The Most Noble Truth: The Bridge Between Want and Need

Posted on May 15, 2012 by

One of the most defining moments in many of our childhoods is when a grownup asks us what we want to be when we grow up, but no one ever asks us what we need to be when we grow up.

When I was studying English at New Jersey City University, I took an eye-opening elective called Comparative Religions, which examined the fundamentals of various world religions like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The professor also touched nicely on the Eastern philosophies of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism.

In Buddhism, there are four Noble Truths:

  1. There is suffering in the world.
  2. Suffering is caused by desire.
  3. To cease suffering, we must cease desire.
  4. This can be achieved by following the Eightfold Noble Path.

It’s this second Noble Truth that always struck me as a contradiction to what it means to be human, even though it made the most sense. Desire, or want, is the root of all suffering, even at the most basic biological level. When we’re hungry, our stomachs ache ever so slightly, growing into a gnarl for nourishment until we satiate that desire. And like the story of how the Buddha discovered the Middle Path, when we over eat, we find ourselves in just as much pain as if we’d not eaten at all, slouching in our seats with our top button undone. Even the word itself is a contradiction. On the one side, it is a desire we have for something, but the opposite side of this linguistic coin reveals another definition: a “lack of something desirable.” Interesting.

It wasn’t until long after I took that Comparative Religions course that I realized I’ve wanted things my whole life, and those things were always trite and unimportant. I remember going to A&S Comics and seeing all four issues of Batman‘s “A Death in the Family” story arc on the wall above the cashier with price tags of $10 and up per comic book. I even saw a copy of X-Men #266, which houses the first appearance of Gambit, my favorite hero at the time, awkwardly hung on the wall of a run down sports card shop in Union City with a $26 price tag on it. And I had always wanted a trade paperback of The Amazing Spider-Man: The Saga of the Alien Costume, which had the coolest (and creepiest) cover my preteen eyes had ever seen.

Still one of my favorite covers.

To be honest, as a child, I was never at a want for what I wanted. My family was the best. I still smile when I think about the day my sister surprised me with a first generation Optimus Prime back in the early eighties. I even had great friends, too. In grammar school, if I saw something that a friend was playing with and I wanted it, I happily traded a Skeletor with my initials etched at the bottom of his foot for a Rambo action figure (anyone remember those?). My friends and I did that with everything. Well, except one friend and his Grimlock. No number of my coolest Transformers could compare to the original Dinobot.

When my Dad died, my attitude about desire changed. All the things that I’d always wanted and owned quickly became unimportant, since I now had to find a way to pay my own rent. I was left with no choice but to sell all those things that at one time had meant something to me. I had quite a colossal collection of 1990s Star Wars action figures, unboxed and set up on a four-tier shelf organized by episode (yes, even the prequels). I had tons of VHS cassettes and DVDs since I loved movies and my Dad got them cheap at Path Mark. And because I was an aspiring musician at the time, recording tracks with my basement band Vexxxed, I had a surplus of guitars, including a gorgeous American-made Jackson Flying V I used for one gig and which ran me up $1,000, a B.C. Rich Warlock and over ten effects pedals, amps, and even a Cry Baby, which I’d never gotten the hang of.

I sold it all on Craigslist, and in doing so, I realized that there’s a great difference between desire and necessity, and the only things that really matter are the things you need in life. In short, I grew up, but I didn’t feel bitter about it in any way; I felt liberated. I’d lived a good life for the 28 years I spent living with my Dad and using my money for wants and wants alone. Now, being on my own for the past five years in a modest apartment with only a small shelf full of books, a chest packed with comics, my laptop, a DVD collection that’s simple in size but complex in content, a little food in the fridge, and a pillow for my head, I finally understand how the second Noble Truth can cloud our minds to what’s real. Wants are luxuries, and we don’t need luxury.

But I do want some things, of course: to see Death of a Salesman on Broadway, for instance. And like just everyone else, I have a wish list on Amazon filled with things like a paperback copy of William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley and the Billy Wilder DVD Collection. I keep these desires in check now, especially since I resolved to own a few of the things I couldn’t have afforded as a kid; so yes, I still hold onto my “Death in the Family” collection and that $26 first appearance of the X-Men’s Cajun cardslinger. Spidey’s alien costume saga sits proudly in my bookshelf amidst the works of Douglas Adams and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

So what, if anything, does a person like me want in this life? To be a writer? A filmmaker? Zen Master? Or perhaps it’s something more intangible: A dream, perhaps? Immortality (I am Greek, after all)? Or maybe something more. Something not only unseen, but unforeseeable, and I guess unattainable, too?

The fact is that at 34 years old, I am what and where I want to be while wandering the Path to becoming something else I’ll want to be. For that, all I want is time. Perhaps I need time –– The kind of time it takes to write a book or perfect this post. The time it takes to make a real difference in this life, so that when this world sells us off for shiny new models within the womb of ages, there’ll be something left on this small blue speck of eternity that said not merely that we were here, but that we made even the smallest difference, because inside we all feel the need to make a difference. That necessity is what makes us more than human. It makes us people worthy of the short time we have to make it.

