“MOOOOOOOOOOONNEEEEEEEEEEEECAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH, VHERE EHS DEE EM-PEE-FOWR FIEL?” Da Boss was on one this morning. It was our last day to finish “The Couch,” another segment from SATUR-19, screened yesterday at Normal’s in Baltimore. Da Boss was going to play half a dozen songs from the soundtrack before the screening. He was ready for that. “The Couch” was not done. It was not color-corrected. It was not finished: there were shots missing. “WHY HAVEN’T WE FINISHED YET!” (Da Boss dropped the German accent when things got serious).
The big breakthrough at Chez NARC Film has been the discovery of opacity layers and filters. This, according to Da Boss, is what saved the day on the segment “One Day in New York City, Summer 2022.” I’m not so sure, but they certainly did help: without having to manually manipulate the images, I was able to get vivid superimpositions and double exposures with outrageous colors and many more very happy accidents. Da Boss kept telling me to “Trust the Plan,” and I couldn’t remember if that was something that Donald Trump or Joe Biden said. Maybe it was Kamala? Nah, she was educating us about coconut trees. All’s right in the universe when you realize you exist outside of the context of your own self.
Or whatever she was trying to say.
I like that lady a lot—so does Da Boss, who happens to share a birthday with her. He was pretty annoyed when he found out shortly before the 2020 election that he’d have to share his birthday with a Vice President of the United States—scratch that, the first female Vice President of the United States. An historical figure, even if she ends up a footnote. That’s a world record. Now, Da Boss likes to remind me just about every day that he also shares a birthday with Snoop Dogg, Arthur Rimbaud, Jean-Pierre Melville, and some cheesecake actress from the 1950s that I used to know socially but don’t remember ever seeing her act. I don’t even remember he name. Sweet pussy, though.
Before Da Boss was awake from his brief nap—there’s been a rash of narcolepsy in town—I had “The Couch” finished. A new segment, this one less music video, more indicative of the rest of the film, but still allowing for surprises for whenever the final cut is premiered this year. Four women in white t-shirts and jeans destroy a tar-black couch with toy hammers. The soundtrack roars with some kind of distorted keyboard—even Da Boss can’t remember what he was playing. “It was probably the Wurlitzer—no, wait, it couldn’t have been, there’s too much sustain—I think the mellotron maybe?” He eventually figured out that the main track used wasn’t directly made by him, but his trusty producer, Jordan Romero—Jordan was running whatever Da Boss was playing through a set of reel-to-reel tape players and feeding it into an analogy delay and a compressor that The Beatles used.
Yeah, whoop-dee-doo, but he was excited about it, and it did sound cool.
I asked about the ending. Da Boss stared off into space. Then he looked me square in the eye and asked, “Have you ever read the Bible?”
“The Couch” ends with the following quotation:
“My precious child,
I will never leave you
Never, ever, during your trials and testings
When you saw only one set of footprints in the sand,
It was then that I carried you.”
—Follow Monica Quibbits on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits