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.

So I said “to hell with it,” and bought a damn treadmill

If you read the last post, you’ll know how challenging it is to borrow a treadmill. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I have a face that says: “Don’t trust me with your treadmill.” Maybe they could sense I was going to dismantle it a little. I was going to un-dismantle it after using it (seriously, I was), but I had no luck.

Fortunately, there’s craigslist. I went and bought one today from a guy who has three houses on the same lot. Seriously. I got there and called him to ask which house he was in. I almost asked him to just fund the film and let us use one of the houses as a studio to film the crowdfunding video. But alas I’m the creative type, not the type who’s good at asking strangers for money.

So, now our production company owns several cameras, a lot of lenses, a green screen, a Steadicam®‚ and several tripods. We almost own a slider that moves the camera back and forth in cool ways. We aren’t exactly Sony, but we can film some stuff.

And we have a treadmill for walking in front of the green screen.

Borrowing a treadmill’s harder than you’d guess

We’re getting ready to film our crowd-sourcing video, and the main tool we need to get it done is a treadmill. We’re just going to walk on it in front of a green screen.

But apparently everyone who owns a treadmill is radically attached to it.

I’d always assumed that people bought treadmills with good intentions, then put them in the basement, the shed, on the porch, somewhere. Guiltily, no doubt. Yes, people use them in the gym. I know I do. But at home? I always placed buying one of those into the category of regretful purchases, kind of like my bicycle trainer.

Double-blogging

We have our movie site up at www.swimmingwithbyron.com, so there will be some double-posting. Please follow us on Facebook @swimmingwithbyron, on Twitter @swimwithbyron, and on the webpage.

It’s all work in progress, but that progress will pick up pretty fast in December and January as we move towards our February Kickstarter launch date.

At this point we’re posting some tiny teasers about the filming of the Kickstarter video. Here’s the first:

Swimming with Byron starts pre-production

Photo by Eric Trimble

Swimming with Byron is officially in pre-production. We shot our first piece of footage for the Kickstarter campaign yesterday in Austin’s Ladybird Lake.

I couldn’t sleep the night before. Eric Trimble, the cinematographer, and I had planned out the shot. I storyboarded the whole video, and then Eric did some more detailed storyboarding. He rigged up my zoom lens with a pull focus for a part of the shot. I’d recruited a team of volunteers. We had the cameras we needed.

But the weather turned dodgy. This was our last chance to get the scene I wanted in open water. After this weekend, with temperatures dropping fast, we’d be forced to do it in a pool, and that would have been feeble as hell.

Swimming with Byron: First shoot planned

Ladybird Lake here in Austin, Texas. Shooting begins right past this train bridge where the buildings on the left are.

We’re getting ready to film the first part of our Kickstarter video, as I mentioned in a post a few days ago. It’s exciting to go from talking about the thing to doing something about it.

Here’s the lake I’ll be swimming. It’s really the Colorado River dammed at two ends of the ten-mile stretch that runs through central Austin. The day we’ve picked for shooting is supposed to crawl to a high of only 54 degrees, so I’m not relishing the idea of stripping down to my swimsuit and diving in. The water will be a lot warmer than the air, so it’s the getting in and out that worry me most.

We’ll be a small crew: the film’s cinematographer, Eric, two student volunteers from a film and fiction class I’m teaching, and a friend of mine. When I wrote the previous post on this I was thinking we’d use paddle boats, but that won’t work, so we’ll have two kayaks. One will tow the other, the second one will hold Eric and the cameras and sound, and voila, a traveling shot rig. Just like Spielberg does it.

It’s technically illegal to swim in Ladybird Lake, but I’ve done it for triathlons and none of me’s rotted away as a result. Just don’t alert the authorities, ok?

I’ll post a “making of video when it’s all done. I just wish we were going to have a day like yesterday, when I took these pictures. I’m crossing my fingers for good light, but am less sanguine about the possibilities for a sudden heat wave in place of the Arctic front that’s forecast.

“You can swim 3 miles?”

People find the funniest things impressive.

Ed Kessel is one of my oldest friends. We went to Indiana University together. We grew up in New Jersey, at the same time, but apart.

A few days ago I was standing naked in my 24-hour fitness locker room when the phone rang, and it was Ed.

“You can swim 3 miles?” 

99 Followers

I just saw that I have 99 followers on this blog.

Should I offer a prize for the 100th? Who’s it going to be? When’s it going to happen? I’m busting with anticipation.

A big thanks to all of you who are reading. I almost put “by the way” at the end of that, but it’s “by the way” at all. We all sit in rooms and write alone, with the hope – that hope we try to pretend we aren’t really feeling – that someone’s out there reading. Getting to 100 followers and who knows how many readers doesn’t put me in major blog category, actually, but I like all of you, lots.

Look soon for a linked blog to the production company I’m forming to make my first full-length documentary film, Romantic Places. I have to change that title. As I re-read Byron’s Childe Harold, Wordsworth’s Prelude, Shelley’s Frankenstein, the other Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” Wordsworth’s “Westminster Bridge,” and so many others in preparation for the film, I’m hoping a phrase will jump out and say “I’m your title.”

French films

I love my job this semester. That’s usually true. Teaching for a living brings a lot of rewards. It doesn’t pay brilliantly, but you get the room to think and share your thoughts to your students and colleagues. That adds up to a lot. Call it “pay,” compensation, whatever you want. I dislike “reward,” because that takes the work out of the equation, and as much as I love my students, this isn’t a primarily emotional relationship. I work at my job.

Every spring I teach a class miles, and fields, and territories away from my main area: French cinema. Cinéma, more particularly. I try to pronounce it right. I fail, but that’s another blog post.

I always love teaching Wordsworth, Wollstonecraft, Keats, Radcliffe, and the other Romantics. I have a great time with the 18th-century novelists. Right now we’re spending good time with Defoe, Fielding, and are about to get to Frances Burney.

But they’re nothing compared to Jean Renoir (who you see to the right), Jean Gabin, Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle, Jean Vigo, et &c. Comme j’adore les films français. I might love them best because I get to teach them least, but whatever, it isn’t important. I love this class.

‘Inside Llewyn Davis’

I saw Inside Llewyn Davis tonight. It left me with mixed impressions, ideas, whatever.

It’s a very good film, no doubt about that. The cinematography’s deftly done. If O Brother Where Art Thou is a sepia/yellow film, Inside Llewyn Davis is a slate blue/gray one. The Coen brothers’ attention to palette impresses, if nothing else does.

But of course, many other things impress.