Moving Ahead--Doing Something

I think a lot about whether or not I really want to settle down in W. Mass--whether I want to stay here, if there's enough to make my life feel that it is significant....

There's always been within me this drive to Do Something Different with my life. Maybe it's because family was made into a poisonous concept that I keep thinking there's more to my life than settling down--that I should follow my dreams and passions and Just Do It.

There's also never been a man who's been willing to go with me whereever I needed to go in my life. Now is no exception. Nobody's going to say "whither thou goest, I go" and I even remember a Dean from the Ada Program at Smith telling me that maybe I should go home and help my husband through his Abandonment Issues rather than stay and finish my education.

I was floored by that one. Imagine, I'm at this feminist school that supposedly supports women doing what they need to do to get ahead, and the dean's telling me to go and take care of my husband's mental state--that his adultery was probably that he was depressed because I decided to "abandon" him in favor of my education. Well, that wasn't going to happen, considering he didn't do much in the earlier part of our marriage to help me get over my fear of commitment. He just let me flip out...

Enough of that...

So this a.m. I spent a good portion looking at grad school cinema studies programs. yes, I've looked at graduate schools before, mostly with the heavy-sigh resignation of needing to make a "practical" decision about my "career."

Yet, odddly, I've put together a "career" that's got nothing to do with what my major was at Smith (well maybe remotely--ministers *do* have to be able to be community developers one way or another)

And if I go into cinema studies it does indeed relate to my work at Smith--my highest honors worthy thesis work on Jesus films. Yes, it was a work of film crit in a rather 'round about way.

Lord knows (pardon the pun) that I had to learn a lot about the style and practice of Epic film-making in order to write that thesis. So, in some ways, I'm kind of one jump ahead of the various cinema studies programs I've looked at.

And I would really like to move out of cold old New England. I'm getting sick and tired of having to be un-fashionable for so much of the year. When you live in a place that's averaging evening temps in the teens, you don't think of wearing satiny peep-toe shoes and sleeveless shirts to dinner.

In other words, I'm tired of being covered-up, and I don't have the circulation to feel comfortable half-naked in New England weather.

I'm a warm weather person, that's for sure.

I'm thinking of grad schools in the San Fran area. I have a few friends out there, and there's lots of places for me to work, too, given my current career. And I think the school I'm looking at would be receptive to me doing thesis work on the porn...

oh, I just heard you gasp ;-)

Yes, I've been thinking a lot about writing about the evolution and history of the porn industry for awhile now. I don't like the way it's constituted these days, but it was a fascinating thing in the late 60's and into the 70's, before video. The filmmakers saw themselves just as that--legit filmmakers. They're not like the guys these days, who see it as some sort of birthright (because their dads--many of the dads my age--made porn) or some sort of nasty lowbrow thing (like Joe Francis and his Girls Gone Wild stuff, who's very much a creepaziod like Chuck Trayonr,manager of Linda Lovelace and Marilyn Chambers....)

I know my fascination with porn has the same roots as my fascination with Jesus films--with my Dad. As much as my dad hated the way the Bible was interpreted in 1961's King of Kings, he fell headlong into porn when it hit the Big Screen and was made somewhat legit by the Hollywood hoi-polloi. I remember the ads for John Holmes films in my local newspaper as much as full page ads for Jesus Christ Superstar, and both left images burned into my brain.

I wasn't allowed to see JC Superstar or Godspell or any of those films until Last Temptation of Christ, when I was in my 20's. I started going to porn in my 20's as well, and had heard all about the porn and exploitation movies my dad went to see because he openly discussed them with my sister's husband (and sometimes my sister, too.)

Gad, my family was fucked up! Don't go see anything about God or faith, but discuss porn in front of a 10 year old....

I've always been fascinated, too, with bad filmmakers who've put their own unique stamp on filmmaking --from Roger Corman to Russ Meyer and all those other folks in between who weren't geniuses like Scorsese. There are few film geniuses out there, but there are lots of other guys who were just making movies to make a buck or channel their particular psychoses....

The Internet in some ways reflects the film industry back then--if you're a quick talker you can make money out here. Not art, but money. And sometimes some people actually make art....those are the geniuses. Everybody wants to be a genius, but most of us are just chanelling our psychoses ;-)

So maybe I've really finally hit on it--where I really want to be and what my real passion happens to be. It's probably been there all along, like my geekiness, but hidden under admonitions of "let's be practical here"--a kind of trade-school mentality that worries about how I'll pay back the loans and such...

But the thing is, I've been able to create a career from talent and connecting with others. My education's helped with some of the finer points of communicating with others, and has given me that patrician background and "bearing" and respect that my white trash roots never allowed, but I had to find my own path.

And perhaps it's been within finding my own path that I see that I can get a little more advanced education in something I'm passionate about and fashion a career out of that--a career that, this time, may be directly related to my passion for cheezeball films and the weirdos who made them...

There's still a bit more research to do, people to talk to, and so forth. But, I"m itchy and restless and don't see children and family and settling down in my future. I'm not sure I ever did, even if those were things I wanted when I was younger. Maybe it was all the motherly browbeating that made me deny the things I wanted when I was young, and now I simply don't want them any more. I hate the possible fact that my own mother and her negativity, as well as my dad and his nasty boorishness, that may have emotionally screwed me out of family, but should I keep pushing to get it at This Age, when there are other things I could do that could make me perhaps just as happy?

Something to think about anyway.