Gregory’s Lovable Önline Gabble Garden
Lovely day and night,
Much to recount, but not now;
First to Dream, ah Yes.
Addendum: Hello. My tapping has been required elsewhere, and updates so swiftly turn to downdates. But we’ll wrangle this into a new post soon enough. Meanwhile, why not toss your Personal Electronic Device into the nearest birdbath, and go for broke on the smooching?
Oh, thank you, Hugh (I needed that).
Busy week! More soon.
Since life continues to be unrelentingly stupid, I suppose I shall burn off the remainder of this green-tea rush by recounting another dream.
I had been discussing Marc Bolan (ne Feld) with someone in real life. It always amazes me that so few people (in America) know who Bolan is/was, since his influence on popular music rivalled that of Liverpool’s finest sons. I became interested in Bolan whilst working in a big, crazy record shop in Washington, owned by total yuppie-Boomer scum (the owner, Jim, once actually told a female hourly employee that he “owned” her). But while I was there, I did my research. This included many areas of popular music, including T-Rex.
That Bolan was so incredibly prolific in such a short span continues to amaze me. He certainly had his limitations, but from his Tolkien-inspired “fantasy-folk” sound to his overblown near-Metal persona, the guy took on the pop idiom in a manner that makes pretty much all of today’s “stars” seem boring and inflexible by comparison.
Perhaps it was the era.
Bolan died in a car wreck at the age of almost-thirty. His girlfriend was driving.
The funny thing was, although he never learnt to drive, he was fascinated by cars, and they figured prominently in many of his songs.
That’s the jump-off point for the recent weird dream, because, unlike Bolan, I don’t particularly like cars, and wouldn’t even mind a world without them. It may be obvious, but I’ll say it anyway: Cars essentially never appear in my dreams.
Last night, though, one did.
I was employed by some strange consulting company housed in what appeared to be a large, airy, low-ceilinged warehouse converted into office spaces. The walls and cubicles were painted a cheery yellow. I had my own cube, but was rarely there, as it was my job to go around, consulting people. (The exact purpose of these consultations was never made clear.) The Woman I Love was in the dream, and although the office was entirely empty to the point of being eerie, suddenly She appeared in it, and suggested that I take The Car out for a ride. Huh? What car? Then: That one. Oh. I hadn’t noticed it. Sitting among the filing cabinets and half-covered by some sort of worn canvas tarpaulin was one of the craziest cars I had ever seen. Bright red it was, and a 1950s (”Mid-Century”) convertible it was, and bigly finned it was, and extremely ostentatious it was. I kinda liked it. I liked that it was not boring. That was why I liked it. That it was a car was almost irrelevant. But why did The Woman I Love want for me to take it out? I asked. She gave me a Mysterious Look and said no more. And then she gave me more Mysterious Looks. Hm. Thanks. Okay. Did She want to ride with me? She said yes, and then did not approach the car. And then She did. And then She didn’t again. I looked around. Was this some sort of set-up? Was it April first? She remained mute. She grinned, but there was no indication of meaning in the grin. I pulled the tarp from the car, let it fall in a heap among office papers. What was my job, anyway? I decided not to worry about it. I “consulted.” Whatever. Somewhere along the line, I must have filled out an application form as a Consultatitian. I must have been a pretty good one, too, because I had my own cubicle. How the hell did this Car get in here? The Woman I Love suddenly vanished. No — wait — She was sitting in the Car. No — now She wasn’t again. What just happened? Noise. One of the side offices appeared to have vomited forth its entire contents, including typewriters, coat-racks, a microwave oven, Jenga, desk things, desk, generic inoffensive art, mugs, loads and loads of paper. The pile of crap was blocking what suddenly became known to me as the only way out of the building (for the Car, anyway; bipeds had easy access to many smaller windows and doors). I started the Car, and then She was sitting in it beside me; and then She wasn’t; and then She was (etc.). I noticed that the Car was sort of useful, but also sort of theatrical; it wasn’t a convertible in the strictest sense, but rather in that it had a sort of fibreglass-papier-mache bonnet over our (my?) (our?) (my?) (our?) (etc.) head(s), which was easily detached, so I detached it. It was quite light, and I let it fall to the side of the Car. The engine seemed reasonably powerful (especially since this was an actual vintage automobile, weird or otherwise). Then, suddenly, She wasn’t there anymore (again), but my niece and some of her friends arrived — as planned, but I had forgotten. Hi. Hi. The pressure