Not that i think anyone really cares, but-

Over the span of the last few months, I’ve been intermittenly working on a video project about two people I know, Franz and Olga. Franz is a World War two vet, a former Nazi fighter pilot, and Olga is his next door neighbor/best friend. She is from Mexico and is very wild and has what I think is a very interesting mystical streak. I really like everything I’ve shot for the project so far and think it has a ton of potential though I’m currently worried that the prospect of my ever finishing it is no longer feasable or at least that the project as I had originally envisioned it is going to have to be severely altered/delayed. Perhaps it’s only a minor setback that I’m sensing and am imagining to be bigger than it is. Maybe at some unknown point in the future it will come back together and in that moment I’ll understand why, though only time will tell. Either way the facts at hand right now are making me rather melancholy but in the spirit of getting over it I thought I’d write down a few of the thoughts I have about the whole thing.

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The reason for my being held back from it right now is stupid: I got in a row with Olga’s daughter less than a week ago and though it wasn’t terribly serious I’m thinking now that it is only going to put distance between the subjects of the film and myself. I’m sure someday it will all blow over, but for now I don’t know how I could really do anything to make any progress on it. At one point my dream for the ending was that we would all go on a trip to Germany and I would film Franz revisiting places he’d been to during World War 2, when he was still a young fighter pilot. Possibly I thought I would even capture him crying, would stand there and film the tears streaming down his face in memory of his Nazi youth.

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Perhaps it’s ridiculous for me to think of things like that, to imagine dramatic episodes in other people’s lives. Maybe it’s even irresponsible? Or rude? I don’t know really, I guess that’s up to others to decide. I just get ideas sometimes and make decisions about what to do with them. I’ve met lots of people who operate this way.

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Franz and Olga have gone on trips together before, before I knew them, though I doubt any portion of them were ever filmed. Possibly Franz has some snapshots hidden away in one of the many photo albums he keeps in the living room for guests to peruse. One of the trips I heard about was to Tijuana. I heard they were partying pretty hard, drinking a lot, and that Olga left Franz behind and that he had to get home on his own. I’m not sure how he did this, bus or taxi or what, and I wonder if I had been there when it was happening if I would have chosen to stay with him or to go back with Olga (assuming there wasn’t anything I could have done to prevent the whole abandonment issue in the first place). Probably I would have stayed with Franz because I think I would have felt bad leaving a ninenty year old man alone in such a dangerous place and also because it would have been better footage.  

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I’ve really liked working on this project, filming it and editing the footage later on, even though I haven’t really done much in terms of editing, just cropping and messing around with the sound a little bit (probably I’m not a real filmmaker (yet)).  I don’t think what i’ve made so far would really work too well as an actual movie but that it could be good as an instillation in a gallery or something.

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The last time I saw Olga she told me she had just been in Vegas with a young man but had left him there with no way back. She said she did this because he ‘needed to fucking learn’. We also got to talking about motorcycles and she told me she was planning on getting a Kawasaki 900. I asked her is that a Chinese company? and she responded by ignoring my question but stating that she didn’t care if she died riding it. ‘If I die riding it, that’s fine’ she said.

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My favorite thing that I filmed for the project was the little bit where Olga talks about the night she had a romance with the moon, after seeing it reflected in the water of her swimming pool one night. Franz’s wife drowned in that pool. I saw photos of her in one of his albums, she was pretty although she sort of looked like every young woman I’ve ever seen in an old photograph. You can tell he’s really happy in the pictures even though his face is very stern. They married very young.

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Olga doesn’t have any opinion on Franz’s past as a nazi. Whenever it’s brought up in conversation she scoffs and waves her hand in the air like she is shooing away any inclination of wrongdoing on his behalf that might be being suggested by the speaker’s words. Other people have expressed different opinions on it though mostly in sarcastic or joking tones. One time I told a girl who had asked me what I did that day about him and she replied ‘Oh, so he’s the guy who killed my family’. I don’t think she was actually angry about it but she wasn’t really kidding either. If I were to tell my grandparents about him they would no doubt call him a monster, having both been young and living in London during that time, and having both been involved in scary incidents in which they were forced into bomb shelters during air raid attacks by the Germans. For all I know Franz could have been piloting one of the planes involved in those raids. To this day my grandfather has reoccurring nightmares that often result in him sleepwalking and frantically flailing his arms in the air above his head. More than one physchiatrist has told him these dreams are resultant from the traumatic memories of being stuck underground during the air attacks.

