Soon your Mike Golamco is going on the road again on business. And when I go on the road, everything becomes bloggable. Why am I going on the road you ask? It's to watch your auditions.

Auditions: I've been through them myself and I know how tough they can be, and almost all my friends are actors so I know how much auditions suck. But in order to get things done, we've got to go through the casting process. I don't like it, but it has to happen.

I never know which expression to wear on my face while I'm watching someone's audition. It's like when you're sitting in the front row watching a stand up comic. If the guy is great you really want to transmit the fact that you like him; if he's terrible you don't want him to feel bad so you attempt to make the exact same face you would if you were enjoying the performance, but you're not enjoying it so it's not quite right and it all just falls apart. So either way I end up wearing a sort of neutral expression -- which on me looks like I don't like anything I'm seeing at all.

You see where the problem is.

This is all compounded by the fact that I know how hard acting is and how much time people have spent preparing their sides and how crumby things are in general because of the economy. Plus in comparison I have the easy task of just sitting there and observing... And then the extremely difficult task of making a choice later on.

Basically I'm saying that we're both on the same side. I want you to succeed. I want you to be great. I want to enjoy what I'm seeing and to be able to tell other folks about you. I want to put you into my database and watch your career continue to grow. And if you turn in a great audition, I'm just as happy as you are -- and if you turn in a lousy one I feel just as bad as you do.

So basically... I hope that helps. See you in the room.

We all know that I love really bad movies. I am a huge MST3k fan -- it's my third favorite TV show of all time. There is something really fun about awful movies. Is it the unintentional comedy? Or how bad acting, visuals, writing, etc., can become a palette for pop culture jokes and references? Both probably.

If Roger Ebert is a film historian (and by the way, I'm glad that technology is giving him his voice back), then this man -- Joe Bob Briggs -- deserves that title as well. Here is a man who has made a life's work out of studying and documenting both awful movies and fun drive-in movies, and compiling an enormous amount of cinematic trivia.

Check out this video of Joe Bob talking about "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies", known to be the movie with the longest title in cinematic history. Watch the video -- Mr. Briggs brings up many astounding facts about this movie, including this tidbit:

When it first came out, live actors were hired to run out into the audience in every performance pretending to be "zombies". And an even more incredibly strange fact: Ray Dennis Steckler, the director and star, was one of those actors! He would go to wherever the movie was being shown and at the same moment his character was on screen rampaging zombie-like through the carnival midway, Steckler would burst through the screen, start grabbing customers and of course the theater would erupt into a riot.

See, that's showmanship.

I'm told that the MST3k episode featuring "The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies" will be coming out later this year on DVD. Hi-keeba!

Hey writers and other wordtards, I just read this book a couple of times and I got a lot out of it: The Inside Story by Dr. Dara Marks.

Our good friend Dave suggested it to me so I picked it up right away. It's about the transformational arc in a story -- how a well crafted, intentionally designed story draws its characters, context, and conflicts from its core theme. It also concerns itself with studying character arcs -- how change comes from a character's internal conflict and reactions.

Okay, that was a lot of word spaghetti. But the great thing about this book is that it takes things that we all already inherently know and structures that information and organizes it. It gives these ideas names and allows us to be analytical about them. The book has already been extremely useful in helping me figure a few things out. So I recommend it.

I'm going through another Haruki Murakami phase. I go through one of these every five years or so, during which I get obsessed with Murakami and read 2-3 of his books. Then something else appears to distract me and I go read someone else.

I'm reading Norwegian Wood right now. One thing that books do very well is to give a long narrative impression of a human life. Movies aren't very good at this, and TV can't get you all the tiny, gritty details that a novel can. When you read a book you live with it for a while -- you pick it up, put it down. You live in the protagonist's skin in moments as you go through the motions of your own daily life. I think this is something Murakami really understands, and it shows in the ruminating nature of his work.

I think the only TV show that has ever come close to the ongoing complexity of a novel is The Wire. Which brings me to a very important confession:

I have seen every episode of The Wire except for the very last one. I have taken an oath to never, ever watch it. This fairly childish idea allows the show to live forever in my memory as an ongoing tale that never ended and never will end. I did not steal this idea from LOST. What happened was that I made the mistake of watching the very last episode of The Sopranos and I felt horrible for months afterwards. I will never be ready for some things to be over.

So back to Murakami: I will soon finish Norwegian Wood and then move on to Kafka on the Shore and Sputnik Sweetheart. Then something else will grab my attention. But in another five years the guy will probably have completed a couple more books, and the cycle will begin again.