Dearest Pammest,

So finally this is it, the final packet, and although I’d be just thrilled to the gills to have you as an advisor for a third semester, the powers that be won’t allow me that privilege, which is a load of crap, because you know I’d follow you into Gallipoli and come out unscathed.  It’s been a wild ride, and I feel it’s been my best semester at Goddard.  I owe most of that to you, so I’m just going to have to give you alcohol at the residency, or maybe you can just drink on-camera with the Bear for the video I plan on shooting.  Fun!

I’d planned on making seven-to-twelve videos for this packet, but of course life intervened and gave me two weeks of flu (still going strong!), a blizzard that prevented me from returning to my video setup after the Thanksgiving weekend, and a fundamental unhappiness regarding the loss of my __________ that didn’t translate well into working for ten hours each day with stuffed animals.  Add to that the ongoing and 300% frustrating task of working as a proofreader for The World’s Dumbest English Teachers, and yeah, I could have done more but didn’t want to do anything at the end of the day but watch Court TV and play Snood.  And honestly, my computer is out of room, falling apart and on its last legs.  If I’d tried to shunt another LB video into the poor thing, it might have caught on fire to spite me and smote me while I slept.

Enough excuses, Hughes.  I’ve made five videos for this packet, all in week three.  Well, technically four videos, since one is a re-edit of the very first Lonely Bear from last semester, but I feel that the four original videos are worthwhile expansions of the LB universe and take the series in some interesting directions I’ve not yet explored, not only in terms of technical assembly, but thematic elements as well.  I’ve also included links to the perpetually-being-created interpaul project and the recently-registered thelonelybear.com, which I hope is visible to you, but it might not yet have achieved total DNS propagation, so if you can’t see it, please check back in a few days and it should be there.  I haven’t had any complaints yet about the page being invisible, but I don’t know how soon name servers are refreshed up in Norway, or wherever you live.  I’ve also kept reading Illuminating Video and I’ve looked at the links you provided in your last packet response, but I have a feeling I’ll be keeping my comments to the minimum because my brain feels like tapioca pudding and I don’t have any keen insights to relate, but we’ll see about that eight hours from now when I get down to writing out the resource list for this packet.  More fun!

So here’s the last packet.  It’s been a pleasure and honor as always, and you should know that you’ve been by far the most positive element of my Goddard experience thus far, and unknowingly kept me from abandoning the program completely on more than one occasion.  You are the consummate advisor, Ms. Hall, and I’m beyond lucky to have you in my life.  Now on to the BIG SHOW!

With much love,
Paul.

I really must say that you have made astonishing progress towards the goals of your fourth semester, Paul.  At this point it is very clear to me at least, that you are entirely ready to tackle your final semester in the program with grace and ease and all your ducks (or bears and camels) in a row. 

I came into this semester deeply concerned with the G3 report committee’s response that implied that I might consider doing an extra semester at Goddard to better familiarize myself with the art historical context of video and digital art.  I sincerely hope that I’ve shown enough progress in that regard this semester that an extra semester isn’t necessary, because I feel that my familiarity with the concepts and confidence in my own practice is strong enough to hold up under faculty and communal scrutiny, but perhaps more importantly, my own scrutiny.  I no longer have the sense of a confused fish out of water.

I am SOooo glad you are in love with Walter Murch. Me too!!!! 

I like to consider my revision of the original The Lonely Bear video a direct result of my Walter Murch reading and research this semester, perhaps a tribute to how deeply his vision and practice has become an itching little influence each time I sit down to edit a video.

I DO love your idea for the next residency about An Hour with the Lonely Bear.

I still hope to be able to do this, but it will all depend on whether I can get my DVD burner working in time to take it to Goddard and shoot and edit and burn to disk before a scheduled showing.  I could make everything for VHS, but what’s the fun in that?

I confess that my American room-mate heard me laughing out loud this morning while I was screening the Limbless Monkey video, and I played it again for him. He is a Professor of Russian at the university, 33-34 yrs old, and Aries “alpha” male, and he LOVED it… thinks you are sitting on the next South Park!!! 

Strange…  I can’t imagine why anyone in that demographic would find LB even remotely appealing.  ;-)

On his recommendation I am referring you to the Bud Light Real Men of Genius things on the web, and though I haven’t seen or heard any of them, he ensures me they contain some black humour that he feels might appeal to someone who would have a penguin slit the throat of a monkey with a steak knife. 

