elwood

I posted this months ago, but had forgotten about it. I like it, so read it, if you hadn't already.



I often struggle with the idea that I should refrain from "updating" for lack of anything of real interest to write about. "When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed." There is also this deeply rooted need/desire to keep my life to myself and to avoid simply using this as an outlet to vent. The only writings I would consider remotely inspired in recent years past have been alcohol fueled retellings of my infatuation with and pursuit of various unavailable women. Unfortunately, the sparsity of said writings has proven nonconducive to maintaining the interest of many potential readers. I have been tempted to type up selections from the countless notebooks and journals I have filled throughout the years, but it would not feel honest, and it would certainly run the risk of failing to capture the moment. There is also the concern that I might not be in the best position, mentally and emotionally, to relive certain periods of my life.

During my most prolific and enthusiastic time in writing, I had the tendency to scribe with passion and outright ferocity, always with the intention of returning to those endless pages of incoherent, illegible ramblings to refine and compile everything in some great semi-autobiographical work of fiction/nonfiction ala Kerouac and the beat poets. I had, for a time, made it a point to live my life according to the question "If your life was a book, would anyone read it?" These days, however I can't imagine too many people could find interest and enthusiasm in reading about a lonely fuck struggling to pay his mortgage and hold onto his slipping sanity while trying to remodel his house. There is something that sticks in my mind, however, that keeps me from completely holding to that line of thinking, and that is an interview with Todd McFarlane sometime in the early nineties.

(McFarlane, for those unaware, was one of the handful of creators who completely reinvigorated the comic-book industry in the late eighties/early nineties, then nearly destroyed the entirety of said industry with mass over-marketing and constantly failing to meet deadlines and maintain the quality their entire company - Image - had been founded upon. He is one of the only Marvel/DC defectors to have held true to his convictions, and has profited greatly from his innovation and dedication.)

He pointed out that every frame on the page of a comic does not have to contain part of an action sequence to be exhilarating. The true test of an artist is to bring interest, expression, and excitement into even the most mundane of situations. His specific example was a hand holding a cup of coffee, and that, if you approach it as simply "a hand holding a cup of coffee, that is all you will end up with, but if you let your mind wander into questioning "whose hand?," "what is their current state of mind?," "why coffee?," "has this person had enough to make his/herself jittery and tense or is it a first cup that is being held clumsily but tightly, as though the drinker's very life depended upon it?" Essentially, it is not so much the story as it is the storytelling, and more to the point, the storyteller's ability to maintain the reader/viewer/listener's interest through the less adventurous but often necessary bits of boredom.