sick day
As I’m temporarily down for the count with a belated case of the winter cold, updates and excitement – both digital and analog – will be briefly delayed.
Looks like it’s time to whip up a second pot of that aforementioned chicken soup.
disclaimer
Based on some of the misadventures about which I’ve blogged in months and years past, a number of readers (by which I mean, my mother) have likely begun to look into A.A. chapters that meet near my apartment, or perhaps see if they might, as a birthday gift, enroll me early on the liver transplant list.
So, before I come home one evening to a living room intervention, I thought I’d better set the record straight: In point of fact, not only do the vast majority of my evenings not involve liquor at all, most are, further, rather dull. I end up at inane business dinners, or while away evenings banging out emails while curled up on the couch, besweatpantsed, simultaneously (occupational hazard) screening a film.
It’s just that, the other nights, that small minority when I likely am, in fact, causing irreparable biotic harm, tend to be far, far more interesting. So they show up disproportionately in posts on this fair site.
From those intermittent posts, it’s understandable that readers might extrapolate to my leading a life involving a permanent alcohol I.V. (though, actually, if anyone has some good leads on where I can get that set up, certainly shoot me an email). Instead, my life is pretty, remarkably bland, with just enough excitement to, at least occasionally, yield a retelling good enough to warrant your risking corporate wrath by tuning in over lunch break.
In service to that, I figure, the rare bout of cirrhosis is a small price to pay indeed.
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.
thinking of you
Read Strunk & White, Poynter or Zinsser, and you’ll emerge with at least one common tip for improving your writing: know your audience.
Which, for most documents, is undoubtedly good advice. Penning a Sunday Style article (seriously, Barbara, it’s almost finished), a business proposal or a birthday card, it helps immeasurably to keep the eventual reader firmly in mind.
With this blog, however, audience-focused writing is a much harder trick to pull off. Not solely because I have absolutely no idea who most of the thousand or two people who float through this site daily are, but also because the groups of people who I do know about are all looking for such divergent things.
Based on the posts that get linked on other blogs, or del.iciou.us bookmarked, it’s pretty clear s-a’s readership is composed of several, fairly distinct groups. There are the 43Folders-ites, thrilled by any mention of productivity hacks and Getting Things Done; there are the startup wonks, looking for entrepreneurial insights and tech business ruminations; there are the film folks, hoping to pitch Cyan (and now Long Tail) and looking first to unlock the secret that will get them cast or hired, or launch their screenplay into production; and then there are the large number of generalist voyeurs, the people hoping to live a bit of the disastrous New York dating life through my vicarious misadventures.
Since I know no single thing I write could make them all happy, I essentially don’t even try. I don’t balance out the flow of postings to make sure I cater regularly to each group, or even neatly section off one kind of writing from another. Instead, as they do in my brain, the thoughts all simply jumble up on the front page, intermixed, sometimes even within a single post.
But while I’m able to block from my mind (wisely or not) the varying groups of readers, I occasionally find myself writing to one single reader. I write, in short, knowing that I’m being blog-stalked by a potential date.
In my prior post, I said that I don’t seem to have a type, a regular pattern that emerges from my dating past. Which, in fact, is only partially true. When I last tallied my kissing count, I re-discovered something that I’ve long, at least subconsciously, known: I tend to like writers, especially those that self-reflect mercilessly, that pour their inner life onto paper (or screen). Which makes me, in short, remarkably good at developing crushes on fellow bloggers.
I say this all to preface admission of my own potential-date blog-stalking. In the world of business, I tend to obsessively research investors, clients and hires. Which has carried over to my personal life, where, especially in the case of other bloggers, I tend to follow along with new postings, to pore over bits of the archive, looking less for the what and more for the underlying why.
And, projecting perhaps, I tend to imagine that potential dates are doing the same thing. The contents of my archives are fairly immutable. But new postings – over that I have some control. So I tend to second guess my own ideas, question topics on which I might typically hold forth. I look at potential posts and wonder how they make me sound. Too dorky? Too neurotic? Too excited about the companies I’m trying to build?
