“I’d like to make a great film provided it doesn’t conflict with my dinner reservation."
The quote from the New York Times' review of Conversations with Woody Allen points to the hit-or-miss quality of Allen's recent films, suggesting that a comfortable work-a-day approach to art has its limitations. We all know the starving artist cliche, and we all know that cliches are cliches for a reason, right? The art is better when the artist is hungry, driven, maybe a bit desperate. And the artist needs to believe that the art will be worth the despair, the hard times.
I know I'm pretty comfortable in general. Not especially happy or successful or accomplished or well-off, but comfortable. My house is warm--I've been known to tell people I keep the heat up because I'm not living in a Dickens novel. Lord knows I'm well-fed, even on the Nicole Richie diet, by which I mean Weight Watchers--I've figured out how to budget my points for cookies and parties, and of course, meth. I stay up late, sometimes even working, but I don't start work until 8:30, and it takes me less than ten minutes to get there. I'm also free to sleep late on weekends--reminding me of Mrs. Hill in Alice Walker's Meridian, who never got over not being able to sleep until 9:00 on Saturday mornings after she had kids. That novel also makes me think of a friend's boyfriend in college--a white boy-- who asked, in earnest, whether he could kill for the revolution. He and my friend marched in the anti-apartheid protests on campus. I went to one with them, but it felt ridiculous. A group of maybe fifteen preppie college students weakly chanting "What do we want? Divestment? When do we want it? Now?" didn't have the energy of thousands shouting "Hey Hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today." Though terrible, Apartheid was a faraway injustice, and it's hard to get worked up over an investment portfolio. My apathetic classmates and I--the ones who went to frat parties and studied for exams instead of protesting--were the children of the flower children, represented by Alex P. Keaton rather than Abbie Hoffman.
Not that my parents were hippies. They experienced Woodstock on the TV news; the TV was the cornerstone of family life in our house. We ate our meals in the family room, plates balanced on our knees, watching whatever reruns might be on at dinner time. My mother got mad if I tried to read while eating. It was important that we were all paying attention to the same thing. At night, she raced to get the laundry put away so she could sit down and watch her shows. Three's Company in particular made me hell-bent to get out of the house as soon as I could. At that point in my life, I was driven. I didn't listen when people told me I couldn't afford to go away to college, much less to a big fancy private school where people would use a knife and fork to eat an orange and I would never fit in. I didn't listen, I didn't fear that I wasn't as good as other people. I believed I was smart enough and I did it. It was after college that the fear sunk in, and turned me into someone who thought she couldn't make it after all. All the hundreds of times I saw Mary Tyler Moore toss her beret in the air and catch it, and I couldn't internalize the lesson--what good did all that TV ever do me?
It's time for me to stop being so comfortable, and to start being driven again. I'm finally in a place where I have time to devote to writing. My job is secure, but not so demanding it soaks up all my energy. For better or worse, I don't have kids, and I'm single. It's time to stop feeling morose about that and to take advantage of it. While it's always seemed crazy to me to work 100 hours a week, to never take a day off, I need to be more of a workaholic. There has to be pain, struggle, maybe a little chill in the air, a little hunger, the dead silence of no TV...I'm betting that achievement will be worth a little discomfort. That's why I'm sticking out the NanoWriMo even though I'm behind and I honestly don't know if I'll ever do anything with it--yes, it is that bad...
I know I'm pretty comfortable in general. Not especially happy or successful or accomplished or well-off, but comfortable. My house is warm--I've been known to tell people I keep the heat up because I'm not living in a Dickens novel. Lord knows I'm well-fed, even on the Nicole Richie diet, by which I mean Weight Watchers--I've figured out how to budget my points for cookies and parties, and of course, meth. I stay up late, sometimes even working, but I don't start work until 8:30, and it takes me less than ten minutes to get there. I'm also free to sleep late on weekends--reminding me of Mrs. Hill in Alice Walker's Meridian, who never got over not being able to sleep until 9:00 on Saturday mornings after she had kids. That novel also makes me think of a friend's boyfriend in college--a white boy-- who asked, in earnest, whether he could kill for the revolution. He and my friend marched in the anti-apartheid protests on campus. I went to one with them, but it felt ridiculous. A group of maybe fifteen preppie college students weakly chanting "What do we want? Divestment? When do we want it? Now?" didn't have the energy of thousands shouting "Hey Hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today." Though terrible, Apartheid was a faraway injustice, and it's hard to get worked up over an investment portfolio. My apathetic classmates and I--the ones who went to frat parties and studied for exams instead of protesting--were the children of the flower children, represented by Alex P. Keaton rather than Abbie Hoffman.
Not that my parents were hippies. They experienced Woodstock on the TV news; the TV was the cornerstone of family life in our house. We ate our meals in the family room, plates balanced on our knees, watching whatever reruns might be on at dinner time. My mother got mad if I tried to read while eating. It was important that we were all paying attention to the same thing. At night, she raced to get the laundry put away so she could sit down and watch her shows. Three's Company in particular made me hell-bent to get out of the house as soon as I could. At that point in my life, I was driven. I didn't listen when people told me I couldn't afford to go away to college, much less to a big fancy private school where people would use a knife and fork to eat an orange and I would never fit in. I didn't listen, I didn't fear that I wasn't as good as other people. I believed I was smart enough and I did it. It was after college that the fear sunk in, and turned me into someone who thought she couldn't make it after all. All the hundreds of times I saw Mary Tyler Moore toss her beret in the air and catch it, and I couldn't internalize the lesson--what good did all that TV ever do me?
It's time for me to stop being so comfortable, and to start being driven again. I'm finally in a place where I have time to devote to writing. My job is secure, but not so demanding it soaks up all my energy. For better or worse, I don't have kids, and I'm single. It's time to stop feeling morose about that and to take advantage of it. While it's always seemed crazy to me to work 100 hours a week, to never take a day off, I need to be more of a workaholic. There has to be pain, struggle, maybe a little chill in the air, a little hunger, the dead silence of no TV...I'm betting that achievement will be worth a little discomfort. That's why I'm sticking out the NanoWriMo even though I'm behind and I honestly don't know if I'll ever do anything with it--yes, it is that bad...
3 comments:
This is exactly why Rocky Balboa moved out of the nice house when he was training to fight the Russian. It was too "nice" to him.
Hm. Maybe I'm thinking of Jean Claude Van Damme in Bloodsport.
Well, whoever the hell it was, they demonstrated the necessity of that inner "hunger."
So I think you should sell your condo and spend the money on hooded sweatshirts and giant slabs of beef which you can hang from the ceiling and punch over and over until you have iron fists, rib-cracking hooks, and jaw-crushing uppercuts.
Don't forget to eat 6 raw eggs every morning.
yummy!
Yes, watch the training montage from Rocky 4 for inspiration. I still dream of going up into the mountains to train for something, anything, and a large part of that training will include punching slabs of beef.
It's Always Sunny... does a good parody of that scene in the "Hundred Dollar Baby" episode, although their recent Serpico bit blows that one away.
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