joan, arkansas

making yourself your audience

alway always...otherwise lapse into what I used to call the sentimental, positing someone else as your audience. it's not a confining stance if you realize as whitman put it, that you "contain multitudes". that's the challenge. and that's what I thank "Keane" for reminding me of.

Movie: Keane

He made a great film. So great it transcends envy. Simply alive and great.

continuity in art

in Art, continuity is everything. that's why in teaching filmmaking, teach history. art can't be taught, but the impulse to pick up the thread and what to do with it, the excitement of that, perhaps can be offered

NOW

Marking the time it begins

what does Time do?

what does Time do?
balloon your crime
your woe
your love
Time is a lazy fuck
and couldn't care less
Time is a person you
made up in your cute
sad way
Time is gravity i.e
acceleration
the limning of an eye
not the eye
not the sumi-e
calligrapher
Time is nothing
Get Time out of your head
Stop reifying
You'll be fine

Ok, so it's ADD

if I'm only motivated to act by adrenaline, by the sense of a deadline, or perhaps the ultimate deadline, which is death, and that simple disappointment and dissatisfaction is something that I will lazily shoulder and bear up until that point, then this spells a trainwreck, a wasted life, and I am well on my way toward that end, having done or left little to be proud of. If I don't scare myself, get off the tractor that I sat on at age 13 dawdling, dreaming, waiting for ambition to strike me, I will end a bitter failure. i need to lay down principles to reverse course now.

1) bannish laziness
2) do nothing halfway that matters
3) set real deadlines and meet them
4) don't deviate
5) and don't coddle yourself with the notion that you are wrecking your dream inspiration. it will survive. trust me.

Movie: The Social Network

Ok, read the screenplay on the internet, saw the movie. So it was skilfully done and very entertaining. Nice job Sorkin, nice job Fincher. Jesse Eisenberg taking on the mantle of that brilliant-but-socially-blind-but-still-capable-of-great-friendship-and-hurt character did great. The story is a defense of how genius alienates and can lose touch with the heart. Check. Kind of like Citizen Kane, only here someone steps in at the end and says to Charles Foster Kane, you're not an asshole, you just want to be one and salvages a hopeful happy ending from the jaws of tragedy. Of course it's different, because while Zuckerberg is portrayed as driven and somehow charismatic in a new way the world has never known, yet he is also shy with autistic shading. Great snappy dialogue, observation of the zeitgeist pretty good (although I wonder how Harvard-as-newest colony in the Aryan Nation really corresponds to reality). It's less of an amusement park ride than I thought it might be before reading the script, but it's a ride nonetheless, in that it does not perforate into the real world of real live human beings, but comfortably hides behind the "spectacular monied success or failure", "asshole or not an asshole" as the main dramatic questions. Maybe little drama, truth be told, plumbs much farther than that, but Sorkin sets out with the firm credo that it properly cannot, and that the only thing workable is to grow up and realize that and make good stories within that box. He once said any screenwriter who thinks his characters somehow have "lives" beyond what's on the page is delusional. Of course he's right in one sense, wrong in another. And for his adhering faithfully to that "declaration of principles" I think he has made the Social Network a great social document, not a great movie.

p.s. - interesting deletion on screen from the screenplay. there is a scene where Sean Parker sets up Zuckerberg in a revenge ploy toward his own former nemesis the VC Mike Moritz, instructing him, once Facebook is taking off and investors are begging onboard, to take a meeting with Moritz and tell him to fuck off. Zuckerberg agrees to do it, and while the scene isn't shown it is presumed to happen offscreen. The setup of that scene was deleted, clearly because it overly complicates Zuckerberg's character and makes him less sympathetic. Was it Fincher who cut that? Did they shoot it? Interesting because the calculation was that they would have lost some of the audience, who needs a very simple throughline on Zuckerberg to follow in order to keep loving him. Thought experiment: Imagine the script being made by Cassavetes. Or more realistically Mike Nichols--ok, say the Mike Nichols of Carnal Knowledge. Not only not deleting that scene, but elaborating on it and doing mischief withe script. Then, maybe a movie for the ages...

p.p.s. - to be fair, reality tugs at the movie in much more insistent way than documentary truth about Hearst troubled Mankiewicz, who in fact delighted in the arch pastiche of it and had a personal axe to grind too.

it would be self-aggrandizing to say

oh they've all written me off.
they didn't even know you existed
misprision
prison

upon making his entrance

upon making his entrance
he wanted to fix everything
make everone happy
mend grievances
be admired loved respected
an entry into a new room
was like falling
and grabbing as he fell
always a chute of failure
abject failure

what a man has done

Pawel: What remains after someone dies.
Krzysztof: What a man has done.

- Dekalog, 1

death is a nice place to visit

they joked about the dead man
to demonstrate to others how well they knew him
and how he would join in their joking if he were alive
or joke about them if they'd been the one dead.
it was a way of switching places
a courtesy
death is a nice place to visit

actor playing a cipher

vacillating within the bubble of whom he's supposed to be.
trying not to break the bubble's walls.

film about a tibetan buddhist

who is set up by his disbelieving friend to a lunch date with an eminent disbelieving former buddhist. the crisis that ensues. short

meaning lives inside emotion, a reification?

when emotion turns, meaning hollows out. not motive energy