Yes!  The Real Men of Genius campaign is absolute genius.  With commercials celebrating people like “Mr. Really Bad Toupee Guy” and “Mr. Too Much Cologne,” how could you go wrong?  Those commercials are a highlight of every Monday Night Football outing for my friends and myself.  Unfortunately, it’s Monday, and I’ve not yet completed this packet, so I’m abstaining from MNF this evening.  This only goes to show my intense devotion for my academic career, since I’m giving up a drunken evening of one-cent chicken wings and $5 pitchers of Labatt Blue.

He desperately wants to know when they are all up on the website so he can send it to his friends, and is already talking about getting a tape of all of them so he can have Lonely Bear Festival keggers here in my TV room!!!!! (GOD, you American boys are Sooo much fun!!!!)

Send him on over to the minty-fresh http://www.thelonelybear.com!  And as soon as I have the aforementioned DVD troubles fixed, I’ll be sure to send you both copies.

I was intrigued by your discussion of the Bear’s position in your personal history. There may be something quite profound operating in his current centrality in your practice… something the psycho-therapeutic folks would just eat alive, hee hee!!  There may be something quite libratory and or safety-making in working with a beloved, familiar object from our childhood…something we “played” with in gentler times, something associated with fun, pretending, and the logistics of childhood play.

An excellent line of exploration that I’ve only just begun digging into both on the new site and in the revised original LB video.  I’ve also been kicking around ideas for the big old G5 presentation thing I’ll have to do at the next residency, and this has been at the forefront of my brainstorming regarding that.  Expect to see a much more in-depth line of questioning in the future.

I also appreciate your comments on needle and journal writing and the trouble you are having “writing”. I suspect it is quite that when one is immersed in engaging work in one “language”, one moves away from others for awhile. Or perhaps one “fluency” takes up the space of another… one momentum replaces another, etc.

I tried to write this time, I gave it the good old college try, but it just wasn’t happening.  I also found that the regular duties of maintaining my online network have fallen by the wayside; every time an author sent me a submission, it felt like a chore to update and upload.  LB has so completely consumed my creative energies that I seem to have no patience left for the mundane work I’ve always done.  This packet provides some closure on LB for the moment, with the end of the “first series,” so I’m hoping I can redirect my interest and energy back into the things I need to do, including the completion of my third silver novel.  This isn’t so different from other semesters, when I was “consumed” by “To Wound” or “The Stillness” and became the recluse wacko with just one thing on his mind.  I feel great about the LB series, but I’m ready to move on to other projects for a while before the inevitable return.  Just logistically, I need to patch up the animals before I shoot any more videos with them.  That hectic shooting schedule really messed them up, floppy limbs, busted seams.  If LB is something that I want to continue indefinitely, I’m considering having some exact replicas of the animals made so that the originals don’t get ruined.  I might have to recruit Andrea for her sewing skills!

The WORK: 
Why are ALL the videos so small this time? 

Not sure I have an answer to that one…  As far as I know, I rendered the videos at the same size and in the same format as before.  If you’re using Windows Media Player, make sure the option is set to “fit player to video size on start.”

This version of consumed is light years ahead of the first one, and the transitions are, as you clearly have seen yourself, working powerfully to create that dream state kind of  mood, which works especially well, I think in the bathtub sequences… the naked eyes to naked eyes transitions.

I just have to tell you about a film I recently saw that hit me like a fucking hammer in the heart.  Extending my fascination with American Psycho’s Bret Easton Ellis, I watched his “The Rules of Attraction” on HBO late one night.  I didn’t expect much, and honestly, the movie is awful, sheer pap depicting college life at a remote New England private university (some scenes eerily reminiscent of my undergrad life), but there is one scene that just cut into me and I found myself tearing up, no, let’s be honest, I was sobbing by the end of it because it was so beautiful, so painful, and dredged up a truckload of memories that I thought I’d successfully buried under happypillfunfunfun. It’s really interesting that this film was edited entirely on Final Cut Pro, which my esteemed classmate Henry Warwick helped code. There’s some great transitions, interesting use of split-screen etc, but the scene is question just blew me away. 

Spoilers herein:  You might want to see this film.  Hell, I hope you do, if only to see the scene I’m about to describe.  So if you want to see it at some point, skip over the next passage, because I’m about to ruin it for you.

