today’s quote

“I feel sorry for people who donít drink or do drugs. Because someday theyíre going to be in a hospital bed, dying, and they wonít know why.”
– Redd Foxx

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hooked

More ammunition for my family and friends’ ongoing ribbing:

As she’s been spending more evenings at my apartment in the last couple of weeks than there’s even vague precedent for in my dating past, for Valentine’s Day, I gave The Girl a toothbrush.

Now, seeing it sitting next to mine in the sink-side cup, I alternate between smiling like an idiot and thinking that if I turn into the kind of guy sappy enough to not just grin at a toothbrush but actually blog about it that I’ll basically have to kick my own ass.

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exactly

“If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.”
– Mark Twain

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r.i.p.

“The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it’s so accidental. It’s so much like life.”
-Arthur Miller, 1915-2005.

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antiphon

“He has no enemy, you say; my friend your boast is poor. He who hath mingled in the fray of duty that the brave endure must have made foes. If he has none, small is the work that he has done.”
– Alexander Anton von Auersperg

When we were first launching Cyan, one of the things we discussed constantly was how we should judge our work. By financial success? By popular response? By critical reviews?

And, in those discussions, we all unanimously agreed that, at least on the reviews front, we’d be wildly happier with films that polarize critics – films that get some really great reviews and some really bad reviews – than with ones that garner a widespread ‘meh’ for their inoffensive mediocrity.

With I Love Your Work, we pretty much got what we wished for. The reviews coming out of Toronto, and in the international release of the film, have been wildly split, with reviewers either loving or hating the film, and with very little in between.

At first, glad as we were to have made something that garnered a strong response, bolstered by the enthusiasm of the positive pieces, at some level, those bad reviews really hurt.

But, with a bit of time, we started to feel okay about them. And then, with more time, better than okay. We started to relish the bad as much as the good. Kurt Vonnegut wrote that “a creative act is not considered: it’s instinctual. It is to be responded to, reacted against.” Those strong reactions, the good and the bad, were the best positive feedback we could get. In making a film, we’re putting a collaborative creative effort out into the world. People responding to it, reacting against it, means that we’re doing at least something right.

But if it only took me a few months to become zen to criticism at work, I must admit it’s taken me much longer to apply that thinking in the rest of my life. I don’t mean at the small, day-to-day level, where I’ve long appreciated people pointing out how I could do things better. Rather, I mean it at the level of me as a whole.

A few times a month, someone emails in, or posts about me on their (or in the comments of someone else’s) site, to say that I’m a 100%, total douche-bag. And, irrational as it may be, their missives initially really piss me off.

In the past, I’ve let them piss me off for a surprisingly long time. A really cutting one could ruin my day. But, increasingly, like with bad film reviews, after the initial shock wears off, I’ve started to revel in them. It’s not just with Cyan’s films, but with my life as a whole, that I’m shooting for far past inoffensive mediocrity. And since the varied group of friends I regularly see, by definition, are mainly a source of ‘good reviews’, it’s the occasional ‘bad review’ that confirms I’m pushing the envelope just enough.

Tellingly, I almost never receive hate mail from people I’ve actually wronged. Instead, I get it from people who seem deeply offended by the fact that I’m trying, day by day, to piece together the life I really want to be living.

Hatred, as George Bernard Shaw pointed out, is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated. Bring it on.

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fishbowl

Growing up in a California house full of skylights and glass walls, I’m a huge fan of natural light. Which is one of the biggest appeals of my new apartment: with giant windows running along the front of my living room, and along two sides of the bedroom, sun streams in, and I can stare out at the city bustle on the street corner below.

Only recently, however, has it started to dawn on me that a window, by definition, works both ways. In other words, while I can look out, people can look back in as well. Not the people on the street, fortunately, as I’m high enough up to be out of the line of sight of pedestrian traffic, but certainly the lawyers in the huge office building directly across 8th Avenue.

I tend to forget about the lawyers, as, most of the time, they seem to completely forget about me. Working from home, I have the general sense that I could tap-dance naked in front of my window and still not generate much interest.

But, as the lawyers seem to work far too many hours to sustain even the vague semblance of a nightlife, a window-side female invariably causes them to sit up and take notice.

In the last week or two, due to the string of excellent repeat dates, and a slew of equally excellent evenings drinking with close female friends eager to critique my apartment decoration efforts, I’ve had attractive females passing through my apartment more evenings than not.

So by now, at eight o’clock, the lawyers across from me start frequently glancing in my direction, scoping out the evening’s potential for vicarious entertainment. I could, I suppose, draw the blinds (seeing as I’m not one, the contents of this site to the contrary, to derive real-life exhibitionist pleasure), but the evening city view is far too good to ruin for the sake of keeping out occasional stares from overworked drones I’m unlikely to ever actually meet.

