This Part of My Life I Call Dancing

April 18th, 2007Blog1 comment

The Pursuit of Happyness — I liked it. I knew I would like it before I started watching it — Will Smith is such a charismatic guy. But it’s also because I really like crowd-pleasers. I like populist stuff more than “art” — stories that get people through the rough tracts in their own lives. Things in which people see themselves. That’s what I like.

I like the interiors of cars more than the exteriors. I like designing interfaces for things. I am most interested in the parts of things and systems that human beings actually touch and manipulate — the things you make contact with. I think that a story needs to be immediately recognizable to the reader. It’s got to teach you how to read it like a video game teaches you how to play through its introductory levels.

As beings floating through the world we have to understand every new thing that we encounter before we can use it. When you open up a book for the first time or the lights go down in a movie theater, a good story will present you with a rosetta stone that teaches you how to interface with it. It could be the first line: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” It could be the first image.

I like stuff that makes contact with the reader/viewer. That’s the stuff I like the most.