The Absent Minded Professor

Hope, Despair, and Passion: Why I miss Unhappy People

// August 12th, 2010 // 7 Comments » // Musings, Unconventional Life

Despair implies a knowledge that there is something better we are not achieving.
Despair is longing.
Despair is hope.

My Coworkers: What do you miss about California, Dawson?
Me: That everyone is supremely unhappy.
My Coworkers: Huh?

I was thinking about something involving despair and hope (prompted by my ever present Twitter folks: "Proving through melody that despair is a form of hope") and the three lines at the beginning of this appeared in my Notebook o’ Ideas, followed by an amusing conversation with my co-workers in which I tried to explain what I miss about California.

There is a unique brand of beauty to being with people who strive to achieve great things, even in the face of almost certain knowledge they won’t succeed. I come from a place where I had a group of friends who were never satisfied with the status quo, they fought like soldiers in the last days of the Apocalypse to achieve great things, important, life-changing things: art and change, politics, love and friendship, it all tied up together in these intricate patterns of life. And maybe we were just young, maybe nothing is really good about those things, maybe I’m romanticizing my youth, but I miss the passion of it.

Where I live now, people’s reaction to passion is so…disturbing to me. Some people settle for staring in bemusement when confronted with a persons passion for something (people, art, politics, the topic doesn’t matter, just passion). But I have seen many, many people avert their eyes, as though passion is somehow obscene or unseemly. And that baffles me, because I think passion is beautiful. Complex, frightening, sometimes frustrating, but beautiful.

I’m not knocking the quiet life of the Midwest. I’ve met many people who’s only goal is to live the scripted life: go to college on mom’s/dad’s dime, get a good corporate job, find the man/woman of their dreams, have kids, settle down. And nothing more is expected. It’s a beautifully simple way to live.

But I discovered something: I don’t fit in that script. My character is all wrong for the story-line. I’m the kind of guy who stays up all night reading a book and writing a review of it, despite having work the next day. I’m the kind of guy who can sit in a coffee shop and talk for hours about life: how it is, how it should be, how we can save the world if we just care a little more. I am historically unreliable and I know it, following my passions where ever they lead me. Recently, I’ve tried taking stability over passion and it just hasn’t worked out.

So here’s my resolve: To live passionately. To care so much it hurts. To strive for things that are just out of my reach. To be more than I was yesterday. To do what I love, whatever that may cost. This may leave me isolated for now, but I’ll continue to actively seek out like-minded individuals.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that passion, hope, and despair are all better when experienced with friends.

Middle Man Me: How Social Media is Going to Change the Art Industries as We Know Them.

// July 26th, 2010 // No Comments » // Musings

Today @DrewZachary made two updates to Twitter that made me sigh and shake my head (not at him…he’s lovely…at the industry of art):

"Since it’s come up, a reminder: legally, the writers on our show can’t read/hear your ideas/scripts for our show. But we still love you."

"The best advice I have for aspiring writers is go through a fellowship or get yourself represented by an agent who CAN submit your work."

This caused me, in my head, to begin reciting my new vignette: "Middle Man Me: How Social Media is Going to Change the Art Industries as We Know Them." (I am not a screenwriter- so don’t judge, this was just the format it played out in in my head):

INDUSTRY: Well, sir, we appreciate that this person has contacted you and shows immeasurable talent, but legally we need them to have an agent get in touch with us.

ARTIST: This person doesn’t have an agent. They’re take on the world is almost wholly unique and no agent in the history of man has expressed an interest in unique.

RANDOM V.O.: Agents, like Industry, are business people, not artists. What they want is to make money. Talent does not outweigh risk, the agent will always take the safe bet first, but art is about risk.

INDUSTRY: Well, that’s just too bad. We can’t help you. If we did, all our agents would get mad at us for effectively letting social media destroy their jobs, and we can’t have that.

ARTIST: We’re letting something great slip through our finger-tips. This writer is really savvy, if we don’t snatch him up now, we’ll miss the opportunity.

