writes nerdy things, celebrates those things as an English teacher, and is the co-founder of the production house ADK MOGUL. He lives in the mountains. Thanks for reading; feel free to leave a message, and please don't ask if he's D(e)Press(e)d.
This is a page from Austin Kleon’sSteal Like An Artist. Yesterday we were sitting around the office and talking about our influences as filmmakers. Tim mentioned that he respects old films but perhaps his biggest influence are movies made in the 1990s, but also Tarkovsky’s Stalker.
Sunny mentioned classic movies, when they were still working out how things work like Charlie Chaplin. Sunny likes old time stuff and it reflects in her work directing Into the Woods recently, her writing, and as well as her acting and singing. Also, she loves Cirque de Soleil so she loves visually impactful performances. Tim likes the clean lines and clean visual effects, none of that shaky cam illusory stuff. In his writing he likes magical realism rooted in our natural environment and how it affects human life.
For me, my creative inspiration is rooted in my sophomore year of high school, when Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet, and The Usual Suspects came out. From that, I can see a line of everything I do.
Reading Kleon’s book and this Jarmusch quote here I think about what we’re doing as a group. (I feel like “collective” is a word that is being used too much around here lately). I like that we’re creating and collaborating on things that come from other influences to build a new experience that is fresh and new in this area. It’s an exciting time for me right now, because finally I’m getting the chance to do only things I care about, which is the entire point of me coming up here.
I had to be forced into a place where I simply did not give a fuck in order to find out what I was really capable of… What elevates someone’s work from “technically excellent” to “truly great” is the extent to which you feel like you’re seeing them live their truth, be fully themselves… Jason Scott, the historian and digital archivist, told me at Webstock that a fitting epitaph for his headstone would be: “He gave a crap. He didn’t give a fuck.
This has been my mantra for the last couple months. I’ve finally settled into a professional atmosphere that engages my creative passions while also being totally okay with the reality that perhaps nothing I write for myself, like The Worst Writer Ever or any of my other writing projects, might see the end goal I would like. That’s not the reason I do them, because for me this kind of writing has been something I’ve engaged in on a daily basis since I was thirteen.
Recently, I was going through my old notebooks from NYC, college, high school, and some of the old typewriter manuscripts from before we had a computer. (I KNOW! I didn’t have one until half way through eighth grade). I’m trying to organize all of my papers in a similar manner to Gay Talese’s system and what I realized was how comics helped shaped me as a writer, and how long I’ve been engaging in writing. Since I was twelve! Twenty years I’ve been handwriting and journaling like this. Perhaps I was a creative life blogger from before the Internet. Maybe this is as far as I’ll get as a writer.
Then I came upon this quote written in one of my high school journals, I cringe at its teenage cliched pensiveness, but: “The second you stop caring about something is when it works out.” And it’s true. I think when you stop giving a fuck about the end game of something and just keep working on the details, and working on it eventually that thing will work out. It may be twenty years from now or next year. I do not give a fuck. It’s not why I do it.
