xtcian

10/3/03 this is going to

10/3/03

this is going to be a very short blog because I have a sinus infection that only allows me to lay on my left side. this also means my left arm is busy holding up my head, and I can't 'shift' to capitalize something. The infection, of course, stems from when I was struck across the face with a trashcan in los angeles and got a deviated septum. You should have seen the blood that came out of me, i didn't think a body's heart could pump that hard.

I have to get surgery - septoplasty - but they put you out on anesthetics and it takes a week to recover, the question remains; which week would I like to ruin. I've grown accustomed to my weeks and want all of them, dammit,

hey, microsoft word is going back and doing some capitals for me.

writing in lower case always makes me feel like e.e. cummings. And now, for the poem every girl in 9th grade had on their notebook...

l(a

le
af
fa

ll

s)
one
l

iness

thank you. ok, the drugs are kicking in

10/2/03 I am barely conscious

10/2/03

I am barely conscious as I write this, having had one of the most intense days of my New York business existence. Keep in mind as I tell you this - the last shipment for Fedex is 9:30pm. And the deadline to enter this Really Big Film Festival is tomorrow. Have I set the stakes yet? Good.

6:20am - Fall asleep after giving the movie a "film look" and laying it all onto a DV cam tape.

10:15am - Wake up, grab tape and rush to Dubbing House to turn our "PAL" (European style) movie into "NTSC" (American broadcast-style) movie. This place is on 38th Street, and requires a Q train, which is running behind.

11:00am - Dubbing House says the tape will be transferred to NTSC by 2:30pm; I freak out, thinking it would be much shorter than that. Outside, after narrowly dodging speeding cars due to fatigue, I go back to Brooklyn to get an hour of sleep.

1:45pm - I oversleep, then run back to Dubbing House, where the tape is waiting. I call a mutual friend who owns a $20,000 deck that will allow us to put the new soundtrack onto the newly-dubbed movie.

3:30pm - At the sound studio, we realize that no deck is coming. Frantic, I rent one from another dubbing house on 26th Street.

4:45pm - After waiting in the green room for what seems like a century, the deck finally arrives. I thought it would be a small deck the size of a VCR; instead it is the size of an upright piano on wheels. I wheel it 12 blocks back to the sound studio, where the fuckwad doorman makes me take the service elevator around the block.

5:15pm - After hooking up this beast, we begin to lay down the new sound on the new movie. I'm noticing that the synch isn't exactly right. It's only off by a frame or so, but it begins to drive me insane. I don't know whether it's just me, or if nobody will notice.

7:00pm - I rush BACK to the Dubbing House YET AGAIN to transfer the new DV cam tape to a VHS tape. You know, like the ones you watch at home. They say it will be ready by 9pm. I pray that they are telling the truth.

7:30pm - I rush down to Soho to play two games of basketball - I wasn't going to go, but I was the 8th player, and to bag it would have been dishonorable.

8:45pm - Sweaty and exhausted, I thrash BACK to the Dubbing House on the R train.

9:08pm - I get the tapes. I am on 38th St. and 5th Avenue. Fedex is on 34th St. and 10th Avenue. There are no cabs. The night has turned cold, and a bitter headwind develops down the cavernous alleys of Manhattan. I run. I run run fucking run, with a giant backpack on, through the wind. I remember the days in 1999 when I was lugging scripts through a rainstorm, trying to get a reading of the screenplay done - now I carry a finished videotape of the movie, and still, New York is trying to make it hard for me.

9:21pm - I reach Fedex. I have in my possession two tapes, and only one can go to the Really Big Film Festival - and both have a flaw. Tape #1 is the new dub with the "film look," but a creeping, tiny synch issue throughout. Tape #2 is the one we made earlier in the week, with a perfect soundtrack, but the footage still looks like video. I call Tessa. I am stalled. A lot of our future seems to hang on this decision, and I have to make a call. It is truly 50-50.

which would you have chosen?

