The World Between the Cuts

"Movies are life with the boring bits cut out."

That's a quote I heard long enough ago that I can't properly credit it to it's originator and have probably mangled it badly enough anyway that it more properly should be refered to as 'a paraphrase'.

But, to me, it begs the following questions:

What does Indian Jones do between adventures?
What does 007 do on his days off?
What did Luke do during the endless days on Uncle Owen's moisture farm before he became a Jedi?
And in romantic comedies, what do 'the guy' and 'the girl' do in their 'down time' on the way to 'happily ever after'? When they aren't interacting with each other / friends / co-workers in order to reveal character and/or advance the plot, how do they spend their time?
Take a classic, like 'You've Got Mail'.
We never saw Tom Hanks in his tee-shirt and boxers clipping his toenails on the coffee table and not being funny.
And remember the part where Meg Ryan was sick? What was she doing before Tom showed up with daisies ('the happiest flower')? She was hocking up phlem!
But we never saw that!

Way back in the day, when motion pictures were in their infancy, a camera was set up, for example, on a busy metropolitan street, and cranked until it was out of film.
And that was it.
That was your movie.
A single shot of jerky, grainy, black and white film from a non-moving camera.
Pretty boring, right?
But think about what a revolution it was back then. All of a sudden, Farmer Bob, from Bugfart, Arkansas, could walk into a dark room and be transported to Paris, or London, or Bombay.

Over time, audiences gained sophistication.
Single scene 'movies' lost their novelty.
And boredom bred revolution.

Enter the Russians.

Sergei Eisenstein was not the only guy to have theories about movie clip 'montages', but he was one of 'the biggies', and he was one of the guys who helped turned motion pictures from single scene vignettes into a visual storytelling artform.
That sounds grandiose but his working theory was kind of interesting. In a nutshell, his theory was about the effect of putting two pieces of film together and what they meant. A rough mathmatical equivalent would be something like: (shot A) + (shot B) = C [a new meaning that is a hybrid of shot A and shot B].
Sounds pretty artsy and poetic, and perhaps a bit primative and prosaic now, but it was the beginning of the visual narrative styles that we see everyday on tv and in movies. With few exceptions - notibly Alfred Hitchcock's 'Rope' (made of 10 minute 'takes' without any cuts) and the newer, fascinating film 'Russian Ark' (made up of one 90 minute moving shot through the Russian Hermitage museum) - all movies are made of a series of 'cuts'.

Cuts.

Kind of a violent term, if you think about it. Something that someone thought was unimportant or uninteresting was cut out. Back in the day, the editor, leaning over an old Moviola film editor, literally cut the film and ended up with a floor full of celluloid strips.
Today, it's the computer recycle bin.
There are ways to sneak up on a cut, like a fade or dissolve, but the bottom line is that something that happened on film will never be seen.

Indiana Jones picks his nose on a camel.
007 cleans his ear with a Q-Tip.
Luke Skywalker takes a dump behind a sand dune.
And Meg Ryan hocks up phlem before Tom Hanks brings her flowers.

'Movies are life with the boring bits cut out.'

Ok.
Metaphor time.

If I were the editor of my own life, would today make the final cut? Would it even make the deluxe 'director's cut' double DVD set? I'm not sure. It might be okay for a 'behind the scenes' section, but it had little that was dramatic about it.

During the last month, what would have not been cut out? Has there been -

Drama? - a bit. Some at work, a bit of my own, and boatloads from a friend or two who have drama to spare.
Romance? - next question.
Comedy? - I'm funny and have funny friends. So, yes.

Specific events?
- Alisa's house party.
- Difficulty with an underhanded co-worker.
- A lady I didn't know at my condo who walked past me one morning and said, 'I found my basket.'
- Lunch dates with my favorite DJ.
- Going to Maxine's new place to pick up a microwave.
- Fun phone and text tagging.
- House of Blues with Angela.
- Having to break plans with Courtney because of a family situation.
- Thursday nights with Becca and Jess.

But how much of the last month would end up on the floor?

I philosophically and theologically believe in down time as much as I believe in up time. Growing up as a Jesus boy, I see lots of Biblical precendents for it. Just by reading the Psalms of David, there are obviously so many 'ups' and 'downs'. Psalms of exaltation right next to psalms of despair. The joyful, vicious pendulum of life swings with wild abandon. Like muscles in the extremes of contraction and relaxation, like desperate inhales and exhales, there are mountains to enjoy and valleys to endure.

