small potatoes

previously published by me elsewhere:

If there's one thing people who are close to me have known for years, my sleeping patterns are 100% unpredictable. Some weeks the number crunchers in my head tally up all of the bits of rest I've gotten, and gather a pretty decent average, but other weeks I'm in the red.

For some reason there's always something small that sets me off in big ways. I'm awakened by the proverbial crying baby, if you will. So, I woke up at 3AM this morning after my requisite two and a half hours worth of shut-eye, and I've been going steadily since then.

I'm finally getting caught up on some back issues of MovieMaker, and I have unexpectedly found myself developing some really strong new ideas for a script that I started working on during the summer of 2005, but had since set aside.

There's something about going back to a project after some time that's still in the midst of its development. I find certain senility has set in during that time, and going back you find personal gems that are far better than your best perception of self, and the material re-inspires you.

The frosting for this fine day comes from one of my favorite cable channels: Turner Classic Movies. They were running a twenty-four hour marathon of short films that just finished at 6AM this morning. Not being one of those people with TiVo, I have taped the whole twenty-four hour stretch on good ol' VHS. I tend to have trouble watching things that I would like to fully digest in real-time, so I'm going to watch it all at my own leisure starting this morning.

To me the short film is so fascinating in a lot of ways. Except those darling judges of the festival circuit, few viewers really get the chance to see many short films in their time. The most prominent forms, music videos, were always this side of four minute advertisements, but what has actually become of music television is now self-parody.

Simplistically the short film has the potential to fall somewhere in the wide expanse between trifle and pretension. It's like listening to the twenty song "Fingertips" cycle at the end of They Might Be Giants' Apollo 18 CD. Was that great art, or just an underdeveloped idea?