O.k., new wee video (down below) – Mr. Peck likes this one… not that he didn’t like the other two, but he especially likes this one – and a new poster (download this baby off the ELEPHANT project page ). Oooo! Ahhhh! Wednesday night we did a rough stumble-through in the Stock Pavilion. Here’s a shot from the rehearsal – Jessica Cornish I believe. It was 30,000 degrees kelvin in the space. We are all made of special recently discovered elements. We do not melt. We only become stronger with heat and dust.

The mighty Susan Becker and Rose Morefield came to observe the proceedings – they will be offering their costume-expertise, construction and counsel. Huzzah! Doug Pugh brought a car-load of audio equipment to test out the space. It works! Additional huzzahs! Chris and Doug talked a lot about the sonic-magic of a woodchip floor. Jen and Jessica were heroic with their absolutely exhausting sequence and they’ve built a fantastic pre-show thing. And Aaron Austin…well, he may be in the show. He’s not sure if he can swing it. I’m not going to tell you what he does because it’s a surprise. Let’s just say his name is… AARON and his last name (I think) is AUSTIN.

OH! Gary’s voiceover for the stop-motion section is amazing. Really haunting and beautifully done. I’ll be stopping in to Nicki Werner’s studio this coming Monday to see what all the folk have made for stop-motion models. I knocked out the animatic yesterday. I was kind of frantic to finish it. I’m really glad I did it. It’s going to make the actual stop-motion shoot clearer.

Chris Peck left this morning. He’ll be back a week before the show opens. My goodness. Things are moving quickly aren’t they.

First of all: Tonight! PechaKucha at Krannert! 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide. 8:20pm outside, unless it’s raining and then it’s inside. Andy Warfel is emceeing. I’m going to talk about ELEPHANT. Jen and Chris Peck and I are going to sing a tiny bit. And I’ll pretend I’m an 82 year old lady named Anastasia from Elkton South Dakota. What could be dreamier? And this – all of our posters are being taken. This is good. Anna Peters is putting up a new ELEPHANT poster every week. When she goes back to put more up… the old ones are gone. I think this is good. If you want a poster, download one from the ELEPHANT project page here on this site. I’ll update the download each week with the poster that we’re slapping around town. I like them. I think they’re worth stealing.

O.k. Here’s a wee picture from the meeting of the Stop-Motion Minds that we had last Monday. Emily Denis, Anna Peters, Nicki Werner, Julia Pollack, Chris Hampson, Sean Brice, Andrea Jennings, Bill Fulara and Hanako O’Leary … I hope I didn’t forget anybody … all got together to make some test-models. They did some super-simple pipe-cleaner-ish ones and some full-on clay models. Below is a picture Nicki sent me of the elephant she made.

The whole stop-motion section for ELEPHANT is going to be about 7 minutes long. Chris Peck recorded Gary Ambler doing the voice-over yesterday. So we’ll take the storyboard drawings that Bill and Andrea have made, scan them in, lay down Gary’s VO, and edit in the storyboard scans along with the VO – and then shoot the thing with the models that everybody is making. I’m nervous about being able to shoot 7 minutes of good stop-motion. I know we don’t have Fantastic Mr. Fox time to make this – at the Motion Museum or TV Museum or whatever it’s called in Queens the Gumby and Pokey exhibit says that they make 5 seconds of animation a day. In the Fantastic Mr. Fox clip about making the movie they said they did 30 seconds of animation a day… but they also had at least 4 separate shoots happening simultaneously. But the thing is this: enthusiasm! The mighty-model-builders seem to want to go for the more time-consuming, more detailed approach and not the faster pipe-cleaner approach. We decided to do a hybrid of clay and fabric/wire. There was a big craft-party the other night. Crafters rule! All hail the mighty crafters! I hope we’re not biting off more than can be chewed.

