That's a Wrap

That's a Wrap is a talkshow about the movie industry, produced by students in the Multi-Camera Video Production course at the University of Cincinnati, Blue Ash College.

Watch me look slightly insane and talk lots of smack about movies with host Kees Henskens (right) and Aaron Bates, Area Manager of Danbarry Cinemas (left).

Both episodes can be watched on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdaFA7ARxut_wz9it9RgBQXG220YmOXr8

Moscow in the Spring

Please check out the Bandcamp page for this fun, noir audio drama created by Zachary George, a talented student in our department. On this page, you can hear an audio spot for it, as well as the entire first episode.

http://detectivefrankpierce.bandcamp.com/

"Jon-Erik Hexum: A Brief Tale in Three Parts"

I. Patrick

I’m trying to jerk off to her Duran Duran poster, but there’s just so much goddamned make-up and hairspray on those guys. I mean, I may as well be trying to beat off to the airbrushed cover of one of the old man’s Oui magazines that he keeps tucked away in the rafters of the garage. I found them while snooping around at age seven and became disinterested just as quickly when I discovered them to suffer from severe dick deficiency. Every once in a while, though, I still climb up there and peek in on them, like you would your grandmother laying comatose in a nursing home, just to make sure she’s still there. You know, to see if there have been any new developments. There haven’t. Maybe he’s forgotten that those musty old sluts are up there. I’m sure he has forgotten about Gran.

God, I’m distracted. I wish Kimberly would forget that I’m here.

She’s been in the bathroom for a good twenty minutes now, I can only assume wrestling with a slippery diaphragm or something. My eyes close and a vision of her in the bathroom crystallizes before me, one newly-shaven leg planted up on the sink like she’s airing out something that she left in the rain overnight. The spermicidal jellyfish slips out of her fingers onto the dirty tiled floor. She picks it up, covered in newly-trimmed pubes, and shimmies it in.

This certainly isn’t helping, so I shove that little horror movie vignette out of my head and I pull more fervently. Concentrate. David. Oh, yeah. Lee. That’s it. Roth. Now I’m firming up in my hand. Concentrate.

“Boy, you sure are excited.”

I flinch, my eyes springing open like a window shade in a Saturday morning cartoon. Adjusting to the light coming into the room from the open bathroom door, I can’t really see because of the sparkles swimming in my vision from clenching my eyes. A blurry, nude silhouette is framed in orange fluorescent light. Jon-Erik Hexum.

“What did you say?”

Even in silhouette, she looks nothing like him. But I’m desperate now.

“Did you just say Jon-Erik Hexum?” She laughs and jumps on the bed next to me.

Did I? Out loud? She pushes my hand out of the way and takes hold of my again-limp hog. I gasp, more shock than pleasure.

I squint and turn back to Duran Duran. They’re better lit now as the bathroom light splashes them like a stage spotlight. They still look like women. Like middle-aged women in a hair salon style book. Even the drummer, and he’s the only one remotely resembling a dude on one of their best days.

God, she’s slinging it around like she’s trying to twirl a drumstick over her head.

I manage to bleat out “I said, ‘Can we have some music?’” and feel the release of pressure as she unhands me. Suddenly, she’s in the floor behind me, recklessly shuffling through LP’s. A pause.

“Duran Duran?”

“WHAT? NO! God no!”

“But Steve said you loved them,” a tiny, disappointed, girlish whine at the displeasure of this bit of possible misinformation from her older brother. 

His reaction, when I told him this lie after practice, was: “So does my sister, Kimberly. Come out with Danielle and me tomorrow night and I’ll bring her.”

It’s obviously not why I told Steve that I was into them, and now I am not so sure I am. All-male band, somewhat effeminate, with full wet lips, who ask plaintively, “Is there something I should know?” Yes, Steve. There is. You should know that I’m into cock. And if the way things are going so far with your sister, Kimberly, are any indication, I am still sure of that.

Even though he didn’t get the fuck-me message I was shining brighter than the bat-signal, it resulted in a night out with him, away from school, and I was not gonna pass it up. Never mind that they were with us the whole time—his girlfriend, Danielle, and sister, Kimberly. As I survey the glossy lithograph of the band, straining against the yellowed cellophane tape affixing it to the pink bedroom wall, it strikes me that his girlfriend bears an uncanny resemblance to the guitarist.

