FOUNDATIONS
How does where we are from and where we live and have traveled influence who we are?
The above photo of me was taken in early December, 2007 at sunrise in Carthage, Tunisia. The story behind it isn't as epic as the history of the place itself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthage), but it was a pretty profound experience for me all the same...
I was accompanying my great friend and then producing partner Blue Nelson on one leg of a particular long-term, record-setting-attempt road trip he's been on and off of in one way or another since 1998. This kicked off the North African leg. We'd previously been through Central and Southern Italy as well as the Southern European island nation of Malta together. This was the morning we woke up in Tunisia, having ferried over from Reggio, Italy 22 hours before, and it began a journey around the entirety of pre-Arab Spring Tunisia that took us down into the entrance of the Sahara Desert and back, with stops across the borders into both Algeria and Libya (past the old Star Wars sets, a movie his uncle helped produce...but that's HIS story to tell).
Blue, Brendan and Bigfoot. On location in the Angeles National Forest, CA, 200...3(?)
Scouting in Rome, Italy. 2007
Delivery "van" somewhere in Southern Italy, 2007
On the road outside Bizerte, Tunisia. 2007
Inside Blue's car at the Libyan border. Note Big Brother Leader (deceased) in the background. They wouldn't let us in but at least they let us leave. 2007
I say all this because I've had a lot of opportunity to reflect on the impact of travels and relocations in the slightly over 9 years since this trip. I woke up on January 1, 2017 in Auckland, New Zealand. The next day I travelled to Wellington, where I woke up January 3rd. On that day I meditated for an hour on the nature of my year just past, and was struck by the realization that in just the roughly 6 months previous I'd been in: Auckland and Wellington, New Zealand; Los Angeles, California, Seattle, Washington and Birmingham, Alabama in the US; various tiny towns in Inner Mongolia that I can't type properly in Roman characters; and in Gannan, Xi'An, Anyang, Erenhot, and Beijing, China.
Which of these things is not like the others? Getting to take part in a traditional celebration in Gansu, Gannan, China. July 17, 2016
Newspaper boardroom giving a talk, Xi'An, China. August 25, 2016
At the airport. Erenhot, China. August 30, 2016
Yakking about something at Sundance: Hong Kong. September 24, 2016
With a 2008 Olympic Torch at the SiMuWu company, which made it, in Anyang, China. November 28, 2016
With Steve Barr in Wellington (I think). Jan 2, 2017.
How did I get here - all of those "here"s - from whence I came? That'll take more than one blog post to explore, but the short version is that it was a combination of accident and effort. I'm going to brain-dump the outline below, without a lot of editing, and then will flesh out details in subsequent posts as I get around to it. :)
I was born in Augusta, Georgia in the Southern US. Mostly raised in and around the Atlanta area, and in Anniston, Alabama, where my maternal grandparents lived. They were the closest thing I had to a stabilizing influence in my young life so I adopted Anniston as my hometown of choice. I lived a few "interesting" years in Southwest Georgia, which will also merit it's own post. I spent one year of college in Birmingham, Alabama back before my mom lived there, which she does now, and I commuted an hour back "home" to Anniston most weekends to visit with my Grandmother, which was (in retrospect) probably why I am not dead or in jail as I type this. I had a sweet fake ID so I would go out and see my friend / guitar teacher Will (then "Bill") Owsley's bands playing in area clubs when I could - he gets a blog post too someday - but mostly I'd sit at home with "Ma" and do laundry, read or chat about things with her, and eat her amazing food. But after that one year in Birmingham, then a regrouping year back in Albany, Georgia at the then-junior college resurrecting my grades (I HATED my college in Birmingham, and avoided studying as much as possible in some creative ways, which is also it's own story), I finally moved to Athens, Georgia to attend the University of and get my life back on track. I lived in Athens for 8 years and have loads of stories and experiences involving the art and music scenes there that I will also dig into another time. For now, the key part of this narrative is that Athens and then Atlanta (where I moved next, the last stop before Los Angeles, and where I earned Bachelor's Degree in Film) are the two cities that most shaped me immediately prior to my move West.
As a Southern expat of 15 years now, I'm unqualified to talk about their values and virtues today. But when I was there, in addition to all the good and bad that are topics for still other discussions, there was a sense of fundamental community that I later had in Los Angeles, believe it or not, in the tight-knit concentric circles of the entertainment business, but which seems so far away from my 2017 perspective as an expat yet again, this time halfway around the world in Beijing.
First stop on the Beijing move: Tuanjiehu. June, 2016
Building a brand at Adamas Film HQ, Beijing, China. 2016
The plan is to be mostly here for ~5 years, give or take, with stops back home and at points elsewhere and in between as needed. The things that I'm building with friends and partners here are worth the tradeoffs, but those tradeoffs are real, and they are significant, starting with the ability to communicate fluently with close friends who share a somewhat similar frame of reference to me. It's why I spend any time at all on Facebook these days, even though the sorry state of affairs in our political system back home is hugely depressing. Still, it's the closest thing to a virtual town square I have, so for better or worse there I will be, for now.
Where have your travels taken you, and what are the lessons learned along the way that you think are universal? I'll have more thoughts on mine later. For now, I'd like to know yours. Please comment below, via the Contact form or any social sites I link this too if you want.
A BEGINNING, A.K.A. WHAT IS THIS BLOG ABOUT?
For this first post, let’s start with a confession:
More than anything else I do or have done professionally (i.e. for money) in my entire adult life, for many years I've secretly fancied myself to really be, underneath it all, a writer.
