Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Art of Avoiding Preposterousness and Self-Deprecation

Those wonderful days of false summer have been driven back to south of the border. It's winter today, and there's no other way to look at it. Wet, cold, and just plain miserable.

I spent today much as I spent yesterday afternoon and evening. Working on my submission to the Dobie-Paisano fellowship. The work seemed straightforward enough. The submission form is a cinch at only five pages. One of the problems is that I'm very squeamish at promoting myself. I was up pretty late last night trying to make myself sound just wonderful … without verging into the realm of either preposterousness or self-deprecation. After a couple of hours of grueling typing, I thought I'd got there. I decided to reward myself by heading out and picking up a few tacos. I'd been typing into the proper fields on one of those interactive PDF files that allows you to add content. I guess I really wanted those tacos, because it slipped my mind that you can't save in this PDF thingy. I watched as about five hundred words of of blood and sweat and typing fizzled into that digital void where nothing ever returns.

I decided I had to get out of the house — before I ground my teeth down to nubs — and return to the process after a late night snack.

The truth is, I can usually recover most of what I lose in these situations (usually caused by power brownouts), just so long as I don't wait too long. When I returned I was able to plow back into the big white space (this time on a word processing program with which I could save) and recreate a palatable approximation of what I had inadvertently destroyed.

The other component was the work sample. I decided on six short stories. About 25 pages in all. It should be simple. I had the pieces written. But they were certainly not in proper formatting. True, the proposal documents mentioned nothing about manuscript formatting. But, really, how else would a writer professing professionalism deliver the goods? Besides, I expect that at least one member of the judging panel would be from the publishing field. I'll spare my readers the tedium of describing my attempts to do this on a computer without a decent word processor program. But I'll hit the highlights — these poor little works of prose were messaged into publisher-proper form, and then: downloaded, uploaded, emailed back to myself; and, they were rudely forced through exotic file protocols (there are various copies of each story on my computer with at least four different file extensions) … and then I had to print out three copies of each.

This last important item I had actually planned for in advance. Yesterday I drove down to the office supply store on SW Military. I wasn't fucking around. I picked up three cartridges of black ink.

While looking around for the ink aisle, I looked up and saw George Ozuna. We chatted for awhile. He told me that he's working to get his high school students over at the Film School of San Antonio (AKA Harlandale High School) to this year's Tribeca Film Festival. Very impressive. You go, Harlandale!

So, anyway, I soon had the ink issue covered.

And the printing of it all worked pretty well. It's just a lot of printing. (Note to those who do a lot of printing of just basic text: put your printer setting on “grayscale. ” Unless you need vibrant black on expensive paper, you probably won't be able to tell the difference. It puts an ink jet printer into over-drive, not to mention it makes your ink last longer.)

But, as I've learned from editing video projects, if you've got a two hour project and you begin five hours before deadline, you've actually got yourself a five hour project. It's just one of the physical laws of the universe. Getting grant proposals, such as I was working on, finished and to the post office by postmark deadline is no different.

I was stumbling out the door at 4:38. Almost all post offices in this city close at five on weekdays. Yes, there is one the closes at, I believe, 11:30 at night, but it's all the fucking way up at the airport.

But I was doing good, right? Twenty minutes to spare with a post office five minutes away. I was fifteen minutes ahead of things.

I didn't have a large envelope, so I headed out with about ninety pages held together in three clumps with some paperclips. I knew I could buy a mailing envelope at the post office.

At the post office I grabbed a mailer, stuffed my pages inside, and I scribbled the address on the front. I sealed it and walked up to the postal clerk.

And then I realized I was supposed to include a check. The submission fee. I had no checkbook.

Fuck.

I had the guy sell me the envelope. Because, well, I'd already written on it. There was no way I could go home, grab my checkbook, and make it back. The place would close in just a few minutes. It looked like I'd have to make the drive out to the airport.

I walked out into the parking lot, and just as I was just about to get into my truck, the obvious hit me. The post office sells money orders.

I spent maybe thirty precious seconds trying to decide whether to castigate myself for not thinking of this while I was at the checkout counter, or whether I should high-five myself because I had suddenly figured out how to save myself a protracted trip out to the north side to visit the airport post office.

I removed my head from my posterior and I made it back inside before they closed the doors. I got the proposal off in time.

The truth is I have about as much chance of landing the Dobie-Paisano as I do of winning a Christian Bale look-alike contest. But, as they say, you gotta play to win. And maybe, just maybe, if I entered enough Christian Bale look-alike contests, one day I might make it. You know, the intersection of a superior hair day with just the right lighting.

For those not hip to the Texas lit scene, we, here, have a certain fetish for our regional authors. Well, that's probably putting things too strong. We used to have this regional respect for Texas writers. Now it's hard to find anyone under the age of fifty who even knows who J. Frank Dobie is. And I can hardly blame them. He was really not that good a writer. But it was really about a community of writers — Dobie, Roy Bedicheck, and Walter Prescott Webb were just the tip of a huge renaissance of Texas letters. The Book Club of Texas, the Texas Folklore Society, and Texas Institute of Letters. All these august entities have Dobie's fingerprints all over them. He was a writer, a gadfly, a folklorist, and one of the first of what has come to be known as a professional Texan (think of Ben K. Green and Molly Ivins).

J. Frank Dobie had a bit of land near Austin — about 250 acres, with Barton Creek snaking through it — and he bequeathed it to the University of Texas in Austin. There is a small house on the property. And UT has created two fellowship programs that allow authors to spend half a year out at Dobie's spread, where they can write in solitude. One of the fellowships is for writers who are established; the other is for those with a more humble track record. Both offer impressive stipends — impressive to me, that is.

I have, of course, applied for the latter, the Jesse H. Jones Writing Fellowship. The Dobie-Paisano website lists all the recipients back to the very beginning, 1967. It also gives more detailed bios of recipients back to the year 2000. And of the seven recipients of the Jesse H. Jones Writing Fellowship from 2000 to the present, all of them have MFAs, a history of having been published, and they are pretty much all on staff at universities. So, it looks like I just pissed away a postal money order, don't you think?

Oh, well. One has to just keep slogging away, trying one's best to assemble successes.

The thing that bothers me is that of all the 79 recipients of both awards since the beginning, I'm somewhat familiar with the work of 13. Okay. Let's look at the first 24 years. That covers it all for me. Those 13 writers are in the 1967 to 1990 phase. 1991 to 2007 (seventeen fucking years), I have never heard of these people. I'm sure they are all wonderful people. But where the fuck are the Billy Porterfields and Gary Cartwrights of today?

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A new NetFlix day. Cobra Verde. The Herzog madness continues! Of the five film collaborations between Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski, I'd seen all but Cobra Verde. This was the final film they did together. It's an historical piece dealing with the slave trade. The cinematography is stunning. The scope of the piece, impressive. And Kinski is gnawing on the scenery of two continents! As lush and poignant as this film is, it doesn't get under my skin like so many of Herzog's other pieces. There are probably four scenes that I'll carry with me for years because of their huge scope and brilliant art design. And Kinski does some great intense scenes. But it's kind of scattered. The script seems to be the problem. And maybe that's because it was adapted from a novel. There is too much plot clattering around in the background. But I highly recommend it. This is what a big budget (well, biggish) extravaganza with a cast of thousands (well, many many hundreds) looks like when it's directed by an artist and not some fucking Hollywood hack.

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It's halfway through the first month of the year. I didn't make any resolutions (leastwise none I'll admit to here), but it's beginning to look like another wasted year. Even at this two week point.

I've generated most of my energies so far this year into two project proposals. The Luminaria. And the Dobie-Paisano. The former I might get. It'll pay me a pittance which will no doubt be mostly eaten up by expenses. And the latter is not gong to happen. (However, I've formatted some stories into a proper state, so now I can start submitting them (and, well, you know, begin to collect those sweet rejection letters and emails).)

And a job? I need to look into that. I can maybe float for another month. I have two likely sources to try and tap. I think that's what I'll be doing tomorrow. Looking for a job. And may god have mercy on my soul.

She’s Softened the Truly Trenchant Me

(Damn — I'm behind on another posting. This is two or three days old.)

I must have had my phone on silent. I looked across the desk early Thursday afternoon and saw I had a message. It was from Dar. She wanted to know if I knew that someone was writing bad things about me on the internet. I had a suspicion what she was talking about, but I couldn't just speculate. I mean, could you?

When I got her on the line, she explained. I realized it was as I had assumed.

I rarely pick up the Current. True, it's free, but it's just not very relevant to my life. And therefore I'm not sure if the article from the Current I read online was published only on the internet. The piece was a sort of year in review of the San Antonio art scene as covered by the Current.

(I'll ladle out the candor — I found the piece on my own because I was googling my name. I do this every so often. You know, to see if anyone's writing about me. And, finally, it paid off!)

Months back I'd written a blog about an article (the cover story, in fact) that the Current ran during the summer on Mark Sullivan and his San Antonio Film District. Current reporter Ashley Lindstrom (apparently also googling her name), wrote that “Local filmmaker Erik Bosse took issue with the Current’s story on his LiveJournal — calling it a 'near puff piece.'” Wow. She certainly could have quoted the nasty stuff. I mean, I was much more trenchant than that. Bitchy, in fact.

She goes on to write these two passages:

“According to the San Antonio Film Commission’s website, the last major feature film to utilize the Sake Studio space where the SAFD is located was All the Pretty Horses ….”

“… a recent visit to the SAFD’s significantly updated website — at least since I was there last — suggests a holy turn of events. According to Jessica Matthews’ District bio (in which her title isn’t mentioned), SAFD is 'an incredible opportunity for the Body of Christ here in San Antonio!!'”

The truth is, there was actually nothing unpleasant directed against me. But I was rather dismayed that the Current's up-date contained little more than information lifted from three different websites? This is journalism?

Sally Baxter, Girl Reporter, is spinning in her grave clutching her little stubby pencil and fliptop steno pad.

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My NetFlix fix arrived late today. I was starting to get worried. But at 4:30 I heard the familiar footfall of my mailman's boots on my wooden porch, and then there it was, the pleasing clack of my mailbox lid dropping shut.

It was Les Blank's documentary of the making of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, Burden of Dreams.

