the sourcerer: Plagued by pianos.

Monday, May 12, 2014

Plagued by pianos.

A message from the German production office: the director has requested that there may not be any pianos whatsoever on set. The lead actor fancies himself as a budding pianist and having a piano on set is counter-productive.

As luck would have it, there is a piano at almost every chosen location. In some instances, a baby grand piano. Not to be moved. So it's a question of the cunning construction of boxes that look like built-in cabinets with drawers or doors with handles and knobs... this is a part of my job that I dislike. Also the hiding of plugs and switches and signage that isn't period. I have, in the past, gotten away with hanging coats over electrical boxes on walls. Washcloths over taps.

Did you know that in Germany, paint colours have codes only, no names. I loved watching the German art director smile when we chose these colours for sets: "Bleached Meadow" for a prison, "Happy Ending" for an apartment and "Marshy Habitat" for a bush hospital.

A dream job, the namer of colours.

One doesn't think of autumn as being a time of growth, but things are happening. And the birds are hungry. I am hungry for my long-legged man, far away in La-La-Land. Ten more weeks.

3 comments:

Leslie said...: I've been following your eclectic blog for a while now. I enjoy the somewhat oddball posts and looks into places I'll never see and insights into set decoration, something I know little about. When you said your long legged man was going away for a long time, I envisioned years. So glad to hear it's now only a matter of weeks.; May 13, 2014 at 12:23 AM
the sourcerer said...: Thanks very much for writing, Leslie. Maybe I'm being a bit of a wuss... but these three months (and 12 days) feel like a very long separation. . . perhaps because if you look at the big picture, we haven't been together all that long. And because he's in a place which I can't imagine. I am very glad indeed that it isn't years!! One slips so easily into complacency - this is, if nothing else, a big wake up call.
L.; May 13, 2014 at 7:54 AM
Marie said...: 10. More. Weeks. That IS long, Lily.

Sorry. Not helping. Aloes - the growing surprise, for me, when I saw my mom's in front of the house, last May.

Hiding the pianos. Can't make that up.

x; May 13, 2014 at 6:33 PM

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You could tend a garden at night, only at night, pouring dark water onto leaves, and into the earth, like pouring midnight onto midnight. You could hold your soil-stained hands up to the moon. The stars would gleam on the bottom of the shovel. It would smell the same as a daytime garden - it would smell green, violet, red, white. But come back, in daylight. Come back, to see the colours without closing your eyes.
- Sean Michaels. Accompaniment to the song "Immune" by LOW. Said the Gramophone

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."
Jim Jarmusch (1953- )

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you smelled and saw nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought that Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) - from A Moveable Feast.