Deep Conversations

Shakespeare

But, peace be with him!  

That life is better life, past fearing death,  

Than that which lives to fear: make it your comfort,  

So happy is your brother.

Chet

I just wrote something up on my other blog. I've been severely distracted these past few days with recent death of Chet. I don't know if writing is simply my way of venting or remembering or whatever it is. I know that whatever I write doesn't convey whatever I feel. It's something. It's something of the moment and though I'm not articulate now or ever really, I just need to the get thoughts down. I'm talking out loud to myself and my fingers are moving, but I'm not really taking a lot of time to think. Maybe that's what I need now. I need to stop thinking. Therapy. That's what writing is. I know that whatever I say now has the potential of pushing me back to Monday, back to shock, back to numb, back of suffocating, back to something I don't want to think about. But for the past few days, I've done nothing but think.

I didn't know Chet as well as other friends of mine, but he affected me nonetheless. His death was not only a shock, but more devastating than I think I could have prepared myself for. In some ways I'm grateful that I wasn't closer to him and yet at the same time so upset for not having been closer. Since hearing the news Monday, the only thing I can think about is Chet. There's Chet's laugh, there's Chet's smile, and so on. I just need to write the things I do remember before I forget. And I didn't know him that well, but I don't want to forget.

I remember when I first saw him holding hands with my neighbor when I was in 9th grade. I had come back to the middle school for some reason and saw them walking down the hall. They were in eighth grade. Jeans and a white shirt. It was then that he wore that and that's the probably what I'll always remember him in. That's what Chet will always wear in my mind.

A few months later I actually met Chet face to face when my first play was produced that summer. His arm around my neighbor in the audience. I didn't know what to think of him at first. There was the studded black leath wrist band, clean hair, white shirt and jeans. White shirt and jeans.

Chet fades in and out of my memory. He's in the yard next door, he's in the hall at school, he's at the band performing. Two shows. Maybe those were the only shows I ever saw him perform in. I saw him and his bands perform at a show I helped some friends out with in Ridgefield and another show in the high school.

I remember the summer time yelling, "YO CHET" over into the yard next door in the summer. My dad told me it was stupid to have yelled over at him. He didn't know Chet and I knew each other. I didn't care. When I went out later to the yard again, Chet started yelling back at me. I can't remember what was said, but I remember my dad realizing that it was ok for us to banter at one another.

It wasn't long after I got my driver's license when I was driving home from the high school and saw Chet walking along the grassy stretch that extends from the high school down past the fields. I opened my window and slowed down, "Chet!"

"Oh hey!"

"Where you walking to?"

"Home."

"Where's that?"

"Cheesespring."

"Want a lift?"

"Yes!"

He swung the door open, threw his bag to the ground and was immediately thankful. He told me how he had gotten into a spat with his parents and they couldn't pick him up. He had stayed after school (photo club, detention, I don't know) and didn't have a way home so he was going to walk. The sun was out, the windows were down. It was a good day. I wish I remember more of what we talked about. But he was grateful, happy, laughing. White shirt, black jacket, jeans. I don't even know if I was legal to allow people to ride in my car yet with my permit, but it didn't matter.

What about coming back to the high school that summer? I thought about filming in the theatre there. Chet had been serving some time in the high school and he and the dean had a great relationship, as if they were old friends. Despite his trouble, it didn't matter. I remember talking to her and then striking up conversation with Chet who was in the neighboring room. The three of us talked and I don't remember what it was about. We laughed until the dean stopped me and said, "Don't talk to Chet he's taking an exam." Chet gave her some bs banter and it made me laugh before I finally found it appropriate to leave.

On another instance, he was doing some work and I remember seeing him on the way out, smoking a cigarette.

"She knows I do it, but she just doesn't care anymore. She knows I'm going to do it anyway."

The light conversations outside of Starbucks when there were others around.

The motorcycle. He parked it right outside of Starbucks and everyone made a stink about the revving engine. He got off and immediately lit a cigarette Everyone kept trying to rev it and he eventually got pissed that they would mess up the engine. My friends and I couldn't help but find the whole thing pretty stupid and when one of they guys I was talking to got in his SUV (a mom tank), he revved the enging jokingly and drove off.

The memories buzz in and out and I'm scared that's all I may have left. We saw each other, we knew each other, but what else do we have?

I feel pathetic.

I've reevaluated so much in the past few days. What if someone else I know is gone to tomorrow?

I'm angry with him in many ways. Just really pissed. I want to shake him, scream at him for making us feel the way we do. But he's gone. And it just hurts and it's scary.

So Chet, all I can hope is that you're better wherever you are. There are people that you touched and people who loved you. You've scarred us in some way, but maybe that's not all bad. You left a mark on us that's with us forever. You left before any of us had the chance to forget you as a passing person in our youth. Now you're an entire piece of it. Who knows, maybe you did want to live forever and that's how you did it. Whatever it is, you're a part of us. Maybe this is where the words start to fail me. I know you know what I mean and I'm thankful to have known you. You made me smile, made me roll my eyes, but whatever it was, you were great. You were a character and a great one. That's something I won't forget.

Maybe I'll go to the funeral. I think it'll bring some closure. I've done a lot of thinking on that. i want to go. I don't know if I want to go to the wake though. Is it open? The thought of Chet in a suit, his eyes closed, his expression gone. I don't know if I can see that. For me, Chet will always be they smile, that laugh, the black jacket, the white shirt, and jeans.

Chester (Chet) Wayne Burcheet 1989-2009

Chet knows

Chet Burchett 1989-2009

Advertising at Its Best

And the Apartment Hunt Begins

Looking for something ridiculous?