The story that we’re telling with the models is really quite sad. The models are all around 4 or 5 inches tall… some are more. So, it feels like we’re going against the grain in a couple of ways – sadness and size. The tiny models will be projected on screens that are 20 feet high and 90 feet long (sitting and watching Inception the other day… why do people like this movie so much? It’s like the lamest parts of four James Bond movies all slapped into one movie that’s REALLY IMPORTANT because of it’s incessant use of THE FRENCH HORN… and realizing that the screen I was looking at was “only” about 35 feet long… what am I doing?) and claymation is usually sort of goofy and funny. I’ll have to remind myself of hiding under the couch because I was terrified of the Abominable Snowman in Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Oh. And then there’s this: the mighty Ryan Thompson is doing some work on the website and the list-serv. Dark, sunless, code work that is immensely helpful and deeply appreciated. Thanks Ryan!

And this! Chris Peck and Jen Allen have made some ELEPHANT RINGTONES! OH, THE HUMANITY! Coming soon!

ELEPHANT – July 10 from Deke Weaver on Vimeo.

So much to do. Here’s a new video for your delectation. Please pass it around.

Last year I was reading Miranda July’s …. oh, whatever it’s called… No one belongs here more than you. Her collection of short stories. There was a first-person-rhythm she has that got me on a nice writing jag. Same thing happened when I was writing Kip Knutzen. Then I was reading John Irving and Carlos Castenada. So, for ELEPHANT, and the bits and pieces I still need to flesh out, I started to reread Ms. July. But since there’s a lot of essay-ish, informational stuff I want to get at, I’ve been reading David Foster Wallace’s collection of essays, Consider The Lobster (recommended by Ernie Scott) at the same time (Damn. I know everybody knows it’s good. But, damn. It’s really really good. And he’s from Urbana-Champaign. Really sad that he topped himself. He’s so incredibly smart, that when he starts looking deeply into particular subjects, he sees all the angles. A lot of not-so-pretty angles. Maybe that’s what brought him down?).

I’m trying to figure out things like this: informational writing sort of stuff but how to make it compelling, LIVE (as in not dead, present, in front of breathing humans). Then you mix in possibly intimate storytelling with gigantic Stock Pavilion space – and, uh… is this going to work? What do you keep? What do you cut? I guess this is the danger of reading elephant stuff for a year and a half and then trying to pour it into a 75 minute mold.

Doug Pugh joined our merry band. He’s been a sound-god for Assembly Hall and much rocking and rolling. Chris, Andy and Doug met yesterday to talk about the nuances of sound, gear, liveness-of-room, can-you-understand-the-spoken-word-in-this-huge-space, number of inputs, number of speakers, placement of said speakers, and the-benefits-of-wood-chip-floors. Wednesday night we had another production meeting. Andy revealed a breathtaking 3-D rendering of the piece, some elephant puppet plans, and the hopes and dreams for our future. Thursday night we had a small gathering of ELEPHANT folk: Anna Peters, Julia Pollack, Rob Lee, Rebecca Walter, Elina Kotlyar, Andrea Jennings, Emily Denis, Chris Peck. Some of these guys are going to make some mini-props for a bigger stop-motion piece that will be in the show. A couple of them will make a beautiful shiny white elephant. Later in the summer, we’ll gather a elephantine-quilting-bee sort of group and punch grommets into the six 30′x20′ sheets of raw canvas that we’ll make into screens.

And, finally: Hi Kevin.

I’ll give the sound to Chris and he’ll take it to his workshop and make golden-sparks shoot out of the air and into your ears and you will be transfixed, stunned. And then we will suck out your blood and replace it with a greenish glowing elixir and control you and send you to other dimensions where the Elephant Gods will implore you to give give give everything you’ve got.

Another production meeting tonight. Rehearsal with Cynthia this afternoon… oh! Performing in this fabulous event will be me (duh), Jennifer Allen, Gary Ambler, Cynthia Oliver, Chris Peck, Kyli Kleven, Steve May, Jessica Cornish, and a cast of thousands. I’m getting tingly just thinking about it… but that might be because of the civil defense/tornado siren that’s blasting over the building. I hate those things.

