Stage Snout.
Womb. A bio tech interface to bring differently oriented spirits from the other page to come and interface with meat.
One giant black rectangle standing hard. Floating stern in it’s own membrane, veined and textured and shining like the hood of a Mercedes. Women’s legs sprout off to the left and right of each corner, a ninja star shape flicking in and out: curling vines, tongues of cats, propelled around in geometric spit. It multiplies so that it can talk to itself. So that the corners can all speak.
They all talk at once and the sound is nothing.
They all refrain from speaking and the sound is the same.
Men stuffed into suits like blisters lanced by a single black thread, pudging out and about to pop. They stand around in a fairy ring watching the rectangle multiply. It still looks like one thing to them. It is a portable acme hole. Something that the snout of their camera will fit against. One of them puffs a fat cigar. He begins by flipping a switch on the far wall. It’s blue, dry like chapped skin. The other suits disappear as the lights dim. A new square appears on the wall.
It’s a movie. A car approaching another car from behind. There is no one in the rear car. All of the colors are pale, washed out with sun bleached orange. The camera work is static. Somehow keeps up, as If the motions required for both cars to be moving down the highway is negligible. The camera is on point.
The car in the far right of the glowing triangle is an old 70’s beater, something that moves like a boat when swerved. It’s thrusting as if someone is stomping on the gas. It appears to be trying to pass the car in front of it, but is somehow enjoying it, savoring each lurch it makes at the edge of the other car’s bumper.
The car in front is a nice, sleek, a smaller than normal sports car. There is a woman in it. Her eyes are rolled into the back of her head. She is staring in the rear view mirror every time the gas from the car behind her becomes audible. Her ass is grinding against the seat. The camera shows this for a second, from the perspective of the car seat he fabric. Shot of the rear view mirror. The beater lurches again. Edges of the mirror bow out with pleasure like a red painted mouth. Woman in the car runs her red painted fingernail along the edges of the thing, holds her finger over the midsection to shush it. Her breathing is irregular. Shot of stomach covered half in waist high dress, half with beginning of tucked shirt. The shirt is working its way out as her flat stomach pronounces itself. The skirt is grey, shirt white. Some skin is showing now.
Cut back to wide shot. The beater is lurching close enough to touch the bumper now, does. It’s metal nose sniffs at the sports car’s tail pipe. Shot of woman’s foot pressing down on the brake with the tip of her pointed shoe, the little space at the end that her toes cannot possibly fill. Black shiny and ornamental, like a single big cat claw. Just as much feeling in it as a piece of hair, probably.
The car meets, her ass lifts, trunk opens, accepts nose of the beater. The woman hits the brakes with her whole shoe now, flies right out of the windshield. The suits jump back, expecting her to fly out of the screen. The camera pulls back. Soundstage around the blister men in suits.
“That’s the one” Says a short one in the back.
“No it’s not” argues a short man next to him. His hair is sandy blonde, brushed to the side like a pastry.
“Well, I jumped.” Explains the suit.
“That’s your own damn fault.”
“Boys, boys!” calls the tall suit in front. The man with the cigar. “We all fully expect the woman to fly right through the screen here, right?”
“Yes yes!”
“No” says the sandy blonde, too low to hear under other suit’s overpowering confirmation. They all turn to look at the frozen frame on the wall. The woman’s face is so close that you can see into her pores. It looks as if the suits may fall into one of them, fill it like a blackhead. They all step back.
“There’s no point. No way this will sell.” The sandy blonde says to the blister-suit next to him. His erection is raging like a shovel under his fabric softened black pants. The camera gets a close up on it.
“Cut cut!” from the soundstage around them. Stagehands run in, touch up makeup.
“I always flub the boner!” cries the sandy blonde. He stumbles away from the blister men. “I’m taking five.” He stumbles off, hands in pockets. “Damnit!” he screams in the face of a clipboard wielding stagehand. The stagehand stops in his tracks, brushes his hair back and continues on. The camera is still trailing in front of the sandy man’s crotch, held out on it’s boom. It seems to be automatic.
