THE PROSE POEM, FILM SCREENING, REPETITIVE LABOR, ON MALE
MODELS,
Hello Friends; this is Matthew Yeager checking back in; I am
thankful to Stacey for allowing me to continue to post over the course of the
next week or so, as I have a variety of threads that I’ve started, and a few
topics I definitely wanted to get to over the course of my week;
As per the screening of “A Big Ball of Foil in a Small NY
Apartment” at the Lighthouse Film Festival last weekend, it went fairly
well. We didn’t get a win,
but I’m informed that we were close.
Alas. Unfortunately, I also
didn’t get to arm wrestle the world’s greatest arm wrestler; the venue where he
was banging strangers’ arms against tables was actually as far away as
Washington Heights is from the Staten Island Ferry – all at the 25 mph speed of
a pedestrian-friendly trolley….What many people don’t realize, what I certainly
didn’t realize, was how spread out into a town, how essentially de-localized
the typical film festival is. “Are
they all like this?” I wanted to know.
Sean acted in a film that went out to Sundance a few years back, and he
said out in Park City films were going up everywhere….As it seeks to put up, in
the case of a large festival like Seattle or Sundance, sometimes over two hundred
total films, a festival must extend out into community; like house wrens with
their nests, a festival will throw a projector up in any suitable place where
people can be arranged. Churches,
community centers, museums, hotel banquet rooms. Rarely is there a single unified structure where the
everything that needs to happen can happen.
When you’re dealing w/ the impermanent projection set-ups,
this can sometimes make for a problematic screening. Every filmmaker we’ve talked to has some sort of horror
story about a projection going all wrong. Was it Thoreau who said that all man’s innovations
were merely “improved means to unimproved ends?” Projection hasn’t gotten any less complicated, it seems,
since substitute teachers were getting tangled up in film. The major development has been to
computerize the problems, which at least limits the physical entanglements. As
far as our screening, at least from a technical standpoint, we were on the
overall pretty happy. The only
thing we could complain about was the screen. The screen’s ratio was 4:3, a
tube tv’s ratio, as opposed to 16:9, which is the contemporary ratio – the
rectangle of today’s flat screens.
To put a 16:9 film in a 4:3 frame, you either end up with a black line
at top and bottom, or you have their sides cropped. To go w/ black bars shrinks the action on the screen
considerably, as you’re putting a rectangle into a square, so the projectionist
ended up cropping.
Functionally, it’s not as destructive as having the first
and last word of all your lines in a poem cut off, but a loss of certain visual
information robbed the foil ball in a few key spots. In one of our final shots, when the ball is full grown, we
allow for the viewer for the first time to get a straight on look at it. Full frontal ball. The absurd melancholic triumph of a
ball played out to logical conclusion, touching its ceiling and its walls. Cropped, you see not a ball of foil, but
a wall of foil. Just an unchanging
squarish-rectangle of foil.
Watching it, you’re like, why the heck would these guys be holding for
four seconds on this wall of foil?
It’s like driving and only ending up getting to see a poster of the Grand
Canyon, stuck up on travel agency window…Naturally, if you have the full frame,
the eye dances around. It moves
from corner to corner, seeing how the ball fits into the room. In editing Sean was really careful
about giving the enough time to poke around that frame before being pulled
along….We actually did have a 10 foot foil ball. It was hollow as a chocolate Easter bunny – just an
inflatable sphere crusted over with layers of tinfoil, but nonetheless it took
up the space. It gave in every way
the outward impression…And it really did shine. Truthfully, it was as peculiarly thrilling as anything I’ve
ever been in a room with: dinosaur bones, paintings, bizarre sea life in
aquariums.
We played with a beautiful little short documentary, “Elegy
for the Elswick Envoy,” about a woman and her tiny car that is winning
everywhere, and understandably. The
two shorts were the undercard for a feature-length documentary called “The
Wages of Spin.” The majority of our audience was over the age of 60 years
old. Wages of Spin was a
documentary about Dick Clark, gatekeeper to stardom, and the pay-o-la scandals
on American Bandstand. It peered
into Dick’s habit of demanding 50% of the publishing rights to whatever new
songs he agreed to spin on the air.
