On Cinema and Being a Giant Nerd

- mimetic portrayal, in Terry and Barry (2007)

I posted a film I made for school a couple years ago onto my other blog thingy - (Everything is Not a Big Deal/Vimeo) - after finally caving on my snobbery and archaic notion of what constitutes as ‘Cinema,’ or the movie watching experience.

I will always prefer things projected onto bigger screens in darkened rooms filled with strangers. I like the idea of a film (when it’s done right) being like some kind of collective dream you share quietly and anonymously with those in your neighbourhood/community. When it ends, you fuck off to whatever is coming next, carrying these unreal moments, pictures and sounds, back to your colonies for future consideration and distribution - just as you do after seeing something on MegaVideo - but with the visual proof (a la yer fellow moviegoers' smug and satisfied faces) that the wonderful thoughts you're having are being had somewhere else in the culture, simultaneously. (Blah, blah, blah blah blah... )

This is by no means a proper critique or stance on my part, and the film I'm showing y'all is by no means what I would consider as something that can stand up to the qualities that equal amazing. But, I've gone on long enough...

[The laughter continues in a couple of days... stay tuned!!]

Prologue

Welcome.

This is my first posting, but it’s actually only half/one part of two blogs – the other being 'this'– of which each are meant to play together like some kind of great partnership (think: Martin & Lewis, Molotov Cocktails and angry proletarian uprisings, KFC-Taco Bell, pee and poo, et cetera, et cetera…). So, this isn’t really my first posting at all!?!

The Children Crusades thing I posted on the other side of this one you’re now staring down was written last winter and can also be found, with all its left out words and original form, in Pinnacle 001.

I chose to post it, and post it first because it was the last public offering of my Writerly-Self, before he disappeared off the face of the Earth until just about a month ago (and having been thought missing or dead until then).

It’s a pretty sad thing when this happens to one of your oldest and dearest friends. My Writerly-Self had been with me longer than most selves…

Waaaay longer than NHL ’09 Playing-Self, Special Needs Supporting-Self and Battlestar Galactica Loving-Self put together. Longer than Dancing With Myself-Self or Staying Up ‘Til 5am Fucking Around on the Internet or Watching Foreign and Terrible Movies-Self… even longer than Masturbating-Self (and by an easy 4-5 years… wow!).

We had been hanging out. We were planning novels together. We would meet up and start a script, work on it off and on for a few weeks, get distracted or called away from it for awhile because of schedules and other commitments, and then meet up later on to revise things or start over. I wasn’t trying to neglect our friendship, in fact, I thought it was going pretty well until he just one day up and vanished.

I didn’t think much of it at first, and continued on with some other things; going to work every day, trips overseas, hanging out with friends and other selves. Eventually, I figured something was up.

It took some months (nearly half a year!) before I was able to track him down.

So with a bottle of gin in hand, I stopped by where he’d been hiding out one night, a little desperate, a little heartbroken, and a whole lot drunk and pissed off…

I stood aghast! My Writerly-Self was so filthy and frail. Laying naked, aside from a pair of brown slippers and a half-eaten peanut butter sandwich that smooshed between his left arm and those sunken ribs (which, at the sight of me he jumped up and devoured to bits with his disgusting little goblin fingers, like some kind of maniac), he looked three times his age and with this terrified lost look in his eyes that told me he hadn’t left his bed (let alone his apartment) in weeks.

I dropped to my knees; weeping and swigging and thinking about homicide.

Hours in, when the both of us had calmed down somewhat, I was able to get his take on what happened…

My Writerly-Self swears that ‘they’ have been out to get him. That he was being followed, censored, poisoned (slowly) and made to perform ridiculous one-man plays about twenty-something protagonists who couple down and lose themselves to stay-in dinners and watching the Food Network at all hours of the day.

He claimed that the brutal communist regime of some occupying nation had then stolen all his pants, but that he had learned to welcome this final indignation, and now counts it as the blessing that has allowed him the peace needed to at last let go.

“I can no longer give good reason why I or anyone should be forced to engage with the World, if these are its set terms?”

He tells me he’s been in this current state of paralysis more or less ever since.

I tell him that, “It is not the World that has set these terms, but our scared way within it. “

To which he buries his head in my crotch, bawling. His disgusting goblin arms wrapping firmly around my waist.

“There, there… self.” I assure him, petting his thick, oily hair in a loving rhythm. “Everything is not a big deal.”

To which he unzipped my pants so he could climb in.

[We, err… I, will be writing things on these pages in a semi-regular fashion from now on. So check back soon folks!]

- The photo is ‘Lothar, Berlin 1982’ by Gundala Shulze Eldowy