xtcian

11/16/02 If a movie ever

11/16/02

If a movie ever needed two directors, it's the new Harry Potter flick; I feel like Tessa and I brought invaluably complementary strengths to the The Pink House; two cerebral cortexes full of right and left-brained ideas that were only hamstrung by our lack of money. The "Potter" series, making more money than the country of Uruguay, have no such limitation and easily could have hired someone else to bring a little... I dunno, magic to the equation. Chris Columbus is nice and all, an affable schlocky dude who can deliver any movie you want with all the fixins laid out neatly by your plate, but he lacks the tiny edge of madness, or the hint of impenetrable darkness that would make "Chamber of Secrets" close to J.K. Rowling's sad heart.

I have only idle conjecture to base this on, but I largely suspect Rowling's divorce plays a big role in the way she writes men: only the sexually discharged Dumbledore and Hagrid come off as benevolent in her books. Everywhere else, her men are murderous, untrustworthy, sadistic or at best, pusillanimous like Mr. Weasely. Snape, Vernon Dursley, Lockhart, Filch, the Malfoys, and everyone on up to Voldemort himself are a laundry list of the worst aspects of men. Rowling's too good a writer to fall into many traps (which is why Sirius Black's transformation is so beautiful), but all of her male relationships are terrifyingly complicated.

Which makes you wonder why there aren't many more stronger women involved. Like Kelly said in the car on the way home, Hermione is the smartest, but she still needs rescuing. McGonagall is formidable, but still answers to Dumbledore. It's a man's world, this wizarding, and it's too bad that boys don't read books with female protagonists.

Either way, Chris Columbus needed a Dark Partner to help him make this movie, and he didn't have one film dorks like me have high hopes that Alfonso Cuarón can give the next book the non-focus-grouped, non-audience-tested, dark and gothic treatment it deserves. So far we've gotten Garfield and we need Edward Gorey.

me, Tessa, Dana, Lindsay and Eric at the 6:30pm showing of "Chamber of Secrets" in Millerton. We braved the freezing rain to be in a theater full of wonderfully yelping kids

11/15/02 I was reminded today,

11/15/02

I was reminded today, as it is the premiere of the second Harry Potter movie, that exactly one year ago I left for a cross-country drive to see my dad for Thanksgiving in Napa Valley (after seeing a 10am matinee of the first movie). It was a drive fraught with AM radio (as I had nothing else), containing the worst opinions of right-wing nutsos on talk shows, and their slightly-more disturbing callers, phoning in to wax racist about the "towelheads" that had recently imploded the World Trade Center. It was that kind of trip, through the fallow, brown cornfields of Nebraska and dead desert of Nevada, where you truly get the scope of America, and how beautiful and awful it is at once.

A year later and not a thing has changed: still a band of monkeys running the White House, stark warnings from the FBI about the likelihood of another attack, and a cold winter brewing depression for anyone enamored of the sun. The only thing I can hope for this winter is to avoid another descent into madness, staved off partly by pills, partly by therapy, and mostly by exhaustion.

It's just that I don't know how much longer this country can do this dance: shots fired at our feet by a government that knows only how to peddle fear to make us complacent, and a band of terrorists who make daily threats against anyone siding with America. This dance, I suppose, will last until the next big terrorist spectacle, after which there might be a spot of relief to those who survived it: a lot like what Liz said about Washington during the sniper spree. Apparently, there was a rush on gas, grocery and shopping every time there was a shooting, because they knew the sniper would be laying low for a day or two.

It's a pathetic way to live, one that makes me want to be a farmer. The truth of this era seems to be this: whatever you worry might happen, the actual outcome will be worse, but somehow more interesting.

Thanksgiving 2001 in St. Helena, CA everyone in this picture is speaking at the same time; I have "depression sideburns"

11/14/02 Today's blog goes out

11/14/02

Today's blog goes out to a girl named Heidi Downing. I don't know where she is, I don't know if she's married, or has kids, or if she is even still with us, but Heidi was the first girl who ever thought I was cool enough to like. Almond-eyed and cute in that effortlessly English sort of way, she sat right behind me in Miss Scrivener's 3rd Form class (the equivalent of fifth grade) at the Dollis School in London, where I spent the years 1977 and 1978.

When I started my first day of school in London, I was already pissed off: it was June, and Americans had been on summer break for a month, but there were still six weeks of the school year left in London. The curious habits, dress code, and indecipherable accents of my class had me mute for weeks. But gradually my Americanhood, and subsequent coolness, won out, and for the first time in my life, I was considered cute, popular and funny. It was all to end disastrously as we were shipped back to Iowa two years later (and I got the shit beat out of me again) but for those English school years, I was in heaven.

Heidi teased me relentlessly, sprayed me with paper-mach, gossiped, spoke rudely of her parents and her idiotic girlfriends, and made me feel like I was the coolest guy in Mill Hill. Together with my best buddy Adam Regis, we were truly as inseparable as Harry, Hermione and Ron - and I developed a deep, soulful love for the girl. It was the kind of affection that was effortless and obvious, it was one I never even worried about. I looked forward to school on Sunday nights. I remember one kid taunting me saying, "You like Heidi, don't you?" and my immediate reaction was "Of course I do, you twit." This kid's comment, coming from some other era where I "wasn't supposed to like girls" seemed so... un-evolved to me.

