Moving toward emptiness.

Sitting here at my desk, trying to come up with something to post, I start to look around my room for inspiration. My room is a time capsule of me from middle school and early high school. It's almost as if the room has been vacuum sealed since Y2K;a paean to the po-mo,pre-9/11 teen on the verge of the digital revolution, preserved for whoever the beneficiaries of our fucked up world will be. I glance over at my CDs--Green Day, Matchbox Twenty, New Found Glory--all pop giants of a bygone era of physical media, when packaging and track order still meant something. In fact, I don't think I've paid for a single CD since my first year in college, when I, like the rest of my peers, discovered the joys of pirated media. While napster may have risen and fallen in a day, its wildly successful (and highly illegal) model ripped down the wall for its successors and phlebotomized the coffers of the big music machines. It's only a matter of time until all physical media disappears, and then what will litter the rooms of teens? Digital frames and posters? Laptop screens and Kindle readers? Xbox 360 and Nintendo DS? Iphones and Ipods? Teen rooms will lose the dust and clutter that scream life and personality and presence.

My room is the blueprint to my current incarnation and eventual, final form. It's weighty, tactile and odoriferous. It's a symphony of color and pattern. It sings the opus Julia. Without all the scraps of paper, the CD cases, the piles and piles of dusty books and games and dolls and figurines and doohickeys, the room becomes nothing but a room in the linguistic sense, lacking all the nostalgic weight that differs it from any other room dating from the time that rooms were rooms. When the day comes that techonology has completed its lobotomy of the physical history of humanity (and I'm becoming more bitterly convinced it will), I hope I'll have been buried deep in the dirtiest dirt in the most cedar of cedar coffins, keeping company with the earthworms and slugs and beetles whose little lives stretch longer than the span of human memory.

"The planet's turning but I cant stand still..."

After House last night, I start flipping channels, halfheartedly looking for something mindless to zone out to. Instead, I came across a "great couples on film" marathon on TMC. The film on deck was Adam's Rib (1949), AFI's 22nd Greatest Comedy of All Time. Being that I had hours of sleepless night ahead of me, I decided that it would be in my best interest to broaden my cinematic horizons. I was surprised at how sharp and modern the film still felt. Spencer and Tracy are absolutely electric, and their acid tongues cut through the tongue twisting dialogue with the ease of a champion fencer. However what surprised me most was how difficult it was for me to pay my full attention to the film. Unlike most of the product pumped out by studios and minimajors today, the films from the old school hollywood system relied heavily on dialogue and character to advance the story. More cutting meant more time in the editing room and more chance for mistake. There were no CGI effects, no cheap laughs and very few sight gags. To find the laugh you needed to follow the roadmap of dialogue.

The amount of concentration and single minded focus needed to enjoy this film meant that I couldnt be on my computer, the phone, or reading a book as I watched. I couldnt flip channels or grab a snack. In other words, I couldn't multi-task the film, a common occurrence for me and many of my peers these days, whether in the theater or at home. Consumption models have changed so drastically that its become nearly impossible for our minds to digest a single flow of information. Instead, we get fidgety, and mistaken this physical reaction for boredom.

Hopefully with practice this affliction will be reversible. It would be a shame to lose out on the beauty and charm of old celluloid hollywood because I can't sit still.

Ch-Ch-Changes

Turn and face the strain/ Ch-ch-changes/ Pretty soon now youre gonna get a little older/ Time may change me/ But I cant trace time

Sooo...Its been a while since I've paid any mind to Awkward Juxtaposition, but I plan to be back now, and better than ever! Nothing much has changed since you last heard from me. Ditched the fickle older man child, still living at home, still crashing in the city on weekends, still in need of money. However, I'm about to start interning at a company I've followed and admired since High School! Unlike the rest of the lethargic, slow to change industry, this company has remained on the cutting edge of distribution and sales tactics, all the while maintaining high standards and impeccable taste. I'll be working for both their sales team and their digital rights divisions--I think! They've expanded pretty rapidly in the last 6-8months, and I'm afraid that means there will be no job at the end of the rainbow for me. The state of the economy doesn't exactly help. All I can hope is that maybe their gamble on internet distribution will pay off and they'll make some serious cheddar. And that will coincide with people leaving/people being promoted. And the company will love me so much that they'll be begging me to take one of their open positions. Well that last part probably won't happen, but I can dream can't I?