My Time as a Human

I was extremely fortunate to have been in China just weeks before my girlfriend Weishi’s Da Gu (first aunt) died. For some reason the thing I remember most about her house was the old wooden box full of smooth stones near her back door. Each morning she took off her shoes and walked barefoot up and down over the stones. Whether a way of stimulating certain nerves in the soles of her feet or just serving as a meditative practice, it was supposed to help somewhat with the extreme pain of the stomach cancer that was slowly killing her.

Da Gu was an extremely tough woman. She never once let her physical ailments get in the way while spending time with us, and she insisted on making us tea and having ranting, passionate discussions with me. After growing up in China as a child, she had traveled to England to study english literature. She returned to work as a reporter and, ultimately, editor for the China Daily, China’s english language newspaper. Her use of the english language was so far superior to my own that I felt almost as ignorant saying hello as when I tried to discuss American history and politics with her.

Da Gu’s ex-husband was a literature professor, and apparently just as tough, opinionated, and stubborn as she was. They had been divorced for more than fifteen years, and to the day still took the time to argue with each other. She explained that two people so strong willed could simply never make it work. What she said next etched itself forever into my brain. “But if I was ever going to get married again, it would only be to him.” Weishi assured me that he had said the same thing to her.

Several weeks after I left China, the cancer finally won out. Someone likely scattered the smooth stones that took in so much pain, leaving them, too, to rest. I wonder how her ex-husband felt now that she was gone. To me those almost, but not quite, solvable problems that linger forever are the most tragic. Is there a point when they should have given in and cut off communication forever? Or was it the dynamic struggle that made what was left of their relationship so irresistible? Maybe, once again, the only answer is to continue to ask.

As the latest Burlesque for Peace event prepares to take over Antones I can’t help but remember my first show.

It was in talking to an ex-stripper friend of mine that the idea first appeared. She talked about how much she enjoyed being on stage and being playful and sexy, but how the environment of the modern strip club was stifling and didn’t allow for any creativity or real performance. I’ve always been a fan of big horn bands and that loud, bold brass music from the old burlesque shows. Before the idea of nude performance was, well, stripped down to what we have today those shows were so much more. Instead of women simply dancing naked around poles all night, there were huge performances with outrageous costumes, long teasing dance routines, fans, people under water with flowing silks, comedy acts and songs. The more we talked, the more excited I became. I started contacting potential venues and then, as often happens, I got distracted by some other series of projects and it never came to fruition.

Years later I was riding out the end of a tough breakup and living on my best friend Steve March’s couch in San Francisco. He had hundreds of books lining one entire wall, and every day he would leave a few more book spines protruding seductively from the enormous bookshelf and head off to work. I paced back and forth through the sunlight that bathed the wooden floors of his large studio apartment, ingesting books about psychology, spirituality and the self and scribbling furiously in a notebook on the end table. In the evenings he would return and we would jump into his Miata to roar into the city for sushi and philosophize late into the night.

It was in this context that I got the call. My friend G-Fire was hosting an all girl DJ night at Elysium, a club in Austin, for her birthday. She wanted male strippers and wanted to know if I was down to be one of them. At this point, I’d never done anything of the kind. The idea was terrifying and, therefore, immediately something I couldn’t resist. Better still that I had only days to prepare and was currently halfway across the country. I packed up my notebooks and headed home.

Back in Austin I drove straight to my favorite thrift shop and rounded up a whole pile of outfits and equipment. When I got to the club I was nervous, excited, and ready to throw down. I burst through the door to find the two other guys cowering at the bar, huddled over drinks. They were simultaneously attempting to goad each other into taking action and trying to somehow avoid the whole affair entirely. I had a duffle bag loaded with costumes and wasn’t having it. I found the next DJ and told her roughly the kind of music I was looking for and went into the bathroom to change.

Her voice boomed through the speakers as she called the audience forward to the stage, “and now I give you… The Professor!” The house lights came up and the music started slowly with a simple pulsing beat. I was standing, head down, my hands held before me completely covered in a thick black graduation gown. The gown turned out to be a good choice, as it completely hid my knees, which were clattering together like castanets.

Each of my arms extended into the opposite sleeve and I slowly began to wripple around like I was working something out under the front of my outfit, doing my best to imitate the girls I remember changing under sweatshirts on the bus after track practice. Then my arms burst free and a huge white bra flew out of my sleeve, arced through the air and landed on someone’s head. The crowd went wild.

From that point I teased and danced and worked my way through layer after layer of outfits. Having never done this before, I had no idea how long it would take and I was only halfway done when the DJ had to scramble to put on another track. It was also my first experience with shoes. There’s nothing sexy about trying to pull off shoes. Hopping up and down and spinning didn’t help, so I yanked off a sock, inhaled it deeply, and threw that out to the crowd earning me more cheers.

As girls were scrambling to fill my waistband with dollar bills, the other two guys were running for their chance to get on stage. Each one turned it up another notch, one by leaping off stage and doing a knee slide. When all was said and done all anyone wanted to know was when it would happen again and how they could get a turn. A few months later, Audrey Maker started ramping up for the first Burlesque for Peace.

For months afterwards I would meet countless people at parties who would insist on calling me The Professor, many of whom only knew me as The Professor. I had so many demands for a rerun that I eventually did another version of the same act that was much better scripted and featured a ruler and a variant of the famous endless handkerchief gag using neckties. Another year I had a really profound moment helping my friend, who had finally left the army, strip off her uniform for the last time. As I handed out her medals from a silver bowl, she threw the trappings of the life she was leaving behind to the crowd.

The all volunteer show has raised money for numerous causes, from the clearing of old landmines to Amnesty International. This year the focus is on voter registration and there have have been several sexy librarian vote drives leading up to the event. I haven’t performed in the last few, but I definitely got a twang watching my housemates Natalie and Jules prepare for their first show this last week. As they bounce and giggle their way through the house, covered in balloons, I have to wonder if, or when, The Professor will one day return…

Mark Gill (former president of Miramax) is the most popular prophet of the end of the indie film world with his now famous sky is falling speech. What he said was nothing particularly new or surprising, but it sums up what has been happening of late. Where once there was a dim hope of having a career of some sort as an independent film producer, that dim hope has become the candle that just went out: if I close my eyes and focus I can still just maintain the illusion. In many ways struggling to become a filmmaker has become more like fighting the odds to become a rock star.

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 story sounded simple enough. Four filmmakers drive down to San Antonio to shoot a story about ghosts in a crumbling old mansion… just as a massive hurricane begins sweeping across Texas. It was as we began loading the van that I first noticed something odd. “Gee Bryan, I don’t see any lights,” I said. “Of course not,” he replied, “There’s no electricity”.

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