xtcian

8/30/02 Tessa flew to Los

8/30/02

Tessa flew to Los Angeles today to provide the "director's commentary" to the DVD release of Five Wives, her award-winning documentary about her father. DVD commentary is something I've always wanted to do - it's usually my favorite part of renting movies these days. Even though we could never be fully honest about our travails making The Pink House, just getting to that stage would be an incredible honor. P.T. Anderson once said he learned how to direct by listening to the audio commentary on laserdiscs, so I did the same in the months before we filmed. I didn't actually glean much about directing, but got addicted to the meta-experience of watching the art with the artist's commentary superimposed. Sort of like Mystery Science Theater on yourself. Ah, the glories of technical post-modernism!

In Tessa's absence, Chopes and I puttered around the house before making an ill-timed errand visit to Manhattan around 5pm on Labor Day Friday. Sitting on the Manhattan Bridge for an hour both ways is nerve-wracking even when the country isn't on high alert for terrorists; frankly, giant trucks hauling fish don't particularly care which lane they're in if they're bigger than you, and frequently try the kind of don't-bother-checking-your-blind-spot turns that would make the mtatu van drivers in rural Kenya proud.

Another old friend has joined us here in New York; that's right, boys, Jiffer Bourguignon has come to study at Columbia. Jiff is one of the more colorful Pink House residents to grace us with her presence - she and Zia Zareem gave the place a well-needed jolt of supercharged estrogen. She was (and is) always game for whatever fun has been planned for the evening, and her down-home Wisconsin demeanor belies a fiery mantle inside: she's the only girl with which I've had a full-on fight with two dozen Krispy Kreme donuts. Check her out at the bottom of the 'about the movie' page on the Pink House site.

Or just peruse the pictures below. A lot happened between these two shots, spanning five years. I went to LA, then to New York and got engaged - while she served in the Peace Corps in Mauritania, lived in Hamburg for a while, then moved here yesterday for grad school in International Affairs. She went from 22 to 27 years old; I went from 29 to 35 (my birthday is a little earlier in the year). Good to remain friends as long as we can in this wicked world, yes?

top, at the 1920s party in February '97; bottom, in New York in August '02

8/29/02 They say that dogs,

8/29/02

They say that dogs, lacking the ability to form abstract thought, don't really have genuine emotions. Anyone who owns a dog knows that isn't quite true, but I can go them one better: today, when Chopin the dog saw us for the first time after his Rimadyl overdose, his ecstasy was the purest I've ever seen in any living creature. That includes the winning of National Championships, the reuniting of war-torn families, and the impenetrable, soul-encapsulating charge of orgasm. Put simply, I don't know if any other creature is capable of such happiness. After a two days of vomiting, having blood taken, getting an IV in the throat, and a diet of activated charcoal (whatever that means), Chopes saw us and did eleven airborne pirouettes and a half-gainer. It was so intense that the entire emergency room stopped and emitted the subconscious throaty "awwww" of seventeen pet lovers all wishing their pet could possibly feel the same. Even the bird owners, who are really weird people.

Tonight he sleeps safe and sound at the foot of our bed, even touching us as he snores, something his control issues would not have allowed even last week. Little guy, it's good to have you back.

8/28/02 Another great "recurring conversation"

8/28/02

Another great "recurring conversation" took place tonight between Tessa, Rick Gradone and myself: basically the Where Can We Find Our Utopia discussion that comes up every month or so. The plain fact is that we're getting to the age when cultural analysis leaves us all feeling desperate and bankrupt for some other time when the world was filled with artists and intellectuals all striving for some greater truth, whatever that means to you. For Tessa, it's the West Village in the 1950s; for me, it's probably Paris from about 1918 to 1928 (although I could have done without the influenza that killed everybody).

Both eras featured strict societies, homogeneity, and corrupt, big-business governments and yet these seemingly infertile conditions inspired some of the best work of the 20th century (Stravinsky, Dali, Picasso and Hemingway in the '20s; the beat poets and Pollock in the 1950s). What we have now is a homogenous society fed identical fashions by catalogs (like Tessa says, everyone in college is wearing the same fucking thing); we have a corrupt, scary government; and a society full of unbelievable inequity – but absolutely no great art, or movements, or masterpieces to show for it this time. Rick said that shithole apartments are going for $1400/month in Williamsburg, and that, my friends, is part of the problem. I've lamented it before, but there is just no fucking way to make enough money to be an artist and live in New York. By definition, we are forced to take jobs we don't like (Rick = hairdressing, Tessa = legal videos, me = moronic Web work) in order to be in the town that inspires us, but there's never any time to actually be an artist.

Now, perhaps I'm overstating that a little: Sean's friends to an exceptional job of getting plays off the ground. Lindsay has an unswerving commitment to the 24-hour plays. And we did make a movie last year, and that is pretty much our job right now. But all anyone does is raise money, that's it. Movies cost so damn much that it can't help but be a huge business proposition. We're gearing up to do re-shoots in Columbia County this weekend, and it will be the first creative decisions any of us have made in over a year. I know, I know, we're incredibly lucky to be making a movie at all (most screenwriters masturbate furiously at the thought of being able to shoot their own film), but to us, the whole thing sometimes looks like a giant pile of cash we don't have. Yet.

One surefire way to guarantee an art-free society besides making sure they'll never be able to afford rent – is to take away any hope for teen rebellion. Today's teens have nothing but their own ennui to rebel against; fetishized by Baby Boomer parents, they have more air time on MTV and full-page spreads in bad magazines than they know what to do with. They're even more boring than we were back in the early '80s, and that was pretty fucking boring. Sure, the Gen-X revolution came along in 1993 and ruined Schoolhouse Rock, "Take on Me," and Atari by selling every memory we ever had back to ourselves in a fecal blast of irony - but today's teens will have precious little to remember, at least culturally. Our crap, as crap goes, was better. I loathed Eddy Grant, but I'll take "Electric Avenue" over "Hot in Herre"[sic] by Nelly any day of the fucking week.

And don't give me any of the usual horseshit about "rock songs are supposed to be stupid" or "you just don't understand the primal glory of youth" or whatever. I have danced to shitty bands until 4am, downed Prairie Fire shots and howled at the moon for years. I have been an irresponsible jackass and had sex with freshman sorority girls in the backs of Hondas without a condom. I went to college for about twelve years simply because I enjoyed being young and irresponsible, and yet through all that time, I STILL could tell a bad pop song from another. "Hot in Herre"[sic] is a fucking stupid, stupid song that is funny for one verse, and thereafter becomes another excuse for terrorists to hate America.

Anyway...

...the question remains: what do we do specifically? We live in one of the most amazing towns on earth, but none of us have the money to take advantage of it, really. And when there's no lasting art, poetry, sculpture, songs or novels being created by our peer group, just what are we doing here? We could divest ourselves of the whole damn thing, move upstate with a few like-minded friends and create our own wildly intellectual, asshole-free commune and grow pumpkins but if you're not engaged in a thriving community of people you don't necessarily know, your brain eventually turns to oatmeal. So we opt to stay here, but we're spending more and more money and feeling lost on a raft, with naught but a few people drifting around thinking the way we do.

Does anyone out there have something profound to say?

Is everyone embarrassed?

Does anyone care?

Where the hell IS everybody?

8/27/02 This one goes out

8/27/02

This one goes out to our dog Chopin Blake, who chowed down an entire bottle of prescription Rimadyl in biscuit form, and now spends the night at the animal hospital under the long shadows of the Queensboro Bridge. We were getting sushi on Houston St., and the Little Lord Poopypants was in the car, apparently agonizing over the state of the world (or a guy wearing a hat on a bike). Just like him to be broody, Romantic and suicidal, just like Tchaikovsky or something but like all artists with wide swaths of mood, we expect him to be back in fighting form by tomorrow or so. After spending the night barfing and then ingesting activated charcoal, he'll probably need a nice long rest on a hill up in the Berkshires.

8/26/02 I try to be

8/26/02

I try to be the sensitive artist type, I really do but I kinda want to beat up the guy who is in control of the billboard at the corner of 26th and 10th Avenue:

I have to walk past that damn thing every day on the way to the production office, and it's always some goofy, artsy, banal aphorism that makes me shudder with Stupid Feeling. This week it is "Cry for beauty, not for sense," but among the other faux-mouthfuls include "Children are the best artists" and "You Must Sweat for Art." It's not so much that the phrases themselves are stupid and goofy (which they fucking are) it's the self-impressed way they're presented, on this giant billboard, obviously paid for by a rich dilettante who has long since lost his ability to connect with real artists doing real work in vastly less-expensive hovels outside the viewing distance of his hip Chelsea gallery district. This guy thinks he's really making Important Statements. Not to be all Holden Caulfield and all, but I feel like taking a paintball gun to it every day, spelling in big gloppy fuchsia letters: "EAT ME"

Whine #348b: Chelsea west of 9th Avenue

In a town that has a lot of ugly places, something about the art district in Chelsea reminds me of the worst parts of the Midwest during winter. Huge, boxy warehouses slumping in brown grids toward the putrescent laps of the Hudson; not old enough to be interesting, but not new enough to have cable modems, there is nothing to do (which is fine, because there's no parking anyway). Decent food is non-existent, the elevators are slow and seem dangerous, and the buildings trap heat better than a closed car. The nearest subway stop is a half-mile jaunt across avenues clogged with Lincoln Tunnel traffic. Tessa has made the best of things in her office (and she hates it when I talk shit about her building) but there's still not enough room, no hint of wood or any humanizing factor, and the hallways always reek of paint thinner and industrial solvents.

