Relevance

In case you didn't think that the subject was relevant to you, here are some statistics dug up by the talented and hard-working Erica McGrath:

"More than 80 percent of U.S. communities
depend solely on trucking for delivery of their
goods and commodities."

"There are 3.46 million truck drivers in the
United States. Total industry employment is 8.9
million, or one of every 15 people working in
the United States."

-The American Trucking Associations

Post is in full swing. We're lucky to have the dedicated and brilliant Mathew Dougherty on board as editor. Keep an eye on his upcoming documentary.

We're working out of an amazing studio in midtown, graciously provided for by Daniel Marracino.

Everything is logged. Assembly is slated to start in one week. Matt and I are currently screening and organizing everything.

I'll start posting teasers on the blog in the near future. Stay tuned!

Production is over. I'm back in New York City and about to embark on post. I have to log and digitize 125 hours (I've already digitized 60 hours in the first wave of post). At 40 hours a week, it will take 3 weeks to digitize, and another 3 to log. Luckily, I won't have to sync cameras this time around. That was a nuisance in the first phase of filming because timecode on the DVX100B would often drift when the camera was powered down, and when you're filming drug addicts and prostitutes engaging in illegal activities, you can't exactly call a time-out to sync up cameras. Overall, I think one camera was a much better formula considering the nature of the subject matter. It's hard enough ignoring one 6'2 dude with an imposing machine strapped to his arm.

In any case, we're looking at six weeks before I make a single cut, assuming a 40 hour work week, which might prove difficult when juggled with freelancing and possibly a part-time job. A dedicated digitizer/logger could cut that down to three weeks if we work together, which might be worth the 1500 to 2000 it would cost. Then again, the more I watch and rewatch the footage, the better. So yeah, I'm kind of on the fence about it.

I'm thinking of picking up a part time job to support myself and preserve my sanity. Ideally, it would entail helping people, sunlight, and physical labor. Daniel suggested working for the census bureau. I'm going to look into that today. My friend, Keegan, might be able to get me a gig selling fish at the farmer's market. Being a Director/Fishmonger is a performance art piece in it of itself. I could also canvas and/or do construction. My friend Teddy might also be able to get me a gig at a dog-walking company.

I've been so obsessed with film and video these last few years that the thought of a working a job out of the industry is kind of exciting. Breaking into the industry is such a rat race that it's easy to become obsessed to the point that you lose perspective. Marc Singer, the director of Dark Days, one of the inspirations for my film, was working construction in Florida last I heard. The guy is brilliant and a complete bad-ass in his own right. When I heard he was working construction, I was shocked. He should be making movies, I thought. I can't believe how far I've come since then.

In a nutshell: status does not make you happy. We get these odd ambitions and sacrifice everything in pursuit of them. Being labeled "Director" doesn't make a person happy. The things that really make us happy are a lot simpler than that: good company, good deeds, and personal growth. My strongest motivation in making this film is helping those less fortunate and teaching the fortunate to appreciate their blessings. I have to remind myself of this on a regular basis though, because its a form of giving that will take a very long time to reach fruition. I have to be patient and keep my eye on the prize.

Just watched Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa. I like how it embraced the raptures of anarchy. I think I'm going to incorporate that rebellious tone in my film, since many of the characters are driven by it.

Everyone should check out Grooveshark. It's the future of music.

If you live in NYC and own a bike or are thinking about getting one, go here for the time of your life.

And if you're looking to do some environmental volunteering, check out ioby.

When we receive an offer to serialize the film, and we will, I have a good formula, host, and modest budget proposal that will blow taxi cab confessions out of the water.

"I was playing hide-and-go-seek with M. and found mommy's pot in the closet." -- J.'s 10 year old daughter.

I am humbled by the spectacle of creation.

"If all consciousness is subject to essential laws in a manner similar to that in which spatial reality is subject to mathematical laws, then these essential laws will be of most fertile significance in investigating facts of the conscious life of human and brute animals."
-Edmund Husserl

Like a flashlight in a dark room, consciousness can only illuminate a small area at any given time. We rarely stop to question where the flashlight points and why, or what the effects of it pointing in one direction as opposed to another are. I would argue that the effects are profound. A number of seemingly distinct psychic struggles find a common origin in misplaced focus.

