Years ago, while I was working nights in Chicago, I started making short films with a fellow night worker. He was a sleep tech, I delivered steaks and cigarettes to the yuppies in the Gold Coast. We found ourselves up and around on a nightly basis until 6am with nothing to do until the idea appeared before us – short films.
We found inspiration and direction by using cartoons/graphic novels as storyboards, and forced ourselves to shoot and edit each piece in one night. Fueled by the crushing boredom of the 2am-6am hours, bottles of wine, and a deep longing for female companionship, I bring you the two ‘best’ of these experiments.
Once upon a time, Arlo worked at a bookstore. While Arlo wasn’t hard at work in the bookstore or hard at work going to USC, he was in a rehearsal space making up songs with his friends.
One day Arlo said to his friends, “There’s this writer, Jonathan Lethem, he has this really neat idea, and in the spirit of this idea he started a project.
And you know what else? He’s coming to the bookstore to read from his new book. Why don’t we actually write one of the songs from his book and play it at the reading?!”
Arlo made it happen. We wrote the song Monster Eyes from You Don’t Love Me Yet and played it at the reading.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.


