Dear Ruth,

I hope this packet finds you well.  Your letter did in fact find me eventually.  I am now back in Syracuse; my exile is over for the moment, as I will explain later in the packet.  No worries about sending my packet response to everyone on the board.  It was an honest mistake and one that I myself have made several times myself in this technological realm, I assure you.

I will admit that it has been difficult amidst traveling to sit down and work at all on my audio, and the video aspect is an entirely different story of frustration.  I did what I could with the resources at hand (and in my laptop) for this packet, so that meant writing and reading.

I will first address where I stand in terms of the overall project right now, then I will address the questions you asked in your packet response.
 

Video:
On February 5th, I placed an order for a Sony DCR-TRV730 Digital 8 Camcorder from seller paulputt on eBay’s half.com.  After charging my credit card, paulputt decided to disappear with my money.  On March 5th, half.com notified me that they regretted to inform me that paulputt had neither responded to my inquiries nor fulfilled my order, so my credit card would be refunded and paulputt would be removed from the half.com site.  With my refunded money, I was able to advance-purchase a Sony DCR-TRV740 Digital 8 Camcorder directly from sony.com for roughly the same price.  This is a newer model.  Unfortunately, sony.com charges NYS tax, so the price was about $100 higher than I had hoped.  I won’t complain; as I write this letter, the camera is in transit, trackable from sony.com and fedex.com.
 

Audio:
No updates to report at this time.  I hope to begin final mixes of the first three soundtrack segments during the next packet.
 

Webdesign:
I’ve worked on several small and two large projects since the last packet.  

http://www.resurrender.com/music.html
On resurrender.com, I created a page that links to several musical compositions, available in .mid and .mp3 format.  Among the compositions are the three tracks that I sent you for the first packet, in various incarnations.  This site allows the resurrender.net community to download my music and give feedback through a thread on the resurrender message board at illout.com: http://www.illout.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=32680.  
Already, other illout members are encouraged enough to display their own musical compositions.  Some of the feedback is worthwhile; some of it is nonsense.  We’ve always had a thread about music: http://www.illout.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=11378 where people list what they are listening to at the moment, but there’s never been a place for people to actually show anyone their own music and gather feedback about it.

http://www.timeforkink.com
timeforkink.com is a collaborative effort started by my best friend Jason Beerman and myself as a place to display our inane efforts at humor.  Although for the moment only the frontpage is visible, we’ve already begun collecting submissions and coding the backend of the site.  Many in the resurrender.net audience have complained via illout.com message boards that the network doesn’t really have a place to display comedic writing.  This is something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time.  Hopefully by the next packet, Time for Kink! will be live, with material for you to look over.

http://www.singingsaintsalumni.org
In undergrad, I was a member of the St. Lawrence University Singing Saints, an all-men’s a cappella singing group founded in 1950.  Because I was the production manager for a majority of my time in the group, I was in charge of building and maintaining our web presence, http://www.singingsaints.org.  Now that I am a member of the Singing Saints Alumni Association’s executive council, I decided to create an alumni page to help facilitate communication between members.  It will also be an integral part of planning and coordinating our 52nd reunion, set for September 2002.  Since the last packet, singingsaintsalumni.org has gone live, providing alumni with an array of communications tools such as an email database and a message board service.  This site will continue to evolve as more information about the reunion becomes available, and as alumni are made aware of the site’s existence in a mass-mailing due for release in mid-March.
 

Reading:
I have recently finished reading two very influential books, Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany, and Remediation: Understanding New Media by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin.  The first is speculative fiction; the second is an academic exploration of new media.  I know that I briefly mentioned both in my annotations from the last packet.  Because of travel difficulties and the fact that I just finished Dhalgren last night at 6am, I will not attempt to write a substantial piece about these two books for this packet.  I will, however, include with the next packet an essay detailing why these two books have influenced me so deeply, and how two books that would seem to have nothing at all in common in terms of subject matter or audience display a remarkable set of thematic similarities.
 

