80: Creative Fire

I'm sitting next to the fireplace this morning (it's still working!), slowly waking up after staying out late for a show last night. It feels good to feel lazy for once. I had a conversation with a friend recently about work/life balance, and while I'm good at separating my day job from the rest of my life, the project that is cultural criticism tends to bleed through into everything that I do. This is good on some levels, because it means I'm always thinking, but on my worst days I'm preoccupied, trying to do the calculus about how I'd write about everything I come across. When it's really bad, I participate in the world on two distracted mental tracks: one that's focused on trying to exist in the space I'm in, and the other that's trying to formulate a grounded, critical, authoritative opinion about whatever movie or TV show or song I've come across lately. My brain literally burns the candle from both ends. It's no way to live.

I say this because I'm starting to feel the itch to make something big again. Sometimes I channel this itch into inconsequential changes: a new haircut, a new hair color, a piercing, a tattoo. I've already gotten the haircut and I have a tattoo consult on the books, and I'm still feeling the itch, which means that these physical changes are just a balm and a replacement for what it is that I actually want to do, which is to write. I want to write another book. I'm not quite certain what about, yet, but I have a few ideas, and I felt this way not too long before I had the opportunity to pitch Becoming Alien. I want to pay attention to this urge, and I want to nurture it, but I don't want the impulse to consume everything, in the way that my critic brain can consume everything I do on my bad days.

A house just a few blocks away from us burned down last weekend. Someone bought it this past summer, after a few years of vacancy and disrepair. It was being renovated. A few days ago the chimney stuck a middle finger into the sky, freed from the walls that had rested on either side of it just the night before. No one was hurt; the houses on either side suffered minimal damage, as far as I can tell. But now the burned-down house is completely gone, a vacant space without even the old chimney left to mark where it had once stood. The fire swept through and claimed all that work and history, down to the foundations. I want to nurture my own creative fire. I don't want it to burn out, and I don't want to burn everything down.

What I wrote:

This weekend I wrote about the documentary A Still Small Voice for Seeing & Believing. It's in very limited release at the moment, but I'm hoping it becomes more widely available soon. (While you're at it, you should also read Kevin on The Holdovers.)

Last weekend I wrote a capsule review of Raven Jackson's debut feature film All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, also for Seeing & Believing.

What I talked about:

I spoke with Ethan Warren for his newsletter. He's doing a series of conversations about things that fascinate people, and when I found out he was giving me carte blanche to talk about whatever I wanted, I naturally picked the Mountain Goats.

What I'm reading:

I picked up the 33 1/3 book by Ryan Pinkard about The National's Boxer this past week. It's mostly a making-of book, which means it's really a book about the creative process. Maybe it's part of the cocktail of things that are making me want to create something new; it certainly made me want to go back and listen to Boxer front-to-back.