The question we’re asked as kids shouldn’t be about what we want to be when we grow up, since it insinuates that we may fall short of that desire and lead to unhappiness. Rather, let’s focus on what we need to do to keep the Grimlocks of unhappiness at bay and keep a smile on your face every step of your Way.

Coolest. Toy. Ever.

Thoughts? Reactions? Any personal Wisdom YOU might like to share? Give us something to meditate on in the Comments section!

Posted in ideas, John T. Trigonis, Uncategorized, Writing | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Writing Like a Martlet: Five Months Past, Five Lessons Above

Posted on April 4, 2012 by

A martlet is an interesting little bird –– one with no feet that spends all its time flying because it can’t ever land. Lately, I’ve felt very much like a martlet when it comes to my own writing.

I mentioned in my blog post “Riding the Writer’s Road: Three Lessons Learned in Three Months of Writing” that I spent a lot of time resisting the writer inside, passing him off as a hack or a sell out. Since shrugging off this false notion, I’ve become more than “just” a poet and an author. While I’ve been hard at work on my book Crowdfunding for Filmmakers: The Way to a Successful Film Campaign for Michael Wiese Productions and my proposal and first eight pages of my comic series Siren’s Calling, I felt the need to soar into some fresher kinds of writing, just to keep myself actively hammering away at my wordsmith’s blade.

Here’s where and some of what I’ve been writing over the last month or so:

Broken Frontier
I’ve been thoroughly enjoying myself as a comics journalist (man, if only that could be a career!), reviewing a few of my favorite titles each month like American Vampire, Batman, Swamp Thing (all three written by my favorite comics writer, Scott Snyder) and Near Death. I’ve also written a review of the first episode of Kevin Smith’s Comic Book Men, as well as a blog about the Robert Kirkman/Terry Moore lawsuit over The Walking Dead franchise and an article about Molly Crabapple’s super successful Kickstarter campaign for her fine art project Shell Game.

Film Slate Magazine
I’ve also written a couple reviews for this top-notch film website and may be reviewing some films from this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, if time permits. You can check out my review for the screenwriting documentary Dreams on Spec and one for an indie film called The Trouble with Bliss, which includes some insightful quotes from an interview I did with actor Michael C. Hall (Dexter) and director Michael Knowles.

Jersey City Independent
So far, I’ve contributed one story for Jersey City’s premiere source for fresh, up-to-the-minute news called “Tachair, Grace Church and Others Help Fill the Bookstore Void in Jersey City” about the lack of a bookstore in my town. Hopefully there will be more articles coming up in the near future once Snooki and JWoww get the hell out of Dodge!

Lamplighter Magazine
A while back, former student and fellow writer Patrick Boyle established Lamplighter, NJ’s alternative art, poetry and culture zine, to which I contributed an article about “How I Joined the Zombie Insistence.” Very soon, my second article, “In Praise of Plastic: The Album’s Last Stand in the 21st Century,” will be featured in the first print issue of Lamplighter Magazine, so I’ll keep you updated on all that. Once I find a bit more time, I hope to add a little more digital ink to the Lamplighter website.

My article "War for the Dead" featured on the Broken Frontier homepage.

Each of these four websites has proven a solid whetstone for me to keep my writing skills sharpened as I undergo the painstaking process of revision and proofreading on Crowdfunding for Filmmakers. As soon as the manuscript gets sent off to MWP on May 1st, I’ll be diving back into one final revision of my feature-length vampire screenplay A Beautiful Unlife and the second rewrite of my hit man screenplay Caput.

It’s been an intense month with all of this diverse writing I’ve been doing, and, as always, I’ve learned a great deal about the craft of writing, the world around me, and the microcosm of myself. That said, here are five new lessons learned that can help keep every writer soar high as a martlet without any care to land.

Deadlines are Important Although the deadlines I get from Film Slate Magazine and Broken Frontier are soft at best, they’re still deadlines, and having them has greatly improved the pace at which I write. If I write a 200-word review today, I should have something to show for it tomorrow. It may not seem like a lot of words, but for someone who wants 200 of only the best words for his or her review, it can prove quite a challenge, and we writers have to be up to that challenge at all hours of the day or night.

(Cut the Sh*t in Parentheses) Much the way parentheticals –– quick bits of direction from a writer to an actor –– are omitted from most contemporary screenplays, I’m learning how to omit them from my writing entirely. I realized I use them too much, and anything fenced in between parentheses are usually nothing more than the writer’s afterthoughts, and an afterthought, by definition, isn’t worth mentioning since you thought of it after the fact. Keep it after the fact and your writing will stay golden.

Of Editors and Writers When you write for magazines and review sites that love everything you write and post it almost immediately, you get a little spoiled and may start to expect every site you write for to accept your work as is, without question or edit. That said, the article that was published by The Jersey City Independent was not the article I originally wrote. It’s funny, because I constantly preach to my students to never be afraid to “kill your babies” –– all those lovely lines that don’t add anything to your story, article or poem but that you love and don’t want to get rid of –– but when someone else does the killing for you, it naturally feels wrong. Even if it’s done in the most humane way possible, as the JCI editor had done to mine:

I edited out a lot of your beautiful turns of phrase, but some parts of your prose felt a little too florid to me for a news piece. Sometimes I just felt like I needed to whack some adjectives and cut to the chase. I also took out the bit of editorializing you included because I didn’t want to come out and state an opinion.

