Lonelier than God
Realizing, now, having spent the last hour reading someone's journal, that maybe I didn't have it all wrong about thinking one should be friends with a person before they think about dating.
The question is, as always, how long this feeling will stick around. My money's on a couple hours at best. Why is everything so transient anymore?
In more tangible news, New Student Week is a strange and kind of isolating experience as a now-junior, now living off campus. I mean, it's all great being a Rescon and meeting all these freshmen who are excited and awed by this realized prospect of going to Northwestern, but at the same time there's a bit of bitterness to the realization that when I leave here forever, these kids will only just be getting to where I am now. I'm halfway to that point, and it's terrifying.
At least, tonight it is.
So I went to see the Kaleidoscope show last night to see a few different things--suddenlycarly in Purple Haze; acererak in Freshman Fifteen; Graffiti Dancers, whom I'd never seen but had heard about--and Boomshaka was on the bill (non-NU folks, think Blue Man Group vs. Stomp in an epic duel over an incredibly sexy group of dancers), and I've decided that I need to see every show they do within a hundred miles of me (wherever I am) for as long as I can. Seriously, they're that good, and they never fail to connect with the audience, and that's a bit of a feat when your audience is a bunch of drunk Northwestern students. I desperately want to get involved with this crew, somehow, but I came to the realization last night that I will never be able to sound design for them. When I get involved and invested in something, I start to pour myself out into it, and when it delivers on my investment, I go nuts. I would spend the entire show screaming and pumping my fists on the side of the stage, putting holes in my equipment and ripping off fader knobs as I worked. I would be a huge liability.
This is hard to believe, I think, for a lot of people who've only known me since Northwestern, but it's true--when Boy Wonder started to come together, on that last endless night before the premiere last year, I leaped out of my chair (on several different occasions), shoving it backward across the room, screaming and pumping my fists and dancing in sheer joy over this thing that I had created, pouring myself into this lifeless machine and manipulating tiny little virtual dials on two screens until suddenly I tapped the space bar and it spit back at me something that had taken on its own character, feeding off my energy, pouring that energy back into me and making the entire ordeal worth it infinite times over. A few people got a tiny taste of how much of me was in that soundtrack when, at the premiere, Byron burst out laughing at an inside joke placed in there just for him--and I nearly jumped out of my chair there, on the main floor of Tech Auditorium with the lights down. It's rare that I feel so strongly as I did that night, and I fervently believe my father in that the only thing that will ever outstrip the feeling I get from breathing life into a film will be the feeling I get from carrying my firstborn down the hall of the hospital. When my father says anything was the most profound and earth-shaking experience of his life, I and anyone who knows his history will listen very, very carefully.
Anyway, this has moved into a pretty significant digression, and is a bit disjointed at this point...but I feel like it's important tonight to be honest with myself, even if it comes at the expense of the writing. You've all, in reading this page, been handed a tiny little look at why it is I do what I do. And why working in an office will never, ever compare, and never suffice.
I feel like this kind of contemplation pretty much sums up my mood for the night. I'm spinning on what used to be Etcetera Radio from 1:00 to 5:00am tonight. I wish I had the record collection to hold up for four hours by myself, because while I think it will be fun tag-teaming with shmian, what I really want to do is turn the lights down, the sound up, and see what kind of life I can give to other people's music in such away that it becomes something of my own. I feel like pouring myself into the set tonight, and I don't feel like that's going to be easy to do with anyone there. Unfortunately, I don't have four hours worth of dark techno-progressive stuff.
I need to rediscover some of my old avenues of self-expression, I think. Watching one of the other groups last night (the only one with live instruments that weren't buckets) made me remember what it was like to play music that was no one else's, or at least to create it in real time instead of seeking self-expression in what basically amounts to glorified playback.
Tom Waits said of music in an interview (which I found, of all places, in the Anchorage Daily News), It's pretty amazing that you can listen to something that happened for seven minutes in a room before you were born, and it still has the power to move you.
