Just a quick DVR reminder! Two weekends from now on Saturday, February 4th, ‘Ultimate Factories Ford F-150’ airs for the first time on The National Geographic Channel at 8 PM ET/PT.

Watching a Raptor do it’s thing is pretty awesome

Hope everyone enjoys!

ULTIMATE FACTORIES: FORD F150
Saturday, February 4th, 2012, at 8 PM ET/PT

more info can be found here.

It’s been a long time since I last had a chance to post on the ‘ol blog — I was simply terrible about writing stuff last year… But one of my new years resolutions is to endeavor to write more this coming year about what’s been going on…

And there’s never a better reason to post something then when you’ve got a new show that’s set to premiere…

Suffice to say tomorrow evening ‘Ultimate Factories Porsche Panamera’ airs for the first time on The National Geographic Channel at 8 PM ET/PT.

Hope everyone enjoys!

ULTIMATE FACTORIES: PORSCHE PANAMERA
Saturday, January 7th, 2012, at 8 PM ET/PT

more info can be found here.

There’s an ache in the side and a kink in the neck, a twinge in the knee and a soreness that won’t escape me. My body feels decrepit, my mind strung out on a million different to-do lists. Physically I feel well past beat and yet as the sun rises there’s a desperate pull coming off the keys on the nightstand. A throbbing image of movement and motion blazing through the latest mental images of the day. I keep asking myself insidiously what lies just over that hill? Where does that rise off of 41 lead? Or that cross street just past 46? Slowly the desire rises, a heat that’s surely greater than whatever effect will come off the deck later today. That sense that tomorrow can’t wait but should. And a feeling of fire to turn the bike over and roll on out the door… To escape, if only for a little bit.

It’s both quite early in the morning and remarkably late for me. The body clock feeling so confused that whether I’m watching sunsets or sunrises matters little. The overall feeling is simply one of total physical exhaustion.

Yet it’s a grand type of total exhaustion.

Because it comes from the work & the knowledge that at this particular moment in time, on this particular shoot, everything coalesced in about as good a manor as it possibly could.

Their were the usual trials and an assortment of problem solving on a day in and day out basis, but when I take a giant step back and survey the landscape that surrounds me, I can’t help but think that this was one of the best, most painless, most perfect shoots in recent memory… And over the years there have been some good ones…

In all honesty that great sense of specialty comes from the guys I had the pleasure of working with on this gig — The crew who worked their asses off to capture pure and total visual magic — Stephen Harrison, Dan Hickey & Terren Lin kicked some serious special ops-like ass and they’re a special bunch — both in the field and personally as people.

What they recorded on disc or card is magnificent.

To say I’m excited is an understatement.

The images are some of the best, most exciting and most emotive we’ve ever had… Oh, what images indeed… And watching them playback makes me smile on the inside and laugh on the outside – because they are there, sitting on screen, waiting to be cut together… Perhaps no part of the process of creating a television documentary feels so filled with awesome possibility or potential creativity and I’m also curious to see how it unfolds… It’s the story that never quite resolves itself and yet hinges on the fear of finding inspiration just one more time, in some tiny corner, you can’t quite describe.

Selfishly, I’ll admit that I think over the years I’ve become more and more of an pure imagine snob – not ‘image’ as in personal ego but rather ‘image’ as in what lies on the screen – The picture that is captured and imprinted on our consciousness when we see it roll by… What used to be just a part of the process for me is now the currency I believe we trade daily and to be in a position to be able to see the process of capturing visual liquid magic unfold is both shocking in its power and awesome to behold, and a feeling of wonder that I hope I never lose.

Sometimes it’s nice to marvel at the feeling that comes from being a kid in a candy store.

Until the next, next…

A cloudy day is creeping in as I crack away on the keys in a city that I used to know so well.

Like the lover you leave and come back home to, I stare out the window and part of me sees what I’ve always wanted to see….

But the other part of me does not. The other part sees the landscape as it is. As perhaps it always has been.

Dirty and gritty and filled with contempt.

Sunsent Boulevard wasn’t a movie but a movement. And film noir isn’t dead, it’s right here. Down the street and across the block.

Drink in hand, I stand there for hours, watching stray shards of blue light spread across the cream and white striped wallpaper walls as echos of voices I used to know holler out for attention.

But its the stripes that grab my eyes. It’s the stripes that call out louder. Stripes that remind you of farm houses and east coast oceanic get-aways and Nantucket in the fall… Whose virtue plies its trade in utterly non-offensive ways.

Sitting in this comfy Martha Stewart-esque room, that’s been romantically dubbed a ‘suite’, inside yet one more swanky Los Angeles establishment, I find myself thinking about the city that’s sitting outside the window. Again and again.

