Monday Alex and Keturah and I met at Danang to go over the budget for the interior design and the production facility and recording studio. It was a good meeting. They pointed out a number of necessary items I had missed. And gave me some concrete costs on chandeliers and other elements.



Tuesday I met with Marcella and Bonnie Banks. Mostly we looked at mp3s I got from Phil. Bonnie also loaned me a couple more vhs and another book. Earlier I was with Skye. We copied over all the footage thus far shot for the Making Of. I left him with two 500GB drives, one each for him and elise. They can start familiarizing themselves with the footage we have, the stories that might be developing, etcetera.

Skye and I also talked about art and film.

Before that I was with my friend LaTasha, a video artist, musician, writer and performer who is movign back home to NYC. We watched some docu of her performances from last year. She’s super mega-talented. I really want to find a way to get her involved in one of my East Coast projects next year.

I spoke with Amy, as well, and she’s going to help me get the food donated to feed everybody. Ali gave me some advice on that today. I’m also going to see if we can get some of the materials donated for building.

I started the day with our fabulous seamstress, Kathryn. She picked up the lining for the usher/usherette uniforms. They are going to be spectacular. I knocked out an email to Chantal to get her measurements. We have Jack’s (and I got her ticket, too).

Tomorrow I am going to try and hunt down AH and SG, two potential investors. And maybe SL, who is definitely not a potential investor, but is always good for great advice.

Jonny is coming out to SF this weekend and he and I will drive down to LA together Sunday.

Erin is working towards getting the ephemera page up, and getting ads and posters ready.

Ote is also starting the poster for Japanese distribution, which is great.

Finally, Keturah pointed me towards a potential screen printer for the candy boxes. Her art is great, so if she can do it, we’ll be in really good hands.

Daniel, my dear friend, and an investor in Disembody, arranged for a friend of his to read my stars and send me a chart recently, as we saw in an earlier post. He then thought maybe he could do some tarot readings for crew. Right now that looks unlikely, as he won’t be down South any time soon, but he did do a quick three card reading specific to Disembody for me last night over the internet.

“Okay, first the 10 of wands. It has been an almost overwhelming burden to undertake, but made lighter by spreading the work around and delegating. Next the 5 of wands. Lots of disputation, argumentation going on. But lively discussion and interaction, the nature of a rough and tumble game (like say basketball or a ballroom dance.) Lastly the 9 of swords. Ouch. Things will seem nightmarish. I could elaborate more on that, but it wouldn’t be pretty.

“Can you see why I’m deciding to give up doing tarot readings? Who wants to hear shit like that? I don’t think it is an accurate spread anyway. Disembody will be a triumph. Nighmarishness is always in the head, just remember that. It has no objective reality.

“I pulled one specifically for the premiere. It is the 10 of cups. Love, joy, fulfillment.

“Its all what you decide it is anyway.

“Dan”

Yeah, I think that is about right. The week we build, between the opening and the premiere should be nightmarish. I mean, the film will kind of suck if it isn’t, right? Where’s the dramatic arc, the tension, the insurmountable challenge overcome, if that week isn’t a nightmare? The nightmare will make the joy and fulfillment of the premiere all the sweeter.

LOL

Today Amy and I went and got the new investor pamphlets made. And I did a bit more work on drumming up funds.

And I got contracts from Janet to go over. I also bought three external hard drives to load with video for Skye, elise and Jonny. Skye and elise are familiarizing themselves with the footage so that if moments of the film need exposition, they can find the relevant Making Of footage quickly. Jonny needs the footage to set up our internet archive library.

Fortunately, I had Jonny on the phone as I was beginning the transfer process. I have been leaving all my drives formatted as Fat 32 so that they will move between Mac and PC (I am on PC, the editors are on Mac). This however is likely my hard drive problem, as Fat 32 is unstable with files over 4GB according to Jonny. Certainly, the drives won’t allow transfers of data over that size, so…

Now I’m editing the footage that is larger than that, and rendering it down to manageable chunks for transfer to a drive I’ll give Skye. He’ll then format one of the other new drives for Mac; transfer the footage from the Fat 32 drive; format a second drive and then transfer the footage over for elise. And from here on out, I’ll just send them every tape and file without capturing it onto my PC. The Fat 32 drive we’ll give Jonny and he’ll prolly copy the footage and then reformat the drive to NTFS.

