i shot this video last fall during the production of a new episode of classic star trek called "the child." peter west assisted me with shooting and editing.
i spent a week in rockport, maine last summer at the maine media workshops. above is a short exercise i directed. we had two hours to come up with the story, choose a location, light and shoot. it was fun to screen this at the end-of-week showcase. it got good audience response. it had a beach boys "good vibrations" soundtrack, but i nixed it here. mara laine came up with the story idea--to use books titles as a dialog--which was great, and i came up with the idea to use the bookstore ladder as a dolly as well as the device that connects the two characters. jim mcgathey directed the lighting and championed the use of "kino on the floor", which i didn't like at first but i have to hand it to him, it works! he also stars. george lamboy set the lights and kept us all in order! i'm afraid i can't remember the name of the actress (apologies).
i'm in new orleans shooting interviews for a friend, tim wolff, who is directing a film, "the sons of tennessee williams". it's about gay social clubs, the men who pioneered them in the 1960s and 70s and the men who sustain them today. gay men in new orleans took a unique path to carve out rights for themselves. they produced fantastic costume balls that provided a non-confrontational, but edgy, interface between straight and gay culture that tested and ultimately prevailed over anti-gay laws.
a great video by eva sollberger about our annual halloween parade in white river junction. it's part of a series eva makes called "stuck in vermont".
here i am in my second episode, seated 2nd from the left.
my friend peter west came along to check out the production for a few days. we're going to be flying to new orleans next week to help friend tim wolff shoot his documentary about gay krewes. i'll be there with peter for a week.
excuse me. i am still here. but, boy, have i not had time to write! advice: never plan three intense projects for one summer with the hopes that two of them won't happen. like people who don't like cats and always have cats jumping on them, they will all happen. and all will require your undivided attention, just like a cat.
i got new glasses. i got a macbook. together, these resulted in this picture.
dreamland's got lights! a generous donor gave me about 30 lights for the dreamland performance space/soundstage today. they're old, but in great condition, generally, and should allow me to set up a lighting grid sooner than later with the ability to light small performances decently. i think i ought to be able to use these for film production too, but they lack barn doors and filter holders and are set up to clamp onto pipe rather than c-stands. very excited!
me as a security guard (from barbara luna's website)
i briefly mentioned earlier that i am working on new star trek episodes with a dedicated group of fans. i mentioned one afternoon to an acquaintance that i'd like to do some sci-fi shorts and she told me about the production of new star trek episodes in upstate new york, about two hours from white river. so, i emailed james, the actor who plays kirk and who is the force behind the new episodes, who forwarded my message onto a guy named "sarge" and voila, i was engaged to volunteer. i couldn't wait to see the sets!
i arrived well into the shoot because i had other obligations, namely taking the production lighting course at the maine media workshop. so, i arrived well prepared to jump into studio production. but, i didn't expect to be put in front of the camera, which is what happened within minutes of my arrival. better yet, i got to act with one of the original star trek actresses, barbara luna, who played kirk's girlfriend in the episode "Mirror Mirror". she taught me how to fall when phasered.
i will be returning to the set in a couple weeks to assist in shooting "pick-ups", shots that are needed but didn't get shot during the principal photography. and i will be returning for another episode's production in october.
you can watch the new episodes here: www.startrekphase2.com
peter and i whipped this up a couple weeks ago. he just quit smoking. rated R for language and sexual content.
i've been loosely following the presidential campaign. yesterday i read that mccain's latest televison ad says the following: "Beautiful words cannot not make our lives better." i thought, well, that's it in a nutshell: if a politician believes that language, the foundation of so much of our culture, and the precursor to almost all action, especially political action, has no potential to better our lives, then how does one make better? it's painfully clear, thanks to the current administration, that ugly and deceitful words lead to ugly action, for which we have paid and will be paying, in blood, sweat and tears, for decades, and for the betterment of who? i believe it's difficult, if not impossible, to write beautiful words without beautiful thought. beautiful action is the result of beautiful thought. our lives are manifestly and directly made better by the beautiful: thought, words and action, an intimately linked trio. i'll be voting for the candidate whose words suggest he's thinking beautifully. sorry john.