Last night we had a read-through of the draft we’re working with right now. It was great. Fab group. We were missing a couple of smiling faces, but here’s the folks that were there: Cynthia Oliver, Gary Ambler, Jennifer Allen, Chris Peck, Valerie Oliveiro, Andy Warfel, Anna Peters, Amy Theobold, and Elina Kotlyar. Some very talented people in the room. Here we go. Production meeting in a couple of hours.

Ah. Check out this wee video that we made yesterday.

ELEPHANT July 1st from Deke Weaver on Vimeo.

First of all, a visual contribution (left) from our very own Chris Peck, entitled: “How To Fail Math Tests With Dignity.”

O.k. They don’t have elephant saddles. You stand very close to the right side of the elephant, right up next to it’s right shoulder. Never stand next to it’s left shoulder. I don’t know why. But if the mahout tells you to NOT stand on the left side of your 9 foot tall, 9500 pound elephant and you have Peter Ngande’s story of an elephant grabbing a full grown 500 pound lion by the tail and repeatedly slamming it into the ground until it was dead (see the August 16, 2009 blog entry) … well, I’ll take his word for it. I don’t need to know why right and not left.

When you are up this close to an elephant, it’s basically like you’re face up against a gray wrinkly wall. You can’t see anything else. You give the command, “Song sooong!” If you are dealing with a trained, domesticated elephant, and it doesn’t knock you down and crush your head like a pumpkin, or pick you up and slam you against a tree, or wrap it’s trunk around your torso and tear you in half, well, here’s what happens: the elephant lifts her right foot. You – the tourist – put your right foot on her right raised knee. You put your hands up over your head. With your right hand you grab the top of her right ear. You put your left hand on the gray wrinkly wall and grab a handful of elephant skin (kind of like a handful of heavy, textured, padded canvas). 1! 2! 3! You push off and up with your right leg, your elephant boosting you up, you pull with your hands on her right ear and the handful of skin just below her right shoulder, pulling yourself up, swinging your left leg up and over her neck. And now you’re on her neck, just below her head. In the words of Andy Quitmeyer, an elephant looks a lot different when you’re on it.

It would work best when I’d get a good push with my right leg. It was humiliating when I’d get stuck hanging and have to pull and scramble with my upper body (no support any more for the lower because the elephant had put his foot down.

My elephant’s name was Jojo. The mahouts all called him a “ladyboy.” He is naughty (the mahouts that speak English love this word – “naughty.”) And he is huge. Most zoos in the U.S. won’t bother keeping male elephants. They are thought to be too dangerous, mostly because of their periods of musth – high levels of testosterone that make the fellahs horny, cranky, and completely unpredictable. Thai mahouts believe that, through the elephant’s diet, they can roughly control when and if an elephant goes into musth.

Jojo was 20 and had not gone into musth yet. Getting on Jojo for the first time was unnerving. I had no idea what to hold on to or where to lean, or how to balance. My eyes were wide open and so was my mouth. I kept thinking about the lion being slammed into the ground. But maybe I wouldn’t even need to be slammed into the ground? Maybe I would just slide off Jojo’s mighty 9-foot high neck and break my own? I figured out that if I put my hands on his head that I could kind of make a tripod with my butt and my hands – a little bit of stability. His head was enormous. His head would move quickly, but it’s so enormous that it doesn’t feel like it’s moving quickly. I guess they’re fast the way a 3-year old can be fast – all of a sudden they’re across the room and into something (there’s a lot of infantilizing that happens with elephants and here I’ve just done it myself). It wasn’t really soft – maybe it was like that dense heavy “memory” pillow stuff that had been upholstered over an unmovable boulder that had been mounted on four and a half tons of bedrock? Two or three inch long black hairs bristled off his big wide gray melon head, wrinkly skin folding and draping over cartilage, giant wide ears handlebarring off to either side of my knees (the creature-designers for Where The Wild Things Are must have spent some time with elephants). You’re supposed to tuck your knees up to his ears. A lot of squeezing with the knees. My breathing calmed down. By that afternoon, I could look around and see other things besides my hands pressed into the top of Jojo’s head.

