Han writes from Cannes:

“films we’ve acquired at cannes so far:
Entre les murs (the palme d’or winner)
La vie moderne (Modern Life, Raymond Depardon’s beautiful and poetic doc)
Mermaid (the Russian Amelie, Sundance Best Director 2008)

“the post-cannes shit is killing me.”

And in other news, I sold De Chirurgie, the antique book that an investor gifted us. It went for $1,000, which was very exciting at first this morning, but then I went to Excel to add that to the raised budget section and saw that I already had it in there for that amount, on the assumption that it would sell for no less than $1,000. So, well, that part of the budget is now officially covered, not just wishful thinking, but it doesn’t resolve my issue with the additional moneys Alex and Keturah added to the budget last week.

LOL

Marcella and I had a good day yesterday.

Jonny got in to SF last night. We’re about to meet for breakfast and plan out our weekend here. Then tomorrow we drive down to LA.

Tonight we’re meeting some of the SF crew to hang out. I might go over to Berkeley early to make a model of the space out of cardboard. Susan found a model maker it appears. Now I need to get him detailed views and plans. This model will be the first move towards that.

Jonny and I also hope to make it over to The Headlands Center for the Arts to meet David, who has a residency over there right now.

And I finished Jared Diamond’s Collapse a couple days ago. I’m re-reading Postproduction by Nicolas Bourriaud.

Today I’m at Marcella’s selling books and jewelry. I have a handful of art books I kept back when I got rid of all my stuff. We’re putting most of them on Marcella’s Amazon store. Others we’re putting on her ebay.

The jewelry I received from my mom years ago. She went on a QVC credit card binge for awhile. I’ve given most of it away to friends, lovers and children over the years. But I still have a few pieces. Of those I’ll sell a couple to help pay for Disembody.

Below are jpegs and links to the items in case you reading this want to support us indirectly…

Nobuyoshi Araki, Tokyo - Marketplace of Emotions

Francis Bacon - Portraits et Autoportraits

Irina Ionesco - Nudes

Jeff Koons - SFMOMA Catalogue

Lorenzo Lotto by Jacques Bonnett

Odd Nerdum - Paintings

Handbook of Rubber Bonding (this it turns out is the most valuable of these, selling for $250 on Amazon used. Here’s hoping we get close to that.)

Shingu - Message from Nature

Ralph Steadman - Scar Strangled Banger

Thierry Mugler - FashionFetishFantasy

Joel-Peter Witkin - Joel-Peter Witkin

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…