xtcian

9/5/03 Believe it or not,

9/5/03

Believe it or not, we're still editing the movie. As we wrapped up today, I remarked that we had aged over two years just during the editing process alone - I was 33 or something when we started. Jessie's hair has gone from long to short to long to short again, and so has mine.

and we don't even use 90% of the computer equipment in that picture anymore

During our editing, our nation was hit with the biggest terrorist attack in history, Tessa's father died, I had a nervous breakdown, the leads in our movie fell out of favor and then back again, I proposed to Tessa, waited a year, and then got married (in roughly that order).

This movie was so hard to physically make that anything less than two years' editing would have been inadequate. We have performed miracles with this thing; brought entire scenes and ideas back to life with the know-how and perspective only two years could have provided. Our test screening went over wonderfully, and the fact that I can still watch this film without puking is a testament to something good lying therein.

One major problem we've always had: marrying the 1930s sequence with the present-day. Several things accomplish this feat, but the biggest is a flash animation that takes the viewer from 1934 to 2003 by showing the decades whiz by the exterior of the Pink House. The music has been the crowning achievement, however: it begins with my mom's Tin Pan Alley rag, which melds into Michelle's 1940s doo-wop. Then George Gilmore and his band take over: a '50s guitar lick, a Hendrix-style '60s rock riff, then a dead-on parody of the '70s "Hustle." Then to a quick '80s Euro-pop-synth, which fades directly into a raucous early-90s Nirvana-sounding grunge. Then my brother Kent takes it home, twisting the original 1930s theme into a 21st century throbbing rave track. And everything is in the same key, using the same theme. The entire sequence is only about two minutes long, but it has to be seen to believed.

If you believe the journey is the destination, and that the process is more important than the goal - both very un-American sentiments - then you would have had a good day in the editing booth with us. Just completing that opening sequence and seeing everything fall into place makes the last two years seem like a pittance to pay for such moments of private joy. No matter what happens with the movie, we'll still have that.

9/4/03 This blog goes out

9/4/03

This blog goes out to my girl Jiffer Bourguignon, who is not only one of the Pink House denizens from the legendary mid-90s, but also happens to be one of my favorite people here on this lovely planet. We first met while she was going through sorority rush as a "rush chairman," a weird little job that is definitely worth another blog entry (even if it reveals how much I know about sorority life at southern universities). We instantly hit it off with a Krispy Kreme fight that involved me smashing three cream-filled crullers into her face. She moved into the Pink House a few months later.

Jiffer and me six years ago today, Sept. 4, 1996

Jiffer and her friend Zia combined to make the character known as Zola in the Pink House movie, but in truth, they were much more surreal than movies can muster. Coy, brash, lovely, manly, flaky and faithful, Jiffer had a sort of dreamy quality that would be occasionally punctuated by bursts of profanity. Men tended to love her, I think, because they never saw her shoes, so smelly that we kept them out on the porch.

At a party on literally the last day of school, Jiff met a German exchange student (one in a long line of them) named Ingo who whooshed her home, floating on air. I remember sitting in the kitchen with her as she said, "Ian, I think this is really the one." I said something sarcastic, but couldn't help think her tone was a little different.

Then she said she was going into the Peace Corps. Having seen three years of her college antics, I didn't believe her - but two months later, she was packing for Mauritania, commonly known as The Worst Place to Get Sent for the Peace Corps Ever. We all got wonderful emails from this place we'd never heard of, and she returned, twenty pounds lighter, directed and full of passion for her next move: grad school at Columbia.

I never believed she would get in, or that she would flourish; not for a lack of faith, but just because I'd had her pegged as someone else. Now she has just returned from Cambodia, by way of seeing Ingo in London, and the school has asked her to be the editor-in-chief of the graduate school magazine, a job coveted by some major heavy hitters. She's truly amazing.

In the Pink House movie, the main character Murray is humbled by a housemate who shows him how wrongheaded, cynical and inaccurate his previous notions had been, how most of his theories are self-limiting crap, and how great the world can be if he opens himself up to the possibility that not everyone is predictable. It has taken me until tonight to realize I wrote that scene about me and Jiffer.

with the vivacious Dee Norton, Jiffer, and fellow PH alum Scott Bullock

9/3/03 Believe it or not,

9/3/03

Believe it or not, but this was a pretty crappy week's haul for this year's vegetable garden - the cherry tomatoes (sun golds) went nuts, and there are a few Brandywine tomatoes that didn't turn into the Elephant Man, but most everything else sucked. The corn was a disaster, and my beloved pumpkins - every single one of them died except for one. Last year I had about 27 pumpkins growing everywhere, and this year my garden looks like the My Lai massacre.

