I’m on the phone with Jonny as I write, and we have decided on the candies for the Morgellon theater!

Bottle Caps
Dots
Good N Plenty
Hot Tamales
Lemonheads
Mike & Ike
Skittles
SweeTarts

all screen printed in Omaha;

Whoppers
Sugar Babies
Milk Duds
Junior Mints

we will purchase and print in LA to try and avoid meltage of the delicious, delicious chocolate.

We’re also working out the design of the ephemera page.

Last night I visited Susan at Fringe. Jake was there. Sunday I’ll probably pick up the model from him.
We three spoke at length about the ceiling. Yesterday was all about the ceiling.
I think it’s safe to say that I was overthinking the ceiling, and that we were being overcautious.
With the ceiling panels being finished by Ket-Anne and Carol-Anne, we’re realizing that each four foot by eight foot section weighs maybe 10 or 15 pounds. And that hardly requires building a truss support structure sunk into the concrete walls of Fringe at multiple points and levels. Rather, it is perfectly safe to suspend it from the actual ceiling of Fringe, if we secure each panel to the plaster and lathe ceiling at numerous points.
The chandeliers will be attached to joists above the plaster and lathe. Sadly, Susan doesn’t think the joists are spaced regularly enough to use to install our ceiling.
Regardless, David and I are both very confident that we can safely affix our ceiling to Fringe’s, without spending several days building a support structure of steel and cables.

While at Fringe, Amy and I made a new set of measurements. Jake mentioned that he remeasured everything before doing the model because the measurements I gave him were so clearly cockamamie. I sent his dims along to David along with my own.

And finally, I received the news late last night that my mother is out of the hospital.
I have a deep abiding distrust of the medical establishment. Like everyone else in the world at this point.
My mother’s experience yesterday didn’t raise my opinion of the system.
Once she arrived for the emergency surgery, the surgeon took one look at her and sent her home. Turns out he hadn’t noted her age when reviewing her charts. And the surgery he proposed is so invasive they won’t do it on the elderly.
To top it off, he told her that this particular illness can also be relieved with a dietary change, but that’s always the secondary option after surgery. Not apparently because it’s a lesser alternative, just because they really like performing surgery.

Whatever, I suppose if I knew how to perform surgery I would want to do so, as well. As it is, instead I know how to create big, purposeless extravaganzas with no rhyme nor reason, and especially no social, political nor philosophical impact, so that’s what I do.
I’ll bet there is a dietary solution to the art world’s ills, as well. Maybe an artist’s diet book will be part of Portal Seven…

I do have two self-help books slated for 2009 as part of Portal Seven, and obvs I was never going to do just two because I don’t trust the number two. Three is a much better number for publishing.

On Monday night Kathryn and I had a great evening with Hanif. We talked for hours about collectivity in art, and alternative models of production/creativity. Like him, I have great faith in the digital. He’s putting the finishing touches on the catalogue essay for the show this week. I expect to print the catalogue next week. And start distributing them around LA and SF (and Chicago and Tokyo and Omaha and Taipei and New York and…) by mid-week next.

I edited and uploaded a slew of new clips to the archive Monday:

Some build meetings are really just excuses to drink,

Three clips about financing and my friend Stel, who swept in to help me out when things looked strange
Payback
Details
Money

Four clips from the first meeting with our lawyer, wherein I explain that
investors shouldn’t sue me
despite the fact that investors might lose every penny
I intend to change the art world forever
artists don’t actually make anything

Tuesday I met with my friend Steven Goldstine and he put me in touch with a number of his contacts in LA, including David Wilson of the Museum of Jurassic Technology and Christopher Coppola of Project Accessible Hollywood.

Tuesday night I caught a rideshare from Craigslist, getting in to LA around 4am.

I spent Wednesday getting caught up. A lot of emails about promotion. I’m rewriting the blurb for email promotion. I finalized the show times. I also updated the website a bit. Jonny has been going gangbusters on the ephemera page and gallery.
Erin has begun the calendar/catalogue.

