Aesthetics Introduction

Version 1.1, 5-1-05

“Aesthetics” is a strange title. Why don’t I just call it “Entertainment” or “Art”? Well, I would, but “entertainment” is too superficial for what I have in mind, and “art” sounds too highbrow; some of what’s here is just entertainment. But I am at heart a philosopher rather than an artist or entertainer or even a consumer, so I’ve called it something philosophical, “Aesthetics.” I do like immersing myself in the experience of fun, beautiful, or profound things, but I am equally (or more) interested in the ideas they represent and in what makes them fun, beautiful, or profound. You’ll notice I also have an aesthetics section on the philosophy page. I’ll try to put my more theoretical discussions of aesthetics there. I guess you could call the subject of this page “applied aesthetics.”

My general aesthetic theory is that people have different emotional or intellectual desires in life, and they use art to help fulfill them. This leads them into different realms of artistic taste. For instance, I like to use music to create an environment for me to live in, so I don’t listen to music that takes a lot of concentration to appreciate. I tend to listen to new age or ambient music, sometimes classical. I like art that I can “get” at a glance but which also has deeper layers of structure and meaning that I can uncover over time. Additionally, my favorite genres of just about everything are science fiction and fantasy. This is due to the fact that the real world is boring.

Before I get started on the subsections, a note on my links: I link to websites I like, but I don’t necessarily approve of everything on those sites. This is true whenever anybody links to anything on the web, but I just want to say to my more conservative readers that while I try to associate myself with wholesome things, sometimes the things I like about a work are accompanied by other things I could do without (usually it’s language and violence). I try to overlook those and just enjoy the parts I do like. I hope my aesthetic and other values will become evident to you as you read through my site.

Music
I’ve been a musician since I was three. I took violin lessons from three till first grade, piano first through twelfth, French horn in band sixth grade through high school, and church choir the whole time. By the end of high school, my musical activities had proliferated so much that I was tired of music altogether. Except for band. Band, I can honestly say, was the best thing I did in school, and I loved it the whole way through. I still kind of miss the French horn. I’ll probably pick it up again someday. When I went to college, I dropped music entirely for a couple of years, after which I helped out with the music at church until our little church closed.

Performing is fun (when I’m not doing too much of it), but what I really want to do is compose. This is what I unconsciously wished I was doing whenever I’d sit down at the piano to practice. And I did compose some, though it wasn’t much and not that good. But what I really wanted my teachers couldn’t give me, which was formal training in composition. I did take a music theory class in high school, but that was about it. Wheaton offers a major in composition, but I had other priorities. You can’t major in everything. So now I plan to teach myself. I want to start with tonal harmony and counterpoint and then get into digital music.

And of course, I listen to music, too. I don’t connect with most styles of popular music. As I mentioned earlier, mostly I listen to new age, ambient, and other electronic music, some classical, and a few movie and game soundtracks. I used to listen to a lot of Christian music, but these days I don’t connect well with Contemporary Christian Music. I do like hymns. But in general I’m an instrumental person. Vocal music just doesn’t do much for me, with a few exceptions.

This section is called “Music,” but other auditory things will likely appear here as well, like sound effects and instrument samples.

Writing
Writing. Yes, I read as well as write. But “literature,” again, sounds too highbrow. I occasionally read high art literature but not that much. I would use “narrative,” but I’m interested in other kinds of writing as well. So I’ll just call the whole thing writing because really, when I’m analyzing other people’s writing, my goal is to know how to write better myself.

I read almost no fiction while I was a teenager, except for the stuff we were forced to read in school. I read a lot of fiction when I was younger, but once I hit my teenage years my analytical mind took over, and I read mainly apologetics. What brought me back was a video game. I never played them growing up, but my senior year of college I was introduced to Chrono Trigger, and I was hooked. Chrono Trigger was an RPG for the Super Nintendo that came out in 1995. I played it for hours at a time, and instead of feeling brain-dead like I did after playing other video games, I always came out of it feeling exhilarated. As I looked for other games like it, I realized that what I liked most about it was the plot, and of course, I could get that from literature. So I broke my narrative fast and picked up The Hobbit, a book I had tried to read twice before and had dropped in the middle of Mirkwood each time. This time I finished it and moved on to The Lord of the Rings. And my fiction consumption has just snowballed from there. Usually I read science fiction and fantasy. And I mostly listen to audiobooks because it lets me do other things at the same time.

