Hat Party / acting / Mercury vs. Village Voice

The Hat Party was fun, but the after-party crowd didn’t turn out. Neither did several of the people I went to the trouble of putting on the guest list. (Grrrrrrrrrr. I’m not mad at Vicky, though. She had a valid excuse, plus she’s going to let me store my boxes in her basement until I can have them shipped to San Fran, which is a lifesaver.) It was exciting until 10 or 11pm, then tapered off sharply, and I left around 12:30. Got great footage of the performers and the hat contest. Seventh and Element showed up early and made quite an entrance, since Element was wearing nothing but a leather harness and black jockstrap, and shaking his bare ass on the dance floor. I was glad when they appeared, though, ‘cause the party needed that extra push into un-inhibition. Sean and LeeAnn both snapped mass photos. The cute go-go boy from last year wasn’t there, they had other ones instead. I met a girl named Alison, Baby LeStrange’s friend, who is a film editor and photographer and gave me her card. Also a guy named Gregor, a former Silverado bartender, with whom I traded old memories of the City Nightclub and Portland back in the day. He said when My Own Private Idaho was filming River and Keanu would come to the City and Keanu would smoke pot in the bathroom constantly and River was “a weird guy.” (He’s also the first person I fell in love with, before Dylan, and before Ben Whishaw, unless you count Krystal Capps, but that was a different, platonic sort of love.)

Joel showed up after 10pm and said he loved the way Art Police turned out. He said every time Justin was on screen it made him laugh, and that Emie has the quality of a silent movie star – those big, expressive doe eyes. (“You should make a silent film with her.”) He also praised my editing, saying “You created spaces that didn’t exist.” It’s true that editing is where the magic really happens: you can take a bad movie and make it a good one through editing, that’s how potent it is to the final mix. Kirk said I should check into doing some community theater when I get to San Francisco, which is something I was already considering. Acting will help bring out my emotions more. I’m already starting to come alive again. I feel like the last eight years or so have been a slow recovery from the time I almost died from drugs, and for a long time after that I was in a sort of semi-zombified state, half alive you might say, which is why I related so much to Andy Warhol (post-assassination attempt Warhol, I mean). But I think I’ve finally made a full recovery. And corny as it may sound, it’s a certain English actor I’m obsessed with that brought me the final step back to being fully alive. Because if you lack the ability to love you can’t be full alive as a human being.The moment I first saw “Brideshead Revisited” in the theater it instantly became one of my favorite movies of all time. I’m going to do a series of expressive portraits of Ben when I get to Maui, I’ve decided. I did a preliminary drawing last night, and it came out really well. I think I’ll send it to Ben, in fact. I believe I am actually friends with him on MySpace.

Yesterday after seeing "Sunshine Cleaning" Joel and I had lunch at the Sunshine Cafe (where I had one of the worst gyros I've ever eaten and a semi-decent peanut butter cookie) and I brought up newspapers, saying I'd like to find one to write for in San Fran. I said the Village Voice would be my ideal, and Joel said the VV is only so revered and important because it's in New York, "If the Mercury was in New York it would be the Village Voice," he said, and I said I thought most of the writing in the VV is better than what's in the Mercury - the Stranger might be a better comparison - and I went off on the relentless snarkiness of the Mercury, and Joel said he likes that their reviews of bad movies are brutal, just tearing the film to shreds, but I said yes, they do that well, but they don't have the OTHER side of it. Let's say I wanted to write a review of "Brideshead Revisited," a film that truly moved me, that I think is beautiful and the highest cinematic art. I want to write a review that expresses that in a sincere, passionate, truthful way. And the sort of review I would write about a movie I loved wouldn't fit in the Mercury. They're too concerned with proving their coolness by being cynical and snarky to genuinely and unselfconsciously praise the beauty of a film. That is a LAME definition of cool and not one I will ever accept. I want to write for a paper where I can express the full range of my responses to art without tailoring them for a mentally deficient or emotionally lopsided audience. If you've read my film reviews in Just Out, you know I can decimate a shitty movie with the best of them, but that is hardly the range of my abilities.

All I care about is telling the truth as I see it.

I ran into Cliff at PSU yesterday – little Cliff who I made “Pestilence” with last year for our video class with Holly Andres. He said, “Aren’t you supposed to be somewhere else?” I guess I copied him on the email I sent out before I left for Glacier. Melanie arrives late Thursday night, and Lisa next Tuesday (St. Patrick's Day), and then it's only a week until I'm leaving on a jet plane for the islands! Oh, joy! My adult life begins NOW.

This Just In!

I got one last cover story in Just Out, cover above! You can read all the articles online here. My articles start on pages 16, 17 and 23.