Still, given the number of different girls that have passed through, and given the exceedingly unglamorous life I lead the rest of the time, I’m sure they’ve (rightly) determined I’m no ‘new date each night’ Cassanova. Instead, I suspect they’re convinced I’m simply moonlighting as a pimp.

Never one to pass up a good opportunity, I’ll therefore be picking up a set of dry-erase markers and scrawling my phone number on the office-facing window. While my visiting friends don’t seem to mind being part of an ongoing faux-reality-TV show, I’m sure they’d be much happier if it was pay-per-view.

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inevitable

It would, of course, be on a day with more balls precariously in the air than ever, that my phone craps out and my bank decides to take an extra day to clear a large transfer.

[Shakes fist at the heavens.]

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life imitates “art”

As the last few posts have led friends and readers to question whether I’m losing my sanity, or at least my asshole edge, I should add briefly that, despite any of many upsides to this girl and her friends, last night also did leave me feeling even deeper entrenched in a ten-years-younger reenactment of a Sex and the City episode.

Which is, perhaps, unavoidable if the girl you’re dating is paid by an online magazine to write (in great detail) about her dating life, but even moreso if, when you meet her closest friends, you discover that they consist of a confident go-getting Samantha, a shy, conservative Charlotte (who, in at least one photo snapped late in the evening, rather strikingly resembles Kristin Davis), and a cynical gay best-friend Stanford (who, fortunately for the real life version, is far better looking than the television equivalent).

I suppose that, in turn, makes me rather inevitable; every Sex-in-the-City story needs an (interested yet historically completely emotionally unavailable) Mr. Big.

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first impressions

My long-standing friend Josh Lilienstein is in town for the weekend, leading up to a med school interview this Monday. And, bucking the common wisdom of a quiet weekend of preparation, he instead spent yesterday rocking New York, beginning shortly after his arrival by Jet Blue red-eye from San Francisco when we headed into Central Park at 9:00am with a bottle of Hennesey and some Starbucks paper cups.

The day went happily downhill from there, with the two of us slurring through a slew of topics; one of the brightest people I know, Josh also has an exceedingly broad range of interests and knowledge, allowing us to – in the course of fifteen minutes – somehow skip from women to adipose biochemistry to Italian liquors to political theory. And while, at varying points of the day, we were more sober than at others, I don’t suspect we ever crossed below the legal blood-alcohol limit for safe driving. Thank god for New York’s subway-centric life.

So it was still not entirely sober that we headed uptown to Morningside Heights at 10:00pm, to meet the girl I’ve been blogging about, along with one of her college best friends and her literature PhD cohorts. Needless to say, I was a bit freaked out, as meeting friends is a crucial moment in any nascent relationship. Inevitably, at some point down the road, you’ll do something to make a girl really, justifiably pissed off with you, and having her friends either rooting for or against you almost always decides your fate.

While I normally wouldn’t much worry, as more than a few of my friends have pointed out, this was essentially our fourth date in just over a week – about the same tally that I usually hit in the first month of dating. So, basically, I really didn’t want to screw it up.

The grad student party we first collectively hit was, admittedly, a bit short of the Platonic college party form (which ideally includes such elements as ‘chug! chug! chug!’-shouting keg-stands and someone dancing on a table with a lampshade on their head), though I spent most of the first hour or two less concerned about the surroundings, and more concerned about just-starting-to-date etiquette. Within the larger party, she and I were privately carrying out the ritual of a middle school dance: slow progress from furtive across-the-room smiles and eye contact, to adjacent leg-brushing sitting to, finally, eventually, standing naturally next to each other, slightly intertwined, hand on back, arm around waist, or (most adventurous of all party stances!) hand in back pocket.

Through it all, it was actually her friends that saved me, as, fortunately, really liking people is far easier than simply pretending to. With each conversation, I eased back towards my natural self, as I discovered that literature PhD students are pretty much exactly my favorite sort of people: intelligent, neurotically over-analytic ones passionately pursuing some relatively obscure topic of interest. As the girl’s closest friends turn out also to be attractive, articulate alcoholics, by the time we left the grad party to head to a nearby bar, I was happily convinced that I’d actually look forward to spending more time with them all.

And, mainly, I realized that I’m looking forward to spending more time with her. So when, a little after 3:00 in the morning, Josh and I finally bid the group adieu, as I kissed the girl goodbye on the stoop of the bar and she asked what I was doing Monday night, although I said I’d have to check my calendar to see, I was pretty sure, whatever it might be, I could probably rearrange my schedule.

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