| EverQuest | Diablo 2 | Baldur's Gate 2 | Thief 1 | Thief 2 | Neverwinter Nights | Morrowind | Music (Korn, Limp Bizkit, Manson) | Napster and Winamp | Seinfeld Redux | Pride & Prejudice (A&E) | VHS Movies on Loop | Cinema of the Time | Classic Film Journey | Kumdo and Anime | Fantasy Novels | Classical Music |

PC Gaming: A Way of Life

Much of what I loved and grew up with in the 90s spilled over into the 2000s. PC gaming took a serious dimension in my life, engendering numinous, transcendent feelings through video game worlds where I could find meaning. Sounds hyperbolic? Because of a video game I discovered classical music and because of this I am today a music librarian in an academic library.

EverQuest

Up to 1998 my framework of experience with video games was limited to small corners of the NES catalogue, several big titles of PC gaming in the 90s, and Nintendo 64. Everything I played was linear, level-based, small-scale and not especially immersive. Later on I would of course learn about what I missed with games like Elder Scrolls Daggerfall and Ultima Online that were already pioneers of the open-world and MMORPG model.

So when my neighborhood friends (Zack, Jake, and Justin Graham) told me about an upcoming game called EverQuest, a MMORPG where you could move about in first-person perspective through a gigantic world and meet thousands of players as if this were like a simulation, I was the most excited I've ever been about a game. The anticipation for Elden Ring in 2022 had a similar resonance, but falls short of what I envisioned with EverQuest (EQ). It's simply impossible for anything now to produce the same sense of wonder. We know too much about video games; they've lost their mystique. No, the excitement for EQ was once in a lifetime. You had to be a kid in 1999 living through the infancy of video games to feel the same amazement at the very *idea* of what EQ promised to be.

I followed the game's development obsessively in 1998, spending hours looking at the official website, gazing at screenshots, watching trailers, reading about all the races, classes, factions, and other lore, and listening to the music soundtrack. It touches deep emotional chords hearing this music today. The release date was March 16, 1999 and this was the first time I ever felt the dramatic urgency of a "day-one purchase" feeling before that phrase was ever coined. Sure enough, I bought EQ that very day from an Electronic Boutique store.

My first character was a troll shaman named Vasgarth on the Xegony server. When I spawned into the game world for the first time, I accidentally hit the key to print the screen and I remember being irritated that I did that. Back then our color printer was slow and it made the computer lag with popcorn noise. Yet I still have the screenshot printout to this day. I kept it all these years in a plastic sleeve. It's remarkable how in that moment I was miffed at the inconvenience and disruption--not to mention lag--but 25 years later I almost tear up seeing the printout...

EQ in 1999 and early 2000 was so awe-inspiring that it gave me a sense of purpose and belonging. I met so many nice and interesting players. The community early on was well-adjusted adults. Being a member of the guild "Arcane Order" I met some great people that felt like family. I've forgotten most of them today. I recall Salin or something close to that--a high elf wizard who was the guildmaster for "Arcane Order". Other friends include Kbel, Meagey (gnome magician and real-life friend of Zack Graham). A close companion was the dark elf necromancer Syndor. He would be a central influence on me, my best friend, and he later became my roommate in real life, traveling all the way from Oklahoma to live with me in Ocean City, MD.

One of my other best buddies was a dark elf cleric named Vaelelil, also a member of "Arcane Order." Then there was the charming guy named Kibano, who added "itooo" to every name and various words. People in the guild affectionately adopted his mannerism and called him Kibanoritooo. My main character from roughly late 2000 on was a dark elf necromancer named Volmort. (Wasn't a fan of Harry Potter, but I liked the name Voldemort so I truncated it for a cool alternate character name). My second main character was a halfling rogue named Tacky. Then there was my dark elf warrior named Deadfall.

