The Dark Blog

2011-09-12T12:41:00.000-07:00

Wait. What's that up ahead?

2011-06-28T19:49:00.001-07:00

Well, ladies and gents, after years of silence, it is my happy pleasure to report something new is coming. Something new and fun and, while it's not quite this, I promise you it will be dark.

As we get closer to launch I'll pop in with more details.

I know it's probably only crickets out there at this precise moment but, I have a feeling we'll all be back together soon.

Cheers,

Lights Out

2007-03-17T12:41:00.000-07:00

It was always mostly an experiment, you know.

I, we, wanted to see what could be done with very little money, lots of elbow grease and talent. And two computers, an mpeg recorder and some factory batched editing software. It took some convincing to get the whole crew together, of course. People don't generally like to walk blindly into dark tunnels, even when their friend is leading them in.

It still bothers me that some of the others I invited declined to participate. No hard felings, guys, but, wow, it would have been great to see your episodes too. I'm just as much the audience for these things as I am the producer. I'm humbled and proud that the guys who came on for this chose to take a chance.

And that's the lesson, I suppose. If there is one.

None of us are wealthy. None of us have big Hollywood connections (certainly none that have aided in this endeavour). All of us hold down regular jobs, have to pay bills, maintain relationships with our wives or Significant Others. We all have so-called Real Lives, I guess is the point.

And yet.

We got you to come here and return here without the use of insane and violent "humor" or the use of naked sex puppets. We made something, you came to see it and, amazingly, you liked it enough to return (some of you again and again). Thanks for that.

So, while this phase of the experiment is done, the second, the larger more imprtant phase is only beginning. That's the part that involves you.

We all take our inspirations where we find them. Mine for this came from Mr. Serling and Mr. Hitchcock. But they also came from Spike Lee and John Sayles and Jim Henson and Octavia Butler. They came from Gene Rodenberry and Joss Whedon, David Eick and Ron Moore and a list of others too long to measure.

They came from the fact that the web is considerably more than a means of gambling away your college funds or drooling over somebody's silicone augmentation at 1.99 a pop. It's not just a place to buy and sell.

It is, both literally and virtually, a feild of dreams.

Sounds flowery, I know, but that can't be helped. This is the realm of the mind, not the senses, and we all could do with a little mental gymnastics, yes? A few more flights of blatant fantasy? Yeah we can. Of course we can.

I will be coming here periodically to provide updates on anything Dark related so, don't be a stranger. Door's always open for freinds.

So, here's the last motto I'd like to leave all you closet Jules Vernes and Tad Williamses. Something simple and plain from me to all of you.

Carpe Noctem, kids. Carpe freaking Noctem

Thanks for coming.

Lights out in 5....

4....

3....

2....

Avast, ye scurvy dogs!

2007-01-25T00:27:00.000-08:00

I don't know where you come down on the whole Pirates vs Ninjas thing but, if you're with the black pajamas crew, you're missing all the best parties.

Pirates rule, baby. You know it and I know and, most important, the pirates know it.

I've been a fan of pirates since I could toddle. Not the baseball team. Not the guys who fire rocket launchers at unsuspecting cruise ships. Not even the infamous Rackhams and Blighs who terrorized the high seas of yore. No. I love movie pirates.

I love the buckle and the swash. I love the maps and the cannons. I love the guys with the giant cleavers hacking away at each other with panache and grace.

Pirates, movie pirates, are freedom and adventure. They are unbridled avorice (remember what Gordon Gekko said about greed) and bravery and, if they get a little gold and a little lovin' in the process well, dammit, that's the pirate's life and dammit, it's for me.

We live in a world of satellites and google maps, of cell phones and gps. Every tiny blip on every map has been filled in. Every centimeter of dirt or water has been caught on film (whether our governments let us see them or not). Everyplace is Known.

So, once in a while, we like to long for the days when the edges weren't filled in, when Here there be Dragons actually meant something.

Keep your ninjas. Keep your elves and ring bearing Lords. Keep your giant gorillas and invaders from space. Keep your last sons of alien worlds. Keep 'em all.

We at The Dark fly the fictional Jolly Roger with pride and we want all of you out there with even a drop of pirate blood in you to set sail too. The 'net is our ocean and there are monsters here as well as treasure. The waters are dark and strange but it's a wide open sea.

Set sail, folks, set sail. Yo ho!

I Am Old Kris Kringle

2006-12-07T12:50:00.000-08:00

Well.

Here we are again, a little more than halfway through the season and thrilled to death with the response. Since we began we've acquired fans as far away as Australia and as close as Woodland Hills, CA.

We now have a podcast at The Dark. We now have a little merch for sale and some REALLY interesting stuff coming up on that front.

