Speak for Yourself

I've lived a good majority of my life under the assumption that most people don't care what I have to say, what I think or how I feel. I don't really feel sorry for myself about that. It's become a part of who I am in as healthy a way as is reasonable to expect. If anything, it's provided motivation to prove myself professionally and artistically in ways that speak for themselves. 

The idea of starting a blog seems to contradict this notion. But in a twist of inverted narcissism, I've found that my desire to verbally express myself weighs heavier than entrusting that responsibility to muted entities. 

And yet, blogs are such a wonderfully passive mode of expression. I have friends who have blogs. I have friends who have blogs that I didn't know had blogs. And I read very few of them. This is surely a reflection of my own fear of and discomfort with wallowing in self-indulgence. But the blogosphere is the perfect arena to confront such fears — the risk of overexposing oneself, and offending or boring others — to a readership that could just as easily be nonexistent as invisible. 

Ultimately, with the creation of this blog at this stage in my life, I'm growing less and less concerned with such things. Equating self-indulgence with self-expression (and vice versa) has kept me quiet, even anonymous, for ages. While my future professional and artistic ventures will still stand on their own as personal expressions, the intention of this blog is to illuminate thought and creative processes with all the minutial vacuity you've come to expect from the medium.

There'll be movies reviews, advertising analyses, recipes and food-related obsessiveness, and plenty of random thoughts that relate to my life and the way my synapses fire.

Furthermore, there are a couple of topics that'll surely be the benefactors of scrutinous elaboration.

SONGWRITING

As one might gather from the name of my blog, I'm consumed by the process of songwriting. More specifically, as a songwriter, I'm on an ever-intensifying quest for the perfect melody fueled by an irrational desire to define and deconstruct the science of melody-making. For almost 20 years now, I've devoted my life to this fascinating, rewarding and, admittedly, entirely unscientific pursuit. Ten years ago, my band American Boyfriends released their first and, thus far, only album, "What Love Can Be..."  — a collection of songs that I felt best represented what I'd learned about songwriting up to that point. In the ensuing decade, I've been honing a new batch of ideas that I feel far surpasses anything I've come up with before, melodies that have miraculously survived a ten-year test of time. 

That being said, I'm also equally intrigued by my own artistic assumptions. Just because I feel I'm creating something valid, unique or even profound, it doesn't mean anyone will agree. But what the art world lacks is individual perspective, and I definitely have one. So as I begin delving into the recording and production of these songs, it'll be interesting (to me) to explore everything from the basics of creative ambition to the specifics of music as I see it.

American Boyfriends' 2001 award-winning debut.

MEDIA BLASTERS

For six complicated years, I worked for this cult DVD company in New York City, as a publicity director and, then, production supervisor. I put my name, reputation and sanity on the line for this company, all of which sustained various levels of depletion over those years. Conversely, I've never felt more pride and satisfaction than I did, and still do, for the projects I had significant hand in. 

Through this blog, I will go into great detail as to how I came to work at Media Blasters and cover the debilitating adversities, regular heartbreaks and unheralded triumphs that defined my tour of duty. My mission isn't to expose Media Blasters as the evil corporation portions of the "fan community" seem convinced it is, a perception I (single-handedly?) spent six years trying to reverse. 

There are plenty of stories to be told, from the tales behind specific DVD releases to the pressures of working within the complex parameters of the industry. Such extrapolation is bound to incidentally illuminate the Media Blasters experience, which could just as easily debunk negative perceptions as confirm them. My intention, however, is to be as impartial as a first-hand account can be. We'll see what it ultimately becomes.

A tragedy and a nervous breakdown hang over
Media Blasters' DVD release of HEROES TWO.

Only a guy so full of trepidation would go to such lengths to explain and justify his desire to blog. All in all, this is just another blog like any other blog you choose to read or not read, so full of delusions of grandeur and relevance. Except this one's mine.