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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yesterday was the final day of the laser show. It was a bit hectic, but because we had fewer kids per show, nothing got too much out of hand. Also, we had plenty of volunteers, thanks to Victor and Danny. The problems were some of the schools. There was one school which had requested 50 tickets for the 9:30 show, and an additional 50 tickets for the 12:30 show. But because they were using the same bus, it became clear that they wouldn’t be able to return to campus, empty the bus, and load back up in time to make the 12:30 show. And then we had another school which was to bring 170 kids. Also for the 12:30 show. I gave the school a call ten minutes before show time to see if maybe they had problems with the bus. An administrative underling told me that they had canceled the field trip. I was told that the individuals who might know the reason why this happened were all in a meeting. How very convenient. If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, meetings are the perennial sanctuaries of the cowards. It would have been nice if they’d let us know. And the third piece of confusion was a school who showed up late because their bus driver inexplicably took them to the Institute of Texan Cultures. I guess that the detailed map I emailed was considered a mere suggestion to the bus driver. “You know, the kids might really like the Institute of Texan Cultures.”

Also, the handicapped elevator crapped out. This sweet little third grader in a wheelchair was trapped in the lift for about ten minutes while the Aztec Theater staff tried all sorts of configurations of opening and closing the inner accordion doors. They sent the lift back up and down to all three levels. Finally, it opened, and the very patient girl was rolled out to her waiting bus.

The Aztec disability elevator is a lawsuit just waiting to be settled out of court. I’m guessing, once the legal fees had been siphoned off the top, it’s worth something between a giant flat screen TV and a domestic sports car.

Once the venue remedies that damn elevator, figures out a plan so that the fucking police don’t hassle school bus drivers who are only trying to unload kids quickly and safely, and implements some sort of online ticket purchasing system … once these issues are resolved, it might be the perfect place to hold these sorts of school events. The kids absolutely love the Aztec. And why not? Everyone who enters the space is simply blown away by the high cool factor — it’s stratospheric.

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The Film Commission’s Holiday Party last night was a great success. It always is. Drew and Janet do a wonderful job of finding the perfect venue, providing entertainment, great food, and stuffing the place with a comprehensive collection of local film folks, running the gamut from the production company pros, to the struggling little fish, like me.

I saw loads of familiar faces, as well as lots of people I didn’t know. I tried to work my way around the room, but there were so many great people I wanted to catch up with, that I missed talking to so many people.

After hitting the sign-up table (and thank you so much, Janet, for handing me my name tag over the heads of the teaming hoi polloi — you made me feel like someone special!), I turned around and there was Lee Hurtado. I praised his piece on actress Danielle King in the newest issue of SWAG magazine. I was hardly surprised. I’ve been reading Lee’s blogs for, I believe, as long as he’s been blogging on MySpace. He’s a damn fine writer. And when he learned I had read the magazine from the on-line pdf version, he quickly handed me a hard copy.

I was very impressed with SWAG on-line, but to see it in the flesh, so to speak, was much more rewarding. I’m amazed with what Mary Robinson is doing. No only is she a talented actress, probably the most beautiful woman in this city, but she is also a good writer and is doing an impressive job as editor of the fledgling magazine, SWAG (which stands for Southwest Actors Guild).

Great job, Mary!

It was nice to have a chance to talk with Adam Rocha, of the San Antonio Underground Film Festival. I’ve been kicking around the San Antonio film scene for four years or more, and I always seem to keep missing him. His film festival was a bit shaky the last two years, but 2007 it came back with a bang. I’m so glad he’s going to keep it going. Adam also teaches video production at Jefferson High School. He promised to get some great work from his students into the second annual Josiah Youth Media Festival. I can’t wait to see what they have to offer.

And then Bill Colangelo and his wife walked up. Bill teaches video production at Northwest Vista College. He’s close with my dear friend Deborah. And when he started to talk to me about the Todd Haynes film, “I’m Not There,” I soon realized that he reads my blog. It’s such a strange thing to discover that someone who you barely know keeps up with your personal journal writing. And then there is the other side of the situation — those people you suspect read your blog. I often catch myself before saying certain things because I’ve already gone over that stuff the other night in my blog, and I don’t want to sound like some redundant self-quoting blowhard. When writers aren’t allowed to quote themselves, their pyschies get all backed up and additional abrasive neurosis begin to develop. Well, that’s my excuse.

But I digress.

It was nice to see the aforementioned folk, as well as: Nikki, Joey, Annie, Pete, Cooper, Bryan, Amanda, Manny, Christophe, Andy, Dar, Brant, AJ, Yollette, Laura, John, Vanessa, Paul, Michelle, Druck, Raven, Michael, Janet, Dago, Rosalinda, Travis, Carlos, Shelly, Rockie, and some smug ass from Austin. If I’ve forgotten you, I apologize. Assuage your bile with the thought that at the very least you aren’t that ass from Austin.

