frenetic license

Briefly, I want to impress a lot of people I've never met before.

Ciro
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"The in-dark answered with wind."
- Samuel R. Delaney, Dhalgren

Yesterday I signed my first Director of Photography contract, this one under foreign and international law (hmm yes hmm) with the London Film School, wherein I agree that I will accept 6% of the proceeds from any profit made upon the work I rendered my services to deliver.

Profit, I assure you, will not likely follow.

But, holy crap it's a friggin' contract for my "services"! Somebody buy me a drink!

Ciro

P.S. I may not have finished writing anything decent in years, but just now I'm writing some dialogue that would kick your pants.
--

“In our existence in this ‘Star Wars’ civilization, we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. That’s a very dangerous combination.”
- E.O. Wilson

Possibly I will be married by August.

Ciro

The weekend has been very strange, creatively. Saturday saw the culmination of months of planning for a four-minute short film I refer to as my "anti-sex-scene" — an attempt to represent intimacy between characters without resorting to Zalman King tactics. The shoot went shockingly well given the circumstances. Two hours before call time, the female lead phones to tell me she can't do the nudity she agreed to (in fact volunteered for) because she hadn't met the lead male.

In my defense, I had tried several times to get them together, in deference to both of their modesties. He was not an actor, but had extensive professional modeling experience, and as I told her over and over, he was a nice guy. In the end I recast her with the make-up artist, who had done nudity previously and was herself a formidable actor. So, one crisis averted.

I spent 5 hours that evening averting other crises (with the help of valiant friends, whom I need to lampoon into crazy risque indie film projects much more often). Turns out the male had also not planned on full frontal (despite my visions of, like, Ewan McGregor nudity), and it took my insistance and the coaxing (cajoling, actually) of the new female lead to get him to remove his underwear.

Wow, that's a weird story to relate. I found a profoundly, shockingly god-bodied beautiful young model looking for acting experience to play the male lead, and half the people on "set" (my living room converted into a bedroom) and my next door neighbor were gunning for naked time. I wonder if I handled it right.

I won't know until I can edit the footage together if I actually did a good job with this one, but I do know that several talented people broke down all the creative problems into parts and carried their weight, and if it fails it is my fault, not theirs. I hope it doesn't fail.

Which (hah) reminds me of how I capped the weekend — a rejection from Fantasy & Science Fiction. I'm not upset. I probably deserved it. Now I wonder how many rejections I should get before I consider a rewrite. A tough call. But I just rearragned the entire layout of my apartment, and it's looking much more studio-bohemian, which makes me feel arty even in the face of a rejection slip.

Hope I don't have to do that too often.

Ciro
--

Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night,
The swaying in darkness, the lovers like spoons?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes?
Does he hum them to while away sad afternoons
And the long, lonesome Sundays? Or sing them for spite?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night?

Seed has posted their endorsement of Obama.

Favorite paragraph —

Far more important is this: Science is a way of governing, not just something to be governed. Science offers a methodology and philosophy rooted in evidence, kept in check by persistent inquiry, and bounded by the constraints of a self-critical and rigorous method. Science is a lens through which we can and should visualize and solve complex problems, organize government and multilateral bodies, establish international alliances, inspire national pride, restore positive feelings about America around the globe, embolden democracy, and ultimately, lead the world. More than anything, what this lens offers the next administration is a limitless capacity to handle all that comes its way, no matter how complex or unanticipated.

Indeed.

Ciro
--

"For his positions and, even more, for his way of coming to them, we endorse Barack Obama for President of the United States."
- Editors of Seed, "Barak Obama for President"

Today a classmate was surprised to discover I was not an artist living on a residency grant at the Centraltrak Gallery in Expo Park. It's not clear to me how he developed this mistaken impression. As far as I know I've never said the word Centraltrak in his presence. The class we're in is a required undergrad survey for the extremely general Art & Performance program. He has no reason to think that I've had any more success than he has.

I turned into a sobbing, blubbering mess during my performance of the "dead in a box" monologue from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (my feeling was existential angst should be angsty). My acting instructor promptly gave me "the agent talk" and wants me to mentor with someone who trained with Marcel Marceau and teaches in Europe and Japan.

My drawing instructor, who's seen me struggle through some of the most basic assignments, has insisted that I get a photo collection together for gallery submission. Some of the photos she picked for it were taken with a cell phone.

