Wednesday, April 19, 2006
A really unusual thing happened as I was getting ready to leave my office and head to the library late this afternoon. The Iranian student/filmmaker I’ve befriended, who I hadn’t seen in a couple of weeks, showed up at the door wearing an American flag as a bandana on his head. Surprised, I said something like “that’s strange, because I’m an American and I would never do that,” to which he replied “I know.” This fellow and I have met and spoken in my office numerous times; I’ve read a screenplay of his, and always enjoy our informative discussions. But today I learned in just a few minutes much more about him. He explained he was wearing the headwear to let the men who “spy” on “Persian” students at MMU know that he wasn’t causing any trouble. My experience speaking with several Iranian students during the past two months was that they are far from being anti-American; in fact, they wish they could be studying in the US (even if they are not enamored of our country’s leaders). He told me he was forced to leave his school in Iran because of his previous involvement with student activism, ended up at MMU, and changed his area of interest from “water engineering” to film (my opinion: not a bad decision!). Anyway, he says someone keeps a close watch on he and others—but what a get-up! The reason for his visit was to loan me a software tutorial, but we ended up acknowledging and talking about the difficulties of current political circumstances (and eventually he did remove his funny cap)…
Morning was taken up catching up on emails and setting up my NJIT server space to handle Java. I think progress was made, but still haven’t managed to get the program to run in a web page (getting a different error message—hopefully this is a matter of the server needing to reboot before it works properly). Then, for various reasons by afternoon became preoccupied with the upcoming gig in Bangkok (probably because I booked the plane/hotel just before lunch, and also filled out the 10 page questionnaire sent yesterday by Festival organizers). So I ended up making a list of potential pieces to perform, making a file of them which I sent to collaborator Curkendall, and listening to nearly 3 hours of field recordings I’ve made here. The best stuff was sounds of frogs, birds, and a barking Thai tree lizard. It was a pleasurable diversion to be working with just language for a change, reviewing pieces I’ve put together over the past three years or so. Some of which are really odd, like the series of “spam” poems I made from unwanted email messages in 2004 (once upon a time one of the editors at Ugly Ducking Presse suggested I make a chapbook of these, but I’d practically forgotten about them since). Anxious to see what Eric thinks of them, this’ll help dictate the direction our show (in two weeks) will take. Next week I’ll upload a few more sounds, work on some video & animations & continue scheming…
Tomorrow we head up to the Cameron Highlands, to check out the tea plantations and breathe in the cool mountain air (which’ll be odd, given the amount of heat we normally encounter here). Bringing some eBook work with me, & hope to be pretty much finishing what I can of that project next week (anticipating that the elements of the production aspect are going to take awhile).
Morning was taken up catching up on emails and setting up my NJIT server space to handle Java. I think progress was made, but still haven’t managed to get the program to run in a web page (getting a different error message—hopefully this is a matter of the server needing to reboot before it works properly). Then, for various reasons by afternoon became preoccupied with the upcoming gig in Bangkok (probably because I booked the plane/hotel just before lunch, and also filled out the 10 page questionnaire sent yesterday by Festival organizers). So I ended up making a list of potential pieces to perform, making a file of them which I sent to collaborator Curkendall, and listening to nearly 3 hours of field recordings I’ve made here. The best stuff was sounds of frogs, birds, and a barking Thai tree lizard. It was a pleasurable diversion to be working with just language for a change, reviewing pieces I’ve put together over the past three years or so. Some of which are really odd, like the series of “spam” poems I made from unwanted email messages in 2004 (once upon a time one of the editors at Ugly Ducking Presse suggested I make a chapbook of these, but I’d practically forgotten about them since). Anxious to see what Eric thinks of them, this’ll help dictate the direction our show (in two weeks) will take. Next week I’ll upload a few more sounds, work on some video & animations & continue scheming…
Tomorrow we head up to the Cameron Highlands, to check out the tea plantations and breathe in the cool mountain air (which’ll be odd, given the amount of heat we normally encounter here). Bringing some eBook work with me, & hope to be pretty much finishing what I can of that project next week (anticipating that the elements of the production aspect are going to take awhile).
# posted by chris funkhouser @ 7:18 AM 
