Hard Bargain, The Film

For nearly four years I have wanted to make Hard Bargain a reality. When Skylar Landsee brought the outline of the story to me, I was instantly excited. At first, it was his story and I was simply helping him work out the kinks in the outline. Then I wrote a few scenes. Then Skylar moved and the project fell apart, surfacing every few months and falling apart again. But we kept coming back to it. Every time we’d discuss making a movie, or what we wanted to do with our summer, Hard Bargain would be mentioned. We passed the same binder back and forth for three years before finally, in early 2010, Skylar gave me the outline and I wrote the script. In March of 2010 when we had a first draft, it was a culmination of years of processing, thinking, and waiting. But now, the wait is over. In the summer of 2010, Hard Bargain will become a reality.

It’s not hard to pinpoint why this story was the one we stuck with. Both Skylar and I are interested in personal relationships, political hot-button issues, and the difficulty of choices. As Skylar explained the concept once, “it’s about things that happen when you’re a teenager. Things like being gay, or being pregnant. Things you might want to tell your parents about. But what if you couldn’t tell them? What if you didn’t trust them to love you if you did tell them? Who do you tell?” I can’t speak for Skylar, but for me the story really came together when we started seeing it not as a story about issues, but instead as a love story: a story about two siblings who start out indifferent to each other, and after surviving a rotten situation together finally forge a real friendship.

The last thing I want anyone to say after seeing the film is that it’s too political. I have done my best in writing the script not to preach as to the rights or wrongs of abortion and homosexuality. I believe I have approached the topics in a matter-of-fact way; these things do happen. The only political statement I hope to make in the script is that the politicizing of these issues only serves to hurt the lives of those it involves. Rather than making a statement that abortion is wrong or right, I wish to make a statement that it happens, and that the women who make that decision are not monsters, but people who need care and compassion. Debating the morality and legality of their actions heals no one.

This is why I think Catherine and Clyde’s stories are compelling; they do not concern themselves with the political, or even the moral. They concern themselves with what is right for them, and in the end even doing what is right becomes less important than doing what is quiet. While I do not want to point fingers at religion or conservatism, I do mean to imply that supporting rules and regulations instead of supporting people and relationships is a failing strategy. I believe that one of the most "christian" things you can do is love and support someone even if they're doing something you think is horrible.

Many people will ask what the title of Hard Bargain means. The hard bargain is this: two young adults perceive the dynamic of their family to be that in order to receive love they must hide their identity and their situation. More simply: lie about who you are, and I will love you. This is, in my estimation, not only a hard bargain, but an unacceptable bargain. Unfortunately, it is one faced by thousands of young people around the world. Fit in, or you will be unloved. Obey, or you will be unloved. The problem of Hard Bargain is not caused by religion, by homosexuality, or by abortion. The problem of Hard Bargain is caused by a lack of acceptance. While the character of Liam ultimately breaks Clyde’s heart, I think he makes the boldest, most moral statement of anyone in the film: “I’m not going to help you lie. Not about who you are.”

This is the message I hope viewers take from Hard Bargain. This is the story I’m trying to tell – the cheese at the end of the tunnel: be who you are, share who you are. For the first time in two character’s lives they share themselves with their sibling and because of that they can get through the hardest, most horrible events of their young lives. Because they share their secrets, they don’t have to go through it alone. For four years I came back to Hard Bargain, knowing I had to tell that story but not understanding why until after I finally had. If you take anything from Hard Bargain, take this.

To receive a copy of the script, volunteer to be involved with the production, or make a donation of any size to help this script become a movie, please e-mail us at hardbargain (dot) thefilm (at) gmail (dot) com

Thank You.

If You Plan on Staying In, These Songs are For You.

A review of Quiet Company's May 11, 2010 release,
Songs for Staying In

(my husband wants me to tell you he likes the cover art.)

Last August, I wrote an unsolicited, glowing review of Quiet Company’s second album, “Everyone You Love Will be Happy Soon.” So when Paul (the band’s manager) asked for reviews of their new EP, I was quick to step up. If I can contribute in any small part to these guys getting hype for their new music, I’ll put forth the effort. These guys are phenomenally talented and deserve all the attention they can get.

Songwriter/Frontman Taylor Muse wrote in his blog recently that the songs on this EP are love songs that weren’t good enough to make it onto the last album but that were good enough for people to hear. I think he’s selling these songs short; while the EP is a short collection of sweet love songs, there is a gentleness and a timelessness to each song- specifically the lyrics. Each song on the album is extremely relatable and will give your heartstrings a tug.

How Do You Do It?
I have been anxiously waiting for this song to be released. I’d heard it twice live, and so it has been stuck in my head since February. Here Muse reveals his Beatles influence, delivering that perfect balance of “catchy” and “timeless” that most musicians never achieve. One thing to note about this song and the EP in general is that Quiet Company is making great use of vocal and choral harmonies. I can also attest to the fact that this song is just as awesome live.

