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3/30/07

Whee! Posting from my mobile phone in a cab! Aint technology grand?

"The Show" is over

I spent tonight working on music.  Not even seriously composing, mostly just playing with instruments, listening to snippets of music, getting inspired.  I even played along to a few tracks from "Godspell", just seeing what I could remember of the piano parts on my keyboard.  It was incredibly relaxing, not feeling like I had to get anything done, and in the end, I actually wrote a few bars of music that could become something, sometime.  It certainly was the most therapeutic thing I've done in a while.

All of which is to explain why it's 1:46AM on a "school night" and I'm still up.  I don't usually stay up past midnight nowadays, without a big project sparking me on. If I do, it's staying up worrying about my future at the University, or my company's future.  Not that I have fears of either one of those things going wrong, but there's that level of anxiety that comes with growing responsibilities (and that doesn't seem to go away with growing older) that is tough to shake and causes many a sleepless night.

Then I happened to click on my bookmark for Ze Frank's "The Show", which I knew was ending this week.  I haven't been the most loyal viewer of the show, and I certainly haven't been much of an active SportsRacer (though I do have an account on THE ORG... you'll have to go figure out what that means for yourself, if you don't know...), but dammit, Ze has been quite an inspiration this year.

Without Ze, me and my buddies at Metaversal Studios wouldn't have started talking about our own wacky videoblog, "Flash Hates You!" (first episode coming soon), and we certainly would have had far less entertaining lunch breaks (it became a tradition to watch the episode together on one person's machine).

Actually, that last bit deserves more than parenthetical mention.  Part of what was so cool about "The Show" is how much it fostered community.  Sure, Ze is an amazing performer who can hold people's attention talking about the most meaningless things (I first encountered him at FlashForward a few years back, when he performed a monologue consisting of all of the most common spam emails strung together), but most of what "The Show" was about was bringing  the audience in to the production.  The SportsRacers made most of the show's intros, submitted ideas, even on one memorable occasion wrote the script.

And now it's over, and Ze's signoff was so sweet that I confess it made me a bit misty-eyed.  And I'm not the type to get mushy over mass media.  The last thing I really cried over that way was probably "Snoopy Come Home" when I was about 12 years old and feeling rather hormonal.

But it's probably not fair to call "The Show" mass media.  For one, it was incredibly "indie", although arguably the lines between the indies and the mainstream have blurred.  But beyond the semantics of "whether or not you're a sellout" (as it's so often put), the amazing thing about "The Show" is that it felt like a one-on-one experience, enhanced by the knowledge that you never were alone watching it.  Ze -> you -> the world -> Ze.

Anyway, I can't wait to see what the guy is up to next.  I don't think I've ever devoted a blog entry to fandom of another blogger before, but I don't think there are too many Ze Franks in the world.  Heaven knows, we could use a few more about now.

Imagine if you will: "This is George W Bush, thinking so you don't have to."  Oh wait, he already tries that.

Ze for president anyone?