« Audrey in Chicago & other happenings | Main | Summer Travels »

June 26, 2010

Getting Away With It

One of my favorite and most oft-read books on directing is Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies and videotape diary, which I bought back in my sophomore year in high school. I breezed through it again recently, and noticed in reading it that the face to which I attached the voice on the page was the contemporary, middle-aged version of Soderbergh - a common attributive phenomenon, I'm sure, but one which prompted a bit of disconnect when I arrived at the entry in which he writes: I turned 25 today. And for what?

For What? It's the only indication of youthful self-perception from a filmmaker who would within that same year win the Palm D'or at Cannes for his first film. It's the sort of rhetorical qualifier one is more regularly inclined to pronounce earlier on, when it feels more requisite and personally unique. I don't know if I've completely outgrown it myself yet, but I'm getting there.

As of today, I've got six months left of my twenties. I cared not a bit about my advancement until a week or two ago, when I read this article in which my age was cited as 30. That number, associated with myself so literally for the first time, seemed like an egregious overestimation. I'm happy to note that the brief surge of personal introspection that followed was mostly free of the whininess that marks Soderbergh's second published journal, Getting Away With It, which I just read for the first time the other day and which, as a result of its attitudinal shift, comes across as far less mature than its precedent a decade earlier. There's nothing like conscientious self pity to turn one's insights tawdry.

That being said, I still related to it, although I'll withhold saying by exactly how much. And that being said, I'll admit that while I may have not have jumped on every opportunity that's come my way over the course of the past decade, it's only because I'm lazy, and my laziness is an innate part of who I am. And I am nothing if not truthful to myself. This trait has not lead me to a Palm D'or of my own, and perhaps it never will; but it has left me on the doorstep of a place I'm very much happy to be at.

I'd still like to run a marathon before I'm 30, though.

Posted by David Lowery at June 26, 2010 1:04 AM