I feel better about my performance in "Art Police" after watching it several times and hearing some feedback. I really kinda look like a thug. My friend Kirk, who came over last night to watch a hilariously bad film called "Zombie Strippers," said that his girlfriend after watching AP said, "Not only does he not look gay, he looks macho." Another friend said he thought I did a good job but that Justin didn't do so well as the other art police officer. I think it's funny the way Justin overplayed the role, though. I told him he should play it over-the-top and be the crazy emotional counterpart to my cool, clipped, deadpan. I think that contrast is funny.

Off to the media center to burn DVDs of Art Police, and then it's Hat Party time, baby!

Garcon Stupide / Fat Actress / being a penniless aristocrat

Here it is March at last, and I wrote my last (pro-rated) rent check to Meghan last night. I can’t lie: I am so ready to be gone, and if I could hop on the plane to Maui right now I would. I guess I must have changed, because Portland probably hasn’t, but the fact is now with the prospect of semi-tropical sunlight in the near future, I find this dreary chilly gray climate really dispiriting and de-motivating. I spent most of yesterday editing at the media center, got the final cut of Bad News done, turned it in for broadcasting and put it up on YouTube, which I probably shouldn’t, because it’s going to have a stultifying effect on me, and certainly no one who sees it is going to want to touch me with a ten foot stick, I look chubby and bloated and most unattractive, but to be true to the spirit of that little project I had to play the clown. It’ll only make it more dramatic when I transform into a golden creature of light and toned muscles and sun-kissed skin on Maui and then go bag me a boy on San Fran! I didn’t plan ahead again so there was no laptop I could check out to bring home with me, so now I have to wait until Wednesday when the media center is open again to go in and finish editing, which sucks when you’re in the thick of the project and just want to keep working till it’s done, and obviously now we aren’t going to be able to submit Art Police to Gold Coyote: the deadline was yesterday. That’s probably my own screw-up fault, although even if I had really devoted every minute to editing it still would have been a dreadfully narrow shave so to speak, and it turned into a lot more work than expected, both the shooting and the editing. There are other places I’d like to submit it to anyway: the 10 or Less festival, and Slamdance, although I think that happened in January, so it’ll be a long wait. What I can do, though, is bring it down to San Francisco with me and shop it around there, introduce us to a whole new tableau of artistic personages. But I’ve definitely got to make it a priority to get my own film equipment in the near future so I don’t have to always be at the mercy of the fickle gods of community media. (Much as I love it.) Certainly I need to get a hard drive of my own, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to install Final Cut Pro on my laptop any time soon: I asked Neal (cool old bearded chap who seems to not only work but LIVE at the media center) how much it costs and he estimated the full suite at around $1300, Final Cut by itself at $800-900. Yeeeowwch. When I got home Meghan was having dinner with her friend Brian who made a Rollerderby documentary and (I presume) his dude, and they invited me to join them, but I wasn’t really hungry, and was in a frantic mood of getting things done (cleaning, packing, laundry, etc.) so bowed out. The truth is I relate to people way more based on temperament, taste and style than sexual orientation. I’m a weird mix of lower and upper class, not so much middle. That is, I grew up in pretty much Midwestern, white-trash poverty, but never felt I belonged there, that it was just kind of a cruel joke, and I’ve always felt I belonged in a castle in England somewhere instead. Basically, I’m an aristocrat with no money and no pedigree. I’ll have to make my own money and start my own pedigree, I guess. Nico said she can take Lucy, and will let me have her back later if the opportunity arises, and I think that’s a better option than Vicky, who has four cats (and one angry husband) already. Cousin Ant says I’ll probably smoke more weed when I get out to Maui because “it’s the national pastime.” It probably wouldn’t be a bad move to forego the liquor and pick up the pipe instead. Although I’m thinking I may not need much of either from here on out. I want to get addicted to exercise: an addiction that’s actually good for me! I watched Garcon Stupide last night. A good example of how a movie can be full of NC17 kinky sex and still be....not very sexy at all. I wasn’t really turned on once. The extremely restrained scene in Brideshead Revisited where Sebastian kisses Charles (this is my blog, I’ll be as obsessive as I want, thankyoukindly) is so much sexier than the one in Garcon Stupide where the lead boy watches his trick sit on a giant dildo. French movies are so cerebral, in the sense of being concerned with thoughts and dialogue and “interior reality” rather than straightforward plot and action, which I suppose I should like, but honestly there were a number of scenes that struck me as an amateur film project for college, dialogue scenes that went on way too long and would’ve benefited from some cutting. I also got Fat Actress and it’s sooo funny, sort of like Curb Your Enthusiasm with a female protagonist, but there were only four episodes of it made. Too bad Kirstie Alley got skinny again. Shit, this Sunday is the Hat Party, isn’t it? And I haven’t a stitch to wear.

Bad News!

It is with some reluctance that I put this link up before I have Art Police finished and viewable on YouTube/Vimeo, because this little film, "Bad News," is very much a B side to Art Police, and started as almost an afterthought, but I guess it's funny enough to show people. Especially now that I've cut out the most embarrassing bits.

