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!!!