Show & Tell-How I Try to Look Smart and Why You Believe Me

My roommate was getting coffee with our former professor, Leonard Oakland, this past weekend. Leonard has been teaching Literature for 43 years. That’s quite the history of experience. They were talking about being 24 years old and he told Kelly, “24-Scary! But a great time!” Oh Leonard, Ain’t it the truth.

I’ve been living on my own now for about five months and I think yeah, scary is a good word to use. I work for minimum wage, in a city I barely know, and I spend all of my time on developing skills that may never pay off in the end. If I’m not reading a book, I’m writing a screenplay which may never get produced. And if I’m not doing that, I’m selling tickets in a box office. At the end of each day, what do I have to show for it?

The home library is where I do most of my intellectual cheating. My roommate and I combine our books into one massive library, intimidating all who enter our hallowed grounds of literature, philosophy, and film. But I know that I haven’t read half the books on those shelves and I probably never will. But you don’t know that, and when you see all of my Charles Dickens books you can’t help but think, “kid knows his stuff.”  

I tell many people I meet that I’m a filmmaker, which is true. Yes, technically I’ve made three short films (and a few shorts for classes). But I’ve only made a whopping 75 bucks off of my movies, and that doesn’t really pay the bills. But I know how impressive the term FILMMAKER sounds (especially to single women) and I can’t resist the look of an intimidated peasant averting their eyes from the celebrity that is me. I could say ASPIRING filmmaker, but come on. Where’s the fun in that?

The act of working on a screenplay is incredibly frustrating, because a finished screenplay, as in greenlit and ready to produce, is still just a screenplay. Until it’s filmed, produced, edited, and released, that screenplay is just a bundle of paper with words. I envy the short story writer. If they want to write a story they can do it in a day and be done, and the whole world can consume it immediately. Once I finish the short script I’m working on, I still have to film the damn thing. I don’t know how professional screenwriters sleep at night, waiting for their next written work to be skewered by some hotshot director. I’m getting away from the point a bit so let me be perfectly clear when I say—working on a screenplay leaves little to show off with.

It’s scary to be in your early twenties because you work damn hard at your craft and you just don’t have much to show for it. But that’s because you’re in your early twenties. What do you expect? A 60,000 dollar salary plus benefits? Living on my own and working minimum wage is forcing me to get creative and get good at what I want to do. It’s annoying that I can’t prove that I’m stretching my intellect and talent every day, but at least I can say that I read James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Sole Searching: How a pair of shoes changed my life

"I mean, seriously, how often do you really look at a man's shoes?" 

-Red  

The Shawshank Redemption

Remember the joy of Lego’s? Thousands upon thousands of pieces for your disposal. You, the eternal god of Lego creation, were the architect of mystical lands. It’s by far my favorite childhood toy. But there’s a curious thing about Lego’s. I don’t remember actually playing with them.  I built them, and designed some amazing ships and buildings, but I never wielded them as my action figures. What I did was set up grand tableaus. That’s where story came in. I had one dungeon island set that kept my attention for days upon days. I’d set up the opposing pirates, the treasure chests, the boats. And I would set them in a scene. And that was it; there they would lay frozen in time. For me, it wasn’t the action that I was interested in but the image. I had a certain look I was going for, a certain feeling that my tableau of Lego’s meant to evoke. I liked the control. I was meticulous in how the Lego’s were set but I never played games, I never assumed characters, I never acted out my world. I merely created the world and looked in from the outside. For it was the look of the world that felt real to me, not playing the scene out. 

Two days ago I bought a pair of shoes from the Goodwill in downtown Portland. This is a picture of a brand new shoe.

I bought them barely used for 40 dollars. Brand new they would have cost 325 dollars. I don’t mean to brag , but wait, no I’ll just brag for a little bit. 40 dollars! I am the newly crowned king of shoe thrifting! OK moving on. I love the shoes. It’s not that they are super comfortable or anything, they’re just…professional. I would walk to work with my eyes looking at my shoes the whole time. I loved hearing the click-clack-click-clack of the shoes hit the pavement. I looked like an adult. 

I’m not one of those Portland twentysomethings who is desperately clinging on to their youth. I know I’m young, but there is a yearning to be an adult and take on great responsibility. Not in the “start a family” way but “become a film director” way. And in the past five months since I’ve graduated there has been nothing that felt like I was validated as the epic man in search of profundity in his new life, abandoning his youthful ways for the life of the artist. So I got an urban apartment, big woop. I got a job at a premium cinema, who cares! Not even the internship with the NY based production company made me feel like a responsible, mature adult in the pursuit of his passion. It was the shoes.

The shoes I had before this pair were the ugliest puppies in the history of footwear. I had to have this specific pair for my job at the last theater I worked. Two weeks later I got a job at the Living Room Theaters. Every day I walked to work in those God forsaken shoes (that after 2 weeks were already falling apart).  I felt like a fraud. At the bottom of my outfit lay the true value of my life’s pursuit. I was worthless, how could such a slob be capable of any profound work of art? How could an artist fill those shoes? He has no aesthetic outlook for his own self, how could he have an aesthetic outlook in the world of celluloid? Under the surface of my wardrobe was the intellect and hard work of a young artist. The requisite reading and writing (I hope) is being done so that I may be a competent and skillful artist. But none of you know that, because my shoes didn’t reflect that.

Director Ingmar Bergman
looking so...Cinematic

Everything changed when I got the shoes, of course. My walk to work the first day was glorious. Here down the avenue was Ryan Graves, aspiring film director, intern for a production company in NYC. He may have the humble task of selling tickets in a box office, but it is the box office for the Living Room Theaters, the premiere art house cinema in all of Portland. Here was the man, the myth nay, the legend.

Obviously the shoes got me carried away, but you get the point. The shoes validated everything I was doing. All along I had the content of the artistic life, but now I had the image, and the image was everything for me. Like the Lego’s of my childhood, I had latched onto the image, and the shoes were the beginning of the successful image, and thankfully, I caught myself before going headlong into superficiality.

Because come on, they’re just a pair of shoes. In my childhood I was obsessed with the image. I didn’t play with my toys-I set them up so it looked like I did. For me, it was more entertaining to look the game rather than live the game. It was easier, I had more control because I was on the outside looking in. But I’m not a child anymore, I don’t have the luxury of looking from the outside in, that’s left to God alone. It’s time I stop obsessing with the image of success, and begin living the successful life that I desire.