Happiness is focusing on what you have as opposed to what you don't have. Self-esteem is focusing on what you like about yourself as opposed to what you don't like. Enthusiasm is focusing on what you like about an endeavor as opposed to what you don't like.

Darkness is palpable in the wake of firecrackers that splutter across an empty sky. We want to throw caution to the wind but convention restrains us.

Sunlight slipped through gaps in the venetian blinds and imbued the running water with iridescent highlights. The water was hot and felt good on my dry hands. It felt like maybe I was washing a part of me as I scrubbed an off-white bowl.
"I don't want you to worry," she said.
I waited. "If I can't even help one person, I can't help anyone."

Prostitution is a symptom, not the cause. Salvation is psychic, not tangible. J. may have stopped but she is still secretive and ashamed: she hasn't really healed. She needs to own it instead of letting it own her. G-d puts us through trials so that we can grow and learn. We should be proud of what we've been through, not ashamed. J. has been to hell and back and lived to tell the tale. She's been through horror's we can't even begin to imagine, and somehow, despite it all, she's full of light. That's not something to be ashamed of.

Real salvation is achieved through targeting the cause. We live in a world where everything is disposable. Apathy has come to envelop people too. It's not just about prostitution. It's so much bigger than that. How many of us have felt worthless at some point or other? How many of us have felt disposable? G-d give us the strength to heal.

What's going to happen to x, not what's going to happen, is what gets us to follow a narrative, because we are accustomed to synthesizing characters through time (i.e. identifying--ourselves and others), and we do it with fictional characters. The gaps between scenes are much broader than we recognize because of how we make arbitrary brackets distinguishing a part and a whole. A movie? There's no such thing as a movie. The distinctions we make between homogeneous and heterogeneous frame the way we see everything.

At Last

I've been too visual to write coherently, so I'll update with a few excerpts leading up to production.

Sunday evening, I'm running as fast as I can though I'm not quite sure from what--responsibility perhaps?--in any case, the important thing is to stop running, but for the life of me, it's hard; I've lost perspective you see, and fear lurks in the darkness, fear of failure, fear of challenge; my whole body is wracked by fear; tension runs like electricity along muscle fibers and reverberates through all that is me; "fear of god," said Jeff. What am I going to do about it? It's hard to say. Drink. No. Write. Yes. This is the beginning, this is the boon, the beauty, the blessing, the grace: how lucky we are to have this indispensable tool and how ungrateful to use it so infrequently that it collects dust in the darkness....

****

You are the blink of an eye, the time it takes a leaf to drift to the pavement, a break in the clouds or a cloud that scuttles over the moon, a raindrop that ripples the surface for a brief second before submerging. Everything will continue as it was before and nobody will know the difference.

Wonders creeps like vines over the skein of reality, entwining the mundane with ineffable glory; for those who choose to see it, the mystery is intoxicating. I trace my fingers over the curvature of space and time and crumple dreams between my thumb and index fingers; I destroy civilizations with a casual glance and forge chaos from bars of gleaming darkness. Life curls and unfurls and wraps around itself, repeats itself, destroys and recreates itself and we are victims swept up by the tumultuous sea.

I saw Monica sitting cross-legged on the bed when I entered the room. I sat down next to her, placed a pillow on her lap, and rested my head on it. She ran her hands through my hair and asked me if everything was alright.
"I was offered a lumping job. I don't know if I should take it or not."
"You should stay." It felt good having her run her hands through my hair like that. "Your work here isn't finished."
A blue shirt draped over a corrugated lamp shade dimmed the only light source available in the room. Monica must have put it there to accommodate her failing vision.
"What are you going to do when you go blind?" I once asked.
"Vision's not that important," was her reply.
The dim light hugged the contour of her jaw.

