"hello hello hello"
- my nephew Arie to everything he sees :)
It’s Fall and I’m thinking about projects. 1
Mariah Carey just started sound-checking for Christmas and beneath the fragrance of fallen leaves there’s that faint whiff of new years resolutions (if you’re into that sort of thing [which sometimes I am - a fresh start! a challenge! a little box to fill with attempts and failures and a record of dusting myself off to try again!]). The world continues to burn in new and ancient ways but now it’s live streamed through the kaleidoscope I keep in my pocket. I anxiously google how much energy a google takes: it is the same as flipping on a lightbulb for 17 seconds.
And then a lightbulb memory, my dad, half-joking, counting seconds as cents to describe the price of running the washing machine. For the dryer, he said, mid-hanging a soaked pair of clean jeans over the edge of the back deck, you count by twos.
Another flipped switch, another 17 seconds to try to find the exact stat about how much water AI uses to generate a 100 word email. I scrolled by an infographic that said it was the equivalent of pouring out a bottle of water? I don’t find the statistic. I wait for the lightbulb to turn back off. In the darkness, orange afterimage floating in my vision, I put down more words.
What does a project do?
As someone on the very cusp of finishing a whole portfolio of projects234 and antsy to build more sandboxes to play in, I think of Rabbi Abraham Heschel’s description of the Sabbath as a “cathedral in time” and filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s poetic understanding of filmmaking as “sculpting in time”. Both views look at process and practice as creating something real and invisible, a space formed by focused attention and duration. Deltas and canyons and the hour glass of the ocean floor keeping track of all of the little things adding up; layers, words, and time spent.
Projects are pursuit. There’s usually a product on the other side but having the project is itself an organizing and meaning-making art.
In her novel Activities of Daily Living, Lisa Hsiao Chen explores this idea by following Alice, an artist navigating her aging father’s deteriorating health while getting by as a freelance editor5 and working on an unnamed project about the performance artist Tehching Hsieh. Tehching Hsieh is famous for his performance art pieces in New York in the 70s, 80s and 90s. He spent a year in a cage, another year clocking in every hour on the hour, another year living outside, and another year tied to the artist Linda Montano.
Chen plays with the idea of projects in the first few pages of her novel.
“The word project comes from the Latin projicere, as in pro— forward — and jecere—to throw.
Alice had done this, looked up the definition of project while procrastinating on her own project. She’d also done this: read blogs by project managers who put it this way:
A project has four phases: initiate, plan, execute, and conclude.
A project must have a beginning and it must have an end.
Curiously, embedded in the layered definitions of project is its own undoing: the project is “an idle scheme; an impractical design; as in, ‘a man given to projects’” (Webster-dictionary.org).” - Activities of Daily Living (p. 12, Lisa Hsiao Chen)
I am a man given to projects and Pillow Fort is a project full of other projects!
IN CLASS EXERCISE: Please read “I need a project for my projects!” in the style of “I need a vacation from my vacation!”
SPEAKING OF PROJECTS
For the last month or so I’ve been tooling around with my friends Caleb and Mark on different ways to use improv in film. Hopscotching in the footsteps of Elaine May and John Cassavetes and the Duplass Brothers, we’re playing between using improvisation as a generative tool to create scenes from scratch or as a texture in written scenes or an ethos in approaching the scaffold of building out a longer project.
BLUFF (below) is the result of a two hour session where we improvised the same scene four or five times, shortening and simplifying and workshopping with each iteration. We started with a fifteen minute version and then worked our way down to three minutes by the end. The sketch below is the result of cobbling together multiple attempts, and I hope you get a kick out of it! (uh, I guess cw: profanity if you’re blasting it on your office speakers?)
WHAT’S NEW IN WILL WORLD
After two quarters off, I’m back to teaching a video production course at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. We’ve learned the basics, and now my students are out roaming the streets of Chicago crafting stories of their own and texting me questions about ISO on beautiful, sunny, fall days like today.
POST, a TV pilot I co-wrote with my friend Ethan Stoller just got accepted into the Atlanta Comedy Festival, so if you’re around the Limelight Theater on November 10th swing by to say hello!
COUPLES COSTUME, a seasonally spooky short I made last year screened as part of Scream-tini Shot: Film Festival & Costume Contest at Mainstage Chicago and snagged a third place finish! To balance out my ego here, I’ll admit that I also burned my arm by biting into a scalding mozzarella stick and getting absolutely juiced.
I acted in a local car insurance commercial produced by the wildly talented Katie Johnston-Smith, so if you live in the Chicago-land area keep your eyes peeled for me spilling popcorn on myself at some spooky the low rates.
Got to re-unite with RITE OF PASSAGE cinematographer Drew Angle to shoot two more tiny episodes of a tiny web series about tiny houses I’m cooking up with
McFadden. Hope to share some eps by the end of the year so stay tuned for screening deets!
AND IN CLOSING, A POEM WRITTEN ON THE TRAIN COMING HOME
HELLO HELLO HELLO
she went on a silent retreat and it took 10 days to remember that it’s all a wave ~~~ Hello, Hello, Hello my nephew yells - to my dad, the slide, the world then, the shared smile with a train passenger who plops, not a full fall but graceful crash landing Her: old enough to be worried about a hip or twist or crack but still able to plop to dismount from standing to smile in a way that winks at CLOSE ONE HUH and I'VE STILL GOT IT, NEVER FEAR Hello, Hello, the men running for the train door closing, ready for anger, arms held up in the universal sign of WHAT THE FUCK MAN, just as the doors re-open and grace let’s them in interrupts the wave, the injustice, as across the street graffiti reads MISS YOU JON CRAZY THAT ITS BEEN THREE YEARS on the wall for as long as I can remember far longer than three years and now, another echo the train lurches and a young man sits down hard the same choreography as the woman next to him who looks and yes, I’m typecasting, but looks, and I apologize in advance, but looks, with all due respect, a little Episcopalian, by which I mean, in some liturgical sense, weathered but open? : a suitcase, and a Patagonia jacket, and the look of someone who recites a creed and means it and loves their queer little niblings without caveat or qualm or complication Hello, Hello, Hello old Chesterton washed up on a strange shore that, upon closer observation was home all along that old feeling new again which the world does every spring and we do every time a stumble is caught and shared with a stranger smiling across the train echoing out Hello
~ ~ ~
bye for now,
Will
project ruminating sparked by a lovely low-key Western shot on a thrift store Super 8 that local cowboy Ned Baker cooked up this weekend.
A sketch with Jenelle!
A short with Hal and Lauren and Hannah!
A play Abby wrote that we adapted for the screen!
In the book, Chen’s protagonist edits a series of videos called Bring on the Feels, creating “short viral news stories of the uplifting variety — a cancer survivor owner of a rescue dog with a cleft palate parachuting together out of an airplane— that kind of thing”