Evangelize Stuff that’s Great

August 20th, 2007Blog0 comments

HBO displayed some incredible wisdom today and renewed Flight of the Conchords for a second season.

I’m really happy about this. I just got the Conchords EP “The Distant Future” and am waiting for the full length album to release. If you haven’t seen this show yet, you must check it out. It gets my stamp of approval.

I believe very much in evangelizing stuff that’s great. There’s so much slag in the world that great stuff must be made visible to others in order to keep hope alive. Likewise, I’m also really interested in hearing what other people find great — especially smart people that I trust, since they tend to discover the most interesting stuff.

I read somewhere that people will often look at crappy movies/music/etc and say to themselves, hey — I can write a movie/music/book just as good as that crap! The anecdote went on to say that if you think like that, you should be thrown off a cliff. Do not aspire to mediocrity or to averageness. Seek out the best — what is the best to you — and aspire to do work that is as good as that. I spend a lot of time taking apart and analyzing the things I really love in order to figure out what makes them great. It requires emotional detatchment (which is hard when you like something so much) and a microscope for the fine threads that these things are woven from. But more often than not, you can get a big picture idea of what makes something great as a whole. One thing that great things often have in common is that the individual parts are excellent, but the summation is even greater — not just because of the combination, but because the elements elevate the entire thing in another direction.

For instance, the most recent ODC (Old Dirty Conservatory) Show. These shows will be getting a lot of evangelizing on this site in the coming months. These are amazing sketch shows with a lot of surprises. And whereas most sketch relies too much on surprises that are one-shot non-sequiturs or parodies, ODC shows feature surprises that are more like reveals — they tell more story. In fact, they complete the story, often in ways that are equally surprising and also incredibly funny. You’ll know what I mean when you go see their shows.

I love seeing great stuff. It’s like seeing the future open up in front of me, showing me methods and ideas I’ve never seen before — stuff that I can pick like fruit to incorporate into my own work. Basically, great stuff makes me better for having seen it. I learn something.