Saalon Muyo

Here’s how madness works.

A few months ago, I noticed an artist named Lights on rdio.com – a recommendation, probably due to some embarrassing pop I’d listened to at some point – and was desperate enough for something new to give it a try. I didn’t think much of it on the first listen. Or, at least, that’s what my conscious brain was thinking. Something in my subconscious clicked, I guess, because by the end of the day I’d listened to the album three times.  Then I bought it. And listened to it a bunch more times.  Eventually, my conscious mind got the hint and decided I was enjoying it.

The album, Siberia, was relatively new, and she’d just started a tour in Canada. I told Erin, “If she comes to Pittsburgh, we are so going to see her.” And, hallelujah, what do you know? She announced her U.S. tour dates, and Pittsburgh was on it. She was coming to Pittsburgh…

…two days after I flew out to California.  Ready for the madness part?

My brain, convinced it was going to see Lights in concert if she came to Pittsburgh, decided that the conditions necessary to see her had been met and that I would thusly be going to see her no matter that I would be thousands of miles away when she was here. Erin, game as always to play along with my crazy time, looked over the rest of her tour. She’d be in D.C. right at the end of our trip, but that would mean cutting Wine Time short. Ok, no good. How about in March, when she was in Tulsa or Nashville? Oof, have you seen those plane fares? No, absolutely…hey, wait! Boston?

And that’s how I built a weekend vacation around seeing a Canadian musician in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Speaking of which: Boy is Pawtucket an armpit. At least, everything except the venue itself and the cool artist’s village around it. Ok, ok, all I’m sure about is that all the detoured, cruddy streets we got lost on were armpit-ish. The Met, though? Really cool venue. Very nice.

Oh. You’re probably wondering if the concert any good, right? You aren’t? Why not? What am I doing wrong, here? Am I that bad at building tension? You guys are a tough crowd.

Lights was awesome. Absolutely awesome. One of the many great things about seeing an artist perform live is to see them between the songs. How they work the crowd  (if they work it; sometimes they barely talk) and how their onstage persona meshes with the voice you’ve been hearing through your headphones.  Lights – her name is Valerie Anne Poxleitner, hence the stage name – was funny, genuine and really into the night with her fans. She was also totally in charge of the stage; a few times, she was half-conducting the other musicians. She responded to tweets from fans, including taking a request from a couple who’d danced at their wedding to one of her songs.

Siberia is an interesting album, fusing pop with a dirtier, dubstepier spine. It’s not the kind of album where you hear one song and fall in love, but one where the effect of it builds on you. It’s not a transcendant album, or a really important album, but it’s good, and it gets lodged in your aural centers in a way that makes listening to it feel akin to satisfying a craving for chocolate peanut butter ice cream (or whatever it is you crave when you want something sweet and terrible for you).  Live with her stage band, the beats were heavier and dirtier and the energy of it just kept pressing you forward. Lights’ voice, which feels a bit produced on the album, doesn’t need help. At all. The girl can wail. Her producers should back off on the [technical thing sound people do to voices] and let her sing.

If it weren’t for the obnoxious college guys (and is there anything more obnoxious than the college male?) who showed up in the hopes that Lights would teleport them backstage for sexy time, it would have been a nearly perfect show. Did I mention that Pawtucket is an armpit? So are a lot of its concertgoers. Neanderthal armpits.

That’s irrelevant. I flew to Boston for a concert, and the concert was worth it. Check out Siberia. It’s a cool album. If you like it, and she’s coming through your town, consider checking her out.

If everything goes right, you should be reading this just after I touch down in Boston. It’ll be my first time back to the city in a while. How long’s a while? I honestly can’t remember. Three years? Four? Has it been that long? I’ve been trying to trace back when my actual last flight back was, and for the life of me I can’t.  Which sucks, because it used to be home.

