Many thanks for chiming in with comments on yesterday. As with my mid-trip post, it is both surprising and touching to find out I was missed.

Yesterday I say I didn’t know where to start. But when it’s hard to know where to start, the easiest place to start is at the beginning, and where sailing is concerned my beginning is in Corona Del Mar, sometime in the late Seventies. My childhood best friend’s mother had remarried and I was just old enough to take the train up the coast to visit for a weekend during the Summer. The new husband (Ned) was a yachtsman. He had a big ketch, and my best friend (Jay) now spent his weekends sailing his sabot.

So that’s what we did on my first visit to Jay’s new home. We sailed his sabot all around Newport Harbor, and by the end of the weekend I understood the basics of how a sailboat worked. I was also hooked, completing the surfing, fishing, boating trifecta that has formed foundation my avocational life ever since.

Since the late Nineties I’ve been building boats, crafts ranging from a six foot pram for my daughter to a 25 foot sharpie schooner named after her, and I had been entertaining the fantasy of building a boat that we’d all be able to sail away on (and come back!)

But the economics of the last few years have been so weird that building big boats makes less and less sense. The cost of materials (wood, epoxy, paint, etc.) has skyrocketed. Meanwhile there’s a surfeit of well-found GRP boats from the Sixties and Seventies. (The ultimate useful life of glass reinforced plastic hulls is still unknown, but so far they appear to be nearly indestructible.)

This all came into focus late last Summer (I was outlining yet another design concept on my lawn with stakes and string.) I realized that the fantasy of building a boat was getting in the way of the fantasy of sailing away on a boat. I began looking at classified ads.

In October I found a boat that was sea-worthy, big enough, and within our budget (which is to say we’ve put off replacing our 1990 Volvo with a minivan for another few years.) It was in Georgia, so I flew down to look at it and spent about a week sailing it and living on it. In November we bought it, and in late December we drove from New York to Georgia, got on the boat and began our adventure.

We spent the next few weeks working our way down the coast of Florida. By late February we had (somehow) made it to Lake Worth, and the day after the full moon, we set out for our first (modest) open water passage; the jump across the Gulf Stream to the Abacos.

We made it and spent the next four weeks in the Abacos, then sailed back, running the 140 miles from Grand Keys to Port Canaveral in one long 32 hour stretch. With the benefit of our hard-won experience, we made the trip back to our car in Georgia in another six days. (Going the other way, getting from the car to Grand Keys had taken two months.)

Our trip was plagued by, perhaps even characterized by bad luck, bad weather, neophyte mistakes, doubt and uncertainty. The Southeast had one of its worst Winters in recent years, and it turns out that the Abacos is about the worst place you could choose to go on a boat in March (frontal passages, often violent, every 48-96 hours; very few all-weather anchorages; none of them deep enough for our boat to enter on low tide, if at all.)

Yes, sprinkled in amongst the drama and the trauma there were some wonderful moments, but mostly it was the most relentlessly grueling thing I’ve ever done, and I did it with my wife (who’s deathly afraid of water over her head,) my eight year old and two year old daughters, a very big dog and a small cat. It was never truly dangerous, but danger constantly lurked at the edges of our trip. Stress makes people make mistakes, we were under nearly constant stress, and mistakes on a boat can kill you.

Yet somehow we made it. Things were often bad, but not once did things go from bad to worse. My hydrophobic wife is the same person who shot the beautiful and award-winning “Ashley and Kisha” the very first time she raised a film camera to her eye. My wife is nothing if not resilient, adaptable, and able to rise to a challenge. Yesterday I wrote about falling asleep while the boat made way under a starry sky; well that was on our run back across the Gulf Stream to Port Canaveral, and Peggy was at the helm.