People with nothing, musicians with nothing, were naturally going to
choose half of something than all of nothing. Most were at least partially grateful to simply reach an
audience. It was an interesting
subject matter, but the film itself ended up causing in me a pounding
headache. In a movie largely about
the rights to music ownership, it was ironical that the filmmaker’s inability
to purchase the rights to the original songs should wield such influence on the
film. To use, say, Fats Domino’s “I’m Walking” or Elvis Presley’s “Hounddog’
requires you to smash the piggie in a way few independent filmmakers can. TV footage as well. Anyhow, the looping underscore of
“Rhythm and Blues Boogie #5,” or whatever the name of the comp-generated 50s
type music that set the continuous mood, got behind my eyes. Also, a repeated use of the Ken Burns
effect. The Ken Burns effect is a
video effect that gives the illusion of a camera moving across a photo;
formally, it’s a unique tool in that it enables a photo to unfold dramatically,
across time, as oppose to releasing all of its information at once. Documentary film would not be
documentary film without those long slides up black-and-white photos. However, like anything, the Ken Burns
effect can be visually battering when seen a number of times in succession.
I meant to do this earlier, but I’d like to post video links
here to two short films that I find excellent, and that can be watched on
YouTube. Both are stop
motion animated; one is claymation
Both are extremely well done.
I will also post our trailer as well.
The first is entitled "Android 207"
The second is entitled "Darkness, Light, Darkness"
And a teaser for "A Big Ball of Foil in a Small NY Apartment."
—-
Anyhow, now I am in the midst of data entry, receipt
tallying, re-budgeting. I have
probably an hour of this until I go to cater. It is an essential activity in any enterprise, even one
failing or floundering as my own: the entering of numbers into
spreadsheets. To this end, every
couple of days I think to myself, “You know what I need? I need an intern. Someone to do exactly this sort of
thing for me.” What I then do is
then realize that organizing my work into work for this intern would be so much
work it would defeat the purpose.
And then I turn and bang my head against the radiator repeatedly. No, I don’t do that. But I do sometimes put my forehead on
my desk for quite a spell of time….
Personally, I am a connoisseur of the pleasure that repetitive tasks
offer, and I suppose I have been since I was a child. Some of my earliest physical chores involved moving enormous
piles of things, wood or sand, around our backyard in a wheelbarrow; why on
earth we had so many piles of things in our backyard; branches, logs, bricks,
sand, leaves, branches; I’d go for about an hour a day. A tree would get struck by lightning
and be chopped down, and my job would be to make a pile of it somewhere. I would be praised by mother, father,
and grandfather alike for the way I moved these piles around. Just think. The vacuuming of steps, one at a time, appealed to me, but
truthfully anything repetitive did: envelope stuffing, the cutting of
Campbell’s soup labels, mowing the lawn.
I found mowing the lawn as enjoyable as anything I’d ever done; I loved
just going back and forth….
On the way back from events, a driver ordinarily gives a
waiter or a chef a ride; our commissary is down in the West Village, so heading
downtown, you can really help the Brooklyn people; you can end them downtown,
right at their train. Once while
driving a van back it was pouring down rain and this woman I was riding with,
Trischa, looked out her side window at these Con-Ed workers in ponchos cutting
up the street w/ wet saws and jack-hammering and she made the comment, “Wow. Men are amazing.” It stands out in my mind because it was
and is the only time I’ve ever heard a woman speak of men as a whole in
anything resembling a positive way.
“What did you say?” I asked her.
I wanted to hear it again to make sure I hadn’t misheard….Customarily,
when a woman begins a sentence with the word “Men are,” it is rarely good. On “Men” the gun lifts. On “are” the safety is disengaged. Men are “pigs,” “orangutangs,”
“baboons,” “buffoons” “incapable of putting anything away immediately after
using it” etc. I suppose this is a two way street. As a people, it’s just a fundamental misfortune that we’re
inspired to make a summary judgment of the opposite sex more frequently by a
negative behavior.
Anyway, I took this compliment on my kind absolutely to
heart. It made me feel good for
about fifteen twenty blocks. What
is remarkable about men, about the males of our species, is our ability to do
something like jackhammer a street apart in rain for ten hours
continuously. It is true. Whatever is in us that allows us to do
this is perhaps the most glorious and useful part of the male. The proclivity of the male mind to
become hypnotized by his labor, or just by whatever it is that he has in front
of him, is a something that should be investigated ….Often I’ll be glassing a
bar, and be so deep into my system of doing it, that an event planner needing
something will have to call my name multiple times, “Matt? Matt?! MATT!!!” I will
vaguely hear her first two implorations, but brush them aside the way a sleeper
brushes aside a feather someone is tickling with. The third crescendo will spook me up out of what I’m doing,
a bit akimbo. “Yes? Hi! Do you need something?” Now how do I look in this picture? A touch like a simpleton. In the woman’s mind, this often translates as sure proof of
the overall stupidity of males, which is a bit unfortunate.
