Blog Is Mark Brinker?

Treatment for Plow Man: The Genesis

2009-07-07T19:51:00.000-07:00

New story published! It's called Treatment for Plow Man: The Genesis, and it's in Yankee Pot Roast, an awesome journal of literary satire. Go there! Go there right now!

This is the Link

Or just copy and paste this in your browser:
http://www.yankeepotroast.org/archives/2009/07/treatment_for_p.html

Whatever you do, do it fast!

The Works

2009-06-10T12:02:00.000-07:00

I got a new story published! It's called "The Works", and it's in Black Boot Magazine. Here's the link: http://www.theblackboot.com/Web_Selects/Mark_Brinker.html

It was one of the first things I wrote after moving to LA, so I guess it's fitting that it would be published now as I'm moving away, sort of bookending things. PS I'm moving out of LA for anyone who didn't know that already.

That link again: http://www.theblackboot.com/Web_Selects/Mark_Brinker.html

PODCAST!

2009-02-15T22:00:00.000-08:00

I have a podcast. It's called Life is Bullshit. The link is life-is-bullshit.blogspot.com, because some asian kid named Neil has lifeisbullshit.blogspot.com, so remember to put the dashes in there. Anyway, you should go to it! Now! What are you waiting for?! Here's another link, in case you forgot to click on the first one:

life-is-bullshit.blogspot.com

You'd better not still be here reading this sentence!

The Noun that Verbs your World

2008-12-01T16:05:00.000-08:00

I got another story published! It's at fringemagazine.org. It's called "Notes from a Man Trapped in a Giant Bottle." Go read it now! Like the booths in a fast food restaurant, this post has been made uncomfortable so that you won't stick around here, but will instead move along and go read the story at fringemagazine.org. Here's a direct link:

http://fringemagazine.org/WebPages/FictionIssue17.html

Two Dreams

2008-11-26T00:20:00.000-08:00

Last night I went to bed at 10pm and woke up at 1am, then couldn’t fall back asleep until 4:30am, at which point I had two really weird dreams. They are described below in all their lurid detail. I'm open to interpretations.

1.
I was with my brother in New York City, and we had a friend who was a small talking robot that looked like a mailbox. My brother and the robot and I went to a coffee shop and ordered cappuccinos, and then my brother left before we got them. The robot then told me that he had borrowed money from the mob, and he couldn't pay it back. Then he went to the bathroom.

He didn’t come back from the bathroom so I went to check on him. When I opened the door I saw the small robot tipped over on his side and I knew immediately that he was dead. A man was standing there peeing on him. The man didn’t say anything, but I knew in the dream that this was the mob sending a message.

“He was my friend!” I yelled, and attacked the peeing goon, and we fought for a while until I subdued him, and he told me that now the mob was angry at me for attacking him and also for being friends with the robot.

2.
I was in a Blockbuster Video with my roommate Maria. We realized neither of us had a Blockbuster account, and Maria couldn’t get an account since she is from Sweden. I got the application for a card, and Maria pointed out that one side was entirely questions about the play Romeo and Juliet. “So they can tell if you’ve read it or not,” she said.

The only question I remember is “What subjects did Romeo and Juliet study in school?” Though I’ve never read the play in my waking life, in the dream I was certain that for Juliet the answer was “Science,” and for Romeo it was a trick question, because Romeo didn’t go to school, because he was too poor.

Tuesdays with Henry 2: Son of Tuesdays with Henry

2008-11-12T01:03:00.000-08:00

The Call has been Answered!

2008-11-02T21:57:00.000-08:00

Like the ghoul in this clip from the movie Hellraiser, my blog is reborn!

The call for entries has been answered by Henry Ferreira. I haven't blogged in a while, but luckily Henry wrote about what I was doing in my time away. His entry is posted below:

"Hello. My name is Mark" A slim young man walked into the doorway. Blonde flowing hair seemed to blow in the wind.

"Oh hello Mark what brings you to my house today!? It's chilly and windy come inside!" A man opens the door. He's blind. He also has crutches. "My wife was jsut making me dinner. Tater's and ham tonight!"

Mark looked down. "I'm homeless. Are you sure you want me to come in? ...I might need a place to stay." A single tear rolled down Mark's cheek and splattered on the floor.

"what was that?" asked the blind man. "Did you spit on my floor?" The blind man has super sensitive hearing from being extraordinarily blind.

"You could hear that?" Asked Mark? "I can't believe it?" His eye's grew wide like dinner plates. But then they grew small out of fear that the blind man would be offended by Mark's above average eyesight.

The blind man laughed, coyly. "Haha. Dont worry about it son. I've gotten quite used to my retardation!" A fly buzzed by Mark's face but it was too slow and the blind man caught and ate it.

"Incredible!" Said Mark.

"Yes!" Said the blind man. "Listen. Why dont you come in and have some dinner. My wife is cooking up something mighty fine! Ham and potatoes! MMmmmm MMMM. My favorite!"

As mark entered the home a single felix cat clock wagged its tall over the wall. A bird in a cage tweeted. And last, but not least, a small dachshund came up to mark and licked his big toe.

"Oh my god that tickles!"

"BAD mortimer!" The blind man kicked the dog and it yelped loudly. "Sorry about that. He isn't very good with new people.

"Thanks for kicking him. By the way? What's your name?" Mark slowly wiped his big toe on the shag carpet.

"Well, my friend call my Blind Bob. Been callin me that since i lost my vision. It hurt my feelings at first but now i think its quite a fitting name." He looked down at the carpet. "I cant see the Carpet anymore."

"OK Blind Bob, My names Mark!"

"I know." Blind Bob motioned to the kitchen. "Wifey is inside cooking the ham and taters." Go thank her for preparing a big meal.

"Hey wifey!" Shouted Mark. "Thanks for making me dinner!" Mark then ate the ham.

"Oh thats no problem. Blind Bob always has me cooking for his firefighter buddies."

Mark began to cry again. "I love you blind bob i would have starved out there with my golden locks in the cold!" He hugged Blind Bob.

Just then, as Mark began to release Blind Bob from his icy grip, the police came inside!

"He's a murderer!" One of the policemen yelled.
"You Lied to me!" Blind Bob yelled simultaneously.

"DAmmit!" Mark pulled out his gun and began shooting the police. Then he shot Blind Bob. Then he raped and shot wifey.

Truly, the beast in this story....was man.

END

Henry has thrown down the gauntlet. Who among you is man enough to challenge him?

