David Ryan

From NSFW (But Then Again, Safety is Overrated):

The arrival of digital technology created a “clearing event” much like the social upheaval of the 1960s, and in the wake of that clearing event there would once again be an opportunity for the exploration of explicit sexuality in cinema.

But this time, the opportunity would not be driven by the laissez-faire policies of the MPAA, or new legal freedoms. This time it would be driven by technology that affected everything from how people engaged with the camera in their own personal lives, to the economics of scale for production, marketing, and distribution of media.

Once again this “clearing event” would create new opportunities and optimism that the cinematic language used to present sexuality could finally evolve, and once again there would be a brief flowering of experimentalism.

But as in the period of 1969 to 1975, this new openness and experimentalism wouldn’t last. In fact, by the end of the decade, the Internet had adopted a culture around sexuality that in some ways is arguably more conservative than anything found in traditional media.

From Metafilter, via Alan Jacob’s wonderful More than 95 Theses:

Every day at my job I helped people just barely survive. Forget trying to form grass roots political activism by creating a society of computer users, forget trying to be the ‘people’s university’ and create a body of well informed citizens. Instead I helped people navigate through the degrading hoops of modern online society, fighting for scraps from the plate, and then kicking back afterwards by pretending to have a farm on Facebook (well, that is if they had any of their 2 hours left when they were done). What were we doing during the nineties? What were we doing during the boom that we’ve been left so ill served during the bust? No one seems to know. They come in to our classes and ask us if we have any ideas, and I do, but those ideas take money, and political will, and guts, and the closer I get to graduation the less and less I suspect that any of those things exist.

Maybe a year ago I was chatting/emailing/talking with Matt Frost, and he said (from memory, and paraphrasing), “We going to look back at the 90s and realize we let it all slip through our fingers.”

That’s pretty funny; Matt Frost sounding like a character from The Big Chill, or like on of the hippie hold-outs whose land I used to hunt on in the Colstin Valley in Southern Oregon.

—

Two things prompt the above thoughts:

1) I’m working on a response to James Poulos’ recent What are Women For? and to the reception his piece received, here at The League and around the ‘Net.

2) I found out that a draft of my own “I’m not really into black chicks.” that I sent to several of my friends got swept up in their spam folders.

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As we got closer and closer there was a lot of ruminating on the best way to turn the hulls. In the end we went old-school. A bunch of old tires Corrigan’s was happy to have us take off their hands, and a 4×4 we found in the yard as a lever:

Likely we’ll get the starboard hull turned tomorrow. Yes, it feels great!

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The port hull of the catamaran Mon Tiki, mid-way through the fairing process.

A year ago I was a broken man.

A year ago I had just concluded a week of guest-posting for James Fallows wherein a traced the entire, but ultimately unsuccessful arc of the Comstock Films project.

One year ago to this day, I made my final guest-post , Kludges, Adaptation and Evolution, wherein I declared my efforts a failure, and proclaimed my intentions to move on to new things.

[A] few weeks before Jim asked me to fill in, I had come to the conclusion, for all the reasons outlined in this last week, that I couldn’t win. I had come to the conclusion that writing about my work, explaining and framing, was in essence, admitting that I was wrong. You can’t just make movies about love and sex and say that explanations don’t matter. The truth is, the explanations matter more than the movies themselves, and mine weren’t good enough.

In fact, two days before Jim asked me, I received email from the managing editor of another magazine. His bosses (yes, even managing editors have bosses) had put the kibosh on his idea to have me as “featured contributer” (don’t know what that is but it sounds good, doesn’t it!) in an upcoming issue, and he wanted to apologize. (None needed JK, this is bigger than both of us.)

Faced with mounting evidence that my films were born of a time and circumstances that had passed, I resolved that Brett and Melanie: Boi Meets Girl would be the last film, and that it was time to move on to something else.

So what did I decide to do?

I decided to start a sustainable energy eco-tourism project in the community where I live. This project has a educational component for local school children which I hope we’ll be able to provide at little or no cost. That’s my attempt to skip as much of that “flinty middle stage” of life as possible and get on with the giving back part of my life while my heart still beats strong and true.

I am as excited about this as anything I’ve done before. But wizened as I am, I am now able to recognize that as much as this move is a product of my insight and willingness to take risks, it is also simply a response to social trends and technology. I am not a leaf in the wind, but neither am I a colossus standing astride history.

I will readily admit I am a drama-queen and a histrionic. When I read myth, I identify with Achilles; when I read history, Alexander the Great. I see my life as a sweeping drama, with myself as the heroic protagonist. I relish the grand gesture, the flounce, and in keeping with this distorted self-image, I saw my guest-stint at The Atlantic as an opportunity to sing my swan song.

The truth, of course, is more mundane.

