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the grind into a performance of Scarlett at The Elysian, then a run-up to filming the show for a special.

the simultaneous push of rewriting material, and also learning it, and realizing it’s been five months since I last performed it.

looking at a video of the Edinburgh performance and cringing slightly at the rough parts that need smoothing over, and wondering a bit about how you can possibly rewrite them and smooth them over in time.

sort of knowing that you will be able to do that, but not necessarily knowing how.

it is beginning

In Los Angeles, if you are up at 5 am, it is almost always a good thing (unless it’s because you have kids, in which case maybe it is a good thing, because you have kids, or maybe it’s not, because you have kids).

Because mostly being up this early means you are “working” in some capacity. Which is true for me today, there are very few reasons I would ever be up this early in Los Angeles: air travel, filming, getting in line early for Courage Bagels… I can’t think of much else.

I could be a person that gets up early and walks and journals and meditates. I would even say I have been that person at points in my life. But I am not that now.

This morning I am lucky to have some work, and it’s fun work.

But damn it’s early

every fabric so as not to offend the gods

that’s why i missed yesterday

I threw away some stuff today. About 10-15 books. I thought about donating/selling but these days when you go to a used bookstore they give you very little. Everyone realizes the books weren’t gonna get read.

I figured I can get eBook versions of the ones I want if I remember to want them again.

For the ones that I don’t, I realized if I get rid of a book, it’s almost like giving Future Me time back… every book gone is 2-10 hours that I don’t have to spend reading it.

You’re welcome, Future Me.

What a tremendous film. Go see it. Reminds you of the terrors of complicity and the bland sheen on evil that took place during the Holocaust, but also reminds you of suburban complicity next to genocide and apartheid happening today.

Jonathan Glazer cements his place as one of my favorite filmmakers.

Weirdly, I’m on a run lately of having visions of moments in films long before they happen. In Saltburn, I was musing in my head about what the main character did at the grave, and in the mansion. Here, early on, I thought about another film (The Act of Killing) and a comic book (From Hell) and both of those thoughts became action in The Zone of Interest.

I will think about this movie for a long time, and will definitely see it again.

I thought his set was fine/whatever. I struggle to think of times that comedians have killed at awards shows (maybe Steve Martin? Ricky Gervais had memorable sets but they didn’t kill in the room).

Calling out the writers seemed clearly a joke to me (“the funny ones are the ones I wrote” seemed obviously to be an exaggeration) and I feel like we’ve seen decades of comics doing the same thing (Johnny Carson?). But okay, I guess it’s bad etiquette.

Even if the set was really bad, I’d be happy that he said to Scorsese’s face “you stole the premise of your movie from native people”. Which I thought was genuinely true and funny.

read a thing about how comparing things make you buy more.

If i have three bluetooth speakers to pick from, and I examine the pro’s and con’s of each one, wanting to pick the best one, it means I’ve already bypassed the decision whether I need a bluetooth speaker at all.

In the Wirecutter generation, some sort of calm comes from knowing I’ve picked the best: bluetooth speaker, pepper grinder, USB audio interface.

Eventually I will assemble a material environment only comprised of the best, most absolute perfectist things, and then I will have made so many good choices my life cannot help be overwhelmed by the sheer competence and all results will turn green.

perfect thought process.

I was looking at a list of the top 10 podcasts from 2023 because I always like finding new stuff to listen to. The winner by a wide margin was Search Engine by PJ Vogt. A few years ago, Vogt (and Sruthi Pinnamaneni, who also produces Search Engine) was ousted from his show Reply All. The short story is that Vogt was gross at Gimlet, which was disappointing, not just because you hate to hear when someone you like is problematic, but also it essentially ended Reply All which was one of my favorite shows.

Anyway, everyone is raving about Search Engine, and so I thought, maybe we just don’t care about this stuff anymore. Maybe we are finally separating art from the artist … which I’m not even sure if we should do, but it seems like everyone else is just moving on.

Is all of it performative? It could be!

I feel like maybe we all have realized that constructing some kind of moral framework based on the personal or political behavior of creators is not sustainable next to just wanting to consume art for pleasure.

I don’t know. I’m trying to put on a name on a feeling where I stopped listening to Gimlet stuff and I didn’t follow any of Vogt’s later work because I felt the outed behavior relative to Reply All was unseemly; then three years later I see that everyone in the podcast world has collectively shrugged. That feeling where there’s a disconnect like, “Oh, I thought we all cared that PJ Vogt was an asshole? I guess we don’t?”

I really don’t know.

Anyway.

I listened to one episode of Search Engine and it was okay.

Do other people have a handle on their lives? I feel like the more success I get, the more chaos I encounter. I don’t think having a manager to arrange all this stuff would solve it… I think that’s an idea performers have in their head before the fact but actually it’s not a thing.

I got one of those big Post-It stick on the wall poster sheet things and wrote all the things I could think of that I need to work on and it’s a LOT.

But the alternative would be that I could reduce how much stress I have in my life but not being in demand in any way. It’s kind of scary how strong that drive is.

Towards entropy?

“surcease” was the word of the day… he regaled us with stories about his life without surcease.

Without relief.

Thinking about expanding my vocabulary. In the Alan Moore BBC Maestro course he mentioned that the breadth of your vocabulary is related to your ability to describe your reality. You need a word for something in order to give it form.

Flashback to me, on a bus, traveling somewhere at night, in Washington DC. I was there as part of the National Peace Essay contest. There was a girl there, we were both juniors in high school, I think her name was Meredith. She was describing how some of her friends made fun of her for knowing more words than them … that she was being a know-it-all. And I still remember this exchange:

ME: But sometimes you need a different word, a better, word, a word that is more… more…

MEREDITH: Precise!

I don’t know why “precise” was evading me, but her properly labeling the feeling with the exact right term has stuck with me ever since.

I’ve thought about it frequently since that day, without surcease.