Situation: Tired, Probably
I didn’t get to do my traditional, “by the time you’re reading this, I’ll be at San Diego Comic-Con” post this year, mostly because I was busy writing other things and then suddenly it was San Diego Comic-Con and what can be done? I’m still writing this before the show, but literally, just before the show; I got too distracted with work and life to properly plan out blog posts ahead of time for most of July because… well, San Diego Comic-Con requires a lot of planning ahead of time. It’ll just run as I’m traveling back this year, is all.
My relationship with the show changes every year; the longer I’m in the job I’m in, the bigger SDCC becomes in terms of time real estate. By the time the show actually started (starts; I’m writing early, remember?), I’ll have been working on it for weeks, thinking about not just my schedule but all the Popverse writers attending, and sending out emails and messages about whether or not we can get into this panel or that press room, or if embargo X is really intended for time Y, or if we can go with it as soon as it’s mentioned in the room, or some such. What was once just “a convention” becomes a game of intellectual Tetris, trying to make all the pieces fit together without losing sight of the bigger picture.
I also find that the show itself becomes less and less… not important, per se, but central, if that makes sense…? My memories are of the friends I see every year, and of the surrounding areas of the show — the spaces you walk through to get there and back each day. I could walk you through the San Diego Convention Center blindfolded by this point — I’ve been going to SDCC for something like 20 years! — but the actual convention feels like an afterthought more and more with every year. It’s just a job, in a different place, and at a different pace from the rest of the year.
If you’d told me that back when I first attended and felt overwhelmed by it all — even the idea of it all — I wouldn’t have believed you. But then, if you’d told me that I’d have done San Diego Comic-Con for twenty years, I wouldn’t have believed that, either.
Looks Like We’ve Made It To The
Watching Blur: To The End the other day — a documentary about the last reunion of the band, which is ostensibly about their recording the Ballad of Darren album and then playing Wembley Stadium, but is really a messy, half-formed movie about the band’s relationship with each other now that they’re actually feeling older — I was struck by Damon Albarn saying something along the lines of, there was a point where I realized I don’t have that long left before I die, and pinning that to being 55 years old. I had this immediate bifurcated response of, wait, is Damon Albarn only five years older than me? and I don’t feel like that at all, even though I feel old.
Thinking about it, I’m not sure I’ve ever really had a sense of my own mortality, really. That’s not to say that I think I’m invincible or irrationally immortal, simply that I don’t really think about death so much. When I cast my mind back to my childhood and think about my parents, I realize the same was true about them, at least from my point of view — they didn’t act as if they were especially concerned about death being around the corner, at least to a point of wanting to actually do something about it. (Not only were their diets terrible, but both were heavy smokers and my father a functional alcoholic.) My grandmother, too, the one that lived with us when I was a kid, she did seem immortal to me as grandparents do when you’re a child. There was a sense that she’d live forever, in large part because that was how she acted, even after she had a stroke.
I turned 50 years old last year and felt immediately weighed down by the prospect of being old, but that was an abstract concern of “Now I will ache and be brittle more” than any true thoughts of my time on this earth being slipping away with every breath. Perhaps it’s a problem with my (admittedly flawed) sense of forward planning; I simply can’t imagine the idea of getting so old and then dying. That feels impossible to me, for some inexplicable reason; my brain short-circuits: Do people still do that? it asks, and then moves on to another subject.
Objectively, I know that the odds of me living to be 100 years old are, shall we say, unlikely, and yet… I still feel as mortal as I did at 30, if not younger. Maybe that’ll change in the next handful of years. Perhaps by the time I’m 55.
Albarn is actually seven years older than me, but given the production schedule of the movie, it makes sense he would’ve been around 55 or 56 when it was being shot. Just in case you’re wondering. Yes, I looked it up after.
Keep Me Moving, Take Me Somewhere
There Are No
There are some sensations that escape language entirely, which is both a welcome and frustrating realization for a professional writer to come to.
Case in point: I’m sitting here with the window open behind me, listening to the sound of the wind as it comes through the trees, hearing it come in waves towards the house from the furthest trees to the ones right immediately behind, and then the wind pushes through the open window and I feel it surround me. Everything goes cool for an instant, and feels at once entirely still and in motion, and then falls away again.
But that’s just a description of the cause and effect, of the facts of the matter; it’s not a description of how it feels physically, or the feelings it evokes internally; I can’t come to anything approaching a way to helping myself share that in any kind of meaningful way without hand gestures, hyperbole and metaphor, and saying things like, you know what I mean, right? on a worryingly regular basis. The experience above is something that can’t be summed up in words, when it’s happening. You had to be there, as the saying goes.
I’m coming to appreciate that a lot more lately. Not just the experience that has to be experienced, although that ideally goes without saying; I mean the shortcoming of language, though, the sense of coming up against a brick wall in my own abilities to write it down and make it understandable to other people in any meaningful way. I read Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living when I was on my trip to the Bay Area, and couldn’t escape the feeling that she’d written an entire book trying to say things that couldn’t be put into words and failing in the most successful, most beautiful way possible.
It’s good that we can’t translate everything into easily digestible language. It’s good that more talented people than I keep trying, anyway.
I’ve Read It In Books
I realized, upon seeing the little kid looking around with no small sense of wonder in the bookstore at the SFMOMA, that bookshops have always been oddly safe spaces for me.