As she reminds me, it is very inexpensive (her lease started in 1994) but I will do my level best to liberate her, and the rest of our posse, to the promised land: somewhere a tree grows.

8/25/02 I mean, I know

8/25/02

I mean, I know 'No day is truly wasted' and all that, but I felt an inalterable sense of time squandered on this, the only day I could work on the Columbia County house until the droves arrive for Labor Day. I drove to Pittsfield, MA on a beautiful but unexpectedly long jaunt up Hwy 7, in order to buy the only lumber available in New England on Sunday: Home Depot, where God wants you to buy cordless sanders on the Sabbath. First off, the map:

is totally wrong. The Home Depot is actually off the map, somewhere in the wilderness to the right. Suffice to say the local girls on Melville Street had no idea what the hell I was talking about (by the way, I know it's been said before, but rednecks are fucking everywhere).

Anyway, I was buying wood for a little project I've got going in the "library" at the farm, a nice bookshelf that could sit on top of Tessa's pre-war desk. I measured everything to match the other bookshelves, and even pulled out a protractor to get the angles right. But when I finished the damn thing, sometime around midnight, I was horrified to see before me the worst carpentry job I have ever done, worse than some of the things I built with a kiddie hammer in the basement with Sean in 1974. It was so lopsided as to resemble the cartoons of the Crooked Man's house and cat. The best I can say for this thing is that it is still basically a tetrahedron; I mean, all the angles add up to 360 degrees, I guess.

Today would have been better spent updating the news section of the Pink House website, as there will soon be a shiteload more visitors (thanks to the IFP selection) and that part of the site hasn't been updated since May. I think that's snow on the ground outside the window in that picture of the three of us editing.

However, I did find something very important: we need to publicize our movie in any cool way possible, and I discovered the kind of pink highlighting marker that has a removable sticker. It's the Hi-Liter by Avery and we think it will be a perfectly sneaky way to inject ourselves into the collective unconscious of the festival. Everyone loves highlighters, right?

Backscratchers are pretty cool, too. Or those hats at Flying J Truck Stops that have fake poopy on the brow, and it says "Dang Birds!!!" Hoo-boy! Those hats are pretty darn funny!!!

8/24/02 I know it's a

8/24/02

I know it's a bit late in the game to start staring in abject wonder at how impressively small and powerful computers have become, but I have to say this 30 gigabyte hard drive in my computer is the size of half a Pop Tart, and that's pretty damned unbelievable. I'd also like to give a big shout-out to the SmartMedia card in my digital camera, which holds 128 megabytes of info on a piece of plastic the size of a broken Dorito chip. And I mean the small chips, the kind near the bottom when you drop the bag.

I once asked a particularly ill-at-ease web guy how big the internet really was, and where it could be stored. This was 1995, and his guess was that it was about 4 tetrabytes and could be fit on hard drives contained in a large top-opening freezer (the kind your grandparents had for various hunks of meat). Since then, the internet has enlarged geometrically, but I get the feeling that no matter how big it gets, the memory chips will get smaller, and it'll still fit into a freezer.

Now the metaphor has taken over, and every time I search the internet, I visualize myself peering from above into that big freezer, removing the slabs of tenderloin and long-picked blueberries, looking for the capital of Botswana and cousin Denny's recipe for squirrel.

8/23/02 I'm typing this directly

8/23/02

I'm typing this directly into Blogger.com tonight - instead of the usual ritual of writing in Word first - because my beloved Tangerine iBook got a new lymphatic system. Post-surgery, it still doesn't know who I am, doesn't respond to my usual sweet nothings, can't remember any of our secret little sayings. My dear little buddy got rid of his puny 3 gigabyte hard drive and now has a 30 gigabyte drive, almost as much memory as I have, but I have yet to install myself into it. This is a computer that has seen me through a major cross-country move, three job changes, countless jaunts around the country and the last drafts of my first produced script. It was with me mere blocks from Ground Zero when our country was seismically jolted, and deflected the pounding rain of typhoons during an evening where a bolt of lightning nearly killed our movie crew. And now it doesn't know who I am.

It sits on my floor tonight like an Alzheimer's patient, a best friend that has to ask your name. I wonder how many rounds we'll have to go through before it allows me to put Word on it, maybe a smattering of Eudora, or even a truckload of Photoshop. Until then, I'm on Tessa's computer, a foreign little place where the buttons are like those in Europe: small, curious, and don't do what you expect them to. The hot water is on the right, here on Tessa's little machine, and the plugs look alien. I long for the Tangerine-fried goodness of my old iBook. I don't care what they say: that it looks like a toilet seat, that it makes me less of a man. If keeping my creamsicle-colored gay iBook is wrong, I don't wanna be right.

8/22/02 In one of his

8/22/02

In one of his occasional geek raveboy moves, my brother Kent sent the family a tidbit from the July issue of Physics World, which, between recipes for butterscotch cookies and the lovelorn advice column, had an article called "Can Noise Actually Boost Brain Power?" Basically, a pair of Japanese physicists discovered that "random noise" may help humans process information more efficiently the latest biological system to exhibit "stochastic resonance," which as far as I can tell, is a theory climatologists have developed to explain the ice ages. Don't worry, I didn't quite get that part either.

Either way, it sounds good to me, since I have a white noise machine purring on my nightstand every night. This may seem grotesquely yuppie and high maintenance, but my fondness for white noise has humble beginnings. My family suffers from a disease called the "croup," which is a bronchial condition that closes up the windpipe of anyone unlucky enough to get it. It's incredibly terrifying, and it seems like we got the croup every six months or so growing up. The only way to survive was to breathe as much hot steam as you could, as quickly as possible. Countless times my dad would bound into the bedroom and take one of the choking children into the shower for a steam bath lemme tellya, it really sucked.

Then we started using humidifiers, and since the croup died down after that, I equated the vaporizer and the sound it made - with blissful safety. I don't carry a noise machine around because I hate other noises, I do it because it gives me an enormous sense of well-being, something others need drugs and Jim Beam to accomplish.

My own stochastic resonance happens every night, but I feel like I deal with it every day in the movies. The trailers we cut today are immeasurably helped by the random blasts of music in them, giving them excitement and narrative drive. During production, we'd often record "room tone," which is that unheard sonic "feeling" of a room that can be edited into any scene to give a sense of continuous place.

By the way, for those of you at home just trying out white noise, remember that turning it off in the morning can seem quite uncathectic, like being ripped out of the womb all untimely-like. Also, you don't need a blindingly expensive Sound Soother from Sharper Image to do it right (in fact, some of those soundmakers are on digital loops that you gradually recognize, making it agonizing). A fan will work fine, as long as it's pointing away from you, or my thinking-on-your-feet favorite, the radio tuned to 87.9 and turned up a bit. Do not use AM radio - there's all kinds of shit that can crop up there, especially at night due to the atmospheric skip. You'll go to sleep nicely, then be jarred 2 hours later by the results of the Ipswich-Chelsea cricket match on BBC Shortwave.

today's Kooky Stochastic Resonance Korner was brought to you by Ian Williams and Chopin Blake

8/21/02 The brouhaha currently broiling

8/21/02

The brouhaha currently broiling in my ex-hometown of Chapel Hill, NC reached a fever pitch this week, as tongues are awag-wag-waggin' over the summer reading assignment for all incoming UNC freshmen: Approaching the Qu'ran: The Early Revelations. The situation played out exactly how you thought it might: a conservative think tank somewhere in East Ass, Virginia brainwashed three moron freshmen into suing the University for being un-Constitutional, spewing out platitudes like "why ain't the Bible on the summer reading program?" Thankfully, their suit was struck down using the same Constitutional logic, but not before everyone named Earl, Jed and Crazy Christian Fucko got their digs in. There was even a CNN piece on the cafuffle tonight with one of my fave newscasters, Aaron Brown, waxing poetic about our alma mater.

Now, the administration of the University of North Carolina has a long history of being full of shit: they invested in South Africa long after it was cricket, they let the CIA do secret recruiting, they repeatedly ignored student input on pretty much any topic, they paid their custodians in bread crusts, they destroyed the Lab theater, and they gave us all really shitty seats at basketball games. They always seemed to us a boardroom full of guffawing old white guys smoking cherry vanilla tobacco in long wooden pipes.

But this Koran issue reminded me why UNC is so important. They stuck to their guns on this one. Despite pressure from the General Assembly and letters from thousands of disgruntled parents, they went ahead and did the right thing, and if only one freshman kid decides not to "hate sandniggers" because of this book, then it was worth it. If you want a "conservative arts" education, get your ass to Hampden-Sydney; if you want a "liberal arts" education, take a stroll to the hill where William Jefferson Davie thrust a poplar twig in the ground in 1789 and marked the spot for the first public state university for the people and of the people. Today I have more than basketball to make me proud to be a Tar Heel.

me and Chip on the upper quad at UNC, July 1989

8/20/02 Making movie trailers is

8/20/02

Making movie trailers is about three steps laterally from being a snake oil salesman waltzing through Topeka in the late 1870s. Everywhere else in American corporate society there are pretty strict rules about false advertising, but movie previews remain the one place where lying your ass off is not only recommended, but required. I worked for several of the big movie trailer houses in Los Angeles, and while there was enough money surrounding them to make each place its own hushed enclave of secrecy, the people working there would usually whisper that their advertisements are frequently hilariously off-base.

