xtcian

4/5/03 Brooklyn, NY Since Daylight

4/5/03 Brooklyn, NY

Since Daylight Savings Time is taking away the hour usually reserved for writing to y'all's truly, I'll keep this short, but I would like to extend a heartfelt "thank you" to Richard Milhouse Nixon for giving us Daylight Savings Time in the first place. Damn good idea, Dick I bet you had no idea how many happy basketball players you made when you allowed us to have sunshine after work.

Before leaving Charlottesville, we stopped by to see my cousin Dylan at the local alterno-shop. They had an exquisite selection of water pipes and rolling papers, as well as an incense stick the size of a small tree branch. Some of the pipes were going for $350, which seemed a little out of the range for some of these college boys. One kid came in and was fondling one such pipe with such awe and reverence that even the most bleary-eyed and cynical of his friends called it "righteous." It was rather sweet, like a boy longing for the red bike in the window.

with Dylan at "Roots, Rock & Reggae"

The ride back to New York was immeasurably sweetened by plugging my iBook into the stereo system and listening to my mp3s of Ambrosia, Supertramp, the Beastie Boys and the 5th Dimension. I think Finger Lickin' Good can solve any problems the New Jersey Turnpike has to offer.

road trippin' 2003-style

4/4/03 Charlottesville, VA We pulled

4/4/03 Charlottesville, VA

We pulled into Charlottesville just in time for a quick coffee with our friend Temple, who is in charge of acquisition (and pretty much everything else) for Dave Matthews' film company ATO. I thought ATO was a bad choice for a name, since it is also the moniker for a fairly generic bunch of fratboys at the Alpha Tau Omega house precisely the kind of place Dave would play in the early, early 90s – but they seem to be doing fine. We swapped indie film stories, then Tessa and I walked down University Ave. ogling all the usual bohemian shops and pizza places catering to the proletarian tastes of the college dollar.

I didn't go to UVA nor did I apply – because the rest of my prep school did, and I was hellbent on going where NOBODY ELSE WAS. I needed a complete tabula rasa, to start over without dealing with the erection-laden baggage and emotional dysfunction of my high school. There are several reasons to dislike UVA: their fans drive me nuts, their swimming team is frequently hostile to Coach Comfort, they have an annoying fetish for Thomas Jefferson, and they hate Carolina. That said, their campus is almost as pretty as ours.

It was nice to see the pedestrian mall still hosting a gaggle of skate rats and punk kids. You could take a time machine back to 1981, and see the same 15-year-olds wearing tartan kilts, profanity-laced leather jackets and blue hair. There's a seemingly endless line of 10-year-old kids just waiting their turn to be pissed off, regardless of demographic changes from generation to generation. It does seem, however, like the style of anarchistic disaffection kinda stalled 20 years ago. I mean, I see the shirts, but do any of these kids know how old the Dead Kennedys are now?

Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole

4/3/03 Chapel Hill, NC Well,

4/3/03 Chapel Hill, NC

Well, it's spring in Chapel Hill, and that used to mean one thing: the NCAA basketball tournament. But if you've been following sports news at all, you'll know this week has been especially painful in North Carolina, and I'm amazed I was down here to witness it. Yes, yes, there's a war going on in Iraq. But basketball is a religion in this state, and to me as well, so it's a necessary sabbatical before putting the world back together.

In a nutshell, our coach of three years Matt Doherty – "resigned" on Tuesday to avoid being fired outright by our chancellor and athletic director, who had met with the players and their families.

The fallout has been immense. A couple of people in the media responded with an "it's about time" article, but everyone else has been dragging Carolina through the mud (I won't link the articles here, but they're easy to find). The general consensus among the fat, bearded national sports writers is that Doherty got shafted, and that UNC has once again plunged into a soap opera far removed from the cool, consistent world of champions Dean Smith once cultivated. To which I say: eat me.

