five deadly everythings...

I can tell my mom is getting old because she wakes up before the birds do and falls asleep to sweet hum of the evening news. This is exaggeration, sure, but not hyperbole. In contrast, I can tell my pops is going through his second childhood. He stays out late with his homies and wakes up without the use of an alarm clock. i.e. whenever the fuck he wants to. This doesn't mean he wakes up late per se, but it does mean if he did wake up late it wouldn't make much difference to his day.

I normally classify myself as a night person. I suffer often from insomnia and have over the years built and believed in the myth that I do my best work late at night. Lately, I've been using what Tyler terms my "backwards-brain", and I'm noticing this was never really true. My insomnia is not so much an inability to sleep so much as it is a phobic aversion to sleep. (insert Nas lyric.) Not so much that "sleep is the cousin of death", but more like "sleep is my bitch ex-girlfriend". It's fucked me over so many times, so I've been trying - irrationally so - to erase it from my existence.

In truth I get my best work done early in the a.m. I learned this during novel-writing-month where I woke my ass up at 6 in the morning and would write a couple hundred words by noon. The hard part is the getting up. Last week when I was getting swamped at school and procrastination made me stupid and soft, I woke myself up at 5:30am and got to school while the main hallway lights were still off. I crawled into the computer lab and got all my past-due assignments done and out of way with time enough to grab breakfast before my first class. By 10am I was alert and I dare say perky.

A lot of cliches are true, and we ignore them because cliches are also boring. Old people are also boring, but I'm willing to try and learn what they have to teach. The lessons it normally takes a lifetime to learn--early birds wake the fuck up and do something, or something like that.

Posted by Scene -- at 11:26:00 p.m. | Permalink

I covered my first criminal court case on Friday. On trial was a man accused of decapitating his mom while she was still alive (though unconscious) and burning down their house. There were more sordid details inbetween. Attempting to dispose of the body, he tried cutting her into pieces but failed. She had deeps gashes on her thighs and ankles but he couldn't get through the bone. So he burned down the house by lighting rags in the basement and cooking a household chemical casserole in the oven.

Despite the, y'know, (allegedly) killing his mom stuff...I kind of felt sorry the guy. Not only were me and a bunch of my upstart journalist friends in the crowd, but there was some highschool class on a field trip. He walks into the courtroom shackled and sees all these kids there, acting the same as they would during the coming attractions before a movie.

In other news, my boss at REMG got the axe. Same day as the trial. Lisa, whom I love, was my last tie to that place. I can quit now conscience-free. Instead of Freshest stuff, I'm gonna knock out another screenplay during the Christmas break. I swear I am. Plus hopefully me and Kamal can get that mixtape done, or at least a couple of tracks.

Hopefully too I want to train over the Holidays. New kid at the store, Tyler, is a boxer and wants to spar. My sister bought new muay thai pads too. And Zeyna and Hector want to roll. I don't know if I have the time, but yes, something about the Christmas season just makes you want to throw a couple of punches.

Posted by Scene -- at 11:23:00 p.m. | Permalink

My friend Blaise once bought me a book on Hitchcock, that contained a passage (paraphrased) that said "I've read a million wonderful essays on Vertigo that broke down the politics and aesthetics from every angle possible, that dissected the movie to its bits and pieces -- but all of those essays failed to mention how beautifully heartbreaking the film is." I mean, isn't that what really makes Vertigo such a landmark accomplishment?

One of my frustrations with going through the film studies process was that there was little room for emotional reactions to film. I was able to squeeze my awe into a couple of essays, but I had to be pretty sneaky with my prose and I knew I could only get away with that for a few (equally emotional) professors.

Anyways, I just read this clip of a review for the movie Babel:

Watching 'Babel' in a packed theatre last month, I fel the same rush I had watching 'American Beauty', 'Shakespeare in Love', and 'Million Dollar Baby.'

I can't rationalize it. I can't quantify it. I can barely explain it. All I can tell you is that, as sappy as it sounds, those films, and this film, made me feel as if my heart had expanded."