Most of the time it's just because the movie sucked. Turd-polishing accounts for most of the misrepresentation, as studios will do just about anything to make a few bait-and-switch bucks back on opening weekend. I worked on one Ephron-esque vehicle that shall remain nameless - a lifeless, confusing, roadkill of a film that had the bloated sheen of the recently dead and they told us to come up with a trailer that was as fuckin' happy-go-lucky as a juggling clown on crystal meth. And if I were an ordinary Josephine who paid money to see that movie because of the trailer, I would have been very, very upset.

As for the "giving away all the endings" thing, do what we did: blame the studio. They're the ones that always ask for 19 great ideas and 1 stupid one and always go with the stupid one. They demand that trailer makers give away the endings to movies because they have no faith that your average McNugget-passing schlub has the ability to comprehend a movie unless the murderer is revealed thirteen seconds into the trailer. And thanks in part to the movies the studios make, they're probably right.

I got into trailers almost by accident, if calling every day for five months seems like an accident. My friend Amy Hill said she wrote trailer copy one summer and the money was good, so I banged on doors until they brought me in. At the meeting, the president of Universal called and said that the trailers for Mystery Men "weren't tracking worth a damn" and to get someone else on it. They looked at me, and I was thrown to the wolves. Two hours later I returned with twenty ideas, and the head of the department said, "we're going to make you very, very rich."

Of course, that didn't happen, but I did manage to stay afloat in Los Angeles for a long time by writing everything that guy says you know, the "In a world where love means nothing..." kind of thing. And I did have three or four campaigns that went through the roof, the biggest of which was Sleepy Hollow, whereby three words paid for my 33rd year: "Heads Will Roll."

Los Angeles being what it is, and me being deep-dipped in shit as I was, I lost most of my contacts in the business and moved to New York in mid-2000 and didn't think about trailers again (unless a particularly awful one was screening). Until today, that is, when I suddenly had to make a trailer for my own movie, and another film I hadn't seen until Monday. This was more intense than just copywriting, however, this is the whole shebang: I had to pick all of the scenes, marry them to the words, and still make people feel like filing in the door from thither and yon.

Writing for trailer copy is basically the marriage of haiku and commerce with a nice "parallel construction" thrown in. By that I mean:

HE TAUGHT HER HOW TO LIVE
SHE TAUGHT HIM HOW TO LOVE
BLAH BLAH BLAH FUCKING BLAH

One of my faves (never used, of course) from the Stuart Little campaign was this:

THIS HOLIDAY SEASON, CHRISTMAS WILL BE BIG...
SANTA WILL BE HUGE...
AND STUART... WILL BE "LITTLE."

THE STORY OF A LITTLE MOUSE
IN THE BIG APPLE.

You get the idea. Looks easy, but you try it. And it's a lot harder to do on your own movie, because you're not used to looking at the forest for the trees. Our project seems to be going swimmingly, however our editor Jessie has lots of good ideas and never fails to admit her bad ones. I, too, am finding it a lot easier to say how bad certain things I make can suck. We're back in the editing bay tomorrow for round two, so I leave you with the trailer for this blog:

IN AN ONLINE WORLD...
ONE YOUNG MAN WILL POST HIS INNERMOST FEARS...

AND SOMEONE DEEP IN HIS PAST
WILL BRIGHTEN HIS FUTURE

THREE FRIENDS ON THE BRINK OF ADULTHOOD
ONE HAS A SECRET
HE TAUGHT HER HOW TO LOVE
BLAH BLAH FUCKING BLAH

our editor Jessie and me on her birthday in February; my hair has been shorn since, as a public service

8/19/02 Yep, that is my

8/19/02

Yep, that is my last unemployment check stub for the foreseeable future. It's quite an accomplishment, since it means That Internet Job has been paying for me, one way or another, since June of 2000. And it's a company that doesn't even exist anymore! They moved me from Los Angeles to New York, paid me for a year, then severance for six weeks, then unemployment for 26 weeks, then with September 11 came 13 more weeks of emergency unemployment. This week is the last week I shall be feeding off that particular teat, and I just want to say one thing: Thanks, That Internet Job. You were a bleeding nightmare and I complained a lot about you, but I have the humility to accept that if it weren't for you, my life would be so much the lesser.

Speaking of gettin' on with one's life, we had the IFP orientation meeting tonight, where we learned the differing style of presenting one's movie whilst at the festival. Last year, some guy who had an ice cream-themed film rented an ice cream truck and apparently embarrassed everybody, so this year they want us to show a little more class. I'm all for that, since my Pink House Acne Scrub was having a tough time getting off the drafting table anyway.

It was fun seeing the infectiously-excited young filmmakers all checking each other out one of them, named Gabriel, tapped me on the shoulder and introduced himself, something that hasn't happened to me since frat rush. I liked him; he's got moxie. The only drag of the meeting was finding out that four of the twenty films will be selected for awards at the beginning of the festival, which I understand for press purposes, but still takes the wind out of the sails of sixteen other movies. I told the director of the Market that I'd been beat up too much in 3rd grade to feel good about that sort of pre-emptive exclusion, but I don't think I got very far.

Tonight, as Tessa went to bed early, I had to stay up and think of trailer ideas for both The Pink House and Martin & Orloff. Making these trailers exercises a muscle in me that has been dormant for a while, but it got erect fairly quickly. What a weird skill to have in one's arsenal. If it weren't so demoralizing, I'd probably make a career out of it.

8/18/02 It seems like the

8/18/02

It seems like the only thing worse than something bad happening is waiting for it terrorists use this logic all the time, and it's why a kidney stone power is so potent. I'm sure any readers familiar with this week's blog could give half a fuck about this topic, having covered it thrice, but if you ever had one, you'd know what I mean. I've never had the sort of mind-body connection that alerted me that one was coming; I think my blog from five days ago was some sort of shamanistic stab at warding it away. I drank gallons of water this week in suspicion, even though I had felt no pain and nothing seemed to be wrong. I just fucking knew. Then again, some religions would posit that I made it happen by mentioning it. After all, the end of the famous Medieval phrase "speak of the devil" is "...and he shall appear."

Passed the stone at 5:45 in the morning, which was nice; the whole ordeal wasn't half as bad as last year's July 4th debacle. The only thing that lingered on was the ghost pain, a heavy-duty Percoset hangover, and yes, that awful feeling of not being in control. It will take a few days to emerge out from under the penumbra of fear and start being cavalier again. Until then, a cookies & cream delight from Bev's Homemade Ice Cream in downtown Great Barrington will have to do.

Sam and Tessa exchange ice cream flavor ideas

8/17/02 I suppose it's terribly

8/17/02

I suppose it's terribly itonic and all, but I got my seconds kindey stone tonight. I'm writing in a brief window iof painlesslessness on 3 (three) Prcoset, 3 advil and something they pushed up my arts so I won't puke. I'll probably go back and correct the sentcnes, but not now.

I keep falling asleep during this.

I knew this was comeing, I even wrote a blog bout it like three days ago. Scroll down if you don't beleve me. I would link to it, but that would be laffable.

All I can say is WHY IS YOUR (my) URETER SO SMALL!? Can't they make a ureter-enlarger so this doetn't hurt so bad? I thin its a flawed design, that;s all I'm saying. I got a cat-scan at the hopsital, and it reminded me of the Battering Ram at Busch Gardens.

q

8/16/02 Can you get a

8/16/02

Can you get a sense of the stifling heat today? Can you feel how steamingly, scorchingly, achingly hot it is jostling down Canal Street around 2pm? If not, click here for the bigger picture, and try to imagine yourself in the bowels of downtown, just getting off the Manhattan Bridge, the pothole-encrusted, 3rd-world, car-damaging stretch of Canal looming out before you. The whole place smells like the bottom of an NBA laundry hamper, and you are already 25 minutes late for where you need to be. The quality of the road plus the quality of the ozone mixes the worst parts of the years 1885 and 2002 together into a post-apocalyptic bouillabaisse. That's right, kids, it's our commute from Brooklyn!

My nephews Sean Patrick and Lucas (along with their mom Melissa) were in town today, staying at our place, rocking on the guitar until late, watching episodes of The Family Guy pirated from eBay. Both nephews remain delightfully surreal, and it's fascinating how many tics, facial expressions and word choices they picked up from Kent.

my extended family also sleeps until noon, which obviously means we're all Welsh cave hibernators with little use for morning

We met them later today at The Half King for lunch, where Sean Patrick's friend Jessie told the story of their first short film. Called "Citizen Robot," it's about a misfit who befriends a race of feminine androids to improve his social interaction. I don't want to spoil the ending in case any of you end up seeing it at the Iowa City High School Film Retrospective, but basically, our protagonist frees the race of imprisoned fembots and all is well. Oh yeah, they couldn't find any girls to be in the film, and they really couldn't find any girls to be in a cage... and they couldn't find a cage, so they dressed up one of their hapless friends in a wig and put him in a soccer net. Oh yeah, the robots are also half-rabbit.