With the exception of the word “whack,” this is a compassionate explanation, and as much as I understand and agree with the editor’s points, it still hurt when I first saw my abridged news piece. It’s sort of like Candy and his dog in John Steinbeck’s novella Of Mice and Men; he’s hurt after Carlson shoots his old dog instead of doing it himself. At the end of the day, however, when you’re writing (1) news (2) for publishers (3) for a paycheck, the writing isn’t about you anymore, and we have to give the editors exactly what they want, and should be able to kill our own babies before they do.

“The Tao is Forever Undefined,” a Writer Defined Forever A Taoist at heart, I go flow with the invisible current of the Universe in everything I do. The other day I met with a young man who reached out to me on Facebook and offered me what I thought was a job as a social media person. Considering that in another year or two the amount of classes I teach per semester may be substantially reduced due to budget cuts, I decided to entertain this notion as an alternative source of income. Long story short, and after listening to a twenty-minute homily from this young man’s senior officer who was nothing more than a textbook for sales pitches and psychology, I realized this “job” was nothing more than a pyramid scheme. A waste of time? Of course not, for it helped me to see that I could never do anything else but what I’m doing now, which is writing and teaching. And if classes become scarce, I’ll simply have no other choice but to put my writing skills, creative and otherwise, to more lucrative uses, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Balance is Bliss While I like writing my reviews for Swamp Thing and The Trouble with Bliss as a diversion from my red inking of Crowdfunding for Filmmakers, I still have to balance these new kinds of writing with my own projects, both creative and expository, to keep the worlds I’m working on floating soundly in the galaxy of myself. Luckily, many of the publishers I write for allow me to be creative with my words, and for that I’m thankful, since it helps me deal with those who prefer straight news to my strong editorial biases. But it’s that kind of balance that keeps us writers moving in the forward direction with every piece we pen.

These lessons I’ve learned are lessons we all learn as writers committed to the word trade. Until next post, I’ll leave you with something I tweeted as soon as I left that meeting with the pyramid schemer.

Posted in John T. Trigonis, Uncategorized, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Bringing the Beat(nik) Back in American Culture in Film

Posted on March 19, 2012 by

The other day I was updating my Facebook status and I noticed an advertisement on the side of my screen for On The Road – The movie. I immediately clicked it and was pleased to see that someone had finally decided to turn beat icon Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, a true classic of American and cultural literature, into a film.

As with any movie that deals with beatnik culture and the personalities or books associated with it, I was a bit nervous about watching this trailer.

Back when I was a student at New Jersey City University picking up a major in creative writing and a minor in everything else, I stumbled on the beat generation by accident. It was partly because of my good friend Dani Shanberg. I met Dean –– er, I mean Dani –– not long after I started a Poetry Club at NJCU for poets like me to come and read and listen to original bits of writing. I first heard the name Jack Kerouac from him and didn’t think anything of it. I then discovered Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” during a Modern Poetry class and, quite frankly, I thought the poem sucked, mainly because I just didn’t get it. A year or so later, I snagged a Penguin edition of On the Road from a friend who worked at The Book Room, a rustic used book store in Downtown Jersey City, and although reading the book was difficult, not to mention dry due to Kerouac’s intense amount of detail, I took to the tale of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty and their life crossing the great American frontier just enough to pick up an audio book version with Matt Dillon acting out the parts, and I listened to all eleven CDs when my pal Alain and I launched out on our first road trip across the country.

Long-haired and lost in the Louisiana bayou, circa 2000.

Of course, the book took on new meaning after that enlightening and somewhat cliché experience, and it made me delve deeper into the beat mythos, where I discovered more works by these American gods of bop prosody. I ultimately learned to love Allen Ginsberg’s verse in Howl and Other Poems, as well as in his other collections like Kaddish and Other Poems and Reality Sandwiches. Shortly after that, I discovered the poetic stylings of the great Gregory Corso, and my personal favorite for reasons still unknown to me –– William S. Burroughs.

All of these books of prose or verse harken back to a different time in American history, and I’m not talking about the Leave It to Beaver variety with stacks of pancakes at the breakfast table for your 2.5 kids or “blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage.” I’m talking about the Beave’s antithesis –– the scores of underprivileged and highly educated word junkies that fattened the underbelly of American literature.

It seems beatnik culture is being reincarnated in this current Hipster Age, and perhaps there’s no better form for it to take than film. There have been a handful of movies that have explored the beat generation, from the lifestyle itself to adaptations of the more popular beat classics to downright farcical films about French beret-wearing finger snappers tripping light fantastics and dropping phrases like “cool, daddy-o” every chance they can. I owned a few of these films, naturally, but there are others I’d never heard of until writing this blog. Roger Corman’s 1995 horror comedy A Bucket of Blood, for instance, is about a sculptor who accidentally kill his landlady’s cat and hides the evidence in some plaster, and after being pressured to create more of the same, he goes from beatnik to murderer. Then there’s the film adaptation of Kerouac’s The Subterraneans (1960), which is about an interracial couple (taboo during the time it was written, adding more fuel to the fiery fact that the beats were rebels of the written word), as well as Heart Beat (1980) and The Source (1999).

