independent study still in progress..

if you missed my earlier post, i just wanted to let you know that the short film some of us shot together two decades ago WILL still be shown, but not until December

creating at the margins...

jonnybaker posted some ideas about the value of creating and thinking at the margins last week which i missed, but they seem quite tied to some of the ideas i'm wrestling with publicly on this blog recently...and a whole set of questions that have been haunting my thoughts all year.

Being positioned at the margins, it seems to me, is the only place to exert a prophetic voice, but the tradeoffs are significant...

so much of the work for artists and thinkers who decide to work at the margins is accomplished in such obscurity that the process can be debilitating.

It's so interesting to be alive at a time when MASS culture so defines local cultures that its difficult for us to even measure small stories / accomplishments / thoughts as successes. As if SMALL precludes the use of the word SUCCESS...

Nevermind...

...all that moanin', only to find out that just one great short film disbands all my angst.

Last night it was a quiet short called _Mindy_ about a 10 year old Asian American Immigrant finding a little bit of happiness in some gum shared with a friend.

And it was great...

And suddenly who cares about MATTERing in that sort of institutionalized way. When you participate in a beautiful story -- as an author, as a viewer, as a reader, as a performer -- it feels lke that's the most spiritual experience imaginable.

So next time I start to moan...remind me...I just need some good story.

I feel like...

...writing a blog about how I feel.

Which is not, typically, directly what I write about.

So probably, you should not read it. Probably it will bore you.

Probably, later, when I realize that I've been more self-disclosive, or simply too rambly, I will regret this post and remove it. So -- probably, if you want to read a blog which will very probably be ephemeral -- you should check this blog out.

So I'm at this academic conference where people are making all kinds of short films: documentaries, narrative films, experimental films, animation...

Good stuff. Stuff I like. Stuff which may or may not get seen by anyone except the classes at the particular film school where the film got made and here at this conference which is full of films that will not get seen by enough people.

A year ago, half a year ago, something like that, I sort of said: You know what, self? You're probably not going to have a second career in Hollywood...and maybe that's okay. Given what careers in Hollywood typically look like and what a purist you are about the kinds of stories you would not like to tell: A hollywood career would probably not be the place for you.

Besides, self, you have a good career that allows you to make little films for small audiences and even spend some of your professional energies developing creative projects. You should *embrace* the goodness of that opportunity.

And I'm trying to do that -- but there's another part of me -- a complex part that's motivated by ugly ambition, an evangelical / missional zeal and a profound discontent with the way-things-are...

that makes me want to spend my life energies making change. doing something to make the world really significantly better.

My friend Matt says that its the profound desire to MATTER.

And as I moved through graduate school people kept affirming my academic writing saying that I'd make a great academician.

But three parts of me felt ambivalent about such praise.

PART ONE: The preachers kid who won Preacher Boy Contests who had his hand pumped incessantly in the church foyers by goodhearted wellwishers who praised him saying: “I just know you’re going to be a good preacher, just like your daddy. “

PART TWO: I secretly still wanted to make movies or write books or something…

PART THREE: I had a deeply rooted and abiding suspicion in the frequent isolation of academic discourse from real pragmatic issues…and thus, felt ambivalent about how much I wanted to commit my life to gaining the STATUS and SOLIDARITY needed in the discourse – world of Academic Writing.

So…I decided I’d give myself a few years to see if I could gain sufficient VOCABULARY and VOICE in some creative writing venues and make a difference / matter by doing that work.

I (capriciously) set a deadline of 35 years old to have achieved said mastery and after that, I said, I’d try to employ other gifts. Ones that had been affirmed by people in the worlds I live in. And see if I could still make a difference or matter in Academic Circles.

So I’ve been feeling like I could back away from that dichotomous thinking (lately) by embracing BOTH my academic career *&* creative work completed on a smaller scale for smaller intended audiences.

So then when today I was struck by the relative isolation of this audience….of these films…I had this flood of conflictual emotions again.

My friend Jay suggests that American Higher Education and especially evangelical schools are too influenced by the Missionary Impulse. (You know – one way to quantify how you matter is by holding up the pelts / souls that you’ve managed to collect during your tour of duty -- )

And so I feel…a little confused.

I suspect that such liminal speculation by a man in his mid-thirties – and entrenched in multiple institutions is a little – well, boring.

And I’m absolutely certain that such public navel gazing by a man at any age is – well, dull. So I’m off to fraternize at the Toledo Zoo with filmmakers from all around the country…maybe I’ll bump into someone with some big answers there…

Peace~

Watching Movies...

I’m in Toledo at the University Film and Video Association Conference. (Ohio, not Spain…)

I’m looking forward to, tonight, seeing a film called:

“Licking English.”

Seriously.

Project: Taking Back Eden

Step one of our landscaping resolve: I develop a course in map making where Jaelyn and Addison and I measured the dimensions and borders of the whole property in order to make a to-scale map of the entire place and plot out a long-term plan. In order to create some incentive for the task, I framed our map-making quest inside of the King / Princess / Prince game/alter.reality that we were already playing.