Well, the whole thing landed them in trouble with the West High School Art Club, as I'm sure you could guess. I told them that visionaries are rarely appreciated in their own lifetimes. They said that they'll actually join the Art Club this year and effect change from within.

8/15/02 So the story goes

8/15/02

So the story goes like this: my mom was contacted by two different would-be composers who knew she was a respected, published and recorded musician, wanting to know how much it would cost to get their own choral works recorded. Now, put aside that this is a little like asking Gaugin to help you paint your porch, but whatever: this is the business she wants to do, and doesn't mind holding a few hands along the way if it means some income. Plus, these guys said they were "totally funded and supported" by "eager patrons."

To digress, my mom is one of the great choral composers of our time, selling millions for Hal Leonard Publishing, and basically writing, editing and creating music for about 90% of the series kids use in music class today. If you're under 30 and reading this, you've sung one of my mom's songs. The are two reasons you don't know this, and one is because she decided to have kids (five of 'em, your author included) and follow my dad's career trajectory into the high faluting world of conducting. The other is what I'll get to in a minute.

Anyway, so these schlubs get my mom's email, which includes detailed accounts of how much it costs to have a small chamber orchestra buttressed by synthesized instruments, a choir, a conductor, an engineer, studio time and tape. What follows is a month of silence - finally one guy writes back and says he's "still trying to secure support," which is Artist for "I'm full of shit." The other has the temerity to go onto a public internet discussion group and post that "some delusional producer" has given him an estimate that was apparently "so far out of line" that he was looking for suggestions on how to make it more "bare-bones and cost-effective."

Forget that this asshole is the one that came to my mom (not the other way around), forget even that he is so outside any kind of community of recording studios as to be soliciting advice on the god-damned internet from strangers. What pisses me off is that he is so set on ham-and-egging his project that he's willing to disrespect the only good advice he's going to get on the subject, dismissing studio costs as "delusions." What he's really saying is that musicians and technicians can fuck off with their high prices; he can find someone to do it on the cheap.

Coming from a self-appointed "musician," this could be construed as self-loathing, but it's just a small example of a disturbing whole: artists just aren't fucking valued in this country. I know, I know, it's a terrible cliché and not worthy of argument, but I'm completely disgusted with the way artists are viewed in contemporary American culture; it's almost as shameful as the way we treat schoolteachers. Making music or movies or ceramics has long been scoffed at as "not a real job" and yet these folks hone their craft hours a day longer than investment bankers, dentists, and office assistants combined. Most artists in this country are forced to make suck-up, sycophantic deals with the vainest, most full-of-shit people just to get 1/9th of what Canada gives to its artists just for being Canadian.

These people who came to my mom (I'd call them "musicians," but real musicians know how much toil goes into even the smallest of recordings) most likely have other jobs where they can haggle their costs down to where they think they've totally fucked the seller. Artists will usually accept the haggle, going down into the financial gutter simply through lack of choice, and impending rent. I've seen truly brilliant minds take on the most cerebrum-dissolving jobs just so they could keep living in their shitty East Village apartments. The only artists in the world - besides the 50 famous ones - who are paid what they deserve are TV writers (and all of them long to be in movies). The rest keep struggling until the realities of health insurance force them into some suck-ass day job.

But we're not letting our mom get involved with these morons. In my opinion, they were lucky to have even gotten an email back from her like all men without vision, they have no idea how close to greatness they got. My mom is capable of such beauty, of breaking your heart within a few measures, writing songs that are simple, surprising and inevitable all at once. I haven't heard everything that is on her website, but her music is so sure, so enveloping, that you feel like you're in such good hands. And of course, she has to pound the pavement for work.

When I get my money, I'm going to put her up in a studio on top of our hill, with a giant window and a black Steinway grand, so that she can make all the music she wants and not have to sacrifice her art at the altar of her kids, her husband, or random bozos on the internet. She should, after 55 years of writing music, be able to do it just for the sake of doing it, smile, and tell everyone else that it is now her job.

mom at Silver Burdett, constructing the music schoolbook series in 1987

Tenk

8/14/02

Yesterday was my eldest brother Kent's birthday, a date that is sometimes Friday the 13th, but always ten years hence of my own birthday. He hovers in that decade of space in front of me, very encouragingly I might add, because he maintains an umbilical connection with the bleeding edge of culture and hasn't lost any of his youthful absurdity. Most hipster kids going to Burning Man and trying out new Tina drugs only wish they were half as hip as my slightly chubby older brother in Iowa City, IA. As long as Kent can keep rockin' the mike ten years ahead of me, I feel like I have some breathing room.

Kent was our favorite babysitter back in the 70s for differing reasons - when he was high on Linn County's best dope, we could get away with anything; and when he wasn't, it meant Melissa was close, and we'd get to play Monopoly. You couldn't lose with Kent taking care of things - Sean and I would be in the kitchen raping the half-quarts of Oreo ice cream and staying up five hours past our bedtime, while our babysitter was in the basement smoking curiously sweet cigarettes, listening to Yes albums and grooving to the blacklight.

He did get fed up with my dad at one point and lit out for the Territories. While my dad acted as private dick and my mom grew privately hysterical, Kent was on various Greyhound buses traversing the wilds of southern Idaho. I think the adventure ended when he ran out of money at my grandma's place in Provo, UT, but we treated him with the reverence afforded Cool Hand Luke when he came back to prison.

Kent and I used to barter in backrubs; we used to "owe" each other 200 to 300 seconds worth (slow counting) for doing various favors around the house. Together with Steve, he shared a phlegm-green 1972 Plymouth Fury that had the shotgun door held on with packing tape, and he'd drive us to get Dilly Bars. After that, he got an orange Beetle that became a fossilized snow fort in our side yard. In those days he lived in a communal-looking wooden housing lean-to that he shared with 16 other people en route to a degree from the University of Iowa. It was the most disgusting place I had ever seen until I developed my own bacterium shithole while at the University of North Carolina.

Kent's the kind of kid that would have easily slipped through the cracks during the selfish, uncaring, kids-as-nuisance 1970s. He was 6'4", always knocking shit over, probably dyslexic and had trouble in school. He got beat up so bad at the post office one midnight that the sight of him the next morning threw me into a anxious tailspin. But he showed them all - my dad, McKinley Jr. High School, everybody. He married the smartest, prettiest girl in town, graduated with a degree in computer science, and is now one of the most respected electronic/experimental DJs in his field. He also has the patience of the Buddha, raising two kids that will probably win Nobel Peace Prizes (well, at least Sean Patrick will - Lucas will probably be head writer for SNL).

One little moment stands out for me: one time in about 1976, he snuck up on my while I was on the ground playing with two bicentennial silver dollars. Surprised, I accidentally hurled the silver dollars and they hit him in the teeth. His knees buckled and he fell on the floor, writhing in agony. I was sure he was going to throw me across the room, but he got up, closed his eyes, and walked out, still wincing. Anyone else getting a mouthful of bicentennial metal at 40 mph probably would have screamed at least, but he was totally cool. I think I counted extra slow while giving him a penitent backrub the next day.

Kent in 1980

8/13/02 We were talking tonight

8/13/02

We were talking tonight about all the various terrible 4th of Julys I've had I consider it a blessing to have sailed through this one relatively painlessly. But last year still haunts me every time I get the tiniest inkling of pain in my side, as it was the year I had my first kidney stone. Now, I didn't even know what a kidney stone was until I had one - I thought it was something the size of a small egg that somehow gets zapped by a laser and comes out of some opening or other. It didn't even sound that painful ("gall stones" wins that category) but if anybody reading this has ever had one, I am with you in a silent, wincing fraternity.

What's weird is how immediately you know something's wrong: not in the "gee, that feels kind of funny" way, it's in the "I really need to go to the hospital right now" category. Your body is taken to a higher place, a heightened state of alert that truly has to be experienced to be understood. You've had pain before, you've sprained ankles, bitten your tongue, had a headache, but this is something else, a primal yowl from the depths of ancestors eight generations back. They say that the pain of a kidney stone is ten times that of natural childbirth, which, I admit, lessens my male guilt a few notches for having experienced it.

What's worse is that I thought I could dodge it. I kept on playing the guitar, trying to learn the verses of That's Why I'm Here by James Taylor as the dagger plunged ever further. Three things I remember on the 45-minute drive to the hospital in the middle of rural Massachusetts: the unrelenting beauty of the scenery when the blood has drained from your eyes and blown out the aperture; watching Tessa drive and remembering the Smiths lyric "to die by your side, what a wonderful way to die"; and the warning on the shotgun air bag saying that it could cause immediate death. Not knowing what a kidney stone was, or that I had one, I believed I was close to death, and thought to myself "this is how it feels." And they're right, you know, death itself doesn't seem that bad; it's when your body decides to survive, that's when the pain hits.

Spare the details, thanks, but suffice to say I threw up all over the hospital while the fireworks of the 4th of July boomed overhead. 15 hours of unmitigated agony produced a long Percoset-induced sleep at the end of which, I "passed" the stone into a little screened cup. I like to include visual aids with this blog, so this is today's picture:

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Yep, that was the size of it. A period. I kept it in a little hospital jar for analysis at some later date, but I never took it in for research. It rested on my office shelf for months until it developed into a totem, a reminder that something so small can have such an effect on the world. And furthermore, that I had survived it, that it was no longer in me, and though I may be knocked flat by other beasts, this one didn't get me.