i just returned from a couple weeks of filmmaking. the first week was a workshop at the maine media workshops where matt seigel, cinematographer, led fourteen of us on a most excellent journey exploring the world of location lighting for film and video. we explored about ten different locations around rockport and camden, maine, where the media workshops are located, lit and shot film and video at six of them. the learning curve was steep for all of us in the workshop, i think, but i came out of it feeling like i'd been through half of film school. matt is a great teacher and i know because right after the class i found myself on the set of a fan-produced star trek episode in upstate new york where i not only discovered everything matt taught us in the workshop came true on set but also got to act with star trek original series actress barbara luna who played marlena moreau, kirk's girlfriend, in the episode, "mirror mirror." it was a great follow up to the workshop because i felt awfully proud when the director of photography told me to "get a 650, drop a single into it with a party red" and i knew what he was talking about. the episode in which i appear (for about five seconds) will be delivered on the internet next year.
i've been learning my new hi-def camera. this is a short little movie i made from shots i took yesterday, taken without the intention on making a movie, but cut together pretty nicely i thought. the subject: things that are still juxtaposed with things that move, with a brief into and outro from main street museum curator, david ford, who graciously divulged his inspiration just before heading off to a hartford historical society meeting on his bicycle (that shot got cut i'm afraid, though it was nice). i'm using a 35mm lens adapter which allows me to mount my nikon SLR lenses on my video camera. it makes for wonderful shallow depth of field and a look that usually doesn't come from a video camera. while i think the movie falls apart about halfway through, my intention was to run all the way through the production process to see how it worked, from shooting, to editing, to color correcting, to sound editing and finally compressing for the web, a process that took me through five different pieces of software. i'm happy with the result. it even sounds good on crappy little speakers!
with all the hype and fear about energy lately, it's interesting to take an objective look at it. i found this chart, produced by the government. it sheds some interesting light on our current energy use (2004). the most astounding fact is that of all the energy we consume, only 38% of it gets used, the rest is wasted. for instance, of the power an electrical plant produces, only 31% is useful energy, the rest is lost in the system. compare this to nature, specifically plants, which use photosynthesis to capture the sun's energy. they do this at near 100% efficiency, wasting almost nothing, and they contribute to the ecosystem. the human habit of consuming fossil fuels contributes little beneficial to the environment (excess heat, excess carbon dioxide, chemical waste, poor air quality, etc). vehicles are particularly dismal at around 20% efficient (the other 80% is lost to friction, so perhaps in the winter they're a bit more "useful" because the heat generated by the friction is used to warm the passenger compartment!). clearly, if we're all going to survive without immense decreases in quality of life, we have to become more efficient. the easiest way is not to participate in activities that use lots of energy, and the second easiest way is to, if one has to use energy, use it efficiently. incandescent light bulbs are among the most energy inefficient devices in existence, between 2% and 13% depending on the bulb. just a tiny fraction of the energy consumed by a light bulb produces visible light! the rest of the energy produces heat. when you consider that the electricity reaching one's home is just 31% of the energy consumed and multiply that by an incadescent bulb's efficiency of 8.5% on average, we get an overall efficiency of just 2.6%. that's 3800% less efficient than your average house plant, which happens to be the most efficient energy "appliance" in your house.
i had a fun birthday a couple days ago, spread out over a weekend, in white river junction and at faerie camp destiny. my friend jon showed up in ghoulish attire for our green screen shoot that gabriel and jade arranged. otherwise, life is very busy for me right now. i really need to clean my office. it has reached levels of chaos unparalleled!
i got a new video camera. the first thing i did with it was turn it on, point it out the window, and then went and had my signature breakfast: two eggs over easy, home fries, dry english muffin with peanut butter, coffee. when i got back this is what happened. if you imagine a whistling wind in the background you'll just about have the day.
