Snow was in the forecast but most of the day passed mildly. It wasn’t until just before evening that giant flakes began to fall. And fall. And fall. It wasn’t as cold as day one but it was a blizzard. Our location, near the fly fishing spot, is up a winding valley along route 63 north of Pecos. By wrap the snow had begun to stick and it the roads were getting icy. My precarious parking job from the morning left me with little other option than to abandon it for the night and catch a ride.

Day 4 was an easier day (I’ve begun to detect a pattern (bad day, good day, bad day, good day) with most of the work inside an old rustic cabin. The weather was sunny, at least while the sun’s trajectory crossed the small window of the valley, slipping away by 3 o’clock. The transo guys got my car free while I scurried around doing my regiment of 2 peoples work. The motions are getting smoother as Bayard (the mixer) and I fall into a groove. Battery, jam, wire. Point stick, suck up sound.

Today (noon call time – I’m writing this at a cafe before I go in), if my pattern is correct might be a rough day. Let’s hope I’m wrong.

I awoke this morning at 4:30(after a minor DST fubar). After yoga and an hour drive I land at a remote (ie. no cell service) valley wilderness along a river north of Pecos, NM. It’s cold and there is snow on the ground but soon the sun breaks over the mountainside. Taking high end sound & film gear out into remote areas scratches a particular itch in my novelty obsessed mind. Not quite sure what it is…
Regardless, soon the cameras are set along (or in) the river and I’m wading into the river alongside the actors, flyfishing. Pretty damn fun. Challenging, for sure. Between the angle of the sun creating shadows, the 2 guys casting their lines & dueling cameras at apposing angles & divergent lens sizes I am pretty well fucked most of the time. It is HARD. A hell of a fun challenge though.

After shooting in the river nearly all day we finally ‘move on’ to some driving stuff. This requires a major rework of the gear so I have to slip into geek mode. More fun. Wire the actors, build antennas on the roof rack of the mixers jeep, etc. etc. etc. I drive the jeep behind the car while he mixes.

Thankfully, due to the nature of sunlight in a valley, it is an early day (made even earlier by DST). Who knows what tomorrow will bring.

Meanwhile, a microphone hovers at the edge of the frame, tracking actors as they dance and wail. The camera accommodates their dance, shifting the shape and destiny of the laser trapezoid. The physics affecting the propagation of sound pressure waves in air conform to the inverse square law such that each doubling of distance from the source results in half the sound pressure. Each inch counts. The biggest challenge being the navigating around all those wavicles without throwing shadows on people or the background. It’s a bit like chess. Or being a pickpocket. Must be sly enough to not get caught yet bold enough to walk the line between the perceivable and the imperceptibe.

Thankfully, due to limits of time and money, film projects must inevitably wrap. Although there may be a modicum of regret experienced as the tight knit crew is dispersed it is minor indeed compared to the utter relief of getting your life back. Which is normally the case. This time however some other work manifested – The 13th Annual Language of Spirit Conference. I’d run sound for them years ago and they asked me to do it again. Since it started the day O.T. wrapped I figured what the heck. All in all, the conference went on for 4 days (all day long). The story of the conference is for another day. Lots of cool and interesting people. Talking. For a LONG time. The theme this year was ‘Science, Technology & Creativity’, a cool and relevant intersection of ideas, I thought. Unfortunately, many people couldn’t get past “science/technology is good/bad” sorts of perspectives. Love to have had someone like David Dunn there. Most significant person I made contact with was Steven Vedro, the author of Digital Dharma. More than anyone he fluidly synthesizes the spiritual and the digital in a grand scheme of wholeness. His blog post about attending the conference recollects some of the high points.

Anyway, I’m trying to sum up the past to get current here and if I get hung up on details I’ll never finish this blog post before getting called back in to work on the next show. Yes I said show which implies that I am working on another movie. Totally different affair – Indie (low budget) psychedelic 3D conspiracy horror. Was that you groaning or my unconscious? Yes well nothing is perfect and this show may be finding how far you can take that famous dictum. At least the subject matter is somewhat stimulating (to me). MK-ULTRA anyone? Numbers stations? DMT? at least they did their homework. Even if the weaving together of these various threads is complete fiction.

Also, I’m swinging the boom on this one which is always great fun. There is something thrilling (I really do get endorphin rushes after each shot) about keeping the mic just outside the frame. It’s like an extreme sport or something, you know? – “living on the edge.” An exercise in being small and subtle and sneaky.

