Copybitch: Which paper has the worstest grammar?

When it comes to distinguishing comparative and superlative, the newspapers are tied with the bloggers and the candidates themselves.

There are two candidates running for the Democratic nomination. Between them, there can be a stronger candidate. Not this, from Adam Nagourney and Marjorie Connelly:

Still, the survey suggested that Mr. Obama, of Illinois, had lost much or all of the once-commanding lead he had held over Mrs. Clinton, of New York, among Democratic voters on the question of which of them would be the strongest candidate against Mr. McCain, of Arizona.

As usual, the links to the reporter's bylines are to lists of their stories. The one for Adam Nagourney at least has a link to a second page that lets you fill out a form to email him, but it warns that the message will be delayed.

When I was a reporter for News.com, every reporter's byline had a mailto: link. I routinely got helpful email from readers that either helped me clarify if not correct the posted story in very short order or alerted me to related story ideas. The Times doesn't cotton to this element of "interactivity," a symptom of its illness-at-ease on the Internet.

Update: Six months later...

Oops, I'm six months behind. Much has happened in that time: As the last entry mentioned, the movie won a big prize in Indianapolis (Best North American Independent Feature Film, according to the Web site) and went on to play in Santa Cruz at the Del Mar Theater. The Santa Cruz crowd was somewhere south of 100-strong, less than I expected after that spectacular Metro Santa Cruz cover story, but certainly critical mass in the gorgeous Art Deco Del Mar and an extremely enthusiastic and inquisitive crowd--the festival director said it was one of the festival's longest and most involved discussions. Santa Cruz gave the movie a "Special Director's Award," and a few months later it picked up an honorable mention at the Indie Gathering in Cleveland.

I spent the summer working on the second draft of my novel-in-progress, and found in August that the movie had won me admission to the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where I am currently in the middle of a two-month residency. I spent the first couple of weeks here working on new revisions to the movie, adding Justin Bond as Kiki and cutting enough things so that I got the length down to 52 minutes from 54. And then, on November 9th, Rooftop Films, the Premiere Commission, Great Music at St. Bartholomew's Church, New York Magazine and Dewar's sponsored a screening of the film at St. Bart's that was absolutely spectacular. Rooftop set up a big screen with great sound in the middle of the sanctuary, and online notices in the New Yorker and the New York Times attracted about 400 spectators. The movie screened, and then William Trakfa played the Messiaen (St. Bart's has New York's largest pipe organ). After a Q&A with me, Bill, Bruce Levingston of the Premiere Commission and cast members Albert Fuller, Manoel Felciano, Nancy Anderson, Wayne Koestenbaum and Ricky Ian Gordon, the Dewar's reception got going and everyone got plastered on free Scotch. In church! Somehow it seemed so appropriate.

A couple of nice blog postings came out, one immensely quotable one ("a genuinely sublime documentary") before the screening and this one afterward. Now I have a bit of post-screening blahs--there are no more scheduled screenings, though I did submit it to a handful of festivals and an LA distributor asked for a copy. Hopefully I'll have more news before another six months go by.

triumph in Indianapolis!

No time for details as I'm running to my flight but the movie won Best American Independent Film last night at the awards ceremony here in Indianapolis! Also, Metro Santa Cruz came out with that photo of Shanti on the cover, and a pretty good interview with me, so that bodes well for tomorrow night's screening at the Del Mar.

the rest of Aarhus

The next day I took myself on an aimless walk around the Aarhus old town (charming!) and beyond it to the more modern parts of town where normal, less picturesque life unfolds. I cut the walk short to get to the museum, a vast, airy new box with a stark white interior and a Guggenheimesque spiral staircase. At the museum that afternoon I was supposed to sit on a panel to discuss the documentary "Orlan Carnal Art" about the French artist Orlan, who, with the help of various plastic surgeons, uses her body as her canvas and her clay. I had two hours to check out the museum's collection and spent half that time sitting in a comfortable armchair that was part of a Pippiloti Rist video installation, a terribly gemutlich room where the light and the imagery and even the furniture and space were all constantly changing. I dozed in that chair, heightening the already dreamlike quality of the experience. I also watched those crazy Bill Viola videos for a while, the ones where people are diving in and out of churning tinted pools in slow-motion explosions projected on every side of you.

The movie was revolting. And I mean that in the best possible way! I'm normally squeamish about blood and guts onscreen and it was so nice to have company. When Orlan is talking to the camera, describing and defending her art and her ideology while the surgeon is inserting a scalpel through the incision by her ear and tearing the skin loose from her skull, every single audience member (and because this was the Aarhus festival, we're talking about maybe a dozen people) had their hands in front of their eyes. I had two distinct sensations of horror, one having to do with the sight of a mad middle-aged French woman having parts of her face pulled free from her skull, and the other wondering: what the hell am I going to say about this? As it happened, I had a great deal to say about it, starting with the connection to gender reassignment surgery (a Danish-American invention thanks to Christine Jorgensen) and drag-based facial reconstrution (see Amanda Lepore, if you dare to) and moving on through the movie's use of frenetic 20th century 12-tone fright music (Varese, Stockhausen, Webern) and how that simultaneously accompanied and contradicted the artist's repeated disavowals of any intent to inflict pain upon herself or to exploit fear or shock....

