It does my heart good, you know? From my desk, I can look out the window and see that the starlings have fucked up the gutters on my neighbor’s house, too. So now I don’t have to feel quite so guilty that my gutters are a complete mess.

I’m not the only one.

And I can also clearly see the starling, sitting happily in my neighbor’s fucked up gutter. She stares out serenely at the world, obviously thinking: God made this gutter just for me, for my nest. What a wonderful world.

I can only guess that all the starlings sitting in their nests in my own fucked-up gutters are wearing the same contended expressions on their tiny faces.

The gutters on my roof sit up way too high for me to see into them, and whenever I walk too close, the birds fly away anyway.

But it’s life — living things, God’s creatures, or whoever makes these sacred creatures — so I don’t really care. What matters more to me is that life goes on and that the starlings return every Spring, along with the robins, to build their nests and hatch their little baby birds, who will come back again next Spring — ad infinitum.

Well, okay!!

Peitor and I did indeed work on Abstract Absurdity Productions stuff yesterday!! And it went very well. We got our synopsis written for Lita måste gå! (aka Lita’s Got to Go!), which is great because synopses are my least favorite thing on Earth to write. I think it’s okay to share the synopsis with you here, because Peitor is showing it to people in LA.  And it will soon be on our new web site anyway (she says confidently, as if she’s going to get back to work on that web site at any moment!!).

If you don’t follow this blog all the time, Lita måste gå! is an 8-minute film, a fictional story, with 4 lines of dialogue — but the dialogue is in Swedish with English subtitles, hence the double title.

Our filmmaking style — in all of our upcoming projects — is an homage to Luis Buñuel, Roman Polanski, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, François Truffaut, Jacques Tati, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Fellini — as well as to the Abstract principles of the photography of the Bauhaus School. 

The premises of all our projects are completely absurd, but handled very seriously — almost poetically — so that the fact that it’s absurd only quietly creeps up on you.

Synopsis:

Lita måste gå! (aka Lita’s Got to Go!)

Lita is everybody’s worst nightmare of a maid. Every day, when Gerta returns to her apartment, an uneasy feeling comes over her that something dreadful is going on. Trying to understand the source of this uneasiness, Gerta begins to investigate. Is what she’s sensing real or imagined? Is it something in the apartment or is it her maid? Whatever it is, the fear in the pit of her stomach grows more inescapable each day. Whilst Gerta goes out to ease her mind, Lita’s cleaning antics escalate to a level that the furniture can no longer endure – the writing desk wrestles her to the floor. The doctor is called in to examine Lita’s lacerations and contusions, but writes off her absurd accusations to an overstimulated imagination. Unsatisfied, Gerta calls in the services of a specialist – and then the Desk Whisperer arrives. In a hushed, tender exchange between the desk and the Whisperer, he gets to the root of the problem. It is here that Gerta learns that Lita’s got to go and that the writing desk longs to return to the forest. Heeding the words of the Desk Whisperer, Gerta then fastens the desk to the roof of her Citroen and drives out to the countryside. In the forest, placing her desk at the foot of a tree, Gerta knows that all is now right again in her world.

So there you have it, gang! That’s the plot to the 8-minute script that it took us 15 months to write! And it’s 19 pages of shots, POVs,  lenses, sound cues and blocking, with 4 lines of dialogue (in Swedish) that don’t come in until page 15.

(And just FYI, the average 90-page script should take you about 6-12 weeks to write.)

But I couldn’t be happier. I fucking love this project!!

Well, in just a few minutes here, my ex-husband out in Seattle is scheduled to call me for a little happy chat.  I haven’t spoken to him since November, I think, even though we email each other many times, every single day. So I’m looking forward to it.

If you aren’t aware, Seattle was one of the first places in the US (if not the first?) that had an outbreak of Covid 19 wherein someone died. Then the State (Washington) was one of the first to go into quarantine, and they seem to have avoided the horrific stuff going on in NYC now because of it.

I was kind of worried that since he is Chinese, he would have been the target of some of that racist awfulness that broke out, but, thankfully, he was not.

So, yes, I have one ex-husband in the thick of it in Seattle, and one ex-husband in the thick of it in NYC. A business partner and dear friend in the thick of it in Los Angeles. And many more friends and colleagues in the thick of it in San Francisco and various areas of the NYC boros. So just pray, right? And just keep hoping that everybody stays indoors. (Although, Dr. David Price, from NYC’s Cornell Medical Center, stresses in a recent video to the world that preventing the contagion hinges almost entirely on washing your hands and not touching your face, period. As well as staying indoors and away from people.)

Okay! On that hopeful note, I better scoot, gang. Thanks for visiting! I might check in again later. We shall see! Have a good Wednesday, wherever you are in the world. I leave you with one of the most beautiful songs, ever. Listen, absorb it, enjoy it and just cherish yourselves, okay? I love you guys. See ya.

“What A Wonderful World”

I see trees of green
Red roses too
I see them bloom
For me and you
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world

I see skies of blue
And clouds of white
The bright blessed day
The dark sacred night
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world

The colors of the rainbow
So pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces
Of people going by
I see friends shaking hands
Saying, “How do you do?”
They’re really saying
“I love you”

I hear babies cry
I watch them grow
They’ll learn much more
Than I’ll never know
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world

Yes, I think to myself
What a wonderful world

Oh yeah

© 1968 George Douglas, Bob Thiele