Yea Julie Hunt starts new production Co.

Ms. Julie Hunt of Willmington NC has thrown off the chains of servitude and started her own production company. We have worked together on Holland America videos for a while, for her old employer, and she has taken the client over and wrested control in the name of Good Nose Productions. Huzzah!

No Sleep Country for Old Men 3 and Coffee Confessional with Tante Ricky

Not much to see here: Morning shoot on the stage with the Mattress sales robot and then coffee with Rick. We talked about all the scalding disappointments that construct our middle ages. People my age sometimes seem more awkward than teenagers. Rick counsels that regular exercise fights despair. This seems likely, but I seem to run (well, more like, waddle ) in the opposite direction. It is nice to be working again. Still using borrowed 744T recorder,  which is awesome.  

Bud is out of the hospital and not-so-ominiously starting hospice care.  Everyone at my house is sick, just been sick or potentially sick.  

The post thanksgiving spiral

Following our Thanksgiving, (where the family came to our house and a good time was had by all) Bud began to feel weak. Through the weekend, my mom said that he began coughing during the night and by monday morning she was concerned enough to call 911. He didn't want to go, of course but couldn't walk or stand. I met mom at the ER.  I had a cold and spent the day with mom at the hospital wearing a mask. It appears that Bud had a minor heart attack and is suffering from congestive heart failure. It's hard to know what to do. It's a story that is being repeated by most people I know who are my age. It's difficult to try and get people who have been making their own decisions for 80 years to let you start to make them. These are not people who want to give anything up that they worked so hard for. I don't blame them.

Bowling Ennui

Bowling is a recurrent theme in my life. I attended a season end U-16 Soccer team event at the immortal West Seattle Lanes. I do not bowl, it is merely the temple of all things American. I watch. My son bowled and junior son sat next to me (with his true parent, Nintendo) while I polished off several beers. It was one of those moments that will be lost to time, a meaningless event that will slip away with the next tide. There I was, in leather jacket and Montana hunting cap (issued to the Montana Trustee Penitentiary Honor Farms in Deer Lodge) I am sure I looked sort of like a anachronism; a bit player sent from the wrong studio casting call.  I watched my handsome teenaged son bowl with out conviction. He has been wrestling with his responsibility to achieve good grades and a lack of social opportunity lately . It was like watching Morissey bowl with the cast of "Freaks and Geeks." His coach retired and we went home.

Huge houses in the deep hinterlands

I did an infomercial on a exercise program last Saturday. It was shot in some one's house in a very upscale housing development in the very far, way out of deepest Auburn (and then some). It was a community of 4000 square foot houses with 12 foot ceilings. The houses had originally sold for 800K and now due to the economy (or return to sanity) were going for 300K, so more middle class people were buying them.  The family where we were shooting rents out their house to shoots: a pretty common phenomenon.  Their furniture was big and substantial (as if the entire house's furnishings were bought from Costco in a single trip) and even though they had 3 kids, everything was perfectly arranged into a soulless motel art direction. Nearby there was a strip mall with all the accustomed chains and new (presumably excellent ) schools. I hated it, or possibly was at least jealous. Here was a completely insular retreat from the rest of the sordid, soiled jetsam of life.  A raft afloat in the sea where it's all okay. Why do the suburbs get everything? I used to think my hillbilly Seattle back street was out there (6 minutes from downtown) because my kids didn't have friends on the street. This place is beyond the asteroid belt. I am a bitter small man.

Quietly Inspiring

My job takes me into people's lives for the length of an interview. This was a video for robotic surgery at Swedish Hospital. The subject was a professor from the UW who had colon cancer.  His story was interesting but pretty common: he got sick and was "cured" through his surgery and was very happy. We do a lot of those. What was fun to see was the relationship between him and his wife. They had been married 42 years and obviously were a life long team. They referred to each other at their "buddy" and were obviously an extension of one another. We on the crew all saw that their relationship was pretty special. It's inspiring to see that kind of human commitment.

I did a couple other days of talking heads. Next week is thanksgiving and there will be no work.  I am probably headed into the dry spell.

Pacific Science Center / John Pai in a funny hat

I worked on a series of TV spots for the Pacific Science Center's new attraction "The Wellbody Academy" which replaces several crappy old broken and dirty exhibits at the science center. They will not be missed. The crew was great and the spots will be nice.

And John Pai in a funny hat.

Election

Glad that's over.

I am very happy with how it all turned out, however...I hope that the division and hopeless despair of disrespect and obstruction can be circumvented in congress. The last four years have been brutal. Never, in the modern era, has a duly elected president been treated with such contempt and disrespect. It has been astounding and disturbing the way all the wounded and neo-feral racists and  suburban trolls have come out of the wood work to lay impotent siege to the man. When he was elected I had  the naive thought that we could maybe put some of the racist past to bed, never did I imagine that it would only get worse. I hated Bush; I didn't hate him the way the right seems to hate Obama. Maybe that is naive too.  The president needs to act while the icky warm glow of the big hug he gave Chris Chistie after Sandy is still freshly seared into people'c collective unconscious.  There is a lot of shit to get done, a lot of nuts and bolts issues of government that need to be attended to, that have been left undone by the sideshow amusement of the election and by the unrestrained hatred of the Republican party.  I want some results.

Gay marriage, legal pot, now that's behind us, lets try and fix some stuff.

WW2 Vet, Rosie the Riveter and my @#$%ing Knee

I did a day with Boeing Historical Archives, which is to say that I am in awe of the human effort that went into strangling the German Reich and the Imperial Empire of Japan. It was a talking head of a historian and then two talking heads of regular folks who gave up some of their youth tho rid the world (temporarily) of fascism. One 89 year old man who had flown 30 missions in a B-17 over Germany as a pilot, his own brother a POW in Germany below him. One interview was a woman who at 92 was a stand up comedian and had been on the production line for Boeing during the war.  It was strangely life affirming to hear their stories as rambling and disjointed as they were.  They asked where they were when they heard the war was over: the pilot told the storie that he was in St. Paul MN being trained on B-25s when he heard: he recalled his room mate had a girl in their room and he was stuck in the hall without his shoes. He laughed as hard as any college freshman. He also went to Montana State.

Go Bobcats.

The worst thing about today is I screwed up my left knee again. It was almost to the point where I couldn't walk. I came home and iced it (Netflix "Ip Man") I have another big job tomorrow. I will hobble through it.