Month: November 2024

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Nice Dream, As Radiohead Put It

It’s rare that I have dreams that I remember, as I’ve noted before many times on this site. It’s even more rare that, when I do remember those dreams, they’re not somehow either inexplicably weird enough, or unsettling enough, that they stick with me. for whatever reason. The other day, though — the other night? Well, early morning, I guess — I had a dream that was just… nice. Pleasant. Positive, even. And for some reason, it stuck with me, and so here it is.

As with so many of my dreams, it’s the details I remember rather than the plot, per se. (Do dreams really have plots, or is that just pushing some kind of expectation of storytelling on them that they don’t deserve?) Everything was happening on a sunny fall day — I remember both the sun, and the chill in the air — even though I was inside, talking to people in a big room with massive windows from floor to ceiling. The room was part of an imaginary office, and I remember there was a lot of white furniture everywhere, including white shelving that extended across the window in part to dramatic effect.

I was in that office because, in the dream, I had been offered the job of editing a magazine. I’m not entirely clear on who was offering me that job or why, but there was some weird connection to the fact that James Gunn’s first Superman movie was about to come out and that was playing some factor into it. (Was it DC offering me a job? Who can tell at this point.) All I remember was, it was a job where I was being told I could do what I want with budget not an issue, literally a dream job, and I was sitting in this room thinking variations on, “I can’t believe my luck” and also “But I’m already editing Popverse, would I have to quit to do this? Is that something I’d want to do?”

Such thoughts weren’t anxiety inducing or bad, I should note; this was, again, a positive dream so it was far more, “Oh, what a great place to be in, what an opportunity” than anything else. The feeling throughout the entire experience was one of being fortunate, and of the potential available to offer people work as a result, and make a good thing that also helped other people in the process.

There’s no small amount of dark humor to be found in the fact that my dream was literally, “Imagine the publishing industry was so healthy to launch a new magazine that you got to be part of,” and also, “imagine the industry was so healthy good writers you know could get work,” but let’s overlook that for now. Let’s just bask in the memory of a nice dream. Good vibes only, as the frustrating saying goes.

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The Semiotics of Barry Allen

After my recent dive into years worth of The Flash issues from the 1970s and early 1980s, I feel like I’ve come away with a pretty good understanding about what made those issues work, and the specific languages, codes, and signifiers at play throughout that era that have fallen out of favor (and, in many cases, out of use entirely) since then. That last part is a shame; comics as a medium is such a unique blend of words and pictures that I feel like there are multiple tricks that only comics can do that just don’t get used anymore because they’re not fashionable, and it feels… I don’t know, like tying a hand behind your back for no reason, perhaps?

To that end, I realized that there’s so much inside this particular era of Flash comics that, should an enterprising creative team wish to do so, a revival of Barry Allen as the hero inside the costume could literally build a comic just out of reconsidering some of the particular visual iconography of his original run. (No pun intended.) To wit:

  • The majority of Barry Allen Flash comics are built around the concept that the cover presents an outlandish situation that requires explanation, and the issue itself solves the mystery of how it happens. (Even if, as is often the case, the cover is not entirely an accurate version of events.) If Wally West Flash comics are straightforward superhero comics, Barry Allen Flash comics are whodunnits, or howdunnits. They’re mystery stories.
  • Unlike most superhero stories, Barry Allen is the adult in the room. His rogues gallery, his work colleagues, everyone else in his life (with the exception of his love interest(s), for some fascinating reason) are all a little kooky and out of there, but Barry is curiously immune: he’s a professional who cares about his friends, his career, his family, and even his hobbies — because, somehow, he actually has hobbies. In revivals, that’s translated into “Barry was a square,” but there’s something more interesting in the idea that Barry holds it together while everyone else… doesn’t.
  • For a long time, Flash comics started with a first page that flashed forward in the narrative while setting the scene for the reader and restating the question posed by the cover. It’s a fun trick to introduce the reader to the stakes of the story, and one that also allows for misdirection and/or contextualization that can’t be fit in anywhere else in the issue. Why did this drop out of use?
  • For that matter: can we have omniscient narrators back in comics, please? Less first person narration — something that the Wally West Flash comics really popularized back in the ’90s, perhaps ironically — and more third person!
  • While we’re at it, why can’t we have caption boxes with hands like this again?


I think what I’m saying is, if I could write fiction, I’d want to write a Barry Allen Flash comic, just to use all these tips and tricks to see what happened.

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I Wanna Hear Those Club Classics

It strikes me that I should share that my 2024 playlist — which I’ve previously shared tracks from here and here — is now passed 150 songs. For those who’ve forgotten or never knew in the first place, it’s a playlist of songs that I’ve either discovered and become obsessed with, or simply recently remembered and become obsessed with, throughout the year. I update here everytime it tops another 50 entries, so here’s songs #s 101-150. (Yes, we’re above that already.)

You can find the actual playlist on Spotify here.

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It Also Means Stumble

The fall is, I promise, my favorite time of the year. There’s something about the dull light on the overcast days, or the way that sun is almost mixed with crisp chills if and when it eventually arrives. (I’m writing this on the first sunny day here in Portland in something like three or four weeks, and it feels magical how much it’s lifted my mood.) Despite that, I’ve noticed that in recent years, the fall is also the time of year when everything just… folds in on itself as if time is collapsing around me.

