I swung by the Museum of Jurassic Technology to meet David Wilson today, but sadly he’s out of town right now. Maybe next week. David is a friend of a friend, and his museum is one of my favorite places on Earth. I first went there in 1997 when my friends Bobby and Monica were in town to play a show. In the afternoon, before driving down to their show in San Diego they insisted we go to the MJT.
It blew me away.
My friend Steven suggested last week I meet David and see if he has any leads on the few remaining items we’re looking for. I jumped at the opportunity.

After that I went to the Hollywood Rubber Stamp Company, which has to be one of the coolest places in LA. It’s a shop where they make rubber stamps. You drop in with your files and they make a stamp very affordably in a day or so. It’s full of inks and pads and stamps and machines galore for making every size stamp imaginable.
They have a very friendly cat, as well.
Oh, and their website couldn’t be more misleading. It’s all corporate and sterile. But the actual offices are a complete inky, dark, breezy mess. You can see the machines in the back, everything is covered in stamps. It feels like they’ve been in the same place for a hundred years, and never really updated or cleaned anything. It’s fabulous, not dirty, cluttered fabulosity.

Then I went by Home Depot. I found exactly the type of doors we need for the confessional and for the swinging doors into the theater. And fortunately they’re inexpensive, $22 apiece. That’s good because, as of this morning, we’re probably close to $2,000 over budget. There are a lot of little things I missed and that are catching up with me.

I spent a couple hours with Susan at Fringe going over details. We also looked at the ad in Artillery. It is great.
We walked over to the parking lot on Hill St where a lot of the artists and gallerists park and spoke to Jose about parking arrangements. We’re renting 5 spaces for two weeks while the show goes up. We’ll have reserved spots. So frakking Hollywood, YES!

Then another Home Depot, this time to try and reserve scaffolding for the month of July. No doing, they don’t take reservations. We just have to get lucky. Which doesn’t sound good, because the guy said one of their two fifteen foot scaffoldings is busted.
We may have to go to Burbank or Pasadena to get scaffolding. And even there it’s a throw of the dice whether they’ll have it in stock when we need it.
I’ll start looking into alternate solutions to Home Depot tomorrow.

I dropped by both Bonelli Contemporary and Telic galleries. Both have shows with extensive public events, much like Disembody, in July. So I offered them free ads in our calendar. I reckon the more things people read about happening in Chinatown on Fridays and Saturdays, the better the turn out for all of our shows.
Plus it’s nice to be thoughtful and cooperative, imho.

Finally, I spoke with Jonny and Erin at length today. We’re getting candy worked out. They made a trip to Wal-Mart and bought them out of the candies we want.
Erin started the calendar this evening.
Jonny got the ephemera page looking all sweet and sexy.
And they got the joysticks for the arcades. Which are going to F*&%ing ROCK!
Oh, and all that during a hail storm that trashed Omaha and knocked the electricity out everywhere but inside Wal-Mart, apparently. Because Wal-mart has some special deal with the devil where they buy bulk evil and he keeps the lights on, Armageddon or no.
Here’s an amazingly strange rave video about it.
Here’s a news article.

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.

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.