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the flip side of reality
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24 hours in south africa
Okay, this dream is set in South Africa in the summer. I think it is supposed to be Cape Town, but most of the city scenes look more like Durban.
The first event is going to the movies. I am with a group of people and we go to a movie theatre that has a narrow and crowded parking lot (too many empty handicapped parking spots). We stroll into one moive and watch the first ten minutes before realising it's not the film we meant to see. This one is some soap opera comedy about teenagers and most of the audience is rowdy teenagers. So we duck out to find the other movie and have to drive to a totally different theatres, and that movie was either sold out or not showing so we go all the way BACK to the first place, troll for parking, and get in to the original movie 20-40 minutes late.
No problem, though, since it's the type of movie you ca just step into at any moment and know what's going on. The interior is like a big beer tent in Munich, with wooden benches. It seems that every ten minutes there is a rowdy intermission of snacks and beer. Not a bad time, actually.
When we leave it is daylight and I stop to make a phone call and get separated from the pack. We decide to meet back at the hotel, which will be a problem for me since I still have no idea how the city is laid out and no idea where our hotel is or even its name. I call someone who is a mixture of Katei Daniel and Tanya Moore and we are both surprised how long it has been since we actually talked. It's like we surprised each other by forgetting each other. I then have a sub-dream which I will explore in hypertext.
So I am now on my own in front of the movie theatre and with some effort catch a taxi. This is a seriously cool taxi. It's a converted green school bus, reworked with couches and curtains inside. The driver is great, and he's very patient with me as I hem and hum and generally fail to recall the address of my hotel, it's name, and even what part of town it's in. Fortunately, after about five minutes of driving aimlessly we come across Erica and Shawn and the rest of the moviegoers. Shawn knows exactly where to go so they all board the school bus (the entrance is in back, like some old London buses) and we take off.
Unfortunately, though, one of the guys with us, who is only a friend of a friend of a friend, is acting very rude. He is quite racists and seems to be trying to pick a fight with the taxi driver, insulting his bus and his glitzy outfit. I try to shut him up but he has such an excessive personality and it is impossible, This gets the driver mad at all of us and I go on a general insult tirade. I insult the racist guy for his outfit, which is a sweat suit of varying shades of peach. Someone else snaps at me for that, and I insult his haircut, which has bible verses shaved into it. I'm not even sure if the driver has the patience to get me to my hotel since soon afterward I am on a mission in a new dream:
I and another guy (who is my unwilling but faithful assistant) have been ordered to break into a guarded complex (a prison?) to carry out some sort of mission. At some point there is a group of five of us but a majority of the guys run off when we don't notice, leaving us alone to our task. Well, that is, us and about two hundred armed guards in grey-and-green uniforms with automatic weapons.
It is surprisingly easy to get into the complex and during the whole mission my point of view switches from the main guy and to an omniscient observer. Which is good, since the main guy ends up finding a particular guard and killing him with a small hand grenade (that came right out of Vonnegut's Galapagos, which I read last night an in which the narrator remembers the one person he shot in Viet Nam because she killed his friend with a hand granade). The two invaders are running before the grenade even detonates and then I am back in the main guy, struggling to run fast, as is always the case when I'm being chased in a dream.
My assistant seems to be safe and I take the opportunity to duck into a large bush to hide and catch my breath. To my horror someone seems to notice me in the bush and walks around it to get a good look at me. It is not a guard but a cute 5-year-old girl with pink bows in her hair. Any place with cute kids with pink bows must be safe so I get out and realise I am in a grassy suburban neighborhood. The kid's parents, a smiley mixed-race couple, retrieve the girl and I run off
My partner is waiting for me at the train station and while I am running I hear narrative in my head. It is a spoken version of the letter he wrote to me about this train station:
The trains in this land are of reasonable quality, but are strikingly easy to infiltrate. The employees are relaxed and easy to deceive, and have a high tolerance for the unusual. The trains are low-security and one would have no trouble finding himself stowed away in a comfortable berth through to his destination.
Sure enough, I get into the long line on the train, somehow feeling like Huck Finn (or was it Tom Sawyer?) and when in the thick crowd when the train guy asks me for my ticket I fumble in my pocket and push onward. He has to stay behind and check everyone else's ticket. My partner, who is Shawn now, is right behind me and make a fuss in order to get the guard's mind off of me.