I moved to Boston in the fall of 2000. I’d been dating Erin for three years, all of them long distance, and it was becoming crystal clear that we were hitting the point where we either lived in the same city or slammed the brakes.  Three years of monthly visits and the occasional vacation wears on a relationship, and when you’ve never shared the bumps and slides of a daily life together in the first place…well, it’s no good for the heart and soul. One of us was going to have to move, and since Erin had as much interest in living in Pittsburgh as everyone else (read: none), that meant it was on me to move.

So I moved.

What? I loved the girl. You think it was a tough decision?

Despite some crankiness from the family – I hadn’t finished college yet, and couldn’t I just maybe wait until that, and maybe until a good job came along and also have you helped grandpa with his computer? – it all fell into place without issue. Ok, finding an apartment sucked (like the night when I went out, in the rain, to see a place, and the owner never showed, and I lost my hat, and I had a full-on meltdown), and moving is never any fun, but really, it went pretty well.

I lived in Boston until 2003, with Erin, in a tiny subdivision of a house with a handfull of lunatic neighbors and the most Irish landlord in the world, ever, including the ones who are Irish landlords in Ireland. His name was Martin Battle. He sang Irish music. His accent was full frontal assault-brogue. Best landlord ever. Anyway, where was I? Oh, right. Living in Boston. The apartment was within walking distance of the T, my job was downtown, and I drove further to pick up Erin from her job at the mall than I ever did for my own job. I never, not once, drove into the city for work.

Boston was wonderful. Incredible. Thinking about it, about the charm of South Station, of the incredible lunches in Chinatown and the mind blowing salad bar down the street, and the feeling that there was something happening around you at every single second…well, the nostalgia gets a little Fellini-eque.  We moved back home to be near my grandparents so long as they’re still with us – and I can never, ever thank Erin enough for getting over her dread of Pittsburgh on my behalf – and though I was only in the city for three years, Boston remains home in my heart.

Going back after so long and staying for such a short time has me on edge. I don’t know what to expect when I get there. What will have changed? What will have passed away? Will the places and sights that anchor my nostalgia remain, or will something subtle but significant have changed in my absence? I half expect to feel like I’ve walked into a childhood home that’s belonged to someone else for years; the walls are all where they should be, but they’ve taken down the wallpaper and are using your bedroom to store Christmas decorations and surplus Costco canned goods.

Either way, I won’t have long to suss it out. Erin and I drive to Pawtucket for a Lights concert – the reason for the trip; and no, I don’t know why I wanted to see her badly enough to plan a whole trip – and won’t return to the city until the next day. That means one day in Boston, hanging out with a friend whom I didn’t know when I lived there, going to restaurants and bars in which I never ate or drank. Even if the city is the same, I’ll be passing through someone else’s Boston, and maybe that’s for the best.

At least I’ve been promised soup dumplings and possible karaoke at a lesbian bar. If you’re going to visit someone else’s Boston, you’d better make the most of it.

It’s past time for me to step up my directing game. Way past time.

I’m with Robert Rodriguez when it comes to being a director.  You need to learn how to do it all. You don’t always need to actually do it all on every movie, but not understanding how to light, or use the camera, or cut your film is opening a weakness someone will later exploit. They might not do it out of malice, but incompetence can ruin your film as quickly and decisively as intent.  Unless you have a budget at your disposal sufficient to hire the best, and the good sense to know what “the best” is supposed to mean, you’re going to be making uncomfortable decisions about who gets to muck with all the work you’re putting in.

At my level – that would be the level where you have no money and are paying people in sandwiches and beer – it’s even more dire.  There’s always someone around saying they know how to do sound, or light a shot, but most of them are affable amateurs at best. Even if you, too, are an amateur, there’s something you need to remember: they’re helping out on set for a few days and you’re sweating blood for something that’s going to bear your name. If you don’t think that makes a difference in how much effort and ability the average person will bring to bear, I understand.  You just haven’t had your sound ruined by someone who put in the time but not the heart.

It’s not their fault. This isn’t about anger. It’s about admitting that directing isn’t the kind of thing where you get to do one job and leave the rest to everyone else. You’re the center. The locus. The hub of wheel. And when the movie fails, it fails all over you. Even if you could hop into frame mid-film and blame the guy who forgot to turn on the digital recorder for the horrible sound in the scene, people would still wonder why you didn’t notice before you stuck this piece of crap in front of them. The point I’m making is that you feel a little feel better when you’re the guy who forgot to turn on the digital recorder.

