It’s not final, because not all of the crew has weighed in, but I’m really excited that we might name the theater

The Morgellon

What a great name for a theater.

I was brainstorming names with Skye and Elise today and we came up with that. It’s frakkin’ sexy is what it is.

S&E showed me a couple of rough edits they made from the Making Of footage. Okay, yeah, I’m almost always excited, I know, but seriously, they looked so good. And not just because I think this project kicks ass.

Or maybe just because I think this project is really exciting.
I don’t know.

In good news, my friend Mik mentioned to me that he thought his girlfriend, my friend Adi, had a full size popcorn machine. And indeed we may be digging that out of storage come July 6 or 7 to drive down to LA and install in The Morgellon. Sweet!

I met with investors yesterday and today. I’ve begun collecting money, which is cool. Of course, I’ve begun spending it, too. Jake got a check for $1000 today for the architectural model. And I spent almost $400 on materials for Carol-Anne’s and Keturah’s ceiling. I spent $70 Fed Ex’ing screens to Jake (and of course Fed Ex delivered them several hours later than promised and paid for.) Another $100 went to Alex to buy DV tape. Etc.

But we’re still unbelievably close to our budget. I can’t believe that every time I do the budget it evens out one way or another.

Jonny is working on the arcades, he just sent me an invoice for the joysticks. Our theater is going to so kick-ass. Popcorn, candy, soda, and an arcade. Hell, we’re gonna have trouble getting people into the theater to watch the film our lobby will be so cool.

Speaking of which Kathryn put the sleeves on my usher uniform last night. She’s making pants next. Jack and I are going to look so good in our matching outfits.

My main concern at this point is the ceiling. We’re three weeks out and it is simply impossible to have a meeting where Ted or David can make it. Both canceled on Thursday, our final build meeting. I spent an hour and a half on the phone with David that morning. And twenty minutes with Ted that night. As it stands I think it’s safe to say they have adopted antithetical opinions as to how the ceiling is best installed. I suspect the hammer waiting to fall in my future is the installation of the ceiling, as we still have no plan and no budget estimate for it. And I’ve decided to re-measure everything the day I get back to L.A., Weds.
LOL
Every stereotype you hear about working in the building industry it turns out is true. Even in a small gallery when installing a temporary wall and drop ceiling.

Tomorrow I meet with Ali and Terry to go over plans for the concession stand. Which I haven’t yet drawn up or figured out. So, obvs every stereotype you hear about artists and musicians is likely true, as well.

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.

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.