I find a seat on the crowded train and Shawn sits in a seat at the other end of the long row. The conductor then comes back to check my ticket but can't remember what I look like and Shawn pretends to be me and flashes his ticket again. The conductor even apologises and give Shawn his money back. He the comes to me and remarks that he like a picture he saw in my wallet and might he buy it from me? I find the picture.. it is a wallet-sized photo of the sound hole and six strings on a guitar. the photo is printed as a transparency in black and white so you can see through it. I hadn't seen it before and think it's kind of cool, but give it to the guard to avoid suspicion.
And we are on our way home.
suburban regrowth/urban integration
(suburbasm)
Okay, first I head to Erica's house. She lives in La Jolla. It might be slightly in the future (30 years?).. It's a bit like LA in that there is really no parking for anyone. The neighborhood was once a cookie-cutter style suburban sprawl (think clairemont) but the zoning laws have changed over the years so there are business dotted throughout the neighborhood, in very modern glass and steel and concrete buildings. Despite the crowded nature of the street (the street is off-white concrete rather than off-black asphalt, also like LA) the surrounding hills have been designated a nature zone and except for a few houses from the pioneer days are totally untouched. It's beautiful, actually. Everything is alive with color in the Southern California spring, much like it is now in San Diego. These mountains and hills stretch a looong way; you can't even see where they end. The ocean is nearby, so a cool breeze blows in the fresh salt aromas.
I pass a guy on the sidewalk, walking in the opposite direction, who is also looking for Erica's house (she lives with a group of people who often have guests). He apparently finds it back behind me and runs back to inform me. "It's in the laughing building" and even though I have no idea what that really means I somehow know exactly which building it is. I had passed it up before because it looked like a business. A hair salon or something like that. Taller and deeper than it was wide, the building was divided in half by a long vertical concrete column. All the front of the building (besides the column) is glass and you can see that while the building is tall enough to be three stories it's only two stories, with tall ceilings.
I arrive and a party is on downstairs but Erica has not arrived yet so Nicki takes me upstairs to give me a tour. I sit down on a pillow in a bedroom and before I know it Nicki dives headfirst (arms out, superman-style) through a wall into the closet. It's amazing. I am totally stumped. Even though that sort of thing can happen in dreams, this was a very realistic dream and I stare in disbelief. She walks out of the closet and taunts me for a while before finally revealing the secret... part of the wall is actually an elastic sheet that is stretched tight enough to look like a smooth white wall. there is a tiny hole in the middle of the sheet which expands when you pass an object though it. So she aimed for the hole and it expanded to pass her body through. It all makes sense and the supernatural surprise is gone but I am still shocked at how effortlessly she was able to dive totally horizontally through that hole and pull it off without me seeing a thing.
Jeremy comes upstairs and is hungry since the party downstairs has run out of food. HE looks in the fridge and inside are a few trays of cupcakes/dessert-style thingies that Erica has made the night before. They all look a little odd for being just food and I realise that at least some of them must me the architectural models that Erica was working on the night before. I warn him about this and help him pick out the cupcakes (low cylindrical chocolate forms with tilted roofs and round colored dots cascading down the sides), and we eat a few.
We rent a movie on VHS, I think it was a Hitchcock action film like North by Northwest. Although it is more bleak and has some scenes where the nutty heroines shoot bad guys in the head. Occasional graphic violence.
Erica comes back and after hanging out for a while, we decide to watch the movie she was out renting, which is the same movie but on DVD. And I am shocked that the movie has been totally reassembled for the DVD and is nothing like the original. The graphic violence has been omitted and left to the viewer's imagination, which is actually more effective, but they have also rearranged the scenes of an offbeat indie-feeling film into a Hollywood-style action movie. It's terrible. I understand that they have done this to reach the DVD market, which consists mostly of the sort of dronelike hollywood-fan eating-at-chili's corporate-victim consumer. Ack.
Erica and I take off in the Honda and drive to a spot right on the border between the failing-suburbia/urban-regrowth streets and the rolling hills. We are now within sight of the beach. There are some skateboarders doing tricks in a gutter, but rather than being concrete it is rocky dirt and they are using offroad skateboards. We pound up the hill in the Honda and have some fun on that hill too. I can't remember if we're doing it in the Honda or on foot or if we, too, have skateboards. I Think we don't have skateboards because I remember the surprised feeling of coexisting with the skateboarders without getting in their way, like surfers and kayakers out at the same break.
