Intemperance laying easy on a calm October evening

Right now the airport near where my boat is anchored is reporting winds of 22mph, with gusts to 33mph and I can hear the wind moaning in the trees around our house. It rained buckets all day long, making our last day of preparation a soggy and cold undertaking.

But the forecast has the rain stopping sometime around midnight, and the winds starting to slack around day break. By noon it should be a fine day for sailing, and we’ll shove off. With a little luck we’ll make the ~250 needed to clear the Gulf Stream before the next wintery blast. From there it’s another few days to Bermuda. If we’re tired, scarred, hurt, or broken, we’ll stop; otherwise once we pass Bermuda it’s another 700 or so miles South, till landfall somewhere in the Leeward Islands.

In case you’re wondering, no this is not a family trip. Peggy and the kids are staying here. I’m going with two friends, and my family will catch up with me (by airplane) later in the year.

If you’d like to follow along, you can go to our SPOT page, which will have updated position reports overlaid onto Google maps. As long as the dot keeps moving along, you’ll know we’re okay. There’s nothing there now, but by the afternoon tomorrow the page should show our little boat making its way into the Atlantic. By this time tomorrow we should be 50 miles out and hopefully be settling into life aboard our little home on the ocean.

Of course I am nervous; and excited too. I love adventures. This one feels like it’s going to be a good one!

Back when I used to do whitewater rafting and kayaking, we would talk about being “on the tongue”—that point when you’re not actually in the whitewater rapid, but you are on the fast moving green water upstream of the rapid—as being the crucial time, the time when the battle is won or lost. Here’s why:

First of all, whether or not you have a good run through the rapid depends in large measure on where you are on the tongue. The tongue is where you set your line, and this is important because once you’re actually in the whitewater, staying on the right line is a hell of a lot easier than trying to get off the wrong line.

The other thing is that once you’re “on the tongue” you really have to make a commitment to running the rapid. Once you’re on the tongue, trying to bail out is more likely to put you on a bad line then actually keep you from going down the rapid, so you’re better off just setting your line and going for it, even if you’re scared, even if you realize at the last moment that you’ve got no business being there. Once you’re on the tongue, hesitation is just going to make it that much more likely you’ll get your ass kicked.

Right now I feel like I’m “on the tongue” of my upcoming sailing trip. The big decision has already been made, to torture the metaphor a little more, I’ve already picked my line. But now there are a thousand little decisions to make, little corrections and adjustments to try and stay on that line. To make sure that my boat and my crew arrive in the Caribbean safely, of course, but also (hopefully!) feeling like we want to do it again. After all, what’s the point of running a Class V rapid if when you get to the bottom you never want to do it again? It’s supposed to be fun, right?

But in case it all goes pear-shaped, a couple of things.

From time to time, I’ve mentioned that the second couple Peggy and I ever did a test-shoot with enjoyed some pretty novel bedroom play, including acts that generally find their way onto lists of things that, if depicted photographically, are obscene. Only a handful of people have ever seen that film, but not for fear of prosecution. It was a private study, made with the explicit understanding that it would not be distributed.

When it comes to the threat of obscenity prosecution, a long time ago Peggy and I decided that we would do nothing to court such a prosecution, but neither would we make any concession in our work to that threat, either in what we depicted, or in where we distributed our work. We have no “do not ship” list. We believe that if you are an adult, you have the right to buy our DVDs and the right to watch them in privacy. We ship to Utah, we ship to Alabama, and a hundred other zipcodes that most businesses that sell sexually explicit DVDs will not ship to.  This is a conscious act of defiance on our part. A conscious decision not to give in to the chilling effect of obscenity laws, not to have our voice muzzled by fear.

But now I think I’m ready to up the ante.

The night before last, I registered TheFistingProject.org. Should I survive my upcoming trip (I’m pretty sure I will) and not decide to simply sail off into the sunset (I’m not sure I won’t) when I get back in the saddle, this is where I’m going to put my energies. I’m going to take everything I’ve learned about love, filmmaking, search, distribution, marketing, promotion, law, commerce, distribution and all the rest and pour it into, as the tagline says, “a provocation exploring the limits of intimacy, obscenity, and art.”