The moderator could hardly shut me up, and that was before he started asking me specific questions about my movie, which nobody in the audience had actually seen. The moderator, Hilarius Hofstetter, a Dutch artist living in Aarhus, turned out to be the same guy who had sat in front of me at the conservatory screening, rifling his papers and appearing to ignore my movie. It turned out he'd seen it previously and had thought rather seriously about it. I'd been so put out by all the paper-rustling, and embittered by the Aarhus lack-of-audience disaster, that I'd been tempted to disregard the festival's request that I step in to sit on this panel and just blow it off, but it wound up being one of the most rewarding experiences of the trip. So it wasn't too late to benefit from that Hedwig example after all.

I spent the next several hours with Hilarius. We got a drink at a cafe on the canal, where hundreds of students and diners and loungers were basking in the first spell of spring sunshine. Then he took me to a fine sushi dinner in the old part of town.

The next day, in the morning, the festival newsletter came out with two paragraphs devoted to my participation in the Orlan panel discussion. Without knowing a word of Danish, I spotted three factual errors: My name was wrong, I was identified as German, and I was reported to have objected to Stanley Kubrick's use of the music of J.S. Bach in "Clockwork Orange." If there were more errors that I missed in those two paragraphs, thanks to my ignorance of Danish, I apologize.

That afternoon, my movie had its third and final screening at Ost For Paradis. For a long, gloomy ten minutes I sat in an empty theater, wondering if I was going to ace out the 2-person screening with a single-person screening. But then a couple came in, and then a quad (including the English filmmaker and composer, both of whom were *repeat viewers* from the conservatory symposium) and then a few more couples until we were safely in the double digits. My movie was preceded by a discursive, interminable doc that might have been about the cultural impact of globalization, though it might also have been about a dozen other things or about nothing. And then my movie played, and it was a great satisfaction to watch it in the company of an extremely warm audience a dozen strong, in a small dark theater with decent sound, and when it was all through to answer several probing and intelligent questions.

Aarhus Day 1

Day One, Friday the 21st, includes Thursday the 20th, when I flew from Berlin to Copenhagen with one Sergei Prokofiev. He didn't look like Sergei Prokofiev--his lips weren't nearly as wasp-stung, and he didn't look quite 115 years old--but he answered to the name when paged by the airport employees and confirmed that a stray bag was his. Nobody involved in this exchange seemed the least bit fazed by his resurrection.

In Aarhus the opening night party was in progress when I arrived. The festival director picked me up at the train station and drove me the two blocks to the bar, where over deafening electronic music she shouted introductions to various festival volunteers and to my roommate, a Los Angeles filmmaker named Zebediah Smith who had a short called "Andorra" in the "Too Much To Dream" program. After dropping off our things in a small room in a large suite right in the center of town, we set out for food and found the only place in Aarhus that served food past 10PM. It was good food, and good conversation, and we discovered that we had a number of mutual friends, including Squeaky Blonde.

The next morning I had some butterflies in my stomach, not because my movie was showing but because I was supposed to talk. I write for a reason; talking is not one of my strengths. The "Convergence of Image and Sound" symposium was at the music conservatory, a bit of a cab ride from the center of town. Immediately some volunteers apologized for what was anticipated to be a thin crowd. I sat in the back of a medium-sized classroom that couldn't be darkened sufficiently and watched the students trickle in. In the end the room was about half full, with about 25 of us. Not exactly a sell-out crowd for the European premiere, but it was critical mass.

Comedy is said to be uniquely difficult among the arts but it has the benefit of producing audible results. When the movie succeeds in being funny, you know. So I could tell that this crowd liked the first 20 minutes, which has virtually all the laughs. (I've never thought about this until now but the movie is a bit sugar-coated in that way, lulling the audience into a comfort zone before socking it with martyrdom and gore.) The rest of the movie seemed to go over well, except with one fellow sitting a row ahead of me, just to the left, who spent much of the movie shuffling through his papers and scribbling notes and missing crucial text plates and turning me into a nervous, resentful wreck.

The movie finished, the audience applauded, and Bartos was introduced. Before delivering his paper, he said some nice things about the movie. One quote--"One of the best movies about music I ever saw"--is going up on the Web site the hour I get home. Forty-five minutes later Bartos had delivered his paper and the panel discussion began. I felt a bit at sea for the first part because the topic was sound design in the movies, a subject about which I have strong but totally uninformed opinions. I took a pass on the first question. I managed to take a few stabs at other questions, but only got to yammer on at length when they opened the floor to questions and people asked me about the movie.

After the panel, Bartos and the others were going to lunch but I excused myself so that I could catch the last part of the noon screening of Apparition at Ost For Paradis (East of Eden), the dilapidated multiplex downtown. Zeb came with me and so was there to witness my face falling like a Danish souffle as the festival volunteer advised me to go to lunch and skip the screening and the Q&A--there were two people in the theater where my movie was showing.

Zeb and I found a charming little cafe where we watched the rain and contemplated our fate. Two people! His movie played later that afternoon in a small subterranean theater with a forty-person capacity, which was, with us, a tenth full. The other audience members were an English filmmaker and her soundtrack composer.

