Saturday, November 27, 2004

Worked all day, met with Dasher about the TV show for a few hours. And then spent the night at the macanudo club drinking, drooling, smoking, and playing cards, of all things, which I hadn't done in decades. It was fun to get away from everything for a while. hang with the old men.

Online diaries are getting more difficult. Attracting too many people now. people come out of the woodwork. Too many emails. And the other night I received a message on my voicemail concerning the diaries. who the person was and how they got my number I do not know. but it warrants concern. It’s one thing to get a few emails that say fishy we love you or Fishy you're an asshole. That's expected. But my numbers aren't even listed. So that is fucking scary. Anything that is public attracts people. that's its nature. But the more public something becomes, the more private it has to become, in order to protect the creation and the creator. G2 has been recommending a move to go full-on blog with this thing, with forums and comment posting and replies and all that; rather than the cryptic sort of hidden way this is done at present, hidden within all these iframes and flash intros. I was into the idea till the last week or so. Now I am not so sure. Might be going too far. I've read a lot of blogs since the whole phenom started and most of the time they are rather innocuous. Innocent musings on pop culture or the mad ramblings of lonely lunatics. Hold on, that sounds like what I've been doing the past three years. uh oh. What people forget is that the Transcendence Diaries are fiction. Fishy is fiction. It is all fiction. The guy is dead. He died years ago. No hold on, wait. He doesn’t disappear until the late two-thousands. and its still not known whether he is truly dead even then. But still, the diaries were always presumed to be largely responsible for his disappearance. Too personal, too radical, too truthful. So maybe that's where we are now in the story. and we should just go with the flow.

The other thing is that the diaries can only last as long as Fishy has time to write them. and only so far as they serve his purpose of the time. frankly I'm sick of me. I'm sick of Fishy. I need to move on to something else. bigger stories. 

Current spin; Carolina from Caetano. Check it on itunes. Beautiful.

Last screening: dinner for five. Someone recommended this because of the show we are filming. Slow start. But as it progresses through the first season, it picks up. met with Dasher today about the show over leftover thanksgiving turkey sandwiches and I was frantically relaying to him with my mouth full how we have to take that idea since its there and we've both now seen it and turn it on overdrive. I mean, we can’t ignore it now that we’ve seen it. its there. so that's a good thing. and there are aspects of that that have been shooting. But the show is 23 minutes long and the whole time you feel like you are waiting for someone to say or do something. for what were trying to do, its much too stilted and stiff. The people are too situated, too successful, too worried about who they are and how they will be perceived. I'm pacing around Dasher’s house and screaming to him that we have to show real people doing real things. without their own censors on. As if the camera weren't there. I'm pointing to the TV with my sandwich and sarah Jessica parker is scampering around some fake white set with a bunch of other no name actors with all these fake smiles on their faces wearing silly Christmas hats attempting to sell people Gap clothing. Just dancing around a big fake white set smiling their asses off. I'm screaming and pointing, ‘you see that man?! You see that shit?! that's what we’re doing!’ ‘what?! Selling clothes?’ “no man. We’re fighting that. we’re fighting this miserable fake bullshit that is being crammed down peoples throats every fucking day. that's what we’re doing. That's the mission we are on Dasher. We have got to be real. We have got to show people who we are. Who they are. I can’t take this shit anymore man. Turn the fucking TV off before I go crazy!’ I yell.

‘o.k. o.k. dog. Just relax man. Easy now. don't have a heart attack,’ Dasher tries to console me. ‘But Fishy this show is about you man he reminds me. no man this show is about people. I'm the vehicle maybe. But no show is good if it is about one person. at least how I'm looking at it now. this show has got to be about people. my band is about me. my music is about me. but this show has to be bigger than that. this show has to be about everyone else. I'm sick of me. I want to explore people. well that's a whole different thing then. we agreed to do a show about you and your move to New York. yeah I know man. But the show has got to be bigger than that Dasher. I'm serious. We have to adjust it a bit. Kind of like comparing the show Seinfeld to that recent documentary we saw, comedian. Seinfeld was awesome was because Jerry was just the catalyst for everything else that was going on, and for everyone else in the series. And comedian was kind of boring because it was about jerry. And I don't want that. but you're hilarious man. Well fine, maybe I'm hilarious. But we’re not making a comedy man. I don't want to make a comedy. I want to make Cosmos, you know that Carl Sagan series. You what?! What the fuck are you talking about Fishy? this is about Fishy the rock singer moving to New York. what the hell does Carl Sagan have to do with that? I don't know man. But trust me on this. that's where we’re going with it. Carl Sagan’s cosmos meets curb your enthusiasm meets Eddie izzard meets my dinner with AndrĂ© meets spalding gray meets dinner for five meets the real world all wrapped up in Fishy moves to New York City. Dasher just stares at me holding his sandwich. Dude you're fucking crazy. I don't know what the hell you are talking about. this is TV, not some new album of yours. This is not nothing is cohesive. This is TV. It has to be cohesive. But Dasher, o.k. that's what you say now, but what if it doesn’t have to be cohesive. What if it can be even more non-cohesive than the nothing is cohesive album? Like an acid trip or something.... Fishy you are insane. And that's cool. that's your job. And you do it well. but our job is to produce a television show that we can sell to a network. and in order to do that we have to present something that has form. Something that is coherent and makes sense to the average person sitting at home watching TV, he says. Dude, I'm not saying we won't do that. I'm just saying that we have to keep our options open right now. that's all. lets just keep our minds open and not box it in. that's all, I say. O.k. I hear you Fishy. But you tell Paulsen at the next production meeting then because maybe he can make some sense out of what you're talking about. I can’t. honestly, I have no idea what you're talking about. 

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