ME: We need to venture forth from the Castle and measure the borders of our Kingdom. We shall make a great map…

PRINCE HEINRICK: (played by Addison) A big one?

ME: Yes, a big map, So that we…

P. H. : A rea’y, rea’y big one map? (Addison still has no “L”s)

ME: Yes. A really big one. So once we have a map…

P.H.: (now the prince is hopping up and down with the every modifier) A rea’y, rea’y, rea’y big one!?!

ME: So that with our really big map, we can take better care of our Kingdom’s lands.

PRINCESS EMILY: (played by Jaelyn) But Daddy, if we go out into our kingdom, the people from the neighboring lands may see us and attack us!

(Really. She said that they may attack us. Is this what it means to grow up under the regime of G.W.?)

ME: Oh. Well. That may be true of some of our neighbors, but I’m sure that there would be many neighbors who would be very kind….we could forge alliances with them.

P. E.: But if we clean up our borders, then the people from the neighboring countries might come into our borders.

ME: So?

P.E.: And they might damage our possessions.

(Really. She said “damage our possessions.” And really?! Where did she get this capitalist hoarding bent anyway?)

So Lynn sprayed massive amounts of poison on the borderlands of weeds and while a couple of them are saggy – I guess I’m disappointed that they didn’t respond a little more like a magic spell. You know – all wither and brown up in one fell swoop.

Still we hack away at our weeds – hope you’re finding –

Peace~

We decided NOT to sell our house.

In other words, we’re staying.

Which is weird because we’ve been working all year to sell it. But we know that we don’t want to have showings punctuating fall semester so we’re pulling her off the market.

We love our house, we’ve always loved it. We just had decided to find a house that had some other qualities that ours didn’t. My new life verse is a good teaching for us to take to heart at this time:

Treasure what you have like it’s the greatest thing in the world, because if you start longing for something you don’t have – not only will you not get it, but what you have will be taken away from you.

It’s a fascinating teaching, because by taken itself it would advocate a kind of ethnocentric, status-loving, stasis-endorsing nowness, that would preclude any thought of Then or There. And I have to admit that that’s the scariest religion I can imagine.

This teaching is: contentment. And I’m trying to apply the principle indiscriminately to everything in my life: my possessions, my history, my opportunities, my relationships…

Which makes it a very hard teaching. It’s a check against: Greed. Regret. (and thus) Bitterness. Jealousy. Selfishness.

It does advocate a “now”ness which reverberates with Buber’s “thou”ness…

And now, I’m walking scarily close to a bad impression of Dr. Seuss.

So like Tigers who pee to mark their territory and like artists who try to use brushes and colors to revision their worlds – we’re painting the whole house again.

Some of you know that we underwent a Beiging of the house sometime in the spring where we bled every Turquoise and Map Blue shade out of our children’s rooms in order to please the realtors / the nebulous “mainstream” housing market. It felt like a ritual of humiliation and hegemony. If I could have I would have played “March Slav” at the top of the stereo speakers voice. Or “Anatevka.”

I asked Cliff and Mary and Lynn what book they’d like to write before they finish with their lives – and they all had brilliant books that they’re practically poised to write; I had nothing. Well, I did have a huge plate of Angelo‘s homemade pasta with olives, garlic, pesto and roasted peppers. But maybe I should write a book called The Beiging of of America. I have no idea what its about, but it sounds like an interesting title, eh?

We’re also trying to “catch up” with some of the landscaping that Casacommunitas demands.

Can you say: rainforest? We bought a bottle of pesticides big enough to kill both our children…And we wish we weren’t going to spray it all over the borders of the yard, but does anyone know how else to undo the fierce garden of weeds that threatens to overtake our neighbors yards as well as our own?

Inappropriate Disclosure #...

well who's counting anyway? everybody knows that i have an extraordinary gift for saying the wrong thing at the right time.

I was just talking to Kerrie about how it is to revel in your children's newfound independence the older they get.

one of the latest child-development-stages that our house is at is:

kids can get dressed on their own.

mostly.

Addison runs into more roadblocks then Jaelyn does, though. And some of them are damnably frustrating...

for him, right now, the worst of these is:

when his underwear waistband gets folded in or back or under. it doesn't matter which. Addison is a bit of a purist...can't stand dirty hands, cleans up rooms on his own (sometimes) and corrects me about leaving lights on as I leave a room. So you can imagine how HORRIFYING it is to not get his underwear waistband to sit just right. He lets out this EXASPERATED scream which you JUST KNOW is about to give way to tears or punches (depending on the tired-ometer). But (happily) with a simple SNAP of the band....all is righted.

He laughs with an "ow!" when i snap him. (Just think how he's going to love wedgies...)

Seems like we're all always getting obsessed over our underwear bands though, aren't we? and then someone comes along and snaps our waistband and we sheepishly laugh "ow!" and realize how we were persevorating...

inappriate disclosure, you ask? whence the title? well i feel like i might be committing the ultimate PK sin -- employing my children's foibles to see the world publicly...

so if you would -- nobody mention my indescretion by blogging about his deep personal pain -- as you wish him well on his wedding day...

peace~