Well, I'm off to Mississippi.

Fly down Wednesday, fly back Thursday, spend over a thousand dollars of someone else's money to shoot some video of a girl nailing a house together and hopefully poke at the True Meaning of Civic Engagement.

I am hoping that the Basal Meat of me doesn't get in the way of things. In my quest to save a buck I quite very nearly booked airline tickets for the wrong date. In fact, had Northwest not blocked the third-party payment, I would have. Runarounds, missed reservations for gear checkout, general incompetence in virtually every fashion on my part...maybe two years of following Fox around have given me a case of t3h st00pid. Terrifying disease, t3h st00pid.

At any rate, Ocean Springs, MS is 1,000 miles away. It'd be about $250 in gas to drive. In fact, for what we're spending to fly two people down to Gulfport, rent a car for a day, and fly back, I could buy a vehicle just to drive there including the cost of gas. In fact, that's what I'm doing in May for the BA/BE, but yeah.

This is the latest hoo-de-hoo in my verite documentary class, which at best lets me use the fancy gear for my work and at worst is a massive distraction. Truth be told, some days I give so little of a damn about the world and the people in it that investing my time into telling the story of someone trying to make it a better place seems almost hypocritical. I'm supposed to be encouraging chaos and destruction, not making some happy-handed paean to youth, truth, and justice.

When Katrina hit, I was rooting for the hurricane!

I must try to make it interesting. I must find an internal struggle, a flaw, a personal shortcoming on the part of my documentary subject and EXPLOIT IT. Only there can my sensationalist muckracking shine!

That, and I'm inherently jealous of people more on the ball than me, which is, well, rather quite a few people really.

At any rate, we're renting a Hyundai, which I will try very hard not to drive into the Bay of Biloxi.

Computer Music

I find myself a believer in removing the risk factor of performance. Once a computer has been programmed correctly, the performance is flawless, perfect every time, effortless, beautiful, a perpetuation of the singular creative act. This is why the computer is my primary instrument. I am intimately familiar with the weaknesses and shortcomings of the human body and mind. Even with the strictest of disciplines, we still make mistakes, we still cause impurities, we still fall short at times of our ideals. The computer changes this. All we have to do is distill that one pure thing, get it right once and only once, and the computer perpetuates it, replicates it, does all the heavy lifting.

The computer enables the laziest of men to achieve their deepest ambitions. Virtuosity is dead.

I have taken the path of least resistance.

The process is still not totally pure, however. There remains some meat between the creative spark and the final product. Until such time as we can jack in to our thought process and transfer Creation directly to a space outside the body and outside the mind, there will be unrealized efficiencies to chase.

Sad to think it's only the domain of lameass sci-fi these days. My dream is more universal and comprehensive than any hokey niche term like "wetware" or "cybernetics", and I refuse to truck with people who traffic in such terms. I don't believe in no damn space aliens. I don't even believe in Myself, or at least the comprehensive Total Meat of Myself. But I do believe in that creative spark. In that impulse, we know the nature of God.

Technology is the vehicle, and will perhaps someday enable us to transcend the physical necessity. Imagine, unlimited things to Make and Do, and nothing more in the Doing than in the Thinking...

An idea just struck me.

Well, spoke to the police today. In order for them to release Fox's Subaru from impound (w/ tow and storage fees already over $300) we will have to convince the owner of the riverfront property not to press charges for the damage Fox did to it and to the Urban Ecology Center.

Apparently, Fox went 'wheelin in a habitat for an endangered snake and did possibly thousands of dollars in damages.

The artwork I need for the movie is still in the backseat, along with a camera case and some other odds and ends of mine.

So, this is the idea. Mr. Godfrey himself said he wanted to smash up the car with a mallet..why not take him up on it? In order to raise funds for restitution and restoration, we make a publicity deal out of this and let friends of Milwaukee's environment come and take cracks at the Subaru with a sledgehammer for a buck a whack. Or, if they prefer, whack Fox himself with a Nerf bat. I like it. It's a public shaming and a way to give back to the community at the same time.

As for me, I would directly give Fox a good Nerfing, yelling "Repent! Repent!" with each blow...

Crisis All of the Time

Potential minor setback with "Catch This Fox" today; all of Fox's artwork, which I have yet to scan, is in a briefcase in the back of a car which he got stuck in the mud down by the river two days ago. And it's not there now. At best, the city impounded it and it'll cost him $200 to get it back. At worst, it was declared a nuisance and has already been recycled.

As I stood in the shower this morning, frustrated with this news, another central question about human nature came to me. Why is it psychologically pleasurable to do the things that one is not supposed to do? And conversely, to not do the things one is supposed to do?

Proper blogging starts now.

First and foremost, if anyone has a 1987-1991 Toyota Camry station wagon that they either want to sell or need parts/repairs for, contact me with haste, especially in and around the Milwaukee, WI area. This is the most important information.