Be careful, whatever it is may be going around out there.
I'm excited as hell about the opportunity to shoot a docu-style video of A Marvelous Paranoia. Shooting begins in late April in my hometown of Sweet Home, Oregon. The book is built in a vignette style of short reminiscences, with an opening chapter that introduces some of the book's themes and anticipates what follows--a recounting of growing up in the Willamette Valley, my escape from small town life, a grinding poverty that I didn't even recognize until I got out to see how others live, a high-school career filled with sports and sports writing fantasies, an unfocused university life (paid for by working in mills), a short political activist/organizing career in New England, a return to disappointment in San Francisco, and finally resettlement in Portland.
The story picks up in the fifties when, as a child, I was taken to the berry and bean fields of the Willamette Valley and told to earn my keep. It ends with me taking a trip to Paris in the late 70s, determined to become an expat writer, and returning home with my tail between my legs.
With all that said, it's a funny book.
I have planned and written segments of a second volume that picks up with life in Northwest Portland circa 1980, when the Nob Hill neighborhood was unencumbered by the greed and phoniness of its current incarnation. The neighborhood meant something to me after my short-lived literary career in Europe. I look at the old neighborhood now and rue what passes as progress in the American mind.
I'll finish that book when I finish it, but right now I see an opportunity to do something special with the video.
I'm on the lookout for an actor to record the book so that the parts of the text I include are vocally polished and articulate.
The pictures, stills and video, will have a collage method designed to accentuate the story.
You've seen this sort of thing before, but you haven't seen this one, which is why I'm jazzed about it.
TS
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