On the desk is some kind of survival spork and I carry metal chopsticks at all times. A long line of parachute cord is stretched tight across the length of the room from the door to a gas line. It’s continuously dripping with socks and long underwear. In a wild attempt to overcome wasteful weight in travel, Kevin and I have stripped our wardrobes to the barest essentials. We arrived with nothing but a book bag of clothes that we wash with hotel soap in the sink each night. Anything else we need to keep warm or look good can be produced with duct tape and towels.

The posters have been a master tool for meeting people. Everyone loves asking me about the guy on my chest and I have a pocket of postcards with the dates of our screenings at gunslinger height. I have it down to a smooth snap and the cards are in their hands. If I talk enough about our insane twelve years of working on this film their eyes glow and their grip on the cards shifts like they are more likely to survive the trip home.

Our second screening of, “Blaze Foley: Duct Tape Messiah” went pretty well. Kevin wasn’t able to get an HD tape made in part because that Tsunami you heard about destroyed the factory that makes tape. He decided that the Beta copy of the film didn’t look nearly good enough and so he got them a digital copy of the film by using the sd card in his pocket camera and a laptop. A good sized crowed stuck around past the QA to hear Gurf Morlix perform and while the funny but crude, “Wouldn’t That Be Nice” got a few on the run they all loved the beautiful songs like, “Ooh Love” and most made a point to meet us afterwards. The legend of Blaze is definitely continuing to spread.

As a random bonus I ran into Andrew Berends at one of the schmoozfests. I still insist that it was my blog post that finally tipped the scales and had Hillary Clinton calling for his release. He doesn’t disagree. Fortunately Kevin hasn’t thought up a scheme to get us arrested in Amsterdam for the same kind of publicity. Yet.

Above: Kevin Triplett sporting a custom duct tape tuxedo made by a fan of Blaze and Kai Mantsch with the poster. We’ve been telling people that it’s a playfully told, fun and uplifting movie about a homeless musician who gets killed.

The idea was to create a film that was a mixture of storyboarded narrative, documentary style interactions and improvisations. The structure from which the film hung was that “David” (the character) had just turned thirty and was writing a letter to himself on his deathbed. Knowing that this future self must have worked his way through the existential crisis he was now facing, he continually asks questions and describes his process as he surfs along on borrowed couches, pull out beds and floors through Portland and Seattle where the stories that shaped him once played out.

In practice, this meant that we had a thin skeleton of a film and a whole lot of space that might, through the act of placing ourselves into the hands of god and the universe, be filled with amazing moments. Or go nowhere. We frequently made reference to the moment in Hearts of Darkness, a documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now, where the film has degenerated into a slow slog upriver through the jungle and the cast and crew are given daily shot lists containing only the words, “scenes unknown”.

We did have a daily list of locations and people for our lead actor, Jef, to interact with. Many were people with incredible stories about spiritual awakenings, tragic war stories, or personal loss, like a man who’d lost his twin baby girls just weeks after they were born. Others were representative characters from David’s personal history. Having just watched, Synecdoche, New York, Kaufman’s latest ultra-meta film, I was well primed to enjoy the beauty of watching Jef, the actor, playing “David”, the character, based on David, the writer/director, who sat watching as Jef kissed David’s former crushes and ex-girlfriends, who were often playing the roles of other, different ex-girlfriends from David’s past. Most of the people Jef was to interact with were non-actors and so through their interactions, they would ask questions probing into who he (David, the character) was. This would prompt Jef to improvise and feel out the character that was emerging, and occasionally ask David (the director) to give him a story or talk about how he would respond to a given situation.

While I (and many others) originally questioned why it was that David didn’t simply play himself in this journey, it quickly became clear that he had made the right choice. Jef was unburdened by David’s ideas about what he could and couldn’t discuss with the people who had great personal weight in his life. There was also room for David himself to step back from the situation and see the interactions in a new light, as well as have enough distance to make decisions about what to cut and where to dive in deeper.

To Be Continued…

Next Episode: It Begins!

I’ve previewed enough film submissions to know that even though 5000 feature length films were entered into Sundance this last year, it’s doesn’t mean that many were, despite their two million dollar and up budgets, even watchable. Statistically only about five of those have a chance of making money. But it does mean that there is so much noise in the system that it’s almost impossible to be noticed.

Admittedly, I spent far too long working on other people’s projects before doing my own. This has put me a bit behind the curve, but what I’ve seen is that many of those friends who’ve produced a lot more and better work, have had successful festival runs, and even received small theatrical releases still aren’t bringing in any more food money than I do. In a quick informal survey after a recent shoot most were living off of about $9k a year. I felt like a wealthy baron with my $13k and health insurance.

