The art of shameless self-promotion when you really don't want to say exactly what you are promoting

No sooner have I returned, than I am back en route this time heading south on the well-trodden road down to the town of my birth. Most of my family still resides there, and really, with the miraculous climate, what reasons would there be to ever leave?

I was expecting balmy and warm, but the weather declined to agree and I was forced to suffer the cold in my summer-y party dress and sandals.

Why I am here you ask? Well, two reasons, which is usually how I like to coordinate trips down to my family. The obvious and best reason: Mother's Day. I think it's been and quite a few years since I've celebrated this one in person and my family is a stickler for all things birthday, anniversary and holiday. The other is that I have a short "art" video playing as part of a sideshow related to an exhibition at a rather fancy museum. Well, we didn't make it inside the museum this year, but, for two nights only, the video will be projected outside as one ambles the gardens of this marbled musuem. Hey, it's a free event and they even printed up a nice brochure with some rather studious text:

Lxxxxx Pxxxx and Kxxxxx Gxxxxxx-Fxxxxxxx consider the body as erotic object in Bxxx Txxx Ux. However, in this case. the nude female body placed on display is composed of glistening plastic, as if the constant deployment of the female-as-erotic object finally renders her completely non-human.

Who knew thats what I was up when I made this film in graduate school?

All that she desires

polaroid by Patrick Romero via Amy Stein

I sat there bleeding on the airplane and watching the film about Jane Austen. I could not bring myself to get up and walk to the bathroom and the two, the blood and the film, seemed very much related. Do you know what it is like, to feel blood coming down and then dripping between your legs? I took pleasure in the feeling, in the knowing that without the other, each on its own would have been banal.

The flight had been delayed and I would be returning home late. I looked forward to the boyfriend and I hoped he would bring the dog when he came to pick me up. But, in some ways, I hoped more that the flight would continue to be delayed. I relished the idea of flying around the sky, never touching down, and retreating to some kind of limbo. Limbo was a luxury. A luxury I wanted to taste.

I saw the documentary about Cindy Sherman, an artist I have always admired. As a college student I had a box of postcards: pictures of her earliest photographs. I knew that she had taken the photos of herself, had become her own subject, but the photos didn’t reveal anything about her. Each of these photos told a story, melodramatic and familiar, and at the same time inconclusive. In the documentary, the filmmaker befriended the famous artist and, surprisingly, they end up together. But the shadow of her art and her success eclipse him completely.

On the plane, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine my future. This is what all the self-help books suggest. It is even what a few of my friends suggest. I couldn’t seem to get past what the next step on the ground might look like. Tomorrow? Next week? I felt like an alcoholic in rehabilitation: one day at a time. Even when I tried to envision the secret to my success, I couldn’t get beyond the next day.

There are so many things to explore in the universe and it makes me dizzy to think of it. Like trying to count all the stars in the sky. A Herculean task.

I would like to close my eyes and drift instead of counting. I would like to feel the brightness of the stars instead of seeing. And I would like to know the limitless of the universe instead of imagining.

All that glitters

photo by Brian Ulrich (don't know the title)

I may no longer officially be a blogger. I haven't written in months. But that most likely means only good things. That I am out experiencing the world, that I am too busy to reflect, that I am concerned about other things, for once, than my own miserable existence.

Oh, and I have been traveling. Currently, I am in that famous East Coast City where my film has been screening, and I haven't even gone to see that famous Biennial yet. I am tired. I am broke. And I hate to admit it, but I am kinda happy.

But don't worry, I am still a grump and curmudgeon. I mean, you wouldn't really be able to see a difference from the outside. It's still me.

So yeah a famous filmmaker (yes, I am talking about myself!) at a famous festival with no job and no next film. Not the best strategy for promoting my career. But at least I made it here. The place I am staying is lovely. And the weather for the most part, nice. And of course, every time I come to this famous town, I can't help but fancy myself living here. Especially when it's not winter.

So. Sigh. How dullsville it will be when I return. And how nice it is to feel special-and I don't mean in that special ed kind of way. It does wonders for the morale. Maybe it will be the boost I need to get the next project started. I just can't imagine being at the starting line again.

On my way home

I have been busy blogging on my film's website so forgive me. I really can't blog like I used to! There just seems to be so many other things to do nowadays. Jeez. Really, I'd like nothing more than to keep you all abreast of all the fantabulus details of my personal life, but somewhere along the line a bit of that exhibitionist charm wore off.

What I can say is that I have been to Taipei and back. I have missed a flight to Mexico and managed to still arrive to and return from Ixmiquilpan unscathed. I have started teaching an editing class and shown up at least partially prepared. I have kept my dog fed and my boyfriend charmed at least when I have been around. The weather is lovely and I do mean lovely so the spirits–and those spirits belonging entirely to me–are high. Even if I do have to work on the computer all day on a Saturday, I can leave my windows open and the door cracked.