Call for Entries

2008-08-14T01:19:00.000-07:00

I realized a couple things after the last blog post: 1. Although not working as an Art PA on Spanish and occasionally Japanese language commercials has greatly reduced my overall anxiety and depression levels, it's left me with a lack of ridiculous, hard-to-believe stories about stuff that's happened to me on jobs, and B. People still read this blog. And while I was considering making up some stories about fake jobs, I decided it might be more fun if other people did it.

So this is my call for entries: Write your own Blog is Mark Brinker blog post. It can be any theme, style, or topic. Maybe you know an actual event that's happened to me that I haven't written about, or maybe you know of a fake event that should have happened to me, either way, this is your chance to make that event, true or untrue, be counted in the pages of history.

Then just e-mail your entry to brinker.mark@gmail.com (NOT mark.brinker@gmail.com, who does not tell people when they incorrectly send him e-mails meant for me, and then I find out weeks later that I never got some important e-mail because mark.brinker can't hit reply) and I will post it up here. All submitted entries will be posted, anonymously or nonymously, whichever you prefer. If no one submits anything, I will go back and delete this post and claim that it never existed, just like those people that Stalin had airbrushed out of photographs or whatever.

If enough people submit then there will be a round of voting and prizes will be awarded.

-Mark Out.

P.S. After a second day of class that mean teacher from the last entry turned out not to be so mean. It was, as I had suspected, largely an act to get us to take the program seriously. She went out drinking with us that evening, and told us that so far only one person had failed the class, and we knew what person she was talking about, and it wasn't me.

The Repressed Anger of all of Los Angeles

2008-08-11T23:09:00.001-07:00

I have this class now that's just referred to as 531, or sometimes, in hushed voices, Sue's 531. For a long time I didn't know what it was, I just knew that it was something to be afraid of. The teachers would say things like "This may not seem important now but you'll need to know it by the time you get to Sue's 531."
and
"I'll answer your questions now, but with Sue you won't be able to ask questions like that.",
and
"What class do you have next?" "531." "Oh my god."

Today was the first day of that class. We came in and sat down and Sue came in and was talking to the TA, and then stopped and turned and stared, annoyed, at a group of people talking in the corner. "Are you done?"

The next hour and a half was basically the same as the first hour and a half of the movie Full Metal Jacket. "This school is a cookie cutter school," she said. "You people are all tasteless cookies, you know, the cheap kind that crumbles in your mouth. That's what you'll be when you come out of the school. And right now you're not even a crappy cookie, you're a piece of crap cookie in training."
and
"I will not hesitate to tell you that you suck. The only reason I would hesitate is if I thought there was no way you could improve. Because there is no point in kicking a retard."
and
"If I could find any other job that pays me the same as I get paid as an editor, I would take it in a second."
and possibly most disturbing,
"No other teacher at this school cares about teaching as much as I do."

Apparently she used to be able to “fire” people from her class, so most of the rumors I had heard about her involved classes ending with a sole surviving student, and, according to her, some classes that didn’t go to completion because all the students were fired. Today she told us that the school has forbidden her from firing any more students, so instead she would fail us, the difference being that we find out at the end instead of in the middle.

Also at one point she called the entire profession of film editing “A Widowmaker.”

The point is that as uniquely furious as Sue is, I’m starting to realize she’s just another link in very long chain of angry Los Angelenos who claim they aren’t angry, but instead knowledgeable and well-adjusted.

See also: my previous boss. When I was still working with him I tried to keep his depiction on this blog as neutral as possible, in case he ever found out it existed. But now that we no longer talk I am free to discuss and analyze his general inner rage.

One night he and another guy and the woman who did accounting were working late in his garage. The guy went to the bathroom and left the door open. My former boss said “Hey man, close the fucking door, there’s a lady present!” The other guy said “It’s just Nancy,” and my boss picked up a power drill from the desk and threw it on the ground hard enough to break it in half.

The next day he tried to explain things to me from his point of view. “I mean, not closing the door, when there’s a lady... it’s just rude, you know? I get really mad when people are rude.”

And then his favorite “joke” is to walk next to someone who is working on something for him and fart.

Also he’ll say “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not racist, but-” and then say something really racist.

See also: everybody on the highways who honks at you when you try to merge, or when you’re just not going fast enough. Also: homeless people who don’t ask you for money, they just yell at you. Also: the people behind the movies whose titles end in the word Movie and occasionally the word Spartans, and the people behind Beverly Hills Chihuahua.

Also: me? My biggest fear these days is that Los Angeles will turn me into a Sue or a My Former Boss. Could it be that with the brownish yellow smog, the constant traffic, the heat reflecting off cracked sidewalk pavement that no one is meant to walk on, the fourteen dollar movie theaters, Los Angeles has a different bell curve than most cities, by which fuming at whoever crosses your path averages out to “telling it like it is?”

The other day after the earthquake I realized that kids going to school in California would have had earthquake drills, and not the tornado drills of the Midwest. The people in my class from California were really surprised that I’d never been in an earthquake, and I pointed out that they’d probably never had to go to the basement in the middle of the night because of a tornado warning. One of the guys in my class said “I'd rather have earthquakes than tornados.”
“No, man,” I said, “Tornadoes are way better.”

Two Exchanges

2008-08-02T12:51:00.001-07:00

Today I came out of the ice cold computer lab I’d been working in to soak up some warmth from the California sun. I was sitting on these big cement steps they have outside. This woman came up to me, and said “Are you okay?”
“Why?” I said. “Do I look depressed or something?”
“You’re like a chameleon.”
“What?” I said.
“You’re like a chameleon.”
“Why?”
“You just are.”
“Huh,” I said. I took out gum from my pocket.
“Let me have a piece,” this woman said.
“Okay – here.”
“Let me have 2 pieces, one for my boyfriend.”
“Okay, take two.”
“That’s my boyfriend over there.” She motioned to an African American guy sitting nearby holding an acoustic guitar. “I used to be racist,” she said.
“...oh yeah?”
“When I first met him I said ‘Get away from me, n*gger.'”
“Huh.”
“That’s what I said, I said ‘Get away from me, n*gger.’”
“Well I’m glad you got over your racism.”
“I met him this morning.”
“Oh.”
“Here,” She had been holding two pieces of paper during our conversation, and now she handed one to me. It was a pamphlet for a nearby Tae Kwon Do school. “Watch this,” she said, and started kicking the cement steps.
“Huh,” I said. I put down the pamphlet. “Cool.”
“I kick steps and walls and stuff but not people.” She slid the pamphlet closer to me. “Here, write down your name and information – I’m gonna give you a call.”
“Why would you call me?” I said.
“I’m a producer. I have my own production company.”
“I just started at this school,” I said, pushing the pamphlet back to her with nothing written on it. “I don’t really know anything.”
“No, it’s okay – you can learn! I have some DVS’s I need you to edit for me.”
“What are DVS’s?”
“Digital Video... Sss,” she said, like the S stood for the one at the end of Videos.
I stood up and started backing away, towards the doors of the school. “I hang out around here all the time so I can catch the newbies!” she said. Then she laid down on the step and stretched her arms out. “I’m gonna get so tan!” she said.
“Okay, well, good talking to-”
“Do you get tan?” she said.
“I’ve got a pretty good farmer’s tan going,” I said, motioning to the clear line between my pale shoulder and slightly less pale arm.
“You’re a farmer?” she said.
“No, I have a farmer’s tan.”
“Will you sow your seed in my field?” she said.
“I’ve gotta go,” I said. “See you around.”

