Clockwork Latrine and Sphere Cheese

This scene is thought by Snacks to be the first one of two "shitty cap-offs" to the Part 1 vignette sequences. The "snack" in question for this one is the wonderful cheese ball, a favorite of both Dan and i since the early days of yore. It's an unwholesome thing, yet a food with irresistible texture and panache - leaving it's tell tale trace of orange cheese flavor dust upon the fingers of each volunteer.

The setting was a bit of an inspiration. I'd heard for years that it was possible to get up into one of Baltimore great Downtown landmarks - and thanks to the help of Joe Wall, property manager of the "baltimore Arts Tower", we were able to procure the ultimate steam punk set - an early 20th century Clock Room. I've had deja-vu/past life/lucid dream tethers to Victorian architecture and technology my entire life. Steam-punk, for lack of a better term elsewhere, is a necessary spice in the Snacks GASA melange. This light tangent/pun into Herbert/Lynch universe is unintentional, but one must admit that the Lynch film looks steamy/punky. Imagine if it had been the Dali/Jodorowsky/Giger pile-up , mythically trapped in the 1970s like a mosquito in amber.

Built in 1911 in downtown Bmore....

it's had a few alterations and iterations since. It was originally attached to a big factory which made the "Bromo Seltzer" health elixer....nowadays it's just a lowly pagoda with a bunch o' pricey artist studios and it's run by the city of Balt. The builder of the factory/tower, a Captain Emerson wanted it to evoke this epic edifice from the 16th century....

the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy. Myself, conveniently in Florence two weeks before the shoot, was able to provide my person as the missing link between these two gemini, and snap the above pic.

The interior of the Clock room is pure poetry for the GASA fantasy, with giant whirring elevator motors, trap doors, amazing Babbage-scapes of loud clacking mechanisms, and even 5 gallons of "worm gear oil"...


The clockworks are now electrical, but the 25 foot long pendulum is still in there. Here's some snaps around the room-





We took the better part of an cloudy afternoon filming the scene, in which Tom is abducted by a Quasimoto-esque Little Howling Wolf and forced to eat cheese balls and shit them in order to drive the rube-goldberg contraptions in the room for an ambiguous purpose.



Wolf had told me many times that he has some deep roots in vaudeville. When he heard about our "comedic" outing in a clock tower with a huge jug of cheese balls and a nice shiny porcelain potty he almost began auditioning spontaneously, showing us just how rubbery and labile his comedic muggings could be.

Well, the result was excellent. Wolf really filled the Steam-punk clock room with his outrageous physicality. He entertained us with (tall?) tales of his theatre resume/exploits and he ate most of our sandwiches. He had to run home at sunset due to the kick-off of the Ravens playoff game, which by the way, they lost.

We also rigged the place up with 50 feet of clear PVC tubes so we could bounce the cheese balls through the room like data going through fiber optics, but unfortunately, i neglected to photo that. Welllll.....

Thx to Wolf and Max Eilbacher for bringing it out to this shoot!