Sturgeon’s Law says that 90% of everything crap. In some 25 years of making a living as a photographer, filmmaker and writer, I would say this is about right.

Not exactly a corollary to Sturgeon’s Law, but definitely related is Woody Allen’s aphorism: ninety percent of life is just showing up; and what has transpired in my life in the last year is testimony to the power of simply showing up, of putting one foot in front of the other, of putting in the hours, of simply grinding away.

If that’s not an inspiring truth, it’s a comforting one. As intimidating as the Mon Tiki build may look from the outside, seen from the inside it is mostly showing up and putting in the hours, day after day, week after week.

Most things are mostly like that. Patience and perseverance hold trumps.

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ASHLEY AND KISHA: FINDING THE RIGHT FIT, 2007

A little more than three years ago we got an inquiry from Yojani Hernandez of the NY LGTB Center. She’s the programer for their Lesbian Cinema Arts Series, and wanted to know if we’d let them screen ASHLEY AND KISHA: FINDING THE RIGHT FIT. Of course I said yes right away.

Like the rest of the Real People, Real Life, Real Sex series, ASHLEY AND KISHA contained utterly candid, unflinching depictions of love-making. Because of this opportunities for these films to screen publicly are rare. Even when they do come along, they don’t always go as planned, or go at all.

In 2007 a programer selected ASHLEY AND KISHA for the Mid-Atlantic Black Film Festival, but was overruled by her board of directors. Later that year, when a programer in Melbourne Australia tried to show ASHLEY AND KISHA as a part of the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, the police showed up and stopped the screening. Other things like this have happened with other of these films, so I was excited about a screening in New York, a screening I knew wouldn’t be stopped, a screening that I could attend.

—

A question that many people ask, and one that I’ve asked myself about a million times is, “Why did you put explicit sexuality in your films? Couldn’t you have made the same film without showing everything?”

It’s a reasonable question.

The inclusion of explicit sexuality makes it more difficult to find subjects, more difficult to find skilled crew, more difficult to get production insurance, more difficult to find DVD replication service, more difficult to get into film festivals, and more difficult to distribute the films (I’m sure there’s more, but that’s what comes to mind off the top of my head.)

My answer, to others and to myself, is that there are ideas that I wanted to explore and express about the human condition than can only take full-form in the context of sexuality, and that the sexuality must not be truncated, blunted, or lampooned in the manner that typifies Hollywood, art-house, or pornographic treatments of sex. [click to continue…]

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Mon Tiki is a novel design, by which I mean she’s a departure from the glass reinforced plastic (GRP) sloops that typify modern sailing craft. Though these boats are often derided as “clorox bottles” by folks who fancy themselves traditionalist, there’s nothing inherently wrong with these boats.

Back in the Sixties the CAL 40 was one of the first boats to fully embrace the design/performance possibilities of GRP. Designer Bill Lapworth gleaned that GRP was a new material and rather than imitate plank on frame lines, he designed a hull to take full advantage of this new material’s properties. Almost 50 years after their introduction, CAL 40s still deliver performance that leaves most sailboats in their wake.

Southern California after the war was a hotbed of this sort innovation. Aerospace, surfing and sailing cross-pollenating with new materials and new design ideas.

When I was a kid, my dad had friends who shaped surfboards. To this day, the smell of polyester resin carries me back to a workshop in the  Sorrento Valley where a green pintail gun was taking shape. My dad had other boards, but that’s the one I remember the most.

A couple of these guys also designed an award-winning aircraft: foam and glass, like a surfboard. I remember seeing it in their garage, before it won the award. That was amazing to me, that they were building an airplane in their garage. One of the big innovations in their plane was the use of carbon-fiber, a material that’s flowed upward from small workshops and home-built planes to military and commercial jets.

The difference between the way that glass and resin is used in the CAL 40 or other “clorox bottle boats” and how glass and resin is used in surfboards (or my dad’s friends’ airplane) is important.

Boats like the CAL 40 are formed in or around molds (male or female); the idea being that you get the shape just right, make a mold and then churn out a bunch of them. There’s a big investment in the mold and that discourages experimentation and risk-taking. Getting it just right, where performance, looks, cost, market demand all meet (like the CAL 40) is the exception.

In a surfboard, the glass and resin is cast around a light-weight foam core.

Until very recently, each of these foam cores were shaped one at a time, by hand, often to the exact specifications of the surfer. Bespoke surfboards (like my father’s green gun) were the rule rather the exception. Upfront costs for surfboard making were low; the materials workable with ordinary tools; design experimentation and innovation were the norm. Even with the recent advent of machine-shaped boards, The Shaper holds a venerated position in surf culture. [click to continue…]

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Clamping hardware removed, we can start smoothing joints and edges.More scarfs in process on the shop floor between the hulls

We spend the last two days taking out all the screws and washers that held the plywood in place while the glue set, and then cleaning things up; filling the hundreds of little screw holes and filleting joints and edges.

