15 hours of ...

 

 We checked out of the hotel and went for brunch at Diane Bessai's fantastic (and large) condo.

Fred Bessai and Diane Bessai

Carl had to get to the airport. Frank, Tom and John Bessai were all there. We got to talk more than we did at the other parties; less people, more about family

. Frank, Tom, and John Bessai

 

Diane has one of Margaret's watercolour snowman pieces from her 2001 show. We don't see it often. John bought it for her for her 70th birthday. 

 

I thought we were going to leave town but we decided at the last minute to drive downtown and find the new Art Gallery of Alberta building (with no address but for some vague description from teenagers at a coffee shop on Whyte who don't drive and hadn't been there). Somehow we managed to find it and saw a very good Warhol show. It had four of his toupees and a lot of his early drawings. It also had a number of films showing that I'd not seen including "Kitchen Party".

Warhol silver cloud pillows at AGA

We arrived in Saskatoon around 8:30 and saw Mike Grzesina's new condo. It is a very good place. William had a swim in his pool. We drove home to Regina, arriving late.

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Eric and I got into the darkroom first thing this morning, or at least 10 am or so, to develop the Warhol footage we kinescoped last week. I chose to use the Kodak "Flexcolor" C41 negative developer to cross process the colour reversal film. The source video images had been converted to negative so the outcome will be a positive with no orange masking that is inherent in regular negative colour films. I've had mixed results with this and I was worried this was going to be a bad day after the first test gave me black frames (but great frame lines). unwilling to give up right away (but in the back of my head planning to re-shoot the footage) we reduced the developer time from 4 minutes to 2 (and the temperature had dropped from 36 degrees to 32) and the result was amazing! I probably have the best colour film I've every processed. We did all 800 feet, plus a roll of black and white, and everything turned out well. We dried it all on the lawn outside the Education Building but the sun was behind rain clouds and the wind had calmed. While it didn't rain, the drying started taking too long and I had to pick up William at school and had no car. I couldn't just leave Eric working since he was my ride. Therefore, I gathered the largest piece, a 250 roll, and carried it as a huge mass into Eric's car and he sped to Connaught School, only 3 minutes late for picking up William. I wound the film onto its core while standing on one of the few pieces of grass in the schoolyard. The still above is from Modern, as converted to film from video using my rudimentary systems. The colours are not altered.

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Very busy day, not the least of which was my sudden urge to create a blog for William so that we can periodically post his Lego news. Here it is: William Loves Lego.
At about 3 minutes before 9am this morning, Margaret and I both left the house to walk William to school and to look at the book fair in the gym. When we got back, we'd missed the courier (who claims to have been there at 8:58, even though the 9:00 bell rang when we were just 2/3 of the way to the school which is only 1.5 blocks from our house in a straight line with a clear line of sight). As a result, I didn't get the stock I needed to shoot the next Modern/Warhol films, which wasn't a big deal since Eric called to say he was swamped by the last thing he needed to do for his last job. It gave me time to get all my ducks in a row for shooting tomorrow as well as other necessities such as mixing up reversal bleach over in Tanya's lab for the weekend workshop. I did stay up until 2:30 last night getting the Warhol 15 minutes of famous finished and packaged to dvd, but I have one flaw that I'm going to work on now.

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This morning I met with the Aboriginal End of Life research group. I had a chance to ask Elder Betty about William's concern that he shouldn't read any books after winter ended. She says that fantasy types of stories shouldn't be told after the solstice (June 21) but education based stories could be told.
This afternoon I finished a version of my website. I'm going to try to upload it with Kalyn's help tomorrow morning. I solved my sorting/data base issue with the spreadsheet in a crude fashion. I created hyperlinks to the web pages within the spreadsheet of titles. I then sorted the page in the ways I needed and exported the appropriate portions of the page for each sorting choice the website will have. Thus, in the end, the website just presents sorted lists, it doesn't do any sorting itself. To add new material, I will need to first add it to my spreadsheet and export it into the necessary choices (each film will be in a minimum of three lists; chronological, alphabetic, and at least one genre). However, after making a mistake with the list and having to redo them all, I found that I can do this update in about 5 to 10 minutes, so not a big deal.
Margaret got her hair cut and when she got home I shot my Warhol video of her. I've not finished all the manipulations of this video set, but I now have all 15 of the source images (see photo: this is not the background I used, I shot outside with a grid pattern from the deck behind her).
This morning the courier arrived with my three boxes of film stock consisting of twenty 100' rolls of 16mm colour negative, ten 400' rolls of 16mm black and white negative, 1000' of 35mm black and white negative, and the super expensive 1000' roll of 35mm colour reversal!
Tonight there was a retrospective screening of Ian Toews's films at the Filmpool. I wrote the program notes and am posting them on my other blog. Ian liked them, which is always the worry about such things.