Matt Doherty went on ESPN tonight for a hotseat interview with Jay Bilas, and acted as though he had been blindsided by the turn of events. I don't pretend to think for the man, but if the last three years didn't quite sink in, maybe that's problem enough. I'm on two email lists one of them, due to Carolina family connections, tends to dither in careful, constructive criticism. The other is a flaming, unadulterated rumor mill containing the kind of incendiary hearsay that I prayed would not be true. Together, they paint a picture that is not terribly flattering of Doherty's bedside manner with his players, and in fact, seem to indicate that the guy needs help. I'll say this: if even 10% of what I read this year was true, this is not somebody that should be following in Dean Smith's footsteps. He'd be great at another program, but not this one.

Instead of doing any kind of real research, the nations' top sportswriters salivated at the chance to take another swing at Carolina, most likely because we've been the poster children for All Things Good in the NCAA since 1961. Some of their criticism is rooted in the old-fashioned "coach as God" crap that Bobby Knight could get away with when he was winning, and Mike Krzyzewski gets away with now because he is winning. You know, the old "Hoosiers" mentality, where the players come to realize that Coach Knows Best Even Though He Humiliates Us Daily. Old timey sports writers love that shit.

The recurring thread among all these pundits (who are all white, as Chip pointed out) is that "the inmates took over the asylum," and now we have a bunch of macked-out bling-bling brats who got their coach fired. To me, this is not much different than the "uppity Negro" comments you'd hear until the 1960s, and is utterly shameful. I think Carolina could air a laundry list of transgressions that would shut these morons up in an instant, but will not do so even at their own peril – to make sure Doherty has a shot at another job somewhere else. For their part, the players all swear they never conspired to get Doherty canned, and only met with the administration because they were asked to.

But here's the thing that makes me furious: even if the players DID get their coach fired, SO WHAT? Dean Smith said many things I take to heart, among them: "you go to college to get a job." This was why he was maddeningly gracious about telling his kids to go to the NBA early they had a job waiting. Now, if Doherty was in the way of our players getting a job in the NBA, it was not only a good idea to find a solution, it was incumbent upon them. This basketball program is not for the "sports world," the administration, nor is it even for me, one of its biggest fans. It is for the student athletes, and if they're miserable, THEN FIX IT. If we can get our 8th grade symphony conductor in Iowa fired (which we did), then our boys in blue should be able to do the same.

All told, I feel terrible for Matt. I know he bleeds Carolina blue, and nobody wanted us to win more than he did. His issues and his demeanor, look and mannerisms – remind me of someone else very close to me, and I have enormous reserves of pity for him as his family packs up and leaves town.

But you can't treat kids today the same way they did in 1950. My shrink once told me that the greatest thing to happen in the 20th century was not antibiotics nor the polio vaccine, nor women's rights: it was the end of countrywide, institutionalized child abuse. Young adults respond to negative criticism differently now. They don't live in fear, they know they have options, and this week, it showed what a few of them were able to do, and it is something to be celebrated.

me and Tessa five weeks ago in Chapel Hill

us today in the same spot

4/2/03 Chapel Hill, NC A

4/2/03 Chapel Hill, NC

A photojournalist named Brian Walski took the above picture of a British soldier in Basra, Iraq, and it ran in yesterday's Los Angeles Times. Today, he was fired, and I've added several arrows to the image to show why. This is the great thing about the internet there are always 14 people out there obsessed with accuracy, and apparently they all alerted the LATimes to an obviously-Photoshopped picture. The above image is actually a combination of two different photos (you can see them both here) and in his war-torn haste, Walski either figured nobody would notice, or else that all brown people look the same.

The red arrow shows the same bent knee twice, the violet arrow shows the same Iraqi civilian twice, and the blue arrow is the most obvious duplication of a dude in the background. He did it for reasons of "composition," trying to make the picture better by faking an interaction between the soldier and the man carrying his baby. Indeed, the fake is a more powerful picture, but not that much more powerful, and certainly not worth losing your job over.

Not only that, but people win Pulitzers for photographs. If this pic had done so, Walski would have had to provide a negative or at least an original digital file - and none exists (although perhaps he could have cobbled something together). The problem with shortcuts in art is that you're always found out. Some artists are thrown into murky ethical waters (like the Realist painters who were discovered to have traced photographs) and some are hailed as masters (like Ansel Adams, who burned & dodged & fucked with his photos endlessly).

