By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com
Artist vs Exhaustion, or, Being an Artist Is Hard, Y'all
I have a cool job, no doubt about it. People who know what I do for a living who don’t work in this field perceive it to be très glamorous: You know, non-stop hobnobbing with celebs (no, and no, thanks), going to parties and red carpets (uh, I live in Seattle, not LA or NYC, for a reason), and seeing films for free (that part, at least, is true). My colleagues who work in this business know that the reality is that a) yes, film critics get to see lots of movies, but a great many of them suck and you still have to write about them, and b) writing — at least, writing well, which I at least aspire to do — is hard. Not hard in the sense of, say, digging ditches under a hot sun, but certainly it’s tough intellectually, as any remotely artistic endeavor is, especially on those days when the words just do NOT want to flow.
My brother is a musician who fronts a couple of excellent Seattle bands, Hypatia Lake and This Blinding Light, and when he’s on stage he makes it look effortless, but I know the endless hours of work that went into making it look that way, and how exhausted the guys get from holding down day jobs and playing shows and having rehearsals and such. His art is his passion, and he gives himself to it completely, but art, like any lover, can suck the life and energy out of you, no matter how sweet it is when things click together.
And I know from my many friends and acquaintances who have actually accomplished the arduous task of taking a film from idea to finished screenplay to movie on screen that making a film also doesn’t come easy. Some filmmakers take years, even decades, to see a project to fruition, which just amazes me.
What brought all this on was that I was catching up with Ken Stringfellow’s blog today; the man journals there prolifically, for a guy as busy as he is, and I wanted to see what he had to say about the show he played at the Fremont Abbey for The Round here in Seattle last week. And when I read his blog and caught up with everything he has going, the sheer madness of his schedule, I was amazed at the energy and professionalism he brought to that performance. If you ever thought you wanted to be a rock star, Stringfellow’s blog will shatter any illusions you might have harbored that it’s a glamorous life.
My favorite tidbit from his most recent entry, talking about a show he was playing in Angouleme (in southwestern France), a couple days after returning from Seattle: “Now, I was the weakest link–singing at 1am that morning, what’s normally a simple part to sing on one of Jon’s songs was sounding like a cane toad being gang raped on a pile of whoopee cushions as I tried to lay it down at home–jet lag, allergies, exhaustion–and here at soundcheck my voice was OK but weaker than normal. Oh, boy.”
Being an artist of any kind is hard, y’all. But hey, it still beats the hell out of working in a cubicle farm, n’est-ce pas?
