The New Boredom

I’ve been anxiously awaiting this for a while and here it is:

Giddy.

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In similar wild spirits, here’s a video that I forgot to post a couple weeks ago:

Seems like bike season, minus the bikes.

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I dont know anything about this other than the fact that I really like it and this Karen person is shooting a ton of film.

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And this will haunt my nightmares for weeks:

I’m back from Boulder City, Nevada in my apartment in Boulder (non-city), Colorado. Chris and I drove out a jillion miles just to add a “City” to our location, and it was worth it since regular Boulder-non-city got covered in two feet of snow while we were gone. There was some suspension testing going on in Bootleg Canyon with Fox out there but then after that was done, a little suspension testing of my own went on with a certain expensive thing:

I luffff goooooooold.

Full review of short term performance will be up soon.

The trip was a week of some of the most vulgar and obscenity filled conversation in recent memory. Lots of laughs and good times were had all around. Then on the drive home, Chris and I swing by the In-n-Out in St George, Utah for some sweet delicious meat  sammiches. It was like being stuck in some weird time warp in which the mindsets of all the people in the building were stuck in 1950 but their clothes and setting were all contemporary. And by contemporary I mean mostly what would have been fashionably acceptable 15 years ago.

Chris orders a double-double and a tripple-tripple and sits down to eat and the outrageously stereotypical Utah residents in the next table over see what he’s eating and make the most bland and obvious jokes possible noting it’s cholesterol levels, and how a growing boy must be hungry, and so on. Chris is a polite young gentleman about it and goes along with them for a minute. (Keep in mind we’re riding the momentum of a tidal wave of obscenity all week). The lady leans over to Chris and says, “Are you familiar with the cartoon Ziggy?”

Chris replies, “Yeah, I know Ziggy” as if he reads it every day…

The lady says, “In this one cartoon he orders a meal much like yours right there and the attendant says, and here’s the punchline, ‘Would you like a quadruple by-pass with that?’” and she chuckles just giddy as can be while Chris is left with the awkward situation of juxtaposing this warm-bowl-of-milk bland humor with the week of shit-jokes that had just been made.

It was one of the most surreal experiences I’ve had in 2009. It’s going to be a good year.

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I would also like to add that this music video is pretty cool and the song is catchy as damn.

First of all, I got a traffic hit from a search for “biggest boobs in school” yesterday which is something that I took as terrific news.

Second- who of you are using google reader to keep up on this site? I know there are a few of you and I’m just curious who it might be and how it works for you?

Thirdsies- I lied, I’m not taking off for a week as of three days ago. I’m taking off for about a week today. Let me explain. I just had a week straight of not going to bed before about 3 or 4 am and getting up at 8 am to get working all over again. I’m tired. I’m grumpy. I’m off to go ride bikes this time, not just shoot them.

Fourths- And speaking of shooting, I agreed to shoot a fellow film nerd’s senior final narrative film over this weekend. I’m normally an experimental film dork which means that I’m pretty used to working alone and ruining a lot of film. This shoot was about 8 people and a u-haul full of gear including a sync-sound Aaton Super-16mm camera. I hate the pressure and the hustle and bustle of sync-sound shoots like that. I hope the film comes back from the lab looking alright. Hopefully it will look something like this promotional still that I snapped off between takes:

As long as the film doesn’t come back completely white or black or out of focus, I’ll consider it a victory.

Also I realized that film making is probably one of the least efficient industries. Just from this shoot over the weekend there was so much waste. Food went uneaten because we were all so busy busting ass. The amount of tape that got stuck to something, and then 4 seconds later ripped off and thrown away, was staggering. The amount of plastic used for one purpose and thrown away was obscene. Everything needed batteries and ate them all weekend. Pretty much all the lights are just gobbling energy non-stop. Everyone drove to locations in their own cars. The film is going of to a lab where nasty chemicals are going to be used to process it all and will have to be treated and disposed of some kind of way. The computers used for digital transfer and editing are going to make fools of the power grid. And some 275+ man-hours of on set production time (and god knows what else in pre- and post-production). All that is going to put about 5 to 8 minutes of projected image on the screen.

It’s like in the Simpsons when they show that Rube Goldberg craziness of how a bowling pin is made. A whole giant tree goes in the back door of the bowling alley and into a series of laiths and sanders and paint to make a single bowling pin which is put in the rack and all the single use pins that were just knocked over are sitting in a huge pile on the other exterior wall of the owling alley.

That’s film making basically.

I’m off for reals this time. See you next week.

I’m off for about another week, thus crushing all traffic momentum that I may have built up lately. I’m shooting a short film with some friends and then taking off to go ride bikes with a different group of friends. I’ll return with something entertaining later.

Back in third grade we used to have gym class every day where we would run around and play games for an hour. It was a good way to get us nice and tuckered out for a while so we would actually sit still and learn some stuff. I don’t know how much actual “physical education” i really got out of it but it was fun.

We had this gym teacher that in retrospect is every bit the lesbo-short-hair-cut looking stereotype that dominates pop culture’s image of gym teachers. I think that’s a ridiculous stereotype and pretty shortsighted when it comes to a person’s identity but then, I guess that’s most stereotypes. Anyways, this lady would come up with these zany games and have us play them every day.

One game was basically baseball but with a tennis racquet and a racquetball. I can’t remember what she called it exactly since the blatantly obvious “racquetball” was already taken by a different and much more legitimate game. Her games always had these really obvious names like basketball with rubber foursquare balls was called “Square-basket”… come to think of it I bet she came up with most of these games using fridge magnet poetry words and would just shuffle words up in the morning to determine the day’s activity.

I stepped up to the plate for my turn with the racquet and time slowed as the teacher released the pitch. I was in the zone. I was completely in tune with the entire world around me. It was this crazy zen moment. I swung the racquet as hard as I could knowing that I couldn’t miss in this meditative state.

And sure enough, I connected. Solid. The ball flew off the raquet in two big halves off towards left field. I ran off with a confident swagger that I have never been able to repeat.

I had crushed the racquetball into pieces, quite literally. I figured that counted for a home run and I made the rounds. When I got back to the bench though, my zen-bubble was popped by a glaring group of angry faces.

See what I didn’t know was that there was only one racquetball… and I just destroyed it. Game time was over and I ruined it for everyone.

The teacher just had us play tag for the rest of the hour. Everyone in the class hated me for that time and I was “it” for close to the whole time as my punishment for blowing the whole racket-base-ball game.

Oh holy shit, that’s what it was called: Raquet-Bat! I ruined Raquet-Bat for everyone one time in third grade.