The one with creative anxiety and Silence of the Lambs
MUSING
In the last two weeks I deleted my instagram account, spent a week generating four feature film script ideas from my brain ferment across a panoply of genres I’ve never set foot in before (domestic-thriller, crime-thriller, assassin-action, romance-heist), lived in a near perpetual state of excited creative anxiety from urging myself to come up with a commercial masterpiece during the strict time I had allocated to do so, limited myself to only two days on shoots as a background actor and spent 12 hours at a time sitting or standing near very famous people, wrote myself notes on Career Strategies And Goals, tried to come up with Practical Actions I Can Implement Today, read a Neo-Jungian psychology book on how we’re all completely fucked up through no fault of our own but nevertheless owe it to both ourselves and every single person around us to work constantly, probably for years, maybe for the rest of our lives, on the near-impossible task of how to not be fucked up, because until we do we’re causing harm to both ourselves and every single person around us, co-threw a house party at which everybody seemed to have fun and I sort of did but also just felt tired all the time, which I think is what hosting mostly entails, watched Rashomon, two Hitchcocks, Uncut Gems, rewatched Sneakers because there’s never been a more enjoyably comforting heist movie ever made (I just want someone to let me rewrite Sneakers - my version of lazy comfort fun work) and rewatched Memento to confirm my suspicion that it’s still the best movie Christopher Nolan ever made, planted herbs, hung out with friends, deep cleaned bits of my house, had a couple of work meetings, researched and booked a three day camping trip, researched and bought birthday and cheer up gifts, washed up a lot of dishes, ran many errands, and talked to family members on long video calls.
Today my brain suggested to me: ‘yes but you haven’t really gotten an awful lot done recently, have you, if you think about it, and perhaps you should worry about that?’
Indeed, we are all a bit fucked up.
I don’t miss instagram yet. (I might when the next book gets closer to coming out and I feel the urge for validation/reassurance, at which point there’s a good chance I will nonchalantly and playfully resurge upon the platform like a dolphin breaking the surface of the sea and cavort around and pretend I’ve never been away.)
FEEDING
This guy’s writing has been giving me life today. Random example extracts:
It was spring and I walked in Somerset, for no particular reason other than it was a bit of Somerset I hadn’t walked in before and spring is the best time to not be indoors. I passed an eighteenth century manor house and two horses who looked a little embarrassed to have turned up to the same paddock in matching coats. I noticed the countryside was just like the countryside surrounding my house if you only took in the basics of what was in it – big hills and steep-banked rivers and crumbling stone barns and hump-backed bridges – but in fact was a much more well-mannered version of it. It was more like what the hills and fields and sheep and lanes where I live would be if they decided to quit swearing and injecting heroin. On a wide gravel path, a man in a Range Rover asked if I was lost. I told him I was fine, waving my walking guide at him to show him everything was very much under control. “When was that book published?” he asked. “2004,” I said. “Well, the footpath you’re heading towards is a quarry now,” he said. Later I passed two women who were heading in the direction of the horses. “She’s still having trouble with her baguettes,” I heard one of them say.
There has been more trouble on the stretch of train line at Dawlish in Devon, which never quite manages a full winter without getting a thorough bashing courtesy of the sea. Still visually striking, and a charismatic force to be reckoned with despite its many romantic setbacks, it’s a sort of railway version of Elizabeth Taylor. They could divert the line inland but that would be far less fun, not least because you wouldn’t get such elaborate excuses for train delays, my favourite of which remains: ‘A wave has hit the train, which has knocked all the air out of it.’
‘We don’t find uncertainty charismatic. Uncertainty doesn’t work for anybody very well, because in general the media don’t appreciate people like that. I would like to cultivate a charisma of uncertainty, a charisma of admitting that you’re making it up as you go along.’
- Brian Eno
WRITING
An unlikely-to-be-used cut bit from a current work-in-progress draft (written with a writing partner):
1. It was the night before Halloween, and Turner Classics was doing a horror movie marathon.
Nurse Hendricks did not generally enjoy horror movies—she did not like being reminded of how terribly sick the world could be—but Silence of the Lambs was one of her favourites. There was something about the chemistry between Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling. It was wrong, of course - he was a multiple murderer cannibal - but the dark kind of romance their back and forth had was difficult to resist. Nurse Hendricks had seen the whole thing who-knew-how-many-times - and some streaming channel other was always playing it, so she’d had it on in the background at work who-knew-how-many-times too.
They were coming just then to the best part, when Jodie Foster, playing Agent Starling, and Anthony Hopkins, playing Hannibal Lecter, meet for the first time, when she heard the noise.
She paused with a peanut butter cup halfway to her mouth and looked behind her. The corridor was empty, as usual. Jane Doe #2’s door was ajar, as usual, and Nurse Hendricks could just about see the reassuring bumps of the comatose patient's feet underneath the bed sheet, where they always were.
Her eyes flickered back, crawling up the wall to the white plastic clock that hung there. Too early for the night nurse - she wasn’t due for another ninety minutes. At this time, Nurse Hendricks was always alone.
Well, alone except for the brain-dead patients she looked after, of course.
So what had that sound been? Unless - oh no. Maybe Doctor Yisheng was making a surprise visit. She wouldn’t put it past him to spring a spot check on her, catch her off guard with her feet up. She hastily stuffed the rest of the peanut butter cup in her mouth and began to tidy up. Plastic salad box, still streaked with globs of thousand island dressing and tiny flutters of leftover kale - in the trash with you. Oh whoops, and she’d left the lid off the night nurse’s extremely fancy organic hazelnut spread that she always had a jar of in the galley kitchen’s little cupboard, and a cleanly licked spoon right next to it—
As Nurse Hendricks hurried to cover the evidence of her minor indulgences, a rasping voice came from right behind her.
“Hello, Clarice,” said a voice behind her.
Nurse Hendricks turned her head and screamed.
Ask me anything and stay curious -