who's hamlet now?
4:59 PM
me: i really like this show a lot, and Adm Adama is easily one of my favorites, but he is awfully Hamletty.
"Do I? No. Wait, yes. No! What was I thinking? Oh, fine, I will. Wait, maybe not..."
dutch: it's not like you can accuse [the writers] of changing their mind... they were only one [episode] apart!
me: i know!
dutch: very weird
6:02 PM
dutch: you gotta finish [Deadwood]
me: i will.
but you should consider starting Breaking Bad
dutch: top priority travis!
me: actually, top priority travis is, i've started editing again and i've been doing some serious soul searching (heh, ugh) about my life.
dutch: that doesn't sound good
me: like, how much of my time am i wasting, and how unjustifiable that is.
i know what i want
and i am not seeking it out with everything i've got.
and so, duh, i'm nowhere.
dutch: Who's Hamlet now?
me: right?
dutch: bazing!
And so, apart from being well-zinged by Dutch, I really have been thinking, Hamlet-style maybe. I mean, what the crap? I'm 30. I spend altogether too much time, huge portions of every day, doing nothing. Or thinking about, talking about, or blogging about doing something, rather than spending all that time doing it. What the crap, right?
The last two films I've seen in theaters were Che (insanely driven man changes the world in part because he forsakes lesser concerns and does not give up or back down) and Synecdoche, New York (insanely driven man struggles and fails to accomplish his masterpiece in part because he spends so much time fretting and working out how to do something that he never actually does anything). Che vs. Caden Cotard.
And it has occurred to me that I want to be Che and I am being Caden.
To that end, hopefully I'll be spending less time at the internet. Tonight I spent just over an hour here and then I cut myself off; I turned my attention to Open. At eight thirty tonight the cut was 11:20; it's now twenty past one and the cut is 9:58. Seriously: it's under ten minutes (we'll see if it lasts). I've killed a scene, chopped two more in half, dropped in some awkward slightly-mismatched music cues (a Belly song in French; an Aphex Twin piano track from Drukqs), and tried opening it a little more abstractly. I don't know if every step I took today was forward, but I took enough that I'm confident some of them were. Actually, I feel reasonably good about the night's work, but we're not out of the woods yet.
I am 30 years old. I want to be a filmmaker. And you know who makes it as a filmmaker? People who make films, who know how to focus and prioritize and work all the time. And you know whose films are interesting? People who live life interestingly. And you know what two things I haven't been doing for well over a year now? Guess.
I want this to be my thing. I want to be a filmmaker. That's what I want. That's all I want. If I'm not willing to put aside stupid shit and work at it, work hard, work my ass off, then fuck it. I deserve to fail. Right? We all do. I don't know, I just feel like, either things change or I lose.
And there it is.
And so, the self-directed pep talk continues. Tough love to follow. Soon I make lists of things I'm giving up because they are in the way of my goals. I'm not gonna like it.
me: i really like this show a lot, and Adm Adama is easily one of my favorites, but he is awfully Hamletty.
"Do I? No. Wait, yes. No! What was I thinking? Oh, fine, I will. Wait, maybe not..."
dutch: it's not like you can accuse [the writers] of changing their mind... they were only one [episode] apart!
me: i know!
dutch: very weird
6:02 PM
dutch: you gotta finish [Deadwood]
me: i will.
but you should consider starting Breaking Bad
dutch: top priority travis!
me: actually, top priority travis is, i've started editing again and i've been doing some serious soul searching (heh, ugh) about my life.
dutch: that doesn't sound good
me: like, how much of my time am i wasting, and how unjustifiable that is.
i know what i want
and i am not seeking it out with everything i've got.
and so, duh, i'm nowhere.
dutch: Who's Hamlet now?
me: right?
dutch: bazing!
And so, apart from being well-zinged by Dutch, I really have been thinking, Hamlet-style maybe. I mean, what the crap? I'm 30. I spend altogether too much time, huge portions of every day, doing nothing. Or thinking about, talking about, or blogging about doing something, rather than spending all that time doing it. What the crap, right?
The last two films I've seen in theaters were Che (insanely driven man changes the world in part because he forsakes lesser concerns and does not give up or back down) and Synecdoche, New York (insanely driven man struggles and fails to accomplish his masterpiece in part because he spends so much time fretting and working out how to do something that he never actually does anything). Che vs. Caden Cotard.
And it has occurred to me that I want to be Che and I am being Caden.
To that end, hopefully I'll be spending less time at the internet. Tonight I spent just over an hour here and then I cut myself off; I turned my attention to Open. At eight thirty tonight the cut was 11:20; it's now twenty past one and the cut is 9:58. Seriously: it's under ten minutes (we'll see if it lasts). I've killed a scene, chopped two more in half, dropped in some awkward slightly-mismatched music cues (a Belly song in French; an Aphex Twin piano track from Drukqs), and tried opening it a little more abstractly. I don't know if every step I took today was forward, but I took enough that I'm confident some of them were. Actually, I feel reasonably good about the night's work, but we're not out of the woods yet.
I am 30 years old. I want to be a filmmaker. And you know who makes it as a filmmaker? People who make films, who know how to focus and prioritize and work all the time. And you know whose films are interesting? People who live life interestingly. And you know what two things I haven't been doing for well over a year now? Guess.
I want this to be my thing. I want to be a filmmaker. That's what I want. That's all I want. If I'm not willing to put aside stupid shit and work at it, work hard, work my ass off, then fuck it. I deserve to fail. Right? We all do. I don't know, I just feel like, either things change or I lose.
And there it is.
And so, the self-directed pep talk continues. Tough love to follow. Soon I make lists of things I'm giving up because they are in the way of my goals. I'm not gonna like it.