How is it that the TriBeCa Film Festival came about without me noticing it this year? Could it be that I wasn’t working at Nerve, where I had been, by default, up-to-date on all things media related? Am I finding myself enjoying life more, lately?

Fortunately the film fest has at least one more week left and I will endeavor to attend at least one screening before week’s end. I don’t really have a choice. Friday I drive to my hometown to house-and-dog sit for my parents for a week. Also, the festival ends after this week. Anyone want to come and attend a screening with me? I’m interested in seeing The Grand, starring Woody Harrelson. Also, I’m very interested in seeing The Killing of John Lennon. Lastly, Aloha in New York seems interesting — a documentary about New York surfers.

- Glass of thirty-year old scotch. It tasted like gasoline.
- Wonderful dinner with Melissa.
- My car towed.
- $260 cash to get it back.
- Sushi with Meryl.
- Bike race with Meryl. I won. Barely.
- Katie’s housewarming party for not her house.
- Breakfast: pretzels and trail mix.
- Drive to Brooklyn Botanical Garden with Rachelle, Meryl and Jacques.
- Brilliant time at the Cherry Blossom Festival.
- Japanese swordplay.
- Sakura, sakura, yayoi no sora wa!
- Drive home.

A good weekend. Again. :)

Up up up and down
Turn turn turnaround
Round round roundabout
And over again
Gun gun son of a gun
You are the only one
Makes any difference what I say
The sun shines in the bedroom
When we play
The raining always starts
When you go away

— Kurt Cobain

He died at twenty-seven. I’m now twenty-nine, which means that I have outlived Kurt Cobain. But have I outlived Kurt Cobain?

Assignment: ask yourself if you have — or will have — outlived him at twenty-seven. If not, make a list of ways to remedy that. Then execute those plans.

Sunlight. Warm air. Water crashing against rocks. Waffle cones. A medium-rare salmon. Frisbees, soccer balls and footballs (all at once.) Grass in between toes. Dirty feet. Bike rides. Flip-flops. Spotting Paul Giamatti walking down the street. Ex-girlfriends you can be friends with. Knowing you’re here. New books. Talking smack about the weird people at the next table via text message. More beers in my apartment than I know what to do with. Photos waiting to be processed. Flirting, with photographic proof. Card games, beers and laughs. New friends.

It seems that I’ve been thinking a great deal about time travel lately. My mind has been dwelling upon the movie Back to the Future, to be specific. You know, it’s basically the story of Marty McFly traveling to 1955, messing up the events in his own history, fixing them, traveling back to the future and finding everything the way he left it.

…only not quite the way he left things.

Marty comes home and falls asleep at the end of his adventure. The next morning he finds that his dorky, goofy, slightly below average family has been replaced — or upgraded, really — with hipper, more successful versions of themselves. And no one is of the wiser. Except Marty. Up until this very point he’s known his family as the uncool McFlys, and is in shock by the changes he’s made.

This led me to the question: What happened to the Marty McFly of that timeline? Where did he go? Did he vanish? Will he turn up? Of course we discover over the course of the next two movies that no other Marty turns up no matter how many times Marty messes with time. Perhaps we should all take a moment and mourn the two? Maybe more? Martys that were erased from time.

Yeah, yeah I know it’s all fictional. I don’t care.

It seems that, as of late, I’ve forgotten what it was about movies that I’ve come to love. For the last few years I’ve started, written and eventually discarded many a screenplay because it wasn’t good enough. I’d somehow put it into my mind that the artistic value of the work was the most important part of the process. Moreover, if a script didn’t immediately live up to that expectation, it would be ignored. Filed into a scripts folder on my hard drive never to be seen again.

I’d become so caught up with the title filmmaker that I forgot what it was that I wanted to make. Movies. Not "films". It’s not to say that I don’t aspire to make beautiful works of art that translate onto the screen, allowing people to juxtapose the character-driven plot and the story contained within against their own lives, finding some greater meaning that’s between the lines. That’d be a beautiful goal.

However I can also remember the film that made me want to hop into the director’s chair and make decisions. And it wasn’t Citizen Kane, or The Seven Samurai or Vertigo. It was Raiders of the Lost Ark. That’s right. A George Lucas story with Steven Spielberg at the helm. Can you find a deeper meaning in it? Of course you can. There’s morals in the story, there’s examples of how to live a better life in the story. There’s also entertainment! It wouldn’t be a surprise if the first image your mind pulls up of Raiders of the Lost Ark had nothing to do with the Ark of the Covenant, or battling against Nazis in Africa. No, it had to do with a man in a brown fedora being chased by a two-storey stone marble.

I was reminded of all of this last night, when I walked out of the movie theatre having just seen Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s double-feature extravaganza, Grindhouse. On opening night. What’s interesting is that I walked in with low expectations. The previews made it look completely cheesy. The dialogue and acting appeared second-rate in the trailer. Oh look, I thought to myself, they’ve made it look like a seventies B-Film. Whoopie. But I went, because my friend had a spare ticket and I had nothing better to do.

But then the film began. Credits rolled, the audience cheered. The last time I heard an audience cheer in a film was 300. Before that? The opening credits to any Star Wars film. There’s no cheering at The Notebook.

What’s more, I was absolutely right. The movie looked like a seventies B-Film. The acting was bad. The dialogue was cheesy. And what’s more, they did it all on purpose! And suddenly I was reminded why. It was the experience. Rachelle said it best, "I never go to a movie on opening night. But you need the audience to make the experience complete."

I walked out into the crisp spring air refreshed. I was reminded why I want to do this. I immediately wanted to write a bad movie. Something fun! A movie that is an experience! And perhaps, if I do it the way I want, not the way I think an audience wants me to make it, it might one day be labeled a film. And maybe one day I can inspire someone to want to make films like me, as Speilberg and Lucas have done with me.

…Let’s just hope they don’t fuck up Indiana Jones IV like they did the Star Wars Prequels.

Spring is arriving. The tips of the trees are prepareing for rebellion; showing hints of green against their own backdrop of grey and brown. Heavy woolen coats are stowed away in closets in favor of t-shirts, hoodies, and sandals. Chalkboards ouside of bars and pubs remind us of the gardens in their backyards and dining may again accompany people watching.

And yet my hibernation is not yet over. Time is needed for some self-improvement, for some upgrades both under the hood and on the surface. This is not to say I’m invisible, or unavailable. It just means that there is work yet to be done.

Time’s wasting. Back to work.