as things seem to happen in my life, a seachange is in process. my architecture work is coming to a close while my film work is starting to bustle. this feels very very good to me. i sometimes wonder if i haven't approached architecture in the same way the george bush seems to have approached the white house: as a response to a difficult past event...a poor reason to approach anything. architecture school was extremely challenging for me and i suppose, in retrospect, i've always wanted to prove to myself that i could "do it" because in school i got the definite impression that i couldn't do it. in general, school seemed to communicate that message to me. what i find curious is that whenever i've tried to "do" architecture, i find myself in film. it happened as a kid, in high school, in college and in grad school. i would endeavor to create architectural projects and find myself dreaming in pictures. a common criticism of my architectural work was that it dealt in pictures, not architecture. i came away from those crits often wondering if i understood what architecture was at all. i do tend to think of buildings sequentially... you enter here, you go there, you see that, you do this... and i tend to like architecture that presents sequences of spaces, processions and especially cities (i liked urban planning a lot). the aspect of architecture that i dislike, viscerally, is all the regulation around it, the bureaucracy that attends most building projects, which, though i may be applying my own neurosis to this, seem to say, "you are bad for even thinking of this." it feels very much like my experience of church, actually, which involved a lot of rules that made no sense to me.
i can't claim that filmmaking is any better, especially in a studio format, where there are terrible pressures to make money, be successful, be glamorous, and climb the ladder. but, my sense is that as an independent, there is much more freedom (in architecture too, but the places you can practice without oversight are dwindling). i've been watching a lot of john waters films and i am heartened by the outrageousness and compassion his films present, despite their surface vulgarity, which i find hilarious and shocking, still! and, now, a teenage fantasy of mine is coming true: i will get to visit the starship enterprise and participate in the making of a star trek episode. this trumps all architectural possibilities! it turns out that not far from where i live there is a full-scale copy of the original star trek sets that are being used to create new original series episodes. it's astonishing to see how well the sets are reproduced, and i can't wait to see what a completely community driven production is like.
oh, and if you need a cinematographer, i've got a swanky new camera that takes gorgeous movies. ask me for references!
i'm so danged excited about making films and i'm learning so much. i found a great website, lynda.com that has extensive instructional videos about all of apple's movie production software. it's been a great way to learn for me. i like watching. i've never been much of a manual kind of guy. i like to jump and get going. i've also been researching movie making equipment. more and more, movie making is done inside a computer and the camera is becoming a capture device that provides files to the computer. the essentials are still the same, but rather than have to spend lots of money on big sets, it's now possible with your average mac or PC, to build fantastic worlds and place actors into them realistically (see prior post). i've always wanted to make some sci-fi films, and it looks like i will be able to, spectacularly!
a while back i decided to put my attentions back into filmmaking. the last time i really looked at what was possible on a meager budget was around four years ago. since conceiving a short film that i want to make in my new studio, and realizing that i was going to need some special effects to pull it off, i've discovered that filmmaking as i knew it four years ago (low resolution video) has been replaced by much more film-like technology (better cameras, lenses, software). i'm frankly astonished by what is possible with a personal computer, a relatively cheap camera and a good dose of imagination.
for instance, the last scene in my film will involve a man tearing down a wall, revealing a beach behind the wooden framing, wind, fog, sand and paper blowing about gale-force. a week ago i was contemplating building a frame wall on a beach, thinking about big fans, and a bunch of stage hands to toss sand. today, i'm thinking it'll be a lot easier and less expensive to do it mostly in the computer.
my first tip that things had changed was a short clip i found of a normandy invasion re-enactment created by three guys--three guys total--who in four days created a 1000-extra-looking scene that's stunning. a month or so ago i watched some of the making-of features included with the "lord of the rings" films. throughout i thought, wow, wouldn't it be cool to be able to play with some of the technology they are using. well, now i can.
as with most things i'm involved with, there are many iterations. i like this process and get nervous when things move too quickly. i like a lot of time to reflect, absorb, integrate.
the design for the new building has gone through many iterations and i think we're finally at one that's going to stick. the picture shows the concept. the prior design was completely flat and i couldn't get past the overall size of the facade being too big for the street. the scale of the other buildings is smaller, more human. so, the idea developed into keeping some of the stepping, but making it symmetrical and also keeping some of the slope. the major change was pulling out the center, not unlike a good ol' fashioned new england church, giving the front some depth. i also played around with keeping the brick facade on the first floor, but it just has to go.