Walski would have gotten away with it if he hadn't been careless, but I imagine being in the middle of the Iraqi desert with a laptop has got to be somewhat ungrounding. The problem is, I think I do a fair amount of altering on this blog too: I change some names, some venues, and occasionally I have screwed around with some photographs. The name and place changes are done to protect various privacies, especially back in January when we were full-throttle raising money for the film. There are also libel issues to consider, I guess, but the legal ethics of blogging are a nascent issue at best.

And I do "Photoshop out" flaws on people's faces I don't think a particular zit needs to be enshrined forever, and I've taken the shine off a few subjects. But there is one altered photo I'd like to cop to right now. It was taken back in January, when Chopin the dog and I were playing on the beach near Santa Cruz. I posted this picture:

...when the original image was this:

Thats my brother Steve in the bottom image, also taking a picture of us, and I just didn't feel as though he fit the whole "a boy and his dog" vibe I was going for. So I'm offering a mea culpa to all those involved, and if the Pulitzer people are out there, I pray they can overlook my hubris and my control freak issues and keep me in the pool for this year's Prize. What's a few "ones and zeros" between friends when we're talking about Great Art? Go team!!!

P.S. If I ever alter a photo like that again, I'll tell you.

P.P.S. Oh yeah, that time stamp right below this is usually wrong. It's almost always 3am when I do these.

4/1/03 Chapel Hill, NC I

4/1/03 Chapel Hill, NC

I was reminded by Sean that four years ago today, I was knee-deep in directing my first film, called "The Rescue of Autumn." It was a short piece, about fourteen minutes long, but shot on some gorgeous 35mm stock that was way better than the material deserved. The actors were great: Seth Shelden, Sean and Jordana all performed admirably, as well as my sister Michelle (as a deaf Scrabble player) and UNC alum Amy Amerson – but let's face facts: I really had no idea what I was doing.

We were beset by all kinds of problems. The film we were using was called "end stock," meaning it was the last bits of unexposed film left in the can by blockbuster movie shoots. My film could easily have been what was left over while they were making "Godzilla." Indie films use end stock because it's affordable, but you only get 400 feet of the stuff at a time; you could be in the middle of a fantastic scene, and the camera will suddenly run out of film (which happened at least 10 times).

We also had some of the worst weather in history, a theme that has been a constant for my film shoots. Even though it was April in Los Angeles, the temperature barely got above freezing, and there were gales up to 50mph. On the last day of the production, it poured down 10 straight hours in a city where it never rains. It was unrelentingly miserable, and pretty much everyone got sick.

When I got the footage back from the lab, it turned out that the sound guy accidentally erased an entire day of sound. Then we watched the picture, and it turned out that our Director of Photography accidentally shot the entire picture two F-stops too dark. Which meant that some key scenes were silent and basically black. It took three months of blowing out the footage in order to see actual life forms - and re-recording the dialogue in my basement until I could show it to anybody.

Seth, Jordana & Sean in "The Rescue of Autumn"

The premiere of the film took place at Jeollado sushi restaurant in the East Village on July 10, 1999. I traveled all the way there from California because I knew nobody in Los Angeles would give a shit. After getting a rowdy crowd of about 100 people drunk on bourbon and sake, we screened the movie and at the end, the entire place erupted in applause and ovation. Several people wanted into my next project, whatever it would be, and I wrote the Pink House movie a week later.

Now, I'm no fool. "Autumn" makes no sense, it's poorly-directed, and apart from four or five zingers, the script is not 1/10th as funny as it was supposed to be. Drunk on Japanese sake is about the only way to get a kick out of it. But it taught me determination, editing, pacing, not to trust first instincts and how to ask for what I wanted. It was the perfect baptism for the firestorm the Pink House would bring two years later. And as a not-so-side note, it brought my brother to the girl he might marry one day, so it has some legacy other than my own navel.

sunny and 70 here in Chapel Hill, thanks!