Long story short: The main character has been receiving anonymous love letters, and he thinks they’re coming from the female lead, but it turns out that they’re coming from a character that has only appeared briefly in one scene, a food service student worker at the school, to whom he was a total dick.  The scene that knocked my ass was this girl’s suicide, after she saw the object of her affection with another girl.  The suicide took place in a bathtub, via a razor blade, and included this gorgeous static shot of the girl that was all head and shoulders and chest as she cut her arms open, bled out, and died.  I thought that scene was rough, hit me pretty hard, but I had no idea what was coming next.  There’s a quick scene of the main character receiving and reading the last letter food service girl had written him before she killed herself, but the most painful part is that he still doesn’t know that it was her, still thinks it was the female lead writing to him.  What follows is a montage of clips of scenes from earlier in the film, focusing on the lead character, but the shots become still and bend to zoom in on food service girl in the background.  I think there are four of these shots, and each time it zooms from the main character in the foreground to a static image of food service girl watching him in the background.  It was completely overwhelming and heartbreaking to see that she’d always been there in the background, and he’d never noticed her.  Okay, I’ve babbled on long enough, just see the movie when you can and you’ll see what I mean.  This is why I make videos!  To inspire such a reaction in the audience…  I can’t imagine a more potent form of creative power.

I can say nothing but good stuff about where you are taking the Bear. LOVE the bigger stretches included this time.  Sometimes when we get series mind, we are thinking that the only ground for play is story itself; you know… PLOT, and maybe character development. So I want simply to underline these other stretches you are making, and to encourage you to stay open to formal, and conceptual possibilities as well as to narrative ones. 

I hope the examples I’ve included with this packet show even more “stretching,” since it was a concept that I kept in the forefront of my mind the whole time I was thinking of ideas for new videos and how to assemble them.

Interpaul sounds like a brilliant project and the central Bear location is wonderful, and I have already begun to send it out… yes, my American roommate demanded it right away! (Still, I think you should burn them to a disc for sale, or onto VHS for film and video festivals to get them to a different audience than the web…you could likely sell enough CD’s to finance a nice dinner with the Regional Director, yes? Or more likely a new video camera? A villa on the Riveria?) 

I worked on interpaul quite a bit for this packet, and I’ve registered thelonelybear.com to be a more easily-accessible gathering place for all the bear stuff.  I do plan to start selling the series online once my burner is fixed, and I’ve begun guerrilla marketing the shit out of it.  (Refer to “Paris Hilton Sex Tape scheme below.)  Once I get more than a few minutes to myself, I’m going to start looking into festivals, but I think my main problem will be deciding which LB videos to send to festivals, since those $25-50 entrance fees add up fast.

You are SUCH a pleasure to work with… thanks for coming back to me this semester; I would have hated to miss this work you are doing. 

The pleasure’s been all mine.  I wish it could continue, but I know I’ll have to get another advisor next semester for the big final push.  Any recommendations?  I wish Catherine would come back, because she was rad.  I’m fearful that I’ll get dicked over at advisor selection and have to work with someone who won’t give me a fraction of the support and inspiration you’ve given me this year, and someone with whom I’d have some fundamental creative and lifestyle conflicts.  I won’t name names.  You’ve spoiled me for anyone else!

Video:

