xtcian

9/7/02 Too exhausted for words

9/7/02

Too exhausted for words again, so pictures'll have to do. We finished the day, it was all fantastic, and as Rick said, each shoot has had at least one totally drop-dead hilarious moment. Yesterday it was Karmen and Jess doing their lame-ass cartwheels; today it was Amy Heidt as Berniece, doing a spit take with a teddy bear attached to her temple. The things we do for comedy, I swear to god...

(click on any picture for a larger version)

me and Zack Ward atop the roof at the sound studio, 8th Ave and 14th St.

recreating the school office scene a year later in a Williamsburg carpentry shop

Amy Heidt as Berniece getting dolled up by Rick

9/6/02 After a four-hour night

9/6/02

After a four-hour night of sleep and a 14-hour day of re-shoots on the Pink House, my brain is too skittishly exhausted to make for cogent reading, but I will say this: it was sunny and 70, we finished the day's shooting on schedule, and all of the shots are really funny. At least they made us laugh, and that's really all we can expect sometimes, right? Meantime, here's some pictures:

Karmen Helms and Jessica Arinella back in sorority makeup; they were terrific today

creating the "pink flour rushes through house ventilation system" shot, a plot point I encourage for all you beginning screenwriters

the crew hard at work on the last shot of the evening: Rick Gradone and John Kelleran as adorable retards, and me and Tessa as earnest filmmaker auteurs

9/5/02 Lord knows I'm a

9/5/02

Lord knows I'm a little obsessed with my pet project of taking the same picture years and years apart (check out examples here or here or here or here) but making movies with flashbacks is even more fun, because you can have your character at age 19 and age 89 with you at the same time! Such a thing will happen tomorrow with our first re-shoots of the Pink House movie, when Ed Van Nuys and my brother Sean will recur their roles as Old and Young Oxford respectively. Personally, I think the casting was brilliant, even on a superficial level:

left: Sean Wylde (Williams) as Oxford in 1929
right: Ed Van Nuys as Oxford in the present

9/4/02 There have to be

9/4/02

There have to be literally thousands of blogs out there tonight, about to weigh in on the two major news items of the day Iraq and the Johannesburg environmental summit - and god knows with the amount of yammering going on about the predictability of most blogs, it would seem like peeing into a roiling ocean to add anything. But the Bush administration seems to be so wildly full of shit, that I have to just blurt it out, if only to make myself feel like I have a voice at all.

First off, I don't know one living person, you know, in the flesh, who wants this war with Iraq. At first I thought Bush & Co. were just doing the hard-core bluff in order to pre-empt any horseshit Saddam might have coming down the pike, or at least to leverage inspectors back in. But now I truly believe these morons are pushing us further towards bombing the hell out of their country. Yeah, I know, "Saddam must be dealt with," blah blah, etc. etc. but there must be bullet-proof smoking-gun evidence that he is close to possessing nukes and is likely to use them (the first I believe to be true, the latter I certainly do not). Even so, he should be given time to dismantle them, and we should be able to send in inspectors to clean the place up. Sure, this all might be wishful thinking on my part, but unless he is psyched to die a martyr (something he is WAY too much of a petty control freak to do) I think it should be the American way to believe that all people are capable of second acts and redemption.

Given the hostility that the U.S. has been receiving recently (and that includes the European allies whose collective asses we saved 50 years ago), a strike against a country that has never done anything to us seems full-blown insane. Even if it's more complicated than that to Republican think tanks, it sure won't be complicated to a young Islamic teen watching it unfold on Al-fucking-Jazeera. Saddam also has got to have contingency plans in the event of his removal, very likely the clandestine handoff of god-only-knows-what to interested parties who would like to make everyone in Manhattan sick. Suffice to say if this war happens, I'm dragging my family up to the farm for a few months until cooler heads prevail.

The worst of it is this: it's all about oil. Every single bit of it. Bush has some sort of wildcatting gene that throws him into estrus every time fossil fuels get churned into the sky. And Americans are just as bad collectively; 51% of new cars last year were SUVs, with an average fuel economy of, like, 2 miles to the gallon.

Which brings us to the Johannesburg summit, where the USA has basically told the entire planet to fuck off. Never mind that the average temperature of the Northern Hemisphere has risen over a degree Fahrenheit in the last ten years alone, never mind that the worst droughts in the world are in the Islamic tinderbox of central Asia, forming a populace more than happy to strike back at the thugs that have 4% of the world's population, yet create 23% of its greenhouse gases (that would be us, for those of you playing at home). Bush's fucking Republican oil-grubbing white racist team of motherfuckers are not only mortgaging away my kids' future, they're basically inviting every country on Earth to hate us even more. Is there a master plan that I don't get, or are they the stupidest bunch of rednecks ever to cheat their way into running the free world?

