Terrance Zdunich's Blog, page 3

A Devilish Debut & Double-Feature!

A Birthday Bash!

Repo! Turns Five!

Testify at Times Scare!

Put On A Happy Face

Smiling is an act of communication cross-culturally recognized. Many biologists believe that our knack for tooth-flaunting originated with our ancient ape ancestors, furry forefathers who would flash their whites as a way of demonstrating harmlessness to predators. Although physically similar, a smile is not to be confused with a grimace, which denotes anxiety as opposed to happiness. Why aren’t you smiling?

As a pre-teen, I remember reading how the Roman tyrant Caligula would practice scary grimaces in a mirror to better strike terror into his subjects. At that time in my life, I also remember teachers continuously asking me if something was wrong—presumably because I was reading too much literature on insane despots, and because I didn’t smile enough—so, like Caligula, I would practice faces, happy faces, in my own imperial bedroom looking glass.

It took me many years to realize that my not-so-toothy grin was an asset when playing big screen devils and grave-robbers. And it took me even longer to realize that all I needed to induce smiles from my fellow primates was a motorcycle with a sidecar. Again: why aren’t you smiling?

I’ve been riding the Ural featured in the video above for a little over a month now and every time I venture out, I’m met with waves, nods, and smiles. Lots and lots of smiles.

Zipping by minivans on the highway, I’ll glance over and see hordes of happy little hands and faces pressed against windows, craning their necks to check out my three-wheeled ride. Even their chauffeur soccer moms and dads look up from their miserable steering wheels and momentarily beam.

Drivers will honk and salute. Even police officers seem happy to see me (whereas in previous vehicles when a cop looked my way, I’d assume they were going to pull me over and that I’d need to quickly think up an excuse for the ski mask, stun gun, and rubber tubing in my lap). Smiling yet?

So… aside from sidecars, what makes you smile? Please share your smirky soft spots in the “Comments” section below.

(photographs by Suthi Pictotte; video by Will Weyer)

Sidekicks

I turned thirty seven last week. I’m not one to make a ruckus over my birthday, so instead of a party I set three large goals for myself… goals that I wanted to accomplish before my age odometer clicked forward another year. The tasks were to complete a freelance painting gig that I began in June (the full painting will be unveiled in a later post, but a detail is below), to finish the “Heaven” portion of the songwriting for The Devil’s Carnival episodes two and three, and to acquire a motorcycle.

I’m happy and relieved to share that all three goals were met, but it came right down to the wire: T.D.C. co-composer, Saar Hendelman, and I completed the last targeted tune three-minutes before the midnight chime hailed me another year older. At the conclusion of our rough, pocketphone demo of the song, Saar can be heard exalting, “11:57… fuck yeah!” His recorded bliss was due as much to the fact we’d narrowly beat the clock as it was that we’d been struggling with this particular number for over three months. Although frustrating, the journey with the song was worth it as it may be my favorite of the new episodes (one I’m excited to share with all of you in the near future!).

The other two goals did not take three months to complete, but each had its own challenges and setbacks, and selecting a motorcycle has marked a whole new era for me and my nearing middle-age mobility.

I’d never driven a motorcycle until last month and although I’d been driving cars for the last twenty-one years, I’d never before owned a new vehicle… let alone driven one that I felt was an extension of my personality. No, the automobiles I’d coached were merely means of getting from point A to point B in a city that all but requires one to drive: Los Angeles. My solution to this Southern California road requisite was to possess a series of cheap, used beaters that transported me around from my teenage years to the present.

My former four-wheeled beasts were all eyesores, rusted rides with a myriad of mechanical problems. Shortly after college, I was driving a particularly monstrous machine that I used for a job as a flower courier. The flower deliveries were usually surprise bouquets from husbands and lovers to their fair honey’s places of work. I found it hilarious that my uncomely chariot was the delivery horse for other people’s romances. In addition to being ugly, the car had no working air conditioner, so in the sweltering summer months I’d show up to corporate offices looking a sweaty, disheveled mess, clutching fists of flowers like a crazy person.

As someone who in thirty seven years still hasn’t learned how to play nice with others—or to shave without nicking his chin—I never felt I was missing anything by not owning a new, or even nice, vehicle. Car payments always felt like the stuff of grownups, and as someone who subscribes to the Fight Club philosophy that the things you own own you, I never wanted the worry that some asshole might key a hunk of metal that was actually of value to me. My shiny new motorcycle, however, has made me eat my words.

