This weekend was another orgy of video shooting. First off, most of Friday was spent preparing to shoot, and then shooting a Critical Mass of zombies and pirates. More will become apparent when it’s edited.
Saturday and Sunday were spent on a levee in Sacramento shooting a barbaric pinata massacre for my friend Stephanie. I’m quite pleased with how the footage looked when we played it back in the evenings. There was a distinct Tarantino-esque cruelty to a couple of shots.
Last week I finished editing a short documentary profiling the Sustainability Fair the Davis Food Co-op held back in July. I could spend ages tidying it up and making it perfect, but I don’t really have time.
If you’re interested in reading my self-criticism, after the jump are some of the bits I’d spend time fixing in an ideal world in which days last 48 hours, I work for eight hours a day and need to sleep for only seven.
Last night Jeff and I went to an art show in a cannery. The place has lain empty since 1999, and is due to be demolished in the next few days. Last night, however, it was turned over to a group of University of California art students to do with as they wished. They put on a show called Uncanny.
There’s an awful lot of pollen in Davis. The air is disgustingly fecund right now, and my hayfever is the worst it’s ever been. Clarityn, my antihistamine of choice, is unable to stem the flow of phlegm. I can actually feel the sting of the pollen as it blows into my engorged eyeballs.
Now I have health insurance I can go to the doctor and get a prescription for something stronger then Clarityn, but it’s not at all obvious which doctors participate in my health insurance scheme. If I go to one that’s not on the list I have to pay in full for my consultation. Whatever its faults, I’ll take the NHS any day.
I’ve been spending quite a few hours lying in my darkened bedroom with wet paper towels over my eyes, which has one advantage. This enforced rest has given me time to listen to some new music.
First, there’s the fairly recent re-release of a record I first heard in Israel in 1999, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by David Byrne and Brian Eno. In the process of making the record they experimented with new ways to make music from tape loops, trying to “[find] music where music wasn’t supposed to have been,” they invented what later became known as sampling. They took snippets of from late night talk show conversations, radio evangelist sermons and arabic pop records. To create the backing for their samples they drew on an astonishing range of music including, of most interest to me right now, the work of Miles Davis and Fela Anikulapo Kuti. The album they made sounded like nothing else in 1980, and it sounds unique even now. This re-release features excellent liner notes written by David Byrne that give a fascinating insight into the work without explaining it away.
The first time I heard the hysterical evangelist railing against MTV on Mylo’s Destroy Rock & Roll I thought of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Contemporary electronic musicians are still drawing from the well sunk by Eno and Byrne.
Second, I picked up Stereolab’s latest full-length CD, Fab Four Suture. It’s a collection of EPs released in the last year that you can find in the kind of bleeding edge ultra-cool record shops that don’t exist in Davis. Stylistically it’s trademark Stereolab, but I have a great appetite for complex arrangements of vintage synths, muted trumpets and jangly guitars and songs sung in French about the principles of Mutualism. There are some wonderful grooves on it, too. Particularly in the middle of Get a Shot of the Refrigerator.
I’m still getting round to devoting the right amount of time to the Cinematic Orchestra’s first album, Motion, which I downloaded from bleep.com and Belle and Sebastian’s latest, The Life Pursuit, on loan from Rev Rehash. There’s a song on it, Sukie in the Graveyard, that reminds me of Lloyd Cole & the Commotions. It’s in the vocal delivery, the hammond organ and the tone of the lyrics – so pretty much the whole song.
When I’m forced to rest my eyes I can still exercise my ears. Every cloud of powdery plant jizz has a silver lining.
I feel as if I was a little rushed trying to get this together two weeks after the grand opening, especially with all the hours I’ve been putting in at the coffee shop and the cinema, but on Saturday 22nd April DVDs of The Varsity Story went on sale. For $10 you get the DVD, complete with bonus materials in an attractive plastic case. That’s about five quid in real money.
