Colin Marshall

Personality

Andrew O’Hehir recently helpfully suggested that film critics cease their insistent death rattles and get on with the business of, y’know, writing about movies. (To wit: “I will offer some unsolicited advice to my fellow critics all around the world: Shut up. Shut up now. Shut the fuck up and get back to work.”) Later in the piece, he says something even more important to critics and immensely relevant to writers of any kind: “Film criticism is a kind of performance, an adjunct form of entertainment. If it isn't funny and lively and engaging, it isn't anything at all.”

I would submit that O’Hehir’s words are true for 90 percent of the words one might string together in a career: if it ain’t funny, lively, and engaging, it ain’t dick. In film criticism specifically, all the erudition and well-developed theory in the world won’t save you from irrelevance if you forget that your principal task is simply to write well. Or, a O’Hehir puts it, “Reviewing movies is a lot more like performing stand-up comedy than like delivering a philosophy lecture. None of those grand ideas even begin to matter if you're boring and you can't write.”

I loved that my interview last week with Battleship Pretension hosts Tyler Smith and David Bax [transcript] turned into a pretty respectably in-depth discussion of criticism itself. I asked them what, in an environment crammed full of film bloggers, film podcasters, and plain old film reviewers, they listen for most in voices discussing cinema. It seemed to come down to not necessarily knowledge, not necessarily intellectual acumen, but personality.

Then it dawned on me: of course — that’s why I listen to their show too! That’s why I listen to all the podcasters and broadcasters I listen to. That’s why I read all the writers and bloggers I read. That’s, in a less direct but no less valid way, why I watch the filmmakers I watch. (It’d be true for vloggers too, if I ever watched vlogs.) I won’t go so far as to say that personality is all, but it now seems obvious to me that, without personality, nothing else — however much you have of it — matters.

Naturally, I make such a big deal of this because I so often fail at having a personality myself. That’s not to say that I don’t possess one — though the matter remains up for debate — but that I don’t convey one. I might have picked up that ill-serving habit through commercial radio announcing, which is all about getting in, maintaining a tone, reading song titles off the monitor, and getting out. You’ll notice commercial radio isn’t a particularly booming industry these days.

Whenever one quashes their own personality in the sort of media that needs it most, I tend to suspect, as Tyler Smith said in our interview, that they want desperately to sound like they know what they’re talking about. We all run this risk from time to time. The probable consequence is a reaction from the audience much the same as the one Smith described himself as having to most other film podcasts: “Wow! You've managed to bore me about the subject I love most. That's really quite a feat!”

Ultimately, I’ve never thought to myself, “Wow, this guy knows so much!” and then become a dedicated fan. I have thought, “Wow, this guy’s so engaging!”, and dedicated fandom followed. Indeed, most of my favorite people to read, watch, hear, etc. probably know far less about the subjects that most interest me than I do. Maybe that’s all that needs to be said on this subject.

Colintroduction

Why, hello there. My name is Colin Marshall, and you have reached my blogular presence on the Information Superhighway. Due to my compulsion to act on unhealthy variety of interests and convert them into various forms of media, chances are better than even that I can offer you something you’re interested in. Here, I’m going to list all I can, as clearly as I can, because even I routinely forget what I’m supposed to be doing at any given time.

My enterprises break roughly into what I think of as four handy “quadrants”: broadcasting, writing, film, and sound. While I make things about these things in and of themselves, I also use them as forms to make stuff about my other, less-broad interests: East Asia, languages, hybridity, the experimental, economics, aesthetics, the urban environment, conversation with neato people, and so on. If this sounds confusing, it kind of is! Let’s break it down piece by piece.

On this very blog, available since 2002 on Livejournal and since 2007 on Typepad, I write about every subject I’m competent to write about, and some I’m not. I used to write more about current events and stuff and express much stronger opinions, but then I realized I hate getting into internet arguments and that nobody, myself included, really knows anything about anything. Before that, I used to write more about cars and popular culture of the years 1978 through 1994, but then I realized those subjects are pretty much dead ends. Nowadays, most of my post turn out to deal with books, film, writing itself, and how to live a reasonably non-wasted life.

I write monthly primers on contemporary novelists which are published by the literary site The Millions. Most of the novelists I’m concerned with disregard the very concept of genre, do what I consider interesting things with form, structure, or language — I’m not particularly moved by plot or character — and seem somehow underappreciated. I’ve written primers on Kobo Abe, Alexander Theroux, B.S. Johnson, and David Markson. I’ve got more on the way about authors like Douglas Coupland, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Ryu Murakami, and J.G. Ballard. The goal is to have enough of them to publish a book, presumably to be titled something like 50 Contemporary Novelists Without Whom Your Brain Will Wither and Die. Except I don’t have an agent. Does anybody have an agent I could use?

