Claymore Productions

Exquisite Corpse Episode 205 Short: The Bar

Claymore — Fri, 11 May 2012 17:44:08 +0000

Oh, the things that happen in bars. (Written by Brian Hurwitz and Josh Segovia; Directed, Shot, and Edited by Mike Fernandez; AD Junella Gabriel; PA Lucas Donnan, Starring James Chase, Mo Allen, Shawn Flickinger, Junella Gabriel, Drennen Quinn, Tyler Smith, and Brian Hurwitz)

Exquisite Corpse Episode 204 Short: Murder On the Side

Claymore — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 17:19:46 +0000

Jack Toast was the best PI in town, then she walked through the door… (Directed and Written by Peyton Brown; Cinematography by Bryan “The Beast” Sentiere; Original Composition by Josh Moshier; Edited by Matt Rice; Starring Peyton Brown, Shannon Noll, Jimmy Pennington, Tyler Smith, Junella Gabriel, Steve Sullivan, and Toast)

Little Poor Me 1

Herman Merman — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 02:18:59 +0000

Don’t freak out.
This is a fictional piece. Nothing I’m writing actually happened, it’s just a distillation of thought, feeling, and intuition. This is writing. This is the way that it works. Dickens didn’t know Oliver Twist, and I don’t know what I’m saying either. I’m just making it up.
Now that that’s out of the way: Everything I have to say is true.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
The pillow is breathing at me. Something about the way I fuzz my eyes out and hold it in the bottom of my vision makes it do this. It’s a battered yellow beauty, with a lion’s-mane fringe, and I’ve got my foot propped up on it. The coffee table is hard on my heels.
The pillow stops breathing long enough for me to get some writing done – or, rather, taking my eyes off it to write makes it stop. Two drinks doesn’t seem enough to account for inanimate respiration. I found an old bottle of Remy Martin cognac today, and applied it to a little egg-shaped liqueur glass I dug out of the back of the bar. Don’t know when I’ve used it before; it still has newsprint on it.
I couldn’t do less with my life if I tried, and I won’t. I’m far too lazy to try to do less. This is exactly as little and exactly as much as I’m prepared to do. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be doing it.
Either one would make me happier. Achievement or complete dissipation. They both seem fine, but I don’t have the stamina for them. I’m a Middle-of-the-Road, like most. It’s the easiest thing there is to be, and easy is all I know how to do well. Everyone knows that greatness takes talent — but really spectacular sinning takes talent, too.
A joke I used to toss off was that I’d never loved a woman as much as I loved a drink. When I’m drunk that bit of cheap wit makes me feel like Oscar Wilde, but it’s probably not true. Maybe. The truth is that I have never been allowed to hold anything that I’ve ever really loved.
That’s not true, that’s the drink talking. I’ve had more since I started. It’s pretty good cognac.
You can’t talk your way into being a better person. You can’t talk yourself into talent. You have to have it, or earn it. My talents lie in small and stupid directions, interesting only to me; and I’m not going to ever earn it. I have a sneaky hope in the back of my brain that someone will one day see me drinking a beer quickly, spouting out truly trivial trivia, making biscuits, and they will use their power to elevate that to the level of fame and art. Many people have that fantasy, but many people are better at more interesting things than I am. I’m worse at less interesting things, and that’s the wrong ride on the life spiral.
It really is very good cognac.
Being alone is never easy. It’s just easier than being with other people. You’ll never be able to give yourself as much as you ask for, but you’ll never want to give yourself less. You may strive for less; you may even think you deserve less, but you’ll never want less for yourself than you want. With other people…well, the math is more complicated. And yet, when you’re with other people, as much as you want to be alone, it’s never as much as you want to be with other people when you actually are alone.
I say you and I mean me. It’s an assumption. It’s probably wrong.
The thing about my friends is that they’ve taught me more about being a human being than I’ve ever learned from actually being one. I keep looking for someone who’s less worthwhile than me to be friends with, but no dice. Some come close: they should try harder.
Something seems wrong here. Something seems untrue; self-serving. That’s probably okay, though. It’s probably okay to just want people to tell you that you’re okay, that you’re not as bad as you think you are. Don’t, though. I’m not, and I am. Besides: This is just fiction.