In the process I’ve discovered that Apple’s iDVD program is a real pain in the arse to use if you want to do your own design rather than using the default templates. If in the future I want to produce my own DVDs, I will need serious pro-level DVD authoring software, which isn’t cheap. I also learnt that Kinko’s doesn’t configure its colour laser printers properly, and that if you want a good quality print it pays to hook your own laptop up to their printers rather than using the shoddy worn-out Dell computers they provide.
I’m fairly happy with the results. To my eye it’s not perfect, but as far as I’m concerned the project is finished.
It’s on sale in Davis, both at the Varsity and the Hattie Weber museum.
Life has been hectic this past month, hence the lack of bloggage.
The big news is that the Varsity opened on Thursday 6th April to a capacity crowd, with all the usual paraphernalia. I didn’t have my camera with me, and to be honest I missed most of the fun stuff because I was busy changing into respectable clothes, but we had the Things We Like jazz trio on the roof of the box office playing to our guests as they walked up the red carpet and the Mad Cow String Band on stage.
Sinisa and Jon stood up, gave quick speeches and then called me on stage to introduce my documentary. I forced out a few words and then parted the curtains so my movie could run. It seems to have gone down very well. People laughed in all the right places, and even at bits that I didn’t expect to be so amusing. Afterwards I was nudged back on stage to take a bow. As I stood up I realised my buttocks had been clenched for the entire twenty minutes.
I’m coming closer to a final cut of The Varsity Story, the documentary I’m making for the opening of the Varsity Theatre (cinema, really) on 6th April. I’m happy with the content and how I’ve orgnised it. I’m pleased with the colour correction. The one big thing I have left to do is tidying up the sound editing. I’ve never done sound editing before, and for me it’s probably the dullest part of the editing process. Nearly the whole project was recorded too “hot,” so I need to add compression filters to everything in order to narrow the gap between the loudest and quietest parts of the movie. If I don’t fix this people will turn their TV’s up for the quiet bits and have their ears blown off when an interviewee coughs. Additionally, the Varsity has a brand new sound system which will expose my shoddy sound mix workmanship if I don’t do a good job.
Of course, the compression filter is just one of a number of sound treatments I need to apply. I’m very glad I don’t need to serve coffee tomorrow.
As promised, here’s a photo of my first painting. Click on it for a bigger view. I made this piece in response to the cafe manager, Alli, declaring that the only art on display in the cafe during the month of March would be created by the staff. As I couldn’t rig up a projector or a plasma screen I couldn’t contribute a piece of video art, so I had to think of another way of getting at least one image onto the wall.
Quickest customer of the day in Mishka’s:
She: I’m gonna get a latte.
I: Certainly, what size?
She: A $3 one.
I: OK.
I ring her order into the cash register and look at her expectantly.
She: How much is that?
We have an opening date for the Varsity, April 6th. I’ve also allowed myself to be roped in to promoting the opening night. All sorts of interesting plans are afoot, but for now you can check out the Davis Wiki entry for the cinema, and the official site, www.thedavisvarsity.com, a preliminary version of which is now online.
My movie, now titled The Varsity Story, is progressing fairly well. I’m shooting yet more material at some point in the next week. Any time I’m not in the coffee shop it seems I’m shooting or editing the movie, or promoting the cinema. It feels good to be busy working on something I care about.
Yesterday the sun was shining, the sky was blue and I was seized by an uncanny urge to buy a barbeque, so I did. Refusing to tell Courtney what was up I ushered her into the car and drove to a hardware shop in the town centre.
“Where are we going?” she asked, “I’m so confused.”
I did not reply. I just grinned and let her figure out what was up.
In the event, Courtney was just as excited as me to be buying a barbeque. We settled for a circular charcoal grill with three legs, two wheels, vents on the bottom and a round top. We bought metal skewers, a barbeque spatula, a metal cleaning brush, a bag of charcoal and a bottle of lighter fluid and returned home well pleased.