Tag long: an alternative for getting down. You swing both of your legs over his ears and put them side-by-side over his forehead. The elephant drops down on his front knees (I think) and puts his forehead down and you slide off on the ground, feet-first. To get back on, you do a running sort of gymnast vault onto his head, trying to kick your legs and feet out and around and over his ears. You end up landing face down on his neck and back. He stands up and you swivel around to face forwards. Another way to get on and off is non long. With non long the elephant lies down – not completely down, like a golden retriever getting it’s belly scratched, but with the head up. Once he’s down, you swing your leg over and hop down on the side opposite his legs.

So this is how you get on a domesticated elephant. How do you get on a wild elephant?

You don’t.

I asked why a culture of domesticating elephants had grown in Asia but not Africa. I was told that African elephants were too big and too aggressive. Asian elephants stand from 6-11 feet high and weigh 3-5 tons. African elephants stand from 10-13 feet high and weigh 5-7 tons. They have names like Vinny. They carry switchblades. They were raised by wolves and belong to a gang called The Jets. And nobody wants to ride them.

News report on a Bear in Cleveland

St. Louis Zoo Replaces Dead Polar Bears with Electronic Proxies

Big Dog Robot

Robot Fish

Here are a couple of links:  an article about SeaWorld, Tilikum, orcas, money and breeding.  Here’s The Woeful Whale, an article by Gay Bradshaw in Psychology Today about Tilikum and captive animals.  Bradshaw includes this quote from Jacques Cousteau, “There is about as much educational benefit to be gained in studying dolphins in captivity as there would be studying mankind by only observing prisoners held in solitary.”

O.k., a slight shift:  I love Laurie Anderson.  Probably too much.  Jen thinks that her work is dated.  Maybe the music is, but the stories are fantastic.  I love them.  At Boulder, I listened to United States Parts I-IV while I printed in the darkroom.  My first performances had me trying to copy the cadence of her “voice of authority.”  She has a thing about whales and Melville.  Here are her lyrics to “Mach Twenty”:

Ladies and Gentlemen.  What you are observing here are magnified examples, or facsimiles, of human sperm. Generation after generation of these tiny creatures have sacrificed themselves in their persistent, often futile attempt to transport the basic male genetic code. But where’s this information coming from?  They have no eyes.  No ears.  Yet some of them already know that they will be bald.  Some of them know that they will have small crooked teeth.  Over half of them will end up as women.  Four hundred million living creatures, all knowing precisely the same thing.  Carbon copies of each other in a Kamikaze race against the clock.  Now some of you may be surprised to learn that if a sperm were the size of a salmon it would be swimming its seven inch journey at five hundred miles per hour.  If a sperm were the size of a whale, however, it would be traveling at fifteen thousand miles per hour or Mach twenty.

Now imagine, if you will, four hundred million blind and desperate sperm whales departing from the Pacific Coast of North America, swimming at fifteen thousand miles per hour, and arriving in Japanese coastal waters in just under forty five minutes.  How would they be received?  Would they realize that they were carrying information?  A message?  Would there be room for so many millions?  Would they know that they had been sent for a purpose?

This was performed in the late ’70’s, early ’80’s.  In 1999 Anderson did a full evening called Moby Dick. It made me sad because it sucked.  She was repeating herself.  She was making objects with uber-digital-NASA tech that were replicating her RadioShack analog tapehead instruments from thirty years before.  I was thinking, well, maybe artists are only allowed so many ideas in a lifetime?  Maybe she’s just run out.  But then her next show, Happiness,  was amazing and it had a moment that stands as one of my all time favorite art/theater moments.

Here’s another whale story from Anderson’s album, The Ugly One With The Jewels and Other Stories.  It’s called “John Lilly.”  Lilly was the man who claimed he could talk with dolphins.  It seems like a song for Tilikum and Dawn Brancheau.  Here’s an excerpt:

We got to the Grand Palace by taking the Sky Train to Chao Phraya where we took a river taxi north. This was nice and cool, which was a relief from the neighborhood we were staying in – the Sukhumvit. We got back to the hotel and the nice cold pool. Walking down Soi 11; more old white men with young Thai girls. It’s super super sad. Sad for the women. Sad for the men.