My other two blogs:

Progress of my film "The Park": www.theparkfilm.blogspot.com

Words of Wisdom from Emmy Yu: www.yuwisdom.blogspot.com

Oh that...

Perhaps a problem of mine..?

Oscars vs. Jekyll and Hyde

So let's take "This is the Moment" from "Jekyll and Hyde"

Vs.

The last last minute of the 2009 opening of the Tonys...er...Oscars

The Craigslist Dancers

Damn it

I should have said this before. I swear, that I've been saying this for at least three years now. In fact it was one of the few things I missed about the subway when I was in Germany.

February 21, 2009

ABOUT NEW YORK

Under Broadway, the Subway Hums Bernstein

By JIM DWYER

Yes, of course, Suzette McLaurin says, she knows the musical “West Side Story,” and yes, she has been a conductor on the No. 2 train for quite a while — nearly eight years.

So along the way, has she heard the electronic whine from the trains that sounds just like the beginning of “Somewhere,” a ballad from the show?

This is not the kind of question Ms. McLaurin ordinarily fields during the 30 seconds or so that her train stops in the Times Square station. She leans slightly through the window.

“When the train is moving?” she asks.

Just when the train is starting, as if the cars were screeching, “There’s a place.”

“I never noticed it,” Ms. McLaurin says.

Once heard, it is unmistakable: an echo of “Somewhere” that rises from the ceaseless tide of shrieks and moans in the subways.

A revival of “West Side Story” begins previews next week, but this little piece of it has been playing nonstop beneath Broadway since 2000, when new cars began rolling with an innovative propulsion system. Most of them are on the 2, 4 and 5 lines, and fresh audiences arrive daily.

To hear a love song from the undercarriage of a train, even fleetingly, qualifies as a found moment. But like Ms. McLaurin, not everyone is listening for it.

“We didn’t know it was there until one day a Times reporter called in 2002,” said Gene Sansone, the chief mechanical officer for the subways. “Then we went out and heard it for ourselves.”

The sound is a fluke. Newer trains run on alternating current, but the third rail delivers direct current; inverters chop it into frequencies that can be used by the alternating current motors, said Jeff Hakner, a professor of electrical engineering at Cooper Union. The frequencies excite the steel, he said, which — in the case of the R142 subway cars — responds by singing “Somewhere.” Inverters on other trains run at different frequencies and thus are not gifted with such a recognizable song.

The playwright Tony Kushner told New York magazine last year that it was his favorite New York noise. Riders often ask transit officials about it, and readers still write to the City section of The Times to report their discovery. The filmmaker Julie Talen told me about it months before I finally caught it.

When it’s heard by people who haven’t been tipped off, they distrust their own ears.

“Everyone sort of noticed it, and then this corroboration process started where people said to each other, ‘Did you hear it?’ ” said Jamie Bernstein, a writer and broadcaster whose father, Leonard Bernstein, composed “West Side Story.” “People still are asking me about it.”

How can a subway car evoke a song that has been fixed in memory by great singers like Marni Nixon, Aretha Franklin and Jessye Norman?

“What makes a melody sound like a melody is not the note it starts on — it’s the relationship from the first note you hear to the next one,” said John Mauceri, the chancellor of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and a conductor who worked with Mr. Bernstein for 18 years.

What the mind knows as melody, Mr. Mauceri said, are these intervals between notes. “Our brains are built on pattern matching,” he said. “How does a finch recognize another finch singing from a tree a half-mile away? Once you have two or three intervals, they become locked in your brain as that song.”

In the first sung line of “Somewhere,” there are two intervals, Mr. Mauceri said. Between the first note — “there’s” — and the second note — “a” — the interval is known as an ascending minor seventh. From that second note to the third — “place” — there’s a descending half-step interval. The songs from “West Side Story,” which opened on Broadway in 1957 and was made into a movie in 1961, are often used to teach intervals to music students.

“What you’re hearing in the subway are the two intervals that remind you of the song,” he said. The same intervals can be heard in other pieces of music — for instance, in the second movement of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto — but do not reside so prominently in memory as “Somewhere” because they are deeper in the music.

“ ’Somewhere’ is probably the only song that starts with them,” Mr. Mauceri said. “Or certainly it’s the most famous.”

The music was composed before the words, which were written by Stephen Sondheim, Ms. Bernstein said. “For a while, there was a dummy lyric to the tune,” she said, singing it: “There goes whatshisname.”

Naturally, the subway sounds also stir the Sondheim words from memory — a song of consolation for two lovers taken from each other by unyielding circumstance. And all this rises from three short blasts of high-pitched sound.

As her No. 2 train was leaving Times Square a few days ago, Ms. McLaurin scanned the platform. The train sang out, a breeze lifting a curtain. Her face lit up.

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

Breaking News

Finding Pieces

So in search of a director's name that I worked with, I did actually stumble upon an "in works" piece of the cut. It's a color sync that I did 2nd assistant camera work on.

"Morning Sway" by Julie Kopitsky

craigslist personals

my friend and I put each other up to the challenge of trying to find the ads that literally make us laugh the most. force yourself through the personals to find some of those hilarious gems.

Here's one:

Oy! I forgot to get a vife!

Nu, I vent to wisit mein mishpoche und mein deer modder, hoo I loff, she sez to me, "Lookit you! Yaw hendsome! Yaw smaht! But yaw fawty yiz olt. So vie arnchoo merreed awreddy?" 
Pliz, Miss. Mehbee yew kin be mein vife und mek mein modder heppy und stop kvetching. Dot vood be nice. So pliz enser dis ed kvickly. But send uh peekshuh mit yaw enser. Mein modder dont vant no meeskeit in mein mishpoche.

Jesus and Hitler?