Badass Film Tour – Day 7: extra Salt Lake City

July 20, 2010

10:55 AM
CHAD:
I spent about three hours walking around Salt Lake City today. I found it to be quite nice. I’ll include for you here some of the sights and sounds. First of all, I got a good look at the capitol building. If you’ve ever wondered what it looks like, here are some videos of it inside and outside…

11:23 AM
CHAD:
One thing that really stood out to me was that along State Street, in front of some big company, there was about a quarter of a mile worth of flowers lining the street. I captured the whole swath on film, and it took almost four minutes to walk past. Enjoy these flowers from your work spaces/cubicles:

11:39 AM
CHAD:
Also, I came up on a street festival for children right in the middle of downtown Salt Lake City. It really looked like a blast. Had I been a pedophile, this would have easily been the highlight of my trip so far:

9:15 PM
CHAD:
Easily the highlight of the day was when Bob, Tyler, and I went to the whole big Mormon area where The Tabernacle Choir, The big Jesus statue, and the church that only Mormons can go into so we had to stay outside are. Neither Bob nor I can recall what this whole complex was called, so we have taken to referring to it as Mormon World. I really can’t say enough about the Mormon girl tour guides that run this place. They are almost all in their late teens or early twenties and are in Salt Lake City from all around the world serving as tour guides for their mission… You know how Mormons go on missions, right? Well, all of them obviously take their faith very seriously and they all have these beautiful, cult-like smiles to go along with their overly courteous manners. My God, if I could have been Brigham Young for just an hour yesterday… Anyway, I engaged in what was far and away the most meaningful conversation I’ve had with a woman in the last decade with one of them. Her name was Sister Martin. You see, they work in pairs, just like the men do on bicycles. When you get there, a pair of them will inevitably come up and latch on to you as your unofficial guide for the event. Along the way, they’re apparently encouraged to do their best to spread the gospel. I mean this with the utmost respect, but it’s a lot like being at a titty bar in some ways, because you’ll have these beautiful women coming up to you and giving you the impression that they really like you and you could easily be taking one home. Over time, it occurs to you that they may have ulterior motives, such as showing you their titties for money or turning you into a Mormon, whichever the case may be. Despite this, I truly believe I made some headway with Sister Martin.

10:30 PM
BOB:
The Mormon Compound was neat.  Did you know, that because they love God, they hand-painted the white pine pews to look like oak.  And they hand painted the columns to look like marble.  Because they love God.  That was their explanation.  They were proud that they could take some of God’s inferior work and dress it up to appear as if it were God’s more top-shelf goods.  I mean, white pine? WTF? Get God’s good shit: oak and marble!  What kind of self-respecting religion has white-fucking-pine?  Also, When out super-nice hostesses asked how long we thought it took to build the hunchback of Notre Dame looking building, I was trying to find a polite way to vocalize my best guess: 300 years and built by Jews? (my second guess was 2 years and built by Mexicans), Chad managed to offer a good guess to the unasked “who” part of the equation when it was revealed that it took 40 years.  “Did Moses build it?”

11:01 PM
CHAD:
Not to nitpick, Bob, but you totally blew the retelling of the how many years did it take to build the church that only Mormons can go into so we had to stay outside story. Yes, it took 40 years to build the church that only Mormons can go into so we had to stay outside, but the question and answer part of the conversation went completely differently. I only bring it up because this very dialogue was the highpoint in my attempted seduction of Sister Martin. Here’s how it went down: We were walking past the church that only Mormons can go into so we had to stay outside, and the sisters asked us how long we thought it took to be built. We all three gave various answers, all of them wrong. Then they said, “40 years”. To which I replied, sharp as a whip, “40 years? Who built it, Moses?” Both Sister Martin and Sister Javier laughed out loud at that, and you could literally feel the tension between them as they desperately tried to decide which one had fallen in love with me harder. Sister Martin even told me it was “good biblical humor”. (For those of you heathens out of the loop, Moses was lost in the desert for forty years, because someone told him there was a quarter buried under the sand.) The hijinx didn’t stop there, though, because then Tyler goes, “It didn’t take Moses forty years to build the ark.” The girls laughed at that too, and then it turned out that Tyler wasn’t being funny, but had made the common mistake of confusing Moses with Noah because their names sound similar and they both have the connection with the number 40. (For those of you heathens out of the loop, Noah floated on the ark for 40 days and 40 nights, because that’s how long it took him to collect a fare from all of the animals.) Tyler then covered for the faux paux by quipping, “Ah, well I get them confused. They look a lot alike.” The sisters loved that, too. The only time things got hotter between me and Sister Martin was at the end when she asked for all of my contact information so they could send Mormons to my house back in Austin, and I told her that women used that trick on me all the time to get my phone number. She laughed and said, “Wow, really?” and I said, “Nah.” Then I gave her my address and told her she could send the Mormons over to my house, but only because I was going to think about her when I saw them. I think I might have overstepped the boundaries at that point.

