We doin’ big pimpin. Me aint writin nothing. Miguel Nelson and David Primmer are riding in the ice cream truck back to LA. By the Boot Barn and the Bun Boy. The boys came through here last Friday afternoon and David was using his laptop in the passenger’s seat as he is now. David felt remorseful and a little incompetent. Miguel was irritated and sure he would soon get over it. There had been some missteps on their way to Las Vegas. Miguel was worried that they might not have enough drugs to last the weekend and were making a late start. David was worried that he would spend money on things he didn’t want to buy. Miguel worried that David wasn’t as committed to having a fucking amazing time as he would like from his friends. David was worried that Miguel was slightly psychotic and capable of totally loosing track of the line between fantasy and reality at any moment.

The boys were in pursuit of hedonism's highest peaks. The boys had 3 hours left in the truck before they arrived at the AVN Adult Entertainment Conference. David wanted to make up for the fact that he had neglected to accomplish any of the preparatory tasks that had been delegated to him by Miguel. He now had to design business cards and formulate a workable business plan for an assault on the porn industry. The name of the business was taking a long time but the front-runner was “Best Picture”. They argued incessantly about the way in which they should use Olympus Eye-Tech head mounted display goggles to preview and rent the newest and hottest adult entertainment DVDs to patrons of many of the nation’s mom-n-pop video stores. Even the smallest store with limited resources could have a world class and perfectly discreet porn offering. No need to create a seedy little closet in the back of the store to collect old and inconsequential porno detritus. They agreed on that. However, they disagreed on the business model.

David, more conservative and technical minded, preferred a scenario where a simple catalog of titles was made available to a store, content programming being handled by Best Picture. And a simple 500 dollar technical investment in a portable DVD player and some goggles allowed patrons to preview titles on a catalog DVD that were then rented through the video store’s traditional operations – video store keeping all the rental fees for the title. The profit from the business would come from a monthly rental fees for the previewing kiosk and the subscription to the latest DVD titles. A copy of the simple ATM or jukebox franchising scheme.

Miguel wanted to implement all the functions of a porn-only video store in a computer kiosk with a card swiper and then pay video stores to host the box. The renter would be able to browse only the currently available titles and make a selection using a completely automated system. Best Picture would pay the video store to host the machine and to do a small amount of media handling, noting when titles were returned and providing a means for drop off. Credit card charges for the rentals would go directly back to Best Picture.

Miguel was the only one who actually gave a shit about the business and thought David’s plan was the work of an anemic retard with no balls. David couldn’t stand to be associated with Miguel’s stupid and unwieldy scheme that would surely hemorrhage money but assumed he would have to capitulate to Miguel since Miguel was going to do all the talking.

They didn’t know it at the time, but the boys would become sickened and bored by the entire porn industry and all its trappings, fleeing back to the banality of heterosexual discos and casino cocktail counters. Miguel got dressed in the parking lot, pulling on his deerskin cowboy boots and David put on a stretchy black shirt. The boys liked porn but what the really wanted was some sort of gonzo porn party crashing experience that they could tell their grandchildren about. They were in pursuit of the holy grail -- an invite to Club Rubber, hosted by Vivid Entertainment – but first they had to tell a few untruths, such as the one about them being porn video kiosk entrepreneurs, and they had to pay 75 dollars to a nice older lady behind the counter for their trade show badges, and they had to ask Ron Jeremy “Do you know where the party is” a few times. The experience was bewildering and not in the least bit arousing (well, the part with Ron Jeremy was rather arousing).

A pornography convention is somewhat different from your average trade show. There is networking to be done and there are a few booths for the companies that offer DVD burning tools or porn friendly ISPs but the life-blood of the show is female porn stars signing autographs. There are admission levels for people in the trade, like David and Miguel, and there is a $35 fan admission. Fans don’t get badges; they just roam around with their DV cameras and stick their heads between every pair of bulging boobs they can find. There are booths selling T-shirts. This should be an indication of how different it is. If there’s one thing that’s usually given away at trade shows it’s T-shirts. There are booths selling dildos. What self respecting porn star needs to go to a convention to pick out a dildo? Call someone in charge: This trade show is a front. It is scheduled the same week as the Consumer Electronics Show for a reason. The biggest consumers of porn are young techno geeks.