of entertaining them suddenly made itself known. Hey…make yourselves at home…want a stale candy bar? Some bad coffee? (I never actually work here; honest.) I briefly considered regaling the youths with tales of my Consulting — except I still did not know about what, exactly, I Consulted. Hm. Hey, kids, could you step aside a little? Yeah, don’t mind that exploded office — that’s somebody else’s. Yes, you may play with the typewriter. Suddenly She was back in the car with me, and we plowed through the debris, giving a wide berth to my visitors, who gazed on from a safe distance with the awe and tedium of youth. See you in a bit? Okay. And we hit the road. The road itself was quite nice. Not the sort of ghastly road one usually finds in America — clogged with rude people cutting off one another as if they went to school for eight years to learn how to do it most masterfully. Actually, there was hardly anybody out there. An occasional other car would pass us from the opposite direction, or else a goat would wander through, and I think we also passed some religious people on their way to something important to them — but basically the road was open and pretty. It looked like a Northern region in Summertime: Verdant and bursting with beautiful views. We drove. At this point, She stopped appearing and disappearing, but rather behaved like a Person, rather than an optical illusion. I’d like to conclude this reflection by saying that we drove off into the sunset — except that we didn’t: It wasn’t yet noon, and so we were simply contemplating lunch.
What does this particular dream mean? Well, some of it is obvious to me, but mainly this dream means itself. Doesn’t take a Jungian. I present it here more in appreciation of the title line, as I don’t actually know what R.E.M. had in mind (exactly) with their album of the same name (which was rife with Southern American themes but recorded during a gloomy winter in England — kind of an interesting combination), but, to me, the words “Fable” and “Reconstruction” are highly suggestive, and they are both suggestions I happen to like.
Cars I really don’t like. I see cars as the cancer of the Earth. Some sci-fi nuts posit that humans are the cancer. Naw. Humans wouldn’t be causing all that much trouble without cars. Suck-suck-suck; spew-spew-spew: That’s what cars do, and what cars make us do.
I don’t like that at all, so in the dream, I suppose, I was taking the nebulous aspects of my current existence (the weird office), finding a focus within it (The Car — not as mere Polluter, but as Symbol), and then striving to focus that focus so that The Woman would actually take the ride.
Reconstruction as Fable.
The niecey showed up, I believe, because the niecey is a good person, and perchance the most globally astute person in our family. She and her friends represent a great big Everything’s Gonna Be Alright (sic).
(I prefer “All Right.”)
And what does any of this have to do with the shooter kid from last week? Very little. Although that story proved shocking for this particular country and the world in general, upon further contemplation, I don’t really feel that I have much more to add to the already oversaturated media-storm. Kid needed support, didn’t get it, derived his “inspiration” from very bad pop philosophies. I can only re-state that some writing teacher should have taken him to task on his ideas and asked him What and How and especially Why.
I really can’t stand people being rude to me, but I also constantly expect it and it no longer surprises me in the slightest. I sang Talkng Heads’ “Psycho Killer” (”I hate people when they’re not polite!”) with our local band as a teen, but it was satirical then just as it is satirical now. Art.
That’s noted because my creative impulses don’t seem to spring from the same well as those of many other males. Case-in-point, yesterday’s reflections. And with the introduction of today’s album title, I would like — much more briefly — to reflect upon another project which totally overlapped the previously mentioned one.
It ended up with the title Happy Phantom Haunting, kind of melding the Tori Amos song with the Robert Wise movie. I shot it in and around a manor house in England in 1989, and finally edited and “released” it in 1999 — a full ten Earth-years later.
For a little while thereafter, during my “popular” years, I had a “friend” who eventually became a known screenwriter — and during his then-starving years he frequently turned to me for free screenings. He’s easily one of the most obnoxious (and bullying) people ever to stalk the planet, but he was nice enough to me (while I remained in print), and so at some point we traded videos. His was a short piece of crap featuring two scuzzy-looking guys discussing forcing a dog to have oral sex with them. He declared it brilliant, and no argument was welcome.
My project was my overly-ambitious English ghost story — which was really a drama — which was really a romance.