Things You Already Know
Of the songs on the EP I hadn’t already heard, this is probably my favorite. There’s a very retro feel to the way the song opens, like it’s coming out of an antique radio. In the video released this Monday the band revealed that this vocal track with effect was a last minute addition and Paul was not a fan at first. Clearly Taylor has better judgment than Paul because it’s awesome. In the video, Taylor says that this song has the best production on the EP, and I’d have to agree. It’s quickly becoming one of my favorite Quiet Company songs.

Hold My Head Above The Water
Long story short, this song will definitely be played at my wedding. I’m not sure what higher praise I can give it. This song is as close to perfection in a love song as I’ve ever heard. Muse’s wife, Leah sings harmony with him on this track and the only way to describe their voices together is “hypnotic.” The song is simple both lyrically and musically which allows the vocal properties to shine. The song is smooth, tender, and effortless. If you can listen to this song without getting sentimental then you are definitely a robot. You should get that checked out.

Jezebel or 'A Song For My Friend About That Whore He Dated'
How do you not love a song with a title like that? The tone of this song is entirely different from the rest of the album: a little harder, a little louder, a little more bare. The turn from “I’m leaving” to “come back to me” is heartbreakingly familiar to anyone who has ever loved a dirtbag. The band has stated that they aren’t going to translate most of the EP into live performance, which is a shame. This song would rock live.

If You Want
In my last review I remarked on how cinematic some of Quiet Company’s songs are, and I think this song is a great new example of that. I can see this song being a great addition to a movie soundtrack. Not only that, but this is a perfect “slow dance” song. The poetry of the line “I shudder to think of all the horrible things I could be if I'd never have held you” breaks my heart. The ending of this song is incredibly moving, and the percussion driving through the song is perfectly executed.

The Biblical Sense of the Word
This is a gorgeous track. I’m a sucker for a good piano song and this is a great piano song. It reminds me of the best of “Everyone You Love…;” in my review of that album I made the statement that what won me over about Quiet Company was the lyrics, and this is a great example of why. Muse stated on his formspring recently that his most deeply held belief is that Love is transformative and beautiful. This song is a perfect manifesto for that belief. “We make our lives worth living when we love each other.” Indeed.

So that’s the EP. I loved it. You will too. Go to www.quietcompanymusic.com where every week they’re releasing a song from the EP as well as a video of them chatting about that week’s song. Listen. Watch. If you have good taste you’ll fall head over heels in love with them instantly. After that you’ll want to pre-order the EP, which will get you all the songs in a digital download right away. After that you’ll want to go to their May 7th EP release concert at Encore in Austin.

I’ve been a fan of Quiet Company since 2007 and I’ve stayed a loyal and active fan for two reasons: 1) they are amazing musicians 2) they are amazing people. It is truly a joy being their fan. But don’t listen to me… listen to their music.

Quest Completed: Achievement unlocked: 40 days wow-free

So I gave up WoW for lent. Really, I wanted to see what it would be like to quit playing for a month or so, and calling it lent would give me a support system of my mom keeping me honest about not playing. I blogged in February about Lent, and how I think it’s good to give things up. Easter is this Sunday, which means I’ve made it about 37 days through Lent- not to mention the two weeks before Lent that I had pretty much stopped playing. So I thought I’d check in and see how it went.

The effect quitting WoW had on me was about equivalent to quitting raiding. I had a few more free nights because I wasn’t devoting those periods of time to the game. But here’s the thing: about the same amount of time was spent doing other “chill time” things. I started chatting more with friends on Facebook. I spent a little more time reading web comics. Also, I realized how much my WoW time was also spent watching TV. My mom and I watch a fair amount of TV, and without WoW I spent that time just watching the show, or fiddling around with the internet while watching TV.

The few days where I got home and went straight to bed without hanging out and decompressing I ended up burning out quicker than usual. So maybe WoW isn’t the problem. Maybe there is no problem. Maybe I just need a certain amount of time to hang out and chill and I’m going to take it. I can’t say I’ve had more trouble getting things done than is reasonable for my course load. The only real time crunch is getting all the 9-5 stuff in, and I never played WoW at that time, anyway.

So there it is. I wanted to quit to see if/how it changed things. It really didn’t. So there’s the lesson. I don’t have to be 100% efficient. I’ve been expecting a lot of myself lately. I’m taking 18 hours of classes at St. Edward’s University, I have a 30 hour crew component to one class, and two teaching internships at local area schools. So long as I’m getting all of that done, I can afford to spend a little time dancing in front of the bank of Dalaran.

