So, happy new year’s first of all …

A lot of people are out celebrating. I never understood this holiday, but I’ve participated a few times.

The best was when I stood under the Eiffel Tower, five years ago. It was beautiful, fascinating, and there was such a crush of people that I felt like I never wanted to go outside again.

I was there with my two kids as I started a stint teaching abroad. They were there for school. We were there for a semester after that. Our hotel was in the 19th arrondissement, so we were a long way front the middle of town.

Crush is the only word I can come up with to describe what came next. We were crushed under the tower. We walked in a mass, crushed, over the bridge, to find a Metro station. We were so crushed in the Metro that I thought my little one would be hurt.

She still fears New Year’s Eve. My older girl says I was the only one afraid that night, but it was truly dystopian. Think “Snowpiercer.” But in a subway, crushed with people who don’t move as individuals, but as a crowd. They move you into a car. They move you out. You stand there fighting for breath while the train courses on.

Tonight I’m just hanging with myself. I built a built-in shelf, painted it, and then did some touch-up painting in the house. I’m halfway through a movie I’m liking: “Le Week-End.” It reminds me a lot of a trip I took to Paris, with a person who could have been something to me (my co-traveler), if we’d gone on.

Beyond that, I hope everyone enjoys 2015. As you’ve seen, I don’t love the night that celebrates the year’s changing, but I love the future.

I think great things will be happening this year. I’m happy for the change, and waiting for the sun to come up on an odd-numbered year.

Boyhood

It’s strange to find a Richard Linklater film at the top of most critics’ lists. I’ve always loved his talky, slow, meandering films. I made a class sit through a double feature of “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset” once when I was teaching in France.

Some loved it. Others, not so much.

Now that he’s made his masterpiece and everyone loves it I’m in the weird position of wanting people not to appreciate it so much since his best films have always appealed to a select few, and I don’t want our small group to get overwhelmed.

Hellespont, Here I Come

Hellespont, Here I Come.

Green screening it

This is me walking through the Alps and fields of daffodils. We did the first half of our Kickstarter filming today with the green screen and treadmill we got on craigslist for $100.

We’ll finish up tomorrow with Coleridge, Dorothy Wordsworth standing with her brother near Tintern Abbey, and the Ancient Mariner himself, talking about “Water, water, everywhere,/And all the boards did shrink./Water, water, everywhere/Nor any drop to drink.”

Then we add in these daffodils:

And these Alps:

Kickstarter video filming starts tomorrow

We all know making a movie’s a lot of work. Even those of us who have no desire to make one. But it’s been interesting to learn how much work goes into preparing to make a movie.

Today was fun, because I got to wear knickers and knee socks, and dwell on the fact that tomorrow we’ll be filming the first bit of footage that gets us on the road to making Swimming with Byron.

It’s the first step of preparation, really, because it’s a video for a Kickstarter project. Our project requires location filming, and to get there, we have to raise the funds. So, unlike many crowdfunding projects you see, ours doesn’t have any early footage to show. We hope it’ll show the idea and the passion.

And knickers. 

Siobhán’s first HS concert

My last post was all about me. This one’s all about my youngest, Siobhán.

She’s a great trombone player. Seriously good. She has more talent than is good for her. Tonight’s her first concert as a high school player.

She’s a freshman at McCallum High School in Austin, the arts academy in town. I would’ve loved to have gone to a school like it when I was in high school.

My school, Dwight Morrow High School in Englewood, NJ, put together some excellent bands, but it wasn’t built into the structure of the institution. With hers, it is.

I’m really looking forward to hearing it. I’m always looking forward to hearing her. She’s playing on the trombone that I played in Carnegie Hall and through Indiana University. She’s due for an upgrade, but she likes tradition.

Home sale to finance film

I’m very happy with the plans we’ve made to get Swimming with Byron from the realm of ideas to the screen (another realm of ideas). I’ve worked a lot with Eric, the cinematographer, and have good support from people here in Austin, people in Rome (thanks Tatiana), in London (thanks Nigel and Andrea), in the Lakes (thanks Fred), throughout Italy (thanks Brian and Alan), and in Turkey (thanks Selin).

But it’s hard to get the money to make a movie.

We’re going the crowdfunding route. I vacillated between Kickstarter and Indiegogo. I’m still vacillating a little, but have mostly decided that Kickstarter’s the way to go.

Our strengths: I’m a Romanticist. I know what I’m talking about. I’ve published a book and many articles, academic and creative, on the Romantics and their places.

I’ve been to all the locations we’re talking about. I speak French, and can get that “walking through France” part of the movie going. I can swim the Hellespont. You should see my lats. They’re massive.

I’ve made one movie as a director, and four shorter films, also as director, as well as narrator. We know what we’re doing.

But can we raise the money?

Holiday hijinks

Fun holiday concert tonight at St. Edward’s university. Here’s a shot of Professor Alan Altimont and me backstage as we waited in between jazz numbers. The crowd went wild for Joey Colarusso’s version of the ‘allelujah Chorus (as he says it).

Venice essay – stuck

I’ve started and re-started an essay on visiting Venice. I can’t seem to move it past a dull recitation of events.

That annoys me because there were some serious events. A volcanic eruption in Iceland stopped me and my kids in Venice. We had to take several trains across Italy and France to escape a city where most people would be happy to be stuck.

This was the spring of the Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption. It messed us all up. I was teaching abroad, and my students and I were all on break. It blew an ash cloud over western Europe that shut down air traffic.

We made a video about it. Watch above from 14:06.

Skies were blue, but planes couldn’t fly. We had ridiculously cheap round-trip tickets from Paris to Venice, but couldn’t use the “get home” half of them.

So we had to struggle to find train tickets and crawl across northern Italy and into France. It cost me about five times what I’d budgeted. But we got to see the Milan train station.

Next summer I’ll see Venice again. Iceland can erupt again if it has to. I’ll be traveling there by rental car from Switzerland with Eric Trimble, then taking the train to Rome where we’ll hang out with my Roman friend, Tatiana Visona.

Keats’s grave awaits us there, as does Shelley’s. Goethe’s son is in there as well, along with Antonio Gramsci. And Gregory Corso.

While I’m doing all of this I’m going to work on that essay and hopefully make it into what I want it to be.

Today = Nat King Cole singing Mel Tormé

December 1’s my first day of Christmas music, and Nat King Cole always takes pride of place. That’s what we always heard in my house growing up, and what I did with my kids.