What the fuck gives? My money is on the following: it rained every day from May 1st to July 3rd, then it was soggy and humid with very little direct sunlight until now. And now it's getting cold again. The only things that could grow in New York State this year would have to be indigenous to the Amazon.

I've brought a bunch of Brandywines back to Brooklyn, and I hope everyone appreciates them, because a lot of back-breaking labor went into this year's pathetic yield. Brooklyn itself looks like London in February, and feels like New Orleans in late October - rainy, gray streets with blasts of warm, humid wind.

They call 1816 "The Year Without a Summer" - volcanic eruptions and general bad luck kept most of the Northern Hemisphere in a state of frozen drought. In New York, there were two "killing frosts" in August alone, and 90% of crops failed. The conditions started a cholera and typhus epidemic in Asia, and it was the first of the Irish potato famines.

On the good side, however, the summer was so cold that writers spent most of the time indoors. One such weekend, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley had a competition to see who could write the best story. Mary won, of course, with "Frankenstein." So, in our situation, let's hope some serious art got made over the last 10 months.

9/2/03 While we were taking

9/2/03

While we were taking down all the wedding detritus left on our trees, we noticed Chopin playing with another dog, a beagle puppy, frolicking in the side yard. The minute Tessa came over, Chopes abandoned his fun for the usual territorial horseshit and tried to kill the puppy he had been so happy with just nanoseconds earlier. With Chopes locked in the house, we inspected the puppy, who had no collar, yet he "sit" when I inadvertently said the word. He instantly imprinted on Tessa, and followed her every move.

We took him to several houses, and then the Animal Hospital, where the denizen King Cynical veterinarian told us in harsh tones to steal the dog, because he knew the owners, and it was the fifth time the puppy had been brought into the hospital as a stray. He didn't, however, know the owners' names or where they lived.

He motioned us in the wrong direction, up a hill, where we spent another hour looking for this puppy's abode. Finally, one woman (everyone seemed to be home, even though it was a Tuesday afternoon) told us exactly where to go, next to the auto salvage place back on the state highway. She, too, expressed the general surprise that this puppy was still alive after all the times she'd seen it wandering down country lanes.

So there was Tessa, knocking on the door of a place that had seventy cans of LaBatt's Blue - as well as those giant jugs of Jack Daniels' pre-mixed lemonade - sticking out of the recycling bin. The owner was young, very cordial, and the dog wandered inside as if nothing had happened.

What do you do? You can't play God in the fate of a puppy, and you have to return it to its owners; that's part of the silent pact you sign when you agree to live in a "community." But we could have easily taken it to the North Shore animal shelter, a no-kill home for pets waiting to be adopted by New Yorkers who love them. Instead, we most likely signed this puppy's death warrant today.

I'll tell you this, however: if I see him again, he's coming with us.

9/1/03 There is a word

9/1/03

There is a word I'm officially taking out of my vocabulaly: "apocalyptic." It's overused, barely means what it used to, and to be frank, we've seen that there needn't be an apocalypse to make things relatively awful on earth anyway. I mention this because a bunch of us went shopping for emergency supplies today, in the event that something terrible happens that would render us without electricity, communication or basic services. The Mormons do it every day without thinking (take a look in their pantry) but the vicissitudes of a bad, bad world are making even agnostics fill their basements with canned corn. It took me a long time (plus Celexa and therapy) to think about this stuff rationally, and the a-word just makes my stomach hurt.

We started out at the Price Chopper in Hudson, NY, where we bought non-perishables of every sort: green beans, pinto beans, ravioli, Spaghetti-Os, tuna, etc., basically ensuring that we spend the End Days farting up a goddamn storm. After about an hour walking around the store snapping up restaurant-sized cans of Miracle Whip and tomato paste, I began to get depressed and opted to go next door to Wal-Mart.

It was good to do this sort of thing in a crowd. Kelly Wachowicz was with us, as well as Laurie Williams and my sister. Kelly serves on the board for NYC's Emergency Preparedness, and it was her vigilance that drove us onward. By the time I got to the camping section at Wal-Mart, we had both paranoided each other into a fine froth.

I got waterproof matches, several flares, flashlights, a bunch of batteries, and a crappy radio guaranteed to fall apart when it is needed most. We also purchased ready-made first aid kits supplemented by generic antibiotic cream and hydrocortisone. I was getting so bummed out about this trip that I bought a $59 DVD player just to inject a modicum of fun in this gallows errand.