The latter parts of the dream (actually I never really know what chronological order these events come in but logically it seems like the latter part of the dream) has a group of us driving in the Nova through a junkyard on the other side of this city. This junkyard/dump is another strange non-urban/non-natural occurrence. It has a system of new paved roads and white sidewalks and orange streetlights. Think EastLake with individual piles of garbage and junk where the houses would be. On one side of the dump are these beautiful rolling hills and on the other side is a Getty Center-esque beautiful and mysterious concrete structure that also reminds me of something that should be in Gattaca.
Although there is not much traffic on the streets of the junkyard we are surrounded by rude drivers and we casually try to spot parts for the Nova (specifically, a new back-right window) among the piles. One guy in a particularly tall and long red pickup truck is honking so furiously and impatiently that Patrice or Stefan (whichever one is driving) drive even slower and stop for several seconds at each stop sign, in an effort to get this guy to understand how rude he is being.
We stop the car by the Getty-esque Center and meet a man who appears to live in its otherwise deserted halls. HE has the look of the downtrodden genius/guru, a crumpled hobo who, upon closer inspection, has bright, intelligent eyes and a worldly air about him. He says that he almost had to intervene to prevent something terrible from happening back at the last stop sign. He never explains himself but I gather that he knows more about the rude truck driver than we do and that the impatient man had been about to do something drastic.
a link
everything on the tip of my mind, and yet so far out of reach... Instead, I'll provide an interesting link for those of you with soundcards and who feel let down by your usual daily entertainment... www.quatermass.net. This isn't an ad for their business, simply an interesting link to a site that explores tactile audio on the web. The internet up to this point has been primarily a visual experience but that need not be the sensory limit...
cross-cultural video production, or how teddy cruz got in my head
Building a device at work to ship to the UK... my responsibility is to document it and direct a film about it. I decide to do it digitally, to fully realise my abstract vision, and since we don't have the time or daylight to do it on film. I first shoot some footage of the device (the "Light Validator" for buses, a real project in my real world) against a blue wall, moving the camera through different angles and zooming in and out. I then document the project manager and some lackey standing in front of a crowd giving a presentation. My aim is to have them floating around the constantly-changing Light Validator surreally in space, shrunken down to the same size as it. Next I shoot relatively still footage of colorful backdrops, such as the blooming yellow-and-green pastures in Balboa Park, the deep blue ocean, a sea of red tile roofs. The final touch is the audio... I go to Tijuana to sample general crowd ambience and to capture specific Spanish dialogue, such as an auctioneer and a city council meeting. I am certain that it will be a quality work, and no longer care that it is entirely outside the bound of what my superiors have in mind to send. I am doing it for the sake of art, not to raise some rich old white guy's profits...
Very fatigued in Tijuana, I stop to rest by a bay, which is somehow freshwater. I speak to a woman in Spanish. She is maybe 30 and I am certain that was the radio news anchor drifting in from my waking world. We chat in the rain while her boyfriend goes for a swim in the terribly stinky bay. When he returns he is very suspicious and when she steps out to use the toilet he interrogates me. "How long have you REALLY known her?", etc. I try to explain to him that I have no interest in his girl and had only met her there minutes before he arrived while relaxing by the water, but through his own suspicious nature he cannot be convinced. Not wanting to get anyone in trouble I leave.
This jealous man was about sixty and British. I Think it annoyed him that I talked to his girlfriend in Spanish while he couldn't. My Spanish is always flawless in dreams, just as my drumming is always perfect (see april 5), and I play the guitar flawlessly. In the dream world you don't need a clumsy body to express an idea, emotion, or art... you have direct access to the understanding and expression of it, so it seems like the medium you appear to be using is always perfectly effective, be it language, an instrument, etc.
This little story at the end reminds me a little of "The Quiet American", an underrated film I enjoyed immensely last week. Check it out.
when frank zappa came to town
I'm visiting the undergrad scene at Warren College at UCSD. The dorms are directly on the beach, nice cove with beach break in the middle and peeling points on the left and right. I go for a surf with Patrice and Big Pete. It's a great time, and I have a camera out there. The pictures don't turn out as expected, but they are bizarre and satisfyingly entertaining. Since it was a digital camera the shutter won't fly immediately when you press the button, so all the shots end up slightly after you planned them. The most memorable images feature Pete in crazy positions with his arms akimbo. Very fast shutter speeds, so every drop of water is frozen as a solid jewel in midair.
