Maybe it's just the summer; all these long, mild evenings are making me feel especially mellow. Down south, we get maybe a few weeks of this a year and the rest is relentless muggy heat; here that pattern is reversed. And I sit in a sunbeam with my window open and enjoy the breeze and listen to the sounds coming from the street. I'm back into a reading phase -- I've picked up Infinite Jest again in order to follow along at least approximately with the Infinite Summer reading challenge. I'm sort of cheating, because I last left off at page 350, and I certainly wasn't about to start over from the beginning. I figure I just have that many fewer pages to read each week. And I genuinely am enjoying the book. It's just that it's sooooo long, 900-some-odd pages, and that doesn't even take into account that every page equates to roughly two or three pages of your garden-variety novel.
And god, the tennis sequences. The Eschaton sequence! Some of these passages are like the Battle of the Ents in LOTR -- you know there's cool stuff on the other side but it seems like the long slog to get there will never end. David Foster Wallace was a brilliant, crazy motherfucker, nonexistent god bless his soul.
I'm looking foward to some visits over the coming month or so; one friend from college (c. 2005) is moving to town in a couple of weeks, and then my best friend from college (c. 1998) is hopefully/probably visiting not long after. The mover, E., has his work cut out for him -- he knows how bad the unemployment situation is here, and still he wants to come, and I can't blame him so I shall try to help in whatever small ways I can. I'll take him on the grand tour, introduce him to some people, try to help him not feel too lost. This is, if I'm not mistaken, his first real venture away from his home turf, so I'll be playing a bit of big sister. If he can just find a job, he'll do fine.
I might even be willing to give him mine. The situation at Fnorders is becoming intolerable -- the flailing and grasping of a dying corporation is never pretty, but these days it seems we're being subjected to a random, chaotic series of diktats coming from somewhere in Michigan, all of which seem to involve small humiliations and added stresses for us. This started out as a not-so-bad short-term job; then it morphed into an unsatisfactory-but-tolerable cage once the economy turned. Now I have come to profoundly loathe the entire company, and want nothing but to watch my store burn to the ground. And yet, I stay. I fight with myself over it, struggle against the deep desire to walk out on bad days. It's actively detrimental to my life -- all of it, not just the hours I spend there, leaving me cranky and discouraged the rest of the time as well. But without that paycheck, everything else falls apart; and I want to be here, want to stay long enough to get into something better. So I swallow the anger and stay.
I am actively looking for other work -- hell, it doesn't even have to be a better job; just being shitty in a different way would at least be a refreshing change. My hope is that (maybe? please?) I can find something else before summer's end if I try hard enough. The other job remains a good thing for the most part. There was a bit of a hiccup a couple of weeks ago -- nothing that affected me, but it left me with a bad taste in my mouth. The two full-timers, who'd been working there for five or six years each, and who were teaching me the job and everything that goes with it, were summarily laid off one afternoon, right before I was supposed to begin teaching a new cycle of classes with one of them. It was so sudden, in fact, that in the forty minutes before the first class began, nobody knew who was actually supposed to replace the instructor who'd been laid off. The job was given to a long-timer who used to teach many of the classes, and he and I have made a respectable team. But it was still a shitty thing. And I have to wonder how much of this was already in the works before I came on -- I was told this was a job with room for advancement, that it could turn into a full-time position over time. And then the two full-timers they had were shitcanned. What does that mean for any long-term prospects I have? Did they know this was going to happen when they hired me? Was I hired as a replacement -- you know, get in some part-timers to replace the expensive full-time employees who are entitled to vacations and benefits? I would really hate to find out that had been the plan all along.
And yet, they still swear that the department is expanding. A local public-access cable station like this one obviously makes a strange fit in the world now -- when we have YouTube and bittorrent and Vimeo and blip.tv and all the rest, what do we need with public access cable? What's the point of pouring millions of dollars into what is arguably a white elephant? And yet, the place still serves some important functions, first among them accessible media education. I mean, the art colleges and film schools are all well and good, but not everybody can cough up the money to attend one. And that's where an organization like this one can fill the gap. Our classes aren't free, but they cost a fraction of the market price for what you get. We provide access to good equipment essentially for free. And there's something to be said for a distribution channel that's specific to the community.
