go big or go bust
"Let go. That's when the magic will start." Mhairi Morrison, creator and star of Feathers and Toast, wrote me that these words, Maggie Smith's from the Second Marigold Hotel movie, were in her ear.
I think you know how ready I am for the magic to start ... and how much (in Madonna's immortal words) 'letting go is not my bag'.
Feeling way out on a limb here... but it's only about a minute long.
(62 sec)
6:20 AM Woke after 5.5 hours of sleep with horrible clarity. I'M NOT HAPPY. Furthermore, there's a tape loop in my head of ___, ___, ___, and ___ (every single person in the past week who has been even a little unfriendly). And worst of all ... I care! Going to finish this free-writing, meditate for 20 minutes and go BACK TO BED.
10:28 AM Just woke from this dream:
I was in a hotel lobby in Canada or Italy, exhausted and frustrated with trying to promote The Louise Log. Sitting there, staring straight ahead, I don't know what to do anymore. A woman walked in and came over, 50-something, slightly overweight and wearing a cotton shirtwaist with a belt. Out of the blue she started talking to me, asking what I do.
(30 seconds later)
Mrs. Shirtwaist is on a lobby computer watching The Louise Log, laughing out loud and drawing a crowd. (P.S. She also subscribed to the mailing list.)
Could it really be that the problem is I'm standing in my own light? Unwilling to let go?
Early in the winter, as many of you are well aware, I had the good luck to call in to Dan Logan's radio show The Psychic Hour on WDST out of Woodstock, NY. He encouraged me to beat the bushes and try and get on Ellen DeGeneres' very popular television show and I am doing just that.
But as the producers for Ellen aren't yet beating down my door, I decided to try and get a little confirmation and went to visit Dr. Rakesh Kumar in Jackson Heights. I asked if it would be all right to videotape my astrology reading so I could share it with you and promised Dr. Kumar that I'd send him a dvd when the footage was edited, probably by the middle of February at the latest.
Last week I noticed that March was upon us and that I haven't even had time to watch the tape of my reading, much less edit it. I emailed him apologizing for the delay and explaining the situation.
Dr. Kumar's reply:
Cleaning up the kitchen last night, I turned on my usual kitchen companion, NPR, and happened to listen to the "TED Radio Hour" which was on the theme of 'Success'. Guy Raz, the host, played excerpts from a number of TED Talks, including MacArthur Fellow Angela Lee Duckworth's about how 'grit' may just be the key to success. (Grit is defined as "perseverance and passion in pursuing a particular long term goal".)
What a shoot in the arm! The Louise Log may not have wide recognition or millions of views ... yet. But along with our fans-to-die-for (the key factor which lets us justify keeping on) we may just have grit. You can imagine how refreshing it is to hear what's been hinted to be 'a pathological inability to let go' framed in this way rather more positive way.
click HERE to go to Angela Lee Duckworth's TED Talk
So full disclosure ... this whole schedule thing - I'm really doing it.
Step 1 Underline any 'jobs' that have cropped up in the three-sides-of-a-page of morning free-writing. List these under a category along with anything unfinished yesterday:
write
do
go
watch
call
Step 2 Prioritize. (This, my sister Lee once pointed out, is the Achille's heel of getting on top of your life.)
Step 3 Make up a schedule. (I haven't gotten up my nerve to tell my dear sister that both of my heels are Achilles heels, the second one being *a realistic sense* of how long things take.)
After 34 days, my husband is no longer annoyed with my obsession with this schedule- he's laughing out loud. I'm generally running behind by somewhere between two and a half and six hours by mid-afternoon and showing no signs of improvement. A Scarlet O'Hara attitude about the carry-over from day to day feels like denial but I don't know what else to do. Suggestions??
2.3.08 I barely scraped a third episode out of the farmers market. So. NOW what? So many possible directions. Feels limitless. And exciting. Scary.
2.22.08 The shoot yesterday went... okay. Stressful. Interested to see the footage, if we got it. I have no idea. We met at Dean & Deluca on University and 11th for a hot drink and to be able to sit down. Shooting while directing is hard- trying to figure out exactly which shots. Hope we got what I need. The written-out shot list was only partly useful. All I could really take in were the storyboards-- needed those for a speed assessment, in the cold, two actors standing there waiting for instructions of WHAT TO DO NEXT. Think I did the right thing to just forget about the over-the-shoulder shots and, when I wanted to cut it short, used the memory of pain in the editing room to LET THEM KEEP GOING. Much harder without a camera operator and with such a small viewfinder.
2.28.08 Hurt by X's remark "Maybe you'll get a REAL feature out of this. After all, these are hardly more than storyboard sketches."
3.1.08 Hope people aren't muttering "BUY YOURSELF A TRIPOD."
3.7.08 Woke with a panicky feeling that the audio on this episode is too crude to upload.
3.9.08 Too bad if people don't like it. I have to think the the one 3 star rating was someone whose mouse slipped. They meant to make it a 5 but it locked on at 3. Not going to take this personally.
