Dave Maass

Once again, I’m behind on blog posts. Sorry. It’s just the way things are. Busy busy busy. But, I thought I’d share a new side project I’ve picked up: Writing blog posts for SyFy channel’s SciFiWire.com, which, of course, is a bit of a nerd dream come true.

These aren’t news pieces or even reviews, but just fun lists and format busters involving sci-fi, fantasy and horror television and film. For example, here’s the Periodic Table of The Empire Strikes Back I conceptualized for the 30th anniversary of the Star Wars sequel:

Click to enlarge.

And here’s a piece on all the reasons why I still love Total Recall, two decades after the fact. And, in honor of the monstrous BP oil spill, here’s my list of sci-fi’s greatest (and silliest) grease and petroleum monsters.

More to come, though I might not get around to blogging it. Instead, click this link to see my author page or the new widget I’ve added to the sidebar.

Other than that, well… the CityBeat gig is friggin’ awesome…but I’ll blog about that some other time.

Lynn Morris and Will Lorimer are two of the brightest people I’ve ever worked with–and what they’re doing just makes me beam with pride. It’s a green beam, because it brings out a little bit of envy as well as my inner environmentalist.

They’re following the coast of the Atlantic—from Britain, down through Europe and Africa and back up through the Americas—in order to document the impact of rising ocean levels.  It’s called Atlantic Rising and it’s an interactive educational film project.

Right now, they’re more or less half way through the trip and have decided to veer off course to document deforestation in Brazil. In order to make it happen–and ship their jeep 1,000 miles inland–they need to raise $2,000 over the next 40 days.

I’m happy to say they’ve almost collected it all and it’s only been a few days. But they still need the go over the top. Please take a moment to check out their video plea here. If you’ve got $2 to kick in, that’s plenty.

Morris (left) and Lorimer (right) are both alums of the University of Manchester’s Granada Center for Visual Anthropology–which is where I was lucky enough to meet them.

Those of you on the East Coast might have a chance to meet them too: Their map shows it won’t be too long before they start documenting the United States’ Atlantic coast.

Many of you know that I now have a significant other, so to speak, and that her name is Megan and that she’s a filmmaker. Those of you who don’t, well, now you do. Recently, she completed a trailer for her 1-hour-long documentary, Finding Home and uploaded it to YouTube (above). Give it a watch; she’s currently in the process of finding funding in order to host more screenings of the film and to submit it to film festivals. Here’s the synopsis (which I helped write):

“Finding Home” explores the concept of home at the beginning of the 21st century from a working woman’s Do-It-Yourself sensibility.

Megan O’Connor, the San Diego-based filmmaker, takes the viewer to the blizzards of Beatrice, Nebraska, both her hometown and the location of the Homestead National Monument, only to discover that home isn’t necessarily where you were raised. Unfortunately, it isn’t where you live at any given moment either, she learns by polling everyone from her Generation X friends to the homeless of Southern California. O’Connor’s journey unfolds while the concept of “home” takes center stage in politics, as the 2008 election reaches a crescendo and the mortgage crisis slams the nation.

A first-person film that will remind documentary fans of Ross McElwee, Finding Home universally resonates with renters, homeowners, and anyone who feels lost and lonely in contemporary society.

I really like McElwee, so it’s no surprise I really like her film (and just her in general).

So, I’m finally getting around to filling out the rest of this new site. I’ve just posted the two documentaries I directed for the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology in 2004 and 2005, which you can watch here or download for your own leisurely viewing.

Bitter: Chronicle of the Final Boddingtons Strike: a 17-minute observational documentary about a five-day strike by workers desperate to save the historic Strangeways brewery in Manchester.

Residual Doubt: Portrait of a Capital Case Investigator: a 25-minute profile of Mary Durand, a “mitigation investigator” working on death row cases in Arizona.

I’m in the process of uploading more. You should see my 2008 DNC video blog online soon.

I’m pulling your leg.

(photo illo cut and pasted using The Gimp)

More in my ongoing war against doppelgangers, copycats, plagiarists, imposters and homonymous villains.

I have a vague kidhood memory of a trip to Smitty’s grocery story where I come across a calendar of mallard duck paintings by a guy named David Maass. In the memory, I become intensely jealous.  My name is hard enough to spell in the first place; surely the one benefit is that it makes me one of a kind. Who the hell does this duck dude think he is?

Well, I thought about it for months and the answer was obvious. He thought he was THE David Maass, that is his name, he had it first. The question then became: Who the hell did I think I was?

After many years of consideration and frustration with Duck David Maass, I decided to start going by Dave Maass. As my Internet persona developed and expanded, that actually worked out for the best. Me and David Maass had come to an unspoken agreement: Google “David Maass” and you get the duck painter. Google “Dave Maass” and you get pages and pages of me.  I’m unique, he’s unique. Yay!

Decades later, Smitty’s ain’t around anymore, but they’re still making David Maass duck calendars–except, now they’re David A. Maass duck calendars.

There’s a new DM on the block, a South Milwaukee School Board member who has started garnering attention from the Wisconsin political blogs. He goes by both David Maass and Dave Maass.  Apparently people like him. He was reelected this year with 1,277 votes (more than any of the four other candidates).

This is of grave concern to me.  I really don’t want to start using my middle initial. I guess the question is whether–if it came to a vote–I could round up 1,278 people to pick me as THE official Dave Maass.

Don’t push me, Mr. School Board Member DAVID Maass. I’m so close to launching a Facebook campaign,  you don’t even know.

