i dont care enough to post anymore guys. well. it's christmas eve. elise spent the night last night and i think her music video is pretty much done (explanation here) so go watch it. also we saw the two towers, which we all loved. especially gollum and legolas and gimli and i dislike arwen and i wanted to see more eomer. but if you havent seen it, then DO. i liked it better than the first movie but i dont know... i know that i will get killed for saying this but i didnt actually find the book all that amazing. sorry guys.... the story and the mythology behind it are definitely the best things about the book but i just really couldn't get into it at all. i feel like the movies have fleshed out the characters so much more, as well as making tolkein's land a reality. i dont know, come argue with me i guess. the comments are open to the public, you know.

so i was trying to edit "untouchable face" when all of a sudden it did this crazy error and asked me to quit. so i do, and it says "the project file is not readable" and shows me that my clips still exist but it won't actually let me get to them to edit or watch. so dad kicks me off the computer and messes around for a few hours. i lie on the couch in misery and watch Noggin in sheer desperadoes. when dad is done doing his own stuff, we get on the Apple discussion groups and try to get some help. dad makes me leave to eat ice cream and lie on the couch in more desperadoes. but everything is okay! we use BBEdit to fix some screwed up text in the file and the movie still plays like a dream. i am hoping to upload it soon but i've gotta ask the host and make sure. the movie isnt done yet but it's 8.9MB. since yesterday at noon ended the first semester of the school year and the entire DYKWYCA team is now on Winter Break, we are free to work on movies. so i PROMISE that "untouchable face" will be done by the time break is over. even if it's not perfect. that part will come later. sorry for rambling, guys, have a wonderful break!

one of the archive weeks is disappearing. it's pretty distressing. i'm trying to fix it. let me know if it actually exists and i'm blind, please.

Which Sleater-Kinney Girl Are You?

hahahaha

12/12/02 Kill Rock Stars newsletter:

"Mary Hansen from the 5RC band Schema, and also from Stereolab, was killed in East London on Monday afternoon after being struck by a car while riding her bicycle. She was 36.

Although no-one at KRS/5RC had actually ever met Mary, we considered her one of us, and we grieve. We feel fortunate to have been able to release some of her work during her time here on Earth. Our condolences go out to her friends and family and band-mates. The world has lost a great one."

Schema - We Think We're Sane (Mp3)(site)
absolutely brilliant song. it's spinning off into another dimension and feeling very firmly rooted to the floor at the same time. i think the roots come from mary's voice because she knows just what she's saying. if it wasn't there, this song might be the soundtrack to some low-budget outer-space movie. it's amazing. i can't find any lyrics, but please listen really as closely as you can. when you hear this you'll believe that the world has indeed lost a great one.

elise's article (see post from 11/12) finally came out in the school newspaper, The Scoll, today. it was so exciting! my wonderful energy was floating around all day plus it was snowing plus things were just beautiful. i am really trying to finish up "untouchable face."

in other news, morgan was filmed in a scene for morgan fox's movie, blue citrus hearts, on monday.

crazy week i dont know whats going on. had a nice weekend. can't really remember it. ha. it's the morning time and i am about to leave.

i am used to backseats
daughter/mother
sister/brother
lovie/lover
i am used to the backseat
i fit there fine
behind what is happening
i see
hearts
i am learning to sit
in between friends
i feel
hearts
warm and this is where
love is

in the aeroplane over the sea

What a beautiful face
I have found in this place
That is circling all round the sun
What a beautiful dream
That could flash on the screen
In a blink of an eye and be gone from me
Soft and sweet
Let me hold it close and keep it here with me

And one day we will die
And our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea
But for now we are young
Let us lay in the sun
And count every beautiful thing we can see
Love to be
In the arms of all I'm keeping here with me

Anna's ghost all around
Hear her voice as it's rolling and ringing through me
Soft and sweet
How the notes all bend and reach above the trees

Now how I remember you
How I would push my fingers through
Your mouth to make those muscles move
That made your voice so smooth and sweet
And now we keep where we don't know
All secrets sleep in winter clothes
With one you loved so long ago
Now he don't even know his name

What a beautiful face
I have found in this place
That is circling all round the sun
And when we meet on a cloud
I'll be laughing out loud
I'll be laughing with everyone I see
Can't believe how strange it is to be anything at all

--neutral milk hotel

where's your full-time gear?

