June update
Jun. 27th, 2020 10:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rinueJune has been busy in ways I have a hard time keeping track of. I'm still working overtime as a captioner, although I've scaled back a bit, and have even managed to put in for a vacation week in not too long, so I can finish writing the first act of the musical before my August deadline. (That deadline has been pushed because the workshop can't be held during the pandemic, singing loudly being one of the more droplet-y behaviors one can engage in, but Chris and I have agreed to continue to behave as though the original deadline is still in effect so that we stay aligned in our work speed.)
My sister, REL, was arrested during one of the protests in Atlanta (just one of those big "arrest everyone and make up charges like loitering" sweeps), and was in jail overnight before volunteer lawyers got her out, so me and her ex roommate did a lot of coordinating of address books to make sure there were people taking care of the dog, showing up at the courthouse, not showing up at the courthouse, etc.
My unofficial screenplay agent (a producer who is constantly trying to get investors to put money into films I write so that she can produce them) is trying to work out a deal with a horror-focused production company in, if I recall correctly, Belarus. I always assume these deals will fall through. I had to dig various files off old hard drives. Pleased by how well all the screenplays and treatments have held up. It's not even that I wrote them that long ago, it just feels long. There is always a lot going on.
Did a livestream for an indie film streaming start-up my friend is launching, backlot.co.uk. I'm not sure how well I came off in the interview, but I know I looked great, because Ciro and I have taken a firm position that if we are filmmakers and we are broadcasting we need to look like we know what we're doing - which means doing stuff like running uncompressed video off a DLSR, carefully lighting the shot, using our very good microphones, etc.
The Strange Horizons fund drive is ongoing (although near its end) which has been a lot of extra galleying and posting and coordinating. It's raised a shocking amount of money very quickly, which is the opposite of what I expected given the other demands on people right now. Related to this, I've been making a series of six facemasks as an art project I'm calling "Masked Futures." They're wearable face masks and they will go out to six people who contributed to the fund drive, but they're also art objects that embody different predictions about the future of society - solarpunk, neo-Victorianism, Mad Max style devolution, zombie/vampire/purge bloodletting, psychedelic radical love, smooth tidy touchless AI. I've finished 5 of 6. They each take I don't know how many hours but probably something like 20. I'll put pictures and the supporting essay on Tumblr when it's finished. For now, I'm sticking snapshots in this twitter thread that's part of the fund drive promotion.
I think the other main thing I've been doing, other than a quick copyedit and evaluation of my best friend Val's about-to-launch new website (she's a freelance editor, so I'm the editor's editor), is helping an African poet I'm a fan of figure out how to restructure a book in which he used a lot of collage/patchwork techniques, because there was a cultural disconnect when it got in front of a US/UK audience, where it was seen as plagiarism instead of a demonstration that he did his homework and is reading a huge amount of contemporary poetry, I mean a really breathtaking amount of reading. He's young and self-taught, which I would not have guessed from the sophistication of his writing, so I've been giving him kind of MLA boot camp, showing him how to do citations, how to write bibliographies, how to rigorously go through and research and deconstruct his own texts to reassemble the poems he cut up and identify them.
It's time consuming but pleasant because I like the poems a lot and it's cool to know them and analyze them in this deep way you normally only get to do with, like, Shakespeare. The poet is also deciding in many cases to replace the sampled lines with original work (his poems were always a blend of his original lines and the lines that inspired the writing), which I've encouraged because I generally prefer what he comes up with.
There are probably other things going on that I don't even remember. I'm on the list of a cat rescue and may therefore eventually get a cat, if there is a cat who needs a house. I think my neighbor, Bob, is about to move to be nearer to his grandkids, and I'm happy for him but will miss Bob.
Been playing something that I guess counts as lawn tennis but is the opposite of tennis because you're trying to keep the volley going as long as possible. I usually wear a pleated knee-length skirt by coincidence because during the summer I tend to wear pleated skirts that length, and my co-volleyer usually has Agassi hair and a sweatband because ditto. My own hair is very long. I continue to feel my fingernails grow too fast. I'm making a lot of pies and tarts and spreads to rescue fruits and vegetables other people have bought and not used, so they won't disintegrate before they're eaten.
Took some photos I'm very happy with, directly after looking at a Gordon Parks photo essay from the 1950s and remembering I like photos. The shots I took are (from a distance) of kids playing with their dad in a sprinkler on father's day (with permission of the subjects) and they're bold and confident and I feel back in my stride after setting the camera down for a while (the real camera, I mean, the one for taking the sorts of shots I'd like to print and look back on instead of quick phone snapshots meant for immediate internet consumption).
Ciro has downloaded the beta of a game which is an art gallery simulator, Occupy White Walls, so he's been putting together various exhibits which I can walk through virtually. It's very much like visiting a museum, which is not surprising because his degree is in art curation, basically, and he's as good as the people who would be doing this in a real museum. As a result, I've been getting into the work Daniel Chauche did as a photographer in Guatemala in the 1980s.