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This morning I sat in Atlantis Coffee (downtown) and worked on my program notes I was asked to write for the screening of Ian Toews' films on Thursday at the Filmpool. At 10:30, Maya Batten-Young met me and we chatted about film industry and student films and stuff, and I shot my 1 minute Warhol video of her. She is #14, I just need Margaret now for my complete set of 15. I also ran into Jarret Rusnick there, he showed me a clip of a commercial project he's working on that will use lots of visual tricks such as this five frame per second blending sequence. I thought it was pretty cool and said I should have thought of it. He quipped that every time a friend succeeds, a part of us dies. William's home reading, which is usually a 12-20 page book taking between 5 and 20 minutes to read, was a 108 page multi-story grade two reader that took him over 2 hours to work through. That's another page done for the Mayor's mega-minute reading challenge that he's so excited about. Speaking of the Mayor, my dad heard him speak at his Gyro club meeting the other day and he said that the rail relocation program is in the works (again). This makes more sense now, with property values increasing that strip of land through the city is finally worth something, although I'm surprised I've seen nothing in the newspaper about it.

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I worked on my taxes with my dad this morning (mostly I need him, but I do help him with the computer side of stuff as well). This afternoon I had my feet measured for some insoles to ease the pain. This evening I hung with William, went for a bike ride, visited the bulldog next door, did some reading, lego, etc. I designed a background for the next Warhol video, a 60s flower power sort of thing with a flower brush I designed. Here are a couple of frames.

281 my birthday

It's my birthday so I premeditatedly dove off of my reduced sugar diet I've managed to maintain for an entire week. Today began with Belgium chocolate in bed. I picked up William at lunchtime and took him to A&W where we each had a teen burger (I ate about 1/3 of his) and root beers. At supper, William wrapped me a can of Coke, so it only seemed right that I drink it. I baked a cheesecake, chocolate, and we had some of that later - although in my twisted reality, cheesecake IS a health food.
My horoscope in the Leader Post for the year reads: "You're so powerful this year that it's like you can control time itself. You learn and do more in the next year than many people would do in 10. Believe in your powers to exceed the norm. ..." Well that sure rocks.
So part of my time travel today was to run errands, pick up a hard drive and camera from work, wash the car, put gas in the car ($1.26 or so per litre), pick up issue 13 of Buffy Season 8 from the comic store (funniest issue ever, Xander hanging with Dracula), drank some of my expensive tequila and talked super-heroes with Gavin de Lint who stopped by with his three year old son Jack to drop off a book for Margaret, restocked my herbs, met with Christina at the university regarding Caroline Leaf and chatted about Warhol, did a phone reference for a student seeking a job, and got home in time to do some great work on my videos before William was out of school. Margaret came home with Terry, with whom I was chatting for a few minutes while Margaret went upstairs to print off a file from the computer from her. However, Margaret comes down and tells me she can't find any of her files. I come up here and find that Margaret's entire folder under the My Files is gone! I look in recycle bin and do searches in the computer and cannot find it. I figure I should re-boot and hope that it's just some glitch that will sort itself out, so I tell the computer to reboot. It tells me that I have After Effects running and, realizing that I'd not saved the really nice looking Warhol style piece I did on Gerri Ann Siwek, I hit cancel. I suppose I should have read the question of the screen more carefully, as the computer takes this to mean that it should continue to reboot and my file was lost. I grouched for a while then got back in the saddle (Gerri Ann is shot on William's spring horse), and I eventually find Margaret's folder, which had been moved inside a different folder. I do not understand why it did not appear with a search. I rebuilt my Gerri Ann video: see still below. I used a more feathered edge and lowered the contrast on the initial image, rather than increasing it as I've done on some others. Overall I like the effect of this altered approach. Some of the blue is going to be replaced with real images, something about death such as car crashes or dead buffalo if I can find something appropriate. I read with William for an hour then watched "Shoot em Up", a movie I'd never heard of before Kevin lent it to me a couple of weeks ago. It was fabulously funny. I watched half of it over again with Margaret right away afterwards. It owes a lot to John Woo and Quinton Terantino, but is definitely its own film, funny at every turn with death and mayhem that straddles both the absurd and the emotionally real. HIGHLY recommended for a fun evening (extreme violence warning).
I got 11 birthday greeting through Facebook! More than in real life!

