Good Earth, have you been reading the recent posts from http://ondesire.com and http://holyboners.com? I have – and they are beginning to spin out of control. Some sort of fugue state is being entered into here, so many eggs are cracking wide I expect there’s one heck of a mega omelet on the horizon. I haven’t even done my review of Cameron’s Avatar in 3D or last night’s dinner with my favorite Africans. Let’s get this sorted out right now.
The Questions
What are my objectives for the two current projects?
What’s my plan to finish them / take them to the next level?
The Answers
I’ve got a mission, so let’s start there, Activating global consciousness to steward and expand the wilds. It’s a good mission, and one would expect my current projects to be in alignment. How then do these two movie projects support my mission?
1.0 Mission
1.1 DOG
Daughter of God is my most ambitious narrative project to date. It’s a surreal exploration of how picturesque and hilarious a crippled global life support system can get. The backstory also explores colonization and exploitation on a planetary scale. With this project I model my theories, channeling the answers to the questions that Fia asked last night – who benefits from the demise of an entire planet? Follow the money, follow the extraction of wealth. Who’s targeting all the world saviors, whose running this prison?
So Daughter of God is a vehicle for piercing the veil. It’s a way of figuring some things out, of playing with the story. Ah, there’s an insight.
What if the story has fragments, alternate eddies and branches? What if the edit is actually scrambled up to suggest alternate possibilities, variant explanations, visions beyond the existing narrative where all the backstories intermingle and cross pollinate? Y’all getting this? That’s how we rebuild the edit, with intersecting time lines and outcomes. Moments that suggest, fragments.
That means that the best moments are extracted and then interwoven as flash sidewise or parallel possibility, while remaining perfectly ordinary, like brushing teeth. Little diversion this, but worthy.
In summary, DOG supports the mission by being a way to better understand what might actually be going on in RL, suggest in ways like the i ching, never the same movie twice, ya get me? Got cha.
1.2 ALM
Seeking the artifacts of a future sustainable civilization is pragmatic action. No external authority is going to assemble our optimal existence and conveniently implode. We are responsible, I am responsible. The future surrounds us, fragments of annihilation and transcendence for the taking. We choose what we gather, I choose. That’s ALM, humans taking responsibility for our collective destiny, one Dan at a time. An adventure of autonomy and connection, of becoming miraculous and capable of planet saving. A hero’s journey waiting for each of us.
It’s about me, as Andrea pointed out, and my reinvention disguised as a sailing trip. Is it universal? Does it translate beyond boats and big lakes? Only if folks share my starting point. They don’t have to agree, they just have to get me. Stepping back, I realize that I am a character in this story.
The Dan Kelly character has a premise, aspirations, a costume, a budget, skills, assumptions, experience and a history. What do we need to know about him so that we can travel with him, suspend our disbelief, make his joy and pain our own?
He is a treehugger, an artist, a science fictionary, a warrior, a lover, a mystic, a caretaker, a technologist, a dreamer, a visionary. My character needs to be introduced to the audience, my character wants something badly and is having trouble getting it, my character undergoes a transformation. Don’t we all?
In summary, ALM supports the mission because it’s about what happens when WE decide to thrive. As my glorious destiny relies on the repair and care of the global life support system, I must become capable of healing planets. I must discover and eventually implement sustainable civilizations. If these epic outcomes are beyond the scope of my present self, then I must purposefully transform and become miraculous. That is the journey worth taking, the true and vital journey of ALM, common to all.
Epilogue
Many folks will find the premise crazy, so I’ve got to make a solid case that my character actually believes that he can develop extraordinary abilities and has ‘evidence’ to support it. Then even if they think my character is crazy, they’ll go on the journey with him. This crazy character will venture out to become a super hero and the surprise ending will be – maybe he was not so crazy after all.
The audience attitude might begin with ‘the poor delusional fellow is captivating’ then gradually progress to ‘wait, maybe he’s making sense’ and finish with ‘whoa, where do I sign up?’ It’s a cognitive hack for extracting folks from the suicidal hypnosis of dominant culture. Start them off with the idea that they are watching a crazy person running amuck, then give them cause to question that premise and in so doing examine their assumptions about what it means to be rational in a culture bent on apocalypse. Wonko the Sane lived outside the asylum (and he got his movie made).