The rumbling of individual tractors combines to form a soft roar that underlies all other sounds in what one friend referred to as the armpit of the universe, while freight trains punctuate the undercurrent, heralding their arrival with triumphant bursts of white hot noise; three head lights form a triangle of dots that signify an unmistakable "therefore", though what follows the conjunctive adverb is beyond my comprehension, along with just about everything else out here; and I'm back in the hot marsh stew alongside adults turned children in a bathtub full of stars.

There's no escape, and bit by bit, my sanity drifts away alongside crystal meth vapors beneath his grim black jaw. I almost blacked out when I saw her pinched on either side by over-exposure. Fuck, I said, and they demanded to know why, but if I told them the truth they'd realize just how far adrift I am.

Distance. There's no escape, no rest, no separation. Church on Sunday and cabaret all day monday. Ain't nobody's business if I do.

There but for the grace of G-d.

It seems like the whole world is rumbling--the trucks, the laundry, the train, the lights, my heart, compiled, inseparable, a hurricane that heaves in tandem to the beats of a billion hearts and maybe I'm going crazy or maybe I'm going sane.

Order is a construct predicated on judgment, and you can't judge someone anymore than you can judge the sun for going down. Judgment serves a pragmatic function exclusively and has nothing to do with truth. The truth is that we're all products of circumstance--you can't judge the working girls, the johns, or the pimps until you know where they came from. It might look like hell to you, but for a lot of them, its a step up from home.

If there's anything I learned out here its just how lucky I am to have the people who love me unconditionally. Destructive behavior invariably requires a void in order to take root.

So when the chaos coalesces amidst rumbling tractors, a simple song slips through the backdoor. Love is the forgotten currency that underlies human interaction and it took a journey through the dark side to unveil this fundamental truth.

A Gentle Push

It's been over a week since last I posted something on here, and I suppose that I've fallen victim to the stagnation of not putting my hands to the keyboard with the intent to type as I have been swept away by the profundity of each day's experiences. I'm also lost in the specifics of what's going on, that I haven't had a moment to step back and look at things objectively. Last night, or rather very early this morning, brought me that opportunity.

The day began like any other: with a knock on the door at 8am by a lovable, yet infuriating and hopeless crackhead. She woke us up and yelled at us for not being awake yet. In fact, she thought to yell at us for all manner of different things throughout the day, not the least of which was her spilling a cup of Frank's Red-Hot all over the comforter on the hotel bed. The fierceness of her anger at us for the strangest and most irrational things was surpassed, if only for brief moments, by her bouts of remorse and depression. She was jonesing. Hard.

At the same time, we were compelled to keep interacting with her, if not for those moments where she realized that she could let her guard down and just kick-it with us, then because she managed to produce a solid scene with three other people who are already characters in the film. The tipping point came when she smoked crack with a lumper who's been using our shower these past couple of days. It was his first time.

Alex and I both sensed a change in his personality, and we both felt guilty for introducing him to our crackhead friend. We decided to stay with him in the room instead of leaving to meet a trucker friend on the lot. No sooner was our friend gone--having long since outstayed her welcome--than we realized how tenuous this moment with the lumper was. He pulled out a dollar, which he said was a gift from a man whom he had helped out with a little gas money. I noticed that the bill was folded strangely in his hand, and as he revealed its origin to us he gently unwrapped it. I turned away for a moment to discover, upon looking into his hand again, that he was displaying a small mound of crystals and powder. Meth.

Alex and I, realizing the gravity of the situation, started talking to him about how dangerous it could become. As we talked to him, he had a glint in his eye whenever we made contact; he had a sense of purpose that would otherwise have been inspiring, if not for the destructiveness of its likely ends. Even as we spoke to him to bring him down and away from thoughts of using the meth, and even as he was engaged with what we were saying he was methodically gathering the crystals and placing them delicately into a piece of aluminum foil.

"Give me the foil man, it's not worth it," I said worried that I was about to witness the pivotal moment in one man's destruction.

"I hear this is how they do it," he said almost as a response as he moved a lighter underneath the foil to produce a tiny puff of smoke. At that moment Alex and I realized that he was locked into an intensely personal moment of addiction, and that he wouldn't be brought out of it by ordinary means. We both worked on bringing him back into the room, and brought it to the point where he seemed willing to give up the foil. He extended the paraphernalia in my direction in a gesture for me to take it away from him. When I grabbed ahold of it, he held tight. Even though the foil was already ripped I did not pull hard enough to tear it further, but just hard enough to sense his resistance.

