Dearest Pam,

I guess I don’t really have a lot to offer you this time, and no, that’s not self-effacing Paul mode coming out, just the simple truth.  The last three weeks have been filled with hardware and software problems (I knew it was coming...  I never get through a semester without having to drop a thousand bucks on something.), a week away for travel and a wedding, starting up two new proofing jobs for two sisters in Taiwan who teach English (and that takes up so much freaking time, it’s ridiculous, but at least at $2/page it allows me to eat, which is nice), a desire to download and watch every episode of Space: Above and Beyond, and the biggest creative block/mindfuck I’ve had in a while.  I have this new novel sitting here half-done, with hardcover publication from _____ due next spring, and I have no more words left.  I’ve been kicking my own ass to get in gear for so long now that my cheeks are numb.  I don’t know…  Real-life problems have made Goddard and personal creative work seem secondary to survival.  So there’s nothing brilliant, nothing mind-boggling beautiful or funny for you to see for this packet, but there’s a new Lonely Bear, and making that felt good, so I should be on the upswing again by the next packet deadline.

My building hasn’t tried to kill me since the last packet, but last night I spent three hours trying to localize and stop a high-pitched sound/vibration downstairs that was driving people crazy.  Apartment 5’s walls were shaking enough to knock pictures down.  I figured it was a backed-up pipe vibrating against a stud, and I’m pretty sure that’s what it was, but my landlord is certifiably senile and couldn’t understand that explanation.  He thought it was some kind of toy my neighbor had bought for her newborn baby.  I’m crazy enough; I don’t have time to deal with other people’s crazy.

Sorry, I whine.  Mid-semester burnout.  I’ll get over it, I promise.  There’s just so much going on, I don’t even know where to begin when it comes to this little MFA program.  I’ll try harder.

There’s so much I did for this packet that I can’t even show you.  Recorded two hours of stuff at my friend _______’s wedding, but it was his camera (mini DV) and wouldn’t work with mine, and he asked me not to use anything from the wedding, anyways.  There’s only so much I can write about what I’ve read, what I’ve seen or sung or done, and I don’t think I’ve done enough for this packet, at least anything that I can show you.

Elliott Smith’s death didn’t help anything.  It’s really gotten me down.

I don’t really have much to say in this packet.  I’ve not impressed myself this time around, so I certainly don’t expect to impress you.  There’s something there, something just trying to break through, but I haven’t figured out what it is or how to uncover it yet.

So you take care, enjoy the autumn and LOVE and stuff, and I’ll try to do better for packet four.

with much love,
Paul.
 

Be careful in that aggressive apartment! I am not ready to lose you yet, and certainly will resent any refrigerator, toilet, or electrical socket that rips you from my world!!!!! 

The Work: 
Consumed V2 
I am delighted you have decided to play this piece through and through again and really use it to explore both formal and conceptual elements. I recognize how uncomfortable it can be working with one’s own body image (hey, I have a body too) and also how hard we are pulled to find “the right” cut. I like this version better… it feeds our “need” to see that eye sustained beneath the water, and frankly, even though I can only see a tiny little screen, the lens and glasses shots seem to be more powerful this time. They seem to “make more sense”… why is that, I wonder? 

In version two of “consumed,” I made a conscious decision to allow the viewer to linger on some of the imagery by playing with the speed of the shots, using slow-motion and strobe effects.  In the first project, I just stacked clips together with a few transitions, but version two, at least to me, feels like a more composed, intentional look at the same images, and not just because the clips are longer, but because I’ve tried to arrange them so that there are similarities in arrangement between different clips.  Tub scene dissolved to glasses scene with the eyes in almost the same position.  I’m playing with a sense of fluidity, which often is confused with faster speed, more pronounced dissolves.  This is a project about allowing yourself to linger on an image, to really look into it and perhaps become consumed by it.

And since you have committed yourself to play with this one again and again, (a VERY good learning strategy… in fact if I was teaching film, I would make everyone cut 25 films from the same footage over the course of a semester!!!! What a bitch I could be!!!!) I have a REWARD for you!