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I worked on my videos first thing this morning and got my Jeannie Mah - Warhol piece done, as well as the preliminary work on my Jason Shabatoski video. This latter one requires me to insert a video file I have at work for it to be complete. He'll be done as a multiple panel video, nearly the same image four times. With Jeannie I began to pull one of the layers out of registration, like a misprint in a multi colour process. This brings me pretty close to my 15 minutes of famous set.
William and I ran errands today while Margaret was at work. I taught him what "disappointment" means. We did not find good white t-shirts to paint on at the store I thought they'd be at, then we didn't find a new supply of patio lanterns at Canadian Tire. Then we found both the Quinn the Eskimo store and the Old Fashioned Foods stores to be closed. When we got home we began watching Jason and the Argonauts today. It is just right for him, get him nervous about the fights, excited about the effects, and links to the Greek mythology that he's been interested in.

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William had a play date over today and I worked on my Warhol videos. I finished my overly complicated on on Allan Dotson, putting a montage of ultra-close ups from 1970s comic books into the background, breaking from the colour fields for the first time.Last night I watched episode 13, the final episode, of Jpod, the CBC television series based upon the Copeland novel of the same name that I read last summer. I've been really enjoying the show, even though they made a couple of the characters too soft and the series began a bit rocky. Perhaps it will find some other life. The episode seemed to be designed to be the final episode, with their division being canceled by the bureaucracy for no good reason. It was an apt jab at CBC. However, there was suddenly a cliff hanger closer that annoyed me, wish they were able to end it cleanly.

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I had another fever yesterday but I managed to have it break before I needed to go out to the MacKenzie Art Gallery for the Thursday night Warhol event. Last nigh, Dr. Christina Stojanova presented two long films, one by New York experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas which was made up of 15 years of clips of Andy. The third film was a cool documentary in which some German filmmakers go to the town Warhol's family (Warhola) were from and where he often sent artwork. Until the late 80s, they were under the Soviets and were not allowed to know about decadent American art, so knew nothing about him (many paintings and drawings were damaged and thus discarded). Between the two, she played my one minute self portrait in the Warhol style I've been working on. Looked good.

Today I set up a Flickr account and posted 197 photos from my vacation to Mexico last week. I initially chose about 350 photos and compressed the appropriately, but then Flickr informed me that only 200 were allowed (I think this is a monthly quota, but true to form I didn't read the details).