Or are you???

Here are some photos. First we have John Montoya (AKA, Johnny the Hottie), with Mary Robinson and Raven Kaylor.

Amanda Ramirez talks with Rick Carrillo.

Brant Bumpers and Nikki Young, and I think I need to make a film where they are a couple. They’re really quite cute together.

The Lone Bannana table. They won second place in the San Antonio 48 Hour Film Experience contest with a wonderfully playful mockumentary on a Nessie type monster who lives in Woodlawn Lake (and for those not from San Antonio, Woodlawn Lake is 30 acres). That’s Joey Carrillo sucking back the beer. Way to go Joey! I really loved the film.

Here we have Laura Evans and Dar Miller. Laura — stunning as always — had decided to place her nametag on her handbag. And Dar, no doubt anticipating the flash off my little camera, has blinked, thus appearing as though the outrageously over-priced glass of cabernet was not her first drink of the evening, but number fuck-it-I’m-gonna-call-in-sick-tomorrow. I was there, and Dar was sober and articulte. And I’m pretty sure she went to work the next morning.

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Wednesday, now. Late. A fairly unproductive day. I dropped by Urban-15 to close out the Holiday Laser Show project. Mailed out a few thank you letters and organized all the paperwork into manila folders and filed them away for next year.

Two of the schools have already sent in thank you cards from their students. The best ones were, of course, those with illustrations. I’m now intrigued with the thought of putting together a coffee table book: “Third Graders from Texas Draw Reindeer!” (I think the exclamation point is crucial because, well, you know, the title kinda sucks. But, dammit, the concept is pure gold!)

And that was pretty much my day. Well, a trip to the grocery store (for disposable razors, votive candles, cilantro, peanut butter, and flour tortillas — you know, the basic staples of life). Sad, I know. But it’s a cold, overcast, drizzly day. Winter is a miserable time of year. But at least, here in Texas, we can expect a week of warmth and sunshine counter-pointed with a week of cold grey drizzle. But right now I just wish I had a plane ticket to equatorial Africa. I’d be warm, and also I’d be free from this Christmas and New Years bullshit. My ill-informed guess is that they don’t push that stuff much in Tanzania.

I knew this balmy weather couldn’t keep on.  I went to sleep with several windows open, and when I got up around 7 this morning it was decidedly chilly.

By the time the Urban-15 team made it to the Aztec Theater, it became obvious that this mild taste of winter was planning to hunker over the town for the next few days.  Cloudy skies, low fog.  The sort of dreary days I hate.  However, we were so low on volunteers, that the time flew by.  We were just seven people hustling 1500 kids — herding them off buses, getting them up the stairs, taking tickets at two different entrances to the theater, ushering them into seats, and getting them out the lower level, onto their buses … all the while making sure that the buses of the kids coming for the next show were being properly wrangled.  We had a fairly good scheme of buses dropping off on Crockett Street, and later, picking the kids up on Commerce street.  It helped that we had learned a few short cuts from Thursday and Friday.  Also, we had our secret weapon: Stanley.  He’s one of the drummers with the Urban-15 drum and dance ensemble.  And that guy’s amazing — worth at least three mere mortal volunteers.

Tomorrow I think we have a couple more volunteers, thanks to Michael Druck of PrimaDonna Productions.

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Carlos was in town yesterday.  He dropped off the “evoL” music video he directed and I shot.  The internet connection he has out in their new homestead in the Lulling Oil Fields (which I really want them to start calling Haunted House Ranch to dovetail with Carlos’ production company moniker of Haunted House Studio) is on the blink, so I told him I’d compress the video and post it online for him.  I’ve placed it on his Haunted House Studio MySpace page.  And then I noticed a six frame glitch.  It was my fault.  I did the first edit on the piece.  Carlos came through and made some changes.  But between us, we over-looked a still image that wasn’t cropped for the wide-screen aspect ratio.  And for some reason, MySpace won’t let me delete the video so I can repost it.  Maybe no one will notice.  However, I recommend that if folks haven’t seen the piece, cruise on over to the slightly improved version on YouTube by clicking:

Here.

The song is basic garage rock, easily in line with the Misfits.  The images are perhaps a bit grisly and seemingly on the misanthropic side (perhaps even misogynistic) — but really, I’m the last person who would notice that sort of stuff.  I recall someone telling my how embarrassed he was watching Reservoir Dogs with his grandmother during some family event.  A cousin showed up with the DVD, they put it on, and he was mortified.  “What?” I asked.  “It’s just a heist movie.  You know — a bank robbery story.”  “Hello!  A guy gets tortured by having his fucking ear cut off!!!”  And that’s when I realized just how jaded I have become.

