November 4, 2024 – February 23, 2025

Stone is patient. We witnessed its heavy waiting, from crusty slabs in an old English graveyard to the slick-kneed arches wading into an inky Paris Seine; the spires of Celtic churches that cut the sky so clean; the fingers of a Scottish henge poking time in the eye; the defiance of a Shetland rock against an angry, cold sea. There are crumbling castles all over Sicily that know no maps, and then there are fortresses whose clean walls withstand the battery of centuries but scream of broken lines and blood. You know there’s a lot of blood on the stone. But I do love the monolithic cathedrals and duomos – stone reconstructed as art and inspiration. And I especially love their jutting gargoyles – dogs and monkeys and fantastical winged creatures, all petrified gaping mouths and curled claws. I love the pinks, grays and blacks of marble that feet have warped trodding up and slinking down old winding French stairs. Stone knows all the secrets.

For four months this winter, we took our time following the stones, John and I. Sometimes our girls Lulu and Zelda joined us. Adventures on the road have always found their way into our creative lives – and our personal lives have always found a way into our films. It’s a good symbiosis. I’ve blogged about these crossovers since 2010, but these journeys were American; this time we ambled through the UK, Ireland, Italy, and France. As we are in post production for our new feature, Mother of Flies, this was a work trip of pleasure; an office with a shifting view. As I write this, on a train through Normandy, John edits, a blur of greens and shadows projected on his focused face. The images we spent all summer shooting have also been coming together under John’s fingertips. Sometimes we open a hotel window to capture the sound of crows, or perhaps that rusty Scottish gate creaks just right. Life blurs by; images congeal. We see and we feel. We let it all flow into our film.

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John arrived in Europe before me. He spent a few days in Reykjavik, Iceland before visiting Lu in Scotland where she attends the University of Edinburgh for a Masters in Psychodynamic Therapy. Lulu lives in Portobello Beach and has the coolest life of any 26 year-old I know, if I’m to be honest. She cold dips in the sea and runs for miles out into the lushest hills and misty heaths. (Lu already ran the Amsterdam Marathon and is now training for an Edinburgh half!) She studies in ancient libraries with an international patchwork of friends, and learns salsa and bachata in basements with total strangers. Lulu is always guzzling up life! I missed the fun in Scotland this time around, but was having my own great time on a film set in New England. The film is a dark beauty called The Recluse, written and directed by Henry Chaisson. Love the role I got to play (Lydia), loved the cast and crew. It’s going to be a gorgeous thing to behold.

So finally John and I reunited (and it feels so good) in Paris. As a junior in college, Zelda is also living abroad this year: Paris for the first half, UK for the second. Columbia University has a sweet little outpost in Paris, and Z bounced between classes there and at Sciences Po. She’s studying History of Art and, well, isn’t that convenient? Paris and its art museums, Paris and the art of walking down a tree-lined street with a baguette in your hand, Paris and the art of an accordion bending notes while you leaf through books on the Left Bank, Paris and the art of asking for more art ( and getting it). We had fun walking and eating through the City of Lights with our girl (who turned 21 there!). Z also had some cool arty modeling gigs, so she really got the full Parisian package. Zelda is such a sponge of creativity, she’s got such an observant eye, and I can’t wait to see how the Paris she experienced manifests through her art, too.

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On to England!
Making movies is like a beautiful bowl of story soup – Ok, probably more like a stew. Lots of textures and meat and potatoes. There’s the whole slicing and dicing in real time as you begin to sweat over the fire. You’re shooting! You’re cooking with gas and things are bubbling and boiling over and sometimes they lose heat and you have to kick up the fire again but there’s a heady aroma of something good that hangs in the air and invades your dreams at night so you wake up hungry …. And then there’s the story of tasting what you’ve got, the seasoning, mixing this and that and adding all the auditory and visual spices (we are currently in this kitchen)…. And then there’s telling yourselves the stew is done; it’s time to leave the kitchen and EAT. Our favorite place to share the stew is at film festivals, where we can also indulge in others’ stew. If you had a dime for every time we said we made films just to take them to festivals, you could buy a bunch of coffees. We love film festivals – for the inspiration, for the camaraderie, for the fun. Also, horror genre festivals in particular have the most lovable attendees: smart, edgy, honest, up for a good time. The kindest, warmest people love cold blooded kills and dark destruction filling four corners of a frame, screen to retina; filling ears with pounding hearts; getting under the skin with hypodermic precision.

I was invited to take part in an industry panel at a brand new women’s film festival called FFS (Females Film Screens, for fuck’s sake!) in Sheffield, England. Nothing better than being on a panel with women whose work speaks thunder – I LOVE learning from them. Lulu came down from Edinburgh, and I felt such good heat from her being there, as I’d be nowhere without the collaborative coals of my wonderful family-collective.

Then we three jumped the water to….

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Belfast, Northern Ireland!
John’s cousin, Neil Shawcross, is a painter and portrait artist renowned for his dreamy, creamy touch. And what a character he is! Stories spin from his tongue as much as his brush tip. Neil took us to his studio, which was better than a museum – packed to the brim with colors and canvases and biscuit tins and boxes of toys and a lifetime of collecting and creating eye candy.

Lulu flew back to Scotland, and John and I trained down to Ireland’s southern coast. We met a plucky older woman on the train who had that Irish twinkle. She taught me how to greet and respond to people in Irish: “Slon!” “Slon lett!” We stayed in the charming town of Cobh, which has steep streets and a big cathedral that hulks like a raven over the town and down to the cove. And we drowned in good Irish tea (the best), fish and chips, and fluffy scones with butter and jam. Editing, writing, sleeping, eating, walking, talking, repeat.

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Next we embarked on one of the most exciting jaunts of our trip: the northern Scottish isles of Orkney and Shetland.
Orkney is covered in green fields freckled with sheep flecked in rich Orkney mud. The islands are also gardens of Neolithic stone circles and Viking castles and ancient burial mounds. You feel small and wondrous in their shadows. It’s a rock-and-no roll playground, its longevity astounding. There are tiny seaside villages and the stunning Stromness, a town with history that juiced the storytellers in us. The doomed ship The Terror stopped at this well for water! And then there’s always the coast: long sandy beaches, slick black rocks, and colonies of seaweed riding a shivery sea.

