Master Plan

You can trace the roots back to [the death penalty movie that I made, In Loving Memory]. When I was making it, I kept encountering the idea that the wardens here were managing large-scale apartment complexes, in other words, most of their concerns were things that you would hear from a condo manager. We're concerned about efficient plumbing or bed management and cleaning, or what are we going to do in our common spaces? And then geriatric care came up and that really kind of stuck with me. How many people were in prison for that long a term that they're going to live their lives out in the prison situation? And some people say that's really expensive, but I say that's really weird. You can't say it's corrections, you can't even say it's warehousing. It's just entirely retributive. It's all the assumption that the victim would never allow whoever did whatever to whatever to ever see the light of day. It's actually antithetical to a democracy. When I would show this movie, In Loving Memory, I would often get the response from liberals, 'oh so the answer, of course, is life in prison without possibility of parole,' which interfaced with this problem I was having with the geriatric issues. What is prison really for? And that was the impulse - was to find out about incarceration a little bit more and dealing with it as a housing issue, just as the wardens would consider it, so, sort of extending it out into the world of the rest of us, the non-inmate population of America. What are the housing concerns that they face when they're managing their own space? Basically wanted to turn us all into wardens.

Another thing making In Loving Memory that got me was this notion that all prisons are islands. That there are state policies, but each prison makes its own internal policy regarding things like prayer hours or hair length. Each county really has a lock on how it handles its prisons. In certain cases, the unions feel that it's in their interest to maintain high prison populations, for job security. That's one of the sides of the prison industry that is super creepy. The two other sides are: the private prison and prison industry as something where there's an economy that's driven by prisoner labor. A lot of people who go into the prison system are going to come out, and they don't really do much to make coming out easy for them, or certainly not preferable. I don't know what effect the population of America in its voting has influence on any of these policies, sentencing guidelines. It's determined, from what I can see, internally, based on some kind of general notion of economy. I shake my head when I see that stuff. You're going by the cost of how much it costs to run a jail - that's your determining factor? I mean that's kind of weird, that's not philosophically complete. The expense they're talking about is a financial expense that's geared in a really narrow band, because the larger expense we're really talking about is the social expense, the cost of putting someone in a place like that for a long time, what it does, the messages it sends, the kinds of expectations that people have.

One of the points that I wanted to highlight in this movie was that the sheriff says, 'We think of prisons like hospitals,' to allow people the opportunity to change in terms of looking at themselves and taking responsibilities on for themselves. Their goal is to offer these community-engaged tracks to let them see a way in which they can possibly interface in a different way. Let me just go back -- there is an anarchist side of me that believes that all of this is absurdly prescriptive. The idea that there is a model in society where you get a job, hold down a middle-class value system, to my mind it's like, why? This is America, we're supposed to be all free, so why can't we live off the grid? But the idea that is an alternative to saying that someone is damned to live in poverty and hopelessness and continual profiling and ghettoization, that's what the positive side of prison as a hospital situation is, trying to work against that model.

Anything that's going to give people more agency I'm totally in favor of. And it ended up a big theme for me in the movie -- it's kind of subtle -- but the whole idea of starting with individual homeowners is that they have agency in their lives, they've made these decisions. And we have other examples where people are providing something for people who do have agency and that are trying to maximize that agency. That sort of civic engagement is a little bit of an undercurrent that flows throughout the movie. And the public housing is about trying to get it so we recognize that it's not just about housing. The housing is one step towards building a socially engaged community.

The garden community

I think the garden community thing is really an interesting idea. If the condo maintenance company takes care of all your bushes for you, then it's just like fluffy stuff, it may as well be a wall painting in a motel. But if you do it yourself, then suddenly you're engaged in something, there's some kind of weird share-y thing that goes on. My guess is that it comes out of that 19th century industrial development thing, people moving out of farming and towards industrialism. How do you keep that connection to living culture alive? It survives to this day - the Victory Gardens and all the common gardens we have in JP. It's interesting because they do have that strangely calming effect on something... it's kind of hard to define it. Even as an observer, you see people gardening and you're aware that somehow there's this connection, that the land around you is living, and there's possibly a subconscious respect that grows out of that. When they designed the Kohler Village, they were really interested in the walk, the path that you would walk from your house to work through this nature path, and when you came out of work, you walk home through that too. So almost like it's this filter, it's like a big clam that spits you out on different sides of it or something to filter out all of the competitive... the geometry of that is a little absolutist as opposed to the wild space geometry which is a little freer.

