babinscreams

Today I finally made the decision to sell the house. The material thing will be good to let go of. The past will evaporate in a big way as another family takes over the space we once occupied. And speaking of space. The last couple of weeks I've moved the computer and tape recorder(s) into the room and the very space Dad occupied at the end. There, I have been listening and digitizing some of the audio recordings he made ranging over nearly 50 years. The most moving were a monologue recounting his layoff in 1970 and another on a weekend encounter group he attended. The most painful was listening to him patronize a woman who was a friend about her racism in 1963. Dad recorded hundreds of hours of monologue. It was amazing how long he could talk without needing anyone to prompt him, critique or question him. He was for most of his adult life a man who pushed himself to question and learn. My respect for him in that regard continues to grow as I hear him on these tapes, so alive and ...

Fascinating changes keep coming. My directing has taken off via the world of political commercials. I traveled to Hawaii and over the course of four days filmed two spots. There appear to be several more coming in the next few weeks. The day before leaving, I had lunch with the head of the cinematography division of USC cinema. It looks like I'll be teaching a course in the fall there. The week before that, I was asked to become the editor of The Society of Camera Operators Magazine. I accepted. I don't know the first thing about editing a magazine, but ignorance will probably serve me well, and I have a few ideas that people seem intimidated by, so I guess I'm on the right track. And lastly, I've been offered a job operating a "virtual" camera on an animated film called "Monster House". This mostly computer created film started with actors on a stage wearing dots all over their bodies which emitted light. The light information was fed into the compu...