Coffee Mugs Are An Art Form

Writing is hard.  Writing on a blog isn’t since anything could be written without plot or purpose.  Writing a short film is hard.  Let me restate that, writing a short film that I feel good and satisfied with is hard.  Plot and purpose and things I’ve never really felt in life, and conveying those things in moving film is almost just as hard right now.  Ideas are easy to come up with, however ideas worth pursuing are the challenge.  One way to go about this would be to just role with a mediocre idea and maybe it’ll work itself out, or maybe I’ll just get that idea out of my head.  But I don’t do that.  Once I realize I’m at a dead end with an idea in I lose passion for it and search for passion somewhere else.  The problem is… I find it.  Then I have the conundrum of having a different passion and pursing that.  Only, of course, until I lose steam with and that and go searching for something else.  Now I’m frustrated.  You know what I’ll do now?  I’ll try and find the big picture.  What Am I Trying To Say?  Well, I’m not sure what I’m trying to say.  I’m not sure I even know what beverage I would like to be sipping while typing this so how should I know what I want to say?  Is it plot or structure, or is it rather that I can’t commit to ideas, thoughts, and plans?  My mind has got a million ideas just enough to get started but never finished.  Different aesthetics, different messages, different themes, thoughts, and ideas.  I just don’t have the will to follow through on them.  I’ve thought about forcing myself to just stick with something, but whenever I do that I get an idea that’s better and that I’m passionate about halfway through the thing I’m trying to force myself self to commit to.  And then I just feel bad because I’ve made something mediocre while a great idea has slipped away.

Now it’s bothering me that a lot of the books I read when I was younger started sentences with the word ‘And’.  Maybe I’d stay passionate about an idea if I get nostalgic.  Although I’m not really in the mood to open up that can of worms.  Maybe I could stick to the future, but that brings up the whole “I don’t have a purpose and don’t know what I want” problem and making films about being confused means making a coming of age story.  I’m not trying to be that cliche.  Lets try some word vomit and see what arrives…

I firmly believe that coffee mugs are an under appreciated art form.  Radiohead is best enjoyed while at a crossroad in life on a cloudy day.  I used to loathe the use of puns in everyday life, but have since gained a new found appreciation and slight fondness for them.  I love my cat dearly, and the more she’s around the more I realize I DO NOT want kids.  However, I love babies and sometimes the thought of a really cute one smiling almost brings me to tears.  Mayonnaise is the anti christ of condiments.  It bothers me that when I flex my foot a certain way it triggers a foot cramp in my toes.  Does that happen to everyone?  I wonder if people actually read this or if the few likes I do get are from computers and people liking things to get me to notice them and buy something.  Speaking of buying things, I don’t understand why I can go to a thrift store and get a great quality “ugly” Cosby sweater for 5 bucks, but if I went to a normal store I would have to settle for a sweater that’s not as “ugly” and is of worse quality (and also overpriced).  Also, I wish that different teas were as common as coffee.  When there’s a meeting there’s coffee.  When there’s a gathering there’s coffee.  There should be tea and not just classic brew tea various teas.  Various mugs would also be appreciated because as I stated before, they’re an art form.

Until Next Time

Elastic Heart (Why I’m Disgusted at People’s Reactions)

Sia has released a music video for her song Elastic Heart.  The music video features Shia LaBeouf (age 28) and Maddie Ziegler (age 12).  The music video is pretty much both of them dancing in a giant cage while Maddie is wearing a flesh colored leotard and Shia is wearing flesh colored shorts.

A lot of people are watching this video and saying that it’s disgusting and that it’s sexual and pedophilia.  I think it’s absolutely ridiculous that people see this video as inappropriate.  I guess what’s making people uncomfortable is the age gap between both dancers and the fact that they’re not wearing a whole lot of clothes, but I just don’t understand that.  While watching the video for the first time I though that Shia symbolized the father and Maddie symbolized the daughter and that the dance between them was the struggle of their relationship and at the end the girl gets out of the cage and breaks free from the past while the dad can’t escape and is stuck in the past.  Another interpretation of the video was that both Maddie and Shia represented two sides of Sia (the lady who wrote the song).  Shia is the adult side, addiction, and the bad things in life whereas Maddie is innocence the young freshness that children have.  The cage represents Sia’s soul and throughout the video both sides are fighting it out.  At the end Maddie (innocence) breaks free and moves on or grows up while Shia (addiction, bad/dirty things in life) is stuck in the cage and can’t get out, but wants to hold onto that innocence that was once there.  Another interpretation was that Shia represented mental illness and the girl is Sia fighting and trying to get rid of the illness, but never really being able to get rid of it completely.

There’s plenty of other interpretations, but I’ve said all this to say that with all these interpretations none of them are sexual at all.  One of them is that both dancers are father and daughter.  Saying that this video is sexual is like saying that having two people who are the opposite sex dance together is always sexual.  This is disgusting to me.  You can’t represent a father and daughter through dance without people thinking it’s sexual when there’s absolutely nothing sexual in the video.  I think this kind of reaction just shows where a lot of people’s minds are now.  Today most music videos and images in the media are hyper-sexualized, so when we see two people doing something as intimate as dancing together we automatically think, this must be sexual in some way, and when the two people dancing together are a young girl and an older guy we think it must be pedophilia.  When you take a step back and actually watch the video, not even thinking about interpretations, you see that the video is really just two people dancing together in a very non sexual way.  There are also some people stating that the girl in the video is being sexualized just by the way she’s dressed.  To that I say, SHE’S A 12 YEAR OLD GIRL WHO’S WEARING A LEOTARD.  If you think that there’s something sexual about someone wearing a plain colored leotard I think you might need some help because that just seems to me like you’re objectifying over sexualizing a 12 year old girl.  There’s nothing sexual about either Shia or Maddie’s body in the video.  It’s not sexual until YOU take the extra step in you’re mind and make it sexual.

I recommend watching Sia’s music video.  When I first watched I actually cried and I’m not sure exactly why, but the video was just really beautiful and spoke to me.  Seeing this video has restored some of my faith in the music video business.  I think that if people start making art like this video that is entertaining to watch as well as having meaning behind it things in music would be more interesting and better overall.  Thanks for reading my rant, I hope it makes sense.  Feel free to watch the video I’ve posted it below.

‘search and cre…

‘search and create. create and destroy.’

yes, creation is difficult. heart wrenching and head splitting, bloodletting and agonizing, it’s all true. but the feeling you get when you put your back, neck, and soul into something and it comes out better than you could have ever hoped or imagined it would… that feeling is immense, and it is only topped when someone who truly understands is blown away by your creation and says to you, ‘wow. you made this?’ and you reply, ‘no. it made me.’
once you experience this super nova, you will forever be changed, and you will forever chase your next fix. and that chase eventually destroys(defines) us all.
dear creators, my heart goes out to you.
-2013, frnkiero.