After looking skyward and beseeching the winds, I decide to go with the "film look" tape. I don't know why. I suppose it was just that important to me. Besides, although New York had made my day excruciating, it didn't make it impossible. I take this as a sign that the new dub had earned it.

9:29pm - I close the envelope and send it off on the last Fedex plane. Freezing, starving and still wracked with ambivalence, I stagger home to Brooklyn into the waiting arms of my beloved.

10/1/03 I am up right

10/1/03

I am up right now, past way past 6am, because of a strong-held belief. I may end up being wrong about this, but I am sticking to my guns because I don't think we have the luxury to do anything else.

Let me explain: these days, a lot of independent movies are made using a Digital Video camera. The upside is obvious - the cameras are cheaper, the DV tape is compact, reusable and instantly viewable, and you can shoot as much footage as you want. The downside is, obviously, that your movie looks like it was shot on video. Really good video, sure, but it's still video.

The DV movies you have seen at your local art house don't look like TV video (you know, a show like "Home Improvement" or something) because the DV has been transferred to 35mm film, thus giving you that "film look" - that familiar flicker, the depth, etc.

But if you haven't transferred to film yet, what are you supposed to do? Have your indie DV film look like a Mexican soap opera and just hope people don't notice?

This is where I have differed with some of the other Pink House people - I am a cynical bastard, and I don't think audiences, even ones that claim to be cinema savvy, can imagine "how good this film will look." I think you have to spoon-feed them applesauce with a blunted spork.

This movie is a comedy, and that also makes a difference. Something about the film look makes things funnier. "Friends" and "Frasier" shoot on film because they can afford it. Film also deepens the emotional response an audience has with the story - think about the difference between "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" or "The Nanny" (shot on video) versus "Murphy Brown" or "M*A*S*H*" (shot on film) - it's not just content, it's an emotional discrepancy.

There are other theories about this. Some biopsychologists claim that the "flicker rate" of film (24 frames per second) instills a "alpha wave" in viewers, allowing them to relax and become involved on a deeper level. Video (roughly 30 frames per second) stimulates an "beta wave," which has the opposite effect. At least that's how I remember it.

Anyway, there's a little trick you can do to your video footage to make it resemble film. Entwine your fingers together, and you have a good metaphor for video: it is an image that is a bunch of lines interlaced. So, you can "de-interlace" the video and suddenly it looks an awful lot like film.

There is a great program that does this, called DV Filmmaker that we have been using to great effect. The problem is, this time I forgot to remind everyone about it, so the final cut of the movie is still stuck in the world of Video-Looking Land. Most everyone else felt as though the version we had was plenty strong enough, but I pitched a fit and had Tessa, Tod, Jessie and various dubbing houses working overtime to get this movie treated.

Will it have been worth it? I don't know. I may be full of shit. All I know is that the film-looking version of our movie just makes me feel better, it comforts me by allowing us to put our slightly-better foot forward. If that foot happens to get in a door somewhere, then perhaps tonight's misery will end up proving worthy of all the ill will I've caused.

9/30/03 Tessa and I got

9/30/03

Tessa and I got talking about the Remsen, NY "Barn Festival of the Arts" I mentioned two days ago - and we realized that it had no barns involved, and that the "arts" were probably more properly categorized as "crafts." I look at "art" as a singular statement, the message conveyed by an artisan with a particular point in mind. Transitively, "crafts" are objects (or "notions," as our grandmothers called them) that are produced in batches, and consumers are not so much interested in the singular craft, but the genre as a whole. You don't buy a particular ceramic dalmatian as a love for one of them, you buy one because you appreciate crap like that in general.

Yes, you can have multiple copies of a work of art (reprints of a Chagall painting, DVDs of Hitchcock), but the singular act of making that painting - or movie - remains the same.

Tessa disagreed - she said that a "craft" is defined as a way of doing things, i.e., jigsawing common girls' names with wood and putting them on a key ring. To her, "art" is a bit more noble concept.

