Writing Versus Multimedia

I have almost nothing today.

I’ve been kind of angry with myself for not having enough writing on the blog lately. I’ve been doing videos and photographs and I’ve been feeling bad about not having done a painting for a long time, but whenever I start to feel bad about not doing a drawing or painting, I feel extra bad that I haven’t done, say, a short story in even longer.

Back in December I wrote this poem:

At a thirty frames-per-second frame rate
a ninety minute movie will project
a hundred and sixty thousand select
pictures one after the other like freight

on a train of flatcars each with one crate,
pretty crates for the viewer to inspect,
pretty crates above train tracks that connect
the railroad to the viewer’s brain substrate.

Borgy’s boyfriend wants to film a movie
about a painter who creates a scene
a single image on a rectangle

of canvas then is tortured by spooky
ways the scene changes and what it might mean
when an image and viewer entangle.

I was kind of angry with myself, even back then, for thinking about films and video so much and I wanted to write a story about a filmmaker doing a film about a painter making a painting. I thought it would be a fun way to think about almost all the stuff I’m interested in and to do the thinking in the context of writing a short story.

That was three months ago and I still haven’t written that story.

I make me angry sometimes.

So that’s something that’s been on my mind a lot lately. In a way I kind of miss the early days of this blog when it was all text.

But at the same time I love having all the multimedia resources that are so available these days.

That’s about all I have for today. This just has been an update on one of the things that’s been on my mind a lot lately. Writing versus multimedia.

I tell myself that the kind of multimedia I usually do, songs or little films, involves quite a bit of writing. And, for the most part, I strongly suspect in the future—well, now—that multimedia writing is the only kind of writing that will exist for all practical purposes. But I miss the writing kind of writing.

And to sort of underscore that duality, back in 2009 I posted the lyrics of a cool Peter Gabriel song. Here’s a cool Peter Gabriel video for that song. I really think this is the future—cool writing, cool sounds, cool images. I think everything will need all three: