Barbie Helped Me Say Thank You

Previously on Miguel’s Madness (a third-person recounting for anyone who doesn’t know)…

Following a series of panic attacks and mental breakdowns in Oakland, Ca, Miguel posted dark suicidal ideation on a very public forum while in a fog of rage, despair, and guilt. The ensuing reactions, and a return to some emotional balance, led him to write a long journal to give his friends and family context for the last public screams into the void of social media.

Because increasing financial insecurity has been an intensifying effect on all of these struggles, former film industry colleague Dor Dotson took the initiative to create a GoFundMe fundraiser to support his family. The response has been awesome.

Ok, let’s get back to 1st person. I will start with that word, “awesome,” which is a part of day-to-day casual English vernacular, but I am using it in the archaic form, which describes something that is not only breathtaking, mind-blowing, and impressive, but something that also inspires feelings of apprehension or terror. I doubt that last bit is included in the everyday use of “awesome,” but it does here.

Much of the terror is in my head and the difficulties I have in balancing my emotions and reactions to those emotions, but some of it is concrete—and the line between the two is blurry. There are the obvious ones, like guilt at receiving monetary support from people I love, the fear of this eventually being held against us at some point in the future, the sense of failure at any of this happening at all in the first place. Let’s brush passed all of that and get to the most immediate and concrete thing: saying “thank you.”

Part of using a fundraising platform is keeping engaged with your supporters. This is both for reasons of simple gratitude, but it is also a marketing tactic to get more engagement and, ultimately, more money. In the case of this particular fundraiser, the goal has been surpassed so quickly that I haven’t had a chance to catalog my own feelings, let alone have the capacity to provide every person with the sincere thank you that they deserve. A couple of days ago, I started to feel panic rise while considering all of this.

Ain’t that some shit?

Ok, let’s move on to the title of this rant. Yesterday, I took the family to see Greta Gerwig’s BARBIE movie. Here is some more context for you: in the past couple of years, my life’s greatest tool for finding the joy in existence—immersing myself in, sharing with, and discussing the art of cinema—has become a trigger for panic, contemplations of suicide, and an absolutely crumbling sense of self worth. Because I have retreated into my cave, well meaning friends have sent me spiraling by reminding me of some of the film exhibition events I have done in the past. All of this is to say that all I have spent my adult life preaching about on stages, in classrooms, and at festivals—that art, and particularly the lowest-brow of popular art or genre storytelling are integral to knowing ourselves and how we fit in this tumultuous universe. Or, as one of the Horrible Imaginings values states: Entertainment CAN be Enlightenment. Exhilaration CAN be Thoughtful. Trash CAN be Treasure.

Somewhere, after the human reaction to the pandemic, the ever-accelerating rise of fascism, the constant shootings (both mass shootings and those perpetrated by the police), the tenacious clinging to white supremacy and patriarchy, and the attacks on education, and. . .well, you know. . .I have found myself in a place where I have looked back on my life and despaired. It has not just been the time and money spent (and family neglected) while directing a film festival, but all the time I spent watching and studying film and sharing what I felt sincerely was the virtue of such activity. All of that sense of virtue and joy was annihilated to the point that I have felt so much hatred for myself and my wasted life.

I know logically that this is not realistic thinking, and my therapist and I have done some work to help me explore where these feelings originate and fight back against them. We all know how strong logic can be in the face of emotion, though. The depression can snowball all of the negativity to make it stronger and stronger until other negative aspects, no matter how trivial, become amplified by their attachment to other negative feelings.

This is becoming scattered, but I will give a quick example from my film work and the film industry as a whole. There are negative aspects that everyone is aware of and powers through anyway: the commercial side of the art form crushing any artistic integrity, the perceived worthlessness of human dreams and well being in an industry that commodifies humanity, and the falseness of community. Horror community, film community, art community, whatever. It all started to feel like the mission I dreamed of and worked hard to built turned into excrement.

