Paths wind strangely at times. After blundering through a week of self-doubt, brought to the surface in part by health issues, I’ve sort of gotten a new fire under my ass, albeit a faint one.
Yesterday I was capable of doing little more than slumping in a chair and moaning to myself about all the things I didn’t feel like doing. The plague that has been visiting our house for the past months shows no signs of diminishing; indeed, my son had a nasty fever this morning and is seeing the doctor today. I’m getting an MRI done this afternoon, and my wife just plain feels like crap.
Desperate for something to take my mind off of the misery all around, I managed to make it down to Blockbuster. Nothing new caught my interest, so I went wandering around in the Drama section, which was thinner than I remember it back in the pre-Netflix days. Still, one item leapt out at me. My extensive mental to-do list for the past few months had included a viewing of A Love Song for Bobby Long, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment.
This is one hell of a movie, and marks one of those times when I’m glad I don’t always let my prejudices get the better of me. John Travolta can pick some crap-ass movies when he puts his mind to it, but his portrayal of the title character in this flick is astoundingly honest and spot-on. That I completely forgot it was him about midway through underscores how well he inhabits the old, drunken, out-of-work literature professor, down and out in pre-Katrina New Orleans.
But unlike so many movies, the title character is actually not the main character. If there is a main character, or rather one through whose eyes we discover the world of the film, it is Purslane Hominy Will, portrayed expertly (and hotly) by the amazing Scarlett Johansson. I won’t give away the movie, or even review it, because that’s not really what this post is about.
The movie had an effect on me in several ways, its quality being only one. I happen to know some background about how the film came to be, and this is what arrested me upon viewing it. Some months ago, I saw a performance by Grayson Capps, whose music is featured in the film. At the show, he went into some detail about his connection to the story.
Some years ago, his old band was playing a club somewhere in Louisiana, and he was approached by a young lady who introduced herself as a documentary filmmaker. She was doing a film on the local music scene, and wanted to know if she could film them, to which he agreed.
Talking later, though, she mentioned that she was looking for good stories from the area that might make a good feature film. In an old drawer at his place, Capps had been keeping a manuscript written by his father that had never seen publication. He gave her a copy, and didn’t hear from her for quite some time. But one day, he got wind that someone had adapted his father’s novel for a screenplay, and then the young director was calling him about providing music for the film that would be starring major Hollywood talent.
This story is incredible enough, but more so when you actually see the characters onscreen. These are damned interesting people, in damned interesting circumstances, and if Capps is to be believed, it’s mostly a true story.
It set me thinking about all the damned interesting people I know and the sorts of stories they’ve told me over the years, many of which are easily fodder for books, movies, and who knows what all. But I think of Capps’ father, who no doubt put hours, months, maybe years of his life into writing down this story, and died without anyone but friends and family being aware of it.
It’s a foolish sort of hope for an artist to count on the future. For every great work that has only been appreciated long after the creator’s demise, there are surely hundreds that have ended up in the dumpster. The future doesn’t care about justice. We who create in obscurity should not make our sole hope that posterity will vindicate us.
But perhaps in the deluge of rejection and indifference as we put our works into the world, we can reasonably imagine that the one person who will make all the difference, who may shine a light onto the fruit of our angst-ridden labors, may be someone we’ve already met, and they just haven’t become that person yet.
I once worked with a singer for a rather good band who had sank into obscurity as they entered middle age. As we sat at our desk jobs one day, he got an unexpected email from a old fan. Apparently they had heard one of his band’s oldest songs on a daytime soap opera that afternoon, and wondered if he knew. Upon doing a bit of research, he found out that one of their early fans, who’d bought their first cassette demo ages ago, had recently started working for the soap’s production company, and had finagled the tune into the show. This came more than a decade after the tape had been released, and though the new exposure didn’t lead to riches, it gave my friend a boost during a trying time in his life. Someone cared about something he made.
I’ve had that experience myself, finding out that someone I’ve never met has appreciated something I created, and it’s very helpful in the continuing quest to feel real. Those of us who create in our spare rooms and throw the result out into the interwebs, never to be seen again, can often get the impression that our creations mean nothing, that they are swallowed up by the vastness of the information glut as a drop is swallowed by the ocean. But when it turns out that you’ve actually reached someone, the feeling is as heartening as it is surprising.
In my earlier post, I spoke of the impending transition from aspiring artist to hobbyist. The arguments I made may be sound, but they’re not the sort of thing that gets you up in the morning and inspires you to do your best work. A Love Song for Bobby Long has done that for me. As I mentioned in my first post on this site, all artists are documentarians of a sort. To capture time, people, places, and feelings; at our best, those are our goals. If there’s even a sliver of a chance that I can capture a piece of the lives I come into contact with on a regular basis, to explain why they mean what they do to me, I have a hard time taking that lightly.
Yes, it will mean more sleepless nights. But I’ve had more of those since I started contemplating giving my life over to normality. Certainly, my illness has made these emotional roller-coasters more dramatic, but I don’t think my feelings on the matter are any less real.
I need to do what I need to do, and it doesn’t matter if it hurts like hell. Life without it hurts worse.
In coming months, I will attempt to tell some stories. I’ve got this big scratch pad, might as well use it.
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