I was only compelled to let go once he stood up and appeared prepared to dump it down the toilet. As he walked over I sensed that if he went into the bathroom to dump that meth, he would likely shut the door and breathe it all in. Alex managed to get him to hand over the foil willingly, and then walked into the bathroom and flushed it down the toilet.

~

There are clear experiences in all of our lives where, if only for a moment, our purpose becomes profoundly clear. In these moments, which sometimes seem mundane and without a trigger, we are compelled in an unknown direction by an equally unknown force. The inclination to choose a path, to resist the usurpation of our will, only serves to deny a spiritual experience which can only come to us through submission to the unknown.

~

After walking across the I-10 overpass, and grabbing an In-N-Out Burger with our lumper friend, we walked back towards the TA. From a distance we saw her, standing on a merger-strip leading the Northbound traffic across the overpass. I suspected immediately that she was, like the girl we met on our first day in town, trying to hitch a ride away from the truckstop and back to some other lot to turn a few tricks. When we walked over to her, having bid the lumper fare-well, I noticed immediately how well-drawn her sign was. It said Los Angeles in funky, and steady lettering which fit nicely into the cardboard square.

She had a lot of red hair and freckles, and she didn't appear to be dirty at all. I was surprised to see her there, and equally surprised that, upon reflection and after five-hours of sleep, I did not read her as a prostitute off-the-bat. Nonetheless, I was confused as to why she was there, and I was determined to blow up her spot and block her eye-line to the oncoming traffic until I found out more about her.

Apparently, if you can believe this, she is an international fashion model, and she hitchhikes all over the world. After speaking with us for a few minutes, and regaling us with her story at a lightning pace, we attempted to interject bits of our background into the mix. Once she told us that she had family nearby who could pick her up, and despite the feeling of camaraderie she instilled in me when she talked about her 'hitchhiker's pride' of wanting to walk up to her family's door and see her journey to its seeming completion, I was determined to keep her from getting a ride.

At the time, and in retrospect I feel embarrassingly hypocritical for acting so protective of her. It's one of the aspects of hitchhiking that irk me the most; those moments where someone tries to whisk me away from my life of danger and destruction. A veritable 'captain sav-a-ho' but for hitchhikers. Regardless, I felt informed by my time working and living at the single largest site of truckstop prostitution in America, and how so many of the truckers here see a young (or old, or fat or skinny or . . .) woman as a piece of meat. We essentially blew up her spot until a meth-addict came by in a rather disturbing manner and offered to get her a ride into LA. She promptly gathered her bags, and we collectively began walking back towards the hotel room. No sooner had we crossed the street, then did a city police car pull over and the officer, upon removing himself from his vehicle, order us to all sit on the curb and produce our identification.

After briefly haranguing us for information, he sent us on our way with a warning about the hotel we were staying at and the truckstop which abutted it. He essentially profiled us as three lost white kids and told us to find a different hotel.

Having already called her family up, the young woman kicked it with us in our room and drank coffee. We spoke, for what seemed like an hour about our film, and about hitchhhikers and squatters. Having never encountered a model in the flesh, I thought that the visceral experience of being in her presence was shockingly juxtaposed by the plasticized images of her in the portfolio which she carried. All-in-all she was a person, no more or less real than any other I had met. The unreality of the situation was in the circumstances which brought us together.

No sooner had the gravity of the situation settled down upon me, than did her cousin and ex-husband enter the room. Her cousin and I spoke for a deceptively short amount of time about hitchhiking, Rainbow Gatherings, and New Orleans after the storm. Each time they attempted to extricate themselves from the room, we found ourselves delving deeper into our conversations--exploring the full extent of our connectivity, while only really scratching the surface. Before they finally left, our lumper friend had returned and was probably just as floored by the parties gathered as by the circumstances bringing them together.