As the bewilderment wore off, David surmised that they felt feeble and superfluous because among the porn stars, they were in fact like so much background radiation filling up the galaxy. They were only different from the fans clogging the aisles if they wanted to talk to someone in a booth and use those business cards they had printed at Kinko’s just an hour earlier. David looked to Miguel for leadership. He tried to sense when magic fantasy was going to kick in and Miguel would move quickly and decisively into the inner sanctum of the industry. But Miguel was tired from the drive and not feeling it. This left the two boys in the very middle of a black hole of femininity caused by the massive masculine attractive forces of a porn and a consumer electronics show. It was very cold in there. They were inside the event horizon and strict laws determined that there would be no unguarded single women. This would seem like a disaster, as in general, what boys go to parties for is bountiful unguarded single women. But Miguel, the true girl-crazy member of the team, was undaunted because his focus was on gaining admission to the afterparties and talking about it afterwards.

Miguel called Adam who gave him the name Vena at the Mirage who gave him the name Jim Malibu from Plastic Fantasy as an inside connection. Jim didn’t know where the Vivid party was but told the boys to hang out around the central bar of the Venetian around eight to schmooze with the conference goers. He didn’t ask a single question about the business or what kind of franchising scheme had been settled on. The boys rested, put on some cologne and cabbed it over to the Venetian.

The central bar of the Venetian turned out to be an informal version of the trade show, wherein a few fat old men, (the power players in the porn industry) chatted while a few porn stars with watermelon breasts signed autographs. At the center of a swirling galaxy of nerdy men was a large tuft of bleached blonde hair. A few of these galaxies were clumped around the bar. The boys wanted to use their flirtatious powers to ply for information. There were no actual women within 5oo light years. Miguel and David looked around for someone cool to talk to who looked like they might know where a party is. They’d heard that they may be taking place in the rooms upstairs. Men stood empty handed with blank stares on their faces. They leaned against slot machines in their bomber jackets emblazoned with “NEC”. No one talked to each other. Everyone was focused on their porn star. Except David and Miguel: they wanted a party. Where, apparently they assumed it was going to be different – with the porn stars and generally horny women possibly outnumbering the men. And the men being of the caliber to at least put Ron Jeremy to rest. Or maybe they just didn’t think at all.

The boys walked to the elevators to see if they could just trawl the corridors of the hotel and possibly detect the presence of a party. They weren’t letting anyone go up without at room key. Everything had been carefully planned for their exclusion. They cabbed it to the Mandalay Bay for dinner and asked the bartenders where the party was. They didn’t know. They tipped the hostess for line passes to the Rum Jungle and promised to return some time when it was hot and packed. They started building escape routes.

Near midnight they cabbed over to the Hard Rock Hotel and asked their driver if he knew where the porn party was and he said it was in club Rain. But strangely, at this point, the boys were frustrated with their experiences with the porn industry and simply wanted to be in a normal environment where people were actually having a good time in a more normal sort of way. The folks at the Hard Rock fulfilled this desire in a very normal sort of way. The boys knew where the porn party was, so they could go if they wanted -- if normal life turned out to be not so good. And Miguel, for one, was determined to at least have normal life be quite good.

The boys began to ingest intoxicants at an alarming rate. Nothing had worked quite well enough to this point. They sat at the big round bar and watched the same patterns appear that they’d seen earlier in the night. Smaller breasted but better dressed women who looked either like Cristina Aguilera or Jennifer Aniston drew the leering gazes of the men who outnumbered them by five to one. Miguel began to enjoy the presence of these normally very attractive women and deride what he referred to as “The big, dumb guys with jobs.” Miguel wondered, how could so many women who had done so much to accentuate their prodigious physical gifts only be surrounded by a homogeneous and clearly unimaginative group of men? Could it be that the women too were as vapid as the men but he was simply spellbound by their asses? It could not be. He had to find out. David wondered why so many negative thoughts continued to cloud his head about the relations between men and women. Negative things similar to what Miguel had wondered, but so many more of them and of a much more bleak nature. He was determined to drown them out.

Exhibit A 7 seconds or download 380Kb

David was able to ingest quite a few more intoxicants while Miguel pursued a particularly interesting Japanese woman with a couture handbag. Miguel was so interested, in fact, that he forgot about his “big dumb guys with jobs” theory and simply had a stunningly good fifteen minute conversation with the woman. However, some sense of loyalty or fear returned Miguel to David at the bar and when Miguel returned to the woman she was gone. She had kissed him on the cheek within five minutes and had told him “Don’t leave without me”. A truly shocking and vexing turn of events. The boys looked for her for another half hour but she was gone. They walked across the street to the Double Down for a change of pace.

