March 13, 2021

I'm distracted this morning. Looking at Twitter and Instagram and scheduling out which screenplay competitions I'm going to apply to (Nicholl, Slam Dance, UCLA Extension, Austin). The drive back to LA plus the push to release Sarah Someone has knocked me flat. (I was supposed to write a letter of recommendation for a student last week and just didn't -- the actual deadline isn't for a while, so that's fine, but I had told him I'd have to him by Friday.) 

I'm applying for an individual artist grant through the California Arts Council. That's exciting. The money would be about 1/6 of what I make in a year, so pretty significant. Plus, it would be amazing to be able to say to the PI of the lab I work for that I got a grant too. It would be validating for me as an artist, as well. A state agency believes in me! I'd think. Although I shouldn't count the chickens, obviously. 

Yesterday was a great day at the rink. It looked like it was going to rain, but it only sprinkled a little. Someone had complained about people being on the rink. I'm not sure why, maybe the noise? There's not much noise and it's never after 10pm. But people play music. Anyhow, the park put a lock on the gate to the rink, but by yesterday, someone had peeled back the chainlink -- so the frame of the gate is still there, but you can walk right through it. Someone brought their speaker and was DJing. People were skating and working on their new tricks. It was happy and fun and free and it felt nice to be back in LA. 

My husband and I watched Eraserhead last night. So here's a MLog! 

**SPOILERS**

ERASERHEAD

1977

Directed by: David Lynch

Written by: David Lynch

Watched: 3/13/21

Henry lives in a dark bedsit apartment near factories and the rumblings of trains. The beautiful woman across the hall, who always looks wet for some reason, tells him he got a message from his girlfriend, asking him over for dinner to her parents’ house. When he arrives, he gets the bad news: his girlfriend has had a baby, of sorts, and now the two need to get married, move in together, and take care of it. The baby is a glistening baby dinosaur head and swaddled flat sack of a body. It cries all the time and doesn’t want to eat. Henry’s girlfriend-turned-wife, Mary X, has had enough and flees back to her parents’ house. The baby gets sick and Henry’s able to nurse it back to health. He receives a small box in the mail with a squirming parasite-looking-thing inside of it. He keeps it secretly in a free-standing cabinet. He has dreams that a lady lives in his radiator. She has a deformed face and sings along to a pipe organ. When the sperm baby things start falling from the ceiling, she steps on them and kills them. Henry dreams his head comes off and a small boy takes it to a factory. They test it out, and sure enough, it’s good for making erasers. In the end, Henry un-swaddles and kills the baby. 

So this is David Lynch’s first film, and I’m relieved to say it’s not very good. Parts of it are great – the soundscape, the music, the cinematography (dark dark dark, black and white), the mechanics of the monster/baby. But it’s not really a story, not beyond, Man it’s weird when you get someone pregnant. Impressively, the whole thing was made for $10,000, and I enjoyed reading how it took over a year to film, off and on as they had money or not. I’m getting around to the confidence and mindset of, Well, of course you just make things. And if you run out of money, you stop for a while until you can afford to start back up again. 

Rating: ★★