It’s the end of December. Christmas is in two days. I can finally say it: SATUR-19 is over. It’s “finished”—meaning I still have to fix a couple of (YES only a couple “a few” as I wrote last week) shots, and then get the DCP made—which means I haven’t opened Adobe Premiere Pro in at least 10 days. Maybe a week. I’m not sure anymore. Time is leaking away even faster now and I’m just trying to get as many promotional hats and other worthless “swag” from the entertainment industry; Da Boss loves stupid gifts like this. I mean really, who needs a letterman jacket from the set of What Lies Beneath? Da Boss, apparently. “Don’t worry, Monica,” he told me, “the jacket doesn’t spoil the ending. That’s just the trailer.”
Not knowing what the fuck he was talking about (typical), I slinked away and got back to reading Daniel Okrent’s superb 2010 history of Prohibition in the United States, Last Call. First, here’s to all the ladies and las chicas who spearheaded the Temperance movement and are really the ones to “thank” for that grand and crazy decade of dryness. It was really out of control—believe me, I was there. Rooster and I had settled in Kanas around the turn of the century, eager to get into bootlegging in the first state to go dry. Problem was we got there about 20 years too late: Kansas went dry in 1880, and stayed that way until 1948. You couldn’t even open a BAR in Kansas until 1987; by then, Rooster and I were long gone, all wet and far from home.
What I find amusing about Okrent’s book is how strongly it corresponds to our world today. In the early-1900s, very few of the “drys” who advocated for Prohibition thought it would work, thought it would be enforced, or thought it was a good idea. All these politicians, from Warren G. Harding to Woodrow Wilson to Joseph P. Kennedy to J. Edgar Hoover, maintained private booze supplies while thousands more Americans simply got their liquor from Canada (Northerners) or made their own (the South). You ever had moonshine? Oh my god. Never again. NEVER AGAIN. I don’t even drink anymore, it hasn’t been any fun since FourLoko was outlawed and re-formulated. You’ll never know what that shit was like in 2009. It was the Millennial Quaalude. I’ve had both, and FourLoko was better.
The most satisfying post-editing activity I’ve taken up are lighting tests: I put up two 12x12 panel LED’s, point them at opposite walls, dress the room, and mix the colors. Right now it’s green and red OBVIOUSLY so I got another two out and started mixing them with different combinations of saturated colors, warm and cold. Hopefully Da Boss will, in his way, understand how light works and, perhaps, improve the quality of his lighting design. “Hey Monica, why are all the lights pointed at the walls…” WELL I GUESS I WAS WRONG AGAIN! “It looks pretty neat, honestly.” Never mind, it worked, I told you it would work, it wasn’t ever not going to work, I was born to make this work and happen.
Mood. Mood…
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