3/31/03 Chapel Hill, NC We

3/31/03 Chapel Hill, NC

We came down to Chapel Hill this week to teach Dr. Peter Kaufman's scholarship class at UNC, seemingly titled "Truth, Proof and Madness." I always loved Kaufman's classes they were the equivalent of an über-intellectual Donahue show, as he loved to run up and down the aisles of a boisterous (and gigantic) classroom drawing parallels between D.H. Lawrence and St. Catherine of Azila. At lunch today, I told him that he – along with religion professor Bart Ehrman – had the profoundest effect on me as a UNC student. While we were talking, Bart Ehrman actually showed up at the coffee shop, and my first thought was "where's the goddamn camera"?

When I say "we" were down to teach class, I actually mean "Tessa," who was fabulous. The class was about 65 people, all of whom had seen Five Wives, the Project ALS short, and the improved Pink House trailer. She kept things intelligent without ever lapsing into boring, and the students seemed way into it. Maybe this generation of earnest college-goers actually gives a shit (although this class was mostly freshmen, which means there's still time for them to stop caring and start drinking Jaegermeister).

A few of the class met afterwards for a Q&A session in Vance Hall, which is also the place where you get grants and loans for school. Thus, I helped give a lecture on having success as an artist, right next to the room marked "Loan Collections," the irony of which was not lost on me.

As a side note, I have to say the government really fucked up when they dealt with my student loans. First of all, the statements were all sent to my mother, who never lived anywhere long enough to actually receive mail. Also, I was led to believe that my loans were actually grants, and therefore I didn't owe anybody anything. By the time I knew what was actually going on, I had already defaulted for over a year. They destroyed my credit, and then asked me to pay up. I would have done so much sooner had they given me a few options that didn't include "you're screwed until you're in your forties."

Anyway, by the time we had been to both classes, we were pretty cotton-mouthed, so we met Chip, played pool, and watched The Core at an empty multiplex, eating disastrously bad popcorn. Ah, the pleasures of small-town livin'!

Chip Chapman: They dont call him Minnesota Fat for nothing.

3/30/03 Chapel Hill, NC Sadly,

3/30/03 Chapel Hill, NC

Sadly, today's blog will have to be slightly truncated, but then again, I dare any of you to write an impassioned diary after having driven nine solid hours through sleet. There's something spiritually crushing about seeing snow again after a respite of warm weather, but there's something altogether torturous about following a winter storm all the way down the east coast. It does something to the backs of your eyes, this kind of driving.

Several pieces of news today that piqued the imagination: first off, my sister is having trouble with her butt. I've had the same thing happen to me, or at least a cousin of it, and it's just wretched. She feels bad about complaining, but she should be reminded that Napoleon changed the course of human history when he was afflicted just before the Battle of Waterloo (do your own research if you don't believe me).

Secondly: the car's satellite radio gave forth nine hours of our government well, Donald Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks – squirming like recently-unearthed worms. Crafty little Peter Arnett (he of Gulf War I fame) gave an interview to Iraqi TV where he said that the current war plan has failed; meanwhile, Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker said that Rumsfeld's micromanaging, disdain for other human beings and overall hubris has left us high and dry in Iraq. The blitz of denials, the unctuousness, and the hemming and/or hawing from the Powers That Be has been the one source of entertainment in this whole bloody, unforgivable mess. To misquote Oscar Wilde, I hope it lasts. (For a great analysis of this story, check out Mickey Kaus' blog.)

Thirdly, and most importantly, it looks like Larry Brown will be the new coach of the University of North Carolina Men's Basketball Team. Anyone who follows sports knows that Brown might well possess the best basketball mind in the country, and just the hint of this news is sure to spread fear into the hearts of several snivelling rat bastards in Durham, NC as well as many other ACC hotspots. He is currently coach of the Philadelphia 76'ers (i.e. full-time babysitter to Allen Iverson), but would drop the millions in a heartbeat to be back in the Southern Part of Heaven. More on that later if it happens as well as a heartfelt goodbye to Matt Doherty – but for now, the air is crackling with promise here as I lie in bed in gorgeous Chapel Hill.