I got railed again today. Not hit as hard as last time though, partially because I'm becoming numb to criticism (which is good, as long as I don't go over the line and just disregard it completely) and partially because I made exactly the same mistakes as I did before and had the same sucesses as before. There's nothing more boring than redundancy. It makes me wonder if I've grown at all as an artist, from the first assignment to this second one. Have I? I don't know. Maybe I have and I'm only insecure now because I can't handle crit very well and I let the criticisms of my work go to my head. But I am my work. I lack progressive work because I don't understand myself well enough to be able to challenge my strengths and nurture my weaknesses...I even wonder if I should be in this class. I was talking with someone after class, and he pointed out to me that he's had a lot of training with all of the different tools that we're bringing to bear on our work in 45x, and he sees this sequence as the capstone to that, where he gets to refine what he's learned. I'm not in that same position. I am learning as I go. I'm not able to take what I already know and bring it a step further...at least, not technically. I suppose, I am bringing what I know...theory and history, criticism, crossed with a writing/photographic background...and am trying to refine it into cinema. I suppose in some ways its working, but I'm still finding myself having to shit out critical thought. I need to train myself to be able to switch effortlessly from intuition to criticism whenever I desire. When I acheive that, maybe I'll be able to recognize a bad idea a helluva lot easier. Like, as-soon-as-I-see-it "easier".

Fuck.

Is being stylistically pure more important than conceptually pure?