But what happens between the extremes?

Moses. A good bit of what Moses did was recorded. The circumstances of his birth, his commiting murder, his flight into the desert, his return to Egypt, and his journey towards the 'promised land'.
This is the news reel. This was what Cecil B. DeMille was interested in.
But I wonder what Moses did while he was in the desert for forty years.

Four decades of his life - on the cutting floor.

And Joseph, with his poetic, prophetic dreams. Sold into slavery by jealous brothers, thrown in jail by a lying mistress, then made second in command of the most powerful nation on the planet.
But what was life like for him as a slave?
How did he spend his days in prison?

And Jesus.

Born under extraordinary circumstances. Parents had to run away to Egypt.
Cut.
Jesus is a toddler. Joseph gets direction to go back to Israel.
Cut.
Jesus is twelve years old talking with the rabbis in the temple.
Cut.
Jesus is thirty years old, is baptized by his cousin John, and begins his ministry.

With only one exception, from about two years old until he was thirty, the events of Jesus' life are not recorded. They, too, are on the cutting floor.

The last month has been fairly dull, and I have been dulled by it. Perhaps I'm high soul maintainence. Admittedly, I thrive on novelty. I'm a bit of a hedonist for new experiences and situations. And perhaps trudging the daily treadmill has temporarily made a mental troglodyte of me.

My pal Marlon and I were chatting tonight about Facebook maintainence. Any new pictures, he asked. No, I said, I haven't had many things happen recently that are picture-worthy.

There haven't been many things to take pictures of and few new things to write about.

I admit, I long for the 'clack' of a clapboard and a rousing shout of 'Action!' But, having reviewed this particular public catharsis, it seems a bit foolish resenting this season of silence.
This dull rhythm is the humming factory that makes life happen.
This daily trudge is the line between points on a map.

This is the world between the cuts.

Downtown O-town

      This last week, the Casey Anthony trial made downtown Orlando a bit more of a focal point than it usually is. The amount of media and bystanders this last week has made navigating downtown a pretty big pain in the butt!

   Downtown Orlando, bless it's heart, is pretty small. I do like doing shoots in urban areas and I have done the best I can with Orlando. Here are some shots that I have managed in this small area in the last year and a half or so:

Deus ex Machina, on overdrive: Transformers 3

  One week ago tonight, I was in Miami at Sun Life stadium for a U2 concert. I had purchased tickets for this concert about two years ago and the concert was supposed to be last summer, but Bono banged up his back and had to postpone the concert a whole year. Which finally happened last Wednesday.

   The set and the performance were predictably amazing. Except for one song. About halfway during the concert, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullens left the stage for an acoustic song that Bono and the Edge did. Bono said that Transformers 3 would be opening in theaters the next night, the director Michael Bay was at the concert in the VIP box, and U2 did a song for the movie, and, well, here's the song - and it was pretty bad. After they had finished, Bono said something to the effect that, "Well, maybe we should have practiced that a bit more".

   They recovered quickly and the rest of the concert was well worth the 2 year wait and the insane amount of money I paid for "cheap seats".

   So, the concert was awesome, director Michael Bay being there the night before Transformers opened was pretty cool, the blown Transformers song was pretty un-awesome, and the movie Transformers 3 was…

   …anti-awesome. :(

   At least I thought so.

   I did kind of like the first Transformers. It was a pleasant distraction. The second Transformers was an absolute mess. I had heard this Transformers was a little better. So I gave it a whirl this afternoon. 

   (Insert sigh here.)

   The problem with porn, from a story-telling standpoint, is that it frequently suffers from a lack of solid motivation for its characters. For example, I stopped by a convenience store today for a quick slice of pizza. In porn-world, the chick who took my money would have been much more attractive than she actually is, a brief verbal exchange of a questionable nature would have occurred, and naughtiness would have ensued. This, in the dirty-movie-version of my day, would have been the first in a series of carnal muse acts that pop seemingly from the ether with little or no motivation.

   There are other objections, I am told, to porn that have nothing to do with the mechanics of storytelling. And there may be objections to my mentioning something so unseemly, but there is a method to this smutty madness.