But I bet you can't tell which photos are from where and what I was doing at any of these exotic places. I certainly wasn't doing anything like eating...

On being blind

Ariella and Crow by Sarah Small via, once again, Amy Stein

For once I can't really complain. The film will be playing at a major festival soon. I've almost cut an hour version for broadcast. I've cut down to 75mins. for festivals. I'm traveling to two different countries in the next month. If I could just get someone else to do my taxes and pay the huge amount I will owe this year, I would be feeling pretty close to perfect.

Finishing this film has been very weird. At a certain point you just let go and let it be what it is and what it is certainly isn't to everyone's tastes. I can't bear to watch it anymore, even though I have to go in again today to tweak and compress and burn screeners and finalize the mix. I am not even sure how I feel about it. Is it a good film? Does it have anything really to say? Every confident decision I made along the way, was eventually questioned. There are certain scenes I don't love, certain music tracks that could be better, and I have no idea how to gauge the pacing after having watched it a bizillion times. And trying to make it better for this festival coming up–which means, after all, at least one person will have to review it–has felt like painting in the dark. Certain things feel right, but at this point, I have such a blindness to the piece.

Everything is consumed with the upcoming events and my back and neck are shrieking in pain from being hunched over the computer. I was a real bitch last week to my producing partner and it was her birthday. So now I have to grow up and behave and make good. This nice weather and blooming cherry blossom trees should help.

At Last as sung by Etta James

Print by Hannah Whitaker via Amy Stein's Blog

Well, there is good news...but I already got in trouble for announcing it on my film's website, so I can't really say here. Suffice it to say, the film will be playing at a domestic festival and not the Bakersfield Women's Festival of 90 Minute Docs That Took 7 Years to Make. A real festival.

And now the freak out begins. It's little more than a month away and I haven't had my hair cut in over a year nor a decent eyebrow waxing in weeks. And oh, not to mention how green I feel. Press already contacted us about screeners and stills and our director's statement and we are just feeling a little unprepared and a lot overwhelmed.

But the absolute most anxiety-provoking thought–the one which keeps we awake at night–is which version of the film to show. We finished cutting our 86 min version back in November but recently started cutting our hour-length version for broadcast. And well, now that some time has passed and I've seen it with audiences, I can certainly see a few places to cut. But it doesn't give me much time to sit with it. The festival wants to know, pretty much yesterday, how long the film is. And then we have to send them about 50 copies of it. And then-

Sigh. Yawn. Freak out.

And repeat.

What's in a name?

The above title will most likely have little to do with this post, but as you may or may not know, once some tidy phrase or keen groupings of words comes into my brain, it becomes quite hard for me to let go of them. So there is lays. A question that rolls off the tongue quite nicely and begs an answer for which we will nonetheless be unrequited during the remainder of this post.

Onward!

A night of drinking, movie watching, and sentence boggle. A night of politics, film ideas, and poorly remembered video game playing. A rainy night, not unpleasant, which has left my head only slightly spinning and my obsessions, for the time being, quietly laid to rest. A night, a bar, a few friends. OK, I think you get the point.

A. Short film idea (in the documentary category): the history of bathroom graffiti. Who do you know who actually admits to writing this stuff? What compels them? What comes first: the idea of what to write or the compulsion to just leave your mark? Where does this legacy come from and can we claim hieroglyphics as it's ancestor?

B. Short film idea (in the scripted category): people trying to recall and tell jokes in a social setting. Some people just have this knack, most of the rest of us don't. In 4o minutes, three of us could only remember one punch line (it had to do with Arafat), two witty rejoinders (Beef Stroganoff and you can see your house from here, respectively) and a myriad of beginnings (Salvidor Dali and Pablo Picasso are walking on the beach...) You get the idea.

C. Something much harder to pinpoint here. Going to a bar alone and whether or not it can indeed be an enjoyable enterprise. That it is much easier to love a dog than your fellow human. Persepolis was equally lovely and underwhelming. Obama is not quite what we want him to be. Will Google soon rule the universe? And birthdays. Not everyone necessarily wants to celebrate them.