My girls drove back from Georgia. I posted a noticed to a boat-building list that I needed crew, and four weeks later we were all together again, 1000 miles from where we first got on the boat. Who knows what our two year old thought of the trip, but our eight year old thought it was wonderful, says she’d do it again in an instant. (Has she already forgotten how scared she was when the last front that we endured started spinning off water-spouts at a rate of about one a minute, or just come to an early understanding that life is a rich stew of varied experiences? Or maybe sitting on the bow while dolphins splashed and lept was that good.)

Yesterday afternoon she and I went out to boat for study-hall (she is bedeviled by the same inane reading comprehension assignments that tormented me when I was in the third grade.) The weather’s just nice enough to be on the boat (with a sweater) but it’s still too early to be in the water. But those days will here soon enough, and they’ll be no insipid reading comprehension homework to muck it up.

I’m home, and it’s good to be home.

I am back home.

Peggy and the girls got home last month (they got off the boat in Georgia,) and I just finished the month-long task of bringing our boat up the Eastern Seaboard. I got home three days ago. I’ve been doing laundry, mowing the lawn, sleeping, and reading my friends’ and colleagues’ blogs to get up to speed on everything that’s been going on during my four month hiatus, and it looks like there are a lot of exciting projects cooking — books, collumns, art-spaces, new films — all sorts of things!

Would you like to know about our trip? I’d like to tell you, but it’s hard to know where to start, except that long before I ever had any aspiration to make films, I dreamed of sailing a boat out of sight of land, through the night, and on to someplace with warm clear water.  I can now say, with more than a little satisfaction, that I’ve fallen asleep on deck while the boat made way under a star-filled sky, and I’ve played with my children in water as clear and warm as any five-star hotel’s pool. Some days were heaven, some were indescribably hard; little, if any of it, was anything like a vacation.  But in the sum and total the trip was one of the most worthwhile things I’ve ever done.

Against that, I am, for the moment, enjoying the fantasy that making films and getting them seen is going to feel easy by comparison to what we’ve just done. But of course they are different adventures, each with their own frustrations and satisfactions. But maybe (just maybe) I’ll find that I have a little more perspective on the film ‘ting. No matter how frustrating (or financially damaging) it may be to have a film banned, or passed over by a festival, neither poses a risk to life or limb.

So, back to the edit bay, and “Bill and Desiree”. Back to blogging. Back to newsletters and press releases. Back to all of the things that are my (so called) real life. And it’s good to be back. It’s good to be home.

Hard on the wind, somewhere in the Gulf Stream

First: an apology. I didn’t mean to disappear without a trace; and it really didn’t occur to me that anyone would notice, let alone worry.

Second: thank you, thank you, thank you! Thank you to my friends who wrote me when our Web site went offline. Thank you to my friends who wrote to say , “Is everything okay?” And thank you to my friends who wrote to say, “Hey, I miss you.”

Everything is fine. Peggy and I are spending some long overdue time with our children, having one of those family adventures that has been as much hard work as it has been adventurous fun. (Yesterday we sailed through a 40kts+ squall, with blinding rain so fierce it blocked our GPS signal for 15 minutes. Thank goodness for compasses and the rock solid reliability of the Earth’s magnetic field!)

I thought I might get some work done on this trip. Ha! If you think it’s hard to find time to edit while managing the marketing and promotion of a small film production company, try going sailing with two young children, a dog and a cat! So for those of you who have asked, no, there isn’t another film on the eve of release.

But, we’ll be back home before too much longer, and I’ve learned one thing that will (hopefully) help me get the next film finished. These films are good enough that they keep selling, even without me flogging them relentlessly. Hopefully that will help keep me from worrying that this will all come crashing down around me while I’m spending time in the edit bay instead of blogging, writing press releases, and generally blowing my own horn.

Speaking of blowing my own horn, some exciting news. Both DAMON AND HUNTER and ASHLEY AND KISHA will be a part of this year’s Israel International LGBT Film Festival, taking place June 24-28 in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa. And this morning we got a request to submit a screener of ASHLEY AND KISHA to New York’s Newfest. No, I won’t be going to Israel, so cross your fingers for Newfest. I’d really like to see ASHLEY AND KISHA play in front of an audience!