Onward north to Shetland!
If I were the Sun god I’d be an exhibitionist. I’d command all ferries to emerge from the black of night and, like a whale, spit its weary travelers onto new shores to watch my golden fingers bust a pull up on the horizon. They’d ohh and ahh at me, the bronze and reds of my muscle rippling across the water; concrete towns emerging in the morning silence and adjusting in my light like mood stones. This is how we discovered Lerwick, Shetland. Thank you, god of Sun.

The Shetland Islands had something to prove. It’s like they were saying, “Look, luv, you’ve sailed all this way, like a greedy little Viking come for something to ravage and keep – let me pour you some mead for the soul, throw you some tasty fish for the gullet, offer up such sights that you will grovel slack-mouthed at the sodden foot of my majesty.” Add in lots of moody mist, stone farms with mossy thatched roofs, and cute squat peat-stained Shetland ponies with long blond manes and thick bangs, and that’s what it felt like. A highlight here was a stretch of coastline called Eshaness Cliffs: massive sheer rock and outcroppings of crag meet a frothing, vengeful sea. Here, birds ride up and down on feral winds and break away to slide tackle the cliff face where they wedge into nests. The lighthouse must have saved hundreds of ships from carnage on the rocks.

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We ferried back to mainland Scotland, where I spent some time in an Aberdeen hospital. Something got to my lungs, and my lungs are my version of Achilles’ Heal. My lungs are the haunted rooms in my house. This is where an old, holey sheet is rigged from drafty rafters, and all the horrors of my mortality are projected. I got to know the UK’s National Health Service, and let me tell you: they did me so right. The nurses and doctors were gems. So after several days in their fold, they got me back on a path lit up by steroids and John’s great smile. Up we went to the Moray Coast then dipped down to Petlochry. John edited, I slept; he walked in the rain, I breathed again.

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Back to England! First, York – what a surprising city. Surrounded by ancient Roman walls and slithering with brick alleyways and Tudor-timbered facades, it’s a city that buzzes and pops. From there we landed in London where we met the girls to take off on a long lucky jaunt with them for the holidays.

Cornwall.
We all four were charmed by Cornwall. We visited small fishing villages like Padstow where we ate hot Cornish pasties. (Sometimes the seagulls ate our pasties, trying to remake their favorite film, The Birds. Those winged devils nearly took our eyes out.) We spent Xmas in sweet St. Ives and chased chippie shops and scones with clotted cream and jam. We went on wet night walks along the coast and laughed and ate and wandered curling streets. Getting to spend time with the girls (now 26 and 21) feels so lucky. That we are great friends is the luckiest part, of course. They’re so cool and so independent… but when we come together to work on a film or tear into a meal or go for a ride, it’s like we absorb the space and time around us and become a kind of funky amoeba, lumpy and funny and hungry to devour more, but as one. What a lucky, beautiful thing.

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Next stop: Italy. Sicilia!
We flew into Palermo. First meal? Pizza, are you crazy? And tiramisu – with pistachios! We spent time in Cefalu, a lovely seaside town with a pitbull of a fortress stretching out on the water. Old towns would be staples on our trip, and Cefalu’s has Roman arches framing that gorgeous teal Mediterranean Sea. In the morning a man drove his cart through the narrow streets, singing while slinging his fruits and veggies. Busciate is a pasta shape you gotta eat in Cefalu. They are long ringlets of yum.

In the southern part of Sicily in Agrigento is the most incredible place called Valley of the Temples. It’s a mile and a half long stretch of land covered in Greek ruins, and you walk its length checking them out as if you’re at an amusement park but without the lines and vertigo. It’s awesome!! You can’t help but be impressed by the architectural design and building muscle, not to mention the preservative kindness of time here, maintaining these snapshots of deified days in a hot Magna Graecia Sicilian sun.

Ragusa Ibla was the next great surprise: an old baroque town with the prettiest high-seated duomo ringing its bells over the white marble streets. Here, you must eat pasta Norma (Norma had a thing for ricotta and eggplant) and casarecce (more twirly shaped pasta) with sardines and rich, oily breadcrumbs. After a stay in bustling, twisty Taormina we left Sicily and moved on to …..

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Scilla and Tropea in Calabria, the toe of southern Italy’s “boot.”
Chianalea is a tiny seaside village in Scilla, where the people are friendly and the swordfish is sizzling. The sea comes right up to the stony village, and plump cats reign in the salty alleys. Zelda went home from here; Lu scuba dived. She and I laughed a lot drinking local wine and dunking focaccia in olive oil. (Fun fact: Scilla is named for the infamous Greek mythological creature, Scylla – a man-eating monster with six snake heads filled with three rows of shark teeth and a loin of baying dogs. Nice! Unless you’re Odysseus, who sailed too close to the caves she haunted there.)
In Tropea you eat lots of cipolla rosa (sweet red onion) and a pasta shape called fileja, long narrow elongated screws that soak up sauce juuuuuussssttt fine.

On to Basilicata and perhaps my favorite stay in Italy: Matera. Matera is an ancient city built of, essentially, caves – sassi – which are rock-dwellings carved into the mountainside. It’s a puzzle of tiers of these cut outs layered on top of each other. It feels like old Jerusalem and looks like it, too. (Lots of movies about Jesus are shot here.) It’s such an amazing place to get lost in the ups and downs of these pale limestone streets that are essentially stairs meandering chasms lined with stone caves people live in. I can’t wait to go back.

Puglia is a fun region – Italy’s boot heel, surrounded by the sea and filled with friendly people and great grub, like the local orrecchiette (ear-shaped pasta) the nonnas are cutting from pasta logs on Old Bari streets. There’s Alberobello (with its domed swirly spire roofs) and Lecce (a great, elegant city with a mysterious vibe, offering up quiet piazzas with baroque churches and lovely orange light); Polignano a Mare’s old seaside vibes and Bari’s walkable, edible energy. Puglia is fun.

Leaving the boot we headed to……

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Abruzzo. Elevations were higher here in the Apennines, and the region was dotted with misty snowcapped medieval towns we’d love to explore. We stayed in sleepy Sulmona, which is dominated by a Roman aqueduct and has killer views of the mountains and high stony, castled villages, like sweet Pacentro, blanketing them.

