The first dice decided film

Well, it's nearly 11pm on Friday night and it's been decided that a week from now there will be the first dice decided film. It means, basically, writing options for various elements of the film, and rolling the dice to decide which gets used. For example, when it comes to the title, there will be six options: however the dice rolls will decide which option we run with.

Same for the genre: will it be a comedy, an action film, a romantic thing, a horror film, something avant-garde, etc...

The nice thing about dice decisions is that they open the mind up to chance, and they take the awful responsibility away that so very often leads to stagnation and fear.

And yet they still incorporate elements of groundedness, reason and sensibility.

So this time next week the film will be made, and it will be posted online: no matter what. If I'm the only person in it, and I have to shoot it myself, the damn thing WILL BE MADE.

Dice willing, of course...

Dice decision on next film I make

Yes, there's a great app for my new iPhone. It's a great dice rolling app where you can roll up to six dice, change the look and function of each dice, the number of sides, and the table that they roll on!

Check out the video: I'll be making more dice decisions soon - and some will be on the iphone.

Great thing about the iPhone, too, is that I can upload video directly to YouTube, Facebook, my website etc.

By the way, the dice decision on the job went really well - the film was fun, good, and was a pleasure to work on.

Watch out for PLAYLAND soon, at The Doorpost Film Project Playland will be online from August 22nd.

My first major dice decision since the blog

OK.

I have a dice decision. I have the opportunity to accept something that doesn't meet the criteria I'd set. This thing isn't something I can publicly mention here, so let's just say that there are consequences if I don't accept the offer.

If I get it my way I got more of that thing we all know and love: money. I know I'm worth it, but there's that risk, of course, that if I don't accept this thing then I'll lose it, and lose the possible connections it would likely lead to.

But of course one can't make decisions based on fear, can one?




And this is one of the key elements to making dice decisions. The moment one opens oneself up to living outside one's comfort zone, and making those riskier decisions, then one is alive. The beauty of dice decisions is they "factor in" an element of risk, but still include the possibility of making a safe decision. If anything, they're a kind of halfway house between living dangerously and living safely.

But as I've said already, I do believe that the consequences of decisions are illusory. One can make a decision that has the most excellent short term consequences, and most abysmal long term ones. So who can really say that there is such a thing as a "good" or "bad" decision?

But tomorrow, I will film my dice decision and post it here.

"God doesn't play dice"

Albert Einstein once said that "God doesn't play dice". An interesting comment from a man who didn't believe in God anyway, but as far as Einstein was concerned, what he was saying was that there are a certain set of universal rules in place throughout the cosmos that are fixed. The universe, according to Einstein, isn't chaotic at all, but a well ordered system, governed by immutable laws.

Personally, I don't agree with Einstein. Not that I'm any kind of physicist, of course, and I don't believe in any kind of sentient, conscious god, but if there were a god I say that god would be chance itself.

All that what we see around us is a product of chance. What we are ourselves - human beings - are a product of chance. I can see no other way. I can't possibly accept any kind of traditional "creationist" nonsense any more than I could accept Santa Claus: the universe is fifteen billion years old, our planet is four and a half billion years old, and that's an awful, awful long time for chance to play its game - and considering it has a universe so vast we can barely grasp the numbers of stars, solar systems and galaxies within it, I'd say that the outer reaches of chance is perhaps what life is all about.

To me, DNA is an inevitable product of randomness. It's most likely rare in the universe, yes - baring in mind that any matter at all is rare in the universe, let alone organic matter - but it exists because the universe has been around so long, the chances of matter eventually arranging itself into DNA is only a matter of time. An awful long time, yes. But a finite time.

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It's strange the fascination so many people have for gambling It's a fascination that's been around so long. People have gambled with cards, dice, the flip of a coin, on horse races, cock fighting, which boxer, wrestler, or gladiator will win the fight. People have gambled on the outcome of events and many have invested everything they've held dear to them in the pursuit of more, or of something they want. And what progress would there have ever been throughout history without The Risky Endeavour? And it's been when those endeavours have had the odds stacked most against them that some people have made the greatest achievements in life.

Cities like Las Vegas have thrived on chance: certainly on the common man's ignorance of probability, anyway. Economies have grown and fallen as a result of it. Wars have been won and lost because of it. The gamble Eisenhower made on the morning of June 6th 1944 could have lost the allied the war had the weather not decided to change in their favour that day. Would we be living under Nazi rule today had a few millibars moved on the barometer that morning, or a few neurons fired a little differently in his brain that morning? Who knows? Did something or someone make him feel confident enough that morning to make that decision? Was a nice, relaxing cup of early morning tea responsible for the halting of the nazi war machine?