 I can definitely see the learning potential in repetition…  My undergrad drawing professor Guy Berard told us to bring in a found object once, something that could fit in the palm of our hand.  I brought a small black and red bird-shaped toothpick dispenser to the next class, and over the remainder of the semester had to draw that thing over two hundred times.  Big drawings, little drawings, pencil and charcoal and conte and ink, five-second sketches and two-week finished projects.  SLU bought one of the drawings from me, a charcoal rendering of the bird’s rear end.  I titled it “Bird’s Ass View.”  So yeah, repetition is an excellent learning tool.  I’m disappointed that I can’t show you the third version of “consumed” this time around, but I’m just starting to realize the repetitive potential of the Lonely Bear series.  More below.

The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film 
by Michael Ondaatje

I’ve ordered this book from amazon and am waiting for it patiently.  I’m in love with Ondaatje, so this should be a good match.

Moo
I loved this entirely…. Giggled constantly and felt moo-ved. BUT, admit I was distracted by the bars separating you from those cows, and wanted a more intimate, full screen version of hide, and belly, and abstracted texture to the point where we only discovered their full contoured cow-ness later. It was the edges of those cows I saw too early… I longed for full screen, no reference, black and white and browns and pinks… a sensual, seductive moo-ving of the camera over their bodies. I wanted you/the camera, almost kissing their shoulders, the camera as hand as well as eye. Does that make sense? I wanted you IN the pen, not outside it. (I am a “visual” artist after all, and weaken at my knees for sweet abstraction, and the body as a landscape, and, and and and….) 

The metal bars of the gate between myself and the cows did interrupt and act as both a metaphorical and physical barrier.  I wanted to shoot without that interruption, but one thing that a video like this won’t make apparent is that the realization of that boundary goes both ways: I know that the gate keeps the cows outside, and the cows know that the gate keeps me inside.  If I’d opened the gate and stepped outside to be closer to them, they would have run away.  It’s a hesitant borderland, one that allows interaction between human and cow, but safe interaction, one with which both the human cameraman and the actor cows feel comfortable.  I could have shot through the gate slats, but that didn’t seem as truthful to me as just acknowledging their presence and working through them.

The Lonely Bear: Knocked Up! 
This is BRILLIANT !!!! I can see an entire cult series rising up and taking over the world. Lonely Bear meets Darth Vader. Lonely Bear in Paris. Lonely Bear goes to College.  Lonely Bear Starts up Porn Site. The Lonely Bear Goes to Newfoundland!!!! 
Maybe T-shirts… maybe a 1-900 number!!!!! And those “babies” !!!!! God I loved those “babies”.   I feel like bundling up all Jordan’s old stuffed animals and sending them to you! I have a large donkey named Desdemona who might be willing to do almost anything to be cast in such a film!!! This is also really GOOD play, Paul… to pull out narrative and really work it episodically is no waste of time, and adds to and stretches out the real diversity of video work you are tackling this semester.

There’s such a feeling of freedom in these projects, not only because I can incorporate just about anything into them, but because they allow me to exhibit a side of myself that many people have never seen.  I’m known around Goddard as the kid who makes the videos that make the women (and quite a few of the men) cry.  They still might cry at LB videos, but hopefully they’re tears of laughter.  This is the stuff I used to be known for: cutting, wry, ridiculous situational humor.  It feels like home to return to it.  I’m still the guy who talks to his dead friend and longs for his ex, but at least I can make a funny movie about a stuffed bear.
 
I am curious to see if you “know” why people like The Lonely Bear. Do you understand what pulls, attracts, and lies beneath the positive response you are getting to this piece? 
Tell me, tell me. 

I really wish I knew why these projects appeal to so many people.  Maybe it’s the sheer idiocy of it all; you can see my hands and fingers and reflection.  Maybe it’s deeper than that.  Maybe people realize that these stories are just metaphors for things that have really happened to me, or could happen, or exhibit just enough similarity between my life and the life of a lonely bear to make people laugh.  It’s self-deprecatory humor, self-aware biting satire wrapped in a self-important package: the obnoxious British robo-voiceover artist, the absolutely horrible public domain music, the trappings of middle-class America saturating every shot.  These projects are made as if I feel they’re more important than they are, and that self-awareness drips through.  They’re a dig at myself.

The Sound and Webdesign
Everything here is solid, solid, solid, and I am delighted to see the crossing over you are doing in terms of using discoveries in one realm to play and push in another. You are using the voice-maker at ATT very effectively, and this new ASCII to html thing also holds some interesting possibilities. 

I hope to have put the finishing touches on an ASCII project for packet four.  Please stay tuned.  All of this looking around the internet has been so inspiring, not just in what I see, but the tools I’ve found so that I can make.