The landmark obscenity case US v One Book Called Ulysses was orchestrated by Random House in order to challenge obscenity laws and clear a path for the publication of James Joyce’s masterwork. The three films that brought down the Hays Code – The Pawn Broker, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf, and Blowup – were produced and distributed by the biggest studios in Hollywood and featured some of cinema’s greatest stars.

So who’s fighting the battle now? Girls Pooping websites, and video recordings of women shooting milk out of their asses, and dog fighting videos. With these as freedom’s champions, no wonder that since the 1972 Miller decision the reach of obscenity prosecutions has expanded; from photographic depictions to now include drawings, and even mere writing.

Maybe with The Fisting Project I can do a little better. We’ll see when/if I get back…

Also against the possibility of mishap at sea, I’m posting a link to a work-in-progress version of Brett and Melanie: Boi Meets Girl. But before I give you the link, a few provisos:

1) If you made a discount pre-order and I end up in Davy Jones’ Locker, you’ll get a refund.

2) If you made a discount pre-order and now  you’re pissed of that I’m putting up a quarter-screen WIP version, send us a note and we’ll give you a refund. Of course if you do that, we might not let you buy the DVD version when it comes out.

3) The interview is still in two camera split screen; you know, one camera showing both Brett and Melanie side by side, and the other as a single-person close-up. That’s not the way it’s going to be in the final DVD. If watching it that way is going to bother you, then don’t watch! Wait for the DVD.

4) Color and audio on this version ARE NOT FINAL. Close, but not final. Good enough for someone to knows how to watch a work in progress, but if watching it that way is going to bother you, then don’t watch! Wait for the DVD.

5) There are no interstitials, you know, those little peaks at the lovemaking to come that I put in between the interview segments. Again (say it with me now!) if watching it that way is going to bother you, then don’t watch! Wait for the DVD.

6) Yes, you can share it, trade it, send it to your friends! There are already people buying our DVDs and loading our films onto torrent sites and fuck all if I can stop them, so I’m certainly not going to get cheesed if you share something that I purposely put online and asked you to download. You guys know the score. Comstock Films is me and Peggy. Selling DVDs is how we pay our bills. If you want more films, you need to give us money, otherwise we have to do something else. You give us money and we’ll give you DVDs of the best films we know how to make. So far it’s worked out pretty good for us. I hope you’re all happy with your end of bargain too!

But enough with the TOS bullshit. On to the film!

Brett and Melanie: Boi Meets Girl, A free, downloadable, quarter-screen work in progress version.

There might be another blog post or two before I go, and probably a few tweets, but mostly consider this “aloha”.  You can’t imagine how grateful I am to all of you for your support and for helping me make my dreams come true. I could not have done it without you.

Thank you everyone, and I’ll see you on the other side!

Back to the American Scene again, where conservative cultural critic and Reason Magazine editor Peter Suderman muses on how the next generation might be as comfortable expressing themselves music and video has his generation is with blogs and other text-based forms:

To me, that’s a potentially huge shift. And I frequently wonder if, perhaps even more than the social media revolution, it’s a shift that could produce huge changes in the way people communicate. We may end up seeing a generation as able and comfortable with audio production and video editing as my cohort is with web-browsing, blogging, email, and word processing.

In service of his post, Peter posted a little Garage Band ditty to show that new cheap digital tools let folks express themselves musically with sufficient polish that you don’t get bogged down in whether or not they can play, or how well it’s recorded.

       

MakingMusicIsEasy - PETER SUDERMAN

Perhaps not surprisingly Peter got jumped on right out of the gate (because no one is so brave, cruel and wise as when they are leaving anonymous comments on the internet):

Dude. It’s pretty late at night. You can take that down right now and no one will notice. Remember when Friedersdorf made some observations in the style of A Movable Feast? This is worse than that. Seriously, man. Nothing good can come of this.