I consider myself a fairly serious Herzog fan. I can think of 12 films of his I've seen. When I saw Aguirre: The Wrath of God at age 14 or 15 I was floored. It was the most amazing movie-going experience I've ever had. There are times in our lives when we are perfectly ripe for particular artistic experiences, and these two trajectories (that film and my life) intersected at just the right time. And so I was a bit taken aback when I realized there was a documentary (and a rather well-know one, at that) about the making of my second-favorite Werner Herzog film.

Anyway, I've finally remedied that spot in my ignorance. Tonight I watched Blank's film. It's incredible. The photography of the Amazonian rainforest is stunning. The indigenous people are presented in a humanistic manner without being overly romanticized. Herzog, as always, comes across as the most insane person you've ever wanted to have as your best friend.

One of the things I learned from this film was that Jason Robards and Mick Jagger were originally cast. Not only that, but Herzog shot almost half of the film before Robards came down with dysentery or something. And when Robards returned to the states for treatment his doctor told him not to return to the jungle. Jagger eventually had to leave. He had a Rolling Stone tour coming up. But one of the treats of the documentary is that you get to see a couple of scenes with Robards and Jagger. Shit! As much as I love Klaus Kinski as Fitzcarraldo, the scenes with Robards makes me wish that version had come to pass. I haven't seen Robards so sweetly hammy since his intense performance in A Thousand Clowns.

This blog is published redundantly on both LiveJournal and MySpace. For those who read this blog off my LiveJournal site, you will have missed the MySpace reply Lee made to the previous blog entry. He wrote:

“I have an interesting relationship with Herzog as a filmmaker. He's one of those artists I respect and admire and just flat-out like while having experienced very little of his work first-hand. The one of his films I'm most familiar with is (obviously) Grizzly Man, which I loved. But he's such a memorable personality away from the camera, so unique unto himself, that I feel I know him much better than I do. Does that make any sense?”

There is undoubtedly a moving authenticity about Herzog when you see and hear him speak. One of the greatest rewards of his documentaries is how he includes himself within the pieces. He generates that sort of warmth and candor that makes you feel like you've known the man all your life. I can place my entrance into the cult of Herzog the personality even more specifically then when I entered the cult of Herzog the artist (in my teen years with Fitzcarraldo). It was 1986, I was 23 living in San Francisco and working in the warehouse of Rough Trade Records. There was a little repertory cinema in the Mission District … I can't remember it's name. It was small, and played some great films. Anyway, when I saw they were going to screen two Werner Herzog documentaries, I hightailed it over. They showed Ballade vom Kleinen Soldaten (Ballad of the Little Soldier), which gave some insight — certainly for American audiences — what was really happening in Nicaragua at that time which was forcing indian children who had not one political atom in their bodies to pick up guns and engage in one of the dirty little proxy wars the US was bankrolling in Latin America. And then there was Herzog's mountain climbing piece, Gasherbrum – Der Leuchtende Berg (The Dark Glow of the Mountains).

This last piece, for some reason stuck with me more. What I most remember (and this was over 20 years ago) was Herzog interviewing the subject of the film, a well-known mountain climber. The mountain climber is relaxing naked in a hot spring. He's in this outcropping of rock pooled with steaming water and there are snow-covered hills all around. Herzog is asking the man why he does it. Why does he risk life and limb to climb? The camera moves in and takes a close look at the climbers naked feet. Toes are missing from frostbite. The climber digressed into something more grand and abstract than simply man verses mountain. He smiles — as can only the most confident men sitting naked in hot springs with cameras pointed on them — and shares a recurring dream. He said that in this dream he was always traveling around the world on horseback. Just him and the horse. Herzog — refusing to play the dispassionate and objective documentarian — piped up that he had almost the exact same dream. “But in my dream I'm on foot. And I'm walking the Earth with a dog.”

If women really want to understand men, they need to watch Werner Herzog films. Getting into sports is the wrong method. That's the way to understand boys, not men. And, ladies, if you attended a public elementary school, you already know all you need to know about boys (those chummy sumbitches sure do
like their jostling and butt-slapping, let me tell you).

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I really need to start looking around for a job. I frittered the day away doing very little. I did, however, work some on my November novel (which has been pretty much languishing since the end of National Novel Writing Month). Also, I finally got around to sending off my proposal for the Luminaria Fest that this city will hold in March. I'm more than a little curious how it will play out. I've been hearing some very unfavorable accounts concerning the administrative structure (or lack thereof) — to the best of my knowledge, this event has not yet hired an Artistic Director.

We'll just have to see. I'll certainly be there whether or not my proposal is accepted. True, the event could come off stellar. But if not, even a desperate clusterfuck can be fun to watch … while enjoying a four dollar beer and gnawing on a cajun turkey leg and talking to vendors who are set up to sell their ceramic skull-shaped bongs.

Today also saw the arrival of the UPS truck. I'd ordered a Century Optics 16:9 widescreen adapter.

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I've wanted one of these little lenses for my Canon GL-2 camcorder for as long as I've had the camera — five years or more. I was always put off by the price tag. $850. Wow! And what does this lens do, you might ask? Well, it's all about aspect ratio. The rectangular shape of a TV screen is 4 wide by 3 high. DV camcorders are pretty close. 3 by 2. But many video movie-makers want something that looks more like a Hollywood film. And this gets confusing, because there are a lot of different formats. But, suffice to say, those movies all have a hight to width ratio where the width is greater than a TV screen. And so 16 by 9 became a good compromise for a cinema-like formate. In fact, it's the native format of high definition video. But for those poor bastards (like me) who can't afford a fancy high def camcorder, there are several ways to give the look of 16:9.

To the best of my knowledge, there is only one “prosumer” level miniDV camcorder that can shoot in a native 16:9. And that's the Canon XL2. It has a somewhat larger CCD chip. But I don't have that camera. Next, there is the option of an anamorphic lens. Such as this wondrous little 16:9 device. But that's a lot of money. However, because of the way it bends the image, it allows use of the entire CCD chip, even though said chip is shaped as a 3:2 rectangle. The lens stretches out the images. The image is later unsquished by your editing software. Another way to get this 16:9 effect is to use the setting that is on most cameras. It's listed under the menus as “widescreen,” “16:9,” or a “letterbox” setting. And almost all the time, what the camera is actually doing is automatically masking off a bit of the top of the frame and a bit of the bottom of the frame and then inserting a bit of code so that your editing system recognizes the images as anamorphically distorted. You will need to reformat it in post-production. And then there is the method I have always used. And that is to shoot in the normal 3:2 SD (that stands for Standard Definition, not to be confused with HD, or High Definition) video. When I capture the clips and begin to edit, I will eventually digitally lay a stripe of black over a bit of the top and bottom of the frame. The reason this method is better than using the camera's on-board faux 16:9 setting, is that I am able to shift the frame up or down if something unexpected happened. For instance, if a microphone was being boomed from above, and you can see it just peeking into the top of the frame, you have the latitude to shift up a bit and have it hidden behind that upper black stripe you're using to give the impression of 16:9.

However, Century Optics (now, Schnider Optics) has decided to discontinue their video anamorphic lenses. It's no surprise. All HD camcorders have no need for these devices. They operate in a native 16:9 format.

And when I stumbled onto the Century Optics website, I was amazed to see these lenses are now priced at $99. I suspect I bought one of the very last ones.

I'm not sure just how good this thing is. I've done some test footage and I can't see that there is an increase of resolution with the lens. But I'll do some more work with closer images.

Here are three images — all frame grabs of video footage. I almost never use the auto-focus on my camera, but for some reason I used it here. These are thumbnails. Click for larger images. The first image is using the Century Optics lens.


The second is using the camera's internal 16:9 setting.


The final is shooting in normal 3:2, and then masking the top and bottom.


What I've learned is that, lacking the Century Optics lens, I have been doing it the right way. But I still need to work with this new toy and find out if it's really giving me an edge.

Hankering For an Horrific Roadside Snacking Opportunity

[This is a posting I should have uploaded several days ago. I wrote it Saturday night.]

It was pushing noon today, when I sat down at my computer and enjoyed my breakfast and coffee while watching, via the Expanded Cinema blog, a short documentary by Les Blank, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. (And thank you Emvergeoning for hipping me to this site). It seems Herzog had challenged Errol Morris to get off his ass and make his first film (Gates of Heaven) by promising that he (Herzog) would eat his shoes if Morris made his film. And eat shoe he did. This piece is so watchable because Herzog is always a wonderful subject for interviews and impromptu statements. Check it out. Les Blank later created a feature-length documentary about the making of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo. It's called the Burden of Dreams, and it's in my NetFlix queue.

Speaking of NetFlix, as I was watching the shoe-eating, the mail arrived. My new NetFlix delivery. A Zed and Two Naughts. This is a Peter Greenaway film from the period when he was most relevant — a film that for some reason has passed me by over the years.

Before I could decided whether or not I wanted to fire it up, Russ called. He was half-hankering to buy a sailboat. There was one for sale up at the sailing club at Canyon Lake he belongs to. He asked if I'd like to head up with him. Sure. I was game for a road trip.

It was a perfect winter day. Well, my kind of winter day. It might have got up to about 80. (Hell, right now it's 63 degrees at one a.m.) Out at the lake there seemed less activity than one would expect on such a beautiful Saturday. The boat owner wasn't there, but Russ had spoken to him. And he set up a ladder and climbed aboard the boat, which was parked on the yacht club's property, propped up high on a trailer so that the long keel wouldn't touch ground. But it seemed that the boat, though quite sound and very cheap, possessed a couple of bumps which had probably affected the structural integrity of the hull. Fixable, certainly, for a price. But Russ wasn't in the market for a fixer-upper.

We headed back to town. Russ had picked me up at my place, so we were heading to the Southtown area. We took the S. Alamo exit off I-35. We were on the access road waiting for the light to change so we could turn onto Alamo.

The sun was hitting us in our eyes, and we were trying to figure out what the truck in front of us was hauling. It was packed with what looked like a bunch of yellow paper. I could see pieces of the stuff falling off. But they fell too fast for paper. Corn husks from a tamale factory?

Close.

We got nearer. The truck was hauling tortilla chips. Not in bags or boxes. But heaped in there as though they'd been shoveled aboard. If they were bound for a restaurant, I want to know that place's name … so I can avoid it.

