The Coconut Sucked

Did we mention that already? I did not re-read the last post. Either way, that coconut milk was practically poisonous and the meat left a taste in my mouth for hours.

But that was over a week ago. Why should I even dwell on it further?

We were in L.A. for two days, interviewing a couple of amazing collectors - one who collects antique flashlights, the other skateboards.

We did a couple of Q&A sessions for "Lumia" and "Video Out" at USC and the Echo Park Film Center. We drove in traffic a lot. We drove some more. We saw the Pacific Ocean. We ate. We kept driving. Then we flew home and it took two days to recover.

We have been working ever since. Meredith is now typing one of her philosophical diatribe/discourse posts on her Montagenik blog, so I'm just hanging out here, making sure young Otto doesn't go pee in my bed. He and Elko, the alpha dog in this household, are each doing their thing.

Fall is outside. We are about to start working.

13Bit Eats a Coconut

Today 13Bit cracked open a coconut. 13Bit drank the juice and it was bitter. A piece of coconut shell lodged itself inside Paul's throat. We googled and we found an instructional video that taught us how to crack open a coconut and it worked. But the coconut oil polluted paul's sink.

It is good to be bitting again. We took some time off, and then I fell ill to the influenza of 2010. But now we are planning new trips for our doc, plotting the ecopocalypse, and the robot band -

this is a short post but i am now going to drink coffee, apparently the same hormone that metabolizes coffee is the hormone you produce when you are pregnant

Did you take your nihilism pill today?

Nothing will endure.

Everything is generational.

The news is broken.

Yes, it's a dark scene at the compound today. Life's ugly realities are weighing heavily over here. Between that the Dow, or did I say Tao, we don't know shit anymore.

Anyway, just wanted to share some of the buzz.

"My eye is twitching."

It's total manipulation, I tell you.

We are eating at Minerva and that Tea Set place, at the panini place and getting french fry bomb baskets from assorted Village grease houses.

We are shutting down shop tomorrow for a couple of weeks, then taking our show on the road in Phoenix and running rabidly across Texas on the collector trail.

More news from the road, hopefully.

"I bruised my stomach with spaghetti..."

Meredith did not say exactly that, but it's what she said in essence.

I think she is trying to dis our new 13BIT fooderie, Cafe Minerva.

Anyway, things are going well. We are cranking out the interviews, doing the ecopocalypse cartoon, getting ready for the Robot Parade, working on the iPad app, planning our next swing through the southwest to collect more collectors, and having civil arguments about modern literature every day.

And we are eating.

In addition to Minerva, a new place opened. We have not gone there yet, but we may go there soon to celebrate this renaissance of high-priced new coffee joints in the increasingly bougie west village.

We may also explore moving operations to Brooklyn. Today, we held consultations with our Persian brethren at Bettertex and learned that they, too, are contemplating a similar move. "Half of our clients no longer want to come into the city," the old man said.

A taxi driver complained to me about the new bus lanes on broadway. All signs point east. They also point west. What are we to do?

Tune in soon for more answers, questions, and head-scratching.

Another day, another bit

Best line of code overheard muttered at the compound today:

"If blah blah blah..."

Yes, Meredith is up to her old tricks again, this time working on the asset upload for our super secret, beyond cool iPad app that concerns "Video Out," our first award-winning feature.

We are closing down shop again very soon, after having closed it down a few days ago for my aborted trip out west, and this time we will most likely stay shut down for a few weeks, barring emergency phone calls from collectors or hollywood agents.

What is the food situation lately in Bitland? Not really dire, but in need of a change. We have been doing Integral Yoga smoothies, the old standby, but we still miss Miracle Grill, Rue Bourbon and a few other local joints that are now gone.

A promising-looking place is supposed to open soon on Charles and Hudson - "Dolci by Donna," or something like that. In the meantime, though, our current standbys are Barbuto, Keste, Taim and Bonbonnierre. Now, I am advocating a return to Westville, after having OD'ed on their pesto mashed potatoes the other night, but Meredith is resisting. I will wear her down, though, at some point in the long slog ahead of us once we start logging all the footage we are now collecting.

And what are we collecting? Did we talk about the collectors documentary yet? If not, we will soon.

Suffice to say that we are collecting collectors, and there are some fascinating ones out there.

Now I'm hungry.

"The Quiet Room" has finally started going out to festivals and we have high hopes for it.

Onward!

A nice quiet room

That's what this blog feels like sometimes. We know that the occasional person drifts through - hell, even WE drift through on occasion - but, for the most part, it's a quiet, clean, spacious room, maybe one with huge floor-to-ceiling arches opening onto the sea. Birds fly in and out. The waves crash on the beach. A tray with a pitcher of cool lemon water sits in the corner, next to the blogging desk and the quill pen knife.