   Porn, when it has any story at all, tends to be sexual set pieces strung together with the least effort made to plausibility possible.

   As I watched Transformers 3 this afternoon, I couldn't help but thinking I was watching action-porn - one badly motivated scene of mechanical violence to the next. And how the characters showed up in exactly the right time at the right place time after time made me roll my eyes. And the way that they were saved time after time in the most improbable manner available just pissed me off. 

   Was it spectacular? Yes. Was it a "big" summer movie? Yes. Was it a good movie? No. I found it exhausting and annoying. 

   One good thing that I really enjoyed about this movie was… no Meagan Fox. That was a bonus. :)

   A cynical part of me thinks that Michael Bay considers the summer movie-going public to be a bunch of mindless automatons only concerned with big things blowing up and breaking. 

   And that cynical part of me is glad that U2 screwed up the song for his movie last Wednesday night.

Un-suck

   I can't take credit for the title. I flagrantly stole it from Anthony Bourdain. It don't recall his location in the episode when he said that, but I do know mine - Miami, and more specifically, the Doral resort.
   The room is the size of my apartment. The pool area is labrynithine, and the body wash in the enormous shower is an intoxicating blend of orange and ginger.
   It smells like flowering trees and ocean breeze outside. I smell like coconut suntan lotion and contentment.
   I found out yesterday that Florence and the Machine will be opening for U2 tonight, which is a total bonus.
Last night, I IM'd with the dear Nadia for a bit whose Wednesday at work at an internet company in Siberia was in a serious day of suck.
   She IM'd looking for a bit of reassurance and comfort during a rough day, and I think I helped with that, but I did feel a little guilty enjoying myself. I was assured, however, that my guilt was unnecessary.
   That's certainly accurate, of course, but for someone as inherinently empathetic as I am, a proverbial grain of salt must be added to a good time when one of my friends is having a tough time.
   While I am writing this, there are people in the world having a rough time. And there are other people having an amazing time. And there are many others simply having an okay time. We all, I suppose, live on a large sliding scale of experience and I should not feel guilty about my enjoyment today.
   Today completely un-sucks... and that's okay!

Hug Theory

   I have an aunt, bless her, who might be the worst hugger since the dawn of time! Perhaps that's a bit of an overstatement, but it might not be! I may be willing to concede that "dawn of time" could be a slight stretch, but I'm pretty confident that she is the worst hugger since the discovery of fire-making, at least.

   Or the invention of the wheel!!

   Hugs are obligatory greetings at my mom's family gatherings. In a family whose skills are more in the areas of gardening, quilt and biscuit making, canning, judging, criticizing and being nasty - rather than in areas like warmth and affection - getting through the gantlet of hugs can be a bit of a chore. 

   This particular aunt, however, seems to have neither talent nor interest in the art of hugging. Her technique seems to be guided by a philosophy that hugs should be accomplished with as little actual bodily contact as the laws of physics will allow. A dictionary definition would mandate the arms encircling the one being hugged - and this occurs! - but her arms don't actually make contact with the victim's body. Just the pointed touch of fingertips briefly on the back let one know that one is being involved in a sham and mockery of all things Hug!

   I dislike receiving these "hugs" from this particular aunt, filled as they are with distaste and borderline contempt, almost as much as she dislikes giving them. If this Ebenezera Scrooge were to receive any bit of justice, she would be visited this next Christmas by three ghost to show her the grave errors of her hugging ways.

   In stark contrast would be my three nieces - 10, 8 and 6 years old - who are visiting this week from north California. They take hugs and cuddling as a given. It's as effortless as breathing to them and a source of simple comfort like a warm jacket and a mug of hot chocolate on a cold day.

   Given these two approaches, I'm definitely on Team Niece! 

   As another example, last week I did a camera gig for two days at Epcot's World Showplace. I hadn't worked at Epcot in a while and was glad to see friends I hadn't seen in a while. Among them was the dear Kristen, a self-admitted "hug-whore". She is, in my estimation, an absolute connoisseur of hugs. She hugs with all her heart and from the depths of her soul. When you get a Kristen hug, you know that you have been good and hugged!