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I had a flash. If only this truck could accidently broadside a delivery van of Pace picante sauce. What a horrific roadside snacking opportunity. A bit too tempting for the accident investigation officer who arrives at the scene as the ambulance crew and tow trucks are busy all around him. “Please, um, excuse me. But … mmmm … this is really excellent. I haven't had lunch yet.” “Pardon, Agent Fleming, but that's not a pool of salsa.” “Oh, my goodness. Not again. You mean entrails, don't you?” “Or worse.” “Oh, good lord, you don't mean to tell me–” “That's right, sir, a chorizo delivery truck was also involved.”

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Alston dropped by around 6:30 and we walked over to the Jump-Start Theater. The place was packed for their annual anniversary party. I saw a few people there I knew, but not many. It was a treat to see Samantha. She's in town for a couple of weeks visiting her family. Pete was there. Rick. Mary and Jade.

The show was broken up into three acts with two intermissions. Each act had it's own pair of MC's. The entire show was about four hours. The theme was a nautical motif — we, the audience, were ostensibly on a cruise aboard a big boat.

I think I had a bit more fun last year. The good stuff was a bit sharper and more rewarding. But it was still a great time.

Some of the highlights were:

Company J. This was five or six women from the Jump Start repertory. They were doing a jazz age USO dance routine in cute nautical outfits, complete with sailor hats. Monessa Esquivel was one of the dancers — braided pigtails and cat-eye glasses suit her.

The Guadalupe Dance Company presented us a great flamenco performmance with three high-energy women.

La Colectiva gave us a playful short one-act piece. And I'm pretty sure that was Marisela playing the macho club singer with the goatee.

Urban-15 shook the place up with three numbers. At the beginning of the last bit, their dancers snaked about the audience dragging people to the dance floor. It always blows me away when I see them perform. Very visceral, primal, and joyous. I hung back from the dance floor to take a few photos (or, as Alston put it, “Hey, you bailed” — and she was right).

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The third act was promised to be singularly raunchy. Those of a sensitive nature were invited to visit the placid waters of the lobby where they might avail themselves of passing a donation along to one of the volunteers at the box office.

The Methane Sisters were the MCs for the final third of the evening. They performed a sweetly spastic homily to the wondrous testes. The girls, May Joon and Ann July (as performed by Monessa Esquivel and Annele Spector), were backed up by their band, The Crip G Band (a punk-perfect passionless coked-up assault from a drum kit and an electric guitar). The “sisters” wore nurse outfits.

“On this cruise ship,” Ann said, adjusting her bra, “we're all supposed to do something other than just entertain — you know, have a day job.”

“We're working in the clinic,” May Joon clarified. She snugged the little nurse hat down on her wig.

“It puts us close to the drugs.”

“Yeah, the drugs.”

“And the, um, the ….”

“The appliances,” May Joon added.

They fed the audience constant reminders about the upcoming Methane Sisters show at the Jump-Start. Three weeks, starting this Friday, Jan. 11th. This year's show has new stuff. But even if it didn't, I'd go anyway. The Methane Sisters rule!

The highlights of the third act were:

A skit by Comedia A Go-Go involving sodomy, transvestism, a stripper club for handicapped patrons (Hot Wheels), and, of course, an in-depth examination of the immigration issue.

Buttercup performed a beautiful low-fi experimental rock duet which started languid, with one of the members wandering the audience providing the vocals through a bullhorn (I know that doesn't sound languid, but somehow it worked out that way), and eventually the piece segued into a more power-pop bit with drum kit and guitar.

The Peace Posse laid down a quick duel rap in slangy jangly Spanglish praising
the two great human pursuits, la revolución y la mota.

The evening ended with at least a dozen Jump-Start stalwarts in cocktail attire politely dancing and eating fire to a recording of the sappy song The Morning After. It took me quite awhile to figure out the significance. It was, of course, the theme song to the movie The Poseidon Adventure. And, indeed, we were soon treated to the best part of the dreary film. The scene where the giant pleasure ship is flipped over by a huge wave was projected on a screen above the fire-eaters. And as the folks in the movie were being tossed around by the shifting ship, the fire-eaters begin to do the same. All were thrown to one side of the stage. And then, as the Poseidon rolls upside-down, the fire-eaters, one by one, went screaming and tumbling across the stage to the far side.

What fun.

Hombres Masked in Bandanas, Somber and Guileless

New Years Day was a sad waste. If it's any indication of what the new year will offer up to me, I'd like to spin again.

I started the day off with coffee. Nothing strange there. But because my newest espresso machine has been sluggish to pump out a cup, I decided to reexamine my coffee makers. I lined up all three little espresso machine, plugged them in, loaded them with water and coffee, and set them to GO! They all gave me less than I expected. Much of the water was wasted through steam. The oldest seemed to perform the best, but take the longest — and I mean really long.

When I poured the coffee from all into a big cup, I had a decent cup of tasty, strong coffee. But what an ordeal.

The problem, I assumed, was mineral deposits. Limestone. I pulled a jug of white vinegar from the cupboard. The plan was to descale the lime deposits that were clogging things up.

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Here's the trio puffing and steaming away. The whole place smelled rather pleasant, like a thousand Cub Scouts were dying Easter Eggs … in a sauerkraut factory.

They all performed like champs. And they spat out some impressive limestone sludge. But when I began the next step — pushing through just water to rinse them out, the two oldest defaulted to being sluggish again. And by the time I got around to the third steam rinse with the newest machine, it became as useless as the rest.

Maybe I need to go buy some more vinegar and keep boiling this through over and over until I can make a cup of espresso again with the ease of old.

Or maybe I just need to push all these machines to the curb and rekindle my romance with the simple practice of making cafe de olla.

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I received my second DVD from NetFlix. Volume 1 of UFO. This was a British sci-fi drama that came out in 1970 and 1971. The producers are the same folks who created those marionette shows like Thunderbirds. Then they made live action series like UFO, and, later, Space 1999. I'm not sure when the series aired in the USA, but I saw them as a kid. Maybe a couple years after they showed in England. I remember watching them with my father who was a big UFO aficionado. It certainly appealed to both kids and adults. The shows often dealt with themes such as adultery and drug addiction. But also there were guys in futuristic space planes shooting down flying saucers.

That the show isn't as cool as I remember is no great surprise. But it holds up better than I expected. Imagine the Avengers without the banter and the camp. The costumes are damn tight (the costume designer was also one of the producers — a husband & wife team), and there are so many very low camera set-ups where a svelte actor or actress walks into frame, walks down a corridor-of-tomorrow directly toward the camera, and the shot continues until the crotch completely fills the screen … before the editor cuts to the next shot.

Good stuff. Nice for nostalgia as well as low-brow entertainment. But I'll wait awhile before ordering the other volumes in the DVD box set.

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Yesterday I stopped by the new offices of PrimaDonna Productions to serve on a panel to help evaluate one of Nikki's young acting students. It was me, Laura Evans, and Bryan Ortiz. We'd done the same for a couple of other students last month, but one of the girls wasn't able to make it. So this was the reschedule night for her.

It was fun. This girl (who I believe is 11) has really come along since I first saw her almost a year ago. She is a natural when irrepressible exuberance is called for. The sort of high octane moxie you see from kids in toothpaste commercials. But she's been working on more nuanced acting exercises and can play smaller, more heartfelt scenes much better. Local actor John Montoya, who had been visiting the PrimaDonna offices, agreed to stick around and help with this young actress to show us some improv work. They were great together.

I was impressed with all the work this child has put into improving her acting chops. And, as always, I'm so impressed with Nikki's work as a teacher for young actors.

During a break, I asked John Montoya if I had heard right.

“You were in a Dolph Lundgren movie?”

“Oh, yeah. Missionary Man. I went to Dallas to see it screen. It's really good.”

Bryan Ortiz was also intrigued.

“Man, I gotta track this down. I'm serious, I really like Dolph Lundgren.”

Personally, I wouldn't go so far. Sure, Dolph plays a pretty good robot (or whatever he was in Universal Soldier — a sort of super zombie quasi robot??), but can he carry a film? I'll have to check out Missionary Man when it comes to a Blockbusters near me. Dolph is not only the star, but he is listed as writer and director. Hell, why not. If Sly Stallone also could manage this creative trifecta as well, while still managing to walk on his hind legs, there is no reason Dolph Lundgren can't do the same.

Congratulations, John Montoya (AKA, Johnny the Hottie) for appearing in three feature films in as many years (and one, I assume, was a paying gig)!

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After leaving the PrimaDonna offices, I motored downtown to the Ruta Maya Coffee House for the monthly film mixer that AJ Garces has been coordinating. The place was packed. I had to hunt out a parking space on a side street. The first person I saw when I walked in the door was Janet Vasquez of the San Antonio Film Commission. Janet's presence always sets a positive tone.

As we chatted, I glanced around. I saw Andy, Pete, Veronica, Russ, Joey, AJ, Pablo, Kerry, and all sorts of people scattered around at various tables chatting away. Probably about half of the people in the place were filmmakers, producers, actors, and assorted fellow traveller who showed up for this film mixer.

Everyone seemed to be working on some project or another. It seems that things are really happening around town.

And speaking of things about town, Joey was there trying to alert people about the open house tomorrow at Cine Studio, the new production offices created by brothers Jesse and James Borrego. It's at 2342 S. Presa, just a few blocks from the Urban-15 Studios. This is a First Friday event, albeit a bit off the beaten track. Joey mentioned that he'd be helping to curate a screening of local short films.

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I was listening to www.last.fm with the Dictators as the suggestion band. This makes the web site / application look for music in the style and genera of the band you entered.

The Dictators was a hard rock proto punk band — imagine a melange of equal parts MC-5, Blue Oyster Cult, and the Ramones. Anyway, there came up a song by the Chesterfield Kings. This was a great punk era band that created a sound and image indistinguishable from those gritty garage bands from the '60s like the Sonics, the Monks, the Sir Douglas Quintet, et al. But here these guys were doing an extraordinary cover of Merle Haggard's death row tearjerker, Sing Me Back Home.

And, therefore, I am now listening to the only Merle Haggard CD I own — a two
CD set, The Lonesome Fugitive: The Merle Haggard Anthology (1963 – 1977).

