Synchronicity

I was in the Delta Grill for a business lunch yesterday, talking about films Cyan had recently acquired, and about other films we were still trying to chase down, like the great Slamdance documentary Holy Modal Rounders – Bound to Lose.

And just as the description “like a non-fiction Mighty Wind” came out of my mouth, the front door directly across from me opened, and in walked Michael McKean.

Hollow Leg

I eat a lot of food. I mean, a lot of food. I always joke that, while I don’t think I could win an eating contest, if there were a ’24 hour total’ competition, where the winner was the person who consumed the most calories in a single 24 hour stretch, I could easily crush all comers. There’s no meal so large that, two hours later, I couldn’t sit down and eat the same thing again.

This is particularly odd given that, by any account, I’m not very large: 5’6″, 140 pounds. At that size, even using equations that incorporate my high activity level, I should need to consume somewhere around 2100 calories daily.

Usually, that’s what I consume by lunch.

Honestly, I don’t know where the food goes. Maybe I have a tape worm.

Over the years of running companies, my eating has been the butt of ongoing jokes: “Do we need to stop in at Subway and feed Newman before the meeting?” “I don’t know, it could last as long as an hour; can he go that long without food?”

And, of course, it jacks up my grocery bill unbelievably; I can easily eat my way through $150 of supplies within a seven day span, without even counting the numerous business breakfasts, lunches, and dinners intermixed therein.

But, mainly, all that eating garners from friends and family of all ages dire warnings about the inevitable, impending slowdown of my metabolism, and of a consequent slow ballooning into late-twenties obesity.

People tell me about their friend, or child, or husband, or self, who used to be thin as a rail, until he hit 27, when all of a sudden, his metabolism slowed and he porked up.

And they tell me this as though I’m eating every half-hour because I don’t have anything better to do. But, really, trust me, if my calorie needs dropped, if I could somehow eat a normal number of meals a day instead of having to constantly stuff my face, I’d be thrilled – thrilled! – at the time and money saved.

Until then, however, the eating continues. Literally, as I’m off to cook up a second breakfast.

Bon appetit.

The Tube

I don’t have TV.

I don’t mean that I don’t have a physical television – because I do. I just don’t get live programming – cable, broadcast or otherwise. Nothing but DVDs.

And not because of some vague, haughty sense of moral ‘superiority’. I’m not one of those no-TV people who, when someone else is discussing a new HBO show, will smile disdainfully, say, “I’m sorry, I don’t have a television”, then stare off, self-satisfied, into the middle distance.

Instead, it is out of profound inferiority that I don’t have television. The problem is, if I do have it, I watch it.

Which, arguably, is the point of having it in the first place. But, as I said, I’m well below average in my dealings with television. I’m addiction-prone, dragged by the gateway drugs of The West Wing and Law & Order onto the icy top of a long, slippery slope that runs down, down, down, through Desperate Housewives, Survivor 8 and re-runs of Full House.

Over the years, I’ve slowly come to recognize in myself the procrastinatory inertia that makes going out and really doing wonderful, exciting things – the things I treasure for years, even as the rest of my daily endeavours blur behind me into an unrecognizable mass – a constant battle. And, simply put, having television just doesn’t help. It’s one more temptation, one more internal set of arguments. It’s a painless route to forgoing reality in favor of reality TV.

So, in short, I don’t have TV. I haven’t for the last year and a half. And in that time, as I’ve slowly forced myself to stop watching and start doing, I’ve been reminded again: life isn’t a spectator sport.

Also Applies to Life as a Whole

“The beautiful thing about jazz is that if you say you’re playing it well and can get a critic or two to say you’re playing it well, and if you look like you’re playing it well, enough people will go along with you to make up an audience. The trick is to do it all with a straight face.”
– John McNeil

Findings

Entries keep rolling in for Cyan’s First Annual Oscar Pool. From them, I’ve deduced three main points:

1. I have no idea who you people are. Seriously, I recognize the names on, at most, 10% of the entries. Percentage-wise, that’s about the same as the ratio between the number of visitors to this site, and the total number of people I’ve ever met in my life who I could plausibly imagine coming here. Who the hell are you other 90%, and what the hell are you doing reading my drivel?

2. James Surowiecki was right – there’s a definite wisdom that emerges from a crowd. Though some categories are closer than others, in nearly every one, a clear Oscar favorite has shaken out. The day before the awards, I’ll be closing the Cyan polls and posting the collective results; should be interesting to see how closely we mirror the Academy itself.

3. That wisdom only appears, however, when people use some basis for their decisions other than the age-old ‘rectal generation method.’ Which is to say, given the utterly random scattershot of answers for the three best short categories, it’s clear you people are pulling guesses for those out of your collective ass.

DIY

Two months back, I mentioned that Colin suckered me into helping log his just-shot film, Underground. Logging is the process of capturing video from tape to harddrive, and of slicing, dicing and notating it for the editor, who runs with things from there.

After viewing the editor’s first month of work, however, it’s clear she didn’t so much ‘run’ with the film as ‘limp painfully in a sideways direction’ with it.

So, combining the philosophies of ‘if you want something done right, do it yourself’ and ‘misery loves company’, Colin gave the editor the boot, took on editing the film himself, and, this morning, somehow conned me into agreeing to co-edit it with him.

There’s now a copy of Final Cut Pro HD for Dummies sitting on my desk. Which, given the obvious stupidity of me jumping into this, seems an appropriate choice.

Puissance

Earlier this afternoon, I stopped in to Starbucks for a business meeting. And though I normally buy my coffee beans elsewhere, I was there, I had a gift card to blow through, and so decided to pick up a pound.

As I sorted through the bags of choices, I heard myself ask, “are any of these coffees Fair Trade certified?”

Which, in all of my prior life, I had never even considered asking – having, similarly, say, never chained myself to a large redwood tree at the threat of its clear-cutting.

At Sundance, however, I had watched the documentary Black Gold, which dives deep into the world of coffee, examining the intertwining of farmers, traders, unions, multinationals, consumers and corner coffee shops. The film is taglined, “your coffee will never taste the same again,” which, apparently, is correct.

So as I paid for my first (or, at least, for my first proactively selected) bag of Fair Trade beans, I thought about Black Gold, and was struck, as I am every few months, by a wave of profound appreciation for the power of film.

Somehow, ninety minutes spent sitting in the dark, watching lights flicker against a blank wall, had left me seeing the real world itself in a new, different way.

And, as I look over our year’s plans for Cyan, as we prepare to make a few announcements next week and to roll ahead on some big actions throughout the rest of the month, I’m happy to see that we’re increasingly refocusing on that power of film, on wielding it in a smart, purposeful way.

Which makes me think, now more than ever, this definitely beats having a real job.

Off-Color Joke Du Jour

[My apologies in advance.]

A man went to his optometrist to have his eyes examined. The doctor told him, “Listen, you’ve got to stop masturbating.”

“Why, Doc?” the man asked. “Am I going blind?”

“No,” said the optometrist, “but you’re upsetting my other patients.”

Paradox

I’ve recently noted two beliefs strongly held by nearly every one of my female friends:

1. Equal pay for equal work.
2. The guy pays on the first date.

Sorry, ladies; choose one.