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.

Two boxes of clothes arrived yesterday at the 23E sweatshop on the Oregon coast.

We are very excited about this. It now appears certain that our concession stand will feature at least 23 pieces of clothing, each hand embroidered with our logo. Well, I think. As with most aspects of the project, I’ve tried to leave open my request so that the embroider can create something that is as exciting for me to see as everyone else.

I can say she has the logos for both 23E and Disembody. So I imagine they’ll be a part of what we get back.

We also expect to have rings and broaches for sale at the concession stand. I am very excited about these. If the people who are definitely supplying goods had websites, I’d link through to them. But they don’t. What kind of sweatshop has a website?

We’ll also have a perfume available. With luck, we’ll have a few. The perfumer, Yosh Han, has been a part of the project since conception. She created the scent for The MVM work, The Henry Wing, last year. It was a fabulous scent. We are super excited that we are working with her again.

before we get to the good news,

I have not heard from Airason, the architect. I’ll call him tomorrow. I can’t believe the fucking architecture drawings are what I’m getting stuck on. So fucking amazing. Did not see that coming.

I left a message for Laris today. He’s a friend of a friend and I’m hoping he has advice on PR and marketing in LA. He’s Philly based but is the founder of Arthur magazine. He may have some good LA connex. I’m hoping he can point me in the right direction for getting a PR machine going in LA.

The big news is still secretish. A friend of a friend who works for an art video distributor heard about Disembody. And requested info. So my friend asked me for a proper proposal for them. Which means I have to put that together. But it’s pretty dang cool to think we might be considered by this place. They handle much bigger folks than I, so I don’t have high expectations. But, on the other hand, my luck tends to be unrivaled in most things, which is how I pull these sorts of large scale projects off, so who knows, maybe in a month or two I can tell you all about our big distribution deal.

For now, Chad, my director, and Janet, my lawyer, and Arthur, my father, are looking at the existing proposal to offer advice on how to impress big hoodoos in LA.

I think that’s all the progress in the past few days.

Oh, wait, I spoke with Yosh about specialty bottles for the scents. I’m probably going to have all the bottles blown individually for the concession stand. Vime for Men and Vime for Women and the theater scent for the architectural models will all be in handmade bottles.

The budget just keeps going up.

I love this project.

No the pictures aren’t relevant. But a blog with pictures is more enticing, isn’t it?

Okay, so we migrated to linux. That took longer than anticipated. Plus we were thrown out of our offices by our hateful landlord. It’s temporary, 4-6 weeks they claim. But it’s insanely disruptive to get 24 hours notice before being put on the street. Since they bought the building a few years ago they’ve done nothing but lie and scheme and sabotage tenants at every opportunity. I really never have encountered humans as scummy as these folks. Weird, because it’s not impersonal. The landlord comes over to the building and treats people like shit. He seems to really hate having people in his buildings.
Anyway, sorry, we’ve been incredibly disrupted by this, so we’re a touch angry. We’ve had to move a video studio, a recording studio, a photo studio, our offices and all of our computers for designing databases and websites and other things we do. Our creative world and our professional world were both put on the street until December or January.

Anyway, now we need to catch you up on Disembody.

Janet, our lawyer, is working on the contracts. The hitch there right now is that Susan, the gallerist, isn’t able to discuss the gallery’s end of the deal until December. So, we’re moving ahead with a 1/50th of the gross for every $1000 invested. Essentially we’re gambling that she’ll go for the offer we made her. This whole project is a gamble on human interactions, and ultimately that’s the point of it anyway: making art together, there is no single artist creating Disembody, it is a collaborative work between many people. (We would argue, and will in a later post, that all art is collaborative, but that aspect of the business is hidden away for mythological and commercial reasons)

We can’t think of a better way to make art than by working with a slew of amazing people; finding ways to involve everyone so that an entire roomful of people feel exhilarated about what they’ve made together.

Yosh, our perfumist, is thinking about a scent for the architectural models. Something popcorny and sweet. We’re very excited. Each architectural model will be a working theater in scale. It will play the film. And it will smell like a theater. So faboo.

As well, we’ll be introducing two new scents at the concession stand of the actual theater:
Vime for Men, Disembody
Vime for Women, Disembody
Each will be available in a limited edition of, umm, we’re not sure how many, somewhere between 13 and 23, we suspect.
They will be captured in handmade bottles. We’re pursuing a friend of The MVM to make the bottles. If he can do it, they will be fabulous. If not, we’ll find someone else and they will be fabulous.

Time for another picture.

Oh, and more good news, we have a producer. David Lockhart is onboard. We’ll finalize something in a week when he gets into SF from LA, but for now it looks very good. We met David on a film we produced. He’s not just a producer, but as you’ll see if you visit his website, he’s also an actor. So we produced him a few years ago and now he may be producing The MVM film for us. He’s outgoing, aggressive and charismatic, all characteristics necessary for a producer. He’s also connected in LA, another important characteristic.
And he’s a rock n’ roller. Yup, he sings in a band called The Stereo Blasters. C’mon, you gotta be a little excited about a producer who is in a classic rock band, right?
David is the one in the bottom right-hand corner.

What else? Oh, it looks like Kam can’t do the architectural drawings. But a friend from CCA, Airason Heard, is looking at the proposal and may do it for us. Airason is pretty amazing. He’s a tech and theory geek with an amazing vision for integrating the human and technological into buildings. With luck we’ll be able to post a few of his drawings for the project in the coming weeks.

Once we have Airason’s drawings, we’ll be getting a brochure printed at our fave printer A. Maciel Printing. It will be bound at Pettingell Bookbindery. We are thinking a small edition of 7 or 8, so that we have something tangible to give investors right out of the gate. The book itself will be a work of art with bios of the folks involved, plans for the project, early behind-the-scenes footage, ephemera from the project thus far, etc.
Marcella Faustini and Elise Irving will be designing the brochure with us.

Finally, I have an incredibly exciting lead on what might be some serious funding accompanied by a distribution deal. Yeah, I mean, it’s just hearsay at this point, so I’m not going to say more, but it’s going to be so super exciting if we get a chance to pitch these people. It’s actually incredibly exciting just knowing that opportunities like this are already appearing. Our spirits are high today.
And atop that, one of our LA contacts has a few investors ready to talk to us when we are down in Tinseltown come December.
So, all is coming along well.