“Re cue the film!” cries the director from his three story cabana chair. The film on the wall rewinds swiftly, back to the overhead shot of the cars. The camera pulls it’s lens back away from the sandy man’s crotch. He’s over at the snack table. It almost hits the director as it repositions itself. The stagehands build a new frame for it quickly. Most of the blister suits have stayed in the same position. The man in front grabs a new cigar, readies himself to light it.
“Do you all understand what is going on here?” the director calls from up above them. The wooden struts of his chair cross each other over and over on the way up like a frozen twisted vine. Most of them nod. Sandy blonde is still pacing. The big suit motions at his cigar, letting him know that it’s burning, that the scene needs to start before it’s too far down.
The director picks up his megaphone.“It’s not a cigarette, get over it! It’ll be fine!” his voice tumbles down out of the funnel like a series of stones. Most of the suits look around confused, not knowing what it is that he is referring to. He doesn’t want to explain. Into his funnel: “Action!”
The film re-starts, and the whole place rumbles. Camera pulls back to a wider shot. All of the stagehands, men, suits, and square of projected film are inside of a box. Something cut in half sitting on a table in a Hollywood studio. There is a camera snout stuck into the wood pulp of the box, a camera man sitting beside munching a sandwich. Five other cameras are stuck into different holes all around the box like needles in a pin cushion. There is a man in a canvas director’s chair sitting across from it.
“You’re really going to do this again?” The camera man says through his sandwich.
“Do what?”
“Have them re-cue the film.”
The man in the canvas chair looks up from his paper. There are different colors like carbon copies stapled underneath it. “It’ll be fine. The film’s a little different the second time. We’ll cut to different cameras this time too, because we already know what’s happened on the film.” He taps the back of his clip board for a second, then looks down, starts writing.
Camera man nods. “You know, I picked up some box programming in film school. I didn’t just learn how to position cameras. I could look over that if you want me to.”
The programmer looks up from his paper. “This stuff is expensive, you know. I’ve got to go through drafts and drafts on normal paper before I can lay it out on this box paper. I can’t have one thing out of place. “
“Yeah, so if you need an editor-“
“The point is, I don’t make mistakes. There are no errors once it gets on the box paper. I’ve got the formulas down. If I had any errors, the box would know when I fed the paper into it. Would probably start smoking or something.”
There’s quiet. The director in the tall chair in the box yells cut and print. The camera man outside the box puts down the nub of his sandwich, clicks the camera two button. The programmer looks back up from his paper, forehead crumpled.
“Who the hell let you see box programming anyway? You aren’t even supposed to know we do this shit. I’m not supposed to do it in front of you.”
Camera man shrugs. “I was good at making friends.” He writes something on a piece of paper near him. “See, here’s the beginning sequence to cue a blustery day. And here’s the line for a blue suit with a flared collar. He hands it over to the programmer. The programmer sets his clipbo
ard with its carbon copies of box paper down on top of a binder at the far end of the long table so that he can take the paper from the cameraman and review it. The binder says “Script” on it.
“Yes, I know these. They look right.” The camera man eats the last bit of his sandwich. “Are you trying to impress me, or show me something you thought I didn’t know? Because this is basic shit, man.”
Cameraman brushes crumbs off of himself. “Just trying to make conversation. Didn’t want you to think you were all alone over there with your box paper. You can communicate with me, you know? I know some programming.”
“But I need to work.”
“Then why do you sit in here?” The film box beeps. Little red light glows from the inside. “That’s done.” Says the camera man. He begins to remove the spools of film from the cameras.
“Because I like to have something going on around me when I work.” He scratches his pink lip. “I also like to see it work, I guess. The box.”
The camera man reloads the cameras. Their ends all have little slots for the new canisters to be attached to. Have to have them on the back so that they don’t all touch each other. Strange device really, like a camera helmet. A fence contraption.
