Exciting wonderful things are happening.  I wrapped publicity on my book The Voting Booth After Dark: Despicable, Embarrassing, Repulsive and am now officially shopping my first narrative feature script Dear Dios to producers.  My goal for this year is to get a producer attached to Dear Dios and raise all of our funds so that we can begin pre-production at the top of next year.

Dear Dios Preliminary Poster

In the meanwhile, I’m also working hard to find the right b-job to financially support myself while I hustle for my a-job — Film Director.  I’d prefer a slow receptionist job with a lot of downtime so I can scheme.  I start a new job on Monday that fits this description so cross your fingers and wish me luck!  ;p

Aside from that, Curve Magazine published an amazing interview on me & my forthcoming book Bloody Fucking Hell.  It’s the January edition.  Be sure to support the lesbian community and order your copy today!  Gracias!

AND last, but most definitely not least …

The brilliant journalist Adolfo Guzman-Lopez interviewed me for his KCET blog Movie Miento.  I discuss growing up Cuban-American in Los Angeles, Dear Dios and read a poem from Bloody Fucking Hell.  Check it out & pass along to your friends!  Thanks for your support, my homeslices!

The artist featured is my dear old friend & long time creative collaborator Brit Lauren Manor:

You can watch the video here:

Hope you enjoy!

What can I do?  What can I do in this global economy gone awry?!  Where the powerful exploit their influential positions so that the rest of us, like ants, must hurry to build their empires under the scorching heat of an inescapable magnifying glass.

I have decided to do 2 things: 1) Go to Debtors Anonymous in the hopes that they tap me into a secret I wasn’t raised with, into some philosophy I need to know to break out of the chain gang of deprivation I currently find myself in.  Although sadly, I really deep down feel that all they’ll offer me is a pile of ethereal bullcrap. 2) Focus on making my 1st feature film Dear Dios.  Making films, by this point, is the only act on earth that brings me pure unadulterated joy.

No matter how broke I become.  Whether I live out of my car or sell my car & live in a shelter, I will work to make my films.  I care about nothing else.

Therefore, in the midst of this employment dry spell and monetary desperation I’ve decided to proceed with revising my script Dear Dios into what I believe may be its final version, and pitch it to producers I feel may be right for the project.  Yup, I’ve decided to face my fear of asking for help aka delegating tasks to other people who are just as, if not more, passionate and qualified enough in their expertise to undertake those areas.  I’m quite excited.

Luck.  What is luck?  Does it exist, Are we born with it, Do we make it?  I don’t know.

All I know is that Dear Dios is getting made whether I’m making it in life or not.  I’ve already started putting out a call for producers and receiving positive responses.  We’ll see how it unfolds.  Reading Robert Rodriguez’ Rebel without a Crew was a huge inspiration and so is the current book I’m reading My First Movie: 20 Celebrated Directors talk about their first film.  It makes the whole process a lot less lonely and a lot more hopeful / open-ended.  Everyone made their first film on the whim of their unique fate — by putting themselves out there over and over again and along the way, letting the rest of the puzzle fall into place.

Let us toast — to true risk!  Merry Hannukah, Happy Christmas & may Kwanza bust your gut open with joyful laughter.  Peace & goodwill to all you homies & haynaz out there!

The artist featured is dear kindred spirit & singer Jenna Robino:

You can watch the video here:

Hope you enjoy!

The artist featured is my dear friend & fellow filmmaker Sarah Louise Wilson:

You can watch the video here:

Story Behind The Video:

Sarah Louise & I met about 4 years ago and developed a wonderful friendship through our mutual friend, her business partner, Mercedes Le Anza.  They own the film production company Stella Bella Productions.  We traveled to Sundance together and thankfully survived the pitch dark, snowy freezing drive back to LA.  I chugged dayquil & yelled, “We’re going to die.  We’re probably already dead” while she drove the truck and periodically laughed.  Later on, I was honored to act in her in feature film The Accidental Death of Joey by Sue.  She’s a passionate, brazen and inspiring artist who is constantly creating — whether it be paintings, writing plays, directing movies.  We laugh a lot together.  Life is good.

I shot her video on Mercedes’ iphone the same night I shot Mercedes’ artist profile because the iphone rocks my socks off.

To recap (from Mercedes’ On Blind Faith post):

I’d put together & trekked over a DIY light kit as I’m working to better my on-production lighting skills, but Sarah Louise Wilson had professional lights from another shoot so she was wonderful enough to leave them set up in Mercedes’ room for me (and I set them up in Sarah’s room afterwards).  Yay!  Thanks so much SLW!

