“I Am Not A Bug” was created out of the footage shot for a short film I did, “Sometimes It’s Not Enough To Talk About It”, featuring poetry by J.C. Coyle and videography, editing and music done by me.
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Years later I started becoming more interested in digital video and purchased a Canon GL-1 and started working at RealNetworks. I was living up on lower Queen Anne in this great little apartment. This is after moving out of brooklynhaus v1. One of the projects I took on was making the sort-of music video for the audio track I had done. Basically, I went around shooting everything I could – like a goon — and edited it all together. It was a fun project to kick out and learn some digital video.
One scene I set up was a reenactment of a scene from my memory of living in Tallahassee Florida, directly after college. I was living in this really *tiny* apartment in back of a house which was in the back of another house. It really couldn’t have been more than 300 sq. ft. During that time I had taken to drinking whiskey in ridiculous quantities and often waking up with headaches that I thought would actually kill me. In order to get over these hangovers I would take really long super-hot baths and fall asleep in the tub. To capture this scene 5 years later, I set up the GL on a tripod and got into the tub, and, well, acted.
For “I Am Not A Bug,” I took this video footage and created a filmstrip of it, using the individual frames of me in the tub, supposedly drunk and leaning out of the tub. I encased this in acrylic medium. On top of it I used a scan of a scrap of paper on which I had written “I am not a bug. No, look, I know I’m not really a bug, but I feel all warm and fuzzy in the world of gas heaters and Frigidares.” I wrote this one evening in 1999 after eating mushrooms.