A couple hours later I was walking from the computer lab to my apartment, listening to my ipod. I heard someone call something to me. I took off my headphones and looked up, and saw this old woman leaning out from a second floor balcony. She just waved, and then pointed down to the lawn. On the grass were two of those Downy fabric softener balls that you put in the washing machine. I picked them up.
“Throw them?” I said.
She didn’t say yes, but just held out her hands. I tossed the first one up, she caught it one-handed, then caught the second one the same way. Then she just waved again, and went back inside.
“Bye,” I called.

I am Plubished!

2008-07-08T22:59:00.000-07:00

I got a story published on a website! The website is called Pequin.org. The story is called "Hey Get a Load of this Salt Lick!"

Most of the words you've read up to this point have been links to my story on that website. Click on one and chances are it will take you there. Or click here. Or just copy and paste this in your navigator:

http://pequin.org/archives/2008/markbrinker/saltlick.php

Also you'll notice a new list to your right, titled "Links are Mark Brinker." I'm optimistically hoping to fill out that list a little more. I'm inspired now that I have infinitely more stories published than I did one hour ago.

The point is you've had plenty of opportunities, and you should only have made it to this point in the blog post if you've already read the story. I know I said that my proudest accomplishment was when they played my voice at the beginning of that public radio show, and that was true, but this is my new proudest accomplishment.

In other news things are good.

Omega Airlines Safety Features

2008-06-28T19:30:00.000-07:00

Dear Blog,

Sorry for neglecting you for so long. My April in Los Angeles was swept away in a torrent of existential despair. Then I went to Chicago for a month and worked on this movie and almost accidentally burned someone's house down. Now I'm back in California. I've moved to Burbank and am attending a 14 month program for digital editing called "Video Symphony." An outdated newsletter from when the school first opened revealed to me that it was once called "Video Symphony Entertraining." Now it's just referred to as "Video Symphony."

The point is that if they can identify and correct their mistakes and move forward, then so can I.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I know I've been cold to you, but believe me it's with the utmost conviction that I say I still love you dearly.

I made this animation a year ago to teach myself Flash, and then subsequently never did anything with it. I'm posting it here to mark my triumphant return to you, my blog. Enjoy.

(click on the picture to view the animation. It's 2 minutes and 30 seconds long.)

Yours until I run out of stuff to write about,

Mark

P.S. If this blog still has any human readers, let me know if that animation plays okay. One of the reasons it sat in a folder labeled "Flash Stuff" deeply nested within a bunch of other folders was that it took me a really long time to figure out how to get it online and viewable, and I'm still not really satisfied. Sometimes I think I may never be satisfied.

All Screenshots

2008-04-29T01:02:00.000-07:00

Since I started this blog a lot of people have been e-mailing me saying "When are you going to show us a new form of documentary photography, one that treats the internet as a landscape and the screenshot as a camera with which you document your travels through cyberspace and ultimately capture something about each of us and the culture we live in?" Well, the wait is finally over. Today I'm here to usher in an entirely new way of seeing and thinking. You can throw away your cameras and you can draw over the lens of your cell phone's camera with a Sharpee - these are devices of the past. The screenshot is the only camera you'll need. Consider this post the first All-Screenshot Photography exhibition.

All of these photographs were collected online and have not been altered in any way. Just like a photo from the top of Mount Everest, you could feasibly see all of these sights yourself. But after this exhibition, you won't have to.

Copies of my book "Shift+Command+4 and Other Ways to Take Memorable Screenshots" are available for sale in the lobby.

A Riveting LA Story

2008-04-27T02:49:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the breaks - this is the only way to let you see the whole conversation in this blog window and still have it be a readable size. Disregard them - this is one continuous tale.

Drinking and Driving and Running Red Lights

2008-04-22T19:35:00.000-07:00

1. A Return on the Pickup Day

On every commercial job I've worked there is usually a day for picking up rental furniture and other props, and a day afterwards for returning those things. Usually two people do this in a 4-ton truck, one to drive and the other to back the truck in to tight parking spaces. The recent Honda job I worked was no exception. I was at my boss's house, getting the list of the rentals we needed to pick up. The guy I'd be driving with was named Rob. Rob said to my boss "While we're in North Hollywood, we should probably return the car from that other job, right?" My boss agreed that we should.

"Okay," Rob said to me. "One of us will return the car and then get picked up by the other one in the truck. Do you want to drive the truck or the police car?"

"The police car," I said.

Before we took off I tried to get the lights and sirens to work, but either they were disabled or there was some kind of code to stop people who have no business turning on the sirens of a rented police car from turning on the sirens of a rented police car. Whatever the case, on his camera Rob has a picture of me behind the wheel, pretending to look like a stern cop. There's actually a story behind why I don't have that picture, but it can't be posted on the blog, so you'll have to e-mail me if you want to hear it.

I followed the truck to the highway. He went through a yellow light. In my own car, I would have stopped. But I didn't know where we were going. "Screw it," I thought. "I'm in a police car." The light turned red as I went through the intersection.

To understand the sweet release of driving a police car on Los Angeles highways, you have to understand Los Angeles drivers. While you or I might perceive the "self" as the combination of mind and body, the Los Angeleno perceives the self as the combination of mind, body, and car. I experienced this form of consciousness one day when I was walking, and was curious about what was behind me, and instead of turning around, I looked up and to the right, where a rear view mirror would be if I was in a car.

Because of this condition, Los Angeles highways, or "freeways," are the locker rooms of the city, the place that residents express their hopes, dreams, and deep inner rage. They tailgate with their brights on, even if there's an open lane to the left, because they shouldn't have to merge left, you should get out of their way and merge right. But this is tough, because when a Los Angeles driver sees someone about to merge into their lane, it is customary to speed up and close the window into which that person would merge. Allowing another car to merge into your lane is viewed as a sign of weakness.