I’m not sure that I could claim that I’ve always been a reader, per se; I can remember a teacher at high school pulling me aside at the end of a class to tell me, essentially, that I was too smart for the books I was choosing to read in class and that I needed to challenge myself or else I’d lose the joy of reading for good. But despite that, I always found myself drawn to bookshops at whatever age. There was something comforting about being surrounded by so many books no matter the size of the store, and I’d always go in with the hope of finding something that appealed to my tastes, whatever they may have been in the moment.
More than that, I have always found myself drawn to bookstores as places to kill time, to hang out and just… be. I can remember hours spent in bookshops when I was a teenager, just aimlessly pushing around books on the shelves, hoping to uncover a new favorite based on title, cover, or back blurb alone. (Ideally all three; it’s how I found Jonathan Carroll’s After Silence, which sported a great Dave McKean cover back in… 1991? Something like that, the era when a Dave McKean cover felt like a statement.) Bookshops felt like spaces where you weren’t just invited in, you were invited in to stay awhile. It felt like part of an unspoken, implicit promise from their very existence.
When I first moved to the States, finding a good bookstore was on top of my to-do list, only to discover I lived just a couple minutes walk from a truly great one, Green Apple. (Maybe the first time I’d gotten to visit a genuinely amazing bookshop.) The same when I moved to Portland, and again, there was a Powell’s branch within walking distance from my house. Sometimes I wonder if I’d have been so happy, so ready to settle, if that hadn’t been the case.
All of this came to mind as I watched this small kid navigate the shelves of the SFMOMA store, his eyes wide as he reached for countless books. He gets it, I thought to myself with something approaching pride. He’ll have a life of bookshops if he’s lucky.
The Streets of San Francisco, Reprise
Someday, You Will Find Me
One of the first things I noticed about the differences between the UK and US after moving to the latter — after things like, the sun seems like it’s a different color over here and American cash is really weird to the touch — was the lack of a monoculture, at least when it came to pop music. I came from a country where everyone knew what songs were in the top 10 even if they didn’t like them; where Radio 1 really was a national institution, for better or worse. There was something comforting in that, to me. It was a north star of sorts for me, if one that I didn’t recognize at the time.
I think about that a lot now, in an era where monoculture seems simultaneously impossible — pop culture has fragmented into a million pieces as a specific form of tribalism feels as if it’s taken over in every facet of… well, everything, really — and entirely omnipresent, with Marvel movies and Netflix and whichever pop figure of the moment (are we past the Sabrina Carpenter of it all yet?). Yet, it somehow feels very different from the one I grew up with: there’s no Top of the Pops and no communal in-jokes that everyone just seems to share even without it being properly and officially shared anywhere. No wonder we all liked Twitter before everything fell apart. (I guess that all came from the newspapers and radio, back in the day…?)
All of this has been coming up as I read The Nation’s Favorite: The True Adventures of Radio 1, an oral history of the radio station’s mid-90s/Britpop era that came out more or less as it was happening. (I’m re-reading it, technically; I first read it when it came out in 1998, but that’s so long ago, I’m not sure it counts anymore.) There’s something about the certainty of everyone involved that what they were doing with a pop radio station mattered that feels almost quaint, in retrospect, but I remember what it felt like at the time, and how surreally “important” Radio 1 felt during that odd era. It was a great time to be in your late teens/early 20s, speaking from experience, because pop culture felt new and thrilling even as it regurgitated and remixed the past in such a way that felt as if it moved through every part of the country.
Maybe that is what skews everything in my perspective; that I was young at the last time when it felt as if pop culture, politics, and social movements were all mixed up and playing into each other, and felt as if that was the way it should always be. (Or, perhaps, I’m just old and biased.)
Foresight, Unwittingly
When I trace the many people I’ve stolen from in building whatever I have that might be called my “voice” when I write for myself — by which I mean, when I write here, these days; I don’t get a chance to write outside of the professional entertainment journalist voice anywhere else anymore — I go to a collection of well-worn references: Grant Morrison’s Speakeasy columns and letters pages in The Invisibles*, Kurt Vonnegut and Jonathan Carroll books I read at impressionable ages, Bill Drummond’s 1990s writing in things like 45 and the like. A bunch of things I read at the point when I was finding myself writing more and more by mistake and trying to figure out how to present myself on the page that way.
It’s a reminder, in its own way, that I got into writing by mistake. It was the thing I did to give myself something to illustrate in art school, and even before that, in high school — my final year in high school, I failed to do any proper final project for my art class all year and so handed in this comic strip I’d been writing and drawing for myself in desperation; the feedback was more or less, “We don’t get comics, but the writing isn’t bad,” which was probably a sign I didn’t pay attention to at the time. (All of that work was left behind when I moved to the U.S.; it’s probably a good thing. I think I might even have thrown it out, when I think back.)
Writing was a fallback, a means-to-an-end that I didn’t think twice about, until I did. I can remember interviewing to do the Masters degree program in my final year of art school, and them asking me what I’d do if I got accepted into the program. I didn’t have a real answer, beyond “I don’t feel like I’ve finished whatever it is I’m doing now, and I’m too scared to go out there and fail to get a job,” but I offered up a jumble of sentences and ended with something along the lines of, “and I think I should write more, I think there’s something more I can do with writing,” and that was the part of the interview where they seemed to relax and get animated about the prospect of me continuing my education.
At that point, I was in love with language and the potential it had to thrill and amuse and educate, but I couldn’t have told you that at the time. All I knew was that I’d read something occasionally and think to myself, oh, there’s something there I need to remember for some reason, and fold it up and put it into a filing cabinet in my brain. I knew I was studying and storing, I just didn’t know what for. No wonder, given that experience, I find myself fetishizing following gut instinct today. I knew my future career decades too early, even if I didn’t realize it at the time.
