The other highlights so far have been Debra Granik's Winter's Bone, fresh from Sundance, and Aaron Katz's Cold Weather. In support of that film, Aaron and writer-producers Brendan McFadden and Ben Stambler continued our tradition of long conversations about other movies. The resulting piece went online over at Filmmaker Magazine, just before their premiere.

Tomorrow morning I'm spending a few hours on the educational end of things, as a panelist participating in Mentor Sessions. I didn't expect anyone to actually sign up to talk with me, but I just checked and all of my slots are booked. Fascinating!

And now some sleep.

The proximal relationship being: I don't try to match the movies to the drawings - I try to match the drawings to what I know the movies will look like.

These will be hitting the big screen starting Friday.

On the other hand, the value I place on the act of possessing has not diminished; it has, apparently, simply shifted into the abstract.

Let's set aside the psychological impulse to collect, which is another matter. What is happening in the general sense is this: those textures, masses, monoliths and physical imprints are being trumped by the dissemination of the art or media (I shun the word content) to which they merely serve as wrapper. In other words, while I may love the design of a record cover, or paging through a well-conceived booklet, it is ultimately not as important to me as having that record. To have music, in its purest form, is to hear it; to own a film is to have seen it. And so, if I'm able to hear or watch what I want to, at the drop of a hat, then the firmaments to retail provided by deluxe packaging and the promise of a shelf well filled begin to fall away.

And once that dike is broken, and the act of possession floods out into the more general realm of experience, its more gainful aspect immediately falls into even greater flux. The monetized value one assigns to possessing becomes an individual decision, one whose fickle economics have been put under the microscope ever since Radiohead released In Rainbows, but which isn't limited to the Pay-What-You-Can model made popular by that record. The traditional model of exchange has already been twice compounded: once by the dissolution of the physical, and once more by the availability of the art, media, etc. through alternative channels. Hence, the model can be more accurately articulated as simply Pay, or Don't.

The resulting experience is the same on either side of that divide. I will hear this music whether or not I purchase it on iTunes or download it from a filesharing site; I will see that film regardless of whether I buy a ticket to see it in the theater or download a DVD rip. The old satisfaction of possession no longer lies in the art of acquisition, for acquisition is now a foregone conclusion. Instead (and here I begin to feel a bit of straw under my feet, but hang tight nonetheless) it can be found in the compensation one offers for it. The relationship between the producer and purveyor has been reversed: we do not pay for what we hope to like. We pay for what we've already enjoyed. So, taking an artists' livelihood into consideration, what was once a simple economic stipulation now becomes a moral one. And what was once an object, possessed, now becomes a meta-object, bifurcated but no less owned; there is the media, in its immaterial and immanently ownable form, and then there is the even more abstract sense of satisfaction that comes part and parcel with having offered something in exchange for it.

And now I'm going to step back from the empirical tone of this piece now and begin to work backwards. Not here, in this predicative body of text, but over the coming months, as we prepare to take St. Nick out into the world in a more intimate form. We'll be exploiting antiquity with a lovely DVD; we'll be testing the waters of the future with a digital release - and through it all, we'll be hoping that everyone who wants to see it - everyone who's already seen it, everyone who will see it - also sees fit to own it, however they so please.

All of the above was actually inspired not by St. Nick but by my purchase of Ramona Falls' new album Intuit last month, brought about by repeated viewings of this stunning video:

If you haven't seen 45365 yet and you're in LA, you can catch it at the Silent Movie Theater on March 18th. Tickets, which will sell out, are available here.

"Reporting in the journal Psychological Science, James E. Cutting of Cornell University and his colleagues described their discovery that Hollywood filmmakers, whether they know it or not, have become steadily more adroit at shaping basic movie structure to match the pulsatile, half-smooth, half-raggedy way we attend to the world around us. This mounting synchrony between movie pace and the bouncing ball of the mind’s inner eye may help explain why today’s films manage to seize and shackle audience attention so ruthlessly and can seem more lifelike and immediate than films of the past..."

Pink noise is what it's called, this wavelength cinema ha been conforming itself to; a ratio of 1 over f, "seated somewhere between random and rigid," to which filmmakers have subconsciously begun to adhere. This sensory verisimilitude has been complimented by developments not just in editing but in lenses, film stocks, moral codes and software - the article called to mind Chris Wisniewski's essay in Reverse Shot about how the advent of nonlinear editing over the past two decades has affected Terrence Malick's filmmaking (he being the rare filmmaker whose body of work is largely free of graduation.

What I'm curious about is whether we've always thought that way, or if the very media which has mapped itself to the contours of our brains also helped develop that landscape. Have we always responded in the same way to different stimuli? To be sure, our pattern-recognition abilities in and of themselves have developed exponentially, as chronicled by Maryanne Wolf in her excellent book Proust and the Squid; hence, one might surmise that, as much as modern film may have caught up with modern thought, they'll both be as antiquated to future generations as a Technicolor opus is to we audiences on the cusp of the YouTube generation. Or, conversely, did John Ford movies look the way people used to think?

But the first question was what I thought of the movie, after having sat through it once again. I couldn't bring myself to actually say that I loved it, but - I loved it. I'm still proud of it. We pulled something off.

