don't walk away in silence

having nothing to say when busy is not the same as having a lot to say and not having time to say it. As an obsessive workaholic, for lack of a better term, I tend to get very focused on one thing and other parts of myself shut off. I've had a largely nonexistent emotional life for the last few months other than occasional bursts of desperation, frustration, etc. For me, the rewards of obsessively trying to do one's job to the best of one's abilities are negative ones, i.e. the negation of feelings of self-doubt, of not living up to one's abilities, not having abilities to begin with, or not having abilities equal to the task at hand. Et cetera. I don't give myself like this on every job - many jobs I am more of a cog in a machine, by design. But this job is different. It is for a small company with more on their plate than they can handle, and so I've taken more responsibility, from managing the computer properly to working out complete post production workflows to writing a large chunk of the show, to the point where in addition to getting an editor credit I'm also getting a writer credit. Which is nice, as it's the first one that I've gotten on a paid project.

We "locked picture" on this show on Friday. To lock picture means, in theory, no more changes can be made to the vision cuts. Different bits of audio can and will be laid in (sound effects on pushes, possibly a different music track to replace a double-up, and of course the new voice-over that was recorded yesterday, replacing my lame half-assed temp voice-over). Meanwhile, the picture is color graded, which means in this case that the image is made to look as good, as consistent, and as rich as possible. By Tuesday morning, this final sound mix needs to be married to the final color grade, as well as the final titles and baselines (baselines = those things that pop up to tell you people's names) to screen for the client, so that if there are any last minute problems I can somehow arrange for them to be fixed before I leave for the airport at 3 pm on Tuesday.

I am flying to the States for five weeks. I am going to Portland, Denver, Farmington Hills (suburb of Detroit) and surrounding environs, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area. I wanted to go to Houston for the return of Mr. Gunn, but adding yet another stop was beyond me on many levels. I had also been strongly considering taking a day or to two drive to Chicago and South Bend to visit friends and NAPpers in the region.

However, tonight, about an hour ago as I was leaving work at the sprightly hour of 10 PM (early night, it is a Sunday, after all), I rolled my ankle really fucking good. The last time I did this was in early 2004, and I did it bad and tore something. (They told me at the time, can't remember any more.) I am pretty sure I did the same thing. It is elevated on my desk at the moment with ice all around it.

This is inconvenient for any number of reasons. I should be packing and doing my taxes right now, which is the minimum number of things really required before I go. Ideally, I should clean my room, as I'm subletting it while I'm gone. But ... anyway. Whatever gets done, gets done, and in the worst case I submit my taxes without reclaiming expenses, which have been minor since I haven't had much time to waste money, and fly with relatively empty luggage which is fine because Christmas will happen and I need to buy new clothes anyway. Although if my ankle is truly fucked instead of sort of fucked then walking around stores, etc. will be a big fucking problem. And driving to Chicago and South Bend is sounding like a particularly stupid idea if the ankle is in fact in as much disrepair as I suspect it might be.

Earlier today, when I was at work and my ankle didn't even register as a possible obstacle amongst the many, much more self-evident ones, I was talking with another guy at work. Even though it's a small office, we haven't talked very much (part of my whole "being obsessive" thing is not socializing when there's pressing work to be done). He's presenting a world music show and is a local DJ and presenter of some local fame, and has tastes just as eclectic as mine (actually, more, I suppose, as he actually likes techno and rave stuff too). We did the have you heard of game, trading names from Sun Ra to Captain Beefheart to Six Finger Satellite. He told me about when he met Bob Moog and what a lovely guy he was, and how saddened he was by Moog's death. I told him Karlheinz Stockhausen died, and he hadn't heard. He told me about how some guy at Red Bull, perhaps the owner, sponsored a Stockhausen sky opera, where instead of dancers aircraft moved in synchrony to typically Stockhausen music. I suspect he refers to this, but I am not entirely sure.

After much passionate discussion about music, he asked me what albums I was listening to recently. I stammered some things about Beirut and Explosions in the Sky, which was really all that came to mind, and then remembered some $2 CDs from the Real Groovy bargain bin (which in turn have been mostly imported from Amoeba's bargain bin, an act of economics I completely fail to comprehend but which must be working for somebody), like Tara Jane O'Neil's IN CIRCLES (which is awesome), and of course production music, which is truthfully what I listen to most of the time because I am at work most of the time. This flew by fine, but the larger point that I realized is that I'm not really obsessed with an album or a song right now. Objectively, I think this has been a great year for music, but I can't remember the last time a piece of music really moved me.