Humor

I try to make it so that for the most part things are positive. The only real element of absurdity that I think I injected was the public space part of Rancho Suhuarita, which is basically the pool. When you see the people walking around the lake, there's nobody there. The theater that he mentioned, I put the tortoises there. When he talks about the trains, there's a toy train there. There's a kind of bizarre feeling of inactivity that is really quite striking. And it did make me wonder, what do these people really want? It was one problem I was having, was that place. I think I let that be. I think there's a strangeness to pretty much everything, like the fact that my mother-in-law has this big house that she'd rather not live in, all the chotchkie items in Lori [Felker]'s parents' house, those little frogs and Lucy things... it's a kind of a nice humor, I think. It's not a biting, nasty... unless you go in wanting to do that. You have to have that lens, 'I live the way I want to live and nobody has a clue unless they're fitting my personal philosophy of what is awesome.' And a lot of people said to me along the way, shouldn't you do this house, shouldn't you do this place? I was like, those are extremes. So many things that are quirky about what we do, they happen in the middle somewhere. And we don't think of them as that outrageous, but they still rub against us in this funny way.

"Where do I fit in all of this?"

I live in a condo, we have an association, we talk about the problems in that association. I've stayed in the same place, and I kind of can't believe it! I've always thought of myself as an itinerant sailor. I've been the [treasurer of my condo] since it started! [I've lived there] since '96, I think, so, fifteen years. I never imagined that I would be in any place more than two. If I look back at what I thought was ideal when I was a kid - nothing like this. It's funny because if you look at this office, you see, it's just crammed with stuff. The one thing that's here is that I can see it all. So if I had a house, I'd be in deep trouble. The studio kind of keeps me honest. It's like in Denmark or Holland or something, you look and you're like, well, I guess that's all you really do need! And it's probably all you should have.

The art career

Artists will complain that in another country there's funding, in another country there's infrastructure. I was talking to Alla [Kovgan] the other day, and she said a little bit how I've always felt. Not fully, but she was saying the other side, which is that the problem with those countries is that artists get in there and, once you're in the club, you're set for life, and it locks out other paths. At least here you can go from nothing to crazy and then back to nothing and who cares? It's all based on where you are at any given moment. The problem with that, to me, is that artists have a long-term survival issue, just like anybody else does. The expectation on an artist is that you make good work all the time. That's crazy, to ask that!

This movie that I'm showing now, it's a low level aesthetic and a very simple design. It's like that because I find that to be consistent with my theme. But I love Morning Glory, and Undergrowth, I think, is wack! That's what I do, that's what comes from me, from the heart of me. When I make these larger pieces, I'm taking a huge risk. I don't think of it that way. But if you look at the American way of looking at art, the way people look at that second novel, for example, oh, it's not as good as the first one. Great! Ok! By what standard is it not as good as the first one? By the fact that you loved the first one and you set these expectations on the second one -- you're not really reading the second one! The Thomas Pynchon novel, Against the Day, I didn't realize that it had been panned in the New York Times and that a lot of people talk iffy about that novel. A really great journey to take for me, that novel. I like Pynchon quite a bit. I didn't look at it and say, it's no Gravity's Rainbow. I read Mason and Dixon, his other book, it's so low-level giggles throughout and absurdities. He's always got this ingenious way of dealing with form and structure, no matter what. So the fact that it didn't measure up to some other thing, I could really give a shit! But that's what happens to American artists! If you're not Thomas Pynchon, you're in such deep doodoo, because you don't have the Thomas Pynchon name, you constantly have to reprove yourself. I think that's how people think we should do it, 'do it better next time, it's gonna be awesome!' That's the idea about progress. For my money, I find it so interesting that artists take these paths, the scary jungle of off your path, off the one that feels like it should be the progressive thing.

Competition

I don't find myself competing with other artists. I see other art and I'm like, wow. Sometimes I'm jealous. Wow, they did an amazing thing, I guess I'll never do that. God, I wish I could do that! I never have a piece where I'm like, I'm going to one-up so-and-so with this one!

We talk about communities and how funds are assigned to communities. To some degree the idea of a participatory democracy as opposed to an adversarial democracy, I think, relies on the idea that the community does, in some ways, know best for itself. If it needs funding or whatever, it's tailored to the needs of that community. Now, this is the kind of thing that leads to localism and racism, so I'm not saying it's particularly one way or the other, but the idea of a participatory democracy is something that we could benefit from.

