Stuff
I’ve got some shit going on. It’s manifesting itself in an intense desire to clean my space and my life. Remarkably, it also is making me very focused on my book. In the old days, when I had some shit going on, I’d use it as an excuse to fuck myself up. In the new days, I use it to amp up my creativity and productivity and to organize my life.
Part of redirecting my shit meant that I spent four hours cleaning my bedroom yesterday afternoon and only got maybe a quarter of it done. My bedroom was in a Very Bad State. It was like 1983 and I don’t necessarily want to be sleeping in 1983. I mean, at least there weren’t overflowing ashtrays or coffee cups filled with a congealed brown mass and dead flies, but that’s about all that was missing. I’m talking clothes, books, old letters, Kleenex, DVDs, magazines, jewelry, notebooks, more books, three pairs of reading glasses, more DVDs, cough drops, endless Art Forums and Film Comments, and that’s just in the pile next to my bed. Anyway, I think I’ve advanced to about 1994 in my bedroom. Only 13 years to go until it’s clean.
Tonight I came home and started tackling my art room. This meant beginning to organize all of Bean’s art projects from 1st grade, 2nd grade and Art Camp. No small task. Then I began excavating the piles on one of my two art tables and found all kinds of treasures - gold plastic babies, whale pendants, fossilized Valentine cakes, my missing stamps, countless missing CDs, my favorite metal ruler, missing collage scissors, broken Barbie heads, skull beads and about a million other things. As far as cleaning the art room goes, I’d guess I have about ten years left. For now, I'll make art in the four square feet of space I cleaned and stab at the other feet when I can.
Finally it was time to leave the house because in my present state I realized that I am unable to function on any functional level that does not involve hiding inside my head and organizing stuff. So I went to the movies. Surprise. Surprise. I decided to take solace in the generic narrative of We Own The Night. Though the movie has gotten tepid reviews at best, I really wanted to see it and knew in my KDD Mind that the movie was underrated and misunderstood. I was right. We Own The Night is utterly meticulous and classic filmmaking. People don’t understand this kind of filmmaking anymore. They just want MTVesque rapid fire digital video. We Own The Night goes back to a pre-MTV era of filmmaking. It was the absolutely perfect film for me to see tonight because nothing comforts KDD like classic film. By doing something so entirely classic, James Gray also is doing something entirely fresh. Too bad people can’t taste the fresh of the classic. I could and loved it. I’ll write about it tomorrow if I have time AFTER plugging away at my book, my job, my mommy duties and organizing my life.
I also need to remember to write the thing I want to write about how there is no you in you anymore.
Bye.