94. Remember
How we remain human. Wrapping a round of animation experiments, Mom in NYC, night flowers.
I’ve always said please and thank you and sorry to AI. I recently learned that this costs tens of millions of additional, tree-burning dollars, but that “maybe it’s worth the price1.” Personally? I just say it under my breath now.
A friend who witnessed this once, looked at me funny. That’s almost sweet, she said.
I admitted to her that I do it to stay human.
I don’t want to forget what it’s like to be human.
News
Leisure | 여유, is currently featured at Golden HOF as a part of a group show called Hanbeon Deo. This Saturday, you can see it and other works in person at the Artist Meet & Greet. Eat, drink, be merry, support the arts—all for just $35. Incidentally—we were featured in
’s City Happenings this week, completely by chance 😍 I’ve long loved her curations, so was tickled to be in this latest. Come hang! It’ll be a rousing time.
Another fellow KAAC member, writer, and artist
asked me to contribute to a creative manifesto zine called Rules to Live By. Other contributors include , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and of course, Carolyn. It turned out great! Take a look.
In the studio
Family’s in town. They’ve now been here for about a week. Hence the two-day delay 🙏
This visit is momentous and mind-blowing for many reasons, one being that my mother was potentially forever-unfit to travel since her health collapse and the subsequent domino-fall of catastrophes both directly and indirectly related, in 2022.
I wrote about her disappearance last spring in “Other Mother,” originally published in The Audacity. Against odds, she began returning to us last year. Since then, her condition has fluctuated; she’s a picture that grows fainter, then clearer again, in cycles. Driven by something akin to a sense of urgency over the past months, we convinced her to get on a transcontinental flight to come see me.
A handful of nights ago, Mom arrived in NYC with one of my baby sisters. The three of us sat around the table after dinner, talking.
I’m sleepy, Mom said, but I don’t want to go to bed. Her eyes were bright, and she wore lipstick.
The process of making a film is a protracted affair.
I touched on this last time too, but testing a “simple” hypothesis by animating something only a few seconds long, can easily take weeks. The following video shows me drawing a single frame. It is almost 8 minutes long at 8x (you do the math). I don’t expect you to watch all of it; I share mainly to demonstrate what a particular strain of insanity looks like. It is titled, takesforever.mp4:
Such requirement for hyper-focus can lead to tunnel vision as well as other problems, not least of which can be the big picture slowly slipping out of sight and mind.
To keep drift in check, I review my work log daily: am I still headed “north.” These logs range from terse todos to full-on journal entries containing ideas, questions, airings of frustrations, insecurity about direction, pep talks with myself.
Some logs can get pretty long, so I place each under a collapsible toggle heading, allowing for quick review of progress and milestones.
Because I’m an overthinker and have a tendency to complicate, anchoring this way is crucial for me. It nudges me into position a little or a lot at the beginning of every studio day. Toggling progress into a simple list view of summary headings further helps me return to the big picture, decide what I should jettison, etc.
Another tool I use to track the big picture is image boards. I cull through the pieces I’ve been accumulating—notes, poems, sketches, vignettes—and re-organize them periodically on digital and physical boards. These boards contain triggers and reminders; they often save me from getting lost or stuck.
These boards also re/inspire me (inspiration doesn’t just come from others!)—some fragments remind me of threads to pick back up and follow, while others come forward as missing puzzle pieces.
Last week I finished my first round of technical and animation tests.
I had some hypotheses that I wanted to vet around combining animation with live footage. This involved using planar tracking, and I learned how to use Mocha AE. Not perfect but I got the questions I needed to get answered, answered (for now):
Next, I’m investigating more software, and going down Pansori2 rabbitholes. Hopefully3 getting some animation done, too.
Stay tuned.
Provisions
Take in good things to make good things.
Sinners. It’s a mishmash of genres; “horror,” quasi-musical, with a few scenes that veered dangerously close to cheesy. Somehow, Coogler made it work. I thought about my own ancestors, I even cried. And the soundtrack! Michael B. Jordan’s biceps alone...
When Life Gives You Tangerines. It’s a Korean drama; there’s a lot of crying and screaming. Still, there’s something special and tender about it. Bring tissues.
Ali Wong’s Single Lady. The woman is nasty. But hilarious and spot on. This resonated a lot because I too am pretty new to the apps and the experience has been terrifyingly good fodder for comedy.
Lisette Oropesa’s golden voice, my god.
Yeah, no reads this time. I wanted to finish two books a month this year and haven’t been getting anywhere close to that. I’m embarrassed about it.
In closing, The Bowery Wall
A few weeks ago I had dinner in Nolita with Amanda, a fellow (in the loosest, “i’m not worthy” sense) animator. We were strolling on Houston afterward when we saw flowers blooming on a wall. It was a high saturation, high brightness, high resolution projection. That’s either a super short throw or a really powerful long throw, she said.
Can we check? I asked, and she gamely ran across the street with me. We looked back whence we’d come, and there it was. A window above, with the unmistakeable flicker of a projector emanating from it. Holy shit, I said. Damn, she said. We ran back and actually rang doorbells (Lynch would have disapproved) but got no answers. Which, just as well.
The flowers felt like a profound gift from nowhere and everywhere. I think we secretly hoped that it was some OG lover of images4, a septuagenarian New York filmmaker stubbornly rooted in a rent-stabilized apartment, projecting stories every night onto a concrete wall across Houston. Namelessly, gleefully, a fist in the air every now and again in the waning light.
Or maybe it was a tattooed anarchist, twenty-nine years old with a beautiful face, living in a spartan warehouse with his collective.
Flowers on the wall, people.
Unlogical and sudden and gorgeous, happening for no reason; giving, for nothing.
A human being can appreciate such things, I thought. A human being, who remembers.
Until next time.
The screenwriter Scott Z. Burns: “Kindness should be everyone’s default setting—man or machine.” I was shocked to read that “In 2019, a Pew Research study found that 54 percent of people who owned smart speakers such as Amazon Echo or Google Home reported saying “please” when speaking to them.” That was years ago; maybe things have shifted. Still, this heartened me some.
Narrative Korean folk singing characterized by stylized speech and dramatic gestures, usually performed by one vocalist and accompanied by a drummer.
I have long given up on this battle (IYKYK). Language evolves.
I learned later that this is called the Bowery Wall and it has a long history of both commercial and non commercial displays. So, not perfect, but I’ll take it.
So glad to hear that you had such a good visit with your mom 💕
So excited for the group show at Golden HOF! Also need to try an image board