True, if your career goes anywhere, you’re going to have to give that job up to someone else. In fact, I dream of the day when I can find someone better at some of these jobs than I am. Having made the mistakes myself, I’m better equipped to know if the person I’m bring on is better, and I’m also less likely to make their jobs more difficult.

So I was talking about stepping up my game. I’m proud of the fact that I can do it all. I can set up my sound. I can point lights. I can swing the camera about and I can hack the footage into something resembling a movie. I can, and have, done that, a couple of times. Now, I want to do it better.

A lot better.

Finding the right books is the trick. I’m not interested in how-to books, especially not ones focused on being a Do It Yourself Filmmaker. I don’t need an instruction manuel and I don’t want to be talked down to. I want theory. I want something I can internalize, something I can turn into a process, so that when I find someone to take a job from me, I still know how to think towards that job. The energy of filmmaking flows from the director to all other jobs and back again.  Knowing how to think about your shots, your setups, your camera moves and your acting directions in terms of those energies means you won’t be begging your editor to make something for which you did not give him the materials. I want something that gives me that. The knowledge of the how and why, the philosophy and the theory. I’ve got Google if I get confused in Final Cut.

I got lucky when someone on my Twitter feed mentioned In the Blink of an Eye. I hadn’t asked, and it wasn’t even directed at me, but as soon as it was mentioned as being one of the seminal works on film editing, I knew this was where to start. Editing is something through which I’ve fumbled; I’d have a sense of not liking the rhythm of a scene, but not a good idea why. That meant a lot of aimless trial and error (which is different from aimed trial and error, I swear), and chunks of scenes I wish I could go back and change.

In the Blink of an Eye is a wonderful read. It’s short (the main text is 70 pages, and the appendix on digital editing is the same), but it speaks eloquently about the way editing should feel, about the mindset of approaching it and of the way the human mind interprets cuts between different spacial points of view. It discusses different film editors not in terms of how to use them, but in how their different approaches change how you think about a film. The KVM, in which you take bits of film and splice, is more like sculpting out of clay, while the Moviola, with which you cut away from long runs of film, is more like carving out of marble. Insights like that speak to the way you should think about a thing, not to which button to flick and when.  If you have any interest in directing, I strongly recommend it.

As for me, it’s time to move on to the next area of pain and suffering: light.

I’ll leave sound for a really masochistic day.

I’m a bad learner unless I have a goal. I never properly learned programming until I had a job, and some projects, at which I didn’t want to fail. Writing? Set a real deadline for myself, or I might as well embrace those empty pages. And physical activity? Working out and stuff? Ha! Ha ha ha. Ha.

I don’t run unless I’m running towards.

I had a great fall, what with that zombie 5k obstacle course thing looming large. Not wanting to beclown myself on a muddy track packed with Walking Dead nerds and people dressed as Team Rocket from Pokemon, I ran regularly and often until I got myself up to a respectable-only-to-me 13 minute mile. As soon as it passed? Hello, couch!

It was time to do myself a favor and give myself a goal. Employing some epic Google-fu (one skill in which I have no doubt: my ability to search), I found this. Ok, so a flat 5K run along a river is nowhere near as cool as running with the bulls zombies, but it is a goal, and it’s far enough away that I have a chance to get myself back into shape. I paid the registration fee as soon as I found it. No, losing $25 by not going to this won’t kill me, but the ego-pain of failing to get ready for a measly 5K river run in April should be enough to do the trick.

I need to thank Mels for this, actually, because in suggesting this truly torturous looking obstacle course that’s clearly beyond me, she prodded me into doing something I’d been putting off. If anyone’s got anything along those lines – preferably ones that don’t require me to climb things and give myself a mid-course panic attack – feel free to clue me in. I might need to challenge myself a little more after a leisurely run up and down a beautiful river. Or I might chicken out, like I did with Mels’ climbing death race. You never can tell.