The dreams I have been having

1. Dream that I got a ticket for driving 95 MPH in a 45 MPH zone
2. Dream that I was petting an eagle and when it flew away left a feather in my hand
3. Dream that I was in a slasher film–the kind where I was a counselor at a summer camp in the woods
4. Dream that I mispronounced my own name...repeatedly
5. Dream that I was trying to read The Biography of Diane Arbus, but I couldn't make out any of the letters
6. Dream that I was flirting and then having sex with my fourth grade teacher
7. Dream that I put the baby in the broiler
8. Dream that I was underwater and breathing
9. Dream that I was late for my finals [ed.note: Casey has been out of school for at least a decade]
10. Dream that I was running through the snow

Anywhere but here

Wendy Small Photograms, Globe Fruit, Young Shoots

Casey is lifting her head up
Casey is fighting the blues
Casey thinks no one like her film
Casey thinks her boyfriend can be pretty sweet when he tries
Casey barely has enough time to walk her dog
Casey is headachey
Casey is trying to change her mood
Casey knows the cold is now behind us
Casey has to work today...but on a friend's film
Casey would like to hire someone to clean the house...she's heard of such things before
Casey wishes there was somewhere else

What we are doing

photo by Zoe Strauss

1. We are appreciating our readers. All three of them!
2. We are remembering our friend, Cayce, who has been gone now for a year
3. We are voting!
4. We are starting to play too much Scrabulous
5. We are trying to get up early and go running with limited success
6. We are keeping our fingers crossed as the gods decide where our film will land
7. We are listening to podcasts of Fresh Air at warp speed
8. We are public transporting (?) and loving it
9. We are watching Jon Stewart again
10. We are getting along with the boyfriend but trying to ignore Valentine's Day

we are becoming again and it feels good like spring

My poor bunny

We had a harrowing New Year's in the snow. It was beautiful and we did go snowshoeing, but an SUV ran over my dog. Literally. Over. I guess I should be thankful it was an SUV as my dog did not get crushed by any tires nor impacted by a bumper. But he did get thrown to the ground and rolled around and as you can see, got pretty fucked up, including a big fat black eye. I guess, we'll have to wait and see.

I can't really say much more, except that I feel really guilty (he should have been on a leash) and really thankful (I saw it all happen and thought for sure he was a goner) and really pissed (the SUV never stopped despite the fact that I was screaming my head off on the side of the road).

There's a big storm that came in last night. It's got all of us a little down after the rush of escaping death. Everyone is feeling all mopey and gloomy. Recovery can't be easy.

Santa baby

Watch me here
...resurrected from last Christmas.

Dudes!

There are some things that are just always running through my head. Like corny things I almost can't help from saying and even cornier things I can't stop myself from writing. Like: no one writes to the colonel when, well, no one writes me. Or can't stop til you get enough when I am running around the house looking for my keys or glasses. There are more. Just stick around and you're bound to hear the music. There, didya catch that? That was just one of them: hear the music. Works well pretty much anywhere. Of course, put em on the glass remains a perennial favorito.

Nothing more except I totally promised to write more often. Because I have all this writing to do, you see. Grant applications, press releases, pleas to be accepted into various higher learning institutions as a, gulp, professor. I even had to write a letter of recommendation for a good friend. And yes, a treatment for a new film idea in the works.

But mostly I need a job. Sort of. Part-time. Until someone recognizes my brilliance and hands over the Genius fellow. Anyone looking to hire an editor out there? And no, I am not interested in editing your Survivor reel for trade. Sorry.

So my advice. To me? Keep up the good fight (there another one!) Keep on keeping on. Wait, shit, no, make it stoppppppppp!
Don't
stop
til
you
get
enough...

The world according to wonder woman

What the hell happened here? Not only have I not gone running for over a week, but I haven't posted in god-knows-how-long? I think I will blame the weather. It's fucking cold! I mean, not cold by Montana standards, but cold to me. Like stay-in-your-covers-for-as-long-as-possible cold. Like arguing about whose turn it is to top off the quickly loosing any warmth mugs o' coffee. Like letting the dog sleep in bed with you EVERY SINGLE NIGHT. The cold sure brings on some bad habits, particularly when it comes to me.

In other news we had our first public screening of THE FILM last Wednesday. 3 out of 4 of the girls tat are in the film were there, the young woman that wrote our title song performed beforehand, and we had a short with everyone Q & A afterward. One of the girls from the film, R, kept to her decision to never watch that fucking film again, but hung around dutifully for the Q & A. R also decided to have a bake sale beforehand wherein she made 120 bucks. We can always count on R to provide some comic relief and she didn't fail to deliver that night: when asked during he Q & A what she thought of the film she quickly replied that she hated it. I can understand. Only 3 years from when we stopped filming, it's still totally embarrassing to all of them.

In closing, we have a new obsession (besides the roots of chicha album that has been playing constantly around the house): Wonder Woman. I'm not really into superhero comics, but she makes for an intriguing story, historically speaking. Created in the early 40's by a sort of huckster psychologist who was best known for inventing and promoting the polygraph and less known for having two wives and siring two kids from each while they all lived together. Wonder Woman was his first, last and only comic book creation. In this creation he played out many of the themes he had already tried and failed to promote in his various psychology tomes: that women were inherently more honest than men, that women could one day rule the world with their power to dominate men sexually, and if men simply submitted to the love of women, the world would be a better place.