Later on that night after all the shooting was complete, we tried to transfer the iphone movie files to a Mac comp and the 4 hour headache began…  We could not for the life of us get either of their 2 MAC computers to copy the movie files.  Thank baby Jesus in da manger that Sarah Louise tried the iphone on her old PC and figured out that we could transfer the files easily to the PC (irony of all ironies since mac & iphone are both apple products!) and then throw them on a mac/pc compatible 16 gig portable hard drive and then plug that hard drive into one of the macs and transfer the files onto my mac compatible (only) 50 gig portable hard drive.  Whew!

The next day when I began editing, the iphone movie files were compatible enough to import into final cut pro unlike the android nexus 3GP movie files, but not compatible enough to edit in the sequences without having to justify every single cut with COUNTLESS rendering.  Try as I might no conversion software, including compressor, would make the movie files and FCP sequence/editing timeline compatible.  So, I repeated what I did with the last artist profile and transferred the movie files into imovie hd, did a basic edit, converted that 2 minute edit into a high quality movie, imported that file into FCP, exported it as a DV-NTSC 48KH quicktime movie file, re-imported that (hi-res & sequence compatible) file into FCP , and walla’ — I cleaned up the edit and added titles.  I didn’t do any color correction on this video because the original on set lighting made it look fine and I was pooped.

Hope you enjoy the piece!

The artist featured is my long time friend & creative collaborator Mercedes Le Anza.

You can watch the video here:

Story Behind The Video:

Mercedes & I have been friends and creative cohorts since our wild college days at Loyola Marymount University.  She was cast as one of the leads in my short fiction film / undergraduate thesis project A Two Woman One Act — an experimental melodramedy.  She played “La Vibora” — a repressed flamenco-dancing Chola grieving the loss of her slain husband Panchito who must face the tormented lust/love she holds for his sister “Le Galliene”on the night of his wake.  We’ve been great buds evah’ since!

Last week, we met at her house on a crisp blue-black Tuesday night, laughed a lot, played with her glorious pug pup “Princess Buttercup” and then got to shooting.  I’d put together & trekked over a DIY light kit as I’m working to better my on-production lighting skills, but her business partner and our mutual friend Sarah Louise Wilson had professional lights from another shoot so she was wonderful enough to leave them set up in Mercedes’ room for me.  Yay!  Thanks so much SLW!

Later on that night after all the shooting was complete, we tried to transfer the iphone movie files to a Mac comp and the 4 hour headache began…  We could not for the life of us get either of their 2 MAC computers to copy the movie files.  Thank baby Jesus in da manger that Sarah Louise tried the iphone on her old PC and figured out that we could transfer the files easily to the PC (irony of all ironies since mac & iphone are both apple products!) and then throw them on a mac/pc compatible 16 gig portable hard drive and then plug that hard drive into one of the macs and transfer the files onto my mac compatible (only) 50 gig portable hard drive.  Whew!

The next day when I began editing, the iphone movie files were compatible enough to import into final cut pro unlike the android nexus 3GP movie files, but not compatible enough to edit in the sequences without having to justify every single cut with COUNTLESS rendering.  Try as I might no conversion software, including compressor, would make the movie files and FCP sequence/editing timeline compatible.  So, I repeated what I did with the last artist profile and transferred the movie files into imovie hd, did a basic edit, converted that 2 minute edit into a high quality movie, imported that file into FCP, exported it as a DV-NTSC 48KH quicktime movie file, re-imported that (hi-res & sequence compatible) file into FCP , and walla’ — I cleaned up the edit and added titles.  I didn’t do any color correction on this video because the original on set lighting made it look fine and I was pooped.

Skills to continue practicing with the upcoming artist profiles: 1) Lighting 2) Color Correction…

Hope you enjoy the piece!

The artist to debut On Blind Faith was my dear long time friend Lalin St. Juste.

You can watch the video here:

Story Behind The Video:

We met at her mom’s house on Thanksgiving morning and shot the segment in her old bedroom.  Where we’d once, as teenagers, had sleepovers and watched movies and read each others’ writings.  We shot the piece on her Galaxy Nexus Android Phone.  Total of 8 minutes of footage.

When we tried to upload the 3GP files onto my computer the complications began.  My iBook G4 was too old and incapable of reading her android phone, much less transferring her files.  Her old PC laptop suffered the same fate.  Thank God, we didn’t give up and kept troubleshooting away.  The files were too big to attach to a gmail account & email.  So, we asked her brilliant and kind tech savvy brother Carlo to help us out.  He taught me that you can connect your cell phone and all of its content to an internet server-based FTP site and download the videos onto your comp from there.  We used the program “swiftp”.  All the videos, thank God, downloaded except for 1 — the one with the interview.  Yikes!  So, we downloaded the “sendspace” application (a large file sharing program) into her cell phone and since the movie file was under 300 mb, we were able to email it to me.  Whew!  Disaster averted.  The only problem with emailing the interview file was that it arrived out of synch.  Dayum!  Oh well, I’d deal with that in post production.

