The Light of Day

Emerging Filmmakers

A quickie before I crash — I just got home from this month’s Emerging Filmmakers Series at the Little Theatre, to see The Other Gods and a half dozen other short indie flicks on the (somewhat) BIG SCREEN with a real audience, followed by a question and answer session that Mike encouraged me to join him up front for. I didn’t have a heck of a lot to say to all those faces staring at us, but I did get a laugh for one innocent/honest comment about the sexiness in another filmmaker’s submission, which happened to fly under my radar when it was co-incidentally shot in the same building I live in.

Overall I was pleased with the effect on the screen — yes, I’m back to talking about Mike’s film here — though I think the overall volume needs to be pumped up a few dB, with some limiting to keep the peaks from distorting. (Yes, mom, I’m playing the loudness wars, but not to the obscene extreme of modern mainstream pop/rock. And no, my mom has no idea what the “loudness wars” are, that was just a figure of speech.) Other than that, I feel good about The Other Gods and definitely want to do more with Mike.

It was good and inspiring to see the other films too, which kind of parallels my experience of forcing myself to go to open mics every week. I’ve only made it to 2 out of 3 so far because of this damn cold — in fact, tonight I was swallowing like crazy to keep my throat moist and not ruin the whole event with coughing fits — but, hey, I’m making the effort, for real.

And please kick me in my sensitive areas and tell me to get some damn business cards printed up. They’re cheap and they get your name out. Do it.

The digital video revolution is doing for self-portraits what sliced bread did for … people who didn’t want to slice their own bread!

Top: first time trying out the camera on me playing guitar, using only the built-in mic for sound, just to see what it would sound like. I played at least a dozen songs, whatever came to mind, and a four-minute Shine On You Crazy Diamond sounded best (surprisingly, since it’s not really an acoustic-friendly song), so I preserved the moment on YouTube, flubs and all.

Bottom: I filmed myself putting down the bass part for a new song this morning. Unfortunately, I sounded better than I looked, so I’ll be keeping the track but not the video. The above still is one of the less-incriminating frames, but yes, the truth is out there: I still have a few grams to lose.

Miscellaneous bits

1. There’s no such thing as an unreliable person. Think about it.

2. When I die, I want my tombstone to say: “Hold down the fort for me, peeps.”

3. I’m going to have to stop eating Triscuits for a while…

… I just can no longer tolerate Rachael Ray’s menacing mug on the box, taunting me with her evil mind-beamed messages of “bwahahaha, I make millions spreading little bits of edible stuff on Triscuits, just because people love my infectious smile so doggone much!”

Infectious indeed. Remind you of anyone?

Lessons in internal parenting

So I’m off work, at the drug store, pickin’ up some snax, and my eye is frozen for a moment on some pads of paper. One says “sketch pad”, the other says “drawing pad”. (You’re probably expecting me to go on a sarcastic rant here about the difference between “sketching” and “drawing”, but you couldn’t be farther from the truth, so pipe down and let Uncle Keith finish his story.) So I realize what’s happening - it’s my inner child. I pull myself away from the art stuff and go back to my snack cruise, but I can hear the little child whining faintly somewhere inside me.

My first thought is that this is a tug of war, and that maybe buying some cheapo “art” stuff would be the more spiritual and living-for-today choice. My second thought is, “no, Keith, if you really want to draw or paint you have stuff at home”. My third thought is “WAAAAAH I WANT PAPER AND FINGERPAINT AND PLAY-DOH”.

Keep in mind, I am not a cold-hearted bastard with a dead soul. But I did have to set some boundaries. “Okay, inner child, tell you what. I’m going to stand here for a few minutes, and you can pick out maybe two things that you really want, and I’ll buy them.”

Well, you know what? The little brat couldn’t make up his mind. He just kind of looked around at everything. He didn’t seem to have any idea what he wanted to do with the supplies when he got them, either, and I of course had visions in my head of fairly ugly and uninspired splotches of color on a few sheets of paper stashed away in a drawer somewhere, while the rest of the paint and paper collected dust.

Finally, I said, “okay, just do this. Form a mental image of the stuff in front of you. If you still want something from here in the next few days, I’ll come back for it.”

That shut him up good.

S’more stuff in my Amazon windfall

Since I don’t really want this to become a review-dominated site, I’m going to do one combined post to catch the rest of the stuff I’ve recently received from Amazon.com (I had a bunch of gift cards to use up). Ready set go.

