Letter

The last two weeks this is what my days have looked like. Open eight frames in Photoshop. Resize each. Place them in a template. Copy-and-paste it into the next page in Affinity. Repeat two-hundred-fifteen times.

I don’t pay much attention about what’s in each individual frame. There’s action, violence, romance, and many familiar movie-star faces but if I start reading the story it will distract me from my task. If I lose track of which frame goes where the whole house of cards will fall like dominoes. Every now and again I have to backtrack because my mind has drifted off and I’ve repeated a spread or resized a frame incorrectly. It’s inevitable. I’m not a machine.

In the time I’ve worked on this thing I listened to the audiobook of Fleischman is in Trouble and tried and given up on a couple others. I want to give up on Fleischman at times but that would mean pausing the production line and starting it up again which is a process that feels more and more leaden as the spreads mount. I power through to the end of the story of a bunch of weaselly New Yorkers tormenting one another and unsuspecting passersby in their quest for the mythical work/life balance. It’s ridiculous but told just well enough that I can half-listen through my labors.

I’ve done this kind of thing for my own books but never for someone else’s. It’s an odd feeling. Because I’m self-taught in book-design I’m sure there are more efficient, better ways to do many of the things I do, but this is the only way I know. If I think about doing this every day for a living I doubt I’d last long. What it’s good for is a time out from my own thing. The mechanical repetition gives most of my heart and mind a break. They’re more engaged in the audio drama than what my eyes and fingers are doing.

I finish the first pass listening to Bronson Pinchot read Strangers on a Train to me.

A guy jumps into my cab near Fenway Park. He keeps looking back where he came from. Tells me to drive.

A couple blocks down the street he directs me to pull into an alley and stop. He gets out, then stoops to feel around behind a light pole in some weeds, pulls out something I can’t make out, then gets back in the cab.

Tells me to drive.

We leave the Fenway, go past the hospitals. He isn’t saying much besides an occasional direction. Left. Right. Straight. Soon we’re in Roxbury. He looks out the window sometimes then drifts off, high or half asleep, I can’t tell which. The meter keeps ticking away.

I haven’t been a cabdriver long enough to get the destination before putting the car in gear. He’s a white guy who looks like he has money so I just keep driving. I know these neighborhoods a bit now and wonder why he wants to go here. Would it have mattered if I’d pointed the cab towards the suburbs rather than the inner city?

We’re deep into Dorchester now. He keeps giving the occasional direction but there’s no rhyme or reason to what he says. Where is he going? It occurs to me that maybe he’s looking for a quiet spot to kill me and take my cab. I rehearse jumping out of a moving vehicle in my mind a few times. It’s been nearly an hour and the meter’s up over thirty bucks.

I tell him he has to tell me where he wants to go. He says to take him back where I picked him up.

We’re by the ballpark again twenty minutes later. He fumbles through his pockets, then hands a bunch of crumpled bills through the pass-through window, thanks me, and gets out of the cab.

This happened in in the mid-90s in Boston. Closest I ever felt to being a dead man. I remember this while watching Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train at the Music Box on a Saturday afternoon. 

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—Vol.1 Brooklyn published an excerpt from the new book. 

—Took nearly three years but Soviet Stamps earned out.

—I reviewed a graphic novel about a community center acting class that takes a turn.

—Listen to my talk with Alicia Martinez, then tune in Wednesday for one with Max Samarov. Mallory, Duncan, Dave, and I talked Halloween.

—Got some new bookmarks for sale.

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Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera played at the Music Box with live accompaniment the other day. I get there early like I always do but can’t sit in the front row like usual because the keyboard player/composer’s rig is set almost against the seats. It looks more like a command module than a musical instrument.

A guy in a leather jacket sits down and place some jazz as people filter in. Then he stands up, turns around, and introduces himself as the composer of the music we’ll be hearing with the silent film.

I spend the next seventy minutes with my mouth open. This was made ninety-three years ago but is still eons ahead of much of what passes for movies these days. How could that be? Is progress or evolution total fiction? Vertov communicates so much without a single word. Now we fill hours and hours with gum-flapping to say very little.

A friend asks the next day how I could enjoy the movie when it was made under the auspices of the USSR and I tell her it’s the same as appreciating religious painting without an ounce of faith. Artists have always have to work under political and ethical restrictions. The Lenin shit flies by lighter and quicker than the recurring streetcars.

The day I write this I read Jean-Luc Godard’s obituary. Godard loved Vertov enough to found a film collective called the Dziga Vertov Group. I love a lot of his movies despite his stupid politics. It’s harder to excuse a wealthy Frenchman idolizing Mao than a naive Jew thinking he’s helping build a workers’ paradise. Less than a decade after Man With a Movie Camera, Vertov was barely allowed to express himself at all, while Godard kept being an apologist for a genocidal monster for an embarassingly long time. 

Still, he was one of the very few filmmakers who kept Vertov’s spirit of innovation alive to the end of his days. He was never satisfied to repeat himself or just push product like most of his contemporaries. I remember being amazed by his 2014 film Goodbye to Language—a 3-D tone poem that I couldn’t begin to describe. It pointed a way forward that no one in mainstream filmmaking has taken up. 

They’re too busy making content.