Being Drunk Helps
At the party I got stuck in the corner with the dorks.
I tried speaking some hybrid of canceled TV and the new next thing
without coming off like a syndicated columnist.
This initiated a spirited game of grabass.
We showed "those motherfuckers" (and our dead parents) what's up.
Not that I didn't envy the absent geeks and their tediously subversive gadgets
after I ran out of booze.
The dorks were appropriating lampshades. Soon we'll have coats
made of a thousand tiny cameras
so you can be reflective and invisible and just go home.
Shot Reverse Shot
I'm under orders to make the homoerotic overtones
undertones and blunt the pointed political commentary,
but I share the sentiment but not the didacticism
so no problem. Also the use of slow motion to convey
intensity or eminent doom or immanent dirty sex.
After twelve-hour workdays I keep working on the parallel
universe version of the movie assembled out of outtakes
instead of sleeping. For example the boardwalk scene
when Matthew McConaughey smiles in a shot reverse shot
opposite Paul Walker. Midway through take 22 his eyes
lose focus in a grimace for half a second. Walker acts
as control variable and holds it steady every take.
The stoic consistency and half-clad melancholy of filming
on location in the Bahamas. The exact same dispersion of scenes
and running time as the theatrical release, which is scheduled
to hit 3000 screens on July 4th, thirty of which screens
will reflect the parallel universe version to an audience
increasingly uneasy in first their seats, then their skins.
I haven't yet gotten to the extended sequence set aboard
the International Space Station, also filmed on location
as part of the most integrated Hollywood/NASA shoot
since 2001 (the movie not the year), the crew given
an impromptu crash course on satellite triangulation and
the militarization of space and the very real danger
of high velocity space debris in geosynchronous orbit.
In my professional opinion the end result will be a grand
rom-com space opera the likes of which moviegoers
have never ever seen before and never will again, thanks
to the temporal and monetary delays and extensions lavished
on Thomas Thomas' already overbloated fuck you
to Time and Money, and Space. Having a P.U. version
is pure T.T. and the nail on the end of his middle finger.
I seized the opportunity to follow up on my interest
in the effects of sleep deprivation as it relates to measuring
the errancy of the excess of state power, in this case
picking the take which most deviates from the tone of its
corresponding take in the source text, which as I mentioned
is being assembled more or less simultaneously. Thomas
took notes on Jessica Alba's performance but otherwise
left the scope and requirements of the parallel universe
in my hands. He also said to go ahead and follow
the studio directives of a more palatable subversion
since all the transgression was just smoke and mirrors
inserted into the in-progress product to keep them feeling
diligent and off the scent. Based on the takes available
and my editorial history I'm guessing the "remaindered
version" (as Thomas calls it) will be equal parts arousal
and revulsion, mixed with scatological puerility and clinical
indifference and unadulterated nostalgia-free jouissance
subtracted from childhood. Or at least that's what I'm hoping
since American Junior High School is my default setting
when I'm exhausted and ill-feeling and interacting with a finite
amount of mannerisms. I'm going for a kind of intuitive,
hallucinatory, somnambulistic precision. A waking version
of lucid dreaming culled from my days as an armchair
oneironaut and protoscientist and figure-ground cartographer.
Thomas calls me an artfag poser since he subsists on iron
infusion therapy nightly out of necessity but my interest
predates his symptoms (cause unknown). Thomas also thinks
technovampires are a metaphor for pretty much everything
and is in preproduction with the aforementioned Alba
on his dystopian epic of blood, the occult, and digital avatars.
Meanwhile I navigate the multiplicity of McConaughey's
bronzed chest and Walker's monoemotive gaze as if my life
and the entire set of known unknown universes depends on it.
With an understanding that none of this would even be possible
without the integrated advancements in non-linear editing
hardware and software, like my Avid at home. Or possible,
but not something really that any of us would have thought.
Because You're a Former Child Actor
I asked you to be my furniture in so many words.
Locally it makes sense, you saying how special I am after the movie
on the way to the club, but it feels weird
without the soundtrack as a general frame.
They always tell people the VIP room is unavailable
as if the numbers in my phone don't add up to a coherent whole
or that that’s ever stopped us before.
I know you know that me and my hot friends get in for free.
But I like you because your face is bloated and saggy but unironic,
like that retro t-shirt and whatever year this is.
Dan Hoy