Also every month — theoretically — comes a new installment of The Humanists, the film column I write for 3QuarksDaily. Each article focuses on one film from a particularly great director. I find great directors do the same things as great novelists: they work primarily in form rather than content, they take risks, they urinate all over genre. I haven’t written one of these in a while, but I’ll get back on the horse soon. In the meantime, some of the best, I think, are on Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century, Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse, and (my favorite film of all time) Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Maborosi.

At least once or twice a week, I update my Ubuweb Experimental Video Project. Ubuweb is the internet’s largest archive of avant-garde material from God Knows When to present, and they have a substantial archive of films and videos. I’m watching all of them, alphabetically by artist’s name and then chronologically, and writing my reactions on this blog. In one of my life’s cooler turns of events, Ubuweb’s founder Kenneth Goldsmith reached out and offered to host my writings on Ubuweb itself. Maybe you wonder why I would do something like this. I’d say it serves the three purposes of (a) honing my writing skills, (b) providing a vast body of audiovisual techniques to steal, and (c) being entertaining for people. (I try to make them funny.)

Since 2008, I have written a weekly podcast review for the web side of Public Radio International’s The Sound of Young America. The column is officially titled Podthoughts. The Sound of Young America, a nationally syndicated interview program, was founded and continues to be hosted by Jesse Thorn, a fellow with whom I’ve long communicated (and once interviewed) but only just met. There are actually a number of similarities between me and him, especially in that we both went to middle-tier University of California schools, we both started shows on our respective schools’ radio stations, and we both think public radio could do a lot better that it does right now. (His own efforts in the medium have inspired mine, about which more below.) Though it’s sometimes a drag how little feedback Podthoughts draws, it’s exposed me to shows I wouldn’t have otherwise heard and connected me with some fabulous people.

More recently, my girlfriend Madelaine Frezza and I started Santa Barbara Unseen, a project to collect and contextualize the images of Santa Barbara, where we live, which aren’t endorsed by the Santa Barbara Board of Tourism. It’s a small town and one nearly as full of palm trees and Spanish architecture as you’ve been let to believe, but there’s fascinating, gritty stuff here too. If enough people find this idea appealing, we’ll probably use Kickstarter to fund a similarly themed art book, something in the vein of Douglas Coupland’s City of Glass.

I also write for Santa Barbara’s weekly paper, The Independent, and I host their weekly radio show on KCSB-FM, Poodle Radio. Further trying to bridge the gap between these two local media institutions, I write a weekly column called The KCSBeat, in which I aim to raise awareness of all the cool radio people are making on the station. I’ve gotten to know a lot of the aforementioned neato people that way.

Since 2007, I’ve hosted and produced another radio program and podcast, The Marketplace of Ideas. It’s dedicated to hour-long interviews with the most interesting luminaries I can find: authors, musicians, scientists, filmmakers, professors, broadcasters, entrepreneurs, etc. I’ve done some of the work I’m proudest of in this venue, including conversations with people I’ve admired for years like Jack Hues of Wang Chung, Bookworm host Michael Silverblatt, comic artist Peter Bagge and Marginal Revolution blogger Tyler Cowen, and specials on things like the 40th anniversary of Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left.

I host another, podcast-only show called Barely Literate, which is a book club in podcast form. We talk about the class of authors I write up for The Millions, but, through the other participants’ selections, we touch on the more engaging edges of sci-fi and other genres as well. (If you haven’t gathered by now, I really don’t engage well with genre.) The show’s on something of an extended between-"season" break at the moment, but I assure you it’s coming back.

Ever since interviewing musician/critic/label head/sound artist Lawrence English on The Marketplace of Ideas, I’ve been into field recordings. Last year, I released my first field recording album, New Zealand Stories, for free. I’m currently putting together a few sound art projects — perhaps with occasional visual components, once I obtain a Harinezumi — to submit to the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum’s 2011 call for entries.

Also last year, I made the first in a series of Santa Barbara Psychogeography videos. Though my camera broke shortly after completing it, I bring good news: there will be more! Madelaine and I are even now laying out plans to make Santa Barbara Psychogeography into a television series on Channel 17, which will, of course, also be viewable on the internet. It’ll hit somewhere desirably in the middle of my interests in still photography, motion photography, cinema, and field recording, not to mention be pretty fun to watch.

In July, I wrote and directed Observer, my first narrative short film. Since I’m submitting it to festivals, I can’t make it publicly available yet, but there are production notes here and stills here. The people from whom I’ve solicited feedback have called it a fine example of Santa Barbara noir and an effective inducer of creeping, amorphous dread. Tim and Pav recently interviewed me about it on their radio show, Radio Causeway. A trailer should make its way up Real Soon Now.