Fortunately, I rarely pause long, as, in fact, I’m at least as dorky and neurotic and excited as my writing might imply. That’s just who I am. And while trying to hide that, even in the off chance that I could pull it off, might help me score a first, or even third, date, it certainly wouldn’t bring me to the the thiry-first or seventy-third.
Frankly, that’s a whole lot of work for a rather brief-lived payoff. So much of New York dating – the posing, the game-playing – it only works for that brief stretch when you have the interest and energy to put in the effort. Which is why, even during those stretches that I’m sure (rightly or wrongly) someone I’d really love to impress is reading along, I fall back on the same strategy for writing as I’ve gradually come to for real-world dates: stop trying so damn hard, stick to the truth, and hope for the best.
While, short-term, it’s probably not the most effective strategy (either for keeping readers or for getting laid), in the long run, it’s the only hope I’ve got.
no, seriously
I’m getting back on the daily posting bandwagon, even if it kills me.
placeholder
The thing with blogging is, it’s a habit. And, like any habit, once you get out, it’s hard to get back in.
I say that in light of my light posting this month – four entries in twenty-three days being more than a bit off the daily schedule towards which I shoot. Sure, I could make excuses, blaming moving, furnishing, hosting my visiting brother, starting Long Tail, or any number of other time sinks. But, in truth, the ever-increasing span of non-blogging is simply the effects of return-post dread: with each passing day, I’m increasingly convinced that, whatever I write as my first entry after the long stretch of nothing had better be damn good, had better somehow make up for all the slacking off.
Hence this post, which, obviously, isn’t a damn good one, but rather an attempt to wipe the fear-of-return-post-quality slate clean. After all, whatever I write next, it pretty much has to be an improvement.
no comment
As comment spam has been raging out of control, and as, of the slightly less than three thousand unique visitors over the past week, exactly seven have actually commented, I’m heading back (at least temporarily) to the years of commentlessness that characterized this site.
If you don’t like it, leave a comment.
instant expert
As with most web users, when I set out to research something, Google is my inevitable first stop. As a result, that site holds great power in designating expertise. Show up as a top result for a search string, and it’s assumed that you know something about the topic that led the searcher to your site.
As I’ve previously written, that’s not always the best assumption. While I continue to pick up a dozen hits a day on ‘urinal etiquette’, a topic I have written about in depth, I also draw equal numbers from searches like ‘fat naked guys’ and ‘lesbian self-photography’, topics that, while obviously enthralling, fall a bit further outside my area of expertise.
Apparently, even people who should know much better are using Google in this way. A Newsweek editor, for example, emailed a couple of months back while researching an article on specialty teas. And while the extent of my contribution to that area of knowledge is essentially limited to occasionally talking shit about Starbucks’ decision to sell sub-par Tazo, I still managed to get my father quoted in her article as a result.
I’ve been particularly amused, however, by the recent spate of visitors arriving at this site by searching for the string ‘asdjf’. I mean, that’s not even a word – it’s what you get when you smash your hand down nonsensically on the center row of a keyboard. Still, each day I get thoughtful, dorky questions like:
“I would like to know what words that appear to be just a random sequence of letters, usually containing elements of the set {a, s, d, f, h, j, i} mean. Sometimes the “words” are separated by semi-colons. Examples are “asdjf,” “asf,” “asdfkl” and “sldfjasjkdf.” Teenagers and young adults use them on the internet and chat rooms, many times in conjunction with “grrrr” (which I presume to be an expression of anger.)”
To which I can only say: aas;lkdfj alj;fsdk kljalfsd a;sldkfjads;fkl.
what’s coming
After countless stretches of thinking time on planes, trains and automobiles over the past month, I’ve finally articulated to myself what I want this site to be about, the various kinds of content I’m hoping to wedge onto this small space of screen real estate. As a result, the structure of the site will be (yet again) evolving slightly over the next few months; in advance, however, I wanted to give whoever the hell you people reading along are a quick heads up on where things are heading.