The problem with trying to find girls you've known is that their names tend to change. The whole sexist surname-changing thing makes Google an ineffectual tool to find half of your old friends. I can only hope that Heidi is out there somewhere, perhaps searching for her own name, finding this site, and understanding this: that she taught me so much about relaxing, that she made my 10-year-old body understand the idea of a non-traumatic love, and that she was the first person who made it possible to be with the incredible woman I find myself with today:

with Tessa at Prospect Park this afternoon we were screwing around, and it wasn't supposed to look like a Christmas card, but...

11/13/02 One of the problems

11/13/02

One of the problems with being a raving technophile (no, not the dancing kind) is that you stand on the front line of all new gadgets and cool electronic stuff and take a lot of arrows for your trouble. It happened with the satellite radio, when we couldn't get signal anywhere from W. 26th St. to Bleecker (XM Radio said that the National Security Agency were broadcasting on the same frequency), and it happened with the Pink House movie, where we were the first to marry DV, 16mm film and ten different kinds of animation.

It happened this week as well forced into a bit of a computer scarcity, we bit the bullet and bought the best Mac currently for sale, a dual-processor 1.25GHz G4 with Final Cut Pro 3. It's the sort of system we spent afternoons dreaming about, particularly the afternoons spent waiting for the old G3 to render video. It has more hard drive space than the Siberian plains, and it starts up so fast that it takes a few times to get used to it.

Problem is, it doesn't work. At least for us making movies. There are so many weird balls in the air when it comes to Final Cut Pro the editing program doesn't particularly like OS 10 yet, you have to have QT 6, the "media" has to be on separate drives, and there are "capture" issues. In fact, there are "so many" niggling little "problems" that I have to put it in "quotation marks" because I have "no idea" what is going on past a certain point.

Wow, that last sentence looked like a Zagat review.

Anyway, our intrepid editor Jessie spent damn near four hours on the phone with Apple, then logged another 3 hours with the people who sold us the computer, then with the people who sold us that G3 years ago. Tessa took her turn for two hours, with Support Professionals determined not to help us unless we spent the requisite $799 for a year of tech support. In my book, that's highway fuckin' robbery for a product that should work in the first place. It makes me believe that the G4 computer itself is a loss leader, something Apple sells for no profit as a way to get you to buy all the crap surrounding it. One of the biggest loss leaders in business are the burgers at fast food joints; McDonald's loses money on a Big Mac, but the profit margin for cokes and fries is astronomical.

Now, I've always been Apple's biggest defender: I have one of the first Macs ever made (the Mac 128K), I cut my teeth on the 512K then spent three years on a Mac Plus, and followed that up with three more on a Quadra 660AV (still working) and a Powerbook 1400 (regrettably sold on eBay to make room for this very iBook I'm typing on now). But Jessie may be on to something when she says that the move from OS 9 to OS X which is a shift from Apple's old system code to a more universal, UNIX-based system – is disrupting the old school of passionate Apple dork tech support guys and replacing them with people who, like Raymond Chandler said of Los Angeles, "have the most of everything and the best of nothing." In short, these guys kinda don't know what the fuck they're talking about.

My mom only uses the second generation of every technology, the "x.1" version of stuff, because most of the kinks are worked out. It's why I bought the second iMac and the second iBook. But most of the time, I just don't have the patience for waiting. So here we are, at the bow of the lead ship, being sprayed with code as a digital storm is raging. Meanwhile, we have to FINISH THIS MOVIE. You know why there is a long list of "fixed bugs" in the new version of any software? It's because wet sailors like us are outside trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with the weather.

11/12/02 Today's blog is brought

11/12/02

Today's blog is brought to you by a Fisher-Price Record Player and the song "She's a Beauty" by the Tubes.

This particular record player is a replica of my first one (which was white plastic) given to me for my fifth birthday or thereabouts. I had three 45rpm singles: "Love is Blue" by Paul Mariat and his Orchestra, "Sunny," and the Fifth Dimension's "Up, Up and Away." I played these songs so incessantly that the babysitters usually took them away. By the time I was 8 or so, I'd figured out how to rig the record player to play LP's (it involved a soldering iron on the sly), and put on Vince Guaraldi's Oh, Good Grief! until the locals went nuts.

Last year, while I was biding my time at That Internet Job and drifting into impenetrable lapses of afternoon-long glumness, I would hop on eBay and start bidding on all the things that made me feel giddy when I was young. Among the cooler purchases were a Fisher-Price Happy Houseboat (actually floats!) for Michelle, and an original Gnip-Gnop game for Sean, complete with ping-pong balls I painted the appropriate day-glo colors. One of these purchases was this Fisher-Price Record Player, which came with a selection of really bad 45rpm singles.