Except I'm lying, because it was Tuesday. Tuesday is the only day off I've had in two weeks, and it was a fucking glorious day. Sunny, perfect, the sort of day that makes me think Auckland isn't a miserable cesspool of unhappy humanity clustered in urban sprawl and for no obvious reason defending itself against a country of otherwise unparalleled beauty. So I did whatever I did on Tuesday (I can't really remember much, but laundry and somehow improbably succeeding in getting my car's warrant of fitness were involved), and in the evening I went to see CONTROL.

I don't know what profile (if any) CONTROL has in the states at the moment, but it's a rather big release here - there's posters everywhere, it's playing at mainstream cinemas, etc. It's the biopic of Ian Curtis, singer of Joy Division, and it's directed by Anton Corbjin. I believe I've referred to Corbjin as an "asshat" here previously, on the basis of his music videos, but his work here is really quite incredible.

There are two scenes in particular that are stunning. The first is Joy Division's first performance on television, where they play "Transmission". They start out, and it's crap. They're barely keeping it together, and as a fan of the song, I'm thinking, this is weak sauce. I'm asking myself why I ever thought Joy Division was even good, because seeing them play I realize just how simplistic their musicianship is.

And then suddenly it starts coming together, and the band starts firing on all cylinders, right around the time Ian Curtis/Sam Riley starts breaking into his full crazy dance routine and shouts "Dance! Dance! Dance to the music on the radio!" I have no idea how this compares to what actually happened on the show, and the arc is not underlined - nobody says "Wow! You started off weak but really turned it around!" or whatever, no reaction shots cue anything - but it feels like you're watching magic happen right in front of you, and reminded me of my other favorite musical scene of the year, where Glen Hansard teaches Marketa Irglova "Falling Slowly" in ONCE.

I assume everybody here knows the story of Joy Division in rough overview form, but if not - they got popular, Ian Curtis stayed miserable, and on the eve of his American tour he hung himself. That's what I knew, and I also knew he was an epileptic. What I didn't know (and I assume that the biopic is reasonably faithful, having the blessing of his widow, whose memoirs were a principal text used for the screenplay) was that the epilepsy onset was relatively late, and increasing in frequency, and that he had attacks onstage. I also didn't know of his affair with a woman while he was married and a father. But what Corbjin and Riley do amazingly well is show how this pressure builds, and how Curtis is torn between how he needs to give so much of himself to what he does and how much it destroys him at the same time, just as he can neither hurt the woman he is married to nor give up his love to his mistress. Generally, people who behave in the latter way fit in my operating definition of the term "asshole", and while Curtis comes off as an asshole at times earlier on I absolutely understood his feelings.

Two famous details of the night of his suicide are the last movie he watched (Werner Herzog's STROZSEK) and the last album he listened to (Iggy Pop's THE IDIOT), and both are checked, somewhat obligatorily, and the movie goes where it has to go, and at this point I'm involved pretty much on an intellectual level, thinking over the movie's strengths (largely documented above) and its flaws (skimming over the surface of the other band members, who don't register particularly clearly as characters). And the suicide happens, as it does, and, okay, that's how the director chose to handle that.

And then the aftermath of the suicide happens, because when you hurt too much and end it all, somebody else has to clean up the fucking mess, and somewhere between the time Samantha Morton (who plays Deborah Curtis) pulls up, walks in, and we don't see what she sees but we hear the scream -

- and somewhere around that time "Atmosphere", the most final Joy Division song ever, if that makes sense, starts -

- somewhere in there I have the biggest crying fit I've had in a pretty fucking long time.

You can draw parallels if you want. Or not. It's your life, not here to tell you how to spend it. Anyway, I haven't listened to a note of Joy Division since I saw the movie. I just can't handle dealing with all of that right now.

And so I keep music at a distance, maybe, and don't have much to say that's actually about music in any significant way.

Hopefully this post doesn't leave anyone disappointed. If it does, I'm sorry. I honestly feel like shit about disappointing people (and am seriously considering loosing myself of this obligation rather than continuing to do so). But I have nothing else to give, and probably shouldn't have given this much. But here we are. Time to take the ice off, pack, hope for the best when I wake up, with my ankle and with the stitching together of the completed elements of this project. Anyone know if you can fuck up a torn ankle by flying?