   Apparently, she thinks I'm pretty decent myself because she told me once that I am one of the best huggers on Disney property. That was seriously high praise, considering the source! That's like James Beard telling you your dinner was amazing! That's like Miles Davis saying that your trumpet playing is really cool! That's like Stephen King telling you that you're scary!! 

   Hugs, at least good ones, live on a sliding scale from friendly to intimate. One-armed, off to the side hugs are friendly and easy. Friendly hugs, even the two-armed variety, are usually high up on the body (shoulders and neck). The more intimate the hug, the lower down the body the arms go (middle and lower back). At least, that's my theory.

   Generally speaking, I think that, like kissing, hugging has an almost infinite variety of things that it can communicate. Some, like my aunt, approach hugs as a nasty but necessary task to perform, not unlike lancing a boil. Others, like my nieces, see hugs as an integral part of life, like breakfast and cartoons. And others, like Kristen, express sweetness and affection through hugs with people she really cares about.   

   Anyhoo, that's what I think about all that.

   Anybody need a hug??? :)

Vintage Tiffany in the Window

   I hadn't looked at, or even thought about, this picture in a while but ran into it the other day and got a little sentimental.

   I shot this last summer I think after a bit of cajoling on my part to talk Tiffany into a photo-shoot. At the time, if memory serves, she was dating a redneck guy in Auburndale, Florida whose family ran an auction house. Judging from the eclectic content of Tiffany's then-boyfriend's double-wide, he had a hard time throwing things away. It was an absolute wreck, but since I kind of like visual clutter anyway, it worked out well.

   During the actual shoot in the stuffed trailer, the boyfriend kept inventing reasons to come back to the trailer to "look for things". I thought about saying to him that I was not there to hit on his girl but simply to do some pics, but I was enjoying a perverse pleasure in watching him watching us.

   This picture of Tiffany was a re-created spontaneous moment. We were in their bedroom (a study in post-modern gypsy carnival design as far as I could tell), Tiffany was shrugging her shoulders forward in a slightly uneasy manner, and I said, "Wait! That actually looks kind of cool. Do that again."

   She did and I think the resulting picture has a feel to it of both confidence and insecurity.

   If memory serves, the vintage pic that I photoshopped her into was either from shorpy.com or from the Library of Congresses online photo archive. Once I placed Tiff behind the window in black and white, I picked colors from the original picture and painted the original colors back onto her.

   Also, I think I had a certain amount of lighting and contrast tweaking to make it blend a bit better as well as a scratched texture on top to make it a bit more coherent. 

   Anyway, I had forgotten about this and had a bit of a moment. :)

Brew Dogs

   A couple days ago, I was at a large beer and wine store just north of downtown Orlando with a lot of specialty micro-brewery beers. I picked up a couple bottles that I had been curious about, including this one. I have really liked the different beers I have had from this brewery, which is called Brew Dogs. They are in Scotland and they came to my attention when I heard about one of their beers called "Tactical Nuclear Penguin". With a name like that, how can you go wrong?? :)
   Anyway, I saw this beer at the store and was drawn to it. It is a limited release and was literally the last one in the store. The price for this one beer was absolutely stupid, but I had faith in the brewery and threw caution to the wind.
   That was about a week ago. I had dropped this beer off, along with several others, at some friends' house to be enjoyed later.
   And later came tonight. :)
  
   Wow. :)

   Several months back, a friend had taken a trip to Paris. She brought back some cool chocolates including one perfumed with thyme. She also brought back some macarons. All of them were amazing, but one was flavored with roses. When I ate it, I was in awe because the beautiful essence of the rose -the heart and soul of the rose - was distilled into that small pastry. It was deeply beautiful and I was in silent awe at the mind and heart that could make something so extraordinary.
   I will never forget that moment.

   Tonight was not in that some level. But it was in the neighborhood. :)
   This beer was one of the most deeply complex and perfumed beers I have ever experienced. Even before I tasted it, I was impressed! There was a deep hops smell, but it was amazingly fruity and flowery.
   When I tasted it, there were 3 distinct phases.
   The first was a pleasantly bitter bite on the tip of the tongue. It tasted like juniper and eucalyptus and mint.
   After that, the big taste in the middle of the tongue was that hop-flower-fruit perfume that was in the smell, with a nice physical weight because of the alcohol content.
   At the back of the tongue, once it was swallowed, was a dark, smokey oak taste rounded off with the bitter-sugar taste of molasses.
   When I pulled air in through my mouth after I swallowed, the whole series of tastes happened again all over again, but lighter and sweeter.
   An extraordinarily crafted beer. I was really impressed.

