journal page 18

july 10, 2001
2:18am
headaches
odd hours
wrapped up a sequence that had been driving me up the wall for the last few weeks, a pair of characters onscreen probably not for more than 10 seconds but doing really intricate things that took forever to get just right. happy to see this bit finally nailed after so long, probably no one will notice all of the tiny care and details going on with any of this animation but it's satisying for me to watch anyway. just wish it didn't have to take this long. i don't think i'm slowing in my old age, i think i'm getting better at this sort of thing and in turn i'm not as willing to settle for less. damn it, acquiring skills means you can't just toss it off anymore.. so now that i have just these two fellows finally interacting and choreographed properly i have to go all the way back and composite all the other elements of stuff going on simultaneously in the moment. skreeee!

am listening to the new bjork album and it is one of her best. very pretty. by the way, the radiohead shows were fab-tastic.

between the new film and these other projects i'm also slowly plugging away still at this secret-y book project that will hopefully finally see the 'anesthetics' comics revived and fleshed out to everyone's satisfaction. this thing will take forever to see the light of day i promise, but rest assured i haven't forgotten. meanwhile wondering what is left of life to live when there are zero free moments and when you find one it's by yourself at 4 in the morning taking a break guzzling a pint of mysteriously blended fruit juice. you will be happy to learn however that my salivary glands are just fine now. thankyou.

i must admit that i was mostly displeased with A.I. i won't go so far as to say that poor stanley is spinning in his grave, but he is definitely performing a couple of double-lutzes and at least a few half-twists. oh how i wish, i wish, to the blue fairy i wish, that kubrick could have made this film himself. a couple of days ago i bought leathery shiny black pants that are covered with reptilian scales because they were just too damn stylin' to pass up. it looks like HR giger designed these for jim morrison or something. that and they were on the 20 dollar repeated-discount rack because clearly no one else in the universe was cool enough to consider wearing them.

don

june 28, 2001
9:30pm,
hallucinations of a dying brain
mildew stain remover
it seems i have some kind of "minor salivary gland infection". there is a little unhappy red fellow under my tongue. why is it i keep ending up with the oddest health quirks? animation slowly continues and it seems my apartment grows more hot and stuffy every night.

have been trading notes with bill plympton quite a bit lately and we're going to team up a little bit this summer and play a few art house theaters together - 45 minutes of his stuff, 45 minutes of mine. it should be a fun program and a convenient way to see all of these cartoons on the big screen. i think it is going to kick off at the laemmle in santa monica and then we'll play the program at any theater that will screen it. so if you're keen on the don and bill show and there's an art-y movie theater in your town who'd like to hook it up, drop us a line..

well, the inevitable seems to have happened, apparently one of you damn dirty apes took the liberty of uploading 'ah, l'amour' into a handy video file format and gone ahead and spammed it to everyone with an e-mail address. three of my friends have been randomly forwarded this thing already. would it have killed you to at least learn how to scan a video tape properly? i've seen porn clips on the internet of higher resolution quality than this... to those of you considering putting it on your website: you are all going to prison. tim is having a rather good chuckle at me (IRONY) because he thinks this has something to do with our ongoing napster debate. so any of you who has received my film in your e-mail inbox, you now owe me one dollar each. you miserable, miserable bastards.

am i the only one absolutely terrified by this photograph?

oh yes, here's the latest from rob in LA:

june 18, 2001
3:47am
"time to get yooou to the moon gods."
inked all weekend and had to begin putting ice on the ol' arm again. i can pencil for days on end but once i grip the inky pens really tight for all the detail work plus furiously erasing off every page, that just destroys the drawing arm after several hours. took a break from all that today to restart work on a um, secret project, and am also gearing up for this class i have to teach in less than a week. which is just nuttiness. i'm gonna learn them kids somethin good i guess. if not we will all just go to a bar. the best thing about teaching a class is that it will give me a reason to leave the art desk for a few hours of sunlight every day. don the potted plant. i've already forgotten what i was going to write about but i guess you're all used to that by now. thought about investing in a fire-proof safe yesterday. every time about now thru the end of each production i grow more and more paranoid that my two year's growing stack of tens of thousands of finished drawings will be lost, damaged, destroyed, incinerated before we can shoot them. this is usually coupled with the recurring fear that towards the end of production i will drop dead and not be able to finish it. which i hear is one that cap'n kubrick shared as well, apparently he didn't even like to drive around in cars during a shoot for fear that he would be killed and his film left unfinished. scary that it makes perfect logical sense to me. scarier that he really did drop dead before he could finish a film. maybe i better get that safe.

june 9, 2001
12:31am
are you guys winners?
took the day off to go see r.e.m. play an acoustic radio show then got sucked into watching the basketball game, so not much work today. must get re-motivated... somebody better bring over the cattle prod and the caffeine IV. it's really like animating 7 films at the same time and progress is always snails-pace. so i'm not sure how demoralizing it will become to spend several weeks just getting through a handful of pictures, as opposed to prior films' rates of progress. moreover i am still not sure how well the animation paper will actually hold up thru the end of this. each page has to go through so many different passes and composites of actions that they're just getting all wrinkled and manhandled to death. totally unavoidable, will have to use that and i sort of saw it coming. it's rather interesting actually, once you work through a piece of paper long enough, it grows veins.