SMALL TIME WRITER: (Tweeting) Hey guys, my friend, The Artist, just got back to me. Industry refused to even contemplate talking to me without an agent. Looks like this is going to be indie after all. You folks still in?

SMALL TIME FRIENDS: Totally in. We begged, borrowed, stole all the necessary equipment, we’ve got YouTube queued up, between all of us our 300,000 followers have pitched in some donations for the budget, our website is built, Facebook fan page already starting to get liked. Let’s do this.

  [Insert Montage of a SMALL TIME AND CO. making a show and putting it up on the internet]

ARTIST: (watching YouTube serials created by Small Time Writer and Company online) See? Wholly unique. And a hit. (he sighs) What do we spend all our money for if we can’t get top talent to work for us because we require ten kinds of middle men?

The End.

Here’s the thing about the art industry, it runs on a system of business. And business sense does not, generally, make for good art. What is sound in a business is not sound in art. Art is about risk…business is about mitigating risk. Art is about creation, business is about structure. You get the picture.

Am I suggesting that the internet and social media are going to topple the mega-giant industries of art? Absolutely not. The reality is, for most people, money is more important to them than art (not because people are evil, though some are, but because we all need to eat and keep a roof over our heads). And if you want to make money with your art, Industry holds the keys to those big dollar deals. Also, people are still working out how to make money via releasing art on the web (I have some ideas on this, to be presented in a later blog). So, it’s not that we’ll ever see these established industry giants toppling to the ground under the weight of the internet. But…

…yes, there is a but. What we will see are some artists sometimes taking their artistic license and blazing new inroads in internet. Clearing paths and establishing way stations for people who are perhaps a little less bold. The two most commonly cited instances of this are Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and The Guild web series. There are many others, lesser known, perhaps not quite as well executed or as well backed (Joss, at least, has resources at his back that the rest of us simply can’t lay claim to), but they’re out there. And they will keep improving. And now and then someone well-connected in the industry like Joss or a plucky group of smart artists with great content like The Guild will push forward with these opportunities. And slowly, the internet will sort itself out as its own kind of medium, separate and utterly different from that of the art industry.

Over time, while I don’t think the art Industries are going to fall, they are going to have to change to accommodate this new, low-barrier sector of their business. It will impact them- not crush them, not kill them, but certainly impact them. It’s a new kind of competition, so new that even those doing it aren’t sure what it’s going to end up looking like.

Today, I tweeted that I’m a cowboy in the wild, wild west of social media. I stick to that. What will come, no one knows, but it’s going to change things. It’s already started to. And I for one, am excited. 

Disclaimer: If you have things to say about art vs. pop culture or my fascination with how the internet might begin making inroads to offering non-middle-man, non-big-industry ways to success for artist, feel free to say so. But be warned- I Snark for a living.

Inception: Last Night’s Adventure

// July 18th, 2010 // No Comments » // Movies, Musings

The Trailer:

This is my story of the adventure of going to see it. Click here to jump straight to my review:

I went and saw Inception last night. It was a bit of an adventure. The first theater I went to was sold out of tickets for the last showing they had at 8:45pm. After staring contemplatively at the clock in my car I decided I would brave the crowds at the Moolah (the local "cool" movie theater) in an effort to see the 10:00pm showing that I had originally planned to avoid due to the length of the film. Hey, you only live once, right?

I arrived near the Moolah at 9:00pm, hunted down some parking (I had to beat up a little old lady, but I got a space) and was in line by 9:15pm. Commence my thirty minute wait in a sweltering hot stairwell in order to get a seat to this movie. Luckily, people watching is a favorite activity of mine and I didn’t lack for entertainment. Did you know, you can pick out the couples who are having problems by how they orient themselves around each other? It’s all about angles when analyzing people’s lives from afar…but I digress. Thirty minutes of fascinatedly analyzing people later, the doors finally opened and with a gusty sigh of relief the crowd, as one, filed into the theatre which was blessedly cooler than the oven the stairwell had become.

I was fortunate to sit next to a chatterer. She wasn’t one of those annoying people who yammer your ear off, but chill and with her own bit of wit about her. Don’t know how her date felt about our few minutes of banter, but I had fun while waiting for the movie to start. And then, the lights dimmed and I prepared to give myself over to the ever enjoyable task of watching a new movie.

[insert two and a half hours of time here]

As the credits rolled, my brain was pumping (preparing, believe it or not, to write this very post) and the witty buddy I had made turned to me and said: "What did you think?" After a moment of thought, I replied, "Y’know, it was good, but I like a little more mind-fuck in my mind-fuck movies."

That pretty much sums up my reaction to Inception. All told I found it…well, a little average. Perhaps I was expecting too much, but to be honest, I was anticipating more of a complex mind-warping experience and this movie just didn’t quite live up to it. There weren’t really any twists that I couldn’t anticipate coming, and Leo’s performance was a bit flat for my tastes. A man who is living tortured with guilt and pain should be more…overwrought, in my opinion. Sad just doesn’t quite cut it, if you ask me.

Truthfully, I would have preferred a little less action and a little more emotion in a film about dreams and ideas. Not that I don’t like action as much as the next guy, but I think if they had spent as much time on developing the characters stories as they did on the bad-ass fight scenes (particularly the ones with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, great stuff in the second level of the dream) they’d have ended up with a much more well-rounded movie.

Now, for the best part of the film: Ellen Page was absolutely stellar as the architect Ariadne (oh, be still my geeky heart…an architect named Ariande…does it get any better? She builds MAZES!). Besides wit, charm, and dry humor she always manages to bring just the right amount of innocent vulnerability to a role, and this one was no exception. In the midst of a plethora of jaded, cold characters (and even in the face of DiCaprio’s flat affect) Ariadne is the warm, beating heart behind it all. It was also indisputably appropriate that she is the Architect of the dreams…literally building the structure which people are filling up with their subconscious "projections".

I rate the movie an overall B-Plus for a brilliant premise and some great work by the supporting cast. Go see it, but don’t set your sights too high.

Highlights:

Best Acting Goes To: Ellen Page (obviously)

Best Fight Goes To: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, fighting some guards as gravity goes wonky on him (nice to see a guy generally styled as a geek being a hard-core badass).

Best Over All Scene Goes To: Ellen Page and Joseph Gordon-Levitt:
   Arthur: "Quick, kiss me." (they kiss)
    Ariadne: "They’re still staring at us."
    Arthur: (shrugs) "Well, it was worth a shot."
    They exchange a look that speaks volumes, and smile.

That’s all from me on Inception. Have you seen it? Did you like? Tell us in the comments!

What If’s Are a Time Waster- Or I’m Too Busy with Web Design to Write Much

// July 16th, 2010 // No Comments » // Musings, Unconventional Life

There’s not much in the way of updates for the next little while. I have a new website I’m working on, so that takes precedence right now. Lots of behind the scenes work this weekend, and hopefully in a week or two it will be ready for “The Great Unveiling”. Meanwhile, not much in the way of writing going on, but I’ll try to get some tidbits out here for you folks relatively regularly. Tonight’s tidbit:

Did you ever wonder what would have happened if you’d stayed?
just hunkered down,
just hung in through the night ’til day?
Did you ever wonder where you’d be
If you weren’t here?

I’m not generally a what-if-er. It’s not in my nature to think that I should have taken a different path, or done things a different way, because I really do believe that all our experiences shape us, and therefore there’s really no such thing as “the wrong path”. Still, tonight I find myself contemplating where I would be if I weren’t here. What my life would have been like had I known then what I know now.

What a time waster…wondering about about lives-that-might-have-been. Alas, it’s all I got this late at night.

Random Note: Q10 typewriter sound effects while writing + music playing= trying to type in rhythm with the music. So trying that again some night when I’m not really tired. I think I should write music reviews that way…