Writing:
I have included in this packet three pieces that I’ve written since the last packet.  It seems a meager contribution to the overall project, but I was regrettably kept out of town and away from my audio/video technology.  I decided to incorporate my vivid emotional responses of uncertainty and fear, and later a newfound solace, into these three works.  Reading Delany certainly made me strive to explore my writing, my voice, in ways that I’ve considered before but never truly tried to hone.

an end: part four: the machinery of night: entries one-three.
I began writing part four of my new novel a few days after the first packet was due.  It was refreshing to begin a new part of the story.  As I explain in the Lilies piece from this packet, my fiction writing seldom follows a direct chronology.  For this part of the novel, I’ve decided to take the audience back to a time just after part two concluded.  I find my writing now heavily influenced by Delany’s inadherence to traditional forms of grammar and chronology.  His merging of first- and third-person perspectives, the incorporation of segments of other media, and the insertion of himself as a character are all tactics that I hope to explore further in this part of the novel.

six months out/living in denial.
This journal entry is my first since January.  In it, I discuss issues of loss, both in terms of the six-month anniversary of 9-11 and my newfound intense disenchantment for the digital medium.  I begin to explore my own online “romances” in terms of Bolter and Grusin’s arguments in Remediation.  This was a difficult piece to write; it was the first time that I publicly acknowledged that I am now in a romantic relationship with someone from the “real world” to someone that I was in a psuedo-romantic relationship with in the digital world.  This entry went live on resurrender.com on 11 March 2002.

Lilies.
“Lilies” is the first time that I’ve sat down and tried to analyze the misconceptions that can grow from online communication that ultimately led to my exile from Syracuse for a few weeks as I attempted to elude a perceived threat from an internet stalker.  In this work, I try to systematically deconstruct the web of relationships and miscommunications, the miscues and the mishaps.  It is a story of Paul, four distinct young women, and a novel.  Some of it was painful to write.  Hell, most of it was painful to write.  “Lilies” is a step toward sifting through the entangled emotions that made last fall a particularly poignant and life-altering experience.  There is material here that I hope to incorporate into the video project this semester.

Take care, Ruth.

Paul
14 March 2002
 
 

That’s it for now in terms of new material.  I will now address questions that you raised in your response to my first packet.
 

Sound Tracks:

A Lifetime Without You.
version two:

“I am a bit curious why you let your line drop out well before the end of the composition.”

This was just an unconscious stylistic choice on my part, I suppose…  I don’t particularly like the sound of my own voice, so eliminating it from the mix as soon as possible becomes desirable.  I also recall my music composition classes with Dr. Michael Farley, where he taught me about layering sounds and strands of audio to a climax and then resolve to an attempt at diminished sound.  I feel that perhaps the climax of this piece actually comes a little too soon, or the track itself is too lengthy.  The repetition is at times troublesome.  I will explore ways to maintain the emotional climax of the piece without drawing it out too long or boring the audience with repetition.  
 

“At this point I have also watched the video and several questions are beginning to emerge for me.  The first is about your decision as to when to use a male or female voice.  When I first heard the female voice in the first track, I assumed that it was a female describing her side of the relationship.  I don't remember now when I first realized that the female was indeed speaking your lines, but I was surprised.  You seem to be describing a heterosexual relationship so I wonder why the choice to foist certain parts of your voice onto a female.”

The decision to use a female voice was a difficult one for me when I first began assembling the soundtrack to the resurrender video project in 1999.  I’ll admit that the vocal mechanics of my own voice were a strong argument against using my own voice to read those textual elements.  I didn’t feel that a deep monotone would be very conducive to a positive audience experience, so I decided to add another level of intrigue to the process by replacing myself with female voices.  The text itself was taken from an assortment of emails.  Choosing voices then became an exercise in matching up voiceover talent to the voices of the recipients of the emails.  I knew that a majority of the audience would never notice, but I also knew that several of the email recipients would see the project and hear voices eerily similar to their own reading emails that they had received months and years before.  I guess that’s one level of that project: catalyzing distinct emotional responses tailor-made for individuals that many people would simply overlook because they would have no basis for that knowledge.
 

