Pocket Symphony

It’s about 7pm on Sunday night, and I’m sitting in a Hollywood coffee shop with a couple of friends. They’re here working on movie scripts - participating in Script Frenzy, where writers are encouraged to complete an entire screenplay in a single month. I would very much like to participate, since it has been years since I have completed a single long-form creative project. However, it’s already the 20th of the the month, and I’ve got plans for several nights in the next two weeks - it ain’t gonna happen. That’s not to say that I don’t plan to get back to writing… but for now, this will have to do.

Quick flashback: When I was in 8th grade, my favorite tome was The Book of Lists.

Essentially a compendium of mostly useless information, The Book of Lists (which is still in print, by the way) spoke to the obsessive in me. I read it all the time - my friend Tom describes it as “The best bathroom book ever” - and while it didn’t make me a better person, it helped me understand that nothing is truly unique, and for every odd piece of trivia, there are several more weirder pieces just like it.

Three years later, I had an AP US History teacher named Tim Cullen who would pepper his lessons with pieces of trivia. Cullen argued that not only did these tidbits humanize the figures we were studying, but at some point, somewhere down the line, we’d be at a cocktail party with some big hotshot, and our knowledge of the quirks of Mary Todd Lincoln would make us more memorable people and get us a leg up in the business world.

In retrospect, Cullen was right, and books like The Book of Lists (yes, there are others!) certainly made me a more interesting person.

An odd side effect, though, is that I turned into what the English call a “trainspotter”, especially around my areas of interest. If I saw a movie that I enjoyed, I needed to see every movie by that director. If I heard a cool song, I needed to hear every b-side by that artist. Luckily, I never had the budget to become a real obsessive record collector - the kind who needed to have copies of every variant pressing of every single, with picture sleeves from every different territory, but I definitely did become a music collector - I needed to hear all the songs (and at least have knowledge of all the variant sleeves etc).

When I restarted my MousePod show, my method of approaching bodies of work set the format. I planned on going through every single animated Disney feature, in chronological order. Granted, I never got that far into my list before I pulled the plug on the show, but the positive feedback I got from listeners showed that I wasn’t alone in my way of grouping things.

So why this rant here today? Perhaps it’s a just a little soul-baring to ingratiate myself to you, the mystery reader of my new blog. Maybe. But probably not. I think what it is is a preview, or a warning, of what to expect. I’m not going to talk about anything in isolation. Everything is a part of a greater whole. And that whole is full of trivia. And I’ll be bringing it here. To you.

Lucky you.