Let’s get back to Barbie for a second. If you haven’t seen it yet, I would give it my recommendation. For me, it wasn’t flawless, but the vast canyon separating what I would have expected and what I saw—it was, well, awesome. Perhaps the heightened sensitivity of my emotional states are partially to blame, but I spent most of the film vacillating between laughing hilariously and sobbing. Just sobbing. And, sitting in that theater with Tiff on one side of me and Scarlet on the other, I started to consider what the film was saying.

There are challenges to patriarchy and, wonderfully, how it oppresses people across the gender spectrum, and I loved that and how it could be presented in a way that was just so…fun. More personally, though, the film is an exploration of cynical commercial fluff (like a toyline that built a corporate empire) and where that fluff can paradoxically add joy and meaning to our lives. As a film lover and particularly as a lifelong defender of the horror genre as meaningful, this paradox is real. It is a seed that has tipped over into unbalance for me lately and decimated my self worth. Barbie spoke to this contradiction quite specifically, and I wonder how many people have written about it.

To couple that viewing with Dor’s GoFundMe was a healing potion. Not completely, but enough to get me to write this and (even more astonishing) be able to look back on the work I did for Horrible Imaginings and Film Geeks and other projects without hating myself and wanting to die. The harmful and stupidly cynical feelings I had for the horror or film communities were proved wrong by so many people who came forward to help us. Reading through the names has been wild because I didn’t know many of those folks even knew who I was or remembered me.

It hasn’t even been a week since I spent hours laying in an oil puddle on the street in Oakland, sobbing to the suicide hotline. For that reason, I’m not sure where I am right now. I will let people know that the financial support will go first to be able to pay and continue to see my therapist. That is…critical.

There is also tens of thousands of dollars of debt that I can directly tie to running a film festival. This will help alleviate some of that. I’m only talking money now because I think the folks who opened their wallets deserve to know that it will be used thoughtfully and wisely (and with the support of the financial resources supplied by the university). Words on here can’t do justice to the feelings that are overwhelming the capacity of my ribcage right now as my heart threatens to break out. I can quote for all of you Frodo’s words to Faramir: “You have shown your quality; the very highest.”

I will also say here that Dor Dotson, the wonderful human who made that GoFundMe, works as a freelance social media and film marketing consultant. Once, I picked her to speak on a panel to art house cinema owners and distributors. If you need services like the ones she specializes in, I will also ask you to consider hiring her. You can find her Genuine Article at her website here!

Didn't know where else to put something this long...

This will be long. 

Yesterday I wrote some dark and upsetting thoughts and posted them in public. It was also apparently posted to Facebook, as well. Even I am aware of the inadvisability of this, many people are upset and scared for me. As I write this, I have literally hundreds of messages from people in response, ranging from comments to the posting, to direct messages, to direct outreach via text message. Also, as of this writing, I have yet to read most of them at all. 

The first thing I want to say is that I don’t really remember the actions of either writing or posting yesterday. On Halloween of 2020, I had my first dissociative mental breakdown. My memory is a jump cut from sitting on my porch to the top of a boulder at the Cowles Mountain apex looking down into the valley and wanting so desperately to jump. Another major one happened in late 2021 around Thanksgiving, and when I realized that my film festival (and in effect the entirety of my identity for well over a decade) was dead. My programmers tried over the next half year to resuscitate it, including a move from 2022 September to the following April in 2023. During that interim postponement, the breakdown happened twice more. 

The second one was almost completely dissociated, and culminated in my wife Tiffany finding me sobbing and laying in the grass in Balboa Park–an event that led to a stay at the ER suicide watch, a misery of screaming and some violence, and a lot of boredom. It’s kind of like being put in the drunk tank of a prison–an experience I remember through a haze. Both Tiffany and the occasional therapists who would come in and talk to me for 5 minutes at a stretch would ask me about being drunk or high because of my trancelike state and periodic sobbing for death. 

As tests would confirm, neither had been the case. 

There has been a thread through all of this:  the frustrations and inadequacies of mental health support. I went through several therapists and a change in health insurance over this period. My friend Victoria recommended my current (most long lasting) therapist who is wonderful, but who I just learned I can no longer afford (one of the hits this week that contributed to yesterday’s breakdown). Psychiatrists were several times as impossible to see, so the biggest benefit of being hospitalized for suicide watch was getting rushed to FINALLY, after three long years, being able to see a psychiatrist, who is still working with me to figure out the biological side to all of this. 

