It's Just THAT Good

So last night, I watched 2 things - This American Life (the Showtime version of the brilliant radio show) and The Animation Show, a collection of animation put together by Mike Judge and Don Herzfeldt. It showcases some of the more incredible and hysterical animation I've ever had the pleasure to see.

These particular pieces of entertainment are very pure examples of people at the utmost top of their games. This American Life is such an unbelievably produced show. The producers find these stories that might seem completely inane and find the heart and humor in them. They take this heart and this humor and bring it to the surface in this often touch, often hilarious and always beautifully sensitive way. I just marvel at everyone involved in the show and everything involved in making it so outstanding.

And some of the animations in The Animation Show are absolutely too ridiculous to describe. And what range too. Some of my favorite pieces in the entire collection are the extremely simple but absolutely hilarious Don Herzfeldt pieces. They're literally stick figure animations, but the scripts are so damn funny, and the amount of expression and life he is able to put into these frankly stupid drawings is crazy!

And then there's Fallen Art. If you haven't had the pleasure of seeing this completely beautiful, disturbing, deliciously inventive piece of animation, go to YouTube right now and watch it. I promise you won't be disappointed. It never gets old and I'm just in awe every time of how someone came up with this idea and made into something this amazing.

Anyway. I was watching this with my lovely girlfriend Shannon, and we had a little discussion about how truly phenomenal some of the pieces in the animation collection are, and how we wished that we had ever done something that phenomenal with OUR lives. It wasn't much of discussion - just one of those, "Man, I need to create things!" kind of thing. It's a conversation that comes up often enough, considering she's a graphic designer and I'm a (very much aspiring) producer/filmmaker...etc.

But I just started listening to an radio episode of This American Life a minute ago, and the conversation sort came back to me.

And I realized how much I haven't done nearly enough "creating" in my life and that I'd better get on it or I'm gonna miss out. Don't get me wrong - there are people who start new professions and new hobbies and new talent that they never knew they had at the age of 75. And that's fantastic in and of itself, but I certainly don't want to wait until I'm 75 to discover that I'm capable of writing a brilliant detective novel or take prize-winning photographs of objects that might look completely uninteresting otherwise.

So that's it. This post is basically for me, I suppose. I just wanted to tell myself that I shouldn't just keep having these conversations about how I want to create my own work. I should actually freakin' do it. So if you know me and you see me, please feel free to ask me if I've done any creating lately. 'Cause I obviously need a kick in the ass, and maybe if I actually have to tell people that, "No, I've been meaning to do this and this and that, but I haven't yet..." I'll get embarrassed enough to actually do it one day.