Anyway, it’s now out there on the web.  Finally Carlos’ European fan-base can wallow in American excess.

As I was making a mDV dupe of Carlos’ DVD (which will explain much of the digital artifacts), Carlos explained that his major mission down to San Antonio was to find a part for his and Shelly’s Camaro (well, I believe Shelly claims it as hers).

He’d recalled a blog where I mentioned his visits to the Pick-N-Pull, and he invited me along.

I could think of no finer way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

We got in his van and headed south on interstate 35.  Just past South Park Mall, you hang a right on hwy 16, like you’re going to Poteet.  Past Palo Alto Community College, and when you get to the intersection of Applewhite Road, turn left.  It’ll take to by the Lucha Libre grounds.  The road curves around, taking you by a juvenile correctional bootcamp and a trailer park.  And before you know it, Pick-N-Pull!

At the risk of sounding like a rube, it’s, well, just so cool.  I mean, I never was into cars.  It’s one of those things men are usually introduced to by their fathers.  I was introduced to a lot of things by my father — H. L. Mencken, Fritz von Erich, Ernest Tubb, Anatole France, Bill Boyde (AKA, Hopalong Cassidy), Hunter S. Thompson, and on and on.  But I never saw my father rotate a set of tires nor change a car’s oil.  In fact, I can’t recall the man ever opening the hood of a car, least it was to look up from an ominous cloud of steam and comment that things didn’t look too good.

Carlos grabbed his tool chest and I followed him to the entrance.  A man in a cage leaned out of a window when Carlos sat his tool chest on a raised surface.  He rooted around to make sure there wasn’t anything suspicious inside.  At the next window, we paid the entrance fee.  I hesitate to call it the box office ….  Anyway, I believe it only cost a buck per person (and thanks, Carlos, for paying my admittance).  I even got my hand stamped.  For those new to Pick-N-Pull, you must go for the experience.  You must!  Take a lunch, there’s some picnic tables.  It’s damn cheap at a dollar!

When you get past the ticket booth there’s a diagram posted on the wall.  It’s a map of the huge facility.  It’s broken up into grids.  Each grid holds a make of car.  Ford, Chevy, et al.

As we were looking for a Camaro part, we headed to the Chevy section.  Carlos had rented a wheel barrow for a buck.  He’d learned that it was worth the cost so he wouldn’t have to haul his thirty pound tool-chest around into the huge auto salvage yard.  And, man, it’s fucking enormous.  The whole places is laid out very properly.  It’s clean and neat.  No doubt that once the gates close at night, and the sun sets, the place is taken over by rats, ‘possums, and coyotes.  But, in the daytime, it’s a very orderly place.

I’m posting the photos all together.  Thy’re thumbnails.  Click for a larger picture.  I was playing around with the faux exposure on my little cheapie point-n-shoot digital camera.  I need to start playing with putting the flash on when I’m shooting outside and dialing down the sky so that the stuff in the extreme foreground will be well lit and I’ll still be able to get those morose apocalyptic skies.

And here we have the item we came for.  A little length of very specific wire.

Pick-N-Pull — build it and they will come.  Next time I’m bringing pasta salad and humus dip!

I just now received my first telemarketing call ever to my cell phone (a pesky Spanish speaking robot). I’ve had this number for maybe six years. And for probably the last five years I’ve been without a landline — and I’d never go back. But because the cell phone is immune to telemarketers (because of some arcane telecommunication legislation) I tend to smiled indulgently when other people bitch about telemarketing interruptions during their daily life. It’d be like listening to people whine because of their acne or the problem they have getting someone to buy beer for them. This is stuff that I quite simply can’t relate to — we’re talking about things so far back in my past that really it’s all just vapor. Phone spam and pimples are things of my distant past. And so should they remain.

Please, telemarketing robots, leave me be, I’d rather not relive the misery of the 20th century.

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I’ve been working long production days for this Holiday Laser Show — about 12 hours per day. Wednesday night I was with the crew at the Aztec Theater setting up the laser equipment. Tim Walsh, the laser artist, arrived pulling a trailer filled with large, heavy cases. The Aztec — one of the old San Antonio movie palaces — has been renovated to show 70mm films. There is no “floor” seating. The lower level is one of the pathways where the audiences can enter. All the seats are in the balcony, which I’m pretty sure have been raked up at a steeper angle than original. At least that’s my take after lugging some damn heavy equipment up all those steep steps to the projection booth.