I am now the proud owner of a virgin Ural model T. Ural is a Russian company that specializes in heavy duty, 1940′s-style sidecar motorbikes, sometimes known as “Cossack motorcycles”. With an alter ego like Count Tarakan: Bad Ass Russian, I couldn’t think of a machine more appropriate to serve as the first mechanical steed that I purchased because I wanted to as opposed to felt like I had to.

I was turned on to Ural by longtime friend and biker Larry Andrews, who, when I told him I was looking for a retro-looking motorbike, said, “You need to check out Ural.”

Larry and I spent an evening drooling over internet photos of the Russian bikes, cracking up at images of Ural drivers taking corners with their sidecars raised at 130° angles, or of WWII cosplayers riding with rifles and eyepatches.

Some Ural models are equipped with levers that engage the third wheel, better allowing the vehicles to go off-roading, climbing dirt roads like the mountains of its company’s namesake in two-wheel drive. Other models are waterproofed and stocked with rowing oars for river crossing.

Apparently, the mark of a good sidecar operator is a driver who can complete an entire lap with the third wheel pitched off the ground like you see in cartoons. I’ve only been driving the motorcycle for a little over a week, so my skills aren’t quite their yet, but I’m getting the hang of it and enjoying the feeling of riding in the open air and receiving double takes from motorists who most likely have only seen bikes like these in Indiana Jones films.

I’m planning to do a photoshoot with my new wheels on the horizon, but in the meantime, who wants to help me name it? And should the sidecar have its own name, independent of the bike itself, like a dynamic duo?  Please enter your suggestions in the “Comments” section below.

Velocipedes And Motor Buggies

Roughly a year and a half ago, I took up bicycling. Not in a competitive or team recreational sense; The car I’d been using as my main source of transportation died, so I purchased a cheap two-wheeler to facilitate local commuting until I could acquire another motor vehicle.

I hadn’t ridden a bicycle since I was in high school, but the simile “like riding a bike” held true. The experience took me back to the adventures I had whizzing down dusty bike trails as a teenager, and I enjoyed the physical aspect of peddling in the elements (I journaled about these cruising crusades in the post I Rode My Bicycle Past Your Window Last Night).

At the time, I was in the heart of pre-production on the musical film The Devil’s Carnival: Episode One. Production followed, then post, and then months of touring the completed project, so free time to break away and car shop was non-existent. Moreover, the more I relied on the bicycle, the less enthusiastic I became about car ownership. It’s been nineteen months, and I’m still using the bike.

Cutting through narrow alleyways and neighborhood necks, I enjoy traveling outside the Los Angeles mainstream. Further, I dread the idea of reassuming the wages of high gas prices, costly auto repairs, insurance payments, and SoCal traffic. The sad fact, however, is that it’s very difficult to exist in a city as expansive as Los Angeles without a motor vehicle. Sure I get around my hood on the bike and bum rides from friends when possible, but my roaming options are severely limited. And even though the city of angels is one of the world’s largest, its public transportation system sucks. In other words, I need to get another petrol-powered bucket.

One of the things I enjoy most about bicycling is that while cruising at slower speeds and being unconfined, I notice things I’d never catch in an automobile. Some of the things are positive—odd color combinations on the surfaces of neighborhood houses or bizarre lawn statues. Others are negative—road kill stuck to gutters and litter heaps. I also notice passing motorcycles.

In addition to the motorbikes being loud and cool-looking, motorcyclists seem more aware of their environments than passing cars. They also appear more cognizant of their fellow two-wheelers, including me.

Bicycling on city streets has made me quite the defensive driver. Almost daily, I’ll encounter distracted car and truck jockeys who come dangerously close to hitting me while texting or simply not paying attention to the road. Sometimes drivers will look right into my eyes as I peddle through an intersection and then turn their vehicle into me as if I wasn’t there. They always appear horrified as they slam on their brakes to avoid crashing into me, so these folks aren’t sadistic, just absentminded.

Motorcyclists, on the other hand—probably because they too are defensive drivers by necessity—generally give a wide berth and patiently wait for me to pass if they need to move through a lane I’m occupying. Through helmets, black goggles, and grizzled beards, I often get nods of solidarity.

