I haven’t listened to any of my nine inch nails music for quite some time. Since I know the new one With Teeth should be out sometime in the next 6 months or so I figured it was time for a chronological review. I put on the first and second albums today and since it’s been a few years and I have acquired some musical training in that time I found that I could enjoy and criticize the music that much more. I also found myself in a somewhat nostalgic kick going through my own memories of a time when I listened to the music quite regularly anyhow I found it to be a good thing and quite cathartic a purging of atiquated philosophies and a reaffirmation of old ideas.

. . . maybe that’s not the point. I mean for elections and all it’s nice that this dichotomy of basic ideologies has developed. Hell when Clinton won in 92 he had only 43% of the popular vote and that was because of Perot (remember him?) The political process has many avenues for variety in candidates but I think it’s good that there are only a few people fighting for the big chair. It forces compromise and sure it creates a mediocrity in the moderation of ideology but that prevents cataclysm. I believe that since we are a Republic of independent states, that is where the real power of the individual lies. In my State of California there are Propositions and in my County of Humboldt there are Measures all of which have a much greater bearing on my day to day life (if any at all). Do I want to pay an extra cent on the dollar so local services can keep on keepin’ on? Or do I want to modify the 3 strikes law, OR fund stem cell research in the form of a bond initiative? These are the things that will stimulate or dismantle the commerce of the state and result in either making my home town a nice place or a not-so-nice place. And that is my 2 cents on the importance of exercising democratic power.

Now what is plurality and where is it okay in my opinion? Award shows! That’s right if there are more than 3 nominees then chances are the winner is just good and not “the best.” I recently read a live journal by director Paul Feig discussing his difficulty in going through the process of getting his film to be in a position to be nominated. He talks about his frustrations with the new rules for striving for that Oscar glory in this diary which I found to be insightful and amusing [that’s the best kind]. Here is a link to the second part of a director’s diary, enjoy. http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/562/562383p1.html

Being sick for these last few days I’ve found myself sort of out things. Sleeping the entire day Saturday helped me to get better I’m sure but I didn’t even go to school most of today I just popped in for two hours to get an acting assignment done. The problem with being sick is two fold 1) you find life is much too difficult to cope with when your own body doesn’t want to work properly. 2) the rest of the world keeps moving and you inevitably get left behind in some respect. I’d liken it to being in a coma. You find that the longer you feel rotten the less you can deal with the reality of the world and the more transcendent things become. When you do come out of this stupor you find the recovery to be traumatic as you must accelerate back into whatever mode you run at as a standard operating procedure.

My Second film project will be a compilation of two rolls of 16 mm film on one roll I have observed my Mother painting a rose and also caught some of the mess on the kitchen table. On the second roll I have observed my brother painting as well as moving around his home and going into a shed where he has many paintings lining the walls.

I will most likely use the images of the collection of paintings in the shed to begin the film and inter-cut my Mother’s careful observation and painting of a rose with my Brother’s wandering about and abstract and rapid painting style. I will serve to find meaning making in how I contrast their painting approaches and also how I might find similarities. Essentially I will observe the rolls and then make decisions about how to cut and integrate the two painters in the editing room.

I’m just starting to become convinced that I’m gonna have one of those weekends with a cold. It pisses me off but so it goes. I spent a number of hours today assisting my audio teacher in micing a band. The band seems pretty good. They have an old organ with a Leslie speaker that spins while producing sound and a saxophonist who plays a giant baritone. They also have the guitar and drums and bass and vocals. The sax and organ give it greater depth than any typical rock band.

I’m at the tail end of being 23 years old and I have a high cholesterol level for the Low Density Lipoproteins. Years of eating junk food and being lazy in college have caught up with me quite fast. It makes me wonder if perhaps the life expectancy is going to start to decrease as more and more people become lazy fat asses like myself? I guess this is not such a bad thing hopefully Natural Selection will preserve those fortunate ones with good genes and the self control and self esteem to live a healthy life.

In developing a concept for a film one comes to an idea. I suppose for me I have strayed from this notion of a solid idea a way to interpret and get what I am doing in making anything. I don’t really feel that it is my concern to have a serious idea and to be concerned with taking that idea seriously. This is not nuclear negotiations or anything of legitimate consequence it is the making of a product that will at best evoke some sort of cathartic experience on the part of the audience or at the very least inspire some entertaining or amusing questions about the quirks of life, nature, humanity and all those other vague and irrelevant subjects. I enjoy making movies and playing with imagery to create meanings and such not because I believe I have “something to say” rather I find the act of creating the product to be one that at best is a sublime distraction.