So suddenly the morning's audience of two dozen conservatory students seemed like a mob and a blessing. We started hearing stories about movies playing to entirely empty theaters. Dark questions began suggesting themselves--was this an actual film festival that had lured us to the damp realm of eastern Jutland? Or were we ensnared in some kind of elaborate farce designed to qualify the organizers for state arts funding? A less sinister but equally dismal question: What if you put on a film festial and nobody came?

Not very many hours passed before I regretted not staying for that 2-person screening. First of all, I would have boosted attendance by 50 percent! But more importantly, I remembered how Hedwig responded when faced with the audience of one, up on the sound stage by the Porta-Potties at the Menses wimmin's music festival in the rain. She gave it her all! That scene is the most poignant example of grace under pressure, generosity in the face of disappointment, that I can think of on stage or screen, and I wish I could have drawn from its example in a more timely manner. At the very least I walked away from my first day in Aarhus with an important lesson--that even an audience of one is worth waiting around for--and with a killer quote from Karl Bartos.

notes on Messiaen and the movie

The first and most obvious question people ask about the movie is why I made it. I've already written a bit about that in the inaugural post, so at the risk of repeating myself, I will try to forge a brief answer to the question.

I first heard the piece in March 2003 the same way the cast members hear it, through headphones (I still have yet to hear it performed live). Usually I don't respond strongly to music the first time I hear it, but this was different. This was, as I wrote before, like being compelled by an irresistible force up a stairway to heaven and, at the top of this stairway, being temporarily and ecstatically blinded by a vision of pure, formless white light. The first hearing of the piece, and the next many that followed, were experiences of sublimity and transcendence that I've rarely, if ever, experienced, much less on the first hearing of a piece of music. Like Jasper James says about her experience listening to the piece, I felt like I was going out of my body.

My first thought was to play the piece for Albert Fuller, whose chamber music class I had taken while a violin student at Juilliard. Every week, after our coaching, Albert would invite my piano trio to the brightly lit white formica bar in his cavernous West Side studio, pour drinks, pass around a ceremonial pipe, put on some music, and talk. It was this act of musical and conversational communion that I wanted to recreate with the movie.

The word communion brings up another set of thoughts I have about the movie and about Messiaen, which is that I made the movie in large part to explore how people who were outside the church--either congenitally outside it like me, or exiles from it like Albert Fuller and Michael Warner--would respond to what is a manifestly Christian program and vision. I am not a Christian. I am a secular half-breed Jew who does not believe in the supernatural. And yet, when I listen to Messiaen's organ work in general and this piece in particular, I respond as though I'd devoted my whole life to Jesus Christ and am finally coming face to face with him. This tempts me to call Messiaen a great missionary, and I do, but only in a limited, failed sense. He is a missionary of religious feeling: Through him, I believe I have been made to feel what my more spiritually gifted fellow human beings feel when they contemplate or worship God or set the world on fire in his name. It's scary and powerful and virtually outside my experience as a secular person. But by "failed" I mean that after three years of listening to Messiaen's music I'm no less irreligious than I was before. If anything, I worship Messiaen. But I find his religious beliefs no less absurd than before I started hearing and loving these pieces that express them.

Messiaen was not unaware of this fate that his music met in the modern world. Here's an exchange from a 1983 interview with Almut Rößler:

A.R.: I read in a German newspaper about an interrview which you'd given together with Ozawa. You said something to the effect that the tragedy of your life is, as a believing composer, to write music for unbelieving contemporaries.

O.M.: That's true. I said that the drama of my life consists of four things. Firstly, I talk about birdsongs to urban dwellers who've never heard a bird in their lives. To hear birds, one has to live in the country, to get up at 4 o'clock in the morning, if need be, and at daybreak and in the evening twilight to listen to the birds greeting the rising sun. In Paris, London or Berlin, that doesn't work. The second drama consists of my telling peole that I see colors whenever I hear music, and they see nothing, nothing at all. That's terrible. And they don't even believe me. The third drama is that I've worked out a language of rhythm in detail, have researched Greek metres and Indian rhythms, etc., and in that process I've attained a rhythmic language of ever greater freedom, which comes ever closer to Nature, for example, to the undulating motion of the sea, to the wind, to the movements of the clouds, etc. Whenever I talk about Rhythm, most people understand nothing, because to them, (at least to the most primitive of them), Rhythm just means a military march or jazz, which I loathe.

The interview goes on and Messiaen says more about how he finds jazz "repellent" and hates when people associate it with his music, and Rößler doesn't follow up on the question relevant to the movie, which is how this inherently, one could say aggressively sacred music operates on minds and hearts in the mostly godless part of the world I happen to live in. That was my experiment, or my test population, anyway--the experiment was to see if a piece of music, which is time-bound, could express the "eternal," and to see how music, which is pure sound, could express the visual and even the architectural (stairways, churches). And on this point I'm getting closer to saying something relevant to tomorrow's symposium on the convergence of image and sound.

