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I'm now in the midst of getting ready to shoot my film and that means that I'm doing casting, which is something of a thankless chore. Lemme break it down how it works. Basically, you put the word out. In this day and age, for people with little to no budget like me, that means using websites, so as to avoid agents who will charge you and or their client for simply being a go-between. Once you get the word out, typically a flood of headshots and (hopefully) resumes come in. At this point, I have over 300 for about 15 roles. Ovbviously, right off the bat, a good number of them are going to be totally wrong. Wrong in that, there is no resume, or no contact number, or no shot of their face, or any number of screwy things. There are professional standards when it comes to paying, big budget roles, but for little things like my film, it's a free for all.       Luckily, I don't have to deal with as much paper as there used to be in this industry. Headshots are expensive for people and it's nice to know that they don't have to send out a $5 picture everytime they try to audition, which is probably a couple hundred times a year. But, with these digital shots and digital submitting comes a scary sense of freedom, which allows people to send all manner of things. This one girl sent me, in addition to a decent headshot, a picture just of her body in a bikini (no face included) and then a very lovely shot of just her ass in said bikini. Admittedly it's a nice ass and all, but it's making realize I probably should have put in the audition listing "Director is happily involved in a monogomous relationship and seeks no outside companionship."       The crazy thing about all of this will be the actual audition, because then the safety of digital anonymity goes away and you're faced with a large group of people that you'll have to reject a large part of. This will be the next step, which I'll be starting tomorrow and it's always interesting to see how it goes, since talent in these searches range from "Dear god, please make them stop talking..." to "Yes! Yes! You're brilliant. Please work on my movie before someone with scads of money picks you up."       Ergh, I hear my email chirping which means more headshots. Maybe for my girlfriend's piece of mind, some guy will send in a shot of his ass in a thong today...

The group Move On - http://www.moveon.org started up an interesting contest to get short commercials from people to run during Bush's impending State of the Union address which will of course, be against all of his "policies" and actions as of late. The site for it is http://www.bushin30seconds.org/ and I have to say, some of the commercials are very well done. I wish them the best of success and hope that it all goes through. Of course, this isn't a one fronted fight to overthrow this regime and there are many other items that have been put out there to show the true face of Bush.       A couple of books are very good, including Michael Moore's - Dude, Where's My Country? and Paul Krugman's The Great Unraveling. Both of these books brings to light all of the corruption and evil CEO-ocity that is running the country currently. Sometimes they're hard to read, since they make your extremely frustrated with the failed state of democracy in this country that got Bush into power. But, they're a must read if you don't like the regime.       It will be a long hard fight for the Democrats against Bush this year, but Howard Dean show some promise and will hopefully be just the person to upset the power. I wish I could look 11 months into the future and see what happens, just so that I could breath easier, but unfortunately my crystal ball is in the shop and I'll have to wait like everyone else. At the very least I hope that control of the House and Senate is taken away from the Republicans just so that they can't railroad through every single thing that they want.

Remember how I pointed out a couple of free wifi spots in San Francisco - here? Well, there's a very comprehensive site I've been turned on to now at http://www.wififreespot.com/       It looks like a great resource and I hope they keep it up to date, since this is an area that is only bound to grow as time goes on. Imagine it, just being to walk anywhere and get online. Pretty crazy huh?

I recently saw Bowling for Columbine, which is a fantastic documentary about guns, violence, and overall consumption in the United States. It has any number of good points and ideas in it, but one of the interesting ones was how people blamed Marilyn Manson for the antisocial, destructive behavior of the boys who shot up Columbine High School. Of course, in an interview with him, he showed great poise and intelligence in talking about what happened. I've always liked him, just not his music.       But this is a roundabout way of getting into the fact that music always seems to get blamed for bad things. It's an easy scapegoat these days, since rock and roll is about rebelling and whatnot, but what the meatheads who start blaming an artist for something don't realize is that by doing what they do, they're increasing the sales of that artist's albums. Naturally, the funniest case of this when they destroy albums like the Dixie Chicks or in the way back with the Beatles. I assume that they must have had to purchase those albums they're breaking right?       Anyways, it's a lot of blindness guiding a lot of stupidity in the end and I guess the only positive outcome from these Bible Thumpers that protest rock groups is the fact that the guys sell more music and for those of us with slightly more than half a brain and up, we see the portestors as the truly idiotic fools they are.

Well, it's here, a new year for all to see. Hopefully this one will see change, such as getting Bush boy out of office and making things in the world a little better, but that is just one of my biggest wishes. For me personally, I hope to be prolific in my creative endeavors and get my film completed.       But for a lot of guys out there, I make an unbiased, unilateral plead. I make this plead to the men who still have ponytails. I ask you to chop them off. Stop wondering if people are pointing at your hair and laughing (yes, they are) stop wondering if the fashion looks good on you (no, it doesn't) and free yourself of this hell! For the bald men with ponytails, Ben Franklin was the originator of that shiznak and all y'all are just two bit perps trying to imitate, so knock it the hell off and cut your hair short, it'll look a lot better.       Just remember that that percentage of men who look good with long hair is quite a bit less than the percentage of women who look good with very short hair. And, maybe you should run with the assumption that you're not one of the ones that falls into the very small percentage. Chop it off!