Dave Sim's blogandmail #179 (March 9th, 2007)

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Fourteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast That Make You a Good Feminist

1. A mother who works a full-time job and delegates to strangers the raising of her children eight hours a day, five days a week does just as good a job as a mother who hand-rears her children full time.

2. It makes great sense for the government to pay 10 to 15,000 dollars a year to fund a daycare space for a child so its mother - who pays perhaps 2,000 dollars in taxes - can be a contributing member of society.

3. A woman's doctor has more of a valid claim to participate in the decision to abort a fetus than does the father of that fetus.

4. So long as a woman makes a decision after consulting with her doctor, she is incapable of making an unethical choice.

5. A car with two steering wheels, two gas pedals and two brakes drives more efficiently than a car with one steering wheel, one gas pedal and one brake which is why marriage should always be an equal partnership.

6. It is absolutely necessary for women to be allowed to join or participate fully in any gathering place for men, just as it is absolutely necessary that there be women only environments from which men are excluded.

7. Because it involves taking jobs away from men and giving them to women, affirmative action makes for a fairer and more just society.

8. It is important to have lower physical standards for women firepersons and women policepersons so that, one day, half of all firepersons and policepersons will be women, thus more effectively protecting the safety of the public.

9. Affirmative action at colleges and universities needs to be maintained now that more women than men are being enrolled, in order to keep from giving men an unfair advantage academically.

10. Having ensured that there is no environment for men where women don't belong (see no.6) it is important to have zero tolerance of any expression or action which any woman might regard as sexist to ensure greater freedom for everyone.

11. Only in a society which maintains a level of 95% of alimony and child support being paid by men to women can men and women be considered as equals.

12. An airline stewardess who earned $20,000 a year at the time that she married a baseball player earning $6 million a year is entitled, in the event of a divorce, to $3 million for each year of the marriage and probably more.

13. A man's opinions on how to rear and/or raise a child are invalid because he is not the child's mother. However, his financial obligation is greater because no woman gets pregnant by herself.

14. Disagreeing with any of these statements makes you anti-woman and/or a misogynist.

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THERE'S

BRIAN LEE MOORE

FOR YOU…IN

TODAY'S BLOG &

MAAAILLL

Sorry for the terrible pun. Hey, Remember Brian Lee Moore from the last Aardvark Comment in issue 300? Army sergeant just back from a tour of duty in Iraq who was looking to make his own independent films? Well, here's an update:


Dear Dave:


I never got around to sending Christmas cards this year, but if I did you would have been first on my list of Christmas cheer delivered by post. I really appreciate all the help and support you have given me on Demon Joe from the advice on the screenplay to the logo for the restaurant scene. I hope that you enjoyed your Holiday Season and that things are going well for you.


The letter's dated January 2, so as you can imagine, that last sentence struck an inadvertent sour note as I descended into Illness Hell. Actually it was a lot of fun working on the screenplay and making suggestions. That happened at a time when I was going out and seeing movies reasonably often where I would always be sitting there going, "Well, THAT part didn't work," and re-writing it in my head instead of just sitting and watching the movie. When somebody sends you a screenplay you get to do it for real. "Well, THAT part didn't work…why don't you try phrasing it this way, instead?" I was just glad that Brian was amenable to having someone do that to his work. The "Sum Burger" logo, as far as I'm concerned, Paul McCusker did the heavy lifting on with his computer colouring (a combination that Jim Waley helped coordinate).


I haven't written since June, so I figured that I was way overdue in giving you an update. The logo actually makes it into the movie even though I cut the restaurant scene. Barry wears it in one of the scenes. I guess he saved his uniform shirt from when he worked there. I am still not finished. Money troubles plague me, but they always do eventually. So no biggie. I am almost done. I hope to be finished by the end of February. If I am wrong about the completion date I'll have to tell you about it then. I am very happy with it so far. It isn't word-for-word what was written in the fourth draft of the screenplay. There was a lot of improv that went into some scenes. Sometimes scenes were edited down into one shorter scene. Sometimes I cut scenes that were shot or were shot AND edited. Sometimes I cut scenes just by scratching them out of my working copy of the script. But all of this was to the benefit of the movie in the long run. I don't regret a single cut.