And so I leave you with this, fair readers: drink all those glasses of water they tell you to! Hydrate like crazy and the stones will roll right through you. Drink! Drink! All God One Love! Dilute! Dilute! OK!!!

8/12/02 It's such a great

8/12/02

It's such a great thing when kids finally hit the age of three or so, start having a personality, and respond to queries with something resembling logic. Before three, it's all noise and a vague understanding of the world around them after three, it starts to make sense, even if it is a bit surreal. Abigail (the daughter of Bridget and Neal, whose Easthampton house we're crashing in) is in the stage when colors play an important part in the day's events. Her T-shirt is pink, the cover of Marie Claire is purple, and the peppers are orange, and it's all rather fabulous. She asked me what sound a rhinoceros makes, and I said, "rouuufffffshhh!" I asked her what sound the ocean makes, and she said, "waveswaveswaveswaveswaves," which makes perfect sense to me. I asked her why her shoes had velcro instead of shoelaces, and she said, well, "you never know." Ain't that the truth.

Tessa, Abigail and I pose for the digital camera. Abigail was particularly struck at how the picture appeared on the back of the camera within a few seconds

Around 5pm, we packed our things and lit for the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, where Tessa's film Five Wives, Three Secretaries and Me was playing as part of the American Landscape series. It's the fourth time I've seen the movie, and it's still fun, especially now that I'm semi-intimately involved with the major players. Tessa is grilled twice about getting married in the movie, which is funny to watch now, seven years after the footage was shot.

I've always been proud and lucky, I suppose - to be the last person 91-year-old Tommy Blake ever met (and remembered). He was very feeble, occasionally lapsing into a dreamlike state, when we saw him in February 2001, but he remembered me the next day and said to Tessa, "I'm interested to find out that your so-called boyfriend is a musician." Which was funny, because no mention was made of our relationship in front of him - likely Muffet said something. Anyway, I played Gershwin on the piano, he clapped in delight, and then his own conversation devolved into a jazz riff itself: a stated topic, with delirious improvisations on it, seemingly incomprehensible, then landing back safely where he started. When we left his house that day, I snuck back to the piano room for one last look, because I knew it would be the last time I'd ever see Tessa's father alive. He sat on the couch with his tie crooked, staring out the window, no doubt thinking of a song to soothe his mind, a slight smile on his ancient face.

me, Blakey and Tessa on that last day, February 2001

8/11/02 Exactly one year ago

8/11/02

Exactly one year ago today, we finished principal photography on our film, The Pink House. It was one of the most harrowing experiences of my life (which includes getting dysentery in Jamaica, collapsing form malnutrition a few weeks before my parents' divorce, and sitting through the first half of the Columbia County High School production of "Crazy For You").

The year since has been pretty exceptional, and I'm not sure if we are as far along as I expected to be. As I said, it's the little victories that have propelled us, but if you'd told me on that typhoon-raging night of August 11 that a year from now I'd still be editing, I'd probably have blown a gasket. Yet here we are, and it doesn't seem all that horrific.

That last night of the shoot, we all met at the local moderately bad Italian restaurant, the full cast and crew, and I was so thankful/ashamed/relieved/exhausted/unsure of the whole thing that I wrote each lead actor a little note expressing my feeling at having worked with them. Here's one I wrote to Pilar Punzano, who despite being one of the Pink House residents, spoke nary a word of English in real life:

Pilar- I know Jorge will translate this for you, so I wont get on the internet and try to do a translation. Besides, the internet translation tool always makes me sound like I’m in kindergarten.

But despite it all, you shone like the sun. I am so proud of the risk you took to come to America, and it is obvious to me that you are a fantastic actor. Even the language barrier couldnt get in the way of your talent. Each time you were on the screen, the entire scene would light up with reds and yellows. You were terrific.

Pilar and Jorge on set

And when we walked into the restaurant, I fully expected us to get booed, and instead, the entire place gave us a standing ovation. We had put these people through hell, and there they were, a year ago tonight, getting drunk and giving me bear hugs. I was so delirious and high from the experience that I jumped into the pool with all the rest of them and swam around nekkid as a jaybird with Rick Gradone.

When I got home, Tessa was comatose, but I still had a raging fire. I'll let the email from that night do the talking:

This project can't be described in any facile terms. We weathered a week of solid rain and two violent tornadoes, and yet we still made the movie. We had to sit on top of a black roof on the hottest day in 23 years, and yet we still made the movie. Our lead actor injured himself on the set, leaving a bone was sticking out of his hand, and yet we still made the movie. Our gaffer went ballistic and nearly killed three extras with his car, the 1st AD hadn't read the script, I had a tooth FALL OUT, a typhoon washed away our set, one of the lead actors threatened to fly back to Spain... and yet we still made the fucking movie. Our movie was called "The Pink House," yet the girls who actually live in the actual Pink House wouldn't let us even open the back door.

I'm convinced the only way to get through this project is with pure primality. By the third or fourth day, we were stripped of decorum, blanched clean of our vanity, and went into battle mode. Tessa turned to me during one of our tornadoes and said, "Feel like you're on the Titanic?" and I said, "No, this is the Carpathia. We're rescuing the last few hearty swimmers."

A year later, I still fucking burn. Hope passion is contagious, because we need things to go our way from here on out.

the directors, producers and cameraman furiously save the last days of shooting

8/10/02 A good djà vu

8/10/02

A good djà vu is hard to come by, but I had one today as I lay in a stranger's bed somewhere east of Easthampton, NY. We came here to the Hamptons because Tessa's film Five Wives is showing at the museum festival celebrating American movies that typify a certain region ("Five Wives," of course, representing Texas). This means staying at a gorgeous house with thoroughly modern architecture, but the second Tessa went for a run, I went for a nap – and was instantly brought back to an afternoon I spent in Kenya when I was thirteen.

Many of you reading this either know about, or have seen works by, Dan Eldon. Dan is famous, unfortunately, for dying the way he did: stoned to death by an angry mob in Mogadishu in 1993. He was a Reuters photographer, and his visionary journals were discovered not long after, becoming the book The Journey is the Destination. But that was still many years away.

Dan was my most consistent friend growing up, even if we didn't see each other for months at a time. His mother Kathy was from Iowa, where we lived, and we followed their family to London, and then Kenya, having awesome kid adventures along the way. We painted murals, dug G.I. Joe caves and played ping-pong until our arms were numb. But on this particular day, I was alone in their gigantic Nairobi house, on vacation, with all adults off doing other things, and Dan and his sister Amy at school. I sat in the love seat in the window and listened to the Beatles' "Love Songs" compilation, and just stared out the window at the beautiful, bizarre trees of their African yard. It was the first moment in my life, after thirteen years of whirlwind neverending "kiddie momentum" that I actually stopped and took stock of my life, and actually noticed the artistic, sad sweep of the tops of the trees. I know it sounds bizarre, but I think it was in that precise moment that I entered puberty.

And today I felt something in the cool breeze of the Hamptons, lying in a bed that is not mine, feeling that out-of-place sensation you get when left at other people's houses as a child, looking up at the tops of the trees sweeping the home stretch of the summer out to sea.

me with Dan Eldon, summertime 1977

8/9/02 Sex is such a

8/9/02

Sex is such a complicated issue in being endlessly fascinating, yet ruined by overanalysis. Nothing is less sexy, to me and most men anyway, than hashing out sexual issues either before or after the act itself. Of course, like Ron Shelton wrote in Bull Durham, a guy will listen to anything if he thinks it's foreplay, and certainly talking dirty has its place in the porn lexicon (I think I majored in phone sex from 1992-94). But the analysis of sex itself in the cold dissection of hard daylight is pretty much a guaranteed soft-on.

I'm not much for sweeping gender-based statements, but many of the women I've known, including the brilliant and beautiful Tessa, are what I call "momentists," folks who really dig on the deconstruction of singular moments that happen to us, going over conversations had 5 minutes ago with a lice comb, taking great pains to find out exactly "what happened." I appreciate the philosophy of "being present" in the moment and understand its appeal, but being a dude, and a fairly hyperbolic one at that, I regard past moments with the same care jazz singers give to passing tones; it was simply a way to get from there to here, and it was probably embellished a little. Needless to say, we butt heads about this stuff a lot.

I mention this because we saw a perfect example of "sex momentism" today in a documentary made by Tessa's friend Leslie, a DV piece about a couple that seeks a solution to each other's hang-ups surrounding orgasm. I should really say it was a "mockumentary," because it was populated by actors and was really quite funny in a low-budget Guffman sort of way but its relentless hashing-out of all things sexual could have only been written by a woman. She did a great job of portraying the man's scarcely-concealed horror at having to go through tantric exercises and seeing a sex counselor, willing to have a his prostate probed if only to settle the matter once and for damn all.

