mine to use and mine to lose.

Mike Mills has a new movie coming out:

Charming. A dog that gets subtitles!
Some of you may know Mike Mills because of this image:

Others of you may know him because of this other movie he did (which I had only recently found out, thanks Sean), Thumbsucker:

I really wanted to like that movie, but I was just really underwhelmed. Maybe Keanu Reeves (who really oddly stood out to me in the movie) threw me off? Because I feel like that was kind of sort of around his Matrix days and I didn't realize that Keanu Reeves is this weird robotic actor that needs a deeper sense of appreciation that I clearly didn't have at the age of seventeen. It was just a really quiet movie, and I should probably see it again, I've...become more perceptive to quietness. (haha).

Anyways though, what I really want to say about Mike Mills is this, he had this book that he put out through Nieves, Fireworks. The explanation he had for this book was just one of the nicest things I had read in a long time:

Some things that may or may not relate to these drawings: A professional suggested I take anti-depressants. I declined. About the same time I started drawing fireworks. I didn’t know what they meant or why I was drawing them. I was confused and embarrassed by this lack of meaning, but they kept coming. I could draw them no matter how I felt. I read that fireworks were first used in China in the 12th century to scare away negative spirits. I envied a world that not only recognized spirits, but scared the negative ones away with small man made explosions.

So, so nice.

And he ends by saying:

I felt a connection between the Chinese fireworks and the placebo effect, and some relief in all the things we don’t understand. At some point the fireworks grew more and more abstract, and messy, and complicated, and I became if not content then at least willing to make things that didn’t have any apparent meaning.

And so:



Last time I drew fireworks was in my first year drawing class at Emily Carr. We had to draw a night scene and I drew people watching fireworks. The teacher said that the idea was nice, but fireworks actually look very clean, and mine were too messy. I didn't really take it to heart. And it was in the class that I didn't take much of his criticism to heart as I did with my previous drawing teacher. And then drawing didn't seem like such a terrifying struggle to impress someone.

But a way to feel better.