Actually, it's still kind of embarrassing, but if others can find amusement at my expense, I guess I regard that as sort of a charity duty that I perform for other humans.

I should probably add a disclaimer about how some of the commentary I issue here, which is excerpted from my writing collection, is satirical and tongue-in-cheek. Then again, a lot of it does reflect things I've thought or that I feel on various topics. It's about 50% scripted, 50% improv with Emie bringing her special blend of off-the-cuff belligerence to the proceedings. She stole the show. But I let her steal it. If I was Andy Warhol she would be one of my superstars.

The Hat Party is one week from today and I'm in one of the frenzies of packing, cleaning, getting shit done that always follows a lazy interlude of irresponsibility.

Art police / rock and roll / creative chaos / anti-gay Milk protesters

Art Police is in the bag! Shambolic though the whole process was, and despite being flaked out on at the last moment by a certain someone who was supposed to be our camerawoman, we got it done in a three-day marathon filming session, starting Saturday morning. And I really haven’t had this much fun, this much of a creative high that is, in quite a long time. I will definitely be doing more film work in the future. It may turn out to be my metier, although I don’t think I’ll ever confine myself to one particular medium. The sort of artists I admire are the ones who can move effortlessly from one medium to another and express themselves in all of them. That’s the kind of artist I am, and I think that will only become more apparent with time. I was talking with a friend the other day who said that Chris Haberman is a true artist – a pretty common opinion here in our lovely little pond. Now, I’m certainly not going to talk any shit about Haberman. He’s a great guy, super nice, super committed to other artists as well as his own work, and certainly an artist. But I’m a different kind of artist from him. I don’t churn out 10 paintings a week, I don’t always have that manic energy every moment of the day. I go through ups and downs. But if you don’t think I’m an artist, then you don’t know me very well, or else you’re someone I probably don’t want to be friends with any more, if we’re really “friends” at all. The three-day shoot I just completed reminded me of the fact that the only time I’m really happy is when I’m up to my ears in a collaborative creative project. It’s the main passion of my life. I was making my own comic books and selling them to other people in my apartment complex when I was 12 years old. I started writing, drawing and building long before that. But collaboration is the direction I need to go in. It is all too easy to write or paint in solitude, that’s what comes most naturally to me, but there’s something very healthy and engaging and growth-oriented about the sort of project we just completed for this film – working with other people, mingling my ideas with theirs, adding new things as they arise and discarding others when we find they don’t work, and then the communal, shared pleasure of enjoying the fruits of our collective labors afterwards. It keeps me from veering too far into solipsism.

So, yeah, the film shoot. We made the egregious error of not looking at our footage as we were filming, so the second day we had to re-shoot about 50% of what we’d shot the first, but it was worth it, because the second time everything looked and sounded so much better.We got kicked out of the Hostess/Wonderbread Outlet Store parking lot (have you ever been in that store? it’s like depression in the form of food – but it seems to do a brisk business!) and got it on tape! Everywhere we went we attracted attention, and whenever we filmed in public (outside Emie’s salon by the Clinton Street Theater, the Food Mart on 21st and Division where the guy was nice and non-corporate enough to let us film outside his store) people watched from their cars, or came up and talked to us. People just love movies, and watching them be made is exciting for them. Justin and Emie’s friend Dan stuck with us through the whole shoot, alternating between camera and boom mic. Another one of Justin’s friends helped us out with camera during the gallery scene. At one point we corralled a couple little boys from the house next door to help with the boom mic after Dan had to go to work, and they were so excited about it, it was cute (production still above). On the second day Joel came over (at very short notice) and took over the photography, and sat in with us as we recorded a soundtrack in the basement, including an awesome little theme song that’s going to sound SO GOOD over the closing credits, that I did vocals on! (With help from Justin and Emie.) That was the first time I’ve recorded music in years, and it made me think I might want to take the stage at a rock show at some point. The way all this music arose so spontaneously was really inspiring. Then the third day we logged all the clips from both days of shooting in detail, which will help a lot with editing, which I have to do FAST, and alone, because Emie and Justin have to work, and our submission to Gold Coyote must be postmarked by this Sunday the 1st.

It’s funny how certain people who were prominent in your life for awhile recede into the background and others unexpectedly move into the foreground. Justin and Emie have really become two of my best friends in Portland since I got back from Glacier. We have a similarity of temperament that smoothes over all the occasional flare-ups and arguments. When it was the three of us and Dan it was a perfect mix: three bossy megalomaniacs and one mellow, calm person (Dan) who sort of glued us all together! And to think that all of them were doing it without any hope of being paid for all of our hard work (unless we actually DO win the prize, which is one in a thousand), simply for the natural high you get from completing a creative project, just like I do. They are like me, depressed when they’re not working on something. We also share certain self-destructive tendencies as well, but I have a hard time working with completely sober, straight-edge, vegan, PC, prim and proper people who don’t know how to party and get work done at the same time. There is something about chaos that fuels me creatively. Making order out of chaos. Creating beauty out of a big crazy mess. If it was never messy to begin with, it doesn’t interest me.