That psychiatrist was not surprised by my drug-like state, and I am learning that they are my brain trying to protect me from the severity of the depressive low. Biological protections are full of unintended consequences.

On the psychological aspect, my work with my therapist has been revealing that the challenges are long and complicated, involving my 45-year life experiences. I won’t write about specifics here, but I will say that I have learned to identify how splintered my internal self is, and how those splinters or parts react to thoughts, outside stimuli, and emotional responses in ways that are often at war with each other. Something else I have been reckoning with is that “thoughts come first, then feelings.” This is why mindfulness is at the center of so much mental, emotional, and behavioral therapy. Slow down, control the thoughts, see outside the emotions, and let them pass. This has been an effective strategy for the first half of 2023, when the certain death of Horrible Imaginings (an event that was EXTREMELY volatile) could have spiraled me irretrievably. 

Friends and family:  I am struggling VERY HARD with the sociopolitical climate, the power of Christofascism and theism in general, and with with the poor outlook for the future of the world my daughter will inherit, but more personally I am struggling with end of a film festival that I had fully adopted as core to my existence on this planet. For so many years, I was so entrenched in the commitment to cinema curation and exhibition that I both coordinated and spoke on panels, programmed countless festivals, and organized artists spotlights for major conventions. (Almost comically, AS I AM WRITING THIS, I just received a message from a friend from IFC Center in New York asking me to apply to join the board for Art House Convergence.) I still have thousands of emails and over 100 unopened text messages from some of my best friends that I can’t bring myself to open or read because of the panic. But I got through April, the month we had targeted for a postponed Horrible Imaginings Film Festival, without spiraling, so I started to think I was beginning to beat this. Then yesterday happened.

I am not finished with the work I was doing with my therapist by a long shot, but earlier this week I got the message that the charge for my last two sessions were declined, along with payments for several other bills. This is in addition to mountains of debt, the most devastating  of which to my emotional well being and self worth the debt I owe to an army of submitting filmmakers from my canceled last film festival. There are other challenges that I am not talking about because they are really challenges for Tiffany, and I don’t want this to take away from her own struggles, or even worse: to make her feel any level of guilt that I know she is taking on by herself without my shitty help. 

Financial struggles are something all of my loved ones are feeling, so it feels pathetic complaining about them, but they are just the cliched backbreaking straw. I was making it through the stress, or so I thought. 

Yesterday, I flew into Oakland, California for a conference. The flight was great, but after arriving I had a canceled rental car and hotel room. My UCSD travel card expired just days before, my own credit card is maxed, and my bank account overdrawn. I found myself without transportation, food, shelter, and negative money almost 500 miles from home. Tiffany had been my lifeline when I spiraled in San Diego. Now, my warped perception was one of absolute isolation and abandonment. I spent most of the day laying in a puddle of car oil on the asphalt, having the cops called on me by Holiday Inn, and sobbing on the phone with different suicide hotline and crisis hotline people. Literally hours. Some of them were helpful; others, not so much. My only guiding emotions that I can remember were despair and rage–both of which were wildly disproportionate to the situation at hand. 

Here’s what I want everyone to know about this kind of depression. Everything is warped and destructive and hopeless, even in the full knowledge of the realities that should lead to both hope and constructive responses. Everything is a contradiction. Many of the glimpses of outreach after yesterday’s post were people (a lot of people) insisting how much they and others loved me. Here’s the thing: I know this. I am so aware of not only that, but I am also aware that I have a greater support system of genuine people than most humans can boast. The contradiction is that the depression’s response to that love is to want to die more. The contradiction is that the depression’s response to my wife and daughter at home is that their world would be better if I could just disappear. 

Yes, I can sit here now and write in some modicum of clarity. But I am terrified. It keeps happening. When will it happen again? And yes, the financial situation we are in is part of it. I have no idea how I will pay my therapist for the last two sessions, let alone be able to continue with her. I need to talk through the pile-on of situations and how those emotional responses overwhelmed my ability to cope yesterday. The mindfulness strategies that got me through April and the official death of my festival sat like a sapling against a flood, and ended up ripped from the soil. 

