To-Do List Days

Days like these I am glued to this small apartment. I write extensive to-do lists: finish grant proposal, get on with the paper, fill out taxes, drop off laundry, etc. And then I proceed to ignore each and every one of the items on the list, preferring to worry about not getting any of it done. I make deals with myself, “if you finish that response paper for the Arabic Cinema class, or at the very least get it started, then you can go see Max Ophuls ‘The Earrings of Madame De’ at the Film Forum”. Of course, I will end up opting for niether. Everything’s such a chore on days like these.

In truth I would go see the Ophuls film, if I had someone to go with. I enjoy going to the movies by myself, but it gets tiresome after a while. I think about my love, I fix her features on my mind, waging war against abstractions borne out of distance and time. I want to account for every single pore on her face, but there is no such thing as High Definition memory.

The other day I caught myself complaining to some class-mates that the problem with our class is that everyone’s too damned nice. I almost choked on my beer as I said it. Is that really what I’ve been reduced to: complaining about that standard Ivy League politeness?

A lot of things I’d like to share, the insignificant, monotonous details that nobody cares about. My love does, but a lot of these I forget before our nightly call. Maybe I need more drama in my life, maybe the lack of it is what is so difficult to write. Maybe that’s the problem, I like to see it on-screen, on the page, but I eschew it within myself.

I used to think that this ennui, which I am so intimately acquainted with, was a San Juan thing, the usual Puerto Rican morass. I now realize that it’s me. It has been me all along. One more thing for that to-do list: snap out of it.

Motherless Writing

Finally finished reading Jonathan Lethem´s sprawling Brooklyn bildungsroman last night. I can now return to my life, which I had taken a break from in order to delve obssessively into this book. The goddamned novel had me missing class because I was staying up till 5am reading it, and it´s a wonder I didn´t brake a leg as I walked down subway platforms without putting the book down. Lethem is quite the wordsmith, a word-fucker in fact. His novel before this one, "Motherless Brooklyn", starred an orphaned, tourettic private detective who couldn't stop spitting out freely associated words and phrases. Fortress of Solitude is just that without the Tourrett's: verb-o-rrhea (of the finest quality) just for the sheer fun of it, like catching a spaldeen in mid-flight, which is precisely what its young, white protagonist likes to do in his all-black block.

The novel is certainly uneven, I'm not sure about its supernatural aspects tagged on top of such a clearly autobiographical conceit. For some reason Americans, and Anglos in general, never seem to get Magical Realism quite right. Still Lethem manages to pull off some fine tricks. The novel is composed of sequences, with elliptical jumps of varying degrees in between. The novelist launches into these without giving any expository information, in media res-style. It has a disorienting effect where characters, situations and plot emerge a piece at a time and come together a page and a half after the sequence has begun. The reader is left to pull it all together, forced to make sense of the Brooklynite mid-seventies, much like Dylan Ebdus -the main character- is trying to do.

Not least in the bag of tricks is a white writer giving race relations such a genuine gaze. White guilt, black oppression, ghetto mentality, alternating victim/victimizer attitudes: all of these fuse to create the muddle that was the gaffitied, funkified, proto-gentrified, hippie communed world where the action takes place. And then there is the loneliness and the yearning, two irresistible Lethem staples. Candid and crushing in his portrayal of motherlessness, Lethem might easily fall prey to his defensive hipsterism, but he is always moving.

My thoughts exactly...

"I was sort of a half-breed of colonization, understanding everyone because I belonged completely to no one."

That sinking feeling...

Disclaimer: if you don't want to hear a sulking, self-indulgent story about a guy laying down his sorry trip - well if that IS your mindset you wouldn't be in this blog right now anyway, so just forget this disclaimer altogether, it's not necessary.

So I spent a fair amount of time during Spring Break working on my feature, the one I had been obsessively outlining. It wasn't as much time as I'd like, but there was effort put into it. Didn't get the whole first act, but got the first 20 pages in. Here's the thing with "the process": as you write it, it doesn't feel right, intuitively you know it's not working. Your characters don't sound like they speak like people, it's just words on the page. But you barrel on, convinced that that's the thing about a first draft. Then you reread it (and here the delusions begin) and you think "it's not as bad as all that". So you change a thing here, maybe switch a sentence from the passive voice to its active counterpart, maybe add a couple of adverbs. Then you re-read it again, this time it doesn't feel half-bad, hell it's almost good. Sure, there's a lot of work to be done, but you figure the idea's there and it works. But still there's that tiny little voice in the back of your head pushing the brakes. You muffled it.
Cut to:
Presented my screen pages in class today. It was horrible. Soapy melodrama: the people reading it couldn't say the lines with a straight face. It was bloody massacre, and I don't blame my classmates for spoofing the hell out of the reading. Fuck, that's the kind of treatment over the top nonsensical lines like the ones I just wrote deserve.

Which is not to say that it wasn't a huge dissappointment. Talked with the professor afterwards, because by the end of the workshop I didn't even feel like it was worth continuing with the damned script. "Don't be afraid of your own ambition" was all he said. What the fuck does that mean!!!! Sounds precisely like something you would tell a student who had just come up with a hideous, half-assed, half-baked, dead-end piece of writing. Suffice it to say that it wasn't a very healthy meeting for me. In fact, it's a wonder I still haven't burned the text.

So now what? I'll plough on with the script, I'll rewrite those first twenty pages this week. Do I have any options? It's not like I have any other ideas. Also: I'm working hard to keep the ego in check. What did I expect? A masterpiece on my first go? So it's back to the drawing board. That's writing: rewriting, taking in all the derision and flattened expectations and going back to rework it all... until it works.

Still, it was a terrible, sinking feeling the one I felt in class today. I hate that gurgling sound, you know, the bubbles a sinking paper boat makes... I guess it's the sound of failure.

Este sofa tiene historia...

...exclamó Tufiñito a boca de jarro cuando nos vio jalando con él pa' la calle. No le pregunté cual era porque francamente me dio miedo de lo que me pudo haber contestado.

Sin Garantias/No Assurance

This is my final exercise from last semester. We stole our shots in the streets of Miramar and then headed to the Port O Call, where we shot the last part. It was a shoot filled with problems, headaches, tension, people storming out of the "set" (if a back-street in Santurce can be called that), fights and other "fun" stuff. However, I did get to collaborate with some very good friends with whom I go way back and I must say that the result of our experimenting came out all right. Hey, at least we learned that you can shoot at night on the street without lighting and you'll still get some exposure.

Como si fuera un Danes pana de Von Trier haciendo un statement sobre el cine...

El cine narrativo es la más efímera de todas las artes. El empeño en hacerte sentir en el momento, en afectarte sensorialmente para provocar una reacción ante un evento que ocupa escasos segundos en la pantalla hace que su impacto sea tan intenso como irremediablemente pasajero. Uno vive lo que sucede en la pantalla, pero vivir es así, una acto momentáneo que se olvida tan pronto se encienden las luces del local.