This our food supply.  There’s more to the right.  We won’t be able to restock apparently.

The restroom is to the rear of the gallery.  We spent part of our food budget on a Glade Pug-in unit that can’t really be used since there’s not an outlet in the restroom.  Apparently.

Lee sent me off on a break/walk to go find an RCA to BNC adapter.  I didn’t find one.  I didn’t find an electronics store.  I did find this, however:

An abandoned cat sanctuary in an abandoned bank lot.  I could smell the baking, rotting cat shit from the corner across the street.  Every inch of loose dirt was covered in feces.  There were kittens everywhere.  Someone had left them chicken wings coated in that Chinese orange sauce, but they hadn’t eaten them.  The kittens hung out behind the iron fence like lions in a zoo.  Pretty fun.  Super cute.

The editors are on edge about the powertooling next to the editing station and so am I.  I snapped at Carson for shaking some luon around.

Two (Sunday) days ago I drove around SF with lee after renting a truck. I woke up at my friend Jordan’s apartment that day. Lee and I walked from the loin to the truck rental place by CCA, so that would be 7th St. and 16thth St. I think. Lee and I stopped at Carol-Anne’s to get keys. We picked things up from Carson’s studio… and the popcorn maker, calendars from the printers, foam and so on. I don’t know who all to thank for helping us that day. For sure Skye went out of his way to pick things up so that I would not have to drive the big truck trough town too much.

Oh yeah, Christan Einfeldt the producer of Digital Tipping Point interviewed Lee and I on Saturday. It was the first inter view we have given for our project. He kindly captured all the footage from the interview and gave it to Skye on a harddrive the next day!
So that was one stop we didn’t have to make before taking the truck to Oakland to get beautiful hoddies from Alexandria’s studio. She made mine brown and I really like it. I think Terry made the concession stand? It looks awesome! Sky and Lee and I loaded the concession stand into the rental truck, tossed in some spare lumber and away I went down to LA.
Got to LA around midnight. Arther let me in and parked his car behind the truck so as to discourage the many looters living in his neighborhood (he lives in a nice neighborhood, so that was a joke about looters but for real that he parked his car behind the truck). I slept and had nightmares related to driving the truck.

the next day I left the house at the same time as Arthur. He was off to pick up Carson. I was off to the gallery. Parked the truck in front of the gallery as close as I could manage. Skye, Lee, Carson and I worked like leaf-cutter ants unloading the truck. Arthur was videoing us.
Once the truck was empty we headed to home depot to get scaffolding and a bunch of sheise.
We didn’t know how to get to the more reasonable aka less expensive lumber store so I called the place and gave a dim description of where I was, got directions and started driving. Of course since I was getting board and whatever I decided to start driving with out really looking at the map. We were going basically in the opposite direction for a while before we called Arthur with our location/desired destination. Arthur got us going the right way. I decided I would look at the map and that super good before driving anywhere in the future.
Lumber store was awesome. Only about a foot clearance on each side of the truck box … max. We loaded 40 2×6 and 30 sheets of lewon with the help of the lumber yard staff.
On the way back to the gallery I missed a turn and decided to pull into an epty parking lot to turn around. I may or may not have come close to crushing a little white car driving the opposite direction while turning into the parking lot.
Carson, Lee and I unladed the truck.
Alex showed up at the gallery and Skye. Lee and Carson helped them unload. Then we all went to Amy’s to drop things off. She wasn’t home yet so all of us excluding Lee went to go buy refreshments. I learned that the Clamato beer they sell in the store tastes just like the tomatoe seasoning packets that you get with the ramen noodles.
Amy got back while we were having our make shift tailgate party and invited us all in.
Skye and I stayed at Amy’s. The truck was parked outside and needed to be returned by 8:31am the next day a few miles from her place.
We watched a bit of All that Jazz until Amy noticed I was sleeping, Skye was asleep as well. Amy gave me a turkey burger and Skye offered his food as well before the movie. That was really nice of them as I had eaten all my snacks.
So today Amy and I gassed up the truck and returned it to the rental place. And now I’m here with Carson and Alex setting things up.
Carson is building the confession booth and Alex is setting up the basement office.
The others are at the store I think. My eye is a little puffy and I think maybe infected. tty world!