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My grandparents married young and were each others first loves. I think the same was probably true about Franz and his wife though I’m not sure about their ages. Olga has been married a few times but I know little about the details of her marriages, even though I’ve had it explained to me a few times and have even watched a tape of one of her weddings (on more than one occasion). She looks really, really pissed in the tapes and Bad moon Rising by The Doors is playing the whole time.

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I sometimes think about what it would be like if I were to have married young and to have married my first love, though I think it might be hard to say who exactly that would be (there are probably a few that I’d consider to be in the running). There was one girl who, although very far from my first love (or even technically a love at all), I went on a date with in high school who sticks out in my head. I remember she had braces and really big eyes like a deer and that we had art class together. There was this one Pixies song on Surfer Rosa where Kim Deal sounded like she’s basically just singing the name of the girl over and over again and I remember listening to this song after school and kind of daydreaming about the girl while I was doing homework (at the end of senior year I started actually reading the books assigned to me and doing homework, for the rest of the time I was a complete shit and did nothing but get in trouble). Anyways I think this was seriously the one date I went on in all of high school and right before it I managed to fall on my face and cut my lip open so I looked like a freak the whole time and then at the end I alienated the girl by making out with her too hard or something because the next week she wouldn’t talk to me. She also transferred out of art the next semester and I missed her quite a bit although in her place there were these two new girls who were best friends and who both wore Smashing Pumpkins t-shirts (one of them wore black lipstick too). One of them was blonde and one of them was Asian and they walked home together every day after school. I never really talked to either of them but I always secretly longed to walk with them, thinking I probably had more in common with them than the people I was actually friends with at the time, plus they always looked like they were about to head off to some secret place in the woods to smoke cigarettes and talk about music and books and what their lives would be like when they got out of high school, and I wanted in on that.

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Franz’s General in the war was General Galland. Every time I’ve ever gone over to his house he’s pointed out the framed picture of Galland he has hanging on the wall, Galland and his wife sitting in their living room surrounded by animal heads, rams and stags and candelabras. By coincidence around the same time I first went to Franz’s house I happened to be reading The Ogre by Michael Tournier, a book which featues Goring as a central character and depicts him as something of a childish tyrant. In fact much of the middle of the book takes place at Gorings house and involves a scenario in which he invites several other high ranking members of the third reich and visiting dignitaries to his property for a big seasonal hunt, at the end of which one member of the party will be pronounced ‘king of the hunt’. Of course Goring goes to great lengths to ensure the walks away with the coveted title (the whole thing is rigged, the biggest game is saved till the end for him alone) and in fact the hunters are all repeatedly warned to not over shadow Goring in any way, even suggesting that their personal safety could potentially be at stake if they were to do so. Anyways because of the visual references to hunting in the photo and probably because both names start with the letter G, I mixed up Galland with Goring and for a long time thought that Goring had actually been his general. While at first it might not seem like the difference between the two men would be too big of a deal to someone interested in war history or to someone who was actually there (Franz) the difference is significant (actually when it comes down to it Goring and Galland hated each other). For one thing Galand was probably the more innovative of the two and definitely the more level-headed. In all likeliness the portrait made by Tournier of Goring was probably not too far off. Another side-note is that Galand survived being shot down during battle four times.

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Of course, Franz actually did meet Goring too, and has even been to the same house from the book. I know this because he brought me a photocopy of a picture of the house, which if you didn’t know any better you could have mistaken for a bed and breakfeast in Switzerland. The picture was labeled ‘Goring house” and above it there was a second photo, this one of Goring in his uniform, sitting at his desk signing some sort of important document. I didn’t ask Franz for this picture, he just went into his house and came back with it and handed it to me. Then he went back in and ten minutes later came back with a picture of himself as a young solider. Then another ten minutes went by and he came back with another picture, the same one of himself in uniform but this time signed. Everyone shouted at him to stop bringing me pictures even though I told them I didn’t mind. Olga told me then that it didn’t really have anything to do with me, Franz rjust likes young men.