Anyway, yesterday I heard "She's a Beauty" on the 80s XM Satellite Radio station (you know the song: "step right up, and don't be shy") and today I broke out the F-P player and found my single of the very same. Thus over the last two days I heard the Tubes song in the newest possible way, and the oldest possible way. Not to be a sentimental drag or anything, but young kids do miss out on the physical quality of albums; just to feel your young fingerprints against a 45 of your favorite band... of course, CDs make so much more sense. We were playing an old album on the ancient Phillips turntable upstate last week, and I was stunned at how quickly a side ends. Just for the hassle of constantly turning records over, I'd like to thank the digital revolution.

Oh yeah, and thanks for Zaxxon too. That game was awesome!

11/11/02 Like many of the

11/11/02

Like many of the best things about the web, the Babelfish language translator has been around since the beginning. I've been using it a fair amount lately to massage my French back into working order; one good trick is to take a web page you know, then translate it to French and read it back to yourself. There are lots of little vocab words I've let dangle by the curbside of my brain, easy words like "laid," which ironically means "ugly." It's remembering this crap that helps you get by in another country.

Of course, the translator isn't perfect, and you can get some pretty surreal stuff back. One of my favorite things to do is take an English page, translate it to French, then translate that translation back to English. It's like a game of "Operator," as the meanings get more and more diffused by their ancient Latin roots.

Take one of my blog entries from last week:

"My fellow Americans:
What the fuck is wrong with you?
It was in tonight's fading hours that I realized the same horror that I had sublimated almost two years ago: it's not the Republicans I can't stand, it's you. Exactly what mass delusion are you suffering from, the one that told you it was okay to let one party take over the White House, both chambers of Congress and the Supreme Court? It's one thing to tolerate a political party that doesn't like black people, that wants to keep women earning 73 cents to a man's dollar, to start an era of coat-hanger abortions, to unilaterally attack any country full of brown people that they want, and to fuck up the environment so bad that my grandkids will have to wear 450 SPF sunscreen just to go play on a jungle gym it's quite another to put them in control of OUR ENTIRE FUCKING COUNTRY."

And here it is in French turned back into English:

"Americans of mine:
What kisses are erroneous with you?
It was in hours of obliteration that I carried out the same horror that I had sublimated almost two years ago: they are not the Republicans whom I cannot be held, he is you. Exactly from which delusion of mass do you suffer, that which indicated to you that it was correct let a part ensure White Home, the two rooms of the Congress and the Court Supreme? It is a thing to tolerate a political part which does not love the black people, that wants to continue women to gain 73 hundreds with the dollar of a man, to begin one era of the abortions of coat-clotheshanger, to attack unilaterally any completely brown people whom they want, and for shit in the environment so bad that my grandkids will have to carry the SPF 450 sunscreen just to go play on a gymnastics of jungle. It is completely another to put them in the ordering of OUR WHOLE COUNTRY KISSING."

I guess you could keep translating it from there, go into Portuguese, Spanish, German, and then back into English, but I think I'd like to end with our whole country kissing.

11/10/02 Well, it's as official

11/10/02

Well, it's as official as we can be in this ever-changin' world: Tessa and I are going to move to France for a while. The Film Program at Cannes has invited us to teach at the newly-forming winter/spring film school, from next February until June, and as long as nothing insane happens, I think we'll be able to do it. Tessa was asked to teach documentary filmmaking and writing, and they'd like me to teach screenwriting. It's an incredible honor, and to be honest, who wouldn't want to spend the dregs-end of winter on the French Riviera? Take a look - seems cool, right?

We're still not exactly sure how they found us, but I think they had a representative at the IFP Market Market a few weeks back, and liked what they saw. They did the research on Tessa, who has an impeccable resum, and the next thing you know, I'm teaching her how to say merveilleusement. My own resumé is less geared towards teaching, which is funny, because I guest-lectured for about three years when 13th-GEN came out - but for some reason that always seemed more like fun than a job. Now we'll both have to get serious about a syllabus and a course outline, and I might learn some more HTML so I can keep the class notes online like they do nowadays.

Of course, this set us off on a barely-tamed spree of buying a bunch of books on the subject, and we plastered our bedroom walls with art like this:

the Michelin map of the Cte D'Azur, with a red arrow by Cannes

It will also be a good test of my French, even if most people in Cannes will only speak English when I come around. I've always believed you shouldn't visit a country unless you know some of the language (and if you don't, then shut the fuck up while you're there). Nothing is more disgusting than fat Americans going to other lands and screeching in English; they make me sick with their giant parkas and ketchup demands. I've been so determined not the be The Ugly American throughout my life that I studied Swahili for three months before we went to Kenya when I was 16, and I think I got around okay. The Kenyans at the market were so surprised to hear a red-headed kid speaking their language that making friends was pretty instantaneous (it's a very friendly sorta country anyway).

Getting the hell out of America for a while couldn't have come at a better time; I'm so sickened by this country's behavior lately that the French will seem couth by comparison. Just getting some perspective, you know, to be free of Fox News, Hardee's commercials and Trent Fuckin' Lott for three months has to be something of an emotional enema.