Lightning Round

Just one week back, I wrote about an ex who pointed out that my life seems to largely consist of a single recurring pattern: sleeplessness, illness, then the avid (drunken) pursuit of women.

And though, at the time, I maintained I was ‘mainly entrenched in avid (drunken) pursuit’, a week packed past bursting with train rides, business dinners, bar mitzvahs and funerals dragged me deeply enough into sleeplessness that I’m now nursing a spring-allergy-driven sinus infection.

Thanks to the miracles of modern antibiotics, however, I’m already on the upswing. Which means I should be, fortunately, back to avid (drunken) pursuit by the end of the week.

Why I’m Not Blogging

Looking at my Gmail inbox this morning, and feeling like a bad Tetris player as I watched the lines pile up far faster than I could clear them out, I decided to take a moment and tally my email count for the past month.

On average: just over 200 pieces of ‘legit’ email and just short of 450 pieces of spam, each and every day.

Looks like it’s time to return to my old trick of stopping sleeping and gong to the bathroom to free up time.

Re-run: Eyeballing

[An ex-girlfriend, after reading through too much of this site for either of our good, once observed that my life appeared to be composed largely of recurring patterns, the central one being: “sleeplessness, illness, then the avid (drunken) pursuit of women.”

And while, at the moment, I’m mainly entrenched in avid (drunken) pursuit, I also seem to find myself repeating other regular life patterns. At least once a month, I come up with something I’d like to blog about, then am hit with a vague sense that I’ve compulsively overanalyzed the topic before. A quick search of the archives invariably yields a post – usually about two years back – nearly verbatim to the one I’d just begun sketching out in my head.

Normally, that sends me back to the drawing boards. But, if I’ve forgotten about the post, odds are you have, too. And as I rarely give any of my blogged ramblings the careful edit they deserve, I’ve decided to mash better re-drafting with the apparently cyclical nature of my life.

Hence forth, when I catch myself about to re-write something I’ve already pondered through, I’ll instead be editing the previous post, then throwing it up here anew labeled ‘re-run’.

As they say, one good turn deserves another.]

Having spent much of my life in photography (and now, in film), I’m obsessive about visual clarity. Which is why, despite my prescription being repeatedly described as ‘totally pansy’ by those who really need their glasses, I wear mine all the time. I have since getting my first pair, in eleventh grade – bought, initially, to help me read the board from my customary back row seat, rather than force a move to the front.

To be accurate, throughout most of college, I actually rotated contacts in about half the time. But, since moving to New York some five years back, I’ve slowly drifted away from rotating. Perhaps it’s my hectic bags-below-the-eyes-inducing schedule, the irritating grit of city air, or a desire for the faux-intellectual look a good pair of spectacles provides. Whatever the reason, my contacts have fallen by the wayside.

I realized as much last week, and have since been trying to work contacts back into regular use. And, by and large, it’s been an excellent change. But there’s one major downside: I awake constantly throughout the night, suddenly convinced I forgot to remove the contacts before going to sleep, leaving me hours deep in irreparable corneal damage.

I should, at this point, admit that I’m a complete and total hypochondriac, the combination of medical knowledge, vivid imagination, and general neurosis conspiring to convince me – often aided by Google symptom-searching (“headache and slight fever? I knew it! Malaria!!!”) – that my world is coming to a slow and painful end.

This is particularly true with contacts, due to a booklet I once read at the optometrist’s office on the potential dangers of sleeping in contacts not approved for ‘continuous use’. In pictures and gory written detail, the booklet laid out the risks of ‘serious eye infection’ and ‘abnormal corneal blood vessel growth’. It is the second that most plagues my imagination, as the line between vodka-induced ‘harmlessly bloodshot’ and slept-in-contacts-induced ‘abnormal blood vessel growth’ is a distinction admittedly beyond my abilities of accurate self-diagnosis.

Fortunately, unlike in the case of goiter, femoral hernia, or any of the other imagined afflictions I woefully cast upon myself, shaking slept-in-contacts fears should be rather easy – if I’m not actually wearing the contacts as I sleep, I’m fine. Less fortunately, my contacts-less vision is good enough that, in a darkened room without any distant objects to stare at, I’m often unable to decide whether I am, in fact, wearing them or not, at least without repeatedly poking myself in the eyeball.

Because my contacts are one day disposables, I’ve now stumbled upon a workable solution: after removing them, I leave them on my night-stand. Waking up at three in the morning, then, I’m able to simply look over at the small silicone discs slowly drying out to relieve my worries and put myself back to sleep. Gross perhaps, but certainly better than abnormal corneal blood vessel growth. Or, at least, better than fears of it. As is the case with most of my hypochondriacal self-diagnoses, I happily doubt I’ll ever have the chance to experience the real thing.