thanksgiving was nice. i didn't really do anything for most of the week. i went home with elise on tuesday to take care of her poor head, which is a lie. it was an excuse for me to be there. she hurt her head, if you didn't know. read her thing about it. her dad didn't want her to drive the car in her condition, which didn't really make sense to either of us, so we sat at her house and watched creepy TV called drew carey and home improvement. linda, elise's mother, fed us wonderful food and then robin came over and was fed too. linda actually offered to drive us somewhere, too! so we picked up laylee and came to my house and watched a charlie brown christmas. we sat around and cast and recast for our movie version. it was great fun. i can't really remember what all we did but it was a nice night. first robin got picked up by her mother, then elise got picked up by her sister lena who had just gotten back in town. i filmed the reunion. it was lovely. then laylee got picked up by her crazy brother who refused to come to the door but sat out in his car for like five years. it was nice. a nice night. the next day i got packed and sat around and elise came over for a couple hours and we worked on untouchable face. she left about an hour before we did. i spent most of my thanksgiving break in jackson, mississippi with my grandparents. i bought two cds - grace by jeff buckley and trompe le monde by the pixies. you should know that "letter to memphis" (the song on which this blog's name is based) is on that pixies album. download it immediately and read the lyrics. it's a beautiful song. anyway i like both cds a lot but i have only listened to each one once. thanksgiving dinner was at cracker barrel with my parents and my grandparent since morgan felt too sick to go. when we got back, we found out she has step throat. poor baby. so yes we got back on saturday afternoon and i think we mostly just sat around for most of the day. my family went to see harry potter around 4 and they liked it. i am very glad i did not go. elise, lena, and brock picked me up at about 7 to go to elise's house where we ate thanksgiving leftovers with kevin, robin, and acacia. elise's brother aaron was there with his friends so we didnt really see him. lena was making clothes and the parentals were off doing god-knows-what so they were basically absent as well. we did get to see a lot of charlie, lena's dog that's part coyote or wolf or something. i had a lovely evening. brock filmed a lot. kevin drove brock, elise (haha) and i home. he and elise broke up practically right after they left my house. i don't think elise is having a very good week. i am waiting for her to call.

i feel awkward and clumsy in these halls
because of eyes and eyes and eyes
faces i never knew
i used to watch the ground
strange taking my eyes off my shoes
to reach
strange thing my hand out of my pocket
to wave
strange in prison
to smile

i've started doing some editting for "untouchable face". if i wasn't going out of town in about half an hour, then i definitely would finish editting by the time Thanksgiving break is over. but since i am, i can't really make a good estimate. footage is looking great though. maybe i will make some new stills for the page. until then, have a happy turkey day!

keep away from the freaks on the fringe. they only talk to you cuz you give them a good excuse to cry.

