My second Instagram movie. Certainly there’s nothing wrong with viewing one’s life through various lenses. Such as the ephemeral snapshots of a cell phone. Here we have a slice of my year (2013) from highlights of my Instagram feed. It seems that my life is crammed full of bicycle rides, enchilada plates, imprudent selfies, and oh so many pretty people. Life could be a lot worse. Music by my favorite Austin space rock ensemble, ST 37 (“Stack Collision with Heap”).
I forgot how I was pulled into the project. I think it was through my friend Amanda Silva. She knew of my interest in the Hays Street Bridge. She had been doing some volunteer work with the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in issues of the gentrification of the downtown neighborhoods, and inquired if I might want to help out for this cause. I decided to make a short film. I should point out that this was a personal project, and other than receiving some documents from the Esperanza as well as the Hays Street Bridge Restoration Group, this was a film produced independently of any organization. I thought it best to create and eventually present this film as the work of a concerned citizen. I was lucky to have many friends help me on this. Most obviously (because they were on camera) Amanda Silva, and Marisela Barrera. The best thing about this little project was that I got to screen it to the San Antonio City Council in the City Council Chambers during a citizens-to-be-heard portion of their monthly meeting. Who knew they let people show videos? Well, now you do. I can add it to my slowly growing list of local venues in which my work has been presented.
These blog postings are getting a bit infrequent of late. To those fearful that I’m passed out somewhere in a pool of my own sick, fret not. I’ve been busy, is all.
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This afternoon I drove out to Edgewood Academy, the flagship high school for the Edgewood Independent School District (one of the 17 ISDs in the city). I was there to pitch the Josiah Media Festival. Kathy Braune introduced me to about 18 of her students who are working on animation projects. Two of the seniors had submitted a piece last year. They are both heading to the University of Dallas next year to continue their animation studies. One of the pieces the students screened for me was a fake trailer of a parody of the Saw horror movies which involved some equipment from the Edgewood robotics department to resemble some sort of anal probe. Ah, youth!
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I’ve been hauling my ass out to the bike trail every day in attempts to get back into some semblance of shape. But, man, these last couple of weeks have been like a sauna. The heat I can handle, but it’s just been too humid for me. Here, let me click over to my favorite weather site. It’s ten o’clock tonight. Temperature 85 degrees. Humidity, 70%. Heat index, 90 degrees. I think I need to invest in a second fan. If this one punks out, I’m a goner.
I ride out to Mission Espada — the last in the line of historic missions — and head on back. Often I walk the mile or more from Mission Espada to Mission San Juan, because it’s nice to slow down every so often, and take in what you might be missing. Sure, I have to wave off the Samaritan inclination of fellow cyclists who think I need help fixing a flat. I even had a train stop and the engineer stuck his head from the side window and shouted down if I wanted a bottle of water. I suspect he had a cooler up there with him and was prepared to toss an Aquafina my way. I waved him off with a smile and continued down the quiet tree shaded lane. Lord knows how long it took that train and all those cars to get back up to cruising speed.
And then there’s all the critters roaming around.
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Over the weekend I spent three days at the Creative Capital Professional Development Retreat. It was myself and 22 other local artists. David Alcantar, Estevan Arrendondo, Julia Barbosa Landois, Sabra Booth, Richard Diaz, Ilze Dilane, Donna Dobberfuhl, Rex Hausmann, James Hetherington, Stefani Job Spears, Deborah Keller-Rihn, Timothy Kramer, Rhonda Kuhlman, Marlyn Lanfear, Leigh Anne Lester, Jose Luis Lopez, Michele Monseau, Roberto Prestigiacomo, Doug Roper, Ansen Seale, Michael Twomey and Luis Valdaras.
It was an intense barrage of workshops, presentations, break-out sessions, and even the occasional role playing.
The best part were the artist presentations that each of us had to make. Just five minutes. I was blown away by the high caliber and diversity of the work. Perhaps they confused me with one of the other Erik or Eric Bosses.
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Last week I was out scouting Nightmare on Grayson Street (the premier San Antonio haunted house). Sam Lerma’s using it as a location for some more of his SAL Film Fest promo videos. Me, Sam, and Dar were ushered in by Gordon, the guy who runs the place, and we wandered the labyrinth of rooms and corridors and backstage work shops.
I inadvertently caused Dar to let loose a piercing scream when I drew her attention to a fat rat that was mounted on a wall in such a way that whenever you opened the adjacent door, it scurried up and down the wall. Dar rounded the corner to see what I was talking about just as I was slowly moving the door open and closed, activating the fishing line that passed over a little pulley.
