Month: March 2024

first weekend of march. straggling el niño rains keep dousing the already lush green hills, ensuring that, when the sun does peak through the clouds of late winter, southern california remembers its technicolor heritage. it’s this time of year that adolescence, a feeling tone that long outlasts the time period it arises out of, blossoms in my heart. i want to listen to emo music descended from Rites of Spring. i want to feel the terror of infatuation. i want to make movies. Taṇhā seduces me and I rediscover an intense attachment to life.

currently reading john gardner’s the art of fiction, a book I always had a vague aversion (Arati) to, but of late i rather enjoy reading books on craft, and also self-help, a genre of publishing that deserves plenty of scorn but that’s also weird and useful, given the right grindset mindset. perhaps i would benefit from putting the ambition to publish aside for a while in favor of really dedicating myself to practicing, because in honesty i don’t actually believe myself yet ready to start putting out fiction. i’ll likely share some of the stories that i have written via my newsletter because i don’t want to think about them any more and putting them out will make me think of them as “done” in some way.

last night watching My Week with Marilyn, an otherwise mid movie, I remembered that my adolescent ambitions weren’t to write, but to direct films, and while I’ve cycled through a wide variety of creative practices in the last 23 years or so, filmmaking is the only one, aside from writing, that i still believe I’d be very good at. that being said, if I thought breaking into the publishing world was hard, or that publishing was in a bad way, it looks positively inviting and healthy compared to the terminal state of the american film industry. idk. maybe i’ll write a screenplay with the intention of it being a piece of fiction, and if i can somehow manage to actually film it then great.

my therapist is advising me to engage more with art forms that aren’t writing, to help clear away my creative blocks. trying to watch lots of movies this weekend, i should reacquaint myself with all the visual artists i admire, and i’m thinking of, as a kind of memoriam to pitchfork’s former glory, listening to all 200 albums on their best of the 2000s list, and writing a little something about each one here.

hoping to set up more things to post consistently while i “build a platform” so that i can “have an audience” ready when i’m also ready to publish.