the design is somewhat traditional, but we're going to implement it in a new way with a rainscreen that will be made probably of wood. this is a kind of floating facade that has been a standard in northern european countries with weather not unlike new england's. the advantage of the system is that the cladding and the weatherproofing are separate and have an airspace between them that lets water drain out should it get behind the cladding (which it almost always does, eventually).
one of the fun (and scary to some people) things about the web is that you can find out how people find you. for instance, people found this blog by searching for the following (ranked in order of frequency):
aloofdork.blogspot.com
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the most pressing question seems to be how much land it takes to feed a person, family, city. now that i've included these search terms in this blog more people will find it as a result.
my epiphany of the day: life is like meditation. my mind constantly takes me away from my simple task: observing, staying focused, just watching. it takes me to far flung places that may or may not exist, away from the present and into the past or future. the same is true of my life. i have moments of clarity when my path is perfectly clear. then all kinds of things crowd into the picture, as if i were taking some kind of family portrait in which almost everything in my life, related or not, decides they're part of the family. the clarity dissolves and i end up spending all my time explaining what all the stuff is in the picture. so, those kernels of clarity... i say to myself, keep those at heart, keep bringing them to the front, keep tapping them on the shoulder and asking them to turn around and look me in the eye.
oh, and a candy heart poem... enjoy.
first, i read a whole bunch of books on filmmaking. i've made a bunch of films, but i've never studied how to make them. so, i started with some lighting books. i never knew that the reason they used to say "lights, camera, action" was that the lights were turned off between takes in the early days because they put out so much heat. nowadays, with cooler, brighter fixtures, they're on continuously, for the most part.
next i read some screenwriting books. there are a lot of them out there, most of them geared toward someone who's trying to make a killing in hollywood. i noticed that many of them referred to aristotle's poetics. i tucked that in the back of my head.
next, i picked up, at the recommendation of a friend, david mamet's "on directing film". it's a short little volume that packs a punch. in it, mamet, with a class, create two scenes from two different dramatic situations. it's fascinating to see how it unfolds. mamet also talks about poetics.
so, i went and got poetics and read it. i now understand why so many books refer to it. it lays out the essential structures and relationships for western dramatic tradition. it's to drama what patanjali is to yoga, i suppose: a concise written account of a practice, in the case of poetics, drama.
now that i'm all loaded up with good advice from 2300 years ago, i better get to work making some stuff up!
today was the day and things went smoothly. at about 4pm, my business partner and i purchased a downtown white river junction building that will become a combination office building and soundstage. it feels great to have the purchase behind us. we can now get to work.
this is what my driveway looks like today. crusty, dirty, partially melted snow muck. i thought this particular bit of it was intriguing.
i've been more or less a workaholic the last week, preparing to purchase the building that will become, in part, the movie studio. the prior owners have mostly cleared it out and it's looking mighty tasty. i can't wait to get my hands on it. i'm not sleeping all that well, worrying about all the little details that have to be attended to before the sale can close.
on top of all that, there was a fire in my big building. thank goodness a friend happened to be in the space when it started and managed to put it out before it did much damage (not much means around $10,000 to $20,000!). it's amazing what a little fire burning for about two minutes can do. crazy. advice: do not store mops anywhere near hot water heaters.
i've continued my home-brew-film-school, watching at least one movie a night and consuming yet more movie-making books. as the date nears for the studio to be mine, i'm seriously contemplating what exactly it is that i will make. i've never quite had this opportunity before, and i'm very excited to allow my creative endeavor to expand in my 3000 or so square feet. i'm also particularly interested in what other people might be interested in doing in the space.
