This is indescribably fantastic. Indisputable evidence (as if we needed it, and we really didn’t) that Charles Bronson was one of the coolest motherfuckers ever to walk the earth. Revel in the Awesome:
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Awakenings
“BE ALERT. BRITAIN NEEDS MORE LERTS.”
An unattributed bit of graffito that I remember seeing in one of those old Nigel Rees compilation books of Graffiti. Probably the first one, Graffiti Lives OK published in 1979, which means I’ve mentally stored this arcane piece of useless trivia for 28 bloody years, since I was seven years old. Curse my eidetic memory!
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how to get my brain kick-started in the mornings. Some days it’s a lot easier than others.
There are days when it’s pretty easy to hit the ground running. You just need the right trigger. Days that begin with the sound of my daughter’s laughter always start well. Or a day when I can flick on the radio and out comes Jackie Wilson’s Higher And Higher, setting me up perfectly for the travails of the coming 24-hours. Both of those things have occurred in the last week, which is why it is so easy for me to draw on them as examples.
But serendipity, like caffeine, only goes so far.
Despite the fact that I will never, ever be a Morning Person (I have always been a Creature of the Night by nature), I do try and make sure that I get out of bed about an hour and a half before I have to head out to work. The Reason? Well, it’s the only time I’m going to have to myself for the entire day, so I might as well make the most of it and gently ease myself into a state of readiness for battle. If I get up late and just run out the door, I spend the rest of my day on the back foot trying to get myself up to speed.
By getting up early, I can have a leisurely cup of coffee, read a few e-mails or maybe a comic, and sift through the illegible scrawls in my notebooks or on the shreds of paper that I seem to accumulate, making sense of the fleeting thoughts that I hurled onto the page the previous day.
But that still doesn’t address my main point. Getting myself into a state of alertness. Making my brain spark and fire to life, instead of stalling in a low-key, purely functional level of ponderous mental plodding. It’s a goddamn art, I tell ya! And I haven’t quite figured out a surefire way of doing it yet.
Sometimes maybe all it takes is a good night’s sleep, but those can be in short supply, especially when your young daughter is ill, as has been the case recently. Now, most kids, when they have a runny nose, either wipe it away with their sleeve, or just allow the mucus to slowly creep out and settle on their upper lip. Not my Buttercup. Oh no, she won’t touch it. This has lead to the repeated refrain of “Daddy! My nose is coming out!” resounding off the walls of AKA Central recently. Which means that someone has to get up and wipe her nose for her, despite the fact that we have tried to get her to do it herself. In fairness, she is capable of doing it, and if she wasn’t feeling so fragile, she wouldn’t hesitate. But not at the moment. And Snot Never Sleeps!
Rambling, aren’t I? OK, that’s enough for now.
An unattributed bit of graffito that I remember seeing in one of those old Nigel Rees compilation books of Graffiti. Probably the first one, Graffiti Lives OK published in 1979, which means I’ve mentally stored this arcane piece of useless trivia for 28 bloody years, since I was seven years old. Curse my eidetic memory!
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how to get my brain kick-started in the mornings. Some days it’s a lot easier than others.
There are days when it’s pretty easy to hit the ground running. You just need the right trigger. Days that begin with the sound of my daughter’s laughter always start well. Or a day when I can flick on the radio and out comes Jackie Wilson’s Higher And Higher, setting me up perfectly for the travails of the coming 24-hours. Both of those things have occurred in the last week, which is why it is so easy for me to draw on them as examples.
But serendipity, like caffeine, only goes so far.
Despite the fact that I will never, ever be a Morning Person (I have always been a Creature of the Night by nature), I do try and make sure that I get out of bed about an hour and a half before I have to head out to work. The Reason? Well, it’s the only time I’m going to have to myself for the entire day, so I might as well make the most of it and gently ease myself into a state of readiness for battle. If I get up late and just run out the door, I spend the rest of my day on the back foot trying to get myself up to speed.