First, despite the recent spate of increasingly lengthy posts, I’ll be refocusing on short writing covering the various and sundry stupid things I muse about during the gaps in my day: The connection between Skinner Boxes and dating. Violating subway etiquette. Chapstick.
Next, I’ll also be fleshing out further some of my longer ideas into essays of varying lengths – from weightier pieces I’ve been mentally outlining (“God at the Edge of Science: Do Limit Questions Imply a Higher Power?” and “The Napsterization of Film: Shifting Movie Businesses into the Digital Age”) to fun but too extended to be webloggy content (further installments of The Great Pickup Line Experiment, more friends and family interviews [e.g.]).
I’ll also be expanding out the Salmagundi section – still pointing people towards the things I find interesting in my constant stumbling through the web, but with a bit of space for me to toss in a sentence or two about each.
And, of course, keeping true to the site’s name, the vanity content (my bio, trumpet performance schedule, etc.) will be sticking around.
I’m still puzzling through the best way to make all of that fit on one page, as well as how to balance what little writing time I have between them. But, at least in my current fantasy, that’s where the site’s going. Argue now, before I become increasingly wed to the ideas, or forever hold your peace.
blog zen
“I just never knew that so much went into organizing a wallet. I would assume that an afternoon with a three year old would produce more material.”
– Senora Juego, in an astute comment on yesterday’s post.
***
I’ll be the first to admit that, when I write nearly a thousand words about wallet maintenance, it’s not because I’m wildly passionate about the subject. Instead, it’s what happens when, sitting down at the computer, I realize I have absolutely nothing to say.
***
Writers block is a fact of writing. Anyone who writes regularly, who routinely starts new pieces from scratch, has – at least on occasion – faced the terrifying nothingness of a white screen or blank piece of paper.
Novelists bitch and moan about it, drink themselves to death as a result. Working journalists, conversely, tend to simply slog their way through, quality be damned; a deadline’s coming, they ain’t gettin’ paid unless they turn in two thousand words, and so they might as well just put something onto paper.
And, in that sense, we webloggers are nearly journalists. The deadlines may be internal, driven by a sense of obligation to regular posting. But they weigh down none the less. The blank screen looms, and we simply write the first thing that pops into our heads. Quality be damned.
***
Often, when I talk to people who’ve just taken up blogging, they’ll tell me that they don’t intend to blog for long. They’ll simply go until they’ve told all the stories they’ve, for years, wanted to tell. And then they’ll quit.
Invariably, this never happens. Through the process of blogging, they come to realize that, in our small daily adventures, the minute facets of our lives, there are literally thousands upon thousands of stories and speculations to tell and share. We could never possibly run out.
And yet, day by day, it’s often difficult to see those facets and adventures. They’re too small to us, too constant, too much a part of life.
***
There is an old Koan about a young monk who, seeking enlightenment, asks Master Dae-Ju to tell him the path to Zen. Dae-Ju replies, ìZen is very easy. When hungry, eat; when tired, sleep.î
We spend all of our lives doing things without really doing them. We go through the motions. We walk through our parts. But are we really present?
If this is the path to Zen, it’s also the path to blogging well. To find material, we needn’t change what we do, merely the way we do it. Fully experience each day, and surely in each lies a story worth telling.
Of course, like any truth, it’s easier advice to mouth than to follow. Unlike Zen, though, blogging provides constant feedback in that pursuit, a daily test of how well we’ve stuck to the course of fully living. Do I have a story to tell? And, if not, is it really because nothing happened to me in the past twenty-four hours? Or is it because so much happened that I somehow missed it all, even as I marked my way through?
***
Keeping a weblog, then, is easy. When inspired, write; when finished, stop. Live through today. Return tomorrow. You’ll doubtless be inspired to write again.