User Profile franz_conrad    Member Since: March 22, 2004 Sex: male Location: Sydney, Australia View Threads With Posts by This User Occupation:    Short film writer/director/editor, statistician. Favorite Score(s):    [b]Wojciech Kilar[/b] - [i]Portrait of a Lady[/i]; [b]Alexandre Desplat[/b] - [i]Birth, The Painted Veil, The Beat My Heart Skipped[/i]; [b]Alberto Iglesias[/b] - [i]The Dancer Upstairs, Sex and Lucia, Talk to Her[/i]; [b]John Williams[/b] - [i]The Fury, Empire Strikes Back, Close Encounters, AI, Memoirs of a Geisha[/i]; [b]David Shire[/b] - [i]The Conversation, Zodiac[/i]; [b]Philippe Sarde[/b] - [i]The Tenant, Tess, Le Train[/i]; [b]Terence Blanchard[/b] - [i]The Caveman's Valentine[/i]; [b]John Corigliano[/b] - [i]The Red Violin, Altered States[/i]; [b]Ennio Morricone[/b] - [i]Mission to Mars, Nostromo, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Days of Heaven[/i]; [b]Phillip Glass[/b] - [i]Kundun, Mishima[/i]; [b]Bernard Herrmann[/b] - [i]The Ghost and Mrs Muir, Vertigo[/i]; [b]Jerry Goldsmith[/b] - [i]Papillon, Under Fire, Patton[/i]; [b]Christopher Gordon[/b] - [i]On the Beach[/i]; [b]Franz Waxman[/b] - [i]Taras Bulba, Prince Valiant[/i]. About Me:    The origin story of Franz Conrad is something like this. I was in Prague shortly after the Milennium celebrations discovering the unglamorous bureaucratic technocracy that is slowly being perfected in the former Eastern bloc countries. Daily my humanity was stripped away by an undistinguished clerical job that placed myself and many others sitting in a great room, working at anonymous desks with identical desktops on our equivalent PCs. My propensity for success within all mediums involving verbose variations on the slenderest of themes ensured my ongoing survival and all-too-justified rise in the favour of my heartless superiors. Inevitably jealousy was aroused by my Weber-inspired coworkers who plotted my fall, and accused me of a crime - the nature of which I was never fully aware of, and consequently I couldn't completely deny my guilt since I knew not what I was accused of. Imagine the dilemma. My Faustian fall was as impressive as my Festian rise to Solomanic sagedom. Fortunately I was found on the streets of Prague by a beneficient secret society that offered to clear my name of the unutterable charge if I would for them undertake a mission that would risk me being saddled with an even more unutterable slur. Confusedly I accepted, only to find myself dispatched with some of the best tracking equipment known to powerful men to the once dark continent, Africa. I was to sail up the Congo in a geographically confused banana boat from Brazil and locate a rogue executive who had appointed himself an impressive severage package that had left his business partners back in Eastern Europe rather desperate. My instruction was simple - to show no regard for human life should it come in the way of the money. As I sailed up the river, I pondered which unutterable slur might the gentlemen be referring to - my first murder? Or the selling of my soul for another's financial gain? Or the abstract detachment with which I regarded the organic discourse of the landscape which sped by with the rapidity of a flightless barn owl? My thought was that if I could identify the unutterable slur - I could, knowing what it was - identify by a process of elimination the apparently less evil unutterable charge made against by my coworkers. I would thus come to a better understanding of myself, and achieve the karma that had been denied me many months. Such inner agonising only made the landscape fly past slower. So much slower that by the time I arrived at my destination at the mouth of the Congo River, my quarry - one Franz Conrad - had gone native in the most unusual sense of metamorphosing into a cockroach that I found myself very nearly stepping on as he preached to me of Weber, Nietzche and the surprisingly-post-modern Foucault. In the end I could take it no more - I picked him up with a tissue and flushed him down the toilet. Suddenly I was afflicted with great anguish, for I understood in erasing Franz Conrad identity the truth about my own. The unutterable charge, unpardonable sin, inelectable malady that gripped my soul was ever so clear. (So clear that I shall not risk fate by uttering the unutterable here.) I decided to take the name Franz Conrad thereafter in honor of the man turned cockroach who inspired this discovery of self and spirituality, and I have testified to the truth of this discovery since with crossed fingers.