The Pace Must Go On -7623
I was asked at the beginning of this year to submit an essay to the online publication, The Hart & The Cur, and I was glad to accept the challenge. Though, I have to admit, it was difficult to dust off the essayist inside me. Most of my writing over the last couple of years has been in other formats, and it’s been a long time since I needed to craft, cull and simplify an original thought into something ready to present as a fully-formed article
Huge thanks to Jean-Luc Currie and Matt Hartley for the assist in editing this into something worth sharing with all of you.
Below you can find an excerpt, but please go check out the full length version on the publication’s website and consider subscribing. It’s one thought provoking article a month, so you aren’t signing up to get spammed.
Click/Tap here for the full version.
The root of any well-rounded conversation about why a song “just hits” is the beat. The melody is a more accessible starting point, sure, but the ebb and flow of the music is the foundation. Pace plays an essential role across the arts. Movies, shows, poetry, music, theater, and stand-up comedy are obvious examples, but pace can even be found in the non-obvious: the flow of oil-on-canvas, still-life photography, and so much more. We often recognize the pace before we are able to identify the title of the artwork, feeling the tempo of Van Gogh’s style before connecting the brushstrokes to the sunflowers spreading out of a vase. Pace is so fundamental to our understanding of what surrounds us that the lyrics of a familiar tune can be punctuated in a different way and yet stick in the same tempo as they’re delivered in song. It’s as much of the meaning as the words themselves.
Pace is essential to the arts, therefore it's essential to life, and for anyone paying attention to the pace of the 21st century, the sirens are wailing.
I’ve been editing video and film content since I was 12. I’m more than twenty years into this hobby-turned-livelihood, and I still find myself cutting, trimming, and rearranging real life moments for my memory bank. This mental process of logging what is happening to and because of me, cutting those scenes, arranging them in a coherent way, and finally exporting them for later review has always felt like a superpower. Yet, I notice that the pace of these memory clips is increasingly untenable.
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