick set-up and pay-off of television that makes it a blast. A lot less stressful than I’ve found features the last few years.

Speaking of features, the first feature is progressing. It’s a slog to get through this first draft; given how much I’ve petered out in this stage of things the last few projects, I suppose this shouldn’t be a big surprise (and frankly, it’s not that big of one), so it comes down to just focus, repetition, and Gettin ‘Er Done.

Oh, and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club is the shit, in case any of you didn’t know. Blues-folk noise rock. Great shit.

If only somebody would do that kind of thing but add drum machines and synthesizers.

Almost a month into The Great Joblessness Experiment of 2009.

Productive day was had yesterday with my writing partner O on the TV pilot we’re working on. For several hours, during a caffeine-fueled meeting at Swinger’s, we broke down the background and social dynamics of our world, figured out who these various characters we’d been spitballing were, and settled on the main storylines for the pilot as well as some twist and turns we could take them through during a first season. These are some FUCKED UP people that inhabit this one, but I can’t help loving them all just the same. This week we’ll be beat-sheeting (not to be confused with the reddish toilet bowl one confronts after beet salad), then on to pages by next week.

I may feel differently after we’ve gotten into the thick of it, but TV right now just seems so much more natural to write than features. Maybe it’s the rigid structure, or the momentum and economy of it that appeal to me, but I’m excited to play in this particular sandbox.

This project also gets my inner John Hughes engaged, and that has been quiet for far too long.

My computer going into the shop earlier this week initially seemed to be a wrench in the works (HEY GOD!), but ultimately the whole incident was a good headkick. I’d been lagging behind the script-a-month schedule I’d set for myself without realizing it (writing began two weeks after leaving The Gig) and though I’ve made progress, I know myself well enough to realize I will have to demonstrate Kryptonian effort to turn out a draft by Valentine’s day.

I started to toe near a familiar spot, actually; almost done with the outline after several days of momentum, I’d jump into edit mode before finishing, and then would second-guess the whole thing. The same box step that derailed several ideas over the last couple years. The great thing about being able to work consistently every day, however, is that it is a lot easier to notice these things as they happen, and putting in a placeholder is much easier because you know you’ll be back into the material the next day.

As a side note, my girlfriend B and I caught The Reader yesterday afternoon. Perhaps I’m missing something, but I don’t see the reason for all the love. A fine film, no doubt, but why the celebration for Kate WInslet’s performance in this picture vs. Revolutionary Road? I found RR to be a much more compelling film — one that had something specific to say, with well-drawn characters — where I found myself struggling to piece together just why people were doing certain things in The Reader.

On top of that, there is a long discussion to be had about how recent films (such as The Reader and The Pianist) are featuring sympathetic portrayals of Germans that participated in Nazi atrocities. Personally, I find this approach infinitely more compelling than the cartoon mustache-twirling seen in films before then (Schindler’s List, et al). I’ve always found that taking the most horrible things people can do, and caricaturing the acts as Pure Evil vs. seeking a greater understanding of what caused these acts to transpire in the first place (see Bush, George W., and Terror, War On) only inhibits our ability to prevent such acts from occurring again. It may simply be an instance of distance from tragedy (cue Alan Alda in Crimes & Misdemeanors that’s caused the shift in film on this subject, but I’d be curious to hear if anybody thinks there are any broader cultural movements in play in parallel with this.

So if I believed in God, I’d say he was trying to fuck me.

Outlining had been progressing nicely on the first spec up on the roster. I was in fact scheduled to finish it up today, and after taking tomorrow to work on a TV pilot with a friend, I was looking forward to writing pages this Friday.

For me, writing pages is the real fun part of the process. Outlining and treatment writing are the logistical heavy lifting of the process, and at least for me at this point, still a bit cumbersome (though absolutely necessary).

So right after lunch, I walked into the office to wake the computer up and finish the outline, and the screen wouldn’t turn on. The computer was fine, mind you – I could restart it, adjust volume, the whole nine – I just couldn’t see anything.

Which as you can imagine, is not so helpful when one is trying to write down and organize story beats.

Apparently there is a known issue with a certain model of graphics card made by the company Nvidia (I’d link to an article about said issue but I’m writing this on my phone, which has no cut and paste functionality see here and here). Users of Dell, Apple, and HP laptops have been dealing with this issue for the last 8-10 months.

Today the issue picked me. So here I am at the Apple Store at The Grove in L.A., looking at a two hour wait to talk to an Apple Genius, who will then take my machine and tell me I’m looking at between 3-14 4-6 days for them to replace the entire motherboard to my laptop.

All of this happening, of course, less than a month after I quit my job to focus on writing full-time.

Like I said, if I still believed in God…