As a corollary to my post the other night, I felt the need to comment on just how easy it is for one to concentrate on one’s past.

It’s like comfort food; the Mac n’ Cheese or Taco Bell of the emotional psyche.  It is so much easier to look backward, opine on one’s own mistakes, regrets, could have beens, and all of that sort.  It’s easy because there’s jack shit you can do about it, but you can pat yourself on the back for finally having figured out that You Were Wrong, or The Thing You Could Have Done That Would Have Made Things Better, or The Reason You Were An Asshole (See, It Wasn’t Really Your Fault! mix).

These mental labyrinths are quite a fun distraction, but ultimately they mean neither jack nor shit.  It’s one thing to be self-aware and to self-examine, but if one does nothing with that moving forward, it’s nothing but self-indulgent masturbation (much like, one could argue, this blog entry is).  It’s the reason we like to listen to songs from our past and relive The Good Old Days (which usually weren’t really that good).  Yes, there is a value there, but if you spend too much time you are just avoiding reality by wrapping yourself into the gauzy folds of recollection.

It all comes down to moving forward, doesn’t it?  All the opinions in the world about one’s own past are meaningless because the past is just that — past.  The best that can be gleaned is the lessons of non-indulgent reflection, and then use those lessons learned moving forward.

And there’s the rub.  Moving forward is hard.  Moving forward is difficult.  And moving forward with self-awareness and insight… well that’s just a motherfucking responsibility.

I suppose this is why so many of us in this modern generation of Post-X-But-Generation-Y-Seems-Like-Made-Up-Bullshit find ourselves in such a bind in our thirties.  We gorge in our twenties — on experience, life, sex, love — searching for meaning and purpose, and then we get to the next decade and realize that that purpose thing we were searching for, is something we need to make  for ourselves.

A lot of us have gotten jumpstarts lately.  This guy gave a lot of us an opportunity to make something, and that movement that we created is now turning into this movement.  Pretty exciting stuff.  It felt great.  But the lesson there, of course, isn’t that some guy did this cool thing.  The lesson here is that we — individuals all across the world — became engaged and did this cool thing.  And that owning your own destiny can feel pretty damn good.

Which brings me to my long-winded final point; the basic concept that moving forward, as difficult as budging that inertia-bound rock from zero may be, is the only real way to feel contentment.  At least that’s been my experience.  Trapping yourself in looking backward is a direct route to misery.

I have a friend who has been doing this lately; he and I have forged a strong friendship over mutually doing this, in fact.  But lately, it’s been rubbing me the wrong way.  Like most people, I am excellent at seeing my own foibles in others, and of course when others do them it makes me morally outraged.

And that’s the lesson for me.  Yes, a quick glance in the rearview mirror is good.  It will let you know whether this turn, or that lane change, is a good idea.

But if you just stare in it too long, you’ll never see what’s coming at you.

It’s sometime after 4 in the morning. My girlfriend is in the bedroom asleep; I’ve been in the office working for the past 6 hours trying to transfer an old blog from Typepad.

From outside the window, the sounds of a helicopter chopping through the night sky. This is definitely a noisier part of town compared to my old place; touches of college and the old place I had at Hollywood and La Brea.

I’ve been listening to Walking Wounded, by Everything But The Girl. An ex-girlfriend (more of an ex-lover, if I were to be honest — I wasn’t really engaging in any boyfriending at the time) gave me the CD when we were doing whatever it was you would call what we were doing, along with Jeff Buckley’s Grace. She’d said the two CDs explained how she felt about our relationship.

I’d never listened to the Everything But The Girl record until tonight. Not that it would have made a difference; I don’t think I would have been unable to understand her point back then, anyway.

I understand it now.

Very late at night — or very early in the morning — are lousy times for regret or recollection.

Best to turn in.

Thanks to Angelman, the audio referenced in my previous post has now been retrieved from a 12-year-old VHS tape.

Next up: proper transfer of the old Super-8 material.

(This will be followed by Phase Three: Merging of audio and video into viewable form, and then Phase Four: OPERATION UPLOAD).

Yes, I am making this sound like a much bigger deal than it actually is. But it’s the holidays, man — what’s wrong with a sense of wonder and impending joy?

So, I’m in need of what is appearing to be a rather difficult item to find:

A Mitsubishi HS-U770 VHS VCR.

I’ve found a couple on eBay, but they all seem to be busted (exhibiting the exact same mechanical failure that my old U770 did, in fact).  If anybody out there on the Internets has one that is working that they don’t need, or can manage to track one down, it would be much appreciated.

