This year’s resolution should be writing more, though god knows that didn’t work so well last year.

Avatar was really… something else.

The Road needed a driving force.

A Serious Man made me laugh way too much at things that aren’t really funny.

There used to be a lot more content on this website; when I originally started it, it was an extension of writing I used to do and I always figured it’d grow in content and form. That’s far from what’s happened. My writing has become less frequent, and my reviews have been slowly shrinking in lenght and content. I’ve wondered why, and there’s a few reasons.

I’ve read a lot more over the past year and a half than I’d done in the previous four or five years of my life, for reasons that include genuine interest in various subjects, a desire to educate myself, entertainment, and familiarization with types of writing. The last one  is, I think, a double-edged sword. While it’s useful to read work by different writers to get a feel for what can be achieved with words and different ways of expressing ideas, it has the unfortunate side effect of making you self-conscious about what you’re writing, even more than before. I’ve learned a lot from reading and have a better idea of the things I’d like to write, but it’s actually inhibited me and as a result I write much less, which in turn prevents me from actually learning how to write in the ways I’d want to, which makes the entire thing self-defeating. Then there’s also the issue wherein consciously attempting some sort of style or idea that I’m not truly comfortable with leads me to read what I’ve ended up writing and get a really alien feeling from it, as if there’s something about it that’s not quite ‘authentic’, something distinctly unlike myself.

The other reason why I’ve found myself struggling to write is because my relationship with my subject, in this case music or film, has changed over the past few years, not necessarily for better or for worse. It’s possible that I hit my peak of musical curiosity in my college years (a phenomenon not exactly unheard of), or I’m simply in a temporary rut, but I don’t really consume music as voraciously as I used to. I’ve found artists I enjoy over the years and I mostly listen to the records they release every eighteen months or so, my musical discoveries lately being simply artists that remind me of those I already listen to. These are the hardest records and artists to write about; I’m already familiar with their highs and lows, and I’m not particularly interested in trashing the latter. I suppose it is a friendlier relationship with music, even if I don’t know any of these artists and am not interested in it.

I grew up consuming music at an alarming rate, and conceiving of it as little more than bytes existing amorphously, out there for the taking and to be enjoyed as I please. Obviously, technology’s changed the landscape, with plenty of artists encouraging these changes and supporting illegal and legal downloading. There’s also many that don’t encourage them, and that’s their decision, and should be respected. But overconsumption, along with the entitlement that comes from it (the idea that it is simply ok to berate and disparage anything, the idea that if music is out there, I am entitled to listen to it), is something I’m starting to feel might be a problem, at least in the attitude it breeds. In me, at least.

The easiest thing to do is download a music album (creating no attachment whatsoever to it) and disparage it. It’s often the easiest form of writing, too: I find it’s hard to speak positively of a record without comparing it to lesser records, easier to highlight what a record excels at by pointing out records that fail at the same task. But it tends to be unnecessary and can be pointlessly mean-spirited, which is just the height of entitled behavior if I’m not even bothering to support the artist even a tiny bit.

So I’ve been thinking I should write differently, and about different things. I guess I’ll figure out just what those things are soon.

Writer’s block? Theme block? Brain atrophy?