Also there is a certain jagged beauty to Emie and Justin’s relationship, which continues to fascinate me. They take turns being the belligerent one. They are cool people, without being hipsters. They weren’t nerds in high school. I like being around people who still embody the attitude of what I consider rock and roll, because I think that’s such a rare thing these days. As someone (I think it was Beej) pointed out, we live in an era when Coldplay (even the freaking JONAS BROTHERS?) are considered rock and roll. I may not record rock n roll – although I have in the past, and may again – but I have some rock bones in my body, all the same. I went and saw my friend Dylan’s metal band Cull play at Mississippi Pizza last Thursday (even sacrificed my favorite night of television for it). It was good stuff. The place was hot with body heat, full of lots of people who all smelled like animals. But hey, we are animals.

Cousin Anthony got to watch Sean Penn’s acceptance speech for the Best Actor Oscar at the Castro Theatre in San Fran! Imagine that excitement. Although he said there were PROTESTERS outside the theatre. What were they protesting? Good movies?

Sorry, anti-gay conservatives, but it’s the 21st Century now, and you lost. Put your bible down and get a life. LIVE AND LET LIVE. Just like Jesus would.

anglophilia / "Bad News" / community media

Today I spent three more hours editing the footage Emie and I shot last month, and I have another session scheduled for tomorrow. I plan to have a rough cut finished by the end of that session, and have reserved a dub rack as well so I can burn a DVD copy of that rough cut to watch with Emie and Justin this weekend, during a break in filming "Art Police."

It started as a funny throwaway, a B-side to Art Police, and it's turned into a fairly intense trainwreck of a mini-movie. The working title was "Monsieur LeTigre Speaks" but I changed it to "Bad News" tonight. It could be a PSA for why people shouldn't abuse alcohol. But I kind of like its trainwreck intensity. I'm afraid when Emie sees it, though, she's going to want me to cut all of her parts out, because she's definitely not the charismatic person she can be when sober. But there's something very compelling, to me anyway, about completely raw footage of someone having a drunken meltdown on camera, and being just totally emotionally naked and vulnerable. I hope I can convince her to keep some of it in.

Most of it is not very flattering footage of me, either. I intended this film to be about self-doubt, conflict, contradiction, negativity, drunken retardation, the voices in your head that argue and cause you to engage in self-warfare. It ain't supposed to be pretty, and it sure as fuck ain't.

Then I helped "Alexandra Paris" with her studio production - speaking of trainwrecks! - and it had that "we're winging it" feeling as always, especially since her co-host never showed and didn't even call, so her Leprechaun-like little boyfriend (who I think must be bisexual at LEAST) stood in for the co-host, and actually did a pretty good job. Alexandra was working the Adams/Breedlove fiasco pretty hard, of course - apparently Beau is posing naked for Unzipped, a men's adult magazine. So he's doing the same thing the media are with the controversy: exploiting it for everything it's worth. At one point after she'd been reaming Breedlove for his shameless self-exploitation, a caller went on the air and hissed the words, "Horse shit!" and then hung up.

I couldn't help it, I blurted out: "IT'S BEAU BREEDLOVE!" in the midst of the live show.

That's what's fun about that show, though - you can do things like that and they just become part of the DIY anarchy of community media.

I hope they have a facility like this in San Francisco. I'm sure they do. Probably more than one. (Photo of the Portland Community Media Warhol-style "Staff Wall" above.)

Alexandra used her televisual platform to rebuke some rowdy (black) kids on the bus earlier that day who had been disrespecting other passengers on the bus, putting spitballs in their hair and such. I've witnessed some pretty depressing behavior on the number 6 bus myself, including a cracked-out lady and her giggling little brat of a child who attacked a gay guy sitting in front of her, calling him a faggot and blaming him for being responsible for AIDS and stuff. The guy held his ground pretty well, but I felt bad for him all the same, and got the hell off that bus at the first opportunity.

A side effect of my intense love for Ben Whishaw is that I'm becoming an anglophile. I may have to move to England in five years or so when I'm done with Maui and San Fran. But I've been talking with Anthony almost daily lately, and my excitement grows exponentially with each conversation. We are going to have so much fun. We really are two of a kind...and FAMILY, on top of that.

I have this interesting premonition that during my six months on Maui I'm going to actually be HAPPY, in the truest and deepest sense, for the first time since....I was a kid?

Or ever?

