New Deal

Hey!, I didn't get my ass kicked this year! It was by no means an easy year, but the low was never as low as taking cold showers in the dark. How was that possible?

• January- No great promise coming out of the gate. I spend the month "networking", which is shorthand for; documenting my calls to friends who have jobs for my weekly unemployment claim.
• February- Halfway through the month one of these calls pays off- I am hired on a film in the Boston area. Myself and seven other local artists leave our families in the lurch to work on a Martin Scorcese film over three hundred miles away. It is the beginning of three and a half months of re-furnishing my life. A week after I show up I am assigned to run the scenic shop for the set dressing department. The film is set in the 40s and 50s so this involves refinishing old furniture to look new, rendering hundreds of historically 'plausible' documents in media specific to the era, aging everything from desk blotters and lampshades to jars of pickles, and altering high-ticket rentals and museum loans (with reversible processes) to suit the aesthetic of my larger-than-life bosses; Dante Ferretti and Franchesca LoSciovo. For the uninitiated, they (husband and wife) ONLY designed settings for a slew of Fellini films ('Satyricon' among them), all of the Pasolini films, and lord knows how many beautiful films up to and including "Sweeny Todd", for which they won an Oscar the night before I started working for them. These are the "nobodies who are somebodies to the rest of the nobodies" in the credits rolling by at the end of a film to which I referred in my post last Easter. Franchesca is a tiny woman in Converse sneakers who breezes through the storage space at the end of a work day pointing out a dozen furniture choices to be made ready for their close-up by the following day. I nonchalantly struggle to keep my ear in front of her mouth so I have half a chance at sorting through the flurry of rolled 'r's and long 'e's that tax my comprehension. She interprets my vigilance as that thing where Italians get in each others faces and I'm golden with her. Ninety-nine percent of the time the upshot was "Paint it brown". Do I want to be the scenic artist on Ed Wood's "Plan 9 From Outer Space" ,watching the film years later and saying " I kinda believe that spaceship is not two pie plates on a string"? Surely not. I love working on something I'm good at. This balances out the frustration of trying to run a modest suburban home with two kids and a dog.
• March- I'm finished with primaries, hating Hillary by now. I ward off sickness with my new invention; the 'Emergence-C' martini. Replacing Vermouth with a high dose of Citric Acid (favoring the Raspberry flavor), I avoid the 'sick' that takes my more sober workmates down. I've refitted my hotel room with, among other amenities, my own watercolors taped on over the existing "artwork", and an entirely new lighting plot and furniture scheme. (I do the same for my Phila. friends). I've seen those 'black light' hotel room exposes- I contrive a path of hygienic carpet samples from the toilet to the bed. I assiduously wash and/or Fabreeze everything- I have a lot of free time on my hands. My plan, however, fails to render me immune to speed traps.
• April- Franchesca rewards me with this line; "Ohh Peeetarrr, Yoo arr soo clos tooo meee." I get homesick, reassuring Michael nightly that I am not ditching him to follow my Italian hot-shots back to Europe- that through it all I am a grounded family man. The Quaker meeting here is more 'mega-church" than it is 'silent refuge'. On odd days off I visit museums, exploit New Hampshire for cheap cigarettes and Staffordshire figurines. The busloads of Belgian soccer teams that punctuate life in a Marriott parking lot in the wee hours add to my further ungrasp of reality. I return home now and again to a household that looks like it is running better without me.
• May- I am charged with planning a party for the Art Department, which with my assistant we do fabulously well; an in-shop affair, employing a warehouse of priceless antiques and 200 latex corpses from the "Dachau" scene. It is worthy of inclusion in "101 Days Of Salo". (Dante pops in). I get upgraded to a Hilton where I learn that my mattress at home is shit.
• June- I return home. Immediately I go to work on a restaurant decor on Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square. (High tone) The last people to realize that the decor is contrived to look like a century-old Paris bistro are the carpenters watching me assault their newly fitted mahogany cabinetry with chains and purposefully administered cigarette burns. The destruction of freshness is an easy fit, but I'm horrified to learn that the rest of the world doesn't operate with a twenty million dollar budget.
• July- My brain is apparently emptied of everything I ever thought was true, and I design for dinner theater again. (see; Feb. 07) Yeston & Somebodies "Phantom" this time. Nothing more challenging than creating six or more scenes in and around the Paris opera house on a thirty foot stage (with about ten feet of wing space). It didn't totally suck this time- except maybe for the part where the producer yelled at me for not being five extra people with two extra weeks. Otherwise, a beautiful production... and if it didn't sell, blame Yeston or Weber or fickle summer seniors- I did my job!
• August- I design and paint elements for a fund-raising gala for the Delaware Symphony. It pays well , the work is fun, but the event itself is a total perk. Michael and I eat tons of oeuvres, drink deeply from the open bar, accept accolades, and pal around with a dozen hard-bodied 'Circ' performers whose antics in front of my barely lit scenery give us both a bit of a rise in our finely pressed trousers.
• September- I start work on a film, in Philadelphia this time. I render hundreds of animal hides to look more like animal hides (a movie thing)- this entails unpackaging and painting a 'dead zoo' of ten or more species of animal skins that comprise the roofs of fiberglass igloos. Painted-on frost clinches the illusion.
• October- I'm laid off from ice-capades and move to a Carnival Cruise commercial featuring the World's Largest Pinata (click on photo to view). A 62' burro, now in the Guinness Book of World Records. It snow-balls into a PR fiasco when the highly attended event involving the dropping of four tons of candy from the pinata's belly is postponed by the Philadelphia police (wisely supposing that young children would be trampled to death in the crowd of +3,000).
• November- I get fresh hope for the political future of the country for my birthday. I eagerly respond to working on more commercials. Big budgets- not one foot in reality. Among other cinchy tasks, I paint the tiny luggage of an hydraulically animated groundhog pink. 'Cause it's what I do.
• December-Some 'Bollywood' movie painted the column tops in a subway station red (it's a movie thing). I painted them orange again. Now- nothing but time off. Mom-mom died this month. When she did, I hear, she sat up, opened her eyes to something beyond the room in which she lay, and reached out. What do you think of that!