11:11 PM
BOB:
Not to nitpick your nitpickery, Chad, but the simple fact that the crap I scrawled out is in any way coherent, is a huge success in my book (which also has Jesus in it, but is set in a post apocalyptic wasteland).  But you are right.  I fucked up the retelling.  That’s what I do.  But in my defense, I am doing ALL of the driving, so I don’t have the luxury of riding shotgun for eight hour stretches of weed-smoking, crossword puzzle solving, blogging fun.  I’m busy dodging shitty drivers and cops.  And when I do have time to regurgitate my notes for the day, it’s usually at 3 AM when you are fast asleep.  So, I do have that going for me.

Before I get sucked back into the whirlwind of the tour, I gotta extend a huge thanks to some super-badass folks who, without them, this tour would be shit served cold:  Mia Cevallos has been the spine that keeps this tour going.  She works her ass off to make sure that Chad and I can raise hell and have fun on the road and we love her to death for it.  I sure as hell hope that Mia and I can get loads of projects going in the future, cuz that woman is a fucking badass.  And Jenny Bendell and Rock ‘N’ Load have been working their asses off to help us land all this killer press that we’ve been scoring.  Jenny is top-shelf all the way in my book.  Without the two of them, we’d be flailing around like shark bait.  So big thanks!  Also, I gotta thank my lovely and super-smart, super-sexy wife Nicole.  Without Nicole, I might have never made one, let alone a shitload of movies.  She rules more than anything.

2:15 AM
CHAD:
We spent most of the late-night hours partying with Casey and Tim, some young locals who took us to a hookah bar. Casey is actually the son of the guy whose house we stayed in back in Park City. He has an airplane, among other things. He showed us some video of him flying it with a bunch of fine ass girls riding in the back. His lifestyle was not lost upon us. Anyway, these guys were so fucking young looking, I kept joking with Bob, telling him it was father-son night at the hookah bar. The hookah bar craze is new to me. I’ve noticed them around Austin lately, but this was the first time I’d been to one. I just never understood why you’d even fuck with such a contraption unless you were doing drugs with it. Tobacco hardly seemed worth the effort to me, but as it turns out, it was actually pleasant way to go about things. I’ll never smoke a cigarette again… Funny thing is, there is a girl in Austin who keeps trying to get me to go to a hookah bar and her name is Casey, too. She spits all over her hand when she beats you off and I really want to encourage all women to start doing this.  Way to go, Case!

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the people whom I begged for money before leaving town. These include John from Elysium/Valhalla, Jason from Jackalope/Chupacabra, Nordstrom from Club Deville, Steve From Headhunters and Dave from Trophy’s. I didn’t actually get any ad money from Dave, I just sort of took 50 bucks off of the 250 that I owe him. That’s right, I took money from a dying man. Also, I got some help from my friends at Affordable Sound and my sister gave me a hundred bucks, re-establishing the inter-family pecking order more to her liking. Talk to y’all soon. CHAD

2:31 AM
BOB:
Yeah, a hashless hooka.  Who’d’a thunk?

Here’s some press for our Victoria screening: http://mondaymag.com/articles/entry/confessions-of-an-austin-weirdo/