Happy Day!

So, since the last post Adam Carolla's doing just fine - his podcast is already #1.
Much as I admire the guy (and I really do), any concern for his fate would have been banished to the back of my mind when I read this today:
Faith No More to reunite for European Tour
It was as though somebody were playing a mean-spirited jape on my person. Et tu, Guardian? So I hunted out the story on other sites to corroborate it. Amongst my findings was this:
Faith No More Bassist Talks Reunion, Reveals Lineup
From Bill Gould's mouth. I'm stunned. The one thing that was guaranteed to never, ever happen in my lifetime has happened.
Faith No More are back together.
There is now a chance that the remorse I've carried for the last decade, having never gotten to see them live (they split when I was 14), might be eschewed.
There's a chance I'll get to see Faith No More live.
Faith No More. Faith No fucking More.
Just to let the world know, if you have any bad news for me that you've been sitting on, now would be the time to tell me. Because I'm so beyond elated you could be screwing all my exes at the same time and I'd just be inclined to give you a hug.

Faith No More. Did not see that one coming.

Sad Day

The radio station KLSX has switched formats and, as a consequence, dropped all its talk shows. This includes the Adam Carolla Show, which I listened to on a pretty much constant basis while working on ‘House Guest’. Once the film was done I even called in to thank them personally for unknowingly helping me with the MA.
Carolla has already set up his own podcast which I’m sure will do well, but I’m still a little sad to see the show go.
Here’s a little highlight that always makes me smile:

So, to the Ace Man, Bald Bryan and Teresa - mahalo.

CONE OPENS!!

Today I got my first rejection from a film festival. It’s basically the same type of template letter you get with applying for jobs or schools or whatnot. I’ve known from the off that ‘House Guest’ wasn’t for everyone, and that inevitably I wouldn’t get through to most of the festivals I submitted it to, but it is a little disheartening for the very first reply to be a fob-off.
As the great Les Claypool once sung, ‘lack of persistence is surely a sin’, so I’ve resolved to find two more festivals for every ‘no’ I get. So long as I stick to the ones that don’t charge (or don’t charge all that much) there’s nothing really to lose.
I found out recently that most studios actually have people on staff whose entire job is to scour the listings for festivals and send films off. So a (pretty good) studio film that’s won a couple of awards out of twenty-odd festival screenings was submitted to about two hundred festivals. Them’s shit odds, and for us indie folk who don’t have the staff or the time to send stuff out to that extent it’s a pretty unbalanced playing field.
On a cheerier note, last week I decided to thank Adam Carolla personally for his unknowing contribution to the completion of ‘House Guest’ by calling into his show. If you have any interest in hearing me kiss arse, you can listen to the archived segment here (skip to about 9’30” in).
Carolla brings up a fantastic web animator Michael Narren, who had previously created some short webtoons using snippets of conversation from Carolla’s prior show Loveline. They’re brilliantly executed and work really well as standalone shorts to people who have never heard the show. You should check them out at his website, or take a look at my favourite ‘Grand Theft Submarine’ (and see why the phrase ‘cone opens’ cracks me up).