Tracking this puppy down is one of the last steps before I can finalize the content for the “Student Films” section of Flicker Shows here at SkinMech, and if  you want to see some real-life working filmmakers (directors whose films you may know!  Excitement!) acting completely ridiculous in some short films made over 10 years ago, then the Student Films section will be for you.

A quick preview of the content to come?

“Breaking & Entering”

“No Content”

“Life Fast, Die Young: The Larry Burnstein Story”

“An Experiment in Sleep Deprivation”

“Lucky Pierre”

and a not-so-coincidentally entitled “Skin Mechanic”

Yes folks.  All of this exciting content will be yours.  All that’s standing between it and you is a VCR that first went into production sometime around 1995.

Thanks in advance for any help.

So, a few of you apparently realize that I dig the Nine Inch Nails.  (I don’t know how anybody would figure this out, but what’re you gonna do).

Anyway, something interesting happened this morning. Trent Reznor (who is Nine Inch Nails, as the liner notes for Pretty Hate Machine remind you) updated his blog on the band’s website with an entry about how he’d wanted to film their current tour in James Cameron’s new 3-D system, so they could release it in theatres and on video. It didn’t happen (thanks mostly to Interscope Records, it sounds like), but the pot-stirring nugget was at the bottom of the entry:

This was an amazing tour and production – certainly the best thing I’ve ever been involved with and likely the final tour for NIN on this scale…

The shows we have announced in 2009 and any more that may be announced will be a completely different approach with some different personnel and will likely be the last for the foreseeable future.

Yep. Nine Inch Nails. One of the best live shows you’ll ever see. Getting ready to call it a day on the big venue rock n’ roll touring thang.

When I first read this, I was bummed out; Nine Inch Nails is a band I came to love right in college as I entered a massive period of transition in my life, and Reznor’s music helped me get a handle on feelings I didn’t know what to make of at the time.

Music is great like that; it’s one of the things that makes it such a unifying art form. And live shows, for me, have always been a way of tapping into that emotional immediacy you identify with certain pieces of music.

On the other hand, I was also excited by the news. Touring has got to be grueling, no matter how successful the artist. And I’ve got to believe that at this point, playing “Head Like A Hole”, “Hurt” and “Closer” aren’t the joy they once were; you play those kind of songs because they’re what people expect when they go see NIN — you don’t play them because they’re what excited you.

And for some of us that have been seeing Reznor play live shows for 15 years or longer, I think it’s safe to say that many of us cherish the moments in between the standards — the new and surprising moments of a live show — rather than the standards themselves.

This last tour pushed the audience in ways I didn’t expect, with selections from both the Year Zero and Ghosts I-IV records. It’s rare that an artist is able to, in the middle of a show, completely switch up the way in which they’ve contextualized themself and make it work. Some people grumbled at the shows I saw when the instrumental Ghosts sections came around; for me, they were the highest of the highlights. A moment when the live experience ceased to be about the lyrical literalism concerts lean toward — audiences chanting “Fist Fuck” in unison — and instead became an organic experiment in mood and texture. Moments of real musical exploration, that required those of us in the audience to not simply recite the songs we already knew in our head, but to stop and listen.

I’m not sure what the next phase of Nine Inch Nails will be, live or otherwise.  And I’m not ignorant to the reality that these grand tours are extraordinarily expensive to put on, and given that Reznor is footing the bill himself there may be a fiscal component to this decision. But I do know, that while Trent Reznor has brought his career and music and band back from the dead over the past four years, he hasn’t done things the easy way. He didn’t simply put up the stage show from The Fragile days, and run it into the ground playing shows for $150 a seat. He didn’t release a Greatest Hits with one new song to justify an extra year of touring. He’s kept putting out records (some fun, some challenging), he’s experimented with new methods of distribution, and tried to find new ways to engage his fans — all the while being mindful of pushing himself creatively, so he never finds himself in the Mick Jagger “Satisfaction” trap.

So while yours truly is excited and nervous (terrified?) about the transition gauntlet I’m about to enter, I’m excited to see that one of my favorite artists is looking to close one door for himself, to see where the next one will lead him.

I may like it. I may hate it. But that’s really incidental. The truth of it all is that artists create. It’s what they do. And each and every strong artistic voice out there following its path and pushing hard to redefine and refine itself is a boon for each and every one of us, no matter what we think of the work itself.

So cheers, Mr. Reznor.  It’s been a blast being on the trip thus far, and I look forward to whatever comes next.