Despite all this fiction I’m reading, I haven’t been writing any stories like I did when I was little. I have these huge mental blocks that keep me from getting very far with … well, anything, but especially creative writing. My writing is all of a more expositional nature. This is something I hope to overcome. Narrative really fascinates me, and I have this impulse to create that so rarely gets channeled into anything productive.

Poetry rarely does anything for me, usually because I find it hard to understand, but I strongly prefer metrical, rhyming poetry over freeverse. I especially appreciate meter-and-rhyme when it occurs in music, though I am also impressed when someone can set prose to a melody and not sound like they’re rambling musically.

Art
I’m including in this category anything visual, such as architecture. I know even less about visual art than the other areas of aesthetics, and my tastes here are even more limited. I’m pretty much at the level of pop culture. Art museums bore me about as much as the average person. I don’t typically care about any art produced before the twentieth century, and the avant garde types of modern art are nonsensical to me or at least uninteresting. My favorite kinds of art are nature photography, fantasy art, and surrealism. Then I have other miscellaneous visual interests, mostly having to do with computers and publishing, like fonts and tiling images. Sometime I want to explore the ins and outs of computer graphics.

Comics
Comics, along with video games, were one of those things I wished I could get into when I was young but didn’t because they cost too much. I did grow up on comic-related TV shows and movies, however. I watched Superfriends, The Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, Batman. Superman and Wonder Woman were at the top of my list of superheros, though they’ve now been supplanted by Spider-Man. There’s something about comics that’s just cool (not a word I use often, but here it fits). To some degree it depends on the comic, but partly it’s the medium itself that intrigues me. The first comic book I actually read was volume one of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. Kind of a dark one to start out on, but that’s what I picked up. Anyway, that launched me into comic books. But one comic medium I had already discovered was webcomics! What a great way to pass the time. I occasionally have the urge to try drawing my own, but who knows if that will happen. I can’t do everything. I have to keep reminding myself of that (if you don’t know what I mean, take a look around this site!). I also dabble in anime and manga, which I like because they are weird and because they are character-driven. And for the record, Calvin and Hobbes is the best comic strip in the universe. The best webcomic in the universe is General Protection Fault.

Games
In a sense, games are the centerpiece of my aesthetic interests, specifically what I call “narrative games.” These are any games that revolve around stories. My primary focus is on computer games, like text adventures and computer RPGs. Narrative games bring together two topics that are deeply fascinating to me: narrative and interaction. Why they are so intriguing to me is a mystery I haven’t yet explored. Of course, most people wouldn’t explore it at all. Those people are normal.

As I mentioned in the writing section, the game that got me started was Chrono Trigger, which I played about six years after it came out. I love that game. To a certain degree it has become the model by which I evaluate many of the other games I play, at least the RPGs. Since then I’ve been playing a fairly steady stream of RPGs and adventure games, both commercial and freeware.

One of my goals in life is to write at least one or two of these games. I want to write at least one text adventure and one graphical adventure. There are other kinds of games I want to create, too–games that are mindless but rewarding. I mean, really. I play games to relax, not to challenge myself. Most games take too much thought or skill.

Mass media
I don’t watch much TV or many movies, but I listen to the radio a lot. I used to alternate between talk and music in phases, but now my musical tastes have drifted away from the kinds of things that get played on the radio, so I listen to talk radio almost exclusively.

And even though I pay very little attention to mass culture, in this category goes one of the few things I can genuinely say I’m a fan of, and that’s Star Trek. The X-Files comes in second. Star Wars is growing on me, along with one or two others.

Humor
Humor is necessary for my survival. I am addicted to it. And to go along with my philosopher tendencies, I also analyze it. Everything else in this section will be a surprise.