I live in the past!!!
Hey all. How was your week?
Aside from some of the requisite meltdowns at my job, mine was pretty good. I'm finally putting the touches on my home office and getting back to work on some personal projects that I'm fairly excited about. One I can't tell you about (*boo!*), and one I can (*Yay!*), so let's get into that.
I'm currently working on a series of interviews with Japanese pop culture entertainment execs and talent from all over the country. One of the things I love about talking to these people is that their attitude towards discussing their work is so much more steadfastly positive and exciting than your average actor's or muscian's.
I think this is because they're painfully aware that any interest at all is a good indicator that they could present their product to somebody, which is becoming a rarity these days. We have a pretty high signal-to-noise ratio going with pop culture in our times, and it's easy for things to get lost. Case in point: I've waited years to watch Ergo Proxy, and it's sitting here on my (new) bookshelf, staring at me ready to go, and I've only gotten through two episodes like a doofus.
But I own it, which is nice. ;)
As I've worked on this project I've been able to concretely realize that pop culture is no longer aiming itself at me. I am no longer "the target audience." The fact that I WAS part of this group in any way, shape, or form for any period of time was probably a fluke... after all did Nirvana know they'd be "my band" growing up, or was it just serendipity? How come Evangelion was HUGE and not my beloved Paltabor? To be fair, I dig them both, but in my ideal world Unsane would still be on MTV and I could walk into any Borders and buy the rest of the City Hunter boxed sets that got nuked in last year's flood or lost when I moved back from Tokyo.
(I lose ONE BOX moving home from overseas and it includes musical equipment, several out-of-print dvds, and my effing Japanese flashcards!)
I guess as I've moved from "avid collector" to "pop culture analyst and armchair theoretician", I've come to realize that I can't hope to embrace the whole of the world in an empirical sense. I can only surmise, analyze, and comment upon the things I feel I am best at and hopefully gain an appreciation for other interests in an heuristic manner.
But man, when I look back on things, and considering what a shitty childhood I had in so many respects, at the very least I can look back and say "Appleseed was 10 times cooler than fuckin' K-on!"
;)
Aside from some of the requisite meltdowns at my job, mine was pretty good. I'm finally putting the touches on my home office and getting back to work on some personal projects that I'm fairly excited about. One I can't tell you about (*boo!*), and one I can (*Yay!*), so let's get into that.
I'm currently working on a series of interviews with Japanese pop culture entertainment execs and talent from all over the country. One of the things I love about talking to these people is that their attitude towards discussing their work is so much more steadfastly positive and exciting than your average actor's or muscian's.
I think this is because they're painfully aware that any interest at all is a good indicator that they could present their product to somebody, which is becoming a rarity these days. We have a pretty high signal-to-noise ratio going with pop culture in our times, and it's easy for things to get lost. Case in point: I've waited years to watch Ergo Proxy, and it's sitting here on my (new) bookshelf, staring at me ready to go, and I've only gotten through two episodes like a doofus.
But I own it, which is nice. ;)
As I've worked on this project I've been able to concretely realize that pop culture is no longer aiming itself at me. I am no longer "the target audience." The fact that I WAS part of this group in any way, shape, or form for any period of time was probably a fluke... after all did Nirvana know they'd be "my band" growing up, or was it just serendipity? How come Evangelion was HUGE and not my beloved Paltabor? To be fair, I dig them both, but in my ideal world Unsane would still be on MTV and I could walk into any Borders and buy the rest of the City Hunter boxed sets that got nuked in last year's flood or lost when I moved back from Tokyo.
(I lose ONE BOX moving home from overseas and it includes musical equipment, several out-of-print dvds, and my effing Japanese flashcards!)
I guess as I've moved from "avid collector" to "pop culture analyst and armchair theoretician", I've come to realize that I can't hope to embrace the whole of the world in an empirical sense. I can only surmise, analyze, and comment upon the things I feel I am best at and hopefully gain an appreciation for other interests in an heuristic manner.
But man, when I look back on things, and considering what a shitty childhood I had in so many respects, at the very least I can look back and say "Appleseed was 10 times cooler than fuckin' K-on!"
;)