i had a great weekend. i got to hang out with robin, brock, elise, and LAYLEE! it was wonderful. on friday, brock and elise picked me up around 4(?). i think the only reason they drove all the way out to my house is because brock wanted ethiopian food. (i live next to abyssinia.) i can't remember how it came up, but we called laylee, who was HOME for once! so we went to go get her and then we got robin. by that point we were very far away from abyssinia and we were headed towards elise's house, so we decided to go there for pizza. at the last second we changed our minds and went to jersey mike's where we got sandwhiches except laylee who was practically broke so she shared mine. then we walked around walgreens and hung out outside the kroger and i pushed elise around in one of those creepy kids carts. keith appeared at some point and it was awkward, especially when i whispered to elise who he was and she couldn't stop stuttering. so he left. brock filmed people going into kroger and we got lots of Disapproving Looks. it was great. then elise and robin drove off. laylee and brock bonded beautifully and i talked to jerry (the camera). elise and robin came back eventually. they tried to make me pee in someone's yard but we ended up just coming to my house and sitting around. then we thought it would be fun if we all spent the night with elise. so while she called her mom i talked to my parents. so brock wasn't allowed to sleep at elise's house sadly, and robin couldn't stay because it was her mom's birthday the next day. so laylee and i spent the night with elise and it was wonderful. mostly we just sat around and talked and goofed off. it was great. she had to take us home before 2 so we played on the playground by Richland a little bit and then elise drove us home. it was weird, being driven home like that. not that i didn't enjoy it. i love me some lise.
so i hung out at home for a little while before we went to the screening of momo's curse at the media co-op. they had some technical problems but it turned out to be okay. wow i remember that i had lots to say about it but i can't remember anything. there were four different camera angles at all times, which was a very good idea since the play was so insane but i don't think the camera people had any instruction or anything. so there was one camera that was just a wide shot the whole time and you couldnt see a damn thing that was actually happening. one camera had no tripod and it was absolutely insane and kept closing up on random people in the audience or random bits of set. the other two were better camerapeople, even though one of them was tinted red for some reason. i dont know that anyone really understood the concept of the play. or maybe they just needed to have better planning. they mostly filmed bill. like most of the time, four cameras were on him and one (if we were lucky) was on some part of the (massive) ensemble. and as filmmakers, i think that the camera guys were very intent on detail and imagery. so you would see a really interesting image, like somebodys disembodied hands doing something, but it would be completely wrong because you had no sense of what was going on, which is fairly bad in a play. everyone in the theatre had seen the play of course, because it was just the company and friends, but it was kind of crazy. the surrealist scene looked great though. lots was missing from the chaos scene after that though. in fact lots of bits were quite disappointing, which is not to say that it isn't completely AWESOME that the co-op even did that, for free and taking time away from their own projects. thank you, co-op. we love you to death and pieces. also it was very nice getting to see OOV people again, even though not everyone came. so after visiting a bit, i went with the fam to cafe ole down the street where we had a very quick quick quick dinner before morgan and i went back to first congo to see the Lucero documentary, which was great. margaret, katherine warren, melanie, melissa, and alice were all there. it was a good time, plus i got one of those great organic sodas and morgan got those great organic jelly beans and khy shared some of his organic popcorn with us. it made up for the tiny dinner.
right now i am really regretting all the songs i never did for music log. i regret leaving but i felt like i had to and i think it's best that i did. so i guess that you guys are going to start getting little music reviews and downloadables here, if you don't mind. music log has really gone downhill though, i feel like. 11/23 post should be proof enough. as if the writing isn't bad enough, is anyone keeping up with archives? how come morgan got kicked off, if she's not even really being replaced? the only reason she was supposed to leave, originally, was because there were going to be six new people, plus brittany, and everyone would have one day. but brittany still has all her days, billy has all my days, and evan has morgan's day? it's crazy, i swear. and the music? well i have this playlist of 220 songs that have been done on music log at some point. i rate my songs with iTunes, and all the old posts have four or five stars. the new ones range from two to three stars. maybe i need to change with the times or something but i like what i like and what can i say? so i'm not impressed by these bands called McLusky and Minus the Bear and i never DID like Grandaddy or The Smiths. all these bands are so damn generic! they don't sound like anything and they don't sound unique, much less interesting. it's not that there's no good music left online. seriously, i can find tons. look at this.

Electrelane - Many Peaks (Mp3)(site)
beautiful beautiful beautiful song! it starts mellow and gets really intense and goes back to mellow. it's instrumental rock but for once it's NOT BORING!! alanna thinks that most instrumental rock is shit. believe me, guys, this song is great. there's guitar and piano but there are strings, horns, and clarinets too. it makes me want to bounce around and i would if i wasn't pretending to do english homework. plus this band is on Mr. Lady which just increases their coolness by about a billion.

drinking tea instead of gin

this week is insanely long and ungood. i even stayed home sick on monday and i feel like we should have had a Friday years ago. but farther back... this weekend was very good. i went home with elise on friday. brock gave us a tour of his crib (which is like a hotel, i swear. there are about ten staircases. there's this balcony thing that overlooks this huge ballroom kind of place, and there's just a couch there for no reason. i don't think it's ever been sat on. i'm moving into his closet. it's huge and it smells like hamster.) elise got a call from her mom that her article about Do You Know Where Your Children Are? Productions article is going to be on the front page of the school newspaper!!! she was radiating excitement all evening. brock said he felt like he'd written the article and i felt like that too. we decided that we are one being. we went to some roly poly place for dinner but i couldn't make up my mind on what to order so i didn't have anything. we took brock back to his mansion and drove around. we ended up at first congregational church, where the media co-op lives. the door to that was locked so we went in someplace else and wandered around until we found them. i felt really weird being there, like we'd intruded (which we did) even though they said that they didn't mind. they seemed so busy too even though they said they weren't doing anything. so i left elise to talk to them and i walked around outside the building. it was cold. apparently i worried elise because she thought i was in the theatre and when she found out that i wasn't she and josh went around calling my name in the parking lot. i don't know how i missed them but i did. then elise ran around cooper-young trying to find me. apparently it was pretty scary. sorry, elise. we found each other eventually and went to elise's house to watch morgan and josh's movie, which they had loaned to her. it was messing up on her dvd player for some reason. there was sound in the first scene but then it just disappeared completely. so we had to come all the way to my house to watch it on my computer. that worked, but elise had to leave (curfew) before it was over. she came back and we finished it on saturday night. then we drove to media co-op and harassed morgan [fox] some more. they let us use their microwave to pop our popcorn. they are very nice.
sunday was pretty normally crappy. the end.
uhhh. week. monday i was sick. tuesday i was loaded with work and up really late (it was my fault for seeing a movie with the pro bono club). wednesday i went home with elise and we did homework. when she brought me home we watched the "deleated" scene in three minutes. today is bad and i shouldn't be online. this week is boring and terrible. make it end.

