I work with an amazing team of creative people across many disciplines and because it’s video games many of these people are younger than me and one of the things I’ve noticed about people in their 20s right now is that they don’t have all the bullshit cultural baggage that the Baby Boomers and their kids (my generation) carried around. 2001: A Space Odyssey is famous for being impenetrable and a lot of people my age have this “screw that movie” attitude. they resent being challenged, reset the respect the movie gets. Something to do with entitlement, I think.
But the guys I work with, younger guys, their attitude is “that movie was weird, what was going on?” They know something’s going on, they don’t mind saying “I didn’t get it” and they’re curious. I love that. No cultural baggage, no chip on their shoulder. Open curiosity. Intellectual curiosity, artistic curiosity.
One day someone asks me if I’ve seen 2001 and then, when I said I had, they didn’t say “did you like it?” They went straight to “what was that movie about? What was the Monolith? Why did HAL kill that guy?” and as I gave what I thought were my answers, this amazing dialog between me and a bunch of artists opened up and we all came away having noticed things and thought about things we hadn’t before.
So I figured, hey, why not write it all down. But that was boring. What was fun was talking about it. So I decided to do a podcast of sorts. I started by writing, I’m a writer, but after a couple of paragraphs I said “this is stupid.” It lacked the spontaneity of the original conversation so I just turned the mike on and started talking. That was surprisingly easy and this is the result.
Maybe someone will get a kick out of it, maybe someone will take it and do something interesting with it, put their own images to it, whatever. If there’s a positive response, maybe I’ll do more of these!