“I don’t know why you don’t just program your film into the film instead. Like that little doozy you were showing on the wall. You could just have one camera pointed at the back wall and film your whole film with the right cuts and all with just one camera. That’s what’s always bothered me. “
“Ah, ah!” the programmer says, tapping his pen against the top of his clipboard. “See, this is what you would have learned if you had really had some programming class. That’s what we call ‘the fallacy of a 1:1 shot.'” He uses his fingers as quote marks. One still has a pen in it and the other still has his clipboard. The camera man imagines that the right most tic mark for the quote was tall and skinny while the leftmost was large and fat like the clip board. Too literal really. We see this in a thought bubble. “See, every chump going into programming thinks of that one. It’s like physics majors who think that they can make a perpetual motion device with a ring of magnets. It just doesn’t work. You get this weird flicker when you do it, and all the characters come out artificial and half blurred. There are just too many removes for it to work. Looks like a bootleg from a movie theatre. You only get that Hollywood effect when you’re filming the real program. That’s why we cut to that little side scene with the same shit going on from the movie on the wall when we need to show it to the audience in this film. You dig?”
The cameraman locks the last film canister into place. Motions towards the slot in the side of the dense wooden box. The edges of his mouth twitch down. “You got the programming for the next scene?” The programmer looks to him, wonders why he hasn’t gotten a real response. He reaches for the binder marked “Script” and flips through it. “Yeah, here we go,” he says to the binder. He pulls a green contact paper out from overtop of a clearly written sheet of dialogue. The camera man takes it and feeds it into the side of the machine. It goes into the slot, but does not emerge in the clear opening on the other side of the box’s wall, the inside of the box. Instead, the walls change, create impossible space like a mirror, a park filled with dogs and machine trees.
“So there’s the key word.” The camera man started.
“Hrm?”
“Hollywood effect. That’s the key word. I think that’s how I figured it out. How I got some programming knowledge of my own.”
“Did I say that?”
“Yeah, you said Hollywood effect.”
The programmer began to write. “And you ended up with programming knowledge from this…how? I thought you had friends that told you.”
“Yeah, well, they only let me in on it because I had already figured it out. I had made a lot of home movies as a child, and noticed that no matter how hard I tried with them, that they never looked like real ones. Always grainy, or bad quality, or whatever. Even on up through high school when I made them with nice cameras, I never could make them look like “Hollywood,” even though the technology I was using was the same. It was all getting cheap right then, remember? Everyone had one of these TX-29’s.” He motions towards one of the cameras. “So one day I says ‘Well, maybe I’m just not filming the same thing as them.’ And I didn’t realize it right then, but by ‘thing’ I meant ‘reality’ and somehow I had figure out that the reality I saw in Hollywood films was not the one that I was in, or that I saw every day. Literally, that you all must have to make your own, and then film it, because the reality I was in was utterly un-filmable. The quality was just too bad, no matter how much detail my camera could pick up. It was the quality of the reality, not of my camera.”
The programmer grunted, wasn’t working any more. “I guess it’s going to start getting more and more obvious now that these cameras are all affordable.”
“Yeah, but most people still think it’s just the acting and special effects. They don’t realize that you have to manufacture a more detailed reality just to make the Flay films appear real-“
“And the 3-d films too. Those are even tougher to program-“
“Oh yeah, I saw the hyper-real programming class on my friends schedule. God, the lengths we have to go just to convince a shoddy low-fi reality that a movie is ‘professional.’ It really does seem like we could use this for something else, something to make our world more real-“
“I think I’m doing all I can. Give them some hyper real escape, no?”
“No.” The camera man smiles, obviously thinks he has agreed.
The programmer starts writing on his paper again. The sandy blonde is standing in the park inside of the box, is about the size of a ken doll, reciting his lines in a pixie voice. We get camera man’s thoughts here in voice over, camera pointed at his head. “They slow it all down to a lower speed in editing so that we can see it. That probably effects the 1:1 fallacy thing further,” he clicks a button for camera five. “Might end up seeing some in-between frames on the programmed movie because of the timing issues. Makes sense I guess.” He clicks another button. Opens his mouth to speak. Camera backs up.
“Sorry,” the camera man starts. “I’ll stay on my side of the fence from now on.” He gets no response. Says “yeah,” to himself real softly and tightens the cameras onto their struts.
“End scene!” rumbles from off the edge of the soundstage. The programmer and the camera man stand up, shake hands, faces aglow all smiles. “Really, well done Edgar. I could really feelthe annoyance, man. Really! I feel like you might actually be pissed at me now!”
The man who played the programmer cracks a smile then breaks it, looks stern and pokes the camera man in the side. “I really might be, John!” He gives it a second. Then they both break into laughter. They walk off the soundstage together, go to the table of food.
