First Menstrual Ninja Post

I’ve decided that on the first day of every month that I will write about ninjas. That way, even if everything else I’m writing is boring to you, there will always be something to look forward to, like a new page on your “puppies and kitties” calendar, full of adorable fuzzy faces . . . except these fuzzy faces are only adorable in the “whoooa, look out, it’s a ninja!” sense! And they may or may not be that fuzzy.
Also, if you don’t like ninjas, you’ll know not to visit my page on the first of the month. But I can’t guarantee you won’t run into a ninja somewhere else, like your office or the bagel store. Or, I don’t know, a dark alleyway or mystic jungle fortress somewhere. Avoiding ninjas takes Extreme Constant Vigilance, and who has time for that these days? It’s best just to accept that masked, stealthy warriors are running around your favorite health club and apartment, and there’s not much you can do about it.
A couple of people have asked me about the picture that shows up at the bottom of this page. What is it? Is it a ninja? Where did it come from? It came from here, right?
There are long answers and short answers to those questions.
The short answers are “a ninja,” “yes, I already answered that,” “a movie I made,” and “no.”
The long answer is that it’s a picture of Ninja X, the central bad guy in the perpetually-unfinished film Ninja Force. His costume includes two pieces of duct tape on his head band in the shape of an X, which means he’s really evil. My friends and I spent a zillion or so hours shooting Ninja Force in high school, and not nearly that many (although still more than you’d think) working on the script. This was probably the first scene we ever shot using actual lighting and “set design,” which sounds impressive, but for all practical purposes, it was just my pal Peter holding an old stage light and pointing it on a black wall for “the illusion of depth.”
Since it is the First Menstrual Ninja Post, I’ll present yet another ninja picture.



This is me acting in a very dramatic scene in Ninja Force, that we actually filmed with two cameras. I played X Ninja #2 or something like that. Just to be clear, I wasn’t playing Ninja X, I was playing an X Ninja. The other characters for a long time were just named Ninja 1, Ninja 2 and Ninja Ed. We gave them some other names later on, but I still like the originals, since they conveyed all you really needed to know.
I colored this picture to look sort of like the movie Waking Life, which is one of my favorite films from one of my favorite directors, and I’m really just posting it to provide some sort of transition to link to the trailer for his next movie, which is really cool looking.

That’s all.

Oh, yeah, the trailer is here.