Or maybe I just think that calling it the Remsen Festival of the Arts was a bit of an oversell, when you consider how many aprons festooned with crying puppies there were in one place.

I think we can both agree that putting the words together to form "arts and crafts" always conjures up long, tedious afternoons gluing macaroni pasta to a bunch of fucking paper plates.

So what have we learned today? Which of the following is art, and which are crafts?

9/29/03 I am the perfect

9/29/03

I am the perfect combination of someone who appears to be doing everything, but in actuality is doing nothing. Even better, exactly the opposite is true as well. When I did a stint as a caterer for The Bashful Butler in Los Angeles, I worked blindingly fast and got everything done so that I could stand around and space out. Of course, all my superiors saw was me spacing out, so many talks were had with my uncle (the owner) and my mom, all that shit.

So at the next gig, I finished my job early as usual, then picked up a rag and wiped random surfaces as I spaced out. The following day, there was all this talk about how I'd "really shaped up" and had a "new attitude."

I began to carry this rag around the job at all times, wiping rails, parts of trees, backs of chairs, the steering wheel of the catering truck, anything I could get my hands on. All the while staring blankly into space. By the time I left, I was one of the most requested workers. I wiped the fuck out of that place.

Now that I don't have to lug hot-boxes around Pasadena anymore, I'm not sure if I'm doing it right. I seem to have accomplished a fair amount of stuff: I'm twice-published (one actually sold a few copies), I've written a novel, three screenplays, and countless magazine articles. I've arranged more than fifty music pieces for McGraw-Hill currently being played in schools around America. I wrote all the songs for a Shakespeare musical, I've written trailers for 25 or so blockbuster movies, and I just wrote and co-directed an entire independent film.

And yet it doesn't look like I'm doing anything. And getting work can be harrowing, especially in the writing business. I have trouble getting calls returned, and I'm basically a charming dude. Perhaps this blog is that rag, the one I used while catering, a way to polish random surfaces so I can look busy to myself, until I figure out what I was supposed to be doing.

9/28/03 My Trip to Hinckley,

9/28/03

My Trip to Hinckley, New York
by Ian Williams

My friend Laurie is from a small town in upstate New York. She doesn't like it very much. Bad things happened up there when she was young. When we got into the car, a storm appeared on the horizon in the direction we were going.

We got there pretty quick. We were supposed to plant bulbs in the ground for her mother. On the way to her house, we passed what she called the After School Rape Hut. It was scary.

Her parents turned out to be very nice, but the dog wasn't. I learned something new! If you put baby powder all over your flower bulbs, the squirrels wont dig them up. Tessa and Laurie planted 100 bulbs all over the yard. I think they were going faster than usual.

Then we had chocolate pie and went to Remsen. This is the town right next to Hinckley. They had a parade! Actually it was called the Barn Festival of the Arts. They had candied almonds, soy candles and macram trivets. Tessa said a lot of the stuff was "crap." But there sure were a lot of people there!

I got a brick of horseradish cheddar cheese. I have to take pills with cheese because I'm "lactose intolerant." My tummy makes weird noises if I don't take the pill. And then it gets very unpleasant in the room. I don't want to talk about being lactose intolerant. It's not funny!

It turns out that Remsen is a town built by Welsh people. Everyone there is from Wales. I am too. So is Laurie. We are both called Williams. So we took a picture of Laurie and me in front of the Welsh Dragon and the "Williams Oil Company" sign. Tessa said "this is not a very flattering picture of you." Meaning me.

It was getting late so we said goodbye to Laurie's parents and "hit the road." On the way home we got really hungry. We remembered seeing a Cracker Barrel somewhere. Then we found it. George said "Cracker Barrel is where all the crackers eat." I got the chicken-fried chicken and a pancake. It was good! Then we went home.

I liked Hinckley, New York. Perhaps we will go back sometime. At least I know where the flowers are.