In other news, anyone raised in the 80′s or with a love of early video games, should go out right now and pick up < a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Ready+player+one&x=0&y=0">Read Player One. I just devoured it and it was the funnest read I’ve had in ages. A total blast.

What crazed adventures stole me from my narrative duty? In a word, “life”. Mostly in the form of a small humanoid creature. Oddly though, work as well. Yes, meanwhile(as they say) I have been gainfully employed (mostly) on a feature film in Santa Fe. I say mostly in reference to the 3 weeks when the show was shut down because the funding necessary for us to shoot apparently “disappeared”. How does that happen? The mind reels. In the interim we were promised a return to work no less than 8 times. Needless to say, the previously upbeat mood of the crew on what had been up to that point a dream of a show took something of a hit. Alas, ‘never trust a producer’ is the prime directive of film work.

So here we are, the final two weeks of this funny little, slightly cursed picture. Shooting in the shell of an abandoned mall in ‘slightly less quaint than Santa Fe’ Albuquerque. At least it beats the heat. Perhaps something interesting will happen worth documenting (or perhaps my cozy little blog will insulate us from the assaults of reality and wrap us in obscurity).

When a gig finally materialized I had to choice but to take it. Still, in the weeks leading up to it I developed an ominous feeling of dread. Never one to allow feelings to whitewash my mental set going into an experience, I put my best foot forward and wrangled up an optimistic outlook. That outlook probably survived about the first week, which by now is veiled beneath sedimentary emotional layers of anguish, despair & hopelessness. The experience is too sensitive to go into details about (and it would sour the reading palates of my “devoted readers”) but I can say that I lasted about five weeks and my expulsion seemed more of a release than anything else. Regardless, there is a sting to being let go and my experiences leading to the end had undermined my self-respect and left me seriously questioning my future. There was some release in the last few days when I simply stopped caring but just went ahead performing my job to the best of my ability.

My last day was on Friday and we wrapped late (around 2am). I had (perhaps foolishly) agreed to boom a non-paying gig the following day as a favor for a friend. Unfortunately, this equated with 4 hours sleep sharing a bed at a friends pad. But I felt pretty good about it. I was working with friends and as I worked it seemed to gradually be cleansing me of all the negative vibes that permeated my daily existence for the past several weeks. This “purification” built to a head later in the afternoon. You see, the gig which I committed to blindly, turned out being a motivational speaker for Mary Kay inductees. The pinnacle moment for these ladies (aged 20s-60s+) involved karate chopping a board in half. The speaker admitted to having NO TRAINING WHATSOEVER in any martial art. Regardless, she donned her self-stylized “gi” and took the 100+ ladies through the motions. Of course, to muster the necessary force required uttering a guttural “hi-ya!”

So, this is what I had been hired to boom. The women all broke down into groups of 10 or so and began taking turns chopping the boards (or trying to). Meanwhile, my crew scurried around the room with 4 (5?) cameras trying to guess who was going to successfully obliterate the board. While this goes on (it must have gone for nearly an hour) I’m swinging the boom pole around while women are chanting “Go! Go! Go!” building to a “hi-ya!” This is one of those moments you just can’t comprehend the profundity of until after the fact. You can say what you want about motivational speakers (or Mary Kay for that matter) but when a bunch of middle age (and some just plain old) ladies start harnessing enough chi to push their hand through a solid object you can feel it. And hear it. Looking back I sort of feel like I was a whirling dervish focused on my dance while someone yelled out instructions, programming my unconscious mind (“Go! Go! Go!”).

In the end almost every single person broke their board (only a couple had to use their foot) and while certainly fatigued I truly felt a kind of purification had a occurred. It was hard to hold onto any sense of negativity after scurrying around that room trying to “capture” the essence those people were generating. Also, the sheer absurdity of it sends my mind reeling. Always good to send your mind reeling, especially when it’s been reeled in too long.

But New Mexico is a long way from Peru. We’re four out of five days in on a shoot in nw nm filming in the alien landscape of the Bisti Badlands. Millions of years have eroded this once underwater dinosaur graveyard into the anomalous forms called ‘hoodoos’. Stunning and (cough, cough) dusty. Giant dust devils spontaneously appear and disappear, leaving destruction in their wake. Amazing and absurd, this process of movie making. Hard to imagine the place surviving our impact.