We hit the shore and he tells me a bit about life during his years here (in the dream it was back in the 80s). In his day many of the grad students shooting crack all the time and complaining about the unwitty and poorly-grammared jokes the undergrads would draw on everything. One example is a movie poster with four lines of unintelligible scrawled text.
Somehow I end up visiting my father and his family in Sacramento. Jackson (my step brother) has grown up quite a bit since I saw him last and has redecorated his room. He has gotten to know his "Uncle Will" in recent days, and has taken a liking to him. Uncle Will is a mildly-successful director of photography in Hollywood and Jackson has some framed stills on his wall from various film projects. One of them is from a film of him bungee jumping, in a red jumpsuit with red helmet. It's from above, hiss body is horizontal in teh bottom of the frame and since the director used a wide aperture the river below and the bridge above are unfocused. Another photo is a vivid abstract from some terrible second-rate comedy, but it's nice to see a beautiful image from an otherwise worthless film. Full of texture and light.
I get an email from Mike Crowe about HIS days as an undergrad and he also talks about the grad students doing drugs all the time. His TA for Pro/E was none other than Stan Balish (local Pro/E contractor and businessman), who reportedly used to take the students out for Sushi, THEN have class after that, hand out coke to the pretty girls and sell it to the guys, and then take everyone out on the town after that. We exchange emails for a while and the conversation turns to Stan's Pro/Engineer skills and we discuss the finer points of that particular design software. At some point I forward the email to Paula (our CAD specialist at work) to ask her a question about something we are discussing and forget the conversation way down at the bottom of the email. The next thing I know she has forwarded it around to everyone in the San Diego engineering community, telling them to never ever use his services because he is a drugged-out corruptor etc. I feel terrible for not being more careful what info I zap around the internet.
Let this be a lesson to you: Be cautious about the emails you forward!
Somehow I end up with Steve Minka at a shopping mall in Vegas. We have some time to kill and see that Frank Zappa is doing a stage show and decide to check it out. It is a very small seating area (maybe 15 seats) and we are lucky to get seated. Before we get a chance to see Zappa the dream moves on to a new topic. Bummer. Maybe my subconscious really knew that Zappa is dead and therefore a live performance would be impossible! Image that -- the impossible not occurring in a dream!
We grab a bite with Jinx at the restaurant upstairs and somehow end up with three orders of very fried, greasy calamari. As we are eating those a scene unfolds in the parking lot below:
A fancy new shiny lowered BMW is pulling into a parking space and a Jeep Cherokee rushes up from behind, cuts him off, and steals his spot. This guy has crossed the wrong people, and gangsters with blue bandanas jump out of the car with shotguns and crowbars and knives. I am certain that we are going to see some tragic violence and tow of the guys start to pry the back hatch open with the crowbars. The driver jumps out and although he is from the same gang (blue bandanas tied to EVERYTHING) the scene gets tough with he and the leader yelling at eachother and pointing guns are eachother and making all sorts of threats. I think there was something going on before we witnessed the parking lot scene. Fortunately nobody gets hurt in the parking lot and they calm down.
The calamari is terrible and I give up.
I decide since I am in a mall I really do need some clothes but I have no idea even where to look. To me Nordstrom and Mervyns are all the same but I end up in a department store which is actually a branch of the city library. All the clothes are catalogued and the fashion magazines and catalogs are all library reference books. There is a group of students there from a local fashion design school, all doing research for their final projects. Although they are busy and stressed out, two students kindly take time out to talk to me a bit and give me some advice.
deadline
Gabi is hitchhiking; I think she is leaving San Diego. Having trouble getting a lift. I work until 11pm, trying to meet a deadline. I am surprised and dismayed that there are at least a dozen others at Cubic at that time.
adventures in babysitting
Stefan had a son (in addition to the two daughters he has in the real world) and he asked me to hang out with him for a few hours while Stefan brought the car to the mechanic. I think his son's name was Stefan, too, but for convenience we'll name him Stephen.
