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peterkovic [followed by a famous symbol that means "at"] [followed by a famous email handler that begins with "G" and ends with "mail"] For a long time, I've been meaning to get an "@insertlogoproductions" email address but, honestly, I need another email address like I need a hole in my head.
This website is an online repository for my various creative endeavors, which include making movies, music, and fiction, and also reviewing the movies of others. The site was originally just for my filmmaking production company, called "Insert Logo Productions," but I've expanded to include everything else. And by "production company," I mean I went down to the county clerk and filed a "Doing Business As" form for I.L.P., because having a production company is supposed to make you appear more professional. The site was up a few years in which the illusion of the "production company" was maintained and I wrote "we" whenever I usually meant "I," as if behind the site was a pack of dreamers with goatees, vintage tees, and tiny glasses all working together. Instead of just me sitting too close to a laptop. My name is Peter Comfort Kovic. I was born in 1978 and grew up in, and still live in, the suburbs of Houston, Texas. I have a degree in Literature from the University of Houston and every few years I get the urge to apply for the Master's Program in Creative Writing at the University of Houston . . . but it passes. I am also a professional classical music teacher and spent a year at a prominent northeastern conservatory before realizing that nothing makes me hate something I used to love so much as going to school for it. When I was small, I loved to sit for hours in my room at the center of my toy soldiers, action figures, and stuffed animals. It wasn't enough that Team A had to fight Team B, I had to concoct epics for them that could last hours or even days, and leave my toys out where they could be stepped on in the middle of the night. If my parents wouldn't buy me a toy, usually a Transformer, I drew it on paper and cut it out, and stored it with the pages where I had sketched the politics, wars, and technology of the Milky Way from, roughly, the years 2015 to 2800. Freud said "The child's best-loved and most intense occupation is . . . play. Every child at play behaves like a creative writer . . . he takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it . . .He likes to link his imagined objects and situations to the tangible and visible things of the real world." In retrospect, the ingredients for these boyhood epics were probably a cobbled-together pastiche of cartoons, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and the origin stories created by Hasbro for their toys. If it was the happiest time of my life, it was because I was so absorbed in the lives I had created and the sounds and adventures I imagined, that I was outside myself, in a waking dream, or a trance after lulling my brain to release the right chemical. I can still remember the strange moment when one of the reveries lifted: we were not soldiers on a mission, shouting at each other in different voices, while bombs went off all around us – it was just me, alone in the silence. So I'm a grown-up now, but still trying to live in that world of make-believe, only now I call it "writing," "filmmaking," or "making music." I incorporate more of the real world in what I do, but really I'm still trying to get back to that same intoxicating place and release that same brain-chemical. I haven't been very successful getting my stories published, or getting my movies into film festivals, or getting my songs heard. But a dream is a stubborn thing, and making things is more fun and more fulfilling than anything I've ever done. If you've never tried writing a novel, try it. 
