Lidia Yuknavitch - Dora - A Headcase

I magnified the bit where the scalpel actually cuts into Sig’s dong footage. At first hard to tell what you are seeing. Gradually as I pull the view back you understand what you are looking at. When his dong shoots blood — I use time-lapse. You’ve seen time-lapse photography. Cloudscapes and celestial motion. Plants growing and flowers opening. Fruit or road kill rotting. The evolution of a construction project. People in a city. Or, the enormous dong of Sig shooting blood across the room. I set a background behind it of — what else? Cuckoo clocks and cuckoos cuckooing their heads off.

But I don’t want it to be the kind of film you have to be super high on acid to understand. Or the kind of art you have to read books about to get. I don’t want it to draw the Seattle nerd wanna be art boys with plaid shirts and odd coifs. I’m no Gus Van Sant.

No, it’s not a movie about some crusted old guy who gets a boner.

Sig and his sausage? He’s just a man-symbol. It’s a movie about everything. This world we live in. The bodies we’re stuck with. The lives we get whether we want them or not. How hard you have to work just to get through a fucking day without killing yourself.

And how girls are virtually invisible. How that will be in the movie is me splicing in shots of Billie Holiday. Heidi. Nico. Maya Deren. You get the picture.

Technically I haven’t laid down the sound yet. But I’ve got buttloads of cool shit to work with. Sometimes I think the sound is more important than the images. Like giving the images … I don’t know, life.

The boy creature in the living room yells “BOOOOOMER.” I smell shit.

I burn a copy of the video footage for transport. I’m thinking he’s crapped himself.

I hear the return of Mrs. K. to the condo.

I hear her say “Oh!” And call out, “Ida!” And “Ida?” And “What on earth? What is all this butter?”

That’s my cue. I gather up my stuff and head out the fire escape toward the posse and the troll statue. I blow a kiss in the direction of Mrs. K. and her two steaming little piles of shit.

Babysitter my ass.

ANY SUCCESSFUL FILMMAKER TESTS A ROUGH CUT TO gauge the interaction between the art and the audience. I wouldn’t say I let that reaction prescribe what I do next, but I do like to get a sense of it — in case I want to further fuck with their comfort levels or expectations. Art is a verb.

I stage a showing at midnight underneath the Fremont bridge near the troll. I project it straight onto the cement wall. At midnight. Gathered are a gaggle of punksters and hipsters and young rebel hoodlums. It’s like a black skinny jeans and Emo haircut convention. It smells like pot and vodka and clove cigarettes — like someone exploded a cinnamon molotov cocktail. Little Teena sets down a cooler full of Guinness. Ave Maria passes out Percocet, Obsidian helps me get the sound levels right.

The CTA Digital LTPP Projector with iPhone cable is a portable solution for displaying movies up to eighty-six inches in size. It supports digital files from its SD card reader. It can run for short amounts of time on a rechargeable lithium-ion battery. It’s beyond awesome.

When everyone has a spot to sit in the dirt or lean on a rock or tree or car, I start her up. For some reason I’ve always liked the dumb black and white old school numbers on a target intro of five. Four. Three. Two. One. Beep. Makes it feel real.

The first image is so bright everyone shields their eyes briefly. Like a white explosion. It’s because the film opens with a field of snow. Mounds of it. As you are trying to figure out more about the setting, the camera pulls back and a gritty electronic soundscape kicks in and the more the camera pulls back the more you realize you are looking at snow , not snow. Booger sugar on a mahogany table.

There are many reasons I chose that as the opening image. But the main reason is this: I see my man Sig’s cocaine use as symbolic of both a strength and a weakness. On the one hand, what the fuck is a doctor doing hopping up on blow and then pretending to “heal” people? And why does the pharmaceutical industrial complex and its army of bourgeois users get a get out of jail free card while we fill up prisons with uneducated poor folks?

On the other hand, name your top five favorite musicians of all time. Or artists. Or scientists. Now name their vices.

Uh huh. What would culture be without drugs? I’ll tell you what. Sad sack of shit is what. It’s just a paradox.

So the visual metaphor of blow is important as an opening metaphor.

The next few image sequences are a quickly moving collage of Siggy popping in and out of his office mixed with speeded up downtown bum scenes, stock footage of experimental monkeys with electrodes in their heads and needles in their guts, extreme close ups of cigars or cuckoo clocks with mangled birds or black leather, a big hand tapping a pencil on a desk, nuclear explosions and Hiroshima burned up folks, that type deal. Bitchin’ soundscape and music. Then the collage sort of breaks apart into abstract fragments sort of like a broken mirror, until the fragments become two buffalos fucking. Zoom in on the male buffalo humping away — its eyes rolling back.

Cue the Wagner.

Cut to Siggy losing his shit in his office. Cut to his big dong taking over the story. All of it in slow motion.

By the time he’s launching himself into the cab he looks monstrous. I love how slow motion close-ups do that. I’ve got his voice slowed down too, so all the tourettezing out sounds like … Demons. It’s just creepy as shit.

Then I go back to an overwhelming whiteness — only this time it’s institutional — and as things come into focus you see you are in a hospital. From there, well I guess you know what from there. Sig and his wang shooting blood scene right at the Wagner crescendo. Only I also splice in little shots of gigantic zoomed in women’s breasts, twats, and asses. So devouring and huge they could swallow a human head. Like Godzilla-sized tits and vag. Like anti-porn. I get a standing ovation.

I bow and chuckle and shake my head. That little stuffed monkey cam? Golden.

When it’s all over we mull about and drink all the beer up and laugh and shoot the shit. People drift over my way one, two, three at a time and give me ideas and reactions. Most of them are media savvy and, well I don’t know if you know this, but we’re all of us film experts without ever having had to receive special educations. It’s the dominant reality of our lives. The moving image. We were born with it. It’s our generation’s lexicon. You are already behind.

At about two a.m., me, Ave Maria, Little Teena and Obsidian decide to go out. I pocket the SD card with the film on it and stow the mini projector in the trunk of Ave Maria’s mom’s Jag. Everyone has a fake I.D. thanks to Little Teena. If you must know, we’ve had them since we were fourteen. He just revises them as we age. It’s not as fun passing as it used to be though now because, well, we look older. We look adultish. It’s kind of a drag. We make our way to Rebar.

The first thing I notice once we’re inside is that Ave Maria has shaved off her eyebrows. I don’t know why the fuck I didn’t see it over at the troll but now it’s plain as day. I lean over and point to her eyebrows and tilt my head in question. She smells like candy. The music pounds up through my heels and shins and knees from the floor.

She spins around and shouts inexplicably at the top of her lungs, “Look at my bitchin’ brow bone!” For a moment she looks like a punk neanderthal. She smiles big as a candy apple headed girl ape and twirls away.

I sip on a vodka and grapefruit and people watch. Just a sea of dancing bodies. Colors shooting from lights all over the room. Hair. Just sweat and synthetic clothing and cool shoes. Then I close my eyes. I let the bass thud thought out of my skull. I let the music remember me as a body. I let a rhythm release me from a self. Pretty soon I’m dancing and rubbing and grinding with other bodies all around me. Only there’s no me. I laugh and jump up and down and dance. Manic. Good manic. Wouldn’t that be something? To get to be a not me all the time? I catch glimpses of the posse or we dance together and then separate.