Thanks!

I wanted to write something earlier but I didn’t know exactly what to say. It’s difficult sometimes to find the right words. 

I’ll say thank you, of course, to everyone who has worked on Heavy Hands over the past three and a half years. The thank you section in the film doesn’t do justice to how much I owe. 

The opportunities I was afforded, the talent I worked with and the time I was given, were in some way or another, gifted to me through the hard work and kindness of others.

So I want to thank everyone for their support, their honesty and belief that I could bring this story to life.

I’m not writing this as an end to anything. I’m writing to say thank you for bringing me this far. I’m writing to say I’ll do my best to make you proud.

Thanks for the love – even when I’m crazy.

Sean Williamson

Next Heavy Hands screening UW-Whitewater February 10, 2013

Be True To The Future Oh Lord

Hi, it's me everyone.

I'm in madison for the week doing some final work on Heavy Hands.

Making movies take forever - everything takes forever.

So I'm bringing that home, my band Hot Coffin is mixing our debut album "Law" right now, I'm shooting our music video and embarking on a new and challenging serial/film/show/short/project/entity called "Witchcraft"

I've been working on it for a while now and am in the early stages of it's creation.

I was thinking that after this movie was done, I would take a break and try to be a normal person and get a house and buy some new shoes and just concentrate on being human for a while.

Well fuck it, I'm going to do the opposite.

I'm going to make something more daring, dangerous or ambitious that I ever thought.

Keep an eye out for Hot Coffin's "Law"

Keep an eye out for "Heavy Hands" - coming to a theater near you.

Keep an eye out for "Witchcraft" coming soon to everywhere.

Also still distributing kickstarter rewards. wacka wacka.

Holy Hell

Hi! It's been a minute.

Both me and Parker have been vewy vewy busy, what with him abandoning us all and setting out for the great American west and me finishing my first feature film - Things have been stressful to say the least.

That said, our stresses, and most everyone I know stresses are white problems at best.

Sure replacing the tires on your car is a bummer but it's not a bummer like starving, living amongst civil war or having a fucking bomb dropped on your family home without warning.

Our problems, our worries, are as manufactured and fabricated as the stories we write about ghosts and monsters or threesomes that never were.

I just want it to be clear that I know this, that no matter how bad things get, I can still go to my parents house and eat their string cheese and drink their diet coke.

I'm not alone and neither are you. Not as long as World Wide Dirt is around. No siree.
-

Well I immediately got off track. I have Heavy Hands shirts for kickstarter customers being made right now.

Check out the store my soon to be brother in law is running, they are printing the shirts.

cool shirts, cool dudes

The Shop WI

Also, there is an awesome event tomorrow night being thrown at:
Sweet Water Organics in Bayview 7 PM

Dawn Of The Universe
Enamored
Shadow Puppets
and More

tons of cool stuff.

Throw them 5 dollars.

Come to this, get some shirts, be real, get real, fall in love, get in a fistfight, puke a bunch, eat some wings, eat some tofu, write a letter, make a postcard, watch a movie, drink beers in a movie theater, go on a drive, slap some asses (consensual), buy some shoes, steal some shoes, live hard, die free, decompose, re-incarnate.

Sean Williamson

East Bluff Shell

A man met a woman at a convention. She wasn't there for the convention. They met and locked eyes and knew each other. He walked to her. "You are something else," he said. It turned out they lived in the same building on the other side of the country. They were together for a long time. Years later, they went on a trip together. She had a fever for a few days and decided to go home early. The fever had chewed up her heart and she died in her sleep on the plane home.

She went in and out of his life with the most grace I've ever heard of. She blinked away without warning and no violence. She got sick and then she died.

There's a poetry to chance. Kismet. I don't believe in God but there's a point where chance almost touches the world of magic. I don't believe in God, but I believe in poetry. I don't believe that poetry is only in our perception. The world has its own poetry. Not for us, for itself. Not space and stars or trees and wind, the universe itself. Something is to the universe what poetry is for us.

- On a walk from East Bluff Shell, down Farwell to Brady, Brady to the closed Italian grocery store, then back to Arlington until Arlington meets Franklin and then back to my apartment, during which time I thought of a girl I once knew and how she kicked in a car that belonged to her ex-boyfriend and then I realized that I actually slept with her recently and funny that that's the same girl, because the two memories are miles apart in my head. And after this train of thought that I tried to dictate as closely as I could, I was thinking as I walked past the last few houses on my block before my apartment and as I climbed my steps that I don't walk so often now that I run a lot and how the two things are not the same, that you get thoughts from walking you don't get other times.

Declaration

Heavy Hands stars Frankie Latina and Kumar Pallana

Well well well.

It's that time of the year when love is in the air. Parties, weddings, parties, wedding, parties. Then brunches and more weddings.

Two really awesome couples got married this weekend - Cesar and Bobbi and Micah and Genna.

There was buffets and wrestling and old friends and new friends and girlfriends and toasts and mini bowling and whole lot of other insane, fun, lovey, dovey, heart barf mastery.