The white you see here and there on the hull is a compound of epoxy, fumed silica, and glass micro-spheres. It’s a lot like bondo, except that it’s structural. The generous fillet where the hull and keel meet smooths the shape, but it also provides strength. Fully hardened this putty is like rock (it’s mostly glass) and a bear to sand, so we do as much shaping as possible when it’s soft.

Once of the very best times to do this is when the putty is partially cured. At that stage it’s got the consistency of candle wax, and yields to a Stanley Surform. Much like our using a cabinet scraper on partially cured panels, using a Surform on partial cured fillets is faster, cleaner and gives a better result than waiting till it’s hard enough to sand and going at it with a power-tool.

Getting at it while the fillets are still soft means Saturday work for me, but tomorrow’s the first day of rehearsal for the Spring show my daughters’ ballet school puts on, so I have to drive to Bridgehampton anyway. Two birds, one stone. Winning!

After the hulls are touched up the seems get two course of biaxial fiberglass tape, then a complete skin of 6 oz glass cloth. Then each hull gets coated with a special fairing blend of epoxy and phenolic micro-balloons. I don’t know why, but a putty made from phenolic micro-ballons is easy to sand; which we will, giving the hulls their final shape.

Reverse angle. I love how fish-like these hulls are.

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The glamour and excitement of boat-building.

What I didn’t know is that our fearless leader Erik Kain had cited some research from Media Matters and the author of said research saw my (what I thought was a sardonic) Help Wanted post and passed it along to her friend Joe.

Joe sent me a very nice note, offering his services on the Mon Tiki build, which I thought was bold, since he’d have to relocated to take the job.

I figured if he was serious, he’d be able to find himself a place to live, and he did, in about 24 hours. A week later he quit his job and moved up to start working on the boat. That’s Joe; he puts his mind to something and it happens. Just the sort of person you want to have in your boat-shop. Especially if the other person is Dave.

Joe and Dave are  good, really good. Both can read plans and draw, both are good carpenters and diligent, eager workers, and both are fine company. Things hum along in the shop quite nicely.

But now that we have two hulls it’s sort of like having two boats, and we could use some help. And maybe you’re that help.

Any sort of building experience is good. But where epoxy is concerned I suspect an average baker knows more about working with epoxy than an excellent carpenter. Tell me what you’re good at and what you like to do, and we’ll see how that might fit in. Eagerness, punctuality, and the ablity to learn are has needful as experience.

The next step? Show me you’re enterprising enough to figure out how to reach me; by phone, email, or carrier pigeon. If you’re right for the job and the job is right for you, we’ll both know.

So there. What are you waiting for? Let’s build a boat!

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Our newly certified BS1088 Meranti hull-planking, clamped in place by 200+ screws and fender washers

On my January 1st post Affirmations and Aspirations, I said I hoped that by the end of January we would have the lower hulls glassed, faired, and turned, but that’s not to be.

As mentioned in my Making a Living in the Wake of the Pelican Disaster, we had to jump through some extra hoops to get our plywood selection signed-off on by USCG Marine Safey Center and that set us back a couple of weeks.

We spent those weeks making rudders and crossbeams, but since those aren’t parts we planned to work on until April, it’s hard to say how far ahead or behind we are at this point.

Either way, the boat is now in two distinct sections, which makes figuring out how to deploy more hands and backs easier, which means the Montauk Catamaran Company is hiring again – 2-4 more workers to get things moving along.

It’s probably too early to expect Karl Rove to hold himself accountable, or even give an update (he’s a conservative, and conservatives believe in accountability, don’t you know), but I expect at least a few of his chickens will have come home to roost by the time Mon Tiki is launched.

Also unknown is how many jobs Karl Rove has created. But I shouldn’t be so smug. I have a car commute for the first time in my life, and not a short one. That blunts the edges of my patriotic pride.

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Two men comfort a third (center), who just indentified the body of his son, Wallace Manko. His son had been a passenger on the fishing vessel 'Pelican,' which capsized the day before. Montauk, New York, September 2, 1951.

From the Wikipedia entry:

On September 1, 1951, as the Fisherman’s Special emptied its passengers, 62 fares climbed aboard the PELICAN, plus its Captain, Eddie Carroll and mate. The 42 foot PELICAN left Fishangrila at 7:30 AM, carrying 64 passengers and crew, which was grossly in excess of its safe carrying capacity.

By the time the PELICAN was towed back to Montauk later that night she was capsized and half-sunk. 45 of the 64 souls who departed on her that morning were dead, including her skipper. [click to continue…]

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