I shouldn’t complain too much. Hector was the one small enough to navigate the crawl-spaces under the seats to snake the fiber optics for the laser. Actually, Hector has years of experience in theater tech — so it wasn’t only about him being the right size. Poor Hector must have been worming about down in there for three or four hours.

I wasn’t much involved in the technical side of things, so I’m a bit vague about that stuff. However, my understanding is that the show just uses one extremely powerful laser. Max, another one of the expert theater techs in town, was telling me how much power the laser draws. Something outrageous like 90 amps. Now I don’t know much about electricity, but my basic rule of thumb for hooking up tungsten lights for film production is that if you’re using a 110 volt system, like in someone’s house, for each amp on each breaker, you can get almost 100 watts off it. So, a 20 amp circuit can managed a bit under 2000 watts. Say, three 500 watt lamps, and then you move on to outlets that feed off different breakers, you know, to be on the safe side. So, to get an idea of this laser, my one bedroom apartment has 80 amps available, coming in through 4 circuits. And that laser needs more power than my home could deliver, and it needs it fed through a single circuit. The laser uses a water-cooling apparatus to keep it from overheating. And with an array of mirrors and three laser projectors (connected to the laser with fiber optic cables), this single laser is able to provide all the light, shapes, designs, animation — add two smoke machines, some loud Christmas music, and 500 rambunctious kids (mostly from area elementary schools), and you’ve got a show. Yep.

Thursday was our first day. We had three shows, with about 500 kids per show. I believe 14 schools were represented. And bearing in mind that a school bus holds 50 children, that’s thirty buses arriving and departing throughout the morning. They dropped the kids off on one side of the theater, went to an assigned parking lot on the far side of downtown for the duration of the show, and returned to collect the kids on the opposite side of the theater. This worked, mostly, but some of our teachers and administrators apparently never looked at the map we provided with the tickets. These maps explained where to drop off the kids, and later, where to pick them up. And then there were the god damn bicycle cops. They were telling us we couldn’t unload the kids in the loading zone. Seems like one can unload beer and brisket for the adjacent hotel, but god forbid you let some third graders off a fucking school bus. There was a moment when George went over to speak with one of the cops — I believe he was given two choice: do what the cop said, or get hauled off to the station. I was amused with the image of George riding all cozy and tandem with the bike cop to the downtown police station, but then I realized that a patrol car was doubtlessly just a radio call away.

It eventually became apparent that this was their passive aggressive way (though not so passive) of letting us know that we damn well should have hired an off-duty officer to direct the traffic. And, yep, we should have. Well, the Aztec should have.

But we managed to get through the day without a bus driver getting a ticket, George arrested, nor a child tasered. That’s all I ask for. I’m really a man with simple needs.

Production work, whether it’s film, theater, or these sorts of events, have many things in common. There’s a lot of unbridled chaos, followed by a certain amount of downtime (sometimes, a monstrous amount of downtime, depending on your crew position). But the one thing that separates a person who can do this work, and one who can’t, is the ability to be flexible. When things go off track, and they so often do, you have to not panic and just work through it. If you don’t have a plan C in mind, you need to cobble it together on the fly … ’cause, like the guy said, the show must go on.

After the first day of student shows, I was beat. Only five hours, but I was up and down the stairs on all four levels (if you count the projection booth). And then I headed back to Urban-15 to make phone calls and generate the paperwork for the next day.

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Here we have Tim Walsh and George Cisneros.

And here are some photos I took of the laser show. Because I couldn’t control the shutter speed, I got some interesting effects of multiple images of the laser light zipping around.

I also took some photos of the Aztec. Here we have a water fountain, the men’s room, and a bench.

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I don’t know if today really went any smoother. Sure, we’d learned some things from Thursday. But we had new problems, like moving the kids off the buses faster so we could try to avoid the attention of the cops. So we were parking hundreds of kids in the lobby until we could clear the theater from the previous show.

And then there was a school (and I’ll not name names) who decided to take all four of their buses to the Urban-15 studios about three miles away. I guess someone decided not to use the map I hand-delivered to the school.

That was for the first show of the day. We had to keep that laser in check for ten minutes as we rushed the kids to their seats.

Thankfully all us crew and volunteers (thanks so much Dar!!!) had on festive holiday head-wear. This sort of stuff makes the kids so much more attentive to your authority, don’t you know.

Actually, my snide comments aside, when you have third and fourth graders, they haven’t yet been crippled with cynicism and societal bile. I received a surprising number of complements on my costume. “Cool reindeer antlers,” was the chirpy refrain of the last two days.

