It's because I've been resilient.
my resume is longer than I realized, thought or translation?, and cat scenes come from character development
¿What you heard?
This week, during the first monthly virtual meetup of the 2025-26 Los Angeles Artists At Work cohort (actually more a quartet than a cohort tbh), every single one of us expressed feelings of impostor syndrome or a sort of survivor’s guilt for being given the opportunity to financially survive for 18 months via this program while many of the artists around us still struggle to make a living.
Why us?
Benjamin finally spoke up with the best answer.
“It’s because I’ve been resilient,” he reasoned. “I’ve been working at this since I graduated.”
As the youngest of the group, I graduated much more recently than everyone else, but especially as I finished up my website updates this week, it’s become clear to me how, though I am only one year two months and three days out of USC, I have been an ethnographic, community-based, culturally-engaged storyteller for over a decade.
What you doin’?!
My AI filmmaking mantra is intelligent output requires intelligent input, so I almost always use video to video rather than text to video or image to video, where it isn’t possible to clearly dictate artistic intention. This is why I’m learning Blender.
Yet, this week, a friend questioned my approach.
What if, in the near future, you can be as intentional with a text prompt as you can with a video prompt?
What if, in the near future, a Neuralink-like gen AI can accept brainwaves as input?
His challenges led me to my own questions.
What is art?
Is it a flash in the creative cortex of the brain, or is it the act of translating that mental spark into something that everyone else can enjoy?
What you seen??
THE LONG GOODBYE (1973) is about a detective trying to solve a murder, but at the same time, it’s sorta, kinda, not really about this same detective looking for his lost cat.
Spoiler alert! He finds the murderer but never finds his cat. It doesn’t make much of a difference though since the cat, which can hardly be called a subplot, actually doesn’t have anything to do with the rest of the movie.
Cinema studies probably has many clever analyses of the meaning of the cat, but I don’t care about what it means. I care about how it got there.
Unlike in The Godfather (1972), I’m guessing that this wasn’t just some stray that wandered onto set but that this cat, absent from the source novel, was the creation of a smart screenwriter who understood that character development is a couple of good cat scenes — even if the cat never actually gets saved.