It’s an easy swipe isn’t it? Someone puts their music up for the world to see, complete with provisos that it’s not to be taken seriously. But deep down we know that no one does that if they don’t think the music they put up sounds okay. It’s an easy target, a pinata, take a swing. Break it open and we’ll all dive in for the candy.

Except Peter’s right. As I’ve banged on time and time again, new tools change how people do things, and even changes who does things, and you never know where that’s going to lead. Mashing up a couple of the comments I left on Peter’s post:

My first major was music, composition and guitar performance (well actually my first major was math, but for the sake of this let’s say it was music.)

I was an okay guitarist, but I was a way above average theory and composition student. Freshman year I was in the second year class. 80% of the students washed out. The next year was just the four of us who survived, so it was like mini masters class. Awesome.

Except I can’t play keyboard. This is a big problem for anyone who wants to have a professional life in music, but especially a problem if you think you want to be a composure. I could get close with theory, plunking out lines one or two at a time. But I don’t have that “I can hear it all in my head thing” so I never really knew if I had written what I wanted until the teacher played it back. Sometimes it was pretty good, especially if I was staying inside well established rules of four-part harmony. Sometimes it was, well, experimental. Just writing this now I’m time traveling to a particular assignment that my professor was genuinely unsure if it was a piece of accidental avante gard genius or the worst music ever written. (the jury is still out.)

My guitar playing hit a wall, and I quit. But right about the time I was leaving I remember the school got a computer that was hooked up to a keyboard. You could play one line at a time and it would play back all the lines at once. Better yet, it would print out sheet music in parts. Awesome. If only they had had that machine two years earlier I might have stayed in music, there would have been no Tony Comstock, and think how much better the world would have been for that…

The absences of technology saved you all from me as a composer, but end up inflicting me as a filmmaker upon the world. But not digital media technology — digital word processing.

After getting rejected for a loan, I got on my roommate’s Mac SE30 and pounded out an angry letter to the president of my credit union. If I had been on a typewriter it never would have gone further than that. But because i was on a word processor I was able to remove typos and misspellings, but also tune and refine my argument — the first time I had ever done that.

Long story short, within 6 months the declined $400 loan had become $15K in loans so I could buy cameras, lights, stands and a car to carry it all in. I was in business. The rest, as they say, is history.

That letter wasn’t the last time I’d use new technology to get around a roadblock in my career path.

Not long after I met Peggy, I bought a Radius Videovision card and the money that made me on my next project was enough to make a down payment on our apartment. Not long after we got our apartment, I got a Media100, and the money that made me on the next project was enough to make a down payment on our house.

But it’s not just about the entrepreneurial side of making art. New tools can be amazingly powerful in unleashing new ideas and new approaches.

I was one of the first people in New York to buy a Sony PD100a, in fact I bought two of them because in the process of doing the studies for what became Comstock Films I realized that cheap DV cameras could be used in a way that would bring cinematography in documentary filmmaking closer to a “one-camera” feel, without tipping over into the “three-camera”/sitcom feel usually associated with multi-camera video-camera productions. Those are the cameras we used to shoot Marie and Jack and Xana and Dax, as well as most of my NGO documentaries.

But Peter’s post isn’t really about all that, it’s about new technology changing the way that people communicate in their everyday lives, and that’s not without significance to a working artist either. Back to my comments:

When I was a upper-level undergrad and BFA student, we used to say the best place to crib ideas was from second term photo students. Enough craft and confidence, but not yet ruined by thinking they know “the right way” to do it. Most of the art I look at these days is made avocationally. It’s like being able to go to a second term crit any day of the week. Lots and lots to steal from. Making a living? Well that’s harder in some ways. It’s hard to make money doing something that anyone can do, so you have to find a way to do something that anyone can’t do. Same as it ever was, right?

And somehow this morning, this all seems tied back to the last post, about learning something new about how things work – boats, film, music – and then having the courage to seize the opportunities that new knowledge presents. The FinalCutPro suite comes with an amazing array of tools, including Garage Band’s big brother, Sound Track Pro and some other fairly powerful sound tools.

