SPIRITEUR diary

We (me, the writer/producer, Ed Joyce, the director, and Khoren Mirzakhanian, the editor) went to the desert last Sunday to do the location scouting. It's very noir out there. Stephen Mooser, the acclaimed children's book author, has graciously allowed us to shoot at his guest house in Joshua Tree and it's going to be perfect. Originally in the script I written the sex/sacrifice/black magic scene to drop in a basement. No basements in the high desert, but there is a natural cave in the hills next to the guest house which will be even cooler!

We then met with Kimberly Nichols, who's this really cool artist/writer who lives in Palm Desert. She's interested in helping us secure some more locations and organizing the community to get involved. More exciting is that she's agreed to play Katie, the psychic.

At this point we're still on track for the end of July/first week of August shoot. I'll go out again in a couple weeks to nail down the rest of the locations and deal with other logistical issues. The weekend of the 17th we'll do a podcast of the novella and, if it all comes together, throw a party to celebrate the completion of last MONGREL COLLECTIVE movie (DIRTY RED HANDS) and to shoot the rave scenes of SPIRITEUR. I'll keep you informed on this blog what's happening with that party and if you come to it you'll BE in SPIRITEUR. Won't that be fun!

RED HANDS DIARY

HAS officially moved to
www.dirtyredhands.com
check out the new posts and watch the movie there!

Red Hands Diary

Once again the members of Dirty Red Hands met at Neti's to check out rough cuts of episodes of Dirty Red Hands. Hector was unable to show up so we didn't get to see the full length rough cut he'd promised.

Because I'm a very impatient person and I feel that this project should have been wrapped up by now, last week I brought Khoren Mirzakhanian, who's this wonderkid post production hot shot to come up with another version of DRH and we watched the cool shit he's edited and cooked up. Good stuff.

Neshia has agreed to be our party promoter club wrangler because I suck at that shit. At this point we're planning one of our premiers for the middle of July.

We are also very lucky that the extremely cool and talented Sylvan has agreed do some composition for DRH. His stuff is very exciting and he speaks with a suave French accent. Check out his work:
http://www.musicbysylvan.com/

Oh, right, and at the meeting I tried to sell the idea of having subtitles for some of the scenes in DRH when we were shooting in environments that shredded our sound. I truly believe that if you look at current docs and a few of the more progressive directors (David Lynch, Tony Scott, anyone who's Brazilian), you will see that subtitles are not only very sexy but also completely accepted as par for course in this new world of digital story-telling, when you can't always control your sound. The other members of the collective thought very differently (despite my stunning Breathless analogy and other pretentious grandstanding postulations), and that's what's cool about a collective, everyone, from the actors to the directors to the editors and composers, everyone gets to contribute and be heard. I certainly heard them and now we're doing an ADR (sound looping) session at the end of the month. I of course hope that it all gets fucked up and we'll be forced to go in the subtitle direction, but unfortunately for me everyone on this project is so professional and talented that they'll probably come up with amazing stuff and we'll end up having really pristine dialogue in those scenes. And that's totally cool too.

Also I think I offended everyone when I suggested that we sell smelly "collectable" t-shirts and thongs emblazoned with the DRH art that we'd personally worn for a while and not washed. It's okay, I'm sure Picasso has similar marketing ideas which weren't understood in his time either.

As soon as Khoren has episodes locked we'll start putting them up on our new website:

http://www.dirtyredhands.com

This blog should be viewable over there too... Actually I'm sure how that transition will work. I'll keep you posted. Oh, right, and I've got my podcasting gear which I'm learning how to use so there will be podcasts of behind the scenes Dirty Red Hands action available.

Hector's incredibly cool cut should also be up on the website when he's done with it, along with Ed's director's cut of the original (non guerrilla) budgeted RED HANDS, of which we still need about $40,ooo to complete. If you are an investor and you watch Ed's director's cuts, beware, your checkbook will start writing itself!

IN YOUR FACE - end notes

Last week, in reaction to what I saw as the potentially lethal growing virus of bland mediocrity, also known as the FACEBOOK WALL, I launched an investigative performance real-time project called IN YOUR FACE.