I regularly do live DJing here in Santa Barbara, most recently at the Contemporary Arts Forum’s 24-hour drawing marathon and every month at the Santa Barbara New Music Series. I lack a coherent way to describe my material, other than, in one of my sets, you will almost certainly hear Eberhard Weber, Alva Noto, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Scanner, Brian Eno, Mitchell Akiyama, Tim Hecker, Tujiko Noriko, and David Toop. (Two of whom have been on The Marketplace of Ideas, and two others of whom I’ll maybe aggressively pursue for same.)

I also do a bunch of personal journaling, have a few bookish things in the works, and am learning Korean and Japanese, but those aren’t really things I “make” or “have made,” per se. Oh, and I tweet — and tweet hard.

The really fascinating part is that I don’t get money from any of this. (Technicality: some of the print stuff gets me money.) I draw more or less a hobo’s salary, and it doesn’t come from any of the above. (It does get spent on many of the above, though.) It’s actually a pure fluke that I earn even that, since I only possess the skills involved in the above. I sometimes sit and wonder about what happened to my modest material aspirations at the end of high school, such as, say, a t-topped Nissan 300ZX, market value $6,000. Now, I find I must force even the thought of a 1991 Tercel out of my mind, for the mental image of such a forbidden desideratum is too beautiful to bear.

I always figured I could establish a substantial audience and go from there, but, as the astute Justin Wehr put it, I am a living refutation to “If you build it, they will come.” Ben Casnocha suggests I be the first recipient of a Junior MacArthur Foundation fellowship, which isn’t something I’d turn down, but something inside me still believes strongly that, if I’m supporting myself on anything other than customers’ money exchanged for goods provided and services rendered, I am “not a productive member of society.”

Though this does feel a bit like I “did life wrong” at some point, I’m not exactly saddened — just sort of confused, like I released a bowling ball and it somehow fell up. Unless I’m missing a bunch of critical factors, my calculations tell me that The Marketplace of Ideas alone should have at least ten times the listeners it does. Hmm. Hence my goal to level up in life, i.e., to make it more consistent, more aligned — to make it a life where the things that take up 90 percent of my time aren’t technically “on the side.”

How, you ask? Dunno.

Fifteen reasons James Franco owns you

I'd heard rumblings that James Franco wasn't your average silver-screen heartthrob, but I figured that just meant he's read Proust or paints with gouache or owns two wineries or something. Turns out no. He's actually some sort of superhuman artist-academic. Alex Mann passed me this profile of him by Sam Anderson, my favorite New York Magazine writer. The fifteen choicest bits follow:

1. "We’ve just finished listening to a lecture by the performance artist Marina Abramovic — a talk Franco introduced"
    
2. "He’s trying to nail down the details of an art show that will be based, somehow, on his recent performance on the soap opera General Hospital."
    
3. "He has class every day — since he’s enrolled in four graduate programs at once"
    
4. "most of his student films, he tells me, have been adaptations of poems"
    
5. "Was he flirting with me, or metaflirting — making a sly reference to all the gay rumors swirling around him"
    
6. "An unusual actor — he overprepared for minor roles, read Dostoyevsky and Proust between takes, and occasionally drove colleagues crazy with his intensity"
    
7. "He persuaded his advisers to let him exceed the maximum course load, then proceeded to take 62 credits a quarter, roughly three times the normal limit."
    
8. "He’s engineered his life so he can spend all his time either making or learning about art."
    
9. "This is, no doubt, mildly insane, even if it’s a form of insanity many of us might want to have."
    
10. "He’s not a savant or an obvious genius — he’s someone of mortal abilities who seems to be working immortally hard."
     
11. "One of the central points of Franco’s art and career, as I read them, is that adolescence isn’t something we should look away from, a shameful churning of dirty hormones. It’s the crucible of our identity, the answer to everything that comes later"
     
12. "Once he gave up trying to control his acting career, everything kind of came his way."
     
13. "as he slides further along the continuum from Gyllenhaal to Warhol — his entire career is beginning to look less like an actual career than like some kind of gonzo performance piece"
     
14. "For an earnest guy, Franco has always been ragingly addicted to meta."
     
15. "It’s either hypocrisy or complexity, self-delusion or radical self-acceptance. It’s the defining fault line of his career, the source of much of his energy. Were he to resolve it in one direction or the other, he might cease to be so interesting."

Gimme

Pretty much everyone like me (and probably like you) has wondered what it would be like to get woken up early in the morning by a call from the MacArthur Foundation. "You are teh genius," the voice on the other end might say, though it would more likely call you "a recipient of this year's John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship" or something. They're called "genius grants" colloquially, but the foundation seems to play that down.

Enabling these idle fantasies, Jim Collins wrote about his own phone call in 2005:

I received a call. The person on the other end of the line asked if I was Jim Collins and if I was alone. For a moment, I thought I was receiving an obscene phone call.

