Scorsese

Hump day - half way through the week and halfway through the month. Today is the day for the power of balance, for with it we discontinue all thoughts.

The sun rose this morning at 7:12 a.m., a minute later than yesterday, and will set at 5:33 p.m. again, same time as the past two days. The waxing gibbous moon is 97% illuminated and rose at 4:18 p.m. yesterday afternoon.  It set at 5:29 a.m. this morning.

It's Martin Scorsese's birthday! The director (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Casino, The Departed, and many more) turns 79 today.  Scorsese graduated from NYU in 1968, and his movies of the 1970s, particularly 1976's Taxi Driver, inspired me to want to be a film director myself. I perceived the American cinematic universe as consisting of twin poles, one in New York and centered around Scorsese and Woody Allen, and the other in L.A. and centered around Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.  NYU vs. UCLA.  I entered Boston University in 1976 as a Film & Broadcast major hoping to become a part of the East Coast axis, but for reasons far too complex to elaborate on now, somehow wound up switching my major to geology. Such is life.

On this day in 2019, the first known case of the covids was traced to a 55-year-old man who had visited a market in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. Today, after several waves of pandemic, the State of Georgia has been experiencing about 1,000 new cases of the covids each day since the beginning of the month.

Okay, I have nothing else to talk about so I'll describe how I went from a Film & Broadcast major aspiring to be the next Scorsese to a nerdy geology major.  Even though I was insprired by Scorsese and Allen and Spielberg and Lucas (not to mention Hitchcock and Welles and Truffaut and Godard and Bertolucci), in the post-Watergate year of 1976, a large number of young people wanted to become the next Woodward or Bernstein, and the Journalism program in B.U.'s School of Public Communications was overrun with journalistic wannabes.  I entered the school's alternative Film & Broadcast program, but even that was dominated by young men and women who wanted to be broadcast journalists or news anchors.  I was more interested in learning dramatic direction, cinematography, and editing, and soon realized I was in the wrong school for that.  I should have been in the Theater program at the School of Fine Arts, and with each passing semester I was falling further behind in the entry-level prerequisite courses for Theater. 

However, the Film & Broadcast curriculum required me to take one science course, and I chose Geology 101, the notorious "rocks for jocks" course.  Oddly enough, I became fascinated with what I learned there, and as dissatisfied as I was by Journalism 101 and Visual Communication 102, I voluntarily took another Geology course the next semester, and then several the semester after that. There was something so much more concrete and real about the science of geology than the nebulous and subjective lessons of film and broadcast, and I felt there was more of a post-collegiate afterlife for a geology major than for yet another aspiring print or television journalist.

There was one thing, though, that kept me interested in the Film & Broadcast program.  We had access to video equipment and studio space, and meanwhile, just down the road from B.U., a burgeoning punk rock and new wave scene centered around clubs like Spit and The Rat in Kenmore Square was in need of exposure and promotion.  Someone came up with the idea of taping some of the bands' performances, primarily to show to club owners to get bookings. Those tapings were made both in the school's studio space as well as remotely at the clubs themselves.  Someone else took the idea a step further, and started making field recording of the bands performing on the mean streets around Kenmore and in vacant industrial space.  This was several years before the debut of MTV and I won't say that we invented the music video, but we were in the room when it happened.

If I hadn't migrated over to the Geology Department, I probably would have wound up in that music video scene, uninterested as I was in broadcast journalism, advertising, or the other career paths offered by the Film & Broadcast program.  It's well known that for every successful "star" in the world of media, there's at least 100 people who never succeeded, but I can't help but wonder sometimes what my life would have been like had I stayed on my original path.  Would I have become some sort of music video auteur, or even wound up joining one of those bands? (Lack of musical ability didn't hold many performers back in the early days of punk.) Would I have moved to L.A., or to N.Y.C., or to D.C.? Would I have acquired a $100,000-a-year cocaine habit?

It's fun to speculate, but I don't regret my decision.  Rocks have been very good to me, and while my life as a geologist may not have been as glamorous as a music video director, or a broadcast journalist or an advertising exec for that matter, I still managed to eke out a satisfying and productive career in environmental hydrogeology.  Je ne regrette rien.