Now I’ve got to use the rest of my internet time to see if I can find an “Idiot’s Guide to Tapping Aluminum.” The boat’s boom and gooseneck are trying to part ways, and there’s still 500 miles between us and where we left our car…

A couple of days ago Atlantic editor Andrew Sullivan made a blog post about the jitters he’s feeling about his impending nuptuals.

Andrew sometimes posts bits I send him, so I sent him a note, encouraging I hope, which he blogged, along with another reader’s note.

Good thoughts both, I reckon. But I can’t help wonder if people who know my films and read my blog will be able to guess which note is mine!

UPDATE: My uncle guessed wrong.

Many thanks to my wife Peggy for untwisting the very kludged stylesheet that had been previously been running my blog, and pouring it into something more inkeeping with the rest of ComstockFilms.com

*schmewch*

Three long-time supporters of our efforts here at Comstock Films have new digs.

The Always Aroused Girl can now be found at www.aagblog.com

Viviane’s Sex Carnival has moved to www.thesexcarnival.com

Chelsea Girl is still at prettydumbthings.typepad.com, but now she is also Chelsea Summers at the eponymous www.chelseasummers.com.

Update your links, and congrats to them on their new digs!

This just in! The incomparable Thomas S. Roche is now at www.thomasroche.com!

The daily business of running Comstock Films takes more time than I ever expected, but slowly but surely, Peggy and I have been getting it more rountinized. I’m also hopeful that whatever the next few months has in store for us, it’s going not going to be quite the roller coaster of the various brushfires that we’ve had to deal with in the last twelves months. I am looking forward to working on BILL AND DESIREE in a state of (relative) tranquility.

I’m also hoping to use this blog as a sort of working journal on this edit. I have a rather archane way of keeping track of my progress by incorporating dates into the dozens of filenames that are generated in the course of cutting a film, but in the 15 or so years I’ve been editing film, I’ve never kept a proper log. But there’s no time like the present to start, right?

So, Bill and Desiree, Day 1. I wonder what day it will be when I’m finished?

As long as men have been sailing the open ocean, there have been tales of immense waves, waves much larger than the surrounding sea-state, looming up and devastating and even sinking large, ocean going vessels. Eye-witness accounts of these waves put them at 75-100 feet high, but for years, scientists dismissed these accounts as an extreme example of the sorts of exaggerations that fishermen are known to tell.

You see according to all scientific knowledge of waves, one of these giants, or “rogue waves” as they are known, could only happen once every 10,000 years in all the world’s oceans, making the sighting of one a statistical improbability. But despite this “statistical improbability”, eye-witness accounts continued, and large, ocean going vessels continued to be lost without a trace at a rate of about one a week. (These disappearances were blamed on poor maintenance, operator error, etc.)

Now as it turns out, there was one wave scientist, Al Osborne, who started with the premise that these eye-witness accounts and ship disappearances were actually happening, and began searching for a scientific explanation. Employing quantum mechanics, Osborne developed a wave model that, if valid, showed that these rogue waves might be far more common than the the once ever 10,000 years predicted by the standard model.

Osborne’s theory was dismissed.

Then on New Year’s Day, 1985, a monster that behaved exactly as predict by the Osborne model swept over an oil platform in the North Sea. More recently, advanced radar imaging of the oceans has shown that the “non-linear monsters” are quite common, roaming the oceans, where they all too often leave no witnesses to their devastation.

—–

My scholastic background is in science. Underpinning my BFA is a bachelor of science degree, with an emphasis on math and physics. I believe the development of the scientific method is one of the great steps forward in the history of the human race.

The scientific method begins with observation, so that in mind I’d like to offer the following observations:

In the wake of a devastating natural disaster that garners international media attention, a blogger claiming to command a $400/hour rate for internet consulting offers to donate the proceeds from a day of his services to relief efforts. Nothing further on this is ever heard.