These experiences opened up my mind to the possibility of making my next vehicle a motorcycle instead of a car: a perfect middle ground that would transfer many of the enjoyable aspects of bicycling into a vessel better equipped for navigating my fair city. Plus: motorcycles are cheaper than cars, cheaper on gas, and cheaper on auto insurance.

Last weekend, I enrolled in a motorcycle training course where I learned the basic biker ropes. The school provided not only instruction, but trial motorcycles and helmets for their students. For me, it was literally a “crash course” as I tipped a bike during a drill and scraped up my knee and elbow. At the end of the class, us students were given the driving portion of the DMV’s motorcycle test. I passed!

I have an appointment with the Department of Motor Vehicles the first week of July to take the written exam for the M1 license. Once this is obtained, I’ll be able to legally drive a motorcycle in the state of California. I’ve already begun the hunt for a bike and gear and will post photos once all are acquired.

Pictured above are the four basic types of street motorcycles: Touring, Cruiser, Sport, and Standard. I know what I’m getting. If you were to join my hypothetical motorcycle gang, which type would you ride? And what should we call ourselves? Please share your suggestions in the “Comments” section below.

Campfire Stories

Fair reader: I apologize for my lack of cyber correspondence of late. For the last two months I’ve been sequestered in my writing cave, shackled to a pen and pad, scratching through songs, nibbling through notebooks. This process is one of isolation and misanthropy. I’ve been meaning to share some of these adventures here, but as the curtain fell on each passing day of creative calluses, I was more inclined to reach for the bottle than a fresh sheet of paper on which to scribble a new blog post.

Last weekend, this changed. I decided to break away from the intensiveness of the writing cave for a brief outdoor excursion. I went camping.

Woodsy weekend getaways have become a yearly ritual for a small group of friends and myself. We pack our motor vehicles with tents and victuals, drive an hour or so from the city, pick a patch, pound our stakes into the ground, and enjoy each others company out of doors. Being away from the writing cellar, however, did little to temper the great spirit of storytelling.

Sitting around the campfire, accompanied by a score of crackles and crickets, my friends and I shared spooky stories from our childhoods. Each night, once the liquor, tales, and fire had run dry, we’d stumble into our respective tents to dream of each others’ twisted yarns—half fearful, half hopeful that the ghosts of our stories would materialize and haunt us in the dark wilderness of the campsite.

Scientists say that prehistoric fire circles played a big role in the development of our modern brains. Prior to man’s ability to harness fire, we were prey to a great many beasts, especially nocturnal predators. Under these hostile conditions, our primitive gray matter focused almost exclusively on survival. With the advent of fire pits to keep our fanged foes at bay, however, our kind had the freedom to relax a bit. We used this free time to think. This thinking caused our brains to grow. It’s ironic that the flames that once provided our ancestors a sense of security in the dark were now being used to spread terror through the sharing of spooky bedtime stories.

Staring nightly into the dancing flames of our open air hearth, listening to communal tales of dread, I was reminded of an eerie event from my childhood that I’d all but forgotten and was compelled to share with my camping mates… and now with you, fair reader.

Although my campfire story was not the most frightening of the bunch, and a computer screen is a pale substitute for logs and ember, I invite you to turn off the lights and gather ’round your glowing monitor for the true story of The Garage and the Open Grave…

The house I grew up in was scary. It was old, dark, with sagging ceilings and creaking floors. The minds of the adults in the place were just as scary. Corrupted by substances and childish superstitions, they thought nothing of passing off stories of ghostly inhabitants, curses, and alien abductions as fact to the frightened and susceptible minds of us youngsters.

A surge in the power in the house’s frail wiring was an evil spirit. A bad dream was a premonition of doom. A gust of wind was a dead relative breathing down our necks.

My younger self was regularly spooked by the stories. Like them, I’d find meaningless patterns all around that served to validate even the most outlandish of claims. A pair of sticks on the ground was a crucifix. A distant barking dog meant that ghosts were approaching. Insomnia (undoubtedly brought about by caffeinated, teenaged Big Gulp guzzling) meant that the spirits within that ghastly house were targeting me. And the cracks in the concrete of the garage floor meant that something… someone was buried there.

This last bit, even after years of reflection, actually bares the mark of some truth.

