Impeccable Tastes

The internet gets blamed for a lot of bad stuff, and it’s mostly true. It’s mostly us, and our inability to stay away from the instant gratification, right? We just keep clicking, and clicking, and clicking, and suddenly a couple of hours are gone. Compound that over a week, and you’ve probably wasted one out of seven days just scrolling through garbage. I remember when the net first started. I remember being obsessed with the Animaniacs, and going to my Uncle’s house, and he had a computer, and I got on there and went to the Warner Brother’s kids website (that they advertised on tv.) This was after waiting for the dial up to connect, with the bee-boop-bee-boop KSSSSHHHH sound. It was all very intense, and you didn’t take a moment of it for granted.

The website took minutes to load up, and there at the top were GAMES and there were images!! I printed out a picture of the Animaniacs on a piece of regular paper, and couldn’t even believe that I’d gotten such a thing free of charge. It was totally mind-boggling. The paper was all warped by the heavy amount of ink, and the image came out all super small, but it didn’t really matter. I felt like I’d played the system.

Then we got music for free. Limewire, etc. If you know you know. I spent hours queuing up songs — sometimes shitty low-quality versions of songs. Songs that, up until then, we could only really get on the radio. I made it my mission to get every song I’d ever heard downloaded on the family computer. Every so often you’d end up with a racist anthem or something weird instead of what you wanted but again, it didn’t really matter. We’d played the system (this time for real, although some of us got calls from the feds). I remember the stoner kids bringing lists to me of hiphop songs from South Park Mexican and Cyprus Hill, plus five bucks for me to burn them a disk.

Then came the MP3 players, so you didn’t have to load up disks anymore. That is when things really opened up. The IPOD and the ZUNE. If you’re under thirty you probably don’t remember the ZUNE. That’s fine. This is when we started swapping MASSIVE catalogs of music. My buddy Nate unloaded an 8,000 song catalog onto my laptop, and I gave him what I had in turn. His shit was nicely organized, mine wasn’t. He really opened me up to a bunch of new music. I remember just ingesting as much as I could — if you had a CD you paid for, I was going to take it and rip it onto my computer. I was the music man, along with Nate.

I remember I used to make mixes for people. I made a mix for Katie and I made one for Casey. Katie turned red, and she made me a mix back. Hers had Yo La Tengo and other stuff I’d never heard. That’s how I learned to respect people. Y’see, because, looking at someone you only learn so much — especially if they’re quiet. Katie was quiet, but she was colorful, and she wore a million crazy bracelets. I was an arrogant boy and I might’ve assumed she was stupid or lacking in substance, until I heard her mix. After that, I reassessed my opinion of her. She was great. Casey gave me back cd’s too: Elliott Smith, whom I cherish to this day, and the Shins. They were both great. That was just a great era. I’m gonna make myself sick if I think about it too much.

Last, from that era, I discovered MOVIE LISTS on amazon. People had recommended film lists, and I spent hours deep-diving into lists. You’d click on one, and investigate the films that interested you, then while looking at whatever film (for example say, IN THE COMPANY OF MEN) they’d recommend you Palindromes by Todd Solondz, and then you’d end up seeing another list associated with that, and continue along. Each list had anywhere from 5-30 movies, and each movie had a little tag-line for why the person was recommending it beneath it. This, mind you, was back when there were LESS movies, so being recommended obscure films was something more novel then today, where I could not tell you any of the three hundred films that were released this month.

So fast forward to today. The internet did it’s thing. It exploded, and guys like me who stood next to the nuclear blast all ended up getting fried in some sense. The kids now are like the babies born in the nuclear fallout, meaning they’re reasonably equipped to handle the fucked-up landscape of today. They’re even learning to turn their nose up to porn! My, if we’d had the information they have today. I guess it’s like all of the old people that died from smoking, and kids of from my era going “What the hell were you guy’s thinking? Didn’t you know that shit was bad for you?”

However, and perhaps like smoking, these kids are all unaware of how much fun we had before the overstimulation took it’s toll on us. The gradual increase of MORE MORE MORE. Music, movies, entertainment, at our fingertips. The greedy hoarding, the attempt to absorb all of it, and the eventual burnout… it was a high like no other. Riding the wave was… well, I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Now, my dopamine is depleted and nothing surprises me because I have, I am convinced, seen just about everything. Or at least, I was convinced… until this afternoon.

Yesterday I watched John Cassavetes, and I’d never really dug into his work before. It was sensational. I wish I’d have caught it back then, in my gluttonous days, but then I might not have appreciated it so much. I appreciate it because it aligns with my sensibilities now as a creator. I’m a creator now, not a consumer, because once you’re burned out on ingesting it you go into manufacturing. So I reconnected with my love of that pure art, the art attached to — here. Pause, and let me take a detour so I can make an appropriate comparison…

I used to wear these Dockers sweaters, because I thought they looked cool. No idea why. They were yuppie sweaters, and I’d go pick them out. They were like caramel colored, with strange striped patterns. I think I thought I looked sophisticated. I was also a fan of boots; Timbaland style, but actually the brand was LUGZ. I saw them advertised on TV and thought they were grand, so I’d wear those too. Then I’d wear my Lee pipes and various other baggie pants, with a DC shoes beanie. So really, it was a cobbled together style of my own design. I remember a very eclectic girl Willow telling me “I thought you were wearing those sweaters to be ironic.” No, the thought hadn’t crossed my mind. I wore it all because I loved it all, and it made me feel good.

And I connect this to art, because, at a certain time there was a purity to my consumption. I watched artists who made choices based on what they loved to the fucking bone. There was no compromise. I remember being that kind of guy. John Cassavetes made me remember being that guy. I was thinking about it today — man, if I ever made a soundtrack to my movie, why not use the saxophone? I used to play the saxophone, and I used to love the saxophone. Who says I can’t use the fucking saxophone?

And so anyways, I had an inkling of this feeling, and then I looked up John Cassavetes on spotify, and I ended up finding this very unique playlist. I popped it on, and every single song was something different, something I’d never heard. I was instantly reminded of the Amazon movie recommendation lists.

This was a six-hour playlist curated by someone, who’s spent a lifetime (or decent amount of time, anyways) digging into music, more and more obscure, connected in some way to something earlier on in the journey that they embarked upon. I loved it. This is why the internet is great. All of my emotions came flooding back tenfold; the joy of diving into the deep end with my interests and not giving a fuck what anyone thinks. Finding one thing I like, then going levels beyond to find another, and another, until you’re in your own little world. How awesome.

The internet gets blamed for a lot of bad stuff, and it’s mostly true. However, the internet is also replete with priceless jewels; of people longing to share their deepest joys and obsessions. The Katie’s and the Caseys are out there, and they’re willing to share what they’ve gathered. I’m starting to feel like a consumer again. It’s a dazzling feeling, like being reborn.