That night we went to Bed Supper Club. You get dinner in bed. Not tucked in. It was pricey. Delicious, but pricey. They were doing the club thing. A dj. A girl walking around with a jacket made of polar bear toys. A guy walking around in a polar bear suit. Polar bear videos being projected on the walls. Later the guy’s got his polar bear head off and there’s the mini-mouse-model-girl and he’s offering to take a polaroid with mini-mouse for 100 baht to support the polar bear/World Wildlife Fund. Meanwhile, on the menu: oysters and venison flown in from the US, other things flown in from everywhere… and all of this served to us (taxi to Illinois terminal, Champaign bus to Chicago, Chicago fly to Tokyo, Tokyo fly to Bangkok, taxi to Bangkok, taxi back to airport, Bangkok fly to Chiang Mai, Chiang Mai taxi to Lampang… and back again). Every single customer there was white – American, Australian, European – and not nearly as hip as Bed Supper Club was wanting to be). So we paid our 100 baht, got the Polaroid and dined on hypocrisy (embrace the tourism…be the tourist).

We flew to Chiang Mai. Took a taxi to Lampang and the Thai Elephant Conservation Center (TECC). From the highway, the TECC looks like every cheesy U.S. national/amusement park entry – booths selling all kinds of tchotchkes. There is confusion. Where are we staying? What course are we on? Who are we? Everything about contacting the place had been confusing… and it continued to be confusing.

We end up in a “homestay.” A mahout and his wife. Open porch, covered, like a combination living room, kitchen, deck. But it slowly becomes clear that it’s definitely considered part of the home (it’s not a porch), so take your filthy shoes off, you filthy bald man (self-flagellation – all mine. the mahout and his wife were nothing but kind). TV’s going constantly with the Southeast Asia Games – soccer, volleyball, track and field. O.k., now before I go further I want to say that the mahouts that we met were super-sweet. We were there for six days. They seemed to be truly kind people. Some of the older mahouts were cranky – but if you started talking to them, the crankiness slipped away very quickly. So, when I write about mahouts and elephants – it’s not all black and white.

Jen and I stumble up to the place where they’ve got a couple of baby elephants and their moms. We arrive just in time to see a mahout punching and whacking a baby elephant with his ankh. The baby is bellowing and screaming. Hugely upset. Ah fuck. That’s pretty much the first thing we see at this place – a mahout beating a baby elephant.

When I was growing up, our back yard neighbors were the Klingers. The father of the clan was named Dick. Dick Klinger. He worked at Honeywell designing torpedoes. Seriously. I’m not making this up. His kids were afraid of him. If they did anything wrong they would get spanked. If they did anything really wrong they would get … The Belt. This was late 70’s, early 80’s. Kids getting beaten with belts by torpedo designers with names like Dick Klinger might have been common in the 50’s, but ideas about raising children evolve. These days? The Belt? No. Bad idea.

My dad told me that raising kids was a lot like training golden retriever puppies. These days there seems to be a couple of schools of thought about training dogs. There are the dogs whose owners are using those torture-chamber-looking collars, the ones where the slightest tug on the leash digs multiple 3-inch spikes into the neck of the dog. And then there are the dogs raised by people who read that book written by dog-training-monks. All positive reinforcement. All love. Because dog backwards is god.

So, I’m guessing that the traditional training of an elephant is a lot like training golden retrievers. The kind of golden retriever training with the 3-inch spikes. There’s a name for this kind of Thai elephant training – phaajaan. I’ve read a few things about phaajaan. One is that it’s only practiced in very-rural (read “backward”) places – the village at the end of the road. If you google it and watch any videos about phaajaan, do it when you’re feeling certain of your place in the world – otherwise you’ll end up looking for a bottle or a high bridge. I’m fairly certain that this brutal tradition was not part of the TECC, but what do I know?

