Lee and I have been working in our garoffice. Lee booby trapped the place so I think we are pretty safe as far as; nobody can attack us. Though I don’t know if we are safe from ourselves. Earlier today while I was setting the last of our traps I realized I needed to use the rest room. Unfortunately the configuration of the traps did not lend itself to easy exit. We had planned more for the ability to stay holed up for weeks and less about basic sanitation needs.
We had to improvise in a hurry. Lee said “there is nothing we can’t save”. He told me later that he was talking metaphorically as in “we can save this situation”. At the time, due to having my mind on storing up provisions… I got the completely wrong meaning out of “there is nothing we can’t save”… I thought he meant “there is nothing we can’t store and make use of later” … like most of our footage so far.
I experienced my first ever video conference call with Lee and Jonny today. It was much less creepy than I expected. I hope it all got recorded so that everyone may watch Jonny’s special effects demos, Lee’s Borg-style headset and my continuous consumption of tea and olives. Talking to Lee for a bit got me excited to do some more work, namely these things:
ephemera section on the site
postcard
ads for magazines
poster(s)
catalogue
P.S. I just realized today (while, and because of, talking with Lee and Jonny) that it’s actually not that hard to post a blog for Disembody. Even if I only post this one blog entry, I think it’s better than zero. So, maybe that’s something everyone can try.
Lee, Erin and I had a meeting via skype. It was pretty rad. Kathryn had a cameo at the halfway mark, I asked about the weather in SF. Because of the meeting I had to stop playing donkey kong for a little while, but it was worth it for sure. Erin and I both have projects to work on. My list looks some thing like:
test confession booth
check out flex book / media catalog
test 4 streaming webcams
test 2 time-laps cameras
setup online media hosting
install reference wiki
The confession booth gizmo is basically built. But I think I should test it a bit more over the next week. Lee and I talked about setting up a media wiki. Lee mentioned it might be a good place to keep track of all of our reference materials. Anything we are using as inspiration etc would get mentioned in the wiki.
Our meeting was super fun and I hope everyone gets a chance to be a part of a video conference at some point in their life.
“A symbol is a layer of concrete we paste onto a thing when we’re bored with the thing itself. I’m satisfied that the rusty horseshoe in my dream is a beautiful creature of iron and oxygen.” - Paul McCurdy
So I have finally come to terms with this beautiful project and have finally gotten someone to realize that they are the only person to really fulfill the role of the director. I have to admit it was a little strange coming into a project that had already had weeks of planning and effort nurturing the foundation. I thought I was aligned and that if I wasn’t, I could find a nice middle ground. But the truth is, the deeper I got into this Disembody project, the more I knew that I could never really flesh it out the way it should be. This project is in Lee’s head, and I’m sure he has been sending me psychic messages all Svengali-like, but my mind is impenetrable. And he is no Svengali. lol - Although that would excite me if that were the case and like the recent news of the hypnotist running around Italy hypnotizing cashiers and stealing their money, that Lee was secretly hypnotizing us to go against our own impulses to follow his demented grand scheme.
I kid! No, this is Lee’s baby, and he has been playing hot potato with it. I’m not sure why, maybe he was hoping that this gallery space would be more entertaining if he followed MTV’s Real World sensibilities and created pressure cooker environments and filled it with pure chaos. Or maybe he was hoping to secretly re-create Peter Watkin’s “Punishment Park” . (You have no idea how demented this guy is! I’m talking about Lee not Peter Watkins. haha!). I can’t imagine this thing not being run by Lee. In fact, technically, Lee is already running things. He as assembled a super talented group of people that want to fully and maybe even blindly support him and assemble his idea. So I plan on taking a backseat and will be co-editing the film with Elise as originally planned. I hope she has enough room on her Hawaii chair for me? I mean since the editors will be working in the dungeon (I’m sure I heard Lee refer to it as that once), we should at least get the Hawaii chair!
P.S. Lee! don’t worry! If you are looking for chaos - you have no idea what me and Elise will potentially do to the final scene - think last episode of Twin Peaks!
