Oh My God revised pages

For someone with a proven, no, stellar record of workaholism, not a lot impresses me, but what I have done since Thanksgiving week and the present moment in order to get this book finished in time for Jan 25 surpasses prior experience, even imagination. Everything hurts. I have seen the sun rise--and not because I got up early--every morning for the past week. Which I've enjoyed, actually--a time comes when the email stops arriving in the inbox and the city goes deadly silent and it's just me and the project, and the subsequent hours fall away so fast it's genuinely surreal. Last night I was out on the deck for a fresh air break and was just gazing up at the eastern sky and a meteor appeared like a giant lamp going on. Not a streak, just a slow-moving fireball, the biggest and brightest I've seen except the time Juliette and I drove through the night from Salt Lake to Dinosaur 15 years ago and saw something that lit up the landscape and looked like it was on track to incinerate a nearby trailer park.

In any case, I just interrupted my own complaining. I am not at my most coherent. I leave for LA tomorrow and the 117 imperfect pages of "Oh My God: Heaven and Hell in the Ear of the Unbeliever" (James thinks it should be simply, "Oh My God, That's Such a Big Organ!") are as good as they're going to get for this first complete printing. I'll order two or three and show them off at screenings, let people put in an order. I'm having a devil of a time with color correction--the 20-page test I got from Lulu was a major disappointment. I've tried to adjust a few things--everything tends to look great on the computer and lousy on paper. Blacks are dirty and mottled, so I've way reduced the black in the background. Could Lulu be the issue? I am rambling. Here are the images--the same ones I posted last time, revised, resized and with director's commentary, but I've skipped around so the commentary will be, like this blog post, a little bit random. Oh--remember to click on these images to read the fine print.

Oh My God: Messiaen in the Ear of the Unbeliever

I haven't updated this blog in three weeks because I've been obsessed with a new project: turning my movie, Apparition of the Eternal Church, into a book: "Oh My God: Messiaen in the Ear of the Unbeliever." I started this project over Thanksgiving, sneaking hours while visiting James's family in Aurora, IL, to prepare the transcript of the movie, and now I'm jamming to get it finished and self-published and delivered in time for January screenings of the film. So I am under some deadline pressure.

Here are a few of my favorite pages from the book so far. They are incomplete--the white space at the bottom will hold a sort of "director's commentary," possibly in my illegible handwriting. At this point I have no idea what it will say. In any case, this is a work in progress, so whether or not you know the movie, feedback is welcome! Share your thoughts in the blog comments or email me (paulfesta at gmail dot com).

Also--remember to click on the images for bigger versions (important when there's 10-pt font to read!).

Jackie Beat

Albert Fuller

Harold Bloom

Ron Gallman

Sandi Dubowski

Karen Hartman

Wayne Koestenbaum

Justin Bond as "Kiki"

Squeaky Blonde

John Cameron Mitchell