Chaotic Jazz

Listening to “challenging” jazz. Sipping peppermint licorice tea, which shouldn’t be good, but I’m finding it… curiously tolerable. Same-same for the jazz.

My life, too, of late: intriguing and unmoored. A coast-to-coast relocation for a gig that evaporated upon arrival. Seven states in as many weeks, for a job that was once wantonly stationary.

In the midst of all this day-job hubbub-ery, I’ve been trying to get back to… I’m just gonna call it “art”.

Producing-? I’m gonna call it “producing”.

Back when I was marginally convinced that there was an online path to murdering my bachelordom, I created a dating profile that stated:

“Daylight in tech, moonlight in film. Challenged by selfies, confused by duckface.”

I may have followed up with an inquiry as to whether anyone out there was not made entirely of yoga…

I’m still a bachelor (shock and awe), but “daylight in tech, moonlight in film” is perhaps the best I’ve ever done at defining how I’ve found balance between these two essential pillars of my life.

One effort feeds the nerd in me, the other feeds the artist.

(One effort makes the money, the other takes the money.)

But the balance has been off for an entire year. The day job has eaten the art job. I intend to use this platform, in part, to chronicle my way back to producing—my way back to balance. Perhaps it will reach a few like-souled folk on a similar path.

If you are on this path (or just enjoy the spectacle), I hope you’ll reach out here; share your journey with the rest of the class…

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Show Notes:

Spinning: Where? by Ron Carter w/ Eric Dolphy & Mal Waldron*
Drinking: Licorice & Peppermint Tea (TEAPIGS)

* The opening track, “Rally”, being the aforementioned challenge. The majority of the album is both accessible and delightful.

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Strange Artfellows

Image © Copyright 2019 Atta Squirrel Films

Michael Afendakis and I are the mom and pop of Atta Squirrel Films. The jury’s perpetually out on which of us is mom or pop, but there’s a general consensus that the team works, in part, because Michael has a grip on all the things upon which I’ve a somewhat dubious grasp, and vice-versa.

By some cosmic boon, in our artistic partnership and our friendship, we are dissimilar where it matters, and similar where it counts.

I suspect that how one does anything is how one does everything. So it’s of little surprise to me that—like its founders—Atta Squirrel itself would seek working relationships with companies of odd-couple ilk.

The notion that our most creatively satisfying relationship as an independent film company would be with a cyber security startup is… counterintuitive. At face value, it might suggest a lack of artistic drive on our part, or a dearth of focus on the part of the client.

In reality, I suspect it’s a matter of both parties being vaguely-closeted-ex-pats of our chosen industries.

Michael and my work in tech and engineering supports the standard rockstar-status existence afforded to all independent filmmakers, and Joel Fulton (CEO of Lucidum, world-class CISO, and world(er)-class friend of both Michael and myself) is—as far as I can tell—a Michelin-tier artist’s soul squatting in the body of a cyber security geek.

Were the body of said cyber security geek built like a brick shit-house.

Whereas my own ex-actor tech-bod might best be described as “lengths of vegan scrawn, peppered with light padding”…

Whah: digression sandwich—what was I getting at…?

Right: Unlikely Artistic Pairings.

Somehow this relationship between Atta Squirrel Films and Lucidum has been a hugely satisfying, wildly productive artistic endeavor these past three years.

Over 40 videos, ranging from a series called “A Lucid View of History”, that examines modern technological challenges through the lens of historical events, to interviews with industry leaders, to our most recent collaboration: “CISO Cinema”, which pits the world’s top security experts against the world’s best-known cyber-themed blockbusters—a concept that has no right being even half as funny and engaging as it actually is.

These productive partnerships, like pineapple on pizza: peculiar players, properly paired…

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Show Notes:

Spinning: Transatlanticism by Death Cab For Cutie
Drinking: Gin & Tonic (Isle of Harris gin, Fever Tree tonic)

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You up-?

Woke to pee. That was my first mistake. (Not that the alternative would have been ideal.)

But despite the consciousness-defying, pinball-stagger that was my 13-foot odyssey to and from the bathroom, once back in the toasty goodness of my bed, my mind would snuggle down into complete wakefulness.