Anyway, as it stands, I think I’ve salvaged all of the footage up to July 6. Everything from this last trip to SF may be gone. I suspect so, anyway. I think about 20 GB of material may be gone, if not forever, for awhile, cuz we can’t afford data recovery just for those meetings. All in all, it’s about 4 TB of drives down. This project was supposed to cost me everything, so I guess, careful what you wish for…

But, let’s close on a cheery note, Jonny is coming to LA for the first week of June!!!! Erin’s loss will be Disembody’s gain! Woohoo! We are going to be productive like nobody’s business! You don’t know Jonny, if you did, you’d know it’s possible we’ll just make the whole film that week. If Erin could come with, hell, we could make the film and all the ephemera, too!

Oh fuck, I was supposed to call Erin earlier this evening…

Wednesday morning the 14th I met Skye and elise, the editors of Disembody, for 4 hours of rough footage viewing. I had collected what I thought were the strongest 8 or so hours of the first 30 or 40 hours of “making of” footage. We watched a fair amount of that footage. And for the first time Skye felt hope. Or so he said. All along he’s feared that there would be no story for him to work with. But after watching this footage, starting back with my first meeting with Ted, he felt like he could not only see story arcs, but character development, that we definitely have all the makings of a fascinating documentary/story. Which was incredibly relieving.



from Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 5

Amy, Carol-Anne, Alex, Keturah, Lee, Skye. Photo by elise

Aah, these are the days I love most, a non-stop rushing about between elements of the project. Disembodied from 7am to midnight. That’s the most fulfilling thing in life. Here’s a blog entry I scrawled in a notebook first thing that morning:

“The big news this morning was a call from David, our primary builder, who did a cursory schedule for the build, that unfortunately lead him to the conclusion that on top of one week building in the gallery, we need two weeks planning and building in advance. David is one of the handful of people whose salaries are not deferred, so this presents a large problem.

This evening he and I will meet with Ted, Carson, Alex, Carol-Anne and Keturah for a build meeting to see where we are and what needs to be done and such.

Afterwards, he and I will meet separately to figure out how to move forward. Essentially I think David won’t be able to pre-fab the concession stand and bleachers, but instead will simply manage the seven day build in the gallery.

I suspect Carson and I, or Terry and I will build those. David will be entirely focused on the walls and ceiling.”

So, yeah, basically, that’s what happened. We met. David and I had a 9pm dinner and caught up, he’s wicked busy, and he told me he can’t do the pre-fab work. Fortunately I had been kind of expecting this, so I had someone else in mind to make those pieces. My sister’s partner, Terry is a fabulous fabricator, and had been wondering how he would be nepotized into this thing. He found out, he’s now pre-fabbing the bleachers, concession stand and light-up concession menus for the lobby.

Before David and I had our late dinner, we met with Carson, Alex, Carol-Anne and Keturah-Anne (Ted couldn’t make it). This was a great meeting. We concluded that we just could not create a movie screen that people could walk through. My original vision was an actual screen, slit up the center. But that was always going to be too expensive. So, we toyed with doors that might be hidden enough, but I was never satisfied with any of them. I don’t want a door-rectangle on the painted screen of a wall. A tear in the screen I could live with. So, we dropped the idea of the audience emerging from the screen. Sad. But it simplified the build immensely.

If there is no screen emergence, then there is no need for a stage or a stairway or a hallway. So, we re-imagined the space. First off, now we are building just one wall. It will have the concession stand dead center on it in the lobby. To either side will be a door which leads into the theater. The theater will just be the screen and the bleachers. Though, still playing with the idea of a theater, when you enter the theater you initially see not the screen, but the bleachers and other audience members.

This is a big change. But a good one. It takes a lot of weight off.

Also at the meeting, Carl-Anne and Keturah really explained the interior design to David and Carson and we all got on the same page about what the ceiling and other design elements will entail. David had drawn up plan for installing the ceiling and chandeliers. We are going to install a metal frame on the ceiling to support the weight of our design. The lathe and plaster ceiling just didn’t inspire confidence for hanging so much beauty over people’s heads.

Before the build meeting I met with Yosh Han , the amazing perfumer who worked with me on the Henry Wing. We created the new scent, Disembody, for this project. It is very different from Archival, our first scent. Disembody is a very sweet, flowery scent. A true perfume, as opposed to the smell of memory that Archival embodied. I think we’ll easily sell out of the 23 bottles of Disembody that will be available.

After my first call from David, I met with Skye and elise. We looked at some rough footage and talked about ideas for how to edit the film in such a short time. We talked about how we’ll need to keep all of the files hyper-organized, and develop with Amy and Marcella a very concise and direct method of logging.