Tits out ‘n’ creamy
Today I had my first real artgasm in months…MONTHS I tell you.
Last Friday afternoon, Tommy and I were sitting out getting stumbly at the park. Suddenly his Doppelgaenger (the director Peter Palasnik) decided to stop by with his seeemingly mute lady friend. The boys chatted for a bit, until the subject of a certain cafe’s certain film competition came up.
I’d heard about it before. Cheeky PoMo cafe decides to host a short film competition/festival on the subject of its staple merchandise. Last year it was sugar. At some point it must have been coffee…and this year.
It’s cream.
I nearly squeezed off a load into my worn cotton grannies right then and there. Cream? My reaction to the borderline-retarded nature of the competition was quickly overtaken by my passionate and enduring worship of nearly all dairy products. Cream included. Could it be that the gods were speaking to me through this cafe’s trite post-adolescent stab at irony?
Yes. Oh Jesus yes.
Seconds later I was on the phone to Rebecca, my long-suffering designer and all-around collaborator. We had been planning to play around with a video-version of a recent opera proposal we’ve presented to a theater in Eastern Europe. “Fuck that shit,” I declared neutrally, “we’re doing cream.”
After a long silence, I heard a labored sigh on the line. “Just storyboard it and be at my place on Monday at four.”
As Monday broke this morning, I lunged out of my apartment and into my local supermarket, where I bought two cans of whipped cream, five cartons of 10% fat condensed milk and a huge jar of vanilla yogurt.
Later I’d find out that at that very moment, Rebecca was securing ape masks and balaclavas. This is why I love her.
See, I’m not an ideas director…I’m a pictures director. I’m an outside-in as opposed to inside-out director. Rebecca gets this. The visual logic I devise for a play, opera, installation or movie ends up molding the project’s content. End manifesto.
This established, I wanted to film a story-less series of bizarre episodes featuring two chunky topless ladies. And buckets of thick white cream.
And so that was today. Rebecca and I bouncing around her apartment in just our underwear (our pants had been destroyed in the first test take), sprinting for the sink after every cut, in order to wipe the cream out of our hair, eye sockets, underbreasts, belly-buttons, etc. Beautiful pictures. Dirty pictures. Holy pictures.
Everything began to stink of foul milk drying into wood. My eyebrows remain curded into a rather unfamiliar shape.
At one point, Rebecca’s roommate came home to find us spraying, smearing, shooting and drooling cream all over each other, and all over her newly done floors. She stood speechless at the smelly, jiggling sight.
Her four-month-old son, Hugo, seemed considerably more entertained.
Rapture, you might call it.
