Editor's Refrain

July, 2013

Jackson Heights, New York.

            One after another, the raindrops splash on the pavement and break in to droplets like flash dancers leaping for no audience. No cars streak through this city rainstorm. A few people walk past without umbrellas. They wear jackets instead of raincoats. They hobble in to their apartment buildings. The screenwriter stands with a black convenience store umbrella and smokes his cigarette as he watches the rain and the people. His legs sway close to the red cement wall that hoards in the puddle splotched garden outside the gray-brown building where he lives. He does not want to get wet and he wants to stay outside. He knows the city is not a place for him.

            He goes in the front door and looks for a package atop the rectangle of tin mailboxes clamped on the wall. He does not see a package. With his keys in one hand and the umbrella, the cigarette butt and the wad of paper matches in the other, he unlocks the lobby door. As he walks three flights of stairs up the silent building he has the sensation that only now, in this limbo between the wet outdoors and his room, can he hear the rain. It pounds the roof like many dozen angry babies’ fists.

            In his living room that is also a kitchen he pauses and wonders if he might want something to eat before getting back to work. He does not need to look at his refrigerator to recall the huddle of eggs and weeks-old milk inside. The screenwriter goes to his room and shuts the door.

            The way this screenwriter works is naïve and absurd, but it is not unheard of. He sits in a skinny wooden chair, an extension of his muteness. He lets his back ache and his hands twitch while he does not type on his computer. When he sits here, he really sits inside his head. The words that come to him are not results, and they do not make much sense. They might exist to tell a story, or they might exist to lift the screenwriter’s head like an over-packed duffle bag and drag it on to physical reality. The screenwriter might make such a thing happen, but he may not meet his real goal on this day, in this city. His goal is to launch himself, his whole person, in to his wooden room with decades-old tearing green wallpaper, gasping for breath, reaching out to friends on his phone and his Internet to express how glad he is to be in the world of people. Until he reaches this point, there will not be a single sound or image in the seat of his head. Only sporadic twitches. He is devoting his life to a cocoon best peeped in to now and again. On the outside, his fingers clack on the keyboard and stop, clack and stop, and he thinks he sees something moving past.

April, 2013

Brooklyn , New York.

Among the things that trouble my soul these days:

The band across the hall. They may be playing a different song for once, but they may also be non-conducive to any kind of work--even if it is, you know, fun-work. Such as writing on a blog.

Why can't Apple simply update Final Cut Pro to include in and out points at multiple places in the timeline? Nobody cared about eliminating in and out points as an upgrade, which is what Final Cut X did. I want more in and out points. I want to be able to export multiple chunks of a sequence at the same time. I would also like functions that auto-correct audio levels and the ability to work with more formats. But I am a mere wishful thinker. The amateurs, the kids with parents who will buy them cute software; these are the folks for whom Final Cut X is made.

In Brooklyn the middle-class bohemian nihilism wafts off Tillary Street and in to the floors of the surrounding apartments. It feels like a cliche just sitting in this borough. 

 January, 2013

   I sit in my bedroom. I am at my parent's house in New Hampshire. The temperature is in the single digits, and will be for the foreseeable future. I am sleepy. I feel like an undercooked loaf of bread. How does one make films? How does one effectively prepare? I ask this to myself because I may or may not be shooting a film in two weeks and I may or may not be effectively preparing for said film. Said shoot is up in the air. I am in a limbo. I have been in a limbo for months. But this is okay. It is not something I can let concern me. 

    This is my website. It's called The Light Reader. It is a forum meant for film criticism and for the discussion of filmmaking, with filmmakers. Its template is both a technical niche magazine for film professionals, and a critical magazine for critics and people not too irritated to read them. That is the concept of my Internet magazine. My cat shifts on my bed, as if calling a blog a magazine is pretentious enough to wake him from his slumber. He's so obnoxious. 

    But it is a magazine. It will be "published" four times a year: Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall. This will give me time to write long-form, fleshed-out articles, rather than quicky reviews. I will be the primary writer, but I will accept submissions. I am still working some things out, but this, for now, is the plan. Below, on this page, lies the criticism. In the "Meet Your Makers" section, there will be the filmmaking stuff. Lengths of issues will vary. I keep telling myself that this is something. Why can't this be a magazine? This is a magazine. It does transcend the typings of a shut-in who watches too many films. It is a magazine. It is The Light Reader.