I'm recovered from all my travels. I'm still taking today off though. I have a lot of errands to do. But in the meantime, I have a question to raise, and perhaps the question points more to the questioner than the answer.
I'm becoming frustrated with some of my friends. What, praytell, could create such frustration?
I'm beginning to feel that a few of the old guard have descended into that trap of dismissing the culturally popular as trash/stupid/intellectually insignificant claptrap etc. as if they are the first people to do so in the history of post-collegiate intellectualism. I wonder sometimes if these people are aware that I do, in fact, now work in the sphere of popular entertainment. I am not sure what I can do with people who refuse to acknowledge the possibility that a Hollywood remake of a foreign film could possibly be better than the original, even though the original was a meandering, plodding mess with a brilliant story premise. I guess it just comes down to criteria of what's "better," and if in fact these seperate things that come from such different places can be truly compared. And, of course, whether or not such comparisons are useful.
I suppose I monitor myself fairly constantly for slipping into irrelevancy of the soul because working in the film industry in Los Angeles can make anyone become a styrofoam snowflake floating in a very strange snowglobe. I definitely get caught in the swirling currents now and again, wheeling by the glitter and the shiny smiling faces, seeing the outside world distorted as through a curved pyrex window. But, as a little styrofoam snowflake I settle to the bottom as the currents ebb. As I gently float down, I can catch my breath and cast my eyes about me for what things have not been shaken by the movement of the globe. Look! That gingerbread house remains, as does that candy cane arch, and the plastic carolers in front of it. A few other familiar faces resolve out of the glittering snow, all points of reference to compare myself against until the globe is shaken again and I am swept back up into the blizzarding currents of air.
I despair of my friends who have not seen that they are in their own snowglobes. They may be different globes, but they are all on the same shelf as mine, have the same basic architechture, and they all contain within them the same terrible trap - all the fizzing glitter (showbiz or otherwise) can blind you to the other snowglobes on the shelf. Or that there is that little plug at the bottom of the globe you could pull out so you could drain the water out. If you want to, that is.