The way the sounds of trash trucks rise up above the sidewalk, the energy that’s hustling down the street, the neon glow in the middle of the day, the way that sunset shines down the boulevards and crests over the hills.

Suddenly all those years of sitting here doing battle seem like an eternity ago — and I find myself asking, was I ever really here?

Did I actually do this?

Live here? Go to school down South?

Honestly, did I call this my home?

Because amazingly I feel this welled up sense of contempt that’s boiling over — This amendment of past deeds that strikes me as brazen if not trite and yet so real and vivid and strong in my veins. I can’t help it. I feel this echo of what once was and yet I know that no longer exists here. Did I savor everything there was to enjoy about the LA experience and get my fill and then move on? Did I leave to early? To late? With too much sorrow in my soul? Is it the girl at the beach calling me back or the image of her that makes me glad I left? Is the Black AMG downstairs utterly cool or a complete status symbol? The bleached blonde hair – hot or way over-exposed? Has everything here become a facsimile of what it was? Do I actually still feel anything for this place? For this city? For what I used to call ‘home’?

So hard to imagine & yet harder to recall. It all seems so distant today. So totally foreign. As if it never really happened.

How sad to lose one’s memory already…

What a shame to feel lost in a land you once knew so well. And yet…

And yet…

It wasn’t always this way.

There was a time where LA held all the possibility I could ever ask for — There was a time when from Mullhulland to the Beach and back again to Downtown was the most remarkable vantage point from which to see the stars shine at night. There was a plethora of culture to be had, beaches to explore, hills to peruse at ones leisure. When did the fake over take the real? Because dreams were born here, and hands were bleed on here, and thoughts ached their way toward freedom and bore the brunt of being manufactured in a city of emotion, right here.

And yet, I’m not even sure I believe that anymore…

This was the land from which endless potential prospered. An oil well of inspiration. A sundeck full of emotional prostitution. An opportunity around every turn.

And yet, I stare out at the vista before me and I wonder was any of that actually real? Did this city, this place, this manufactured oasis, really create that?

Or did I just want to believe that it was real?

Driving on the freeway, I shuttle between lanes, fight my way towards the off-ramps, and creep to a stop in the middle of the day… The veins of the city’s arteries are pumping out automobiles at an awesome rate. Suddenly cars seem everywhere and concrete goes on forever. The way the walls of traffic ebb and flow and creep into your car’s personal space. So much noise. So many people. So much movement. At its best breakneck speed the entire drive feels overwhelmingly congested.

It’s half-past ten, I realize that I’m gripping the wheel with every ounce of energy and sitting up in the seat taller than ever and that I’m feeling tense.

Terribly Tense.

As if I’ve never done this before — And yet I have, a million times or more… What the hell is going on here?

Is it possible that I’ve begun to see the world through Small-Town America eyes?

A blue blacktop of never-ending daylight screams across the horizon line as the machine’s pulse rises and falls in an endless cycle of movement.

Rubber rips. Throttle cables advance. Gears roll on. The engine rumbles.

Planted, the machine echos through out the valley floor. I feel it ache. I hold its hand and it revolves around my sense of the moment.

There are days and there are issues but right now, the landscape never felt grander. It never seemed more alive or more viscous in certainty.

I spy vineyards and cow fields, in equal proportions, as the machine flies down the pike.

Across the fields and through the mindset of the daily grind. So much is fading away. So many thoughts are evaporating. So many stresses letting go…

Why I have not done this more?

Why have I held back?

What was I thinking?

It’s a constant refrain. A constant fear. A sizable and rather matter of fact issue at hand.

Because days like this hold all the grandeur of the universe in their finger tips and I so easily forget it.

Then the road squeezes down. The path becomes constricted. The shadows of the tall oaks spread themselves across the roadway. And in their coverage I’m reminded of the darkness that lurks. The things in life you never quite can put away for good. The faces and feelings that haunt your subconscious.

Yet as the machine rockets though, there’s a kind of spiritual and totally mechanical movement that puts wonders about the next thing, about the after-life, about life in general, on hold.

Fleeting really. Flashes of forward frames dancing off in the distance. With those big conceptual ideas that make you grasp at straws to explain….

Someone crested this hill many, many moons ago – I wonder who he or she was? I wonder what they thought? I wonder how the landscape has changed. Who said this region could grow grapes well? What part of the path they chose was predestined? What part was created? Who manufactured the momentum? Did they realize what they might be starting?

Surely it was not from the seat of an Italian L-Twin… It couldn’t be… Because then there’d be no farms or vineyards or homesteads… Just thousands of divergent asphalt paths shooting off in every mindless direction…