In trying to dig up traces of this 1999-2002 era on the Xegony server, I found a few threads on the Project 1999 EQ forums, but not much to go on. My memory has eroded so much and a single server might have 1000-1500 active players, all at different levels and across many guilds. Someone named Tass Underfoot loaded hundreds of screenshots from the year 2000. Sadly, as I scroll through I don't remember any of these people, just fleeting recognitions of guilds (Havenlight and Inner Circle) and perhaps people I did cross paths with. I wish I could recall more names of folks who 25 years ago were dear friends. There is one guy I found in this screenshot dump: Kibano, my old friend, was captured in a few of them. Yet I seem to remember his race was troll or perhaps he used illusion items to change his appearance. I've forgotten much of the game's mechanics. Still, it's him alright. Just seeing his name is like finding an old photo of a buddy I haven't seen in decades.

EverQuest was an addiction. I played every day and usually all day. Since I was internet schooled, I frontloaded my homework assignments early in the week and then binged-played EQ for several days straight. It feels like I witnessed so many events and met so many different people in EQ even though it was just 3 years. But this was my life. Norrath was a simulacrum for living in a world that offered adventure, friendships, discovery, and belonging. Sounds sad, I know. I've since gone on to have a fulfilling and grounded life in the real world with a career and real relationships. But I haven't forgotten these years between 1999-2002 when EverQuest was a way of life and gave me such warmth and purpose. Yes it was just a video game, but it was something more profound: living in a virtual reality world that I loved, developing characters, sharing drama and laughs with friends, and it felt like home. By 2002 the "look" of the game was dramatically changing, the meta gaming and min-maxing was taking over, and I became alienated; I missed how it was from 1999 and 2000. So I decided to quit and go on to other forms of escapism.

Diablo 2

Although EverQuest was a constant presence from 1999-2002, I took breaks on occasion or threw other games into the mix. Diablo 2 was another highly anticipated game, having followed its development since 1998. I bought the big box PC game at Walmart upon release. Diablo 2 was pretty much everything I had hoped for and more. Imagine a game exceeding all expectations when yours were already at the highest. Diablo 2 had improved combat and, unlike its dreadful successors, maintained the dark gothic atmosphere established in Diablo 1, even as it showcased brighter desert and jungle biomes. Matt Uelmen's soundtrack is a powerful and haunting soundscape. The cutscenes, the dialogue and voice acting all seared into my brain.

Baldur's Gate 2 and Infinity Engine Games

When Baldur's Gate 2 came out in 2001 I got lost in this world for a while and it exposed me to the DnD ruleset and cRPG real-time with pause combat. Once again I was immersed into a fantasy world of enormous scope, storytelling qualities, RPG choices and consequences, and atmosphere; not to mention top-notch voice acting by the one and only David Warner. Nowadays everyone is agog for BG3, but BG2 is still the peak of the cRPG golden era and the Infinity Engine, giving us beautifully hand-painted backgrounds that convey a fantasy world of AD&D far better than anything today. After BG2 I returned to BG1, its expansion Tales of the Sword Coast, and went on to play every infinity engine game out there, including Icewind Dale 1 & 2.

Planescape Torment struck me as being the greatest cRPG ever made, a statement I'd stand behind today. Gamers who haven't played this and insist on calling anything made in the last ten years as being the greatest RPG is like saying Inception is the best movie ever made when they've never seen Citizen Kane or Sunset Boulevard. PST when played with the right mindset and conditions is experiencing a video game as art (sorry Roger Ebert, video games can be that).

Thief: The Dark Project

In the wake of leaving EverQuest behind me, missing it but knowing I can't go back, I needed a rebound like a quick fix girlfriend to fill the void. I rummaged through any PC games I had on disc from the 90s and scoured my old gaming magazines with demo discs in sleeves so I could try out something new and see if I liked it. After trial and error I eventually came upon Thief: The Dark Project (1998). It looked great: first person medieval/fantasy setting with some stealth elements and action that I found enjoyable. It wasn't long before playing the demo level of Bafford's Manor over and over that it dawned on me this is the game I've been lookin for. I went out and got the full game and embarked on the next most important gaming experience of my life, and arguably the most enduring and lengthiest excursion into a single gaming experience. I would play Thief 1/2 fan missions for roughly 10 years.