The Double Down was even more normal than the Hard Rock but not in the “blonde maple with brushed stainless steel” or the “ESPN on the flatscreen” way that the Hard Rock was normal. More like in a “graffiti’d up black-walled punk rock dive in a strip mall” sorta way. There were two fights while the boys drank and watched the punk band. The band was a low-rent hardcore group ringed with their buddies shouting the words and mildly pushing one another. David was quite comfortable and more involved than Miguel, having spent at least as much time in this way as Miguel had spent in a disco. But in the interest of satisfying both of the boys needs, soon it was time to go to a disco. And they cabbed it over to the Barbary Coast to get into a club called Drai.

Drai’s was $20 and long-lined with the sort of crowd that didn’t intrigue either member of the moving two-man party, and when all means of scamming admittance had been attempted and scuttled, the boys cabbed it over to the Rum Jungle.

Let’s just skip the telling of the disaster that was the Rum Jungle because this is a long story and everyone has probably been to an overpriced, empty and flatulent disco. But inside this disco the boys talked to a very kind member of the staff who told them of the secret of Seven. As David stood under a caged woman go-go dancing they were told that club Seven would be the place where the friendly and extremely attractive member of the staff would be if she wasn’t helping keep everyone from having a good time at the Rum Jungle.

The boys cabbed it over to the Seven where they succeeded in spending another $20 admittance each within a half hour. Yes, a sad thing, but the boys had found what they were looking for. Or, rather, when they heard the exquisitely dirty progressive house and electroclash inside the club they decided that the music was all they needed. They happily danced in the moderately crowded and sexually mixed environment for the next 4 hours and walked in the morning sun back to their hotel room at the Luxor.

I'm working on a larger one, but here's the first stuff from the Coachwhips show at 16th and Mission BART plaza. They're probably on stage right now at the Hemlock. I decided to stay home and work on videos.

Ratta Tat Tat :5 seconds or download 415 kb

I gotta kick this little monk's ass up on to the net. Recently I spent an entire day evaluating every moment of my existence in relation to the afternoon I spent on top of this hill in Pelling, Sikkim. I listened to the cicadas making their racket, I played with the dirt and stones, I took pictures of monk kids, and I stood there with my hands on my hips. I tried to keep going on through the sickness.

What I kept thinking in-between day-dreams was how insignificant that day will be in the sweep of my life and how pivotal the day in Pelling was. This monastery has some crazy shit that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world -- like the only sacred murals of Buddhisatvas having sex. I have a little bit of it here for you. I wanted to tell my friend David about it that day, but it was really just sentimentality and I was the only one who possessed it. I wanted to tell him, while we were at the burger shop, about the little kid sleeping in the grass while another kid bashed cymbals over his head. That I wandered around what was essentially an abandoned ancient outpost, staffed only by a few deformed children.

Now, watch as this monk kid tries to whistle for the cameras. I had to get setup with my camera, and by the time I was ready, he couldn't whistle. I tried to whistle to get him to start but I think it was me turning the screen around on my vidcam so he could watch himself that got him going. Every single second of footage I shot on this day is worth public viewing. I think I'll do the chattering, ringing cymbal thing that this kid can do next.

the whistling monk kid 1:07 minutes or download 2.6 megs

This vidyo is from Burning Man. I never put it up but I intended to match it with the sunrise vidyo. We got one week of this stuff, looking out through the canopy of our silk parachute.

Om Flambe Mothership Sunset :14 seconds or download 460kb

Hello? Central Services? I'm at 579B Block 19, Northwestern Section D. That's exit 1 on Green Pastures Highway at the Orange Blossom flyover and I've got trouble with my air conditioning. It's an emergency. I've got to have a heating engineer.

Thank you for calling Central Services. I'm sorry, due to temporary staff shortages, Central Services cannot take service calls centrally between twenty three hundred and o nine hundred hours. Have a nice day. This has NOT been a recording.

This is an emergency!

Thank you for calling Central Services. I'm sorry, due to

Look, I've got to have a heating engineer.

Thank you for calling Central Serv

Awwww Shoot. Click!

Get In, Get Out :04 seconds or download 400kb

Bzzzrrtt!

Hello?

Hello.

Hello?

Hello Mr. Lowry.

Yes, who is this?

Put the phone down and raise your hands.

Wha, what is this?

Harry Tuttle, Heating Engineer at your service.

Tuttle? Are you from Central Services? I called Central Services.

Well, they're a little overworked these days. Luckily I intercepted your call.

What was that business with the gun?

Just a precaution. I've had traps set for me before now. There are plenty of people in Central Services that would love to get their hands on Harry Tuttle.

Are you telling me that this is illegal?

