Hyperkult

After the rain, Napa, CA

As I’ve taken the time to slow down and refocus both my energy and attention span lately, my writing has slackened in kind. I’d expected to have something to say about New York Fashion Week (didn’t flip through one slideshow), the Olympics (missed them completely), or the upcoming Oscars (still haven’t seen Avatar), but the opposite is true.

There’s never a dearth of blogging fodder, just an occasional lack of steam to write about any one of many topics. Instead I’ll share something that held my rapt attention last week: a Human Media piece on editor, composer, and artist Tucker Stilley. I could wax philosophical about the powerful segment, but I think it’s best to simply listen, and that I’d probably spoil it with a wordy synopsis. So listen.

J'taime. Photo: Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo in 'Pierrot le fou'

Every year around Valentine’s Day I embark on a personal music project: create super-duper, holiday-themed playlist for a coterie of friends who care to listen. I really enjoy the process and absolutely adore V-Day, however constructed and commercialized it may be. Any excuse to shamelessly play Roxette, right?

Though I’m something of a pop culture zealot, I’ve managed to miss out on many of the biggest entertainment phenomena of our time—often deliberately so. I’ve never seen a Lord of the Rings film nor read any of the books, don’t know what The Secret is, am vampire-averse, and, most offensively (depending on how you look at it), have altogether avoided Harry Potter mania.

Among Potterphiles, author J.K. Rowling is a veritable god. While I don’t share this enthusiasm, after watching her commencement speech to Harvard’s graduating class of 2008 I have garnered an enormous amount of respect for Rowling. And, to further prove that I am as contradictory as they come, I’ll admit that I discovered this video via my Facebook friend feed (perhaps a “repost of a post of a thing that was seen on a blog”).

Her speech, an earnest and thoughtful meditation on “the fringe benefits of failure,” resonated with me. Over the past year my own confrontations with failure have forced me to question my beliefs, motivations, and what continues to buoy my optimism in the face of shit-tasticness. We all need a little pep talk sometimes, and Rowling’s speech helped restore my waning faith this week. I hope it does the same for you.

Totally unrelated post-script: I stole this blog entry title from the show I’m about to see tonight—a triple-bill of Jogger, Daedelus, and Nosaj Thing. This remix is magical in its own right: