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.
“Peter Ngande, the cook and general assistant in the Amboseli elephant camp, once saw … an encounter between a solitary lion and a herd of elephants. While working in a fossil-digging project in another part of Kenya, Peter noticed the lion crouching and glancing from side to side as if frightened. A herd of elephants was approaching, and the landscape somehow trapped the lion so that he couldn’t get out of the elephant’s way. At the last moment the lion leaped forward, dug his claws into the shoulder of the lead elephant, a large female, and hung there. In a single motion the elephant reached her trunk over the lion’s body, grabbed him by the tail, ripped him off, and, using the tail as a handle, slammed him into the ground repeatedly until he was dead. The elephants then broke branches from some nearby bushes and covered the dead lion with them – a sort of burial – before they walked off.” – Silent Thunder, page 64