Well, yes and no. Officially, only Central Services operatives are supposed to touch this stuff, (would you hold this please) but nowadays, with all the new rules and regulations, they can't get decent staff any more. So they tend to turn a blind eye as long as I'm careful. Mind you, if they could prove that I'm working on their equipment, well, that's a pipe of a different color.

Listen, this whole system of yours could be on fire and I couldn't even so much has turn on a kitchen tap without filling out a 27B/6.

Bloody paperwork. Heh.

I...I suppose one has to expect a certain amount?

Why? I came into this game for the action. The excitement. Go anywhere, travel light, get in, get out, wherever there's trouble, a man alone.

Now they got the whole country sectioned off. You can't make a move without a form.

This is a home movie that John Freeman made. It's his first one. John wrote it, directed it, and did the cinematography. I produced and edited it and did the casting and special effects.

Orange :44 seconds or download 1.6 megs

As mentioned in this post, I bought this keychain because the guy was going to cry, fiending like a junky and I wanted to get the fuck outta there. This is my friend John demonstrating its functionality. I just want to mention that John is a suprisingly well adjusted adult and a great human being.

Khajuraho Keys :30 seconds or download 880kb

Good morning. I promised this vid a long time ago but I did a hell of a lot of procrastinating in the mean time. Whew, that's hard work. Anyhow. Here's my dreamy BART ride.

West Oakland BART :42 seconds or download 1.8 megs

This is the Om Flambe Mothership in action. I've said it before, this was the most beautiful shelter at Burning Man. I'm going to do some other nice videos where you can see the canopy better. This one's just for arty effect.

The Mothership in the Evening :2 seconds or download 260 kb

Here's a vid of Marcie grabbing the cable. I thought the last part of the climb would be a piece of cake but I guess this late in the season they take down the poles that hold up the cables and remove the 2x4 steps from the rocks. Nothing but bare cable laying against the rock and they were heavy to lift. You had to slide your knuckles under them most of the time.

This is 8,900 feet in the air. You get pretty squirrelly when you exert yourself at that altitude. Marcie was scared shitless but she'd probably get upset with me if I said that on my website. Still, she powered up it and we were the only ones at the top as the sun went behind some clouds on the horizon. Sunset was 10 minutes away and as I look back, it was pretty stupid of us to try for the top because if our flashlights hadn't worked we'd be stuck 3 miles from camp with a big black moonless forest to crawl through. It woulda got ugly I'm sure.

Grabbing the Cable :52 seconds or download 3.7megs

This is a video of Psyche's Windows by Stephen Chaparro. I was sooo goddamn high on ecstasy when I shot this. I think we're listening to the Rachmaninoff "Vespers" chorale. Right in mid-vid, the music swells just has our raver-boy faces into the wind and the glowing blue sheets billow. You can kill me now. This sculpture was featured in two of the finest moments I had at Burning Man. Here's a photo of the outside.

Psyche's Windows :30 seconds or download 1.8 megs

Watch as David Maltz, gentleman and scholar, gets down and gets pixelated.

Blue Feet :37 seconds or download 677 kb

This was written a week ago today so I thought I'd put it up. The scene is Nevada, on a dried up lakebed.

It's six twenty two in the morning and my left thumb is sticky from tangerine and tender from, no strike that, (I just looked), blistered, from a bout of unsafe fireworks play. A big white swollen blister. A little silver digital camera. An eight pound Dell laptop. God, in all its glory, revealed to me carnally.

So with the sudden insight that I don't have to describe anything to you, I shot myself. But I shouldn't have wasted the flash on those pics of my dirty Vans. Batteries will be batteries, and thus, the frequency of beautiful events is inversely proportional to the amount of power in my cells. I struggled with the most beautiful images at their end: franticly swapping pairs of alkalines in an out (I had 8 extras) after my NiMH batts threw up the "no juice" sign.

I have a plastic martini glass filled with water (and powdered lightly with dust on lip). I have an apple (dust?, yes, dusty) and a tangerine. Not dusty -- at least not on the parts I'm eating. If I shift my head just a little to the left, I block the rising sun with the sheet hanging from the ladder that props this parachute up. Trying to type on an LCD screen when the morning sun is shining into your face is hard, because when you look around, you get spots in your eyes. Sitting on a plastic inflatable chair shaped like a phone is easy because my butt is in the part you talk into. And neither hard nor easy, but nearby, a snoring Japanese punk rocker is lying on an inflatable rolodex. The white fluffy stuff on my peeled tangerine dried to a crust in the time it took me to write that.

Time, and the events that it carries past me, are floating away like a boat undocking from a pier. I'm supposed to be seeing my lover off but I was late and I forgot my glasses. I just wave at the big boat and hope she sees me standing here, all dirty and tired and happy.