Esther and Jerry Hicks: Ask and It Is Given (Learning to Manifest Your Desires)

I’m always slightly embarrassed to admit my closet interest in new-agey self-helpy material, but the basic idea — that we attract events, situations, and people into our life by the way we choose to think and feel — is something I’ve already come to believe on my own, and was curious as to how it would be presented by someone else. I’d wandered on to the Hicks’ website maybe about a year ago, and the book is supposedly written by a collective of non-physical spirits channeled by Mrs. Hicks. Whether that’s real or not, the freely downloadable .mp3s of “Abraham” speaking through her were so entertaining in their own right that I didn’t mind letting go of the price of a book.

Waking Life

A friend of mine brought this movie up in passing as an example of a good “eye candy” movie. It follows a young man stuck in a dream-state, who mostly wanders from scene to scene listening to other people’s semi-pretentious monologues and rants. Sometimes he doesn’t appear in the scene. What makes it visually interesting is that it is entirely computer rotoscoped from live-action. It seems to be shot almost entirely with a hand-held camera, and the individual elements (facial features, details in the background, etc.) sometimes follow the original movement rather loosely — possibly intentionally — so you may want to take your motion sickness pills before viewing. Overall, I think the scenes are more effective and less disorienting when the artists “cartoonify” the faces rather than tracing them exactly, such as in the “I don’t want to be an ant” scene.

One standout is rotoscoped footage of the actual mini-orchestra rehearsing soundtrack music for the film. (In the commentary track, we learn that a cellist’s smoking habit was “outed” to her family by the appearance of her cigarette in this scene. Another commentator jokingly suggests she should have told them it was “drawn in”.)

Idiocracy

I wouldn’t say don’t ever watch this, but don’t build a shrine for it in preparation for the next Office Space either. The problem is: how do you actually make a film entirely about incredibly stupid people, and make it interesting and funny for smart people? It seems that the only answer Mike Judge could come up with was “exaggerate, exaggerate, exaggerate”. I often found myself wondering who the ideal audience really would be. As willing as I was to suspend my disbelief, I could not get one thought out of my head: if people were really like this, all that automated machinery would have irreparably crapped out a long time ago. There may be some reversal or resistance to human evolution in an idiot-proofed culture/environment, but that culture/environment would have to be maintained by someone.

Roger Waters - Ça Ira (There Is Hope)

If this purchase doesn’t embody brand loyalty, I don’t know what does. I have no plans to fall in love with it. I’m happy for Waters that he has an opportunity to experience something different and work with different people. I’m also morbidly curious as to what my nouveau-operahead parents (as well as the veteran aficionados) would think of it. What I don’t get is — if you’re going to make music, why not just make music? Why try to make an entire piece that isn’t in your own style, and deliberately work it into a traditional format in order to be accepted by a community that likely doesn’t know you from Britney Spears?

(Then again, what is his style? Were you as confused as I was when the Radio Waves single first aired?)

2/14

My immediate supervisors apparently think my coworkers and I are kindergarten students.

This is not a bad thing, mind you. In fact, while most people today are either focusing all their energy on their significant others, or feeling incredibly alone and neglected, I spent the better part of the day remembering the TRUE MEANING of valentine’s day.

Well, no, actually I have no freaking idea what the true meaning of valentine’s day is.

But … I do think I have a better than vague idea of what love is, and I spent the better part of the day celebrating that. I did not once think about or care about whether anyone, including myself, had an opposite-sex partner. That’s just a reflection of one aspect of a person’s self-sustaining social framework. Some people have wives or husbands. Some are single mothers. Some are more attached to their parents than most people their age. Some have dogs. Some have cats. (Some have three mice in one cage, one high-strung mouse in another cage, and a free-range fifth mouse that visits them all in the night. We won’t name names.) Some are introverts, some are extroverts. Some have annoying neighbors. Some play guitar at coffee houses. Even the loneliest people in the world have some kind of relationship (even if it’s just a routine interaction with a cashier or security guard), and even the most social of people have some dark secret they don’t share with anyone.

Life is way more complex than “you’re sad if you’re alone” and “you’re happy if you’ve found your soulmate”.

