While it isn't intentionally that I haven't posted anything since one month and one day ago, there are certainly some reasons for it. It's kind of nice to know that even without adding content, 313 visitors will still manage to make their way to the site. I don't want to apologize for my absence but I still have an interest in putting an explanation into the cosmos that is the blogosphere (it occurs to me that this is a faulty metaphor, as a layer of the atmosphere would be a separate thing from the cosmos, but I apparently think it's better to criticize my own word choices rather than hitting the backspace button a few times).
First of all, the so-called real world has begun to take more of a priority in my life. Being married, owning a house, and taking my job seriously enough to start using the word "career" takes up a lot of one's energies and attention. On the one hand, I'm learning all sorts of new skills, up to and including those involved in re-flooring a pantry. I'm also learning more about what it takes to be successful in a professional setting. Whether or not I'm succeeding in being successful is an entirely different story, but the theory is less foreign and burdensome. On the other hand, I simply have less time available for things like watching movies, let alone writing about them. Now, it seems that when there is free time available, I have been scared to watch a movie because I will also have to invest the time afterward to write something coherent and worthwhile. Once that feeling started, things began to get backlogged and doing critical analysis felt more like an unfulfilled responsibility than something that was fun to do.
This ties in with the second big reason: the fact that I bought a great new set of speakers. Hearing music pumping out of something other than cheap no-name earphones or computer speakers has reminded me of an excitement that I haven't felt since I got a discman for Christmas in or around 1998. I remember popping in albums like The Barenaked Ladies' Stunt, Matchbox Twenty's More Than You Think You Are, or The Smashing Pumpkins' Machina and laying there in bed, listening to these albums on repeat for hours on end. I would lose sleep because I was too busy listening to music.
Now, doing the rating, cataloguing, and criticism of any album I pick up, I am not listening to music. As a biological function, yes, I am hearing the music that is pumping through ear buds into my brain, but the process is more one of consumption than immersion. By approaching the blog like a second job, I have pushed myself further and further from the essential core fact that I really like music. I am a fan of the media arts, but I have lost touch with the ability to enjoy them. So, the lack of blogging is not so much an abandonment, it is more of a detox period. I am re-learning how to enjoy music for the sake of music, movies for the sake of movies, video games for the sake of video games, and television for the sake of television. By confining myself to a schedule, there have been opportunities that I have missed out on, whether it is not starting to watch a series because I know I won't have the time to review it (Sons Of Anarchy), not watching a movie even though I had it out of the library (Annie Hall and Fargo) for the same reason, or even just being worried about listening to music I have already heard for fear that if I am not constantly listening to new music, I will fall behind the pack and be unable to say anything worthwhile about the music I'm listening to.
It's not that I want to stop experiencing these things with any level of intellectualism. To do so would be untrue to the training and education that have partially shaped the person that I am. No, it's just that I don't want to be scared to watch, listen, and experience things just because I'm not going to be able to commit to writing about them. So I'm going to listen to music again. In fact, I'm listening to Bruce Springsteen's The Rising for the first time since I reviewed it in November 2009. This is an album that I have given a rating equivalent to 4.4 stars, making it one of the 15 best records I have ever heard. Yet I haven't listened to it for a year and a half because I have been too busy consuming other music for the sake of keeping up with an imaginary, self-imposed quota. To me, that's utterly insane.
Now, I'm not going to be going crazy with this, solely focusing on things I have experienced before, and never bothering to talk about anything new that I come across; to do so would be just as dishonest to myself and my neutoric, categorical nature. But, I'm hoping that it's all going to be done with a better focus, a better central idea. I don't want to categorize and rate the media arts in order to throw words onto a website. No, I want to categorize and rate things so that I can point people in the right direction and let them know what the really good stuff looks like. And, when I feel like looking back, I'll be able to heed my own advice. When I'm unsure of what album to choose off of the shelf, I will be able to knowingly pick out the gems and really listen to great music, not because reviewing it will get my website hits, but because listening and truly experiencing is nothing less than what the best music deserves.
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