The Reading and Looking:
Glad you liked Oryx and Crake, Atwood is one of my favs, though confess I like her other fiction better than her 2 “speculative” works.

I heard that she’s up for the Booker award.  Excellent, excellent, excellent.  The book deserves it.

I appreciate your point about radical social work by some of the early “video” artists, and also your reluctance to feel “pressed” into activism just because you are an artist. I think, certainly in Canada at any rate, many of those early Port-a-Pak users were less interested in video as an “art form” and WERE doing activist work, and found access to video a sudden and profound opening of the power dialogue. We have quite a different system in Canada to support art-making, and video for artists really grew out of publicly funded (not cable or broadcast funded) activities that grew up from what would have been “visual arts” practices. 

I’m often confused by many fellow Goddard students’ desire to acquire government funding for their art.  I don’t know if it’s a generational difference, a cultural difference, or what.  “Magnetic North” has certainly opened my eyes to the artistic programs available in Canada for funding etc.  I’ve never applied for a grant or government help for my art, nor do I intend to.  I guess it must be because I don’t work with communities, I don’t make public art, and I don’t want or expect Washington or New York to give me money for what I do.  Please don’t take that the wrong way…  I’m having a hard time textualizing what’s going on in my brain.  I guess my belief is that if I create something that someone likes and they want it, I’ll sell it to them.  I don’t want to be paid for the process of creating; it’s mine, all mine, and I’ll accept any and all financial responsibilities for it.  It often seems to me that at least here, artists feel that the government is obligated to help them out.  Is this a personality difference?  Back to my good old plumber comparison, if I were a plumber, I wouldn’t expect the government to pay me for being a plumber.  As an artist, I don’t expect the government to pay me for being an artist.  If I need a new camera, I buy it.  New tapes?  I buy them.  If I need a new domain, I buy it.  It just seems to me that far too many of my Goddard classmates are focused on getting government money for doing the same things that I pay for myself.  </confused blathering semi-rant.>

I don’t want you thinking that this looking (and reading) is somehow not as “juicy” or powerfully profound to your practice as making stuff, Paul. THIS is important and fundamental work which will transform your eye and mind and heart as an artist, and even if you were not in graduate school, would deepen and enrich what you DO as an artist and how you think about it. 

It’s reassuring that you write that, because I know I don’t have a lot to show you this time, but I really feel that my reading of video and internet history is paying off.  I’m learning, and I know that I’ll incorporate what I’m reading into future work.  I just have a hard time not being able to show you something.  Contextualization is a bitch!

Til then, take GOOD care… hug the Lonely Bear for me, take good care of your new “family”, and perhaps you should invest in some condoms for the Thing with One Eye ? 

No comment…  Just watch the new installment.  ;-)
 

Video:

• consumed. (v.3)
• You’re just going to have to trust me on this one.  There’s no link to it because I haven’t yet been able to successfully render the new version of this project.  I swapped out some of the glasses shots and replaced them with extreme close-ups of my eyes and forehead taken during the summer, forehead and cheeks covered in drops of sweat.  When using a dissolve transition between these shots and the darker shots from earlier versions of the project, the sweat stands out like stars.  It’s a gorgeous effect.  Wish I could show it to you, but every time I’ve tried to render this, the program freezes on the second-to-last shot.  Technology pisses me off yet again.  I’ve tried switching things around and tweaking the settings probably a dozen times now, but it still freezes up in the exact same spot for no good reason.  I gave up and moved on to other things.  Hopefully I’ll have a version of this available for you to see by packet four.
• needle.
• http://www.offensemechanism.com/needle01mpg01.mpg
• 00:04:10, 22mb
• October 22nd was a painful day because I found out that musician Elliott Smith had taken his own life by stabbing himself in the heart.  It hit me hard of course because of the obvious similarities to his life and death and those of my friend Jacob (refer: The Stillness).  I listened to my favorite Elliott Smith song all day, “Needle in the Hay,” perhaps known best for its use in “The Royal Tenenbaums” during the scene in which Luke Wilson decides to kill himself.  Found a live track of the song, dumped it into Pinnacle and wrapped some old summer footage around it.  This is a throw-away project.  I liked the lighting conditions in the field I was walking across, took some footage attempting to re-create a sequence I shot in 2000 in [re][surrender].  Nothing deep or special here.
• The Lonely Bear: Surgery Fun for Everyone!
• http://www.offensemechanism.com/surgery01mpg01.mpg
• 00:02:55, 15mb
• The next entry in the Lonely Bear series.  Deals with the fact that two members of the Lonely Bear entourage are missing body parts.  It’s formulaic, as simple as changing the pieces of “Knocked Up!” to new footage, new voiceover, new music.  Simple, but it’s still a shitload of fun to make.  Even in this repetition, I can see what little things I can do to make it unique, to surprise the audience.  The LB series is a welcome departure from my usual deep dark heavy material and allows me to hone what humor I have.  And even if I start with everything storyboarded and ready to go, little surprises and opportunities pop up with no warning.  There’s a structure to these, a serial feel, but even in that framework, I think I’m learning, growing, getting better at this.

