Open call for illustrators.
Posted spring 2012. I need a few talented artists for storyboarding, illustration, and graphic design work. Local New York City and Connecticut illustrators would be ideal, but the Internet makes all things possible.
Painters, pencilers, and intaglio printmakers are all welcome.
In addition to workaday freelance tasks, I have a few long-term projects requiring collaboration, including two screenplays I would like to turn into graphic novels and a book manuscript that needs plates.
I am an award-winning producer, published writer, and successful grant writer seeking freelance allies who find the words difficult but the sketching easy. Email your portfolio to headlessfilm at gmail dot com.
And thanks.
Dotkalm 2.0 is live.
After a year of late nights and stolen seconds, with considerable understanding from loved ones and help from this here iPhone, my new site is up at dotkalm.com.
I wanted the ability to divide and focus on each new project’s audience – whether students, clients, Bumpspark participants, or Musica supporters – as well as tie my work together under my byline. I also wanted easier functionality, with the ability to write and update each audience through any number of online forms and voices, from anywhere, with any device.
I did everything myself, to learn further. The home page is therefore simple, an experiment accomplished with Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Illustrator. It was designed with a smartphone in mind. The project sites are WordPress blog templates with simple mobile versions for the moment.
Delivering content was my priority. It will probably take me another year to get used to juggling everything and keeping it all updated. I am still working at writing at the pace required for today’s technology. I am patient.
I might be doing too many things at once, but I don’t think so. My mind has always worked on five narratives at once. And teaching should exist alongside working and now it can.
Welcome 2012.
Feedback is appreciated.
Gash
When I saw the World Trade Center towers on the morning of September Eleventh for the first time, from the front of One Centre Street, both buildings were burning.
It was within ten minutes of Flight 175’s impact and I knew nothing more than two airplanes caused the damage. I recognized this was terrorism, but I did not own a cell phone. There was no wi-fi. I had no reporter’s commentary or television screen to frame the story. I was in the chaos.
I would work off my own senses in Downtown Manhattan all morning, until after the second tower collapsed.
The puncture in the north tower looked like a scorch mark to my fresh eyes, before I realized it was an absence. I remember that learning and observing distinctly. Is it burnt there? No, it is a hole, but it doesn’t look like a hole. It doesn’t look like anything is there.
It looked like a painting on canvas, because the canvas was torn.
It looked like a rip in the sky.
Today is the tenth anniversary and I am alone in my apartment in New Haven, Connecticut. I have a lot of work to do, work that I love, teaching writers, and no time for this. I tried to turn off the television and the radio.
I have moved on, but it is still there. The anniversary always tells me I have not moved on as much as I think or feel most days. Every time I look at a digital clock and catch that it is 9:11, morning or evening, I still recognize the numbers and what lies beyond them.
The right image or memory can bring it all back. A rebroadcast this morning of a clip of Peter Jennings reporting that day and his loss of composure brought back the chaos instantly.
We remember that day with words and images that put it into context, yet the memory of that morning buried deepest within me is the lack of context. The weave of our words and images was rent apart.
Burning documents and photos filled the sky. Lives evaporated.
The cynics today, those above it all, those who find it morbid or just ignore the day, the single-mindedly political, or the overly patriotic, and of course, those who honestly grieve –any response today is acceptable. Nothing is right or wrong. But it is all a response.
Those who belittle, belie.
Those who find mismanagement in the memorial or the invitation list just need a direction for their emotions, in the same way the partisan need their right road.
Those who still look for a conspiracy seek an impossible reason that might somehow explain, because they cannot look at the reality directly either.
There was no plan. What the terrorists accomplished very much alone was an undoing of plans.
In each of our minds there is a small container of memories that does not get a label. We tear off its lid occasionally like a bandage from our skin because we must give it oxygen so that it does not fester.
Within are the glimpses through holes in the sky that none of us ever ask to see.
This is a big day. It does not feel like it happened yesterday; it feels like ten years ago.
Many have counted every day since.