And regardless, you could still do some pretty awesome shit in our studio if you had a mind to.
But whatever. I never expected this to be a forever job, just a for-now job. And there may be some future in it yet, at least over the short-term. They talk about opening satellite facilities around the city -- designed more for field-based work than studio productions -- and that plan sort of hinges on people like me. I've filled in some big gaps in my knowledge -- I'm comfortable in the control room now, I've got the studio stuff down pretty well -- and gosh darn it, I really enjoy the work. Whereas the prospect of going in to one job every day fills me with dread and frustration, I look forward to going to my classes here. I like the students. I like their projects, as amateurish as most of them are. And if the situation is kind of fucked-up on a political level, at least I can have some fun with it for a while. And anyway, I need the fucking paycheck.
The only thing I still enjoy about the other job -- sometimes, anyway -- are the people. I mean, mostly I hate them; and I feel bad about hating them, because very few of them deserve it. I admit that I'm not really very good at that part, and am not at all cut out for the job I have. I can fake it well enough to convince most people, but pretending to care, about the customers or about the company, isn't something I'll ever be really good at. In fact, not giving a shit has become my primary survival mechanism; it's the only way I can keep my soul and my sanity intact.
However, I get to interact with people in a way I never get to otherwise. This last week, for example, Portland hosted a huge convention for the Lutheran Ladies Missionary Society (or something like that), and like clockwork on Sunday afternoon we were deluged with prim, plucked, purse-lipped old women in twinsets and pearls, clucking disapprovingly at everything that intercepted their line of vision. They did not approve of Portland, no not at all. They bough up all our Glenn Beck and ravaged the Christian Inspiration section. The were needy and high-maintenance and ungrateful. And god, there were hundreds, thousands of them! I rode down MLK Blvd. one evening as they all congregated at the MAX stop and Burgerville; it was a full regiment in knit pants, sensible shoes, and tidy, highlighted hair. We all laughed at them afterwards.
I now take guilty pleasure, I'm vaguely ashamed to admit, in fucking with people, something I never did before. My favorite thing is to let a customer say something to create an awkward silence (which can be almost anything) and then to let it hang like a turd in the air between us. I've gotten really good at ignoring the stupid commentary that accompanies even the simplest transactions -- the redundant statements about rain, the tiny complaints, the veiled insults, the too-obvious jokes. I've also become adept at faking cheerfulness. I can deal with a customer without making eye contact or smiling, and still impart a sense of cheery eagerness through voice inflection alone. If I talk to customers with a hint of condescension -- as though I were talking to a small child, say -- they buy it every time. And I should feel bad about it, I guess, but I don't. I don't care that my interactions are rote and robotic, that my enthusiasm is 100% artificial, because they don't care either. They want the gesture, but their own end of the interaction is too rote and automatic and shallow for them to notice that I'm responding in kind. It's fucking depressing, but from a sociological perspective, it's pretty interesting, too.
While you're suffering through 103F temperatures and humidity that makes walking outside feel like being smothered under a hot, wet blanket, up here it's 73 degrees and mostly sunny.
Just sayin'.
And sorry about the long gap between posts. It's been an unusually busy, relatively stressful few weeks, and the blog has just fallen by the wayside for a while. Things should settle down soon, and I'll have stuff to talk about.
In the meantime -- before it gets too old to post -- here's a video of a few hundred happy, naked people on bikes* and one closeted, repressed fundie:
(not strictly safe for work)
This is why I love Portland: the majority are on bikes and naked, and one of them is trying to calmly reason with the solitary raving religious nut yelling at them to "get raped." So, it's exactly the opposite of Mississippi.
PS: I threw that in just for you, Nelson. I think I'm caught up on my nudity quota for a while.