The caller then told me I had been selected as a MacArthur fellow. I laughed, convinced this was another well-orchestrated prank by one of my former college roommates. The caller tried to reassure me, and eventually gave me a number to call to confirm the award. The number had a Chicago area code, the home of the MacArthur Foundation. Maybe this was legit.

I called the number and was assured by the folks on the other end that I really had been selected for the award. They then told me I couldn't tell anyone, except my immediate family, until the announcement in a few days.

That night, my wife and I told our young children about the award. Our daughter quickly chimed in that she too was a genius, but her brother was not, because he didn't know all of his colors and he could count only to 10.

Every year, the MacArthur Fellowship unconditionally awards 20-40 Americans $500,000 each for "exceptional merit and promise for continued and enhanced creative work." Examples: Alex Ross won one in 2008, Terence Tao did in 2006, Johnathan Lethem did in 2005, museum of Jurassic Technology creator David Wilson did in 2001, and David Foster Wallace did in 1997. It's difficult enough to figure out the rhyme or reason of Fellowship assignments — the board decides in secret — that it's a total mystery how to position oneself in its way.

One thing you seem to have to be is over 30, or maybe more like over 40-ish. Ben Casnocha, a man full of ideas, thus proposes a sort of Junior MacArthur Fellowship:

There needs to be a MacArthur Foundation that focuses on emerging talents. It should give no-strings-attached grants to emerging talents in the same way MacArthur does for established talents. The grants would be given regardless of type of talent, though it would emphasize those demonstrating extraordinary creative potential yet who do not have much money.

His case study? A certain Colin J. Marshall. Flattering, certainly, though it also raises a whole suite of issues I find interesting to think about. Many of these are brought up by the post's commenters. Here's a selection:

I am extremely disturbed by the lack of awareness that he even exists. This fact, more than any other, has persuaded me that “if you build it they will come” is completely, utterly false.

Maybe Colin wouldn't be so intimidated by the dark, occult art of making money if he made a sea-change in his thinking. Here are the phrases in his comments that jump off the page: "the impossible dream, "I have... disdain for myself," "I've got enough self-loathing as it is," "how I picture my tombstone," "I live in awe and fear," "I am gripped by a mortal terror," "I have long lived in terror," "I whine endlessly." This is not the kind of thinking that will get him where he wants to be, unless it's an early grave.

Isolating a guy like Marshall from the grubbier things could have some downsides.

Maybe he should apply for a feature journalist in some leading dailies or magazines, for a limited stint, as a career-experiment. Maybe there's a future Malcolm Gladwell into making; the New Yorker awaiting him. Maybe he should run for a job in reputed Ad agencies. We are in dearth of sensible marketers in this world, who don't just sell products, but also beautiful ideas to live by. Maybe he should write a book and get it published. A book is a tradable token of collective, cohesive, extended human thought, with an overwhelming, timeless physical presence and that sells well.

Your friend sounds like an extremely talented guy with a promising future, but I can't help thinking his disdain for the McJob could harm him not only financially but also creatively.

As an artist, isn't it dangerous to become too far removed from the concerns of Everyman?

You know what I call uber-intellectual, non-sell-out, can't fathom working a McJob/fallback career people? Bums. Pretentious bums at that.

All have sound points. Even if I weren't among the recipients, I like do Ben's idea. I've often pondered what the results might be from a Y Combinator-type organization that, rather than funding young groups of tech startup founders, funded young individual creators. That's not exactly "no-strings-attached," but it's in broadly similar territory of enterprise. Then again, funds granted with only a "Do what thou wilt" might prove more effective in the long run.

Yet, as several commenters pointed out, there is a danger in patronage. When you're not sustained by the (loaded phrase ahead) "real world," you run the risk of isolating yourself from it. When I make things, I make them not for my own amusement but to be received by the rest of actual humanity. I want what I make to not only be for the world, but of the world and in the world as well. Ivory towers, both the well-known ones and those that spring asymptomatically up around you, are the bane of my existence. This explains why I take pains to avoid professional academia when it comes calling — or, why I would take pains to avoid professional academia if it ever were to come calling.

I do, at this point, have some confidence that I could make good things with the kind of resources a Junior MacArthur-style grant could provide. But is it wise to pile a lot of time into projects your next meal isn't coming from? The world may never know.

Donkey Lips' third-in-command

I used to be fat, which sucked. This is no strike against the fat; I just hated being it. The worst thing about the fat condition, as I recall, was the constant burden of avoiding being conspicuously fat. Nervous concerns about how to sit, stand, act, dress, eat, and comb my hair so as not to call attention to the fat knocked everything else at least a couple rungs down the priority ladder. This was actually exacerbated by the fact that I wasn't quite the class fat kid, though I surely would've been sworn in if the four or five fatter kids were to suffer fatal heart attacks. Maybe when you're Donkey Lips, you own your size, but when you're the borderline — Donkey Lips' third-in-command — you obsessively front like you're on the other side.

