xtcian

2/1/03 Day 42 of the

2/1/03

Day 42 of the Oh No, Not Again Road Trip of Violently Earthbound Aspirations

Houston, TX

We had half a mind to drive north this morning, out of Houston, past Nacogdoches and into Dallas, but we decided to stick around another day and have the afternoon to ourselves for once. Frankly, I'm glad we did I don't need to be in the middle of another national tragedy. Being in Houston is bad enough. The headlines here were pulling out the rarely-used 150-pt. font screaming "SHUTTLE DISASTER"; Columbia took off from here last month, and pieces were found not far from the city. Turns out the most important piece was left on the runway during takeoff, but we'll see. Meanwhile, it's eerie – the Coke machine next to our "extended stay" motel door has an old picture of Columbia taking off. Between the floods, Enron and today, I imagine this part of Texas is feeling snakebit.

My brother Steve called me and told me the news. The second he began to speak, I knew what the day would be like. Unfortunately for this shuttle's crew, I think most of the country is still in a state of trauma fatigue, making it hard to work up more than the usual tautologies about the lack of a rational universe, and how psychologically crappy it has been to be an American lately.

I think I was the last to know about the first shuttle disaster in 1986. I was dinky little 17-year-old freshman at UNC, and I'd really overslept. While walking to Medieval American History class with Kendall Crosswell, I asked why all the flags were at half-mast, and she told me to stop making sick jokes. "No," I said, "really, what happened?" That ordeal stopped the country in its tracks for a month, but I doubt this event will have such staying power. Sept. 11 has pretty much sanded off the raw edges of everyone's nervous system, making anything short of a visit by Jesus into another day on the trauma treadmill.

Tessa asked me if I ever wanted to be an astronaut. I told her I wanted to be an astronomer. The shuttle Columbia fixed the Hubble telescope, giving us access to pictures of the distant galaxy that would have turned Galileo white. For this, and the fascinations of little fledgling dorks everywhere, we'd like to say thank you, and hope that you remember nothing of the explosion, only peaceful sky blue and white.

1/31/03 Day XLI of the

1/31/03

Day XLI of the Impenetrable Labyrinth of Other Peoples' Families Road Trip

Houston, TX

Just to let all of you out there blogland know our schedule (since I'm sure our trip has seemed random to many of you) wait a minute, I just thought – do any of you care?

Let me start over. We're in Houston until Sunday, then we're off to Dallas to rescue Tessa's childhood furniture (and a WHITE PIANO, yikes) from the Blakey estate. Then we're going to dip down into New Orleans, stay at a cheap bed and breakfast and write for two days. Then up to Salem's in Jasper, GA, then over to Chapel Hill where I am going to school a young man named Chip Chapman in basketball. Then up to Charlottesville to see Shannon Worrell and hopefully go skiing at the shitty bunny slopes of Wintergreen then home to Deare Olde New Englande. Make sense?

Until then, I'd like to fuck with my posse in Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn: it was 75 and SUNNY here today, yo! We even went for a walk on the bayou with Tessa's sister Michelle just 'cuz:

Michelle Blake, Tessa and moi

We had a bunch of appointments today that I won't bore you with, but we did get to spend time with Tom Brooke Blake, Tessa's brother. I've actually had a really good time with Tom this trip, and it's fun to see Tessa's once-splintered family together now. In his office (which was Blakey's fortress back in the day) we also met with the two secretaries, without whom the entire state of Texas might fall into the Gulf of Mexico.

Future Wife, Two Secretaries and Me Taking the Picture

We saw The Hours tonight, leading to a debate on lesbianism, life entrapment, and why anyone bothers to be an artist which I'd share with you if I wasn't so sick of sitting in this parking lot.

1/30/03 Day 40 of the

1/30/03

Day 40 of the Doing Our Part To Salve the Fragile Skin of Our American Economy Road Trip of Ne'er-Ending Strip Malls, Car Dealerships and Bennigan's

Houston, TX

Just to show you how committed I am to bringing quality entertainment to each of you every night, I did a little "timer" picture to show you the "office" I've been using to "log on" to "the internet":

click for bigger

It's actually been quite peaceful, here in the front seat of the car. I've got the satellite radio tuned to the XM Classics station (currently playing: Rachmaninoff's Cello Sonata), and the seats in this rented Infinity go waaaay back. Our gas-guzzlin' Land Rover we call Ol' Bessie finally got so fucked up we had to take it into the shop. I was okay with half the lights not working, but I wasn't going to drive another 2000 miles with Tessa's seat belt broken.