I've been making art steadily for the past few months, with ups and downs (I'm still figuring it out). But the biggest revelation has been the one where I freak out at the thought of ever having to drop it all and go back to wage slavery. The advantage, I've learned, of being completely barred from your dreams is that you don't miss them as much every time you have to give up. You begin to feel like this, this small sphere you occupy, struggling merely to exist from one moment to the next, is enough, is normal, is all anyone can ask for. You have no trouble sustaining this illusion, when you're not pursuing something better.

The smallest drop of recognition is dangerous. Opens the seeds up and forces them to take root. Even if no more is coming.

I just don't want to give up anymore.

Ciro
--

"I must rejoice beyond the bounds of time. . . though the world may shudder at my joy, and in its coarseness know not what I mean."
- Ruysbroeck the Admirable

"So many of the arguments that knowledge goods industries make for extending their reach are really naked self-interest and rhetorical tricks."

Ciro

It's true that my mirth can be cruel at times, but I am usually possessed of good intentions. Nonetheless, I say that Chad owes me a great big, "Fuck you!" He in fact is going to be published, is among the bare handful of my writer friends to achieve that honor for fiction.

I think his friends owe him a congratulations.

Ciro
--

"I turn the ocean over. . ."
- Soulsavers, "Jesus of Nothing"

. . . about the Firewater show —

1) Tod A. spit in my mouth.

2) Tod A. put my glass to his lips.

3) Tod A. gave me his bourbon.

Whoa.

Ciro
--

"So you light a dog-end smoke, and you're laughing as you choke, and you give the wheel of fortune one more spin."
- Firewater, "Bourbon and Division"

Neuromusicologists have long been interested in the psychophysiological structures that separate relative-pitched people (a majority in Western civilization) from those with perfect/absolute pitch. Hard data has not been forthcoming, though experiments asking participants to sing popular songs they know by heart has demonstrated that absolute pitch is stored in memory for most individuals, even if they cannot apply that memory to individual tones. The common scenario for those with perfect pitch is that each tone has an individual significance, rather than one that relies upon the melody. For some, both carry meaning without any kind of training.

My girl has been telling me for a while that I in fact have perfect pitch. The experience of music that most perfect-pitched people describe didn't really match my own, so I was skeptical. Not too long ago, though, I ordered a basic course on music theory, because I was tired of being ignorant, and I went through a few exercises today. It's good to learn. My favorite moment of eureka in a long time came during an exercise with the harmonic series of F. I returned to the exercise a few hours later and discovered that I could sound each note, perfectly in tune and on key, even though I had no melody to associate them with.

So, she was right. I have perfect pitch. That's not so bad.

Ciro
--

"Ooy vol I tub!"
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce), Amadeus

"Efffffffffffffffff."
- Romie Stott

And, today with a china marker I turned someone's ballpoint doodle into an image of Morpheus the Sandman.

Ciro
--

"As I am an honest Puck. . . "
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

When I was bean-slinging in Boston, one of my regular customers was an MIT guy who was working on the detection system to allow using one of these devices for preventing seizures. Now they're trying them on psychiatric disorders.

Humans rewire own brains. I am a strange loop. Whoa.

Ciro
--

"I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does."
- Jorge Luis Borges, "A New Refutation of Time" (trans. James E. Irby)

The lady above worked the corner for 3 or 4 hours before anyone noticed the sign. If she's right, I was the first, on my lunch break. She was happy to oblige for a picture.

My neighbor has Decided to ride her bike to work — ten minutes, probably, less if she keeps at it and gets better at riding.

I've been a pedestrian for a long while, a status forced upon me but which I am now reluctant to relinquish, even in this most unwalkable of cities. Highways are king. Land around you is cheaper than the air above, so people build out instead of up. Everyone wants their own private manse, and space between neighbors. Downtown is dead after 6 p.m.

A Dallas pedestrian knows a lot about frustration — you spend hours going short distances, most of your nights in doors, isolated. It reminds of me of being an artist in this city. Once I thought I could turn that into a good film, about being stranded, about dysfunctional creative communities, about relationships that fall apart under the weight of disconnection and the mute anguish of struggling to get nowhere. I still do. I still have something to say.

And I've Decided it's time I say it.

