The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

PETERMBALL Sunday Circle

Sunday Circle Banner

The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them).

After that, throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all.

Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project and what you’ve got coming down the pipe in the coming week (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog, you can sign-up for reminders via email here).

MY CHECK-IN

What am I working on this week?

My deadline to get a rough exegesis draft to my supervisor is this Friday, which largely sets my to-do list for the week. There’s about four thousand coherent words left to write, and about ten thousand incoherent ideas half-written in another file. Much of my week will be spent winnowing out the bad ideas and finding the stuff that will fit.

Once the draft is turned in, I’m taking a few days to chill and then getting back to fiction…but that’s likely to be next week’s project.

What’s inspiring me this week?

Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, which is one of the best films I’ve seen in years. The first Rian Johnson film I encountered was the low-budget indie Brick, which took the tropes of film noir and ported them into a high school setting. The result was such a startlingly fresh, tight, and innovative mystery that I found myself rewatching the film over and over for the space of a week, puzzling out all the tricks.

Johnson’s Star Wars film, The Last Jedi, took his knack for visual framing and turned it up to eleven. Whether you come down on the side of loving that film or hating it, it’s hard to deny the visual impact of what’s put up on the screen. Johnson, when given a budget, prooved to be both stylistically flashy and incredibly coherent in terms of visual style.

Knives Out is a blend of those two approaches. It’s got the really nuanced understanding of its genre that made Brick great, although it’s taking on the cosy mystery rather than film noir. It uses that nuance to recretate the genre from the ground up and deliver something fresh, accompanying a cracking script with really great performers.

And then it’s got the budget for Johnson to turn his knack for visual style loose, and the results are spectacular. 

What action do I need to take?

Setting myself an easy one this week: hit up the various social media sites and edit my interest profiles. I do this fairly regularly on Facebook, which maens it stops assuming I’ve got a prevailing interest in things I checked once or twice (or assuming I’ve got an interet in certain interests showing up on facebook, whe that’s not really how I use the site). I’ve never done it on twitter, though, which my explain why the site is becoming increasingly difficult to navigate and engage with. 

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The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

PETERMBALL Sunday Circle

Sunday Circle Banner

The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them).

After that, throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all.

Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project and what you’ve got coming down the pipe in the coming week (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog, you can sign-up for reminders via email here).

MY CHECK-IN

What am I working on this week?

I’ve just spent two weeks marking, and like all end-of-year grading exercises, it obliterated any other work. Which means this week is all about gaining ground on the two projects earmarked for end-of-November deadlines–getting my exegesis draft finished, and getting a new short story collection together. Everything will be drafting and line-edits for the next seven days, possibly the next fourteen.

What’s inspiring me this week?

My partner and I finally caught up with Season 4 of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, which is a phenomenal series in and of itself but also a really interesting one to look at in terms of series.

Serial fiction is often predicated on keeping characters iconic and close to archetype, particularly in animated narratives. She-Ra pushes its characters to evolve and change, a constant disruption of the status quo. The characters still cleave close to archetypes, but the series is finding new iterations on those archetypes and shedding new light upon them. Things that happen resonate through the series.

And the season finale…well, it’s a big status quo change. The kind that actually has me wondering whether everything we’ve seen thus far is the first act of a longer story, or if we just hit the end of a second act, or possibly the whole thing is unreadable in those terms.

It’s a fascinating thing to puzzle over, given where my head is at in thesis terms. I just wish I had the time to go down that particular rabbit hole.

What action do I need to take?

So many things. The key word for this week is regroup, since marking blew all plans out of the water and I don’t have any real sense of where I’m at with any projects. I new weekly checkpoint and project review is due, and it’s worth revisiting all my project plans for the quarter and seeing how challenges, goals, and timelines may have shited.

Fighting For Your Life With Shia LaBeouf

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

1.

Here is a morning thought for a Friday: the glory of the internet is that there’s always someone who hasn’t seen Rob Cantor’s Shia LaBeouf. And there’s always someone who has forgotten the song and needs to see it again.

Being the one to rectify either situation is a gift that keeps on giving. Go forth and be that person.

2.

And here’s a challenge for your Friday: what can Rob Cantor’s 3 minute clip offer you as a creative person (regardless of how that creativity manifests). Yesterday I logged a quote from a recent Garth Nix in-conversation I attended: we are all descendants of everything we’ve ever read. This applies to three-minute clips as well as great works of literature and non-fiction.

These days I run through a list from Todd Henry’s Accidental Creative designed to help capture creative sparks and insights.

ARE THERE ANY PATTERNS YOU’RE EXPERIENCING THAT ARE SIMILAR TO SOMETHING YOU’RE WORKING ON?

One project I’m kicking around at the moment is a year-long research-and-report series based around being more satisfied with my writing. Not necessarily being more successful with my writing in purely monetary terms, but hitting the end of 2020 and feeling like I’m pushing towards something instead of treading water. I found my way back to this clip as part of that, thinking about the works of art that really resonate with me and get me excited about creative possibilities. Cantor’s work is part of an emerging pattern: B-Grade ideas treated with po-faced seriousness, an appreciation for small absurdities in the genre, writing everything from a different perspective so you’re forced to re-examine the familiar.

At the same time, the project I’m noodling with the moment is a straight-up crime novel. No supernatural elements, no magic and no SF. Just a downright nasty thug doing bad things to bad people. Despite this, it’s not a book that’s grounded in realism—I wanted a very stylized feel to it. Realism heightened to the point of absurdity, then filtered through genre tropes. So I look at little patterns in Cantor’s song—the sheer pleasure of whispering Shia LaBeauf’s name and the way it lures you into the moment; the constant escalation from band, to orchestra, to dancers, to children’s choir, to acrobats, and the way the structure constantly mirrors and pushes the increasing absurdity of the story to the point where “but you can do jui-jitsu” feels like a natural progression.

You can’t do that in the same way when writing fiction, but the general idea of it seems like it could be replicated in some way.

WHAT DO YOU FIND SURPRISING ABOUT WHAT YOU’RE EXPERIENCING?

Two words: production values. Doing weird, gimmicky songs on the internet is nothing new and Cantor’s work had already gone viral two years before the clip appeared. That he doubled-down and produced this amazing, bizarre clip is just magical—one of the few things that has ever gone viral where I’m really blown away by the production and effort that went into it.

WHAT DO YOU LIKE ABOUT WHAT YOU’RE EXPERINCING AND WHY?

  • The fusing of “high art” forms like dance, choir, and an orchestra with an ostensibly low-art aesthetic of a goofy horror movie plot. Also, my god, the production values on a three-minute Youtube thing is incredible. There’s an intent here that’s often missing when people do this kind of thing, a real seriousness and gravitas that elevates the goofiness of the concept.
  • The dedicated seriousness of everyone involved. They don’t treat it as a joke and therefore elevate this to the level of parody within the story, so you’re able make those decisions for yourself as a viewer. There’s an ideology of trusting the reader here that I appreciate.
  • The Shia LaBeouf guest spot at the end. Always fun to see someone willing to go along with a joke, but it also really nails the dedication and willingness to go all-out on production values.

WHAT DO YOU DISLIKE ABOUT WHAT YOUR EXPERIENCING?

  • The second “Shia LaBeauf” not really being whispered by the violinist. There is so much impact in the first one, and the kid’s repetition of “quiet, quiet,” that gets lost when the name is said in a low voice instead.
  • The little details that get lost. I missed the blindfolded mohawked dancer in the final stages of the song because the clip had gone all maximalist and drowned us in detail. It’s only today, after about fifty repetitions of this clip, that I finally noticed something going on int he background.