In love with Love

Last night bordered on magnificent. I’ll never think of Friday the 13th the same again. I arrived early for my volunteer shift at the Love Show, and got to take a spin through the whole building and see all the art before any of the public arrived. Then a magical night began. Amazing art everywhere I looked, great connections with people I hadn’t seen in a long time - Kaj-ann, Vicky, Bruce from the PCM class that certified me as a producer, Richard who literally GAVE me the coat off his back, Jules who made an amazing 3D piece for the show of two kissing suspended jointed figures (I’m going to her bday at the Florida Room Monday night), S.I.D. (the artist formerly known as Jona) who wants to buy a copy of my book, Kjerstin who said she liked the Art Police script enough to want to help us film next weekend, Haberman who is always very affectionate, Ben Pink himself (I really wanna grab that guy and say, “Dude, RELAX for a second,” but I know the mountain of responsibility he has makes that impossible). Just truly a fantastic night and the most fun I’ve had at a public event in as long as I can remember. I was in love with Love. And aside from shoring up old friendships I made a bunch of new friends, including a very friendly dark-haired skater boy who was, shall we say, NOT UNATTRACTIVE, and said he wished he could take me with him when he left to smoke a bowl! (But I was stationed at the front door making sure no one left the building carrying an alcohol receptacle.)

I discovered a precious young maiden who had climbed into the middle of one of the installations (photo above).

I did my double volunteer shift (Leigh greeted me in the volunteer lounge afterwards with “The best alcohol monitor ever!” and gave me a sip from her flask of whiskey), got my two drink tickets, but by that time the bar had run dry and I was pretty tired anyway, so I bailed, but not before giving Vicky a big hug, because she is certainly in the top 10 of people I care most about in Portland, and now she’s made the most amazing offer to take care of Lucy for me (despite already having four cats!) until such time as I have my own place in San Fran and can take her back! Plus she said, “I’m always looking for an excuse to visit San Francisco,” meaning she might even be able to bring her down to me when I’m ready to reclaim her! This is nothing less than a miracle for me. My excitement about the future and the great things awaiting me was alloyed by sadness at having to leave behind this girl with whom I have bonded so strongly over the past few years. She really is a little person with as much personality as a human being, and I don’t care if it makes me a crazy cat lady/dude or not, I love her, and the prospect of never seeing her again was hard to bear. And now, because of the friendship of someone who empathizes with and understands my bond with this animal, I don’t have to! Everything is coming together beautifully. I’m still going to make an attempt to find someone else with less pets already to take Lucy until I can have her again, since Vicky already has so many pets, and her husband is opposed to it, but it’s so good to know there’s an option in the background in case nothing else works out. I’m going to sleep easier, or happier, from now until I leave.

I figured out my taxes today in about 20 minutes (so far the 1040EZ form still takes care of me nice and simple), and the IRS owes me $210, except they’ll just take it and apply it to the money I still owe them from years ago, that one weird year where I somehow ended up owing them over $1000. (I still wonder if I figured that wrong and screwed myself over, but it’s too late now.)

Made my weekly call to mother tonight, after a lovely dinner of stuffed bell peppers, asparagus, broccoli, lemon bars and sparkling juice with Scott, Meghan, their dad, and Meghan’s friend Brian. Dear Mother is her ever-lovin’ loopy old self. “I’m getting into younger guys again,” she told me. “I think the Jonas brothers are really cute.” So we’ll both be watching SNL tonight: her for the Jonas brothers, and me for Alec Baldwin. I bought some brandy for hot toddies to celebrate the occasion.

Anthony said he coined the word “murse” for a man-purse and it made it all the way onto The View! He’s paranoid about people stealing his ideas so I won’t be blogging about our titles and ideas for the book until after it’s all ready for public consumption.

I had nothing in the planner today, but decided to make a lazy day productive by going to the media center and doing some editing on “Monsieur LeTigre Speaks,” the short film I shot with Emie a while back, the night we went to Slabtown for Sam’s birthday (or was it Audra’s?) To my surprise I found that we’d shot 45 mins. worth of footage, and some of it is quite hilarious! It’ll probably be about 10 mins. long when finished and I’m going to try to have it done for viewing by next weekend so we can watch it before filming Art Police, and hopefully I’ll be able to put it up on YouTube by then too.

