Tuesday, August 09, 2011

Such horrible news!

No, I still haven't heard about my grant. What horrible news I am talking about is the massacre of the uncontacted tribe in the Amazon by drug traffickers from Peru. Such a sickening thing to hear about. And even if the tribe did manage to hide or flee, they have had contact with those people and have therefore suddenly been exposed to viruses they don't have immunity for.

It pisses me off. I fucking hate genocide, and all because of drugs. So fucked up! Why? Ugh! I have done coke in the past, but I am never touching it again because for all I know these genocidal murderers have been implicated in it. BAH!

I never much liked cocaine anyway. It always seemed like a stupid drug, all it did was keep me from being able to sleep. Who needs that? I like sleep!

On to other things:

I have decided to start shooting for my video, even though I don't have my grant yet. I kind of have to, this annual carnival called the Exhibition is in town and it features heavily in the beginning of Mars: The Maiden Voyage. And I am finishing shooting in January, should I get funding, and I want to have the video done by July, and the Ex won't come back again until next August. So here I go! I'm excited, it should be fun, and we will have a car to go put the equipment in while we take a shooting break to go on some rides. I am doing green screen to put the actors in later, and it will be the first time I've done that in a video I've intended to distribute.

I didn't hear about my grant today. I already mentioned that. Well I called the Canada Council to inquire about when the results are coming out and they told me they were just finishing admin stuff and the results would be out "shortly." What does that mean? A week? Three days? I don't know. So after I got off the phone I was kind of like "Gee, that is highly vague!" And then I was frustrated again. But there is nothing to do but wait!

I'm excited about going out shooting video! YAY! VIDEO! I love video. It is my favorite thing in the world, I am going to marry it. I haven't done any serious shooting with a purpose for my own career since You Are A Lesbian Vampire. I used to be so prolific. Now I am just, I dunno. I did do some work that is currently invisible to the public, like writing Bunnyhug and half my Mars script. Writing scripts seems so invisible. Like, who is going to see them really? I always used to give copies of Bunnyhug on PDF to close friends and none of them ever said anything to me about it again. I have absolutely no feedback on it, it is kind of weird! It makes me miss being in school where everyone had an opinion on my art in progress. Crits are actually pretty great.

It's been a strange life. Such a strange life! Oh well. It is my life.

bell hooks had this thing about the X class, an intellectual/artistic group of highly educated people who are also extremely poor. It really resonated with me. Van Gogh would have been X class. He was always asking his brother Theodore for money to keep making his art. We read some of those letters in art school. He was so broke while he was alive. I think every artist has a fear of being Van Gogh. Brilliant but totally disregarded until after death. Other people making a profit out of the passion that just cost you money your whole life. And totally mad of course. You have to flirt at least once with madness if you are a creative genius.

Actually some artists get really pissed off if you point out that there is a higher incidence of mental health issues (especially bipolar disorder) among artists than the general population. People don't like artistic and crazy mixing up.

When I am manic my art is really weird, I don't really like it after. And when I am depressed I make kind of serious hopeless videos. I like when I make comedy the best. It just makes me feel happy to make people laugh. Touched By Fire by Kay Redfield Jamieson is a really good book about creativity and manic depression. My Dad gave me a copy when I first got diagnosed bipolar. It helped me feel more comfortable with my diagnosis, even though it was so grim, all those creative family trees dotted with suicides.

Anyway, it is late here, and I have to get up and go to work in the morning. I guess I won't get my grant results tomorrow either. God, the suspense is killing me! Ahhhhhhh!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That is fucked up... And today's the UN's  "International Day of the World's Indigenous People", not that it ever seems to make much of a difference... 

My partner has depression, and we talk a lot about the stuff you're mentioning here, cuz she's also an artist and trying to get her career going (In fact, she's applying to do a MFA in Regina, woo hoo Saskatchewan!!!).  I heard a radio interview with the editor of the book "Live Through This: On Creativity and Self-Destruction" (http://www.sevenstories.com/book/?GCOI=58322100238060) and while it kinda made me want to read it, I'm also kinda thinking like you're saying, about the grimness of creative family trees.  My partner's doing okay these days, and making rad art, so a lot of the time I just want to focus on that, instead of getting stressed out about how low she could get at some imaginary point in the future.  I'm going to look up Touched By Fire at my local library.

Good luck on your grant... My fingers are crossed for you!

Clark Nikolai said...

It's great that you're shooting without a grant. Waiting for grants can be so discouraging and then if you don't get it you've wasted all that time in which you could've been working on the project. It's not good as an artist to be so dependent.
The next time you come into some money, start buying gear. Things like cameras can change of course but stuff like microphones and lights stay the same for a long time. Having gear means you can make art all the time just to keep in practise.
There's the idea of video "sketching" where you're just always shooting something. No real reason. Just to do it. Then what tends to happen is that your skills get better and when you do have something important then you can execute it well. Also you discover while sketching that you find things that interest you and you can then take on of the short sketches and redo it longer or whatever.

Insanity can be just another normal view of things. Anything can be directed in a destructive way or a creative way.