Kevin Clark - Composer

Nerdy 4th

First we hit the Liberty Science center and played with all the exhibits, including Arabic language karaoke, a giant snapping turtle rearranging the logs in his tank, a model of the Rotterdam flood prevention dam, and a thing where you stick your head inside the head of a giant bat and it echolocates people walking around in front of you.

Then we had friends over and played the Game of Thrones card game (much like Magic: The Gathering, except instead of having simple base rules and endless complexities on top of that, it’s just wildly complex from the get-go (THREE kinds of combat?)), and I think we celebrated being American by playing a game set in a feudal world and all deciding not to fight, and that a nice federal system with no land borders or standing armies would probably be better.

Oh yeah, and I made burgers.

You can’t fund Game of Thrones

The new arts economy is awesome, and it’s growing by leaps and bounds. It’s more fair, more diverse, more meritocratic, and more original. It’s much more deeply integrated with the audiences we make the art for.

But it’s not here yet. A LOT of people watch tv on their normal televisions when the programs are scheduled. And they watch commercials. People buy print magazines and newspapers.

I feel weird when they hand me hard copy of news (“this is already 6 hours old…”) but they do.

There’s a new paradigm growing, and it’s growing fast. But We can’t just expect everything to work in the new way yet. This change will take decades, and we’ve got to have functioning careers sooner than that.