Perhaps the most important beat-based film would have to be David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (1991), based on Burroughs’ heroin trip of a novel and starring Peter Weller as Bill Lee. Having recently gotten through Burrough’s novel, I can say that the book and film are different. I think. But each is strangely original, blending together a nauseating world of aliens, talking cockroach Underwoods, and more sex and death (and sickly combinations of the two) than you’d ever expect in a novel, even for today’s standards.

A true "WTF?!" moment if I've ever seen one.

Aside from Naked Lunch, there is also Gary Walkow’s 2000 film Beat, starring Kiefer Sutherland as William S. Burroughs and Courtney Love as Burrough’s wife Joan, which ends with the accidental killing of Joan by Burroughs after a drunken game of William Tell goes awry. And for even further insight into Burroughs’ life, there’s Yony Leyser’s William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, a splendid documentary about the tormented writer’s life.

Most recently, beatnik culture has resurfaced from its comfortable subterranean depths with the indie film Howl, Rob Epstein’s biopic that examines the obscenity trail of Allen Ginsberg. I was disappointed with the film, mainly because of James Franco’s performance as Ginsberg and especially with the fact that the entire poem “Howl” is illustrated using cheap computer graphics.

The illustrated "Howl" by Eric Drooker.

So then, what’s my opinion on the trailer for On the Road? Let’s just say that Walter Salles is just the right person to direct a movie about a pair of road hitchhiking free spirits embodying the essence of an entire generation because he already did it in The Motorcycle Diaries. That said, when I did watch this long-awaited trailer, I was pleased for the most part, especially when I saw that Viggo Mortensen is playing Old Bull Lee. I’m not sure how I feel about the actors playing Sal (Sam Riley) and Dean (Garrett Hedlund), and most especially with Kristen Stewart in the role of Marylou. But who knows, perhaps this will be the film that inches her away from what’s proving to be the Twilight of her acting career.

And I’m happy to see that On the Road is only the beginning of a revival of media about the only real American culture ever to have existed, which has inspired everything from hippies to hipsters. Steve Buscemi is slated to direct Burroughs’ gender-shaking novel Queer in 2013, and who knows what’s to follow. I for one would love to see film adaptations of Burroughs’ first novel Junky, which kept me seated in “The Poet’s Chair” on the second floor of City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco for well over a hundred pages before I finally caved in and bought a copy for the plane ride back to Jersey the next morning.

Remember this. Always.

Now, if only poems could be adapted into films. That would be a little slice of Nirvana.

*          *          *

So what’s YOUR favorite beatnik-inspired book that you’d like to see made into a movie?

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The Sirens are Calling and I’m Shipwrecked on Creative Shores

Posted on February 20, 2012 by

We’re coming up on three months into 2012 and the sirens have been calling to me quite fiercely in one form or another. That said, I’m hoping for another productive year that will drive me towards my ultimate goal, and I thought I’d tip my various hats in your direction so you can have a sneak peak into some of the numerous projects I’ve been stirring up, as well as some a few possible outside projects I may be working on through the year.

UNDER MY TOP HAT
I’m currently working on three major projects that have kept me seated in front of my Macbook Pro whenever I’m not teaching or watching some film noir:

Crowdfunding for Filmmakers: The Way to a Successful Film Campaign: As many of you know, since November I’ve been writing a book under contract with Michael Wiese Productions about successful crowdfunding tips and tactics specifically geared toward DIY filmmakers. The book is based on my most successful blog post “The Tao of Crowdfunding: Three Ps for a Successful Film Campaign” and two other posts under the “Tao of Crowdfunding” umbrella, one of which landed itself on indie film guru Ted Hope’s blog. The book is coming along very well; I’ve moved from the writing phase to the rewriting phase, and at present I’m still ahead of schedule and should be able to deliver a finished manuscript to the publishers on May 1st so that the book can make an appearance sometime in late 2012 or early 2013.

Mating Dome: My eighth short film, co-produced, written by and starring Joe Whelski and shot by Alain Aguilar, should be hitting the 2012/2013 film festival circuit sometime in the next few months. So far, Joe has submitted the film to Sci-Fi London Film Festival and Worldwide Shorts Film Festival, with many more on the way, including the prestigious Hollyshorts Film Festival.

In the meantime, check out this sexy little teaser:

Dig it? Keep a lookout for updates on Facebook, Twitter and the official website to see where you can catch this short sci-fi comedy about what dating will become forty years from now. 

Siren’s Calling: I’m taking a step away from my own short film projects due to my massive lack of a savings and have decided to adapt my very first horror story into a comic book series called Siren’s Calling. I’m currently in talks with the very talented Lauren Clemente (you may remember her work from the Cerise poster) and hopefully we can sign some contracts and get working on this terrifying tale about a siren from the sea fed up with her life as a deep sea femme fatale and tries her luck as a film noir actress in 1940s Hollywood.

My siren's not as friendly as the Starbucks variety.

Siren’s Calling takes some inspiration from my favorite comic book series by Scott Snyder & Rafael Albuquerque called American Vampire (in the period piece element) and Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead (for it’s black and white artwork feature), though it’s more like The Little Mermaid if Ariel came from Hell. Intrigued? I sure hope so.