Next up were Umbria and Tuscany, which are Italian heavyweights for a reason. Lots of hilltop villages that remind you of butterscotch cupcakes with chunks of vanilla icing on top. There’s just a uniformity of burnt sugar loveliness – lots of creamy browns and muted coppers in the bricks and crispy stone facades. Cheeses and breads and farro and fermented grapes…. Spello in Umbria had me enchanted with its steep, narrow dark alleys and old Roman gates. We walked through empty Umbrian villages (Todi, Montefalco, Bevagna) promising more bustling warm seasons. We were happy to hear our echoes. In Tuscany we explored Gubbio and castle-peaked Assisi. We drank espresso and talked about scenes to edit, then we’d go back to our little flat in Montepulciano overlooking Tuscan fields and John would show me what he’d edited that morning and I’d check the script to stake the scene’s claim in the timeline. (It’s rare we work with a fully formed screenplay, but since we only had Zelda for a short spell this summer – and an even shorter stint with Lu at home – we thought through the whole narrative with a vigorous intent and an atypical blueprint. As such, we’re finding Mother of Flies to be one of our biggest, most fully realized films to edit yet. The last feature we shot, in the summer of 2023, was Fairy – a 2 week fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants shoot that left us feeling wet and unwound, like bloody laundry hanging from a rusty nail in the wind. I think we’ll eventually go back to Fairy and find something really cool to make of it, but for now it’s this odd, creepy, untethered kind of wicked stepchild we’ve got locked up under the stairs.)

In Emilia-Romana we stayed in Parma and of course John ate ham and I gobbled up crystal-crumbly parmigiana. We visited friends who have the coolest shop for cinephiles, Notorious Cinema, in nearby Emilia. What a dream job – curating and selling books and physical media and movie art! Luca and Ricci took us to a local joint for regional specialties – lots of meat for John and fluffy pumpkin ravioli and effervescent purple Lambrusco for me. (Around this time John celebrated 20 years of sobriety, which is just too sexy for words. The man runs on natural creative fumes like nobody else I know on earth. I’m glad I’m on his team – and did I mention he’s as smokin’ as a hotcake skillet? Well he is and now I did.)

Speaking of John, he lived in Milan back in the early 90s as a model. He worked with fashion icons like Armani and Gucci. I, too, lived in northern Italy as an exchange student when I was 17 (back in 1986!), so this was a wonderful return for us both. We loved Milan, and Torino was an especially cool discovery – such a clean-lined, calm and pretty city we’d both revisit. After 6 weeks in Italy, from bottom to top, we really gulped in this wonderful country. It’s the kind of place that always welcomes you with open arms and a spilling-over spoonful of something tasty pointed right at your mouth.

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France!
We had a GREAT time in Nice and were both charmed by its easy, balmy vibe and colorful, buzzing narrow streets selling all the things that make your belly thud and your heart skip. We were so enchanted by the markets and streets, the glass-clinking evening banquet of sights and smells, the sapphire, clear water. With a quick stop in Arles (such a cool little city with two well preserved Roman amphitheaters – TWO!), Toulouse (where you have nothing to-lose but your mind, cuz it’s a pretty place with the baddest beauty of a Roman bridge reflecting its arches in the swift Garonne), and Bordeaux (another baroque beauty with one of my favorite cathedrals, St. Andre, with its spiky gargoyles of dogs with howling mouths you can see the sky through), we jetted up to Loches in the Loire, Rennes in Bretagne, and Caen in Normandy. Loches is a neat town wound around a cool castle with lots of history around Joan of Arc and mercurial medieval royalty. I love towns like Loches where we are the rare visitors, and locals flock in to mingle at the killer Saturday market and debate cheeses to take home and fish to buy. It’s a colorful experience, a sensory assault. Nothing beats a local market.

Meanwhile: editing, walking, writing (I’m working on the synopses and directors’ notes for Mother of Flies), napping, eating, repeat. The body of the film is really robust by now, and all the pieces are sliding into home base.

In Rennes we enjoyed walking the city’s sloopy, timber-housed streets and eating pizza in bed, resting tired legs while watching The Godfather films, All About Eve, the new Nosferatu, and The Bad News Bears. After editing all day, I love that moment when John knows he’s done for the night and we shift to studying other films. Depending on how the movie speaks to us (or doesn’t), we say, “Goddamn, that was good,” or “It’s hard making movies,” and we will talk ad nausuem about what worked for us and why, or what didn’t…. Sometimes a film will hit us so strongly, I can tell we both are questioning the film WE are currently making, and we have to swallow the natural bile of fear, blot out the devilish whispers of doubt that always bubble up. Those poison pushers are always there loitering, but you can’t let them jam a stick in your spokes as you ride those black back alleys of the mind.

So we were a bit sullen, finishing our French whirl in Caen, which isn’t far from all the ghosts of World War 2 and D-Day in Normandy (my uncle “Colonel” Ellis was there). But knowing we’d be seeing Zelda the next day was a boost……

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England and the last leg!
We got on a long ferry to England, spent a night in fun Brighton, then trained up to Cambridge. What a town! It’s a hive of activity – all ages of people bustling and biking around. You can spend a whole day wandering the many colleges, each with its own charms. Zelda is in Pembroke College at Cambridge University, and it’s like a mini Hogwarts, founded in the early 1300s and as lovely and impressive as you’d imagine a 700 year old educational establishment in England to be. Think old pointy-steepled stone church with beveled glass, old brown brick and shiny gray granite libraries with creeping ivy, and elegant turreted structures with huge windows hiding long tables where the students eat meals – sometimes in their formal black robes. They’re supposed to maintain certain levels of good manners. Ha. I am pretty sure both the rebel and the performer in Zelda are having a hoot when she’s in those robes at those tables under those gorgeous rosy windows with all the serious framed faces from centuries of academia staring down at her. Z goes to lectures and has solo sessions with a supervisor who’s probably written half of the books on her shelf. (I believe Z’s thesis this semester is on the representation of black bodies in classical art.) We also got to hang out with Z’s boyfriend, Luke, who is visiting. What a sweetie. We all walked around chasing meadows popping with purple and white crocus, looking for a noiseless place to record some wild dialogue for the film, but we ended up recording in Z’s small quiet dorm with a window open. We said our goodbyes and waved to Lulu, also thriving in inimitable vibrant Lulu style, a few hundred miles north in Edinburgh at her own ancient university. And we are heading home….