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.

Actually this whole weekend has been a little unnerving. One of the primary investors is being hit hard by the current economy, and may be pulling out of the project. Which, with three and a half weeks to go, will introduce a serious complication. LOL
Of course, that was always one of the main points of 23E Studios, to devise a project so ambitious it could only fail, and then find a way to make it succeed.
I meet with that investor today to talk.
Then I begin improvising. As deflated as I feel fearing this is coming, I must say I’m also a little excited. Up until now everything has gone so smoothly…
Too smoothly. The film was going to be boring.

Another aspect of the unnerving weekend was that our potential architectural model maker leaves town on the 22nd of June. And he can’t give me a bid, let alone start building, until I get some measurements from a crew member, who hasn’t had a chance to get the measurements from her studio. So, over the last few days I’ve been watching the narrow window of opportunity for the architectural model close. Which, given that this afternoon we could conceivably lose half of the remaining money I was expecting, is probably for the best.

Our press release and other promotional materials that were supposed to be finished this weekend, are all tardy. So, those deadlines have been on my mind a lot, too.

Having said that, we’re now in a place where the project is simply unstoppable. And this is really the part of the project that is most thrilling for me, being caught up in something that is beyond control. The next few weeks can be nothing but pure improvisation. I get to live my art the way I play my music, by the seat of my pants; constantly adjusting to my partners and peers; sometimes leading or throwing out a riff we all ride, other times having to change direction on a dime when they introduce a new line. It’s probably a poor metaphor, but that is one of the ways I think about Disembody - it is one of my compositions, but the sound is spread out over the course of a year, impossible to hear with human senses and on a human time-scale.

I used to compose works that required performing acts of sound throughout a day or a week or a year. All the while recording my life, sometimes around the clock for weeks. Those recordings were then compressed to discover the rhythms inherent, or to find the composition of the sound acts within the music of my life.
Disembody is very much like one of those compositions, except this time our final product is a film. And this time it is a piece of music improvised by an orchestra of my closest friends, as opposed to being a solo work within the orchestra of my life.

Disembody is a unique feeling. There’s a wonderfully complex and seemingly contradictory feeling I get (and I think many performers do) before playing music with people. The mix of fear and excitement, feeding each other, hopped-up nerves. It’s a great feeling, really addictive.
Normally I have that feeling in the hours leading up to a performance or a studio session.
But for the last few weeks I’ve had that sensation coursing though my days and nights. It comes in waves. But I’ve never had it so regularly, so frequently before.
Except maybe on my first oRSo tour, when I’d get it before the show each night.
Except now I get it at the most random times. It’s strange how trepidation and fear can be so addictive and thrilling.

Anyway, the past three days I’ve experienced a very heightened sense of deflation mixed with the thrill of having to overcome a challenge.

So, having talked about the things not going right, let me mention that they are greatly outweighed by things going right. Stel and I met last night and he is bringing a couple of eight port gigabit switches so we can set up a solid network in the gallery. As well, he’s bringing several wireless access points. And he came up with a simple and reliable way to pull off the ending of the film, that doesn’t require a video switcher.
Phil and Libby are both raring to go on the project now that their wedding is behind them.
All of my crew members blow me away with their dedication and skills. Erin and Jonny have worked tirelessly on the website (our main promotional tool), posters, the confessional, screen printing, the arcade and a ton of other aspects; Amy is bending over backwards trying to help find funding and food donations; Carol-Anne and Keturah are spending hundreds of hours creating the interior design and all of its elements; Carson and Ted and David are all working on the build out; marcella, elise, Alex and Skye are pooling their resources to fashion an incredibly organized and efficient shoot; Hanif, Han and Ote are all working to make the promotion and conceit of the project as broad but focused as possible. Janet and Arthur are going far beyond the call of nepotism in accommodating all my demands and desires. And Susan, of course, is simply mind-blowing in her openness to letting us do whatever we dream up.

So, all in all, despite missed deadlines and a few setbacks, I find my spirits remain high. I’ll weigh in again after I meet with the investor. Maybe I’ll even have news on how we’ll need to rejigger the project to accommodate such a substantial loss.