Tessa and I plan on getting couples therapy before we're married I look at it as a "kicking the tires" sort of thing – but I know it's going to be a struggle for me to participate as much as I should. Tessa is actually very cool about this stuff (and would never make me do anything I don't want to do), but the desire to "not talk about the relationship" must be shackled to the 'Y' chromosome or to MY chromosome, because I think we're doing fantastic and have a ages-old desire not to muddy the dockwater. One thing age has given me, however, is the ego to accept that my ego doesn't know everything, and I'm willing to do a little couples therapy with the old Jewish adage: "It can't hoit!"

But on to the really important stuff we got Sean some candy-red Nike Shox VC Hoops shoes for a belated birthday present - which reminded me a little of the time in 1976 when I got him a basketball because I wanted one – but since he's playing hoops with bad knees on Astoria's famously crappy asphalt courts, I thought it would be nice for him to have the best shoe currently available. Thanks, of course, to the miracle of eBay, where I've made several friends who seem to work in the bowels of Nike, whereby certain pairs of shoes tend to "fall off the back of the truck" and "into their hands." It was another stroke of luck altogether to find the Nike Mique Women's Hoops shoe for Tessa, but now she, too is ready to take on all comers in Columbia County with her devastating 10-foot floater.

After dinner, Sean, Jordana and I went to see Full Frontal, the new Soderbergh movie, at the 23rd St. googleplex. A fun but unsatisfying ramble through one of Soderbergh's inside jokes, it may have the unfortunate effect of making people think that all DV features look like dogshit. I wish everyone could see the trailer for The Pink House; they'd understand what DV is capable of these days.

Ian's Leftist Pinko Freak Vegan Comment of the Day: okay, so they took out all the porn shops on 42nd St, but does anyone else find the proliferation of corporate neon crap reaching hundreds of feet into the air equally if not more offensive?

Jordana, Sean and me battle the trash, homeless, black Muslims, white Christians, Australian tourists and Sony on our way to the movie on 42nd St.

8/8/02 This one goes out

8/8/02

This one goes out to my friend Julie Morgan.

Any of you who live in New York knows how rough the summers can be; the pungent smell of cooked urine wafting up the stairs of the subway, the way your grundle starts to get a little jubbly down there, the 3-liter gulp of broiling bus exhaust as it misses your body by 17 millimeters. So it is truly amazing when the cold fronts from Canada swoop in, pushing every last droplet of humidity out to sea, and leaving us 79 and sunny. Today was one such day, so I'd like to call this blog entry "The Top 10 Greatest Things on Earth."

1. Cumulonimbus clouds. If you grew in Iowa and North Carolina like I did, you would have been privy to some of the greatest thunderstorms God ever orchestrated. Sure, the Texans like to think they have crazier weather, but it only seems crazier because of all the trailer parks. The cumulonimbus is the Savage Beast of the Sky, a beautiful shaft of pregnant water bubbling at 26,000 feet, about to open up a can of whoop-ass on you and yours. Before tornadoes, cumulonimbuses start getting green, like they're about to throw up. Poets like the cirrus clouds, or the dainty mackerel sky of an altocumulus. Not me I want the booming bass of a good rogering thunderstorm.

2. The part in Hucklberry Finn when Huck decides not to turn in Jim the slave. Huck Finn is required reading for every bored, acne-bedecked 9th grader, but it is one of those books (like "Catcher in the Rye") that makes you think school won't suck so bad after all. There is a passage where Huck decides to turn Jim in as a runaway slave, but his conscience won't allow it. Finally, in one of the best passages of literature ever written, he decides that he'll go ahead and "go to hell" and stick it out with Jim and it's so breathtaking and gorgeous and cathartic that I put the book down, looked up at the mackerel 1982 sky and decided to be a writer.

3. Cellos. Now, I was a violin major at Carolina, and spent 20 of my most prime, productive years fucking around in the back of the second violin section. I was a good violinist, but knew I would never have the discipline to be great. On the sly, however, during vast rests in the middle of symphonies, I would look longingly over at the cello section in rapt envy. Cellos are so cool these huge, gorgeous pieces of furniture you stick between your thighs and evoke low growls and unearthly, longing high notes. I always thought the cellists were cooler people, in their own little club, keeping to themselves and stealing smokes behind the auditorium. Put it this way: if I had been a cellist, I would have been great.

4. The clitoris. So misunderstood by men, and such a pity. Not quite the brazen sex organ of the penis, but needing a coaxing of a more coy sort, the clitoris, like writing, thrives on the philosophy "less is more."

5. Interstate 15 through the Virgin River Gorge. My family, being Mormon and raised in both Provo, UT and Los Angeles, has Interstate 15 down to an art form. Snaking from upper Utah to the dingy basin of Death Valley, I-15 cuts through a tiny piece of Arizona. And I mean "cuts," because the road is built into the canyon etched by the Virgin River Gorge (aptly named for my Mormon cousins, no doubt), and it is more fun than any video game yet coded. The river and you are both going 60 mph through hairpin turns and cliff walls formed by 3000 years of water and 40 years of dynamite. It's rumbling, gorgeous, intense, and when you are spit out into the flatlands of Nevada, you look in your rear view mirror with the post-coital buzz of a great lover.

6. "Save a Prayer" by Duran Duran. I wore thin the tape of my hijacked version of "Rio" listening to this song over and over: the vocal line is so beautiful, with John Taylor's bass line approaching genius, the two working in contrapuntal juiciness like a Bach 3-part invention. The song never falls into the predictable, always one chord change ahead of the listener. Forget the lyrics ("some people call it a one-night stand, but we can call it paradise") and just close your eyes, develop a crush on the girl at the movie theater concession stand, and be fifteen.

7. Pumpkins. Just one seed produces a vine 30 feet long with eight 60-lb. pumpkins on it. The flowers are male and female, and it has sex with itself. As the vines grow, they send little "feelers" reaching out to lash itself on whatever's near, then the vine itself plunges into the ground, basically to look for additional financing. The fruit can grow so big that cars can't carry it. And during the last week of October, we hollow them out, create ghoulish faces, dress up in outrageous costumes, collect candy and dance in ecstasy in the last great pagan holiday of our culture. I mean, how cool can a plant possibly be?

8. The Jack & Coke. The variations on it are flawed - the Southern Comfort & Coke can be a bit sweet, and the Jim Beam & Coke just doesn't have the mark of quality. Jack is still the best way to go for your average drink dollar, and something about the caffeine in Coke mixes with the giggle-juice in the bourbon to produce a perfect, hassle-free buzz which, if maintained, can last an entire night. Girl drinks are fine on occasion, and a nice single-malt scotch will make you feel part of an ancient brotherhood. But the Jack & Coke is a people's drink, brown with obfuscated intention, a social lubricant that allows for the bigger questions and gives the timorous the temerity to ask a girl to dance.

9. The 3-point shot. Dean Smith, who is the 11th greatest thing in the world, won his last National Championship on the shoulders of Donald Williams, one of the most beautiful shooters ever to play in college. His 3-point shot, taken almost 20 feet from the hoop, was as graceful as ballet, and drove daggers into opponents with effortless ease. The arc is a beautiful thing, and like a great novel or symphony, you're never really sure where it's going to land. The lay-up or dunk is just too "on the nose" for my literary tastes; I like the shot that keeps you guessing. And when you release that shot off the tips of your fingers, your hopes follow - and if it goes in, the beaming satisfaction is that of a parent watching his youngest child graduate.

10. New York Fucking City. I'm including all the boroughs here, even you, Staten Island. Tessa calls it a city of orphans, and truly, most of us could never live anywhere else. You could rollerskate down Avenue A with your hair on fire and a sparkler duct-taped to your dingdong, and nobody would bother you. People think New Yorkers are jaded and have "seen it all," but I think it's subtler than that: New Yorkers simply appreciate everyone's desire to express themselves, because its most likely why they're here as well. Look at the Zodiac ceiling of Grand Central, or the graceful buttresses of the Brooklyn Bridge, the art deco phallus of the Chrysler Building, or the sweeping fauna of Prospect Park – I mean, that shit didn't have to be there. New Yorkers just try harder.

The rest of the country thinks we're self-involved and smug, fetishizing every last detail of the city and crowing about how things only have cultural relevance if they end up here. I say, if you can show me a place where gays can kiss outside, where blacks, Hispanics, Jews, Muslims and goofy white ex-fratboys can all joke on the same bus, where art is actually important to people, where investment bankers with families went back to work 100 yards from where 3000 of their compatriots were murdered a mere week after the event... then you can come join Tessa and me for a nice, cool beverage on our stoop in the beautiful rows of Park Slope. We would be glad to have you.

the kids in my family on Thompson St. in Soho: me, Sean, Michelle, Steve, Kent, November 2000

8/7/02 Smart celebrities are the

8/7/02

Smart celebrities are the ones that understand that they had a choice in the matter, and behave differently simply because they know the responsibility of being famous. It's the dumb ones that are always moaning about how they can't go to the store and say things like "you try being hounded." Like Morrissey sang, "you could have said no if you'd wanted to."

I think the same thing occurs when you write in a blog: the mere fact of making something available for public consumption ensures that you will necessarily have to deal with the opinions of others, and you had better be ready. Levels of expression by human beings occur in roughly the following states (from most private to public):

inner thought
inner thought written in a private diary
thought said out loud
thought expressed in front of a crowd of people
thought expressed in an online diary
idea expressed in a magazine
idea expressed in a movie or a song
idea expressed in a novel
idea etched in stone on side of mountain
idea buried in a time capsule
idea put in the Voyager satellite and launched into space

Now, the online diary occupies an interesting communication space just after "the spoken word," since the (unrecorded) spoken word can be misconstrued, re-purposed and even denied, thanks to the impermanence of memory. Blogs are also right before a magazine article, which, despite having a short shelf-life, remains searchable in print for a long time, has a modicum of research involved, and is delivered to thousands of people.