For Messiaen, every chord or "complex of sounds" had a color (for Scriabin, western music's other famous synaesthete, keys were colored). Messian's descriptions of these colors are worth quoting at some length:

Take, for example, a complex of sounds which gives a group of colors: ash, pale green, mauve. If we move it higher by changing the octave, it will turn almost white, with some reflections of very pale green and violet. If we move it lower by changing the octave, it will turn almost black, with reflections of very deep green and violet. If, now, we transpose it up one semitone, it will become emerald green, amethyst violet and pale blue. If we transpose it up another semitone, it will give oblique bands of red and white, on a pink background with black patterns. In transposing it a semitone lower, it becomes white and gold; a tone lower we will have colored crystals of burnt earth, amethyst violet, light Prussian blue, warm and reddish brown, with stars of gold.
(from Messiaen's address to the Conference de Notre Dame, 1977)

For me, this description and others like it make the "tragedy" or "drama" of Messiaen's unique aesthetic experience that much more poignant. All these brilliant, elaborate colors and patterns and pictures, and we, his audience, can see none of them! When I imagine a piece like Apparition of the Eternal Church, with its series of ultra-dense chords alternating with the empty flat planes of open fifths, I have to imagine that Messiaen has painted a stairway of wildly colorful steps that nobody but he can see. He spent his life painting for the blind. And I suppose that would have to have been a powerful, negative inspiration to believe in God, to be able to hold out the hope that somewhere, some other being could apprehend one's work and creative expression, that one has not worked for a lifetime in creative isolation, that the act of artistic communion was possible for him in some other realm.

Now, only because it's getting late and I have to catch that flight to Aarhus, and not because I've reached any worthwhile conclusions on the points I've raised so far, I should jot down some other thoughts that have been bouncing around recently.

The extent to which the movie's "experiment" resulted in failure: A surprising number of people did not experience transcendence. I resisted this thread of the movie for a long time and resented it, but ultimately had to yield to the reality that most of my listeners were hearing something closer to the fires of hell than the white light of celestial ecstasy. The worse response, and one I've severely muted in the movie because I find it so dispiriting, is the one that doesn't even recognize any kind of sublimity in the music but experiences it as feeble or cliche, and these responses most often associate the piece with the soundtracks to old vampire movies, or, as Harold Bloom put it, "one of those dreadful Vincent Price Poe movies." Ron Gallman actually had some very cogent things to say about this response which I had to cut and hated cutting, because he articulated so well how Hollywood had co-opted the sound of the organ and brainwashed us into certain associations that for some people tie the music irrevocably to cheap horror. And this brings me to a rather sour point about the convergence of "image and sound"--movies and music, more particularly, which that convergence can be poisonous to great music when the movies in question are bad. The consequences--not just from movies but from television commercials--for Beethoven's fifth symphony--have been particularly devastating in this regard. There is hardly a person living who can hear that piece of music without associating it with automobiles and lightbulbs and whatever else some art-hating Madison Avenue executive was trying to sell at the moment. Also consider United Airlines' rape of George Gershwin, whose Rhapsody in Blue will for so many people be forever associated with one of the least pleasant of modern experiences, commercial airtravel. Also consider Ken Russell's kitsch assault on Holst, even passages in Mozart comedies where the action onstage falls so terribly short of the music. Refusal to see Clockwork Orange, despite admiration for Kubrik's use of great music in 2001.

Even the greatest and most powerful music is fragile in this way. So I had a lot of trepidation that in making this movie I was committing the same atrocity I've resented the film and marketing industries for committing against so many great works, and attaching images and ideas to a piece of music that were totally unworthy of its grandeur and greatness. So tomorrow maybe I will talk about the long period of indecision I went through in deciding how, or even if, I should include the music in the movie, and what images I would juxtapose with it. The problem: music, for us non-synaesthetes, invites an array of imaginings that is both limited and infinite. The convergence of image and sound nails music down to a single spot from where it can be extremely difficult to extricate it; the juxtaposition of great music to an image can cancel its relationship to the infinite. The point of the first part of the movie, to have people expose their internal imaginings, and to juxtapose those images, seemed harmless as long as I didn't play the music over it. But when I started attaching concrete images, and texts, to the music, in the second part, I started getting into hazardous, possibly murderous, territory. And there's a point here I'm hesitant to try to make in Aarhus, that has to do with my being able to understand, on this level alone, how Muslims can get so worked up about the depiction of their prophet, a sense of violating that relationship to the infinite through the confining power of an image.

Now I'm off to Aarhus, where I may be crucified for saying some or all of the above.

screening dream

Before I start free-associating about the movie and Messiaen, I should mention a dream I had this morning (it's 6:30 Thursday morning in Berlin) about a festival screening in an unknown theater.

I'm watching the movie and notice several things wrong in the slo-mo closing credit sequence that's set to the Celestial Banquet. I've had to add all this back matter and now the images are out of synch! Also the last credit, pointing people to apparitionfilm.com, goes by too fast--I resolve to fix that. Meanwhile people are getting up and leaving the theater during the credits, terribly disappointing since in some ways it's my favorite part of the movie, and then when the movie's finally over I join my mother and her cousin Lynn in the lobby. Lynn complains about all the material about the moon that I cut since the last time she saw it. I explain that there was a whole thread previously about space that I finally decided was too tangential to the core themes and had to be cut, though I love some of those clips and miss them too. She presses her point: she really misses the material about the moon (in reality, there are a lot of clips about space but none about the moon specifically). Finally I promise her that if I can find someone who can tie together the themes of space and the religious sublime, then I'll put all those clips back.

