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 | | From: | Marco McClean | | Subject: | "The Mic Won't Be In The Shot." | | Date: | Thu, 20 Jan 2005 06:05:35 -0800 |
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 | My dream from Wednesday morning, 2005-01-19:
I'm moving along a highway through a national park of
close-by mountains and big trees, mostly cedars, but strange
cedars, tall but exaggeratedly conical, like the experimental
wingless VTOL rocket in the news last year. /How many house
frames would one of those trees make? Six? Eighteen? A hundred
thirty-one?/
Now I'm riding a bicycle on a paved path parallel to the
highway. Up a hill to my right a giant chainsaw operated by
someone on the other side of one of these strange cedars is
drawn down through the tree, splitting it vertically to leave
it standing-- it's a clever trick to get more and longer
two-by-fours out of it. But the chainsaw operator in this
experiment is in too much of a hurry or whatever he's riding
on is outta whack; the cut veers away to one side like a knife
twisting in butter and a third of the huge tree topples away,
travels end-over-end like a hurled caber down the hill toward
me, /walks harmlessly over me/ and stops on the highway,
flattening a car. More cars, unable to stop in time, crash
into the tree and into already-crashed cars.
It's too hot in the sun; I leave the path for S-curved
shade on the right. Somehow I'm also on the left side of the
path watching two kids race; one is on a bicycle and the other
is on rollerskates. I'm thinking about how people like Charles
Hurwitz borrow money to buy lumber companies then smash down
the entire forest to pay off their debt and stay obscenely
rich. They always say they're planting trees faster than they
cut them down, but they're planting /baby trees/ and cutting
down gigantic trees that are hundreds of years old; the baby
trees will never be allowed to grow a tenth as big even if
they live; too small to produce milled lumber they'll be
shredded for particleboard. No more forest. /What can I do
about it? Nothing./
At night I come into a Midwestern industrial town as a
passenger in either a bus or a car. I'm interested in the
buildings flicking past my window. Here's a very narrow
three-story house on a corner-- it's barely wide enough to
have a stairway in it; I get to examine this house for a
relatively long time. Normal old row houses go by at a
movie-cartwheel-effect flicker rate that merges them in a way
that almost sings. My point of view lifts up and swings
leftward over houses and businesses to where an
only-barely-visible speeding truck is being guided to a
loading dock by a bored but professional radio voice like the
voice of an air-traffic controller. Then at the loading docks
there's no truck; it was and is a golf-cart pulling a hollow
Airstream trailer. The controller-voice man, angry at being
deceived, runs out of the building to the golf-cart, but the
golf-cart driver has already run around the side of the giant
warehouse. I run behind him with my heavy documentary camera.
In the back of the building a co-conspirator stands
holding a crash door open. "Come /on/, come /on/." My subject
and I rush inside, turn through curtains to the right and run
on continuous wrestling mats between high-curtained work
cubicles or sleeping quarters. A curtain wiggles --that's the
one. We're in.
Now my subject is Juanita. She's the union rep smuggled
inside here for a secret meeting. I keep the camera close on
the silent labor-rules conversation of gestures the cubicle's
movie-stereotypical truck-driver man has with Juanita as they
smoothly settle down eye-to-eye on the wrestling mat floor of
this dim space. His left eye and her right eye are almost
touching one another.
I'm down on the floor too now, of course, shooting past my
own cocked knee (I'm in jeans and work boots); the man
gestures, silently asking the one who let us in --who's
peeking in through the curtains-- if the film will be usable,
ya know, with the knee in the way and all. I say, "The mic
won't be in the shot," meaning my knee won't be in the shot;
I'm zoomed way in. The man outside says through the curtain,
"He knows what he's doing." It's nice that someone sticks up
for me; it's like, /Let the man work, Joe./ It feels good.
-end-
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