Work. Other work. Other other work. My financial situation, the world’s financial situation, my questionable significance to my significant other, the virtue of minimalism and its contrast to the state of my apartment…

I’d gone to bed at a respectable hour—that was probably my first first mistake. So when my mind found my body up at 2:00am, and smacking itself into things, it must have thought it had received the day’s 4-hour allotment of downtime, and assumed it was time to resume over-thinking things.

It’s been a long run, lately.

Back in August, we launched “The Grandpa Diaries” on YouTube, alongside a few car videos we produced in collaboration with Workshop 337. The one Jaguar video has received [14x] the views of all 13 episodes of “The Grandpa Diaries” combined, proving the corporate overlords at YouTube favor the ad revenue produced by those searching for the world’s best-loved classic car over that produced by the 4 humans who have ever typed the words “grandpa” and “diary” into a search window—an inherent bias I’ve long suspected, and now know to be true.

While I’ve been wading in a sea of thumbnails (a phrase I now can’t un-coin), my fellow Squirrel, Michael, has been corralling our first feature through post: a documentary following an insufferably talented group of high-schoolers, called “We Rise.” Signs point to that hitting the festivals by year’s end.

And then there’s Outside Clients—the Squirrel-for-Hire stuff.

Michael and I both have day jobs, on top of (beneath? Supporting? Definitely supporting…) our Atta Squirrel endeavors, so we only have time for the one client. For a good stint now, that one client has been a cyber security startup called Lucidum, and we’ve been a bit spoiled by the whole thing. The CEO, Joel Fulton, is “missed calling”-level creative, and working with him is an unadulterated pleasure.

Sometimes another client shimmies its way in edgewise, and we curse our own idiocy for taking on more work than our already-taxed schedules can bear. That usually goes something like:

SQUIRREL #1: So, I’ve got a bead on this gig. It’ll be weeks of work for days of pay, and we’ll pretty much wanna stab ourselves in the face by the end of it.

SQUIRREL #2: That doesn’t sound great.

SQUIRREL #1: I already said yes.

So, yeah: It’s been a little too much of that lately. On top of the day job, preproduction on the next season of “The Grandpa Diaries”, post-production on “We Rise”, simultaneous production and post-production on seven episodes of a new series for Lucidum, and this nagging feeling that the world coming to an end might mean the world’s coming to an end…

Not the time to wake to pee. A mind is gonna jump all over that window.

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Show Notes:

Spinning: LP1 by FKA Twigs
Drinking: Coffee, Black (Starbuck’s Sumatra*)

*I know, I know; find me another proper coffee that tastes like bitter dirt, instead of sour blueberries stomped on by hipsters, and I’ll drink it.

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50/50

Image © Copyright 2022 Atta Squirrel Films

A buddy of mine from work is poised to become a dad, at any moment. I asked him what ratio of excited to nervous he was, and he replied, “50/50“.

I’ve had two extraordinary women nearly usher me into getting pregnant (think I’ll just let that phrasing stand), but the closest I’ve come to creating anything with any kind of life of its own is this company.

(Another type of creation that has required an extraordinary partnership…)

To stretch an already dubious analogy to wafer-thinness: The incubation period of ASF is best measured in decades, but the next 50 days will see huge things happening for Atta Squirrel.

Some several events, an industry screening of our first documentary, the launch of our web series, pre-production on our largest-scale project to date…

What ratio of excited to mind-wipingly terrified am I-?

Oy.

What ratio, indeed…

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Show Notes:

Spinning: White People by Handsome Boy Modeling School
Drinking: Valerian Nights Tea (DAVIDsTEA)

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The Positivity of Negative Space

Image © Copyright 2022 Michael Afendakis

Not gonna lie: This week has been a whole thing. Inspiration, death, and a heartbreakingly predictable breakup, all clamoring for headspace.

As I am wont to do, when confronted by… let’s say “shitstorms of emotional what-not”, I called an emergency porch swing session—whereby Michael fuels the furnace of Jonathan’s dubious assertions about the nature of things, with too-good-for-Jonathan wine, and an ear toward clever one-liner openings.

Six hours later (having whittled our current angsts down to their bitter, bite-sized, chewable cores, for later consumption), we found ourselves at Michael’s editing suite.