• Fifer, Sally Jo and Hall, Doug. Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art. New York, N.Y.: Aperture in association with the Bay Area Video Coalition, 1990.
• Digging in even more to the history of video art.  Exxxxcellent book!  I highly recommend it.  What I’ve found most interesting in my reading for this packet is the nature of the histories of video art history itself, how the history was being problematically written even before video art had really had a chance to develop.  Okay, that probably makes no sense.  Difficult to summarize.  It’s like people were struggling to write a video art history to legitimize the medium even before those who were actually working within the medium had had a chance to do anything worth historical note.  Just finished an excellent essay that dispels many myths of the early days of video, how guerilla art was a savage attack on television culture, how Nam June Paik was a conceptual art hero who took up video arms against that oppressive culture, how collectives and communes bathed in sheer cooperative beauty and created video to undermine and resist.  The essay states that that’s all a bunch of romanticized bullshit, and it’s nice to hear a voice from this great post-post-modern wilderness that exposes a lot of what I’d expected already.  I realize it’s just one opinion, but I think it’s awesome that that opinion was allowed into this attempt at a video art history.  It appeals to me much more than the touchy-feely fight-the-man idealism that saturates much of what I’ve read on video art history.  I’m also very intrigued by the early attempts to identify the inherent properties of video, as if identifying overriding properties within the medium would make video a legitimate art form.  To me, it seems a modernist attempt to get video into museums.  There’s SO MUCH in this book.  It’s overwhelming, but it keeps me interested, and most importantly, I really do feel that the essays contained in this book are teaching me.  I set out this semester to learn the history of video art, and now I realize that that’s a problematic goal, but at least now I’m aware of the problems and am being exposed to a spectrum of historical viewpoints from which I can assemble my own understanding of video art history.
• Hafner, Katie. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.
• This book seems to be a good companion piece to the Tim Berners-Lee history of the world wide web that I read earlier this semester, digging even farther back into the history of what would become the present internet.  Excellent resource for the history of ARPAnet and those mostly-men who created the backbone that the web would decades later sit upon.  Interesting digressions into their histories and personalities and desires.  Great analysis of the transition between room-sized military calculating machines and the precursors of networked workstation computers.  Also takes the time to point out that the internet was NOT designed at the beginning to be a nuclear first-strike warning system or anything so dramatically dark.  That’s a bit of internet history no one seems to know or care about.
• Sans Soleil.  Stewart, Alexandra and Marker, Chris, dir. 1982. Videocassette. New Yorker Video.
• I’d bought this video my G1 semester, during my Chris Marker “La Jetee” obsession, and I looked at it a few times, but I don’t think I ever really watched it before.  Driven by my recent viewings of “Kill Bill” and “Lost in Translation,” I was inspired to really watch it all the way straight through.  The underlying theme for all three films is that fish-out-of-water (or white person submerged in Asian culture) standby.  Marker’s “Sunless” has that Bill Viola quality of orchestrated spontaneity that allows the viewer to linger on often uncomfortable, disconcerting imagery, yet with more figurative visuals.  It’s a long, tedious film that’s at times overwhelming underwhelming, but every shot, each and every scene, seems intensely composed, intentional.  I know it’s easy to turn the camera on and point it at someone and see what happens, but Marker has a way of doing that that makes me  believe he was controlling every inadvertent actor in this production.  Use of voiceover was excellent, often not tied to the images at all.  Also gave me an opportunity to see the video synthesizers so often mentioned in “Illuminating Video” first-hand.  With ILL shitting the bed once again, I’m scrounging around for meaningful things to watch.