We pop in occasionally, write a little snapshot of 13BIT life, usually about what we eat while editing or some other such interesting morsel, or "bit," as it were. Then we leave and go about our bittness.

That bidness today includes sending the Bit-Rocket into low-level orbit towards El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de la Porciúncula.

We're off to collect some interviews of collectors.

No more apologies

No more apologies, god damn it, for not posting. We could make a movie about the pathology of guilt, shame and inaction of not posting, but it would not be true.

We have actually been super hard at work, doing the work of Bitting. But first, a 13BIT food update:

We have been eating a lot of dark chocolate salty pretzel chocolate bars from the Chocolate Bar, on Hudson Street (and, no, we do not get any swag for our priceless references, just the joy of knowing we are spreading the word).

We have been doing smoothies still from Integral Yoga. Uh...chocolate corn chips with guacamole. Brussels sprouts from Integral, as well. Ninth Street Espresso from Chelsea Market has become a mainstay and, on our new pagan holiday of Options Expiry Day, we sometimes get ice cream from Ronnybrook Farms, also in Chelsea Market. The occasional Gobo takeout diner. 2 Boots. What's new, you ask? Not much. Why mess with a winning formula? Better to just add little bits of junk food, one thing at a time. We still miss the loss of Rue Bourbon and Miracle Grill, but life must go on, Bitting must go on, the future marches on. Which brings us to:

1. Lakshmi, aka "The Quiet Room," is a couple of days from being sent out to festivals and greater things.

2. The uber-blog "Low Budget Legends," has finally been released into the wild. You can glimpse it at http://www.lowbudgetlegends.com

3. We have put the water footprint doc on the back burner for now, actually, we have wrapped it in foil and put it in the low-carbon footprint freezer temporarily while we are feverishly at work on another documentary, the subject of which will be revealed in the near future.

4. We have been pod-casting parts of "The Discreet Charm of the Hipster Class" to wild popular acclaim.

5. We are getting in gear to write the script for the next narrative.

6. German TV is running "Lumia"

7. We are participating in a forum in Los Angeles in the fall on visual arts, and will be doing special director chats about "Lumia" and "Video Out."

And let me tell you, people, THIS IS NO VAPORWARE! Everything is actually happening and we are very excited dot com about it all.

PLUS, 13BIT Labs is working on a few killer iPad apps.

Yes, Elko and Otto have a lot on their plates here while we are chewing on our bones and watching them work.

We promise not to take so long until the next House of Bit post.

It's Not All About Food

But...since some of our stalwart food standbys have closed lately - Miracle Grill, Rue Bourbon, etc. - we have need to expand our horizons, to coin a brand new phrase.

Hence Westville and now, possibly some new place called Path Cafe.

13BIT must run on something, after all.

In other news, we are back editing Lakshmi, heading to Europe to interview people for the eco/water/metrics doc, and have other interesting plans, including a top secret neo apocalyptic adventure.

More will be revealed.

I was told to blog.

Meredith commanded me to blog something. I think she is worried about our public profile, wants to make sure that we are putting the best face forward or something. I am not sure, and I really don't know why my blogging would be the best thing to do for our public profile. Either way, she told me to blog, so here I am.

Let me fill you in a little bit on what we're up to.

Today, we created four Facebook groups, one for each of our films so far - aside from the one we're now writing - and one for the actual company, 13BIT Productions LLC, from which comes the noble name "House of Bit." We are so abysmal at self-promoting, yet so adept at web, geeky, online stuff that this seems like a really nice way to conduct our PR. We are hoping to use the current mania for Facebook as a way to keep people current on what we do, provide a small presence in the social networking world, and simply to plant a flag on Mount Facebook. So that was something we did today. It was exhilarating and somewhat scary. Exhilarating because we actually did a small bit of publicity and that made us happy. Scary because it felt like we were spamming our friends. Meredith, especially, almost had a complete breakdown over intruding in the lives of her friends. She thought they would hate her for sending these invites. I tried to explain that, if they are really her friends, they would welcome these developments. If they are not her friends, they won't care. I felt the same way, though, so I had to put up a brave front while I was telling her all this.

We also are still doing technical work to prepare our next project, a true blog about low budget filmmaking, which will cover the gamut: from philosophical issues to technical stuff and everything in-between. There will be no real overlap between that blog and this one. While we truly love this blog and, if nothing else, it lets us see what we have been eating for the past few years, we wanted to make one that focuses more on the filmmaking. We will continue to post here for both of our readers, but we wanted to make something more accessible to anybody making a film. We promise that we won't post about junk food to the new blog. Unless it's related to filmmaking, of course.

The last tidbit is that we are closing in on finishing the first version of Project Venezuela. We are very excited about this. We will probably be putting up casting notices soon.

Very, very excited.

And, for the record, we have been ordering from Taim lately. REALLY good falafel and sabich.

