fair habitat

| | Comments (1)

No more pencils, no more books, etc. On Monday, I went to a panel discussion down in Union Square about artistic freedom, featuring Anna Deveare Smith, Margo Jefferson, James Schamus and a couple of others. Margo asked ADS at one point what sorts of freedoms she'd noticed changing in her own practice in the last few years, and got a great answer: something to the effect of "well, since I've gotten to be fairly well-known over the last few years, one thing I really regret losing is the freedom to fail--to do something ambitious that probably won't really work, but that I can learn a lot from." Exactly, I thought, that's what I've gotten from working on Contes de Fées--it's a mess, and I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm getting a lot out of the process, both its successes and its failures.

So then last night was the final meeting of Sound/Image, and the presentation of everybody's final projects, which meant I finally got to show CdF to a bunch of people at once (people who'd been drinking beer for a couple of hours, even better). The sound was awful; the projector was set to "widescreen," so it cut off the top and bottom of the image. And what do you know: it went over great. People laughed when I'd wanted them to laugh; they clapped at the end; they came up to me afterwards and told me they'd liked it. Still kind of a mess, but a much more entertaining mess than I'd thought it'd be, and all the frantic ultra-terse editing I'd been insisting on to squeeze 4+ hours' worth of footage down to the length of a "Merrie Melodies" cartoon kept it from getting dull. Actually, everybody's projects were very good-to-better than very good, I thought.

And now I've got Leela Corman's mix CD of favorite Middle Eastern pop on the stereo, a giant vat of black bean chili molé in the fridge (it came out really well, based on first-night eating; if it stays as good as leftovers, I'll post the recipe), and a great big work-void stretching out in front of me (well, I have five definite assignments already, but for the first time since I started doing this I'm columnless--that's going to have to change pronto). Time to start typing.

1 Comments

From my experience, chili is one of those foods that gets better with age. I hope your recipe is no exception to that rule.

Leave a comment

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Douglas published on May 14, 2003 9:44 AM.

motor matted was the previous entry in this blog.

shop strap is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Powered by Movable Type 4.0