Madman’s Mutterings

A few weeks back I said that I could reduce the budget for my movie by $25,000 if I could just get my hands on a 16:9 lens adapter and use my current camera. Or maybe I wasn’t that specific. Maybe I just said “lens.” But that’s what I needed and I put out the call and you folks came through for me. Thank you.

The lens got waylaid by customs here and they “requested” an additional 1500RMB before they’d release it. Ouch.

I’d met Cecilia a few weeks ago and I was part of the group that helped her shoot a music video down on Gui Jie. I wasn’t the director on that shoot and there were things I would have done differently. Not better. Hopefully not worse. Just different. And I did have a shiny new lens that I needed to get the hang of…

I took her to a park about a half a mile from where I live. There are these very non-Chinese marble columns and archways. Great fountains. Pigeons galore. We spent an hour baking in the blistering heat before we came back to my apartment and shot the rest.

I’m not used to working with a crew. I know I’ll have to adjust to that on the set of the movie, but for this, I did everything myself. We did a few clothing changes, variable speeds, half a dozen lighting set-ups. I knew what I wanted going in, so we were done in just a few hours. Capturing the footage would turn out to be another problem entirely…

But when I got the footage in and I saw the anamorphic lens at work, I had the first real sense of what this film will look like. In a week or so, I’ll have this edited together. You can see for yourself. A week or so after that and I’ll head out to the Great Wall and see what she can do with the world’s biggest Do Not Disturb sign.

In the meantime, I’m getting closer to wrapping up the producer proposal and I’ll have an intern coming in next week to help with some of the legwork. I’ve got distribution and fulfillment sorted and I’ve been in touch with a location agency here. We’re still on track to begin production in South China in November.

And you, gentle reader… your contributions are still most welcome through the Paypal button on my site. Every little bit helps. Really.

Thanks. More to come.

Current Mood:  optimistic

Everybody handles things differently. That’s a given. Good news, bad news, no news… we all react this stuff in our own way. Part of being friends with someone is learning their language. Some people try to show you the bright side of things when things look bleak, or show you that the situation is circumstantial and not some outright plot to make you miserable.

That doesn’t work for me. But again, everyone is different.

For me, when things take a sudden bad turn, I usually go around for about a day flailing my arms in the air and beweeping my outcast state (and yes, you get bonus points if you get the reference). I get forlorn, depressed, think the world is falling apart, and I lock myself away in a room until the feeling goes away. I cannot stand being around people at that point. I’m always aware that I’m coming across as a melodramatic git and I simply need to step away, have a stiff drink, get a good night’s sleep, and look at the whole thing with fresh eyes in the morning. This is my process. This is how I absorb what’s happened, make it part of me, and figure out how to deal with it. It’s like a vaccine in a way. You get a little bit sick so you can get better.

But how best to deal with me when I’m in a state like this? What’s a friend to do? Most of my friends have the pamphlet by now. Some of them opted for the accompanying CD and aromatherapy candle. Which is nice. But, really, I think my language is pretty simple.

If I say, “He’s a jerk,” it’s best if you don’t respond with, “Well, maybe he mistook your meaning” or “Look at it from his point of view.”

No. The correct response is, “Yeah! What a jerk!”

I’m easy, man. Very simple. If you’re my friend, your job is to be on my side. That’s it. Don’t give me the other side of the coin. You’ll just make me defend my position, which send me further down the rabbit hole. Don’t hand me that “the sun will come out tomorrow” stuff. Right NOW it’s raining. And really, when the lightning hits the tower, it’s best if you’re not holding anything metal. Or I might just think you’re a jerk, too.

Either way, the lighning happens in a flash, the thunder echoes for a little while, but the sun does come out tomorrow. At least for me. As cheesy as that sounds.

A special hello, hello to all of you as we say “good-bye, good-bye” to the King of Pop. Get your dancing shoes on and spin that mirrorball. This is the dance show!

Here’s this week’s playlist:

You Rock My World – Michael Jackson

The Love Bug – BoA

Un Attimo Di Pace – Eros Ramazzotti

Baila  (Les Bronzés 3) – Zucchero

Disappear – No Angels

Zaama Zaama – Tafkarinas

PYT (Pretty Young Thing) – Michael Jackson

Bitter – 鈴木亜美

Boom Boom – Chayenne

환상의 짝꿍 (Baby I Love You) ft. Ye Eun Of Wonder Girls – H-유진

I Want You Back – The Jackson 5

Dig the LINGO thing? Want to be a part of the show? Leave a comment and we’ll get you on the air!

As always, thanks to LanguageCast for giving us a bit of their bandwidth and bringing the show to more people. You guys rock my world.

Current Mood:  bouncy

A friend of mine asked me for advice the other day. It always surprises me when this happens for the simple reason that no part of where I am right now was on purpose; none of it by design.

I don’t have a plan. I have no map of the road ahead or the direction I think things ought to go. The whole concept of a “Five Year Plan” seems absurd to me. I get out of bed every day with the hope that I’ll have a reason to get out of bed tomorrow. That’s it.