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…. To catch the tail end of winter! To cook a lot and watch John’s parents’ dog, the love-bucket called Daisy. To finish Mother of Flies! We must reshoot one or two small scenes – one is of Solveig (the necromancer I play) waking in the dirt below a tree. John will climb up the tree and shoot down at me. We aim to create our own make up and practical effects of my face as a decomposed corpse in the roots and dirt. Solveig recites these words:
Tongue of fire and mouth of moan
Blood and seed and cunt and bone
River flowing
Sapling growing
Stink of rabbit, vulture knowing
When the veil of night has flown
Sleep in quiet, still as stone.

We also must reshoot an extreme closeup of Solveig’s thorn (her wand) going deep, in and out, of John’s ear. She’s debilitated him while she takes Mickey, Z’s character, alone into the woods to perform a severe ritual with a snake. (For Mother of Flies we shot an actual snake named Cooper, with John’s wrangling cousin, Shane. I am not one of those people naturally comfortable around snakes, but Cooper, a beautiful silver ball python, was quite friendly, thankfully. The goddammned love of ART had me reaching into holes with the serpent; had me openmouthed on the ground with Cooper curiously slithering towards that warm hole. At one point Shane – almost nonchalantly – said, “I think he thinks your thumb is something to eat.” Thumb retracted, thank you.) The thorn and snake in cahoots with a human body (ears and mouths!) will be a job for our incredible VFX wizard, Trey Lindsay, of course. So cool to be rocking with Trey since 2018 and The Deeper You Dig. He’s been doing incredible work on Mother of Flies, including building roots that sprout from cabin floors and whole tree trunks from roofs, blisters that bubble and burst on bellies, corpses that blink in and out before our eyes, and a giant Death Vagina that smiles down upon us from a ceiling. He’s our fifth family member, a total pleasure, a golden-hearted human. He’s our favorite cinephile, who teaches us so much about film – especially horror.

And there it is: four months of creative fodder. Drifting on the path of stones. John and I are good drifters. Hopefully, this film will help us drift some more …. to festivals and friends. And hopefully our imaginations will continue to drift, too. Please, please, please, never let our imaginations atrophy and turn hard. We can leave the stones alone on that point. And so…. Until next time!

Nature’s Rx for the blues: a dog, a ball, and a beach. The soul’s recipe for positive pathways: water, sand, rock. The mind’s menu for clear mental skies: wind, leaves, rain.

In Manzanita, Oregon – a coastal town wedged between the Pacific and the forested brim of Nehalem Bay – we chased a memory. Precarious, chasing those, as Time is an excellent but impatient potter, always shaping and shaving and chipping away at the same clay. The key is grabbing a new mug. You can swig from familiar views, love how a place feels in the hands of memory, but you gotta be up for a new brew.

After being stuck three days in a Wyoming blizzard (which was kind of fun and definitely impressive in a holy-shit-this-is-some-crazy-winter-mayhem way), John and I were finally reunited with our wonderful Lulu in Oregon. Oh, Lulu. Our resident life-eater and world explorer, freshly back on American soil after a year in South Korea. I hugged her so hard I practically absorbed her back into my womb. And then Zelda arrived for the reunion, all the way from NYC. The view from our rustic little shanty was golden: a sacred sunset and eight to ten tiers of white frothy waves unfurling towards a wide dog-kite-human pocked beach. But having the family together to share it? Nothing better. Plus, Alex, Lu’s lovable boyfriend, was with us. Alex is like a bowl of cocoa: warm, sweet, and silky-souled. So with the five of us on the Oregon coast in the first shy peeps of Spring…. next level heart stuff. The last time we were in Manzanita was during the height of the pandemic, when Z, John and I roamed in an RV while shooting Hellbender, and Lu would visit and camp outside. We’d carved out some formidable memories back then, biking and hiking and digging all the happy dogs on the beach by day and dodging moon-lit jellyfish by night. So this time we opened wide and just let the coast and good company shove all its everything into us.

Once you hit the Pacific Northwest, you’re really asking for it, the whole opera of sea life, sky life, the amphitheater of mountain and forest. John and I were all in, so we left the girls and ferried to Vancouver Island, British Columbia – fulfilling a personal dream. We drove to the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve, which is the land of the Nuu-chah-nulth; is west of the glacial Strathcona peaks, and flanked by two wonderful towns, Ucluelet and Tofino. Ucluelet is smaller, and I would live there in a hummingbird heartbeat. It’s the kind of place little kids run around freely, taking classes down on the beach; everyone is out, rain or shine, on feet or two wheels or accompanied by dogs dogs dogs everywhere dogs! And whichever way you bob and weave, you’re just getting smacked left and right by the prettiness of it all: emerald coves, ancient cedars, trails a shimmery disco with trees all shagged out in mossy lime catsuits. In the air, a riveting scene of eagles, gulls and herons. And in the ocean…. ah, the ocean, that mysterious friend you can never truly know. At low tide my favorite thing to do is to gingerly creep onto the rocks and peek into all the dark crevices where orange and purple ochre starfish hide. It’s either highly romantic or deeply possessive, the devotion of their clasping, their long, slow, go-steady attachment. “Never let me go!” (But woe to the bivalve that crosses their path. The stars will use their suctioning feet to pry open the shells and insert their stomach inside. “Have stomach, will travel!”) I have another creature I’m geeking out on, too: the tunicate. First I found a small colony of bright orange “salps” – aka sea squirts, sea pork, and sea tulips! – clinging underneath a rock. Tunicates are called such because it’s like these tubular creatures are wearing a rubbery tunic with built in ventilation – like wearing a dress with two big arm holes and nuthin’ underneath, yahoo! When you see a certain species of tunicate on the beach, you easily mistake them for jellyfish: clear, gelatinous, deflated like a balloon, with a small hard red chunk inside, which is the guts. Sometimes they attach to each other in a massive long conga line that allows them to snake through the water. Under the same rock where the sea squirts were hanging out, I also identified a breadcrumb sponge, which looks like spilt thin white paint that defies gravity. The patience of sea life is epic, so much hanging and clinging as the water washes by.