Exquisite Corpse Episode 204 Short: Clocks

Claymore — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 03:15:22 +0000

The clock is ticking. Time is passing. And you are listening… (Directed by Michael Fernandez; Written by Jeff Rukes; Shot, Edited, and Graphics Animated by Michael Fernandez; Narrator – Jeff Rukes)

Exquisite Corpse Episode 202 Short: Kartoshka

Claymore — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 17:51:35 +0000

Когда жизнь дает вам лимоны, найти картофеля. (Directed by Michael Fernandez; Written by Tyler Smith; Cinematography by Michael Fernandez and Whit Conway; Crew: Bryan”The Beast” Sentiere, Alex Bonk, and Junella Gabriel)

Exquisite Corpse Episode 201 « Short: Like Batman

Claymore — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 07:16:33 +0000

In order to save his city from evil, a man must become like the fictional superhero he idolizes. (Directed by Brian Hurwitz; Written by Eric Eyerman; Cinematography by Michael Fernandez)

Exquisite Corpse Episode 201 Daddy

Claymore — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 06:13:58 +0000

Daddy will take care of you. He’ll make sure of it. (Directed by Peyton Brown with Steve Sullivan; Written by Peyton Brown; DP Bryan “The Beast” Sentiere; Audio Steve Sullivan; Edited by Matt Rice)

Exquisite Corpse Episode 201 Live Sketch: The Kid, the Dog, and the Coma

Claymore — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 07:28:45 +0000

A boy dreams of owning the greatest baseball bat of all time, The Moonshot. (Directed by Eric Eyerman; Written by Jeff Rukes; DP Mike Fernandez; Shot by Matt Rice, Bryan “The Beast” Sentiere, and Alex Bonk; Edited by Matt Rice and Steve Sullivan)

Exquisite Corpse 201 « Full Episode

Claymore — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 02:21:02 +0000

Episode 201 of Exquisite Corpse will be online in its entirety very soon. In the meantime, enjoy the live sketch The Kid, the Dog, and the Coma from the premiere of Exquisite Corpse’s second season.

Poor Little Me 4

Peyton — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 04:41:11 +0000

Poor Little Me 4

Other people must sleep well. They must, because the world keeps functioning with some kind of steady rightness.

I don’t sleep well. Or, that is to say, not since a time before my memory of any sleep I have ever had. My memory of my past life is not very good. That may seem like a dramatically fictional statement, but what I mean by it is for more pedestrian. I simply have never had a very good memory for my own life. From what I can tell, it is hardly unusual for people to have foggy memories of their childhood. However, even at a young age I distinctly recall being unable to remember anything from a few years before. Even now, I feel my college years begin to slip away from me, just as I felt high slip away in college.

The earliest that I remember being obsessed with how poorly I slept was middle school. Even then, the memory is a palimpsest; a story told to a person told to a person, although the person was always me. You begin to buy your own fictions.

It never stopped. I know many people have trouble sleeping as teenagers, but it never stopped. I wake up tired every morning. I have woken up tired every morning since the beginning of time, as I reckon it. When I do wake up. When I haven’t been up all night.

Drinking helps.

For anyone who doesn’t know, the inability to sleep well is not principally horrific because it makes you tired. Its central horror is that it turns every day into wondering when you will get to sleep again. Spending your time waiting for the next time you will be asleep is a select kind of hell. Being unable to give a complete shit about the life around you because you can’t wait to be unconscious again saps what I can only imagine is a great deal of pleasure out of life. We reserve a special pity for those in comas, caught in a kind of limbo between life and death…but I spend my waking life dreaming of that limbo.

I can’t take satisfying naps. I can only fall asleep in the middle of the day for obscene periods of time that leave me feeling painful and unrefreshed.

The cliche bemoans us spending a third of our life asleep. Given the option in times of unemployment, I have spend as much as half the day (really, as much as two-thirds of the day) in bed, indulging in fitful and disappointing orgasms of sleep.

I don’t dream of a better waking life — indeed, I rarely dream. I daydream of a dark and dreamless sleeping life. Not death. Death scares me appropriately. Sleep is defined by waking, as everything is by its opposite. Really all I want is to wake up one day and feel satisfied. But isn’t that the goal of it all? Satisfaction?

If I haven’t been satisfied by anything else at this point, I can’t really ask it of sleep.