Sadness and heartache drips from the walls when these songs sigh out of my speakers. The song playing right now is “(My Friends are Gonna Be) Strangers.” This song title was morphed into the title of my favorite novel by Larry McMurtry, “All My Friends are Going to Be Strangers.” The emotional impact of the song and the novel can be summed up by this wonderful Merle Haggard couplet: “The only thing I can count on now / is my fingers.”

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Friday night.

I've just returned home from the open house at Cine Studios. The offices are in an unimposing old single story building on S. Presa. It's one of my favorite neighborhoods in San Antonio. There's a quirky stretch of S. Presa between the the Southern Pacific tracks and the highway 90 overpass. There's the Wildcats Cheerleader training space where lucha libre events are often held. There's the old Piggly Wiggly store which has seen several incarnations in the few years I've lived in town — the Wiggle Room, an arts and performance space; and now an artists studio. Can't forget my local lunch haven, Pepe's Cafe. There is the Urban-15 Studio. Farolitos Restaurant. And the HEB grocery store where I shop. It's the neighborhood where I get my truck's oil changed. Where I bicycle. Where I shoot scenes for my movies. And I'm happy to see Jesse Borrego investing his money, time, and good name into a business in this wonderful bit of San Antonio. Maybe his presence will help the locals who live further north drop their irrational fear of that bit of town south of the railroad tracks.

First I stopped by Urban-15 to see how things were going with George and Catherine. I hadn't seen them in about three weeks. As I pulled up to their space, I saw their son, Antonio, walk inside. I almost didn't recognize him, as he'd sprouted a beard. He was in town for Christmas from his final year at film school in NYC.

Everyone seemed to be in good spirits. George, Catherine, Rene, and Antonio were all back in the dormitory, where they had closed off the office, the “yellow room,” and the kitchen. Back in early December they'd lost their building manager, and without him to finish the work he'd been doing on the central heating units, they'd been reduced to heating a smaller space. They're still looking for a replacement for the position.

George and Catherine had other plans, so they weren't able to drop by Jesse's open house. But Antonio was there for awhile, mingling.

I left my truck at Urban-15 and walked the two blocks to Cine Studio.

The building is a narrow row of four or five offices. The larger space on the corner is where an area for a band had been set up. There was a buffet set up for eats and drinks. And a table for a silent auction. Art work was hung on all the walls. Jesse stepped up to a microphone and explained the vision of his new production company. He thanked his partners and other artists working in the neighborhood. And then we had a blessing of the building.

This is one of the things that makes San Antonio very special. The Coahuiltecan people (the descendants of the indigenous folks who built the missions), as represented here by the non-profit group the American Indians in Texas at the Spanish Colonial Missions (AIT-SCM), seem to be on hand for all the important ceremonies, especially involving the arts.

This time it was Isaac Cardenas. I'd not met him before. But his name has come up quite often when speaking with other members of the San Antonio Coahuiltecans. Jesse Borrego is also a member of one of the families that identify themselves as Qualitechan people.

After Isaac finished the blessing, I went up and introduced myself to him. One of the things he does is work with boys and young men from families with abuse. In fact, this ties in with one of the programs of AIT-SCM, the Fatherhood Campaign. He's a very warm and caring person, and still completely pragmatic. I'm glad I decided to flag him down and introduce myself to him as he was leaving.

It was an interesting melange of people who came and went throughout the night. The place was pretty well packed for the three hours I was there. However, the room set aside for screening local films was rarely packed.

Too bad. There were some nice pieces screened. Some I had seen before, like Chadd and Nikki's Dating Danielle; AJ's Crush; Joey's Nestor-Fest & his trilogy What To Do in a Zombie Attack; and Antonio's Katrina doc. I also got to see a few new things. One was titled Shot. It was produced by the San Antonio production company Laszlo Rain. Very slick. I thought the story was pretty weak. But the productional values were damn fine. What one would expect from Laszlo Rain. We also were treated to a trailer for Pablo Veliz's newest feature, Double Dagger. It looks really corny — 'cause, you know, it's an action film. But, that aside, the trailer kicks ass. Plus, it's got Manny Garcia as a major character. I'm going to have to track it down when it's released in, um, I believe Pablo said, May.

There was a point in the evening where some guys were playing a trailer for some sort of documentary, and there was this weird scraping noise. I thought at first it was the sound track. But it just kept getting louder. It soon became apparent it was coming from the half-opened door to the street. I peered across the room to the door and I saw these metal blocks slide by, making a hell of a noise. There was someone standing on top of these two metal blocks, which I quickly recognized as gas tanks from automobiles. Annie, who was sitting beside me, stood up and muttered that this she had to see. I quickly followed. It looked like some freaky performance art. I could only think that it was part of Jesse's open house.

When I stepped onto the sidewalk, this is what I saw.

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The image can't quite convey the performance. Two men in cowboy hats with stetsons and bandanas around their faces like bandits. They stood, back to back, atop two steel gas tanks, their feet strapped to them like they were wearing weird skies.

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These had to be pretty heavy pieces of metal. And so, they had to keep a clear “leftright, leftright” rhythm.

The gas tanks gave them considerable additional height, so their heads were damn close to the wooden overhang of Jesse's long building. When they came abreast of the entrance to the CineStudios, they began to hand out flyers.

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But people weren't enough in their comfort zone to get the offered stuff. I took another photo and then I stepped up to get whatever the guys were handing out. The one facing me offered his hand. And as we shook, his eyes, above the bandana, were so somber and guileless that I began to assume that they were some sort of religious nuts. You know, walking across Texas on top of gas tanks. I've heard stranger. I took a flyer and a postcard and watched as they rounded the corner. I made a discussion not to follow them. I knew they would have to dismount soon and toss their props into a truck and drive off. I didn't want to spoil the mystery.

I stepped into the offices of CineStudio. The flyer was a piece of typing paper with two stanzas of gibberish. Above the “poem” was two words on two separate lines. “Ajax,” in bold. “Essentials,” in italics. On the bottom left of the page were three names. “Gerald Ford Saddam Hussein James Brown.” And on the bottom right, in rubber stamp: “Reissue by Alas 2008.” The postcard offered little more clarity. The image is a color photo, in profile orientation, of the downtown Greyhound bus station during the daytime. It's clear that it is San Antonio because you can see a VIA bus. As I look at the postcard now, I notice that the building in the background seems to have some graffiti at th
e very top. Or maybe it's some important info placed their via photoshop. I'll have to take a closer look later with a magnifying glass. On the back side is a line of text — part of the laminated card, but placed at a careless angle as though it were a rubber stamp (it isn't): “THE PROMISE OF INSECURITY.” In caps. And at the bottom is another line of printed text: “This interruption is brought to you by Alas.” And then there is an adhesive Avery address label on the back that reads, “DOWN TOWN SAN ANTONIO / GREYHOUND BUS STATION / LOCKER # 204 / 9:00AM, JAN. 5 – 6:00PM, JAN. 7 / 2008.” This sticker has been placed atop another sticker, and I can read the info underneath. It's basically the same stuff, but the dates are Dec. 8th – 10th, 2007.

And the meaning?

Dunno. Pure Dada, I hope. It'd piss me off were I to discover that were one to visit the Greyhound terminal on the days and times listed one would be presented with a Toblerone bar or a fucking Zune.

I assume that these hombres had already clumped around the larger crowds of First Friday down at the Blue Star Arts Complex and then traveled down Alamo Street. And when they realized they still had thousands of flyers and postcards left over, they remembered that there was something arty going on down south presa way.

And even though I screened my own Kitty Loves a Rug Sucker to the thunderous applause of half a dozen people, I would have to say that these cowboy pranksters were the highlight of my night.

But filmmaker Ranferi Salguero singing Smoke on the Water came a close second. I would have sworn the guy was too young to know the lyrics to a Deep Purple song.

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I love this guy's shirt. Click on the thumbnail.


Welcome to the neighborhood Jesse! I was so happy to see so many wonderful people from such diverse backgrounds come to a space on the wrong side of the tracks.

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Oh, hey, if you need something to do tomorrow night — Saturday — you have only one choice. The annual Performance Party at the Jump-Start Performance Space. Doors open at 6:30. Entrance? Only a $5 suggested donation.

Let me be more specific. If you only attend one night of theater this year in San Antonio, you MUST make it Saturday's Performance Party. I blogged about last year's event. Check back in the archive.

Gotten Into Mom's Mescaline Stash

It was a sublime blast. One night only. Be there … or I may never speak to you again.

Dispatches from the Sequined Ghetto

(A late New Years post, where I've pasted together several recent failed blog postings.)

It's a weird limbo time of the year. Last week I only knew it was Thursday by the midmorning sound of the garbage truck. I have no job, no project. And not much on the horizon. But that was when my first NetFlix DVD arrived! Thanks, Paula.

Angel-A. An extraordinarily beautiful film centered around a breathtakingly lovely woman. I expect both from Besson. It's shot in black and white, which works great, especially when you're filming in Paris. It's a wonderful post-modern noir love story.

There's an interesting driving imperative about NetFlix. Usually when people loan me movies to watch, I take forever in getting around to them. But because I can't get the next one without sending back the last one, it's quite a motivator. I mean, dammit, I want to maximize my return — well, the return of my gift.

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With this New Year, I'm finding myself thinking in terms of fresh resolutions for 2008 as well as a general accounting for 2007. This is something I tend to avoid. But I'm so appalled by my accomplishments in 2007 — even more rudderless than usual.

True, I involved myself in a lot of fun events. And many actually paid. I crewed on a feature film. Helped with audio on a documentary by a South African filmmaker. Co-produced a dance video. Promoted/produced three film screening events (NALIP's Meet the Makers film series; the Josiah Youth Media Festival; and the San Antonio 48 Hour Film Festival). I recorded audio for an experimental film shot in Mexico. I coordinated the Urban-15 Holiday Laser Show. I helped with some other people's projects (such as Dar's SAL film fest). And I'm sure I'm forgetting stuff. But I did almost nothing that I can claim as my own. Yes, there was the still incomplete final Short Ends Project short I did. But that's little balm. As I mentioned, it's still incomplete. And I have to say it is my only film which made its way into production which I have not brought to completion. I've produced and directed 15 short pieces. On film and video. Narratives, documentaries, experimentals, and industrials. And the last thing I did, was the only one that gave me problems. I think I need to either finish it or just throw it away. Either way, I need to move on. Do new work. Get better. That's always been the idea. But I've just stalled out. Become paralyzed by the stark realization that I've accumulated a body of work which has little about it that is worthy of praise.

