Some direction in life

Happy birthday to Nick. I sent Nick an article on January 23rd being the worst day of the year (according to some lunkheaded sociologist) and forgot to tell him happy birthday the same day. This was not an intentional head fuck. I felt pretty awful for it.

Nick's birthday also saw the launch of the project we here at otaku-house and his band and a group of remarkable directors have been working on for months now for Death Cab for Cutie - Directions.

This is why I've been so silent and hard to get a hold of. I've been working as a producer on the project with Jill Kaplan and Nick and being a producer is not my strong suit - I tend to be very scattershot and although the budgets were small this was still equivalent to having 11 videos produced concurrently, which would be hard at any point. But it has been gratifying in every sense to be a part of this, mostly because all it required was for me to explain how best to encourage directors to do their best work and to express what I love about music videos.

Directions also sees me finally following up on 16 Military Wives, at last.

I am enormously proud of what we shot. I always believe that the primary responsibility you have as a video director is to the band and their aesthetic. Thus, 16 Military Wives was a fun exercise in whimsy. But it isn't exactly what I'd like to explore personally with filmmaking. What we're doing with Directions is not, I'm quite certain, groundbreaking or original. What we did get right, I believe, is giving directors the ability and latitude to follow their muse - something that was blindingly obvious to Nick as a producer and someone who has been through the process of being in and graced with music videos, and from me as a director and hearing what sucks about the process. So I feel that the video we've shot (we still have to edit it) is exactly that - it is an example of what I'd like to explore in film, at least aesthetically and tonally.

And mostly that isn't anything to do with me but my crew, my incredible crew, the best I've ever had, mostly all again from the Decemberists video but with some new additions.

So to Tarin Anderson and Bernadette Spear and TG Firestone and the absolutely unbelievable art direction team of Jess Engler, Adam Bloodhead, and Ryan Smith... I wish I could spend more time just hanging out with all of you.

I'm also working with Rob Ryang of p.s. 260 and you've probably all seen his Shining trailer but if you haven't then watch it and know how I am the luckiest director around these days to be working with him.

Working with Tarin and Rob has been probably the best thing that's ever happened to me as a director.

I don't know, I just really can't thank my crew enough.

Here are some photos of the incredible set I had built. Everyone pitched in to make this happen.




___________

Congratulations to Colin and Carson for their imminent arrival, someone who is inarguably going to be one of the most amazing little people we've ever met. Congratulations to the rest of their band for their good fortune and future.

About two years ago I was telling Carson Ellis about a graphic novel I desperately wanted her to draw. Chris Walla was around at the time and asked if I'd ever read the His Dark Materials books by Phillip Pullman. He told me I should really, really read them.

I had not. I had slightly heard about them somewhere. It sounded vaguely Harry Potterish - or at least, being sold by the book industry as a variation on such, children's fantasy.

I devoured those books as a kid. T.H. White, C.S. Lewis, Madeliene L'Engle.

I was particularly into the Madeline L'Engle books - A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, a Swiftly Tilting Planet. They were illuminating and were about an odd family of overly bright children with an absent father who worked for the government and the fear of nuclear annhilation was a pretty large part of them; which pretty much sums up my childhood.

I thought several years ago that maybe they'd be possible for adaptation, thinking wildly in my head of things I'd like to do if all things were possible. It just sensed right to me; and my memories of the book conjured up a children's movie that thematically I could get underneath easily, combined with a chance to do a blowout visual piece, something like a kid's movie that would look like 60s avant garde crossed with pure 80s period dressing - A Clockwork Orange meets The Shining for kids if that makes any sense.

So I reread the books. And I got this awful knot in my stomach. Something akin to betrayal, or what an ex Scientologist must feel when they read about Xenu.

The books are fantastic and spellbinding and have beautiful digressions into the mysteries of the universe and such vividly drawn children, especially gifted children who aren't overly precious... But they are also pretty straightforward Reaganesque, Christian propaganda. Mind you I'm being overly harsh, because they aren't nasty and dispiriting about it the same way C.S. Lewis is; it's blindingly obvious what stance his books have. L'Engle equates an alien planet's oppression to be a fairly transparent critique of socialism as a pure evil which gets defeated by the power of love and the aid of an actual angel spreading Jesus waves.

I read that Phillip Pullman lectured of how the end of the Narnia series culminates with one of the girls being cast out from paradise forever for showing an interest in boys and makeup as she enters her late teens. And then presto - it's announced that everything is awesome - all the children have died in a train accident and are to live in the paradise of Narnia forever!

That is, to paraphrase Pullman, an intensely fucked up message to share with children.

But yes me and my new friend Cat Solen have discussed this at length, how the adult versions of our selves revisiting these books cannot fathom the warm nostalgia and personal connection we have to these worlds given that in essence they are books which have a fairly strong and direct ideological message which we can't abide by now.

We like life, the here and now, and can appreciate the harsh aspects of existence but celebrate what is good and proper and possibile within a lifetime here on Earth, and wish there were books that said so to children.

_____________

Which brings me to Phillip Pullman, and all you ever need to know about him is in this article in The New Yorker which finally got me up on my bicycle to Community Bookstore in Park Slope to grab the last copies they had of these books, and I had my holiday downtime reading set. And within three days I'd finished it all.

And these are the first books I cannot wait to share with whatever children I might have someday. They are absolutely staggering. They are not perfect; and at points I'd be hard pressed to say that they're necessarily kid's books because they can be so brutal, but I would gladly share them with my children knowing it would not in some way fuck them up deeply but prepare them for life; for both the coming joy and dread and how those two live side by side always but it's all right because everything is tinged with wonder.

The books are essentially about something revolutionary in today's developmentally retarded day and age in which youth is pushed at as an attainable goal: that the loss of innocence for wisdom is not merely neccessary, it is in actual fact a good thing. Ignorance is not bliss. The book's radical cosmology is both blasphemous enough and brilliant enough to suggest that taking a bite of the apple metaphorically and literally may have been one of the proudest things our species ever got itself into.

This is also the first work of fantasy I've read literally since Tolkein's extended essay on picnicking hobbits called "The Lord of the Rings" that seems absolutely toweringly original and singular.

I cannot recommend these books enough, and from now on when Chris Walla tells me to listen to something or read something, I will not hesitate.