23 january, 1999

why don't you just come back and crash on the extra bed? you don't want to have to sleep on that [krusty] sofabed.
because i have to update my website, it's what i do. i am called to it at [one am] odd times. if i didn't respond to that call i would be truly unemployed.

23 january - tonight i had a fabulous experience.

doug in his infinite foresight arranged a place for us to stay - a ski bum condo with a mostly functional hottub. we found a liquor store in this mormon town and we have 1800 tequila ketel one and some beer that isn't 3.2% alcohol (everything they serve in restaurants is. or like last night we ate at the irish camel mexican restaurant, and the pitcher of margaritas arrived as six glasses each with a shot of tequila and a pitcher of margarita mix. state law - no more than one shot poured in any container. something like that.

doug block this film maker made a documentary about web page makers and used me in a large part of it. "home page" that documentary was accepted to sundance and doug brought me out to park city utah to promote the film with him.

sundance is a giant party for film geeks. the backbone of the affair claims to be intensely personal independent film making. socializing on doug's coattails i have met a group of folks who seem to be making some honest films. that's a nice thing to see. although i am exposed to a disproportionate number of documentary folks - they seem like the nerds of the party - intellectual and more fun to talk to, passion and direction. there's a lot of interesting and engaging and passionate and honest people in fiction films too - but that's where the stars work and when you have fur coated sunglasses indoors have-i-seen-them-somewhere-before people around it's not about the plight of anybody except if you can't get invited to the good party.

last night we retreated from a day of filmgoing to a hottub with the tequila - that was our own story session, a few nice folks in the out of doors (21 yrs angie of atomic pictures, dan a filmmaker/masseuse, debbie editor, doug). snow on your skins and then immersion in a hottub will set your nerve endings aflame!

then this morning my brother colin arrived and we hit the slopes and we chased movies. for three hours we waited in various lines and wandered to different theatres, missing the waiting list successes for one movie and desparately selecting another - hoping for films we hadn't heard of and wouldn't otherwise see to have empty seats for some kind of saturday night sundance experience to make my brother's madcap 36 hour utah excursion fleshy.
we ended up bearing numbers 16-20 on the waiting list for "Autumn Heart" (heard of it? i hadn't). all i knew about it was "ally sheedy." it turned out to be one of the most moving film experiences of my lifetime (and i missed the Slamdance premiere of the Jane's Addiction "Three Days" documentary for it - Perry Farrell spoke there. dv said perry's afterparty had girls takin' their clothes off).
La Ciudad wasn't bad either. In fact it was downright inspiring - the kind of movie that wants you to contribute to the community pictured.
each of those was a memorable, fantastic film made by dedicated folks without big studio funding. and i don't know if will be able to see them outside of the festival (or the sundance channel on cable). so that's a good reason to come, that's a good reason to see films. add being able to ask the director questions and it's positively fulfilling.
showing home page is strange - over 100 people watching me prance around my life on tape in 1996 and say all sorts of deliberate stuff. i'll reserve exposition or proposing audience reaction until after tomorrow's AM showing.

i had planned to snowboard because i hadn't before and it seems a sport new to our generation. but my brother is rather a skier and so we hit the hill and i hadn't skied in 15 years and with a good lesson i was able to be face planting into snow drifts on intermediate hills by 2pm. i put in my contact lenses for this experience. and they hurt like the dickens after 17 hours of sun and wind and strain. i couldn't go any longer with them on and i wasn't going to fight through it. i have just recently read in raygun that momus has severe eye damage from "poor contact hygine."

i rushed back to what i love - update my website. i have scrawled the beginnings of a few pages but rare physical exercise amidst the harsh elements and augmented altitude has just whooped my butt. i can't stay awake and i have a screening in 7 hours and homesite on this laptop loaned graciously last-minutely by jonathan, homesite is taking its time to process my typing so each letter only appears after an ever-increasing delay, unless i turn off word wrap and then i lose context. so it's back to notepad, nearly every time.
otherwise i feel lucky to have my musical context with me - jonathan's old 560 thinkpad is lacking a CD player so I dumped 350 megs of MP3s from my collection - i stayed up the night before exercising my right to archive my music ripping MP3s in Linux so now I can still listen to sweet soft techno, willie mctell, X, ravel, swan silvertones, Buffalo Daughter, polar bear, Rappin' 4'tay and vallatarfrangammelboning.

now if only there was some way to share that audio love with you!

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