Michael and I have always divvied up the tasks on any given project: one shoots, the other edits; one writes, the other directs. Notes are requested or unsolicitedly proffered, then incorporated or cheekily ignored…

Yet there we were collaborating, in-time, on our documentary. Snipping and shuffling clips about, layering themes, finding the measure of silences, and creating negative space—room enough for our heroes to spar…

Breaking the edit like a script in a writer’s room.

I’m not keen to silver-line the mourning I have in store for me, at the moment. But I am keen to appreciate the view of my life from 100 yards:

Man up to his neck in it, gasping for art.

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Show Notes:

Spinning: Viva! La Woman by Cabo Matto
Drinking: Negroni (St. George Terroir Gin, Carpano Antica, Campari)

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Atta Quinceañera

We’ve had a few cracks at committing to a plan for launching “The Grandpa Diaries,” each hindered by various acts of wantonly aggressive unfortunateness.

The End Times…

Jonathan’s comically exuberant insecurities…

But we had a production meeting today, that saw plans for several long-noodled threads snap into place.

Atta Squirrel’s Coming Out Party
A friends & family screening of our upcoming documentary, “We Rise”
And (at long, terrifying last): The launch of our web series, “The Grandpa Diaries”

May the interwebs have mercy on Jonathan’s soul…

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Show Notes:

Spinning: Skelethon by Aesop Rock
Drinking: Gin & Tonic (St. George Botanivore Gin, Fever Tree Tonic, Regan’s Orange Bitters)

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Accidental Momentum

I think I can partially speak for my partner-in-squirrel-based-crime, Michael, and confess we've both long struggled with being artists trapped in the bodies of day-jobbing squares, working for the proverbial man.

Our recent productivity has snuck up on me. It's been... yowza: literally years since our debut short, "Monster", and just this week, I realized we're in post for one thing, pre-production on the next thing, and writing the thing to follow.

I think I was eating a beet salad, or something equally Bay-Area-Bourge-y, and thought, "Damn, kids... to the untrained eye, this might look dangerously akin to doin' stuff."

Momentum, like an aloof cat I've been trying to woo into a petting, only to have it nudge my elbow when I finally give up and reach for the remote.

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Atta Ballers

I grew up outgoing, but have grown steadily more introverted as I've gotten older—a sort of reverse social bloom that began somewhere in my early thirties, as I settled in to how I prefer to navigate the world.

For this reason I find industry mixers a bit of a mixed bag. It's the type of gathering that tugs at both of these disparate aspects of my personality. So as I walk into a room of semi-familiar faces, like last night's Cinequest soirée, my inner Lampshade and Wallflower immediately begin to fumble for supremacy.

Thankfully my business partner and relentless confidant, Michael Afendakis, has no such social quandaries. Within moments of entering the milling fray, he appears before me with a bottle of champagne and several glasses. When I note that there are only two of us, Michael gestures sweepingly to the people around us, popping the thin, socio-prophylactic bubble Wallflower had apparently blown up around Me-And-Mine upon arrival.

"See," he announces, "here's Lori Triolo-! I'm sure Lori would like a glass of champagne..."

Lori is one of the producers of "Lost Solace", by all accounts one of the buzz-worthiest films at Cinequest this year, and one of Atta's social touchstones since we met her earlier in the festival. We also chat with Owen Thomas (friend-of-Atta-Squirrel and voice-over-extraordinaire, who's motion comic "Mono" is featured in the Barco Escape Shorts), Pamela Ann Berry (Product Ninja at Atomos), and several other fine folk...

One thing I keep hearing about Cinequest is the festival's culture of inclusivity—a genuine sense that the organizers and filmmakers want to connect in some fundamental way with the work, with the art that may come of that work, and with one another.

Last night was that for me. For the first time, amidst the hubbub of screenings and meetings and slightly-overwhelming social what-not, I found myself simply appreciating being a filmmaker amongst filmmakers.

It was a welcome disarming, by a charming group of people, in an open atmosphere diligently cultivated by our hosts. And I’d like to thank everyone for all of it.

And Michael for the champers.

Which didn’t hurt.

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