Before biting the bullet and burning the weight after junior high, I'd often fantasize about my glorious post-fat future. Oh, the question wasn't about what I would do after being fat; the question was, what wouldn't I do? This gave me a certain amount of motivation, but in retrospect it was a recipe for grand mal procrastination. I pushed everything into the then-speculative after-fat era. Should I play music? Nah, I'll do it when I'm not fat. Should I act more? Nah, I'll do it when I'm not fat. Should I maybe make some more friends? Nah, I'll do it when I'm not fat. Now are you gonna pass that tray of peanut-buttered bagels, or aren't you?

The alert Alex J. Mann linked me up to a Hacker News post from Paul Graham about what changes when you get rich:

One thing you learn when you get rich is how few of your problems were caused by not being rich. When you can do whatever you want, you get a variant of the terror induced by the proverbial blank page. There are a lot of people who think the thing stopping them from writing that great novel they plan to write is the fact that their job takes up all their time. In fact what's stopping 99% of them is that writing novels is hard. When the job goes away, they see how hard.

By the same token, the younger me blamed his lack of achievement on being fat. The period right after losing the weight was, to be fair, fantastic. (Chalk up a point to my half-baked theory that life's best times are all openings-up of new vistas.) I almost immediately got together with a girl who, in appearance if nothing else, seemed to have been crafted from my mental image of The Girlfriend the World Has Long Owed Me. Yet the episode taught me a remarkably ill-serving lesson. It encouraged the delusion that progress in life is held back by some single obstacle whose defeat will allow everything to automatically fall into place. (I suspect another sketchy video game metaphor at work.)

Just like suddenly getting rich, this proved to be more of a distraction than a real advancement. Cut one obstacle down, and two more rise in its place. These obstacles can take any form. Just do a find-and-replace on Graham's words: "One thing you learn when you stop being fat is how few of your problems were caused by being fat." "One thing you learn when you get enough time is how few of your problems were caused by not having enough time." "One thing you learn when you get more information is how few of your problems were caused by not having more information." "One thing you learn when you get a significant other is how few of your problems were caused by not having a significant other."

For all the discomfort and self-consciousness, being fat had the advantage of giving me that single obstacle, that boulder in my path to fixate upon. If I was feeling down, I could just daydream about what might be behind the boulder. It was quick a pick-me-up that didn't require me to get up and, y'know, move the boulder. I've never stopped feeling the weenieish instinct to do the same about other simple problems: I'll do it when I know more people. I'll do it when I live somewhere bigger. I'll do it when I'm more fired up. I'll do it when I have better ideas.

The really poisonous part of this behavior is that it gives you an easy avenue of self-sabotage. If you suspect that, having cleared the boulder, you won't actually be able to realize that envisioned potential, you can always treat the boulder as insurmountable. This is just what Richard Yates wrote about in Revolutionary Road: claiming to dream of the amorphous expat writer's life in Paris, the thoroughly suburbanized Frank secretly relishes every one of fate's ostensible cruelties that prevent his "escape." He anesthetizes himself with the vision of, and desperately fears the reality of, what James Wood called "an invisible 'creative' life that he is too unimaginative to envision."

I've recently come to believe that, if I'm performing below full potential — though, as with perfection, the approach to full potential seems to me asymptotic — it's because my social connectedness is somewhat thin. I'm insufficiently networked, a marketing guru might say. While I do, in good faith, see this as the largest stone in my road, the trick is to avoid succumbing to the delusions that it's immovably large or the only one in my way. Both are so very pleasing, but not as pleasing as, uh, making something out of life.

The shibumi critic

There's this Japanese concept called shibumi, which Will Boehlke of A Suitable Wardrobe describes as a kind of quality sans flashiness. In his wheelhouse, displaying shibumi is "the best way to stand out": you do it by wearing clothes "that the eye passes over, only to return in appreciation." This concept applies well beyond men's fashion; I now find myself looking for the shibumi, the ostensibly unremarkable but subtly impressive, everywhere in life.

Peter Brunette was a shibumi sort of Marketplace of Ideas guest. I had him on the program in April to discuss the cinema of Michael Haneke, and he displayed the sort of strong grasp of craft and context a true film scholar should, not to mention the consummate lecturer's voice. The conversation's lack of unusual jags or shocking revelations perhaps caused your ear to pass over it, but did it not return in appreciation?

As anyone in film circles now knows, last Wednesday Brunette died suddenly at the Taormina Film Fest. The outpouring in response has been immense, coming from fellow critics, academic colleagues, students current and former, filmmakers, you name it. I've been seriously impressed; I suspected he was a pretty cool fellow from our interview, but he seems to have been so much more than that to so many. "My whole life is art films and foreign films and documentaries," he said to me. Calling it a life at a film festival has thus brought many of his remembers to remark that, hey, at least he went doing what he loved. But the more I happen to read about him, the more it seems to the point not that he died doing what he loved but that he lived doing it, which is maybe even rarer.