in less than two weeks i'll be purchasing the future studio building for dreamland, the vision for which has shifted dramatically over the past year but now seems to be stabilizing in the form of a filmmaking soundstage that can be used for events as well. this weekend, the radical faeries are coming up to white river junction for their annual meeting and will be staying at our place. gabriel and i have been working hard the past few days to get our shower project done. we tiled all weekend. we started the project a year ago! tomorrow, gabriel and i are travelling to boston to see the moms and the boys and catch a matinée (and maybe get a couch). meanwhile, other projects are on hold, such as the house i was trying to buy and the purchase of the land across the street, both of which have been tangled up variously. i am working on drawings for my parent's house in california, which is a simple but dramatic reworking of the windows and some interior partitions. i'm also working on a house for two friends in new hampshire. and soon, very soon, i'll be working on the graphics for white river indie films, which will be showing fourteen independent films at the tip top at the end of april. it looks like a great slate this year.
the results are in. people like the facade design pictured here. i concur. i like the large areas of color. the next step is to figure out how to make those areas of color happen. they could be made of stained natural wood, or untreated wood of various species (it wouldn't be so vibrant), or possibly cement-fiber board, which is durable. i saw a building in los angeles that was done with fiber-board. it's pictured here, too.
i've been working this weekend on new designs for the dreamland theater and office building. my business partner and i already went through a round of design and permitting but we decided the project was too ambitious, with a third floor, an extension off the front, and significant rehab of the interior. so, we're now playing with a less ambitious scheme, and i'm finding it's a lot of fun to work with just what you have. limits are the source of so much creativity.
so, the top picture is how the building looks today. the bottom is a model i've been playing with. because our budget is limited, our radical move is going to be to re-skin the front facade and change the shape somewhat. i'm leaning toward bright colors. power poles are ubiquitous in white river junction, so we decided to use them for decoration as opposed to spending near $100,000 to have the power buried.
i'm curious what you think. there are 27 different and flavors of this in a web gallery located here. take a look. let me know what you like.
if you're curious about the materials, we're thinking we will strip the vinyl exterior and replace it with additional insulation sealed with a rainscreen over which will go decorative natural wood, stained or untreated, or alternatively painted or stained cement-board. the first floor street level will be mostly glass curtain wall for retail or public-oriented businesses. the theater/soundstage is out back, down an alley. haven't got to designing that yet.
for anyone interested in staying abreast of developments at dreamland, i've just put up a really simple website. eventually, it will list events and describe what and how you'll be able to use dreamland. you can also sign up to be on an email list.
i had a great meeting today with jane applegate, who will be the executive producer for dreamland. the concept for dreamland has developed in an exciting new direction, just minutes ago. time will tell if it sticks, but we were thinking about the decor for the theater, what kind of theme it might evoke, and how it might operate not only as a theater but as an event space. and then it occurred to me, partly because i'd been thinking about where i might be able to shoot scenes with sets the past couple days, why not make the space a bona-fide mini-soundstage? most of the elements would be more or less there anyway: lighting, sound, video projection, some staging, and a big open floor with tall ceilings. so, i'm running with this idea. the picture is not the space, just inspiration. lovely, naked, functional space.
i've always had a feeling that white river could be home to some small independent film production. a number of filmmakers live and work in the area. it also serves my desire to have the space be a creative place, rather than a consumer driven thing. so, coming to dreamland will invite you participate, create, join in, and experience. when you enter, you'll be not only witnessing some kind of show or event, you'll be in a space that's infused with creative energy and tools. i think this is pretty cool. it will also allow me to spend money i would have otherwise dedicated to decor on better lighting and other studio gear because the decor will be "soundstage." the bar will be "kraft service."
i've been drewling over this camera for the last month, ever since having used one to shoot documentary footage for a friend in new orleans. i'm promising myself i will not even think about buying one until i have a project worthy of the price. it's not a super expensive camera, as they go, but more than pocket change. you could buy a decent used car for the price.