My sister, REL, was arrested during one of the protests in Atlanta (just one of those big "arrest everyone and make up charges like loitering" sweeps), and was in jail overnight before volunteer lawyers got her out, so me and her ex roommate did a lot of coordinating of address books to make sure there were people taking care of the dog, showing up at the courthouse, not showing up at the courthouse, etc.
My unofficial screenplay agent (a producer who is constantly trying to get investors to put money into films I write so that she can produce them) is trying to work out a deal with a horror-focused production company in, if I recall correctly, Belarus. I always assume these deals will fall through. I had to dig various files off old hard drives. Pleased by how well all the screenplays and treatments have held up. It's not even that I wrote them that long ago, it just feels long. There is always a lot going on.
Did a livestream for an indie film streaming start-up my friend is launching, backlot.co.uk. I'm not sure how well I came off in the interview, but I know I looked great, because Ciro and I have taken a firm position that if we are filmmakers and we are broadcasting we need to look like we know what we're doing - which means doing stuff like running uncompressed video off a DLSR, carefully lighting the shot, using our very good microphones, etc.
The Strange Horizons fund drive is ongoing (although near its end) which has been a lot of extra galleying and posting and coordinating. It's raised a shocking amount of money very quickly, which is the opposite of what I expected given the other demands on people right now. Related to this, I've been making a series of six facemasks as an art project I'm calling "Masked Futures." They're wearable face masks and they will go out to six people who contributed to the fund drive, but they're also art objects that embody different predictions about the future of society - solarpunk, neo-Victorianism, Mad Max style devolution, zombie/vampire/purge bloodletting, psychedelic radical love, smooth tidy touchless AI. I've finished 5 of 6. They each take I don't know how many hours but probably something like 20. I'll put pictures and the supporting essay on Tumblr when it's finished. For now, I'm sticking snapshots in this twitter thread that's part of the fund drive promotion.
I think the other main thing I've been doing, other than a quick copyedit and evaluation of my best friend Val's about-to-launch new website (she's a freelance editor, so I'm the editor's editor), is helping an African poet I'm a fan of figure out how to restructure a book in which he used a lot of collage/patchwork techniques, because there was a cultural disconnect when it got in front of a US/UK audience, where it was seen as plagiarism instead of a demonstration that he did his homework and is reading a huge amount of contemporary poetry, I mean a really breathtaking amount of reading. He's young and self-taught, which I would not have guessed from the sophistication of his writing, so I've been giving him kind of MLA boot camp, showing him how to do citations, how to write bibliographies, how to rigorously go through and research and deconstruct his own texts to reassemble the poems he cut up and identify them.
It's time consuming but pleasant because I like the poems a lot and it's cool to know them and analyze them in this deep way you normally only get to do with, like, Shakespeare. The poet is also deciding in many cases to replace the sampled lines with original work (his poems were always a blend of his original lines and the lines that inspired the writing), which I've encouraged because I generally prefer what he comes up with.
There are probably other things going on that I don't even remember. I'm on the list of a cat rescue and may therefore eventually get a cat, if there is a cat who needs a house. I think my neighbor, Bob, is about to move to be nearer to his grandkids, and I'm happy for him but will miss Bob.
Been playing something that I guess counts as lawn tennis but is the opposite of tennis because you're trying to keep the volley going as long as possible. I usually wear a pleated knee-length skirt by coincidence because during the summer I tend to wear pleated skirts that length, and my co-volleyer usually has Agassi hair and a sweatband because ditto. My own hair is very long. I continue to feel my fingernails grow too fast. I'm making a lot of pies and tarts and spreads to rescue fruits and vegetables other people have bought and not used, so they won't disintegrate before they're eaten.
Took some photos I'm very happy with, directly after looking at a Gordon Parks photo essay from the 1950s and remembering I like photos. The shots I took are (from a distance) of kids playing with their dad in a sprinkler on father's day (with permission of the subjects) and they're bold and confident and I feel back in my stride after setting the camera down for a while (the real camera, I mean, the one for taking the sorts of shots I'd like to print and look back on instead of quick phone snapshots meant for immediate internet consumption).
Ciro has downloaded the beta of a game which is an art gallery simulator, Occupy White Walls, so he's been putting together various exhibits which I can walk through virtually. It's very much like visiting a museum, which is not surprising because his degree is in art curation, basically, and he's as good as the people who would be doing this in a real museum. As a result, I've been getting into the work Daniel Chauche did as a photographer in Guatemala in the 1980s.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-06-28 12:59 pm (UTC)I'd never heard of Daniel Chauche. I shall use his work in photography class next year, though! I'm trying to assemble a diverse bunch of work that my kids can look at so they're not just taking pictures of their computer screens.