Dirty Jobs with Mark Brinker

Pretty much the first paying job I had when I moved to Los Angeles was this concert sponsored by Nokia at the art museum The Getty Center. Nokia has this phone with a high resolution camera on it. What Nokia wanted to do was have representatives use the camera to take people's pictures and then e-mail the pictures from the phone to a Flickr page, and on top of one of the Getty Center buildings we set up a laptop and a projector, so the pictures taken on the phone were projected onto the side of one of the Getty Center buildings. Our crew spent the afternoon setting up the projector and building a tent in which the photos would be taken, and then once the concert started everybody left the roof to go eat hot dogs and listen to the music. Except for me.

It turned out that the computer's screen saver went on automatically if the computer sat still for more than 5 minutes. And because the computer was a Nokia corporate issued computer, that setting couldn't be changed. So my job was to sit on the roof of the Getty Center throughout the concert, moving the mouse slightly every few minutes so the computer didn't go to sleep.

Then, a few weeks later, I was at my boss's house working on Halloween. I get paid a flat rate for 12 hour day, so sometimes if we finish what we're doing early, my boss will have me hang around to see if anything else comes up. After the work was done on Halloween, my boss said "You know what? I've got some stuff to work on in the other room. Could you sit by the door and answer it for Trick or Treaters?" So I did.

Probably the highest profile job I've had so far was on a photo shoot with Jessica Simpson for a line of hair extensions sponsored by her and her stylist, Ken Paves. The theme of all the photos was a single Ken Paves interacting with several Jessica Simpsons.



In one of the photos Ken was a store owner and all the mannequins were Jessica Simpsons. The director decided at the last minute that it would be funny to have Ken carrying Jessica under his arm like she was light and stiff and in a mannequin pose. The solution we came up with was to have Jessica lay on a board that two people held, and have Ken pretend to hold her, and later photoshop out the board and the people holding it.

I was on the head-end of the board. Jessica Simpson said "I'm sorry you guys. This is probably so heavy!"
I said "Don't worry about it."

So it's clear that these jobs have been tests where the importance of my role has increased as they've checked off the list the things I can be trusted to do, such as Mouse Moving, Door Answering, and Celebrity Lifting (for Aquatic Leaf Moving, see The Wetsuit Story). And it's all been building up to this:


FLOOR MAKING! That saltillo tile floor is actually a photo printout, based on a tile that I made in photoshop and then tiled in illustrator. That floor is the culmination of everything I learned at RISD. It's by far the biggest job, both in terms of importance, and physically, that I've done in Los Angeles. Who is Mark Brinker? That floor is Mark Brinker.

Needless to say, I may have hit my peak, and I can only assume that a cocaine addiction and subsequent downfall is right around the corner. When you're this high, there's really only one direction you can go.