Like a Chihuahua

This afternoon, I discovered that, with the din of blow-dryers in the background, “just a trim, please, I’m trying to grow my hair out a bit” apparently sounds exactly like “please whip out the buzz-clippers and sheer off most of my hair.”

The Medium Tail

[Though we dropped the name Long Tail Releasing for Cyan’s distribution arm largely because having two different company names was confusing the hell out of people, I’ve also had increasing reservations about the extensive philosphical waxing going on around the internet about the power and importance of the Long Tail effect in film.

As I continually receive emails asking for my thoughts on the matter, I thought I’d post my usual response here.]

There’s a great David Foster Wallace essay about television, “E Pluribus Unum”, in which Wallace states:

TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

Which, essentially, is the classic argument for the importance of the Long Tail in media: if only we could democratize distribution sufficiently, we could let all this wonderful, refined niche content find its own set of consumers!

That’s a lovely idea. But, speaking as someone who gets sent reams of unreleased indie films each day, I can definitively say most of the film along the far end of the Long Tail isn’t there because it’s niche-ey, it’s there because it’s remarkably badly made.

So, at some level, the Long Tail is the result of a sort of Darwinian winnowing process, in which the 15,000 films submitted each year to Sundance, Cannes and TriBeCa are pared to the hundred or so fit for broader consumption. And, looking back over the past ten years, as the number of films submitted to festivals has exploded yet the overall quality of films released hasn’t much changed, I’m not sure that a larger quantity of films along the tail necessarily dictates better films at the head.

However, I do believe that, between the crap in the Long Tail, and the major releases in the head, there exists a sort of ‘medium tail’ – content too small to justify release given the economics of traditional film distribution, yet quite good and potentially highly appealing to at least a specific, focused audience group. That’s where changes in how film distribution works should really intersect with Long Tail thinking in a positive way.

Conversely

[An old Buddy Hackett joke]

A guy goes into a doctor’s office; he’s got a dot on his forehead.

The doctor says, ‘Oh my God, I’ve never seen this before, but I read about it in medical school.’

The guy says, ‘Well, doctor, what is it?’

‘Well, in six weeks you are going to have a penis growing out of your forehead.’

The guy says, ‘Well, doc, cut it off.’

The doctor replies, ‘I can’t cut it off; it’s attached to your brain, you’d die.’

So the guy says, ‘So, doctor, what you’re telling me, is that in six weeks, every morning when I wake up and look in the mirror, I’m going to see a penis growing out of my forehead?’

And the doctor says, ‘Ah, no, no, no, no. You won’t see it. The balls will cover your eyes.’

How to Carve an Ox

[An excerpt from the Chuang Tzu]

Cook Ting was cutting up an ox for Lord Wen-hui. At every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee – zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Ching-shou music.

“Ah, this is marvelous!” said Lord Wen-hui. “Imagine skill reaching such heights!”

Cook Ting laid down his knife and replied, “What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now – now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.

“A good cook changes his knife once a year-because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month-because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness into such spaces. There’s plenty of room – more than enough for the blade to play about in. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone.

“However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety until – flop! – the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.”

“Excellent!” said Lord Wen-hui. “I have heard the words of Cook Ting and learned how to care for life!”

Mamma Mia

One afternoon, when my brother and I were about 5 and 8, respectively, our mother picked us up from school in the family Volvo. She then drove down the road about five hundred feet before announcing that she wasn’t our mother, but rather an alien, who had come to kidnap us.

Obviously, a debate about this ensued, with my brother and me insisting that she was, in fact, our mother, and her insisting, no, in fact, she was an alien, but that the other aliens had just done a remarkably good job in making her look precisely like our mother. The debate raged for nearly the entire ride home, with my mother holding out just long enough for my brother and I to start developing serious doubts.

To this day, I’m not entirely sure what possessed her to do that, but if she were to do it again, I also wouldn’t be terrribly surprised. Because, while she’s smart and articulate and logical and organized and successful, my mother also jumps on beds and pushes people into swimming pools without warning.

Or, at least, without much warning; by now, my brother and I have both learned to recognize that certain gleam in her eyes which serves as the signal for both of us to run for our lives.

Apparently, my mother inherited this troublemaking streak from her own mother, who once, while measuring her for a skirt she was shortening, poked my mom in the posterior with a pin, “just to see what would happen.”

So, on this Mother’s Day, to any readers who have been following along with self-aggrandizement and wondering what the hell is wrong with me, I say: go ask my mom. Much as she’d deny it, her genes clearly account for at least half of the whack-job traits I possess today.

Happy Mothers Day to moms everywhere, but especially to my own, because, frankly, she’s better than yours.