Thanks to my work supervisor, who I am so grateful for, I was able to meet up and eventually regulate at the end of the day yesterday. It took other people to ask for that help on my behalf. I am sorry for upsetting anyone yesterday, and I am also sorry that I am not responding to calls or texts. I am also sorry for my own cowardice in being about to reach out for help. I wanted to give some context to yesterday, and I hope I did.

Horrible Imaginings 2021: A Reflection and A Thank You!

It is Saturday, September 11, and perhaps it is a testament to my tunnel vision that, while so many people seem to be reflecting on the two decades that have transpired since the attacks on September 11, 2011, my brain is still intent on trying to reflect on our 12th annual event, which was still in the thick of things one week ago. Perhaps it is inadvisable to start this reflection in this way, but I have always been fairly transparent with my darkest thoughts and I do think it is illustrative of the all-consuming nature of festival organization.

Honestly, I’ve been trying to sit down and write this for the last five straight days, only to stare at that godforsaken blinking cursor on my computer screen. Instead of composing this at home, I am now dictating it, speech to text, to my phone while I wait for the next film to start at The 21st annual film out San Diego film festival, which is happening right this second at our own former venue of the Museum of photographic arts in Balboa Park. Funny how this particular setting has made me able to think in a clear eyed manner about last week.

Let’s start at the beginning.

In June, we held a 24 hour marathon because we knew we were doing a hybrid festival this year. This entire endeavor was experimental, but we knew one thing for sure: it would be double the work, double the budget, double the stress, and double the energy. Although we did not reach our Quixotic goal that weekend, We did make enough that I could compensate my team, which was of the utmost importance to me. 

Which brings me to the next bit of foundational information here. Our programming team of 11 people has been going strong with the same brilliant minds since 2019, but the core operations team has always been a bit harder to keep organized and static. This is largely due to my own failings as a manager who delegates responsibility well. Right around the time of that June fundraiser, we solidified an organizational chart of official core operations with some legacy team members getting promoted and some wonderful new folks joining the cadre.

Now, forming a newly minted team just two months before the start of our festival was not without significant growing pains. I am pleased to announce that everyone settled into their roles in record time, leading to one of the smoothest running festivals in our twelve year history. 

And how did that affect the festival last week? Well, it takes place in a town where the hospitalization rate is spiking dramatically and the local government is not too quick to act. We had to act instead as an organization, along with our partners the Frida Cinema, to decide how to execute this event in a safe way. That meant dropping Cinema capacity to 38%, honoring requests from both filmmakers and audience members to opt for virtual participation after thinking they would be taking part in person, lots of wipe downs and sanitizers, and—of course—requiring masks inside the building.

So much gratitude goes to the entire ecosystem of our community: Cinema, volunteers, press, audience, filmmakers, panelists, and our own team for doing their part to make this run smoothly and safely and with very few glaring technical difficulties. As I look on the backend, I see people are still tuning in to watch the Q&A’s and panels that were live streamed. There is a lot we are still learning about how to best serve our community and our artists, but I am fairly certain we will continue going forward with some hybrid model in the future. It was such a treat to be able to have audiences hear from filmmakers all over the world, whether they were on stage in person or projected on the screen via zoom. We owe much to the Frida staff for making this capability possible.

As many reading this will attest, the most glaring technical problem was that the awards ceremony live broadcast failed right at the tail end of the festival. I want to apologize to those of you who tuned in and were waiting for a broadcast that never appeared. While that was both embarrassing and frustrating for all involved, I must admit that the greatest fraction of my feelings comprise relief that it was the only thing that failed to broadcast. Frankly, the discussions of the films that we showed are far, far more important to me and to the mission of the festival.

Programming wise, I am very proud to reflect on how eclectic and diverse our artist representation continues to be. The source of this mission is to explore the fears and anxieties from a variety of perspectives and experiences, and having diverse filmmakers is simply critical to that mission. Our fears are tied part and parcel to our personal experiences, and Horror in particular benefits from multiple sides to every story. Once again, I have our programmers to thank for such thoughtful selections, and I hope they are ready to start again in one month’s time!

