The Pimp urges us to consider life as a buffet of experiences where not enough fun being served.
Not sure if I’d call these my favourite films but they are films that continue to resonate with me for reasons both personal (Lipsett Diaries, We Lived in Grass), and deeply silly (Little Cow, Bimbo’s Initiation, Crazy Mixed-Up Pup).
I don’t believe in a god or afterlife. This is it. I don’t subscribe any particular meaning to life. It is what is (insert your favourite Kierkegaard or Sartre quote here). Me and you spend a lot of anguished moments in search of happiness, calm, stability, self. Why? Who says we’re meant to possess them? How the heck would we even recognize them without depression, tears and chaos? Increasingly, it feels like we’re being force fitted into them by our various institutions. Gone are the days when someone was just an accepted ‘character’ or ‘eccentric’ or ‘curmudgeon’. Those descriptions have been replaced by bipolar or borderline and deemed an illness of the mind. If children appear restless at school it’s not because they’re bored out of their skulls being forced to sit at a small desk in an overcrowded room for hours while some boring adult talks about stuff that doesn’t interest them, no, it’s because the kid has a disorder that requires chemical correction.
We don’t seem to be having fun anymore. It’s like we’re taking all this urstuff seriously. Life should be nothing more or less than a buffet of experience samplers. There might be some dishes you spurn in favour of others and that’s okay. You’ll likely grow tired of it and try something else down the road. But even if you don’t, who cares? As long as you’re not doing anyone harm, who has any right to tell you that what you’re experiencing is right or wrong. As Philip Roth wrote in I Married a Communist:
“It’s all error… there’s only error. There’s the heart of the world. Nobody finds his life. That is life.”
I read that and can almost feel the hours, days and years of accumulated stress, anxiety and tension melt and trickle down my shoulders, back and ass onto the street and into the sewers where they belong.
So, hey, sit back, breathe and try a sample of my small animation buffet.
Lipsett Diaries
Bimbo's Initiation
Accordion
We lived in Grass
Crazy Mixed up Pup
I am so proud of you
Little Cow
A well-known figure in the world of independent animation, writer, author & curator Chris Robinson is the Artistic Director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival.