This is the moment when you wake up and realize that you are not building a career, but are in fact living much more like a painter. (Although, sadly, the brushes are far more expensive.) It doesn’t make me want to quit making films. On the contrary, I feel liberated. If I don’t have to fuss about the potential commercial success of projects I work on, I can focus instead on making things I care about. Their value is determined entirely by my own metrics, and not where they might take me.

I’ve also been repressing my other artistic outlets, like writing and music, so that I could focus on film projects. This shift also means that taking time to work on music, either for one of my current film projects or an album of children’s music, becomes more viable. Without profit there is only art.

Kevin Bewersdorf comes from a different world. Despite his work in indie film, he considers himself to have been in the realm of painters and installation artists from the beginning. We exist in a new era wherein individual copies of an artwork have no inherent value. Everything digital is immediately pirated and available for free online. So borrowing from the world of prints, he made limited edition DVDs of one of his recent video installation projects and sold them, with certificates of authenticity, for extremely high prices. The buyers know they can get a copy of the work itself for free online. What they are buying instead is a piece of the artist’s work that may increase in value as a collectable over time and, more importantly, they have the opportunity to support a valued artist’s continued productivity.

I should also note, for the record, that Kevin’s deadpan, playfully sardonic artwork has been hugely inspirational to me lately. Highly recommended are his photographs and his Four Sacred Logos bit.

So while the road may have become rough with the remains of broken dreams fallen to earth, it doesn’t mean that I have to stop and turn back. If the sky really is falling, I can finally take my head out of the clouds and realize that what remains to be seen is just as beautiful.

The house had been falling apart for many years. The massive grecian columns were shedding the last of their sun-bleached paint to reveal the cracked wood beneath. The old chain link fence that wrapped the front of the place was completely overgrown with an ivy bursting with purple flowers. Bees swarmed around and through them and danced about the metal sign that read, “No Trespassing”.

The porch was a nest of rotting teeter totter boards that groaned and cried quietly beneath my feet as I heaved camera equipment to the door. Just inside I swung the sound mixer off of my shoulder and dropped a handful of sand bags. The owner of the neighboring restaurant had bought the house out from under the previous owners after the trouble started. Now he seemed to be using it as a storage space, as I was surrounded by tall, thin metal mushrooms of the sort used to heat an outdoor patio during the winter. Stepping through the little forest I had to climb around a pile of fat CO2 canisters squatting in the corner and past a huge rolling metal storage container.

The modern tools of the restaurant trade were loathe to extend any deeper into the house than the front room and I left them behind to explore. The railings had all been removed from the massive staircase and I could already see the evidence of the young woman’s chainsaw work. She had stripped the house of all drywall or plaster and left only the bare skeletal structure. Next to the stairs the floor had been torn away as well, and I could see through the lines of boney ribs to the earth below. Under the stairs, protruding only halfway up through the remnants of a floor was a sink, still installed and complete with copper pipes running off into the bowels of the house. It was as though it were designed for babies to crawl across the floor to the bowl to bathe. Equally as mysterious, a toilet sat resting, isolated, on top of the exposed floor supports.

I climbed up past the outline of an archway to the second floor where the damage was much the same with the exception of one room. Some of the ceiling and three of the walls had been covered with new drywall and painted a bright pink color. The remaining wall was no more than exposed studs, and light shone up past the ends of the floorboards. At the center of the room a brand new ceiling fan hung down into the room. It was like a guest in a tuxedo showing up for a barn raising, dangling from on high to survey, with nose held high, the piles of old nails, rat feces and raw wood thick with years of dust.

I left this odd oasis to climb a metal ladder into the attic. Here the low roof sagged inwards towards me like a wet blanket. Instead of supporting or repairing it, they had popped in a new skylight that protruded from the tired wood like a pimple. Again all of the wood structure was exposed with the exception of but a fragment of original plaster, from which a tuft of pink insulation dripped towards a hole in the floor. Despite this, absurdly, to one side was a set of sliding glass doors that opened onto a tiny, exposed portion of the roof.

The dreamers who had come to this house years ago had arrived with great vision and little skill or money. The tall bamboo helped hide the eyesore from afternoon diners, but at some point the little mexican restaurant next door couldn’t play their music loud enough to cover the screaming as the young couple began throwing each other’s clothes out onto the street. Their fights grew louder and more frequent. It was the chainsaw being taken to the walls that finally lead the restaurant owner, fearing for his business, to buy them out.

No one really knows what happened to bring them to that point, but anyone who has tried to rebuild an old house (including Wendy Spies and myself) might have a few ideas. Our fearless director Bryan Poyser had a few ideas of his own, and you can see how they play out when he completes this next film.