EXCEPT if that other car is a police car. The LAPD's proud tradition of overreacting, especially when it comes to highway situations, has led to an corollary to the LA be-an-asshole-on-the-highway doctrine, which is back the hell away from cops. Initially I drove extremely cautiously, this being someone else's rental car, but shortly into the trip, I noticed something that I've termed a "Pocket of Freedom." Regardless of the speed of traffic, I could go as fast or as slow as I wanted, and the amount of space between me and the other cars would not change. Even without the sirens, we made the trip from Santa Monica to North Hollywood in record time.

In North Hollywood, I drove past a real police car. I'd wondered about this. My car had a sign taped in the back window that said "Motion Picture Vehicle," but from all other angles was indistinguishable from a real police car. I'm not sure what police procedure says about a person in jeans and a t-shirt driving one of their vehicles, but this officer waved. It could be that he didn't notice my lack of uniform, or that given our distance from the cinema vehicle rental lot, he'd seen a lot of inappropriate driver-to-vehicle relationships. Or maybe this person wasn't a cop at all, but a costumed actor on his way to a shoot who forgot to tape up his Motion Picture Vehicle sign. Whatever the case, I waved back at him, and through this exchange we acknowledged the unspoken power we each felt in our respective black-and-whites.

2. A Pickup on the Return Day

I was helping Rob pack the 4-ton when I got a call from my boss.

"What are you doing?" he said.
"Packing the truck."
"I need you to pick me up at the Standard Hotel in Hollywood."
"Okay..."
"I'm on my way there now, so leave in 5 minutes and we should get there at the same time."

I left Rob to make the returns on his own, and drove to Hollywood. Surprisingly there was a metered spot directly in front of the hotel. As I was parallel parking, my boss pulled up to the hotel's valet, in a bright red vintage-looking Cadillac convertible. He got out and gave the keys to the valet. "Keep it near the front," he said. "Someone is gonna pick it up in a minute." And then, to me, "Come on, let's have a drink by the pool."

I got a Fat Tire, my boss got a Pomegranate Mojito. "I stayed in the Standard once," he said. "The rooms are tiny."

"What was the Cadillac for?" I said.
"Music video. Same as the police car."
"Oh," I said, realizing I forgot to ask about that.
Halfway through our drinks, an Art PA from the music video came to pick up the Cadillac.

"This Mojito's the business," my boss said.
"Really? It's good?"
"Yeah. Sip?" He slid me the Mojito.
"Sure. Fat Tire?"
"Sure."
We traded sips.

We left the Standard. Getting into my Honda Fit, my boss said, "Ouch. Sucks to go from a Cadillac convertible to this!"

On the way home I went through a yellow light. My boss said "I was wondering when you were finally gonna go through one of those. I mean, Jesus! It's Los Angeles!" I put on my signal, and we got on the highway.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like...

2008-04-18T01:20:00.000-07:00

A good portion of my day is spent talking on ichat with Henry Ferreira (see Tuesdays with Henry), and I feel we've come to know each other's online personalities fairly well. So when Henry left his ichat account open on a public computer in RISD's Printmaking building and a deeply angry sophomore named Maria started talking to me through his account, it didn't take long to realize that this was not my friend. But for some reason I talked to her for a long time anyway. I'm posting some excerpts from our chat, so that researchers can analyze the unfocused angst of a modern American art school student, and together brainstorm ways to quell that anger, or at least direct it toward something that needs a good name calling!

(Notes: 1. You may have to click some of the chats to open them in a new window and make them easy to read. There's no good way I've found to stop blogger from compressing images. Blogger is lucky that I didn't know about Tumblr when I started this thing. 2. Henry was also logged in to facebook, which is how Maria found out the rest of the information such as the fact that my girlfriend's name is Emily.)

Seagulls

2008-04-10T20:42:00.000-07:00

I just got done working on a Honda commercial. The commercial was Japanese, for a car that’s only available in Japan. Most of the crew was Japanese as well, including the director and producers, and a translator accompanied them for when they had to talk to the crewmembers who didn’t speak Japanese.

Since this was a car commercial, most of the shots were of the car driving through various neighborhoods. The only real “set” was an RV that followed the Honda, outfitted to look like a hip trendy mobile radio station, which I guess was supposed to be the spirit that this new Honda embodied.

Anyway, on the first day the shot was of the RV and the new Honda in a parking lot. We needed to paint over the white parking lines with gray paint, and then lay down our own parking lines with white tape, because the spaces had to sit at a slightly different angle than the real parking lines. That took about two hours, and after that, our work was done. We’d prepared the RV the night before. Most of us stood around either tidying up our truck, or grabbing some food from the Craft Services table. But at some point the Producers had told my boss, the Production Designer, that there might be too many people in the art department. He was seeing a lot of standing around. So for the afternoon, we got busy, cleaning the RV that we had cleaned the day before.

My boss handed me a spray and told me to use it on the wheels. When I was on number three out of six, he walked by me and said “Not the tires! The wheels!” He came by and told me to start over on the wheels, and then handed me a different product to use on the tires. After about five hours of cleaning the van, production wrapped for the day.

The next day we had one less person in the Art Department. And today the set wasn’t a parking lot, it was a driveway and a back yard. We were responsible for even less today, this time just a surfboard and two bikes sitting in the back yard. We looked for things to do. I drove forty minutes to return a single chair that we had rented. I came back to set and there was still nothing needed. We put another coat of wax on the van.

Then we packed up and moved to the next location, which was a beach in Marina del Rey. The shot was the Honda at the beach, the driver getting out and looking at the ocean, and a seagull flying by overhead. With only the Honda in the shot, we weren’t responsible for anything.

Until the translator came over to my boss, and said “What methods do you have for attracting seagulls?”

Apparently when the crew scouted the location, there had been hundreds of seagulls on the beach, but now there were none. “I’ll get right on it,” said my boss.

Two of our people got on the bikes that we had used in the last shot, and rode up and down the boardwalk with bags of potato chips. The plan was to find some seagulls and use the potato chips to lure them towards the car. The rest of us stood on the beach with bread and potato chips and other snacks we’d taken from the Craft Service table. Whenever a seagull would fly by overhead, we would all throw food into the air, and in the direction of the car, trying to catch his attention. There were four of us at first, but then the Production Assistants, who also had nothing to do, caught on, and soon there were about ten people at various points on the beach, throwing confetti-like showers of crumbled bread into the air whenever a gull flew past.