What bewitched me about Thief was its atmosphere. The game was made with the unique Dark Engine, Looking Glass Studios' in-house engine built for producing gradations of shadow to hide in. Even today the atmosphere generated by the light system is more immersive than any modern game. Perhaps like no other game, the sound design is as important as the visuals. Just hearing the world around you is enough to feel sucked into a universe like no other. The art direction, too, is leagues superior to its contemporaries any modern FPS. Again, people who go nuts over Bioshock are likely those who never played the classic PC games from the 90s. Bioshock, as good as it is, borrowed from System Shock (made by the same devs as Thief). What you get in Thief is a fantasy setting fusion of medieval motifs with steampunk and Victorian aesthetics. You have city streets and art assets that look like something from the Italian Renaissance and yet you also have haunted cathedrals, crypts, and celtic-pagan influences.

This is a powerful and convincing world, bolstered by lore and storytelling that seems so adult and intelligent by today's standards. Garrett, the cynical and pragmatic protagonist, is an ex-member of the Keepers, a secret order that strives for balance and order, working behind the scenes to influence the city. They're experts at stealth and Garrett uses the tools he learns to his own benefits: robbing and looting. Garrett's writing and voice actor makes it work: we get a confident, independent, no-nonsense antihero who has a moral compass but prefers to keep his head low. A great premise for a character who is drawn into epic dramas and must eventually pick a side. Despite his greed and opportunism, he's a likable tough guy with the most suave and indelible voice acting performance in video game history. He's the video game version of Sam Spade from Maltese Falcon.

The gameplay offers so much control and freedom, unlike stealth games today where you crouch to walk by and that's about it. In Thief you have to use different techniques of moving based on the situation, and that changes the way you input keys on the keyboard. If you want to move forward to sneak by someone, you need to carefully assess your surroundings, including light sources (gauging the light gem at the bottom of the screen), surfaces on the ground, and patrol patterns or cones of vision. Going for a full stealth experience can be so tense and like a balletic dance of precision stealth choices and movement. If you're slinking around some guards on a loud surface, you need to press the forward key in a regular rhythm while crouched to avoid making a sound. Some surfaces are louder than others, and you can get away with standing while moving forward. In other situations if you're on a quiet surface, you need to run instead of walk and dart to pockets of shadow to avoid being seen.

The rope arrow mechanic is still a modern advancement of game physics that dazzles the most jaded gamer. Shoot an arrow with rope attached to *any* soft surface anywhere in the gameworld and you can move vertically and climb anywhere you desire. Thief offers the maximum sandbox version of gameplay freedom that was a testament to the FPSs of the 90s and early 2000s: go anywhere you want and use the environment to your advantage, with an AI detection system that is so elegant and reliable. Many stealth games today have ambiguous or buggy AI alert systems where you can't tell why the AI is alerted or how they spotted you. Even the original Deus Ex had its problems. Thief 1/2 are perfection in the stealth genre, the absolute apex.

Thief 2: The Metal Age

After Thief 1 I tried the demo for Thief 2, which was a modified version of the famous city rooftop level. Here your character traverses a level entirely comprised of city rooftops and upper story rooms and a completely non-linear level design. It is arguably the greatest video game level ever made for that reason. The player has the freedom to find a path across these rooftops in a gorgeous cityscape with an art direction heavily influenced by art deco. Here we've moved from Italian Renaissance at its core aesthetic to full-on Victorian steampunk and industrialization with building facades and interior design taken straight out of the 1930s.

When I finished the demo it was a no-brainer to get the full game. At this point I stumbled onto the TTLG (Through the Looking Glass) and Eidos forums and found a thriving community of Thief players. One of the reasons Thief 1/2 occupies gamers for so long is that the modding community continues to create new "fan missions", many of which are more beautiful and larger than any of the original missions. There are hundreds of these fan missions of mostly high quality that offer thousands of hours of gameplay. At one time I was systematically playing all of them and preferring to complete these missions through stealth alone, never being seen or heard. This style is called Ghosting: do not kill, damage, or alert anyone. Playing stealth in Thief is very methodical and slow. It takes patience. Despite being an FPS experience, it's all about finesse and caution. Sometimes you can stand in place and take 5 minutes to analyze movements of guards before making a decision.

