Still from "Sugar," (2008) the festival's closing night film, directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (courtesy of Sony Pictures and BBFF)

If you’re a fan of indie film and global cinema, take heed: Beyond Borders Film Festival, sponsored by the Rime Foundation and hosted by the Parkway Theater in Minneapolis, begins tomorrow (March 25) and runs through Sunday, March 29.

I first ran across a mention of this ambitious little global film festival when I heard they’d be screening Nina Paley’s brilliant Sita Sings the Blues, a gorgeously animated, very personal reimagining of the Indian epic, Ramayana. And when I looked through the full line-up of films, well, I was a goner.

Twin Cities Daily Planet has a nice write-up on the festival today if you’d like a bit of background (“Beyond Borders Film Festival brings world cinema to Minneapolis”).

According to TCDP, festival organizers have snatched up some terrific festival circuit favorites from around the world, and will screen the world premiere of a new documentary chronicling a Tibetan monk’s search for the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama, Unmistaken Child.

See their whole, impressive line-up of films on the BBFF website.

Watch the trailer for Sita Sings the Blues that first grabbed my attention. (As an aside, the DIY effort behind the making of this film is a triumph of artistic perseverance, if ever there was one. It was mostly animated in Flash, on a home computer, if you can believe it.):

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y5_zJ1xfQs[/youtube]

Seriously. You should go. I’ll see you there.

Related links:

Star Tribune “From Tibet and beyond far beyond” by Colin Covert

MPR’s own “Movie Natters” blogger, arts reporter Euan Kerr: “Going ‘Beyond Borders’”

KFAI’s coverage (one of the festival programmers, Jim Brunzell, is a host of the weekly show “Movie Talk” for KFAI)

Getafilm blog post on BBFF (and my source of a number of the links above)

"Writer's Block" © Inger Klekacz, reproduced under a Creative Commons license

When I saw the headline on a recent article in the Guardian, “Writing for a Living: Joy or Chore?”, I thought I knew what I’d be reading about. The familiar complaints of working writers usually have to do with privation–the scarcity of gigs, the low pay for freelance articles, the shrinking number of places that will publish your work. It usually boils down to this: How in the hell can I get enough work and money to quit my day job and make a modest living doing this?

It’s less often that you hear successful writers talk candidly about the day-to-day joys and petty frustrations of their writerly work lives: what happens after one has gotten to the enviable position of living the dream, earning their keep as a full-time writer.

A.L. Kennedy responds: “The joy of writing for a living is that you get to do it all the time. The misery is that you have to, whether you’re in the mood or not.” Will Self, on the other hand, sees the task as anything but a chore: “I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction…. Frankly, if I didn’t enjoy writing novels I wouldn’t do it – the world hardly needs any more and I can think of numerous more useful things someone with my skills could be engaged in.”

A veritable constellation of other literary luminaries–established novelists like Amit Chaudhuri, Hari Kunzru, Julie Myerson, Geoff Dyer, Joyce Carol Oates–weigh in on the question. Their responses are as fascinating as they are varied. Here’s a spoiler: many of them find their success, specifically being in a position where they write creatively for a living, to be more arduous, more painful than they could have imagined. In fact, a number of them admit to regular fantasies of switching to a vocation far more mundane.

I’m struck by the idea that this question is an equally pertinent, intriguing one to pose to other sorts of artists. So, what about it? Do you who earn your livings by being an artist of some kind ever find that the necessities of the grind–the need to make money, to be unrelentingly creative, to hustle up recognition enough to maintain the status quo–suck the joy out of making the artwork? Or, do you find that earning your daily bread by using your artistic talents–whether it’s in performance, film, painting, sculpture, or putting words together on a page–to be an unmitigated pleasure?

To get the ball rolling, I’ll make my own confession: there’s nothing in the world I’d rather do to earn my keep than work with words and writers (and I’m keenly aware that I’m damn lucky to have the job I do in this economic and media climate). BUT some days I dread everything about it, too. The practical concerns of meeting deadlines and making sure everything rolls out on schedule, the interpersonal dramas, the necessarily cut corners and last-minute compromises–the job of it all–are no loftier or more rewarding, in many ways, than I found in any other work I’ve done. I love writing and editing, but I can’t say I always find it delightful.

What about all of you out there? Did any of you land your dream job in a creative field, or finally establish enough patronage to quit your day-job, or get a coveted staff job in performance only to become wistful for your carefree days as an amateur? Have you successfully married the unbridled creative flow of making art with the day-to-day grind?

Is making art, doing your creative thing for a living a joy or a chore?

Please leave a comment below, share a bit of your story.

(Thanks to The Rumpus & Kottke for the link)

Author Bill Holm (Photo: Einar Falur, reproduced courtesy of the McKnight Foundation)

Last Wednesday, the world of letters lost a treasure: beloved Minnesota essayist, poet and raconteur Bill Holm unexpectedly succumbed to complications of pneumonia in a South Dakota hospital.

I didn’t know Bill well, but I read him; and so he felt as fully-fleshed, as dear  to me a longtime family friend. Who could spend time inside his singular prose, and in so doing brush against his formidable intellect and wide-ranging passions, and feel otherwise? So, when I heard of his passing last week, I did what many did, I’m sure: I went straight to the bookshelf and took refuge in his glorious stories.

As I poked around the shelves and reacquainted myself with his work, I ran into an old favorite: an impassioned essay which hit themes that recurred again and again in his writing–the enduring joy to be found in great music and art, the perils of brutishness and political myopia. As I read, the paragraphs below, in particular, struck me. I can think of no more fitting tribute to Bill Holm’s life and literary legacy than to share those words with you here:

Great works of art ask more of us than elevator music, celebrity magazines, Survivor and internet games. Beethoven gives us everything inside him-all his brain and heart and genius and soul. And he demands that we give him the same. Like Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” he asks us to change our life-to think and feel with everything inside us. He gives us joy, wisdom, beauty at the highest level of human consciousness. He means more than to merely amuse us, though he is of course able to do that with elegance and humor too.

…

My friend Jonas Ingimundarsson, Iceland’s most beloved pianist, had a bout with cancer a few years ago, but after the usual terrors luckily survived. I went to see him at a little concert hall outside Reykjavík where he practiced on a Bösendorfer Imperial. I asked what he was working on. “Now,” he said, “I have time only for the most beautiful music.” He played a Chopin “Nocturne” and one of Schubert’s last “Klavierstucke” with great inward tenderness. I wept like an idiot listening to him. None of us has time for any but the most beautiful music, the greatest music, played and heard with everything inside us.

Related links:

Bill Holm’s website

An index of tributes, news stories, and remembrances of the author since his death last week

A remembrance of Bill Holm by Milkweed Editions, which published many of his memoirs