Save a sore lower back and some slightly thinning hair, old age has meant little more than a myriad of heartbreaks and a gradually expanding vocabulary. My pain, be it physical or emotional, is none of your business, but I will tell you that this now mediocre command of my mother tongue has largely stemmed from finding myself involved with various forms of litigation (Q: what part of ‘can’t squeeze Kool-Aid out a cobblestone’ they not getting?)
Larger lexicon, likely the only upside of having to make so many appearances before Judge Roughneck.
Want an example? Redaction. A word I would have never used, never known, never given a gnat turd about, had it not been for a certain current housing battle I presently find myself entangled in, with none other than thee “Capital M” Man.
Back in the day, I’d a probably just said something to the effect of, “totally crossed out, not like Kris Kross, but like the CoIntelPro cross-dresser did with all his classified papers on the Panthers” oblivious to the fact that there was a simple little 9 letter noun that could say the same damn thing. However now that I’m old, and I find myself in these old people situations (housing battles and the like) I’m forced to learn and use such words in order to avoid living on the proverbial park bench. Ahhh, education at its best. Saving a sorry soul from a life of lice, piss-stains and open-air sleeping accommodations.
So, in honor of this new appellation taking refuge in my dome-piece, I’m going to place this bad boy into practice to make sure I don’t forget it in a minute (‘cause isn’t that the best way to make a new expression stick? –Use it, so you won’t lose it.)
And what better way to employ the term than to show off some of the email exchanges during the process of producing this latest video production masterpiece. But not just any electronic correspondences, no-sireee-bob, I’ll be sharing with you, young fresh fellows and fellowrettes, full blown no nonsense keep my ass out of further litigation REDACTED emails. Yes, you heard correct, what I’ll be exposing, my dear readers, are documents that have been thoroughly edited, sharpie’d, censored to conceal the vital bits of illicit information, so as to allow the authors of the documents in question the leverage necessary to deny any culpability of any sort, at any time, in any form, whatsoever, so help them Confucius. Which in laypersons’ terms means, ‘if you can’t read the names under the black ink, you can’t prove shit.’ Leaving it so I can claim I was referring to a bad motherf—[ooo, shut your mouth] “What? I was only talking ‘bout Donald Duck,” and with that I’ll be crystal clear and free, just like water used to be.
Don’t worry Mama, I’m coming home!
S’pose what I’m really getting at is since there was so much hip hop hoopla surrounding the making of this here music video/short film production/masterwork, I’m sure there’s probably like at least 7 seriously gossip happy nerds out there that will bother reading this and have a grand old time trying to decipher the cryptic significance barely veiled in these ever-so-vaguely altered messages and I’m here to give the people (well, the nerds at least) what they want. But with a twist, of course. The Redaction Factor. To make it more exciting, challenging, confusing, annoying. And then again, though I doubt it, maybe some of you nerds and non-nerds alike are interested in the behind the scenes nonsense that goes down behind closed doors and firewalls during the making of these little music movies. Whatever the case, without further ado, I present to you…
Redacted email numero uno:
[This was the original email I received from a certain “someone” after a brief phone call in which another certain “someone” from a certain label told me they wanted to make a video for a certain song recorded by a certain artist. In the phone conversation I was told that the certain artist wasn’t going to be in the video, leaving me to assume (strike one against me) that this was a decision of the certain artist’s making. And thus our decent into hell begins. We start with the email that contains the “treatment” (actually two versions, one by one certain “individual”, and the other one by an alleged “feminist”.)]