I don't know what pisses me off more. When people younger than me bitch about how they have yet to achieve success, or when those older do the same thing. The former, of course, make me feel like a major loser. That later make me feel that things aren't likely to get any better. And then there are those optimistic fools with no real plans who are convinced that they are just a few months away from tremendous success — they are carrying, in their heads, their responses to probing interviews by James Lipton and Charlie Rose. They bemused me, but mostly they're just in the way.

I was talking to a friend recently about how unpublished writers and unsigned filmmakers are the most vulnerable and exploited classes of people in the entertainment world, the Sequined Ghetto — yes, I like that. They are completely thrown by flattery and the mere whisper of success. They empty their bank accounts — even go into debt — signing up for MFA programs, film schools, and they pay reader fees, consultation surcharges, and they squander money that should go to their families to support the staff and administrators of film festivals and writers conferences. They have no advocates. The untalented are fleeced and fucked, and the ones with promise (I'll be kind and round up to 1% of the lot) are cheated and chiseled upon until they get around to hiring a pricey support staff of agent, manager, lawyer, and accountant.

The absurdity of “having people,” is having to have people.

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Saturday I spent the evening with Russ editing some on Melancholy, Christy Walsh's experimental dance video. We're a bit behind. But you get what you pay for. And me and Russ are prime examples of what a “zero dollar production package” will get you … if you're lucky. We will finish it, and it'll look great. But it's hardly been a high priority for the either of us.

Recently Russ got the bug to dive back into editing. He slapped together the scene where Christy's character gets drowned. He scored some great music, and then he processed the shit out of the footage with a couple filters from the Magic Bullet software. It came out damn dramatic. So now we're back on track to finish it up.

It might not have fallen so far behind, schedule-wise, were Christy not currently living thousands of miles away in Korea, on a one or two year ESL teaching gig.

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Jennifer pointed out that my NetFlix account also allowed me to watch a certain amount of movies online, at no additional cost. Wow. Thanks, Jennifer. But the problem is that they don't offer the service to Mac users. Something about DMR compatibility. I could probably do it if I owned a much newer Mac with an Intel chip as well as well as a recent version of Windows for Mac. I don't. So I'm screwed out of eight (or is it nine?) hours of selected online movie-watching. What Jennifer giveth, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act taketh away.

If you've got a PC, a fast connection, a hankering for movies, drop me a line, I'll see if I can hook you up.

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Sunday was a perfect winter day in San Antonio — not near so common as I'd like them to be — seventy degrees, not a cloud in the sky. I took to the Mission Trail on my bike.

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I kept forgetting that it was the weekend … during the holidays. But I wasn't the only one with the idea of enjoying the parks along the southern reaches of the San Antonio River. Most people were out fishing, playing with their kids, walking dogs, or, like me, biking. But I guess there was other activity not so innocent. The Park Police were cruising around in their ATVs, hassling people. It wasn't until I took a break at the southernmost mission, Espada, that I began to hear the sporadic muffled explosions of fire crackers. I guess that's what the do-right boys were trying to curtail.

It's getting so no one can have any fun anymore. A man can't even stagger out into his backyard on the stroke of midnight, New Years Eve, and discharge his shotgun (or what have you) without having the neighbors dropping a dime on him to the cops, or worse, the Homeland Security. That's a horrible way to start the New Years, what with gramps hustled off to Guantanamo.

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Two perfect days in a row, Sunday and Monday. Knowing that a cold snap was approaching, I headed again to the bike trail Monday. Not feeling over ambitious, I put my bike in the bed of my truck and drove toward the missions. As I eased through the intersection of Roosevelt and Steves I noticed I was coming up on a pigeon standing in my lane. I took my foot off the gas and slowed a bit to give the critter a chance to flutter out of the way. And I got closer. No reaction. It had to be able to see me. It was in profile, and staring at me — unflinchingly — with it's left eye. And I got even clo
ser. Perhaps it was blind in the left eye? Maybe despondent from the holiday hubbub? Sadly, we will never know. It expired beneath my tires with a soft crunch.

Now I'm not one to believe in omens, but, fuck! I've never seen a pigeon not clear away from an approaching car. And as a tendril of superstitiousness snaked it's way about the jangle of appalled guilt of crushing a bird, I thought it best to consider the event as a symbolic representation of the receding carcass of the old year. Death, followed by rebirth … right?

But what to make of the next bird incident not even an hour later? I was lounging in the sun on a rise above the river out near Mission San Juan, and I happened to look up into the branches of a tree above me. There was a large bird perched up there and it peered down on me. It was some sort of hawk or falcon. Had word already gotten around? But what did a no-nonsense carnivorous bird of prey care about some urbanized lice-infested kissing cousin to the dove, the symbol of peace and passive wimpery?

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The bird seemed fairly unconcerned about me. So, after the shadows started to get long enough, I decided to get back on the trail. The cold front was coming in with serious bluster from the north, making me fight while pedaling back as though I was going uphill.

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It's been fairly quiet on my street the last week or so. Because school is off for the holidays, there is not that pesky steady flow of students, teachers, and parents using Guenther St. as a short cut. Also, many of the neighbors seem to be out of town. But every so often I get a knock at the door. Hope, from across the street, dropping off some cookies. Deana presenting me with a little gift bag containing a card from her hubby and kids and a t-shirt, recognizing me as a “Proud Member of the Gunther Gang.” Ah, neighborhood nationalism …. The neighbors here are really pretty sweet.

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I remember these nights. These New Years Eves where I find myself sitting at a keyboard, writing, trying to keep warm, and glancing at the clock every now and then to see if it has magically transformed from the old year into the new. I fancy that if I tried hard enough I could turn up about a dozen such descriptions from old letters, emails, journal entries, and, now, blogs. Most likely they would all say the same sad old refrain of loss and unrealized dreams, carelessly hidden beneath a wee coverlet of wry and brave self-deprecation.

In lieu of resolutions, maybe I should try and peer into that 2008 might have to offer. One of the problems I have with this exercise, is I have already committed myself to promoting two film events for the second year. Josiah and 48 Hour. Don't get me wrong, I in favor of these events. But I want to get back to doing creative work.

Okay. There is a kids film — a project to which I'm attached. I'm currently polishing up the script treatment. (And would you look at me — it's a paying gig!)

I'm hoping to be able to make it to the annual NALIP conference in California.

Also, I'd like to make it in June to the Writer's League of Texas' Agents & Editors Conference in Austin.

My sister has convinced me to submit some work to the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship Program. And I'd better get working, the deadline is two weeks away.

I have two novels I'm in the middle of and sporadically adding to.

There is a short experimental film I'd like to do in February.

Deborah and Ramon want to start looking for funding for another Proyeto Locos film (Proyecto Locos being our collective nom-de-nick).

And then I need to start gearing up this coming week and begin looking for ways to find funding for the Josiah Youth Media Festival — time to teach myself to become a grant writer.

Also, I need to give serious consideration if I want to run this years San Antonio 48 Hour Film Project. I'm divided at the moment. It's a load of work and pressure, and it really doesn't pay all that much. I just don't know if I want to get on that treadmill again.

Hmmm, all I see from the above is a tissue of unfocused, tenuous projects. And this is all I got. Shit. I mean, that's it. Please, just don't tell my landlady and the credit card companies.

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I headed out before the midnight hour and wandered toward downtown. I watched the fireworks begin to launch at midnight in the area around the Tower of the Americas.

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It was quite nice. There were no crowds — I was far enough away from the crush of downtown. So, to all, Happy New Years!

Emma, the Problematic Chihuahua

Wednesday

Well, Christmas has come and gone.  Now I just have to wait out the next week until all this holiday malaise begins to dissipate.  It seems that the only things people are capable of doing in December is to plan parties and go on  shopping excursions.  God forbid you want to get your gall bladder removed, your toilet snaked, or get the paperwork finalized on that important restraining order.  “Sorry, but our offices are closed for the holidays.  If you'd like to leave a voice message, please press 1.”

Monday I made the quick trek up to Dallas to see my mother, sister, and aunt.  Thankfully, my aunt deposited some money into my bank account so I could afford the gas.  On the way out of town, I filled a near-empty tank.  63 bucks. Wow!  I guess it'd been a while since I last spent so much on gas.

There were loads of cops and state troopers out pulling people over.  Speeders and drunken weavers, I guess.  I saw three accidents.  The most dramatic was off the highway.  A fire truck and three cops cars were on the access road, and men in uniforms surrounded a sports car laying in the grass, belly up.  One of the firemen was holding open a large book.  I almost wanted to pull over and take a closer look.  Was it a bible, with him giving the last rites?  Or was he, perhaps, frantically flipping the pages of the instruction manual to Bell County's newest purchase, the Turbo Slicer 5000 Jaws of Life?

It's been another financially lean year for me — as it has been for the other members of my family.  We decided to keep it basic.  Small gifts.  And I sure wasn't bringing much with me.  I arrived at my sister's place while she was still slaving away at the bookstore where she works.  I used to do that.  And working retail on Christmas Eve is pretty irritating.  You get to see panicky assholes who are willing to buy absolutely anything — ANYTHING!  “What do you mean you don't have any Far Side calendars?  It's a tradition!  I get one for my nephew every year.  Okay, I guess I'll just get … this one.”  “Um, this might not be appropriate, sir.”  “What's not to like?  Robert Mapplethorpe's Positively Male.  Fishing, right?  And boxing and sky-diving I bet.  Kid's gotta grow up eventually.  Oh, and I need that gift-wrapped.”  “Yes, sir!”

The next day — Christmas — we picked up our mother and drove to our aunt's place.  We had a late lunch and opened gifts.  My sister always gives me great stuff.  She's the only person who can buy me clothes that I'll actually wear.  And if she gets me music or videos, they're unfailingly things I like.  This year she got me a six month membership to NetFlix.  My first DVD (which may well be speeding my way now) will be Angel-A, a recent Luc Besson film I'd not even heard of.  I've also added to my “queue” a bunch of obscure Herzog documentaries as well as disk 1 of the boxed set of UFO, the British sci-fi TV series from 1970.  I'm curious if it's anywhere as cool as I recall from my childhood.