Indeed.

I will always love you as sung by Dolly Parton

James Deavin from the series The Games We Play

No mames

Desiree Holman, Masks (Conduits of Fantasy) 1

The Online

Brendan Lott, Oil on Canvas
What Are My Motives, Are They Selfless Enough,
Are They Righteous, Righteous Enough?

It is day two of the online of my documentary in what we estimate to be a 6-day painstakingly tedious process of color correction and tweaking of shots to a price tag of you-don't-even-want-to-know. Let's just say, had we not needed to go through this process in order to deliver our film back to the people who helped pay for it, I would be the owner of fairly new, fuel-efficient compact car.

So here we are, waiting to hear the results of who got into Sundance cuz we are pretty sure we didn't, filing our rejection letters as fast as we are sending out applications, and making everyone in the film look better than they actually did–or at least, better than how my camera captured them. I get to catch up on crossword puzzles and emails, while sitting in a dark room all day, wondering about what might happen next. I would be lying if I didn't admit that I am looking forward to attending a few festivals, like maybe those in Italy, France or Hawaii. You know, the kind that offer air travel, hotels, and happy hours. It's not the primary nor even close to the tertiary reason I got myself into this kind of mess (making films, that is), but I could use a little reward for all the energy spent right about now. I mean, it hasn't even played to an audience of more than 2 yet.

But back to reality. I suppose I should sign up for that loan deferment again. At least I made it a couple years this time. I've postponed looking for a new place to live til after the holidays, and I have a couple editing jobs in line through December. I keep thinking now would be the time to write that Great American Screenplay that's been cluttering up my desktop for a few years, but I can't seem to bear to open it to see where I left of.

All that to say, it's not a bad time for me. And if you know anything about me, you should know that I always sound more negative than I really feel. I generally like this time of year. I am not as stressed as I usually am. I don't have everything riding on the success of the film anymore. And the BF and I have been getting along, in our small, small space, despite the fact that we have both been working from home together. And for the record, while I was the one who whose brilliant idea was to rent the abysmally art school-y Fur, he was the one who paid for both of us to see The Mist. Haven't heard of it? Yeah, exactly.

The ice film done-ith!

Camille Seaman, Tabular Iceberg, East Greenland 2006

Well, almost-ith.

For the last seven weeks I have been about ice. Call me the Snow Queen, call me Snow White, just don't call me Ishmael. I came on to the ice film as an editor a year after shooting in Norway completed, and a week after someone else finished assembling the scenes. Not a bad way to start a documentary and a real treat–after having just edited a film that took two years in post and probably logged in at about 350 hours of tape–to be on a film where the estimate for completion topped out at a mere 6 weeks. Of course, turns out they underestimated, but it wasn't like, by a year or anything. No, that would just be the underestimate on my own film.

So two films are done-ith and I am out-of-a-job-ith. There are a couple weeks left tidying up things here and there. Maybe a week or two of paid work, but that's it. And while I do get to enter a whole new phase with the distribution of my own film–one that means the rejection letters will be piling up faster than I can burn them–the time has arrived for me to move on. Just not yet sure to what.

My Master Plan had been to be spending this year traveling from art residency to art residency, amidst a flurry of film festival travel, oh, but if it weren't for those pesky rejection letters! Plan B offered the option to start teaching again and putting that degree to some use, but here we are mid November with the academic year well into motion. Plan C, well, we are coming up with Plan C right as we speak. One hopes one doesn't have to go to Plan: No Way in Hell, and start editing for television again.

My boyfriend's advice is to just spend less money. But I've got a dog to feed and house. And PPO health care with exorbitant rates and even higher deductibles. And a student loan the size of a median house in Manhattan. And. And. And. Just when I thought I had the time to finally start going to therapy again.

So here's to something new. Something wild. Something blue.

Ice, Ice Baby

photo of ice guitar, lit on fire from the ice music documentary I am currently editing. Only the strings and the head and tuning pegs weren't ice. Click to enlarge.

And they said it couldn't be done.

Why Loaf Man is not a good screen name...

list via to-do list

...but Mario Plimp is.

As I sit here and write this, I am checking off my own list of notes from the first rough cut screening of the ice music documentary I am editing. Note to self: try to do notes before too much time elapses as aforementioned list usually scrawled in completely unintelligible writing.

Tiny tumbleweeds

Laura Nix, Abandoned Car, from the Accidentally Kansas series via Amy Stein

My birthday is almost here. I will be 37. If you add those numbers together that equals ten. A nice even number. I hope this year is more even than odd.

P.S. I am not going to Amsterdam.