(2:11) (The audio was re-mastered in 2011.)
I've been getting such encouragement from you and it means the world to me. "Keep at it!" Eric DM'd me. "It's good!" Max said. "Keep going on" Véro emailed. "You're going to explode!" Bill wrote (and, from the context, I could tell he meant in a good way).
But even with this kind of frankly amazing support, sometimes you need a professional to give you a boost. Many of us have been in therapy to try and keep at it. Cathy Crosky, a coach whose specialty is leadership and organizational transformation, also coaches regular people who just need to get organized or to get a little more assertive. She recommended this video which addresses the pandemic of dis-ease we all suffer from. And it's HILARIOUS. Enjoy.
A trademark Mudd Lavoie tip I've never mentioned (which goes against my overriding accomplishment instinct, so I need a lot of reminders): DANCE.
(30 sec)
I met with a circle of wise women this morning and one of our topics was “of never feeling content”. Sitting with it, I realized that the topic seems related to yesterday’s ‘jealousy’, maybe even the breeding ground for it.
And I began to see that I actually harbor a fear of contentment, a fear that contentment will lead to complacency which will sooner than later lead me to forget what I long for and to become a shapeless, barely conscious couch potato period endofstory.
My husband pointed out that feelings of contentment and gratitude are more likely to lead to a sense of success. And a feeling of success can in turn produce more energy for accomplishment.
Not sure about that. But looking squarely at my ‘hopes and dreams’, recognition being front and center among them, I proudly admit publicly that I’ve had some. But what do I do privately? I discount what I’ve accomplished. And I have rational-sounding explanations for doing this. I don’t need a Brutus or a Judas Ascariot, I move the goal posts on myself.
History is littered with mighty wrecks who went down screaming too much ain’t enough. Almost makes you want to stop cringing at the suggestion and make a damn gratitude list.
This photograph has long been balm on the raw wound of my jealousy, but I was happy to read Wikipedia's definition of jealousy just now and to discover that "It has been observed in infants five months and older." Whatt.
Sophia Loren and Jayne Mansfield Credit: Joe Shere/mptvimages.com
With all my life experience, that's a fact I couldn't have imagined.
Rolling back time, back to the turn of the century, when I was rewriting one script for what felt like an eternity, I was regularly overwhelmed with jealousy. So many, many artists, and (by my count) less-deserving artists, seemed to be reaping the very rewards of success I longed for. Meanwhile my work languished, under the radar or unrealized and me with it, unrecognized. It was a horrible period.
I got a break from the horror while making The Louise Log. So much to do, there was hardly time to sleep much less to feel jealous.
And then suddenly, yesterday, the old fear invaded: my work and I are doomed to obscurity. It's just not going to happen. This is my fate. It must be my karma.
Luckily I happened to see my friend Danusia. She suggested that the best antidote to jealousy is to get back to work, that it passes. 'Eventually', I thought. 'WHEN', I asked, tossing and turning through the night, deciding every hour on the hour that I've HAD it with this blog. Day 39 is enough already, it's a waste of time.
And so, this morning, like every morning, (almost every morning) I started my brain drain, free-writing, three sides of a page. Pen to paper, I started complaining "So tired...etc.". And not twenty minutes into it, BOOM, there was an idea for a series of very short, possibly hilarious videos that I think you're going to love.
Today it's the old "a picture is worth a thousand words". (:10)
In early 2008, going to one-to-one sessions at the Apple store ($99/yr) (!), I got a pretty good handle on video editing with imovie. Okay, so four year olds at the kiddie table there had a pretty good handle on it too. But, coming from film editing with a splicer and tape, I'd had a phobia about this mysterious method of editing with a ... keyboard? It was thrilling to be able to cut tape the same day I started learning and to refine my 'technique' with every session.
The tricky part about this third episode was that, though there were still hours of tape of Christine Cook picking up vegetables and paying for them, I was pretty sure I'd already used the only 'story' I could pull out of Louise's (my) experience at the farmers market.
What became obvious was that for it to be interesting to others, it would have to be interesting to me. If I could discover something about myself that I was taking for granted or (hello) completely unconscious of, maybe that could be the basis of a story.
I can't emphasize strongly enough the role that multi-hypenate Emily Spray's gorgeous song "You Can't Stop The Rain" plays in making this episode.
(Side note, our current t-shirt's quote comes from this episode.)
(1:51)
A purchase you won't regret, this simple t-shirt will change your life. Forever.
Today's mainstream Hollywood movies don't usually grab me by the throat but Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman did just that. I was sure that it's so good it would lose out to other standard issue Hollywood movies at the Oscars the other night. But no!