I also spoke to Jordan Biren yesterday. Which was great. I’ve been hearing great things about him from so many people. It was a real pleasure to talk to him about the project.

I picked up the posters today, and spoke with David, our contractor, at length. Tonight Amy and I will go measure Fringe for what I hope is the final time.

We’re 16 days to the opening, and 12 days to the first install day. I’m oscillating between exhaustion and excitement pretty much all day every day.

Oh, and I guess I should mention this cuz it could potentially play into the film, my sister called to tell me that the crew sweatshirts may not be ready for the opening because she has to fly out to Oregon where our biological mother was rushed into emergency surgery today. As it stands, Ali, my sister, says it appears she has some bizarrely strange illness. I’ll provide more details when I have them, but for now, that’s all I know.

Yeah, I was supposed to update you a few days ago. Traveling and a busy week have kept me offline a bit.

The good news is that the investor concern of my last post was resolved. The investor is Stel, a dear friend of many years. He was hoping to have money available to invest. Money, that is, on top of his labor the week of the show, his travel expenses which he’s paying himself, and tons of equipment (including the projector and multiple computers) which he is loaning. However, he does not have ready cash right now.

What he does have is a line of credit he has made available to me. This is pretty frakking dodgy territory, borrowing from a friend to make this happen, but it’s necessary. And Stel and I are both confident we can do this without wrecking the friendship. So…

Actually, knowing that the money to pull the project off is coming this way is all the more pressure to stay within budget. Because the last thing I want is to have to ask Stel for more than we discussed already.

Good news on that front, Jake Lee High, a frakking genius artist, programmer and architect, and close friend of Susan’s, is making an architectural model for us for $1000 this weekend. How amazing is that!
This morning I picked up video screens from Elise, and overnighted them to Jake. He is going to build the screen into the model so that it shows the actual film. RAD!!!!
And all affordably!

Also, through my friend Travis Meinolf, I was pointed at the fine folks at Howard Quinn. They do the newsprint calendars for a few theaters in SF. And they will do our theater calendar for a great price. So, now we have that lined up. Sooo exciting.
Of course, exciting for me, less so perhaps for Erin, because she just finished two amazing posters and two amazing postcards, and now I’m throwing an 8 page fold out calendar/catalogue at her.

Plus she is teaching Jonny how to screen print so he can make the candy boxes. Which, of course, she’ll be helping design…

Jonny is also working on our arcade game. And found two other arcade games he is dying to include in the arcade. So the current plan is to try and build three 3/4 size arcade machines with these three games.
LOL
We’re fools in the best way!
Jonny also has the cameras streaming and the timelapse working. And I understand he’s got the switch for the confessional smoothed out, too.

Amy’s mom sent out an email today asking her many contacts in the film world to consider investing in or making in kind donations to the project. So hopefully that will lead to some good news.

The last two days I’ve spent the afternoons printing out posters for Disembody. And a poster for another 23E production, KR-3.

This morning I had a long phone meeting with our lead contractor, David. And tonight I meet with Ted, our architectural designer. Sadly, between us we can not seem to find a single hour when we’re all free to meet together. This is super fucking lame. But it is a fact. So, I’m meeting with folks individually and trying to coordinate. I’d say it makes every aspect of the build at this stage take about four or five times as time consuming.
Good thing this is my entire life.

Stel and Alex and Jonny are currently talking about the network situ and how we’ll do the final editing of the film during the actual premiere. I think Stel came up with a very graceful solution.

Last night Alex and Carol-Anne and Carson and Keturah and I met. The tiles are looking amazing. The ceiling is going to be quite something. The chandeliers arrived, and we’ll see them Saturday. We’ll also be picking up a bunch of molding for the ceiling Saturday.

Kathryn finished the body of my usher’s jacket last week. And we did a final fitting the other day. I think the sleeves went on yesterday, so I may have a complete uniform to show you by week’s end!

So, yup, busy. Exactly the way it should be with less than three weeks to the start of install.