The game is simultaneously the most calming experience and yet suspenseful and cerebral. I remember feats of stealth that I wish I could have recorded: gracefully running, crouching, dashing in and out of dark corners, and evading a guard about to pivot by slipping around him just as he turns, achieving a virtuoso ballet of movement to avoid being seen by several guards in one go. Thief lets you be the quintessential ninja with none of the stupid modern climbing mechanics introduced by Assassin's Creed. The most gratifying moments come when you can defy the intentions of the game designers with techniques and pure player skill. There are many sections in missions where you know the author intended for you to be discovered, where the level cannot be traversed unseen. Yet with determination and skill, there are sometimes ways to defeat the author's intent. This, and the beautiful game world of Thief, has kept me infatuated with the series for 20 years. I like too that the world has the same graphics, the same engine, art assets and look to it. The universe is comfortably static and yet offers infinite variety through modders' fan missions.

I was once a regular poster on a Thief Fan Mission Ghost report thread where I'd post my end-game stats for every fan mission I attempted to ghost. I went by the name Tacky on TTLG, another handle on Eidos I've forgotten, and then Deadfall/Hexameron. Klatremus has archived these ghost reports, it seems. He came later to the scene and was interested in an even more elite ghosting style: supreme ghost. While I moved on with other life obsessions, he has since become the only person of those old days to carry the torch of Ghosting. From what I can tell, he's all that's left of this small community. There were only about 4-5 of us posting Ghost reports at the height of its popularity in 2002: there was Peter Smith, Vanguard, Sneak, a few others I've forgotten, and Klatremus came later. He also seems to have reposted all the reports from the Eidos threads to a new master list in TTLG in 2020. What a terrific guy. I wish I had kept up with Thief and the ghosting community. He's just the devotee and steward it deserves.

In 2003 I tried to learn how to use Thief 2's level editor named Dromed. It wasn't easy to learn and I gave up eventually, but I did return to it with vigor and intent in 2014 and built a large level of a library based on the Library of Congress. Unfortunately after months of work I switched jobs, moved to a new state, and the project was scrapped. I still have all the files and wondered about going back to it some day. It's a kind of life goal of mine to create a Thief 2 fan mission, but the knowledge and effort needed is substantial. Still, thinking about it gives me a warm feeling and ambition to finish what I started 12 years ago.

Infantry Online

This old online free-to-play isometric shooter is virtually unknown to people today. I must have encountered it because it was made by Sony and suggested as an alternative distraction whenever the EverQuest servers were down. I recall hopping on and you'd see a bunch of players in the chat box talk about someone at Sony tripping over the power cord because the servers were down. Infantry was so fun that I'd often choose to play it longer or when the EQ servers weren't down. It rewarded tactics and maneuvering and was a blast to play with a bunch of people.

Neverwinter Nights (2002)

After the waning days of EverQuest were behind me and I had played the hell out of Thief 1/2 fan missions, I went into another gaming direction with Neverwinter Nights, an action RPG that was singular for its time as being a DnD campaign simulator. The game was bundled with a toolkit for creating your own world or "mod" with ease and accessibility. I had joined a few online NWN campaigns made by fans, which all had their own servers and small playerbase. It was quite interesting to go from the massive numbers of players in EverQuest back to a MMORPG experience except there was nothing "massive" about it. Campaigns might have 3-10 active people at a given time. Still, I loved NWN and particularly its innocent fantasy atmosphere. I eagerly awaited the release of its expansions Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark. I then went about building my own campaign and world with vast numbers of areas, tilesets, customized NPCs with dialogue trees written by me. I created entire factions, names, and ideas and lore for the different biomes. I sometimes spent all day getting lost in this world-building. It was never ready for launch so it's one of those projects I made for myself.

Morrowind

Sometime in 2004 I upgraded my computer with a better graphics card and memory capacity and was able to play a host of new games, most notably Morrowind. Having read about but not played Daggerfall in the 90s, it was exhilarating to be plopped back into a massive world like EverQuest, but it was just me playing in a cRPG sandbox. Morrowind and its expansions sucked me into its world for months on end.

Music: Korn, Limp Bizkit, Marilyn Manson, Slipknot

All of the bands I had discovered in 1997-98 were fully assimilated into my musical diet by 1999. Korn's three albums were set on replay several times daily. Some days I might hear Korn's self-titled album four times. When Korn's Issues came out, it was very appropriate music for my early teenage angst. It's an album I recurringly played in 1999 and then didn't return to. When I've tried listening to songs from this album 20 years later, it's remarkable how much the music summons old memories and an old consciousness, placing me back in time-capsule form to the year 1999.

Limp Bizkit, too, was the most played band on my CD player, particularly his first two albums. Significant Other was a daily soundtrack. When Napster came out along with cable internet I was able to download a song in 10 minutes(!), I dug into all sorts of offshoots of metal (we didn't call it nu-metal then): System of a Down, Kittie, Coal Chamber, Static X, and Slipknot. In addition I had Nirvana's and Rob Zombie's hits on my playlist.

The Matrix Soundtrack

The Matrix soundtrack was also extremely important in my music development. I received it by the most arbitrary means: my aunt wanted birthday present ideas and I guess I was into The Matrix and wanted the soundtrack, so she got it for me. Not only did it have the hits I liked from Rammstein, Deftones, Rob Zombie, Marilyn Manson, and Prodigy, but it introduced me to Ministry and Rob Dougan's "Clubbed to Death" (itself quoting Elgar's Enigma Variations). This instrumental piece was one of the most profound I had heard at the time, showing me that music wasn't just for headbanging or that it even needed vocals. I must have played this a hundred times a day at one point while playing EverQuest. I can't listen to it now without feeling like it's 2000 and I'm going through dungeons in Kunark.

Rolling Stones, Clapton, and Slipknot?

Curiously I revisited some older music that I grew up hearing my dad play on loud speakers while we worked outside: Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin. My dad made bootleg audiocassette copies of Voodoo Lounge and Journeyman. I replayed these over and over on tape all day while playing EverQuest. Imagine these styles and that I was also engrossed in Slipknot's first album, which was unlike anything I had heard. I got it on CD after hearing "Bleed" through a Napster download. Slipknot was heavier, faster and death-metal infused--far from what I was getting with Korn--and I liked it. This planted the seeds for a late awakening to metal that would emerge ten years later.

For a spell I was awestruck by Marilyn Manson. He was a known entity in the mid-90s MTV days, but I hadn't bought his albums until around 2000. Antichrist Superstar and Mechanical Animals broadened my music horizons further. Around this time I balanced buying CDs for bands I liked, including Orgy and Kittie.

Napster and Winamp

Using Napster to discover songs was groundbreaking for the time and it's how I became acquainted with so much music, maybe just a single song from an album. When Napster went bust, I turned to Limewire, especially by 2003 when I became interested in classical music. Songs I downloaded sometimes had inaccurate titles and composer names: "Mozart's Greensleeves" or "Bach's Fur Elise". It was very confusing for my then ignorant self who knew nothing about classical.

Winamp was a mainstay at the time for listening to music playlists while doing things on a computer. I had hours of playlists organized by mood or activity. A particular winamp playlist I had was my Thief 2 playlist for hunting for all the loot in a fan mission and I didn't need to hear in-game sound to do so: Static X's "Bled for Days", System of a Down's "Toxicity", Nirvana's "Heart-Shaped Box", and so on. Other times I had a whole Chopin playlist to accompany my tinkering around in Thief's level editor called Dromed.

Seinfeld Redux

Although Seinfeld was always a top-choice sitcom and familiar material for me in the 90s, I really came back to it hard in the early 2000s. I found that I was starting to miss the 90s already and I also liked leaving good sitcoms to run on my bedroom TV while I played PC games. It was something I could just listen to. Before long my primary choice was to turn on Seinfeld reruns which might play for a couple hours each day.

I started to memorize entire episode scripts and then--before Seinfeld came out on DVD--I recorded dozens of episodes on VHS tapes. That way I could just put the tape in and let it play: 6 hours of Seinfeld reruns each day. Yes, I was a Seinfeld junkie and know it so well that I really can't go a week without referencing something happening in life to a Seinfeld episode. 20 years later I can still quote large swathes of episode dialogue. Not that there's anything wrong with that!