So anyway, we decorated little paper bags in with hearts and whatnot to hang at our desks, so that we could go around and distribute valentines. Which means I had to stop and buy those silly packs of valentines that you probably haven’t seen since you were a kid. I couldn’t decide between Star Wars and Hello Kitty, so I picked them both. (Maybe subconsciously I was thinking “I want to poke your pussycat with my lightsabre”, but I digress.) Memories came flooding back. It was great fun challenging myself to pick which cards would go to which people, and which innocuous messages I wouldn’t mind having misinterpreted by which people. Every set has a certain percentage of cards that say “FRIEND” very prominently in the message. I laughed my ass off at this — this is definitely a “way out” for kids who are obligated to distribute the cards to anyone who might get the wrong idea. I had great fun (and got a lot of laughs) handing these off to people and proclaiming “I only like you as a friend.”

The absurdity of the uncomfortable social dynamic of children who may or may not have crushes on one another served as a great contrast for what was ultimately wonderful about today, which was that I had so many extras of these things that I wound up going around to other departments and spreading “love” where it was unexpected, with a spirit of humor. It’s hard to explain exactly what I mean by that, other than the fun and “inclusive” attitude I had. That’s just it — valentine’s day has come to be associated with exclusive love rather than inclusive love.

Making people laugh, smile, and even express gratitude for the unexpected. That’s what I did for 2/14.

Review: The Corporation

Any CD I listen to, any film I watch, any book I read (don’t say it, Christy!), has to find me via some pathway into my life. Usually that pathway involves another person I know, via a direct recommendation, a few mentions in passing (if two or more people make mention a film, album, or artist under separate circumstances, it becomes exponentially more “significant” in my subconscious), seeing it in a friend’s collection, hearing it mentioned in comparision to (or grouped with) something I’m already familiar with, having it handed to me to borrow, or having someone just plain put it right on and expose me to it directly. From there, other pathways involve natural connections to what I’m familiar with, such as more work by the same artists, or something those artists talk about.

For all of these paths, it’s logical that I would know at least a few other people who are familiar with it too, so that I can discuss, critique, compare notes, and generally “geek”. Subsequently, one thing that sets The Corporation apart for me is that no one I’ve talked to has ever heard of it. Surely with good reason — as sick as you are of hearing cliches like “the movie THEY don’t want you to see”, this is in fact the movie they don’t want you to see.

I found it on Wikipedia; I was reading up on corporations in general in order to come to better terms with some of the frustration and angst I cope with at my day job, as well as outside of the job as my mental space is polluted with branding and advertising, the people I interact with on a daily basis are inundated with deeply disempowering and life-trivializing messages, and my conscience is strained by the necessity to buy goods and services without knowing exactly what I’m supporting and financing. Upon finding the film, my immediate reaction was “why have I not heard of this?”

While I certainly didn’t need to see a movie to put a bad taste in my mouth about modern corporations, and while this film will certainly do little other than preach to the choir, I’m finding it to be more intense and engrossing than I expected for a documentary, and I daresay even entertaining — in an adrenaline-boosting, get-off-on-getting-pissed-off kind of way — and in the end, there is some hope.

It’s a two-disc set with tons of extras that I haven’t begun to scratch the surface of. While I can’t begin to get into detail about all the people who appear, I will mention that a certain Michael Moore appears a few times in a refreshingly soft-spoken demeanor.

I tend to lack words beyond that when it comes to reviewing films, except let me be that first person to recommend it to you. It’s an important and kind of all-encompassing issue, the basic premise being that corporations are given nearly unlimited legal rights and yet have no conscience, even if the humans running them would otherwise be perfectly decent people (which is often the case). The entity, the “legal fictional person”, exhibits the traits of a psychopath, due to its sole guiding force being the quarterly bottom line.

And now if one other person mentions the film to you in a separate circumstance…

Now you see it, now you don’t?

If you thought there was a new post here, and now there isn’t, it’s because I had a new demo up and I switched it to private… the song was off to a decent start, but it needs more context. I’ll re-public the post when I feel like there’s sufficient context for it.

Get around, get around, they (The Other Gods) get around

I asked Mike Boas for a running list of all the festivals which have either shown or are scheduled to show his animated short, H.P. Lovecraft’s The Other Gods, which, as you know, I created the soundtrack for in a few insanely focused and self-disciplined days. Here’s the list as of now:

• H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival — October 8, 2006
• Something Wicked This Way Con — November 3-5, 2006
• Horror Dance — January 13, 2007
• Tromadance — January 24, 2007
• Emerging Filmmakers Series — February 26, 2007
• A Night of Horror — March 23-25, 2007

That last one is way out in Sydney, Australia. You gotta give Mike a hand for the tireless promotion he’s doing!