Continuing my mission to reach a better understanding of the strange land I currently inhabit, last Sunday I went with Tom, aka Politco Wonk, to see my first basketball game.
The Varsity doumentary is coming along. I shot interviews two weekends ago, and now I’m amassing documents. Above is an original lobby card for the first movie to play in the Varsity cinema on June 9th 1950. By all accounts, it was a bit of a B movie, albeit one presented in glorious Technicolor.
Update: 1st Feb 2006
On further investigation, it seems that The Eagle and the Hawk was in fact the original Brokeback Mountain, as this alternative version of the lobby card conclusively proves. Who’d have thought? Thanks to Jeff for sending that along. ;-)
I don’t know exactly how this came to be, but I remember a degree of nagging and flattery emanating from Courtney, and a degree of arm-twisting from Julie at the Co-op. The upshot is that on February 16th 2006 I will be teaching a course on how to make Cornish Pasties and Chicken Tikka Masala. Here’s my class description:
How to Eat with a Stiff Upper Lip
British cuisine is underrated! Join Liam Creighton to learn to cook two perennially popular winter warmers. From England’s rural past, the Cornish Pasty, and from multicultural modern Britain, Chicken Tikka Masala, the nation’s favourite dish. This class features meat, but is totally free from jellied eels, pickled eggs and black pudding. Vegetarian versions of both recipes will be demonstrated.
I hope no-one I know turns up. That would be really embarrassing.
I’ve started pre-production on the Varsity documentary. Hopefully everything will be in place for a shoot on the second weekend of December. I’ll post more news as and when it happens.
The New(ish) Jaga Jazzist album is wonderful. Courtney and I are looking into buying an iMac for me to edit on. If and when it happens it will look like this. That is all.
My friend Jeff has decided to use me as the face of his Crow About Davis t-shirt range. I hope my mug doesn’t damage his sales too substantially.
Last night, after months of wrangling, dithering, and what appears to be attempted sabotage, the city council finally approved my boss’ plan to reopen the Varsity cinema in Davis as an art house cinema.
Built in the 1950s, it had all the trappings of a small movie palace, including murals and a proscenium. It’s been hacked about since then. In the 70s it was divided into two screens, then in the early 90s the council acquired it and turned it into a very dull theatre space. The murals disappeared, the seating capacity was halved, and the exterior was painted grey and white.
Cinema Treasures documents the history, whilst the Davis Wiki details what the place has been used for in the past couple of years.
All being well, over the next few months I will make a documentary about the history of the building to be shown on the night of the grand re-opening.
The other day a customer at the coffee shop asked “Did you see that?”
“What?” I asked.
“Someone just came up to one of the tables outside, changed their baby on it, and left without wiping up.”
And bugger me, it was disgustingly true.
Picnic Day turned out to be more fun than I thought. Having witnessed a pretty half-arsed St. Patrick’s Day parade in Rochester last year, I’ve been apprehensive about parades. As I’ve discovered from watching student films, there’s little entertainment to be had from watching people walking.
Yesterday I discovered I may have been too harsh in that judgement.
Tomorrow I’m being hauled into work – missing the televised coverage of Crystal Palace vs Norwich – to help Mishka’s deal with the craziness of Picnic Day. Apparently, everyone who has ever lived in Davis returns to the town for the day to watch a parade and a dachshund steeplechase.
I’m charging the camera batteries as I type.
Davis Film Festival tonight and tomorrow. Lots of shorts, lots of schmoozing. And, thanks to one of my regular caffeine-addicts, I have a free ticket. Get in!
Apologies, this is a very Davis-centric post. Rachel, one of my regular coffee shop customers, recently mentioned that she’s riding her bike 100 miles around Lake Tahoe in aid of a young lad with acute lymphocytic leukaemia. This is a big effort, and earns her several hundred Junkopia kudos points.Rachel’s blog, which documents the endeavour, is worth a look, although I’m sure what she really wants is for people to go to the donation page.