A FEDORA FULL OF POSSIBLE DIRECTION
Aside from my own creations, I may also be directing a few things later this year, if I can manage to get some time away from the keys of my laptop.

With Mating Dome, this years marks the return of the trio behind Nothingman Films in what we hope will be a series of film projects that will help Alain, Joe, and myself soar to newfound heights as storytellers. First up for me, though, is coming on board as director for a short episode of a series of environmental skits Joe has been writing over the past year. If all goes well with that, other projects may follow, even perhaps a resurrection of our original comedy series The Fool!

Hope you liked that episode, ’cause we’ve got 90+ episodes written out and ready to go!

My good friend and fellow writer Sam Platizky’s, who’s had much success with his two feature-length films Blaming George Romero and Red Scare, is embarking on his first web series called Loster, which follows at the lives of a bunch of people brought together because of the ending of their favorite show Lost.  Sam asked me if I’d like to direct one or two episodes of the series, and based on what I’ve read of the series so far, and once I nab a little time away from my laptop, I hope to be a part of Sam’s next endeavor for film and web world conquest.

Hot on the heels of my very first music video, Pepper Coat’s classy folk tune “She’s Gone & I’m Here,” Marinell and I may be back as a producer/director team on a short documentary for good friend Adam Ramos’ (who worked as hairstylist on Cerise) “gentleman’s barber shop” Virile in Walkwick, NJ. It will be part promotional video for his shop, and my first step into the world of documentary filmmaking.

Other projects may include a music video for a song called “Drive the Spirits Out” by the band Icewagon Flu. Sound familiar? These are the awesome guys who not only let me use their song “Liza Was Rejected” in my short film Perfekt and Talk to Me in Cerise, but they’re also the boys who wrote and donated the title song for my short film about a former spelling bee champion haunted by the word that took him down.

IF THE COXCOMB (STILL) FITS, WEAR IT
I may be returning to my theater roots sometime this year. I met with good friend and Artistic Director for Hudson Shakespeare Company Jon Ciccarelli and we spoke about my rejoining the ranks to direct Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus sometime after the summer. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for this one!

BOWLERS AND BEANIES: THE SCRIPTS I’VE NOT FORGOT
What about my other projects, you ask? Like my feature-length scripts for A Beautiful Unlife and Caput, and my “Memory Trilogy” of short films?

A Beautiful Unlife, my vampire script that was shopped around the Hollywood studios after additional work on it with script analyst Michael Ray Brown, which received much praise, some solid critique and ultimately rejection, will undergo one final revision (it’s all in my head as we speak), and by 2013 will become my next crowdfunded film (so long as Crowdfunding for Filmmakers

Caput, my Hudson Hawkesque dark hit man dramedy is not on hold by any means. I hope to hold a script reading sometime within the next few months to get some much needed feedback on this quirky plot-driven narrative so I can delve into a third draft of it and hopefully shop it around to agents and competitions in late 2012/early 2013.

The first two scripts of my “Memory Trilogy,” Statuetory and Café Mnemosyne, are all written, revised and ready to be shot. What’s missing, as I mentioned earlier, is money, since each of these will require locations shooting (a café and an artist’s loft/studio for one and a diner for the other) and some pricey props (mannequins ain’t cheap!) As soon as I find the money, I’ll make the time.

NEWSBOYS WEAR NEWSBOY CAPS
I’ve also been getting into some other kinds of writing to add to my 10,000 hours, penning a few articles and reviews for the likes of Lamplighter, a Jersey-based arts and culture magazine, Jersey City Independent, a very reliable local news source, and Broken Frontier, a comic book review site. I’ll also be writing some reviews for Film Slate in the weeks ahead.

And if the world does end on December 21st, 2012, at least I’ll have the satisfaction of leaving behind me an impressive tome of treasures that’ll hopefully keep future (or alien) generations thoroughly entertained.

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Riding the Writer’s Road: Three Lessons Learned in Three Months of Writing

Posted on February 1, 2012 by

Today marks the beginning of my fourth month writing The Tao of Crowdfunding for Filmmakers, and on May 1st I should have a complete manuscript ready to turn in to the editors at Michael Wiese Productions. Back in December, I wrote a post called “Tao Te Trig: The Flow, the Muse and the Working Writer’s World” about what I’d learned during my first month of being a working writer, so I thought I’d continue that here with three important lessons I’ve learned in three months as an author.

Lesson #1: Get Organized, Stay Organized
I’m no stranger to the written word; I’ve written at least a couple thousand poems (if you count my napkin poems of 2000 – 2003), a dozen short stories, one five-act play, and four feature-length screenplays (two of which are still with us) and the one thing I’ve learned is to get and stay organized. I wrote about my ten pages a day screenwriting philosophy, but I find each type of writing demands different requirements and so each requires unique organization.

Sometimes the texture of a napkin is more conducive to a decent poem than a page from my Moleskine.

For The Tao of Crowdfunding for Filmmakers, I spent a day and broke each of my eleven sections into weeks. I worked a four-day per week writing schedule, my days off from teaching, and squeezed in some extra hours on the days I did work but had a substantial lull between classes. If I finished my weekly quota, I refrained from getting a head start and instead worked on something else; I was already being pretty ambitious with my weekly schedule as it was, and sticking to it was challenge enough.