Pride and Prejudice (A&E)

Here we move into a bizarre little fixation that many would be surprised to know. Around 1999 or 2000 my mom got the A&E production of Pride and Prejudice (1995) on VHS in a nice box set. This was shown on the actual A&E channel before but I finally got to see it in its entirety, and I loved this miniseries. How on earth did someone like me, playing EverQuest, skating outside, and listening to Marilyn Manson come to love Pride and Prejudice?? "I'm all astonishment" to quote Ms. Bingley. This miniseries had all the ingredients to captivate my attention: great writing, scintillating dialogue, memorable characters, and an elegant, poised directing style and production quality that you only get with these British period pieces from the 80s and 90s. Was I watching Pride and Prejudice for the romance between Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett? No, I liked the interplay with all the side characters: Mr. Bennett's quips against the lunatic Mrs. Bennett, Mr. Collins as he goes on about Lady Catherine de Bourg, and the serenity and calmness of the atmosphere and period scenery. I may have had a secret crush on Jennifer Ehle too, who played Elizabeth Bennett. I was eventually leaving this VHS series running in my bedroom TV while I played video games.

VHS Movies on Loop

This lifestyle of playing movies in my bedroom while I worked on my computer was a common thread throughout the early 2000s because I was internet-schooled in high school. I spent most of my teenage years in my bedroom. So media of all kinds was critical consumption and food for my intellectual and cultural development. What my mind craved over time was listening to good dialogue, memorably delivered by tour-de-force acting. Since I was always doing things on my computer, I listened to movies more than watched them. Here are the titles that got the most play in the early 2000s: Sneakers, Braveheart, First Blood, Midnight Run, Princess Bride, The Shining, Time Bandits, and What About Bob? Dialogue matters. Movies I can listen to with memorable performances and readings of sharp dialogue have remained supreme. It's why two of my favorite movies of all time would later be Glengarry Glen Ross and Sleuth, both essentially stage plays on film.

Cinema of the Early 2000s

The Matrix, Gladiator, Blair Witch Project, and Lord of the Rings left a great impression. I saw Blair Witch with my mom as a matinee and we were the only ones in the theater. It was the most unsettling and frightening movie-going experience I've had. There's something about seeing this knowing nothing about it and hearing the fullness of sound in the theater that makes the film an experience one can't get watching it on TV. I was transfixed by Blair Witch for a while and even created one of the stick figures and hung it in our wooded backyard, much to the dismay of some neighbors. When Two Towers came out, after having seen Fellowship, I can't recall any time since when I've been more excited to see a movie in a theater. This may be the last time anyone old enough to have seen these films in a cinema had the authentic 1977 Star Wars experience. Lord of the Rings got me to read the original books, which in turn revitalized a sudden interest into fantasy books.

Digression into Fantasy Novels

Having consumed and loved the Lord of the Rings books, I decided to plunge headlong into fantasy novels. Before I could dip my feet into various authors, I immediately got hooked on R.A. Salvatore's Icewind Dale trilogy and all the Drizzt books up until The Thousand Orcs. I used to drive a few hours to an isolated little used bookstore on the eastern shore called Unicorn Books near Salisbury MD. This old shop must have been built in the 60s or 70s and the inventory looked like it hadn't changed since then. I found old copies of Elric saga books, Dragonlance paperbacks, and other fantasy series that exemplified 80s sword and sorcery. These hit the spot and I was an avid reader for a few years.

Classic Movies: Origins of the Love of Film

I saw AFI's 100 greatest movies on TV and around Bravo's channels "100 Scariest Movie Moments" was shown every year around Halloween. Both had an impact on me. First, I had a driving need to rent old films on VHS that I had never seen. I would go to my local video store in Ocean City, MD named Sound Odyssey and there, the owner named Ralph, would help me pick good classics. This is an experience no one will have again now that video rental stores are obsolete. With his guidance I saw Taxi Driver, Deer Hunter, Godfather, Death Wish, Clockwork Orange, and many others. I also got on a horror digression thanks to Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie Moments, which covered a lot of classic movies that happened to have horror elements. Halloween (1977) was already in my top tier of horror, but I went on to see The Sentinel, The Tenant, Rosemary's Baby, and Dawn of the Dead.