“Good job all around!” from offstage again.
They both mumble thanks through mouthfuls of hummus. The sound had come from a director’s chair. In the chair is a dog with a red face painted around its asshole with lipstick. It’s a poodle. Its real face is mashed into the seat with its front paws bent and sticking out backwards. It’s back legs are straight, holding its asshole face up. The poodle hair sprouts out like a beard. It has little glasses on it. The glasses seem to be speaking. There may be an audio device present. Louder now:
“You will find that once you have created (baffle, as in tennis) a full and complete alternative to reality (no, waffle, you waffle in tennis), as scripted or un- as it may be, that you have ripped a kind of hole (no, you’re thinking of the shape of the net). You see, when you discover that your reality has the capacity to contain another reality alternate but identical to its (racket ball then. Or bowling) own, that the likelihood that you are already in a reality (dissimilar, really. Get the language out of the net) that has been created by another identical one around it skyrockets immensely. Once you create a reality below you, yo
u feel the claustrophobic weight of the ones that are already around you, (smells. The racket always smells!) that you have probably been created in. (don’t touch them, really. Oh my god, squishy.) Scary thing really (waffle, I told you! Soggy waffle! Good good man, put it down! You! I think a tense change is in order. No? Shove that thing…).”
The dog’s face yawns against the beige fabric of the directors chair. The painted eyes on the hairless area around the asshole do not change. Maybe a fleck of lipstick has fallen off.
“The good news my friends, is that-“
A group of men’s arms tangled together like a koosh ball roll up on their outstretched palms and grab the dog by its hind legs with their long side arms.
“Fred’s doing his fucking ART PROJECT again!”
Stagehands gather around. Some laugh a little bit. The Koosh Ball has a toupee on it’s top. The hands pass it off to the palm behind them as they roll.
“FRED!” calls the koosh ball. There is no answer. “This is getting fucking ridiculous. He’s usually at least here to collect his dog by the time I find out where his goddamned tape recorder is. I realize that this film is getting a little ridiculous, but shit, we’ve already had three shots ruined by the VOICE OVER from this DOG’s ASS!”
The stagehands burst into laughter spitting hummus from the snack table. The dog sits back down face first, smashing it’s left ear and eye against the seat.
“How the hell did he train it to do that anyway?”
Camera moves through two walls, back to snickering Fred, a man in a red cardigan stretched out down and over his arms. He’s eating a sandwich from the snack table. The lens moves right up to his forehead. His thoughts become audible, like a stethoscope pressed over someone’s throat as they speak.
“It’s like that ant farm I had when I was a kid. It went along swell for almost a year, longer than most ant farms last. I had to re-order food pellets more than a couple of times, the things almost starved waiting for the mail to come, but I brought them back every time. Until grandma moved in. Made this sausage every morning for breakfast that was way too spicy to eat. She told me I had to, it was good for me, skipping breakfast would make me weak, give other boys the advantage of good morning energy and fuel to burn. So I chewed them. Chewed them and walked back to my room, stuffed my garbage full of it after excusing myself to go to the bathroom. I couldn’t stash much like that, so I never ate all of the sausage, but she always said that some was better than none at all. So I run out of room in the trash and have to start shoving bits in the ant farm. They eat the stuff, surprisingly, but it doesn’t take long until most of them keel over dead with this strange smell like the inside of a snare drum, one that’s never been opened. New like the poisonous glue binding of a book, something way too fresh to be coming from dead ants stuffed up with spicy meat they shouldn’t have. I realized that I had tainted their little world then, their world that somehow resembled and anticipated our bureaucratic system, a smaller mock up reality, but not a complete one like everyone is making nowadays. A little tiny offshoot of one part of reality like Chester. (the viewer should be cued in here that Chester is the name of the dog. Maybe flash image of dog in directors chair.) Chester is just like the ant farm, the only little one part of reality mock up I can make because I don’t have a big budget and can’t afford the real simulators. Scary how complete they are.”
Camera pulls back from pores of forehead. Fred wrestles his hand out of the sleeve of his cardigan. The sandwich is still in it. He takes a bite, chews It over and leaves the rest of the sandwich hovering in front of his face, looks as if he is about to address it. Camera presses lens snout against right hand side of his forehead so that sound of his thoughts comes through much more softly. View over the rest of his forehead from part of lens snout that is pointed out. The sandwich is still seen hovering.