The people not throwing food became runners, going back and forth between the Craft Service table and the people on the beach, resupplying the throwers whenever they ran out. At some point the Art Director figured out that cheese was the best because of its shape – it could be tossed into the air like a frisbee, thus reaching a higher altitude, closer to the seagulls.

I noticed one of the Producers talking to the translator, who ran over to us. “There are too many people,” he said. “You will scare away the seagulls.” So the rest of us backed off the beach, and only the Art Director was left, throwing pieces of cheese into the air by himself. I jogged over to Craft Services for more cheese.

“You mind if I borrow some more of this?” I asked, picking up a stack.
“Sure,” said the Craft Services person. “But it will never work. Seagulls don’t eat cheese.”

When I came back, a seagull was hovering in the air about fifty feet above the beach. He started making slow circles towards the ground. Everyone struggled to contain their excitement. The Art Director threw cheese with increased fervor, to make sure that the seagull saw and understood. The Director said something to the camera person, the Producer said something to the actor, everybody scrambled to get the camera ready to shoot, and the seagull got startled and flew away.

I went to the Art Director with more cheese. The translator jogged out and met us. “You can stop now,” he said. “They are giving up on that shot.”

I took the cheese back to Craft Services, and joined the rest of the Art Department in tidying up our truck. But a few minutes later I heard a caw, and looked over to see that not one but two seagulls had landed on the beach near the car, and were eating some of the food that had fallen to the ground. And while I was looking, a third landed, and then a fourth. I looked down the beach. Hundreds of seagulls were flying in, directly towards the set. More and more landed, eating all of the food we’d thrown at them earlier.

“Well, now they can definitely get that shot,” I said to the Art Director.
“They’re not going to, though,” he said. “They’ve moved on already.”

So as the sun was setting on the beach and the Producers and Director and Camera Crew were hurrying to finish before it got dark, we all stood around, eating food and drinking coffee from Craft Services, and more seagulls landed on the beach, and at one point the crew had to turn the camera slightly, to keep all the seagulls out of the shot. Like the rest of us, the seagulls were no longer needed.

Tuesdays with Henry

2008-03-26T16:20:00.000-07:00

I decided to post some of the deep intellectual discussions I've had with my longtime collaborator Henry Ferreira, with the hopes that young prospective minds might glean some knowledge.

Los Angeles is a Fantastic Land Filled with Mythical Beasts

2008-03-10T21:13:00.000-07:00

I found my second cockroach last night. My old roommate and reader of the blog, Florian (Hello, Florian) found the first one in our kitchen, and trapped it in a Pringles can (by the way, after you put the can on the cockroach, how’d you flip it over and get the top on it? Impressive). We studied the cockroach through the clear plastic lid, and then threw the sealed Pringles can into the dumpster outside.

And at some point, that cockroach escaped, and over the course of four and a half months, journeyed back to the same kitchen, this time with something to prove.

I smashed him with a metal sauce pot. In my defense, I tried to take a page from Florian’s book and trap him, and then I guess throw the sauce pot away with the cockroach inside. If I had started out planning to smash him I would have used the cast iron skillet, which is only for punishment, whereas the sauce pot sacrifices some of its smashing ability in exchange for the ability to contain things, leaving open the possibility of an insect’s rehabilitation and eventual release. But I missed when I tried to put the inverted sauce pot on him, and rather than risk him escaping, I re-inverted the pot and hit him with it. And then, because somebody (probably Florian) told me that cockroaches can survive heavy blows like being stepped on, I dragged the sauce pot along the floor for a few feet, leaving a long brown line of former cockroach. Which I immediately cleaned up, because cockroaches eat the bodies of other dead cockroaches, so the place where the line was is now actually cleaner than the rest of the floor.

My hope is that this cockroach was just a fluke, a bug in the wrong place at the wrong time, or maybe a bug in the right place, right time, that wanted to die. The point is this apartment has had an infestation before, but with ants.

A lot of times around the middle of a commercial I’m working on, I’ll fall into a routine of eating dinner from a drive thru as I race home from work, so that I can get to sleep as soon as possible because I have to be back at work in seven hours. And then when the job ends, I’m faced with an indefinitely long weekend where I can reflect on how dilapidated my apartment has gotten while I was working on the commercial. This happened to me at the end of a set of two commercials, back to back, when I came home and found a line of ants coming into the kitchen through the window, and marching across the wall into my cupboard. They had found a box of cereal, and were covering the outside. I wiped up the ants with a paper towel, and threw the towel and the cereal box in the dumpster outside.

But an hour later when I came back to the kitchen, I found an entirely new line of ants, this time going into a bag of tortilla chips. My new roommate, Jay, (who doesn’t read the blog, because I haven’t told him about it) saw the problem, and said that using Windex on ants kills them by dissolving their exoskeletons. He said it as a joke, like “wouldn’t that suck?” but this turns out to be a really good strategy when you need to kill hundreds of ants in a short amount of time, and you’re running out of paper towels.

So I killed the second line of ants, threw away all the food I owned that wasn’t canned or unopened, and left a little puddle of Windex at the base of the window as a warning to new ants. And the next day, came into the kitchen and found a new line of ants, coming in the window and marching around the puddle, up the wall, into my cupboard and finally into a (sealed!) box of Honey Bunches of Oats. I Windexed the ants and threw away all my food that wasn’t canned, and went to Home Depot for ant poison.

The ant poison worked after about four days. The ants are supposed to take the poison out of the trap and back to the colony, and share it with all their friends, and then die. At first, ants were just climbing over the poison, up the wall, and into my cupboard, where there was no more food. I put a second trap by the window, and by day three the ants were congregating around the trap but not going in. I put a third trap by the window, and after the fourth day, there were suddenly no more ants, and I haven’t seen any since.

So I’ve survived one infestation here, but according to the internet, poison often doesn’t work on cockroaches, because apparently they taste their food before actually eating it (clever bastards). The other sticky traps you can buy attract the cockroaches and then kill them, but until I see more around, I don’t want to bring any product into the house that proudly proclaims “Attracts Cockroaches!”

You’re probably thinking that I live in a disgusting insect infested apartment and now you’re never going to visit me, and you’re right, but you were never going to visit me anyway. In my defense, my boss lives in a nice house, in a nice part of Los Angeles, and also has problems with Los Angeles beasts.

We often work out of his garage, which sits behind his house. One night, I was staring out the open garage door at my boss’s house, and saw something climb out of a tiny hole in his roof, run across the shingles, and jump onto a nearby tree. At first I thought it was a squirrel, but noticed the tail as it was running, and figured out mid-jump that it was, in fact, a rat. So not only do they approach the size of squirrels, the rats in Los Angeles can also climb trees.

