Daedalus Howell Story

Nine months ago, I was out of a job, fricasseed by my own wee media market, and generally peeking down the double barrel of “destiny, interrupted.” I was at the lowest point I'd ever been, which is saying something since I was a teenage telemarketer. I was lower than Dante’s Inferno, I was Dante’s Intern, I was his mid-40s intern, filing broken dreams and lost self esteem in Hell’s circular file. After one of my bipolar bottom outs, my partner and collaborator Karen Hell asked me what I really wanted to do. What did I really want to do? What did I really wanna do? And what did that really mean? I took it at face value... Well, what I really want to do is direct, I said. Read more: http://daedalushowell.com/blog/wasteland

I remember when I was first on the periphery of what I guess we could call my screenwriting career and some Hollywood dickhead asked me “What’s your quote?” He meant “what’s your rate, your fee, your market value” — all of which was zero at the time. But what I thought he was after was more akin to “Play it again, Sam,” or “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a fuck” — you know, a movie quote. I mean that’s what people quote anyway — the movies. Except, I have a new quote — and it's not from the movies. In fact, I hate where I got it. It was the worst. It was a meme — you know, with an image of a sunset, the words hovering there, in all caps, over the shimmering sea as if belched directly from God, like some Wayne White word painting. It reads: “It's not too late to be what you might have been.” First off, fuck you, meme. And you too, God. And Wayne White -- okay, you get a pass, but... Fuck you to the person who didn’t credit the quote’s author, George Eliot (I looked it up). Which became its own wormhole, si

When you’re a broke-ass-art-person, there’s about million podcasts and blogs and online courses encouraging you to create podcasts and blogs and online courses to help monetize your creative process by sharing it with other artists who, in turn, will create more podcasts and blogs and online courses. For me, this puts the “meta” in “metastasis” as this sort of thinking has been like a tumor in my creative career. So, Ima gonna take this here buck knife, put back that bottle of what-the-fuck-else-I’m-gonna-do, and cut the goddamn thing outta me. As a career-long writer, I've been down this diverting wormhole more than a few times. Every time my industry was “disrupted” or I self-disrupted, I would start selling tours of the rag and bone shop of my expertise. I wrote ebooks, made podcasts, consulted. It worked, until it didn’t, and I’ve come to the personal conclusion that this kind of shit has derailed more than a few of us art peoploids. Remember when we produced writing and art of substance instead of

This edition of Daedalus Howell’s Night School of the Mind, is brought to you by Quantum Deadline, "...a noirish, sci-fi-lite detective story with a heap of self-parody that's by turns poignant, witty and comic..." says the North Bay Bohemian. And I agree because I wrote it and you can get it on Amazon right now in ebook and paperback. Remember when the entertainment industry was pushing the term “transmedia?” Yeah, neither do I but I do know what it means, because all I really need to know I learned on Wikipedia. Transmedia storytelling “is the technique of telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies.” The entry was first created in 2015, back before the prefix “trans” took on the cultural heft of gender issues and the term “media” became a rapidly deflating political football. Plus, “transmedia” always sounded like one of those meaningless corporate constructions like “multichannel” or “accountability.” So, how do we refer to the

Before I walked the plank into indie authorship, I did time as a small town newspaperman. As my affiliations grew, so did the amount of press releases I received in my inbox. I still receive them, and one arrived today that served as an ironic reminder of an issue I’ve been facing — a pervading feeling of inauthenticity. Maybe it’s a Gen X thing, or an artist thing, or a byproduct from all the Fake News we read. Maybe it was because Nirvana's bassist played a Guild B30E Semi-Acoustic Bass for the Unplugged album, which technically is not totally unplugged. So, imagine the deep soulful sigh I released when some flack from West LA beamed me a release for a premium, naturally-alkaline, spring water from some nordic country that hopes to inspire individuals to find their own “pure authenticity,” you know, by drinking imported water.  Side note: When I lived in L.A., I visited the FAQs on the municipal water company’s website. The answer to the question “Is my water safe to drink?” was a shruggy “Probably.” Fo

April 23rd marks William Shakespeare’s 423rd bday. For the sake of this chat, however, let’s just say it’s his 4-20th birthday. Because the question of the day is “Did Shakespeare smoke weed?” Doobie, or not doobie? That is the question – the one that circulated the Internet a couple years ago when anthropologist Francis Thackeray, suggested that William Shakespeare might have sought creative inspiration by smoking pot. Thackeray is the Director of the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and in 2001 he conducted a study that found marijuana residue in pipe fragments unearthed in Shakespeare’s garden. Though cannabis was cultivated in England during Shakespeare’s day for rope-making and other textiles, it’s unclear if it was used recreationally. It was references in Shakespeare’s work itself, that encouraged Thackeray’s line of inquiry. “Some Shakespearean allusions, including a mention of a ‘noted weed’ in Sonnet 76, spurred Thackeray's inquiry into whether S

Long left behind in B-Movies, quicksand is making something of a cultural comeback. But maybe not in the way one might expect. From fetish films to a David Bowie word salad, your host Daedalus Howell plays through the sandtrap and finds old video games, snakes, and Nazis along the way. Links to everything discussed at http://daedalushowell.com/blog/quicksand.

The third and final installment of the mini-series "Burning Down the Art House" focuses on Tom Schiller’s hat tip to Fellini, "La Dolce Gilda," starring Gilda Radner and evoking a nostalgia trip for your host, Daedalus Howell. Links to the videos and more at http://daedalushowell.com/blog/part-three-art-films. Sign up for your free Screenwriting Structure ebook! http://eepurl.com/lVAWH

Still in pursuit of the elusive art film, I find my way to Bergman through the portal of parody and pubescent thanatos. Behold, De Düva... Watch the films mentioned here: http://daedalushowell.com/blog/part-two-art-films. Theme music by Shannon Ferguson, additional music by Kevin MacLeod.

Whilst developing my feature-length art film, Pill Head, I ask why I'm drawn to the genre and whether it's really a genre at all. Also, I connect the dots between Monty Python and Jean-Luc Godard...