It wasn't just the walking around that was tiring; it was the constant conjuring of hypothetical situations. Like, I bought a compass. This would only be necessary if NYC were a a giant smallpox biohazard, the power was out, I was alone in the wilderness north of Westchester County, walking off-road in a violent rainstorm, trying to find my way to the farm. I mean, what the fuck?

Basically, I look at it this way: if something bad happens and we're in Manhattan, it's every-man-for-himself to get off the island. If something happens while we're in Brooklyn, we're okay, but we've got a long, awful walk ahead of us. If it happens and we're up here at the farm, we're doing pretty good for a few months or so. Add some solar panels and a hybrid car (both things we're thinking about) and we might even thrive.

Kelly brought up something that had been plaguing me for a while. In the event of a true national emergency, should every person with a food-stocked house consider having a gun? It goes against every fiber of my body to even think about having something like that in my home, but it could get very iffy in times of desperation.

Bud's dad used to lock the screen door at his house "because it keeps a man honest." Bud used to tell him that a man with any amount of honesty probably wouldn't be jiggling the screen door to start with, but the point is unnerving: would a shotgun and a kind word save your livelihood? My current bet is "no," but those are the places you visit, mentally, when shopping for this kind of event. I used to eye the gun rack at Walmart with disgust; today I looked at it with curious disgust.

For now, however, things are normal - we just have a basement full of crackers and canned peas. I'm met with the same challenge that I had as a kid growing up with the Mormons: resisting the temptation to storm downstairs and scarf down all the apocaly-chocolate.

8/31/03 I'd like to take

8/31/03

I'd like to take issue with yesterday's New York Times, which had an article in the Sunday Arts section entitled I Don't Want to Grow Up - a pop-culture piece on the "new breed of quasi adult" that is "co-opting the culture of children as never before." The article uses words like "kidult," "peterpandemonium" and "rejuveniles" to describe this disturbing (according to social scientists) new trend of adults rejecting adulthood.

Among the things they mention are motor scooters, "Harry Potter" and "Spongebob Squarepants," all of whom have a worrisomely adult audience. The reason for this, apparently, is rooted in the avoidance of dreary grown-up issues like lawn care and mortgages. The average age for video game players is 29 (up from 18 in 1990) and more adults 18-49 watch the Cartoon Network than CNN. There are apparently grown-ups baby-doll fashions and mentions of Twister.

Now, maybe this is partially true. With the kind of culture that gives moronic kids more airtime than they can possibly swallow - as well as the current emphasis on "tweeners" (a phrase that has been used every ten years or so, might I add), there may be a few more adults who know more about the Ashley Twins that they should. But really, what kind of story is this?

Motor scooters (or a Vespa, which was actually in the NYTimes picture) have been a passion for adults for fifty years. My buddies Lindsay and Dana both had Vespas at the age of 20, they have them now at 30, and they'll probably have them at 40. This isn't a pop-culture trend, this is the longterm appreciation of a good product. The same goes for video games - the average age has risen 13 years in the last 13 years because the same people have grown up with great video games. If you loved your Game Boy in 1990, you're going to love the PS2 today. This is not a trend, this is hobby loyalty!

Adults like "Harry Potter" and "Spongebob" because they are immensely enjoyable on their own merits, not because they want to escape paying bills and re-seeding the brown patches on the lawn. And baby-doll dresses and Twister? PLEASE! Could anything be more 1994?

Maybe I get tweaked about this stuff because it's my generation they're talking about, again disparaged because we're not only chained to our own now-dusty pop culture, but because we seem to be co-opting the pop culture of those 15 years younger. I'd like to re-write that New York Times article, and put it this way: we liked our old pop culture ("Brady Bunch," "Sesame Street," etc.) because it refined our sense of irony and humor. We like the new pop culture when it is good. This is not out of a fear of aging, this is the fruits of a longterm commitment to good entertainment. Just because your 10-year-old knows what a Patronus Charm is doesn't mean we can't.

And even if we are avoiding (or, in my hopes, redefining) adulthood, it has nothing to do with lawn care or mortgages. The Times fails to make the bigger point: that we are a generation born into cynicism (Nixon), raised during paranoia (The Day After), lost our virginity during the age of death (AIDS), and now see an entire world hating us (9/11) just as we intend to bring kids into it. Pardon us if we just want to play a few video games to take the edge off.