Of course, death is always on the prowl, too. On that same rock, a romp of otters left a massacre of mussel shells, and I watched one otter grab a fish. A. The slimy green-purple-pink anemones bask in the sun until the tide tucks them in and their pretty frilly mouths sting and capture prey. Sea cucumbers will eviscerate their own organs if doom is a done deal. When I’m lucky enough to be saturated by Nature, I find the balance comforting. Life and Death; some of the loveliest sights a marriage of the two. On the beaches, massive sitka spruce and cedars wash up, all wave-whipped smooth like a carrot, and eventually the sun bleaches them grey, their bones stacked in curly knots where birds rest and nest. In the forest the Spring rains are lacquering the trees that drink the soil that eats Winter’s waste. Flowers peak then fade, while the tiny young leaves open and stay, fine with themselves, with their stamina, with their gentle grading through the greens.

Am I feeling wistful? Yup. Sentimental? You bet your bottom sand dollar, I am. I’m feeling lucky, too – to live and work on the road for a while, with the one I love, visiting the ones I love, and loving where we find ourselves in the Pacific Northwest. I even love the cold waters that burn and numb my body; they make me feel alive. And I’m thinking of death, sure, because friends are beginning to slip away at a steadier pace. It’s kind of like looking at the ocean: You figure you’ll see a seal or dolphin, maybe a whale; you just never know when; and it’s always a meaningful encounter when you do. It’s a reminder to look, see, and feel. That when you look out your window at a phantom mist swooping down a breakneck chasm of conifers onto a vibrating sea sheltering all the chaos and colors we cannot see…. Well, you just say, Okay..

Sometimes you find yourself at home away from home.  

When we showed up in Colorado Springs, we met the directors of Six Feet Under Horror Festival – a title that is all the more apt when you learn that these guys are forensic pathologists.  Leon and Dan and his cool wife, Sarah, took us to dinner in Garden of the Gods (which itself feels like a hellish paradise, as if the sky gods dribbled red clay from their hands to make big mud castles on the earth below.)  It’s really fun when you can sit at a table over dinner while talking about the human anatomy in ways that are surely not appetizing to many.  But for horror filmmakers (and those who do autopsies for a living) it’s as easy as “please pass the butter.”  So Dan and Leon made this a dinner to remember, and John and I found ourselves enchanted by these charismatic docs who, after spending their days scientifically exploring dead bodies, still have space in their hearts (and a healthy sense of humor) for the blood, guts, and wicked offerings of horror cinema.  And when Leon, the county coroner, invited us to join him at the morgue on Monday, John and I were like, “Is it Monday yet?”  

Not yet.  First, the fest.  
6 Feet Under invited us out to Colorado to present two of our horror features, The Deeper You Dig and Hellbender, plus our Yukon/Alaska short Ever and  a short we act in, Miltown.  Even before the projector sparked up, the CO Springs horror crowd welcomed us with wide open arms.  It’s funny: with our first feature back in 2010, we set out to make a ghost story, and yet we weren’t quite ready to explore the darker corners of our imagination.  But when we were?  It felt like home.  Not only within those shiny webbed narrative corners, but within the crowd that loves them.  And now we’ve found another home 6 Feet Under,  where the dirt cradles our heads, the beetles clean our bones, and …. where we hope to be invited back to screen Where the Devil Roams and Hell Hole with some new forever friends and genre comrades!

And cut to:  EXT. County Morgue.  Morning.  Monday!

I’ve always been fascinated by human anatomy, and it’s been a dream to sit in on an autopsy.  Having the chance to do so – legally! – was lucky and fascinating; a day that John and I will never forget.  

The deceased at a county morgue are there because of a dubious death or a crime scene.  The first surprise: it’s not a slow, dramatic process in a dark room under a tiny spotlight the way you might see in a TV show or movie.  It’s more like a hive dance, several techs buzzing around, business-like, doing their precise jobs – and often using tools you’d find in your kitchen or garden shed.  There was no easing into the dance here.  In heavy stillness bodies waited; knives were sharpened ; exploration began.  In full visceral glory.  

I cannot quite grasp the intricacies of a human body – how all the pieces grow and culminate in a system of bones that move and blood that circulates and invisible signals that shoot from here to there to make bones move and blood flow and breath get breathed….. and the connection of organs that, like the techs, do their job again and again until they don’t.  For instance, the brain.   When I was homeschooling Zelda in 7th Grade, I had her use a cauliflower as a stand-in for a brain; painting its functional regions and cutting it open.  And let me tell you, the curly paths of a cauliflower are not that different looking from the creamy, pale folds of a brain.  And yet that organ is orchestrating everything from our attics – and it’s covered with the thinnest, hard paper-like covering (the dura mater – thanks, Dan!) and then bone, then skin, then hair if you’ve got it.  That’s it.  We are tough; we are vulnerable.  We are complex, yet simple.  We are animated, and then we are still. 

After Leon made his first examination of the day and determined the cause of death, he then showed us the rest of the facility, which was equally fascinating.  This included the Bones Room, where a tank filled with maggots and beetles cleans bones the good old-fashioned way.  There’s an Evidence Room, which is a sad place.  There is Toxicology….  It’s like biology class on steroids.  It’s a big swig of Well, OK.  It’s grim and honest; exciting and sobering; tremendously wild and there you go.  

Grateful for the experience (and to the bodies themselves), we said our goodbyes, got in our car, shared a kiss (grateful to be this side of six feet under), gassed up, and, still wide-eyed and totally wowed, began driving north towards our big beautiful life-eater, Lulu.  Oregon and bone-crushing hugs, here we come!

The Rockies are flexing their snowy biceps on the horizon. As we approach Colorado, the Kansas plains are beginning to swell with golden grassy mounds here and there, thin snakes of snow nipping at their ankles. To the left and right earth-anchored cows mingle with sky-whipped windmills – the old mills frozen in rusty peace, the new ones like metal soldiers flicking butterfly knives in the blue. John’s Kickass Playlist scores the kickass views as the West gallops ahead and we follow. You know when you find yourself waving at antelope that you’ve crossed over.

