This month felt like a long ass few weeks. A few things contributed to this vibe. One, my trip to Breda. This was great fun but ultimately an experience that fell in my busiest time of year. Two, my teaching load continues to be imbalanced and I have a manic semester, across two programmes and three year groups. Yes, there will be a quieter time to follow, but it sucks in the middle of the maelstrom. Then add some family birthdays, a World Cup, and it felt like a big deal getting through to writing this blog post.
Creatively, I’m in a weird space. I listened back to some of the recordings from earlier in the year, and they frustrate me. In some cases, I like what I have. In others, I’m bored of it. In most cases I think it could be better, but I’m torn between whether the best that I can do is not going to match my own expectations, or whether I am being lazy and not wanting to re-record a lot of the stuff because of the time it takes. I plan to re-export some of the tracks with the songs as they stand, perhaps arranging them in a different order, and seeing whether I can get excited about them again in the run-up to Christmas, or whether I should ditch the lot and start again. The filmmaking is in a similar space. The last two projects that I started were aborted at various stages of production. I made a film with Will after lockdown but I hated my own performance and may salvage some footage for music videos. I was planning an improvised project for the summer, but some real life stuff came up and I shelved it to spend time with family. A third project, Isra, is completed but is struggling to get festival slots because it falls into a death zone run-time of 41 mins! I really want to break this duck…
In more productive news; I managed to reach the 63rd book this year, which matches the record from a few years back with one month to spare. It feels like a hollow achievement given that I had a big session of graphic novels earlier this year, and I’ve achieved very little else!
READ: Sabrina – Nick Drnaso, Brass Sun – Ian Edginton, Alternative Scriptwriting – Ken Dancyger, A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini, The Cartoon History of the Universe 2 – Larry Gonick
WATCHED: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Beetle Juice, Out of Africa, Atomic Blonde, Battle of Algiers, Harvey, Deck The Halls, Lost in Paris, High Plains Drifter