Now, I have a complete first (and rough) draft of my book of about 300 pages (more than I ever thought I’d write!), which will now need to be cut down during the revision stage; and a new stage means new organization.

Lesson #2: “Be Impeccable with Your Word”
This is the first of four agreements I took to heart from reading Don Miguel Ruiz’s book of Toltec wisdom The Four Agreements, which I discovered buried at the bottom of a box of books at one of the universities where I teach.

The Four Agreements of Don Miguel Ruiz.

You may wonder why my two blogs, Hat & Soul and The Trigonis Review, don’t have a regular frequency for posts, and that’s because I refuse to push any of my writing out into the world that isn’t at its very best. An idea is precious, and it exist in our minds in its purest form; there it retains 100% of its power to inform, to inspire, and ultimately, to transform. Once we attempt to translate that idea into words, it will undoubtedly lose some of its original essence because words are all too human while the idea itself is divine. By the time we choose our words, we may only be getting across to the reader 75% of the actual, untainted idea.

Therefore, in order to maximize the power of language, writers must be impeccable with our words. If we know we can say something more clearly and concisely to ensure that our readers will understand exactly what we want them to understand, then we owe it to ourselves and to our readership to put forward only our very best writing.

Lesson #3: Resistance is Futile
As much as I don’t want to admit this to myself, let alone to all of you reading this, I spent a great deal of time resisting my natural calling as a writer. I’ve always prided myself on being a poet, and I’ve been trudging along this mysterious life with a suitcase packed full of self-imposed rules of what it means to be a poet –– Always Think Deep Thoughts; Always Appear Beat and Brooding; and above all, Never Sell Out, which oftentimes means only the first two words of that sentence for me.

"Untamed Muse" by Tom Kidd: A great depiction of my vision of a poet.

Sometimes it takes more than a imaginary muse to tell you how it is and help you see the world through a different pair of shades.

How did The Tao of Crowdfunding for Filmmakers come about in the first place? My girlfriend Marinell and I were talking one night about how so many crowdfunders were benefiting from my first Tao of Crowdfunding blog post, and she suggested I write a book about it since I’d been grumbling about not having an actual book of poetry published yet. I declined, to which she retorted that I really should start making money off my writing. Initially, the poet in me got upset, but the writer hidden deep inside heard the call. I wanted to write a poem, but instead I wrote a solid proposal with the idea in my mind of proving to Marinell that a legitimate book publisher would, in fact, want to have this book as part of its catalog. Interestingly enough, I didn’t need to prove anything to her –– she already believed in me with utmost certainty that I could do it; instead, I ended up proving it to myself. The rest is history and a Twitter hashtag.

And here I am now, closing in on my 34th year and I finally understand that while only living the life of a poet I’d been neglecting my “Unlived Life” as a working writer; I never believed someone would want to pay to read something I’d written. I’ve since unpacked my old Million Miler filled with fabricated Rules and the faintest whispers of Resistance and embrace the scribe’s boulevard up ahead, with all its curves, turns and crossroads, and green lights as far as the eye can imagine.

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What are YOUR thoughts about life on the “scribe’s boulevard”? Writers, any advice you’d care to share from your experiences? Readers, any thoughts from the reader’s perspective of things will help us pack this Comments section for the long journey ahead.

Posted in crowd-funding, ideas, independent, indie, John T. Trigonis, poetry, screenwriting, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , | 7 Comments

From Television to Tomorrow’s Vision

Posted on January 16, 2012 by

Happy 2012, folks!

So the other day, I did something I rarely do. I went to Hulu and watched a show that my good friend Troy Romeo recommended called The Booth at the End, a web series about a guy who sits in a diner and helps people get what they want. I watched the first episode and I was hooked. That night, I watched the remaining four episodes, and for the first time in a long time, I can’t wait for season two of something. This same sort of thing happened once before when I finally made time to watch another web series, The Mercury Men, a short sci-fi series that was eventually picked up by SyFy, about men from the planet Mercury trying to destroy the Earth in the 1950s and shot in a campy, Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon style (only with much better special effects, I must say.)

Sci-fi fans, past and present, will get a kick out of The Mercury Men.

Now those who know me well know that I do not watch TV. This is partially because I don’t subscribe to Cable or DirecTV, but also because I haven’t found anything on TV or the web that can keep me engaged past than the first episode. I tried a few recent shows like HBO’s True Blood during my research for my feature-length vampire script A Beautiful Unlife and the first episode of Californication at the request of an acquaintance; both of these programs had absolutely nothing to keep me wanting to watch.

Then I thought back to when I was a happy, healthy little boy going to grammar and eventually high school, coming home and doing my homework with much interest in every subject, then spending the remainder of my day with my head tucked into A Tale of Two Cities and Madame Bovary. Then right before bed I would read an act of Coriolanus or whatever work of Shakespeare I could take out from the local library (for fun, of course).

Wait––! That’s not how it was. Not. At. All.

