Month: June 2023

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And Turned Around, Sooner or Later

The other day (as I write this, weeks before you read it), I was having a conversation about the importance of failure — the idea that it’s not only okay to fail at things sometimes, it’s probably necessary on some deep, inexplicable emotional level.

This was treated with no small amount of cynicism by the person I was talking to, and I get it: failure is meant to be a bad thing, and certainly isn’t the goal of any particular enterprise, especially in the early days. Moreover, I can remember surprisingly clearly how strongly I felt about the idea of failing at something when I was younger: how scary it felt, how overwhelming and horrifying the very concept of people seeing me not do the thing I set out to was at the time. How could I face them if they knew how badly I fucked up? I’d ask myself, mortified at even considering the possibility.

Since those days, I’ve failed at a lot of things, professionally and personally. I’ve screwed up, and I’ve been screwed up by others; it’s been difficult and awkward and, sure, utterly embarrassing at times, too; I’ve dealt with a lot of it badly, and with less grace and goodwill than I’d have liked, looking back, in many cases, too, to my regret… but I can’t deny that a bunch of those failures have been for the best, in the long run.

Not in the, “every failure was a step on the path here” way, exactly — but also that, as cliche as it is — but in the sense of, it’s good to learn your limits and find out what you can’t do as well as what you can. It’s worthwhile to step out of the wreckage and go, “Well, I’m never doing that again,” and know exactly why. There’s value in fucking up and learning from your mistakes, even if sometimes the real lesson is that someone else is a real dick.

I’m not sure how much of this translated to the person I was talking to, or how much they realized that (a) they’ve failed at something and that’s fine as long as they accept it, and (b) it’s better to fail and move on than pull everything down around them in an attempt to disguise the failure from themselves and others. I know that the me of even a decade ago might not have been ready to accept that. Nonetheless: sometimes it’s good to give in and admit that you made a trash fire.

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The Shots I Don’t Take

I’ve been left thinking lately about the stories I haven’t written for work, and the oddly zen practice of how that has shaped my day-to-day and my career as a whole. I’m not talking about turning down or ignoring so many of the PR emails I receive daily — so, so many, like you wouldn’t believe — but the stories that I actually research and work on that, for whatever reason, don’t end up making it to the finish line. There’s more of those than you’d think.

Part of this is, simply, you go into something researching the truth behind a rumor or something that someone has told you and it turns out not to be true. This is relatively common, honestly, and it’s at once frustrating and enlightening; your story might die, but at least you get to the truth of the matter, you know? There’s something to be said for that, even if you ultimately have to surrender all the work you’ve done up to that point.

(Very very recently, I was looking into something that would have been A Story in a very big way, and I was eagerly trying to get to the bottom of it as quickly as possible so I could write it… but it turn out to be nothing, outside of some uninformed gossiping and people believing the worst of others. I was at once relieved and, honestly, upset.)

There are also stories that never see the light of day because of anxious editors or, worse, cautious lawyers; I’ve had that happen on a number of occasions, and that is far more upsetting, especially when it’s of particular importance to people personally. I get that publications don’t want to say that XXXXX XXXXXX is a manipulative asshole who has been accused of emotional abuse by previous partners for legal reasons or whatever, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are, and that people involved want their stories told. Alas.

One day, when I’m old and everyone has forgotten everything else, I should just put all of these unfinished, unpublished stories in a book and share them anyway. I’ll call it, Go Ahead and Sue Me, I’m an Old Journalist and Have No Money, Fuckers.

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Up The Ephemeral

This, from Christopher Cantwell’s newsletter, has been on my mind pretty much daily since I first read it:

“In Halt and Catch Fire, at play was always the notion of people in need of connection trying to use technology to bridge the gap. We are living in the ironic end result of it not working. Of course, it also has in a multitude of ways. I’ve met some great friends through technology and established an entire second career. But it feels easier to maintain those connections the old fashioned way now, outside a swarm of wasps and detritus and deafening, meaningless noise.

“None of what the characters in our show did worked. Life has greatly improved in ways that can’t be discounted because of machines, but not socially. Technology has fueled cruelty and eradicated humility and assailed ideas of empirical truth and understanding. It has led many to believe that humans are data to be harvested or deleted, based on whether or not they please us on a whim. It has propped up the ephemeral and turned it into idolatry, it has aided in the denial of and / or the worship of real evil, all in the fearful hope of retaining or gaining even more power.

“It’s a failed experiment.”

Ignoring the fact that this makes me want to go back and rewatch Halt and Catch Fire — a show that I dearly love, and loved more and deeper the more it went on, and the more it became kinder to the very flawed characters at the heart of it — I return over and over to the idea that the internet is a failed experiment, and one that has made us crueler and worse people. The internet is responsible for all manner of good in my life, personally; it’s been where I’ve discovered love both romantic and platonic, and where I found my career, after all. But I can’t deny that, as a whole, this whole thing has been… probably not for the best?

And yet, we’re still here. There’s nowhere else to go, is there? Not really; we can’t all just unplug and step away. Such a thing is literally the stuff of dystopian sci-fi because our imaginations can’t really comprehend the idea that it might actually be for the best. How could it all work without the internet, again, knowing what we know? Would things really be better, or have we just had a shift it will take generations to recover from?

And now this question can live in your head for days after, too.

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And It Would Be Alright Now

I’ve shared what I’ve been reading in terms of comics all year so far, but I figured as we’re approaching the midpoint of the year, I’d share my 2023 Spotify playlist. I started it at the very end of 2022, as you’ll be able to see below from the screenshots, but this is the second year I’ve done this: made a playlist that’s either new songs that I’ve not heard before but become obsessed with, or else things that I’ve not listened to in awhile that I felt the urge to dive back into. (More of the former than the latter, so far.)

