A vocational question, tossed into the ether...

So if one loves making film/video art and literature, how does one become a successful video artist/art-filmmaker? How does one find the financing to make work on anything other than a tiny scale that is challenging and unconventional in its structure and relationship to its source text?

Mustasche March

This March, I participated in a competition to see who could grow the best mustache. The thing was dreamed up in February by Adam and Slate, who by their own admission saw it mainly as an excuse to have more guys walking around Penland with creepy mustaches. The rules were simple: the mustache had to be grown of the participant's own hair, on the participant's own face, and each contestant had to start the month with a clean shave and agree to pay the winner a dollar. Voting took place at lunch in the Pines, on Monday the 30th, and the winner was announced at lunch the next day. I am pleased to announce that my mustache took home the cash prize and a trophy, which was beautifully crafted by Glass instructor Martin Janecky and gilded by studio assistant Carrie Battista. I believe that the reasons for my victory were twofold: 1. fast-growing facial hair, and 2. the courage to grow and wear it as a mustache for the entire month, rather than growing a beard and shaving the excess near the end as many of my competitors did. Cheered by the crowd to make an acceptance speech, I offered these words: "I'd like to thank my parents for giving me the genetic material that made this victory possible, and the good people in the kitchen who fed me such a delicious, high-protein diet. Also, thanks to Adam and Slate for having the vision and making it a reality, and to all of you good people for your encouragement and your votes. I hope that my victory today may go some distance toward rehabilitating the popular image of the mustache. It seems that somewhere along the line, the mustache fell out of favor in our culture. Maybe this is because (as my fellow core student Mark Warren suggested) many of us grew up with an unconscious fear that Burt Reynolds would steal our mothers from us (though in my case, it was Tom Selleck); or perhaps we watched one too many cheap pornos in college or saw Charlie's Angels kidnapped by one too many mustached men in a conversion van. Whatever the reason, I think it's a mistake, and I am here today to declare that I am not a child molester, nor a 70s porn star, nor your 6th grade gym teacher. I am a good man, a gentle man, a friendly man, a man with a mustache."
It was a proud moment for me. But one shouldn't rest on laurels, and it seemed that a March mustache might be bad luck in April, so that evening before bed I snipped, clipped, and shaved my upper lip back to the factory preset, as it were.

Dante the pilgrim

I was watching Peter Greenaway's TV Dante on Ubuweb yesterday, and it called to mind a moment from the fall of 1995, when I was a student at Anne Arundel Community College. I was enrolled in a course in World Literature (which to its credit was truly global in scope - we read bits of everything from Indian theater to Mayan creation myths, from Chinese poetry to Faust), and we were discussing Dante's Divine Comedy. My professor remarked, somewhat offhandedly, that the directness of Dante's narrative and the richness of his descriptive verse could only be the result of lived experience. This struck me as an odd thing to say, and so I asked him if he meant to say he believed that the poet had literally experienced the events related in the Inferno. "Yes," he said, "That's exactly what I mean. Dante lived this story, or at least he believed that he did. This stuff is for real."

"Blago gets the boot"

I think I'm going to miss Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. Seriously, the guy had really begun to win my sympathy in his last few days in office. It's not that I disbelieve the charges against him, nor that I thought of him as a particularly venerable political figure. Rather, it occurs to me that for much of my adult life, I've been growing accustomed to watching the winners in politics act like gloating, petulant jerks, even as ever more of their victories could be chalked up to fiat, dishonesty or error, while the losers were expected to behave politely and contritely, in the interest of stablity and decorum. Reading excerpts this morning from governor Blagojevich's final address to the Illinois senate, I realized that I had begun to get a special pleasure from watching a loser defiantly refuse to give in, even as the tide of inevitability rose all around him. Having spent the last few weeks recoling from the sickening grey spectacle of George W. Bush leaving the presidency with the false air and gestures of a gentle, respectable statesman, it's been a refreshing change for me to watch a villain boldly refuse to go quietly. If all politics is theater, Rod Blagojevich's was at least an impassioned, compelling performance.

Warmth and light

On Thursday, I looked up from my email at 6 p.m. to discover, though the sun had sunk behind the mountains, there was still light in the sky. Friday was brilliant and clear, with a high temperature in the 60s. A bright sunrise filled my bedroom with early light, and it occurred to me that I've been waking progressively earlier recently, in little bits and increments. I drove to the grocery store in a sweatshirt, with the windows down, listening to the Hallmark Sounds of Halloween tape that Marianne gave me. In the evening, Marianne, Andrew and I walked to new resident artist Amy Tavern's housewarming party. The warmth and light of the day were liberating; in the winter, I feel trapped, cut off, but Friday I felt a part of the world, free to walk around in the open air. It was like being reborn. Today it is chilly and gray; winter is far from gone, but I have gotten a hopeful reminder that it won't last forever.
In Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Kathleen Norris writes,
"Weather Report: February 10 - Spring seems far off, impossible, but it is coming. Already there is dusk instead of darkness at five in the afternoon; already hope is stirring at the edges of the day."

A dream

A few nights ago, I dreamed that my grandmother was still alive and making dinner for my father, my aunt and I. She was cooking very slowly and we were tired of waiting, so dad took me out to eat instead. As we ate microwaved pizzas at a folding table in the freezer aisle of a grocery store, he looked me in the eye and told me I should give up art and become a writer. The next morning on the radio, Garrison Keiller quoted someone famous (whose name I can't remember now), saying "How does one become a writer? Try to do something - anything - else." So by that reckoning, dream-dad, I'm right on track.

A new age of Hollywood musicals?

I think it's time for the crowd of young Hollywood filmmakers who keep giving us mediocre depressing-and-uncomfortable-life-situation comedies with brilliant, loony musicals buried in them to admit that they are better at creating brilliant, loony musicals than depressing-and-uncomforatble-life-situation comedies. Seriously, Nicholas Stoller, jettison the rest of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and just show us the Dracula puppet rock opera. And Andrew Fleming, why not cut the dead wood that makes up the other 60 minutes of Hamlet 2 and just present the musical in it's entirety? Dare to let go of your ironic detachment, take sugar over saccharine, stop acting like you're too smart for the things you're good at and we (the audience) are too smart for the things we enjoy, and you may just begin a new age of Hollywood musicals.