THE CUTTING OF BAR FRUIT AND THE FOLDING OF LINEN NAPKINS
AND A.R. AMMONS
There are several jobs in catering that can legitimately be
called a breeze. They are the two
jobs that require you to sit, which is a water-fountain in the desert after a
prolonged period of standing and walking.
One is the cutting of bar fruit. You can sit down, usually on an overturned 5-gallon bucket
or a glass lug on its side, and turn about five limes a minute into neat lime
slices if you have a good serrated paring knife. Watching lime after lime
divide into 12 or 16 even wedges is a task that is universally loved; it’s
revivifying as watching waves; there is a tiny drama in each lemon or
lime. Will I be able to cut this
lemon or lime into perfect slices?
Boy do I hope so, you think.
What sort of glow will each fruit have when it’s cut into? The is always the drama of opening
anything. Will the lemon’s be
seedy? You are happy when
the fruit glows, and when the lemons contain few seeds. There’s a little Russian fellow I
work with; I don’t know how old he was when he washed up; 19 maybe; he’s a
tremendous worker; he’ll do whatever you tell him to do for as long as you tell
him to do it. He’d stand in a
closet for ten hours guarding the darkness if that’s what you asked him to
do …One day, after about a month
on the job, he comes up to me.
“Matt, may I cut, em, limes?”
He was like a Russian Oliver Twist. “So you like cutting limes, yes?” I asked him. I asked him in the way you might ask a
tiny puppy crawling towards you as you shake a milk-bone box: “Do you like
biscuits? Do you?” You’re enamored that they have already
developed a preference. I don’t
mean that in any sort of demeaning way; you don’t learn all the tasks in
catering for a good year….Another time a guy told me he really liked cutting
limes; I was in a grumpy mood and I said, “You know why you like cutting
limes? Because it’s easy.” The guy had never realized it was easy,
and that everyone liked doing it, and it almost broke his heart; he thought
he’d found a niche as fruit-cutter.
The second job that you are able to sit for is the folding
of dinner napkins. Not while folding
dinner napkins, but sometime after, recollecting the task in tranquility, I was
able to discover in the task a perfect manifestation of SWERVE, “swerve” in the
AR Ammons sense – one of the primary forces that generates new art. At a dinner party w/ 400 guests,
the easiest way to get the napkins folded is to sit a couple of people down at
a table, and have them each just groove on linen napkin folding for about 45
minutes as everyone else is doing place settings. Let them become as machine-like as possible.
There are as many napkin folds as there are knots in a
scouting manual; obviously you want something pretty, demonstrative of skill,
stylish, in agreement w/ the shape of the plate, and also easy to
reproduce. The way it works is
that a waiter is shown how to do a fold.
Depending on who’s running the show, the fold ranges from being
relatively simple to a kind of an origami so advanced as to be enraging. The captain stands there, approves
everyone’s version of it, and then leaves. As the waiters reproduce the fold soon they stop checking
the model and begin reacting to the shape they’ve just made; a certain kind of
habit starts taking presenting itself; your shape starts to veer. It’s a bit like a telephone game, in
that the original ends up distorted.
At the end, if the waiter hasn’t righted himself with the model at any
point, his 100th napkin will look not like a long lean swan but a
squat blanched penguin – something new entirely.
When an artist sits down to try to make a new piece, what is
governing the type of piece he or she will make try to make is not so much the
pieces that have been made by others, but the pieces one has made, or attempted
to make, oneself. The divergence
from the original by reacting to one’s self, to one’s own sense of rightness,
in a progressing series of forms is swerve. Qualitatively, it can be measured. Naturally, one’s veering is righted by the force of the
original, if the original is checked.
“Oh shit,” you think, “Look at mine compared with this one.” The “tree surgeon,” in a list I helped
Cate Marvin get together of poetic “frenemies” a few years back, is someone
that is essentially arguing for the original against the new direction. He tells you to abandon what
you’re doing for what you used to do, which would, if you are swerving out into
yourself, be closer to an original that includes his own conception of how to
make a poem. As Ammons would say,
if everyone tells you to stop doing it, you should keep doing it. That road leads to fringe standing,
sure, but there is no other path to originality.
Of course, in the case of catering, the last
thing you want is the principle of swerve, in microcosm, causing new napkin
shapes to enter the world. You
want all the napkins to look the same.
You are reprimanded in direct proportion to how they do not. - Matthew Yeager