Jesus, I just can’t look at these guys anymore. So I turn my head to look at sister, Kimberly. “Not Kim. Never Kim.” I watch her naked 13-year-old-boy body squatting over a pile of LPs. There is nothing sexy about it. I prop my head up on my arm and look closer, inspect, really, her mole-speckled ass. I glimpse her reflection in the full-length mirror on the wall in front of her and my attention is drawn to the roast-beef-sandwich-of-a-thing hovering over her records… like it’s surveying them, trying to decide for her.

I begin to superimpose on it diagrams from freshman-year health class that I had committed to memory for multiple choice exams. Where in all those folds of skin do you put your penis? I cross-reference these with half-imagined glimpses of the Oui photo spreads my father had at some point used to pleasure himself. Is that the clitoris?

I had better remember fast. That thing looks like it’s about to make its mind up on a music selection and then it’s going to turn its rapturous attention toward me. I should just do it. And do it right.I bet the walls of her vagina are tight, constrictive. I may even bring her to orgasm. Maybe even make her ejaculate.

Nope. That kind of talk is too clinical, academic. It’s not working, though my free hand is. Furiously. At my dick trying to bring it back to life.

What made Steve think that I would be a good match for her? It couldn’t have just been the poppy, British New Romantic music. My eyes clench again. Even tighter this time.

Sting.

In Dune.

She’s grown impatient with her record collection, I hear with a harrumph, followed by her walking across the room and flipping on the FM receiver. static. The Pretenders. static. Fabulous Thunde—static. The Police. Oh God. Leave it here. She does. And I’m firming up again.

I open my eyes to find her bald cunt staring me right in the face, I mean right at eye level at the edge of her bed. Her clit, at least I think that’s what it is, points at me accusingly, as if to say, “I know what you are.”

How did I end up here, peering into her womb?

I’m pretty sure I smell gin. And I am nowhere near her breath.

A terrifying thought thrusts its way into my flaccid mind: What if I miss and it goes in her urethra? Is that even possible? It can’t be good. I can’t do this. There’s just nothing to work with down there.

My brain’s performing even more poorly than my hog, but I manage to ask “Got any grass?”

“Grass?” she repeats, drawing the word out.

“You know, marijuana.”

“I know what you mean. Just who calls it that? Are you from the sixties?” She’s clearly impatient now. Her tone is surprising, considering just how much she seems to want to fuck my brains out, “No. Steve usually does, but I don’t think he’s coming back from Danielle’s…”

“Where’s he keep it?”

“His closet. But he might have taken...”

“Let’s check,” I’m already digging around in her A-ha sheets to find my briefs.

“He doesn’t like me being in his room-- anyone in his room. And he’s gonna be pissed if we smoke up his pot.”

“You just said he won’t be back,” there’s no talking me out of it. Now, I have to be in his room… his bed… his underwear drawer. I’ve pulled my own underclothes on and throw Kimberly my white, button-down shirt, “Here.” Cover up that accusatory, gin-soaked, music-loving pile of medium-rare roast beef.

But now, even though it’s hidden behind my one good shirt, I still can’t get the image of it out of my head.

“Awwww,” she’s admiring herself in the mirror, stroking the collar of my shirt at her neck and fingering the embroidered monogram.

I am up and at her bedroom door, “Where’s his room?”

The Unknown

The Unknown from Lucas Ankney on Vimeo.

Please enjoy The Unknown, a visually-arresting, meditative journey by graduating student, Lucas Ankney. His work is in the vein of Jodorowsky, Derek Jarman, and Matthew Barney.

Cocaine Lane

Cocaine Lane from Sam Laudner on Vimeo.

It's nearly Spring and that means it's student film season around these parts. I am excited to share with you the work of Sam Laudner, a student graduating from our program this semester. His neo-noir, Cocaine Lane, is stunning.

My Coulrophobia video

That was my contribution to the Coulrophobia Détournement Double project orchestrated by Betty Wut and myself. It is no way meant to be a competition, but instead complementary visual explorations on the same theme. The guidelines on the project are at:

http://matchcut.blogspot.com/2012/11/current-project-coulrophobia.html

It's taken me long enough to complete. And not a moment too soon-- the original coulrophobia video, clips of which were required in our videos, has been yanked from YouTube. Also, I have exactly one day left on my Adobe Premiere trial. Freddy has volunteered to download another trial for me under his account, so I hope to finish the three other video projects I've started.