Knives Float on Water
Thinking about direction and meaning
As usual, I have taken some time to ponder the next moves, the purpose, and the objectives (or lack thereof) of my next project or projects. Or in this case, the direction. I announced two Substack posts ago that I was abandoning working with media companies and would instead seek my own path to checking off one of the last two items on my bucket list. Namely, making a feature film, or more precisely, whatever the equivalent is in this networked media environment.
My mind finds a thing that appeals to me and starts to build a network of associations around it. Then, I will sit and soak up that constellation of meaning, like some wyrd astrology chart. Here’s the mindmap of my most recent journey.
I said I wanted to realize a movie or a movie-like expression of the epic story that Ong’s Hat/Liminal Cycle has become, furthering the story’s evolution and, therefore, finding new ground. A story in my feed caught my eye and got the ball rolling.
Vincent Gallo, notoriously problematic, is, one may even say, a problem child of indie film. He made a film that he sent to two festivals and then pulled from distribution, declaring it off limits. I was struck by a few thoughts while reading about the history of this film. Guy Debord, pulling his films from distribution until after his death, and Vincent Gallo working with Coppola on Tetro. Tetro was one of two films that Coppola produced during a period of time when he was getting back to basics, and according to an interview I read with him during that period, he only used as much equipment as would fit in one van. Simple. Basic. Bare bones. Devoid of all the distractions that money and equipment bring with them. Art. Tetro was shot in black and white, which gave a gritty feel. The other film from this back-to-basics period was Youth Without Youth with Tim Roth, from a story by Mircea Eliade (yes, that Mircea Eliade).
Anyway, so here we are again at Coppola, where I started on the Substack several weeks ago. He had to avoid the producer sludge so he could make Apocalypse Now, and ponied up his own money to make Megalopolis, and no matter what you thought of the movie, that took a lot of courage and demonstrated a lot of artistic integrity.
And now Gallo with Promises Written in Water. I will not drone on about this movie because I haven’t seen it, and not many people have. Besides, the actual content of the film is not my point here. It’s the story of the making and distribution of the movie that grabbed my attention. And yes, Gallo has said and done some things I am not thrilled about, including his seeming full-throated endorsement of Donald McRonald. However, as an artist, in the case of this film, he did what he thought was proper and the Hollyweird scum be damned.
Here are some of my favorite reviews and quotes about the movie, with bold emphasis added by me.
There have been reviews that it opens with a 10-minute scene of Gallo chainsmoking and a scene of him having Delfine Balfort do several line readings in a row. It was initially supposed to be another film called "The Funeral Director," which Gallo took over. The people on Letterboxd who saw it in Toronto describe it as "if someone detonated a bomb at the center of a traditional narrative and then assembled the broken shards into a mosaic of beautiful marginalia." Here's the experience of a boom op that worked on the set of PWIW: https://jwsoundgroup.net/index.php?/topic/1841-working-with-vincent-gallo/
"The documentary language of this fiction film splits the audience into two: At the official screening they clapped for five minutes – but at the press screening they started laughing and booing from the start, where Gallo is credited as director and editor, and for the script, music, production and acting. They were noisy throughout the screening, laughter returned, a mob dominated the audience."[
https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/vincent-gallo-promises-written-water-release/
Promises Written in Water” sounds like a natural next step for a filmmaker that has long been obsessed with breaking and challenging traditions and cultural expectations.
“What I have tried to do in this movie is to make choices as if this was the first movie ever made and not to buy into the story of what cinema should be,” Gallo told The Independent in 2011 about “Promises,” confirming then he had no plans on releasing it.
I think you can see why some of this appeals to me. Does this mean I’ll be making a movie I'll never release? No. Besides, I already released a book in a very limited edition that I’ll never reissue. (Used copies show up very occasionally, priced outrageously at $800 to $1,000 or more. Please don’t purchase them because you’ll only encourage the parasites.) No, it’s simply about just doing the art you want to do, however you wish. Your art. Your way.
This is what I am pursuing. This is where my mind is at. Have I begun designing and writing? No, not yet. But I’m warming up the engine, and this is the kind of fuel I’m putting in the tank.
My coffee roaster has written a compelling story. Check it out and get some beans while you’re at it. Seance is my roast of choice, or the decaf Seance if you please.
https://redshiftcoffee.com/r-i-h-s-early-experiments/
Shouting out shout-outs
Gabriel gave me a shout-out, and I dropped a response. You know, one of the things that always impressed me about the Beats was how they all helped each other as writers. Ginsberg broke first with Howl; he helped Kerouac publish On the Road, and they both helped Burroughs publish Naked Lunch. You rarely see that kind of supportive behavior anymore. Most people see you achieving success, and they get petty and jealous and try to sabotage your art.
Don’t be like that as much as the world seems to want you to be.
A friend once observed, “When you’re ahead of the pack, you often cross the finish line with arrows in your back.”
408. Synthetic Text Extruder Hype (ft. Emily Bender, Alex Hanna)
These are precisely the kinds of conversations we need to have about AI. I’ve worked with many foundational technologies underpinning today’s AI systems. To hear more about my experiences, check out Ong’s Hat: COMPLEAT.
At their core, AI chatbots are built on large language models (LLMs) or databases of words, where each word is tagged according to its relationships with others (for example, “A is like B in this way”) for derivability. These are filtered through grammar rules and powered by inference engines that determine the most likely response to a prompt. This runs on a sophisticated software and hardware stack, something we could envision, but not fully realize, as recently as 2007. Despite significant investment, we could achieve promising results back then, but not in real time.
It took nearly 20 more years and the repurposing of GPUs originally designed for gaming graphics (thanks to their floating-point capabilities), along with the advent of affordable memory and storage, for the vision I once spent a million dollars of investor money pursuing to finally become a reality.
The book THE AI CON and the discussion with its authors break down these developments better than anywhere else I’ve encountered.
Also, see The Conscious Mind by David Chalmers and start asking questions that address the hard problem that most discussions of AI and sentience seem to ignore.
Ong’s Hat: Interdimensional Portals or ARG? | Shadow Frequency Ep. 124
Did rogue scientists in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens really build a device that opened portals to parallel worlds? In Episode 124 of The Shadow Frequency, Matt Wilson explores the infamous Ong’s Hat conspiracy—from the Incunabula Papers to the mysterious Egg Device. Is this early internet myth more real than we think?