With a snappy cap and a bottle of Scotch, you, too can be a screenwriter! 2004, Los Angeles, CA
The truth is, though, that it's been many years since I've actively DONE much of it; any that I've shared publicly at least, aside from the random social media screed. Besides the other obvious limitations of that form, there are also issues of sharability, ownership, and permanence to consider.
For a long time now I've been sorting out how, exactly, to rectify this situation, and I’ve decided that this blog is the solution. I operate in a world of bilingual, cross-cultural communications every day, so I know that getting the tone right in this adventure will sometimes be a challenge, but I figure that if I at least state my (good) intentions up front and am candid and clear about things as I proceed, then I can be forgiven the occasional misstep - in theory. Right?
Cool. So: why a blog?
Well, for one thing, I need a regular creative outlet to encourage a proper writing habit, and having a personal platform that begs to be filled is a great motivator. And in an effort to integrate and consolidate my online presence, I want my thoughts to show up in one central place instead of being scattered across a half-dozen different websites, none of which I actually own. So I'll push OUT to social media, but things will START here.
I also have lots of random stories to tell, things that don’t necessarily fit cohesively into any one other place, which leads us to the next question:
What’s with the title?
This is where it gets weird, or maybe more interesting, depending on your point of view:
The short version is that given where I started from, in all ways, the expectations any reasonable person would've had for the trajectory of me and my life versus where I've actually ended up is nothing short of - well - crazy. The gap between those two things - what psychologists call cognitive dissonance, but what I call my reality - has at times made me feel a little crazy, too, hence the blog title. So acknowledging that it’s okay to be “crazy, but in a good way" has become the unofficial organizing principle of my life. It’s the only thing that - ironically - consistently makes sense as a philosophy for me, and I suspect that even more people will come to similar conclusions of their own as the reshuffling of the geopolitical order continues.
High school graduation pic. 1986, Albany, GA
Hair farmer extraordinaire. Jan 1996, Atlanta GA
All growed up. New Years' Day 2017, Auckland, NZ
Okay, great. So how does this fine idea look in practice? Your mileage may vary, but my operating philosophy is try to take (only) smart risks, learn from mistakes, share the wealth of successes and the (usually) helpful pain of hard lessons learned freely, with others, in order to help flatten their own learning curves, and then I trust that they will share their own relevant lessons when I most need to hear them. In my case, self-reinvention has been both the secret weapon to my forward momentum, and the self-reinforcing result of it’s application. In the process, I try to do as little harm to myself or others as possible while avoiding stagnation at all costs. Then, repeat. GO.
The longer / more candid version is that, if you know the details, from an outside perspective my life story so far reads like the adventures of a slightly more self-aware Forrest Gump adrift across the entire spectrum of the international entertainment business, which isn’t horribly far from the truth. In my travels from Anniston, Alabama to Athens and later Atlanta, Georgia, then across the country to my long-time home of Los Angeles, and then now, all the way across the Pacific Ocean to my current home in Beijing, China, I've been fortunate to have and make and experience far more than my fair share of random and amazing connections and coincidences and collisions with notable and/or fascinating people, places and things along the way, and many of the stories and lessons learned are just too good / funny / weird and/or instructive not to share.
So I wanted to create a place to collect them all, in a way that hopefully doesn't make me look like a self-promoting jackass. That’s (frankly/admittedly) an inherent occupational hazard of the entertainment business, and will likely prove easier said than done sometimes, but that's the goal anyway.
"Whoa-OH! LIV-in on a preh-ER!" KTV with the squad, as you do. Jan 2017, Beijing China
And I figured that sharing these tales will not only help ME to work out and integrate some of the stranger questions and tangents and insights of and from my life into one cohesive meta-story, it might also help someone ELSE to identify and sort out the overarching themes of their own seemingly random lives as well - and then they can tell me or others what they learned, and the positive cycle continues.
Because - to get back to that Forrest Gump comparison for a minute - in retrospect, my own journey HASN’T been completely random. Along the way, I’ve used both conscious and unconscious strategy and tactics, combined with a massive amount of good-to-great fortune, plus some lucky recoveries from a few tragic, potentially debilitating missteps - moments that could have and nearly did end me - to get where I am and wherever I am going...but that’s getting ahead of the story.
For now, at the very least, I think this project could be fun for me and my friends to reflect on and engage with, plus maybe it's interesting for any of THEIR friends who see it, and in this day and age that ain't nothing, so off we go.
In terms of content, I'll use this forum to post about any and everything I want to, but will tag and categorize it in order to be easily searchable to anyone who randomly (there’s that word again) stumbles across it as well. When I have a lot to say on a subject, like right now, I can be a little bit long-winded (insert friends' and former students' knowing laughter HERE), so I'll try to be succinct wherever I can or should be. But I won't put artificial limitations on what I write, either. It's my blog, and I'll ramble if I want to. ;)
I imagine that I’ll mostly write about current events and relevant developments in the film business between the US and China, plus notes from my travels and then anything else I want to get off my chest or discuss with you here. And in between those topics, I'll add chapters to the backstory of my life as they occur to me - for fun, or posterity, or just to share the learning experience (and wow, have I had a few).
Think of this site as an asynchronous memoir of a guy who isn't famous, but who has some unusual stories to tell. I hope you enjoy it, and that this is worth the time it takes to read and write for all of us. Comment below if you like. Thanks. :)