Mostly the kids seemed to be amazed by the Aztec Theater. And who can blame them? Lavish is an understatement. I imagine ten thousand dyspeptic interior designers who have just eaten several copies apiece of the most vividly illustrated editions of Popol Vuh, chased it down with tumblers of DayGlo poster paint, and were then allowed to run around the space, vomiting like a champion runway model — yeah, that’s what the place looks like. Quetzalcoatls, corn gods, and shit like that. The kids eat this stuff up. Meso-America cultural tropes as bastardized by PT Barnum and H. Rider Haggard’s gayest younger brother. When I find myself walking through the Aztec Theater I ask myself why I’m not dressed in a gold lame suit and clutching a calfskin riding crop? Screw those reindeer antlers. This would get the kids to “form a line straight and to the left!”

Here we have some of Santa’s elves (Hector and Herman) who were ushering the kids. Hector (on the left) knows how to place a hat at a rakish angle. He really needed a cigar.

One of the Aztec staffers made some comment that the stairs could get exhausting. “All this up and down,” she said shaking her head and pantomiming exhaustion.

“It’s the Aztec,” I said with a smile. “You really just need to do it once. Up at the top, the projectionist, I believe, will be more than happy to cut out your heart with an obsidian knife and then toss your carcass down the back.”

She made some excuse to leave. Something about paperwork. Wow! And I’d thought I was being so charming. I’m serious, I’d caught her smiling at me earlier — and don’t think I don’t cut a striking figure with a pair of antlers on my head. However, it was the word “carcass,” wasn’t it? Girls don’t like it when, in speaking to them, you use the phrase “your carcass.”

Shit …. And, hey, wasn’t I supposed to be spending my holiday months in a cave in the Bofecillos Mountains living off mesquite beans and cottontails? Yes, I believe that was the plan. And I don’t have a plan B, let alone a plan C.

I have mixed feelings about the idea of “film races.” They have become very popular. Usually they demand that the filmmaking teams complete a short movie (script to finished edit) in either 24 hours or 48 hours. Some push it to 72 hours. The first such event I witnessed was a 24 hour film contest connected with the Dallas Video Festival. This was back in 2001 … maybe 2002. There were several hours of movies screened. I believe that the maximum run time was three or five minutes. And though my memory is shaky, I think that there were over 70 teams. Hardly anything sucked. This amazed me.

Flash forward a few years. San Antonio has had three years of our home-grown San Antonio 48 Hour Film Experience. What's up folks? Each year, worse than the last. There were eight films this year. Two were solid — good work! Two more were watchable and entertaining. That left four that weren't watchable. I'll not make enemies by being specific, but you can access them online. And if they aren't posted yet, keep trying the links through the blog site:

http://www.sa48hr.com/

I want to give high marks for Drew Mayer-Oakes, our film commissioner, for running this event. Even if I'm on this blog grousing about the quality of the work submitted, it shouldn't reflect poorly on Drew. His SA48HR Film Experience is the real deal — a gift to the film community in this city. We can choose to use it how we wish. (Though my hope is that we'd decided to shine, rather than flounder — I can't really make a stink here 'cause I decided not to run a team, so shame on me.) As for the other similar and more recent film event, the San Antonio 48 Hour Film Project (which is connected to the national organization), I think it's not so near the honesty of Drew's grass-roots SA48HR. Let's see if we can kick SA48HR Film Experience back up to speed in 2008.

And one more thing I want to say about the SA48HR Film Experience is to express my thanks to Salsa.net — this organization has been brilliant in hosting the online presentations of all the films produced for the three years of the SA48HR Film Experience. This is one of the more overlooked resources of locally produced San Antonio films which are available on-line.

There were 75 people at the downtown library for the screenings tonight! That's great. Lee Hurtado greeted me when I came in. He posited a rhetorical question when he wondered why all these people didn't show up for the free monthly summer film forums. I muttered something about the “narcissist factor” (how people love to show up to film events if the project they worked on or appeared in is being screened). Before Lee could make a reply, a certain local actress cheerfully greeted him with a hug and a milk and honey greeting: “It's so nice to see you, Chris,” she said with a purr. I slumped down in my seat and pretended to make eye-contact with a fictional friend on the far side of the room.

You never know who might think you're important.

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The downside to a large crowd at the downtown library is that there is only one lane out of the parking garage. It was a bottleneck. After the crush subsided, I headed out.

I met Pete for a drink at Ruta Maya Coffee House so we could compare notes and perform our little postmortem of the event. I explained that if only I knew how to send a text message I would have treated him (he was seated six rows in front of me) with the standard thought that goes through my mind whenever I'm subjected to a painfully boring movie: “If someone doesn't start fucking a corpse pretty soon, I'm out of here.” And, sadly, it never happened. It never happens.