Talkangelic

My winning streak continues. This morning Scott drove me to UPS where I shipped my two boxes off to Maui for a whopping $95 – damn! And that was the cheapest rate, parcel post. I insured the clothing box for $300. Could tell it was shaping up to be a beautiful day. Then he was so kind as to drop me off near Emie and Justin’s house. We had our cast meeting for Art Police, and it went well: I felt much better afterwards. Both of them did really well delivering their lines, funny and professional at the same time. I underestimate them because of how messy their lifestyle can be. We’re filming the weekend of the 21st, and I called PCM and made the equipment reservation with Pam, who said she thought I’d moved already. Audra will not be participating in the film (omg) so Emie is going to play both roles: Ann Athema and the gallery owner, which actually I think is going to be really funny, and I’m looking forward to her change of costume and makeup. There’s a gallery right across from their house they think we may be able to film in to avoid the cramped quarters of Emie’s salon. Justin was very interested in my book “How To Be A Gay Porn Star” which I’m writing up for J.O. We decided we should get a fourth person to work the camera while we film. They were playing a show at The Know tonight and invited me but I’m avoiding drinking and that pretty much means avoiding going out. I brought them my space heater, the one I got from Wal-Mart last year, since their house is always freezing; this way they don’t have to turn the gas on and heat the whole house. I was going to sell it but wtf. After the meeting I went into downtown and picked up the Christopher Plummer memoir “In Spite of Myself” which I had on hold. The MAX routes were screwed up because they’re preparing to open the green line, so they had bus shuttles bringing people along what is normally the MAX route. Nonetheless I got out to Chameleon by 4pm for my meeting with Pat. He made me food as always, and it was really good – spring rolls and chicken and cabbage on rice, nice and spicy. We talked over the Hat Party and he confirmed I can have the patio for my birthday/going away soiree on March 18th! He doesn’t have special guests planned for the Hat Party this time – Sam Adams probably won’t work this year, for obvious reasons – and is looking for new performers, so I suggested some of the burlesque performers of Query/Sluts and Squares, and need to put them in touch with him. I’d love to see them rock the Hat Party. I suggested he auction off Beau Breedlove as part of the festivities, which got a big laugh, but uh, I don’t think that’ll actually work. Why do cars always almost hit me when I’m crossing Sandy, legally, in the Hollywood District? It’s happened many times, something about that particular area. My new contacts are working out great. I’ve missed the freedom of not wearing glasses. Portland was great for glasses – “When in Rome,” you know – but Maui just says contacts to me. (Gotta be able to wear sunglasses.) My sobriety is strong right now. I even resisted the lure of free drinks when I visited Pat at Chameleon this afternoon. Although I’ve rediscovered the ritual of smoking weed before bed. This stuff is mellow and non-paranoid and makes me feel like a big, lazy cat. Scott just invited me to the Talkdemonic concert at Doug Fir, but I’m feeling too stay-at-home. Gonna work on stuff, smoke a bit of herb, watch SNL, which is new tonight, with TV on the Radio as the musical guest. Cuddle with my sugarpuss, who seems to be growing ever sweeter as our time together draws to a close, as if to be certain to break my heart when the time for separation arrives.

Temporal dissolution and gold styrofoam

Man alive, what a beautiful day. I sold my bike! Guy came over this morning, examined it, took it for a little spin up the road (he asked if I wanted to hold his wallet, but some people you just trust immediately), and said he’d take it! (One thing I’m going to miss about Portland: cute, skinny cycle boys.) He was only the second one to look at it, too. Now I’m trying to unload my computer but I don’t know if it’ll happen since the day of the desktop is over. Its selling point is that it comes with lots of expensive software (InDesign, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc.) pre-installed.

It was beautiful today in more than one way: the weather, for sure – an encouraging glimmer of spring. And also I was more active than I’ve been in awhile, fully emerged from my recent spell of winter doldrums. I spraypainted a mannequin head gold (for reasons known only to myself). It looks oddly beautiful, like a crumbled Egyptian statue. Afterwards I went out and about and had myself a productive day. Stopped by Justin & Emie’s to talk Art Police and get a new blue cloth bandage on my recent knife wound, which has healed very well. Then went to Goodwill in search of props for the film: a badge and bad art. Didn’t find either – well, there was plenty of bad art, but nothing that quite grabbed me the right way. (The perfect thing would be a painting of a cop hanging from a tree or being shot, then you’d have the art police in the film objecting to art depicting their death, it would make it kinda darkly funny.) Jean called to say she’d found the coolest vintage book on Lou Reed and the V.U. at Goodwill (which I had just left!) and asking if I wanted it but I stood firm by my policy of NO MORE STUFF. (I’m going to sell some of my books at Powell’s this week, except the precious few I just can’t live without.) Then to PSU where I took advantage of my dwindling student privileges to print out free copies of the finalized Art Police script. We are having a cast meeting I believe on Saturday then filming (at long last) next weekend.

After PSU I road the streetcar into Northwest, on a mission to find the house on the corner of 25th & Kearney where my cousin used to live. He can’t remember the house number and needs it for the book. I found it all right (photo above), a massive many-windowed dark old house with a gnarly witch tree in the hill-shaped front yard. There I felt an eerie sense of what I might call “temporal dissolution” – the sense of time being unreal, and of the lingering presence of another person who once stood right where you stand now. In other words, I tried to imagine my cousin walking out the front door as I stood on the steps. I didn’t bring a pen to write the house number down, just memorized it, then walked away and started thinking of other things and like a moron had forgotten it within ten blocks, so had to walk back and get the number again! (Memory isn’t what it used to be.) Nice day for walking, though, I didn’t much mind. Finally I picked up a few groceries at Trader Joe’s and checked to see if they had any boxes I could take for moving, and the stocker girl was very sweet to stop what she was doing and check for me, but they didn’t have any usable ones. (Where does one find cardboard boxes? Aside from buying them, which seems silly.)