This is why I'm focusing on culture. To some degree a town or an area defines itself as having a culture, and it's independent of the national culture, but it's also joined with them. It's seen as sort of a shared entity. For example sports, it's not a culture I believe in participating individually. But, Red Sox Nation is in some ways a Nazi idea, nationalist socialism, that idea of town pride can be a dangerous thing. I think there's another way of looking at it. We here create a culture that has this university taint to it, it has a New England maritime thing mixed into it, and all these radical artists are known to come through here, too, innovators in technology. This defines the town to some degree. We do somehow believe there's something more [than simply the economy] and i think we take pride in that definition, at the same time knowing that one of the things that makes it great is its variety. To my mind, that's actually a metaphor for participatory democracy in a socialist way. Socialist, meaning that we believe in sharing these things together. We don't believe the tech people are against the sports people are against the artists. We believe the tech people want to go to the art shows and the sports events. That the artists are interested in baseball, me excluded, and also fascinated by things at MIT that are going on. We do believe in that and we want to promote that, and that is not capitalism. Capitalism is about competition between these areas, that there's an aggressive, self-interested mode of action that allows you to form partnerships.

The Occupy movement

(Rob to John Gianvito, who has just walked in) How do you feel about the Occupy movement?

(John) Did you see Michael Moore on TV last night, on CNN? He was with a hundred Occupy people for an hour, talking about how people shouldn't criticize it yet because it's only five weeks old, and movements take a while to formulate. But he said there's a website already for Occupy New York City that has a list of ideas that they're asking people to vote on to see what planks people are wanting to get behind. But the speed with which it's taking momentum is really remarkable, it's certainly noteworthy. So, I'm for it.

(Rob) The interesting thing about that movement to me is not related to what I was just talking about. The foreclosure one interested to me. I think the last thing on an agenda of a neighborhood development committee is consideration of a place for culture. I don't mean that they don't consider it, I think it's low on the list. I think there are a lot of foundations out there that have arts as something that they support, but it's usually a token kind of support. For the most part, they're interested in what they consider as fundamentals: education, housing, whatever, social welfare things. Occupy Wall Street is generally directed toward that, and I think it's awesome.

You know, I'm not a single issue voter, but sometimes I feel like I have to constantly be saying that not having kids is ok. That it's a great choice. That atheism is awesome, because to be an atheist, to be a believer in something that's not God, I mean, a true believer, is a strong thing. There isn't the support. It's creative, it's an inventive thing.

The arts is always something that's last in line but first in our consciousness. The color of our world is determined by the arts. The things that define Boston when we say the Emerald [Necklace]. How the city is shaped as part of that. The physical housing of a house is just a metaphor for a person, and how the house is situated is a matter of cultural consideration. To define the society as having a certain kind of architecture and a certain way of interacting is provided for, supported, even fostered and promoted by a certain kind of design. I really think that's true. As an example, I went with Tessa to the art store the other day, and we went across the street to have something on an outdoor seating arrangement. A couple metal benches, a little bit of a sidewalk over here, what a marked difference that was from being in New York and having that cordoned area with two widths of sidewalk this way, and we were at a table with someone, and there's a shade tree and an umbrella. We could have stayed there all day and just talked! it's so inspirational, as opposed to, there are cars here, and should we leave now, you know, kind of feel. It totally determines how your head thinks.

The same is true of movies, when people get impatient. Watching things on the internet, you can only take so much, as opposed to really living with it in a theater space. I know the difference between what it takes to put something on a TV versus what it takes to put it on a screen. When I was editing this movie, it was pretty clear that I had to extend the shots because they were going to be on the big screen. They had to last longer, because you're going to fall into that experience.

So the housing thing, it really stretches out across all this stuff. Just to go back to Occupy Boston, foreclosure, just the very idea that so many people are subject to this because of the economic system that we have in place and all the weird regulations and laws and the flouting of them and fudging of them, that, somehow, this is able to affect so many people really is a cultural issue. But it's not simply the culture of finance. It's a sort of game that people play where they're making a strong statement that the place that you live in has nothing to do with the place you live in. In other words, you don't really exist there, you exist at the behest of someone else, interchangeably, the assumption of nomadic finances, that borders don't matter. It's a conceit to a certain kind of disposable culture.

And this is why film has always been a double-edged sword for me. I really like painting because that thing is always in your face. It doesn't go away. And film is as ephemeral as you want it to be. In fact, you blink, you miss some of it. You never truly are experiencing a set moment. It really is the expression of a dream. Film is necessarily utopian, whereas painting is something that insists on its existence in the world and the problems that it creates. It transforms as time works its magic upon it with any individual communing experience.

So, Occupy Wall Street -- cool. But I feel like I'm missing a chance to ask the world to re-look at the arts and say it's not just about funding ballet, it's about having it fully part of all the things we're doing.