Paula also gave me the audio book (in CD) of Amy Sedaris' I Like You.  It's her quirky book on entertaining.  Paula wants me to loan it to her after I listen to it.  She's curious how a book that is so fragmented and compartmentalized could have been turned into an audio book.  Well, I listened to the first two disks on my drive back to San Antonio last night.  What she's done is to have placed the recipes as files on the final disk (though I haven't put it in my computer yet).  And when she comes to a sidebar, there is the sound of a bell, and Sedaris (who reads her own book) says in her gushy voice: “Sidebar!”  I've never read the book before (though I've seen Amy Sedaris interviewed on chat shows during the book tour — so I know the basic concept of the book), but it does indeed work well as an audio book.  One of the joys of listening to Amy Sedaris is when she has soothed you into her girly world of taffeta, napkin rings, and Jell-O molds, and then she shifts into passing out advice on how to remove vomit stains, or, perhaps, she'll share the joys of planning theme parties such as Pol Pot Luck.  I'm looking forward to listening to the rest of the disks.

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My perennial obligation in this neighborhood (the price I pay — above and beyond my rent), is that I have become the poor prat who walks Phil's dog when he's out of town.  And for this holiday season he's off for about a week. 

I stepped out today, noonish, walked two doors down, and snapped the leash onto Cutesy.  As we headed out for the basic three block walk, Emma rushed up and danced around us.  It seems this hyper-active Chihuahua (and I guess I'm in danger of redundancy) had escaped from her backyard.  She lives over at the end of the block.

She manages to escape fairly often.  And true, I have feared that Emma might one day get run over by the cars that travel a little too fast down this street.  But, she's not my dog.  And I really don't care enough.  I mean, really, we're just talking about a yappy Chihuahua.

But today, as I was walking Cutesy down Constance Street, I noticed that a car showed, stopped, opened it's door, and Emma leaped inside.  Ah, her owner has come home.  But it soon became obvious that this was not the case.  The car sat there at the stop sign.  And I knew that the two women inside were looking at the info on Emma's tags.  The owner's name, address, and phone number is indeed on the tags, but I already knew from another neighbor that Emma's owner wasn't home and that the phone number on the tag was a home phone — so, for the moment, at least, the information was useless.

I watched with more bemusement than anything else as these busybody do-gooders slowly turned right on my street and began looking for the address.  I walked back towards Cutesy's place and past Emma's house.  The car looped around, and rolled to a stop at the address on Emma's tag.  Exactly 25 feet from where they had coaxed the dog into their car.

As a frizzy-haired co-ed in a $200 sweater carried the poor pooch to the porch, I called out.

“She's not home.  The neighbor at that house over there already tried.”

The girl furrowed her brows and walked up to me.  She seemed unfamiliar with the notion that dogs, at times, run free.

“What should we do?” she asked.

“Well, Emma manages to squirm free every now and then.”

“She doesn't get run over?”

I assumed it to be a rhetorical question.

I explained that the fence was too high to return Emma to her yard.

“Of course you could just toss her over, like a football,” I suggested.

“I could take her home,” the girl said.  And then she looked over her shoulder to her mom waiting in the car.  “Oh, but we're going shopping.”

This was going nowhere.  I was trying to inch my way clear of this bubble-head — a sort of virginal Paris Hilton.

And then apparently a thought crossed her pristine, uncluttered mind.

“Would you take her?”

I was tempted to see how she's react if I were to reply that “Look, lady, I wouldn't touch that shit-eating flea-bag even if you promised me a quickie in the backseat of your mom's car.”  But, always the gentleman, I took Emma, tucked her under my arm, and headed on my way.

I tossed Emma into Phil's house along with Cutesy.  One of my neighbors who watched this transpire said she'd alert Emma's owner to drop by my place when she got home.

Fucking people!

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Thursday

Deborah came by yesterday to drop off a little gift.  Her and one of her daughters had spent a day making some candles in mason jars.  I put mine on the window over the sink.  It's burning right now.

She told me that she had left the Bihl Haus.  She'd been helping them curate and promote shows since Kellen and Eric had launched the gallery a bit over two years ago.  But she wanted to spend more time on promoting her own art work.  It sounded like a wise move.  She's had a couple of very successful recent shows.

When Deborah asked if I was doing anything for the up-coming Luminaria event, I said that the whole thing seems fairly antithetical to what artists actually do.  The website is unfocused.  And most of the local artists with whom I've spoken have observed that it just doesn't seem to be a good fit for what they do.  You know, make art.  However, if you're a firedancer, and you don't mind performing for free, this might be the thing for you.  (Not completely free.  As the city promises to pay “out of pocket expenses,” I do think that you can probably get reimbursed for the gallon of gasoline, box of Diamond Matches, and the body glitter.)

Deborah has been talking with a couple artists who also have spaces at the Blue Star Arts Complex.  They're planning to open their studios.  Maybe there will be an overflow.  And maybe I'll make a little experimental video piece and screen it at a space at Blue Star.  I'm thinking that the theme of the piece, in keeping with Luminaria, will be Fire.  And if it's a success, I can move on down the line to the other three of the four elements (five, if you count Rubidium).  So, all I'll need is two dozen tiki torches, a fur bikini, a Zoot Suit, 300 votive candles, a svelte Chicano hipster, a pouty sex kitten, three of Satan's vile minions (gender unimportant), and a case of cheap yet adequate Texas wine.

Hey, maybe I DO need to petition the Lunimaria folks.  This is starting to sound like some serious “out of pocket” budgetary cabbage.

Did I Just Say Execrable?

I've a writing for hire gig I really should be attending to, but I'm a great procrastinator. I'll find a way to put off anything. And here I am, putting of a writing task … by writing.

Tonight I took in a free screening of a new Sigur Ros documentary. It was advertised at 1100 Broadway — at the intersection of Broadway and Jones. Now, the only place I know in that area is an old building which houses an antique shop and the studios of several artists. This is the building where a large shell of a space was used for a NALIP video slam. The acoustics were execrable.

Anyway, I drove down to Alamo Heights and picked up Alston. And when we rolled up to the building at 1100 Broadway, it was, as I feared, the same space of the NALIP event. We had arrived early, as the advert had requested. But there were hardly any people there. In fact, the folks putting on the event (and I'm still a bit unclear on who was running things) were still moving a projector screen around, trying to find the perfect spot. As people slowly showed up, we all waited outside on the sidewalk. Alston drew my attention to the screen. It was a wide roll of paper (like a photographer's backdrop) suspended from a couple of light stands. Seemed low-tech, yet smart enough. Alston wondered if they were going to bring in chairs. I said I thought not.

Eventually we were led inside and people began sitting orderly on the floor in front of the screen. They made sure to consolidate space in case more people showed up. But the man who seemed to be running the event pointed out that most of us would have to move, because we were in the way of the video projector.

I turned around. Surely the projector was high enough over our heads on that folding table behind us. There was the DVD player, a little mix board attached to the portable 2 speaker PA system, and … and I saw no projector. That's when I realized it was on the floor under the table. I've never seen a projector set up on the floor. The people spread out, creating a little corridor down the middle. Alston wisely decided to relocate. I followed. We had originally positioned ourselves on the inside wall, thus trapping ourselves in case we decided to flee. We moved to the wall with the most empty space — the best escape route.

The acoustics weren't so bad during the music sections (most of the film). Yes, there was plenty of hot reverb, but that was mostly lost in Sigur Ros' signature sound — loads of sustained mournful chords and the occasional warm reverb of feedback. But when we'd get a break to listen to members of the band speak, they were completely incomprehensible. They all spoke English, and I don't believe their accents were all that thick. It was that damn cement floor and plaster walls and ceiling.

I'm not a huge Sigur Ros fan. Their music is a bit too pretty for me. It fits certain moods, but still, for some reason, their music just doesn't speak to me. I like it when I hear it. I like being around it. However, I do not seek it out.

But, because their sound is so cinematographic, it worked beautifully as the background score to this lush film. The images were stunning. I'm not surprised to find Iceland a photogenic country, but the team who put this film together had a great aesthetic sense of light, composition, and texture.

The premise of this band documentary is that Sigur Ros, after their years of success, decided to give back to their home country of Iceland. They put together a series of free concerts spread out to small towns throughout the island during the summer.

It's so sad that these socialist utopias in north-western Europe have such cold weather, or I'd've expatriated myself abroad yesterday. And so, for the time being, I hang out here. I saw a man tonight, as we left the movie, riding a bike. He wore short-shorts (which did not flatter his physique) and a sleeveless t-shirt (so, god knows where he was keeping his cigarettes) — and he seemed quite comfortable. I won't say it's balmy tonight, but it ain't cold.

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Tomorrow, around noon, Carlos will be paying me a visit. He wants to use my place as a location for a scene in a short film he's doing.

I just don't have the energy to clean this place up. But I'll guess I'll drag my ass from bed tomorrow and throw everything into the bedroom and hope he doesn't need to make with too much set design.

And now I really need to get to work on my writing assignment.

Adventures Among the Irrationally Alphabetized

There's been some chatter in the news about Mars' near proximity to Earth. Last night the red planet was apparently orbiting around the sun right alongside us, neck and neck, and then we broke ahead. Word on the street has it that we will not be so close with Mars again until 2016. A quick google search showed that Earth overtakes Mars in this manner every 26 months. But because the Earth has a slight elliptical orbit, and Mars has a fairly significant elliptical orbit, these neck and neck pass-byes measure out at wildly different distances each 26 months. We two planets got very very cozy back in 2003. Less than 35 millions miles separated us. Last night, it was more on the order of 55 million miles. That's quite a deviation.

I did take a look at Mars before heading out to the grocery store. It seemed about as bright and red as usual — but maybe if I were far from city light pollution, it'd be more pronounced. Times like this, I wish I had a telescope, or even a robust pair of binoculars (my little pocket-sized birding glasses just don't do it — besides, I need a threading for a tripod … I got plenty of tripods).