But all she saw was a moth eaten rat gliding up the wall a couple feet from her. I think the echoes of her screams are still bouncing about the walls of the warehouse.
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I’ve been checking out some gritty industrial settings for a shoot coming up in about three weeks. The decommissioned Hay Street bridge is very appealing.
As is this loading island on a dead Southern Pacific siding over in my neighborhood, between Say Si and La Tuna.
I need to get the rest of the folks involved in the project to take a look at these places.
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The footage me and Russ are shooting for Jayne King out at Northwest Vista College just keeps plodding along. We’re about a week and a half into a three week project. She’s working with the Sokolow Theatre Dance Ensemble to reconstruct choreographer Anna Sokolow’s last work, Frida.
Last week we said goodbye to Sokolow Ensemble members Lauren Naslund and Samantha Geracht who spent week one working with Jayne’s students.
And then, this Monday, Jim May, the artistic director of the Sokolow Theatre Dance Ensemble arrived to give further shape to the dance piece.
He worked with the dancers in the morning. And then me, Russ, Jayne, Jim, and two of Jayne’s dancers loaded into a Northwest Vista van and drove to the airport. The Mexican students had just arrived. This project has an international component. Five dancers (three women and two men) flew up from the Central National for the Arts (CNA) dance department in Mexico City.
We set up a little impromptu interview session in the airport. And it seemed we had plenty of time as the kids’ luggage flew in on a later plane.
I had a very pleasant weekend. It is finally spring here in San Antonio. Well, for people throughout most of this country it would appear to be high summer. Saturday it got up to at least 100 degrees. I’m trying to get back into shape so I upgraded my basic bike ride from the ten mile jaunt to the more serious twenty mile excursion from my front door to Mission Espada and back. It kicked my ass.
Earlier in the day I met with Ashley Lindstrom of the Current. We had coffee at Ruta Maya … where I was waited on by the very talented Rebecca Potts, one of the gifted filmmakers over at the North East School for the Arts. I believe she’s just finishing off her senior year.
When Ashley arrived I had no trouble recognizing her from her photo on the Current website. Being a wise-ass blog writer sometimes pays off. She has a very easygoing natural charm about her and I could see how this would pay off for a journalist in an interview situation. She could coax the skeletons out of the most hardened sociopath’s closet. Now that I think about it, just what might I have unknowingly blubbered out to that sweet, trusting face?
I enjoyed not only reading her piece on the Marfa film festival, but also talking to her about it.
Read the piece here:
http://www.sacurrent.com/util/printready.asp?id=68683
On another Marfa film fest note, my friend Emily, a photographer from Dallas, posted a huge slide show of her trip to the festival, as well as an excursion down through Presidio, Redford, Terlingua, and back up to Marfa.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/crookedpinky/sets/72157604945015399/
My favorite part of the world.
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Today me and Russ met with Gordon Delgado. He’s trying to get a feature film made this summer. I first became of aware of the project through Carlos, who’s playing a small part in the film.
There are some notable actors attached to the piece. And what I’ve read of the script is quite appealing. But it just seems that he’s a good three months away from shooting. Nope. He’s slated to begin first week of June.
He’s a likable guy. A middle aged artist with a clear vision of what he wants the piece to be. He did a solid job some years back on a short shot on super 16 called Jesus in a String Bikini. Maybe this will happen. And, who knows, maybe it will happen exactly as he envisions it. And maybe even me and Russ will be on board the project. However, at the moment, it’s all up in the air. We mostly were meeting for lunch at Taco Haven to affably size one another up.
We’ll see … we’ll see.
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Tonight me and Russ rolled our first cassette of video on this Sokolow documentary we’re doing with Jayne King out at Northwest Vista. Two members of the Sokolow Theatre Dance Ensemble arrived today from New York. They’ll be working with Jayne’s students on a dance piece created by choreographer Anna Sokolow titled Frida, based on Frida Kahlo, who Sokolow knew.
The women from New York are staying at a Bed and Breakfast in one of the little mansions three blocks from me, and conveniently just beyond the back fence from Jayne’s house.
We got about thirty minutes of the three of them talking about their plan to teach the Northwest Vista kids the Frida piece.
Tomorrow morning we’re off to campus for an early shoot with the students for their first day of this project.
And somehow I think there are a couple of important things I need to do tomorrow, but I just can’t remember. Oh, well, it’ll all come back to me. You know, the moment it blows up in my face.
