videophage.com

I finally got my phone again, so I can finally go ahead and transcribe the eighth production note. The eighth day of production took place on July 2 and the following paragraph was recorded the next morning on my phone at work.

There is so much going on that it’s hard to stay focused: keeping up with new friends, quitting my job (last day this Thursday), putting in my 30-day notice, editing solo video projects, a big empty room with a piano and our two skateboards leads to all kinds of distractions. We got three more shots, I think only ever having to do a maximum of three-and-a-half takes for the second. We should’ve shot more, but I didn’t realize that we should’ve kept going until after we had already packed up everything. My mistake, should’ve checked the shot list one more time. We’ve been on a bit of a time crunch because I leave at the end of July. We reconvene this weekend. (Unfortunately, we will actually not be getting back to production this weekend.) My last day is the sixth, so I’ll be free to work on shit that actually matters to me. When I’m not consolidating and packing and getting rid of, I’ll be shooting, editing, uploading.

One unforeseen challenge now though is the door to a back closet that houses some props we were gonna borrow is now locked for the first time since we’ve begun moonlighting in this dance studio. I think I have to start being a dictator if we’re gonna finish this on time. I always drag my feet. I envy people who just create shit, it all just comes pouring out. I think too much, man. The idea will come practically fully formed, like “Kubla Khan” did to Coleridge after an opium-induced dream, but I hesitate in the execution. The idea is there, but I get stage fright. What if I’m not as good as I think I am? What if no one gets it? What an ass I would seem to be so confident in myself and my work if it was only mediocre or above average at best. But “Kubla Khan” is one of the greatest Romantic poems of all time precisely because it is unfinished. Only the first fragments of sporadic genial affliction could be captured to paper before the rest was lost in a flurry of hazy memory and unwelcome intruders. Coleridge is my favorite poet precisely because he was not as great, or heralded, or confident as Wordsworth, and he knew it. A man who felt he always had to overexplain his own perceived shortcomings before anyone else could humiliate him with them (see his preface to “Kubla Khan”). That fear of humiliation and rejection lie most of all with rock and roll’s last poet laureate, Kurt Cobain. We don’t want to be the greatest, we just want to be someone’s favorite, and preferably live to see it.

III
My genial spirits fail;
And what can these avail
To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
It were a vain endeavour,
Though I should gaze for ever
On that green light that lingers in the west:
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.

Excerpt from “Dejection: An Ode” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1802)