Ciro
--

"They will find you. They are looking now. It will not be too late."
- Romie Stott, "Forecasts"

Ciro
--

"Someone will have to measure the wreckage. Someone will have to walk through the ruins. Someone will have to count the cost."
- Charles P. Pierce, "The Cynic and Senator Obama"

In Dallas we're not that organized.

Ciro
--

"Large, dark, garbage."
- Terence Scopey (Julian Sands), Million Dollar Hotel

http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/T/TECHBIT_EPILEPSY_FOUNDATION_HACKED?SITE=WIRE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2008-05-07-19-29-17&reload=true

I'm all for the Computer Underground, but this shit makes me want to napalm the next DefCon.

Ciro

--

"I am a hacker and this is my manifesto."

- The Mentor, "The Conscience of a Hacker" (a.k.a "The Hacker's Manifesto")

I'm supposed to be writing about a museum visit for a class, but I've become Distracted. It's difficult for me to write about art — I get the vocabulary in my head, start examining my responses, and suddenly I'm in the mood to create something, not dance about architecture. In The Mood. It's a peculiar problem, I think. Just now I spent the last hour drawing and trying unconventional combinations of clothes. I have a scarf tied to my arm. I just finished a sketch I started a year ago. I'm plotting notes in Sibelius.

Outside the wind is up. The sky is twilit by the city. If I can find the moon, I'll swallow it whole.

Ciro
--

"Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees."
- Robert Irwin

My father is not afraid to cry. His father was, I think. I have a picture of the two of them together, from some time in the late 70s or early 80s. My father has on a rockstar face, one of a series of expressions he learned from Mick Jagger. My grandfather looks made of wood or stone. No expression. I wonder if his face ever moved, except out of anger. His life was so devastatingly hard, what I know of it.

I see that face on the homeless men scattered around downtown. It's a cliché, really — ghosts in the flesh. Corpses that don't know they're dead. Some of them don't even ask me for money, they just look at me, like I'm a silhouette in the distance.

My father will lose his place to stay in 2 weeks; he has no prospects. My brother won't take him, can't — his girlfriend won't allow it. I told him he could stay with me, if he saw a doctor and took prescribed medication. I wasn't hoping for a cure, just some kind of relief. A day or two in the week, or even an hour, when he could get by without hearing voices, without twitching, without trying to convince me that he's growing younger and will soon save the world.

He refused.

It took a day before the finality of it hit me. In 2 weeks, he will be on the streets, and I will have no way to help him. I'm a Starbucks employee with a Pell grant, no heat or hot water, eating the food my customers won't buy. Working and studying full-time. I have no room in my life for sickness.

I almost deleted that last line. I'm so ashamed. I promised the people who care about me and see me in the middle of this that I would be selfish, that I wouldn't try to fix what I can't fix. "I have no room for sickness in my life." I keep telling them I've moved past guilt, because the looks on their faces say they need to hear it, but I haven't. I'm terribly ashamed, and torn open, and lately, seconds away from tears. The right words will do it, as my manager discovered a few days ago. I had to excuse myself to the back, find a small corner and cry. I think about what I have to tell my family in Italy, when the time comes that he's disappeared. I won't know what to say. I'm filthy with guilt. I hate my choices. None of them are bearable, and I'm most ashamed of the one I've made.

It won't be over for a long while. He's not dead, and until he is, I don't have any way of letting go. While he's still breathing, while he can still speak, I'm almost convinced that bond is still attached. But it's not, and for gods sake, it won't stop hurting.

Ciro
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"And all his disciples, they shave in the gutter, and they gather what's left of his clothes."
- Tom Waits, "Diamonds and Gold"

So the emerging scene is far less than we deserve, and the outcome is far from certain, but I think that misses the point. When it's all over, I'm selling t-shirts that say, "I made it through the Bush Administration."

Ciro
--

"Great political parties, then, are not to be met with in the United States at the present time. Parties, indeed, may be found which threaten the future of the Union; but there is none which seems to contest the present form of government or the present course of society. The parties by which the Union is menaced do not rest upon principles, but upon material interests. These interests constitute, in the different provinces of so vast an empire, rival nations rather than parties."

- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (trans. Henry Reeve)

It's not just that I did a lot of work on one of the installations, or that one of the headliners is my best and oldest friend (and a formidable artist) — it's that it's everything you could ever possibly need to feel completely fulfilled forever.

Ciro