Around the late 90s and early 2000s I also watched many classic films from the 30s to 50s. My mom would have TCM on a lot and initially my teenage brain rebelled against the idea of watching stodgy black & white movies that seemed old-fashioned, slow, and full of archaic dialogue and emotionalism. I had enough receptivity though and a respect for the art of film to take a chance on some, and I was struck by their quality. I don't remember all the movies my mom helped me discover: The Heiress, Gaslight, Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Notorious, Wait Until Dark, Harvey, among others. When I saw The Philadelphia Story I would even mockingly spout dialogue "CK... Dexter.. Haven!"

Having grown up on 80s and 90s TV and movies, it wasn't completely stretching myself to watch these older movies. Filmmaking and audiences have changed so much in the last 30 years. Getting this initial introduction to classic film created a foundation that would ultimately lead to a huge multistory complex of film knowledge and film-loving attitude. I returned to classic film again and again, each return getting more intense and deeper. In the late 2000s I became obsessed with Siskel & Ebert, watching their old episodes where their criticisms of 80s and 90s movies were laced with references to film from the 20s-70s. Soon I began to understand what it means to cite Fellini, Lang, Kurosawa, and Orson Welles. In the early 2020s I dove deep into classic westerns and watched over a hundred in a few months. I then moved to the peripheries of classic noir and discovered commentaries and writings by Peter Bogdanovich, which bolstered a love for the movies. All of this comes full circle and now *all* I want to watch is classic film; to the point that when I watch anything else I find it boring and obnoxious. Without this early acclimation to classic film I might not have built an affinity for it that blossomed later into a full embrace.

Kumdo

Around 2001 I became interested in a martial art with the sword, the Korean variant of Kendo. I went to Park's Martial Arts every Saturday morning to train and learn the forms and practice swinging a bamboo stick or wooden katana. This became a significant influence later on when I would meet a friend on EverQuest, invite him to be my roommate, and teach him Kumdo as well.

Dragonball Z

When I met this friend online we shared a mutual interest in Dragonball Z, a show that was newly airing on Cartoon Network in the early 2000s. I really got into this show and watched it with religious observance like it was a soap opera. It was appointment television and I recorded on VHS the entire Frieza saga all the way through the Androids and Perfect Cell episodes. Vegeta was my main man, partly because he reflected my own serious attitude at the time and a penchant for training hard in my own sword martial art and physical exercise. Vegeta was a kind of role model for that. He also happened to be my online friend's male crush as well, so we bonded over a mutual affection for the proud, stentorian and always-scowling spike-haired dude.

Yu Yu Hakusho

From DBZ my buddy and I would venture into Yu Yu Hakusho, which once it got to the season of the dark tournament, became a new favorite anime. Our new male crush was Hiei, who, like Vegeta, was a permanently serious and training-obsessed bad ass who usually beat anyone he faced.

I remember my childhood buddy Joey Moraniec who occasionally visited me in Ocean City binge watching all the DBZ shows I had taped on multiple VHS. He also got me into anime, introducing me to Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Vampire Hunter D, Ninja Scroll. We'd rent these from the video shop.

Classical Music

In late 2002 I had a random encounter with a piece of classical music that changed my life forever. It may be the single most important and pivotal influence in my life. I was playing a Thief 2 fan mission "Calendra's Legacy" and it contained a short MP3 that played on loop around a certain building. I had no idea what this music was: a haunting series of arpeggios and expressive melancholy. With determined investigation I figured it what this music was, because I had to hear it in its entirety. Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. More specifically, the first movement which made the piece a household name.

Classical music for me was negligible in my life. My dad had an upright piano that I'd play chords on or mess around with; I had a little digital keyboard for kid's that played midi sounds. Somehow my mom got the notion to buy an upright digital piano with the assumption I would take lessons. We had it all the way back in 1997 or 98. It looked like a nice piece of furniture in our family room. I knew some classical from Fantasia and my mom occasionally played a Tchaikovsky audiocassette featuring the Nutcracker. Outside of this I didn't think of classical piano beyond naive, upbeat tinkling sounds straight outta Mozart. That there was music like this Moonlight Sonata--dark, expressive, sublime--was something new to my sensibilities. It set me down a path of music culture that became a colossal way of life for the next 20 years.