It's great to get this stuff done in Houston, which is a town geared to separate you from your money in the most uninspiring way possible. The miles of Office Depots, Chevy dealerships, Super Walmarts, Sweet Mesquite restaurants, and strip malls laden with nail salons and cell phone outlets is truly something to behold; like a desert of commerce, it stretches for miles and miles until the Staples stores and Thank God It's Fridays disappear into the horizon. I've seen nonsensical sprawl before, but this is truly biblical in scale.

Naturally, we're abusing it like good Americans. We dealt with the Land Rover, we got Chopin a desperately-needed bath, replaced some Banana Republic sweaters stolen from the break-in and then wandered around the Barnes & Noble in a consumerist daze. We didn't buy that much, but somehow wandering around all these stores makes a body exhausted.

Tonight came a dinner Tessa had been dreading due to the Herculean burden her family's past has placed on her: a roundtable at the Houston Country Club with Tom, Michelle (both half-siblings from different mothers) and Muffet, a character much-discussed in the Five Wives film. To be clear, Muff was wife #5, Tessa's mom was wife #4, Tom's mother was wife #3 and Michelle's mom was wife #2. There's all kinds of estate stuff from which Tessa was thankfully spared - but with so many twisted trunks of the family tree, and the myriad control issues of ol' Blakey, there's more than enough weird stuff swirling around the backwaters of Houston to keep the conversation lively.

It's enough to be thankful that I came from modest means in a midwestern place; we never lacked for anything, yet we weren't driven crazy by the barbiturate cocktail of Money and The South. I will forever call the South my home, since it is down here that I became a real person, but I'm not so swooningly romantic to forget the devilish limitations of this alluring swampland. Is it possible to raise kids on the bayou without them becoming so gothic?

1/29/03 Day XXXIX of the

1/29/03

Day XXXIX of the All The Things That White People Like To Do Road Trip of Golf Courses in Deserts

Magnolia, TX

For being pissed-off liberals, we sure find ourselves doing a lot of things that upper middle-class white people do whilst wearing pleated pants; we took a day trip to Tessa's dad's ranch/golf course combo, an 18-hole paradise that some say is one of the hardest in the land. We'd come to find some of Tessa's things that had been squirreled away in the upper floors of the pro shop after her father died, but it turned out to be only a couple of dubiously artistic renderings of Kenya and a musty love seat.

Undeterred, I found the big-screen TV and cranked it up to watch my beloved Tar Heels get their ass handed to them by Georgia Tech. Thankfully, we had the whole golf course and cabin to ourselves, or else my profanity-laced cries of anguish would have been unappreciated by those living in these parts. We let off a little steam by thwacking golf balls into the 2100 acres of forest woodland. My hair kept me from seeing much of my progress.

I golf like I ski like I play basketball flashes of brilliance with the occasional move so ridiculously awful that I think truly the Gods must be fucking with me. Of course, it's hard to do anything well when the goddamn dog has a psychic break every time you swing the club. Chopes would not shut up the entire time I was practicing, eventually forcing Tessa to cart him away like a mental patient.

time for your medication, Mr. Border Collie

This golf course was meant to be Blakey's crowning achievement, and now it may be the one thing (besides his descendants) to truly outlive him. Those woods are lovely, dark and deep right now, but it is only a matter of time before Houston hemorrhages in this direction, and transforms this lonely patch of undulating bluegrass into a sea of golfers testing their wits against the ghost of wily Thomas Blake.

