Cris Mazza and Davis Schneiderman

Anybody Here Seen Our Old Friend John?

Artists' aesthetic statement:

This is a collaborative short story. The authors produced it by sending work back and forth over email, based upon the agreed-upon protagonist, along with prompts for the other author, such as, include a line from Edith Wharton, visit a particular website and include 15 words found on the front page, etc. This story will be incorporated into a larger text called The Book of Methods, featuring a series of collaborations between Schneiderman and other writers, all powered by "machines."

1) As long as the chicks still want to fuck him—John—the world can't be ending.

If he can get one on each arm, his constellation is rising. (Whatever the hell that means —the ladies sure know what's rising.) Gemini. The starbirth of the Orion cluster. But these things tend to go hand-in-hand: if he can't get his next documentary produced, the fruit won't be as easy to pick, no matter how many film festival theatre lobbies he strides through, open trench coat flapping behind him like a Leni Riefenstahl medium shot. Yes, John must always work fast for maximum return.

But damnit, he'll have to spend as much time glad-handing potential producers and investors—wiping sweaty palms against his trousers—as he might ordinarily spend accumulating the ladies with a sort of underhanded charisma, ever so charming at first but less so as each sentence passes the damn-like threshold of his whitened teeth. God knows it doesn't take him much time—no time, really—to secure one hottie in hand and have another licking her chops at him from the bar. He uses his extra time to hustle investments, but then what to do with the lady-in-waiting (who won't want to be waiting for long), since it takes too goddamn much time to explain the project to each investor—the nuances of his art—and such duties keeps him circulating the floor forever even when the babes get tired the way they do with fluttering eyelids, and they want to go for another fruity drink or chocolate martini or find a Jaccuzi with thick enough bubbles to net him a hand job.

He thought he'd kicked this pernicious time problem last year when he got some star-struck projection-room boy to play a sample for the next film, a sort of pre-trailer John invented, just before the lights came up at intermission during a five-short subject screening on who knows the fuck some bullshit about human dignity.

John was bankrolled by the end of short subject four, not to mention all the way into the silk blouse beside him. He gave the projection boy an autographed picture and a condom for good luck.

Another time he got a nightclub DJ to cut all lighting and play his current release's trailer on the ceiling during an invitation-only post-screening party to a long-time colleague's twenty-year documentary triumph. These kinds of things can be accomplished with a lady on each arm, and the thrum of the crowd gets her purring like a lap-cat in his ear.

John still got laid last night, twice in fact, but not a single sample DVD of this new project has successfully transferred into one of the manicured, slightly soft, yet imminently masculine hands of the moneymen, and the clattering discs in his coat pockets seem, like a shamanic rattle made of a shrunken head, to be keeping the ladies, at least the attractive ones, at arm's length today.

That's when he hit upon the solution. Ingenious.

Instead of pitching this project about a wildlife ecosystem developing in abandoned factories and warehouses on the west side of Chicago, his next film could, and really should, be about him—John—his success and how he got here, a postmodern blockbuster with a split screen, one side would be the film he shoots and the other would depict him shooting the film.

Of course half the screen will be black when he puts down his camera and entertains . . .

Jeez, that other camera's going to have to be on a tripod, he's not an exhibitionist, after all, or else...genius, one of the ladies can shoot