By getting up early, I can have a leisurely cup of coffee, read a few e-mails or maybe a comic, and sift through the illegible scrawls in my notebooks or on the shreds of paper that I seem to accumulate, making sense of the fleeting thoughts that I hurled onto the page the previous day.
But that still doesn’t address my main point. Getting myself into a state of alertness. Making my brain spark and fire to life, instead of stalling in a low-key, purely functional level of ponderous mental plodding. It’s a goddamn art, I tell ya! And I haven’t quite figured out a surefire way of doing it yet.
Sometimes maybe all it takes is a good night’s sleep, but those can be in short supply, especially when your young daughter is ill, as has been the case recently. Now, most kids, when they have a runny nose, either wipe it away with their sleeve, or just allow the mucus to slowly creep out and settle on their upper lip. Not my Buttercup. Oh no, she won’t touch it. This has lead to the repeated refrain of “Daddy! My nose is coming out!” resounding off the walls of AKA Central recently. Which means that someone has to get up and wipe her nose for her, despite the fact that we have tried to get her to do it herself. In fairness, she is capable of doing it, and if she wasn’t feeling so fragile, she wouldn’t hesitate. But not at the moment. And Snot Never Sleeps!
Rambling, aren’t I? OK, that’s enough for now.
Friday, March 02, 2007
Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc
“I love writing but I hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says. “You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, giftless. I'm not your agent and I'm not your mommy, I'm a white piece of paper, you wanna dance with me?" and I really, really don't. I don't want any trouble. I'll go peaceable-like.”
Aaron Sorkin from his Introduction to The West Wing Script Book: Volume 1
Also, something that occurred to me this morning as I was fighting my way through a particularly brutal hangover – many years ago, after I’d flamed out of my Law Degree realising that it just wasn’t for me, I dusted myself off and decided to re-enter the hallowed halls of higher education. I applied to get on to a bunch of media and film studies degree courses. I was rejected for all of them. I wasn’t considered to be suitable material for such endeavours. Now, universities use things that I’ve written to teach their film students.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. All those people who turned me away? Fuck them. Fuck them up their stupid asses.
Ah, and that’s enough of sucking my own dick for today. The white page beckons.
Aaron Sorkin from his Introduction to The West Wing Script Book: Volume 1
Also, something that occurred to me this morning as I was fighting my way through a particularly brutal hangover – many years ago, after I’d flamed out of my Law Degree realising that it just wasn’t for me, I dusted myself off and decided to re-enter the hallowed halls of higher education. I applied to get on to a bunch of media and film studies degree courses. I was rejected for all of them. I wasn’t considered to be suitable material for such endeavours. Now, universities use things that I’ve written to teach their film students.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. All those people who turned me away? Fuck them. Fuck them up their stupid asses.
Ah, and that’s enough of sucking my own dick for today. The white page beckons.
Thursday, March 01, 2007
Chops
Horn players call it their embouchure. Practicing every day keeps their embouchure strong. If they don’t, mastery of their instrument starts to slide and they have to build up to that level of excellence all over again.
My embouchure is pitifully weak at the moment. Seeing as this blog sometimes acts as my Jiminy Cricket, getting all of this out of my head will keep me honest and maybe even stick a much-needed foot in my ass.
My writing at the moment feels flabby and dull. It’s not writer’s block. I have no problem getting the words out. It’s just that they all seem so lacklustre, as if everything is stuck at the level of a first draft, and I don’t have the magic dust in my arsenal of tricks to bring the words to life.
January zipped along in a tumult of flailing fingers as the writing ticked over nicely, and I made strong and steady progress on my long-gestating screenplay Rotten Timing. Unexpectedly, an opportunity came up that was too good to dismiss, and I shifted my brainspace over to something else and started banging together a proposal for a non-fiction book.