But now it's time to get to business. I have a couple more shoot things this week and music and editing and soundtrack galore.

And goddamn am I excited.

With the help of my friends and kickstarter nation I'm gonna have an edit ready for festival submission come August 10th. That may seem an arbitrary deadline but let me tell you, it's not.

Let me declare it here and declare it now, Monday, May 14th 2012, starts the stretch run of Heavy Hands.

Are you ready? Are you ready?

For Starters

I can’t thank you all enough for the insane love and support you’ve shown me and my feature film Heavy Hands.

I ventured in this kickstarter campaign not exactly knowing if I could succeed or not. Lets just say I thought but I didn't know.

It became increasingly clear to me - throughout the campaign but especially at the end - that the people in my life would not accept this project falling short, they would have my back.

This revelation, at this point in my life, is one of the most important and humbling lessons I could be taught.

This isnt just a thank you letter - this is a promise - that with your support and overwhelming interest I will make Heavy Hands better than anyone imagined. 

We will make this film better than I ever imagined.

From Milwaukee with love, forever and a day.

Sean Williamson

Pick Your Poison

This is a choose-thine-own-adventure-type project. It's an exquisite corpse anthology that also functions as one story with 8 endings that also functions as 8 good stories. It was edited by Parker Winship and written by that fellow along with Lee Odeja, Bethany Price, Sean Williamson, Mitch Olson, Jim Winship, Ilse Griffin, Artie Nosrati, Dan Oberbruner, Nick Kotecki and Dustin Williamson. Artwork is by Micah Bennker.

It's called Pick Your Poison. Sometimes it's a hardboiled heartbreaker and sometimes it's an epic poem and hopefully it's always fun to read. I've never seen anything like it elsewhere.

Below is the beginning. If you like it, keep reading here.

WAIT.  Don’t go out there.  Easy, fella’.  Cool it down.  Nothing to be afraid of so knock it off.  Twist the heat to max and soak it in for ten more seconds.  You didn’t do anything.  You didn’t do anything.  You didn’t do anything.  … three, two, one.  Kill the ignition.  Pop the door.

SO MANY THINGS

Help me finish Heavy Hands. I'm doing a lot of work to get this film funded and a lil help goes a lonnnnnnng way. thanks. KICKSTARTER.

This can't be happening.

"This can't be happening," has to be one of my favorite phrases of all time.

In other news... look over there. What is that?

Fantasy

I saw John Carter last week. It was good. I wanted it to be great, which made it worse. Some people saw that movie and didn't like it at all. Some people saw it and it filled them with awe, which is what a movie like that partially aims to do. Take 700 people and $350 million dollars, 500 shots, 70,000 special effects, 12 script drafts, and combine them just the right way and it pierces something deep inside us. The ads for the Christopher Reeves Superman movie said, "You'll believe a man can fly!" And that's what we want. Childlike awe. We want to believe in Santa Claus and King Arthur and the Green Lantern. What Star Wars and Indiana Jones did to us when we were children, that's what we want from John Carter.

Some people did feel that. I didn't. I took a bus home and went to sleep. A couple days later, I started watching the 6th series of Doctor Who on Netflix. And what I saw on my laptop did for me what I had wanted from John Carter 3-D. I believed a man could travel through time and space in a box that's bigger on the inside. I believed two time travelers in love could travel in opposite directions and reach one perfect moment in the middle of their relationship, but every other one would always mean more to one than the other. I believed in anti-matter prisons and the most deadly foe in the history of Earth, who everyone has seen but no one can remember. I also believed that these things were fucking awesome.

What's cool about it is that one strip of cinema hit someone's brain in a movie theater this week and did the same thing to them that a compressed digital streaming tv show did for me in my apartment. What's cool is that there is no formula for awe. It hits you right and you're there and it does something for you unlike any other experience I know. A rarer sensation than some of the best ones out there. It's better that it's different for everyone. Your favorite lover usually isn't your neighbor's favorite and blue moon ice cream does for him what only mint chocolate chip can do for you.

Fantasy is delicate and it's intimate. In a balanced world, Spielberg and Lucas would get hundreds of kisses everyday instead of millions of dollars

Rivers/Museums

The river walk. Past docked empty cruise boats, reminded of Boston. The smell, the breeze, the thick ropes. How long have these boats been the same? The upper level cage, folded up chairs. Great-grandparents rode the same boats.

Another city with a river. Do all great cities have rivers? Is there a great land-locked city. We still live in the world mapped out by pre-industrial civilization. In hand-drawn maps.

Museums make you feel time, not just because of the history but because it's the place you went as a child. Don't know if it was time or fantasy I felt then.

I Wrote My Name On It

(Me, a record, a turntable and my homie Wayne Coyne)

Photo by Erik Ljung

Here’s what’s happening.

I mean everything happening.

Sometimes, when I’m stomping around the office cursing because I wasn't paying attention in high school when Mrs. Jewwet (sp?) was teaching me photo shop, I just need to stop and remember that everything will be OK.