the picture quality is stunning. having worked with standard video for years now, my first shoot with this camera knocked my socks off. i'm used to what is now called standard video, in which approximately 480 horizontal lines of picture make up each frame. by comparison, 35mm film, which is what is used to shoot most motion pictures today, can resolve in the range of 2000 to 3000 lines (however, according to a paper i just read, by the time it's printed and projected in a theater the resolution drops to somewhere in the 700-800 line range). this camera, the sony pmw-ex1, resolves about 1000 lines, which by comparison is apparently better than what you'll see at most movie theaters. hot damn! the color quality is half that of more expensive broadcast cameras and a quarter that of the most expensive (as in $200,000!), but if you're in a situation where you need higher color fidelity, the camera can output it via cable to a recorder or computer, a really nice feature.
i'm also used to video looking, in my opinion, like hell, especially when outdoors in high contrast situations. back when i shot film in my still camera, super-8 and 16mm cameras, i could usually manage to keep the sky, faces, even shadows, within the range of the film, meaning each of those areas would have some tone. with video, i've always grimaced at having to choose what to let go, shadows or highlights. this is mainly because i use cheap video cameras, and don't spend much time with lighting, but it's also partly the result of the narrow range of electronic image gathering. this new camera, to my delight, had adjustable response curves and several presets that allow you to set up the camera to respond much more like film so that the sunny side of a face, for instance, doesn't bleach out but maintains tone at the same time the bicycle in the shadows of a tree is still visible. hot damn, again.
okay, one more thing: this camera seems to have a real lens. what i mean is that the usual three controls, focus, iris and zoom, each have physical rings that you can turn to adjust manually, which makes shooting, for me anyway, so much more enjoyable. i'm not a fan of automatic.
there are a number of other manufacturers making similar cameras today. i can't vouch for any of them, but from what i've read and seen on sites comparing them, this camera has lots to offer for very low budget independent filmmakers. now, if i can crank out a script that i feel is worth shooting, maybe i'll get one.
soon, downtown white river junction will have a new venue for movies, music and other laudable entertainments (no, not the wrap, our infamous strip club that burned down a while back). this is the back door, soon to be the stage door. in about a month, i will be purchasing, along with a business partner, a downtown building and converting the back 3000 square feet into the dreamland theater. the plans are by no means set in stone, but the concept is to create a space in which almost anything can happen that requires projection, amplification, lighting and an audience, all of which excite me! i'm hoping for lots of experimentation. i'm very excited to be able to use the space myself for projection of my movies and god knows what all else, maybe even some performance. there will be a bar that will serve a variety of beverages and food so that coming to dreamland will be sort of like going to a giant living room with creature comforts and all your friends. i've been scheming with a variety of people about producing programs at dreamland which will vary from indie film to indie music to indie theater. indie seems to be the key word. the space will be able to hold about 130 people sitting and more standing. during the day i'm hoping the space will be used as a community auditorium where lectures and presentations can be made. we are sorely lacking a place for this kind of thing in downtown. the rest of the building will be renovated as office space, some of which is already leased and some of which is available. talk to me!
over the weekend i took time to re-read a couple screenplay writing books i've had for years. the curious thing about every screenplay book i've picked up is that they all describe the same structure for narrative films, which is: 30 pages of act one, 60 pages of act two, and 30 pages of act three, each page corresponding to roughly one minute on screen. act one and act two are punctuated by "plot points" near their end which turn the movie in a new direction, either towards conflict in act one or resolution in act two. i remember the first time i saw this formula and how i thought, "that is so lame." i couldn't believe that all my beloved feature films followed this structure. but, in fact, almost all of them do. apparently this structure derives from vaudeville, which early films imitated, and is partially what we expect and love when we go to see a feature film.
feeling rich with possibility from sucking up so much advice over the weekend, last night i suddenly felt overwhelmed. i was thinking things like, "how do you even start?" "where do the ideas come from?" i ought to know by now, having created my whole life, but it seems i'm forever susceptible to this "blank canvas" panic. perhaps one just has to get used to it. but, this morning i thought, wait, i take notes all the time with my camera. it's kind of my idea catcher. so, voila, a hundred ideas poured into my head. fear is the gatekeeper.
although i am supposed to be doing other things, i have been obsessing on filmmaking. it's my pattern to do this. the only downside to my habit is that i tend to overdose and flame out which means i attend to my interests sporadically as recovery permits! it would be nice to nurture a smoother approach, but, it may just not be in my cards. i also tend to obsess on details but only those that are easy to reach, such as things on the internet or things that i can manipulate in my mind.