The guy claimed that he couldn’t understand the dialogue in the first couple of minutes, and gave up on it.
Mind, the thing was shot by a total amateur, prior to any real production training — but comprehensible it is, and really rather pretty.
I still cringe that the guy — who has been known to call himself “Mr. Hollywood” even as his friends drop like flies — sincerely believed that his canine blowjob movie merited more praise or even just plain appraisal than my awkward but oddly involving half-hour ghost story.
Guys.
Hollywood.
Forget it.
Anyway, I mention it here not so much to blow my own horn (these are more my personal reminders of various achievements), but specifically because the eerie mystique of the R.E.M. album above fueled both the writing and shooting of the project (Fables on my $400 -!- Technics portable CD-player was the current fave.) Peter Buck has a very peculiar and even haunting little guitar line right at the beginning, on “Feeling Gravitys Pull” (sic), and that was my entryway into the movie that eventually became Happy Phantom Haunting.
(Weird how things connect: Yesterday I was standing outside a small theatre, waiting to go in, and the woman in charge of allowing this to happen suddenly exclaimed that she had been talking with a friend recently, and the friend had to go have dinner with Peter Buck: “You know, the guitarist for R.E.M. — they are one of my very favorite bands!” How do you like that? What are the odds? Synchronicity. She could have been a Limahl nut.)
I loved shooting what became Happy Phantom Haunting. There were lots of challenges, but everybody was kind-hearted and even with our incredibly primitive gear we actually got everything we set out to get. The whole thing could use full looping and colour-correction (and probably an overhaul-edit), but it exists! Compared to the slick stuff you watch, it probably wouldn’t hold a candle, but…it exists! I had a wonderful time working with the cast: Melanie, Mindy, Steve and Bernard. A very happy experience indeed.
Sometime I’ll see if I can get these projects compressed and get them onto the site.
Meanwhile, I’m going to give up on this ridiculous evening and return to dreams (in which no car, symbolically or otherwise, is requested).
(Time and distance are out of place here)
Hi.
Happy Earth Day.
When I was a Junior at USC, I made a movie called Can. It is still one of my faves, and probably the one from cinema school for which I am best remembered among my peers.
Certainly, of that time period, it was the most ambitious.
There had been some meditation. Although there was landlocked bewilderment Freshman year, and I was quite away for Sophomore, by the middle of Junior year I had some grip regarding how to get around Stupidland — er…Los Angeles.
I also had a car.
A shiny silver Ford Escort wagon.
I later had cooler cars, and more expensive cars, and even a couple of the same car, but that Escort was the most pleasant and useful overall. It sounded nice, smelled nice, looked nice and carried things nicely.
I was extremely poignantly alive that year, and wished very much to Say Something with My Movie.
At that quite tender age, all of the Conflicting Energies of the Universe were making themselves known to me.
Meanwhile, my friends were pretty much all making movies about Lovers Who Murder Each Other.
I never understood that.
Weird.
Anyway, first I went to The Beach.
I lay upon The Beach several times — usually up around Malibu or Point Dume, or maybe it was Will Rogers — and I Thought and Thought and Thought (and Scrawled and Scrawled and Scrawled).
Gotta make My Movie good!
I decided upon themes of Conflicting (or, at least, Opposing) Energies: Feminine & Masculine; Black & White, Dirty & Clean; Caring and Rude; those sorts of things. (Curiously — and perhaps in line with the briefly running R.E.M. theme of these current posts — Love & Hate never really entered into it. Oh, I believed in Love — did I ever! — but somehow this particular Movie wasn’t about strong emotions, but rather about being Useful.)
For some reason, I decided to call the thing Can-Can.
The dance amused me — even though my concept of it at that time was, at best, vague.
Somehow my meditations had landed upon an antihero who was the embodiment of everything I did not (and do not) like about Dumb-Ass (American) Guys. Surrounded by quite a few of them at the time (frats, military types, etc.), I felt very ill-at-ease: These were not Men the way I had hoped Men would be. Something was wrong. So I satirised the sitch.
