Today looked nice from my window. I pretty much mi…
Today looked nice from my window. I pretty much missed it. I’ve been holed up in my room the whole day, spending too much time online, and the more time I spend online, the less I have to write about. Mostly I’ve been realizing that, for someone who doesn’t like people in general, online forums are not an acceptable substitute. People are people, online, virtual or no. Often if’s worse online, as there is that aura of anonymity to hide behind, like people in cars on freeways in LA, and any semblance of respect or thought vanishes under huge waves of pettiness. Virtual pettiness just makes my eyes hurt.
Yes, I am depressed because I probably made a mistake in putting up Alphadogah on Triggerstreet, where it’s rapidly becoming the most maligned piece in the history of the site. Now, apparently, not only am I a horrible offense to the craft in general for my abysmal projuction values, I am also a racist bigot for having only white foreigners in the film. I fully expect it to be dead last of all the films there within two weeks, if it’s not taken down out of spite, and if I ever meet Kevin Spacey I’m going to have to buy him lunch just to make up for it. All of this doesn’t surprise me; I knew it was bad when I uploaded it. But it is a bit depressing. I do take comfort in the fact that most of the people trashing it on a cinematic basis haven’t done anything themselves to speak of, however. But I probably should have chucked it when I was done and forgotten about it, rather than subject myself to the dubious honor of one of the most hated short films ever made.
It’s not just Triggerstreet, however. When I had the audacity to compare the GL2 to the DVX100 on the 2-pop forum, the moderator deleted the thread due to “trolling”. In any of these forums, if you’re not the Resident Expert, you’re nothing, and there’s nothing to be gained by trying to contribute. I don’t know why I expected it to be any different from real life. Just naive, I suppose.
The only remedy, of course, is to do something else, something bigger, more ambitious and time-consuming to take my mind off it, but every idea I think of turns out to be impractical or derivative. Back in New York I had to come up with a film a week for three weeks one month; I don’t know why I can’t think of anything now. Perhaps I’m afraid of making another travesty, and travesties look a lot worse on video, believe me. At least crap in a black-and-white 16mm film can be called “experimental”. Do the same thing in video, and it’s just crap. So far I feel like I’ve been doing utter crap, and I’m trying to work my way up to crap.