I'm a huge fan of The Butterfly Effect, as you might see...

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One thing that strikes me odd about us humans, though, is we crave uncertainty. We might think we want it, but certainty is, to many people, a kind of death. It's almost non-life. After all, we all know what boredom is. Isn't it just a type of certainty? People will live lives of apparent luxury, and yet be bored to death.

I can't help thinking that's odd.

Now on Twitter...

I'm now on Twitter at https://twitter.com/dicemanjack

Website, in development, is www.dicemanjack.com

Dice Decisions

It was about 20 years ago that I first read Luke Rhinehart's The Dice Man, which was, to me, a wonderfully enlightening book about a man who makes decisions based on the roll of the dice.

The premise of the story is simple: starting out with just small and unimportant decisions, by the end of the book he's making all of the biggest choices in his life by the roll of the dice.

I About 12 years ago I felt I was at an impasse in my life: I'd ended a relationship with a girlfriend in Sweden, left my career in England as an actor because I felt it wasn't going anywhere and I'd hit forty. I'd sold the home I loved when I'd broken up with another woman some years before, and I felt I was drifting and unmotivated. For me, it was the classic mid life crisis. My sense of adventure had gone, my career hadn't happened the way I'd imagined it would when I was in my twenties, and life just felt numb at best. I was homeless, jobless, penniless, loveless and hitting middle age.

So I decided to roll the dice.


I think it had been some things I'd witnessed in the years prior to this decision that made me commit to it: I'd had a lot of things fall apart in my life - home in Brighton, long term relationship, stability, and trust in "the system", as well as a profound sense of needing a different perspective. I'd come to the realisation that one of the most potent ways to recover oneself was to literally "recreate" onself - the real meaning of the word recreation, after all, and I found that there was no better way to do that than engage in some kind adventure.

Besides, life had become something absurd to me by 1997. A unique and precious gift not to be squandered, but at the same time not something to be held on to and preserved like some museum piece. As the saying goes, "To risk is to die, but to not risk is to not live". Life became something to me not that you waste, but equally not something you don't take out of the wrapper.

In the preceeding years I'd lived with the aftermath of my girlfriend's rape, her breakdown, my breakdown, a serious car wreck in which I saw people go from happy, vacationing people to broken, bloody, dying and wretched souls in minutes. Other, bizarre coincidences occurred that seemed to be telling me life can be taken away in an instant; I found a man seriously injured and dying on the beach in the middle of the night - had I not found him in time, would most certainly have died. Others' ordeals were like messages to me: live life NOW! I came to the conclusion that life simply had to be lived with real courage and a sense of awe and adventure.

It had dawned on me that decisions made by The Universe, Nature, Chance - call it what you will - made careful plans a silly idea. John Lennon once said that life is what happens when you're busy making other plans; and to me, the idea of making plans just seemed futile. One can make the most careful plans, I thought; dedicate one's life to something, just to see those hopes dashed at the most pointless and ridiculously ironic moment. And I was fed up with waiting for life to come to me. I must have been about ten when I first read that passage by Thoreau: Most men live lives of quiet desperation...

If I was going to be desperate, you could be damn sure I was going down with a fight. Rage, rage, against the dying of the light!, as Dylan Thomas once wrote.

I gave myself six options of where I'd be going: India, Australia, South of France, USA, Stay in the UK, or go back to Spain, where I'd lived in 1992. I'd not made it to Barcelona as I'd originally intended, as I'd witnessed the horrendous car wreck that spooked me and sent me back to England and a massive breakdown of my own. I'd wanted to see the Guadi architecture there. Some day I will, I know. Just not yet. But back to the dice...

The concept is easy: each side, each number on the dice is assigned an outcome. If you roll a two and two is assigned to, say, "go to Australia now", then that's what you have to do. It means surrendering to fate, you might say. You can do anything with your options: they can be around what you're going to eat, where you're going to go, what you're going to wear, say, drink...You can use them to throw in some daring, too: you can give yourself a great excuse to break out of comfort zones by rolling the dice. Wanna risk being a slut for the night? Do something completely out of character, just for the dare of it? The dice can help you.

And so The Dice - my dice - fell on the USA. And so on April 10th 1997 I came to America with a guitar, a suitcase hastily filled with a few bits and pieces - some quite absurd - and $350 in cash. No credit cards, no contacts, no sleeping bag; a small rucksack with a Teddy Bear tied across it, and a newly restored sense of adventure.

I flew into Phoenix Arizona as a symbol of rebirth (even though the extra price of the ticket cut into my very limited funds) and that was that.

That was my first major dice decision.

Watch this space for some more...