* full disclosure: more than a few of these naked bikers were friends of mine, though fortunately my vantage point on the proceedings was nowhere near this asshole.
May has proven to be my own personal cold and flu season. Having gotten over the rhinovirus a couple of weeks ago, I thought I'd paid my dues for the year, but it turned out it was just the flu lining me up for a clean shot. In the morning I was fine, out running errands, in the afternoon I started feeling a little funky, and by nightfall I was up to 103F and reduced to little more than an animal shivering under a blanket. All my usual methods of controlling a fever worked poorly at best, and for several days I couldn't get much below 101. I don't know if it was the dreaded H1N1 or just a garden variety influenza, but I'm calling it my swine flu either way, because that virus was badass enough to deserve a title. It was literally the sickest I've been in a decade.
So I spent the entirety of last week in bed struggling against a stubborn fever and doing not much else. Not reading, not writing, not watching TV, not fucking around online, just laying in bed sleeping about 18 hours a day, and staring at the wall for most of the rest. After a week, feeling considerably improved, I attempted to go into work, and discovered that within that context, a wide gulf can separate "considerably improved" and "fit for work." Apart from the wooziness and my inability to regulate my own temperature, several days of violent coughing had absolutely shredded my voice (which now, ten days after first getting sick, is still fragile and comes and goes), rendering me unable to speak. And as my mother can attest, if you can't talk, you're not much good to anyone in a work environment, yourself included.
But it's mostly over now. The voice is still rough, and my right ear is cut off from my brain by a small, unmoving lake of snot. The cough is going to be with me for weeks. At 33 I am robust enough to shake it off, but it's easy to see how a bug like that set loose among the very old or the immunocompromised could be catastrophic.
Anyway, that's been my week.
I've developed a recent thing for typography. I mean, in retrospect, it's been an obvious passive interest for a long time -- nothing I particularly want to pursue, but something that piques my interest whenever it comes along. It seems to me that there are picture people, and there are word people; I know for sure that I am very much the latter and almost not at all the former. I can appreciate pictures, and I can definitely appreciate others' skills with images, but for me, the picture part clicks only superficially, if at all. I can tell a good image from a bad one, but as far as understanding the differences between the two, I'm lost. Even hand-holding me through the process will only get me so far; the synthesis just never forms in my mind. Words, I get. I got them early, I got them deeply, I grok words. I'm more often careless with them myself, but if you drop a really masterful composition in front of me, I can understand how it works, why it works, and can make some good, educated guesses about the processes used to write it.
So maybe typography, then, is my bridge between two disparate styles of perception. Maybe I like it because it adds another layer of meaning to something I tend to take for granted. Maybe I like it because it offers me a handhold on the slippery world of images. Maybe I like it because, if you can look past the words, letters are just cool. And sometimes it's good to see them treated as beautiful in their own right.
I'd say that well-designed, well-chosen black letters against white space is probably one of the loveliest things humans have ever created.
Today (well, okay, technically yesterday, as late as I am getting to this) is the 25th anniversary of the death of Andy Kaufman. According to at least one website, he's still alive.
Personally, I don't buy it. And that website is the biggest reason why.
It would be wonderful, delightful, heartening to think that he'd pulled it off, that he'd faked his death and gone to ground waiting to re-emerge, or not, at some future date. But this far on, that almost seems too obvious for Andy. I mean, to "die" and then reappear after one year or three decades would be interesting, and sort of cool, but really, where's the fun in it? For him or for us? And wasn't that always the ultimate point with Andy? The fun?
The person who slapped up that website is blatantly obviously not Andy Kaufman, and doesn't even seem to especially understand Andy Kaufman. Which is either the best evidence that it really IS Andy, or the best evidence that not only is Andy gone, but that even if he reappeared, he'd be irrelevant now.
Put it this way: if that really were Andy Kaufman, then I'd just as soon Andy stay dead. If that was what he became, then he's outlived his usefulness to us anyway. But the better joke, the more sublime joke, is almost certainly also the reality: that Andy died of cancer 25 years ago today, and all these years later, we're still doubting.