John just said, “If I’m reincarnated, I wanna be a tumbleweed.” I’d say it’s already in our DNA, as we make our too-many-times-to-count trip across the continent. We left New York a week ago, making a fun stop in Cincinnati, hitting Horror Hound to see our buddy Jay Kay’s short film and saying hi to Greenlandian actor Anders Hove, there for the Subspecies: Blood Rising premiere. (Hove came to Serbia this winter to make a cameo in Hell Hole and it is …. memorable! Can’t wait to work with Hove again.) Then we stayed the night in a Victorian bed and breakfast along the Mississippi in southern IL. Lovely; like stepping back in time. Except I’m not sure if Victorians (known for zipped-up, quiet discretion) got busy like our room neighbors…. without a care for acoustics…. taking the occasional breaks to pick up calls from their kids: Oh. Yeah. Mmm. Ringaling. “Hi Bunny! I miss you, too!How was school today? Let me talk to gramma. I love you, too, sweetie!” Oh, oh, yeah…. Ring-ring. “Hi, honey. Go to sleep, hon’. Miss you, too…..” Oh. Oh. Mmm….. Well good for them. (Did I mention John hates bed and breakfasts?)

Next stop: Kansas City, MO. We really liked this city, its antiquated square brick and stone buildings, its friendly people and great culinary offerings. Unfortunately, our car got busted into there, which is a shitty feeling. Hopefully someone is enjoying my wardrobe and John’s wawa pedal and half a mic stand. And it’ll be cool if 50 people are walking around Kansas City in H6LLB6ND6R t-shirts, because those got nabbed, too. (We are headed to a Con.) But heaven help the thief who reads my notebook with a whole lotta variations on Devil mythology, the 7 Deadly Sins, how to slay with originality, considerations on wendigos, golems, and selected demons at large, and your run-of-the-mill everyday dark forces that make for good horror movies in the works. Good luck there.

So yeah. We are on the first leg of a 2+ month trip: first to hit the 6 Feet Under Film Fest in Colorado Springs. (They’re screening a double feature of The Deeper You Dig and Hellbender and also some shorts: EVER (the short we shot in Yukon and Alaska) and Miltown – a fun short John, Z and I act in directed and produced by our pals Connor Martin, Chris Beyrooti, and Yale Slaughter. Then….

Then we get to see LULU! After almost a year teaching English in South Korea, traveling to Japan, Singapore, Bali and Vietnam, Lu is back on American soil, and we are dying to see her. And her lovable boyfriend, Alex. In Oregon! Then we bum around the Northwest while John edits our Serbian creature feature Hell Hole (a fun one, folks!) and we hold our breath until we can announce big plans for our newest feature, Where the Devil Roams. We are very stoked to get this one rolling! More on that to come, plus other fun news on the horizon….. Zelda is happy at college in NYC, and with every mile we are cooking up new storms to capture on film. Thank you, road. Thank you, wheels. And thank YOU, dear reader.

When you’re happy, art’s hard. That’s what John said when I was struggling to kickstart this final post from our 5 months on the road. And he’s right- our time rolling around in the Wonder Wheels has left us giddy and full-bellied from the fall-to-winter feasting on America. We gobbled up a good chunk of this place and got sauced on the sights. Hey, when a crumbling desert mesa tosses you a biscuit, you take a bite; when the Oregon Coast offers you a drink, you hand it a glass. (And when the Rockies raise a giant, iron fist, you say, “Which eye?”)

But for Nature, art is neither hard nor easy. It’s just another day at work. She clocks in, gets to it, hangs her labors on the wall and doesn’t charge a fee to take a peek. What a peach. It was good to step inside and go from room to room in her American gallery: Northeast to Northwest to Southwest and home. A good chunk, yeah, but a nice size to chew on. It’s like a thumbnail on Earth’s hand. But an outstretched thumb can take you far, and this trip…. ah, this trip….

To put it into perspective: Yesterday I dug a black shard of cactus thorn out of my leg – and I was thrilled. It was there for more than a month, still hard and persistent like the Chihuahuan desert that raised the cactus that grew the arm that launched the thorn that stabbed my leg. I remember the moment it speared me – and this makes my heart wag! We were hiking in Big Bend National Park, racing the setting sun…. and the sun won…. so we were navigating the dark, and the sneaky sucker got me. It was painful, even shocking, but I loved it. I hope the scar sticks around to remind me of that wild, star-flared, chilly dark desert night.

I hope for many things: That somewhere in the northwest, beached jellyfish are still catching the moon, lit up like lanterns in the wet Pacific black. That winds are rising like witches from the top of the White Mountains.
That the silky, grey sand from the Salish Sea still hides in my shoes. That the ghosts of highways haunt my heart. I hope the inky Sawtooths nip at my thoughts and the soft, wheat-whipped prairies sweep my dreams.

If the memories flicker and fade, luckily we’ve got our film H6LLB6ND6R as a moving monument of our adventures. As always, the road is the best location scout. You just have to wander down one. So thanks, America. (And thanks, John-Z-and Lulu, for making the wandering so much fun!) Perhaps art isn’t always hard when you’re happy.

***And thank YOU for drifting with me as I explored our ride in words. Much appreciated. All my love. – Toby

Arizona.

The desert in snow.  Like a sea on fire or a tree growing on a rock, some things just don’t seem to mix.  And when they do, it’s weird.  A little jarring. The kind of thing that can alter the DNA of one’s perception, which is always a good thing.  Please, give me that.  Crack me open and pour in a cup of Never-seen, a hunk of Unknown, and a dash of “Huh?” 

When we pulled into Dead Horse Ranch State Park in Cottonwood, Arizona,  the terrain was a familiar Sonoran desert scene: dusty, crusty brown, and fringed in the muted grey-greens of juniper, sagebrush, and puffy cottonwood trees.  We rode our bikes up-down-all around a high loop in the Coconino National Forest (a desert forest!), during which I learned I am a royal chickenshit when my bike finds itself on anything other than pavement or dirt.  (Hell, thy name is Gravel!) But when not terrified by the natural rollercoaster of rock, sand, and eye-gouging shrubbery (my heart going full steam lub-dubbery), it was a desert ride to remember.  

