Almost Famous/Untitled

"The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool." - Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs.

We live in this state of constant acquisition. We buy, consume, and buy some more. We shelve the things we had to have in favor of new things we have to have...and then what happens to the thing we had to have yesterday? What was the point of acquiring that? Asking those kinds of questions sort of led me to Little Round Mirrors.

People like me connect with film and music in a visceral way. Owning a copy is our way of attempting to reconnect in that way, as though a physical copy preserves that connection (not necessarily). I'm sure this is a holdover from a bygone era when album cover art was bigger than our heads, literally and figuratively, and we could play records and stare at the liner notes and wonder for hours while incense and candles burned, and that faint, musty smell of old record covers and the petroleum scent of vinyl filled us with the stuff of adolescent dreams. We could do this over and over. Or maybe that was just me.

But we are lucky if we can revisit even a tinge of that initial, connected feeling, when a film or album grabbed us and shook us. I know many people who have no idea what I'm talking about and say dismissive shit like "you have too much time on your hands." To a great many people, this stuff is all background noise behind their important lives, and that's fine. I hope they feel connected to something, and they don't begrudge me this, my own thing, you know? I can be optimistic.

Almost Famous hit me at a time when I needed a film to validate all the things I cared about — in a way this is the anti-High Fidelity, which was the film that made me question the things I love and how they can be viewed as superficial, as if my life had no meaning because I care about this stuff instead of, you know, houses and babies and all. Almost Famous is a kind of vindication. Here's a film that depicts people who feel so deeply connected to music because, to them, this is real. Everything else is for everyone else. Almost Famous made me feel like less of a freak because I found freaks like me. Belonging, even among fictional characters and faraway strangers, adds value to what I've felt all along and diminishes the loneliness. I'm pretty sure Maslow was talking about this stuff.

Add to that my own obsessive-compulsive desire to collect, which is likely due to control-freak tendencies and my reluctance to change (recordings are playable over and over, virtually immutable), and the result is a house full of physical media that I promise myself I will enjoy someday. But time fades away, writ Neil Young, and everything and everyone around me changes even if these collections don't.

Acquiring something takes seconds. Connecting again takes much more time and effort — more than most people can spare. Oh, and sharing that stuff with somebody else? You're lucky if you find one person like you, who hears your offer of wanting to watch Almost Famous for the umpteenth time and says, "I'll be right over."

Mostly, it'll be you on your own. I hate being alone with this stuff. I hate seeing or hearing something amazing and wanting to immediately play it over again so someone else can catch it, and there's nobody around. I hate even more when there is someone around and they don't get it. Maybe hate is too strong.

I just find myself wanting to connect to others and explain why this shit matters so much and why we should not ignore an opportunity to feel that ache, that pang of bittersweet memories and that moment of identification with a character, or a moment when a song swells and actors speak words and we shudder.

I want to share that, but art doesn't always work that way.