With Jay-Z proclaiming “30’s the new 20” and The Game speaking unrelenting praises of his West Coast forefathers, Virgina’s Clipse (brothers Malice and Pusha-T) have smartened up their drug-peddling tales, sneaking back into the lineup after four years to drop one of the most chilled out and cleverest hip hop albums of the year.

On their prerelease album, Revival, Ithaca’s Armageddon Monks create a high-octane sound with sharp guitars and piercing vocals from lead singer Aamir Baseer. Drawing obvious comparisons to arena rock megastars Metallica and Velvet Revolver, the Monks demonstrate their song-writing prowess best with “Get Your Fill.”

Daze: How did you go from writing blurbs for Cornell Cinema to writing the “cult hit of the summer?”
John: I always wanted to do something in film, which is why I worked at Cornell Cinema. I bought this big, blue child molester van with no windows from my neighbor for about $1200 and drove across country to California — it took about three months to get there. I had 500 bucks in my pocket, which was enough to move into this hotel in Little Moscow in Hollywood. I got a job teching, which led to a job working at USC as a production coordinator for about three years. From there, I got another job working as an assistant at DreamWorks, and one of my bosses then was a producer named Craig Berenson — he read some scripts of mine and really liked them. He had actually read a script five years before in which one of the subplots was about some snakes that got loose on an airplane. The script wasn’t really that good but I said (to Craig), “What if we make the whole movie about snakes on a plane?” and he said, “yeah, okay” so we pitched it around, developed the story line and finally we sold it as a pitch to MTV Films, which had a production deal with Paramount. Just when we were about to get green-lit to go into production, September 11th happened and that was devastating for so many larger reasons than just the movie. When I saw it on the news, I wasn’t even thinking about the negative effects it would have on the movie, which of course it did. Paramount put the film to turn around, which meant that they weren’t going to do anything with the script. Luckily, one of the executives who was working on the film, Don Granger, left Paramount to become a producer and co-president of Mutual Films — he bought the rights, asked me to do a few rewrites and we sold it to New Line. After that, everything started happening really fast.

Even though Halloween has officially passed, the spirit of horror films is still in the air. I got a chance to chat with independent filmmaker Seth Landau, whose horror film, Brian Loves You, has already started to receive substantial media attention despite its low budget.