25 years ago, back when I was a struggling music student, I would have sold an eye for something like Sound Track Pro; and reading Peter’s post I remembered that after finishing Damon and Hunter meant to reward myself with a little playtime with the program. IIRC, I meant to give myself a month or six weeks to figure out how it works and just to enjoy making some music after so much time away.

Well you know how it is with intentions, good and otherwise, I made a couple of tracks and then got caught up with something else and haven’t had the program open since.

But I thought it was actually pretty brave of Peter to put his GB track up where all his TAS fellows could pounce on it (or maybe worse, ignore it completely.) Inspired by Peter, here are the couple of tracks I made:

Ain’t It Funky Now

Stroke It

I don’t know where these tracks fit into my own personal taxonomy of effort. Maybe they’re like that letter to the credit union I wrote that changed my life. Or maybe they’re like the studies that Peggy and I used to do, not really meant for public consumption, but not without value. Maybe they’re just embarrassing.

Or maybe they’re like those second term photo-student works that used to inspire me – just enough skill and confidence to be interesting or charming without being ruined by being self-conscious. Maybe I can start stealing from myself!

I started writing this last May, but wasn’t quite sure where it was taking me. I got as far as Kenya and then laid it aside. Today I think I’ve finally got my bearings on this post, and know how I want to finish it off.

———-

In 1998 we got a Newfoundland puppy and a year later my wife got the idea that we should get a rowboat to teach the dog water rescue work. Being an incorrigible DIYer I thought I’d give building the boat a try, and a friend of mine suggested I look up Harold “Dynamite” Payson, and through that I found “Instant Boats” and the work of Phil C. Bolger.

 By the later Summer of 1999 we were taking our freshly painted Teal out for it’s first sail — by “we” I mean Peggy with our first child in her belly, our (now full sized) Newfoundland dog, and me — gently gliding across the nearby bay. I celebrated the birth of our daughter by beginning on a Bolger “Light Scooner”, which had it’s maiden voyage on October 1st, 2000 with wife, now hatched daughter, the dog, and me. (That me , the dog and the scooner circa 2001 in the picture.)

Through boat building I also met Bob Wise, who along with his wife Sheila, built the “ultimate instant boat” in the form of the Loose Moose II, a plywood sharpie sailboat big enough for them to live aboard and capable enough to cross an ocean.

Phil Bolger’s instant boats work so well (cheap and fast to build, capable for their purpose) because they strip away the pretense of what a boat is suppose to be, and get to the heart of what it needs to do. They use materials in novel and efficient ways. They don’t cleave to romantised forms.

I built my Teal on my patio in a couple of weekend for a couple hundred dollars. Bob and Sheila built the LMII in about a year in an aircraft hanger at Charles De Gall airport for less than most people spend on a new car. Bob and I began corrisponding, mostly me asking him questions about the reality of making a big boat.

In the Fall of 2002 I got a commission to make a promotional documentary about an NGO relief program in Afghanistan. I knew Bob been had in Afghanistan with the Northern Alliance during the offensive against the Taliban earlier that year, so I asked if Bob had any advice for me. What he sent back was this:

1) Grow a beard.

2) Get good kevlar.

3) Get really warm long underwear.

4) Can I come?

A couple months later we were in a bar in Belgrade, Serbia, having just finished 10 long days with a stubbornly unhelpful Russian guide. (The story of how we ended up in Serbia instead of Afghanistan we’ll save for another day.) Bob was talking to me about shooting film, and I was having trouble hearing him. He was telling me my work was good enough to shoot on real cameras. I was hearing him say that because I shot on video my work wasn’t real. I remember being near tears as he (patiently) explained to me all the things that shooting on 16mm would let me do that I couldn’t do on a Sony handicam.

Bob persisted. When Bob got back to the Caribbean (he and his wife live there on a boat) he sent me a link to a camera on eBay, and the next thing I knew I had a Russian-made Krasnogorsk K-3. From the first shot I saw come out of that little wind-up camera (Kiko Martin as the trigger man) I realized Bob was right. My work was good enough for film, and I was just been to scared to hope that shooting film would actually make a difference.