Here's a bit of Gerald Peary's memorial for the man in indieWIRE:

He was at every film festival on earth, or so it seemed: boisterous, gregarious, with that deep, booming voice, and spreading his extraordinary warmth. Who of you out there in critic-land have not shared a tasty dinner, or downed a brewski, somewhere on the globe with Peter Brunette? Who had not stuck with him, long into the festival night, when Peter—his term—would get properly “shitfaced”? Unusual in our stiff-in-our-body, I’d-rather-hide-in-the-dark profession, Peter was that weirdo film critic who really liked to have fun.

[ ... ]

“OK, I’ve got this festival figured out,” he would anounce on a first afternoon at Toronto, Cannes, anywhere, as he laid out a complicated game plan about how he would somehow get through the next days. His apprehensions started with a formidable lineup of films he’d been assigned to review for indieWIRE, or Screen International, or, in recent times, The Hollywood Reporter. Or there would be interviews he’d agreed on with negligible filmmakers because (That was Peter!) the female publicists representing them were twenty-something and damned cute.

[ ... ]

Partying away the night, Peter in the day was an unstoppable, Type-A workaholic. Also, and he agreed with my analysis, he had a Clintonian thirst to be noticed and liked. So the film reviews—and they were smart and good ones—spilled out at every festival. The publicists adored him (well, that hour) for writing about their clients. Byline: Peter Brunette.

We give lip service to living deeply, to not being one of Auntie Mame's poor suckers starving to death at life's buffet, but I find real examples strangely scant. Here is a man whose mourners have drawn an emergent portrait of as a true bon vivant, a genuine — read that adjective again, for I do not choose it lightly — lover of film, literature, travel, languages, wine, friends and "twenty-something and damned cute" publicists. In other words, a man who, even in death, probably has some lessons to teach a schlub like yours truly. Save not getting 30 more years or so, I would be surprised if Peter Brunette died with regrets.

My students go crazy because I can never remember how movies end. They say, “What happens at the end?” I say, “Gee, I can’t remember.” “What?” They’re astonished, because for them, the intrigue of the plot is most important, whereas for me, it’s striking moments, ideas that are used and played with. I rarely pay attention to plot. I know that makes me a little weird, makes my students laugh at me, but it’s just the way it is.

500 words

Brevity, Polonius said, is the soul of wit. I think that's true, yet I am, by nature, an enthusiast of the long form. In fact, longform.org, an aggregator of long-form articles new and old, may well be my favorite newish site on Internet. Clearly, brevity isn't the soul of good journalism, nor would I call it the soul of rich sonic experience, nor would I call it the soul of great literature, nor would I call it the soul of fine cinema. Because I make things I myself would enjoy — as anyone making anything should — I'm thus more of a natural long-form worker, too. Certainly I don't think brevity is the soul of fascinating interviews.

But then again, wit's nothing to scoff at. Even beyond getting big laffs, brevity's useful as a creative constraint. I've spilled much digital ink before about the catalytic effects of constraint on creation. The documentarian Errol Morris put it best, describing his way of art: "I create an arbitrary set of rules, and then follow them slavishly." Where I to create an arbitrary set of rules for blog posts, then follow them slavishly, what would they be? Could one, in the name of brevity, wit, focus, challenge, etc. be keeping each post at or under 500 words?

I'm working on two different film projects right now, both in their very early stages. One, The Aleph (which I've now started writing as just א, as it'll appear in the titles), adapts the eponymous Jorge Luis Borges short story. Since I'm working with pre-written source material and shooting on the savagely limited Super 8 film format, a lot of the "rules" are established for me: faith to the events of the text, minimal divergence from the details of the text except to strip it of its most specific temporally and geographically locative elements, no sync sound, that sort of thing.

The other, my submission to the Vimeo Festival, is wider-open yet has thus been more difficult to get my mind around. Racking my brain for ideas about what to shoot, I eventually just began laying down rules. What if I set a ten-minute time limit, halving the contest's official 20-minute cutoff? What if I shoot in black and white, but with colored text? What if I don't move the camera? What if I set a ten-second minimum shot length? (This should get a more pleasing ASL, not that I'm an ASL geek or anything.) Why not have narration that comes through the phone, and disallow that narration from referring directly to the onscreen action? Why not score it with tones that gradually dissolve into noise?

The dam broke. Ideas, so insistently un-forthcoming, flooded my mind. I went from despairing about having nothing to shoot to barely typing at pace with the movie itself as it screened in my head. Each idea I get down on the screen generates unexpected offspring. I'll tell you now that the film is about two girls and a creeping sense of exciting dread. But I could tell you so much more.