   

   Here's the label:

Segments of the Whole

   Where does a story actually begin? Stories, in essence, are specific segments of lives. They are highly edited, specifically focussed accounts of the riot and mess of lives, either real or imagined. So, does it quite matter where I start here? Probably not.

   It's Sunday morning - Father's Day for those who are tuned into holidays more than I am - and the first day of my work week. And I am tremendously fatigued, body and soul. I am bolstering myself with a Rock Star energy drink and the determination to be upbeat and engaging when I actually begin to interact with my fellow human beings today. 

   The sensation of being an empty tank is partially from family difficulties and demands, partially from an unusually busy work week, and partially from having no safe place to stop. All of that is not whining, I don't think, but simply observations of the current situation.

   Additionally, I realize that "everything always changes". The rhythms and rules of the current flow will be completely different this time next year. To quote the 1939 British poster, "Keep Calm and Carry On".

   I'm reminded at the moment of an idea I developed with my Siberian email buddy that we refer to as "the illusion of routine". Each day and moment, while it may seem mundane, is actually quite rare and precious. And, I suppose, boredom could be a symptom of being unaware of this.

   And, speaking of my Siberian email buddy - I'm picking up a bit of Russian. Having had an approximately six month period of a vivid, lively exchange of long emails and scores of instant chats with a lovely woman from Kemerovo who I will refer to here as Nadia, I was shocked, when we chatted about Skyping, when she told me that she could barely speak English. Reading and writing were fine, but she simply had little opportunity to listen to and speak English.

   After I picked myself off the proverbial floor from the shock that someone so articulate in written english, who had such a command of shades of meaning and complex ideas, couldn't actually speak the language, I decided to do something about it. 

   First, I began recording what I alternately refer to as "audio notes" and "Radio Joey", along with the transcription of what I said. I had to get over my microphone-phobia, but all things considered, I'm doing fairly well with it.

   Second, only after sending several of these audio notes did it occur to me that my learning a bit of Russian would be cool for at least two reasons. First, it would be a gentlemanly way to verbally meet Nadia "in the middle" so that effortless spoken conversations could happen a bit sooner. Second, learning a new language is learning a new way to see the world. In my fledgling initial efforts, I have made a few observations.

   Specifically…

   The American mouth making Russian noises is both pathetic and funny, but, I do seem to make progress. I've just about got the alphabet ("alphabet"/"azbuka") and can almost sound out most words, without, of course, yet knowing the meaning and where the stress lies in the word. And I do have a small but growing vocabulary. When listening to Russian online, there are times when a word I recognize will pop through the noise like a lighthouse beam shining through a dark, foggy night.

   One subtle but important differentiation I discussed once with Nadia is the difference between "house" and "home", the first denoting more the physical structure and the second implying a bit more about the emotional and relational connection. From what I can tell, and from what Nadia said, there seems to be no differentiation in Russian. Both seem to be covered with the word "дом" (doam).

   And one other interesting non-differentiation I found just the other day is the word "рука" (roo-kah) which is the word for both "arm" and for "hand". 

   One function of language, I think, is to differentiate one thing from another. That may seem overly obviously at first glance, but without language - without the labeling of objects and activities - the world becomes more homogenous. The advantage to that would be a sense of the connectedness of everything, but the disadvantage would be a perpetual ignorance of the properties and functions of separate items. 

   I could be incorrect about the word "рука", and I will check on it, but I was fascinated that something I took for granted - a linguistic difference between my arm and my hand - was something that not everyone on the planet does differentiate as automatically as I do. 

   And I thought that was cool.

   One final thing - Having so many things going on in my life can be wearing, but I guess it's better than being bored. I have found myself, in periods of a long grind, to enjoy things on purpose. A day may have kicked my ass, but there are bits that were pretty cool, so I enjoy those for all they are worth.

   In that vein, I appreciate the following picture taken during the Vancouver hockey riots. Destruction may be all around, but that doesn't mean you have to stop having fun!