Since that was sent off, I’m having trouble reclaiming the part of my brain that was preoccupied with it. I’ve been doing what writers should never, ever do. I’ve been giving my proposal a messy autopsy, violently slicing into it and thinking that “I should have punched that section up a bit” or “Damn, I shouldn’t have put that in there”. And it’s all futile, because it’s out of my hands now, and I should just forget about it and move on to the next thing. If the book gets picked up, great. And if it doesn’t? Well, shit, at least I rolled the dice and gave it a shot. (Of course, if the proposal is rejected, this is probably the last you’ll ever hear about it).
Another thing I’ve been doing (and I am positive that all published writers with a tantalisingly open web browser do this) is googling myself. It’s odd to discover that something I wrote is considered to be required reading on a variety of Asian Cinema Studies courses at prestigious London and American Universities. Kind of blows my mind a bit, to be honest. I’m no fool - I’m not the leading anything in any field. Nevertheless, it’s flattering and motivating and at least I know my words are reaching people.
But it also leads to a weird disconnect between differing realities and conflicting perceptions. Here I am struggling to squeeze words into meaningful sentences, convinced that I am creatively barren at the moment, and elsewhere I’m held up as some kind of authority on something. It’s fantastic, but it’s also confusing.
I don’t know what I’m trying to say. Maybe all writers are always painfully self-critical and dissatisfied with their efforts. Maybe I’m trying too hard to write my way out of an illusory slump. Maybe life is like a school report card, and I keep seeing the words “Must Try Harder” burnt into every page I fill. Maybe it’s OK to try your hardest and do your best, whatever the results, as long as you really are trying to do your best instead of just half-heartedly chipping away at something.
Anyway, enough of that. I know what I have to do. I’ve known all along. Must Try Harder.
My embouchure is pitifully weak at the moment. Seeing as this blog sometimes acts as my Jiminy Cricket, getting all of this out of my head will keep me honest and maybe even stick a much-needed foot in my ass.
My writing at the moment feels flabby and dull. It’s not writer’s block. I have no problem getting the words out. It’s just that they all seem so lacklustre, as if everything is stuck at the level of a first draft, and I don’t have the magic dust in my arsenal of tricks to bring the words to life.
January zipped along in a tumult of flailing fingers as the writing ticked over nicely, and I made strong and steady progress on my long-gestating screenplay Rotten Timing. Unexpectedly, an opportunity came up that was too good to dismiss, and I shifted my brainspace over to something else and started banging together a proposal for a non-fiction book.
Since that was sent off, I’m having trouble reclaiming the part of my brain that was preoccupied with it. I’ve been doing what writers should never, ever do. I’ve been giving my proposal a messy autopsy, violently slicing into it and thinking that “I should have punched that section up a bit” or “Damn, I shouldn’t have put that in there”. And it’s all futile, because it’s out of my hands now, and I should just forget about it and move on to the next thing. If the book gets picked up, great. And if it doesn’t? Well, shit, at least I rolled the dice and gave it a shot. (Of course, if the proposal is rejected, this is probably the last you’ll ever hear about it).
Another thing I’ve been doing (and I am positive that all published writers with a tantalisingly open web browser do this) is googling myself. It’s odd to discover that something I wrote is considered to be required reading on a variety of Asian Cinema Studies courses at prestigious London and American Universities. Kind of blows my mind a bit, to be honest. I’m no fool - I’m not the leading anything in any field. Nevertheless, it’s flattering and motivating and at least I know my words are reaching people.
But it also leads to a weird disconnect between differing realities and conflicting perceptions. Here I am struggling to squeeze words into meaningful sentences, convinced that I am creatively barren at the moment, and elsewhere I’m held up as some kind of authority on something. It’s fantastic, but it’s also confusing.
I don’t know what I’m trying to say. Maybe all writers are always painfully self-critical and dissatisfied with their efforts. Maybe I’m trying too hard to write my way out of an illusory slump. Maybe life is like a school report card, and I keep seeing the words “Must Try Harder” burnt into every page I fill. Maybe it’s OK to try your hardest and do your best, whatever the results, as long as you really are trying to do your best instead of just half-heartedly chipping away at something.
Anyway, enough of that. I know what I have to do. I’ve known all along. Must Try Harder.
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