So, like any good show, we now opt to take a break. Our egos are so swelled that we need to take them on vacations and buy them some jewelry and video games or they won't behave.

Okay. Not really. The truth is the holiday season snuck up on us and we just won't be able to keep the breakneck pace we've been at since this started without offending those we love and with whom we live. So, we break.

As these episodes are our gift to you, your gift to us could be to send people to the site for a look at what has gone before. This is a perfect time for new veiwers to jump on to see the archived episodes.

Part of the point of this is to inspire. The web is vast and strange and we thought there was room for something like THE DARK. The truth is there's not only room but hunger. So go make some of your own. It doesn't have to be scifi or noir or involve CGI but it also doesn't have to be porn or some rip of MTV'S JACKASS.

And no fan films. I have nothing against them. Hell, some of them are AMAZING. But we want to see YOU. Your ideas. Your execution. Not so we can do anything with them but because we want to be entertained as well.

GO. Dance, monkeys. Make something.

And don't be concerned that the site will be ignored. It won't. During the hiatus I will be posting stuff I find on the web that I think is cool and creative. Stuff by people who are out there doing it now and stuff from the past that inspired us to be the lunatics we are. What, you think people like us just APPEAR? Oh no. It's much more complex and sinister than that.

There are wheels within wheels, people. Over the holiday I'll show you some of the spokes.

So, thanks again for the support, folks, and Happy Holidays.

Seeya in January.

A kind of wild justice

2006-10-18T11:44:00.000-07:00

Say hello to Mr. Poe. Not the first of us travelers in the shadows but absolutely one of the best.

His presence- well, his image-– isn't related to the subject of this address. He's just here to commemorate the Holiday Season.

Take your Christmas and your Chanukah. Take your Kwanza and your Ramadan. We darklings know. We know the best holiday of all is October 31st. We know and we know why.

Now. Tonight's topic.

Revenge.

I'm a fan of it. I know you're not supposed to feel that way in these enlightened times. I know we're all supposed to strive for harmony with our neighbors and to embody as best we can the so-called Golden Rule. On a certain level I even agree with that sentiment. The problem is, there's something so tasty about the suffering of someone who done you wrong. Something so scale-balancingly Right that I just can't seem to put that particular addiction down.

My friends tell me it's a quick path to the Dark Side. They say civilization is our collective attempt to rise above the kneejerk violent response to some deep offense. To seek or enjoy revenge is to be uncivilized, to be out of fashion. They like to think that humanity is above such petty concerns as taking pleasure in an enemy's misfortune or, if you're REALLY lucky, causing a bit of that misfortune yourself.

Really? I don't know. Seems like we've been in the revenge biz for quite a while. We make our loved ones pay for not remembering our birthdays or anniversaries. We make our children pay for not achieving or being what we think they should. We make our leaders pay for going the wrong way even when we may have pointed them that way in the first place. If that's not revenge, I don't know the stuff.

In the old eye-for-an-eye days, the rule was, if one of yours got hurt, three of theirs got killed. If some of yours got killed then ALL of theirs and all of their friends and all of their friends' friends took the dirt nap. And their children and their pets and the guy who happened to shake hands with them while waiting for the crosstown chariot to stop and cart them off to the Coliseum.

Hm.

Maybe those old eye-for-an-eye days aren't as far behind as some like to pretend. We don't even need to cross the ocean to see folks burning down the whole house just to score points on somebody who once scored on them.

Crips vs Bloods. Dems vs Rebs. Red vs Blue. North vs South. Rap vs Rap. White Supremecists vs well, pretty much the rest of the planet.

Call it the Politics of Personal Destruction or simply The Chicago Way, revenge has been with us since we figured out standing on our hind legs would get us that much closer to the tasty hanging fruit. It'll be with us well past the time we're all cloning ourselves, netlinked and flying around in those antigravity cars the 1960s promised would be here by now.

Not really making an argument here. Not trying to sway anybody this way or that.

I'm just saying revenge is #2 or #3 on Humanity's nightly menu. Served cold or hot it's the bona fide Blue Plate Special.

So we thought we'd provide an example.

Happy Halloween.

Good Evening

2006-08-25T16:30:00.000-07:00

All right.

Let's talk about death.

Now, don't be squeamish; sit still and play fair.

Death.

Like birth and breathing, it is one of the very few things that 100% of us share with one another.

Everyone who was born will die.

We all know it and, at some time or other it crosses most of our minds. Not all our minds all of the time but most of them at least once.

It's not fun, is it? Frankly, it scares the living crap out of most of us.

So, why do I bring that up now? Why mention something terrible and inevitable that won't happen to most us for years and years?

Because, in a strange way, the stories, the lovely stories we tell, are all about death. Even when they're not.