1/28/03 Day XXXVIII of the

1/28/03

Day XXXVIII of the Such Huge Projects Hanging By the Thinnest of Threads Road Trip of Rant Preparation

Houston, TX

I know you're supposed to keep a game face in this business of filmmaking, your cup must runneth over with untethered optimism and you're never supposed to believe for a second that it isn't all going to turn out great in the long run. I even hesitate to put such feelings here on the blog, because there may be repercussions down the road if somebody gets an itchy google finger and wants a little dirt. But we've been on this road trip for almost a month and half now, and the money attitude in this country is really beginning to piss me off.

We've done so well, you know? We shot a movie for $256,000 or thereabouts and the film itself turned out to be a funny, soulful, intelligent, raucous, fantastic joyride. We have a legitimately hot young cast, a murderously good soundtrack, and a demographic most producers would kill for. The sheer magnitude of talent we gathered together for this thing is basically the Manhattan Project for indie film; this group of people is only half of our arsenal:

Early glimpses of the film have been met with more success than we imagined; not only did we get into the IFP Market in September, but we heard second-hand that the only film to watch from that event "was this film called 'The Pink House'." The footage we took into Technicolor has been called by those in the business as "the best digital footage they'd ever seen."

Tessa and I both have track records that aren't too shabby either hell, she was on the short list for the documentary Oscar™, for chrissakes. And even after wrapping, our principal cast has done extremely well for themselves. Fred Weller is a legitimate Broadway star, and Heather Matarazzo's last two movies combined for $128 million.

Whatever. There's only so much you can say, right?

We set out on this road trip to try and raise the rest of the $175,000 we need to give The Pink House a good sound mix, finish the animation, and transfer it all to a 35mm blowup so you can see it in theaters. $175K is an alarmingly small amount for a movie, as I'm sure y'all know. But in this harsh economic climate, we would have been thrilled to raise only $30,000 on this trip. That would enable to finish the creative part of the movie (editing, animation, score, and a few tweaks) and submit it to Toronto, Telluride, or another A-list festival.

$30K. That's all we need to raise. That amount stands between success and failure.

And how have we done so far on this trip? Five thousand dollars from one of my dearest friends Salem Suber. That's it. We have been to 24 states. We have seen, pleaded with, held hands with and broken bread with 20 or so people who could have found that much change stuffed in the backseat cushions of their Jaguars, and the only person who has come forward is a humble restaurant manager who is a father of three, living in Jasper, Georgia.

I'm not trying to be thankless, really. I know $5000 is the kind of money most people will never see all in one place, and trying to raise $30K let alone $175K – may strike some people as presumptuous at best. But that's the way independent movies are made! There is no government help here, not like Canada or Australia. The only way artists can thrive is by a certain amount of patronage on the part of those who are more fortunate and believe in giving a voice to some other artists besides those housed by Miramax and Paramount. Not to mention that our film in particular is a really good bet, as far as indie films go: it's a comedy, it was made inexpensively, and could be bought by a distributor at a festival for $1 million or more – that's not even wishful thinking, that's fairly realistic.

And so I find myself, sitting in this parking lot at 1am, suckling wireless broadband internet off of some unsuspecting guy in the apartment across the street, wondering what is going to happen to our project. Could I handle just saying "oh well"? I spent two years lugging scripts back and forth across the country, I spent a month with my stomach in my throat as we directed this thing in the August heat of North Carolina, and now we have spent a year-and-a-half in post-production. Can I just say "well, we gave it the ol' college try" to myself, or to all those people in the picture above? Four years of neverending optimism, of struggles and late-night fights with my beloved, 10,000 miles on the car, making our case with everyone on earth. I know you're never supposed to admit this in public, but I am really scared.

So tonight, this blog goes out to Salem Suber. We have been fast friends since we met in 1989, been on countless insane adventures, and his unflagging good mood has been an infectious, delightful presence in my life for fourteen years. His belief in us, and his faith in the process, makes all this talk of war, the economy, and the pecuniary habits of gazillionaires quiet, and for a few seconds, allows me to believe in the magic of making movies again.

1/27/03 Day 37 of the

1/27/03

Day 37 of the Sam Houston Galleria Full of Homosexuals Road Trip of Oh The Historic Irony Dept.

