It's a romantic comedy kind of evening for me...
Happens. But when it does, I always get really introspective about the last few years. In truth, I've been incredibly introspective for the past 6 months or so. Maybe longer. I think my life is changing again without me paying too much attention to it...
As if my "Confessions of an Arm-Chair Economist" essay wasn't enough.
I don't mean to be narcissistic about it, but I guess there's a lot to think about right now. The personal stuff... I don't know. This is even strangely hard to write.
First off... the romantic comedy thing. I like them. I always have... Most of them are awful, but even the awful ones are about love, and beauty, and finding rare connections with people... People understanding each other. These things have always gotten to me rather deeply. It's not a huge secret that films with a moment of true beauty, love or heroism can make me bawl like a little girl. I'm too much of a professional artist to ever suggest that all art should be anything in particular. But personally, this is what always moves me the most.
A gesture, a confession... That moment when the protagonists kiss in the final scene after being apart the entire movie. The spark where two people get each other and know it.
But... It also reminds me that I haven't experienced that kind of connection in a long, long time... I miss that. My options have gotten more and more limited though on that front simply because I've gotten more and more intellectually hard-core over the years. I've not met a single person in Los Angeles that I've been particularly impressed by, though to be fair I don't meet all that many people. Regardless, finding someone who actually understands (and more importantly, appreciates) a ranting curmudgeon like me isn't exactly all that likely.
But anyway... For me, art is first and foremost about humanity. It's about expressing the universal aspects of the human experience in ways that no words alone can properly describe. Truth is - that's why I wanted to become a composer to begin with.
Music is intangible and temporal. To affect emotion without the ability to create something directly representational and without using words is about the closest to magic the universe has to offer as far as I'm concerned... But I've been so focused on everything else lately that I've hardly had time to write anything new, much less pursue film scores and other projects either.
Howwwwwwwwever... I'm not sure I want to.
I guess that's the second part of this introspection. I don't know what I want to be doing right now. I went to graduate school for Film Composition. I know how to do that, I'm a fine performer and a good teacher, I think. I have a lot of various technical skills... But I don't want to use any of them to propagate the idiotic media that continually gets foisted on the world by mediocre minds and even worse talents. I'm sick of the student films... I'm tired of the movies that mistake "darkness" for serious drama and angst for intellect. But looking into the future, and imagining working on any number of the thousands of movies made every year by faux-socialist sheik directors is just depressing. I don't want to do that. I don't want to spend the next 10 years sucking up to people who have barely functioning brains. It's not just that I don't want to... I mean... I can't. It's just not who I am.
It's not just the obvious stuff like Soderbergh's "Che"... A lot of Hollywood is run by artists who think they're hip by being useful idiots. Joe McCarthy may have been evil, but he wasn't particularly wrong about the kind of mentality that pervades Hollywood. It's not really a secret anymore, so I doubt I'm giving anything shocking away by saying that the town is full of people who fancy themselves "socialists" and even "communists". This shouldn't be a surprise anyway given that these are largely people who's jobs require them to do nothing but "think" emotionally - so processing ideas logically and critically thinking is virtually impossible for most I've met.
But where does that leave me? I don't know... If I can find some partners, or convince Nick Gillespie to hire me at Reason (was up for a producer gig there earlier this year...), then I'd like to start creating more pro-liberty media. Ultimately I have some larger scale plans, but time & resources are putting them on hold. So what do I do now?
No really... What should I do?
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