UPDATE 04/08/2010: Oh crap! Using my middle initial won’t help either. He’s also a David J. Maass. See his comment on this post.

A little something I shot with London Wilder, son of Daddy Needs a Drink columnist Rob Wilder and genius in his own right.

Resources used: Flip cam, iMovie, Myspace Video

Who knew I could ever be jealous of a dead man?

OK, that’s not fair. John “Ash” Amador was the last man I interviewed on  Texas death row. He  spent 12 years in a cell before his appeals ran out and the state administered lethal injection. And yet, Amador–or at least his spirit–made it to Manchester before me. His head topped a float during the city’s art car parade.

Many months ago, a punk-rock documentary team from Britain asked me for permission to use photos I shot of Amador and posted to flickr. That’s punk rock as a style, not a subject matter; the doc, 402, is about his execution and their subsequent efforts to cast his favce in a death mask. I didn’t really know what to expect from the group, but couple weeks ago, I received a package par avion with the DVD,

This image is from the casting of Ash’s head within hours of his execution. As sad as it is, as awkward as it is to view the man’s expressionless face, I couldn’t help but grin during this scene. The rest of the film is a lot of smack talk by Brits in mohawks, and, a bit randomly, an interview with Gerry Conlon (a Guildford Four exoneree who was played by Daniel Day-Lewis in In the Name of the Father)…but the most compelling thread is Amador’s row bride’s struggle through the system of institutionalized murder: from buying a body bag to his last call to retrieving the body.

This is what I wrote to the filmmakers, when, just absolutely overwhelmed, I had to pause at that casting scene:

Your doc is making me think a lot about how I met Ash. A reporter can have only two hours with inmates at Livingston on Wednesdays and you can only interview a single inmate for 50 minutes at a time. I was there to see Kenneth Foster, whose execution date was coming up. Foster, you might’ve heard, was never convicted of killing anyone; he was sentenced to death for being the driver of the car the killer was in under Texas’ “law of parties.” [currently up for revision in the Texas legislature]

Since I had another 50 minutes, I asked Ash–who also had an upcoming date–if he’d like to give me an interview. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to write a story about him. His execution was too soon, and my editor would only let me write so much on death row. I was up front with Ash, told him the best I could do–as a member of the press–was record our interview and upload it to Archive.org and the post pictures to Flickr for posterity.

I never saw Ash’s case file. The district clerk in charge of court records was perpetually in violation of the rules for releasing cases to the public for inspection. I never saw Kenneth’s either; in the weeks before his execution date, staff couldn’t locate his records.

Ash was executed August 29. Foster received a commutation from the governor on August 30. That was the day I was driving out of Texas hauling a trailer of my stuff to Santa Fe.

I always thought that Kenneth was lucky, Ash just wasn’t. Now I see that I was wrong. John Amador is still one lucky motherfucker. I’m watching with bulging eyes and a big smile muttering to myself “whatthefuckwhatthefuck.” You’ve given the man one wicked afterlife.

Here’s the trailer:

Remember Anna Lagerkvist, the Tech.co.uk writer who ripped off my Nuke to the Future Piece? No? Well, read this post to catch up. The last thing I mentioned was that the editor and publisher were conducting an “internal review.” Weeks passed and I heard nothing back. So, I sent them a letter. Here’s what they said:

Shrug. I would’ve liked an admission of guilt and an apology, but “appropriate actions” will have to be enough. She wasn’t fired, though, that much is clear She’s still listed on the masthead (in case you wanted to email her).

I’ll tell you this much: I feel much better now that I’ve been cited on Wikipedia. Some kind citation-smart soul added part of my Film.com interview with David Morrell, author of First Blood, about the newest Rambo film to the Rambo Wikipedia entry. (I don’t mean to brag, but with 175 recommends, it’s the top rated story on Film.com at the moment).

This week, I finally got around to watching Seraphim Falls, a western that played in theaters briefly last year. My coworker, his partner and I hooked my laptop up to their projector and we watched the film unfold across the length of the wall of his living room. It killed my laptop doing it, but in the end, reinstalling Vista (again) was worth it.

Starring two Irishmen as American Civil War veterans, the film’s too sparse on dialogue to hear the lilting holes in their assumed American accents. Hell, from the opening scene, you know that Brosnan’s character probably hasn’t spoken to anyone in three years.

He’s a mountain man, one minute building a fire and the next running for his life. Throughout the film, Brosnan’s motivated only by shame and survival, as Neeson and a gang of bounty hunters chase him across the New Mexico wilderness. You don’t know what Brosnan’s done, but it’s something horrific and old and soul-scarring, both for him and Neeson, who won’t stop until he’s personally put a bullet in Brosnan’s head. The chase is exquisite and brutal and logical and long; you might call the plot slow, but the scenes are white-knuckling and physically exhausting.

It’s the kind of Western I complain they don’t make anymore. It obeys the genre rigidly, and yet completely transcends it. It’s the thinking man’s action film; a little James Dickey with a lot of Serge Leone. Man against man. Man against nature. Man against his own soul. In the last quarter, it gets downright metaphysical, but it’s both apt and intriguing and wide open to interpretation. That’s just how I like it (and why My Name is Nobody is one of my all-time favs). I spent a good twenty minutes lying in bed that night meditating on the multiple layers of meaning in the title, “Seraphim Falls.” Plural on purpose, I concluded.

Anyway, it satisfied me like so few films do. Totally recommended, dude.