Sean Guinan is a refreshing exception–a young man of ambition with a teeming imagination yet not another journalist who cheats. He’s not a journalist at all, actually, but he’s doing what some of those fabricators might like to do, if they had a little more talent and there were money in it. “I am a filmmaker/video artist and have been producing works for CAN 19, Chicago’s Cable Access Network, for the last six years,” announced his recent note of introduction. “Unfortunately, as Channel 19 is neither a film festival nor a local theatre company, it has no regular-basis critical forum for its programming. I am writing to you, then, in the hopes of receiving any sort of mention.”
One of the questions Guinan put to himself was whether he belonged in college. “If you need a degree to go into whatever field you’re going into, you need a degree,” he says with exquisitely symmetrical logic. But Guinan didn’t think he needed a degree to work in theater, and if he didn’t need one he didn’t want one. “I wanted to get cracking!” he says.
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He wanted to be rich and famous by the time he was 30. The acting he’d been doing wasn’t getting him there, and it also wasn’t leading him anywhere he’d willingly settle for instead. A couple years out of Shimer, he made a crucial decision. “I decided simply not to make it a priority to try to get a job, pay rent, or do any of those things my friends were beginning to do. I simply stayed home with my parents.” And he started studying video.
Memory, Guinan has reluctantly concluded, is simply not good enough.
According to an unsigned letter to Hot Type, this coverage was “very dispiriting” to Herald reporters. “What’s especially troubling about this entire episode,” says the letter, which has the ring of inside knowledge, “is that they refused to see the hypocrisy of their coverage, ostensibly passing it off to the news staff as an exploration of the racetrack’s new incarnation.” In fact, the festival flopped, the letter goes on, but the Herald didn’t report it.
Technology story that’s really about the movies: “Not Rocket Science: How wrong do ‘Armageddon’ and ‘Deep Impact’ get it?”