Finally, the videos are onto my computer waiting to be edited, but DUN DUN DUN they’re 3 GP files, which are not compatible with my final cut pro 5 movie editing software.  So, I did some online research and found that they have to be transferred to .mov quicktime files and THEN imported.  The necessary transfer software either wouldn’t work on my old computer or you had to purchase it and I’m working with a budget of $0.  Thank God, the editing software iMovie HD read and imported the 3GP files just fine.  It would take far too many hours, however, to convert all the 3GP files into quicktime files to then transfer them into final cut pro for editing so I decided to read the iMovie HD manual and learn how to use it.  In comparison to FCP it’s limited in major ways, but I was at least able to do a basic edit of the film INCLUDING sound correction, which was great.  I then transferred the edited film to a “full quality” quicktime file by going to the “share” tab and hitting “quicktime > full quality”.  It produced a .dv file which I was able to import into final cut pro, but FCP wanted me to keep rendering that scheisse in the timeline sequence, which makes it impossible to edit so I took that .dv file and through FCP compressor I exported it into a hi-res quicktime .mov file and THEN imported it back into FCP.

From there on out, all was gravy.  I was able to edit some glitches in video and add titles and mess around with color correction.  15 hours of editing later (including time spent in iMovie HD & FCP), I was finished.

Repeat Lesson of My Life: Whatever you don’t know — read the manual and watch the tutorials on youtube by reelclever aka learn.  Everything that is worth knowing can be learned!  Yay!  I’m using these 1 – 2 minute pieces to practice all aspects of filmmaking, including, and especially, the facets I’m weakest in, which in my estimation are cinematography and color correction.

My strategy is to practice, troubleshoot and practice until … I die? or less dramatically, need a break!

Hope you enjoy On Blind Faith!  Stay tuned for next week’s artist …

xo!

Take, for instance, my film directing.  Writing has come second nature to me since I was a wee tyke.  I’ve written like I’ve breathed — because I had to.  The reality I’ve posed sounds dramatic, but I’m Cuban so yeah, all of my realities are dramatic ;p  Writing has always been the way I connected with myself, the way I’ve reflected and thought aloud, the way I came to resolutions, the way I touched the calming thread that holds together this seemingly incalculable and chaotic existence.  I didn’t grow up thinking, “I’m going to be a writer” because, quite frankly, I always was one.  I have about 50 journals by this point.  Yes, writing was literally like breathing.

What I did grow up hoping for, dreaming about, enamored by was Film Directing.  I imagined myself visually bringing to life my written stories.  Film Directing was my great childhood dream and has continued its reign over heart and psyche ever since.  Yet, unlike writing, film directing has brought with it many great fears.

The “Production” stage of making a film encompasses all of my fears: “What if I don’t use the best camera in the best way and light her face perfectly?  What if the film gets exposed or ruined on its way to the lab?  What if the set isn’t built when I arrive to shoot?  What if my shots are shaky?”  What if? What if! What if?! … for moments and years.

My creative purpose is quite simple: I write so that I can direct and I direct so that I can edit.  My great fears don’t lie in the writing or editing, however, but in the directing.  I believe it’s because in the writing and editing processes I can control the elements.  In writing, my imagination can design anything it dreams about and bring it alive through description.  In editing, I know I can play around with footage that’s already been shot and made available to me.  I can make the most of whatever I’m given through cuts, pacing and sound design.  But Film Directing … depends upon (gulp) many elements — God, Other People, The World, and Me.  From concept to manifestation, film directing depends upon the right mixture of it all.  Our  serendipitous expertise, timing, and overall cohesion…

Additionally, I’ve never been a techie – a tech savvy person.  I learn about film equipment because I’m a film artist and I need to understand the tools at my disposal so that I can bring my films to fruition.  I don’t like to adapt my equipment on the spot to the ever-changing dynamics of production.  In other words, the production process triggers all of my control issues! ;p  That being said, when I feel I’ve got all the elements under control, I LOVE film directing.  I’ve yet to master this rare sense of safety aka blind faith that everything is going to turn out as it should.