• The Lonely Bear: Animal Husbandry!
• http://www.offensemechanism.com/husbandry01mpg01.mpg
• 04:16, 22mb.
• I consider this the final “traditional” episode in this phase of the series, because it contains all those formulaic elements of the previous episodes.  I don’t really have a lot to say about this one, except for that it pushes the boundaries I’ve set in earlier episodes regarding the sexuality of the animals and for the first time shows two of them getting it on.
• The Lonely Bear: The Best Episode EVER!
• http://www.offensemechanism.com/starring01mpg01.mpg
• 02:46, 14mb.
• When considering that the episodes have a recognizable formula that the audience has come to expect, I decided to play with that concept and create something that would undermine those expectations.  One of the most-easily recognized elements of the series is its opening credits, which are a thirty-second block introducing the characters for which I’ve used the same video footage each time, only altering the soundtrack to make each episode original.  For “The Best Episode EVER,” I chose to simply extend the credits past the thirty seconds that the audience expects, adding on an additional two minutes of credits and then ending the video “because we ran out of money.”  The audience is never given the chance to view the end product that the credits imply will be following.
• Next Week on The Lonely Bear
• http://www.offensemechanism.com/commercial01mpg01.mpg
• 00:30, 3mb.
• I hate commercials.  Hate them, hate them, hate them.  So of course I decided to make one for “next week’s” episode of The Lonely Bear.  The thing is, I never intend to produce the episode implied by the commercial, which I was hoping people would catch on to, but I’ve already had several people tell me that they can’t wait to see the finished episode from the commercial, although there is no episode, nor will there be.  This particular video was an attempt to play with that concept, placing an expectation into the audience, like the “Best Episode” listed above, and then never giving them the payoff.  I had considered creating a trailer for a Lonely Bear feature film, which I still might do, but until I can afford to hire Miguel Ferrer to do his typical Hollywood trailerspeak, it just wouldn’t be the same.
• Paris Hilton Sex Tape
• http://www.offensemechanism.com/parisbear01mpg01.mpg
• 03:08, 16mb.
• I had a lot of fun with this video.  By now, I think everyone on the planet must have heard of hotel heiress Paris Hilton’s sex tape she made when she was nineteen.  I know I receive about fifty emails each day advertising sites where I can watch her fuck.  Oh joy!  I find her about as attractive as Lenin’s corpse, but I’ll admit that I used file-share program Kazaa to locate and download the video of Paris being naughty, like every young curious heterosexual lad has.  Being obscenely rich doesn’t make young Paris any more attractive or sexually interesting than your average gal, but what I did find fascinating was the use of night vision in the tape, which gave it an eerie green haze and messed with the natural colors, for instance making Paris’s eyes glow like a cat’s in the dark.  There was a classic comic moment when her phone went off during the act, and she actually answered it.  I thought that the video was hilarious, and I closed it and was about to go about my business, but then the deep-down video artist/opportunist/Mr. Hyde element of Paul Hughes made me open the video and watch it again.  You see, this is the most popular video on the internet right now, and everyone is trying to get it…  I had a vision, and it was a night vision.  This Paris Hilton video is a comedy goldmine!  I realized that if I really wanted to create a guerrilla marketing campaign for the Lonely Bear series that would reach the most people for absolutely free, I could use the Paris Hilton video as a starting point.  I decided to create a shot-by-shot recreation of the original Paris Hilton sex tape, only my version would star the LB series’ happy couple, The Ostrich and The Thing With One Eye.  I had all the elements, two willing participants, a bed, a video camera with night vision, and a cell phone.  This video is the result.  After I shot the footage and edited it together, I created a voiceover soundtrack starring the LB narrator guy and another TTS engine voice to exactly re-create the dialogue on the original sex tape.  I included a link to thelonelybear.com at the end of the video, and after it was all rendered and saved as “original_paris_hilton_sex_tape.mpg,” I opened up Kazaa, dropped the video into my shared folder and waited to see what would happen.  Within minutes, people were downloading the video, thinking that they’d soon be watching our young heiress giving a blowjob.  Instead, they were treated to The Ostrich giving a blowjob, followed by a link to a site about a bear.  It’s been three days, and poor horny schmucks are still downloading the video.  This is the power of the internet at its finest.
• The Lonely Bear’s Christmas Special!
• http://www.offensemechanism.com/xmas01mpg01.mpg
• 03:43, 19mb.
• My influences are clearly showing in this video.  I grew up in love with the Charlie Brown holiday specials, but my favorite was always the Christmas special, not only for the animation and the sad story of CB (Come on, Charlie Brown is the saddest comic character in the history of ever!), but also for the Vince Guaraldi soundtrack, which I still listen to year-round.  I stole a track from the original soundtrack and Cyrus Chestnut’s Guaraldi tribute album from a few years ago, and I wrapped a story around those two pieces of music.  I wanted to capture the same depressing atmosphere of the original CB cartoon, while at the same time injecting some heavily-South Park-influenced humor into the mix.  This was the last original project I made for the semester, because then I moved on to:
• The Lonely Bear
• http://www.offensemechanism.com/bearrevision01mpg01.mpg
• 07:15, 38mb.
• The original “The Lonely Bear” was problematic in that my production process had not yet been streamlined and I was still in essence learning what my computer could do with video, so there were the annoying elements of bad download from my camera and bad rendering and choppy transitions.  I owe much of that to the fact that I assembled the original project in those beautiful two weeks between my camera being broken the first and second times, so I’ve always considered it a rushed job and something that I’d return to later to clean up.  I thought it would be a fitting conclusion to both this semester and our working together if I used what little time I had left in this packet period to return to where we began together.  My desire to re-edit this project was only heightened by reading Walter Murch, and I feel in many ways this new version was directly inspired by him.  I was able to lop off a minute of old footage, making sure that each shot had a length and composition that was self-contained and meaningful.  I spent much more time with the transitions, and instead of inserting half-assed two-second dissolves everywhere, I made a conscious attempt to direct the audience’s eyes with my cuts from scene to scene.  After comparing the original and new versions, I’ll admit that there are times that I think I might have cut too deeply, might have excised a bit too much, no longer giving the audience the opportunity to linger over an image.  Another problematic aspect was my addition of the omnipresent robot voiceover guy, providing a narrative where before there was none.  I do have versions both with and without the voiceover, so the jury’s still out on that one, but I present the voiceover version here for you to see.  I think I might go with the non-voiceover version for festivals and showings, because I like the ambiguity and want the audience to think instead of being told.  It’s all a learning process, and I’ve learned considerably since first posing a stuffed bear and taping him.