The Piano

I went out to Walmart to their bargain bin classical section where they sold CDs for $1-3. And I bought a Best of Beethoven CD that I still have because it contained Moonlight. I listened to this piece over and over, entranced every time. With our digital piano still in our possession, collecting dust in a corner of the dining room, I decided to learn and play Moonlight from scratch. I put the CD in my walkman, played the first few seconds, and then tried to replicate what I heard on the piano. I was delighted with myself that through rigor and obstinacy and slow memorization, I was filling in the harmonies, playing the notes I heard, all by ear after repeated listenings for seconds at a time. After nights of this work I was soon playing the whole piece by ear with only a few octave doublings or inner notes missing from chords (I discovered this years later when I learned to read music).

Playing it by myself brought much attention from my mom and also my dad when I'd go and visit him back in Baltimore. Pretty soon I learned Fur Elise the same way, as well as the slow movement to Chopin's Second Piano Sonata, best known as the Funeral March. Very quickly I became a total sap for Romanticism, I was going through teenage angst of yearning for a girl I couldn't have, and expressing this outpouring of emotion through these pieces was the only outlet.

I watched the films Amadeus, Immortal Beloved, and Impromptu, which made the world and people of classical music come alive for me. In short order I started listening to Mozart and loving his milieu and the classical music sound in general. This wasn't a casual interest now: classical music was a new frontier. I continued buying bargain bin CDs at Walmart and knew it was serious when my hunger for new repertoire and composers never abated.

Birth of a Music Dilettante

I kept building my knowledge of classical too. I would read books and liner notes, and absorb everything about the world of piano composers in the early 19th century. I picked up some volumes from an old anthology set my dad kept on his shelf by the piano: The International Library of Music (University Society). A couple of these volumes were purely music history texts with the history told in purple prose and vivid narration by contemporaries of the 19th century. This wasn't Classical Music 101: I learned the basics by reading the great authentic texts by Hans von Bulow and other 19th century musicologists. Beethoven, Chopin, and Liszt dominated my imagination. Reading about the milieu of Liszt as a rockstar performer who played these virtuoso titanic recitals that made women faint was like nothing I ever knew. This world of Romanticism, piano music as high art, legendary composer-pianists who were creating a new vehicle for artists in music was all mesmerizing.

Little by little I built upon my familiarity with the piano repertoire: all of Beethoven's piano concertos and sonatas, various Mozart works for keyboard, Schubert's impromptus, Mendelssohn's piano output, Liszt's greatest hits, and Rachmaninov all followed. My musically burgeoning brain was still limited in how much complexity I could process. I can remember when I tried listening to Beethoven's late piano sonatas in 2005 and they were impenetrable except for the Hammerklavier. It would take a couple years before I could make sense of them--I later learned they're among the most esoteric and dense of the piano literature. Within a year I cracked their aural code and adored them as great masterworks of the piano repertory.

Becoming a Classical Pianist

By 2005 I had learned by memory to play several pieces and kept them in my permanent repertoire including a Chopin nocturne (G minor), Beethoven's Fur Elise and Moonlight, the slow movement of the Pathetique, parts of Liszt's Dante Sonata, Mozart's Fantasia in D minor, and the full Funeral March of Chopin. All of this was learned with a mixture of ear-only and consulting the score. I finally got around to reading music in autodidact fashion. The idea of starting simple with learning to sight-read "Mary Had a Little Lamb" never occurred to me, though. Even if it was an astronomical challenge of trying to run before I could walk, it didn't matter. Learning music notes while looking at Rachmaninov's Prelude in C# minor was perfectly fine to me. I played what I wanted.

At the end of 2005 I had made up my mind to aim for a career path related to classical music in some way, I just wasn't sure how; radio host or academic professor perhaps.

1997-1998 2006-2010