First, let’s get business out of the way. Stop SOPA. Stop PIPA. You know how you know they’re bad laws? The MPAA wants it badly enough to call today’s Internet Blackout Protest Thing an “abuse of power.” Hilarious. Anyway, get schooled.

Second, where the heck have I been? Well.

The important thing is that I’ve been hard at work. Maybe not as hard at work as I’d like to have been (I never am), but I’ve had my eye on the prize. The prize, of course, is writing something I can sell. (Ok, also writing something I can shoot. I have a couple of prizes in sight. I like prizes.)  To that end, I’ve been writing in my expensive little Moleskine notebook with an expensive, archival inked pen as much as possible. Things are coming together. Not as quickly as I’d like (it never is), but things are happening. Things are also moving on the webseries. Pre-writing is happening on all fronts, even if the blog makes it look like I’m curled up on my couch.

To be fair, there’s been some curling up on the couch. I had some bad days recently and that was about all I wanted to do. Which is the other side of not updating the blog. I haven’t exactly been bursting with enthusiasm of late, and I’m taking what productivity I can squeeze out of myself and putting it somewhere it can do the most good.

All that said, I hope to be blogging again soon. Maybe Friday. Maybe next week. Not beyond that. Blogging is important to getting things done. The time it takes is nothing compared to the feeling of doing something it imparts. I’ll be back.

But in the meantime, things are creeping forward.

See you all soon.

You might have noticed that I’ve been doing this whole Movie Education thing for a while to try and expand my pitiful cinematic horizons beyond what my nerd upbringing provided. I have this idea that it’s going to be good for me when I go back to directing this summer, but for now, that’s pure theory. I might still be a wanker. Well, ok, I’ll definitely still be a wanker, but we’ll have to see if I’m a more practiced…oh, never mind. We’re talking about books, today.

Trying to do a Literary Education project like I’ve been doing for movies would be a fool’s errand. I’m a fast reader, but it would still take too much time for it to be a serious focus. Still, I’d like to get outside of the genres, books and authors with which I’m comfortable and to get out into a wider world. But where to start?

What I’m saying is I need some help.

My mom actually got me going with this, suggesting I pick up some Jane Austen, both because it’s a free download and because I’m apparently a neanderthal heathen for not having ever read anything she’s written.  She suggested I start with either Pride and Prejudice (shock!) or Persuasion.  Thoughts?

Whichever way I go, though, it’s a start in a direction I need to take.  My reading history is inconsistant. I’ve read piles of some stuff (Epic poetry! Greek drama! All the fantasy books!) and almost nothing in other areas (Anything you’d read in a Western Lit class! And shut up, I was a terrible student.).

So this is where I ask for some suggestions.  I can’t promise when I’ll get to anything suggested, but I will get there, and I’ll appreciate all of it.

Let me help to focus your mind. I mean, I’ll take any suggestions at all, but if you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the awesome books you’ve read, think, perhaps, about what was formative to you. Something that opened your mind to new genres, cultures or modes of thought. Maybe something that influenced your own style or interests, or that gave you an appreciation for something you used to hate.  It can be modern or ancient. Fiction or non. Verse or prose. Sky’s the limit.

Make me a better reader. I dare you.

I’ve never been much of a short story guy.  I never read short fiction like I did novels, and even though there are a bunch of shorts I really love, getting an anthology of short stories is a ticket to a half-finished book sitting on my shelf.  For me, the getting into a story part of reading takes up a lot of energy, so a few hundred pages of ten page stories means dozens of times where I have to get oriented, figure out what I’m reading, why I’m reading it, why I should care. Just when I’m into it, the thing is over. Restart. Retry. Have fun.

That isn’t to say I don’t respect short fiction. The canon of modern science fiction is built on it. The best SF writers almost all did their best work writing shorts.  Some of the classic SF novels of the 50′s and 60′s are either a collection of shorter works or evolved out of a short.  In fact, I not only respect short fiction; when I can get myself into reading it, I almost always come away kicking myself for how little of it I do. It’s a deficit. A weakness.