By the time they had left, I was deep inside myself pondering the plethora of impossible moments of the day. I probably would have done well by myself to have written last night. The fresh perspective that follows a five-hour nap atop a day of utter chaos and synchronicity, I suppose, is good for me to have taken the time to step into in order to do justice, at least in writing, to the events of one extremely long day on the set of Lot Lizard, the feature documentary.

Peace and Love,
Dan

Walking through the lot in the middle of the night I glance through the windows of a cab cloaked in darkness and barely make out the face of a gorgeous blond, no older than twenty, perched on the lap of a grizzled trucker; something about the trench-like wrinkles on his face juxtaposed her smooth cheeks and silky hair disturb me in a way I can't even begin to convey.

We decided to do something different for a change. This blog entry is from the subjects rather than the film-makers.

M: I'd like to give a shout out to all the crackheads. I had a nice day today, kicking it, tweaking it, tripping it, deaking it with you guys, being that I was the only one that wasn't sober besides bubbathon. Coming to life, on TA west side.

B: I just want to say to everybody out there hustling--do yo thang.

M: Trickin ain't easy.

Lala land

Apparently 'Party Row' is a term that doesn't really apply here. Every row has the potential for a party.

There is one place though, that stands out. Between the third and fourth rows, there is an asphalt slab about ten feet wide, bordered by an 18 inch concrete curb. Both the third and fourth row trucks back up to the slab, so it creates a fairly reliable party spot; there are two giant lightposts on the slab, and our first night out here there was a group of nine Bosnian truckers having a cook-out.

At first they were a little wary of us--everyone out here seems wary of everyone else--but after Alex had a very short conversation with them in Russian, we were offered steak-sandwiches from the grill and beers.

We sat there, mostly taking in the scene: a foreign tongue with loud gypsy music blasting from the tractor parked nearby. Then came one of the working-girls. She was the first one I've seen who didn't look much older than she actually was. In fact, I can only guess, but she looks younger than she probably is. She was wearing a shirt that left her breasts almost out in the open, a pair of risque underwear and high heels. Her hair was done up, and so was her make-up. In fact, the deliberateness with which she presented herself was probably most shocking to me only after I remembered how reserved and unpretentiously the older working-girls dressed in Tucson.

She came over and played with the Bosnians--first touching them seductively, then bending over in front of them. Then she offered one of them a 'date' for $300, to which they laughed her off. The whole scene had an element of a 'party.' When I think of the girls who have been out there for only a couple of more years, and I think of how quickly a body is taxed by both the continuous intercourse and its subsequent effects on their minds, as well as the drug abuse, I can't help but wonder if this atmosphere of a party changes gradually into the drudgery of a job, or if there is a singular moment where a girl just decides that she's not playing around with the guys anymore. I suppose I wonder how this girl so scantily dressed (in weather that I had to wear two sweaters and a jacked to withstand comfortably) turns into a woman hustling the lot in a full-length trench-coat without much a thought other than where the next hit is coming from.

Peace and Love,
Dan

Have you ever walked out onto a frozen lake in the dead of winter, or wandered through the streets in the middle of a thunder storm? There's a kind of solitude in those experiences: each step takes you further away from your fellow man, but brings you closer to something important, something beautiful, that everyone else is just afraid to see. We cloak ourselves in comfort and safety as the world passes us by.

I lost myself in the rhythmic symphony of the train as we zoomed between mountains black as ink, bound toward our final destination.

Tucson was phenomenal, though we came up short on b-roll after our lead cut off access. Access has been and will continue to be the most difficult aspect of this production.

As we pull up to the motel in Ontario, Kitty asks for a cigarette. I introduce myself and shake her hand, which catches her off guard. She's not used to being treated with respect. She's not used to having someone be nice to her without expecting something in return. Her smile bares her three or four remaining teeth, but she was, and still is beautiful in her own way. Mark Singer succeeded because he spent six months with the homeless without any intention of making a film. We don't have six months and the agenda corrupts us, but we can suppress it, if only for a little while. Empathy is the key into this world, not money or deception.

A good sign, in any case. "In Ontario, they'll come to you," said one trucker. 7 AM, Sunlight breaking through the fog, and just a few minutes.