it occurred to me today that much of what makes people seem old is the weight of their aspirations. the older one gets, the more one may have aspired to this and that and the more you aspire, especially if you aspire unrealistically, the more you don't get done, so life starts to seem like a long list of unaccomplishments. this may be just my take, but i feel my energy surge when i keep my goals clear and simple, and specifically focus on one thing. as a teenager, with the structure of my life defined for me (and little past to ponder), focusing was easy. as an adult, i think it's possible to maintain a similar focus, but it requires discipline to keep minutiae from taking over. for example, it's easier to sit around and answer email and surf the web than to actually create something. like any good story, i think life requires structure in order to succeed.
my pendulum swings again.
my friends all laugh.
i try not to wince
at the thought that i might be
wasting my time.
here are some pix of the schindler studio house on king's road in los angeles. i visited here the last day of my trip and was happy to have done so! friend and fellow artist timo elliot accompanied me. the house impressed me because it is small but feels grand. this is partly because it is literally small scale; i could not walk through the house without ducking. all the pictures were taken on my knees! were people smaller in 1920? i've had similar experiences in frank lloyd wright houses. schindler worked for wright.
as usual, i found the bathrooms the most interesting places. the play of light on fixtures, pipes, porcelain and the private nature of the spaces draws my attention. they are functional sanctuaries.
the living spaces were a bit hard to judge because they were bereft of furnishings. bare concerete walls and floors run throughout. the fireplace is marked only by a copper hood. i guess the logs just went on the floor. pedestals with speakers playing an audio piece punctuated (or interrupted, i found) the architecture. the house is in okay shape. it's clearly old. the wood is dark with age and the paper-fiber wall panels (paper walls!) are stained. it looks fabulous in pictures! being the first modernist house in los angeles, it's a gem, and should be preserved. it's great that it's open to the public. we were allowed to wander as we pleased. there are guided tours on the weekends. a must see if you're at all interested in architecture.
i had lunch with the magnificent timo while in los angeles. we hadn't seen each other in nine or ten years. we toured the schindler studio house together. timo is a painter and graphic designer. you can check out his stuff on flickr here.
you can see a picture timo took of me taking pictures here. i'll post some of the pix i took of the schindler house shortly. until then you can see them at my flickr account here.
eraserhead, by david lynch, is one of my all time favorite films. i watched it for the god-knows-how-manyeth time last night. i recall defending this film in college and graduate school to befuddled friends who thought it was gross, stupid, incomprehensible, and a waste of time. i still feel it's one of the best films ever made and it holds up, for me, viewing after viewing. i just learned the libarary of congress has deemed it "culturally significant," so i feel supported in my early defenses. if you haven't seen it, i highly recommend it.
eraserhead was lynch's first feature. he'd made a few shorts prior. it took six years to complete, which is hard to believe when you watch the film because there's no indication of that time span, other than perhaps the lead character's hair which gets longer. it was made by a small crew working mostly at night in unused spaces at the american film institute in los angeles. the script was just 21 pages long (a typical feature script is usually around 120 pages).
it's a tense film despite the lack of dialog and action. the story is told by the environment as much as it is by the actors. radiators, door knobs, lamps, steam, sounds from outside, long periods of silence, and misunderstanding move the story along. one of my favorite scenes is henry's wife's departure late one night. she leaves him because she can't stand their baby's constant crying. she gets dressed, goes to the foot of the bed, reaches under, and rocks the bed, moaning in escalating intensity. it seems like sex. this goes on quite some time. henry watches, dumbfounded, as are we. finally, she lurches back and we realize she has pulled loose a stuck suitcase from under the bed. it's brilliant.
driving around los angeles with marco provided lots of opportunity to shoot pictures from his car window. because traffic in los angeles is chronically jammed (average speeds of around 7mph at 5pm) i was able to spend a lot of time looking. the variety of architecture provides lots of interesting shape-making, especially against a dusking sky. i've posted all my los angeles pictures here.