“…know that even the complete systems can be corrupted by the ones around them just like the tiny ant system was completely corrupted by the spicy meat from grandmother. Just can’t think of any other way to corrupt than by introducing small realities that do not correspond to the ones they are in into what I can only assume is a lesser reality. There must be one above us right now that can be affected by our breaking down. The ones below us they abuse in the studios need us too. I wonder if they’ll break down if this reality becomes corrupted. [If] I introduce the right sequence, the right non-sequitur, a necessary and ill-fitting little line of code that could throw off the fabric-“
The camera pulls back again, swiftly as if jumping out of the way of something. Fred looks at the sandwich again as if about to speak. He coughs. Camera pulls back between two walls again, back to director trying to wrestle dog free of director’s chair, but the dog’s face is stuck, has melted into the fabric. “Well someone get some scissors! I’ll cut this fucking dog out of the chair, I swear it!”
An ignorant stagehand approaches wiping hands on pants. Description unnecessary, could be any stagehand. Give them a headset and a clipboard like Taco Bell, no one will know really.
“Here, take this!” He hand’s the dog’s hind legs to the intern. The intern holds them wordlessly, tries to stare just over the dog’s rump, but cannot stop looking at painted on face. “And I’m going to go get-“
The hummus on the stagehand’s palms squish around the hind legs, the dog and chair shoot out and back like a squeezed wet balloon, fly out and knock the camera. The shot swerves and shakes, the camera flies back through two walls with the director screaming and withering, the rest of the cast on a strange sort of fire.
The shot lands at Fred’s feet, the lens of camera obviously cracked. “You!” Fred calls. His sandwich is finished. “I haven’t noticed you before!” He crawls towards it on hands and knees, cardigan billowing out below him like fabric cow’s udders. “I bet- I bet you’re it. But that would be too obvious…”
A calling is to be made from the back of the theatre here, a “You fucked up the shot! We still have two more to pull out through- who coded the FUCKING hummus? Who coded the intern’s hands?”
“Intern? I programmed stage hands…?”
“Shut up! I don’t need to hear about-”
Fred is sticking his big finger towards the camera lens now, bigger and bigger like a whale growing up out of your nose up towards eye about to intrude, to push sphere back into brain and ocular hammock-
Someone is to run down isle of theatre screaming here “Stop!” maybe, or “You’ll ruin it!”
Fred’s finger becomes the shot. Square on wall becomes blinding light. Needs to hurt eyes of viewers in the theatre. Harness light of the sun, perhaps. Person running down isle needs to hide.
Shot in bright pure colors like hyper real cartoon, bits of lens still stuck around the edge of the shot. Those bits covered by broken lens still have color and look of normal live action movie. Fred is vomiting his sandwich back up onto the floor. His mouth is over the absence of lens now, the camera’s snout hole. We see down his throat, his wiggling uvula and an old beater full of blister men in suits barreling towards audience. Concentric squares identical to projection square that movies are displayed against twirl out from their eyes kicking with women’s legs. Car reaches lens, Fred’s mouth recedes behind it like a left tunnel, he explodes backwards from shot. Men in beater car land on top of stage hands, break through the surrounding movie frame and spit a woman in a grey pantsuit out of the back. She has a balding camera head with programming babble scrawled on the side, is orgasaming with her legs up, is tinier than the smallest stage hand, but still holds them all down, is sitting on a pile of them. Vacuum in theatre to be activated here so that edges of screen bow in with pleasure as camera gets closer and closer to absolute darkness of her open skirt. Camera continues to approach with broken lens pulsating like pig snout until suction reaches its maximum. Screen is to be detonated when camera reaches total blackness and hint of read tailpipe glow in center.
Page in script should also be ripped
through from behind using two fingers, maybe three. Make sure edges of page are not affected, but nice outward waterfall effect is created by the ripped triangles of the page. Perhaps rig this version with explosives so that next page will blow out when turned to. Probably need to wrap whole thing in plastic so as not to detonate prematurely. Thank you.
We Stay Up All Night Because We Are Dissatisfied (#2) Page 3
