This resonates with me...

Walter Pater wrote (The Renaissance):
"At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to play upon these objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions—colour, odour, texture—in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further: the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind. Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world."

This is like the process of creativity: an impression from without or within leads to a time of reflection - without effort the whole entity is passed through the massive filter of the personality and a new being springs up. Then this new thing must come forth: I disagree with Pater's last sentence - the creation is not kept as a prisoner but displayed. Does it sing, is it both familiar and strange - does it augment the world? If yes, it might be worth something. Films, paintings, poems and other writing - they all fall into this category. I am gearing up for the final acceleration into the period of preproduction on this project. I will keep you posted...

And all the clouds...

Bad news then good news. J the director emailed to say he'd suddenly lost his job - probably a victim of the world economic downturn. Very abrupt. Companies treat their employees in such an inhuman fashion these days - clear your desk and bugger off - no notice needed 'cause you're a subcontractor (for which read: we've made sure you're not an employee so we will have absolutely no obligation towards you). I was devastated, for him as well as for me - he probably wouldn't want to do Yowie now. I facebooked him cautiously. After a couple of days there came a response - yes, I'm on for the Yowie, was a bit down - nothing that a beer wouldn't fix. I replied: Have one for me. Prosit.

I decided to tell J the new director absolutely nothing about the previous director, so that any ideas for the script that J came up with could not in any way be claimed by the previous director as being his ideas. He'd already claimed that he had put significant numbers of ideas into the old script - Kylie and I had then gone carefully through and expunged completely anything that could possibly have been contributed by him - in fact they were few and trivial. Anyway, we'll see what J comes up with in the new Yowie era.

The Winter of my content

Autumn in Canberra is spectacular. Crisp days and trees aflame with colour. Things finally seem set for the making of The Yowie in September. Yippee. I feel so tired of the whole process that it will be an anticlimax. At least that's how I feel now - probably when the camera finally rolls I'll feel great.

Was discussing the whole dreary voyage to realisation that most creatives have to go through with a friend yesterday: what we agreed on was this: in the old days (ah the good old days when everything was in fact pretty stinky) there was no barrier between creatives and the public - creatives did their thing and presented the result to the public - and got booed or cheered. These days the creative offers their pathetic scrap to a whole swag of middle-people: editors and script jockeys, government officials and various failed creatives turned bureaucrats. Look what happens next: the faceless comformists making up this middle earth then pull the work to pieces: is it politically correct? correctly formatted? recycled paper? tick the right boxes? does it offend any one of a huge number of aggrieved minorities? Etc. Assuming it gets the nod, the next step is called 'wearing down the artist.' After a depressing length of time a dismissive approach is made to the artist: Dear X, we have assessed your work "The pathetic scrap" and one of our junior editors would like to discuss it with you. She/He will shortly be writing at sometime in the future a 1000 page critique of your work and sending it to you. You then have fourteen seconds to reply with a new draft of your, ahem, work. Please bear in mind we receive 13 thousand similar such scraps every day and we may never actually proceed to the next stage, while reserving the right to plagiarise your work and, if not plagiarise, then bowlderize, homogenize, destroy, multilate, obfuscate, and other reduce your pathetic scrap to an even more pathetic scrap that may or may not ever get in front of an audience. Yrs, etc. PS, then there is the issue of funding. Ha Ha Ha.

And so it goes. Sigh. Nothing original about all this - I just had to have a rave.