shot a little bitty bit for "untouchable face" today.... katherine says she has too much work, so "much finer" will probably be delayed a lot. everyone is really excited about Charlie Brown Christmas plans, and we can't wait for it to snow!! if anyone has advice on using actual mics with a digitial camera then uh... can they let us know?

elise submitted her DYKWYCA article (see 11/12 post) to the school newspaper and it is going to be printed on the front page!!! since nearly everyone in DYKWYCA is part of a Collective Being, our Self is very excited about making it on the front. way to go, everyone!

in other news, go rent three minutes (based upon a revolution of the sun) at black lodge video.

also brittany has dropped out of the company. she may come back some time, but no one is really sure when that will be.

i am not sorry i said it
i am sorry i did not say it all
i could have gone for hours
but she was slipping
goodbye and i still can't hold her attention
nothing hit the right way
did i miss my target
or did the target run?
i could have said
"you drained me dry"
to the point where i
couldn't find comfort in similarities
needed to find separation
i needed
something beautiful for myself
something she could not
steal/perfect
they would not have loved you three years ago

The Fury

she helped me find courage and recognize beauty
she took it too far
she was nothing
and i was lost
she helped me understand she understood
she was lovely
she was not enough
and i was alone
she helped me become
she sees me
she is beautiful
and i am loved

that's a pretty nice haircut
elise is amazing. she is running this canned-food drive all by herself at like... three different schools. so this morning she announced it, on the tv thingie, and these people in my homeroom behind me were awful.
girl: she's weird.
guy: her hair looks like a boy.
girl: her hair looks like yours!
guy: why does she talk like that?

et cetera. it was really awful. the most awful thing was that I DIDN'T SAY ANYTHING. i couldn't think of anything to say at first and then by the time i realized that they had stopped talking, it was too late for me to say something and be relevant. i doubt that they would have held the incident in their minds for that long. so since elise is going to be making this announcement tomorrow and the rest of next week, i am going to defend her to death kind of. it was just awful because i had this two-hour conversation with her on tuesday night in which we talked about a lot, including people's reactions to her hair and everything. and plus elise is a completely amazing person. don't doubt it.

this week is weird. i'm still bipolar but sort of even more so? to a lesser extent? ahahhahahaha god. but yeah. reports today. DO NOT EVEN ASK. i should be doing homework but i'm really not. so uh. i'm gonna go avoid homework elsewhere.

From Home Movies to Music Videos

By: Elise Masur



Every Saturday, Memphis' very own Media Co-Op (1000 South Cooper) shows an assortment of short films created by locals. The directors of these films usually have no professional equipment or financial backing. However, to see a 13-year-old and her 15-year-old sister generate an astounding music video is something unusual to these already remarkable filmmakers.



So, how exactly did White Station Sophomore Alanna Stewart decide to start a "production company"? "We just did a short film called 'Romeo and Juliet Revisited' as an extra credit project, but Katherine (Dohan) entered it into the Memphis Digital Arts Film Festival over the summer. We were recognized as notable film makers, and seeing everyone else's homemade movies was really inspiring." After having always wanted to make films, witnessing the simple yet notable works of others helped Alanna and her friends realize just how easy it could be. "We never even use a tripod!"



The result, "Do You Know Where Your Children Are? Productions," is comprised of seven high schoolers and one middle schooler. Each video is filmed with a regular camcorder and edited on the Stewarts' home computer. So far, they have decided to take on eight different filming expeditions, each one chiefly directed by a different member of the production group. Even though they've only created two films, they have been well received, even by their teachers. Alanna and Katherine's ninth grade CLUE teacher Mrs. Kitts, who helped give life to "Romeo and Juliet Revisited," said, "They were brilliant…It was wonderful."



Crediting last summer's film festival as their inspiration, Alanna said, "The night it ended, my sister was coming up with visual ideas to put to this song…by a band I really love." Voila, last Saturday, 13-year-old Morgan Stewart watched on as her video to "Get Up" by Sleater-Kinney played on the silver screen.



When asked about the premiere, [Alanna] said, "I loved seeing it up there. I thought that I was going to be nervous like at Romeo and Juliet, but I just got really into seeing our work up there and knowing that these people would appreciate it for what it was and what we are…I felt like we'd accomplished so much since Romeo and Juliet…I want it to feel like that with every movie we make."