Over and out.

Chipatosis

Sometimes, the mail is your conscience. You make a purchase on the Internet and then forget about it. Then, weeks later, a package arrives or, as happened today, a mountain of boxes arrived via UPS from a mad moment at the 13Bit compound that occurred weeks ago.

We were editing one night and Meredith had a craving for some salty food. Usually, it's sugar that powers the Superbitter engine but, every once in a while, one of us wants something specific. In this case, she was jonesing for a bag of the Hawaiian Sweet Maui Onion potato chips from Tim's Chips that we had eaten for a whole previous year.

A little background - I first discovered these chips on one of my hot spring trips with the mighty Paul S. We had stocked up at the Nugget grocery store in Davis, California. Actually, he had brought them on previous trips for years and I had fond memories of ravenously, greedily eating them with great gobs of fresh guacamole by the side of remote hot springs in Idaho and Nevada. Good memories. How much better does life get than a feast of such delicacies, bottles of water, and a good soak at dusk?

Anyway, that's how I knew about them. I could not find them on the East Coast, though, and had become curious about where I could get them. I also wanted to get some for a cross country trip a year or two ago. So, I found them online (www.timschips.com) and, on a whim, ordered a few boxes. When they arrived, I was a bit horrified because I had not thought about the fact that boxes of potato chips take up a lot of room. So, we began to eat this stuff while we'd edit. And the boxes were bottomless. We had chips coming out of our ears. We gave chips away to people. We had Hawaiian Sweet Maui Onion potato chips available for every shoot for "The System," aka "Not Blavatsky," aka "whatever the fuck we are going to call this movie." Anyway, we had chips for a long time.

And then one day, there were none left and I said a silent "hallelujah" and thanked the Universe that I lived through all those chips and vowed that I would never make the mistake again of ordering potato chips in bulk from the west coast.

Life went blissfully on. We edited. We shot. We kept on bitting.

And then one day, Meredith wanted some chips. I had a weak moment, as well, and decided to order some new ones. I went on line and was barking out varieties to her from the main workstation: "Limon con Salsa?"

"Yes"

"Maui Onion Rings?"

"Yes"

We just went into a chip frenzy, clicked "Buy," and then forgot about it.

Today, I was taking Elko out when the UPS truck stopped in front of the building and the guy ominously said "I have something for you."

He started piling the boxes up in the back of the truck.

I had only bought a hundred dollars' worth of chips, but let me tell you, a hundred bucks goes a long way in the world of wholesale chips.

When Meredith came over, I promptly blamed her for the whole episode, tried to impart as much guilt as possible through special osmosis, then we sat down to work.

20 minutes later, I felt like a chip. Just one chip. Meredith was an easy sell. She wanted a chip, too. So we both walked over to the mountain of chip boxes - a bit warily, I will admit - and we started cutting open boxes in awe.

I will not reveal what two flavors we ended up sampling, but within 20 minutes, Meredith was complaining of the dreaded 13bit Chip Fever.

We are now well provisioned for the end-of-summer writing, post production and test-screening season.

[crunch]

"Death by Pizza"

Oh my god, I think I'm going to die. This pizza made me sick. I think I'm going to need ten Tums.

Yes, this is the last day of "Food Month On The House of Bit."

One of us decided she wanted pizza tonight. One of us had already planned on getting pizza, so it seemed like the thing to do.

The pizza arrived - a medium pie from 2 Boots, half Tony Clifton and half Mild Margherita.

We ate with gusto, then resumed working. We were writing a scene tonight. Eventually, one of us seemed to feel sick, and declared it to be so. The night ended.

This will be the last food post for a while. Monday is our last day of work until mid-January.

So, what do you want to eat?

The real questions of editing and film work don't always revolve around cuts, frames, angles and lighting. They don't even center on plots or dialogue.

What it really comes down to most of the time is "What do you want to eat?"

Sometimes, these decisions have a greater effect on the outcome of a project than anyone would ever care to admit.

Ponder that, Socrates.

House of Bit Dusts Itself Off For Bitness

We only have two days to work this week - between my return and Meredith's annual 4th of July mega-bash, which has menu preparations like I have never seen before - we will not really get up a good head of steam until next week, BUT, that being said, the Bit House is open and we are preparing for the summer season.

We are using these two days for our show at S'nice, which features truly gorgeous, large-format prints on canvas. We entered "Video Out" into another festiva because we would love to go to Greece this December. We are planning and plotting on the "Lumia" end-game, the final shoot which we decided we must do in order to streamline the film, then one quick shoot at the Whitney.

Then we finish editing, do the color correction, sound and titles, the endless PR and promotional preparations, then hit the festival circuit. It's a mundane part of the business, but it's satisfying in its own way.

And after that, we begin the narrative feature.