I’ve talked about our team and our programmers, so I will name them here in alphabetical order:

For core operations, we have our Director of programming and filmmaker outreach Sterling Anno. It was Sterling who not only served as a programmer, but helped organize the program booklet, communicate with filmmakers, gather materials needed for screening, and worked with the cinema to ensure the best experience possible. Special thanks also to his monster volunteer Jacob Angelo!

Jon Condit handles our virtual presence, as well as our web presence. He organized our discord channel and made sure the live streams and links were working over the course of the entire weekend. Jon also worked as a programmer.

Lauren Cupp is our Director of marketing and worked tirelessly to keep the public informed not only about our festival, but about the titles we selected. She had to hit the ground running, basically reinventing our social media strategy and analyzing the results. What a champ! Her monster volunteer Sara Olson created some truly stunning images from film posters or stills. 

If you know some of these names already, then you have Jay Kay to thank. He is our Director of press and media outreach, and one thing he did was work with various outlets to organize interviews with staff members besides myself. Personally, it was a joy to hear an interview about horrible Imaginings that was given by one of our team, and not by me. He also worked very hard to compose press releases about our offerings and personalized outreach to a variety of media outlets. Jay also worked as a programmer.

Rabia Sitabi is our project director. Any organizational success behind the scenes, including people keeping people on task, organizing a timeline of needs, and defining workflows, comes whole cloth from Rabia. Personally, Rabia was a huge reason I made it out of this in a balanced psychological state. And she did this nine hours into the future every day because she lives in the Netherlands! She also worked as a programmer.

Laura Vasquez has been involved with the festival for years, but took on two very important roles starting this year: first as Director of HR, and second as Director of Production. In the first role she helped organize volunteers and ensure a proper code of conduct, as well as contribute to our values statement. In the second role, which likely was far more taxing, she organized any food, parties, and other on-promises activities that were planned for the festival. 

Sterling, Jay, and Lauren

At the 11th hour we hired LJ Jackson as a Director of sponsorship and partnership outreach. She has created a sponsorship deck for next year, and will help ensure a more spectacular future for our festival. If there is one major thing to reflect on that is both depressing and a little inspiring it is that we managed two years in a row with zero financial sponsorship. For full transparency, ticket and past sales plus money from film submissions covers a total of around 60-70% of our operations budget. The rest requires gifts, donations, sponsorships, and grants. To have survived two years in a row without this was difficult, But I am proud to say we still stand. That said, it is definitely not sustainable and you will be seeing another fundraiser soon!

Financially, the virtual component did rescue our festival from languishing deep into the red. Our sincere gratitude goes out to all participants and audience members, whether you saw us in person or through the veneer of a computer screen. We definitely cannot do this without you. So buckle in folks, because I am about to unleash a metric fuckload of gratitude.

We also can’t do this without the filmmakers who provide that 50% of the conversations we have in the form of their art. Thank you to all of you for submitting your work, having the bravery to display it on a huge screen, and being present for our questions. A very special thanks goes out to the professionals who devoted time to enlighten us via our panels. Neuroscientist Eric Leonardis fielded a brilliant Discussion on Transhumanism with Naeri Do, director of TRANS. And he had to do that while talking to a big screen over zoom and through the intermediary of a language translator. It was fascinating and brilliant and could’ve been very easily derailed, but it was more than I was hoping it would be! Editor and filmmaker Andrew Kasch, who had no work in our festival this year, took time out of his insane schedule on set directing in Vancouver To join two of our filmmakers in a panel on filmmaking during the pandemic. His contribution added exactly the layers and elements I was hoping it would.

The rest of our programming team worked tirelessly over an extremely difficult year to distill our submissions down to one exemplary program. My absolute gratitude and awe go out to Laila Ayad, James C. Coker, Rebekah Fieschi, Synthia Hogan, Ashlea Wessel, and Macon Wilson for all of the hours of thoughtful scrutiny they put into their jobs.