And still, Americans don't care. They'll continue to vote for Bush and his limp-dicked cronies because they fear regime change while we're "at war." More than likely, the rest of America has been anesthetized by the glacial breeze of their Navigator's air conditioning unit, by the untold liters of Starbucks frappucinos, and by the constant re-runs of "Friends" on digital cable. Meanwhile, a young man in the parched basin of what used to be Iran's great Lake Hamoun will look across the cracked ground and begin to seethe with rage, and I don't blame him one god-damned bit. I look across my cracked psyche at the White House and feel the same way.

9/3/02 By all accounts, my

9/3/02

By all accounts, my sister was a bit of a surprise in 1972, showing up in my mom's 41st year as a little present to all of us boys thinking we were going to rule the roost in a quadratic algorithm of testosterone-charged superpower. If she was a boy, her name was to be Joshua, but instead we got Michelle, and in many ways, she keeps all of us honest. I don't know anybody who so perfectly mixes my generation's affinity for sarcasm and idealism better; she's a poster child for all things good. As a kid, she was intractable to the point of mild mania (a famous story she hates involves a rainy day and a pair of Wellingtons), but then again, she got shit done. Playing with Michelle for the afternoon meant no fucking around there was going to be a castle built with playpeople and a working moat, and if you weren't helping, you were bloody well in the way.

Michelle shows one of her creations, a bizarre trans-species mix of G.I. Joes and PlayMobile people, circa 1977

Well into adulthood, she always had her ducks in a row, even when she was a goth chick, and even if it meant a shitty job in a place like West Covina, CA so she could pay her way through junior college. She ended up graduating from Millikin University in 1995 with a major in musical theater, and spent a few years in Chicago and Kansas City being the best thing in some otherwise middling shows. Heeding the bad advice of her brothers (je suis culpable), she moved to Los Angeles and probably would have gotten a great gig there if all of us hadn't moved to New York within months of her arrival.

NYC, however, has been both a blessing and a curse for her being a natural organizer and leader, she is unfortunately one of the world's greatest waitresses, which makes the food industry all too easy a trap. She disappears into every restaurant like quicksand, emerging every month or so with plenty of money but an empty heart. She was fabulous as a wily sorority girl in the Pink House movie, as well as Mac's play The Second String, but the next day always found her back in Union Square Café stripes.

Michelle, Easter 2002

September 11th changed a lot for Michelle, however, as she was one of the first volunteers down at Ground Zero, and wrote so well about it afterward that her words found their way into Slate Magazine. They eventually gave her a week-long diary that recounted her new passion: becoming an EMT and getting certified in emergency medicine. So when an opportunity arose for her to cross the United States as an EMT as part of the American Frontiers Public Lands Trek, we basically told her she couldn't not go. Two months walking across America and nursing hikers back to shape? No brainer!

The trek itself is actually pretty cool in a country criss-crossed with privately-owned ranches and huge swaths of corporate holdings, not to mention the freeways and various other trouble you can get into whilst in the countryside, it's actually a novel idea to cross the U.S. entirely on lands owned by you. Ostensibly, you can take the path these trekkers take, and not get fucked with by anybody, not get permission, not have to do anything but breathe and put one foot in front of the other. It seems a perfect fit for my sister. Michelle is that rare kind of non-self-righteous vegetarian, the perfect tree-hugging liberal who also likes dumb boys and gets her toenails done. She makes idealism palatable, because she understands ennui as well as anyone.

And her writing, which is descriptive yet simple, hooks you unwitting. Read her daily journals on the American Frontier bio for her, and you can feel the hunger for a pesto pizza after a week of eating outside, you can hear the lap of cold river threatening to spill into her dugout boat. Even now, as one of the Trek's sponsors is dropping the ball (she won't say which one) and failing to give the journey any press, Michelle is determined to make them pay for their disdain. She called us tonight to get one of our journalist friends to write an article on the Trek, so that a tree falling in the forest truly can make some noise.

Last night she slept in Island Falls, Idaho after three days of pounding rain. I looked at the map and discovered that she is mere miles from Last Chance, Idaho a town I doubt she will ever visit, either literally or figuratively.

detail from family portrait, 1988 Michelle and I had hair that was truly the envy of all we surveyed

9/2/02 Bed felt good tonight,

9/2/02

Bed felt good tonight, so good that I hung the camera up on top of the curtain rod and put it on a timer, 'cuz some moments you have to catch, especially when you're a self-involved archivist like me. We spent the day scouting for the Pink House reshoots, then I rejiggered the crappy bookshelf I made last week, filled it with books, then created a home-made frame for our 1880 train map of America. By the time I did the dishes, I pulled a Scotty Bullock and had "too much pie," a Fruit of the Forest concoction that made both Tessa and I roil from bloatedness. So here we lie, a day full of Labor, which is what Labor Day is all about, right?