The online blog is in that limbo state between your private thoughts and public consumption, where half-theories and private anxieties are exposed to any number of people, like walking in on someone just hiking up their undies. It marks the liminal where an idea teeters from ethereal to universally searchable. This makes for a wonderful writing experience, because you can use free-form jazz and not research a damn thing just cull from your daily experiences and make gross generalizations about the world at large. The inherent disconnect, however, is that you have a tacit responsibility to be thoughtful to your audience the second you hit the "publish" button.

For instance, my brother Sean took offense at yesterday's blog, in which he accused me of being capricious and smug about moving to Brooklyn, since I'd said "everyone does it eventually." He's right: plenty of people don't move to Brooklyn, and work their whole lives just to live in midtown Manhattan. Just because I think something makes sense to me, doesn't mean it makes sense for everybody. Personally, I think Manhattan is overpriced, overcrowded, and best visited from the vantage point of a few miles away. But there are also millions of die-hard New Yorkers who would crater and disintegrate if they didn't get that special bagel every morning on the corner of 14th St. and 8th Avenue.

Which makes me think... do I need to get a graphic at the top of this page that says "In my experience..." so I don't have to type it in every time? It's like my brother Kent's friend in Minnesota who reads this every day because he thinks I'm a deliriously self-involved fuck. I agree with the fuck part, but how can you write a diary and not be self-involved? At the very least, the understood function of a blog is that it is just an opinion, written for free, naked and inchoate and fetal, about a work in progress called M-E. I'm not entirely sure if I agree with the theories I put in here last week.

There are so many blogs out there that I feel blessed that anyone even gives a shit; hell, they are 16 at my subway stop alone. I mean, any of you could be reading this chick instead of me. This thing was originally supposed to be about my coping with the drug Celexa, but it's useful for so much else. I'm going to have to be content with the misuse of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and accept that the viewing of this blog by other humans inherently changes it, and if newspapers are the "first draft of history," then blogs are the batter and not the cake.

Besides, I'm way more interesting than those knitting blogs.

Right?

8/6/02 There just comes a

8/6/02

There just comes a time when you have to move out of Manhattan. It may not be the time you think it is, and you may have serious reservations about missing the "fun" you could be having in the throbbing aorta of the city, but unless you have a ton of money or have some hideaway niche in a secret nook of the Village – the desire to move out is as instinctual as hunger. Or, put more specifically, the magnet that draws you to Manhattan is the same one that repels you to Brooklyn.

I didn't live in Manhattan long enough to get sick of it, but I did anyway. For years, however, I came up from North Carolina or from Los Angeles, and ended up on 1st Avenue in the East Village, where a disproportionate number of friends happened to live. The first wave, in the early 90s, was Jamie Block (5th St.), Ami Vitale (2nd St.) and of course, Tessa (on Ave. A, even though I never saw her place). Back then, the East Village was a fucked-up place swimming in heroin, and I recall never going past Avenue B unless you wanted to get your ass kicked.

The next wave of friends inherited the post-homeless, gentrified Giuliani East Village, all of whom moved there in 1997 or so: David Surowiecki, Jon and Catherine Gray, Lindsay and Dana, Lars, and then me in 2000. 1st Avenue became such a symbol of freedom to me, a great northward-churning strip that offered fun, purpose and an escape from the turgid, solipsistic, self-loathing I experienced everywhere else.

from the middle of 1st Avenue, looking north at sunset

Now, only Lars is left. Every single person who used to live on that avenue is now in Brooklyn, Prague, New Delhi or New City (NY). To a large extent, the very pheromonal buzz that brought us here had been largely squashed by '95 or so the "anti-folk" rage-mixed-with-nylon-strings intensity of Jamie's rock'n'roll scene was swept over in favor of lounge electronica and places with names like Karma. Soon enough, sorority girls were seen as far east as Avenue C, and the rent for shitholes near Tompkins Square Park lofted into the "$1700 for one bedroom" territory.

Like most things, I got to the party late: even though I had a stunningly well-compensated job on the Web, the dot-com wave had crested and washed ashore by June 2000. I had a place on the corner of 1st and 13th, and though my rent was small, I was growing tired of sleeping with my face against the ceiling and the screeching girls from Lake Ronkonkoma excoriating their boyfriends on cellphones. Something clicks in you after 30, you begin to experience the world in a way that isn't quite so overrun with endorphins, and you see the East Village for what it is: a lot of old, smelly buildings on a grid. There's plenty of drinking to be done if you're still looking for sex, but if you're past substance abuse, there's not much other recreation.

And so today I helped Dana and Lindsay move their things to Carroll Gardens, joining me and Tessa in the old clich we don't want to hear: "you move to Brooklyn for the space, and then New Jersey for the kids." I promise you none of us will be moving to fucking New Jersey, but the space is a big issue. I walked into Lindsay's new apartment and instantly saw how their books and belongings – long cramped into a dense, spiral nautilus – could stretch out and unfurl. Like my shrink says, "things in Brooklyn are built on a human scale."

The strange thing is that I still do miss a little drinking, a little swaying my head to the bleat of a bad band, and the little rush I'd get when I'd visit the boys from far-off lands and play hoops on Chrystie. There is still that vestigal hope that an avenue in the East Village can provide salvation, but you really do get to the age when you carry enough personality that you no longer fit in your Manhattan apartment.

8/5/02 Yeah, I know, it

8/5/02

Yeah, I know, it looks like a wedding invitation or maybe an invocation from the two of us, exhorting you to accept Jesus H. Christ into your ever-lovin' soul. Truth is, it's just a random moment on the Harlem Valley Rail Trail today, with me holding the camera away from us as far as I could muster, hoping we'd get the rainbow in the picture. Rainbows are among the most particular "you hadda be there" kind of moments, rarely translated onto film with even one-ninth of the glory of the original thing. But... I dunno, doesn't this one have the right spirit, at least?

8/4/02 There is something vaguely

8/4/02

There is something vaguely organic about being up here at the farm a day doesn't go by that we don't buy some goat cheese or milk or hydrangea grown or made exclusively at a farm called Aunt Bessie's Sheep Ranch or something. This place crawls with homegrown goodness, everything having that cow-poop-mixed-with-pablum smell that reminds you that you aren't very far from the source of hearty fuckin' goodness.

The truth is, it all tastes better, and on a larger scale, you feel like each dollop of local sheep cheese consumed somehow makes you Less a Part of the Problem, whatever the Problem might be. We actually have apricots and blueberries up here, which has been a nice re-education for me, since most of my flavor ideas have been long since warped by Starburst chews and sour gummi bears.

Somehow, none of the packaging for these local goods have changed they all sport the stripped-down homey style of 1887, or the ubiquitous green that says "I'm organic!" It reminds of my vegetarian years, roughly 1991-93, when I was besotted with the resurgence of community service amongst us Generation Xers, and got fat eating nothing but french fries. Part of that time I was dating Susan Comfort, and with that came no meat, relentless recycling, and repeated, horrified re-readings of Diet for a New America. I even wrote a couple of environmentally-themed songs at that time that were terrible. I mean, what the hell was I thinking???

One of the good things to come from those dioxin-free days was my involvement in a project called From the Hip, which was our little way of trying to convince the world that the members of Generation X weren't all Frito-munchin' scalawags with brainfuls of "Gilligan's Island" trivia. The project, of course, was doomed from the beginning.

We were never sure what kind of project it would be (a book? a video?) and though 280 young photographers scoured the country looking for "at-risk youths making a difference," only about three of them could take decent pictures. Most of our schemes in the summer of 1993 ended in humiliation at the hands of book agents and corporate sponsors, but none of that mattered to me: I was having too good a time.

It was then I got to know some fabulous people: Stasia Droze, who has since been like family; Lawrence Lucier, who became my confidante at CitySearch in 1996 and then my East Village roommate in 2000; even N'Gai Wright, who later became the character N'Wal in a little movie I'm working on called The Pink House. Our leader Tony Deifell, was an old Chi Psi buddy who always had a plan I learned a lot from his dogged determination, especially when we went to Washington D.C. to crack a few skulls.

Our project was a failure, as were most public service anthems dedicated to our generation (does anybody reading this remember Lead or Leave? At least those Third Millennium cats are still around). But like any project full of bright, intense young thinkers, we all have tons to say to each other even a decade later. That, and I really miss the "let's get together and put on a show" way of looking at one's career; we really did just rent an office in downtown Durham and hope for the best. These days, there's so much formality and structure that accompanies all our decisions - back then, if you had gas in the car, a paid phone bill and a place to get bourbon & cokes after work, anything seemed cool enough to try for a summer.

detail of the "From the Hip" group photo, showing me (with bouffant), Stasia Droze and Lawrence Lucier, August 1993

8/3/02 Okay, so this is

8/3/02

Okay, so this is the sort of journal entry you're supposed to write when you're fifty-three and start being entranced by nature the subject here is my pumpkin patch – but I swear to god, there's a Chi Psi frat party going on in my yard as I speak. Metaphorically, of course.