As I write this, I'm at the end of about 48 hours sitting in this apartment. I wish I could say I was the first on my block to contract swine flu, but it turns out to be a garden variety cold, if a particularly unpleasant one. Fortunately it came over me at the beginning of a long stretch of days off following a couple of months of constant, hectic activity, so a couple of days of convalescence was something I could both accommodate and enjoy, apart from the sniffling and spasmodic coughing.
Some people's lost weekends consist of drugs and booze; mine are made of rhinovirus and streaming episodes of Heroes on Netflix.
Just under a month into the new job, I'm beginning to see its potential. There's nothing remotely cool or glamorous about it -- I'm there to teach, and to help people make really, really bad TV shows. But driving back from a shooting location over the weekend, P. and I got a chance to talk a bit, and we were experiencing the same reaction: elation. There's none of the usual bullshit in this environment, no ego or attitude, just excitement of people doing something they thought they might not be able to do and finding it manageable, and an intense earnestness about the work. It's so easy to look at what they produce and laugh at its gracelessness and ineptitude, but I would take my earnest students over every creative classist in the city.
The class I was with this last weekend was shooting a short piece on a local comic book artist, a guy who's about to see his best-known work released as a movie. The week prior to that I'd been with a class shooting a studio piece with a different comic book artist, less well-known but very talented. Next weekend we're working on a piece about urban farming, and that unit, I believe, is working on getting a quick spot in with our scandal-ridden mayor (in conjunction with the organic garden they just planted outside city hall), but we'll see if that works out. I've already met the mayor twice anyway. The point is, this is actually not a bad spot from which to meet interesting people, both in the classes themselves and during their productions.
And then, as well, I've got access to the entire station -- the 5-camera studio, lots of good field equipment, a mobile production van, lists of people who want to work on productions, blanket shooting permits for the city and county... why, there's not much a girl couldn't do with all of that at her disposal.
This job isn't what I was hoping for when I left film school, but finding myself here, I'm realizing that it could become a comfortable spot that offers me a lot of possibilities and a lot of resources. It leaves me enough time and energy for other things; it will, hopefully, provide me with enough income to maintain my cozy, if simple lifestyle; it should help me accumulate all of the solid production experience I've constantly felt I lack in the years since I left school; and it offers me access to all the tools and toys I could reasonably ask for. That is to say, it offers me a lot of freedom. I like that.
The summer will be bumpy, since that's when the media education department is undergoing some top-to-bottom restructuring -- P. and I were hired in anticipation of that, as part of the station's plan to subsequently expand the department. I'm not going to be able to get really comfortable just yet. And I still have a lot of work to do -- I have to prove what I in turn have to offer. But so far things are going well, and I'm working from only hopeful assumptions.
In completely unrelated news, the Mandelbrots -- remember them? -- seem to have vanished. Following the last round of discoveries, I managed to get John (the intelligent, swollen one) chatting about movies on the phone a few times at work. Nothing much, but chit-chat -- he was so eager to talk, although while I was on the floor I was pretty restricted. But I managed to get him, barely, to send a couple of emails to one of my numerous addresses telling me about his screenplay. It was all just by way of establishing some sort of connection, building some thin bridge to see if it led anywhere. And then he just stopped. And Eunice never came back in, nor did Mark. They stopped ordering DVDs, and nobody's heard from them since. With two of the three suffering major physical ailments and the third apparently incapable of caring for himself, anything could've happened. Or nothing. It's sort of a shame either way.
Otherwise, things are comfortable. I'm beginning to glance tentatively towards the future, buoyed by the sensation of my retail-deadened soul beginning to stir. It turns out they grow back, who knew? Not soon, but on the horizon, I can see interesting things coming. New developments tend to bring new growth. Maybe a fresh round of significant connections? Maybe new collaborators, new projects? I'd like to dust off my passport sometime in the next few years, maybe. There are endless possibilities. We'll see what comes.