I then blurted out my thought of creating the “WTF! Film Festival.” I can't recall if this occurred to me during the first or the second film of the evening. But occurred to me it did.

As we were leaving Ruta Maya, I spotted one of the poets from the other night at Urban-15. Nick, I want to say is his name. Anyway, he was one of the strongest readers. Very impressive. I stopped to thank him for his wonderful performance.

And then I realized who he was seated with. I hadn't been able to tell, because he had his back to me. But it was Joel Settles, of Comedia A Go-Go fame. Joel and the poet whose name might be Nick told me they're planning a show at Ruta Maya on December 29th. I might have the day wrong. When I get better info, I'll try and put it here. But it will undoubtedly be worth attending. I can't imagine either of these talented young men involved in something that isn't of great interest and importance.

Anyway, when I arrived home tonight, I checked my MySpace page. I had a bulletin from Comedia A Go-Go. It looked like the comedy troupe had another comedy video posted online.

Check it out.

I watched it. It won't change the world. And a year from now I might not even remember it. But it's funny, playful, well-produced, and the perfect salve to my ordeal of watching local crap.

Comedia A Go-Go's video's are, I believe, often dismissed as a kind of YouTubey viral marketing sketch comedy. But their secret is that they are solid writers, solid performers, and in the technical realm they edit tightly, light adequately, shoot smart, and collect sound like they know what they're doing.

And you know, I think they know what they're doing.

I’ve been feeling fairly anti-social lately. The holiday season always throws me off balance. American behavior is at no other time of the year so codified and constricted as it is between October 31st and January 1st. It’s all consume & shop and clog up the highways in these twin pursuits. The daily activities of life seem to be placed on hold, making it difficult to get anything done.

If I only had the financial security, I’d take a sabbatical for these two months in a cave in the Bofecillos Mountains. Yeah, it sounds cheap enough, but I’d still need to pay the rent on my place.

But here I am, in the city, surrounded by the candles in pumpkins, the frozen turkeys and tamale fixin’s pilled in grocery carts, and the endless residential districts festively lit with lights in red and green (which I rather like, I just wish they were a year-round sort of thing). And then there’s all this sports crap — it seems so much more strident now than other times of year.

At least I have a job that should get me through to the new year.

I’ve been helping out with Urban-15’s Holiday Laser Show that will be happening this coming weekend at the Aztec Theater.

The show is designed by Tim Walsh, a laser artist from San Marcos. It seems he was one of the founders of Brave Combo. What a interesting career arc.

Check the Aztec’s website for show times. But, for Urban-15, the most pressing component of the Laser Show is their outreach program to the local elementary schools. Most of these schools are on the southside and westside. We’re expecting over 5,000 students for three shows per day for four days: Thursday, Friday, Monday, and Tuesday (which is December 6th, 7th, 10th, and 11th).

My job last Thursday and Friday was to hand-deliver the tickets along with lesson packets for the teachers. We have 34 schools coming. We split up the deliveries. I took those further to the south, as well as the schools on the westside. It was nice to see that some of the schools are still in the old buildings that still have character, however, way too many were in these horrible structures that look like low security prisons … which, I guess they are.

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I’ve found myself in a weird position. Other than floundering along on my November novel (I only made half of my 50,000 word monthly quota), I’ve not been engaged in anything with even the hint of creativity in months. But still, I seem to move fairly freely within this city’s art world. And therefore, I’m getting more dirt than a Bissell Broom can masticate. The San Antonio art community runs on a paltry amount of $$$, but, make no mistake, the slack is taken up by high octane gossip (which you might know as “chin music,” or perhaps “balloon juice,” as regional idioms do vary).

The most recent topic of conversation is our Mayor’s push for the Luminaria.

This, from the website, sounds promising:

“An artist-driven celebration of the arts, Luminaria is an unprecedented collaboration of over 40 non-profit organizations that will come together for 1 day to celebrate the dynamic vitality of San Antonio’s creative spirit.”

The problem is that there is not yet a provision for paying the artists. Cause, you know — “artist-driven.” I’ve heard some folks say that this will be remedied. I certainly hope so. Because this sort of crap needs to end. When local vendors, who sell beer, gorditos, and Alamo shot glasses, make loads of money on an event where people show up because of the arts, well, one would assume that the artists would all get fat honorariums. However, this just doesn’t happen in this town.

I’m hopeful that this Luminatia event will fix this problem and recognize the artists in this city with some cold coin, and not just the old style assumption that pro bono work makes them all giddy and sweaty with the hope of promoting their names and their works. For the most part they’re not terribly giddy … unless they get ahold of enough Alamo shot glasses brimming over with beer and frozen margaritas.

