Okay fellas, I have this idea for a little film. I keep thinking about the generative thing-a-ma-jings I was making with Context Free and beginning to play with in Processing last year during the days I still had to hold A for every single nap he took. (That would be nearly nine months, I say, coyly displaying my stigmata.) They were just static images, but with the changes from one rendering to the next, each began to anthropomorphize until I felt like I was looking at a documentary series of strange little beasts responding to something mysterious taking place just outside the frame. I was thinking the other day about how I’d like to include one of those little guys as a character in a film. Or maybe, more accurately, over a film. While the film would be fixed, the creature would have a defined “personality” in that he’d respond to certain cues within it, but like a child, his responses under identical circumstances wouldn’t necessarily be the same. The composite would be different every time the movie is played.

I don’t know the details yet. Would I model the entire set so that the creature could really and truly inhabit the same space as the children? (Oh yeah, my idea for the story-let involves little kids, who have some of that quality of unpredictability themselves.) Or maybe his world could just be superimposed over the whole thing, which is probably a bit closer to what I am imagining.

This started as I was sleepily thinking about Merce Cunningham and the brilliance of all those separate compositions crashing together to create these moments of meaning that can’t help being intensely personal for the viewer because they’re perfectly random, and mixing it all up with the little dust creatures in My Neighbor Totoro and realizing that even though I can recall all sorts of things I did when I was two or three years old, I can’t ever wrap my adult mind around my childish reasons for doing them. I thought to myself that for children there is this other parallel world where everything has a significance we adults can as little picture as we can another dimension…

I’ve got the perfect setting and dozens of tiny details and scenes written, though the story doesn’t hang together yet. It’s okay. I think I could work on the creature concurrently.

All right, who’s on board, kids? There’s no way I can corral this beast all by myself.

~

Fine, I grant that Mister Four Hour Work Week probably has some worthwhile things to say. (People I respect keep claiming he does, though people I respect have also read Eckert Tolle, whom I was compelled to chuck in the dirty diaper bucket early in our acquaintance.) But really, the man gets rich off our pathetic desire to contemplate getting rich instead of working. He’s like the lottery and malt liquor. It undermines his credibility. Maybe you People I Respect could just relay to me the worthwhile things he has to say without letting me know where they came from.

I’ve been looking at lot at handwritten type as I work on the first set of aphorisms posters in three to seven minute increments. (They are about half done. I will post them here as high resolution downloads when they are fresh from the oven and I’ve sampled the print versions myself.)

Another fine Twitter toy. Try some onomonopiea!