neurological dryer lint

cause his next one will be to starboard.

so i got this email the other day:

Subject: engaged
From: Dan Ewald
Date: 4/20/2005 8:41 PM
To: jw@bootleg.org

Congrats to you and your fiance.

I'm working on a TV show and we're looking for engaged couples to profile. There is a large amount of money for the chosen couple -- would go a long way to pay for the wedding.

If interested, email me at [email address]

Dan

so i'm curious. is this spam? there's no website for the sender's domain, but a google for it returns several sites, mainly web forums, that have similar requests for people this company is looking for. turns they do casting for FOX shows, and they'd done Temptation Island and Trading Spouses. hmm. not exactly my forte (although much respect on turning a Chappelle's Show sketch into reality). renee said it'd be okay to just get some information, so i responded. this was what i got back today:

Subject: RE: engaged
From: Dan Ewald
Date: 4/22/2005 3:32 PM
To: jw@bootleg.org

Justin,

I understand your skepticism regarding reality shows. I've worked on the good and the bad.

Fortunately, this is a fun one. No eating bugs, I promise!

Our company also did "Renovate My Family" -- which was a feel-good show that really helped people out.

"Engaged" is looking for couples where the groom-to-be has conflict with his future in-laws. If you have a great relationship with your girlfriend's parents, you probably wouldn't be right.

But if they've had problems with you or vice versa, please let us know. I could walk you through the audition process. If you're in the L.A. area, we could do an in-person interview. If not, I'll show you how to do a tape submission.

Let us know.

Thanks for your interest,

Sincerely --

Dan Ewald
[phone number]

-----Original Message-----
From: Justin Hall [mailto:jw@bootleg.org]
Sent: Thursday, April 21, 2005 7:37 PM
To: [email address]
Subject: Re: engaged


Sure, I'm interested. Can you give me some more information? Looks like you guys did Temptation Island and Trading Spouses - not sure how much we'd go for something along those lines, but we'd like to hear what you have to offer.

Thanks. Justin

so hmmm. i don't really have a bad relationship with renee's parents. we're not best friends or anything, but i think they're great people and really respect them, and we haven't had any real conflict about anything yet. which i guess is good, but i wanted to be on a reality show. :)

simon, bradley, brooke, anyone else that's about to get hitched - do you guys want to kill your future in-laws? i'll pass them your info. simon's already been on TV and had butter rubbed all over him by Blink-182. or some chicks. or something.

anyway, yeah, that's about all the excitement for the week. the wedding site is live and finished now, and i think we're going to put the URL in the invitations and give people the option to do RSVP's straight from the site. i gotta get B to code that. or use my (slowly developing) perl skills or my (rusty and weak) PHP skills to do it myself.

so shots from the new superman flick got released. wow. that dude is a weak superman. i think they were aiming for the OC look with this guy (and kate bosworth, who looks way too fluffy to be a solid lois lane). bryan singer is an okay director, but this has travesty written all over it.

news on the transformers live-action movie, though: they're gonna get the voice actors from the original series to do optimus prime and megatron. if they'd gotten anyone else it would have been a betrayal, IMHO, so it's good that someone in hollywood has some sense.

although it's sad, the vast number of unoriginal, movie-adaptation-of-another-story films that make up the whole list of released films every year. it keeps growing. originality is draining out of hollywood - probably out of popular culture as a whole - and has been for at least 20 years, if not more (too young to effectively say). meanwhile underground (non-popular) forms of artistic expression are moving in the opposite direction, becoming more subjective, fragmented, strange-for-strange's-sake, occasionally more risky and dangerous, but for the most part staying the course at least away from repetition.

with the tools and technology and wealth of freely available knowledge and experience to a larger group of people than ever - shouldn't things be getting more complex, original, like a fractal? it feels more like looking through a kaleidoscope and seeing the same colors repeating in barely-varied patters over and over again in a big circle. our culture should be ballooning exponentially to a period of intense creativity (in the context of art, music, film, expression in general). maybe popular culture will implode eventually. we lived without it (as we know it in its socially-dominating form) for a long time, right? can we live without it again? what's going to replace it?

mmmm, IHOP in the morning. what should i get?

listening to: machines of loving grace - butterfly wings