That would be tough for me. On my secret project which is the closest to this that I've ever worked, I don't see things in terms of what needs to be cut or what needs to be left in. I tend to see it as either "this is working" or "I give up". Probably all those years of sheer forward momentum on Cerebus where I just couldn't afford to cut anything because of the time constraints.


I have learned a lot about what it takes to be an artist in terms of craft and discipline and I think I have begun to pave my way for a successful career if I can just complete this project with precise planning. In retrospect, I probably should have listened to my teachers and just made a short film and then beg a lot like they do…


Had to laugh at that. There's a military guy looking at the movie business. "Jeez, where's your self-respect?"


…but I had this fear that I would spend the rest of my days shooting weddings or filming training videos. I would hate that. I keep telling friends that I went to an arts college because I wanted to tell stories and that if all I wanted to do was to get a job I wouldn't have gone to college, I would have just drove a forklift in a factory.

A theatre opened in my home town. I went over there hoping to steal talent from them, but I ended up being part of their talent.


Had to laugh at that. There's what happens when the military guy meets the theatre world head-on.


I got cast in a musical adaptation of "A Christmas Carol". I would have taped it and sent you a DVD of it, but the guy who wrote the music is very paranoid. He got ripped off by the BeeGees a long time ago. He refused to let anyone record it. Which is cool in a way. Less work for me. I play Scrooge's nephew Fred, the ghost of Jacob Marley, and young Ebenezer. I sing also. I had forgotten how good I sing, actually. That and my vanity is what led me to the Marley part. No one else could sing the song. I had way too many lines to memorize and got little done on the movie in November and December. However, I can never get a lot done while the Holidays go on anyway.


They were trying to talk me into playing the sheriff in "Bus Stop", but I don't think so. Last night, we talked some other guy into it.


Had to laugh at that, too. Picture some poor bastard getting it from both sides from the military guy and the theatre people. He wouldn't know what hit him.


So I will be in a cheerleading capacity for the next play. I have to finish my movie. And that's all there is to it. I had to tell a friend that I couldn't do his documentary he wanted to do. This is the same deal.


Once Demon Joe is finished, I have other plans in the works for 2007. I really don't want to perform in a lot of shows at the Warehouse Theatre, but I would like to do some shows of my own that I would have control of. I want to do a one-man show about "The Terrible Two-Year Old". I want to dress up as a toddler in a blue pajama suit with over-sized sets. I might also do a stand-up routine based on my relatives on Comedy nights. There's talk about me playing Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple. I am going to adapt A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. It will have the darker elements of satire that the book had, but all of the adaptations lack. I also want to write my next two screenplays for next year. So it will be busy. I am not sure how much of that I'll get done, but I'll have a more concrete idea of what I'll shoot for in 2007 in a couple of weeks.


In March, I am determined to be finished with Demon Joe, if not by February. I will mail you the restaurant costume and a DVD of Demon Joe on March 15, 2007. I will live up to that promise. Happy New Year, Dave. May God bring you happiness.


Hey, you too, Brian. I asked if I could have the restaurant costume for the Cerebus Archive to go with the draft of the Demon Joe script and he said sure. I'll let you know if I see anything late in March. Oh, and if there are any rich Yahoos in the film business who want to give Brian a hand with distribution or take a look at a rough cut, you can contact him at mooreinstore@sbcglobal.net. Who knows? Demon Joe may be the sleeper hit of the decade!

Tomorrow: Okay, I've been at this since 10:30 this morning (Feb. 21) and it's almost 6 pm and I'm finally getting to the bottom of some of these stacks and tomorrow is Saturday March 10 so that's roughly sixteen days of lead time. I can do this. I can do this.

There's MORE for YOU

In Today's BLOG &

…MAAAILLLL!

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REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
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If you wish to contact Dave Sim, you can mail a letter (he does NOT receive emails) to:

Aardvark Vanaheim, Inc
P.O. Box 1674
Station C
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada N2G 4R2

Looking for a place to purchase Cerebus phonebooks? You can do so online through Win-Mill Productions -- producers of Following Cerebus. Convenient payment with PayPal:

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