My fraternity can best be described as the place where hyper-intellectual, world-wise former dorks ended up when they wanted to flex their newfound social muscles. We usually got the girl, but only after a profound struggle, and only after she had dated some asshole Phi Delt first. Chi Psis at Carolina ran the school; we always had the student body president, the head of the athletic association, the editor of the paper, and we were the de facto home of the Morehead Scholars. I'm not sure what the Lodge looks like socially these days, but when I was social chairman, we mixed with all of the hottest, most Southern sororities the ones that would never have given any of us the time of day in high school.

We were total dorks, but most of us had never had access to women like that before (and those who didn't move to New York, never again). I used to have a problem justifying my place in a fraternity, which seems to anathema to everything I believe in, but age has taught me that people who hold contempt for a general idea - without interest in understanding the shades of gray that accompany them tend to be some of the most boring people in the world. Tessa and her best friend Jason Lyon call it "contempt prior to investigation," and I agree that it comes hand-in-hand with the death of one's spirit.

So I'll say what I always say: if you were there, you would have loved our bunch of guys. Or at least 75% of them (like all microcosms, it had its requisite share of groaners). Besides, my rule about anything in life is "if you make three lifelong friends, it's going to be worth it," and by my count, I have about eighteen lifelong friends, so those willing to pass judgement can eat me.

Anyway, at these Chi Psi parties, eighty of us would start milling about the living room around 9pm in various states of drunken anticipation. By 10pm, we were sure none of the chicks were going to show up, but by 11:30, they would start trickling in. There were always a pack of five or six girls that really dug the mixer's particular theme - we had parties dedicated to the Boxer Rebellion (we all wore Chinese boxers), or a Coast-to-Coast Hall Crawl, where the entire second floor would become a map of the United States, and each room would have a drink that corresponded to that state (my corner room was California, and therefore daiquiris).

Our "scene" was small enough that everyone dated everyone else's girlfriends as long as enough time had passed to make it kosher (usually when both parties had other interests, so about 3 weeks), making the whole thing very communal (or incestual, depending on your attitude). In the end, it was a very colorful, intense place that sustained itself through relentless innovation, intellect, and a desire to have sex.

Which leads me to my pumpkin patch. Sometime in the last two weeks, the garden has exploded, leaving me to believe that I planted WAY too many pumpkin seeds in one place. Seeds look so little, you know? At this point, the pumpkin vines have broken free of their fenced-in shackles and begun to creep over the lawn.

our pumpkin patch is now "Little Shop of Horrors"-esque

The amazing thing about a pumpkin is that it has to pollinate itself. Male and female flowers grow on the vine at the same time, and it depends on bees to bring pollen from the male to the female. And if bees aren't around, you, the stalwart gardener, have to force the pumpkin vine to have sex with itself. You do this delicately, by finding a male flower that has just opened, and swishing it around inside a female flower.

You can tell a female flower (red circle and arrow) from a male flower (blue circle and arrow) by the large, pregnant pouch at the bottom of the females. Also, there are a shitload of males around, about eight to every female, and they start blooming weeks before the females even get out of bed.

So... a over-functioning plant that breaks free of its barriers, sprouts men that get to the party way early to woo the small, disturbed following of late women, has incestual relationships with its own pool, and then creates a beloved fruit for a weird holiday? Ladies and gents, we got ourselves a Chi Psi frat party!

8/2/02 Twelve years ago today

8/2/02

Twelve years ago today I was in a car accident that shoved my destiny in a different direction; for a long time I would have said it was a terrible thing, but now I have to say that my official quote of that day "I'm fucked and my life is over" – has turned out to be largely false.

The "I'm fucked" quote is bandied about my family not just as an example of my overwrought sense of persecution, but as a general phrase of total disillusionment. All of us are capable of impenetrable spirals of theatrical gloom, but apparently I was particularly good at it (and quotable to boot).

The day in question August 2, 1990 – was either the day of or day after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait (how relevant, eh?) and I was just finishing up my first month of my job at New Line Cinema as their very first Beverly Hills production intern. Those were the days of their first huge successes, namely the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies and the Nightmare on Elm Street series.

I was originally hired at New Line to be the main production assistant for an unmitigated piece of shit called Suburban Commando, a fish-outta-water comedy starring Hulk Hogan as an alien who must crash to earth to refuel, or something. It was uninspiring dreck, but at the time, I was so broke that I was literally living off of one loaf of Brannola Oat Bread and a brick of cheddar cheese, no lie. I lived in an apartment with Sean and Michelle in Monrovia, CA and we probably had fifteen dollars between us for the month of July 1990. It was a disastrous living situation, and the Iraqi invasion had sent gas prices so high that I couldn't afford to drive to look for work. Suffice to say "Suburban Commando" looked like heaven to me at the time, for $600 a week!

Pretty soon, I understood one of the life's great truths: get in the door somewhere, and if you're smart and competent, you will run the place in three weeks. The key, of course, is getting in the door. At New Line, I soon became the secretary for the whole production department, answering calls and helping post-production on movies like Pump Up the Volume and Metropolitan, being a fly on the wall during meetings discussing upcoming ideas (all of them just awful) and getting stuck in the elevator for 20 minutes with the likes of Andrew "Dice" Clay and Jerry Lewis.

I was a very bad secretary, sending rejection letters to the wrong people and always being late, but I think they kept me around because I always provided good conversation. It continued that way until August 2, when, on the way home from work, I was read-ended by a reggae drummer in a white Mazda truck. He had been pushing 60mph on Cahuenga Blvd., and after he hit me, smashed into two other cars and ended upside-down (and unhurt). As for me, my glasses were found a block away. The impact had shortened my VW Bug in half, and the whiplash well, if any of you have had it, you know what I mean. Still in debt, almost out of cheddar cheese, knowing my Hollywood job – sans car – was over, I called my mom in New York in tears and said, "I'm fucked and my life is over."

Two weeks later I was back in Chapel Hill, where I was to stay for another seven years, even though I'd graduated. I should have known better than to try Los Angeles again in 1997, but I thought perhaps things would work out better. They ended up being worse, but in much more interesting ways.

And here I am, 12 years later, far away from those awful places, standing on the edge of getting my first movie off the ground. My therapist was right about one thing: nothing worth doing comes without a heavy dose of ambivalence, but I'll add my own piece of advice. Nothing worth doing comes without thinking at some point that you are fucked, or that your life is over.

my grandma and I at the Grand Canyon, July 1990. I didn't think I had a mullet, but I suppose this proves otherwise

8/1/02 We saw Endpapers last

8/1/02

We saw Endpapers last night at the Variety Arts theatre in the East Village, thanks to some inexpensive tickets provided by the talented and very cool Alex Draper. The show itself, concerning the political intrigue inside a fading independent book publisher, was about six great lines shy of an good play, and in many ways was pretty inconsistent. The actors were, on the whole, nuanced and funny, and approximately two of the roles featured some reversals you couldn't see coming - but overall, the fight between "this company gotta make money" and "this company gotta stick to ideals" has been trite for about fifty years now.

Still, the blue-hairs were lining up to see the show; a busload of elderly Jewish couples were shipped in from Dix Hills and all of them tittered on cue. It works because it's a simple play, one that sets up a very recognizable battle between corporate reality and artistic imagination, and then plays it out to what everyone in the theater reasoned to be a fair conclusion.

I'm going to spoil the play for anyone who hasn't seen it right now...

but...

...basically, the banker who threatened to call the loan on the publishing house ends up being the CEO after the charismatic luminary dies which is okay, we're told, because he reads a lot and "gets it." Gramps in Seat 105B thought this was a terrific ending, but actually, it's a bit of a nightmare. The bank guy owns the publishing house? It's obvious the playwright also thought this was cool, as his other choices were unacceptably bipolar: a gruff idealist who makes bad business decisions, and a slick entrepreneur who has no heart. The bank guy (deftly played by Alex), and therefore the playwright, has informed the audience on sixteen different occasions that he likes books and quotes poetry, so he's the obvious choice: business with a heart. Compassionate conservatism.

But in my head I always extend a play's storyline longer than it runs, and in my extended remix, the bank guy eventually gets cold feet and sells the whole fucking company to AOL while the gettin's good. If not that, he makes bad decisions and ruins the company and then sells it to AOL. Either way, I think the wrong choice was made here. Bank guys aren't supposed to run publishing houses; that's why they don't.

If you accept that, you can also accept that the playwright wrote a tragedy and didn't even know it. Long is the tradition of the "unreliable narrator" in fiction, you know, the first-person storyteller who obviously misinterprets his own story. But how about the "unreliable novelist," someone who creates a work of "art" that has its own intention outside of the artist?

Joe Eszterhas became an "unreliable screenwriter" with Showgirls, which was unintentionally funny both Beck (Loser) and R. Crumb (Keep on Truckin') became an unreliable composer and cartoonist, respectively, when their work – to their horror – was adopted as a generational credo.

Maybe my own words, right here on this page, are telling you things that I don't want you to know. Perhaps this diary is having the opposite effect on you that I want, each word radiating the wrong meaning. God, am I an "unreliable blogger"?