I wake up from the dream thinking, yes, that's all I need to do to restore all that great material and make it relevant, actually shore up the movie's exploration of religious sublimity, but then remembered that, in fact, John Cameron Mitchell and Sarah Sanford have a quick exchange about the space age and the gothic that already does the trick rather (perhaps too) efficiently.

But before I wake there's this scene in which I've accidentally wandered into the women's bathroom to overhear a conversation Karen Hartman is having in the stalls with another audience member. "I really think," says Karen, "he ought to go to film school to do porn."

Apparition on tour/Berlin stories/Karl Bartos "debate" preparation

On Saturday I left on a little tour in order to attend Apparition screenings in Aarhus (Denmark's second largest city if I haven't mentioned it), Indianapolis and Santa Cruz, and between Aarhus and Indianapolis to attend the gathering of the Radical Faeries in the wilds of Tennessee for novel research, spiritual battery recharge, and fun. I write from Berlin, where I'm staying alternately with my San Francisco friends John Borland and Aimee Male, who coincidentally expatriated here the day I arrived, and with an old SF flame, the Finnish choreographer Tomi Paasonen and his Greek dancer boyfriend Jorgos. I've spent the past few days getting to know the city and learning how to tzpe on a German kezpad. Actually, I haven't done much typing, with the exception of a long e-mail to Apparition cast member and prime inspiration Albert Fuller, who was hospitalized with pneumonia last week and is recuperating well, according to a mutual friend who is looking after him.

In Berlin I have mostly been riding a rented bicycle around town, consulting my plasticized city map every five minutes and finding half the time that one of those great traffic spokes spun me off in the wrong direction. With John and Aimee, I've been to see Tomi and Jorgos's collaboration "D.I.D.: a choir piece for one man," at a cool little performance space up in Prenzlauer, and to hear the organ in three cathedrals--the Berlin, the French, and today, St. Hedwig's, where the organist played a Bach favorite of mine, the d minor prelude and fugue, and the Symphonie-Passion of Marcel Dupre, which I know from the CD that first introduced me to Messiaen's organ works (Kalevi Kiviniemi playing the Poulenc Concerto and several other pieces including M's Celestial Banquet). It was lovely to be in St. Hedwig's and to hear the organ there, and to hear in the flesh those two spectacular pieces for the first time, and yet...there was something lacking in the experience. The organist managed to play for thirty minutes without delineating a single phrase. I've heard more significant musical feeling from a Cingular Wireless ringtone.

While in Berlin I also tried to barge in on the office of the director of the Berlin Film Festival in order to press a copy of my movie into his influential hands, but his secretaries and assistants weren't having any of it. So much for Berlin. Now I have to focus on Aarhus, and the task ahead, which apparently involves both speaking in public about the movie at its two regularly scheduled screenings and participating in a "debate" with Karl Bartos (Kraftwerk) and two Danish professors after a separate screening of my movie and an hourlong address by Bartos to the "Convergence of Image and Sound" symposium. I hope the address is in English, or I will have to limit my responses to observations about the weather.

I don't actually think they'll expect me to debate the professors, per se, if for no other reason than that the topic seems so uncontroversial. Image plus sound in the movies: I'm for it! But I do have a lot of thoughts swirling around my head about this movie and about Messiaen in the specific context of image and sound, and I've been reading up about Messiaen's experience of audiovisual synaesthesia, which is something I've always known about him without knowing very much about it. So I thought I'd update this blog, shoving that dismal technology saga (resolved with a PowerBook hard drive transplant, courtesy of the AppleCare Protection plan) down into this blog's archive, and try to focus some of those thoughts in advance of Friday morning's forum. Let me start off those notes in a separate post.

happiness is a hardware failure

I was able to churn out several copies of "Paleojournalist" and print labels for them. Then I worked up the courage to open Apparition of the Eternal Church, and all hell broke loose. All the chapter markers were in the wrong places, and, worst, when I tried to export a copy as a QuickTime movie (the requisite step for producing a DVD), I got the obtuse, obscure and awful error message "General Error." I feel like that should be my geek drag name, at least this week.

The good news is that when I described the history of this sorry period of technical failure to Apple Support guy #7, he immediately came to the conclusion that it was a hardware failure. If I'd done not only two Archive & Installs but an Erase & Install, and I'd heard that outrageous clicking sound during the battle of the search fields, there was no other logical explanation. So he made me a second appointment at the Genius Bar at Stonestown, where I'm writing this on a football field-sized monitor hooked up to a Power Mac G5 with Dual-core 2GH PowerPC G5s. The thing about that much computer is that it can render your video edits on the fly. You don't look sufficiently impressed.