Another half year later and Bob and I were sitting in Jomo Kenyata Airport in Nairobi. We had just spent a month in the parts of Keyna where the tourist don’t go; the parts that are people, and cattle, and poverty. Kiko had gone back to New York a week earlier with 30 precious spools of film, and Bob and I spent another week on Lake Victoria making a short film about fishermen and boats.

 
Fair Winds/Uncertain Future: The Fishing Dhows of Lake Victoria

Having already sold me on shooting film, Bob was on to what to do after the film was made. He was talking about Bruce Brown and Warren Miller and four-walling, he was talking about short-run digital printing, he was talking about pitching production stories to industry trade magazines. This time I wasn’t resisting, I was taking notes.

At the time Marie and Jack was finished but virtually unseen by anyone. There were fewer than 200 hand-made copies in the world. Six years later, we’ve done six or seven commercial pressings of the Marie and Jack DVD, and we have five more of our erotic documentaries completed, all of which have been financially and critically successful and three more in post-production. There are literally tens of thousands of copies of our films in the world, and all of this is in no small measure due to taking Bob’s advice and running with it.

Bob also helped me when I decided it was time stop waiting until I had enough time to build a big boat and just to buy a good old plastic boat and get on with it; and for the last couple of months he has been helping me get ready for my impending trip from New York to the Virgin Islands (or where ever we eventually fetch up.)

So why back to this post today?

Back in 2002, when I asked Bob why he, a person with way more film experience than I had wanted to come work on one of my ULB docs, he said, “If you get it about Bolger, you probably get it about making films, ” and I guess that kind of turned out to be true. I’ve been able to take an unconventional approach to the idea of putting sex on film, come up with some novel technical solutions, and put that all in service of an objective, instead of a form. 

But the thing that’s on my mind today is what happens when someone shows you that many of the obstacles to making the boat you want to make, or making the film you want to make, or living the life you want to live are all in your imagination? That your reasons you can’t are really excuses, conceived in doubt and nurtured by fear?

Over at TheAmericanScene.com a commentor asked me the following:

Tony,why the hell can’t I find anyone who wants to pay me to think up great ideas? It’s like they all want me to work them out, write them down, edit and polish the bastards until they shine like the sun. And even then most of them won’t pay! What gives?

I know he was asking (half) in jest, but it made me remember something I wrote about boat-building right around the time I was first getting to know Bob:

That may be the most seductive aspect of Phil Bolger’s work. When you look at plans for any of his oversized “instant boats” you can actually imagine building them. Sit down with a pad a of paper and a calculator, and you can actually imagine being able to afford to build them. You start to believe you could actually have the boat of your dreams for less than a Korean station wagon. It’s tremendously exciting. It’s even a little scary…

There’s nothing so awful as the moment you realize your dreams are within reach. I have literally been reduced to tears by the sudden epiphany that the only thing standing between me and living the life I want is the doing. When I look at the plans for the the Loose Moose II, or Illinois, or Wyoming, or Breakdown Schooner, I am faced with the terrible knowledge that they are all within reach; that if that’s what I really want, it’s something I can do; that my day of reckoning has arrived.

But what I’m realizing today is that day of reckoning arrives over and over again. That everyday presents the opportunity to decide to do what you want to do, and with that, the opportunity to make excuses.

Does that mean the glass is half full or half empty? I’m not sure. I guess it depends on what you want.

(Between my starting this post on May 18  and finishing it today, Philip C. Bolger chose to end his life rather than allow Alzheimer’s to take away his ability to decide when it was no longer worth living. In the early morning hours of May 24  Phil rose from his bed without waking his wife, went to a secluded spot in the back of their property, put a pistol to his head, and pulled the trigger. Phil’s solution to this last terrible “design brief” was as bold, ruthless, and rigorous as any of his most celebrated boat designs. He is survived by his wife and long-time collaborator Susanne Altenburger, and legions of fans, who feel as I do, that his designs and the philosophy for living that he expressed through those designs, left a powerful and positive mark on our lives.)