The garage was spookier than the main house. It was dusty and rickety and looked as if it were built sometime after the initial property was constructed, and by someone with only so-so carpentry skills. I always imagined that a former resident was responsible for the building, someone long since dead. I even contemplated that it was the corpse of this dearly departed framer that was concealed beneath the cement, haunting me and my family’s fragile imaginations.

The cracks in the concrete were frightening; jagged fingers busting up the ground in bizarre, clawed patterns, as if the very foundation was trying to split apart and spit something up. Stranger still, the cracks converged in the floor’s center in a large rectangular outline—an outline roughly the size of a hole one would need if they were looking to bury and conceal a body. More suspiciously, the concrete rectangle was a different shade than the rest of the floor, as if it were made from a newer cement batch… as if someone had cut a slab from the floor to hide something, and then filled it back in with fresh paste, taking care to smooth over the seams, concealing any evidence of the treasure… or the crime. But over time, the rock-like floor had yawned in fissures that traced the edges where the old concrete met the new, creating a mysterious crypt door beneath our feet.

In my early high school years, I decided it was time to unearth whatever secret the garage was keeping. I gathered a small group of classmates to help with the excavation endeavor. I needed help partly because I didn’t possess the physical strength to singularly hammer through stone and compacted soil, but mainly because I was too afraid to brave the task alone.

Once my ragtag team of adolescent archeologists was assembled, we gathered our hammers, crowbars, and spades, and got to work.

Concrete is heavier than it looks, and dirt is harder than it feels. We learned these principles over the weeks that it took to pry and lift the body-sized block and then cut into the cold earth beneath, shoveling through rocks and roots. We would meet after school, lock ourselves in the garage, blast Danzig and Iron Maiden from a boombox, slurp down the aforementioned Big Gulps, and take turns digging. Growing mounds of scooped dirt began forming a crenelated hill around the gaping hole we were making.

The chasm became deeper with each day that passed. Convinced that it was only a matter of time before we’d unearth human teeth or a skeletonized corpse—with ankles and wrists bound by electrical cord—the digging was not only exhausting, but scary. Especially at night. The longer the excavation lasted, the deeper (quite literally) the terror became.

It got to the point where the hole was so deep that you had to lower yourself in and then rely on the aiding, outstretched hand of a colleague to help you out. As such, we made a fraternal pact that no matter what evil our digging awoke, no one would leave a man alone down in the hole.

Like all brotherly pacts, all it took was real conflict (or a pretty girl) and all illusions of masculine camaraderie and bond were swiftly shattered. Unfortunately, I was the one in the hole when our pledge was tested, and failed.

It was a sticky summer night. Tunes were blaring and shovels were swinging when a series of odd sounds—seemingly coming from inside the garage—put us all on edge. Over the music, we kept hearing faint scratching against a wall. Pale with fear, we’d turn the music down, listen, hear nothing, shake it off, and then resume the dig. This happened a couple of times, but we convinced ourselves that our minds were just playing tricks.

Shovel in hand, I was in the ditch, which was now well over five feet deep. The ground at this depth was rock hard. We were certain that we were inches away from our quarry as folklore told us that things always became most difficult moments before victory… especially when dealing with evil spirits.

And then it happened; with a stomp of my boot, I stabbed the blade of my spade into a particularly hard patch of dirt. As I did, a deafening WHUMP slammed against the roof of the rickety garage. The entire building shook and dust rained down from the ceiling beams.  It was as if some unseen presence was warning us to dig no further… as if something supernatural was waiting to strike us dead if we continued.

In a blink, my entire crew went sprinting from the garage, leaving me alone in the hole… alone in the open grave.

In a punch of adrenaline-fueled terror, I sprang from the pit and chased after my fleeing friends. We dashed into the main house for safety. Inside, we locked the doors, caught our breath, and then nervously laughed about the terrifying encounter.

After that night, it was all but impossible to rally the crew to continue digging. I was relieved, as their reluctance allowed me to step away from the task while saving a bit of face. Eventually, I filled the hole back in, but only during daylight hours, and only with the garage door braced open.

In retrospect, I’m fairly certain that the thunderous crash against the garage roof was caused by my next door neighbors, folks who preferred mariachis to heavy metal, and had grown quite sick of our noisy, late-night burrowing. I’ll never know, just as I’ll never know if we were truly inches away from unearthing a fossil, a treasure, or indeed a murder.

I hope that you’ve enjoyed this chilling campfire chronicle, fair reader. Please share some of your own ghostly tales or spooky adventure stories in the “Comments” section below.