Consider all of these songs recommended, of course.

The playlist so far goes beyond 50 songs, but that feels like a good place to stop for now. I should add that I try to make sure that no artist appears on the list twice, but I’m fudging the details a little on that here: “Neil MacArthur” is, in fact, Colin Blunstone under a fake name. (For those who don’t know either name, but generally know their pop: Blunstone was the lead vocalist for the Zombies. The Colin Blunstone track here is basically a Zombies reunion a handful of years after Odyssey and Oracle, and it’s glorious.)

Go on; sample some stuff. See if there’s some new (or old) favorites in there.

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Me/Not Me

Discovering my name on a newly-published story at The Hollywood Reporter the other day was a trip, as someone who hasn’t written for the site in a more than a couple of years at this point. It was attached to an obituary for John Romita Snr., one that I can remember writing in advance many years earlier; still, it’s an odd thing to see yourself suddenly out of context like that.

(It was written, darkly, just after the death of Stan Lee in 2018; we’d had a meeting that was, essentially, “Which other comic creator is old and is likely to die soon? We should write obituaries for them just in case.” Even then, Romita was 88 years old. He was, of course, on the list.)

The THR story wasn’t the first time that I’d discovered my name on “new” stories without any warning, mind you; Newsarama as-was — I think the site is officially called Games Radar now — used to do that kind of thing as a matter of course: taking old stories and updating them and republishing them as new, with the name of the original author attached. Going by their business practice, which I should emphasize I knew about ahead of time so this wasn’t a surprise, I was working for them years and years after I’d actually stopped. “New” stories would appear while I’d moved on to multiple other sites.

It’s a strange feeling, this particular lack of autonomy. It’s one thing to search for background material on a story and find something you’d written and utterly forgotten about years ago — that happens all the time, which only makes sense considering how long I’ve been doing this, and I’ve gotten used to it — but to find things that appear to be written contemporaneously, referencing events that have only just happened, that claim to be mine and I didn’t do it? That’s a whole different level of strangeness.

My writing will live on, on the internet, after me. But sometimes, it’ll be born on the internet without me, as well. It’s a disorienting feeling, at times.

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Everything Is Exactly Right

I am, as I’ve written here before, a fan of stillness and silence. There’s a particular pleasure that comes from the absence of noise and clutter — mental, as well as visual and aural — that I couldn’t even come close to explaining even if I had years to try, but it’s something that I find especially important and fulfilling the busier and more frenetic the day-to-day becomes.

This thought occurred to me recently while sitting on the couch, waiting for something to happen (a specific something, I should clarify, not the generic “waiting for something to happen” that denotes ennui or boredom). I was finishing up an unusual piece of evening work while no-one else was around — they were asleep, making all parts of the house surprisingly still and silent — and for once, there was no music playing and no television making dramatic noises off in the background somewhere. Instead, when I finished typing and closed the document in question, I suddenly realized how quiet it was.

And yet, it wasn’t entirely quiet. At some point, without me really being fully aware of it, two cats had started to lay on me as I worked — one on my legs, another against my shoulders and draped across the upper part of my arm — and both were asleep, cozily snuggled up to me and snoring. The sound of those snores, almost comically gentle and understated as if a human was trying to conjure up an approximation of the cutest snore imaginable for an animated movie, was effortlessly comforting, and somehow underscored how silent and still everything else was around me.

Even as one of the cats pushed against me, as if trying to sleepily will my leg to change shape and become more comfortable (Sorry, cat; there’s bone in there to prevent that from happening), I felt at peace, entirely comfortable and thinking I can’t move, I cannot, I can’t disturb these cats at all over and over to myself — reader, I did eventually; the ache in my leg demanded it — it felt as if I was receiving an unexpected, inexplicable gift: a small strand of the world that was not moving for just a second, letting me exist quietly and happily. That thought came to me, and was immediately affirmed by a low purr right next to my head.

Sometimes, in the midst of everything else, things can feel at least temporarily perfect.

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We Won’t Care, Just You See

A side effect of getting older as a lover of pop music is, I think, coming to accept that The Kinks were one of the greatest bands of the ’60s. Oh, sure; everyone knows their hits — “You Really Got Me,” “All Day and All of The Night,” even “Lola” — but the older I get, the more I just kind of step back and think, holy shit, they just kept putting out shockingly great music for fucking years, didn’t they?

I’m not entirely sure what it is about the band that prevents them from being up there with the Beatles and the Stones, the two iconic bands of the era; listen to songs like “Stop Your Sobbing,” and it’s got the arrangement (vocal and instrumental) of an early Beatles song, while “I’m Not Like Everybody Else” has all the sneering posture of the Stones at their anxious, nervous angry best. (Something like “Nothin’ In The World Can Stop Me Worryin’ ‘Bout That Girl” has the blues riffs and rip-offs of the Stones’ early days, too, but paired with a vulnerability that Mick could never.)

There’s so much more the Kinks are capable of, though, at least for that first decade of their existence: songs like “Days” and “Shangri-La,” or the so-famous-you-forget-how-good-it-actually-is “Waterloo Sunset” have a wistfulness and longing and sadness all their own, while “The Village Green Preservation Society” and “All of My Friends Were There” are informed by the British Music Hall tradition in a way that other bands only claimed to be, outside of things like “Your Mother Should Know” or brief intros to more raucous songs. (Hi, bands like The Move and The Creation.)

Maybe that’s what I missed before, and am only coming around to now — a recognition and appreciation of how vast and varied the Kinks’ output was at their height, and how restless a band they were during that period. It’s not just that they could do it all, it’s that they did, for a time there… and that’s something that I find myself thinking about more and more often, as I age.

Maybe I’m just jealous, at the heart of it.