And it will be. Today starts the Heavy Hands Kickstarter Campaign. Woot Woot!

I feel really, really, really good about this project. I know that in the end it will be much more than I ever thought it could be. So there’s that.

Tonight Altos are having a listening party at Burnhearts (where I work) and Katie Rose is bar tending (and she’s awesome!) and then...

This coming saturday they are having their record release show (Stonefly Brewery March 10th 8 PM) where the album they created, where the music video I directed, “Sing (for trouble)” off their new album, will be premiering.

Altos’ album is amazing, as people - they are amazing, the rest of the lineup for the album release is amazing. (including the Larry Bird of storytelling, Jim Winship)

I’d like to say a lot of things about everyone in that band and everyone who helped on the music video and a lot of things right now but really, really, I’ve been sitting in front of a computer for a few weeks now and I just can’t put into words how I feel about anything.

I know working on this video and working on Heavy Hands and making all these new friends has been one of the best things in my entire life. So, there’s that.

When I was a kid my dad had a bunch of records in the basement. (this collection has since been pillaged by my brother, then by me) On the back of each record there would be a name. Nothing complicated, just a simple marking “Fil” or “Jon”, for “Phil”(my dad) and “John”(my uncle).

I’ve never been much of a collector. In fact, there are very few things that I carry from one destination to another. I usually just throw out what I don’t need and move on...I’m sure that says something about me - but let’s not get into it.

But the other day I stopped by dan’s house and he gave me a copy of the new Altos record and for the first time I found myself writing my own name on the back of something. Which, I guess, means it’s something I don’t want to lose - or throw away.

And I don’t.

So maybe, just maybe, this is the start of holding onto things for old Sean. Oh boy. Here we go.

KICKSTARTER (it has begun)

Heavy Hands

Modus, Frankie and The Infinite Struggle.

Years ago on a planet called earth, in the great city called Milwaukee, I met a dude named Frankie Latina.

I had just gotten back from Alaska and read about Frankie and his film, Modus Operandi, in the Onion AV Club. I emailed him and we met and had a couple drinks at the Intercontinental, and through a course strange events, I decided to be a producer on the film.

At the time Modus had premiered in Las Vegas at the CineVegas film festival and was showing at the Milwaukee film festival a few weeks down the line.

I worked on a shoot with Mark Metcalf (of Animal House fame), helped with some T-shirts. Then basically went to a bunch of parties and shit.

What started at the intercontinental bar brought me to the AFI film fest in LA (where I saw The Fantastic Mr. Fox) to New York (to the IFC theater) where I may or may not have had to much too drink, to the Gene Siskel Theater in Chicago (where Roger Ebert was in attendance).

And World Wide Dirt has been a busy world lately, no doubt. We have a feature film on the editing table, a highly ambitious music video premiering in a month and a short film by Parker Winship that is gonna knock some socks off.

In many ways, things started for me when I met Frankie. I owe a lot of thanks to Frankie and how he's helped me along and looked out for me when he could.

Being a producer on Modus is something I’ll always feel great about and I cherish the friendships I’ve made because of it.

But besides all that, on this day, Valentines Day 2012, Modus Operandi is being released by Kino Lorber. Which means you can get a killer DVD through Amazon, Netflix and Kino.

So lets take a second to celebrate this accomplishment and give a solid WWD “Fuck Yea!” to Frankie Latina and his journey with Modus Operandi, which started long before we all knew his name - and will continue into infinity.

Heavy Hands fall 2012

The Hitcher - Marissa Nans

Loddy Lo

She plays songs that remind him of something in himself, of a dance behind a frosted, neon-glowing barroom window. A smokey place in the light of a Wurlitzer. And he wants to tell her, but he hears her voice, young and lively, and she's father away than ever and so is he. His room, the radio, that frosty barroom in a triangle whose three points expand away from each other at the same rate as the universe. He opens his mouth and wheezes.

Heavy Hands fall 2012

Nate Brown

Coming up next, a cool little ditty from Kristin Peterson:

if you ever chose talk radio (of the am variety) instead of your
"blues drive" or dub-stepping, synth, auto-tune modulations
to hear the pagan maybe Indian fire festival maybe native american
bump bump bump WHAT'S DISGUSTING? UNION BUSTING! bump bump YEAH
and if you ever wondered who did lay down the dough to send
pizza after pizza to those who marble-slept for days even after
the drinking fountains (bubblers?) were turned off and the ibuprofen ran out

if you ever bit your tongue at Easter
when your grandpa blamed it on the black man
the teacher man, man who don't even have to WORK
in the SUMMER TIME!  the big cheese concrete man, too.

if you stopped on your way to the bank to catch a glimpse
of those who cared so much that a country like Egypt
was moved, like Libya, like those donkey fuckers we're supposed
to  hate-- they have preoccupied their days with flames,
strength, and pain

come on, write down your name,
siggy, and home place
they don't even ask you your e-mail address these days.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately...not really. Happy New Year everyone.

Do You Love There?