“Another question I have is about your strategy of montage and repetition.  I wonder, whom do you listen to in terms of sound artists?  I wish I had a wider knowledge myself but your work vaguely reminds me of some of Glass or Steve Reich in terms of the use of repetition.  Their work is sometimes criticized for being monotonous, but the repetition can also be used to heighten tension.  I note in your letter the comment that "sound can communicate the most poignant of emotions."  I would agree, and actually remember taking film classes where the filmmakers argued that , just as you say, the sound take was as or more important than the visual.  But in your case, the use of repetition seems very double edged.  On the one hand it can heighten the emotional tension, even if in an irritating way, and on the other it can lull the listener into a bored monotone.  It seems like a fine line and one in which I think you could fall on either side of.   Does this make sense to you?  How do you think about this issue in relationship to your work?”

I never really thought about my musical influences when it comes to the kind of work that I compose.  I do listen to Philip Glass, and his “Kundun” soundtrack (and the Kundun dvd) are actually within arm’s reach of my desk at all times.  Dr. Norman Hessert first introduced me to Glass in undergrad freshman year.  He also introduced me to composers Alan Hovhaness and Arvo Part.  Both of these composers use systems in their work, systems that the casual listener would probably not pick up.  For example, in “Silouans Song,” a Part piece that I used during the home: refuge/solace segment of the resurrender video project, Part uses a system of extended discord, in which sounds swell to discordant climaxes, then resolve to a phrase in which only one or two of the atonal elements remains, builds again to a distinctly new discord, and follows again with a resolution to another discord.  These waves of jarring sound were particularly effective for the emotional atmosphere that I wanted to create in that segment.  Another highly influential piece to my own compositions is Hovhaness’s “Cantus In Memoriam Benjamin Britten,” a study in repetition and tempo.  Each instrument plays the same scale over and over, but each instrument plays the scale in a different tempo.  I always try to find a system to the madness of repetition.  I know that sometimes it all seems to fall apart, and in many cases, the repetition is indeed irritating or annoying.  I think perhaps that it an effect that I want to have on the audience: to make them uncomfortable amidst a suffocating wall of sound with no end in sight.  Other more-mainstream artists that I listen to who deal with electronic composition or repetition are Radiohead, Bjork, Stereolab, Cornelius, et alii, just off the top of my head.
 

“A related question is the whole question of narrative line.  Obviously you're not interested in making a traditional Hollywood style film with a linear narrative.  But do you need some type of narrative to create the emotional tension that you're after?  How can you do this with a series of repetitive fragments?  Or can you create an emotional tension without story line?  Does the viewer need to have any identification with a character, which by the use of fragmentation and male and female voices for the same person, you seem to thwart?”

This is perhaps the most important issue that tangles with my creative process.  As you saw from the resurrender project, sometimes I have a hard time creating a coherent narrative structure, relying only on distinct segments to lull the audience into some sense of storyline that is never really resolved.  I must think about this more…  I think it is possible to create an emotional tension without a readily-apparent storyline.  Jarring images and sounds can certainly carry an inherent emotional response.  I need to resolve how to incorporate images and repetitive audio tracks into something coherent and meaningful to be truly effective.
 

“As you proceed, the integration of the visual and the sound tracks will be an issue.  In your last tape your interspersed several different types of footage, from your friends horsing around, the theatre students chasing a gorilla and much more impressionist footage accompanying the journal readings.  I don't want to offer an extended reading of that video as it's already a completed project.  But now that I've seen it, I would love to hear from you regarding some assessment of what works, or is problematic to you in that tape, how you see it informing your present working style, and or which strategies in that tape you wish to continue to develop.  I think that will help further our dialogue.  Maybe I should ask not only about strategies but content as well.  You are using much of the same text for the audio of your current sound tracks no?  How  do you think that you will see that material in a new way in your current work?  What is its hold on you?  I also would love to know which filmmakers, or even writers do you look to for inspiration in terms of the use of montage?”

I had begun a deconstruction of the resurrender project for you to read when my vcr decided to die.  In the next packet, I will include a substantial essay on the process and product of that project.