In case you live under a rock the way I do, it won Best Picture and is the story of an artist putting all his chips on his comeback. It's got texture and passion and is mostly about the drama behind-the-scenes of the artistic process. The Artist (played by Michael Keaton) even has an inner voice! For anyone doing creative work, the scene with the New York Times Critic is alone worth the price of admission.
Michael Keaton in Iñárritu's Birdman
One of the cringe-worthy memories of my childhood was my mother's effort to motivate us: "Move along and accomplish!" I'm not sure what she wanted us to do, probably clean our rooms, but my heart was set on eating another box of eskimo pies and doing more cartwheels. I was in the moment, crazed by too much sugar / hyper-activity and fairly (if not totally) unconscious.
Apparently, my mother's words eventually got to me though, and so, at college I became *result-oriented*. Fearing that my future would hold the three-part death sentence of filing cabinets, fluorescent lights and pantyhose, I spent four years trying very hard to be a good student. After college, the focus shifted to trying very hard to be a great artist.
Fast forward to the 21st century, I was now trying very hard to be a great mother and to somehow keep a hand in the great artist game. In retrospect it sounds like a downer version of the eskimo pie and cartwheel epoch: I was overwhelmed by motherhood and going crazy with my unending attempt to write a second feature script. A friend recommended that I see Lynn Kreaden: "She's crazy intuitive and she reads what's blocking your energy. You can talk to her and she listens but what she does is way more than 'therapy'."
I made an appointment and trooped up to her office and went back a number of times. I didn't go every week or even every month but, from the first moment, I trusted Lynn and felt clearer and more connected to myself after seeing her. She always wore extremely comfortable-looking velour sweatpants and sweatshirts and was into feeling delicious. I wore a leather motorcycle jacket and tight jeans. At one of the sessions, Lynn remarked that I had something like a thick steel plate over my heart. A whattt? Huh? She said that we were dissolving it.
A few months before starting on The Louise Log, Lynn held a weekend workshop with about ten men and women I'd never met before. Even with Lynn leading the group, I felt a little threatened but it turned out to be interesting ... and even fun. (!) And then, on the last day we met our 'guides'. I ended up having a mind-blowing experience, hearing things no one else in the room could hear.
Watching Adele put her all into this song is already inspiring, but watch through to the end for the five seconds as she looks around to see how she did.
The original version of this video was only of the first (1:38). Unfortunately that one has been defaced with a huge annotation so you miss almost all the good stuff. If you can look away from this version at (1:38), you'll enjoy the whole song and miss the part that's out of sync.
Gary Brolsma, evidently a fan of the O-Zone song "Dragostea din tei", made this video at home and when it went viral, became an "unwilling and embarrassed Web celebrity" (New York Times). I find it heart-breaking that his pure and innocent passion should become a source of embarrassment to him.
Thank you to my children who first showed it to me way back when.
(1:13)
AND. You too can own an mp3 of Lawrence Block's amazing Affirmations for Writers! Click HERE.
I sort of forgot to wrap up the point of yesterday's post: if you want to stick your neck out doing something creative, you're going to feel vulnerable and you may even get hurt. It makes sense to make the rest of life as easy as possible.
Meditation is another great tool for this, not that I didn't turn learning how into some kind of a 'Climb Everest' challenge.
Over the past thirty years, I read a lot of books, talked to plenty of people, took at least one class and spent a lot of time trying to meditate. Finally I gave up: I would never get this.
And then, my dear friend Bernadette, who had been meditating daily for decades, recommended Swami Muktananda's book Meditate. It explained meditation very simply and clearly and encouraged me that I'd been trying so hard, I'd missed the whole point.
One winter day soon after, holding still and staring at falling snow (which happened to be falling straight down, without wind) I effortlessly 'dropped into myself'. Instead of reaching up and out, trying so very hard, by simply internalizing the action of the snowflakes, I was meditating. I made a little video so you could try it for yourself, no matter where you are or what the weather is.
The cards that used to be falling out of my wallet all the time have been enjoying a nice safe and secure home in this fantastic little case for the past five or ten years.
Every once in a while, I add a few more cards, going over capacity, and then it takes an unreasonable amount of time to get the case to snap closed. I sort and reorganize the cards, spreading them out more evenly through the compartments until my shoulder blade muscles are on the verge of going into a spasm. At this point I either give up and put the job aside or, if really lucky, the case snaps closed.
A few days ago, I had a brainstorm: why don't I remove a few of the cards? Don't I deserve that? Don't I deserve that level of comfort and peace in my life? I removed one plastic and two laminated cards which I rarely if ever use and snapped the case closed. The feeling of relief, satisfaction, wholeness and happiness was so much bigger than I expected or imagined it would be. And days later, the feeling is still with me! This is a legal high, it's FREE, and by golly it's long-lasting.
So why hang on to stuff? Because the thought of letting go makes me anxious? But what if holding to more than I need creates a permanent state of anxiety because there just isn't room for it all.
Next stop: the medicine chest.