The whole fucking canopy is glowing gold and silver, gusts ripple through. It sounds like when your upstairs neighbors are walking around or doing something and you're like, "What was that? What are they doing up there?" The wind on this parachute is making noises like they're having a small mixer upstairs, just friends, you know, but who'd they invite? The wind doth protest and I am unable to release the idea that the sounds are like something else, instead of just what they are. Latent over-sensitivity to stimuli, yes, it's apparent to me, but nothing I can do about it.

Om Flambe Mothership Sunrise 1:04 minutes or download 6.5 megs

When you run a Nickel Metal Hydride battery down, unlike an alkaline, you get a "power bounce back" if you turn the device off for a few seconds and let it "rest" and then turn it back on. If you have no way to recharge, and if you're patient, you can milk NiMH batteries for what I would guess is an additional 10 percent of their capacity. I have other batteries, but in my camera, two double-A Energizers, fresh out of the package are good for about 2.3 seconds of video before they are completely drained. My Sanyo is the most efficient AA battery sucker I've ever seen. I put in another pair thinking that it was a fluke and the batteries were duds but the same thing happened. I've taken to aiming and holding my finger down on the shutter button as I close the battery compartment in hopes that the camera's reaction time is quicker than mine and it will get a shot off before the screen blanks.

I have no recharger and I have no patience. All I have is the sun rising and it has made me impatient -- not impatient with the sun but with the batteries. If you were dying of cancer and your daughter was about to win the Indianapolis 500, you'd want to get a picture of it. Even though you may die before they are developed and trying to operate your camera at this point may mean you miss seeing the finish. At least I'm guessing that's what you would do because that's what I feel like right now.

The tangerine was juicy and sweet, but the crust almost took the top of my mouth off. It turns out that I do have to tell you that. John is sleeping on my film cameras.

Well, time for you to go back in the ziplock, my son.

Saw my friend Dan Coffeen today. His nose stuck out and the shade from his baseball cap moved like bat-ray wings over it. When he contemplated something, the shade wrapped wings around it. But when he said something, the wings slid back to expose it.

We don't have jobs. I told him that he should boycott the liquor store next to Java Supreme and he thought that sounded like a fine idea. He told me that he'd abdicated his musical direction to the good folks at Aquarius Records years ago and I agreed that was a fine idea. I said that he was about to discover the best music that he had never heard and that I was going to tell him about it. He said he'd send a filmmaker my way.

I learned "Stupid Preoccupations" by Vic Chesnutt today and I also a devised a rigorous frequency analysis (after hours of mind-numbing specialized audio software piracy) of the internal noise generated by my vidcam in hopes that I can create Parametric EQ settings to cancel out the noise. I was fairly successful, finding really obnoxious screeching tones at 1350, 1780, 2081, and 2693 Hz. This technical shit allows me to bring you the sound of morning wind ruffling through the silk of a parachute.

However, today, I'm going to post a movie that has no sound. I think it's better that way.

Sunrise in the Parachute :03 seconds or download 288 kb

This was culled from some old Super8 movies I found at my house.

Mom on the Beach :20 seconds or download 2.4 megs

I call this, "A Personal Video Statement by Me on the Meaning of Life".

A Personal Video Statement By Me On the Meaning of Life :58 seconds or download 4.3 megs

Alright. Here's the post for today. I'm working on lots of other shit besides this but the deal is that I have to have something "original" to put up every day. I've re-compressed all the videos on my website now that I've learned a thing or two and they're all bigger and better than ever. Check 'em out y'all.

PacBell Building Sky :33 seconds or download 245 KB

The PacBell building is probably my second favorite in SF. I wish I could drive up the side of it like they do in that SUV commercial.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you now, three videos that I think, smash the living hell out of the Steve Ballmer video. The Hammers of Misfortune!

Click on the images to pop up the vids. If that don't work try downloading them. Note in the video called "Claw", the guy giving the "metal grip of death" sign. He's so into it that he has marshaled the very forces of evil with his fearsome claw.

Hammers of Misfortune Guitar 19 seconds or download 1.4 meg

Hammers of Misfortune Hair 8 seconds or download 653kb

Hammers of Misfortune Claw 9 seconds or download 1 meg

These flash movies have a little play button in the upper right-hand corner that looks like a triangle with a p in it.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I did a skate video. Filmed it with my new camera and sliced and diced it with Premiere.

Night Skate

:33 seconds
or download 1.3 megs

It's on the videos page also.

Two new videos posted tonight: "Kids and Rat" and "Varanasi Paan Spitters". Check 'em out.