Rainyface Thursday

Happy Thursday! For the title, I was going to go with Sadface Thursday, but I thought that might give off the wrong impression. Besides, it's hard to be simultaneously sad and Happy, even for a Thursday.

Last Friday was my first field trip for Art, and that was crazy. Like the exhibit was called "Bees and Meat," and it was a collection of things she had come up with after "Not a Cornfield," a previous art thing where she turned abandoned track lines in downtown LA into a cornfield. She's crazy. This has pictures and stuff of the artz.

My favorite was the room of corn, titled Corn Crypt. It was majestically, magically beautiful. While I was standing there, I felt moved to write some poems. Whut! And in the effort to digitize my experience, I started typing out an intro to them. It goes like this:

I saw this today, January 18, 2008. Kinda creepy. I wrote some poems whilst in the corn room, because I guess it spoke to me. It was called the Corn Crypt, and there was a cement walkway going from the doorway, taking a turn halfway in, and ending in the middle of all the corn. It must have been a good two+ feet deep, filling up the whole room, pressing against the windows and stacking up in the corners, spilling (controlled, artfully) onto the walkway, too.

Standing on the edge
Of a sea of corn kernels
I want to dive in

Walking to the end of the path was dramatic, because suddenly it’s like you’re stuck in the middle of all of it, no where to go. With my toes practically to the corn itself, it was easy to pretend there was no walkway, and the only choice was to step out into this white/orange sea. It was an urge I carefully restrained.

It was so quiet in there, too, at the far end of a hallway at the far end of the exhibit. It was just me and corn and my imagination. The walls were blank and white, the corn was pebbly and unbelievably everywhere.

Hills of corn as if
wind blown, desert-like
roll serenely, funereally
to the horizon
A landscape of golden silence


And I'm happy I wrote that because it's definitely now the first half of my paper I'm turning in for that trip. I hope my poetic outbursts impress (or at least don't irritate) him. My thoughts on the Bee Box have yet to be recorded. You know what in the Bee Box?

Bees.

Saturday I took Brianna and Jenn to see Joe. Again, when I get that DVD, I am going to show it to you. That is both a promise and a threat.

Sunday and Monday were collectively the best filmic adventure I've ever been on. When I took my video production class, I learned that out of all things, I did not want to be involved in the production process. But being production assistant on a shoot where everyone else has already made all the decisions and knows exactly what they are doing, and all I have to do is help carry stuff and then watch the movie magic--that was really my sort of thing. I have all sorts of fun stories about it, but I've already told most of you. If anyone else is interested, I'll tell ya!

And there's only been three days since then, and it's like so much has happened but really nothing at all has happened. I've been busy with class and homework and setting up my own shoot for this weekend. Gosh, have I told you that I don't really like production? It's going to be the most disorganized thing you've ever seen. But Motion Picture is really helping, because he's very knowledgeable and I feel at least adequately prepared to be Cinematographer on my first semi-official film. And even Producing last semester gave us some good practice, although it came too late to get decent grades on anything. The shoot this last weekend was also HIGHLY educational, and I feel all kinds of prepared just from the stuff I saw there.

But production pretty much has all my time for many many weeks. This weekend is the start of our shoot, but then I have to go home and get my crown finished. And then by the time I get back, my block of classes has already started, and the next weekend is the second and last chance to shoot. And there needs to be a fully-edited film by that Tuesday. Then that weekend is friends-time/pickup shooting, and the two weekends after that I think I'll be PAing on another student film. It's so intense. And during all this I have to do all my other homework and get my own script ready and then suddenly it's going to be my turn to direct.

Grar. Wish me luck.

Also, it's rainy and cold, and that makes me sad. I wish it was summertime. Or even spring. Or just sunny again.

Well, I'm going back to that Art paper, and then probably shoot details. Oh, our movie. It's a short (less than five and a half minutes) silent film about a bossy pizza chef and the little guy who saves the day. Also, mobsters. It should be cheesy and lame. That's what I'm shooting for. Gosh, I hope you guys don't even notice the puns in those sentences. I really didn't mean them.

-Steph