Beyond that, I only have North.

It’s my internal compass. The guiding star within me that makes me do certain things and prevents me from doing others. I’m not talking about my conscience here. Not morality. North is different (though it’s both of those things, too).

Every day I put one foot in front of the other. Forward motion is important. More than you know. There’s a lot of bad stuff behind me, a lot of mistakes, a lot of South. You know how you get away from South? You go North.

Perhaps the hardest-won thing in my life is this thing, this North, this knowledge of myself and where my happiness lies. In my youth, the needle swung me all over the map. I didn’t know what North was, so one direction was as good as any other. You tried stuff. Most of it didn’t work out. But now and then you saw a flicker in the sky, some distant glimmer that might be something like the life you’d like to have, so you walked that way a while.

For 17 years my North was a person. Everything I did, thought, wrote or spoke stemmed from a desire to be there. To be more Northerly. And then that ended, like the polar shift that happens every few million years, the needle swung around and I stood there for a long time with nothing but a useless compass to show for the journey and wondered what the hell I was supposed to do next.

North.

If you’ve got a compass in your hand and you’re standing at the South Pole, any step you take will look like North on the needle. You’ve got to get some distance. You’ve got to put some distance between you and that place before the compass can be a compass again. Eventually… with any luck… you get your bearings. Otherwise you wander lost into the frozen wasteland and are never heard from again. I try hard not to let that happen.

But when my friend asked me my advice, I realized that I was not nearly as lost as I’d thought, and it kind of helped me to make some hard decisions of my own.

“Go North,” I told him. “North is where you want to be. It’s different for everyone. You must go North. Every time I am faced with a choice, I ask myself where that choice points me. If the answers is South, I say no. Plain and simple. I do not go South. If the answer is Northeast or Northwest? Sure. I will walk that road a while. East or West I will only walk for short period before I need to turn my feet Northward again. But, ultimately, always, the goal is North.”

And this is where I am now. I have been heading Northerly, but not North.

My North is not yours. Not his. Not hers. So it’s time to make an adjustment.

It is hard to say good-bye to the people who have shared this place of Not-North with you. Good-byes have never been my strong suit. But North is North and they cannot walk that road for you.

North is a direction. It is not a destination. When I have walked far enough, traveled long enough, loved well enough, I will lay down my head and sleep in a place beyond my imaginings. But for now…

I go North again.

One foot in front of the other.

Current Mood:  thoughtful

I’d like to be one of those guys who could, at the mention of the words “white bathing suit,” call forth the image you’re looking at now. I’d love to have met this shapely icon in her heyday, ask what was on her mind, what was making her so forlorn in this photo. I would have bought her a drink. She would have sang me a song. These are the thoughts a man ought to indulge in.

Alas, no.

Really, I blame my mother. She bought the thing. The White Bathing Suit. There was to a birthday party for a girl I had a crush on. Dawn Gallagher. That was her name. Pretty little thing. Cute as hell. And so sweet she invited me to this birthday party in her backyard the same summer that Ghostbusters was on the silver screen. (She says it was summer. I’m sticking to my guns and saying it was, like, November. That water was cold. COLD, I tell ya! But it’s her birthday. You’d think she’d know.)

It was a pool party. (Strange, in November.) Thus the bathing suit. And I wanted to make a good impression. I had, as previously mentioned, a huge crush on this girl. Dawn Gallagher. Cute as hell. So when I told my mom, who worked at Macy’s, to bring me home something I could wear to the party, she brought home the White Bathing Suit and I wore it.

It’s one of those things that seems obvious in retrospect. You’d think I could have seen it coming. You’d think somebody, anybody, would have raised a red flag before I felt the spring of the diving board beneath my feet and splashed into the water with a raucous “banzaaaaiiiii!”

Because, really, the only thing worse than wearing a White Bathing Suit and jumping into a pool in the middle of Novemer (I swear it was winter, don’t believe a word she says!), is calling attention to yourself as you hit the water.

I went in, went under, swam to the side, got out. And was met with a collective gasp, followed by a squadron of pointing fingers. And the only thing worse than wearing a White Bathing Suit when you have a HUGE crush on someone is diving into a pool of ice water in the middle of November and have that reflect the… uh…. size of your crush.

Transparent. I think that’s the word that describes it. Invisible comes close. I reached for a fig leaf, a towel, a lawn chair, the family dog… I came up empty. A millisecond later I was back in the water, my manly bits getting a little too much attention from the water jets against the wall and I waited there until Dawn, laughing (to this day, laughing), brought me a towel.

You would hope that people would get a chuckle out of that and move on. Sadly, just last week Dawn and our childhood friends reminisced on the subject. Not the party, no. Not the sill Ray Parker, Jr. song that stuck in everybody’s head. No, it was the White Bathing Suit and the HUGE (huge, I say!) crush I had on her.

That’s what remains. And pictures. They say there are pictures.

God help me.

Current Mood:  nostalgic