I first take him to the Museum of Contemporary Art downtown. They charge us admission, even thought they will be closing in five minutes. Stephen has a fun time there, despite the fact that minutes later we are out on the street in the rain. We are hungry so we go to a colorful collection of restaurants in a part of town that reminds me of the area near Hyde Park in London. One particular restaurant is called "the Little Iraqi Village" and it is stylish and inviting. It is part of a complex of tiny adjacent international eateries, and the main front wall is open to the city. It's a special dynamic to be sitting in comfortable warm dry chairs and have the rain falling just a few meters away.
They are surprised to see Westerners come to eat because in the last year or so it has only been an Iraqi clientele. Everyone is very very friendly and cordial and even thought the place is crowded a young man rearranges tables in order to accommodate us. He remarks that he thought all Westerners hated Iraqis and that is why this big war is on and it gives him hope that we came here. We talk shit about the government for a while and I reassure him that I don't condone war. Stephen pipes in with a comment that sounds like something he is just regurgitating from my arsenal and I feel bad for exposing him to hatred and war talk. I get the impression that proper child-raising (which his family practices for sure) involves not exposing your children to too much war, etc.. until they are old enough to understand it?...
There is a sign outside the restaurant that says "Teenagers and young people are encouraged to join us for our nightly cultural events" and sure enough the place is getting crowded with teenagers and young people. There is a television in the corner of the room and every night at 7 they all watch CNN and watch their country be reduced to rubble. Again.
Young Stephen is pleasantly adventurous for a little kid (he is about five or six) and has his heart set on the "Number One" and is very disappointed when the one unfriendly person in the establishment, the cashier, tells us there is no more Number One left and we had better hurry up and order since it is almost 7 on a Sunday and the kitchen will be closing very soon. We take another two minutes to decide but it's too late and she declares that we can no longer eat. The kitchen is closed. Despite the otherwise very comfortable environment, I feel responsible for feeding Stephen and we head out again.
Same story at the next restaurant we hit (a Greek place), that is, the kitchen just closed, so we go to a grocery store instead. It happens to be in Bonita and I run into a handful of people I don't remember form high school and their families. Josh Bell is using some high-tech new electronic method to maximize his ability to get into the best possible grad school for mechanical engineering. His driven father says this method would work for me as well if I wanted to go to grad school (hint, hint) and I ask him if it would work for music grad school and he notices my long hair and flip flops and realises I have "fallen to the dark side". Josh's setup includes two flat desk-sized panels with descriptions and regulations of the particular school engraved into it and colored brown. There is also a very detailed table fo entry requirements and flow charts of required classes, etc. From what I can gather, Josh, runs his magic pen (like the one from "Picture Pages" with Bill Cosby) over the text and it is scanned into a computer, which then does certain calculations based on the text and the unique movement of the user's hand to determine from their personality exactly which steps need to be taken. It's an expensive system and I understand that it's yet another step closer to giving rich white kids all the advantage to getting into pimpy institutes of learning. (Akin to expensive SAT classes etc.)
Matt Davis is also there with his brother and I jump up high to see his face (he is even taller than life in this dream). I mention I heard he was moving and he says "yeah, MAYBE", as if the word wasn't supposed to be out yet, or he didn't tell his family just yet...
Stephen is not as well as hiding his boredom as I am so we grab some grub and get out of there. After eating we end up at my place and it's getting later. Stefan calls to say he is still at the mechanic and Stephen should get some sleep so I put him to bed in my bed. I live right on the beach and the bed is in a corner of my room that is floor-to-ceiling window. Right along the very corner is a narrow window (8 inches wide?) That swings all the way open to let air in.
What I hadn't realised before was that it also permits the entry of mischievous crows and ducks who have stolen a pouch I keep full of more soft pouches that come in handy during travel or camping. They have pulled them out to the shore and are fighting over them. At one point an indigenous girl get s the bags and skips around in the water with them, and then the crows take it and hand it off to their crow king, who is like a normal crow except twice as large and has a white crest on his chest, and he speaks english. I run a hundred meters in ankle-deep water to catch up with him and grab the bag. For a brief moment I think he is going to launch his crows on me but instead says "I will only permit the loss of this great prize if you swear to fold them in the proper manner that is fitting of their greatness" Not wanting to feel the wrath of a crow kingdom scorned, I fold one of the bags very neatly in front of them before rushing back to my house (it's cold out there!)
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