holiday couture

I had conceived of writing about the different holiday things that did ultimately come up after I jumpstarted the holidays with my Scrooge-y rant. I thought I'd go on about my resistance to push, shove, and elbow others in the crowded streets or at the mall and how I don't feel the need to scurry around like that. Isn't it just a means to solidify relationships into the next year?

Well, I thought I wanted to write about that, but I keep hitting a wall. I feel like I don't really care. I don't really want this forum for personal expression anymore. I don't know. Maybe. Sometimes it's nicer to be anonymous. It's like hearing the neighbors through the wall. Make of it what you will, but it's not the truth.

Speaking of anonymity, I write short on-line film reviews. After I was involved with screening movies for a local film festival I posted a couple reviews about some of those flicks on IMDb. Out of nowhere I received a personal message from one of the actors who was in one of the really dreadful ones. He was offended, pissed off, and whatever about my opinion of the movie he was in. It really caught me off guard. I was so taken aback I almost felt uncovered from behind my IMDb moniker. I wrote him back to smooth over whatever injury he had to his pride. Strangely, he wrote back and felt comfortable enough to share how right I was about the low quality of his movie and how unprofessional the producers and crew were, and on and on. I don't know what it was but with a small bit of diplomacy on my part I gave the guy an opportunity to vent a little.

What does that have to do with the holidays? I don't really know.

It's hard to be sure of anything, growing up in one of those Easter-Christmas presumably Christian homes, where the occasional redemptive rush to church in the early morning seemed to excise my mother's demons in the off-season. It's hard to know what to take from the holiday when what you've quietly known since you were a child and began to speak up about as a teenager is that your beliefs don't coincide with what you were being fed. It's hard when the traditions are fun, taste good, and the like. It's hard to give it up just because you are repulsed by the commercialism from a standpoint that mass-marketing, pop star sell-outs, and big conglomerate buyouts make-up the news of the day and it just doesn't go away. It gets worse. Nothing becomes more about family or more about friends or simpler around the holidays. The wolves pound harder on the door and the sales get brasher.

Phew! It seems appropriate that the New Year will be met in a new apartment with a few less things after another personal purge.

I need a change.

candy store

In one of those writer e-mail newsletter subscriptions I get was an article entitled "Creativity: Overcoming Too Many Ideas Syndrome". It involves the writer who finds themselves so overwhelmed by inspiration that they never seem to finish anything. As clunky a title as it is, I can fully relate to the concept of starting one new idea after another and then moving on. No closure, no fruition.

I was once told by a film school buddy of mine that some writers like being in "that" world so much they don't want to leave. I don't know if it's exactly that, though. I get so much out of the creative process. Sometimes I'm just not sure of the value of finishing. Building up the stack doesn't really seem to get me anywhere. All dressed up with no where to go, so to speak.

The thing is that I have plenty to say and I never lack a place to go next. There's always another story for me to tell or for me to go back to tell in a new way. I have never really had a fear of the oft-spoken about sophomore slump that affects filmmakers and musicians alike. For example, think of Kevin Smith's "Mallrats" as an example of a flick rushed out much too quickly or Terrence Malick's "Days of Heaven" given much too slowly.

It's not so much about finishing something that really gets me. It's about giving it up to the world. Well, sort of...

The best example is what I've done with this journal. I've written about four or five entries during the past couple weeks and have had little or no inclination to post them. I find it sort of peculiar. Perhaps it's about the give and take with the instant commentary and analysis, the lack of reciprocation, the want of opening up and exposing parts of myself, but feeling ultimately needy, empty. And I'm left wishing many of my readers would be so bold. I think it's the actor's sensitivity: standing alone under the lights, quelling up with uncomfortable emotions, while the audience sits their critiquing.

The main difference is that this is me. I'm not playing a role, except the one I play everyday. I am the perception of who I think I am, of how someone like me walks through the world, of how I see every movement and thought. True, that's all siphoned through me before it gets here, but putting it out without the guise of created character and interwoven theme like I can do in fiction is something I am hardwired to avoid.

I've heard it said that "blogs [yuck] are for bloggers [double-yuck]" and the presumed audience is secondary, but I've always written with an audience in mind. I used to write personal journals in that same way, as if with some overwrought expectation that one day they will be referenced in some bombastic memoir.

Yeah, right.

hypocrisy 2

Just got this through my Filmmaker Magazine e-mail newsletter:

"WHAT WOULD JESUS BUY? Just in time for the holiday season, Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) brings us a Christmas tale that is sure to cause some controversy. What Would Jesus Buy?, directed by Rob VanAlkemade, introduces Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping's Gospel Choir to the big screen as they load up their bus for a cross country trip and attempt to save people from the holiday season's rampant consumerism. The film is much less silly then it sounds, and actually brings forth several issues most people forget to think about this time of year, such as how much consumers really spend, the risk of debt, and what the big chain stores do to local economies."

Thank you!

balance beam

Years always draw to a close for me in a similar personal fashion. Like many, it's a time for personal spring cleaning: dusting off the old identity, cleaning out the mental closet, wiping off the counters of my soul, and all sorts of other mixed metaphors that quickly ensue.

The hustle and bustle of the holidays always overpowers such efforts toward taking stock. Since I was a kid, there was always a part of me that felt that December was a wasted month. Better put, it didn't really exist. Everything quickly becomes the year-end wrap up, as if the year's eulogy is offered prematurely. Does life really cease? Sometimes parties overtake general workplace agendas. Everything seems to take a backseat.

So, befitting one who enjoys eating his cake and complaining about the frosting, the holiday season moved a foot forward this past weekend as I took in a holiday-themed matinee and the holiday tunes eased themselves back into the music library blend on the computer (one such tune found itself awkwardly placed between some country song and Rage Against the Machine).

The matinee was a stage performance of "Bell Book and Candle". The film version starring James Stewart, Kim Novak, and Jack Lemmon was one of the first five movies I ever saw. The movie always had a special place in my heart, and it was in pretty regular circulation when I was growing up, along side the original "Miracle on 34th Street", some artificially colorized version of "A Christmas Carol", and "It's a Wonderful Life". For some reason my mom would always call it "It's a Good Life", lacking any irony or cynicism. I'm sure that says something.

film library

"You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy"
-Eric Hoffer


I'm moving.

Streamlining.

Parting with a large percentage of what was briefly an impressive movie library that was accumulated through some expenditure and rolls of (now antiquated) VCR tape that I used to buy every two weeks in the bulk 10-Pack. Surrounding myself with the "ownership" of movies and stacks of books about film and filmmaking does not represent my love, passion, and involvement in the art.


I do.