VALENCIA Chapter 6: Channing Kennedy

This wasn't in the script.
This wasn’t in the script.

Channing Kennedy is super cool. He is a writer and blogger for Colorlines, a maker of movies and of art in general, and sort of a magical person overall. When I found out he wanted to do a Valencia chapter I was psyched, because I knew he would do something very excellent and unexpected with it, and he has. Read on.

Michelle Tea: Hi, Channing! What happens in your Valencia chapter?

Channing Kennedy: Chapter 6 is about Suzanne, an acquaintance whom Michelle describes as a ‘friend on hold,’ who dies. It’s a short, hard chapter.

MT: Tell me about your cast and why you cast them.

CK: I called on people close to me who’ve experienced a situation similar to the chapter. After reducing it into a script, there were really only two characters: Michelle, played by my mother, and Suzanne, played by my friend Daphny. We were also extremely fortunate to get our friend Dylan to play the stabbed prostitute at the last minute (and to dominate that scene), especially since I’d already spent $5 on a huge bottle of fake blood.

Meanwhile….

MT: Where are you filming?

CK: In my mom’s duplex in Berkeley, with one external nighttime scene that we did near MLK and 24th in Oakland (because I know Oakland better than SF, and because that’s where I was when I read the chapter for the first time). It was raining on our shoot day and I had no backup plan, but fortunately we found a nice dry overpass to shoot under. Plus it was during an Occupy Oakland raid right, so the cops were all busy across town while we were screaming in the street.

MT: Did your chapter have any special challenges?

CK: Mostly tone, since this chapter has higher stakes than the ones preceding it. But the story itself is pretty universally relatable.

MT: Are you sticking to the story, or messing with it?

CK: We’re sticking as close to the chapter as possible while also making it a ghost story from the year 2034, when Michelle is 63.

MT: Where were you in the 90s, and what were you doing?

CK: I was ages 9-19 and spent most of those ages in a tiny conservative town in Missouri, talking loudly about atheism in hopes of starting a fight and being 70% sure that I had invented noise music. Some friends and I made a short film that placed in a student festival, and I was pretty gung-ho about becoming a filmmaker until I found out how expensive it was and how much you had to plan ahead and do things correctly, at which point I lost all interest. (I regained interest later, with the advent of digital video and stealable software.) In general, I distracted myself from a shitty homelife by being a totally awesome misunderstood loner. When we got non-long-distance dialup internet at home, my life totally changed; I was able to make internet friends and to listen to fifteen-second .rams of Beck songs and to download porn very slowly.

In 1998 I went to a state college on a full scholarship, found out that I wasn’t the only cool person in the world, and dropped out immediately. I was required to see a therapist back home and he advised me to take up linedancing, a prescription which I stupidly declined to fill. Really, I flubbed the ’90s pretty badly, but I was a teen! I’m inherently distrustful of anyone who dealt well with teenhood.

Bring back Biz.

MT: If you could bring back something lost from the 90s, what would it be? What are you happy to see go?

CK: Since most of my ’90s came to me via TV or the internet, there’s not a lot that hasn’t been willed back into existence already. In general, I think the internet is a huge plus! I have a young broke trans friend in Missouri who orders hormones online and makes gifs of Mark Mothersbaugh’s gym-shorted dick to share on Tumblr. Barely any part of that sentence would have been possible in 1993. Disenfranchised folks having fewer barriers to participating in culture and finding their circles = objective good, fuck nostalgia.
I kinda miss cruising the Missouri backwoods, listening to Biz Markie tapes in my old Volkswagen Cabriolet, and staying up all night working on music. But really, the car and the music were both hella shitty.

MT: What was your first San Francisco makeout?
CK: It would have been with Emily in 2008, in our first-ever apartment together at Turk and Leavenworth. I had never lived in a city before and never set foot in California prior to moving here, so hopefully we got a few good makeouts in before I went into my month-long culture shock poutcoma.
MT: What are you obsessed with right now?
CK: Hunting down pirated episodes of Adventure Time, hitting refresh on Emily’s Tumblr (tusksfamily.tumblr.com) even though we’re sitting in the same room, 2011 Oakland rap videos, Robert Ashley’s video opera “Perfect Lives,” making giant batches of burritos and freezing them. Nancy comics.

MT: What was your last project and what will you work on next?

CK: Most recently, I’ve run support for (and acted/sang/operated puppets for) Emily’s new movie, Gold Diggers of 1829, which took three years to finish. Plus we got married in July, and that involved designing an unzippable ring pillow shaped like a gutted fish, and a talent show and Powerpoint presentations and the release of a wedding zine full of comics by our friends about us. Plus the usual weddingy stuff. I feel like we could’ve gotten an artist grant to cover our wedding if we’d been smart. In general, I’m very lucky to be doing creative work at my day job, creating video and writing for Colorlines.com. For the coming year, I’ve got a few scripts and comics ideas in very early stages — they’re all kinda scifi stonerish comedies about the internet and sex and intersectionality.

Emily + Channing

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