Here’s something else I don’t know: I’ve heard that training an elephant is all about control. When an elephant is a baby, the trainers chain her to a post or stake. She can’t pull it out because she’s not strong enough. As she gets older, she gets much bigger and stronger – so much bigger and stronger that she could break any chain and yank out any stake – but she doesn’t believe she can do it, because she could never do it as a baby.

Phaajaan goes way past a chain and a stake.

But, see, there’s this split.   There are the elephants inlaid with mother-of-pearl in the Buddha’s feet, the elephant-headed god Ganesh sitting atop shrines throughout India and Southeast Asia, the cute cartoon elephants plastered on products from beer to showers, the countless wooden and gold-leaf encrusted elephants offered at the Erawan Shrine in Bangkok.  And then there are the living elephants.  No big surprise.  Gay Bradshaw writes about it in her last chapter of Elephants On The Edge.  It’s a psychological split called “doubling.”

Part of the elephant show at the TECC included playing a recording of a bunch of kids singing a nursery rhyme-song that’s all about elephants.  It seems that most people in Thailand grew up singing this song.  Here’s a recording of the concierge at our hotel in Bangkok singing the song – Chang chang chang (chang is Thai for elephant).

In the hotel, we get on the elephant, I mean elevator, with a man in sunglasses (it’s night), and graying hair combed to the side like Horatio in CSI Miami. His (in the words of Spalding Gray) “giggling Thai prostitute” gets on with him. She has a low-cut blouse, glitter sparkling in her cleavage to emphasize the merchandise. She gets in, looks at me, but all I can see are boobs and, I imagine, all she can see is tall white American which means $. Later Jen was talking about this girl and her braces. What was she, 12? 14? Maybe. Later we saw other women with braces. Reminded me of Berlin in 1991 and how lots of people there seemed to have eye-patches with gauze coming out on the edges. Is there such a thing as local fashion in medical practice? We talked about the pervasiveness of the sex-trade. Soooo many gray round white men walking around holding hands with young Thai girls. Another girl on the elevator, all silk and shimmer. And then I thought about what I’d read about elephants mating: the screaming, the chasing, the loud trumpeting, the spinning in circles, the dropping flapping vulvae (what’s the plural for “vulva”?), the six-foot S-shaped guidable penis, the urinating and defecating with excitement. That’s what elephants do when they’re happy – they rumble, they piss, they shit.

We wake up. We eat breakfast. The chairs are smaller. Different than the chairs that we found at Carters in Urbana – an entire dining room set that seemed to have been designed for giants… or at least corn-fed Midwest farmers. We read. We plotted. We find and buy a couple of super elaborate maps – Nancy Chandler . At one of Jen’s friend’s recommendations we make appointments for Thai Massages at “The King and I.” They give us gold silk pajamas. I take everything off and put on the gold silk pajamas. This was a mistake.

Thai massage has a lot of stretching and pulling. Jen was getting massaged right next to me, behind a curtain. My massage-er (masseuse?) washed my feet. Then she started working on my legs. Another part of Thai massage includes taking both hands and sort of cutting off blood-flow at the crotch. And with the silkiness of the pajamas and the stretching and the rubbing and the tugging and the pressing and the more rubbing … well … I tried to imagine dead frozen puppies who had been hit by cars. Later I looked in the phrase book. I found “Easy tiger,” but could not find “I apologize for my erection.” Luckily, I didn’t need the phrase because the dead frozen puppy thing works pretty well. Later in the trip when we got more Thai massages (really cheap with the exchange rate), I kept my cotton boxers on under the silky pajamas. All was well.

Oh. Did I tell you about the ELEPHANT show we’re doing in September? We’re doing an ELEPHANT show in September. You should come.  Oh.  And this:  my friend Chris is writing for a couple of shows in LA and has made dismissive references about his job “writing dick jokes”…  I realize that writing about prostitution, massage, elephantine bowel evacuation and my body may be confusing and possibly even wrong.  But you know what?  I’ve read a lot worse.  I will refrain from any references to genitalia in the next post.  I promise.