REDACTED LETTER #1
[I responded to this above email to the sender of the email with this email of my own…]
REDACTED LETTER #2
[On the follow up phone call I reiterated the points in the redacted email above and then made it clear that I could only do the video if 1) it was cool to change stuff to make it a little less “on the nose” and “didactic”—making sure it didn’t come off as some anti-choice propaganda, but also not coming off like a knee-jerk pro-abortion thing either—because preachy crap is always crap; it's more important to try to get people to think than to tell them what to think—and most importantly 2) I needed to make sure what I wanted to do was cool with the artist (it was her song after all). Blessed with a healthy intuition, I sensed that the artist probably hadn’t seen or probably wasn't going to be feeling the narrative I had just read. So next thing I did was tried to contact the artist to see where she stood in relation to this potential production. And tried. And tried again. And after a week of phone call voice mails, text messages, and unacknowledged iChats, (did I mention that this artist has a tendency to go MIA, and ironically enough, usually to MIA, but not alas, with MIA, whom she doesn’t particularly care for, prompting many an argument between us.) What was I saying? Oh, yeah, after a week of trying to track the artist down I finally got through on a chat (man, i hate that word "chat" fingernails on a chalkboard). Think it was a google "chat", if memory serves…P.S. Note the time, 4 in the morning. Shit’s like detective work I tell ya.]
REDACTED LETTER #3
[After this exchange we talked again on the phone and my artist friend said, “Fuck it, I should be involved. It is my most personal song after all. So I was like cool, let’s make this happen. And I got the ball rolling. But then my friend, the artist, really went into hiding. Couldn't find her at all, for a long ass spell. And all the while I had the other parties involved asking me when I was going to start. Quagmire brewing. So I started the shoot, all the while hoping that I would be able to track a certain artist friend down when it came to the days of her scenes.
Never happened.
Got to the days where I needed her, but still no answer on the various lines of communication. So fuck it, I did the damn thing as best I could without her. Sound like a dick move? Going ahead without her? If you were one of the 9 people who pay attention to the mindless underground hip-hop chit-chit-chatter circuit (big up the boring backpack message board/blogger massive, you know who you are, seen?!) you may have heard that the artist was none too happy about all of this. But before you rush to judgment and cry Foul-e-lujah, please read the post-production exchange below for a more thorough explanation of my rationale. And then feel free to comment. And I’ll rebut. And so on and so forth. So I can relive this wonderfully banal moment of my life and argue these points again and again, in perpetuity, ad infinitum, always and forever...or at least until the cancer kills me.]
REDACTED LETTER #4
[still no response, so…]
REDACTED LETTER #5
[And still no response, so I went to the artist’s show anyway, and it was sort of awkward, but who cares. I sort of like awkward. My whole existence is awkward. Default setting for my whole aura, awkward. Whatever. Bottom line is we still haven’t properly spoken and resolved any of this. Maybe one day we’ll laugh. Or not. Who knows? However, that’s not the end to this boring tale. There’s more in store to induce a snore for sure. Check out these exchanges over the content of the film between myself and certain inside players, resulting in a migraine where all I could see for 3 straight weeks was the flashing integer 4080. The letters are out of order, so it might be even more puzzling than all of this already confusing crap you’ve been trying to sift through, but that’s okay because the comments were out of order when they came into the world in the first place. All I can say is it may be helpful if you go to the bottom and read these in reverse because the shit is all backwards, literally and figuratively.]
REDACTED LETTER #6
[And that, Ladies and Germs, is Redaction. My new favorite bit of terminology. Hope you’ve enjoyed, at least as much as I have (n't). And on a final note, please watch the long version of the video. Yes, that means there's an ADD version too for you preocc spacecases. But seriously, it's only in the longer cut that you can witness Mr. Dead getting sucker punched in the family jewels by his youngest son, Lil’ Lil’ Dead--it's adorable. Come to think of it, guess that was Lil’ Lil’ Dead’s interpretive response to the subject matter of the song. Wait, are we on to something? Roshambo--home remedy approach to paternal abortive/spermicidal measures? Perhaps a new craze? 'Cause crybaby men always feel left out whenever women have something to call their own? (Well, everything except the lower pay for equal work thing.) Aa-and on a final final note: watch the film in HD will ya? For better quality! Just click on the HD symbol and it will open up in a new tab on the bricolagista! vimeo channel). And feel free to check out the other stuff that's posted there too.]
Tally Garden Tool!
–Monihan Monihan, September 2008
