Smart Gals are now in their tenth year of organizing events that celebrate books and the artists and authors who make them. They’re commemorating the anniversary with an unusual sort of installation piece at the Barnsdall Art Park, and I’ll be privileged to help out with a “quiet” reading.
The Smart Gals have installed their Reading Preserve—a “sanctuary for the endangered act of reading actual books”—before at the WeHo book fair; this time the preserve will be part of both the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery’s ongoing “Actions, Conversations, and Intersections” exhibition and Smart Gals’ own anniversary. (They’ll also be showing all of the awesome bookmarks Smart Gals commissioned their Speakeasy reading events over the years—shown here at left is the bookmark Esther Pearl Watson made for our event a few years back.)
On Thursday, February 4th, 2-3 pm, I’ll be quietly reading a book (from my library, but not written by me) in the preserve, surrounded by comforting pillows. You can join me or… watch me?
Other participating authors include Janet Fitch (White Oleander), Aimee Bender (The Girl in the Flammable Skirt), and Cecil Castellucci (Boy Proof). You can find more from the reading preserve author schedule.
One cool thing is that on Sunday the 7th, the Smart Gals will include writing from the participating authors (for example, from me, an excerpt from my novel in progress) on hand-made pillows that will become permanent elements of the reading preserve. Outstanding, right? Forever printed on a pillow…
I used to keep an informal list in my head of writers and artists whose hearts I’d eat to steal their talents.
I don’t keep the list anymore (somehow the way I think about that sort of desire has changed), and the actual phrasing was stolen from an Evan Dorkin strip, I believe where he pictures himself eating Jaime Hernandez’s heart. (For the record, Evan Dorkin was never on my list, nor was Jamie Hernandez, but the metaphor for talent-envy was spot on.)
Talk about multi-talented. Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist who scripted “The Spirit” with Will Eisner and cartooned for the Village Voice for four decades, but also an Academy Award-winner for animation, playwright, novelist, artist…
Talk about a sharp mind, and an ability to crystallize the human condition into short, bite-sized pieces. Give me a six-panel Feiffer cartoon strip over any page of poetry to hit a note smartly, sharp and subtle at the same time. (Each such feat is a tiny miracle, and his work is full of them.)
He’s speaking in town on June 21st thanks to Cinefamily and Family bookstore. I’m probably not going to be able to go because of prior obligations, but you definitely should! You must. They’ll be screening the odd, ground-shifting (even by over-three-decades-later standards) film Little Murders.
I’d seen actor Joel Huggins’ “Fish Out of Water” web series and fictitious web journal a while back, but the fact is, I don’t talk to Joel a lot. (I do see him a lot, lately in an Intel commercial…) But so I had no idea that he and director Ben Barnes made another ‘Fish’ film and have now scored two years of back-to-back Fish at SXSW.
Fish Out of Water’s a puppet/live action comedy… If you check out this interview just up from Massify, they talk about the evolution of the idea and the puppet itself.
The new short, Fish Out of Water: The Nightmare, is excellent:
I’m perhaps foolishly doing everything myself on TEXAS 1960. Camera, editing, sound recording and final mix. Elana’s doing color correction. The idea is to learn now… and speak more competently to real editors, cameramen and soundmen on future projects.
But Christ! Final sound edit feels like a fog. The internet, usually so forward with advice, is nearly mum. It took me hours to find the following information, which could be described as opinion rather than fact:
Dialog voice should ride around -10 to -12 db, with peaks at -6db. (Overridden by a friend at a post house who says they put a hard limiter on all voice at -10db, no peaks above.)
Dialog voice should get a boost at 2500Hz (mid-range of human voice) and at 6000Hz (high end, for crispness). (But again, it’s just someone’s opinion.)
And then I talk to some friends who work as editors… None of them have opinions on this stuff. They send their big projects to audio post houses for final mix, professional black boxes where obsessive audio nerds do… Well, I don’t know what they do. No one I know seems to really know. It presumably involves chickens and black candles.
So then I talk to the directors I know who’ve sound-mixed their own successful independent films… Only to discover they’ve all gone by a method of “it sounds good to me”. To be frank, they have something. I’ve seen their films and had no complaints about sound… which is reassuring… But regardless, I’d like some freaking guidelines. How can I go by “it sounds good to me” when I have grave suspicions that rock and roll has permanently damaged my hearing?
Have tried building my own dolly using random things around the house. Worked, but only had a range of four feet. Severely limiting.
Don’t have much to say on the Eazy Dolly or their promo video that wasn’t said in that post, but liked the Make Film Work site and his video on shutter speed (see “screencasts” on his site)… which admittedly, is info I already knew but he explained it well… I was just daydreaming about the same stuff yesterday (exposure time in videography and still cameras, etc) and he summed up better than I would have. Liked everything enough to warrant a post.
Wanted to give a shout out here to the new site up at my buddies’ production company Population 1280 Films. I won’t be too shy to say I hooked them up with pal Jacob Winkelman’s design shop temp2, who put the site together on a shoestring (though you’d never guess).
If you haven’t seen it, Population 1280’s film Pop Skull was an amazing piece of work also made on a shoestring. It’s a freaky movie that really sucks you in, and received a US premiere at AFI Fest last year. It’s now getting DVD distribution from Halo 8.
Spent real money on a piece of art for the first time. Up till now, the most I’d ever spent was $75 for a Johnny Ryan illustration.
Tell truth, I bought two original pieces of art recently. The first one though, only cost me six bucks. That’s right, only six!