Web Design:

• interpaul
• http://www.paulevanhughes.com/interpaul/
• It’s still in the very first stages, scattered with broken and incomplete links, but I hope what’s there will give you an impression of where I hope to take this project.  Sometimes it’s easy to fall into a thought process and obsessively link events together, and I hope this page reflects that obsession.  I want it to be easy for the viewer to fall into this, to get lost in the links, perhaps unable to get back to the main pages, but instead forced to follow successive links in an attempt to regain some sense of location and control.  A few of the links are external, directing the viewer to my other sites, but most of the links are internal, leading only to another page within the loose network.  I know it might not be readily apparent at this stage the complicated associations that will exist between people, places and things that will exist when I’ve gone through every html page and linked together every common element, but I hope you can see what I’m getting at.  I want the viewer to discover that what at once appears to be very loose, confusing and suspect connections merge into a tight sense of obsessive thought processes that have determined who I am.  interpaul is a project that presents implicit elements of a story as revealed by explicit fragments.
• thelonelybear.com
• http://www.thelonelybear.com
• Here it is, the all-star clearinghouse for all things Lonely.  I needed something with name recognition, because I knew disseminating the link http://www.offensemechanism.com/bear.html just wouldn’t work; people are lazy and stupid.  The site includes all the videos so far, along with sections about the characters, myself, and production notes.  I’ll add links for purchasing the series on DVD and festival information soon.

• 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.
• There’s no way I’ll finish this book before the end of the semester.  I’m about two-thirds of the way through it now, but I’ll finish it eventually.  I was hoping that this would be definitive resource on video art that I’ve looked for during my entire Goddard career, and although it is an interesting read and presents dozens of varied arguments and viewpoints, I’ve come to realize that since video art is still a young medium, there just can’t be a definitive resource yet.  Sure, it gives some very informative views of the early days of video, the activist phase in the 1970s, the audience participatory work in the 1980s, but then it fizzles out.  The publication date works against it, because I feel there’s no way the authors could have foreseen the digital revolution as applied to video, and instead become mired in arguments about how the video medium is particularly important to Latino culture (Bullshit! says PEH.) and how video has an inherent responsibility to work toward social justice (More bullshit! says PEH.)  Maybe I’m just trapped in a whirlpool of modernism, but those post-modern arguments that art has to have some deep, socially-conscious meaning beyond paint on a canvas just don’t sit with me, and I resent being battered over the head with po-mo dogma every time I open a book.  There has to be so much more than this!  There has to be a reference that discusses the effect of the digital world on video and recognizes the value of art for art’s, not society’s, sake.  Blah blah blahhhhhh says PEH.
• James, Dr. Leon. “Cyberpsychology: Principles of Creating Virtual Presence.” November 21, 2003. Online: http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/cyber.html.
• I’ll be brief.  I know this guy was trying to write what he thought would be a definitive source for cyberpsychological research, but to me, it reads like the work of a complete amateur and exhibits so many inherent fallacies that it was laughable.  Reading this article has only inspired me to use my seven years of being an internet rockstar to myself make the definitive resource on cyberpsychology.  I realize that James’ original article was written in 1994, and it does contain what I find a hopeful naiveté (see also: Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte) that certainly should have been revised when he re-wrote the article in 2000, well after the dot-com bubble collapse.  It’s a good effort, but failed to impress me with its suspect analyses of dataspace.