For forty-eight hours I responded to the really stupid and what I saw as completely useless entries with what I felt to be honest, insightful, and challenging feedback. I did this in an effort to try to break people out of their FACEBOOK orbit and hopefully elicit a more meaningful exchange that would further investigate what FACEBOOK is really about as a technology of communication (and not just a "social networking" site, which really doesn't mean anything if you think about it for more than three seconds).

Here are the results.

With the exception of Susan Johnson (who admitted that she had written a worthless comment and then encouraged me to vote on the Netflix Find Your Voice contest, which I did) the replies to my reply were either extremely hostile and inarticulate, or articulate and just as banal as the original comments made by the users.

After my first volley of comments I avoided using FACEBOOK for the rest of the forty-eight hours, and did not read any of the replies to my replies which were forwarded to my GMail account. I avoided FACEBOOK because I felt ashamed, and I didn't read any of the re-response comments because I was embarrassed and felt as though anything I re-re-re-responded wouldn't be of any use or further any sort of meaningful exchange.

Conclusions: I was surprised with how upset people seemed to get when I told them their wall comments were boring and useless. The reactions I read seemed to indicate that people, when they comment about how they've just watched Battlestar Gallactica, or bought a latte, really have a lot of emotion invested. My impression of FACEBOOK was that it's mostly a diversion, a waste of time, and the comments people make are either to promote something or just fill in the void so they can feel that they are "connecting" to something greater than themselves in real time. I now feel that things are much worse. It seems that FACEBOOK is being appropriated for a huge ego interface, that commenting on the buying of latte is actually signifying a real world weight of existence that goes beyond the mere checking in and checking out that the "social networking" site was designed for. In the real world you would never make these comments to your friends, or if you did you would make them without any sort of emotional/identity affirming expectations. It looks as though however in the artificially removed world of FACEBOOK, the banal is really transmuting into something much more powerful.

To dumb it down, it looks like really boring people are making really boring posts to try to either rationalize or transcend their own boring natures. Fascinating. Essentially I was wrong with my assumption that I could challenge and agitate people into a "more meaningful" exchange. There perhaps isn't a conservative social rules-of-manners at play on this site. What you see, is what you get, and that fact that it really isn't much could in fact be the "more meaningful" truth behind actual real world social interactions.

What I've learned from this performance project is that I'll be avoiding FACEBOOK as much as possible. It's too real, too direct. I think I need the rose colored glasses and glamour of real life interactions. I'll still try to promote mmmmmongrel because, why not, it's free. As far as the question of trolling, the question of whether or not the definition of trolling of inaccurate and that maybe Internet trolls are much more useful and positive and important to the world of the web -- I'm still not sure. This will have to be explored in a future project. If anyone has any ideas I'd love to hear them. If not I'll put on my thinking cap and let you all know when I've come up with something.

"IN YOUR FACE" real-time performance project

Today 6/6/9 at 1:15PM I launched the latest mmmmmongrel project titled, IN YOUR FACE, a real-time performance project interacting with the friend's comments on FACE BOOK. Facebook is fun, but it's also really stupid. People are encouraged to post the most boring and irrelevent shit about their lives and it's somehow, applauded? - is that the right word. It's like despite all this cool and fun technology, people are behaving socially just conservitavily as their grandparents did in the 1950s.

This could be happening for a variety of different reasons and IN YOUR FACE is a project designed to investigate and maybe uncover some buried truths about social interaction, technology, and honesty in general.

It works like this: for forty-eight hours I'll be responding as honestly as I can to the really stupid comments people make on my facebook wall. I'll be cataloguing the responses I get and using this information to come up with a summation, which I'll post here. My prediction is that once you start to tweak the extremely banal veneer of FACEBOOK comments, everything will quickly erode to the most egregious and immature and angry sort of "communication." Does this mean that people are showing their true colors?, or is it just reactive and a form of "socializing" against "trolls." I personally think the whole concept and pigeonholing of internet "trolls" is very atavistic and deeply conservative, and I can't wait to get the results of this very exciting performance project!