By now, I've done six sessions at PCM, and I'm feeling much more at home. P. joined the staff officially this week, and I was quietly pleased to find that during his first night in the studio class he was as confused-looking as I must've been; he even graciously complimented me on how assured I seemed on the studio floor. And it's true, I'm gradually figuring things out, becoming a bit bolder. Tomorrow (well, today technically) is my first session as a co-teacher, equally responsible for managing the class. The other teacher, being an old hand, will of course still be guiding me through it, but as far as covering the material goes, it's as much my job as his.
The station does basically two types of class: project-based, multi-session courses for the studio and field; and then single-session component classes designed to cover particular topics in greater depth. Tomorrow's session is just a component class in using video on the internet -- I spent a couple of hours tonight reviewing my codecs and the peculiarities of a few major video-hosting sites, but having looked over the syllabus for the class I think I can probably get through it without embarrassing myself too badly. It's not rocket science, after all.
And from here on out, I will only be co-teaching (with the exception of the field production course already in progress, on which I'm essentially a TA.) We sat down a few days ago and hashed out which of the upcoming classes P. and I each want to teach, and I surprised myself a little by volunteering for courses that I find more intimidating -- the studio production course, and component classes on switching and directing, audio, and using the character generation system. I guess I'm thinking that the best way to get more confident in those subjects is to damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead.
Other than that, life is quieting down a little. I've got my bookcases up and full -- today I took some leftovers to Powell's and turned about a dozen French and anthropology books into enough money to buy a bottle of decent cachaca for our upcoming house party. But the books are unpacked, the boxes are gone, and it's been nice getting re-acquainted with, by weight, the bulk of my few possessions. I still have a couple of boxes of assorted crap to finish putting away, but I'm getting to the lighting and art-hanging stage in my room, which is nice.
In a couple of weeks, one of my closest friends in town, Rick, is leaving. Rick is considerably younger than me, though he scoffs at the idea of attaching any significance to that fact. The reality, though, is that Portland is the second place he's ever lived, and the only place outside of Detroit, his home town. Which is to say, it's time for Rick to go see something of the world. Somehow he got it into his head to undertake an epic journey by bike down the Pacific coast, over to Arizona, and then on to Tennessee. He is spectacularly under-prepared. Lots of people are very worried about him, me included. But as I see it, this is the kind of thing a young guy (and pretty frequently a middle-aged 40-ish guy, probably even a elderly 75-year-old guy) just has to do sometimes, and so I'm happy to see him off. Rick's a great guy, but he needs something to age him a little, something to test him, make a man of him as they say. Crossing the southwestern desert on a bicycle in May or June could probably do the job.
I'll miss him for sure. I don't really expect to ever see him again. But part of the understanding here is, if I am to settle in one city, then I'll have to accept that I'm no longer the person who continually leaves; I'll be the one who's left behind. It's a little sad, but I'm willing.
My Aunt Vicky is my favorite aunt. I mean, I've got a few cool aunts, and I don't mean to diminish their importance. But Vicky is particularly special. She gives me a sense of continuity with my mother's side of the family, demonstrates that I make sense as a part of the extended clan. My mom is awesome, but there are traits that I share more in common with Vicky -- the bookishness, the unapologetic liberalism, a certain kind of mellow, it'll-all-work-out-in-the-end philosophy. She was arguably the one among her siblings most willing to step outside of the life that was expected of her, and go off on her own path, a proud tradition among a certain kind of woman in our family.
And I suppose a beloved aunt is a bit like having another mom, except one who doesn't always get on your case about the same old mom stuff.
Anyway, today is my Aunt Vicky's birthday, and it's a bit of a landmark occasion. I don't think she would object to stating her age -- in fact, I bet she's rather proud of the accomplishment -- but I'll still leave her to give the precise number if she cares to.
So a very, very happy birthday to my Aunt Vicky, whom I admire and respect and love very much.