One of my favorite audio podcasts is Astronomy Cast, with Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay. A recent episode (number 66) was about “How Amateurs Can Contribute to Astronomy.” One of the things they mentioned was a website called the Galaxy Zoo. It's an open source research tool where the public is invited to help crunch information. There are currently a million galaxies (I believe) in this particular database. They are wanting people — you know, like you or me — to make a couple of basic judgments on each of these galaxies. When you pass a rather fun training tutorial, you are ready to begin. An extreme detail of a deep sky photo (usually a bit fuzzy because of resolution issues) pops up and you have to decided if the object in the center is a galaxy. Some are not. Computer programs have isolated the discrete points of light in these massive photos of tiny bits of the sky, each with hundreds or thousands of galaxies and assorted cosmological miscellany. Sometimes it's a star from our galaxy hogging the foreground. These are pretty easy to identify. Sometimes there is a smear of an Earth-orbiting satellite wandering into the shot. But most are galaxies. And you get to make a call. Spiral Galaxy, or Elliptical Galaxy. And if it's a spiral, you click on one of three specific buttons: is it spiraling clockwise, anti-clockwise, or is it photographed edge on, and you can't tell? Some of the images are blurry or smeary or just uncertain. But others are just stunning. And the endlessness of the images takes your breath away. Millions … billions of these things. There is more info available if you're curious. You can click on the specific photo number and it takes you to a page with a wealth of arcane astronomical information. Many of the galaxies have a spectrographic breakdown. Also, most have a red-shift number, to give a vague notion of how far away they are. But the best thing is that you can toggle over to the large photo which each galaxy is but a tiny detail, and you can zoom in or out. I recommend this website to anyone who doesn't quite grasp the enormity and beauty of the universe.

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Monday Mexico sent a gift up our way in the form and clear skies and warm weather. Thanks, man. I was getting cabin fever.

I took in a bike ride down the Mission Trail yesterday. As I was trying to pick up a bit of speed on a straight-away just south of the old Espada Dam with Slippi by the Animal Collective screaming on my iPod, a middle-aged couple pedaling toward me on comfy roadsters (rented, I assumed) slowed and waved me to a stop. I pulled off my “ear buds.”

“Afternoon,” I said.

The man was saying something to me but because of his thick German accent, I was having a hard time making it out. These tourists weren't asking for directions or anything like that. The man was making declarative statements.

The woman was nodding along with every word her husband said. I had to smile. Her bike had a basket, and it was filled with pecans.

Finally, I was able to filter out the accent. The man was warning me about some dogs up the trail. “Just around the corner,” he said, pointing in the direction I was headed.

“Ah,” I said. “I see.”

“We had to go fast,” the woman said. “Very fast.”

“One is a pitbull,” the man said with stern gravity.

“I'll be careful,” I said. I dipped my head a few times to let them know I understood and appreciated their warnings. I thanked them, replaced the headphones, and continued on my way.

I know they meant well, but they killed my momentum. Besides, dogs have never really bothered me, and I ride a lot. Actually, I was hoping for a bit of adventure. As I approached the curve ahead, I was whistling, making come-hither-doggy kissy noises, and all that. And when I finally saw them, they were down at the base of the river levee, nosing around at the shore. I was practically yelling for them to come get a piece of me. Shit, they weren't gonna hoof it up that hill just to chase the likes of me. It's quite comical to see a dog avoid eye-contact. And here were about five street-wise delinquent mutts pretending like there wasn't some asshole on a bike calling them out. They were looking at butterflies, clouds, fish, whatever wasn't up on the levee top.

What happened to German grit and where-with-all? Scared of a pack of lazy hounds? Oh, how far have the mighty fallen …. Maybe this couple was from Switzerland or Austria.

Here are some photos from my bike ride.

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Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting

Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting

Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting

This last one — pretty boring, eh? — is of the famous San Antonio Ghosts Tracks. It's bolstered by a very nice narrative to add to the verisimilitude. The problem it is so easily to check the public records and demonstrate the story as completely bogus.


Ask anyone who grew up in San Antonio about the Ghosts Tracks, and mostly likely they will give you a detailed account of a time in their teens, late at night, they had some sort of hair-raising encounter at this lonely crossing. The honest ones will, after a beat, conclude with, “but we were all pretty stoned.”

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Monday I visited the new offices of PrimaDonna Productions. It's a three room suite in the El Cid Building. I'm happy to see Nikki and Chadd make this major step. But it won't be the same. One of the charming things about calling up the “offices” of PrimaDonna Productions was when I'd call up in the morning and be talking to Nikki and I'd hear water running. “Are you brushing your teeth? Nikki, are you still in your pajamas?”

Congrats on the new HQ!

I was there because Nikki invited me to give feedback to her acting students. She has three girls in this particular class. They're really coming along. Nikki is very good as a teacher, particularly with children. She's honest with them, and they always seem to appreciated it from her.

The other two guests were filmmaker Bryan Ortiz and actress Laura Evans. I was honored to be in such good company. Besides, it was nice to chat with two people who I not only respect but whose company I truly enjoy.

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Today was a quiet and somberly cloudy day on my block. I holed up watching documentaries on YouTube — randomly and serendipitously encountered. They were all bio docs. George Clinton, the Buddha, and Stephen Fry.

Sounds like the invite list for a nice fantasy dinner party. Throw in Judy Chicago, and I'd be all set.

The only intrusion on my privacy was the gentleman from CPS (that's City Public Services, they are the gate keepers in San Antonio for both our gas and electrical utilities). You don't want to see one of their trucks pull up in front of your house. And when I saw the signature white pickup out my kitchen window, I quickly began searching for a receipt from my last payment. But before I could find it, the loutish knocking on my door (and did I say “gentleman?”) reassigned my priorities. When I opened it, the guy was holding one of those pink termination notices in one hand and he was scratching his head with the other.

“So, which is apartment A?”

The three apartments in my little house are so irrationally alphabetized that half the time I can't remember what letter mine is. But thankfully, my mailbox is mounted on a pillar of my porch so that it faces my front door. I looked over CPS Man's shoulder.

“I'm C, man,” I said firmly. “C.”

I even pointed to the mailbox behind him.

“You're looking for that one,” I said, pointing to the door down the side of the house past my air conditioner. “But they moved out about a month or more back,” I added. The guy just smiled, said he was sorry for bothering me, and he headed down my driveway to place his grim warning on the doorknob of a vacant apartment.

Having felt a great relief, I returned to the Buddha. Sure, life may be suffering, but I wasn't planning on doing any of it today.

The Aroma of Post-Modern Pretentiousness

No doubt I could do my taxes on my own.  People do it all the time.  But because my mother has made her living, off and on over the years, as a book-keeper, I turn it over to her.  There is, of course, the apparent loser quotient of a single adult guy having his mom do his taxes, but, as she handled all the financial paperwork for the family bookstore, we've all become dependent upon her.

Anyway, as I call myself a self-employed filmmaker — a field that doesn't pay so well in San Antonio, Texas — my recent tax returns, even though augmented by income from various other part-time temp work, looks outrageously low.  Damn straight — I'm fucking poor.  But I understand my mother's concern.  I call myself a filmmaker, yet my income from production work is so paltry.

However, this year, I have income from 9 production gigs.  In fact, the majority of my income is production-related — for the first time ever.  Most of the $$$ came from working to promote film events, but that still counts.  I'll refrain from quoting how much money I'm talking about.  Really, it's not much.  If you add in the money I made early in the spring from my occasional gig scoring standardized tests, I will be lucky if my income for the entirety of 2007 comes to more than 12,000 dollars.  This sad total is what I would be making if I returned to the world of retail.  And it's pretty much living at the poverty line.  No security, no insurance, no pension fund.  But, I'm working for myself.  I'm having a lot of fun. And I'm living in a pretty cool neighborhood.

If I were a responsible adult (and if you haven't been reading this blog, I'm not), I'd be appalled … scratch that — I'd be fucking paralyzed with fear and depression to realize that what I make in a year, folks my age with my education spend on vacations.  To other countries.  Exotic countries.

Oh, shit.  Now I've pulled myself into grave depression.

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I'm listening to one of my favorite albums, Baader Meinhof.  It was a one-off conceptual album by a band of the same name.  I picked up the CD in a bargain bin some years back.  And I'm not sure why.  Perhaps, with that double “a” I thought it might be some good old fashioned Kraut Rock.  It wasn't until I bought the album, listened and grooved to it, that I tried to find out more about the band.  I discovered that it was created by Luke Haines, of the brit “glam revival” band, the Auteurs.  I'm not familiar with the Auteurs or even Luke Haines.  I also discovered that the Baader Meinhof Gang, AKA, the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion), was a leftist militant organization in West Germany active mostly in the 1970s.  And as this album came out in 1996 (before 9/11 gave terrorism a bad name), it creates a warm romantic tone within the narratives of the songs about people who take their ideals to the streets in violence.  Ah, yes.  Some of us can still recall (at least within the celluloid world) the sex-appeal of sleeper cells and dangerous east European women in leather coats who wore more eyeliner than Twiggy and whose bleached hair sat atop inch-long dark roots.  Code words, high signs, samizdat, ouzo in basement bars, and camaraderie, even unto death.

Ah, sweet conflict!

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Earlier tonight I attended a “live sound and video performance” with my friend Alston.  It was over in the Salon Mijangos space in the 1906 S. Flores building — where you can find Flight Gallery and other cool spaces.

Two artists were scheduled to collaborate.  Sound artist Giuseppe Ielasi (from Milan), and video artist Michael Grill (from Vienna).  I heard about the event through the local art blog Emvergeoning … or was it through a MySpace bulletin from the record store, 180 Grams?

Anyway, it sounded intriguing, abstract, and with just enough aroma of post-modern pretentiousness to sell me.

The space was cold and dark when me and Alston walked in.  They never turned on the house lights of the gallery — otherwise I would have taken some photos.  By the time the show began, there was a decent attendance — certainly for a miserably cold Sunday night.  Maybe fifty people.  And there were probably sixty chairs set up.  My neighbor, the artist Marlys Dietrick, was there.  She pointed out some people who I knew of, yet had never met (such as the three folks who most often write on the Emvergeoning blog).

We started off with some video art from various people.  This was presented to us by Leslie Raymond, of UTSA.  Some of the pieces she shared with us were created by Potter-Belmar Labs (a collaboration between herself and Jason Jay Stevens).  All very nice experimental stuff.