The Do or Die age

Yesterday, I referred to my own "Do or Die age." I've noticed an unsettling difference in age 25, a quality that sets it well apart from even ages 24, 23, or 22. It seems to me that, by 25, youth can never be an excuse. In childhood, adolescence, teen age or that void of early-twentysomethinghood, I could always put off attempts of all sorts by saying, "Maybe I should grow up a little more first."

Three apparent truths hit me at once: (a) oh craps, I am, by all widely-accepted definitions of the term, grown up, (b) needing to grow up was at no point a valid excuse for not starting to do stuff — real stuff — and (c) to what extent is anybody who avoids doing stuff actually "grown up"? (Or actually "alive," for that matter?) While I'm glad to be stripped of my ability to hide, slumped, behind youth, I also wish I'd have somehow lost it earlier. Now, pondering when I should make something, I inevitably hit the question: "If not at age 25, when?" (It prods me further that so many seem to have come up against this at 24.)

So the pressure to "Do" builds apace. I can be unclear, to myself and to others, about what my own "Do"-ing actually involves, although the mandate "Make as much interesting stuff as possible" casts as wide a shaft of light as anything. (The "as much" "as possible" bits aren't perfunctory, either; I'm increasingly interested in prolificacy, both in the kind of things I make and the kinds others do. I suspect it's where you wind up when you truly always produce).

Nor can I ignore the "or Die" component be ignored. Unlike supposedly all young people, I've never felt invincible — though I doubt that delusion is as fraction as widespread as is commonly insisted — and damned if I don't spend a sizable chunk of my mental bandwidth pondering issues of or related to my own mortality. I've burnt over a quarter of my life expectancy, and it's grown critically important to me not to conceive of life as open-ended, to "sit in front of the telly and treat life as if it goes on forever." Hence my growing avoidance of opiates like fantasy-enabling, distracting-from-life entertainment.

I once wrote — probably on Twitter — that we can divide humanity into two groups: those who understand that life is going on right now, and those who don't. I'm trying to move from the first to the second. When I recently interviewed filmmaker Andrew Bujalski, we talked about critics' tendency to call his twentysomething characters "unprepared for life." The director said this:

I'm not sure what constitutes preparation for life. For better or worse, we're all in it and it's moving at a constant speed, although sometimes it seems like it's speeding up. I think I object to the notion that any of the characters are "unprepared for life," or that they would ever get more prepared. I'm not sure exactly what they're supposed to be preparing for. There's jobs, there's adult responsibilities, so forth and so on. But those come at you one way or another.

Could there be an important distinction as well between those for whom life is a series of things that "come at" them and those for whom life is a series of things they try to figure out how to put themselves in the probable paths of?

The deadline = my great enemy = my sole savior = my great enemy

Seth Godin listed six things about deadlines, including that they "force us to decide," that "we're incredibly lax" about sticking to them when they're only in our own heads, that people don't like them, and that they work. In sum, that they're "a cheap and useful tool to for yourself (and others) to make a decision and to ship." All true, I'd say, adding that they often seem to be the bane of my existence, but more often — and more strongly — I suspect they're also my only hope.

When I interviewed (transcript) audio dramatist Tom Lopez, a childhood hero of mine, he had this to say about deadlines:

There's nothing like a good deadline to keep you awake, I'll tell you. I always used to joke that, on my tombstone, it would say, "He never missed a deadline. Not even this." Every series I've done has always been on the air while I'm still writing the last part. You've got a three-month thing, so it really keeps you awake, sometimes with very little sleep. But that's the way they used to do radio: they did it live, generally speaking, but often they were writing right up to the moment of going on live. You lose something, as you know, when you tape something. The energy is different when something is live, and that's it — you can't do editing with it later. It's gone out. In a sense, that helped, having these desperate deadlines. It helped keep an edge.

Despite the hundreds of pained hours I've sweated under the ever-lowering blade of some deadline or other, I've realized that I owe them nearly everything I've accomplished. (Not that I've accomplished a whole lot, but still.) I'd argue that almost everything good I've done, I've done under a deadline, but it's more accurate to say that I have deadlines to thank for almost everything I've done, period. The emphasis should go on done; I start plenty without deadlines, but finish... uh, less than plenty.

(Curiously, I somehow managed to complete New Zealand Stories without a deadline. Wild data point, I guess.)

Why? Because the deadline-y stuff will always and everywhere out-prioritize the non-deadline-y stuff. Implicitly or explicitly, Godin references and riffs on the idea that "real artists ship" quite often, which, of course, has its origin in a famous motto from the almighty Jobs. I can't speak for you, but if I'm going to pull all the nutty stunts required to finish, or "ship," a project, I've got little choice but to do it under a razor-edged deadline. Radio shows have to be broadcast; articles have to pass through the printer; videos have to be turned in; events happen whether or not you show up to DJ for them. That's why I finish and/or "ship" them.