It’s no surprise that, since I wasn’t much of a reader of short fiction, I was an even worse writer of it.  You can’t really write what you don’t read, unless you’re some kind of savant or lucky moron, and I’m neither a savant, nor lucky. Short fiction, outside of a few pathetic attempts, was simply outside of my ken. Until a few years ago, that wasn’t really a problem for me, but it was a deficiency I started to feel. I don’t like having weaknesses.

When I got my Kindle a few years ago, the first thing I did was buy a subscription to Asimov’s. It’s still probably the best thing I’ve done with that Kindle. I don’t read every issue, and I don’t always read everything inside. That doesn’t matter. Just getting myself into the rhythm of it has made reading them easier. I was even enjoying the ones I didn’t really enjoy. Better, I started wanting to give writing them another try.

It was well timed. Last fall, Rachel came to me and asked me to write something for an anthology she was putting together.

Like with reading, my spin up time on writing shorts is almost as bad as for something much longer.  Proportional to the word count, it’s probably worse.  I spent the better part of two months just trying to get the ideas to lock together, to overcome my biggest obstacle in writing short fiction: finding a story that fit. I feel comfortable in long form writing, because my ideas tend towards things that need space to build. In short fiction, I’d always struggled to find a story I could tell in 5,000 words that wasn’t so slight as to not be satisfying (and I hate how many short stories feel like cast-off, underdeveloped novel ideas) or so long as to turn it into a novella.  I’d given up hitting that roadblock in the past. This time, I kept at it. It took me a few months, but slowly, things fell into place.

Last night, I turned in the second draft of “She Says Goodbye Tomorrow” to Rachel.  I couldn’t be more excited about it.  And, yeah, I hate saying that out loud. It feels like asking for trouble when people actually read it. Who knows if the things that make the story work for me will work for anyone else. At present, I haven’t even heard from Rachel if she likes the new draft. But I’m saying it anyway, because I am really happy with it. Whatever comes, I’m proud of where I’ve gotten.

I mean, I wrote a short story I don’t want to burn on completion. That’s some success, right there.

I probably have at least one more draft of it to do, but finishing the second draft of “She Says Goodbye Tomorrow” basically means the last project from 2011, the last project not a part of The Plan, is done. Which isn’t to say that a ship won’t wreck into the plan and sink it tomorrow, but keeping on top of the short – and getting it done without hating it – means I’m at least starting things on track. This is good. This is very good.

As for the anthology, I don’t have a publication date, but when Rachel gets it out, I’ll let you know. Oh, who I am I kidding? I’ll be flogging the hell out of it for weeks before its release.  Until then, wish me happy re-writing.

It was a busy, busy month, but I managed to watch an awful lot of movies. I even had my first ever Movie Education With Mom. Let’s just get into things so we’re not here all day.

Zelig - Woody Allen’s mockumentary on the strange case of a human chameleon is funny, odd and extraordinarily well done.  The modern mockumentary is essentially a riff on Spinal Tap, with scenes of people ad libbing their talks to the camera and awkward moments the camera just happened to catch. Zelig is something else, more a PBS documentary built of old photos and snips of research footage than a Christoper Guest film. It’s meticulous, and it’s also really, really funny.

Harakiri - Japanese movies not made by Akira Kurosawa or Yasujiro Ozu tend to feel like filmed adaptations of theater more than films, and for long stretches Harakiri is no different. Luckily, it happens to be a pretty great piece of theater. A disgraced ronin appears at a lord’s house and begs for the right to commit seppuku in their forecourt. It seems, in these early days of the Shoganate, this has become a common way for disgraced samurai to extort charity from lords who don’t want the mess of a dead samurai in their home. What follows is the story of one lord’s cruel solution to this problem, and the vengeance he’s brought down on himself as a result. If you can take a bit of stodginess, this is pretty good.