The movie’s butt-head (prior to Butt-Head) became “Doug” — “Doug” always seeming to be a good butt-head name, in my estimation. He’s never really named in the project until the end credits, but I found a very funny actor named Dan who also happened to be a waiter at the now-defunct Ed DeBevics “diner” on La Cienega, to play him — which he achieved with supreme Dougness. I simply asked the guy if he’d do the role while a small gaggle of us were there being waited-on by him (and having something kind of like dinner). Not only did the fellow take the part, he literally wallowed in it. To call his performance cathartic would be an understatement.
It required mopping.
Next, although at the time the concept of “Goddess Spirituality” was as limited in my conscious mind as “Artemis is kind of cool…which one was She again?…,” I knew that I wanted Elemental Energies to oppose Doug — or, rather, for Doug to oppose the Elemental Energies. Mind, this process was largely unconsious, and required a lot of weeding: My fine professor Clinton Solomon (who now sells real estate with his wife) proved wiser than many of my classmates would admit. He took a breeze through my first draft and simply told me that it was too complicated, to get to the heart of the matter, to remove Black Man & White Man and Left Man & Right Man and all that polarised busy-ness, and to focus on what the story was really about.
In retrospect, all of this may seem easy and clear-cut, but, mind: At the time most of us were taking a full load of classes, many of which were not really complementary (and certainly not complimentary!), plus Emotions were running high. It was a tense and difficult time. Concurrent with telling good stories visually, we were supposed to be learning Sound and Lighting from extremely demanding professors who wanted us to use the proper mics and to figure luminence with old-fashioned, analogue light-meters and all that.
Tough stuff!
Once I had wiggled through some of the process, however (this while lensing and editing my fun partner P,’s own Lovers Who Murder Each Other movie, egad), My Movie began to take shape:
Can (I dropped the dance reference entirely, although it was the point of entry) would be an amusing allegory about a man who lives in a big rubbish bin on top of a mountain, who runs out of Coca-Cola and thus goes out and destroys Nature.
For Nature, I knew only that I needed Women.
Elements.
Again, this was a purely instinctive, unconscious process. To me, then, some unspoken Feminine was closely related to Nature — but this was USC, of course (not Bryn Mawr, not Sarah Lawrence), and the gentler (if equally strong) aspects of Femininity were not daily entering my periphery nor my direct field of vision.
I was seeing someone back then, and kind of meant it (I now know very well how “kind of” it actually was; I didn’t then), and it took a huge amount of work, and in the end she was actually rather clueless about femininity herself. It was exhausting. Could have done without the sneering comments, too. She became a lawyer.
Q: What do lawyers use for birth-control?
A. Their personalities.
I wish her well. I definitely do not wish her.
That was the pressure-cooker of the time, though. That was how it felt.
And within this pressure-cooker I needed to find three actresses, who could, respectively, capably depict the elements of Earth and Sea and Air.
Although I had shot all of my Super-8 movies with casts of my friends, for this colour video project (alas; looks good, though) I knew I’d need — as with Dan — to search beyond my immediate circle.
I placed an ad and received headshots and resumes. Loads of them. Boom boom boom boom boom. Every day, for weeks.
At first, I would open the things, examine the photos (men also applied, for the part Dan had already inadvertantly landed), read the resumes, and try to make sense of focusing a rather generic blanket-process into something more specific.
(For a while, in appreciation, I wrote personal thank-you notes to all who submitted headshots; after a couple dozen, that practice had to fold.)
I narrowed down the submissions to a scant few, and, with P., conducted on-camera interviews and auditions.
This was strange for me, frankly (there was a collective embarrassment factor), but it seemed to be the only way to do it.
Eventually a young woman named Heidi came in, and she was ideal and clearly not insane. I had decided to give all three roles to one actress, so she got all three roles.
As this was a non-verbal production, this meant emoting in a couple of wigs and three different outfits.
Thus my wig-shopping of the time.
The exteriors were extensive and took place mostly throughout the rougher reaches of Malibu. Heidi was involved in all of that. Dan, meanwhile, enthusiastically made a huge mess out of his “abode” set I had built in one of our classrooms, and later joined us for the exteriors — which were fun, from the misty shore to the sun-blasted mountains.
I wasn’t thinking about Star Trek or M*A*S*H at the time, but I was basically recycling their locations.
It was an enjoyable shoot, as I believed in the work, the actors were terrific, and P. was as dependable and good-natured a production partner as anyone could want.