Cut & Shoot, TX to Houston, TX

Have I mentioned before how much I adore clandestine wireless pirating? I believe I have, but a big, modern city like Houston offers all sort of wifi opportunities; you just need to know where to look. I had a hunch about the butt end of a Comp USA, and sure enough, here I sit in our Residence Inn parking lot with three choices for surfing: a transmitter called Airport31oCb, one called James, and another called (boringly) Linksys. I chose the latter, because it has the best reception and they didn't ask for a password. Once you have the signal, just go to the Tools section of dslreports.com and you can find the outgoing email server and then the world is your oyster.

I'd feel bad about it, I guess, if I were to spend my entire internet life out in this goddamn parking lot suckling the hard-earned broadband teat of someone else's toil, but three or four days isn't going to hurt anybody. We can always go to Starbucks for wifi, but I don't feel like paying TiMobile 25 a minute for the pleasure. Plus, it's WAY more fun to do what Tessa and I do – drive around silly places looking for signal, like the Feds do at the end of "Pump Up the Volume."

Besides, Starbucks better charge for it while they can. It's getting too easy to do this, and nobody is bothering with passwords.

Speaking of brain trusts, passwords and secret money, I accompanied Tessa to the top of a Houston highrise this afternoon to meet with her financial advisor about the future of her portfolio, as well as his astute prognostications about the trends of the market. I didn't always understand the language (I have trouble determining between "equity," "capital," "assets" and "cash") but the view sure was nice.

1/26/03 Day XXXVI of the

1/26/03

Day XXXVI of the Every Day is Like Sunday, Every Day is Silent and Grey Road Trip of Morrissey Ruminations

Cut & Shoot, TX

The second day of our sojourn in Greater Cut & Shoot was pretty miserable athletically, as the piercing cold rain and unmitigatingly gloomy skies made exercise an unapproachable option - and because the bad guys won both the Carolina/State game and the Super Bowl. I only cared about the Super Bowl because I think Warren Sapp is a fat, sick fuck who should go to prison for the kind of bullshit he's pulled on the field this year, and to see him celebrating with a World Champion hat on (three minutes before the game was over, mind you) further convinced me that we are deep into an era of American History I call the New Mercilessness.

I believe the New Mercilessness manifests itself everywhere from reality TV to our Republican-held government, but it's been a saturnine enough day to skip it for now. One more rant and I'm going to get that GERD acid reflux disease that Sean's always getting.

We spent most of the day with Nonnie, Tessa's grandmother, and it only nails home the Buddhist prospect of remaining in the moment. Tessa asked me (after having some family personality difficulty of her own) how I've always managed to stay friends with both my mom and my dad, and I think it is largely due to my thankfulness that I have them around. Not everyone does, you know. Plus, as Tessa said, very few people actually bother me, which is funny given that everyone thinks I'm such a rant-monger.

I did tell her the story of my mom's biggest fight with me: in 1995, I was pretty sure I got scabies from a houseguest at the Pink House (everyone in Chapel Hill deals with it at some point, and no, it isn't a sexual thing), which meant my erstwhile girlfriend and I had to sleep in the nude, covered in some radioactive lotion designed to kill the little buggers. Afterwards, you burn the sheets and pray it never happens again. However, at this juncture in my career, I was too poor to buy any new sheets, so I grabbed some extras from the Holiday Inn where my mom was staying.

She found out about it and thought it was a metaphor for everything else in my life where I'd abdicated responsibility, where I'd acted classlessly, and intimated that my life was careening apart at the seams. I screamed back that I was itching too bad to care, and we had an hour-long blowout that left me feeling like something of a worthless cad. We got over it, though, like parents and children do.

My mom and I never fought like that again, most likely because I got a job. And the only thing I bug her about now is an exercise plan, which I dearly hope she starts again. She's 71, and if she wants to see any of our kids - should we be lucky enough to have them - she's got to lay off the Snickers and enact a regimen. You hear me, mom?

Speaking of mothers, I found pictures of my dad's mom's farm while scanning images at Uncle Chuck's place. It was her childhood home in the piedmont of Tennessee back in the teens and 20s. A picture of their fields looked familiar, and when I started going through pictures of our farm upstate, I suddenly realized why:

above, Geneva's farmland in 1920; below, ours in Columbia County last year