The sleeplessness and sedatives, I know it sounds repetitive. Every show can't be a benefit

blog from the road: Park City, Utah - Wednesday

Hey there, obviously dedicated readers. I am tired.
On the road this whole week and have been running in high gear basically since we got here. The place is high up in the mountains and I was recovering from a nice cold/flu thing so there was much light-headedness the first day or so as I couldn't catch my breath for a solid 24 hours. That made things fun, at best.

Anyway, I'm working. it's not that interesting other than the scale and variety of things that we're asked to do - I'm being sent to shoot POV video for a bunch of Olympic-y winter sports madness "adventures" they set up for all their people to go do today, basically to assemble the slam reel and maybe become it. I'm told bobsledding and a mountain zip-line are on the shot list - all of which can only go well on less than 4 hours sleep after yesterday's 21-hour onslaught.

when I don't sleep I Twitter like a fiend. enjoy.

Been reading a lot of Anthony Bourdain's writing and I am always struck by how familiar it all feels (maybe that's a sign of how effective his writing is) given my time in AV - all the stuff about a gnarly group of questionably-educated and morally flexible miscreants that can throw down the highest quality product while still finding time to screw with each other, the guys that you can ask to pull a 21 hour day followed by an early morning into another 20+ hour shift of heavy lifting, answering impossible demands and everything you can imagine going wrong - and you can know that they will be first at the venue, no matter how little sleep they got and they will serve it up like professionals.
That sounds about right. Maybe I'm trying to make myself feel a little better, like there's a karmic payoff for being such a wage-ape, but I don't think so. Anyone that's been on a crew gets it on some level.

Maybe I'll write an angry punk-rock tell all book about the underbelly of corporate meetings and populate it with the shifty characters and insanity I work with. Or maybe I'll just keep giving it away here for free.

Anyway - got to listen to the keynote presenter yesterday, Mike Eruzioni from the US Olympic Hockey team that beat the Russians in Lake Placid. Scored the winning goal in The Miracle game. Yeah, that was cool. I'm not a sports guy, certainly not an Olympics guy but it's still a really compelling story. He was pretty funny.

He made his pretty-cookie-cutter-corporate-talk about teamwork blah blah and he hammered on the issue of "respect" with sections like 'respect your competition' and 'respect your success' and blah blah. He got to the 'respect yourself' part (which was pretty generic, pretty much what you'd imagine it would be) and told the story of getting to speak to the President after their win.
"And I haven't spoken to that guy since, he never calls. I asked every day for a while, I'd come home and ask my dad....'hey dad, Jimmy Carter call today?'
'nope'
'Guess I'm the same guy I was before, then'"

it was pretty good stuff.
that's it for the road.

Meanwhile, back at home - the return of Ka-Baam!! tomorrow!!
Bryant Lake Bowl, 10pm
Seriously. Be there.

I'm teaching a HUGE Master Class on Harold and structure on the 7th
(contact Jill Bernard to get in if there's room left)
I tried to put some mental energy into this while my fever was running high at home and my brain almost started leaking out of my ears. I like the brainy side of things, especially when it meets the freaky freeform side of things.
I'm excited.

That's it, I think.
Running breakout sessions (read: sitting in the dark, blogging) and then getting into some spandex and a bobsled. Really? Really.