Script and rewrites and location-scouting and casting and rehearsals and fittings and prop-houses and “catering” (we did our best) and shooting and then — although I lensed most of the thing, I have to give P. his due — the edit, which I supervised but he conducted, and which was really rather fly.
A synth score, zany sound effects, a commercial jingle, a sound mix…
We screened with our classmates at the Norris Theatre at USC — which was very enjoyable, considering the luminaries who have visited that space — and the project earned me an ‘A.’
Something slipped, though.
DVDs didn’t exist yet, so I just got some okay VHS copies to the actors.
We remained friendly, but I don’t know where they are anymore. (A quick check reveals that Heidi still works; no sign of Dan.)
Believing Life to be Grand, I concluded the semester and hastily flew off across the ocean to see if Life in all its Grandness awaited me There.
It Did Not.
I had A Bad Time, and Jim Henson and Sammy Davis, Jr. even died while I was There.
Jim Henson dying?
For My Generation, that is huge.
Although much sporadic fun was had after that year — including in the realm of Moviemaking — I note that a darkness had crept into my work thereafter. Nothing nearly so dark as the efforts of the Goths with the Precision Haircuts, but something involving despair.
Basically, the previous concerns (way before Al Gore made it post-70s trendy again, I noticed that we were literally killing our only planet; plus: Hey, Wherzuh Feminine?) returned, but with much less hope. Sarcasm and bad dreams made it into my work much more than before.
I felt like we were all losing.
(Not surprisingly, that feeling saturated the 90s.)
Caught between Hardcore Tree-Huggers and People Who Really Do Not Give A Crap, I felt that I had lost my voice. The wit and sincerity of Can did not readily return — not both at once, anyway.
Although I have enjoyed and celebrated Earth Day (Every Day should be Earth Day, non? — like when the environmental solicitors outside Expensive & Trendy Natural Foods Market ask if we have a minute for the environment: “Every minute,” I always say, and not unkindly), on this particular Earth Day I revive the spirit of Can. It was adventurous and weird and full of heart. It wanted to keep Bad Things from happening to a Good Planet. It took Feelings and made them Form — which is a crackerjack thing to do when you can manage it.
I don’t want that time or its trappings back, but on a personal note I feel that I was particularly adept at that sort of storytelling, and that I choose to reclaim.
On the evening of the screening, we directors had to go up in front of the crowd and say a little sumpin’ about our cast, crew, experiences, whatever.
I thanked everybody, and then – silently noting the enormous wastefulness of the entertainment industry — gently said:
“Recycle.”
(There’s a splinter in your eye and it reads “react”)
Oops. Skipped a day. Gloriously. No oops.
Today I feel like opening with a useful quote:
“Life is so pitifully short, the years with parents especially short, that not one second should be misused.”
-Pearl Sydenstricker Buck
Of course, that dedication goes out to Alec Baldwin, who is the toast of the Media today for yelling at his daughter’s voice-mail.
(Why does a child have voice-mail? Why does a child need voice-mail?)
In 1991, I got to experience Alec Baldwin yelling through a telephone into my ear. I was an assistant to a honcho at Paramount, and honcho’s secretary had fled for the restroom or junk food or something, and, sans instruction, had left me in charge of her telephone — which was a brand new system awash with brand new numeric codes necessary to connect one screaming imbecile with the next screaming imbecile. My first call of the day? Alec Baldwin. Calling the wrong office. I tried, in the milliseconds he afforded me, to explain that I didn’t actually know how to connect him with the other honcho, but would try. After a few seconds of fumbling, he exploded:
“IT’S ALEC BALDWIN, GET ME [honcho]!!!!!!!!!!”
That was an extremely unpleasant experience, brevity notwithstanding, and I haven’t liked anything about Alec Baldwin ever since. Well, maybe The Cat in the Hat (nice choice!) A few years ago I saw him at a film festival party and realised that not only did I not care, but that I was actively choosing to move to the other side of the room.
The point, however, is parenting. Could somebody please explain to me why most fathers sincerely believe that the primary definition of their job is: “To Torture My Own Children”?
The mother seems nuts, too. Good luck to that kid.
It rained today, in the morning. Rain tends to make me happy, but this rain, while nice and a lovely complement, was already out of its league in that capacity.
Then there was guacamole.
The only two current Hollywood films I have seen are Perfect Stranger