Much of this event will happen along Houston Street. And this brings to my mind that, for some odd reason, I’ve only recently heard of a monthly arts event that happens in downtown San Antonio (which is pretty much where I live). I’m speaking of the Houston Street Fair & Market. This event is just not talked about in the arts community. And therefore I assume it’s just an opportunity to sell frozen margaritas, turkey legs, and Alamo shot glasses. We’ve all stumbled into these festivals, right? Mylar balloons and soulless music. I’m afraid that this Lumanaria will be much of the same — just larger, and lasting late into the night.

What’s up with this city’s obsession with parades and festivals? If the city council wants to support the arts, do it. Just fucking do it. Get all these filthy vendors out of the picture and aim the spotlight at the arts.

Or, hell, just begin laying out the plans for the 2008 San Antonio Turkey Leg Festival and Parade! Sign me up for the one-legged race.

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Last weekend was the San Antonio 48 Hour Film Experience. There was a time the other week when I almost signed up. But my camera is ailing, my editing set-up is having problems, and I just don’t feel inspired. But for those who took the challenge, bravo!

The screening will happen tomorrow (Tuesday) night at the downtown library.

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Instead of rubbernecking at the SA48HR Experience kickoff, I spent last Friday night at Urban-15. They had a poetry event, part of the Urban Verses series. It was part poetry slam, and part curated show.

Anthony M. Flores was running the event. And as curator, he’d decided not to read any of his works. I was disappointed. I’ve heard him read at least twice before, and he’s very good.

Andrea Sanderson and Midnight Radio were one of the evening’s featured performances. Andrea is a talented young poet, as well as a singer. However, there was a moment in the evening when Andrea and the two fellows backing her as Midnight Radio, deviated from their original songs and moved into some covers … and at that I had to stand up, pretend to get a call on my cell phone, and slink down the back stairs to join Hector, Debbie, and Rosendo in the courtyard. As the strains of “Killing Me Softly with His Song” (which I hated in the ’70s, and it has yet to grow on me in the ensuing decades), I was glad to see that the clouds were starting to break up, and the misting rain that had been an off and on affair for the previous few hours had headed out of town. There were tiki torches, strings of white Christmas lights, and a cozy fire blazing away in a raised cage off towards the back fence.

And then the slam itself began. I’m not really familiar with the rules of poetry slams, but one of the poets gave me a run down later in the evening. Rules and competition. Yeah, sounds like the perfect way to suck the life out of poetry.

However, the poets who took up the slam challenge were all great. This city has some outstanding poets.

The professionalism of the evening was maintained, no doubt, by the fact that I decided against reading a poem I’d prepared.

Whether my piece is good or bad isn’t the main issue. In fact, I susspect it’s fairly good. But the problem is, I’m not up to the level as a performer to compete with the likes of Amanda, Rene, Nick, Andrea, and even Santiago, who got up to read after having been away from poetry for quite a few years.

Guess I just whimped out.

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On a poetry-related note, it might amuse some that because of a near cock-up (so to speak) with spell-check, the poetry slam was almost promoted as a Poultry Slam. That would have been something else all together. But in some regions of the East Texas Piney Woods and probably most of the Florida panhandle, such an event should attract quite a crowd. No doubt many would arrive with their own notched and polished lengths of 2×4 lumber nestled in velvet-lined cases.

“Yo, pops, where do me and Skeeter sign in?”

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I took in a matinee of the new Todd Haynes film, “I’m Not There.”

I never saw Haynes’ “Far From Heaven,” but I was very enamored of his “Velvet Goldmine” when it came out.

To call “I’m Not There” overly pretentious is only a problem is you find the artificiality of Todd Haynes films off-putting.

The clips I’ve seen of “Far From Heaven” are so screamingly lush in their set design, that it takes one’s breath away. And were it not for my irrational aversion to Julianne Moore, I’d probably have rushed out to see it. As for “Velvet Goldmine” — it was so obsessed in recreating the euro trash glam rock aesthetics of a bygone era that one wonders how anyone got around to the business of acting.

That times ten with “I’m Not There”.

The script breakdown for this film must have been a nightmare. There are five different actors playing six different fictionalized versions of Bob Dylan, and each of these intertwined sections has a different look and a different sensibility — different film stock, different lighting, different color palette. I mean, you have fucking Richard Gere as some weird confluence of Billy the Kid meets the current old man Dylan riding his horse through some old west town peopled with Runyon rejects, circus freaks, and the occasional and inexplicable giraffe and ostrich.