The job that I least envy is that of the awards judge. For the difficult task of selecting favorites, I offer sincere gratitude to film critic Beth Accomando, who also supplied some absolutely fabulous brain cookies for our REEL Science Panel, composer Andrew Scott Bell, filmmaker and scholar Shayna Connelly, and screenwriter Kirsten Elms. Our judges are all professionals with extremely busy schedules, so their hard work is noted and appreciated. It should also be noted that they had about a month to watch everything with judgment in mind. Not an easy task.

Everyone’s hard work in this ecosystem needs rigorous documentation. It should not only be informative, but it should look goddamn good! For supplying both qualifications, I offer my thank you to Srini Rajan, Vanessa, and of Urbanite Media for stellar photography!

We also owe much to our on-the-ground volunteers Percy Presswalla, Percy Presswalla, Christine Schindel, Bryan Vermeer, Allan Dizon, Sara Kalhor, Hilary Lange, and Mike Zhou. Extra special thanks goes to the wonderful Leonardo Ostergren for always going above and beyond to ensure the best event possible for just about everyone involved. Leo is the kind of person you dream about being part of your team!

The manager of the Frida Trevor Dillon worked his ass off to ensure the sound and picture quality of almost 100 titles over a four day period. He also helped us schedule out and plan for a very rigid timeframe of events that included ensuring we were broadcasting live when we told virtual audiences we were going to be. Y’all, this shit was hard! Major thanks also to Isa Bulnes-Shaw and Garrett Cruz for managing the floor and the projection booth. I know it wasn’t easy, but you made it seem so! Every person who worked at The Frida during our festival was badass and I love them! Sydney Dayan helped wrangle volunteers, Owen Ela helped use the powerful Frida Cinema socials to spotlight our films, and Martin Nguyen continues to kicks as on all kinds of operations, both technical and logistical. 

Logan Crow, you are the head of one of the most cherished buildings in Southern California for me. The Frida Cinema is not just a movie theater. It is a church. It is a therapist's office. It is a family home. It is our home. Thank you for your dedication to this art form and the continued proper exhibition of it. Your work is not unseen.

I know that was a lot of acknowledgments to read, but each one is deserving of all of our time! Stay tuned to our social media channels and our Vimeo channel in the coming weeks as we add supplemental interviews and conversations with our filmmakers! And don’t forget that the first Campfire Tales of the season takes place on the weekend of October 3rd—virtually starting September 30th and in-person at The Frida Cinema starting at 5:30pm with live discussions with the filmmakers! Feel free to reach out with any questions and let’s enjoy the best season of the year!

Goodbye, Todd.

The world has lost an exceptional person with the passing of Todd Stadtman. Todd was the creator of the magical and (especially for me) super influential film blog DIE DANGER DIE DIE KILL (FOURDK), as well as the author of the necessary nonfiction book Funky Bollywood: The Wild World of 1970s Indian Action Cinema, the novels Please Don’t Be Waiting for Me and So Good It’s Bad, countless articles for equally countless outlets, to say nothing of his work as a musician and spinner of tunes for his Pop Offensive radio station.

Directly due to the conversations I had with Todd, I learned to love watching wild world cinema without the benefit of subtitles, an all-too-neglected experience that opens up opportunities to learn new ways of interpreting visual cues in the movies. The book signing for Funky Bollywood: The Wild World of 1970s Indian Action Cinema that I put together at Digital Gym Cinema for Todd was one of the most fun and proud nights that I can remember as an event organizer. Before the signing, I drove up to LA to have lunch with Todd and his wife Liza before we embarked on our mini road trip to San Diego. It will be a memory I will cherish forever.

I am linking two different episodes from our now defunct podcast here. The first is a wonderful episode where Todd took over as host for an episode. He asked me what I wanted him to record, and I told him I wanted him to just discuss what he loves and why—a sort of personal philosophy of his tastes. You can listen to that here:

The second podcast is a live recording of our discussion from the aforementioned book signing. Todd and I discuss Bollywood, particularly of the 70s action variety, and get some excellent questions from the audience. It is well worth listening to, and maybe it will inspire you to find some great films to watch.