Spring fever? Can’t be, I’m still wearing my winter coat as much as I’d like to retire it for the season. I can’t focus, I’m running out of Kleenex and so tired and achey all I want to do is lie down. Tried to work on a poem this morning. Forget it. Will go and fine tune AURAL Heather stuff as everything is coming to a head, or fruition which sounds like the more positive take. Roderick is delivering the master later today. We have to nail down the order of the (spoken word) songs and I think we nearly have nearly reached consensus. We will probably be in this phase for a week, preparing the artwork and master before it goes to the manufacturer. I’m getting nervous as we near the date of the cd launch, May 29. A critical time, need to make sure I see the graphic layout before it gets printed. Final steps ahead, cannot go back.
I was wearing my videopoem director hat for two days preparing a proposal:
How To Remain In The Saddle
Free riding lessons for starving transients
How To Remain
How to remain
thin. Abstain. Abstain from eating
food. Calories kill
the fat rats first. If she could say No
and balance Belgian truffles
on her tongue briefly before spitting
them out, she might remain. Live
long. Enjoy fruition. By shunning urges,
she could linger—dainty as a colt’s
foot—deploying her charms raw,
dogtrotting a straddled chocolate Arabian
through mazes of lane. She could retire
to her body.
Alas, ankles thicken, braids recede,
the old mare conjured whenever she dare
to look. Fight back. She may be forced to
cover the grey, yellow, but refuses to swallow
diet pills. Amphetamines in the olden days.
Still, dinner in the garbage rouses niggles
of guilt. She snuffles it out before Buddy can,
barfing rather than blowing
calories on fusty pizza
or molding, olive oil-sopped arugula.
It is my goal to adapt this poem from my forthcoming book, Window Seat, to create a videopoem . The audience is along for a wild ride in How To Remain In The Saddle with an infatuated compulsive, an obsessed protagonist resolutely heading toward an elusive goal of perfection, perpetually struggling to stay on, to stay thin. She fails but ultimately, and in a fluky manner, finds transcendence. A maiden no more, she is a hapless Calamity Jane who persists nonetheless in getting back in the saddle, despite an unruly horse—an Arabian stallion in the beginning—until ultimately finding her destiny and achieving grace upon a winged Clydesdale.
How to remain in control is at the heart of anorexia and bulimia. Ubiquitous images of the ideal woman provide pressure and anxiety. In How To Remain In The Saddle, instead of her body disintegrating, her beloved horse slowly withers away, imperceptibly at first. Its ribs start to protrude as it becomes increasingly emaciated until finally disappearing. *poof* She falls to the ground. (I want to do a live action piece but this part will likely require either animation or CGI.) After more shenanigans and misguided side-trips, our heroine survives to land on the back of a solid, stable mount.
Though eating disorders are serious subject matter, this story is really about facing our all-too-human mortality. They are a red herring, if you will. How to remain is our secret desire. I plan to render the story as farce for it is folly to attempt to halt the inexorable march of time. I will employ a whimsical style, adopt a comic Keystone posture to emphasize the absurdity of her futile pursuit. How To Remain In The Saddle will spoof on classic myth as in the adventurous hero Bellerophon arrogant enough to believe that he, a mortal, can reach Mount Olympus. If you will recall, an outraged Zeus causes Pegasus to rear up, throwing Bellerophon back down to Earth. Just such ambition fuels our heroine’s quest for power, eternal youth and beauty, i.e., immortality. She is in a race. A horse race. A rat race? Or a labyrinth, her body goddess-perfect and everlasting at journey’s end. Along the way she is frequently tossed off and pulled back to reality by gravity. Reel time will accelerate as it does in real life, an allusion to “amphetamines” and the way time seems to fly by with advancing years as we move toward the time of our inevitable departure. Of course how we live and how we depart are both crucial parts of the story, not just the middle and the end.
I strive to be visually inventive. I start with a shot list, then a storyboard, as in a conventional film, but like to improvise during shooting and incorporate the element of chance. Working with a talented director of photography, we will have the opportunity to experiment with the medium and in post-production as well, with a good editor. I don’t have to shoot in video but I have in the past because of its affordability. I like its history of experimentation, a fundamental aspect of the medium. Video lends itself to hybridization. I haven’t felt like I was compromising quality by using digital video.
Whether an audio or video project, my collaborator, musician/sound designer Roderick Shoolbraid and I, are meticulous about voice production, carefully weighing inflections through the lines of the poem, graphing the centre of pitch to avoid linear monotony. We strive to create terrain, a sense of place in the sound. In any case, Roderick Shoolbraid has composed original music for this piece. In addition, I am doing research, scouting locations and crew members and have started work on a shot list and storyboard.