This year, for example, it felt as if October just… didn’t happen. Or, rather, days of it did — I remember by birthday, and Halloween, for example, and I know I went to New York for a week of it even if all I did was work endlessly — but the entire month seemed to pass in the blink of an eye overall. Suddenly, it wasn’t just November but midway through November and I felt as if I’d magically arrived here through time travel or sleepwalking through the last few weeks. (To be fair, that might have been the case, given how intense my workload was for about four or five weeks there.)

Last year, the fall was lost to my UK trip; I left mid-October and when I was back, it was almost Thanksgiving and the holiday season felt as if it was already underway. I spent the holidays trying to catch my breath and wondering what had happened.

What is it about this time of year? Is it the stress of the entire rest of the year finally catching up with us and pulling us under for a little bit? Is it that the darker mornings and evenings just fuck with our sense of time and sending us spinning as a result? Am I simply not as much of a fan of the fall as I used to be?

Maybe I’m just getting old. But the final two months of each year are becoming increasingly tricky for me, and I’m not quite sure what to do about that.

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Once More With Unspoken Feeling

Would that I could explain why I got obsessed with the idea of “instrumental writing” the other week, but alas, it defies logical description. The idea appeared in my head as a question — literally, “what does the writing version of instrumental music look like?” — and then just… stayed.

My first thought was that the answer wasn’t writing at all, but abstract visual art; that there’s no such thing as instrumental writing, because the joy of instrumental music was that it was something you felt but couldn’t fully explain, even if you understood it. By virtue of the way writing works, I figured, anything you read automatically has some level of explanation and specificity that instrumental music manages to avoid. Just the use of language at all surely presents some context that is otherwise entirely absent in music with no lyrics, right…?

Then, of course, my brain went to a place of, “Well, what if there was writing that was nonsensical and entirely context-free? Could that work?” Admittedly, I don’t have the clearest idea of what this would actually look like in practice — I imagined mash-ups of purple prose that looked like something we imagined robots would do in the ’90s if exposed to too much Bill Mantlo or Don McGregor, but that wasn’t it — so obviously that clearly wasn’t the answer, either.

Perhaps the true answer that isn’t simply, it doesn’t and cannot exist, lame-o, is that instrumental writing is something that doesn’t start or end. A stream of consciousness that the reader can drop into and back out, and exist inside that space for as long as they want. Writing that doesn’t exist for the reader, but instead for the author, and just exists to be interacted with or not, as the case may be.

But where would someone find something like that?

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Not In Your Contact List

There’s something to be said, I’m sure, about what the spam of any particular era says about that time. Who amongst us fails to remember the time when almost every single spam email wanted to trick us into confirming our existence — not to mention our personal details — by promising untold wealth if only we’d believe that an African Prince was asking for our help? Those were happier, more naive years, when the counterfeit powers that be sought to take advantage of those political promises of “Hope” and “Change” by suggesting that we should dare to hope that our lives could change if only we revealed way too much about ourselves to a stranger. (Hey, he was down on his luck and just needed some help!)

Lately, though, I’ve found that the spam of today has two significant differences to the “classic” spam of the past. (Those quote marks around “classic” are doing a lot of work, let’s be honest.) For one thing, so much of it seems to be coming in as texts, rather than emails — am I the only one who’s getting multiple spam texts every day now? I blame the fact that my phone number is likely on several million lists after years of convention attendance — and, more importantly, it’s… sad now. Take, for example, this spam text I received earlier today:

Maybe I’m just too much of a sentimental old man, but there’s something about this message that feels like there’s enough backstory to fill at least a novella of longing, pretentiously and anxiously written by a first-time writer processing a recent love affair in the most self-indulgent manner possible. But it’s melancholic in such an inescapable way to me that feels fascinating. Is this where we are now, wondering about people we miss and wanting to hear from them?

I could be reading too much into these messages, of course; I am me, after all, and for every “I hope you still have the same number, I haven’t heard from you in so long and I was thinking of you” spam text, there’s a “I work for an employment agency and I’d like to offer you a job” one as well. Perhaps the real feeling out there is “economic and emotional uncertainty,” to which I’d respond, “I think that was my 20s, and my 30s, and a lot of my 40s as well, glad you all caught up.”

I should simply delete these messages, and not think about them so much. And yet, hours later, I’m still wondering about whoever came up with the above text and what’s going on in their lives for that to be their attempt to catfish us into disaster. Spare a thought for the spammers; it seems like maybe they’re having some hard times themselves.

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The Movies of October 2024

It strikes me as very weird that, despite managing to watch literally nothing while I was in New York for a week — I really was far too busy working the entire time, as ridiculous as that sounds — I still managed to see as many movies as I did in the remaining 24 days of the month. Thanks, especially to the Criterion Channel, which I subscribed to as a birthday present to myself back at the start of October.

Really, though, what I’m honestly taking away from October’s movie viewing was that I was too tired to watch The Substance on Halloween when it came to Mubi. What a way to end the month that would have been…!

(Also, I have no idea why Letterboxd decided to format the layout this way…)