After a break, Ielasi and Grill presented a piece which lasted about 45 minutes.  Each artist was stationed at a Mac laptop, one on each side of the room.  As this collaborative piece was purported to have an improvisational component, I must assume that each artist was making minor ameliorations to compositions which were already complete and laid out.  I was on the outside aisle and so I could peek at what Ielasi was doing.  He had some sort of nonlinear audio program running.  But mostly he was making physical adjustments not to the computer program, but to the dials on a small mixing board.  The computer was somehow plugged into a little pre-amp about the size of a trade paperback book.  Six XLR cables feed out of the pre-amp into the soundboard, and there was a single 1/4 inch audio plug fed into a hefty amp which was connected to some large speakers.  The guy spent most of his time diddling with the knobs on the mix board.  At the risk of sounding like a rube, I wonder if my experience would have been noticeably different if he'd walked away and taken a seat in the audience?

As for Ms. Grill, I'm even more curious what she was going to make novel, improv decisions on her computer for the video feed.

The performance, however, was very powerful.  The images were all abstract.  And the sound was somewhere in that realm where musique concrète meets “noise”  — soft, one moment, like Zoviet France or the Hafler Trio, and, the next, pure aural pain, like that of Merzbow.

I'm not convinced that were I to experience the video without the audio, or vise a versa, I'd have anything positive to say.  As it is, I loved the piece.  One of the problems with minimalism is that there is usually no room for subtext, and as such, it can often be tragically boring.  Take Merzbow (the quintessence of what has come to be called “Japanese noise”) — this is primarily swaths of aggressive sound.  Aficionados claim to discern beautiful forms within the feedback and atonal chunks of electronic screeches.  This says more about the human brain's ability to find order in chaos (as well as the usefulness of a good dope connection) than anything else.

There was a grand sense to the piece that brought to mind the psychedelic freak-out scene in 2001 when Dave, having reached an orbit around Jupiter, makes a journey through space and time … something like that.  With the performance tonight, the images, though moving through an orderly sequence, were abstract digital animations.  My interpretations, doubtlessly erroneous, was that what we saw was the entire unfolding of the universe, from the original singularity of infinite volume and density, to the big bang (and short-lived inflationary stage), and into the cooling phase where quanta condensed and grouped into atomic assemblages.  Order began toward more sophisticated structures as anther force, gravity, pulled gases together forming stars and galaxies.  We see a period in the performance where the images are yellow and orange like a stellar furnace, or perhaps the early molten phase of the earth.  There is a short period where the images are clearly organic.  But soon they return to abstract, orderly patterns — perhaps, or so I thought, the ultimate transition of any successful intelligent culture to that of an artificial intelligence.  We get a bit into the Frank Tipler territory as this binary mesh moves through a greater and greater degree of complexity until the increasing recursion of data makes it all appear random, like snow on a TV.  We cycle through a movement of intense audio as the visual static begins to jitter wildly.  The sound and picture begins to tone down and, after several transitions, we are back to the original washed out images of unfocused and unformed potentiality, as if it's all about to begin again.

And it ends.

I could, of course, be wrong.  I often am.  It could well be the story of two robots.  Their casual meeting (say, in a factory commissary), and the predictable seduction, foreplay, and the ensuing intense perfunctorily automated orgasm.  (I'm on the cusp of petitioning grant-funding for a new project: “The Amazing Arousing Robots: An Experiment in G-Rated Pornography.”  You know what I'm talking about.  “Insert flap A into slot Y,” oh baby oh baby!)

Or, it could just be sounds and images.  No meaning.

The bottom line is I am a very cheap guy, and I usually equate spending money on entertainment as pissing it away.  The show cost 8 bucks — well beyond my normal cringing base-line — and it was worth every penny.  I only wish we had more work like this in San Antonio.  I also wish one didn't had to put so much energy into tracking this stuff down.

Stranded in the Middle of Miserable December

Yesterday there was a flash of sunlight in the early afternoon. I was just about to carry my laundry around to the washing machine on the back porch with the hope that I'd then be able to hang my clothes out on the line. But before I could tear myself away from the latest podcast from astronomycast.com, the clouds gathered back, and I decided to blow off the one thing I had planned to do Thursday. With a complete lack of motivation, I spent the day catching up on audio and video podcasts as well as a mountain of blogs I subscribe to. I also watched some of a foreign film Catherine loaned me. It's from Sri Lanka. “A Peck on the Cheek,” is the English title. It's a beautiful film, but for some reason, the DVD began to freeze up about thirty minutes in. I'll have to track down another copy.

I also got around to listening to an album available free online which I had bookmarked a few days back. It's a conceptual piece by Andreas Ammer and FM Einheit titled “Radio Inferno.” It's a raw, noisy piece (as one would expect with members of Einstürzende Neubauten onboard to collaborate). It's a multi-lingual version of Dante's Inferno. There are snippets in English provided by, of all people, the late great DJ, John Peel. His is the voice of Radio Inferno, warm and chatty, and when you're sure he's about to share with you the final results of the match between Manchester United and Arsenal, he's off and talking about how “the surrender to sin leads, by degradation, into solitary self-indulgence,” and then we switch to a basso profundo voice bringing in Dante in the original vulgate (or so I assume).

(As an aside, I was responding to an email from Pete. And I happened to reference Ted Cassidy, the actor who most recall as having played Lurch on the TV series “The Addams Family.” I hopped over to the IMDB site and looked up Cassidy. Much of his later work had been voice-over narration. There was one animation project I don't recall with the frightful name of “The Godzilla Power Hour.” When I clicked on the bio link, I discovered that Ted Cassidy had spent some time as a radio announcer in Dallas for WFAA. In fact, he was in town during the Kennedy assassination, and interviewed some of the eyewitnesses. Which brings us to John Peel. During his early years in the US, he spent some time in Dallas, doing some on-air work with WRR Radio. He was covering the arraignment of Lee Harvey Oswald. Why these two minor luminaries haven't been enfolded into the vast conspiracy narrative of the JFK assassination lore is a puzzle. Ah, but who am I kidding — I'm sure they already have been.)

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I just realized I own a CD where Andreas Ammer and FM Einheit collaborated. “Odysseus 7.” I'm listening to it right now. Powerful pretentious nonsense. It's a “radio space opera.”

But of course it is.

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It's mid December. I have to confess that I have almost no sense of the impending Christmas time. Strange in that I have spent the last three weeks helping to promote a Holiday Laser Show. Hell, I was in the theater for 14 performances, and it was nothing but holiday music. And, yes there are many houses on my block with Christmas lights. All except mine, I believe. But because I haven't been to a mall, or any retail establishment that isn't my neighborhood grocery store, and because I don't watch TV or listen to the radio, I feel almost completely disconnected from Christmas — and by that I mean the crass commercialism of the season. It's very liberating. Actually I was downtown on the riverwalk last week when the Urban-15 team was setting up the laser equipment for the show at the Aztec Theater. There were Christmas lights everywhere. It was beautiful. But there was no strident cry to buy buy buy.

The bottom line is, I'm not a Christian, nor am I keen on conspicuous consumption — fact is, I've major problems with both. However, I really like the colored lights. Also, I have a soft spot for the pagan winter rituals of celebrating death and the coming resurrection.

And I do have fond and warm memories of Christmas from my childhood. The nostalgia component is undeniable. I'm a huge Dickens fan, and he practically cornered the market on Christmas nostalgia.

That's why I got such a kick out of watching the elementary kids cheering and singing along during the laser show. Christmas is when we freely feed our kids the most outrageous fantasies … and that might be a wonderful thing, but the problem is, we've gotten lazy and allowed the corporate sector to feed these fantasies to our children, complete with product placements.

Kids don't need toys and crap. They need stories and magic. When I think back to my warmest and clearest memories of Christmas, I can only recall one or two gifts I got. What I really remember was that there was this special day just for me and my sister. And when I learned that it was all a big fat lie, it didn't bother me. The fact that my parents would conspire to lie to us (and such corny lies!) so we could have a magical experience was really one of the most wonderful things about Christmas when I look back on it all. Fuck the presents.

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Listening to all this Andreas Ammer and FM Einheit conceptual stuff, I'm thinking of working on some sort of San Antonio-specific multimedia post-modern rock opera. I'll utilize, of course, some of the elements on my novel in progress (I'm still plodding along with “The Cucuy Club”). Music from maybe three local sources. Live and prerecorded. Dramatic set-pieces as live action, as well as video inserts. Dance. Poetry. Narration. Hell, lasers. Why not?

It's slowly starting to percolate up to my frontal lobe.

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Today (Friday) was not much different than yesterday. Cold, grey, grim, and wet. I read through a back issue of the New York Times Review of Books and tried to keep warm. There was really one thing I had planned to do. I have three checks from various projects, and I really should take a drive out to my bank and make a deposit. But after I stepped out onto the porch and turned a despondent eye heavenward, I decided to take a nap instead.

Actually, I had another thing planned. My novel writing group was meeting for dinner in the evening. So I finally hauled myself outside. We were meeting at El Mirador. It's pretty much in my neighborhood. Within walking distance. But I put off leaving until the last minute so I had no choice but to drive.

El Mirador is probably the most famous restaurants in the King William area. It's one of those places praised by locals and tourists alike. It's fancy facade has kept me away for all the years I've lived here. As I recall, many people suggest visiting for Sunday breakfast or brunch and ordering the tortilla soup.

When I got there, I saw Beth and Tom already at a table. I sat down, greeted them, and peeked at a menu. The prices were reasonable. As we chatted, the rest of our group filed in over the next twenty minutes of so. Finally Gregg (Gregg Barrios) showed up. He's the one who brought us all together. When novelist David Liss, who was teaching the November novel writing class at Gemini Ink, turned all of us down — for whatever reason (keep in mind one had to submit a work sample to get into the class) — Gregg contacted the powers that be at Gemini Ink. His plan was to offer all those who were snubbed a chance to meet and workshop their novels for the month of November. For free. And so we were treating Gregg to a nice dinner.

Our intention is to continue this group. We'll begin meeting again in mid January. I have mixed feelings about this. I&a
pos;m all for writing groups. But I don't know if this group of writers is for me. They're all wonderful people. And most of them are actually fairly gifted writers (no matter what Mr. Liss might think — fuck him). I'll just have to wait and see how things play out.

Here's a photo of all of us (except me — I'm holding the camera). We have Rebecca, Lauren, Rebecca, Gregg, Beth, Don, and Tom.

Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting

The food's very good at El Mirador. But avoid the place on Friday night if you want to carry on a conversation. Very noisy.