This is why I'm so happy about the Vimeo Festival, a competition run by the eponymous video-hosting service. I've long been looking out for devices to prioritize the film/video quadrant of my pursuits, and this, with its July 31st submission deadline, seems just about perfect. I don't so much care about the $25,000 grand prize grant (though I could use it). I don't so much care that David Lynch will judge the "experimental" category, which is the only one with which my sensibility meshes. (Okay, I do care about that.) I care that it gives me a psychological reason to prioritize filmmaking, which equals de-prioritizing some of life's detritus that never mattered anyway (i.e. marriage, reproduction, the acquisition of real estate).

When people see a work and think they could do better — when I see a work and think I could do better — it seems to me that they/I are correct. The problem is that they assume infinite time. Sure, you or I — anybody — could write a better book than The Da Vinci Code, given as much time as we needed. What couldn't we do, freed of chronological constraints? But that's not the relevant question. The relevant question is, could we write a better book than The Da Vinci Code in a week? In a month? In a year? In a decade? Maybe — but maybe not. And if we couldn't, there'd be no weaseling out of that grim judgment.

Set a deadline, and you set observable conditions for success or failure. For obvious reasons, this is invaluable; for other, less obvious reasons, it causes all manner of crushing aggravation. I feel like it's the root of procrastination. I once tweeted to the effect that procrastination is the temporary displacement of tasks at which it is possible to fail by tasks at which it is not possible to fail, a definition that resonated with more than a few people. Can we claim that the set of things at which you can't fail highly overlaps the set of things without deadlines? I know I'm procrastinating when fleeing a deadline-bound activity (writing an essay, say) for a non-deadline-bound one (dicking around on Wikipedia, say). Do you?

More and more, I'm thinking that laying down a deadline, no matter how arbitrary, disclosed to at least one other party, should come as step one of any project. (This is another advantage and/or pitfall of collaborations: they're hard to pull off without many agreed-upon sub-deadlines.) I'll get the copy in by the of this month. I'll have a show ready every x day. I'll finish this job by xx/xx/xx. I'll move to another town in x months. I'll write x posts a day. If nothing else, fear of public shame will keep you at it!

Sink, swim or sink (into despair)

(Former Marketplace of Ideas guest) Michael Silverblatt, host of KCRW's Bookworm, recently granted an interview to the Believer. There's valuable stuff in there about conversation, literature and conversations about literature — as you'd expect — but I especially like the ultra-compressed letter to a young interviewer with which Silverblatt's words end: "My advice to you: sit forward, listen with all your might, and don’t ever be thinking of your next question."

I've realized that my best interviews are the ones where I look at my notes the least. At this point, my notepad fast approaches vestigial: I routinely jot down a bunch of subjects I think it'd be interesting to address yet find myself consulting the list less and less. I'm not quite to writing down nothing at all in advance, much less Silverblattianly leaving the pad at home, but I'm sure the day will come. In interviewing as in any other craft, the best results come out of sink-or-swim situations.

This general principle dawned on me soon after a more personal, specific one: I am proud of nothing I've done but that which I've simply jumped into. My sneaking background tendency, no doubt influenced by the powerful Timmy lobby, is to mull and hedge everything for so long that the edges wear down to nothing. This damnable impulse toward mediocrity neuters once-bold plans, reducing the sink-or-swim to that aquarobics thing where you hold on to the edge of the pool and kick, a pursuit that bears all the fruits it deserves.

"There is no success without the possibility of failure," wrote Raymond Chandler. Among all human endeavors that have succeeded in ways that meant a damn, is there a single one that was not, at first, a sink-or-swim proposition? I got thinking about this after a conversation with The Livejournalist Formerly Known as cobalt999 , who, in pulling up stakes and moving to Vancouver after college with only the knowledge that, culturally speaking, it seemed to be The Place for Him, committed a sink-or-swimmier act than I ever have.

Though I've rarely sought it out, being confronted with the sinking/swimming binary keeps me alert, awake and alive in a way I'm otherwise not. Spending extended periods out of this state, under anesthetic, is bad enough, but it's horrific to ponder the cost of all the interesting stuff undone because of the suffocating embrace comfort 'n complacency. After all, how much of interest do the comfortable ever produce?

The "upside" of staying out of sink-or-swim situations, I suppose, is that you avoid sinking, theoretically. But I harbor two suspicions about this: (a) some form of sinkage, especially the ultimate sinkage of wasting your life, nevertheless remains possible and (b) that sinking, as normally understood, is actually preferable to the non-life life that comes of sink-or-swim avoidance. At bottom, though, it does seem to me that one must make a sort of peace with potential sinkage. I don't consider myself the starving-artist type, but there probably does come a point when the artist must accept his starvation.