My latest NetFlix arrived this afternoon. For some reason I had never gotten around to seeing Living in Oblivion. It’s one of these movies about making movies that everyone who has seen has loved. Especially if they’ve ever worked in production.
I’d put it off because I’d assumed it was just goofy fluff. I think the problem is that I confused it with another movie about making movies, The Big Picture by Christopher Guest (which I have just placed in the NetFlix hopper, to arrive in good time to my front porch).
Tom DiCillo directed Oblivion, and if someone had explained that he was the DP for Stranger than Paradise, I might not have put off seeing this film for long. Also, I had not known that it starred Steve Buscemi, Catherine Keener, and Dermot Mulroney.
It’s definitely worth watching, and I expect I’ll see more of DiCillo’s work. But if you just read the comments on IMDB it sounds like fucking Shakespeare. And I think the reason is that with the digital revolution and the explosion of film schools, a significant percentage of serious movie watchers have, at some time or another, worked on a film set. And Living in Oblivion does a solid job of delivering the verisimilitude of what it’s like on a movie set. One of the highlights is Dermont Mulroney as the director of photography who wears a beret and a leather vest without a shirt. We’ve all worked with someone like that … or someone who wants to be like that.
Apparently the piece began as a 30 minute short, but everyone enjoyed the experience so much, that they tracked down more funding and extended it into a feature.
There’s a great establishing scene that opens the piece. It’s 4:30 in the morning. Two production assistants are loading up the craft service table with stale cookies a handful of grapes, and a carafe of coffee. No one else has arrived yet. One of them opens a half gallon carton of milk and gives it a sniff.
“I think this milk’s gone bad.”
“When did you get it?”
“That can’t be it. I just bought it Tuesday. Wait — what’s today?”
“Monday.”
“Really….?”
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Someone finally snagged the recliner that had been dumped in front of my house. That took a good three or four days. And I can’t imagine it was an easy task to haul it into the pickup truck. The deluge the other night must have soaked it with a good thirty pounds of water.
This week is bulky trash pick up. It comes to my neighborhood maybe twice a year. And always the week proceeding the King William Parade. The neighborhood commission doesn’t want anyone to have some lame reason why their yard or curb is filled with unsightly crap as the parade with all the public officials and the media comes tromping down our streets.
This means that the enterprising trash pickers are cruising the neighborhood looking for the tasty morsels to snatch from the mounds of brush and household refuse. I don’t mind this — I’m a supporter of the time honored scavenging arts. But it does create a maddening bottleneck with all the trucks inching along the street — the drivers hopeful, discerning.
But it’s not just the residential neighborhoods. For some reason I have been seeing people’s shit dumped out along the Mission Trail where I ride my bike. This was out on Villamain along the railroad tracks between Missions Espada and San Juan.
Next, I stopped to inspect the Bridge to Nothing. The location for a Carlos Pina short film of the same name. It’s a decommissioned bridge that spans a little canal that shunts off the San Antonio River. It’s a cool location, and I was thinking if it might lend itself to an upcoming dance video. It’s filled with aesthetic potential, but I came to the conclusion that it won’t do for the performance.
There’s another place I want to scout as a location. It’s a much larger decommissioned bridge. You can see it from up on I-37 as you head north from the Alamodome. It’s on the eastside. If I wasn’t still fighting this damn cold, I might have cycled over to the place. But, instead, after coming home from my more humble bike ride, I got on my computer and used Google Maps to get a satellite shot down on the bridge. And then I thought maybe I’d try the “street view” setting. I’d tried this before, but wasn’t able to get it to do much.
Wow! It’s working great now. After cruising around the closed off ramps to the eastside bridge (360 degree street-level photos), I headed over to check out my block.
The Google photo truck had obviously come down my street around Halloween. The Witte’s house and the Cortes’ house are both festooned with loads of fake spider webs. With no little trepidation I rotated around to look at my house, fearful that I’d be sitting on my porch and picking my nose. But I was nowhere to been seen. My truck wasn’t even in the drive.
There’s actually a way to cruise down the photographed streets. All I did was to use the arrows on my keyboard. It’s not a fluid movement, but it’s a rough approximation.
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I found this on my windshield early this evening as I was heading out to the grocery store. Some fucking bird had perched in the pecan tree above my truck and took a dump on my windshield. And for some reason this stink bug couldn’t keep away.
I call this piece Stink Bug on Guano.
Look for my entire guano series at the finer digital photo galleries this coming First Friday