Yesterday cousin Ant called from Bora Bora where he & J. are vacationing, he said there’s a place that opens into a hole in the ocean, so apparently there was a big round glass window IN THEIR HOTEL ROOM that opened directly into the sea – underwater! – and as we were talking a manta ray swam up and was playing right outside their window! Ant was yelling for J. to get the camera. The life they lead is the kind we used to watch on television shows about rich people. But I’m happy for my cousin. He and I both know what it’s like to live in evil welfare apartments in the small-town Midwest, where dreams are crushed and people cut off one another’s legs with lawn mowers for sport. He deserves his happiness. And he works hard, too. And I’m going to work while I’m there. It’ll be a vacation to be sure, and I’m sure as hell going to enjoy six months on Maui, but it’ll be an active enjoyment, not idle.

Now, let’s see, what do I have to get done before I leave? I’ve been stacking the deck heavily of late. I have three articles due to J.O. on the 23rd, including a substantial one on a gay porn star who has written a book about how to be a gay porn star (he just offered to put me in front of the camera after our interview!), plus three films I’m reviewing from PIFF; I’m volunteering at the Loveshow next Friday as an alcohol monitor (lizard?); shooting and editing a short film; publishing my book; hosting a going-away gathering on March 18th (with friends from Glacier visiting – Lisa who shares my birthday!), plus school stuff and everything I have to do to be ready to move. Hot damn, it’s a good thing I like being busy!

And on that note, I think I better go do some work. Kiss meow, glam

Art Police Revisited

I woke up the other night with two funny little fragments in my head, 1) "Gayness and alcoholism both run in my family. But alcoholism runs faster." 2) "Like a crackwhore without her crackpipe." The first one is almost good enough for a bumper sticker, but I don't have a car.

The image above was borrowed off the internet, I believe the title is Flyff Art Police by Artoki.

My laptop is back up after suddenly shutting down a couple weeks ago. Thank goodness it was just the power cord, and I've got the new one now. I had a momentary panic that the hard drive crashed, which would be devastating as my entire book that I've been working on for months, and many other things, could be wiped out in an instant. Now I can finally bring it in for printing! And then there's my little movie, "The Art Police," which has suffered from a lot of recent emotional turbulence and problems that have gotten in the way of being successfully creative for a while now. But something wonderful and unexpected has happened, and it turns out now that the recent delays and flake-outs on my part and changes of cast were for the best, possibly. What I mean is that I woke up this morning, after conjuring ideas for several hours, and wrote an entirely new and vastly better draft of the film. I now see that the first version was a rough draft and I hadn't held it in my mind long enough to really clearly envision it all. After finishing writing it in one burst (it's only about a 10-minute film anyhow!) I read it over and got excited, and became fully committed to it for the first time. Every single thing is better now, more fully fleshed, detailed stage directions, I THINK I finally have the perfect cast (if Audra agrees to take the part of the gallery owner, which I've totally written with an in-joke just for her), and most of all, the ending is actually....almost amazing. Much better than the others. And it makes a kind of intentionally ambiguous point, on the one hand condoning the need for self-love when you're an artist, and at the same time commenting on narcissism as well. So. I'd despaired of making this film several times recently, and thought how low I'd fallen if I couldn't even make one more short film before I leave Portland. And now I know it still IS going to happen, and better than before. I have to have it all edited and copied by March 1st so we can win the top prize at the Golden Coyote!

All righty then. I need to stop self-analyzing and go live my life now. My next post will be about politics or economics or rare imported China or something relevant like that.

End-of-year doldrums

“Exanimate” would be a good word for my mood right now. Actually, “frustrated and pissed off” would be better. When I stop drinking a lot of emotion comes to the surface that I’ve been repressing. I am pissed at one friend for having a fucking video camera and not using it for film projects, so I have to check out all the equipment from the fucking media center, lug it to where we’re filming without a vehicle, then return it on time. I am pissed at another friend – whose family I am pretty sure now is independently wealthy, though she never talks about money – for sitting on an EMPTY HOUSE that she OWNS here in Portland rather than letting a friend who is leaving Portland in three months live there and PAY HER RENT, or at the very least, store some stuff in her house FOR A STORAGE FEE, until I can have it shipped to San Francisco. And these two friends are also the ones who I’m supposed to be doing “Moonshine Boulevard” with, but I can tell neither of them is as into it as I am, and I’m just not going to put all that work into a project only to have it not come to fruition. And I am pissed at mySELF, too, for having insomnia last night, not being able to sleep, and consequently sleeping through the meeting I was supposed to have with my cast for “Art Police” this morning. So now that project fell through. Well, actually, just that cast fell through. I’m already working on another arrangement so I can still get this film made in January. I hope so. I am so artistically blue-balled right now. I don’t have sex – have been celibate for six years, going on seven! – creative projects ARE my sex, and realizing one is akin to a glorious orgasm, while this is like....the opposite of that.