That is not to say that my ideas aren’t something I have a degree of sincere consideration and confidence in promoting, rather I play with these ideas instead of dictating them at best having fun with the images and the ideas that the audience can come up with. I do not work in such an esoteric fashion to create product so desperately abstract to evoke only the forced awe of art house patrons and frankly I do not see the point in that except as it perpetuates an elite class that all classes of intellect is based on rather illusionary pretenses. I can use big words [with the help of a thesaurus and spell checker of course] to write about the most vulgar of works such that it can sound truly profound. This form of deconstructive criticism and attempt to assign importance to “serious” ideas is retroactive at best and ultimately a game for those who prefer to concern themselves with ascribing objective value to something that is only as tangible as the collective references [the shoulders of giants] that can be universally understood. In this case that which is serious is that which is generic and most accessible in a piece of artwork everything else is a clever attempt to reduce the uniqueness of the piece into those parts that can be reassigned to previously understood movements of thought and art in human history. Without inventing new words our human minds will ultimately resolve metaphor into these basic concepts and find a way to arrive at the familiar. For me the point is not in trying to mask this familiarity behind some pretense of a serious commitment to originality or this lofty notion of the filmmakers idea, rather it is to find novel and interesting ways to create meaning from the familiar through references and combinations creating novel images that create unexpected and yet totally familiar and strangely intuitive emotional responses and intellectual pondering satisfying the human desire for catharsis and neurological stimulation.

I found myself engaged in a mildly tedious task of drawing a rudimentary floor plan of the apartment room where I live. I am supposed to note the number of outlets and then figurethe Wattage or something like that. I got out the old physics book and spent 20 minutes trying to find how Wattage related to Amperes and Voltage. Finally, I broke down and checked a table in the American Heritage Dictionary and low and behold V = W/A and that was that. It frustrates a lazy fool like myself how often the simplest questions require hours of research and are usually best found in the most general of reference books. I often think that all I really needed to make it through college was a good set of encyclopedias an internet connection and a good thesaurus and dictionary. I could have saved quite a bit of money on books.

Maybe it is my rushed sensibility towards education. I see no point in endlessly distracting and confusing a simple point through the laborious process of discovery when the answer is not something of subjective quality but a simple fact. In art this does not apply of course. I found myself shooting my ukelelle for my 8mm object assignment. I put it in the sun and shot it with mostly macro-zoom lens shots. I think it looked good but it didn’t take much deliberation or forethought the whole process probably too less than an hour to familiarize myself with the camera [reading instructions just like a textbook nothing simple there] and to set it up and shoot the footage. I wonder if this quick approach is a sign that I have no appreciation for the artistic skill and patience that I have observed fellow students to demonstrate? Is my impatience and desire to just get the assignment job causing me to produce work of low quality? I think it is but I don’t know what the difference would be a shot is a shot and if it takes me 15 minutes to shoot what I think is good footage then maybe that’s just something that I am good at. I’ve always figured that people who can accomplish a task and do it with intelligence, thoughtful consideration and produce quality work without taking a long time are “good” at that task. To me it seems that is the real goal in life to find what you can do well such that you can excel at that since the consistent thing about all of us is that we have a limited amount of time. Though there is a learning curve and there are limits in terms of talent and intelligence but if one does not test them then one cannot know how “good” he or she can be.

My next project in the Super 8 mm class is supposed to be an object study. I will explore an object from different angles and lighting and positions and such. I don’t know what sort of object to study but I think it should be something with texture, something that can become abstract lose depth and flatten (dimesionally dynamic). There is a lacking of light now as the stormy dark weather has began. I will need to start getting used to using lights and doing lighting designs so I can acheive the professional exposures with rich depth of field and vibrant colors that distinguish my work from the amateur stuff I’ve done in the past.

Things went well I was happy to finally have enough light to really stop down and open up my depth of field. I think this whole project will come together once I’m looking at all the footage in the editing room. Eisenstein did have a point with his montage theory.