But the really good news is that my movie plays, and exports to QuickTime, just fine on this computer. General Error has left the theater of war. And that means that my files actually aren't corrupted. My movie is safe, and I'm actually on track to have a version of it ready to export and take with me before they toss me out of here at nine.

it depends on what the definition of "final" is

I won't belabor you or my RSI-ridden hands with the details, but I am by no means out of the technical weeds. There is something seriously wrong with my computer that even a hard drive wipe didn't resolve. Some genius on the Apple support team has showed that I can get rid of the problems by opening a new account on the computer, but the new, problem-free account was corrupted after a day's use. So I will cycle through new accounts to churn out the copies I need of this movie until Apple or perhaps a deus ex machina figures out how to solve the problem for real.

final update

I replaced the clip and the problem went away. Even odds it reappears tomorrow, but at least I can go to bed knowing that I have a QT movie where the picture matches the sound all the way through. Now if I can just get iDVD to install, I'll be in business.

retraction

I deleted some FCP Thumbnail caches. When I brought back the project, I was happy to see that the thumnails were all back. But that section where the video from one section had been replaced by video from another--the place I thought was OK now--had reverted. And it's like that in the QuickTime movie too.

update--some success

My "Paleojournalist" project is in somewhat better shape. The thumbnails in the timeline are still screwed up, and the video and audio were still scrambled in that one spot, but by restoring the project to a 5PM version from yesterday I was able to quickly make all the edits I wanted without having video spontaneously migrate from different parts of the movie, like some kind of A/V schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder.

Once i had an acceptable edit, I exported it as a QuickTime movie. But now I can't reinstall iDVD, because the install DVD says I have one of the following applications running and to please quit it first. I had no applications running. I restarted the computer to make sure of that: same result. So I am not out of the woods, and I will wake up early in the morning to call Apple. I am getting my money's worth out of that Apple Care Protection Plan, and I am enjoying not one minute of it. The worst thing is that I remain, amid this iDVD thing and other possible anomalies, both afraid to open Apparition and even to back it up on my other external hard drive. The other drive already has a back-up of the movie and its clips, though it's badly outdated. What if I back up what's on the main external drive, but replace the older uncorrupted clips with newer, corrupted ones? Do I need to go out there and buy a third external hard drive to know that I'm not royally screwing myself by trying to be responsible?

"You need," my boyfriend announced last night, "a community of filmmakers." When I get back from this festival tour, I promise, i will find one, if only to spare him and you from all of the above.

Art is difficult. Technology is lethal.

If you thought the last post was pathetic...

...now I'm closing down the Apple Store in Stonestown. They're copying my personal data from their external hard drive to my wiped PowerBook and there's nine minutes left. They're ushering out the small, young hipster girl who could be anywhere from eleven and sixteen and who spent the last half hour taking and sending grotesque split-screen pictures of herself through iChat. Now, after more than three hours in this place listening to six different music tracks simultaneously blaring from six iPod Hi-Fi units, the Apple Store is quiet, despite all the silhouetted musicians working so terribly hard on all the mammoth iMac displays perched on blond wood counters. The security guard's wife just called and badgered him on when he would be coming home. He explained he had a few more people still in the store. That would be me.

I suppose I could accentuate the positive--it's been a very long time since I've had a technology meltdown, and strictly speaking I've never had an iChina Syndrome, unless you count the time that chick at RadioShack plugged the wrong power cord into my external hard drive and smoke came out of it, melting the only copy I had of my audition video for John Mitchell's Sex Film Project. Fortunately I'd already made and sent a print.

iChina syndrome

(Warning: this post contains geek language and may not be suitable for all readers, except perhaps as a treatment for insomnia)

I write this on a spiffy new iMac at the Apple Store in Stonestown, where in 90 minutes I have an appointment at the Genius Bar. To say that my computer is having a meltdown apparently doesn't do the situation justice. My inner life right now can best be compared to the look on Jack Lemmon's face in China Syndrome when he has grasped the gravity of the problem eating through his nuclear reactor. Nobody does crestfallen like Jack in a nuclear control room. But I am giving him a run for his money.

The problems started after I shot some video with my new Casio Exilim Z850 camera, a nifty little 8 megapixel device that takes primo quality video for a camera its size (imagine six credit cards rubber banded together). I found that my Mac couldn't actually read the AVI video files the camera produced, so I called B&H Photo Video in New York, where I bought the camera because they were the only ones who had it in stock and because shopping at B&H is good for the Jews. They directed me to Casio for the correct driver that would let the Mac play AVI. I did this, and successfully played a few videos, and that, I thought, was that.

The next day I opened up an old video project that I need to edit and burn to a DVD in order to apply for a MacDowell Colony fellowship (they require two separate video submissions). I'd ediited this movie in two weeks for the September memorial for a friend who'd died in June at the age of 91 and who had had a colorful and fairly distinguished career as a journalist in print and on public TV. I'd done four separate interviews in the four years prior to his death, and the result was good. The movie's provisionally called "Paleojournalist: News from the Life of George Dusheck."

I made good progress editing the video on Friday, identifying half a dozen clips I could part with without derranging the narrative, and I found a nifty image online of Fred Friendly to add when George mentions him as having funded KQED's Newsroom show, which was George's last gig. When I tried to add a transparent "Fred Friendly" title over his image, because George spaced out his name in the middle of the story as 91 year olds are permitted to do, I started running into trouble: following the image, Final Cut Pro played the right video and the right audio, but when I paused on the clip it displayed a still image from elsewhere in the movie. I restarted the application several times and always got the same results, with occasional new eccentricities, like the timeline icon showing the wrong video.

