In Dreams

I often wake myself up in the middle of a dream because I am trying to control it too much and it feels like I am reading a book. A stranger in my dream is doing some sort of activity and I am writing her every move and beautiful prose of her thoughts. Anyone who is lauded for their writing says their trick is too keep a notebook by their bed and write down their good ideas if they have one in the middle of the night. I feel this takes too much energy. I’m trying to sleep, dammit, and if I’m going to get up to turn on the light, I may as well just go type it and give up any hope of sleeping. By the time this happens, that prose has disappeared and only incomplete, incoherent sentences remain.

When I am watching a movie about a writer, fictional or not, they are often alcoholic, suicidal, crazy or a combination of the three. I wonder if to be a famous, interesting writer I have to be the same and if I already am, then why have I not reached my star in the sky yet. Then I remember after my kind of psychosis follows apathy and laziness, the ability to write a complete sentence but no good ideas to write about.

On one particular night of self, I found myself watching what was probably my one hundred thousandth syndicated episode of the longest running television series in history. Tom Wolfe was making an animated cameo of himself, which was strange because earlier that day I had been telling my co-worker she’d enjoy his writing. When ever I watch this episode #384, I can’t help but to feel jealous of the downtrodden barkeeper’s poem, “Howling at a Concrete Moon.” I think it is better than anything I’ve ever written and his was meant to be funny.

There was I time I couldn’t sleep for weeks and in the pitiful minutes I lapsed in and out of consciousness, I would find myself with the overwhelming desire to check the floor by the door for a “dear Jane” letter to myself. If I were to write it what would it say? “I’m sorry but…” the letter would trail off because I would already know what I was thinking, feeling about this mess I’m in. The thing is, though, I don’t want to write a dear jane letter to myself. I want someone else to write it to me so I have an excuse to feel abandoned, to know the reason is it’s him, not me, who doesn’t have the desire to make this work, that my tortured writer’s soul has come between us.

too beat for a creative title.

For my "writing new media" project, I chose to do a video with the files that my professor/advisor had given me to work with. I could have done a photo essay, but i work with photos all the time, so i thought that would not be challenging enough. I could have done a podcast story, but i have one for my portfolio already. it's actually a quite funny piece in the style of NPR about noah's ark that i did in 2002. So here is my first attempt at video (except the few flash animations i've done).

From beginning to end, this two minute movie took me about 6 hours. i hadn't used windows movie maker before nor have i used a time-line in years. My computer is lacking a sound card, so there is no sound to this, but i think the text works better than the actual song to these lyrics would. I like how it turned out (but please tell me if it's too karaoke!!!)

Making the words match up to some of the specific frames was probably the most complicated of all this project. There aren't very many effects - only the same two effects per clip and only two transitions in the entire video. The words, however, have a few different styles applied to different parts, but for the most part it is me adding a few extra words to the previous texts to try to tell a story.

When i figured out i wouldn't be able to use sound, i decided to use words and searched my brain for something i've read about walking or passers-by. I ended up using lyrics by one of my favorite bands, Ulver (it's Norwegian for "wolves" in case you were wondering). When their Perdition City album first came out in 2000, the were getting a lot of criticism for turning too experimental. Hey, i thought, i'm experimenting too! Perfect!

I've worked with text and images before and of course a picture says a thousands words, but this was a little different for me because i feel like i'm forcing the viewer to accept my interpretation of the images. It's no secret that sometimes i feel like a drone that has nothing to say and even if i wanted to say it, it'd get lost in the "torrent of sound and images that overwhelms our lives."

You can interpret this story whatever way you want.