This same blogger, still claiming to command $400/hour as an internet consultant, implores his blog readership to join in a fund-raiser to buy a handful of playstation memory sticks to provide portable pornography to US troops stationed in Islamic countries. Price of the memory sticks? About $100 each a J&R Music. Again, after the initial post, nothing more about this is ever heard.

This same blogger, while claiming to advise the highest levels of corporate America on internet strategy can offer as any evidence of his acumen only a string failed blog ventures and penny-anti domain name auctions.

—–

Human beings have the strange ability to ignore what is plainly observable when these observations conflict with how they think the world should be, or how they think the world ought to be. For years scientists managed to blind themselves to the huge body of evidence–indeed, the plain fact–of rogue waves because these waves didn’t fit into their own prejudices. These prejudices can be so blinding they can cause even the most acute minds to ignore or dismiss what is plainly in front of their faces.

An avalanche of traffic (second only to Google) from Spain yesterday, which it turns out traces back to an oblique two word link on the Spainish launguage blog Vicisitud y Sordidez.

The linking words were “tiempo real”, and linked back to a post titled Memo to Sienna Miller: Real sex does not have jump cuts that was half google-bait, and half a meandering riff on the way the passage of time is depicted in love-scenes.

Judging from the number of people who visited via that one little link, Vicisitud y Sordidez has a readership that would makes the world of sex-blogs, even top tier sex blogs, look pretty small. But my command of the Spanish launguage is barely sufficient to allow me to travel in Mexico and usually get on the bus to the right destination, or actually get what I want in a restarunt. It’s no where near sufficient to make heads or tails of what sort of blog Vicisitud y Sordidez is. Even with the help of the Google translator, I really don’t know either the post in particular, or the blog in general is about.

Whatever the case, I think it’s pretty nifty that six months after I made the “jump cuts” post, such a well-trafficed blog found a reason to link to it. But it still leave the question: Quien es Vicisitud y Sordidez? (Sorry, I can’t find the right key combination to put the upside-down question mark at the front of the sentence.)

Well maybe it’s me.

After a week of tearing my hair out and exchanging a lot of email with SEO specialist Danny Sullivan, Seth Finkelstein, and Phillip Lenssen, and coming up with a lot of theories why ComstockFilms.com fell of the face of the earth on some of our most important search terms, this morning, while chewing over it some more I remembered three different, vaguely connected things and maybe, just maybe I found a reason that this has all happened.

Last week, against the worry that some of our feeds might have been looking like duplicate content, we made changes to our robots.txt file. We checked our robots.txt file in using Google’s webmaster tools, and everything seemed fine. It looked like it was doing what it was supposed to be doing.

But this morning when I tried to feed our robots.txt file to Google’s URL removal form, it spat it back out and accused us of bad syntax.

Really? I went back and checked it with Google’s webmaster tools. All a-okay.

But just for fun, I re-wrote the (alledgedly) offending lines, and bingo, the URL remover ate the file like orange sherbert.

A few hours later there are still some goofy things on the first page of our Google site index, but at least our index.html is there too.

My theory is the bad syntax opened a door into all those files we didn’t want the Googlebot messing around in, and that’s how all those nasty, outdated URLs ended up in our site index, and pushed out all our nice new Relevant URLs. Hopefully by tomorrow morning it will look better, not worse, and maybe by the end of next week things will be back to where they were at the begining of last week.

Or not. Time will tell.

In the mean while, we make a lot of progress on ASHLEY & KISHA and I cold-called like a mad man and picked up a few new retailers. I remember reading about the North Korean human wave tactics and how they would simply flow around restance points and envelop the enemy. This week Peggy and I were our own little human wave. The Google issue resisted everything we could come up with, so we flowed around it and claimed victories in production and sales. I’m exhausted, but proud of us. Whether or not this robots.txt thing is the fix, tomorrow morning’s lox and bagels will feel well-earned!