While the experiment was useful, I don’t think I’m going to quit for good. Ultimately, I was worried it was taking too much time from my already overrun schedule. But I think it’s ok. The distance was good for perspective, but other than that giving it up wasn’t a big deal at all. So I guess I’ll keep playing so long as I’m having fun.

I'm excited.. expect spme all caps.

In addition to having the BEST BIRTHDAY'S EVE EVER I am now having the BEST BIRTHDAY EVER.

Eve:
Got my car legal and MINE. I now drive a station wagon.
My scene in Performance went so very well!
Cupcake party with my St. Ed's friends.
Quiet Company concert with a NEW SONG YAY
Finally got to meet the lovely Leah Muse who was wearing the coolest shoes ever.
My mom conspired to have the best present OF MY LIFE waiting for me at home. Pics later.

Birthday!
I woke up to a HUGE bundle of flowers with a tag that completed Joshua's Birthday countdown sentence: "I need you like oxygen" *melt*
Krispy Kreme Donut in bed!
Long Hot shower where there was enough hot water!
Made caterpillars out of bananas in my first class of the day (Education class activity)
Made amazing strides in tutoring Hsa at the middle school and felt like a REAL TEACHER!
Got brownies to share with my last classes of the day
Got a badass parking spot on campus (THIS NEVER HAPPENS)

Also? The weather is my absolute perfect ideal day.

Birthday MAGIC.

To conclude I will be singing karaoke with all of my favorite people at Shooters Blue on 620. I'll get there between 9:30 and 10 and we'll have a cupcake cake. Be there if you can. I'll be happy to see you.

Thinking About God on a Rainy Day

This was a comment left on another blog, but I felt the need to put it here, to keep it visible for myself. This is the kind of thing that I try to gloss over with my family, but it's not worth it to hide. It's important to work through. I've forgotten a lot about the time in my life where faith was a struggle and not a comfort. I've entered a place of calm agnosticism, where I find the existence of God equally possible and impossible. I can feel that kind of peace only because I made it through the times when the absence of God in my life made me want to die. I've often been jealous of people I know who are certain of the existence of their God. They seem so comforted by it. I never was. Like an absent father or an abusive spouse, I felt the absence of God more keenly than I ever felt his presence.

Comment left on Taylor Muse's Blog: (with minor spelling errors fixed)

The hardest time in my life to live through was when I was trying to make -my life- make sense through the lens of the religion I'd been brought up with. Things didn't start looking up until I gave up trying to make my life meaningful in light of the fact that I had never "felt the presence of God" - which at the time made me feel with 100% certainty that I was going to hell.

As soon as I stopped believing that true love could only come from someone who refused to even talk to me (God) I started to be capable of loving myself, of loving anyone. Depending on God for love (which I never felt) led to the most unsatisfying, painful, dangerous place I've ever been in emotionally.

It makes me laugh when people say they got saved by Jesus because losing my faith was the thing that saved me from a terrifying place, where doubting God existed meant doubting I would ever really feel loved.

Instead, I discovered love was already there in my life. Recently my mom asked me how I get through the hardest times in my life not knowing that God loves me. What I told her was "You love me, that's enough" but what I didn't tell her was that God's "love" was never enough for me. Hers was.



Today, before I even read the post that inspired this comment, I wrote a poem which I titled, "An Atheist Sees the Face of God in Music" which is not meant to be a universal claim, but the description of the event. The poem does not mention God except in title, but it describes a feeling of perfect euphoria felt by being in the audience of a rock concert. For dramatic effect the girl in the poem crowd surfs, though I never have and do not wish to. I gave the poem this title because that's how I feel when I listen to music, the same way people at church seem to feel when they raise their hands and wobble back and forth during a sermon. I've never felt that way in church but in a concert hall I feel it nearly every time, if the music is good.

There's a part of me that has never understood why anyone needs God when the world is full of Music and Love.

I'm a control freak; you'd think I'd have mastered self-control by now.

I am not a very religious person. This is a statement that really shouldn’t surprise much of anyone, but I thought it was necessary to state because where I’m going with this post is going to verge on ideas I’ve grown up with, being raised catholic.

I’ve been feeling like shit for months- overworked, under motivated, and generally as if most of what I’m filling my time with is worthless- as if I’m wasting myself. So I began to try and recall the time in my life when I felt most successful, healthy, happy. I landed in my junior year of high school, sometime after my birthday up to about a month before the end of the school year. Anyone familiar with both school calendars and catholic calendars will be able to identify this time as lent.

While there are many parts of Catholicism that make no sense to me whatsoever, I’ve recently understood Lent in a way I never did growing up. For years I thought of it as ridiculous- what did God care if you stopped eating chocolate until Easter? Even my shaky theology now is sufficient to say that he doesn’t. But there’s something to it, this idea of “giving something up.”