(black-and-white nature photography by Jason Alvino)

He Said, “Now, Hush Love, Here’s A Song”

Singing Trails

I recently returned home from a mini-tour with my friends and collaborators, director Darren Lynn Bousman and composer Saar Hendelman. On this mini-tour, we visited eight North American cities over the course of two weekends, hosting double feature screenings of our films Repo! The Genetic Opera and The Devil’s Carnival. I say mini-tour because in comparison to the size and expansiveness of previous tours with these two musical movie projects, eight cities seemed like a cakewalk. But size doesn’t matter, right?

To make this petite touring experience as exciting as former ones—as well as give audiences something chewy, veiny, and new—we added the component of live music to the lineup: nightly, Saar and I sat down at a keyboard and sang a song live from the upcoming The Devil’s Carnival: Episode Two. We also demonstrated some of our songwriting process. In other words, in addition to screening our films, the tour also included a very stripped-down, exposed, and personal performance for our fans.

Prior to this mini-tour, the last time I’d really sung for an audience was in 2005 during Repo! The Genetic Opera‘s off-off Broadway summer production. Even then, my singing self was masked behind the make-up and costume of the GraveRobber character. On the set of T.D.C: Episode One, I was even more concealed, buried behind pounds of horns and prosthetics as Lucifer… so this singing live as Terrance The Songwriter, as opposed to Terrance The Actor, was more than a little intimidating. This, coupled with the fact that the majority of movie theatre venues we’d booked weren’t set up for live performances, made the whole affair complicated as well as nerve-wracking.

At all eight cities, a keyboard needed to be rented and delivered to the theatre, amplified through a PA system, and then sound-checked with us upon arrival. This all needed to occur during a travel schedule that typically had us arriving in each city with zero time to spare.

 

At a Boston airport, for example, en route to Toronto for an evening screening at the Rio Theatre, we were on our cell phones, frantically trying to secure a car to pick us up when we landed. We needed this vehicle to transport us to a local music store to rent a keyboard, then to the Rio to set up (during a narrow window between screenings of an existing film), and then deliver us to our hotel rooms to freshen up before the actual show.

We were just about to board our flight. Our phone calls were hitting dead ends. When, suddenly, a stranger—a woman who had overheard our panic—offered to drive us. While this proposition seemed a dream come true, I couldn’t help but blurt at this Samaritan stranger, “You’re either really crazy, or really cool.” When she responded with “A little of both”, we knew we’d just met a likeminded soul. We didn’t know at the time, however, that we’d also just made acquaintances with one of the most fascinating individuals we’d ever crossed paths with: Rita Leistner.

Through conversations at the airport, and then over dinner that night, we shared stories with Rita and learned that she was a well-published photojournalist whose work had appeared in Time, Newsweek, and Rolling Stone. Perhaps most interestingly, Rita spent years in Iraq covering the war. She worked “unembedded”—outside of the U.S. Military’s official program. This meant that Rita, without protection, experienced and documented some of the most horrifying, beautiful, devastating, dangerous, and primal human stories of a war-torn country. Imagine a situation where bullets are flying into a crowd and everyone is fleeing for their lives. Then imagine a slight woman with a camera running towards the barrels to get better photographs. That is Rita. She wasn’t lying when she said that she was both crazy and cool.

She gave us a copy of a book that featured her work during the war to peruse during the flight. Midair, thumbing through the shocking and touching images, I found myself evaluating my entire existence as an artist, and a human.

The most sobering aspect of the encounter with Rita was the realization that most of the time, most of us are so closed off that we fail to investigate how remarkable—cool, scary, or otherwise—the stranger sitting next to us may be…. at the airport, on an airplane, or even at a late-night double bill of a cult movie musical. I’m happy to share that Rita was in attendance at our Toronto screening of The Devil’s Carnival and Repo! The Genetic Opera, and seemed to enjoy herself.

In the spirt of running into the cannon fire, Darren, Saar, and I have decided to add two additional stops to our mini-tour this weekend: Portland and Los Angeles. At these engagements, Saar and I will not only be performing a song from Episode Two, but I’ll be singing “In All My Dreams I Drown” live.

So grab your tickets while they last, and come meet us, and hopefully a few marvelous strangers, on the road: http://thedevilscarnivaltour.eventbrite.com