On an unrelated note, it seems that my entire site is back up after being down for a little over a week (power outages is what the e-mail from my hosting company said) and I hardly noticed because I was so wrapped up in finishing these little films I've been making. I wrapped them up Thursday evening, a few hours before my flight, and they'll be hitting the big screen at their earliest convenience.

Dear Friends,

I would like to invite you - those of you living in Manhattan and its outer burroughs, at least - to join me February 27, a week from tomorrow, for a very special screening of St. Nick at 92Y Tribeca. This is the first screening of the film this year, almost twelve months since its premiere, and it may be one of the last chances to see it on the big screen (at least in the US - should you reside in, say, Budapest, you'll have a chance to see it very soon).

So I urge you to venture out into the cold to break cinematic bread with yours truly. If you've seen it already, come for the company, and tell a friend to do the same. Allow me to entertain you, in my quietly distended way! I promise you won't leave disappointed. The screening is at eight o'clock - tickets and directions can be found Tribeca Film is giving away a pair of tickets, which you can register to win right here.

And afterwards, I would like to challenge anyone and everyone to a snowball fight.

I can't wait to see you all!

Love, David

Whimsy is a delicate thing. As much an art in and of itself as a quality of art, it is capable of execution with as many varying degrees of quality as its outriding vehicles. Like wit, whimsy is a stealthy property, able to slip itself into the direst of straits. Wit is a razor, whereas whimsy is a dirigible, holding its host aloft against the general pull of reason.

Whimsy is a gentle transposition of expectations. A shift in color or proportion in a Magritte painting is whimsical. It is also surreal, a trait which, like irony, whimsy frequently trades in but which it is not interchangeable with. It frequently plays upon the extant, but it needn't alter it so much as widen our perception of it. In other words, it surprises us, but doesn't shake us from our footing. Flight Of The Bumblebee, for example, is whimsical, and it expands our comprehension of what Korsakov's opera is while leaving no doubt in our minds that we are, indeed, still listening to Korsakov's opera.

Like wit, whimsy often works - and works best - when its innate frivolity is a subterfuge. But give melodrama an inch and it'll combust all over, and hence what is whimsical will often come crashing down when buoyed by too much pathos - a great Hindenburg of caprice. This is often what we mean when we say that something is precious; its whimsy is leaden.

"That's amazing!" I called back. "Do you know what those are?" she asked, and I confessed that I did not but that I'd look it up as soon as I got home. I did, and I suppose she had in mind the more surly of the two Smith brothers when my countenance stopped her dead in her tracks.

Even if the similarities aren't as literal as she might have imagined, it's nice to know I'm so strikingly antiquated.

The result of discovering time and time again that magic never happens according to plans is that, eventually, you stop planning altogether. I've learned to trust in vague notions and my own eye for the moment. Sometimes I'm off, but it's worked often enough that I don't worry when, a few days before production, we have an 8 1/2-ish crew meeting that consists of shrugs, laughter and a handful of assurances that flying by the seat of our collective pants is actually going to work.

And so it is that, as I write this, I can hear the buzz of circular saws in the studio next door, constructing a set on which something will happen. We decided not to use motion control. We also gave up on the livestock idea. And while we were out shopping for a chandelier to drop this morning, Toby and I caught sight of a small piano.

DAVID: What if a piano came crashing down instead of a chandelier?

TOBY: That's not a piano.

And that's how these things develop.

I'd spun in my head a dozen more Proustian onsets to this entry, but then thought better of sentimentalizing something I've long since retired. One critic, noting last year that St. Nick was being billed as my first feature film, surmised that I'd apparently distanced myself from it. This is true, in a sense; in private, I'm very proud of it, but there's no need for it to exist in the public eye. I've got other work that I'm happy to be represented by; this one can fade away. The same can be said for much of my output between then and now, which I've pared down to the one or two offerings I feel actively contribute to my body of work, excising the many whose value was in teaching me what not to do.

I do my best to regret nothing in life, but were I to allow myself some celebratory leeway in this regard, I'd wish that version of me who was nervously directing coverage in a kitchen for the very first time ten years ago this morning had learned a little more quickly how to throw that coverage away and get to the heart of the matter. With any luck, he'd outpace this current, clean-palated me, who often - but not tonight! - thinks that that he has indeed learned just that.

I came out of that film with a many memories, mostly faded, and a few dear friends with whom I'm still making movies. Yesterday, I met up with James M. Johnston to sign off the last few contracts for St. Nick's distribution. You can find him in the picture below, taken on the last day of our first collaboration. Also in there is Adam Donaghey, who has three new films he produced playing at SXSW this year. I look forward to making many more films with them both.

Everyone else in the photo has more or less vanished.

As has been writ often on these pages, this film is a particularly beloved one of mine, my involvement with it notwithstanding. I can't wait to see it with an audience, and on the big screen. You can see the trailer, soon to be updated with festival laureates, right here.

There are tons of other great films in the lineup - I'm excited about friends' new offerings like Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture and Aaron Katz' long-awaited Cold Weather. Clay's film Earthling is in competition, Lovers Of Hate will have its first Sundance encore here, as will Cyrus and Enter The Void. Oh, and Trash Humpers is playing!

There are a few new things of mine that will be playing as well, to be announced at a later date. But ultimately, March in Austin is all about Audrey The Trainwreck for me. It's the real deal.