After doing some obvious things like throwing away preferences and POA cache and verifying and repairing permissions, I called Apple. That's why I paid $349 for AppleCare. After an hour troubleshooting on the phone, the guy at Apple suggested I resinstall my OS. I did this. Anomalies persisted: In the finder, I tried to revise an in-progress file search and, failing, opened up a new search window. The two windows vibrated back and forth, with a hideous clicking sound emanating from the CPU, until I did a hard shut-down.

On restart, Final Cut Pro showed the wrong thumbnail image to the clip after the Friendly image. First this was only when the movie was paused, but then the wrong video took over the whole clip. The correct audio played under the wrong video. Delightful!

I remembered I was supposed to upgrade my software from OS 10.3.4 from the install disk to 10.3.9 via Software Update. I did this, restarted. I repaired permissions, verified the disk, threw away (again) three FCP preferences and POA cache files. I emptied the trash (which I'd neglected to do before).

After this upgrade , Photoshop wouldn't let me add text to a TIFF image without turning the whole image red in the process. And then it wouldn't let me edit the text, or add a new layer.

FCP retained "media offline" timeline thumbnails in Paleojournalist from a previous start-up when I didn't have my external hard drive connected. This persisted after restarting the application.

On restarting the computer, ALL the thumbs said "media offline." This varied when I shrunk and expanded the timeline, but the "offline" icons never went away entirely. This willfully bizarre problem persisted even after I restored the project to a previous version (too bad about all that lost work) and after I reinstalled the FCP HD softtware.

The Finder wouldn't open Dreamweaver. It seemed like it was doing it, but gave up after a few seconds and withdrew it from the dock. Other options in the left hand column of the finder were inaccessible.

So this morning, after a mostly sleepless night until a Klonopin intervention that let me sleep but didn't exactly tone down my bloodstained AM nightmares, I called Apple again. Apple Suport guy #2 created a test account and determined that the problems weren't in my account. We started the computer from the installer disk (hold down C during start-up) and verified permissions, repaired permissions, verified disk (no problem!)

After this solved nothing, Apple guy #2 went away for five minutes and he asked if I had added any internal hardware (I hadn't). After another few minutes, he came back and started up the computer in Safe Mode, opting not to preserve my settings. Then he abandoned me to my computer, which, once it restarted, showed no recognition of any of my data (though the disk is full enough to suggest it is still there) and no recognition of my original account. Perhaps more significantly, after I spent 20 minutes on the phone with AT&T's SBC Internet Services tech support, I learned that while I was online enough to use iChat, I couldn't open a Safari window.

Apple Support guy #3 was concerned enough about the apparently accelerating corruption of my data that he said he was transferring me to a back-up specialist, who would help me back up my data before proceeding with our troubleshooting adventure. The thing is, he explained, it sounds like the computer is continuing to degrade information: applications, movie files, etc. This is what I spent half the night awake fearing--two weeks before I leave on festival tour, HAL has scrambled my movies like so many silicon eggs--and it was almost comforting to hear the anxiety half confirmed by a professional. My movie, possibly both my movies, are destroyed after three years' work. What a relief.

Apple Support guy #4 (the back-up specialist) said my situation sounded so dire that he was making me an appointment at an Apple Genius Bar so that someone could actually put his hands on my radioactive computer, and here at the Stonestown Apple Store Genius Bar is where I find myself now, 45 minutes early. Originally I was 90 minutes early, because the SF State library, where I was going to track down the book "The Technique of My Musical Language," by Olivier Messiaen, exists in four copies, as opposed to one $70 volume on Amazon and zero available copies at the SFPL or the UCB library. SFSU, unfortunately for me, is closed this weekend for its spring break. I'm sure that information was online when I checked for weekend hours the other day, but it escaped me.

Worst case scenario with respect to my movies is pretty bad, but it's not a complete loss of either one. It's a loss of weeks and months of work. For Apparition, I have a fairly recent project file backed up on Gmail. Even if all my data on the external hard drive is corrupted (as the Paleojournalist data appears to be), there is supposed to be some way that I can use the project file to automatically cue the tapes to re-import the clips. And the truth is that now that I know how Paleojournalist goes, I could reconstruct it from the original tapes in a matter of days if I had working software and hardware, which seems to be a lot to ask of the Universe right now.

I thought I had just about enough time to get everything done before my April 15 departure for Berlin/Aarhus/Nashville/Indianapolis/San Francisco/Santa Cruz. Now it looks like I just have to work four times as fast and three times as long to get it done. Anyone know where I can score some ProVigil?

inaugural post

After three years of my laboring on it in isolation and obscurity, this movie is finally getting enough action in the wider world that I'm feeling the urge to blog about its progress. Particularly because of the twin absurdities that book-ended the day.

A brief history: I began the project in the spring of 2003 after hearing a recording of "Apparition of the Eternal Church" for the first time (Olivier Latry's 2002 recording on Deutsche Grammophon of the complete works played at Notre Dame). Listening to the piece then--precisely three years ago, because it was James's birthday weekend and we were spending the night at Sierra Hot Springs--I felt the succession of ascending chord clusters alternating with the flat planes of open intervals as a stairway to heaven that I was being forced in a rapture to climb. Each massive step upward, louder and higher, sent a new, stronger wave of chills through my body and when all the alternation of dissonance and emptiness yielded to the massive, seemingly endless, blinding white light of the C major climax in the middle of the piece, I thought I would turn into a pillar of salt. My next thought was I have to play this for Albert Fuller.

