once upon a time
Thursday, February 26, 2004
My Movie For Gerri
"What She Left Behind"?
-stock footage of cottages, skies, water
-footage from kat's little birthday -- also a little from the sesame street at the beginning
- title less corny
-old 16mm footage of her and her children.
-anna's black and white footage of me dancing on the street
-her school photos
-ducks are very yellow/ they like to eat marshmallow/ they like to swim and swim/ even when it's dim
-footage involving pills - hints
-beating heart projected onto my breast
-"tell your own truth"
-barbara reading from her journals
-footage of journals and cards -- her handwriting
-hands of people she loved
-footage and photos of her children
-"she told me once that all she'd ever wanted was to be a good mother."
-"for all the smiles, i saw her crying, but i couldn't have known what it meant."
-fade in and out of Scarborough fair "remember me to one who was there/she was once a true love of mine."
-photo of me with gerri and zeddy
-quotes from dad, erin, jen, meg, kat, patrice?
end:
-shot of empty pill bottle with empty glass of red wine with lipstick. man's voice "it was a heart attack"
played against the la da dee da da doo! of rainbow connection.
audio over credits, my poem:
i had to sneak through hallways
and tiptoe through corridors
to get to her room.
she had built a tent around her bed
with light and dark silk
that that of the dress she had bought in that bohemian garden
where there were chessbords painted on the rocks
and katherine caught baby snakes in the grass
i brought her yellow roses and she said,
"don't you get it?
i came here to get away from all of you."
What if someone designed and illustrated the Bible like a cheap romance-pulp fiction soft cover? The cover to the new testament could be Jesus in a loin cloth looking a lot like a black Fabio, with Mary Magdelaid looking lusty and washing his feet with her hair, with captions like "the HOT NEW testament!" "The Passion of Christ like you've never seen it before!" "The son of god, and the whore who loved him!"
And the Old Testament: "the Good Book has never been so BAD!" with a cover that plays on old master Adam and Eve paintings, but giving Adam and Eve would have modern porn-star type bodies. Probably with Eve feeding Adam the apple.
Inside, it would just be the bible untouched, maybe with three scattered color plates in each testament.
Saturday, February 14, 2004
I walk the spit-shined city sidewalks, the saliva-scented streets of Chinatown, with pebbles pressing themselves into the rubber soles of my sneakers. A gob of spit lands fat beside my shoe. I look up at a dignified old woman pulling a shopping cart and wiping her mouth. She's looking directly into my eyes. If she's trying not to smile, she's seceding at it wildly. I keep on walking. The sun lays a heavy hand on the crown of my head. Sunlight glints and glares off the shop windows selling leather-brown headless beasts who hang from strings by their feet. My shoulders are sunburned. So is my nose.
I have the vague notion that I'm in love, but I haven't decided with who. I don't think there's any such thing as a romantic comedy.
Sunday, February 01, 2004
flash animation idea #2
the flirt
the flirt is a cute little girl with a bright face and big eyes. the animation starts close up on her dancing. when the camera zooms out, the audience can see that she is dancing on the heads of a long row of men. their eyes are all following her and they are grinning and applauding. she's singing a little ditty with coos and do-do doos. this goes on for a while with the music building until suddenly... the girl comes to the head of a stern looking woman. she stops short. the woman cocks her head. the flirt hops down and sits on the floor cross-legged with her head on her hands, elbows on her knees. the stern woman walks out of the frame, and the flirt blows a raspberry after her.
flash animation idea #1:
the girlfriend
a boy and girl are sitting at a table side by side eating dinner. they are clearly on a date. sparks are flying and conversation is getting more enthusiastic and tender until -- they kiss. when they pull apart, a third party is pulled out of the girls lips like a ghost: an exact clone of the girl. "the girlfriend." the girlfriend immediately latches onto the boy's arm. she giggles and coos and clings. the boy and girl try desperately to talk through and around her, but it's no good. the girl gives up and leans her head on her hand, while the boy makes increasingly uncomfortable conversation with the girlfriend. his attention is caught by a pretty waitress walking by, and he's gone. the girlfriend fades away, and the girl is left alone, picking at her lettuce.
art show idea:
paint an art space entirely flat black. have an actor, covered from head to toe in white paint, move through the space. everything he touches, he leaves a print. film this actor moving through the space. plot this so that significant things happen to him in different parts of the room. (perhaps a series of bad things getting worse and worse before he leaves, with a hint that he's committed suicide in the next room, or a series of good things one would want to remember in a life, or perhaps a mixture in an attempt to distill real life.) the show involves this empty space, and monitors close to the places where the significant moments happened, showing these moments in continuous loop. the audience can then move through the room, following his footsteps as if following his ghost. it's also interesting to think that hundreds of people have followed these footsteps before and after you. it feels in my mind as though this path would gain a real significance over time in a spiritual way. if an audience member chooses to specifically avoid the actors trail, he or she is still choosing to interact with the exhibit.
the idea came to me when i was sitting in my desk in art class. i was remembering how a few nights before i had an entire subway car to myself for one stop. i danced up and down the isles, thinking of rush hour traffic earlier that day and the eighty people in that car not looking at each other. little did they know that in that same car carolyn was skipping up and down. thinking of this, i wrote, "i was here. now you're sitting on my ghost." on my desk. then, it came to me.