i'm in los angeles for a little less than a week, checking out architecture, photographing, hanging out with my friend marco and his friends. then back to vermont.
gabriel and i arrived in new orleans a couple days ago, greeted by sunny warmish weather. it feels so good to be here. i love changes of venue. i suppose that is my gemini sun shining through. i always loved those scenes in westerns when someone turns a table over and the everything flies into chaos.
i'm working the first week here on a film being produced by a faerie friend. we had our first shooting day yesterday. i was a bit nervous because we are shooting high definition wide-screen, which i've never done before. the cameras are new and excellent, sony xdcam ex. these cameras have no tape, pure solid state. it took me a couple hours to get used to the controls, and my greatest frustration was confusing the start/stop button with the detail focus button, so i'd get a good shot going and would go to focus and stop the shot. but, otherwise, i found the camera easy to operate and love the manual focus, zoom and iris. we do a second day of shooting today.
media fodder: here's a clip from a fabulous party a couple years ago. i love this dress that i made out of napkins and scotch tape. the dastardly david ford tore it mercilessly from my body on a near empty street after it had survived for hours in a crowded room.
and here's one of a nice man i met on the street.
something this morning told me there was a separation in the universe. i'm not sure why i felt this but i woke up feeling a kind of emotional hangover and took a nice long bath, shaved. the older i get the more aware i become of the deep interconnectedness between us all and at the same time the infinite distance that separates us. the latter seems to manifest for me in inverse proportion to the closeness i perceive in a relationship. the more i get to know someone, the clearer the distance between us becomes and conversely in the company of complete strangers i can feel deeply intimate. at times i'll feel a potent intimacy with someone with whom i've lost contact. it's as if in the presence of fulfillment there is absence and in the absence of fulfillment there is presence. it's a beautiful paradox because it always (usually after periods of struggle and pain) points me back to the divinity within myself, the wholeness that i've only experienced from inside, to the principle that one finds the deepest contentment in oneself, that the habitual reach to the outside for balance only unbalances. in the brief moments that i've wintessed my own wholeness i've felt capable of loving everything, unconditionally.
my friend jim in boston makes cool animations based on his paintings. here's one!
i knew that i had a lot of photos. but, i had no idea exactly how many. right now i'm importing all my photographs into iPhoto and it's telling me i have 35,471 so far. until last night they were spread across a bookshelf of dvd backups and an armload of smallish external hard drives. i bought a 500 gigabyte internal drive for my PowerMac and last night imported about 20,000 images. this morning i brought in about another 10,000 and now am finishing up by importing the dvds. i should have room for another 50,000 or so, which will keep me cool for a few years more.
i tried out iPhoto a few years ago and was not impressed. but, apple seems to have improved it dramatically. it operates quickly and is handling my tens of thousands of photos nicely. i love the way iPhoto puts all your pictures into a giant contact sheet. i put the thumbnail size down as small as it will go and it turns into a tapestry.
it feels really good to have all my images consolidated. a few weeks back, working on a magazine, i remembered a picture. it took me nearly all day to find it (it happened to be on a firewire drive that i thought was on but was off, duh). this triggered my research into ways to organize photos. for the past three years they have been organized by a variety of methods defined by my different camera upload softwares. it turns out that i had the answer under my nose with iPhoto, but i looked at quite a few packages before settling on it. the most powerful was aperture--from apple too--sort of iPhoto on steroids, but i had a lot of trouble with it and it seemed very slow by comparison and even corrupted one of my hard drives by creating folders that crashed my system when i tried to open them. i had to mount the drive on my PC laptop and delete the files through windows. the problem may have been related to that drive's windows file system... who knows. anyway, while i liked a lot of the organizational aspects of aperture, i didn't like the way it imported. iPhoto does a great job of sucking up whatever photos are on a hard drive and letting you organize later. maybe there is a way to do this in aperture but i couldn't figure it out and i wasn't too keen on spending $300 on photo management software. so, the short of the long is that with now almost 40,000 pictures, iPhoto is doing great. i hope it continues!
