Exterior morning: Pink cherry blossom petals are moving down the street like ashes. They gather and swirl in the center of the road and seem to move with a ghostly will of their own.
Exterior Coney Island Beach VO: “We were all out on the street because of women.”
I’ve been working on editing up a long version of Willoughby Monologues. It is a strange exercise in that the finished e-book pobably won’t use much of it, but as sound track. I’ve mostly been walking around and recording little monologues and dialogues around brooklyn. I may use these as audio tracks for narration in the e-book, or I may just rerecord the thing in a controlled environment. In short I’m making something I may not use, but somehow I feel like assembling all these disparate parts from a year’s worth of scattered efforts will be worth it. I’m trying to make some structure out of the chaos and find the through line of the story.
A Police helecopter circles over head. There has been an incident and it darts about like a bee.
VO: “I was out there because the wife couldn’t stand my smoking in the house. She said it made the place stink like a bar.
VO: “Clark was out there because of his mother. She’d died in that very house. Emphasima. He still wouldn’t dare smoke inside. He said she was still hounding him from the grave about smoking in the house. She haunted the place; an all seeing ghost, looking out at him from framed family pictures. He would slink out of the house, like a guilty child to sneak cigarettes in the open Brooklyn air…. and talk. Clark was a real talker. Talked about his mom mostly and the ghost of her, but today he was talking about Willoughby.”
VO: “Willoughby was the third point of this triangle of smokers. He was the other side of the street…. But he was still sleeping.
From here, it would be just as good to download the sample TK3 book of Willoughby: Here, but I wanted to talk for a moment about low rez video. Last night I was watching BBC about the London bombs and I was struck by the camera phone videos. I’ve always known that Willoughby is about the cycle of violence we currently find ourselves in, but I was sort of struck by the way that low rez video is becoming the look of contemporary crisis, or craziness, or whatever the fuck is going on. I’ve seen plenty of bouncy pexelated journalists, but this was clearly shot by a “civilian” (which is becoming a meaningless term and may have been since WWII, but I digress). It showed smoke pouring down the street and ashes and bodies in an erratic hand held jumble of pixels… Somehow it felt very intimate and home made… you could almost feel the person behind the camera experiencing this vision, but also having enough distance to film it… then I went back to editing, and my first shot is similarly jerky and grey, but it is pink petals moving down the street. It sort of slapped me back into what Willoughby is all about I think. Anyway I ended up working late into the night, or was it morning when the rain came?
Clark:“What the hell is wrong with Willoughby. Listen to him. What’s he saying? Sounds like… I don’t wan’t to Cry.”
VO: “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. He’s saying I don’t want to die. Jesus Clark! It’s all he ever says for weeks… how can you not know what he’s saying!?”
Clark: “Is that what he’s saying? I thought he said he didn’t want to cry…. Like he was some kind of cry baby… Like boo fuckin’ hoo, I’m fuckin’ Willoughby and I’m so sad…like I’m NOT sad, like YOU’RE not sad, like the whole fuckin’ world ain’t sad…. Doesn’t want to die huh? Shit. Is he sayin’ that I DO want to die, or that you wanna die… or that my mother wanted to die? Is that what he’s sayin’?”
VO:“I don’t think he’s saying that. I don’t think he’s saying that at all. He’s just saying that HE doesn’t want to die.”
Clark: “Well, who the fuck wants to die?”
