Today, yet again, I wounded myself. With the help of many terrific part-time carpenters and helpers who will not long remain nameless, I’ve been doing a lot of the renovations on our new office space. An honest observer could describe me as an enthusiastic carpenter but not a particularly dexterous one, so a few times a week I generate some scratch, cut or splinter that bloodies the scene. Once, one rather gnarly gash that I got from crowbarring old tile off a bathroom wall had me stumbling out onto the street, perhaps thinking the fresh air would help me think as the blood unfurled. It was clear I needed stitches, but at that moment my mother appeared, just inexplicably strolling along the sidewalk (she lives 25 minutes away), and seeing her son clutching his bloody calf, she calmly offered to walk up to the pharmacy and get some butterfly bandages that would patch me right up. It took about 3 months to heal but it’s a good looking scar, I would guess the sort of scar an arrow might produce in a 13th century filmmaker’s leg.
In the Bahamas, a few years ago, we hired a man named Marcus to bring us to a rather remote set of abandoned buildings which bore strange scratched drawings of ships from centuries ago. Ships had become a bit of a theme in our film (The Arc of Oblivion), and I wanted to get a closer sense of what might have possessed these artists. The road to the buildings was overgrown and outrageously stony, I do not think it is even reasonable to call it a road, but after a few hours of 5mph pickup truck bouldering we had arrived; our guide lit a cigarette and began slashing at brush with a machete. We filmed a while, just quietly moving among the buildings which had long ago lost their roofs and were marvelously shot through with trees and flowers, the pleasant whirr of bees. I came upon Marcus studying the drawings, and after a pause he said when he was a kid growing up on Abaco, they would tattoo themselves by scratching their forearms with the torn branches of poisonous plants, causing a bloom of scar that would fade after some months.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fecafb104-3cb1-4050-8ffa-d7172c46e8fd_4032x3024.heic)
The Arc of Oblivion wandered far afield, but it first emerged from a rather quotidian observation: that we filmmakers weren’t making anything physical anymore as part of our work as artists. After the DVD’s supremacy faded and the streamers began to stream, things got downright intangible. Musicians press vinyl records these days, and people still buy books, but videotapes and the like haven’t quite leapt into the land of the commercially hip. They’re obsolete. Change is okay, I mean change is wonderful, and ubiquitous, but this particular shift struck me as subpar. It’s odd to spend a few years doing the often very physical work of filmmaking and then make…nothing. (Maybe this is why I spend a few hours everyday incompetently doing carpentry?) I still mull the forms our films could take that would earn them a spot on someone’s bookshelf, but lacking an engineer’s ingenuity, I mull without progress.
My wife has several very beautiful tattoos, and admiring them one day I suggested I join her by getting one small simple tattoo - like an emblem - for each of my films, on my forearm. If nothing else, a way of keeping track of them:
Two Buckets (2006) - two buckets would do it.
King Corn (2007)- okay, maybe just a small corn cob.
The Greening of Southie (2008) - the building in question had a very strong silhouette.
Truck Farm (2010) - the beloved 1986 Dodge!
The City Dark (2011) - hmm, a constellation? A dark-sky friendly lighting fixture? Maybe film tattoos are silly.
The Melungeons (2012) - no idea. A map of Tennessee? OK my film tattoos are not going to work.
The Search for General Tso (2014) - a drippy chicken nugget? This is now sounding awesome!
Bluespace (2015)- maybe Mars? But how do you draw that.
The Smog of the Sea (2016) - Jack Johnson’s face? The Sargasso Sea?
The Measure of a Fog (2017)- some fog? Someone measuring some fog? That’s not what this was about at all.
The Most Unknown (2018)- this one would be like 9 different tattoos, I need coffee.
Picture Character (2019)- an emoji!
Thirteen Ways (2019) - um, the number 13
Picture a Scientist (2020)- no idea what to do here, maybe another emoji, maybe they should all be emojis?
The Long Coast (2020)- a lobster boat?
The Arc of Oblivion (2023)- an ark!
Shelf Life (2024)- cheese!
And so on. Anyway, before I’d finished my list I was so consumed in self-loathing for (a) the unhinged self-aggrandizement I’d evinced by even suggesting this idea and (b) well actually it was mostly just (a) — that we both agreed I would not do this. But in the absence of printed DVDs on the shelf, it was helpful to make the list!
The films leave a mark on me anyway. Not a simple mark that I could trace or point to, but more like when, on a recent shoot in New Mexico, a cloud of bees collided with our windshield, making popping pellet sounds that jolted us, and for long moments we couldn’t piece together what had happened, until we saw one dying bee struggling in the lee of the windshield wiper. We were doing 75mph in a 1984 Ford van, and the wind eventually tugged away all bee parts from the glass, but the collision is with me still.