Beguile Us in the Way You Know

man down

On the plane out I watched a movie that everyone said was amazing but they were wrong.  In NYC, a place I hadn’t been in since the late 90s - when M and I both worked for Barbara T, there for for staged reading of a project she was putting together based on a book - when I was in film school, still full of hope/possibility and a sort of pulsing and radiant naive ambition about making it in filmmaking. Walking around NY now and remembering that trip from 20 years or so prior, dull translucent memories pinballed with loud thuds and I found my way to the home of one of my oldest friends from Chamblee HS (Atlanta GA) and his family. We stayed up late across a couple nights talking about dumb things we did then and who’s dead now and how our parents are managing these days. I walked through Central Park and saw the John Lennon memorial and the nearby Dakota which brought me back to Madison Elementary (Manitowoc WI) on Dec 8, 1980 when I was 8, as old as my son is now. I went to the Rubin Museum and quietly made my way through multiple iterations of removers of obstacles. I got to screen 2 episodes of Microaggressions at a film festival, which was mostly rewarding but which also came bundled with an admixture of social anxiety and constant self-evaluation, mostly of the caustic and corrosive variety. One thing was/is clear: the dominant paradigm/model of making cinema that I was schooled in - and that I aspired to -  is no longer respected, relevant, or real. And so began a slow tug at a fraying thread that stretched across the entire month: why are you trying so hard? On the plane home, I watched a movie everyone said was horrible but they were wrong. 

***

The next weekend in Southern California - a place which activates the film school and beyond corridor in me, ambition and its slow curdling - for my father-in-law’s memorial service. He was a wonderful human being, intelligent, kind, hilarious. He died in late July at 93, just as we were headed to Yosemite, our son by coincidence wearing a Vogelsang T-shirt that came from him. The service was small and beautiful. An eternity of striving and joy and ache and suddenly there’s your artifacts on a table and impromptu rememberings from a small roomful of people. A decade earlier we met him in AZ for Thanksgiving at his sister’s house. The light was orange and golden on the cacti and we buried part of ourselves on Thumb Butte, not knowing what lay ahead (because who can?). At the service his sister, the last remaining of 4 siblings, called herself the last performer on the stage at the end of the play. Going home from LA we had layover and had to kill time and I got on social media and watched emotions rise and realized I feel at my best when I’m not on social media but since there are tendrils of striving and filmmaking and blunted but potent ambitions gnarled here not being on it has never seemed possible. What if you stopped? a voice shouted.

***

Some time later in the month in my office at dawn, still black outside, putting together shooting schedule for Sister/Brother, revising script to the constraints of no budget, the lead character struggling with the death of her ambitions but finding new way forward. Realizations made less of cymbal clashing and more of accumulated moments, of gentle questions that aim to remove obstacles: what if you didn’t drink so much? what if you ran more? what if you were kinder to yourself? This character is me and not me at once.

Near the end of the month, the royalties from Amazon for the last several months of Microaggressions and The Black Sea - not my only works but my two best and most recent, both involving years of sweat, doubt, triumph, effort - arrived in my bank account: five dollars and five cents. Less than a pumpkin spice latte but more than I would have earned if I didn’t do the work. What does one do with this information?

***

Halloween night I stayed home to hand out candy while M took the kids around. I had been sick the previous week and only just now started to envision feeling whole again. The knocks started strong but tapered off.  I was in costume at first, still not quite myself, but when the inevitable last knock came it was just me who answered.

Black Hayagriva at the Rubin