By evening, winds stoked angry clouds, and the first flecks of snow began to whirl like ash from a white scalded sky.  The heat from the desert day shrank lizard-like into the cold desert night, and by morning the DNA of my perception had changed.  The desert in snow.  A strange marriage of star-crossed lovers fully draped in a veil of white.  Cacti transformed into funny whiskered snowmen; yucca into narwhals, their shoots piercing a sea of sparkling fluff.  And in Sedona – striking, vibrant, sexy  Sedona- the red cliffs and ragged mesas looked like massive hunks of half-eaten Devil’s Food Cake, white icing dripping down the sides.  

Snow aside, the desert is full of characters.  You could write a classic Western opera on the cacti alone.  You’ve got your saguaro, tall and proud, like a hydra-headed sheriff. The deputy might be a squat, jovial barrel cactus.  Then there’s the ocotillo, your villain, all spidery and barb-wired, with its sneaky thick-fingered sidekick, the cholla, quick to stick with daggered burrs.  The Joshua trees are your preachers, arms raised in prayer for the souls of the sinners.  And the prickly pear are your busomy damsels flashing their purple succulence, batting thorny lashes.  Coyotes hide in the wings crooning a sad, hungry ballad, and hawks saw thin rusty chords in the rafters.  Winds jangle like spurs.   

Of course there’s more to Arizona than its deserts.  There are some cool towns we love revisiting, like Jerome.  Built up high on a mountain overlooking the Verde Valley, it’s a strange kind of slinky, living ghost town, all switchbacks and steep streets lined with both galleries and crumbling facades.  And then there’s Bisbee, an artsy old mining town near the border of Mexico. The massive red open copper mine could swallow whole the charming historic district.  Haunted hotels, cracked walls, and antique shops stipple the spindled town, its tiers spun out and stitched together by thousands of stone steps that zig and zag up the mountain like ivy. 

We’ve got another ghost town (or two) on our horizon.   In Texas!  We’re headed to Big Bend along the Rio Grande.  More desert opera.  Maybe a tarantula or two.  Big skies and brazen stars.  

The Pacific Northwest is demanding. Rain and wind hammer the coast and gnaw at our little home on wheels. Washington looms like a masthead over its gusty, water-bound corner of the country, and the wet drama is captured in names that all make sense: Deception Pass, Dismal Nitch, Cape Disappointment. It’s easy to feel the haunt of ships and souls lost in the deep dark drink. This place is wild. Unpredictable. It has a pirate heart. While we sleep the Pacific swallows massive trees, plays with them its mouth, then spits them onto the shore. I can hear the boom and crunch, the beaches a pick-up-stick display of dried grey bones.

In a state that isn’t shy about its natural gifts, Washington’s Olympic Peninsula is especially talented. The Pacific Ocean pummels its western edge, muscles its way through the Strait of Juan de Fuca (nudging Canada above), eases into the Salish Sea, and finally sinks into the Puget Sound. In Port Townsend, a lovely town in the peninsula’s top right corner, we watch river otters, sea lions, and orcas just a stone’s throw from the trailer. The views here make you feel like you’re plopped inside a giant caldera, distant snowy mountains puckered around the watery town on all sides: the Cascades and Mount Baker, the Olympics, and Mount Rainier shining like a silver yolk in the faraway sky. And then there are the rainforests: fuzzy, lush, dripping in hot forest breath, steeped in fog.

After two months in the Northwest we are pretty much addicted. Washington and Oregon are iconic, like eagles perched high up on their wild edge of the country, and we are easy prey, happy to be hunted and ripped all to love-pieces. We flit between parks on both state coasts and it never gets old. And we can see Lulu. She comes to us; we go to her. It’s an odd but beautiful bonding in the time of Covid: campfires and rooftops and virtual hugs. Love always lurks in all the things we cannot see or do.

So we’re shooting and living. The Wonder Wheeler leaks, her furnace broke, and sand has found a forever home in the cracks, but she keeps on rolling. And, thankfully, so do we.

P.S…. there’s a rich indigenous life on the Olympic Peninsula. I covered some of the Makah’s cool seafaring history in my previous 2010 blog:
We were rooted in the Olympics of WA like its native Sitka Spruce.   Not ready to leave yet, we visited the Makah Museum, which taught us that the coastal Makah and Orvette tribes were tough whale and seal hunters.  They would sail out in groups of eight on boats carved out of entire tree trunks, and each man had a job, one of which was to dive in and sew the whale’s mouth shut so it wouldn’t sink.  (When sharks arrived, the hunters would toss rocks off the boat– a tactic that seemed to distract the sharks and send them chasing the rocks down.)  Everything they caught they’d eat or use:  seal bladders for bags, intestines for bow strings, sewed up seals for floats to tow whales back to land…. Fascinating stuff!

Is there a happier sight than a dog and a ball on a beach? A sexier view than a hot peach sun setting over a wet denim ocean? A silkier song than the hush and coo of waves whispered through the teeth of grassy dunes? Think monster crags that stand in the surf, and the herby, almost medicinal air of evergreens.
Or moss, the shag carpet of choice, bearding trees in minty around-the-clock shadow, mushrooms sticking out like fleshy warts.
This is the Oregon coast. It’s big, it’s beautiful, it’s bound to break your heart. Even as you’re standing right there with it, its lush green arms wrapped around you, the ghost of its looming absence is already haunting you.

Our favorite thing to do on the Oregon coast is ride our bikes on the beach. When the tide is out, the tire patterns on the hard damp sand make me smile, reminding me of old good friendships: the lines run side by side, then converge, cross, then join again. John, Z and I go for beach rides in the morning, the late afternoon, and even under the starry night sky. We chase the shiny edges of the ebb-and-flows, dodging jellyfish glittered up by the moon, our wheels making a soft “shluss” in the thin surf. John says, “Is this romantic enough for you?” I say, “It is.” Z feels it too, because as she comets by she sings she loves me even more than the ocean, and I’m guessing that’s a lot. Sigh.

