tiny projects

This interregnum between the penultimate drafting of the main thing and final typesetting and design might be granting me a peek into where I'll be heading, creatively, once it's done: a full embrace of Rubin's experiment train of stake-lowering thought, a practice of tinier, smaller projects, each project existing solely to explore and finish and move on. Partway there with the weekly Shards, but I'm aiming to expand aspects of its intent (namely, that they're nothing but experiments) across the totality of my creative practice; now that the ambition to have anything resembling a creative career is dead and buried, I’m having fun simply tinkering or, as my late grandfather would say, “potting around.”

attempt(s) at thought

Finding that the longer I'm away from social media the less I think in smaller blasts, the less desire I have to share the tiny and dashed off. Expect, then, this space to move more (back?) towards longer (read: more than 50 words and likely possessed of a title) pieces that are still dashed-off, half-baked, and not at all fully developed but are, nonetheless, representative of an attempt at thought processes deeper than the clever turn of phrase.

That said, (still)life pictures, EarBliss, and Attendance Cards will continue as per normal. Just fewer "status" posts.

INDIANA JONES and THE DIAL OF DESTINY (James Mangold, 2023)

(Directed by James Mangold from a script by Jezz Butterworth, John Henry Butterworth, David Koepp, and Mangold; starring Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Mads Mikkelsen, Toby Jones, Antonio Banderas, John Rhys-Davies, and Boyd Holbrook. Released 30 June 2023; watched 2023w50 via 4k)

If I learned anything from this entertaining-enough trip down memory lane, it's that Spielberg is as integral to INDIANA JONES as Harrison Ford is under the fedora: Mangold is one of the best, most competent storytellers working today with a panache for finales (LOGAN, I mean... damn) and DIAL is a competent, occasionally thrilling exercise in old-school adventure filmmaking, but for DIAL to truly feel like the farewell to one of the best, most iconic franchises of the last 42 years that it was intended to be, it needed more than competence: it needed Spielberg's unabashed heart and Spielberginess. His decision to not direct DIAL, to "pass it on to a new generation" – perplexing, considering that that's something you would do if the series was continuing which this clearly isn't (P.S. the only actor working today I could see convincingly playing Indy would be Ryan Gosling) – will, I think, go down as the greatest tragedy of the series – yes, even more so than CRYSTAL SKULL which, for all of its LeBeouffery and vine-swinging with monkeys and nuclear-explosion-survival-via-refrigerator excesses, nonetheless wore those excesses proudly and in the best spirit of the series's Saturday matinee / Republic serial inspiration. I'll stick with THE LAST CRUSADE as the farewell, with CRYSTAL SKULL and now DIAL OF DESTINY as wistful and flawed approximations of memories in a family photo album.

between

This whole "I'm finished for now with one project and don't have another except things I started a long time ago" space is weird. I know it would be the space that Rick Rubin would call the seed gathering phase (or something like that) and I've got them percolating around and about, but it's been a long time since I've been here. Not sure I particularly want to revisit those things I had started long ago, before my grandfather's death (or even, in some cases, before my mother's death more than a year and a half ago): I'd rather find something new to play with. On the other hand, I do feel like I can't get on with this next chapter of my life (and my work, perhaps) until his house is empty and out of my hands; anything else would be in the "before times" and I want whatever I write to be of the moment (which would be this slightly maddening "between"). Think I'll consider the best I can do right now to be to show up and write something and will duly consider this to be that something until something else pops up.