Home now.
“I wasn’t born in Austin, but I got here as fast as I could”.
Those words were written on a bumper sticker I saw yesterday, and it concisely sums up my feelings about my recent relocation.
Twenty days ago I decided that it was time to get serious about my career. That meant that I needed to take control of the steering wheel, kick ESPN out of the driver’s seat, and move to the city that was going to offer me the best chance to launch a successful career in a field I am passionate about: film and video production.
Eighteen days is how long it took for me to resign from my job, find an apartment, drive everything I own 1,993 miles in a total travel time of 31 hours. I guess you could say I attacked my new plan with a vengeance.
Now I’m in the first place I’ve wanted, or even felt I could call home in over a year. So, now that I’ve done the hard work, it’s time to get to the fun stuff. Job search time.
Tamers of beasts
Hey there, strangers.
I bet, if you do a search on every blogging service, the most common topic is along the lines of “sorry I haven’t written here in a while”.
Why apologize? There’s no reason for me to apologize. Thus far in the life of this blog, I have offered little to my two documented readers. I can understand how certain bloggers feel guilty when they fail to keep their throngs of readers up-to-date on their latest adventures. I’m not that type of writer.
This has been an especially eventful [for better or for worse] couple of weeks.
At the end of February, I visited home. Home is El Paso, Texas. The Pass to the North, as it’s been coined. While I was down there, I found out that one of our generation’s great photographers, my future work partner, and my friend, Robert, was diagnosed with testicular cancer. This was devastating news. But it was all the motivation I needed to visit him in my favorite city: Austin, Texas, the place Robert calls home. After my week in El Paso, I flew back to Connecticut, put in four days of work, jumped back on a plane and spent another week at the live music capital of the world.
It was a huge relief to see Robert doing alright, albeit, stuck in a hospital bed, temporarily bed-ridden, only had one ball… I could go on. His amazing sense of humor and awesomely faithful outlook on life were as strong as ever.
That happened to be SXSW interactive week, so my brother Ben and I treated ourselves to a few staples of Austin culture. We saw Bob Schneider rock at Antone’s, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht get sloshed during their live DiggNation at Stubb’s, and listened to Milkdrive (South Austin Jug Band’s alter ego) jam at the Elephant Room. I also hung out with Robert’s brothers Joe and Jimmy, my friend Alana and the rest of my Austin family. A great week, despite the hardships.
When I arrived back in Connecticut, I found out that my uncle Jimmy had been diagnosed with Primary mediastinal B-cell lymphoma. That was after he was incorrectly diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma, a much weaker and more penurious form of cancer. He’s currently at MD Anderson in Houston. As of right now, we don’t know much else. All I do know is that we don’t call him Rattlesnake Jim for nothing. This is the dude that busts into burning buildings to rescue women of the night and their, um, clients in his spare time. He spent years searching for gold mines in Mexico with an AK-47 slung across his back, and he prevents helicopters from tumbling off the edge of mountaintops by using his own body as a counterweight. All I’m saying is that, this is no hill for a climber.
Sprinkled throughout those trips, I am leading a group of people from work to start brainstorming ideas for a short film which I will direct in the next few weeks.
Throughout all of this, I’m searching for the next step in my career. More on that later. Crazy times.
Denied.
I haven’t posted here in a while. I’ve been too busy not getting accepted to Grad school. I’m bummed, but I knew all along that the chances of me getting in to the Radio, Television & Film department at UT Austin were very slim. They accept 12 people per year, and I’m sure they are all stellar applicants.
I was expecting their admission decision to be mailed to me. I imagined setting the sealed envelope on the table, staring at it and contemplating for an hour whether to open it, knowing full well that the words written inside would determine the course of my life for the next three years and ultimately have a resounding impact on my entire career- or not.
Instead, I got an email. I was sitting at work on Thursday, doing instant replay for a lame college basketball game when my iPhone buzzed, alerting me that I had something to take me away from reality for at least a few seconds. I slid my finger across the screen and was indicated that five new emails had made their way into my inbox. Glancing through the subject lines I saw that I had a few new Twitter followers and some junk mail. My eyes dilated when I saw a subject line that read “UT Admission”. I opened it, fully expecting it to be an indication of when I should expect an admission decision. Instead, the following statement sat there, staring at me:
Dear Luke,
We have concluded our review of applications for the Master of Fine Arts in Film & Video Production program at The University of Texas at Austin. We regret that we are unable to offer you admission for Fall 2009.
The applicants for our program were exceptionally competitive this year, resulting in many well-qualified applicants being turned away. Our decisions are the result of an extensive review of all the applications and supporting materials, assessing qualifications as well as the fit for our program.