Artist/filmmaker Jim Ether was briefly selling $6 dollar “mystery” paintings. He put up a great video on youtube showing off scores of the random little paintings, and I’m happy to say I grabbed one. He’s taken down the video, but you can still see the paintings at the link above. The deal was, you sent $6, he sent you a piece, you had no way of knowing what you’d get. Great idea. Seems like maybe it was too great (it definitely felt like a steal), so I’m not sure that he’s still selling them. But he does have an Etsy store here.
But then the piece that I actually spent a little bit on was a triptych by artist Skinner, whose work I got sort of obsessed with when I picked up a comic/zine of his at last year’s APE. Check out his site… there’s a recent Citrus Report interview with him… and he’s also got an upcoming show at Minna in San Francisco.
Haven’t been able to settle on a preferred method for sharing fiction online. Here’s the same old story excerpt, printed from a zine-sized (back-pocket) PDF, first with Issuu, then with Scribd.
Scribd on the same document:
The more I think on it, the more similar they are… so I suppose it comes down to interface… and the straightforwardness of Issuu (not having a menu, even the way it tends to railroad you into fullscreen) perhaps makes it the winner. Though both still have issues reproducing my font of choice (in this case, the probably poor choice of Goudy, need to get Janson on this machine).
Last night I read the introduction to Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. Never read it before, and honestly, haven’t started yet, right now reading Arkansas by John Brandon (McSweeney’s Books). (At the LA Times Festival of Books realized I’d never read a single novel pressed by McSweeney’s—the kids manning the McSweeney’s booth were kind enough to sell me three novels for $10 bucks each (on a cover price $22).)
But so I read King’s introduction and was pleased to find myself in this passage:
“My approach to revision hasn’t changed much over the years. I know there are writers who do it as they go along, but my method of attack has always been to plunge in and go as fast as I can, keeping the edge of my narrative blade as sharp as possible by constant use, and trying to outrun the novelist’s most insidious enemy, which is doubt. Looking back prompts too many questions: How believable are my characters? How interesting is my story? How good is this really?”
Which the basic approach is the same as I discussed in my Accoutrements post, but the thing that really struck a nerve was the implied fear of going back to revise or revisit during a first draft.
And that’s me! I’ve become petrified of looking at finished pages! I lock them in the fire box and, even though the plan was to once weekly pick them up and type them into a computer, revising as I go… too scared. For largely the same reasons King described: don’t want to sit around overanalyzing. At least not yet. Not until the bulk is there.
Anyway, nice to find an affirmation… I’ve read King’s On Writing, and remember a similar relaxation/relief. Kind of a “there, there, it’s okay”.
I can’t write longhand. I know a bunch of great writers did, and on even relatively recent books—Infinite Jest was written in longhand! Yikes!
But so I have my tools here. The most important one, the beast with primacy, is The Magnet. That’s the pet name for the IBM Selectric III that I write my fiction on (and which was a fantastic gift from Elana). Called The Magnet mostly because of its electric motor that sometimes won’t turn on till ten seconds after you flip the switch, but also a half-cornball come-hither-muse voodoo epithet.
So… why a typewriter. It’s not for reasons of affectation or insistent Ludditism, I swear. I’m just a believer in keeping writing and editing separate, and the typewriter’s like those weird braces that force a golfer to swing correctly. The belief’s not universal; a number of my friends edit as they work (or “in-between”), they’ll use word processing software to do a quick polish on the last paragraph before moving on. But I’m strictly against it. I don’t want to get stuck over-thinking a sentence that was perfectly fine. I want to spit everything out as fast as it comes, keep moving. The subconscious is where all the best work comes from; when you’re really into some fiction, writing and reading are both hypnagogic. I don’t want to kill the trance or the momentum by taking a break to fix ANYTHING. Let the word be misspelled, let the last sentence be stuff of grammatical nightmare, let the term or the name I can’t remember be a hastily typed “xxxx”.
As you can imagine, then, even though it’s a correcting typewriter, my correction ribbon never gets any use. The Magnet is for first drafts only. Editing is for later. More specifically, the first edit comes later when I retype the pages into a computer.
In the meantime, the typed pages need somewhere to live… They go in the fire-safe plastic/concrete box. Yes, they live in the box, which I’ve been assured will withstand flood or fire. (For the curious or likewise paranoid, this box is a Honeywell File Chest, which when I bought it was sold for $50 and free shipping. The price seems to have gone up… They may have realized offering free shipping for $50 purchases and then selling something that costs exactly $50 and weighs over thirty pounds was a bad idea.)
And then for screenwriting, I use Celtx, which is in so many ways better than than its competitors, and on top of that, is open source and free. I know that my own experience of Final Draft was filled with amazement, a lot of head-scratching along the lines of: “This is a ‘finished’ software product? Why are there so many paint bugs? Why is this abomination a ‘standard’?”
The other thing about Celtx is that it has a lot of built in tools for managing your film if it’s something you’re going to shoot yourself. You can record all sorts of information, like phone numbers and availability of your cast, contact info for locations, details on props you’ve acquired or ones you still need, audio files for temp or final score… And then again, if you just want to write, you can forget about those tools, and it’ll just be the straightforward script software you wanted. The other nice thing is that if you feel obligated to pay something for the work that went in to making Celtx, they’ll only encourage you to donate $5 to Against Malaria.
Smart Gals are now in their tenth year of organizing events that celebrate books and the artists and authors who make them. They’re commemorating the anniversary with an unusual sort of installation piece at the Barnsdall Art Park, and I’ll be privileged to help out with a “quiet” reading.
Tell truth, I bought two original pieces of art recently. The first one though, only cost me six bucks. That’s right, only six!
In the meantime, the typed pages need somewhere to live… They go in the fire-safe plastic/concrete box. Yes, they live in the box, which I’ve been assured will withstand flood or fire. (For the curious or likewise paranoid, this box is a 
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