I was a happy, healthy kid, that much is true. But everyday I would rush home from school and finish my homework with Flash-swiftness I could so I could adjust the rabbit ears and tune my eyes to Channel 11 for two action-quacked hours of DuckTales, Chip & Dale Rescue Rangers, TaleSpin, and Darkwing Duck. The tops of my mornings through the late 1980s up until 1992 started off with some Looney Tunes, The Jetsons, and the first ten minutes of Conan the Adventurer before I’d journey up the hill toward Weehawken High.

Classic. 'Nuff said.

It’s strange even for me to think that I don’t watch any TV today when, looking back, I watched a lot of TV throughout my entire life. With a television set in every room of our apartment (except the bathroom, of course), I suppose it was easy. I started out much the same as kids today, only instead of Barney and Friends I was taught my A-B-Cs by Cookie Monster and my 1-2-3s by The Count. And even now I can easily recall some of the many cartoons that lit up my living room most –– The Flintstones, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Transformers and G.I. Joe; I watched this last show not for the “Real American Heroes,” sadly (Duke and the gang were kind of boring), but for the villains: Cobra Commander and Destro hidden behind their masks, Zartan and his sun-blued flesh, and those strange twins Tomax and Xamot (and let’s not forget about Serpentor!)

Totally bad-ass, 1980s-style!

Saturday morning cartoons have always held an extra special place inside. On certain Saturdays, when my Dad would drop me off at my Yiya’s apartment (yiya is “grandmother” in Greek) whenever he’d have to work the early shift at the diner, I would spend those mornings happily sipping a Nestle Quik chocolate milk from a bendy straw and watching Superfriends, Dungeons and Dragons, Jim Henson’s Muppet Babies and Captain N: The Game Master, plus the occasional episode of The Smurfs, Fraggle Rock, and yes, Pee-wee’s Playhouse.

Eventually, I moved onto live-action TV programming. Early on, my shows of choice were game shows (well, not my choice, as my Dad was master of the remote, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy them.) Mornings in summertime meant watching classics like The Price is Right (Bob Barker is the only host of this show, by the way), Family Feud with Ray Combs and The Newlywed Game with Bob Eubanks, back in the days when we kids didn’t know what “making whoopee” meant. At dinnertime, my Dad and I found ourselves so immersed in the fist-to-jaw escapades of action shows like Knight Rider, The A-Team and Baywatch, that once the smoke cleared from the explosion right before a commercial break, the smoke rising from our dinner plates had cleared as well.

The original KITT, which inspired so many of my sci-fi tendencies today.

Around the same time I discovered sitcoms, as well. The ones I enjoyed most were Family Ties, Growing Pains, and Small Wonder, but later on I would start staying up extra late in my Dad’s bedroom (he had a better TV in his room than I had in mine) and watch reruns of 1970s classics like All in the Family and Taxi. On many occasions, my Dad and I would sit in the kitchen chuckling away at The Cosby Show, Cheers, Perfect Strangers, Who’s the Boss? and especially Three’s Company. Later on, I would take a peculiar liking to The Wonder Years, Doogie Howser, M.D. and other situational dramedies. But perhaps the only two shows I remember ever making me laugh out loud with every episode were Married with Children and Seinfeld.

When my sister lived in Union City, only a few blocks away from my apartment, I’d visit more frequently and she’d cook us up some chicken cutlets and we’d  watch Law & Order (or CSI –– I can’t tell the difference to this day between any of those crime dramas; even then, I didn’t care for them, but it was about quality time; that, and the chicken cutlet). On weekends, I went through a brief stint in which I sat up with my sister-in-law Patti watching classic programming that originally aired in the late 1950s through the early 1980s on Nick At Nite. Shows like Leave it to Beaver, Bewitched, I Love Lucy, The Munsters and Gilligan’s Island, and even a few episodes of Mork & Mindy and Laverne & Shirley, bounced splashes of grey and eventually Technicolor all along the living room walls until I couldn’t laugh anymore and fell asleep.

And after ten or twelve years watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles battle Shredder and Krang while Jason Priestley and Shannen Doherty tried to fit themselves into Beverly Hills, 90210, plus late nights on the edge of my seat as Dr. Sam Beckett tried desperately to find his way home in Quantum Leap, I got hooked on what would become the very last TV serial ever to leave an indelible mark (or two) on me –– Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Vampires and Sarah Michelle Gellar? 1997 - 2003 were good years.

As you can probably see from the thirty-something titles listed, I’ve spent an enormous amount of my own wonder years situated in front of the tube transmitting images, stories, humor, adventure and even personality into my very being.

Today, there are no shows I feel an all-encompassing kinship with, none that might inspire me with the sudden urge to speed home, sit in front of a flat screen and get my fix. No stories being told in today’s digital TV universe have moved me to that sort of zealous devotion to any one title or writer or story arc. The only show I do “follow” with some interest is The Walking Dead, but even that’s not enough to make me pull together a “boy’s night in” with Doritos and red wine to watch each episode as it happens; I’ll catch up with season two when it’s on Netflix. And while I have a subtle curiosity about HBO’s Bored to Death, mainly because of Jason Schwartzman, it’s remained in the same position on my queue for months. I have no care to play catch-up on Lost, Breaking Bad, Rescue Me, Mad Men, It’s Always Sunny in Philidelphia or any of the other shows that win Emmy Awards for writing or “Best Original Series.” The truth is, TV writing is not what it was when I grew up with television, and no story is original (quirky, yes, but not original.) As a matter of fact, the only shows I will watch whenever I can catch them are food reality TV shows (of all things!) like Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations and especially Man v. Food.

