MonkeyFight

Notes From the Festival

I've been attending the Tribeca Film Festival this week with The Ignorant Bliss of Sun and Moon, the short I wrote and produced with director and friend John Hyams. It's been a great experience so far and I still have two more screenings. They do an amazing job of getting people out to the screenings - even for the short films. We've been playing to sold out shows so far.

Some other highlights: We had some audio trouble with our tape but the tech people at the festival handled it really well, so only one screening was painful. Stolichnaya is a festival sponsor so my organs are in a nice vodka marinade. I've seen Elton John perform. I've seen DeNiro mumble through a few words at a podium and give his signature eye-brow raise.

My friend Jason LaMotte won the Special Jury Prize for his short film The Terms. It's an excellent film adapted from a short story by Mike McCormack.  We're discussing turning it into a feature. When Dennis Leary announced the prize he said, "This film is about a father who's going to shoot his son in the head...and it's a comedy." Then he said, "I'm Irish. I thought it was a documentary." Check out the trailer here: http://www.thetermsmovie.com/

I met Jason last year at the Palm Springs Film Festival and we quickly hit it off partly because we had a shared creative sensibility and partly because we both had our first babies due within a week of each other. His was bornin late August and The Boy was born in early September.  I've only been to three festivals but each one has resulted in great things. At Aspen Shortsfest I met Adam Collis who eventually bought one of my scripts, and my friend Matthew Bonifacio who I'm collaborating with now on Brickhead. At Palm Springs I met Jason and also Sharon B., the woman who programs the shorts for Tribeca. If I hadn't met her I have no idea if The Ignorant Bliss would have made it into the fest because they receive nearly 3,000 submissions so it's easy to get lost. And now at Tribeca Film Festival I've been able to hang with Jason some more and I've met several New York filmmakers and producers who I will follow up with over the coming weeks. So the take away: do stuff and show stuff and talk to people. Then do it for about ten years and see how it's going. Then keep going. 

More later.

The Monkey Fight is On

I’ve been meaning to change oinkbird to monkeyfight for months. I’m sure you know what that’s like. When I imagined doing it I saw a coordinated effort involving graphic designers, branding consultants, and loads of fresh code written by people in foreign lands. But fuck it.  I gotta start somewhere. So I’m just changing the name. Bang. Just like that. I certainly don’t want to be half assed about it but it’s never going to get done if I don’t do it in pieces.  So I’ll start here and gradually it will become what is inside my head, which is monkeys.

About 15 years ago, I was introduced to the image of monkeys in my head by a woman who taught yoga in New Orleans. (This is the same woman who put me in a position that made me feel as if my back was breathing but that’s another story.) She said during class one day, “Try to calm the monkeys in your mind.” And suddenly all the monkeys in my head got a little worried: “Oh shit. She spilled it. He’s onto us.” It was one of those moments that resonate in a way that make you pay attention enough that you might actually learn something new. I didn’t. I mean, it caught my attention but I didn’t do much about it:  "Oh right." I thought. "Sometimes I’m generally distracted and unclear about what I’m supposed to do with my life so perhaps I should- hey look at that piece of string.” Monkeys love string.

I did mange to hold onto a thought though; not exactly beware of the monkeys, but be Aware of the monkeys. Point is – I think it’s gotten exponentially more difficult to focus on things of importance with the speed and density of distractions these days. High speed monkeys. I mean, I check my email thirty five times a day. I look at my phone over a hundred times in a day. And honestly, how did we used to spend the minutes we now spend on Face@#!ck? Literally, what did we do in the days when 'status update' and 'feed' were boring technical words? Don’t get me wrong – for all I know people were choking kittens before and now they’re harmlessly looking at pictures of people they wanted to have sex with when they were 17.

The Boy is over seven months old – 231 days to be exact. He’s got two teeth on the bottom of his mouth and two coming in on the top. He’s found some syllables: “da-da” and “ga-ga” - both timeless classics. He’s not crawling yet but he can sit like a champ. I played catch with him this week; he would throw a little tiny ball and I would throw it back in his lap and he would pick it up and throw it again. It didn't exactly go in my direction but it seemed a little early in life for coaching. This went on for about five minutes and I could have done it a lot longer if he’d let me. Yesterday I took him into Manhattan – just the two of us - to pick up my filmmaker swag bag from the Tribeca Film Festival. Naturally the chicks swarmed him (ie me). I fed him a bottle, he fell asleep, and then I requested a meeting with Sony Pictures Classics. He ate his first noodle last night – whole wheat elbow macaroni.

Every parent says it goes fast. They even say it in the same way, shaking their head with a sort of breathless disbelief, “It goes fast.” My hope is that monkeyfight can slow things down a bit and help me stay connected to the things that matter most to me. That's the fight. And make no mistake, I love me some monkeys - I just don’t want them running the asylum that is my head. And besides, monkeys can play catch with the best of ‘em once they’re tamed. So if we play our cards right we might even be able to field a team in the end.