So I played it for Albert, and videotaped his response, and then I played it for Manoel, and Eisa, and John Mitchell, and now I've played it for well over 100 people and edited down the responses of 31 of them into the movie now gaining a toehold on the fringes of the festival circuit. I'm sparing you a lot of iMovie and Final Cut Pro bloodshed. Suffice it to say I learned on the job.

Once I had a forty-minute movie, I had the good luck and pleasure of meeting Michael Warner at a spring gathering of the Radical Faeries last year. After I interviewed him and his boyfriend Sean Belman, they hosted a screening of the movie at their Chelsea loft, where I interviewd a few others. Then I started submitting it to festivals. About a dozen rejections later, I was approaching the hopelessness zones of demoralization when I got email from the Asheville Film Festival, the one that didn't say the dreaded "thank you" in the subject header, but said "Congratulations."

The Asheville screening, in late October, went fine. They programmed it for four in the afternoon on the first day of the festival, a Thursday, but this turned out to be a scheduling blessing in disguise because unlike movies that showed on Saturday night, while there were four movies and two events going on at the same time, mine had no competition and got a respectable 70-person, very receptive crowd.

After another round of interviews in New York right after Asheville, I re-edited the film and in December submitted it to forty more festivals. Forty. Four-oh. Anyone familiar with the process knows how time-consuming and shockingly expensive that is. In January, the rejection emails started coming. They continued through February. I'm not the most mentally well person to begin with, and have a particularly difficult time keeping it together when it comes to rejection of any kind, much less daily repudiation of my artistic vision and craft. So I comforted myself with vivid, glorious fantasies of taking my computer and the external hard drive and all the MiniDV tapes and DVDs and videocameras and mikes and flinging them and myself after them with great relish off the Golden Gate Bridge, but then I thought how badly that would pollute the bay and I decided I would live and endure the remaining two dozen rejections that were still outstanding.

Then I got an acceptance, from the Echotrope experimental art series at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Nebraska. Why was it, I wondered, that my half queer and vaguely sacrilegious movie was only playing in the Bible Belt, in states that voted for the "president" by double-digit margins in both elections? I was troubled by this, but when you're as desperate and depressed a filmmaker as I was in the dead of this past winter, you'll screen your movie in Myanmar if they ask (they haven't).

Then, in a matter of days, the movie got picked up by festivals in Aarhus, Denmark's second largest city (I'll have you know); in Indianapolis (Red State #3!); and in Santa Cruz. Granted, it's not Sundance, Telluride and Tribeca, but it's something, and I prayed as hard as a secular Jewish-Italian atheist can pray for exactly that: something. Anything. So I was happy, and that's putting it mildly. I still am.

Then, today, James's birthday. Our plans to go out of town fell through before noon after a difficult telephone call. Then email popped into my box from Echotrope (Nebraska!) informing me that my screening, scheduled for this evening, was being put off until autumn because they hadn't gotten around to promoting it and they wanted to assure it the audience it deserved. Hey, no problem--it will keep my screenings page fresh through the fall.

Another recent development, which leads me to the day's other absurdity (I'm getting there, I'm working on it) is the Web site I just linked to in the last sentence. I could never figure out how to use Dreamweaver, and it was only when Manoel's fans started quizzing him about this movie he was supposedly in, and he asked me if there were a Web site he could point them to, and there wasn't, that I was shamed into spending four all-nighters of brute-force application learning and Web authoring that produced the handsome brochureware otherwise known as apparitionfilm.com.

Now the most important question for a new site is whether and when Google notices, and therefore confers upon it, its existence. So before James and I went out for his (disaster-prone) birthday dinner, I asked him to search on "Paul Festa" and "Apparition" and see what came up. The Web site didn't, but one unfamiliar result did:

Films on Music Subjects
Apparition of the Eternal Church 57:13m Dir: Paul Festa What if music were visible? In their collective hallucination under the influence of Olivier ...
www.parkcityfilmmusicfestival.org/MusicDocs.html - 9k - Cached - Similar pages

Park City Film Music Festival dot org? Red State #4? I remembered submitting my movie to these guys but I'd never heard back from them. I assumed it was one of those places that (rudely, and that means you, Silver Lake) only notifies in case of acceptances. Actually, that's not true--I'd completely forgotten about Park City. And they'd taken the movie. And they'd screened it, on Saturday, January 28, at the curiously precise time of 4:14 PM, in Room 1, “The Blue Room.” And I didn't know a fucking thing about it.

So cheered, befuddled, and annoyed by this news, we went to James's disaster-prone birthday dinner (we waited an hour at our favorite sushi restaurant for our big plate of nigiri, and they started closing up before we realized they'd completely forgotten about it and us). When we came back here after our meager dinner, I started nosing around the Park City festival site, wondering what I'd missed and double-checking to see if it hadn't won any prizes. I chastised myself for having such a vain thought--my movie is "little," "no-budget," "out-there," "experimental," "technically challenged"--it's not a prize-winner.

In fact, it won Gold Medal for Excellence - Director's Choice for Best Film Musical, Performance Film or Experimental Film.

All I can say is that my little movie had a much better time in January than I did.