By far the most fun I've had in front of a flat screen to date!

I’ve watched enough television to help me shape, mold and constantly recreate the person I am today: My fascination with vampires comes not only from Hammer Films and Joss Whedon’s Buffy franchise, but from late nights spent with Dracula: The Series and Forever Knight; my penchant for sci-fi stems from following Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and catching a few Twilight Zone marathons on New Year’s Eves past; my predilection for duality and parallelism comes from watching Beauty and the Beast and random episodes of Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

So instead of spending any more of my time sitting on a couch or kitchen chair with a remote control in hand surfing for something to sustain my attention, I’d rather spend that same amount of time and energy creating something that will make others give me the benefit of their attention for a change. This is not a trashing of contemporary TV programming, nor is it a song of praise for the shows of all my seasons past; it’s a prelude of things to come, a glimpse into what all those years spent watching TV can create in us, if we choose to let it, that is.

In the epic battle between Man and Tube, this one goes to Tube…and to Man.

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What are some classic (or contemporary) TV shows that have made a long-lasting impression on who YOU are?

Posted in a beautiful unlife, ideas, TV, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 14 Comments

Top Eight Movies I Saw in Theaters in 2011 (Because I Only Saw Eight Movies in Theaters in 2011)

Posted on December 30, 2011 by

As many of my closer friends on Facebook and those who follow me on Twitter probably know, I spent the bulk of 2011 writing, teaching, and doing research for my second feature-length screenplay Caput. That research took the form of film noir, and I spent just about all of my free time seated in front of an old 23-inch Magnavox tube television watching everything from Billy Wilder to Nicholas Ray, from Jimmy Cagney in The Public Enemy, White Heat, and a bunch of what falls between to everything from Humphrey Bogart and a few titles from Edward G. Robinson.

So needless to say it’s a bit difficult to pull together a “Top Ten” list when you’ve only seen eight movies in total through the course of a whole year. And even though I spent an entire week in Cannes during the Festival du Cannes with my short film Cerise, I didn’t even get to see one film while I was there. Not one!

But out of what I did see in theaters during 2011, here’s how they rank up:

8: Green Lantern –– Okay, it was “Boys Day Out” and my buddy Dave and I saw this in 3-D and afterwards compared the movie to all the Green Lantern comics we’d ever read, and concluded that this isn’t really the best interpretation of GL.

7. Captain America: The First Avenger –– It’s been a heavy year for comic-related movies and me, and although I’m not much a fan of Marvel Comics or even Captain America and the Avengers for that matter, I found this movie to be entertaining at best, and quite ridiculous at worst.

6. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo –– This was the last movie I saw in 2011, and while it was very well-done with great performances by both Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara, it’s really nothing more than a straight remake of the superior Swedish version (and not the best testament to any skill David Fincher may have as a director).

5. The Greatest Movie Ever Sold –– The only doc I saw this year, and a humorous and informative one at that! I definitely recommend this one.

4. X-Men: First Class –– Entertainment at its best. I thoroughly enjoyed this installment of the X-Franchise, with wonderful performances by both James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender as the conflicting “brothers” Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr (Magneto).

3. Source Code –– A semi-brainy film for sure (Oh, how I love anything dealing with parallel worlds and other Michio Kaku-like stuff!) in the guise of an action drama. A fun ride which offered up a few minutes of heady conversation at the diner afterwards.

2. Rise of the Planet of the Apes –– By far the most entertaining action film I’ve seen in a long time, and although the CGIed apes could be a bit distracting (mainly at the beginning), my enjoyment wasn’t all that hindered. This experience was enhanced by the fact that I saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes in an AMC Dine-In Theater in Menlo Park, NJ (there’s something to be said about watching a movie like this over a juicy burger, crisp fries, and a Blue Moon fast at your side!)

1. Midnight in Paris –– An absolutely beautiful film and (in my opinion) Woody Allen’s best work to date (but that could also be because it caters to every fiber in my being as a writer and aficionado of classic literature!) This experience, of course, was made even more special because I saw it with my Lady Marinell in Paris (around the midnight hour, too) with French subtitles. Viva la Paris!

As an added bonus, here’s a proper Top Ten List of Films I Wanted to See (But Didn’t) in 2011:

1. L’Artiste
2. The Flowers of War
3. Anonymous
4. Melancholia
5. Another Earth
6. The Skin I Live In
7. The Adjustment Bureau
8. Coriolanus
9. Sleeping Beauty
10. Win Win

Most of these are on my Netflix, and once I’m done with my brief James Bond phase, I’ll start catching up on these 2011 films.

That’s all for now, folks. It’s been a superb year for blog writing, poetry writing, classic movies, and book writing for me, and I’m hoping 2012 continues this tradition tenfold.

Happy New Year everyone, and thanks for reading!

Posted in cerise, Comic Books, Facebook, film, independent, indie, John T. Trigonis, twitter, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments