i'm not going to apologize for being really shitty at updating this blog.
i'm just not. so get over it.
i am in a garage in
olympia,
washington. it's furnished with a futon, a
dvd player, a
tv and prototype of an
experimental electrolysis engine that runs on water. i am watching the extras on the life aquatic dvd.
i'm in
olympia,
washinton because it's relatively close to
portland,
oregon (my new home).
i'm here on the type of business i won't get paid for. i made this business connection on the world wide web (namely f
acebook; have you heard of it?)
i'm here helping a few ambitious guys from NYU film school to make their micro-budget (
i'd guess less than ten grand) feature length movie. i'm in charge of sound, and today i established myself as bestboy in spite of the fact that i don't yet know what the bestboy responsibilities are on a film set.
i'd never met any of the other crew members when i got here but they are turning out to be great guys. for the next month
i'm sleeping on an air
matress and sharing a room with
nandan (pronounced nun-dun)
rao. He's the director of photography for the film and he's got one of the coolest cars
i've ever seen. it's a 1972 Cooper Mini that he imported from new
zealand when he has 16 years old. it's about half the size of the new BMW minis and it's even still got the steering wheel on the right side of the cabin (technical note: despite the right hand drive, the
transmission is traditional
american configuration with first gear at the upper left position.)
i've been tagging along with him to his always informal meetings with director
zack weintraub. tonight was a day off from shooting but instead involved a trek to locate and procure a
canoe for shooting tomorrow's summertime rope swing scene on the
deschutes river with the two 15 year old lead actors who are playing 17 year
olds in the production. if this film sounds at all interesting please visit
http://lotlmovie.com for details and extremely up-to-date coverage of the project.
to say the least,
olympia has held nothing but good experiences for me (although a few long hours) and
i've already met a lot of people. all of these people seem to be interesting in their own ways and
i'm glad to have met each and every one of them.
dateline: prior to
july 7, 2009
the beginning of the month of
june saw me returning from a great week-long trip to lake
powell with my family. my oldest sister, holly, helped me pack up my stuff and clean my apartment. we set out with two cars and a u-haul trailer en-route to
portland from
logan on the first day of
june. just two hours outside of cache valley, my
subaru broke down on the side of the highway. it ended up spending the night there in southern
idaho while holly and i continued our drive to
boise. with much appreciated rescue from my dad, grandpa, and grandma the old
subaru rolled into the capital city of the gem state the next day and was quickly checked in for diagnosis at a
boise mechanic shop. diagnosis failing
fuel pump (which i like to think of as the heart of the car since it delivers the vital fluid to the engine). my graduate school entrance exam taught me that
fuel pump is to engine as heart is to muscle tissue.
3 nights in
boise while waiting for repair. 600 dollar repair bill. the highway out of
boise long and littered with
anticlimactic excitement. a new life. a test of character. potential. potential for neither success nor failure but likely something in-between.
after extremely slow email, phone and in-person
negotiations it was decided i would not be
immediately gainfully employed through my first attempt. this led to long days of handyman tasks, resume advances, sleeping in 'til noon or more, a new love for
domesticated canines, and increased discovery channel viewership.
the last month has been a bit of a blur. the next month will likely result in a similar blur with an underlying theme of film-making with would be strangers in olympia, washington. we're slated to wrap on august 8th and from there i foresee that unknown potential i mentioned earlier. income will be paramount on my to-do list followed closely by shelter i can call my own which
may be followed by musical endeavors in pdx.
as you trudge though this post you may be asking yourself, "what's the bottom line here?" where is all of this going? i'll oblige to answer such an inquiry with the following:
bottom line: i dearly miss the friends and family i left behind in utah (or the ones in finland). i want them to know i'm doing well. i hope that those friends and family are doing better than i and i hope against hope that i will see them all again. the thought of only seeing them for a temporay visit is quite literally (at very least it would seem) heart breaking.