I think that's pretty astute.
The question is, as always, how long this feeling will stick around. My money's on a couple hours at best. Why is everything so transient anymore?
In more tangible news, New Student Week is a strange and kind of isolating experience as a now-junior, now living off campus. I mean, it's all great being a Rescon and meeting all these freshmen who are excited and awed by this realized prospect of going to Northwestern, but at the same time there's a bit of bitterness to the realization that when I leave here forever, these kids will only just be getting to where I am now. I'm halfway to that point, and it's terrifying.
At least, tonight it is.
So I went to see the Kaleidoscope show last night to see a few different things--suddenlycarly in Purple Haze; acererak in Freshman Fifteen; Graffiti Dancers, whom I'd never seen but had heard about--and Boomshaka was on the bill (non-NU folks, think Blue Man Group vs. Stomp in an epic duel over an incredibly sexy group of dancers), and I've decided that I need to see every show they do within a hundred miles of me (wherever I am) for as long as I can. Seriously, they're that good, and they never fail to connect with the audience, and that's a bit of a feat when your audience is a bunch of drunk Northwestern students. I desperately want to get involved with this crew, somehow, but I came to the realization last night that I will never be able to sound design for them. When I get involved and invested in something, I start to pour myself out into it, and when it delivers on my investment, I go nuts. I would spend the entire show screaming and pumping my fists on the side of the stage, putting holes in my equipment and ripping off fader knobs as I worked. I would be a huge liability.
This is hard to believe, I think, for a lot of people who've only known me since Northwestern, but it's true--when Boy Wonder started to come together, on that last endless night before the premiere last year, I leaped out of my chair (on several different occasions), shoving it backward across the room, screaming and pumping my fists and dancing in sheer joy over this thing that I had created, pouring myself into this lifeless machine and manipulating tiny little virtual dials on two screens until suddenly I tapped the space bar and it spit back at me something that had taken on its own character, feeding off my energy, pouring that energy back into me and making the entire ordeal worth it infinite times over. A few people got a tiny taste of how much of me was in that soundtrack when, at the premiere, Byron burst out laughing at an inside joke placed in there just for him--and I nearly jumped out of my chair there, on the main floor of Tech Auditorium with the lights down. It's rare that I feel so strongly as I did that night, and I fervently believe my father in that the only thing that will ever outstrip the feeling I get from breathing life into a film will be the feeling I get from carrying my firstborn down the hall of the hospital. When my father says anything was the most profound and earth-shaking experience of his life, I and anyone who knows his history will listen very, very carefully.
Anyway, this has moved into a pretty significant digression, and is a bit disjointed at this point...but I feel like it's important tonight to be honest with myself, even if it comes at the expense of the writing. You've all, in reading this page, been handed a tiny little look at why it is I do what I do. And why working in an office will never, ever compare, and never suffice.
I feel like this kind of contemplation pretty much sums up my mood for the night. I'm spinning on what used to be Etcetera Radio from 1:00 to 5:00am tonight. I wish I had the record collection to hold up for four hours by myself, because while I think it will be fun tag-teaming with shmian, what I really want to do is turn the lights down, the sound up, and see what kind of life I can give to other people's music in such away that it becomes something of my own. I feel like pouring myself into the set tonight, and I don't feel like that's going to be easy to do with anyone there. Unfortunately, I don't have four hours worth of dark techno-progressive stuff.
I need to rediscover some of my old avenues of self-expression, I think. Watching one of the other groups last night (the only one with live instruments that weren't buckets) made me remember what it was like to play music that was no one else's, or at least to create it in real time instead of seeking self-expression in what basically amounts to glorified playback.
Tom Waits said of music in an interview (which I found, of all places, in the Anchorage Daily News), It's pretty amazing that you can listen to something that happened for seven minutes in a room before you were born, and it still has the power to move you.
I think that's pretty astute.