My boss also has an iguana named Napoleon, whose cage he paid me to clean out once (for more on random tasks that have nothing to do with my skill-set, see the “Dirty Jobs with Mark Brinker” post.) While I was hosing the tank in the backyard, my boss told me that he had found the iguana burrowing under a neighbor’s house, trying to escape a stray cat. In other words, it’s a wild Californian iguana.

Or possibly my friend Emily Schmidt(who may or may not read the blog)’s iguana, which escaped into the walls of her house, where she assumed it died. More likely though, it traveled two thousand miles to California, where my boss found and recaptured it. The smell in your house was probably a decoy, left by the iguana, so you wouldn’t come looking for it. If you want Napoleon, or whatever his name was when you owned him, I can probably spring him for you, but you’ll have to come to Los Angeles to pick him up.

Well that’s enough shout outs for one blog posting. The moral of the story is that in Los Angeles I’ve discovered a magical garden of wonderous creatures, like that episode of TaleSpin where Balloo and Kit Cloud Kicker find an island where dinosaurs still exist, but have to keep it a secret so that the Air Pirates won’t exploit it. I know somebody besides me remembers that episode.

To Have and Have Not, and Other Options

2008-03-05T11:06:00.000-08:00

1.
When I moved to LA I got started working surprisingly quickly, and the excuse that I could always fall back on was "I just moved here." I could measure my time in LA in weeks, and I could put an inflection on it to get different messages across. A brightly uttered "I moved here three weeks ago!" could mean "I'm very grateful for the work I've been doing so far, and I'd like some more, please," whereas a matter of fact "I only moved here three weeks ago" could mean "We both know that I'm underqualified for this job, but come on, in three weeks, it's amazing that I've even learned everybody's name!"

But eventually three weeks turned to five weeks, and then eight weeks, and then I came to a point where it was weird to measure the time in weeks - I think 9 weeks and beyond is a measurement of time that only pregnant women get to use. When the "about two months" mark kicked in, the amount of time I'd lived in Los Angeles wasn't an appropriate reason not to own things like furniture or a vacuum cleaner.

So when my boss was throwing away a couch, I said "I'll take it!"
"You want this couch?"
"Yeah. I don't really own... like, anything."
"Nothing?"
"I've only lived here for three and a half months."
"Oh," he said, maybe a little disgusted.

"You should probably wash that couch," another guy said.
"Oh?"
"We've all taken a turn on that couch."

So a newly cleaned sex couch was the first thing I inherited from my boss ("Talk about a Love Seat!" (Sorry.)), but his hearing that I didn't own anything opened the floodgates for all the extra stuff that he owned. Next came a thick white wool rug, ("My whole apartment is carpeted" I told him. "Put it on top of the carpet," he said. "Just take it.") a stereo and speakers, two backpacks, a large toolbox, another wool rug, two coffee tables ("Don't get rid of those," he said, "And let me know if you move or anything. I love those coffee tables." "I don't have to take them," I said. "Just don't mess them up.") a hanging lamp, an aluminum breadbox containing a 2-liter bottle of RC, and a pink lightbulb (the last 3 items were given with the instructions "You're an artist - see what you can do with these.)

So now I have a bunch of stuff to sort through. Aside from one of the backpacks, which will return in part 2 of this story, the rest of the stuff is either in my bedroom or in my closet, waiting for the day when I move to an apartment that has some non-carpeted floors, roommates who I don't fear will mess up the metal coffee tables, and a darkroom. But I haven't lived here long enough to be ready to move to a new apartment.

2.
My apartment is right by the main campus of the University of Southern California. When I moved to Los Angeles, I didn't know anything about good places to live. I ended up where I did because it seemed centrally located, and I figured living near a university would be a good way to meet people and take advantage of the school's libraries. However, when I tell people where I live, I get the consistent reaction: "Oh. The Ghetto."

Which I always thought was a little ridiculous, and chalked up to people living in more affluent neighborhoods, imagining the horrible things that must take place in areas where the rent was cheaper and the buildings had more than one floor. From my experience, the problems of the area were more along the lines of groups of girls biking haphazardly down the sidewalk while talking on their cell phones, or the nightly beer-pong tournaments that take place in the apartment above mine.

Then one night I was walking back from the USC library, talking to my girlfriend Emily on the phone and carrying my computer in its carrying case. In my defense this was at 8:30 at night, on a busy street. I heard footsteps running up from behind me, and as they got closer they sounded too fast to be someone jogging by, so I turned just as this guy grabbed my computer case.

And without thinking I grabbed it back from him. He reached for it again and I pulled it away.
"Give me that!" he said.
"NO!" I shouted, and turned and ran down the block.

At some point I had closed my phone, so while running I opened it and called the police, who said they'd meet me at my house. During the conversation, the guy who tried to mug me drove by in a car and threw a plastic bottle at me from his window, which instead bounced off the hood of a parked car.

Back at my apartment, a police officer showed up. I had wondered if I should even bother with the police, since nothing actually got stolen, but it seemed stupid not to call. I told the whole thing to the officer, and after I was done, he said, "And what year are you?"
"Year?" I said, and then noticed that he wasn't an LA police officer, but a USC Public Safety Officer.
"Oh- I'm not a USC Student. I just live near it."
He stared at me.
"I just moved here. Randomly."

Then a USC Sargent walked in. He'd seen the first car parked outside. So I gave my full story to him, and he called it in on his radio, "I've got a student here who was mugged," he started, and went through the entire story, and at the end the first officer said, "I just want to make one correction - he's not a USC student."
"Not a USC student?"
"No."
He asked me, "Were you ever a USC student?"
"No - I just... live here."
The Sargent called back on his walkie to figure out why USC Public safety had gotten my 911 call and not LAPD. While he was waiting for a response, he looked around my living room. "Just moved in?" he said.
"It's been about four months."

Eventually we found out that LAPD were on their way. The Sargent asked the Officer if he could stay at my apartment until LAPD arrived. "They usually take a long time," the Officer said. "It could be like an hour." We agreed that he would leave and call me in an hour to check if LAPD ever showed up.

Two LAPD officers did come in less than an hour, and I again gave my statement to them, and a few minutes after that two more officers showed up, so in the course of the evening I gave my statement five times to seven people, counting the 911 operator. And in the end, there was no reason to file a report because nothing was stolen. Now when I'm walking to the USC Library, I carry my computer in one of my two new backpacks.

