alive, not dead!

I'm starting to see why the fellas named this site what it is.  I'm alive...not dead!  That's what I want to scream after realizing I haven't blogged something since early May??!  Is that right?  Can't be so?  What the hell have I been doing??

It ain't that I don't love this site, but I think I just got blogged out this year.  Not that I was blogging a bunch to begin with, but I sorta keep another blog and since I've been in China, it's been damn near impossible getting onto it, so I've just let that go basically and as a result, think my blogskills have soured here too.  I guess that one's a little more personal and the AnD stop has always been what's going on with the career kinda thing.  I should just fuse it all together already.  Stupid me, me stupid.

Anyway - since early May, it's been a whirlwind!  Shanghai Rush kicked off (it's still going on btw, we just aired episode 8 this past Sunday) I left China to go back to the States for a bit and stopped in Hawaii for a week, NYC for 3 weeks, and then came back here, which puts me about where I am at this moment - in Shanghai and ready to head to Taipei for the next few days.

The travel has been killer and I should just tell people these days I live in an airplane, but I guess I shouldn't complain.  It's strictly business and for that I'm grateful.

It's kinda funny - for SR, I have to lay down voiceover tracks each week as the production team is editing each episode week by week.  My narration over the episode is the last thing they put into the final cut before they send it off to ICS.  This means that for the 4 weeks I've been gone from SHG, I had to find places to do narration work.  Oh man, to think where some of them have been done as I watch an actual episode.  No one watching thinks about these kinds of things, but since it was me, I do!  I did episode 3 from an apartment in Honolulu, Hawaii.  Episode 5 was from my living room in NYC.  4 and 6 were from the MTV Studios in Times Square.  All this tells me is, basically, have voice, will travel.  With technology these days, anything is possible!

Anyways, I came back to SHG in time for the Shanghai International Film Festival.  This was the first time I've ever attended it and what a year to pick for the first time!  As we all know, China is becoming the center of the universe.  Business, sports, film, food & beverage, anything and everything you can think of, people are flooding into here to build it.  Fortune 500 companies, the NBA (building 12 arenas around the country), Hollywood, all the western cuisine you can think of, have set up shop here.  You feel it walking about town, you hear it in all the English being spoken here, you see it happening every day by day.

In the business of film and tv, it's no different.  The Festival has become truly international now with people from the world over descending about SHG to do their thing at the festival.  Danny Boyle, whom I had the pleasure of meeting, presided over the grand jury.  Other big stars were in town all week - people from Clive Owen to Halle Berry to Andie McDowell to Quincy Jones (picking up a lifetime achievement award and working with Tan Dun on something for the World Expo 2010) to Ewan McGregor to the regular Chinese stars like Zhang Ziyi and Karen Mok.  I had a nice chat with Chris Doyle too, but that dude's pretty much Chinese and always around Asia, so his presence wasn't surprising.  My favorite might have been getting to know Singaporean filmmaker Royston Tan.  Dude is fierce!

My production company is co-producing a film that was accepted into the co-pitch program in the festival.  We're very excited as hotshot Belgian director Christophe Van Rompaey has come on board to lens the pic!  His first feature: Moscow, Belgium was a smash hit and everyone's going to be curious about his follow-up.  It was a full week of non-stop wheeling and dealing, networking, drinking, pitching, seminars, lectures, etc.  Exhausting.  I also hosted a student short films award ceremony one night that turned into an evening of "how to look cool when sweating your ass off while up on stage."  It was hella hot in there!!!  Met some nice peoples, including the executive director of the Hawaii International Film Festival, which is great as I just learned that another film we were behind will be going there in October -- so looks like it'll be Honolulu time for me yet again this fall!  I can never get enough of that place - and plus my best friends will just have had their first baby right around then!

A few more episodes of recording for SR (our executive producer talked about us in The Hollywood Reporter! and remember, you can catch the series on Youku - though it loads crappy from the States), a visit from Mom, and then it looks like it's back Stateside for awhile...just in time for the Asian American Int'l Film Festival (a short I was in is playing in it.)  Man, they really miniaturized it this year!  Went from 10 days down to 3?  Is this a reflection of the economy of lack of fare?  Either way, I'm disturbed.  And either way, this is a good article my friend sent out that addresses the lay of the land today:  I Need Eggs!

Oh, if you're in NYC - and I'm bummed I'm missing this - my friend Karin Chien (an amazing indie film producer) is presenting her Chinatown Film Project which is a collection of 10 shorts set in NYC Chinatown done by 10 amazing filmmakers on July 1.  (I was lucky enough to get to act in one of them directed by Miguel Arteta who did The Good Girl and more recently a film called Youth in Revolt with Michael Cera.)  This project is the first film exhibition that the newly designed MoCa is presenting.  Curious to see this new Maya Lin project!

Alright, that's what's been up, more stuff on the horizon, but still waiting to see how it all shakes out.  Too much to think about....one day at a time...

My thoughts are continually with Laura Ling and Euna Lee who are still in North Korea.  What a terrible situation....