Sadly it didn’t turn out, as I’d hoped, that a big budget reality film was being shot of us. I kept waiting for the moment that the door wouldn’t open and we’d be forced to spend the night in the place, or for something to grab my leg. Instead we had absolutely incredible natural light that made each shot look like a million dollars. At one point, watching Kevin walk up the staircase into golden light filtering through light clouds of dust, we all swore we’d just seen him ascend into heaven.

Soon this old house with all of its history and mysteries will be rolled off into another young couple’s dreams and the land left behind will become a parking lot. Even then, it could well be the place that a pair of future newlyweds emerges from a romantic dinner at the restaurant next door to share a first kiss. I’m glad we were able to add one more piece of history, and capture a bit of the soul of this place before it moves on.

All photos by Kevin Bewersdorf

AP Wire

New York Times

The documentary and journalist communities are doing what they can to get the word out and get him freed. For the moment, things are looking positive and while he has at times been denied food and water, the hope is that he will be released soon and this was simply a tactic to apply pressure on foreign journalists. I hope the same can be said for his translator and the local who was traveling with them.

Curiously enough, I was in the process of researching a pet project of mine about a man who’s freed hundreds of Chinese dissidents when I got this message. I had just about reached the point that I was going to give up on the project, as the situation had changed quite a bit and I wasn’t sure I could see the documentary angle that would work. I was also in the process of writing a blog entry about my experience playing guitar this weekend. Now all I can think about is what am I doing sitting here in the US wasting time?!

It’s not that I’m excited about being tortured. (I also listened to some of the grueling torture details touted at the Republican Convention earlier.) But what am I doing with myself here? This weekend I spent a day or two working out PHP’s new object based database system. Today I tweaked security on a system that allows students to check out microphones. These jobs are for someone else, someone who can’t swing a camera and sleep under the stars in a foreign land. There is something bigger I need to be doing.

I hope Andrew is OK. I do know that he’s doing what he loves and that he knew the risks going in, but that doesn’t make it any easier. Good luck. You’re doing it right.

After poking through the dusty camping gear and santa suits that fill any burner household and coming up empty handed for towels, I decided to hit the street. I managed to find a french cafe I remembered from years past and ordered up a plate of avocado sandwiches. A pick up artist tried to work on me by talking about Tesla, but he had forgotten to google him first. His knowledge ran out long before his enthusiasm. Spring is in the air here, and hormone levels are high. Walking to the supermarket there was a lot of checking out going on before I ever reached the register. San Francisco is a beautiful city and I’m glad she appreciates me.

Last night was the long awaited viewing of The Dicky Box by Logan and Dicky himself. I’m pretty happy with the latest cut, or as happy as I’m going to be, and so it was time to face up to how I’d represented my friends. We rolled out a screen and cranked up the DVD. I would have made sure that everyone had beer, but they were way ahead of me, nervously cracking open bottles of Pabst. I teased them a little but, as Dicky said, “has anyone ever made a feature length film about you?”

I felt a little like I was introducing Dicky to the character Dicky that I had created from a brief time in his past. I wanted the two Dickys to get along, and learn from each other. I chuckled nervously at the silly over-the-top sequence of the kiss, and Dicky was appropriately mortified. “I mean, has anyone ever filmed you making out with someone?! In slow motion?!”

Talking afterwards, Dicky realized that he swore a lot more than he thought he did, and apologized. He also saw for the first time what made the project, and his role, what it was: how much he was both a truly emotional person and yet completely unwilling to admit to or share his emotional experience.

Logan was primarily concerned about his bad hair and strange comments. More than once he had to ask us, “what did I mean by that?” He was very generous, though, about the film I had created, and felt it was a fair representation.

It was a relief to me that the comments weren’t overwhelmingly negative. The things that made either of them uncomfortable pertained more to their own actions and hairstyles, and not the angle I provided. Dicky’s concern about font choice aside, I don’t feel the need to make major revisions now. I have some interest from a sales agent and I’ll be sending her a version very similar to this one when I get back to Austin. It’s time for this project to get some exposure and time for me to move on to the next story.

Here is what I had with me every minute of every day, strategically placed on my body (thanks to cargo pants) such that I could grab it without even thinking:

- Leatherman tool
- Waterproof flashlight
- Notebook
- Pen
- Extra camera batteries
- Extra Firestore batteries
- Nylon cord
- Twist ties
- Handkerchief
- Lens cleaning brush
- Lens cleaning fluid and wipes
- Rubber bands
- Tiny bottle of hand soap/body wash
- Expendable wallet with money and business cards
- More hidden travel wallet with:

- Real money
- Passport
- Immunity shot list
- Contact number for emergency evac
- Phone numbers for credit card cancellation
- Phone numbers and addresses of people in states and local
- Credit card (backup left elsewhere and uninitialized)

- Water
- Organic dried fruit and nuts mix
- Warm hat
- Wool scarf
- 300 weight fleece
- Brim hat (to swap with warm hat when the day heated up)