Consequently, I haven’t directed a film since 2008.  I’ve written and produced and edited, yes.  I’ve done a lot of those 3 things, but I haven’t directed a film — documentary or fiction.  I keep saying that when I get funding for my feature Dear Dios, I’ll direct, and yes that is true, but I’d be lying to myself if I didn’t acknowledge that I wasn’t directing RIGHT NOW because I’m afraid of failing.  Of failing my vision and proving myself incapable of translating my pages to the (longing sigh) screen.

My perfectionism has convinced me that if I can’t direct a film perfectly then I must wait until I can — until I have the perfect amount of funding to make sure I buy the perfect equipment and pay the perfect lighting designer and perfect cinematographer to do their jobs perfectly so that I can do mine P-E-R-F-E-C-T-L-Y.  When the truth is that production, and interchangeably film directing, are exciting and fulfilling processes because their synchronicity comes about in vibrant ways that only unpredictable circumstances can produce.

I’ve forgotten to do 3 pivotal things with my film directing that I do all the time with my writing:

1) Have Fun!  You’re not a writer or a film director.  You’re a human being who loves to write and direct.  That’s all.

2) Fuck Perfect.  Who cares.  You’re not doing this to prove anything to anyone.  Just do it! Do it a lot all of the time because it’s FUN!

3) Every creative piece is perfect AND imperfect in its own way.  These are the realities which assure they each find their unique place in the world.  Your style will change with time.  Let it unravel and develop.

In the spirit of spitting at fear’s face, I’ve taken on 2 new directing projects.  The 1st one is a music video I’ll be doing for my creative collaborator / dear friend Brit Lauren Manor and her amazing song “A Tragic Disappearance“.

The 2nd project is a web series of 30 – 60 second artist profiles featuring creative friends that I admire, love and respect. I’ll be shooting both undertakings on hi-def cell phone cameras.  I’m teaching myself to play with the available elements and learn to enjoy the tools at my disposal in order to disengage the great fear that I don’t have what I need.

I’ll post both projects on Bloggimia within the next month so stay tuned!

I don’t feel “poor”, but I am … financially struggling.  I believe that’s how many of us — especially artists — feel at the present moment in this country.

I also feel blessed to have amazing friends, a loving family, a roof over my head, food in the fridge, and a car in an easy parking spot.  Most importantly, I live in a city where art is affordable and there are great times to be had for little to no cost (save gas) all over town.

That being said, there are certain realities, ugly strange realities that I cannot deny.  I’m unemployed and have been for the last 4 months.  I’ve survived by selling my film equipment and borrowing money from family.   For the 1st time in my life, I’m on government aid — food stamps and cash assistance.  I apply to roughly 20 different types of jobs on a weekly basis from Junior Film Programmer to Cashier without successful results.

Still, I don’t feel like “a poor person”.  I do feel drained, however, and obsessively wonder to myself when the clouds will part and jobs that I don’t loathe, which pay a fair wage, will fall from the sky into my bank account.

I feel ashamed and humiliated by my circumstance.  I know many others that are in the same predicament.  No one talks about it.  Only liberal news stations and Occupy Wall Street protestors who are presently being silenced with pepper spray and jail sentences.  The rest just hint with downturned eyes and shrugging shoulders when you ask them, “How are you doing today?”

Poverty is a slow flogging.  The whip stings a bit at first, but as time passes the ache grows into a weighing wail that trails your spine with pointed metal tip and curls into the pocket behind your knees.  It produces a heaviness that proves fragmenting.  Poverty takes a hammer to the skull of identity and cracks open questions that follow a specific and unavoidable stream of conscious thought: What am I then?  A powerless bum?  Another victim of circumstance?  A whiny good for nothing? A lazy degenerate? …

Has my sense of self and belief in my self-worth always derived its fortitude from what I did for work and how much I made doing it?

What do I contribute to my society now that I haven’t much money to contribute … even to myself?

These are the questions that arise when a Capitalistic society goes asunder.  As the United States crumbles and becomes China’s indentured slave, we Americans scavenge for work, money, safety, our old sense of self … behind shrugged shoulders, downturned eyes and quiet shame.

In the face of destitution, I wonder to myself: What the fuck do I do now?!  Well, I have a couple of plans:

1) Think “outside of the box” when it comes to raking in money.  Entrepreneurial brainstorming ahead…

2) Continue applying to 20 jobs per week (just in case).

3) (Last, but MOST important) Continue to work on my art stuff.  I’m almost wrapped with the last bit of promotion for my book The Voting Booth After Dark: Despicable, Embarrassing, Repulsive and I’m moving into wrapping the development stage of my first feature film Dear Dios.  I’ve also decided to practice my directing chops by embarking upon a web series of 1 minute Artist Profiles shot on the artists’ cell phones.  More on that later.  I’m directing and editing a music video for a dear friend, as well.