Fuck. Maybe it’s just end-of-the-year doldrums. Let’s hope so. In that case things should start to look up in a couple days.

By the way, as a couple people may know, I had a blog on Today.com called “The Intellectual Homosexual” for a little while, but it fizzled pretty quickly, mainly because there was no incentive – they never paid me, though they were supposed to pay a small amount – but also because I just don’t think Today.com is the right venue for me. So that’s why I started at www.tonyletigre.com – to have my own forum and be completely independent, to post as often or as seldom as I like, and as much or as little as I like, on ANY TOPIC I desire to write about! Well, “completely independent” isn’t quite true since my blogs are still provided through Livejournal and Blogger.com, but it’s a step in the right direction.

For anyone interested, I think you can still find the remains of the old blog here.

The fish who drowned in moonshine

Somebody left this Care Bear outside the Taco Bell by my house. That's kind of sad, right? I guess that makes it a Nobody Cares Bear.

I just got off the phone after about an hour with dear mum, wishing her a happy birthday – FOUR TIMES, since my cell still drops calls continuously when I’m at home and it’s using the wifi connection. She sounded in great spirits, although she’s afraid she’s going to have to move to a smaller room since her rent went up $40, but when I asked how much her income also went up (it does every January) the figure she gave me came out to $39, so I don’t get how it really makes a difference. I told her to crunch the numbers and talk to her people and get back to me and if she needs me to I’ll send her a check each month to cover the difference so she can keep her big beautiful room that she loves. I called and left Anthony a message about how much I love Little Britain and there’s a sketch in it where the queen or some other aristocratic fat bewigged lady is lying on a couch dictating a memoir to her assistant who sits there typing it, and every so often she stops and asks, “How many pages is that?” and the assistant checks and says, “Twelve,” and the silver haired lady utters an exclamation of disappointment and goes back to recounting more anecdotes. I watched it with my roommates the other day and said, “That’s me and my cousin writing his memoir on Hana!”

A friend of mine (I'm not sure whether to use peoples' names in a public forum, some people are shy and sensitive about that, while others are like me and don't care) said the original title of my book made her think I sounded like a trustafarian. If she meant "Live Through Me" it is (intentionally) a bit grandiose sounding, yes, but it also references the fact that people who absorb other peoples' journals and diaries are in a way living vicariously through them, just as I used to absorb Virginia Woolf's life through her diary back in my freshman-in-college days (I'm with the Indigo Girls on that one). It also relates to my mother, who is disabled and living in a nursing home in Minnesota, telling me every time I talk with her on the phone that she nows lives vicariously through me and my sister. (Naturally, she's excited about me going to Maui in the spring.) And lastly, it is (also intentionally) a reference to Hole's album "Live Through This," which although I don't really listen to it any more (just as I don't read Marvel comics any more), defined a certain era of my life and is probably one of my 10 favorite albums of all time.

If she meant the title "Como me llamo" made me sound trustafarian, I'm not sure why, unless just because I'm a white American using a Spanish title - but I'm studying Spanish in school, I genuinely find it to be a beautiful language, and learning a second language is good! Maybe she meant the translation of that title, "What is My Name," but I'm not sure why that would be either. It certainly has a personal resonance for me, since I've been changing my name to one thing or another practically my entire life, as my family can well attest. I was born with the first name Joseph, called "Joe" throughout my childhood (my sister, mother and cousin still have that name in their phones and address books for me). At one point I was toying with the first name Simon, at another J.D. At another (now highly embarrassing) point when I was a teenager, it was going to be Gary Glamdring! (Good God.) So when I legally changed it to Anthony LeTigre in May 07 it was only the culmination of a long history of wondering, more or less, "What is my name?" I still have a poem with that title in the booklet I'm publishing in January and I'm going to work this whole question of names into it as a theme.

Nonetheless, the final title I'm going with is "The Fish Who Drowned." Unless I think of a REALLY KILLER new one within the next week or two.

What are you doing for New Years? I get invited to parties (of course!), but I'm really kind of over getting drunk, and how much fun will a New Year's Eve party be without booze? I guess I'll find out.

I'm meeting with my three cast members tomorrow afternoon to discuss a script I wrote called "The Art Police" which they're going to help me film in January! And the neo-noir reimagining of Sunset Boulevard that I'm conceiving with Kirk and Melanie is starting to look really promising, and I've bestowed upon it a working title - "Moonshine Boulevard."