Sixteen Candles - Every time I admit I haven’t seen a John Hughes teen comedy there’s a wail across my Twitter feed like nothing else. Then I admit that, until I started the Education that I’d only seen Ferris Bueller and, frankly, never liked it that much. Hughes’ teen films exist in some kind of alien alternate reality version of high school that doesn’t click with me at all. Like all Hughes movies, I found Sixteen Candles watchable but not extraordinary. It did have some great moments of Ringwald’s character getting family harassment over her growth into a woman that was honest and great. I can see why people liked this one, but I can barely even remember the plot at this point, myself.

Persona - Yes, yes, this is only the second Bergman film I’ve seen. No, admitting that on Twitter gets nowhere near the reaction the Hughes thing does. I…ok, so I’m glad I saw this, but I’m honestly not sure if I understood it. It opens with a surreal montage right out of  Un Chien Andalou, then settles into following a nurse and her patient. Her patient, an actress, has suddenly stopped speaking. Is she faking? Does she have some sort of trauma? The movie plays out as a psychological power struggle between the two women, lapsing occasionally back into the surreal at critical points.  I need to make watching more of Bergman’s films as a priority. I feel like I don’t get his language, yet, and it’s holind me back.

Nights of Cabiria - Fellini! How I love thee. Though, to be fair, I prefer later career, fantasist Fellini to early career, neorealist Fellini. Nights of Cabriria falls into the space between the two, with a plot out of his neorealist days and a style stretching towards what he’d develop into. Cabriria follows its eponymous heroine, a prostitue who we meet being nearly drowned ny her pimp/boyfriend when he robs her, as she floats past tragedy after tragedy. People have compared her to Chaplin’s Little Tramp, and that’s as good a comparison as any. Cabiria is sweet and hopeful no matter how many times she’s betrayed or hurt. There isn’t a ton of plot – that’s the neorealist influence, sadly – but the final shot, of a crying Cabiria wandering into a parade of musicians and slowly breaking into a smile, is so beautiful that it’s worth the entire film.

Le Samourai - I was griping about French New Wave films on Twitter when a friend told me to stop complaining until I’d seen Le Samourai. I like a challenge, so I immediately put it on the list and gave it a try. And? What a film. Cool, slick and confident, you can feel dozens of assassin films being born from this one. The plot is simple. An assassin slips up, gets seen, and spends the movie evading the cops and his former employers. The success is in the details, in its presentation and style. Here’s the thing, though. I really don’t think Jean-Pierre Melville is a French New Wave director so much as a director working in France during the New Wave. There’s a distinct difference in the texture of this film to say, Breathless or The 400 Blows, and that difference is exactly what I felt those films were lacking. Le Samourai is distant but not detached, cool but not empty. Unfortunately, that means I still admire the New Wave more than I like it. But Le Samourai? That I liked. Lots.

Another Woman - I began and ended the month with Woody Allen. I don’t typically watch multiple films by one filmmaker – or even in one style – in a given month, but I was at my mom’s baking and she suggested we give Another Woman a watch. Absolutely not one of his funny ones, Another Woman is about infidelity and emotional detachment. The cast is superb – especially Gina Rowlands as the lead – and the script is a work of perfect, quiet honesty. Rowlands plays a writer in a marriage gone cold, a marriage both committed adultery to begin. When relationships are born out of infidelity, can anything other than infidelity be expected? My mom spent the early part of the movie afraid she’d misremembered it as a good  (it starts a bit slow) but we spent the rest of the day talking it over as we baked. Highly, highly recommended.

Hey, everyone! Happy New Year! With the holidays wrapping up, I’m hoping I can scrape my life back together. Someone reminded me that I might have over-promised my goals this year, so I should probably get on that, like, immediately.

2012 is looking to be a fun year of film, and nothing has my little geek heart fluttering like The Raid. I love foreign action films – Ong Bak knocked my butt off – and seeing Indonesia getting in on the hard edged martial arts action scene excites the heck out of me. Just check this trailer out!

Warning: This is a red band trailer, which means it’s got some – ahem - violence. Like, some bloody, bullets and fists into heads kind of action. If it’s not your thing, be warned now. If it is, be warned that extreme awesome is afoot.