We wish you well in your future pursuits. Thank you again for your interest in our program.
Sincerely,
[Name Omitted]
Graduate Adviser
Problem Solving
The sixty most watched minutes of football for the entire year wrapped up a couple hours ago. Being an employee of ESPN, you might think that I had a vested interest in the game. It might surprise you, if you don’t know me, that I am much more interested in the rich little morsels of capitalism that are sprinkled throughout the evenings main attraction. I say rich because NBC sold tonight’s sixty-nine prime time spots for $100,000 per second.
So, Budweiser bought a bunch of ad time during the Super Bowl, and actually became a major sponsor. For example, they were responsible for the aerial photography that was used sparingly as a scene-set, or “in bump”, as we call it in the business. A contingency of Budweiser’s substantial airtime purchases was that no other major brewery be allowed to buy time during the Super Bowl block between 6:00p and 11:00p.
This ended up being an issue for Budweiser’s strict competition, Miller, which obviously saw some advertising potential. Now, I don’t know the first thing about buying or selling advertising time, but I think that Miller’s solution to this predicament was pretty clever. Instead of buying ad time from the GE-owned national NBC office, they bought time from hundreds of independently-owned NBC affiliates across the country.
As if that isn’t clever enough, Miller broke new ground with the length of the ads. While every other agency is trying extend their clients’ commercial TRT, Miller’s concept was to shorten their spots down to one second.
So, not only did Miller spend substantially less on their air time, but their relatively simple concept probably saved their company a couple million bucks. And 90 percent of the country still saw the spots.
Now that is problem solving.
Here’s a link [fixed] to the slew of 1 and 5 second commercials from Miller.
’twas the season
The Christmas season has come and gone. As I have stated at least a few times in the short life of this blog, this year was very different for me. I can’t say that I particularly enjoyed being away from everyone I care about, but I have decided to chalk it up to an invaluable character-building experience. Christmas is the time of year for my family, as I’m sure it is for every other family who doesn’t aspire to someday star on the Jerry Springer show, that we all get together as a giant group and do the things that we all collectively love to do. Having such a large extended family turns would-be regular outings into full-on shindigs.
I can’t think of a New Years not spent at our cabin in Timberon, New Mexico. Timberon is one of the few places you can go to on this planet where you can leave everything behind but the food you need to eat, and you’ll do just find. There is no cell phone service and we haven’t allowed a television. For entertainment, your options are listening to vinyl, throwing darts, and of course, the great outdoors, which will keep you busy forever. There are some mountain tops that offer views of fifty miles in every direction.
My brother Ben, my mom and myself on top of the world
Trips to Timberon are just one of the things I miss about being far away from home. I recently solidified my priorities in life. I have decided that the important thing is that I am able to do what I want and love. Where ever I work should just help me to be able to achieve that. Of course, it’s a huge bonus if what I love to do and what I get paid to do happen to be the same thing.
A few people have told me that I am moving too fast with the next phase of my career. Why should I put in five years of work at a place that I know I will leave, when I could be spending those years cultivating my art form and building myself a career where I decide my goals?
Paxton
This is my dog. His name is Paxton. He is living with my mom and sisters while I get some valuable work experience in the Northeast. I love him.
Happy birthday, Pax.
Paxton
Christmas
This is a year of firsts.
It is my first white Christmas. Two days ago, Connecticut got ten inches of snow in a matter of hours. Being a product of West Texas, I have never before seen anything fall out of the sky in the quantities that the snow fell this week. It began to fall in the early afternoon, and within ten minutes there was measurable accumulation. Fast-forward ten hours and you couldn’t walk down the street without freezing knees. Cars were sliding across roads like bumper cars, and I ran to my vehicle to partake in the fun. Of course, being from Texas, I relocated to the Northeast with a souvenir from down south: a truck. Therefore, sliding down the road wasn’t in the books. My tires laugh in the face of icy roads as all four of my wheels power through the inclemency. Yesterday, another six inches of snow fell out of the sky. Before work I helped my neighbor get his Jetta out of the driveway. Pulling his car through the snow with my truck reminded me of the good old days when my roommates Joe, Erik, Tyler and I would venture into the desert, hoping to get stuck somewhere, just for the opportunity to tie our trucks together and solve a problem.
This is also my first Christmas away from my family. It makes me sad that I can’t be near them. Christmas means family and laughter and booze and food and Christmas lights and throwing frisbee on the golf course in 60-degree weather. If I take my family out of that equation, all I’m left with is booze and Christmas lights.
And that’s how accidents happen.
Merry Christmas.