4) Stop pretending that what’s happening isn’t happening and admitting that yeah, sometimes, it sucks.

5) Remember, Remember, Remember: Always — Onward and Upward.

Essay I wrote for the Tiki Tiki Blog …

“Being Cuban, One Afternoon at a Time”

Being Cuban. Being Woman. Being Lesbian. These are all concrete identifiable experiences for me that melt into a puddle of vagueness whenever I try to grab them and hand them over to someone else for understanding.

But, I think the best way to explain the Being Cuban part to someone not Cuban entails describing one afternoon of my life.

I was born Cuban-American a.k.a. a Cuban in the United States. Therefore, I’ve always lived at the point where two distinct worlds briefly brush against each other while on a rush to separate destinations. This dot in the space-time continuum is an unusual locale where two opposing atmospheres converge to form a rare hybrid of people: Los Cubanos-Americanos. I like to think of this planetary meeting place as my grandmother’s house.

Every Thursday from 1 p.m. – 6 p.m. for the last three years, I’ve hung out with my grandmother “Mamaita” at her home in a suburban outskirt of Los Angeles. She lives in a primarily middle-class/lower-middle class Mexican-American neighborhood. I live in a similar barrio five minutes away.

Her well-kept, peach-coated, wide 4-bedroom property faces a groomed yard adorned in pastel flowers, Aloe Vera plants, and heavy concrete ducks. During her 25 years there, she’s used the Aloe Vera to cure everyone’s everything — from derrieres wounded by poodle bites to minor burns to acne breakouts. If you really want to clear the acne for good, however, she highly recommends using Azufre three times daily.

As soon as you walk into her living room, you find yourself standing on a light-yellow shag carpet surrounded by shelves of books, family portraits, certificates of achievement, and aged trinkets from my childhood.

Her books are medical, psychological, and nutritional in nature and all in English. Although she mostly writes, speaks, and listens to the radio in Spanish, she prefers reading in English as a means of practicing the language. Her comprehension of the English language is impressively vast especially since she still struggles from time to time to wrap her mouth around the English translation of her Cuban phrases. Barack Obama becomes Arak Oama, in other words.

Our family portraits change weekly, but include us all – at one point or another – standing or sitting next to each other while looking pensively or forlornly off into the distance. Including the babies. Framed above us all, my great-grandmother, her mother, stands between two Alice In Wonderland Characters Tweedledee & Tweedledum at Disneyland, taken years back when she flew over from Cuba for a visit.

Mamaita’s certificates of achievement range from the University of Havana to college in Cali to an award she won for poetry in 1989, the Golden Poet award. A killer poet and bona fide book addict she can usually be found humming behind gold-rimmed glasses while writing with her left hand or holding a book she’s reading with her right.

When I arrive, the radio tends to blare ballads by Olga Guillot, Benny More, Celia Cruz, and Joan Baez from the “It’s a Cuban Chreeesmas” music mix I made her. Mamaita also enjoys ’60s American Folk songs and various genres of American music. One time I found her listening to Nirvana on the radio. She told me that hard stuff often helps her get the inner knots of AAH! out.

We then walk into the kitchen where she’s cooked the most delicious food I ever will eat. Hers are healthy versions of classic Cuban meals: platanitos fritos, ropa vieja, yucca, arroz prieto, y ensalada Cubana.  And from behind a plastic child-protective gate, my grandmother’s heart-melting mildly obese dog “Angelita,” resemblant of a chubby little lamb, barks for me to pet her.

After petting Angelita, my grandmother and I sit down at her round 1970s dinner table. Sitting relaxed on her walker seat across from me, she cups her glamorous 1940s crop, lifts her classic gold-rimmed glasses from the tip of her nose up to her eyes, and begins gently twirling her Sagittarius necklace with her right pointer finger. Instantly, her left fist opens up and begins expressing all the ideas, memories, and feelings she’s started telling me about.

We speak about poverty in 1930s Cuba and surviving El Barrio de Jesus Maria, the positive effects vitamins and good nutrition have on the body’s different organs, and how my aunt Mamadina prayed as a little girl for La Cigüeña to bring her a little sister, and then my mom was born.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see a large Cuban coffee maker on the stove and know that after lunch we’ll drink her incomparable Cafésito Cubano con Leche de Cabra. After which she’ll recite a poem she wrote for me when I was very little and emphasize the line, “mi nietesita de ojos color caramelo.”

For me, Being Cuban means being Cuban-American one afternoon at a time.