But I enjoyed making it! More on that later.

First off, this Dustin Hoffman interview clips is making the rounds.

First, he explains the origin of the movie Tootsie, which started from a brilliant and insightful question : how would I be different if I had been born the opposite sex?

Not how would it feel. How would I, the person that I am, be different if I had been born female instead of male? I can’t help but imagine that my life would be radically different.

Not necessarily worse, just not the same. Might even be better, honestly. Assuming that many basic aspect of my character would remain the same, I might do better being a chatty, warm, intelligent woman.

Then again, menstruation. Yikes.

Personality and self are really what it all boils down to, though, isn’t it? We like to think that the basics of our personalities are fundamental to us and unchanging. And to a certain extent they are. Babies, after all, show distinct personality traits practically from birth. There is a strong scientific argument for personality being something we are born with.

But I can’t help but think that being born female would have led to so many life choices and events that would be impossible for a male me, or at least very unlikely, and that would lead to, if not a totally different person, a totally different arrangement of the same basic elements.

Of course, the real meat of the clip is Hoffman’s massive realization that if he, with the best makeup and clothes possible, could still be the sort of woman men ignored without even knowing it… and he knows that he is an intelligent and interesting person…. how many wonderful women had he ignored because they were not attractive enough to the eye?

I think “brainwashed” is a good term for him to use, because it gets across the feeling he must have had that he had been fooled somehow, hypnotized into not seeing what was right in front of him.

What a powerful revelation that must have been! I wonder what his wife thought of it.

I picture her rolling her eyes and saying “Well, duh!”. But that’s just me.

Next, we have this Amy Schumer piece about how women interrelate. Warning, while brilliantly written, it is also quite harsh, especially the ending.

Honestly, that ending sucks. It makes no sense in terms of the skit. She totally dropped the cow there, and she dropped it into the sad sensationalistic meat grinder of modern cheap comedy.

It would have made a lot of sense if the ladies had attacked the one who just said “thanks”, or screamed at her for being a stuck-up bitch, or waited till she left and then just piled on the departed cheery person with comments about what a bitch she is and how they all hate her.

Mass suicide made no sense at all.

But otherwise, I think the writing is completely brilliant. The things the women say to run themselves down are marvelous.

“I look like a golden retriever’s dingleberry.
“I look like a whore locked out of her apartment. ”
“Fuck YOU, I look like a cow. Indian people are trying to worship me. I sleep standing up in a field. ”
“I’m legally retarded. On my SATs, I just drew a picture of a house on the first page, and ate the rest. ”

That is some serious LOLs there.

It builds well too, and keeps the ball in the air by switching targets. A dye job, a dress, a hat, and so forth and so on.

And the ladies deliver it all perfectly, really nailing the contrast between the singsong cadence of the compliments and the monotonous and staccato cadence of them putting themselves down.

I would, of course, find that shit impossible to endure. I would neither put myself down after someone gave me a compliment, or put up with people who felt the need to do it.

Just say thank you, and leave it at that. That is actually the best choice.

Finally, here is today’s vid.

It was a lot of fun to make, and with Ulead, not that hard either. I’ve been planning on doing a simple music video for one of my original compositions for some time, and today I finally did it.

Doing something colorful and abstract like that was a good first step. That way, I did not get trapped in indecision by trying to figure out what real world images best represented my music.

Fucked if I know. It would be one thing if my works had lyrics. Then you would have words to provide the structure. But when it’s purely instrumental, I would rather not try to translate it into a visual medium, and that is the only sort of music video that I am interested in making.

After all, that’s the kind of music video I like. Anyone can make a music video that has nothing to do with the song. A real music video is an extension of the song into the visual.

But I am, fundamentally, a little too left-brained for translating the purely musical into images, at least, not with the sort of fidelity I would be demanding of myself.

So, abstract it is, at least for now. The colors and their motions have nothing to do with the music. I am no synesthete. Numbers don’t have colors to me, I can’t taste a musical chord or smell words. (Can anyone smell words? That would mostly suck. )

But I figure that if you can’t say what the music is saying, don’t say anything, so all I did was make some pretty video wallpaper to watch while listening to the song.

Maybe I would have been better off just putting a single image up. That is what a lot of people who post music to YouTube do. Usually it’s cover art, and I don’t exactly have that because it’s not like I put out an album or anything.

But I could fake it.

Tomorrow : who knows? Maybe The Deal Episode Six. Maybe another music video. Maybe something so weird and wonderful that even I can’t imagine it… yet.

Onwards and upwards, folks!