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As I write this, William is in bed, supposed to go to sleep. He says he's sad and lonely. He says he is slad.
This evening I went to the "Unscripted" session at the Dunlop Art Gallery. Some interesting points were made about art and cities, but it wasn't the madhouse that I heard the last session was. I began grabbing interesting words from the air to create a new "Mr. Saul" film, probably for the Cathedral festival. I also convinced Jeannie Mah, Elwood Jimmy, and Lorne Boeg to appear in my Modern/Warhol video/films. Margaret and I saw the Warhol exhibit today (her for the first time, me for the second) and I spent most of the time watching the 90 minutes of films I'd not had time for previously. I realized, while watching them, that I shouldn't be doing a 10 minute set of portraits in Warhol style, but obviously I should do 15! I'm calling the set "15 minutes of famous". My role call is now Tyler Banadyga, Leesa Streifler, Eric Hill, Carle Steel, William, me, the three new ones, and six more I've not shot yet. Margaret will be one of them, that leaves five.
I thought I had one of the three dvds done for New Dance Horizons today, but when I looked at it, the image disappears inexplicably after the first two minutes. I recall there was some sort of error when exporting the video, but it looked in tact. I guess I was lazy and didn't check it far enough in. Grrrr. I need this done and deleted off the hard drive so I can move on.
Saw my doctor this morning, he says there's nothing too wrong with my liver (recall test with giant needle a couple of weeks ago) but abnormalities could be from some fat on my liver and I should look into my levels of triglycerides. Hitting the books again I guess.

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Last night we watched Across the Universe (I bought it, keeping up my collection of Julie Taymor films). I loved it. It was solid eye candy, all the way through. I'm not always into that, except when it is done as well as this. Choreography was amazing. The use of the Beatles songs for nearly the entire soundtrack (not score, but actually all the dialog) worked for me. I grew up with all this music and she found a way to use the words not only to draw upon your memory and nostalgia but to give the words a new context and a new life. These songs were written to be seemingly general (all you need is love, etc) but every person listening to them and connecting with them brings their own specific meaning to them (that song that reminds me of...) . Taymor made every song very very specific, never general. This gave it real heart. To connect to people in general, you need to talk in specifics.

This morning I installed my new 500 gig drive, giving me a full Tb internal now. I don't know how I managed without it.

I helped Margaret set up a Flickr account and upload photos from the Ice and Fire Carnival from the weekend. Check it out here.

I also put about a quarter pound of hair product in and shot a video of myself for my self portrait section of my Warhol series. Here it is (about a minute long and silent).

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I got back to my Warhol videos today, did one with William in 7 colours with him showing off two cans of Campbell's soup that we were donating to the pyramid of soup at the MacKenzie a couple of weeks ago. We all went back to the park today to collect scarves and hats and wire sculptures left with the snowmen. It sure turned told over night. William got to climb a bit and I think appreciated some of the park more today, even though he got really cold, really fast. I bought a new hard drive because 500 gigabytes just isn't enough anymore. I've not installed it yet because I need to figure out if my new Dell computer takes SATA drives. We didn't do the crossword in bed this morning like we'd planned, so we going to do that now, so good night.

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William's new antibiotics in capsules are a bit easier on him but he's still been a bit sick (no more vomiting but problems out the other end instead) so he stayed home again today. He's getting well enough that he's less able to just stay in bed and rest, so he'll have to get back to school tomorrow. He's finally getting the hang of swallowing the capsules. The dentist suggested opeing the capsule and mixing the powder in with jam. This is like what I had to do when I was his age, except with apple sauce. The pharmacist suggested keeping the capsule whole and burying in into a spoonful of ice cream. This seemed like a good idea so we tried it but he just couldn't do it and ended up with the cap in his mouth and the ice cream all gone. Eventually he's got his mouth trained to do it and the last two went down on the first try, just with a mouthful of milk.
Watched 18 minutes of Sisu, it is coming along well. Some issues around different actors, some being better than others, that has limited the ways some scenes can be cut, but it all seems solvable.
We went to see poet/art star John Giorno at the MacKenzie Art Gallery tonight. He was the sleeper in Warhol's "Sleep". The presentation seemed very 1962, although with a 71 year old guy doing what yoú'd expect a 20 year old to be doing, sort of beat poetry stuff. Bold and often funny, it would have felt better with a haze of smoke in the air and at least three drinks in the belly.

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I went to the Warhol show at the MacKenzie today. It was good, it hit all the icons and included some nice large pieces, but was not as creative of an approach as the AGO had a few years ago. I do appreciate the copies of his films running on a screen with lots of chairs available, but the cycle is three hours long with no way to select pieces. When I arrived there, "Eat" was just starting. It was the only one I'd seen before and it is 40 minutes long. As I was there with William and he was doing a short term craft during a tour, I was unable to see any films I'd not previously seen. Since it costs $12 to go in to the show, it is not something I'll be willing to pick up in bits and pieces. I did get tickets for the event they are hosting on Thursday, so I'll try to grab more of it then.