There’s something about depriving yourself of something unnecessary that makes you feel really amazing, especially if it’s something you’ve begun to depend on too much. My mom usually gives up chocolate or soda, and while that may seem frivolous to you, I get it. The chemicals in these things are emotional satisfiers for her- a kind of self-medication that sometimes gets out of hand. Forcing yourself to abstain from something that has become a chemical or emotional dependence for you is empowering.

Like your body, your self-control has to be exercised every once in a while to keep working at all. I find it interesting that a religion that goes very far to allow for confession and absolution to make up for loss of self-control also includes a specific time of the year where we must exercise our self control, where the community holds you responsible for a promise you’ve made (in their hearts ‘to god’ but in my heart) to yourself to exercise your self control.

Even non-Catholics do this. We diet. We ‘cut back’ on drinking. We make New Years Resolutions to stop doing whatever bad behavior we’ve decided is worth taking a long look at, worth trying out the absence of. What lent gives us that New Year’s Resolutions and diets don’t is a time limit. If you’re on a diet to lose 20 pounds you might be on it for 10 weeks or 10 months. But lent is 40 days. At the end of 40 days without something you can be pretty sure to have some perspective. How hard was it to give up? How good do you feel without it? It might just make you appreciate it all the more.

The year I mentioned earlier, my junior year? I gave up red meat. A beef roast never in my life tasted as good as it did on Easter that year. Nothing to do with the holiday, just an affirmation of the old adage, “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” And if it doesn’t, it probably means that it’s something you didn’t really need after all. And knowing you don’t need it is half the empowerment gained from self-control.

Whether you’re catholic or jewish or a witch or an atheist, I encourage you to think about what in your life you could go without for 40 days. Something challenging but not life-threatening. Like giving up candy, or fast food, or any little indulgence you think might be getting out of hand. Don’t call it lent if you’re not catholic… call it a “self-control experiment.”

So what am I giving up?

I’ve been struggling for a while with spending too much time playing video games, namely WoW. I don’t want to throw around the term “addiction” because I don’t think it is, but it is a time sink that has become a little too much for me. I checked out when my current subscription would end, thinking I’d keep playing until that came up and then I’d take a serious break. I can renew my account at any time, and until then see what I’d be doing with all that glorious time I’m currently spending on the game. When I checked my subscription end date, it was February 17th.

February 17th, which is also Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. I don’t believe in signs, or providence, or fate… but that seems like some pretty perfect timing to me.

A Poetic License Never Expires

I have this theory- well, it’s more of a belief. We go through our lives trying to define ourselves. Maybe in words, but mostly in actions. Think about the last time you signed up for a social media site like Myspace, Facebook, ect. You had to fill out a section of space about yourself, about your interests. How did you go about filling it out?

I’ve read through a lot of profiles and most people tend to define themselves with a few vague adjectives and then a long list of “interests.” For example, my interests are theatre, literature, education, and if the site is less formal I’ll include my relatively recent interests in video games and web comics.

What I want to talk about right now is the things I never mention. The things that once were a big part of my self-identification that are now outdated hobbies. Like art. When I was younger I wanted to be an artist until I realized that I was awful at drawing. Then I discovered Photoshop and spent several years thinking I’d go to college for graphic design. Only four years ago I counted my three biggest interests as theatre, education, and graphic design. Based on my college schedule it’s obvious that education and theatre won.

Graphic design is still there for me. Every once and a while I’ll see an ad looking for a designer or an artistic submission and my heart aches a little knowing that if I’d made different choices I’d be there with enough education and experience to be good enough. I use my skills sometimes, too. For the past three years I’ve worked on the program for my high school theatre’s musical. It’s mostly ad work, but there’s something really special bout taking a couple baby pictures and kind word’s from a kid’s family and turning it into an ad to support them in the program. Not as artistic as the stuff I’d make for myself, but it warms my heart.

I think about these things sometimes. How if we won the lottery and I didn’t have to think about job security I might spend a few extra years in college just to dabble in graphic design, learn how to really polish the one thing I can really say I was never taught- something I taught myself and just had a knack for. Maybe I’d work on my photography or drawing skills.

What’s most poignant for me today is the fact that these things never go away. As much as I’ve suffocated my art it pops up every once in a while in the form of an irresistible desire to make LiveJournal icons or a header for a friend’s website. There are other skills that occasionally try to assert themselves- I haven’t sung in any venue but karaoke since high school, but every now and again I’ll see some choir recruiting and just wonder. There are also the things that I’ve gained over the years- poetry is one, and it’s making a mark in my life that I’ll have to describe at another time.

I guess the whole point is, the art is in me. Whether I’m called to draw, sing, paint or write a poem, it’s there. I’ve spent nearly 20 years struggling to find a medium for the words swirling around in my head. I’ve been moving around looking for a way to put things down, to express myself. And it doesn’t matter whether it makes it into my poetry, or my blog, or my about me section ever.

I am an artform. So are you.