Hapless legomena, or: welcome to my blog

In documentary filmmaking, a "radio cut" is a first draft, laying out narration and sound-ups on a timeline, before b-roll, animations, or other visual illustrations have been selected. It's where a simple A/V script (the "paper cut" ha ha) first starts to turn into a movie, where the materials begin to be, in Tarkovsky's phrase, sculpted in time. It's where you find you need some connective tissue here, or to cut this bit there, and it's full of placeholder slates and temporary fudges.

I think you see where I'm going with this.

An introductory blog post serves the writer much more so than the cautious prospective reader, though I suppose in the early days, it's useful for both of us. Fernando Pessoa said, in his Book Of Disquiet, "It will seem to many people that this diary of mine, written solely for myself, is too artificial. But it is in my nature to be artificial." Well, so too here: "written solely for myself," but also presuming it'll be read by "many people," a diary both confessional and full of (marred by?) artifice and performance.

The posts here won't be (forgive me) "picture-locked"; they'll be rough passes at ideas; some of it might work and some of it might end up on the cutting room whatever. So yeah, think of them as radio cuts, working drafts. If you're feeling really generous, though, think of them like Schlegel's fragments or, idk, Schopenhauer's Parerga and Paralipomena. Shortish writeups of miscellanea, concatenating to whatever extent possible my professional world of filmmaking, my atrophied academic background in critical theory, and my general experience of the world, such as it is. There might, I'm afraid, be a lot of "putting [x] in conversation with [y]" going on here.

If that sounds too much like homework, well, yeah, kinda – this is supposed to be homework for me, a place to think through what's going on in a culture determined to deprive us proles of any need or desire to think. I used to know how to think in papers, or at least paragraphs; now I only ever think in sentence fragments, stabs at hypereconomic pith for a caption or a tweet. And while I hope it won't feel like homework for you, whoever you might be, it might be nice for us to stretch past the usual referents on our screens, if occasionally a little painful.

So consider this a scratch track. The footage isn't logged, we'll need to ADR all those lines, and the pacing is all over the place, but the assembly has to start somewhere. Stick around if you don't mind a little audio clipping and the occasional frame stutter. We’ll (shudder) fix it in post.