9/1/02 My brother Kent took

9/1/02

My brother Kent took issue with my blog from a few days ago while I was bemoaning the state of art and brilliance in my generation, and also stating that Manhattan makes being an artist downright unbearable. He responded:

Art isn't made best by the comfortable, unfortunately for those who try. The reason that New York has always been a site of creative ferment is that it isn't 100% comfortable, and the inspiration of desperation makes people productive.

Which is basically true, and Orson Welles (as Harry Lime) had that great line in The Third Man about how 30 years of noisy, violent churning under the Borgias in Italy produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance - while 500 years of peace, quiet and harmony in Switzerland produced the cuckoo clock.

I understand all that, but there is still such little emphasis being placed on art as a career in this country if anyone told you that they were a painter, more often than not, your response would be, "yeah, but what do you really do?" Making movies is respected only because there is the shot at a pretty big monetary payoff (even Tessa's dad asked us at the diner if Five Wives had made any money yet - never mind that it was on the short list for the documentary Oscar). And to an extent, being a visual artist is generally tolerated because so many websites need an artistic rendering, and websites help companies sell products.

All other "artists" can fuck off, as far as most people are concerned, and the rents in so-called "artistic neighborhoods" (SoHo, Chelsea, etc.) only further the reality that it's okay to be an artist as long as you have a $10 million trust fund. The government cuts funding for the arts yearly, even though it adds up to pennies per American per year. I suppose, in a nutshell, all I'm saying is that New York, which is supposed to be an artistic haven, has priced itself out of genuine talent. That pre-supposes that rich people aren't generally talented, something I happen to believe, but don't have the energy to defend it tonight.

No doubt Kent's right, and some poor, struggling writer, poet or painter will claw his way out of his/her hovel in the Bronx, and his/her work will be better for the struggle. But that idea has become so quaint that most people have opted for some other day job they can stand, just to pay rent around here. Soon enough, someone who could have been a brilliant playwright finds herself working at Chase Manhattan for five years, and before you know it, she's a banker. If you want to find some of today's unwitting Mozarts, Eschers and e.e. cummings, they're the ones vaguely dreaming of an alternate life, while they make doodles on a pad, at a desk on the 34th floor of the Citibank building, a stack of papers waiting to be input into Microsoft Excel.

basically, that's me doing the same in 2000 at the Woolworth Building

8/31/02 I think I'll dispense

8/31/02

I think I'll dispense with today's events (I sat in traffic most of the day, Jiffer and I went to the farm, and then played CatchPhrase! with Lindsay in Millerton) and go straight to...

The Celextant, August 30, 2002

For those of you just getting here, The Celextant is my little way of making myself write about the Celexa I take daily which is obviously a self-involved navel-gazing subject if there ever was one, but since this is my blog, I get to do whatever I want. Like Woody Allen said, "what's wrong with masturbation? it's sex with someone I love!"

Anyway, I'm still on 30mg a day, and lately I've found myself slipping back into the "lost afternoons" of anxiety where a particular topic (usually the same old shit) can catch me in a chokehold and refuse to relent. I'm back to functioning semi-normally at Asset, but a jaunt into the heart of Times Square last night left me looking around, wondering how long it will all last.

I could go a dose higher, up to 40mg of the Celexa a day (which is normal) but I just got over the fatigue and sexual silliness that the smaller dose brought on. Besides, I think I may have a problem that drugs just simply aren't going to fix. I need to find inner serenity in a way that is self-propelling, a genuine warmth of heart and mind that comes from the release of control. But 35 years of private obsessive-compulsion has left me pretty wrecked: I was even obsessive about hiding my obsessiveness. Sometimes I look at pictures of us at Carolina, and wish I could find that mindset again. I wasn't particularly happy towards the end, but I thought my biggest problems were trying to have sex with some chick on Pritchard Street.

In the end, you find comfort in the strangest of places. I was looking at pictures of the human brain tonight, and something about the stark, wet, physical reality of our thoughts, fears and desires gave my troubles a nice perspective. I mean, look at the bulges, blood vessels and folded lobes of matter. It seems pretty easy to insert happiness into that glob, just as easy as anxiety, right?