Fiction I can't remember a time when I didn't want to write. Even when I didn't like reading, I liked to write. I used to write long, rambling novels about sensitive young artsy-types. I went on for pages about what the characters felt and how they met, but there was little growth or actual story. Now I've learned the beauty of outlining using the three-act structure, so that characters are defined not by their feelings, but by the choices they make, and how they change over time. My default protagonist is no longer a spaced-out young dreamer, but an angry man who knows what he wants. I've mailed my stories and novels to agents, publishers, contests, and magazines. I'm beginning to see a glimmer of what might be called "progress."I like to write about violence, confusion, doom, religion, hallucination, brooding, nostalgia, alienation, the South, the worthlessness of reason, and men who adhere to codes long past their usefulness. I like long internal monologues, but I also like it when you never know what someone's thinking. I like huge sentences like Faulkner and sentences that are like punches to the face, like Hemingway and Cain. My fiction doesn't read very much like my movie reviews, or like this paragraph. Some of my favorite novels include I Claudius, The Trial, The Naked and the Dead, Deliverance, Blood Meridian, Lolita, Heart of Darkness, Absalom Absalom, Old Man and the Sea, Crime and Punishment, All the King's Men, Catch 22, More Adventures of Samurai Cat, and The Big Sleep. Read some of my fiction here. I've only included samples instead of entire stories because posting on the internet sometimes counts as "first electronic publication," and that's a cherry to be sold, not given away for free. Filmmaking Apparently I went insane in my 20s because I thought I could make movies all by myself without having gone to film school. Enormous amounts of time, money, frustration, and technical difficulties later, I have little to show for my efforts besides acceptance into a couple of small regional film festivals, and the knowledge that I made three movies. The DVDs are upstairs. That's reward enough.Not surprisingly, my films use many of the same ideas as my writing, chief among them how often our ambitions and fears play out in our heads as long, convoluted, and sometimes violent daydreams. But film, more than literature, also offers an enormous opportunity to enjoy watching people just doing stuff. Watch clips from my movies here. Rock + Ambient Music I've been writing songs for fun since I was 16, but I've never played live or even been in a band. My first stab at recording was for the 2007 RPM Challenge, which is the "Record-an-album-in-a-month" contest. I've done RPM every year since then. Participants record 10 songs or 35 minutes of original music in just 28 days. I couldn't get anyone to sing for me, so I had to do it myself. My voice is just good enough for you to tell that I'm really trying but, just bad enough to be embarrassing.In 2007 I set out to make "techno-folk," combining synth-pop beats with indie-folk guitar strumming. Many of the songs were too complicated for the simple equipment I was using, so in 2008 I stripped things down and made more of a goth rock album. I went in the opposite direction in 2009 by recording everything "live" using a video camera and only acoustic instruments. In 2010 I got tired of listening to myself struggling to sing, so I went in the opposite-opposite direction and made an entirely electronic, instrumental album. I don't think I'll ever do much with rock music, but it's been fun learning about songwriting, mixing, and recording techniques, and maybe someday I'll be in a real band, if I can find the time and people who can put up with me. Listen to some of my songs here. Movie Reviews I LOVE movies, probably even more than I love books. I love sitting close to giant screens and being able to see the scratches and the grain and the emulsion. I love handing myself completely over to someone else's view of the world for two hours at a time.I started writing movie reviews in 2002, mainly to organize my own thoughts about films. Like most novice movie reviewers, I tried to be more objective and professional than I really was, and many of my early reviews sound like bad Roger Ebert knock-offs. My original review site was on GeoCities, a free service provided by Yahoo!, and my nom-de-plume was "The Friday + Saturday Night Critic" because it sounds casual. Yahoo! killed GeoCities in 2009 in a process that no doubt involved columns of flame, falling girders, and men in matching jumpsuits fleeing with their arms over their heads. My more recent reviews are more conversational and personal, and better for it. I've revised, or at least commented on, many of my older reviews, and I will be gradually reposting them here starting in July 2010. My latest theory of film is that we like movies that are sincere and have the right degree of subtlety, but what's subtle for one person is obvious for another, and vice versa. I dislike "Avatar" (2009) and "Titanic" (1997) not because of what they have to say, but because they take a very long time to say the same handful of things over and over again. I dislike television for the same reason: a show only has a few things to say, and then it says them, over and over again, in infinite, slight variations, for as long as possible, until it's cancelled. But who am I to judge how fast someone else should "get" something? There have been plenty of times when someone's said to me, "If it was anybody else, I'd say what's going to happen to you would be a lesson to you. Only you're going to need more than one lesson. And you're going to get more than one lesson." Read movie reviews here. Blog Sometimes I blog, but mostly I hoard my feelings until I'm ready to stick them in a story or a song or a movie, or tell them to a friend.Waste time on my blog. Artwork I did all the drawings on this website. They look like some of the promotional material for The First Day of Shooting and the still drawings in SLEEPY.IMDb I have my own IMDb page, which isn't as cool as a WikiPedia entry, but it's a start.HTML I have a love / hate relationship with webdesign. I copied most of the HTML on this website from my heroes Quackit and Free Templates. A good friend of mine made a very convincing case that I should learn CSS. I said "I'll get back to you on that."-Peter Kovic, July 2010 |
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