“You want the life of the mind, I’ll show you the life of the mind!”
- Barton Fink

So Bean and I moved to Seattle, WA a few months ago and I’ve been meaning to write something about it here but I didn’t know how. I’m not exactly sure I do now but time keeps going by and I want to get past it.

Los Angeles stopped having anything to offer.  When I moved there, reluctantly, from S. Korea (not that I wanted to stay in S. Korea, but I was reluctant to move to L.A. Some of my friends have even commented that the reason I moved to S. Korea in the first place was to put off moving to Los Angeles), I had this idea that I wanted to be a professional screenwriter and maybe, one day, a director.  I love stories and storytelling and I figured I would just show up and continue writing and showing my work to people and that eventually everything would just pay off on its own.  What I found, when I accidentally started climbing the wrong career track (feature development), was that a Hollywood feature film screenwriter is the lowest wrung on a very tall ladder.

The films that inspired me to move to Los Angeles in the first place were no product of Los Angeles at all… and hardly successful in the terms that are valued there.  In L.A., there were no thriving P.T. Andersons (he’s there, but it takes him years to get anything made, which is ridiculous), no valued Charlie Kaufmans (I’m thinking of his work on the brilliant Synechdoche, NY), no interest in innovative and meaningful filmmaking as an expressive art form of our century.  I’m not saying these people don’t exist, and that there aren’t some filmmakers who are doing really interesting work on the scene of America cinema.  I’m saying these people are often frustrated and, with maybe a few very rare exceptions, supported by the structural beams of a higher class. In other words, they come from money.

Over and over again I would meet successful people only to find out they had a trust fund, or a wealthy family member who was willing to support them. Hollywood lives on that. How else could a person live on the wages paid by the entertainment industry? They sell the aura of celebrity to you as part of your payment. I can’t tell you how many times I got a job that barely paid for gas, only to have the hiring producer explain that I at least got to meet [insert celebrity here].

It works for a while, too! Sure I want to meet these people. But as soon as that aura fades (like Walter Benjamin only less nostalgic), and you live in L.A. long enough to stop caring about famous people (about 2 years), the feudalism of Hollywood starts getting really, really old. Studios begin to resemble castles (with their self-contained shops and their Page programs), the realities of class difference deepen, and the Horatio Alger story starts to sound tinny.

Film is a business driven by business, and the majority of American film consumers don’t share my tastes.  The majority of Americans are not that educated (even if they have a degree), not taught to value art, not taught to love vegetables, and not taught to support anything but junk food and light entertainment. Just as long as there isn’t too much thinking involved. That’s what sells. Dan Brown sells.

But I’m just bitter…

Television has taken a brilliant turn and shows like Treme (my personal favorite right now) and 30 Rock deal with class and American culture in such a remarkably direct way that I have to take heart. Of course, those shows aren’t produced in Los Angeles, but at least they are on the air.

I can’t pretend that there aren’t great films being made right now on very little money. Joe Swanberg and the mumblecore movement comes to mind, as do the Duplass brothers’ The Puffy Chair (and my personal favorite, although sans Jay, Humpday, which completely freaked Bean out even though it is one of the funniest films I’ve seen).

These films, however, are not being made in L.A., nor, in particular, in the way I was trying to make them.

So Bean and I moved to Seattle and I’m hoping I can live here free from the duress of a very high cost of living and feel comfortable enough to pursue a life of the mind. I haven’t lost my compulsion to tell stories visually, but for now I’m much more interested in exploring the kinds of stories that I want to tell and I’m burned out on “market considerations.”

Does not caring about the mass market push me into elitism? I don’t know, but any industry that “plays down” to the lowest common denominator in order to capture the largest market share possible, is not one I want to participate in.

The trend in culture is to diversify and segment entertainment to such an extreme degree, that it goes screaming past the horrifying state of commodification imagined by Lukacs and into a wave form of perfect unity in non-unity. What I’m interested in is the “vital impetus” of that movement but I don’t know enough to form a sophisticated opinion yet.

Anyway, I don’t believe that entertainment should ever lower itself to the “common people” because I’m an optimist. People rise to the occasion of art. In fact, I think it is important that they do. Any artist who dulls his work in the service of the market is a liar, but more importantly, a thief, and the work will fail in the long term because she robbed the reader of something important and everyone knows when their being fucked.

So am I self-centered, elitist, and (consequently) irrelevant for deciding to ignore what appear to be mainstream tastes in an effort to work on writing that I’m interested in? I’ll think of what I’m doing as an artistic mating call to gather a like-minded community, and to hell with everyone else.

So far Seattle is working out just like I imagined. I already found the peace and quiet I needed to get back into the novel I started years ago and it looks like I’ll be finished in October. That, and my frequent bus trips around the city give me the reading space I love. Now that I’m out from under that backlog of New Yorkers I can actually pursue personal study projects again.

I’ll write about this more in other posts, but currently I’m investigating Bergson’s idea of the vital impetus (Creative Evolution – see below) in conjunction with some topics on Zen Buddhism, and what I have a hunch will be an interesting take on post-structuralism (from freaking out about there not being any center, to accepting that there is no center).

I’m probably way off on all of that. I’m basically going on the short ends of knowledge I retained from my undergrad years. Anyway it’s nice to at least attempt an intellectual pursuit.

At least in Seattle, I don’t feel like I have to endure an awful and uncomfortable life in an ugly, smog clouded environment while I wait for “my big break.”

I’m through waiting.

Here, I’m living in a beautiful, clean city, surrounded by nature, and a community of people I seem to have a lot in common with. Gone is the feeling of transience that came with living in a college town (Berkeley), a foreign city (Pusan), and a city founded on personal reinvention (Los Angeles).

It’s a new thing for me to be in a place as stable and promising as Seattle.

I like it.