La Vie Artistique

Just watching Eating Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoying It). I was already a Melvin Van Peebles fan -- my own djinn are so restless, I'm a sucker for any polymath.

And Melvin is a genius. Scary, scary smart. Restless, intellectual and continually grounded. Like I said, already a fan.

But then in the movie, I heard about how Melvin got into movies. He made three short films, but got no interest in America. So he went to Holland and studied astronomy. French filmfolk asked him to come out, opened his eyes and left him.

He found himself in France: alone on the Champs Elysees, didn't speak a word of French, three cans of well-regarded short films under his arm and not a penny in his pocket.

He was a beggar for a while. Then he became a street musician. Gradually, he learned French. While he was still busking, he learned that there was a law giving French writers a director's union card to bring their own works to the screen.

So Melvin wrote four novels in French. They were critically acclaimed. He took the novels in and got his director's card.

And that's how he came to make movies.

The man is now one of my heroes!

That kind of tenacity, creativity and flexibility is what it take to make a creative career.

Too often, I meet kids with plenty of talent (for art, music, writing, etc.), but they have this real passive outlook. Like they'll take a course and then answer the want-ads or something. Now, courses don't hurt; they may even open your world and change your life. But no one cares. There are no want ads for artists, and no one cares you're alive. They also don't care if you came from a prestigious ecole or were raised in the wild by wolves.

They want to see the work. And they want the work to make them care that they're alive. And in a territory where maps don't work, twists and turns are to be expected.

It's a sort of commando sensibility: dropped behind enemy lines with a knife in your teeth and a goal. You do whatever it takes to get there: over, under or through, you get to that goal.