The man on our left understood this. He obviously knew, when you stick "happily ever after" on the end of something, you're either lying or you don't know how the story really ends.

Mr. Hitchcock spent his life telling stories of death. He spent considerable time lending his name and face in order for others to do the same. But, like now, in this admittedly one-sided conversation between us, there was more to Mr. H's discussions of death than the dying.

There's the in-between. There's the in-between and how we play it.

There's life.

Think about it. You're definitely going to die. Today. Tomorrow. In sixty years. Definitely. No wiggle room whatsoever. It's like the great black curtain hanging at the end of a hallway and, whether you like it or not, you're going to go through.

So, immediately, the question becomes, "How?" How will you face it? Will you face it? Sure, you have to experience it, but will you actually face it, head on? If not, why not? And, also if not, how will you avoid facing it when experiencing it is a given?

Will you tell yourself to get it over with and just make a dash for for the velvet blackness?

Will you dawdle near the corridor's far side, spending far too much time examining the crayoned drawings of roses someone's left on the wall in hopes that you will draw out the best part as long as possible?

Will you dance some of the way and crawl the rest?

The choices you make about what to do with the in-between are the same ones Mr. H injected into telling his stories.

Will you watch, he asks, like Jimmy Stewart in REAR WINDOW? Will you hide like Tippy Hedron in THE BIRDS? Will you run like Cary Grant in NORTH BY NORTHWEST? Will you flail and slash and embrace delusion as Anthony Perkins did in PSYCHO?

Only you know the answer and, no matter what you say out loud about it, only you will ever know for sure.

So, for Mr. H and for me, take a second and seriously think about it. Ask yourself the question.

"What am I doing with my in-between?"

We at The Dark are dying to know.

There's the signpost

2006-05-31T18:23:00.000-07:00

Picture a man with an Achilles Heel.

Actually, you don't have to picture him because I've done it for you. The subject of our first discussion is the gentleman depicted on the left. If you don't already know who Rod Serling was, or even if you THINK you know, here's a little background.

He was a genius, of course, though he'd never say so. He was deeply fervently in love with the American Ideal and hoped to remind his audience of the meaning and importance of that ideal with the best tool he had, namely, his writing.

His Achilles Heel? Small-minded people and the heart disease inspired by his chain smoking. He died too soon but not too late to leave his mark on the minds of millions, perhaps billions, of people. I am proud to be one of those people. I am honored to be so marked.

I discovered Mr. Serling as a child watching, of course, the television series for which he is most famous, THE TWILIGHT ZONE. As a child I did not understand the subliminal aspects of Mr. Serling's work. I was just thrilled to get a daily dose of high quality fantasy or science fiction, for free, from the lovely magic box in the living room. As I matured, I began to realise what the series actually was: a delivery system for notions of common decency, human connections, the beauty of aspiration and self-sacrifice, the tragedy of dreams deferred by evil.

If you've never seen the Original Twilight Zone, and I can't imagine that there's anyone out there who hasn't seen at least one episode, please do not get it confused with any of the subsequent attempts to recreate it.

While I would never disparage the work of any creators who tried to keep Mr. Serling's child alive in the minds of current generations, many of whose talents and accomplishments far outstrip my own, I respectfully believe that they, with the exception of SHATTERDAY (by Harlan Ellison, Alan Brennert and Wes Craven), missed the point of his work in both of these last attempts.

Yes, there were spooks and aliens and interdimensional gateways. Yes, there were monsters and genies and humans trapped in alien zoos. Yes, yes, yes. But nearly all of these were meant to illustrate aspects of our condition as humans, notions that Mr. Serling thought needed shoring up in the turbulent times following WW2, the KOREAN WAR and the awfulness that were the McCARTHY, VIETNAM and JIM CROW eras of American life.

It's a tiny little planet we live on. There are more things binding us as humans than can ever keep us apart. The universe is a big, scary, wonderful place and we might want to give it the awe and the attention it's due. We might want to open our minds to the possibilities.

These are some of the constant underlying themes of the speculative depictions in Mr. Serling's signature series. The magic and hyperscience were just window dressings to make the point.

I think, somewhere along the line, people got caught up in the quirky stacatto speech pattern and the bells and whistles of the show and, in recreating it, kept bringing us the box without providing the miraculaous gift that should have been contained inside.

It's doubtful I will ever be as talented or as brave as Mr. Serling. The challenges facing our generations are less stark in many ways, less clear cut than those of the Twilight Zone era. Though things have gotten better on a lot of fronts, the sun has dipped a little closer to the horizon on others. It behooves those of us who loved Mr. Serling's work and, more, loved what he was attempting to do wtih that work, to try and keep the ball rolling.

So.

Welcome. Take off your coat. Have a drink, put your feet up. And remember: there's nothing in the light that isn't there in the Dark.