Sample Journal Entries - Em Weston (faux celeb)
Greetings, from sunny Nevada, where Albert Szukalski is fast becoming my favorite person. Ever. Aaron and I just got out of a week long fight with Oliver, to scrap the whole video process, and put this guy up, in place:



Ol won. The videos are still coming out. Actually, we're almost done. We've been out here with Noel and our crew for about two weeks, and we're looking at a Friday the 13th wrap. If I get my way, we're partying with the bike ghost. We can hook a keg up to the back of his bike. That's at the Goldwell Open Air Museum, just outside of Beatty. They love us, there. (By "they," I mean the people who keep it open.)

For those of you not in the know, Goldwell is a series of outdoor sculptures by a whole bunch of modern artists, in the ghost town at Rhyolite, Nevada. It was a gold rush town that really only lasted four years, from 1904 to the Panic of 1907. They officially packed up and left in 1916, I think.

Fast forward to 1998, when a different "they" made a shitty movie, called Six String Samurai. They filmed a lot of it in Death Valley and Rhyolite. Basically, it's about a post-apocalyptic world in which Elvis is reigning as America's king, out of Vegas. He dies, and there's this exodus to find a new king. Some friend of my brother's showed me the movie, after I played his house party, up in Trenton. This was around 2000, I think. Anyway, I've always loved Death Valley. Death Valley's amazing. It's desolate, yeah, but it's astounding. Just astounding, because you think, "How could anything live out here?" but there's plants all around you, there's animals, and you're really all alone. I don't know, it's great. But I was looking at some of the prodocution photos from this terrible, shity, awful movie, and I ended up seeing pictures of Rhyolite, and thinking how great it was. It's very weird, very Hills Have Eyes, and I told Oliver that if I ever made a movie, I wanted to make it some place like that.

So, when it came time to scope out locations for the big shoot to finish up Who Will Survive..., I started asking about Rhyolite. It came down, around March, to where we had permission to shoot outside of Socorro, New Mexico, and to use one of the lots at Universal Studios for like...six hours, for the video for "Shiola." This was all stuff my producer (he who shall remain nameless) worked out on his own. I trust him to know what I like, even if he has to argue with me for a couple weeks about it. But I was all set to go to Socorro (I love New Mexico), when about six weeks ago, I called him up and was like, "Hey, what about Rhyolite? It's in Nevada, they made Six String Samurai there."

Of course he said to me, "What the hell is a six string samurai?", and I didn't tell him, but a couple days later, he got in touch with Suzy McCoy, who runs the historical society preserving the town. I apologized for the short notice, and asked if we could film there. She said she'd love it if we could, but they had a survey team coming in to do markings for an archeaological dig, about two miles away, the same time we were going to be there. A couple days and a big cash bribe later (partial courtesy of my dad's hospital. Thanks, Dad.), and the surveyors pushed their thing back a week.

Then there's Goldwell. Noel and I went there at 2:00 in the morning, the first day we were in Nevada. We'd finished up at Universal Studios the morning before, and we were supposed to get the outdoor shots for "Shiola" done that night, send the footage back to a friend of mine in LA, who's doing the editing, and switch focus back to the WWS set. But there we are, in the desert, alone, in the middle of the night. It was so fucking quiet, after we turned the Jeep off. We left the flashlight off, and we walked, and we were blind, from the headlights/total darkness transition.

When our eyes focused, there were these white things, these wraiths, about fifty yards up ahead. They're on like a raised platform, so they looked like they were floating. I didn't show Noel a picture of them, before we went out there. Not even the bike guy. (Bikes follow us around, huh?) It was fucking amazing. I wasn't scared, and then he grabbed my arm, and I was terrified. We stopped walking for a minute, and they were so big, and real, and crazy unreal. Like white Nazgul.

You go somewhere like that, and you see something like that, and it's like being in a movie. I live for Noel, but after that, I live for that kind of moment, where all the scary-bad stuff you believed in as a kid is real. Seeing the Last Supper, that night, was like everything in the world I ever wanted. Noel was with me, and I was about half scared out of my pants. What else could I want?

Not a rhetorical question. I did want one other thing. I wanted those statues in the videos. We had to be back in Rhyolite at 6:00 to shoot the rest of "Shiola," but the second I got a chance, I called Suzy again, and asked her if she could get the number of somebody at Goldwell. I kept our crew waiting out there for another two hours past when we were "done," until somebody from the museum society called me back. I begged the guy, for about a quarter of an hour, to let us go out and shoot for a little while.

He said, "As long as no tourists are harmed in the making of this video." He laughed, and said he was almost kidding, because there's never anyone out there, and we might as well do what we wanted. We went, we shot, he got another hefty "bribe."

A couple days later, we broke from shooting, and I got to meet him. His name's Ray, and he looks like a Ray. Noel and Oliver and I showed him the footage we put together at the museum, and he thought we were amazing. We spent the next three hours with him, and he listened to Who Will Survive... and gave us his blessing to do whatever we want. That guy's coming to the wrap party. For sure. With 100 of his friends, if he wants. Bless the bastard, I don't care. He can drink my booze.

I'm writing this from a shitty motel in Beatty. I've been home a lot, this year, but it hasn't felt like it. In February, I was up in NYC every other day, and moving all my crap over to Noel's house. (I wonder how Issy's doing.) Touring until almost May, and while I was technically home with Noel until two weeks ago or whatever, with my sister's birthday, and my dad's birthday, and finishing up the landscaping at my parents' new house, I've still been on the move a lot more than I want to be. When we get home next weekend? Book tour, babies. Book tour. I'm a busy man.

But what the hell - I'm only good at fruity, philosophical speeches. This has been a pretty good year. It's going to be a pretty good year. I never had everything I wanted, before. It's a weird feeling. What do you do, when you have everything? I think I'm supposed to be afraid of losing it, right now, but I'm not. I'm happy, and I plan on staying that way.