3.
Dedicated readers of Blog is Mark Brinker will remember that I recently worked on a commercial for a Swedish furniture company known for having cheap but good looking products that you have to assemble yourself, which I'm trying not to name in this entry because I don't want some guy that they've hired to troll the internet looking for references to their company to see this post and think I'm somehow giving away insider secrets. If you haven't figured out the company, refer to other posts on this blog, where I do say the name (I'm hoping that if these trolling internet guys do exist, they don't try very hard).

The company wanted everything in the commercial to be their products, so at one point something like $40,000 worth of furniture was picked up by us from pretty much every branch from Los Angeles to San Diego, and then assembled. The plan the whole time was to return all the furniture to the store, since it was used by them for their own commercial. But after the shoot, when the first truck arrived, the people at the store had no idea what it was doing there, and no interest in their assembled-but-never-actually-used furniture.

That was the last I heard about the whole thing, until two days later, when I got a call from my boss saying "I need you to meet the truck at Goodwill, so you guys can donate all the that furniture."

So I did, and we parked the 5-ton truck stacked to the ceiling with furniture next to the Goodwill drop off area and started unloading. Until the Goodwill people saw the furniture that we had partially disassembled so that it would all fit, and decided that they didn't want it either, they only wanted fully assembled furniture, and no appliances. So we picked through the fully assembled pieces to donate and started loading the rest of the appliances and partly assembled furniture back onto the truck, wondering if Goodwill knew they were turning down a brand new dishwasher, 2 ovens, and about 20 doorless cabinets.

Apparently somebody did realize that, because at some point a Goodwill manager came out, looked in the truck, and said "Okay, never mind about before. We'll take it all." So we re-unloaded everything into the Goodwill drop off area.

The Production Manager from the commercial was also there, taking pictures of everything we unloaded so he could catalog the things we donated. "Let me know if you want anything, and I'll see if we can give it to you," he said to me and the other guy unloading. He took some dining room chairs for himself. He had to drive them to his house in shifts, and when he was gone he left me with the camera. "So I'm gonna take the rest of these chairs, and Chris is taking those other chairs. So if you don't mind, just stage a photo where you take those chairs off the truck so it looks like we're donating them."

After several hours of couch and appliance moving, I called my boss to tell him we were done and ready to send the truck back.
"You didn't give them ALL of the stuff, did you?" my boss said.
"Yeah. Why?"
"Not the couch though. Or the dishwasher. Right?"
"We unloaded everything."
There was some swearing on the other end of the phone as my boss talked to someone else he was with.
"You need to get that couch back. And the dishwasher." And then, "You had better pray that you can get that stuff back."

So the truck driver and I ran back into Goodwill to tell them that we needed to take two of the nicest items we'd just donated away from them.
"It's already been priced and put on the floor. You can't take it back," they said.
After the truck driver explained that he would lose his job if we couldn't get the stuff back, Goodwill agreed to call the regional manager. And I went out to the showroom, to sit on the couch so that nobody would buy it. After a while the truck driver came out to wait also. This Goodwill's manager was on the phone with the regional manager figuring it out.
"This couch is overpriced at $600," the driver said, loudly. "A person would have to be crazy to pay that much for this couch."

Eventually Goodwill agreed to let us take the items back, and as we carried the couch out the door people browsing commented that we'd been lucky to have purchased it before anyone else could.

Back at my boss's house, he apologized for overreacting, explaining that he'd promised the couch to the commercial's makeup girl, who'd recently moved, and had no furniture. "As for me, I need a new dishwasher," he said.

Out of the whole thing I got a coffee table that was never assembled because when we opened the box originally, it turned out to be the wrong color for the palate of the commercial. It's sitting in the corner of my living room, and I'll probably just wait until after I've moved to put it together.

Dirty Jobs with Mark Brinker

2008-02-26T17:52:00.000-08:00

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.

Mo Money Mo Problems

2008-02-26T16:02:00.001-08:00

I walk by this sign a lot and finally took a picture of it. Now that it's looking like we'll probably have a border relaxing Democrat in the White House, I think we'll all be needing a little Mexican insurance.

Yesterday I turned in all my receipts for the expenses accrued on the recent Ikea job, like food, gas, and supplies I had to buy. This morning I got a semi-angry call from my boss saying that I had included a receipt for a 24oz Sapporo Draft beer from 7-11. I said "Are you being serious?" and my boss said "Yes." I said "Do they even sell beer at 7-11?" and he said "Of course they do." I said "I don't know what happened. They must have given me the wrong receipt or something," and he said "I'm taking it out of the folder. Just make sure it doesn't happen again." So now my boss thinks that I drink the big 24oz cans of beer while on the clock and then try to get reimbursed for them.

Also on this job I had to buy a bunch of faceplates for light switches and outlets (which are apparently technically called "receptacles") that amounted to about $150, though we only ended up using about $18 worth. After the shoot I couldn't find the unused ones to return them, but when I asked the guy I thought might know where they were, he said "Oh I returned them for you." He then gave me 3 Home Depot Gift Cards. He said "One of these has your money on it. Just take them in and figure out which one is yours, and then give the other two back to me, because one of them has like 400 dollars on it that I'm going to use to remodel my kitchen."

So I took the gift cards in and priced them. One has $190 on it, one has $44 on it, and one has $0 on it. 190 is more than the initial purchase, but 44 dollars is $116 less. And it appears that $400 dollars of the other guy's money is missing.

I told my boss about the whole thing, and he said that I should just use all of the cards to buy a bunch of stuff from Home Depot to teach this guy a lesson about repaying people in Gift Cards.

But there are 2 catches. For one, if this guy thinks he has 400 dollars on one of the cards, and I say I spent all the cards, he thinks I've stolen 400 dollars from him. The second catch is that this guy is in a motorcycle "some call it a club, some call it a gang" called Los Vagos. So the question becomes do I assume that the 44 dollar card is mine and give the other two back, do I spend all of the money and tell this guy that my boss told me to, "and by the way the card you thought had a lot of money on it actually had no money on it, swear to god," or do I move out of California with no forwarding address? If I disappear, at least you guys will know the reason why.

Also, has anyone else seen this Taco Bell advertising campaign?:

Christians be lovin they Caramel Apple Empanadas!

The Wetsuit Story

2008-02-26T01:40:00.001-08:00

I was working on a Domino's commercial, and the night before they e-mailed me the call sheet with the names and phone numbers of the crew. There was a note at the bottom. It said "Note: There will be a 7 foot alligator on set tomorrow. All untrained crew are to remain at least 15 feet away from the alligator at all times."