Of course the thing we love most about Oregon is Lulu, who lives in Portland. Seeing her here – so independent, hardworking, and ever adventurous in the city and beyond …. blue eyes twinkling above her mask and body strong like a bull’s…. my heart just flops onto its back, holds its sides, and rocks with ache. It’s not a bad ache. More like a love sickness that can’t be quelled. Or a rip in the ol’ ticker, raw and swollen open from adoration…. a small tear that can’t be stitched, so it stays open, like a gill, letting all the big love seep in and out.

Meanwhile, Zelda turned 17. She’s sitting alone under a tree sketching, curled over a pad with pencil in her long graceful hand. And now the ache returns, this time to be that lucky paper, or perhaps the pencil, bent to the wise hand’s will. 17, with the aim of an arrow. Now she’s waking a napping Lu, cocooned and warm in her blue hammock, and I can hear them laughing in the Oregon sun. The sweet ache again. It twists and pulls like taffy in my belly…. so much sugar and a salted joy. It’s a heady swoon, like falling from something sky-high into something bottomless and true.

Today is Halloween, my favorite holiday of all. It’s fun giving nightmares their due; fun getting spooked by shadows and creepy things under a stark moon as the days trip ever closer towards winter. Of course much, much scarier things lurk around the globe these days, and they’re not so much fun. But this post is about love. And beauty. And as I sit here in a state park along the Pacific coast, where fires have dulled and the air cleared; where dogs grin, all wet-whipped from the waves; where strangers wave hello as they walk by, or from their morning-dewed tents, or lifting their noses from books they quietly read outside their motorhomes…. I’m less scared, and more hopeful. Less bitter; more inspired. Not empty, but hungry for more.

Good to Be Bad(lands) and Why Oh Wy-oming

The Badlands of South Dakota are cool in a dusty, rusty, ruthless I-only-smoke-Marlboro Reds-and-nothing-green-survives-my-burnt-crusty-stare kind of way. It’s as if primary colors were outlawed then banished from the landscape, leaving behind long gnarled fingers of grey rock that jut out of a beige dry land. Sometimes blocks of earth fall away as if the sky had boots and stomped the earth in random fits. You can’t help but think of sagging, weathered sandcastles, lonely remnants of a dinosaur’s playground.
We hiked in, and as the sun began to sink behind a jagged skyline, we set up to shoot. You’d think it would be easy: dark edges against a pumpkin sky. But we couldn’t get the shot.
The Badlands scoffed at a close-up, and the camera got shy. But it was cool. The Badlands are really a teaser for what lies West…..

Wyoming. And the sovereign badassery of Yellowstone and Teton National Parks and the all-around vastness of everything in between.

Yellowstone is a huge natural amusement park full of endless attractions. Upon entering from the East through the Shoshone Forest and Absaroka Mountains, we were greeted by a lone bison strolling all hunchbacked and casual smack-dab down the middle of the road. Soon the bison and elk were on constant display, although we didn’t see any grizzlies this visit. The wind is bearlike, though, and it riles the massive Yellowstone Lake into an angry ocean. Rainbow colored thermal pools smoke…. mud pools bubble…. fumaroles spit, hiss and thump…. and geysers burp straight up to the sky. Steam and the stink of sulfur bathe your face. It’s a strange kind of beautiful Hell. And then you find yourself jaw-dropped and head spinning by a carousel of new views: snow capped mountains lording over wide bison-flecked valleys, waterfalls crashing, rivers cutting through rocky canyons, cliffs hanging out with eagles…. Damn, it’s good.

En route to The Tetons we wound through the striking Owl Creek and Wind River Mountains. The winds turned fierce and we found a ranch to host us for the night. Parked outside the horse and bull arena, for three hours the trailer shook and rocked through a downright dirt and sand blizzard. Then the winds calmed and we were surrounded by a psychedelic sunset and miles of sagebrush hosting horses and playful fluffy-butted antelope at home on the range.

100 miles west we were eye-slapped with our first view of The Grand Tetons, which roughly translates to The Big Tits. Oh, those frisky French. The more elegant Shoshone name for them translates to Hoary-headed Feathers. Either way, they’re unmistakable: dark, stark, stabbing the cloud cover with sharp brilliant white snowy peaks. The Snake River slithers at their ankles, spilling in and out of Jackson Lake. Dark shadows reveal themselves to be moose hulking beneath the pines, in heathery meadows. Oh, and in Jackson you can find the best croissant this side of Paris, Z says. (Persephone Cafe- thanks Nancy Lee!)

OK! On to Idaho and Craters on the Moon! Thanks, Wyoming. Ding!Ding!Ding! You’re the champ.

Here’s the lowdown on the slowdown.

It’s about a bone-straight country road, flanked by legions of corn stalks grayed and at post-summer rest, their papery swords bent by the winds. It’s about faded metal water towers, all long neck and fat head, proudly mouthing small town names like Sun Prairie, Baraboo, and Jolley. It’s about soft peanut butter and jelly sandwiches assembled on a dusty gravel shoulder that smells of cow and dirt and is kind of nice. It’s about feet on the dashboard and wind in hair; about singing to the radio and sharing apples. John horse-gobbles them down to the core – my favorite part- which I then gnaw into a heart-shaped nub. Zelda studies quietly in the backseat. Weeds tumble across the road like feathers. Windmills tickle the horizon. Watching the views sprawl outside the car windows John says, “America’s just so fuckin’ big.” Z turns down the music and says, “I’m gonna write my history essay.” I say, “Good luck.”

Indiana, Illinois, Iowa. Heartland; hard land. The Wonder Wheels like the long flat roads, but not the occasional strong gusts. Strange how they can make a 5,000 pound trailer wobble and reel while the watching cows stand solid and, uh, un-mooved.

As we head west, chasing the sundown, I can’t help but feel like happiness is a road. Or a cloud. Or an old truck rusting in a field. Sometimes you need some space to feel small. To slice through stillness with a set of wheels and a pair of eyes. Tonight we’ll reach South Dakota. The West with its big beauty dangles like a tasty carrot, and the ache of anticipation is like waiting for a second kiss from the person who knocked you out with the first kiss. A little dizzying, a little scary, a lotta thrilling. I like it.