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Had breakfast with Mike and Paul at their parent's house. As always, the conversation turned to Lego. It seems that they built Lego as kids as well, so I suggested looking for the sets. Unlike my mom who wanted me to take all the stuff that was mine out of the house shortly after I moved out, Mike and Paul's mom seems happy to store their stuff, cleverly hidden so not even they can find it. So with her help, they uncovered three Lego sets from 1977. Paul is probably building them right now.I watched Cody Banks 2 with William, it was uninspired, then worked on my Carle Steel video (another Warhol styled "Modern"film). I put 4 frames of Warhol's "Empire" in as the background. I don't know how to get stuff off of Youtube, so I simply used the print screen command to grab whole screens of the image as it was in pause on Youtube, the copied them into photoshop, cropped them, then imported them into After Effects and created a loop of them. As I promised her, I have made her thinner (by about 1/3).

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I was supposed to have some tests done at the hospital today but they had a computer problem yesterday so they postponed me for a couple of weeks. William had the day off school and I had booked it off from everything, and as it is still very cold out, we made it pajama day! The whole family spent the whole day in pjs. I worked on my videos (did two versions of my Felipe Diaz silkscreen portrait) but also did some significant tv watching (Spiderman 2 and some Reboot with William).

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Very cold here today, about -52 degrees. William spent his first lunch at school, he didn't really enjoy it. He usually has either a hot lunch (grilled cheese, macaroni, soup, etc) or peanut butter. None of these choices are available to him at school. Besides that, he seems to have been seated at the back with no companion, and on top of it all, no Lego. We thought he might do better without the trip through the cold, but now I'm doubting it.
I got back to my silkscreen-style videos today, working out a 9 colour Leesa Streifler that I'm pretty pleased with. I also met with Mauricio about his courses towards his MFA and afterwards asked him about Dreamweaver. He gave me some start up pointers that I've begun to play with. June and I did an MSN test for the class I'll teach in St. John tomorrow, I'd better dig out my notes. I finished the Nero Wolfe novel "Over My Dead Body" today, it seemed very close to the tv adaptation until the last couple chapters (unless I fell asleep during that portion of the show when I saw it).Publish Post

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William went to Teagan's birthday party at the swimming pool today. Actually, he spent much of the day at the pool as he had lessons in the morning, then a lunch break at A&W, then back to the same pool.
This evening the Warhol show opened at the MacKenzie. I really wanted to get tickets, there was a Velvet Underground cover band and $500 worth of candy from the cool candy store on 13th, but for one reason or another I didn't.

Three to get ready

My office is finally empty. One object I wasn't able to move into my smaller office was a Auricon camera I found under the stairs over a year ago. It has a 1000' magazine and is equipped with the optical sound writer. It also cumbersome, awkward, and weights about 45 pounds. I've seen images of it twice recently, once in a reconstruction of a press conference in "Prairie Giant, the Tommy Douglas Story", and once in a promotional still for the newest Andy Warhol documentary. It is in the first instance that the camera was most often used, but it is in this latter case that the Auricon will be historically remembered and that I was most interested. The 1000' magazine meant that Warhol could shoot 30 minutes of 16mm film uninterrupted. This he did with films such as Empire and Sleep. In his later films he began using the soundtrack and would allow Factory hangers on to perform in front of the camera, often with little or no direction, then he would market it as his film. The sound was written directly onto the film so that no complicated intermediate steps were needed, it came from the camera to the lab to the theatre. Optical sound is the traditional soundtrack for 16mm film and, due to the expense are relatively low quality of it, has been rapidly disappearing. It used to be that you needed to got the step of having one made if you wanted to show your film on the big screen, and only then were you really a filmmaker. In ten years, this gate keeping barrier has disappeared as digital projection eliminates the need for this process. However, for better or worse, now there is very little to differentiate a seasoned veteran from my five year old son.