This was probably the third job I had worked with these people, and I was trying really hard not to ask too many questions, especially since I knew so little about the tools, techniques, and behaviors necessary for the job, and hoped that if I just jumped in to things people would think I knew what I was doing. So I didn't ask questions when the first thing to do at work was to sink black tarps to the bottom of a swimming pool, and then to fill the pool with branches and dirt and lily pads so that it looked like a swamp.

The morning passed with no sign of the alligator and with little incident. Except shortly before lunch, my boss walked up to me holding a wetsuit. He held it up to me. "You look like about a large, right?" he said.

Since I was so new to this job the other people in the art department had decided it was really funny to give me fake requests and see how I dealt with them, especially when told to do things that don't need to be done, or find things that don't exist (apparently "sandwich clamps" mean your hands, and there is no such thing as a "left handed smoke-shifter.") So I was a little skeptical about the wetsuit.

Until about an hour later, when my boss looked at his watch and then said, "Okay, put on the wetsuit."
"Seriously?" I said.
"Yeah," he said.
"I don't have a bathing suit or anything."
"Darren has a bathing suit you can borrow."
"Can Darren just put on the wetsuit instead?" I didn't actually say that, because I was trying not to ask too many questions.

Instead I borrowed Darren's bathing suit and walked down the block to the mobile home bathrooms to change into it. As I came out, a minivan drove past me and parked in front of the house we were shooting in. As I got closer I saw that it said "Cinema Critters" on the side.

I'd imagined something along the lines of a metal trailer attached to a truck, like something out of Jurassic Park, or at least something like the kind of trailer that horses and sheep are driven around in. Instead, the alligator showed up in the back of a minivan with its mouth duct-taped shut.

I went back to the pool to double check that this wetsuit thing wasn't a joke. I was wearing the bathing suit under my jeans, and if it all turned out to be a joke, I could just manage with those for the rest of the day, but once the wetsuit went on there'd be no taking it off.
"What are you waiting for," my boss said. "Get to it."

Being from the land-locked midwest I've only had the opportunity to put on a wetsuit once before in my life, and that was under strict SCUBA instructor supervision. So in my haste to get the thing on, like putting on a wetsuit next to a swampy pool with a 7 foot alligator waiting in the back of a nearby minivan was just part of the job, I put the wetsuit on backwards (it zips up the front, just like a coat, was my thinking.) So I turned to my boss and said "Now what," and he started laughing, and then took a picture on his iphone, and then told me it was on backwards, then pointed it out to the rest of the art department. So I hastily took it off and put it back on with the zipper in the back, and stood to the side and tried to look inconspicuous, the only guy in a wetsuit near a pool surrounded by people wearing normal clothes.

Until some other crew member walked by me and said, "You know you've got that thing on inside out?"
"You're kidding," I said. "Really?"
"Yeah," he said. "I know. I used to be a SCUBA instructor."
"I used to be SCUBA Certified," I said, peeling off the wetsuit as fast as possible.
"Well a lot's changed since then," he said.
Then Darren walked by as I was putting the wetsuit on the right way, and told me that the bathing suit was also on backwards.

What it turned out they needed me to do was go into the pool and adjust the leaves and branches slightly, and later, if the alligator ended up going in the pool, I might have to readjust the branches that it moved away while sliding in. Apparently nobody knew for sure if the alligator would go in the pool.

Meanwhile, I still had to do my job as part of the art department, which meant sprinkling leaves all around the concrete side of the pool, and then hosing those leaves away when the director changed his mind and decided he didn't like them. Someone handed me the hose to coil up. "Leave it turned on," he said, "in case we need to spray the side of the pool again." So I left the water on and coiled the hose up and dropped it on the ground, not taking into account the nozzle on the end, which clicked on as soon as the hose hit the concrete, and sprayed water directly at the camera. "WHOA!" the camera department yelled, and I turned the water off, and they started trying to dry off the camera. Somehow nobody in the art department saw that, and I'm hoping none of them read this, because I know I probably would have fired me for that.

After that I just stood to the side, having decided that in my frazzled, wet-suited state, anything I touched would get messed up. I had been in the water already to move some leaves around, and was getting cold wearing a now wet wetsuit. My shoes and coat I had set aside by the pool, and I was just about to go get them when the 1st Assistant Director called "Alligator's coming through!" and 4 guys from Cinema Critters carried the alligator through the garage and into the back yard, setting it down next to the pool, directly between me and my shoes. "Everybody stand back, we're untaping her mouth," they said, and then did.

I wish for the sake of the story I could say that I somehow ended up having to be in the water at the same time as the alligator, but that climax wasn't to be. Instead, the alligator just sat still until the handlers prodded it with some poles, at which point it would slowly walk forward while the camera filmed it, and when it got within 15 feet of the director, the handlers would jump on it and drag it back to a safe distance, where it would sit until they prodded it again. At one point they tried to make it go in the water, but the alligator continued walking forwards and one of the handlers said "No way she's going in there!"

Eventually she left, and there was little point in my ever having put on the wetsuit, except that at the end of the shoot I had to get in the pool to fish out the tarps we had dropped in at the beginning of the day.

I got to keep the wetsuit. I've been debating things I can do with it, besides practicing putting it on. The best idea I've come up with is to take a shower while wearing it, and zip a bar of soap inside the wetsuit, and let the water permeate until the soap is all gone. I like to think this will give me a deeper clean.

An Adventure of Cosmic Proportions

2008-02-25T01:22:00.000-08:00

My name is Mark Brinker and I live in Los Angeles. Now we're all on the same page. I'm starting this blog mostly to post the ridiculous artwork I end up making for my job as a graphic designer on commercials.

So I was working on this Ikea commercial, and after a 12 hour day my boss told me he needed more set dressings for the next day's shoot, specifically rock band posters and "Star Wars-type posters."

So this was my first attempt. I printed it out and my boss said "Absolutely not." He said "I'm looking for something with like Yoda on it. Something more along the lines of... you know. Like Yoda."

A part of my job is making sure that all artwork used on the walls of the set is cleared, so that George Lucas doesn't see Yoda in the background when he's watching an Ikea commercial and sue Ikea and the production company and my boss and me. And rolling into the fifteenth hour now, I couldn't think what was similar to Yoda but royalty free. Until I had this epiphany: Yoda's basically just an old man with green skin and crazy ears. I'll just do that. I can make my own Yoda!

I showed this to my boss. He said "You know what? Fuck it. I think let's call it a night," and then, sort of under his breath, "Looks like fuckin Ghandi with Elf Ears."
So the moral of the story is once again Yoda has helped me get to sleep. Thanks for reading.