I think the film’s a fucking mess. But it’s so beautiful. And just when it seems to be veering into high-earnestness, it down-shifts to playful surrealism. For instance, the scenes with the Beatles, Brian Jones, and Pete Seger, are dead center between creepy and comical. To paraphrase “Brownsville Girl” (that masterpiece where Dylan and Sam Shepard collaborated) “I didn’t know whether to wince or to laugh, so I laughed.” These scenes are all in the Kate Winslet section. I was a bit distracted by her prominent cheekbones (so lovely on a pretty girl, like Kate — but so, and here I’ll say it again, so creepy on Bob Dylan) — but Winslet had the mannerisms of Dylan down solid.

It’s a lovely disjointed mess. I have nothing against long movies. Some of them need a lot of time to tell a story. But with “I’m Not There” it seems like too much padding and bloated showboating. It would not have suffered were the whole section where Heath Ledger’s Dylan persona were stripped out. (Yeah, yeah, were that allowed to have happened, we would have lost some moving, winsome performances by Charlotte Gainsbourg … and, um, her nude scenes …. And now that I think it through, it seems these sorts of decisions are made by folks wiser than I.)

Probably the elements that will make this film sink or swim among the fanatical Dylan fans will be the book-end bits. We open with Marcus Carl Franklin. He plays Dylan as an 11 year old black boy calling himself Woody Guthrie as he rides the rails and eats fried catfish in the homes of sharecroppers. (And I’m not making this up.) And then, at the end, we have the Autumn (Winter?) of Dylan’s life, where Richard Gere trots though rural Missouri on horseback wearing granny glasses and a buckskin hat and he’s seemingly been transported back in time to that era of outhouses and Victrolas. And if all you can grumble is a sour “what the fuck?” I can only caution that it sounds like you’ve wandered far from Brother Bob’s path, and you’d better pop into the nearest freight elevation, fire up a joint, and get right with God and get the fuck back into your seat before the opening credits begin rolling on the next screening. Tell me that the second time around still has you scratching your head, and I’ll know you to be a rube not worth my time.

The film made me realize that Bob Dylan means so many things to so many different people.

Todd Haynes has his own personal interpretations of what Bob Dylan and his music means to him — much of his point of view is lost on me. Haynes’ is walking his own subjective beat.

My own take on Dylan is a scattered memory of images and sounds. First, there was that great “Subterranean Homesick Blues” period. Somewhat later was that iconic scene in “Don’t Look Back” (Pennebaker’s wonderful 1968 documentary) where Dylan and Donovan meet in a hotel room, and both come off as self important twats — but the scruffy American is the one who, ultimately, has something worth saying. And I guess that, really, so much of my knowledge of those early Dylan songs comes from the versions done by the Byrds.

The fact is that the most interesting (at least to me) period of Dylan’s life was already in the past when I was of the age I could have embrace it — but in my youth I already had contemporary music of my own. For those years of my life, Dylan was little more than a guy from another generation who had a nasal voice and often wore funny hats. And then, in the mid ’80s, I was blown away by the song “Brownsville Girl.” Sam Shepard wrote the lyrics. Bob Dylan made the song. I remember the first time I heard it on the radio. I had to go out and buy the album.

And so that is my Bob Dylan. The kid from the super-8 music “video” for “Subterranean Homesick Blues;” the cocky brat who made Donovan look like a washed up flower-power casualty; and the well-seasoned burnout who sang about driving across the country, skirting the law, and, as is mentioned in the final stanza, was more than comfortable with vanishing into the absurdity of his own iconography:

There was a movie I seen one time
I think I sat through it twice
I don’t remember who I was or where I was bound
All I remember about it was it starred Gregory Peck
He wore a gun and he was shot in the back
Seems like a long time ago
Long before the stars were torn down

These are my interpretations of Dylan. He had a strong impact on my life. And, really, I’m not at all what you’d call a fan.

And that, I believe, is as good a definition of a pop icon as you can get.

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To close on, here’s what you can do to serve your community.

Click for full image

This is in my neighborhood (well, a bit further south in the trailer park and ice house district). I’m trying to figure out the best type of spray paint to use when I add the word “CRAP” at the end of the first sentence. However, another person suggested that the alteration should be to cross out the word “serve, and add the word “POISON.” And then another person pointed out the the closest McDonalds is over at I-35, a couple of miles away. The fact of the matter is the double arches isn’t even poisoning the community where they are advertising.

“The guy in the billboard is too happy to work at McDonalds,” someone in my vandalism focus group said.

“And too svelte,” piped up another, scowling in the back row.

The exit polls had “poison” and “crap” in a dead tie.

I’ve not been so conflicted since the return of the McRib.

I’ll have to think this over some ….