For the first time in what feels like months – and probably is – I rode my bike five miles to work and five miles back. I’d been starting to feel like a lardy, cranky bastard, but working up a sweat on the bike (mostly on the way back home) makes me think I’m back on the right track.

Other news: I’m currently reading a book that’s a collection of pages in a box. You assemble them in whatever order you want, except for the very first and the very last. It feels like inhabiting a very disorderly memory, which is likely the point. It’s called The Unfortunates and it was written by B. S. Johnson, no relation to London’s current head buffoon mayor.

In A. S. Byatt’s Little Black Book of Stories there is one about a woman who turns into an beautiful and bewildering assembly of stones. Naturally she ends up in Iceland, where the stones are still very much alive. Talking to her Icelandic sculptor friend shortly before her final transformation, he tells her the story of a man who abandons his friends to live wild amongst the rocks. Each year for three years they visit him to see if he’s willing to return to them, and each time they ask what he believes in. The final time he responds, laughing “Trunt, trunt, og tröllin í fjöllunum,”

“‘Trunt, trunt’ is just nonsense, it means rubbish and junk and aha and hubble bubble, that sort of thing, I don’t know an English expression that will do as a translation. Trunt trunt, and the trolls in the fells.”

Ever since I finished the story, trunt has been rolling around inside my head. I love the idea of a word that is so chock-full of nothing.

This weekend has been my first time off from jobs and movie stuff for about two, maybe three months. After ignoring most of the Superbowl, I took Courtney to see There Will Be Blood. Within the first minute she whispered in my ear “I really notice cinematography now.” At that moment I think my heart skipped a beat.

This weekend Courtney and I launched the Shooting Bulletins blog. It’s where we’re keeping a record of our progress as we attempt to make a short movie that will prove my worthiness to be admitted to film school. Check it out if you’d like to see how we’re doing and to find out how you can help us do what we need to do!

We’ll be putting the third bulletin up some time today.

This is funny, sad, touching, hopeful and true. It’s about the village of Botton in Yorkshire. I’ve only got so far as the two blokes in the print shop, who have a Goon Show-esque repartee, and if it weren’t time for bed I’d watch it all the way through.

Update: I finished watching. It was mostly quite decent, but the lack of any serious analysis of exactly how the Botton model helps its patients lead meaningful lives in spite of the difficulties they face was troubling. It felt as if the makers of the programme either intended to present a freakshow and make it acceptable by making some nod towards serious analysis, or they wanted to make something serious but lacked the budget to get interviews with experts, or that the programme makers were fairly young and failed to recognise they needed more serious analysis to add weight to the project. I suspect it was a combination of the latter two.

Wow, for about half an hour I thought I’d totally destroyed my blog. I just upgraded to a new version of Wordpress, and it wasn’t the easiest transition.

This week it’s starting to get serious. I’ve received some useful feedback on my script, I’ve cast an actor, and Courtney’s realising the scale of the project we’re about to embark on. My short movie with the working title “Julie, Julie” is officially in pre-production. In the next week or so I’ll be starting a new website with a “donate” button so people can help fund the project, should they so desire.

Thanks to my script readers: your feedback has been very useful.

This weekend was another orgy of video shooting. First off, most of Friday was spent preparing to shoot, and then shooting a Critical Mass of zombies and pirates. More will become apparent when it’s edited.

Saturday and Sunday were spent on a levee in Sacramento shooting a barbaric pinata massacre for my friend Stephanie. I’m quite pleased with how the footage looked when we played it back in the evenings. There was a distinct Tarantino-esque cruelty to a couple of shots.

Palmer asked me if I could help him with a documentary project he’s working on, so this Sunday we went to Sacramento to interview locally-based outsider musician Lenny G. Blat. Something about him reminds me of the Legendary Stardust Cowboy.

Palmer’s started editing already, and a couple of clips are up on YouTube.

When the camera’s off Lenny is surprisingly warm, and unpredictable. He sings almost constantly, as if he has a musical variant of tourette’s syndrome.

According to Palmer, the Maggot Baby is hatching soon.