-Sean Smith, Newsweek

Now, while I hate two of the three films he mentioned, I love this review. I love Mr. Smith's loss for words, and I love his observance of "in a packed theatre" which is so crucial.

peace.

Posted by Scene -- at 12:37:00 p.m. | Permalink

Some Words

Looks like I have a little time to blog because my plans for the night fell through. The in-house music company at Sbux (Hear Music...they released that Ray Charles duet disc that was everywhere and won a Grammy) is having a contest for baristas to submit their music and maybe win a chance at being included on one of their compilations. Kamal and I were planning to enter for awhile now, but we're as slack with that stuff as we are with closing the store on time, so things were thrown together last minute. We were supposed to record tonight with Chris after close, but the dude we were purchasing the beat from couldn't get back to us in time, etc etc etc. So I'm here with a couple of hours free.

Not free actually....I *could* be using this time to do the homework that I've fallen so behind on. But since this block of time was scheduled for not-homework I'm gonna spend it doing not-homework, ok?



Let's see. So one of my last assignments was to interview and profile a working journalist. I got in touch with Leslie Scrivener at the Star and that went really well. Why Leslie? She actually profiled Kamal and his group a couple years back, so I remembered her name. She's the Faith and Ethics reporter. I like her because she does smaller stories on real people. She really gets voices heard that otherwise would be muffled or silent, and her work shows a sustained dedication to actually making the world a better place (as opposed to, I dunno...getting the biggest scoop).

She showed me around the newsroom which I have to say impressed the fuck out of me. It's huge and flat and long and sprawls like a prarie. Computers and reporters and desks and computers and it's all very "Daily Planet". There's a buzz in the air and it's contagious. People smile at you when you pass which is very nice.

We went to the cafeteria and she bought me a muffin and talked to me for a little over an hour-and-a-half. We covered so much, from her days in j-school to her big break covering Terry Fox (nobody else thought it was a good story), to her insights on the profession. We even talked hip-hop (she's like 55, dope) and a bit about my aspirations and I can see why she makes a good interviewer -- she really makes you feel comfortable and you really really wanna talk to her. I think she has voodoo eyes.

She signed my copy of "Terry Fox: His Story", and she wrote on the flap, "To Jef: who asks all the right questions." And that's the nicest thing she could have possibly written.

It hasn't been all fuzzy-feelings at school though, sad to say. These past two weeks brought me back to my fuck-up ways, and I bungled a bunch of assignments and missed about three deadlines. The thing about my program is that the grades don't really matter. As long as you're about 60 you're kosher. But missing deadlines? It means you can't do the job. Period. Whether you can write your way to world peace or not, the deadline is everything.

I'm taking this really hard because I fucked up school so badly last time around. I'm sure I'm being too hard on myself but I have to because this time I really wanna be as a good as I can be. I'm tired of having a lot of potential; I wanna perform and fucking produce work. It's been hard adjusting, and the moment I fall behind I start gasing and losing swagger. It's like 90% swagger, honestly.



But in the end, I'm cool. It's hard not being able to see my friends or even my girlfriend as much as I'd like to...but that's one of the sacrifices I swore to take when I decided to go back. I was gonna do this for real or not do it at all. My friends'll pop into the store on weekends sometimes (they came by tonight which was nice) and we'll catch up fast over my lunch or whatever. It's not much and it's not enough but it's enough to get by. Keeps me sane and feeling human.

If there's one thing I'm learning in class that's invaluble, it's how to not bullshit myself. (or is that un-learning something?) When you spend all your time worrying about getting the story straight, getting your facts in order and when your whole career depends on whether or not you can back your shit up...you learn to really stop lying because you'll get caught and that's it. So I've spent the last little while being painfully honest with myself and those around me. It's a good thing. It's hard, but I'm earning respect for myself, which is something I didn't have two years ago.

peace.

Posted by Scene -- at 12:25:00 a.m. | Permalink