It’s That Time Again
As you’re reading this, I’m probably losing my mind. I’m writing it a couple of weeks ahead of time in a vain attempt to try and build up something resembling a buffer of posts before the big event, but on the day this publishes, the annual terror that is San Diego Comic-Con Week is ramping up.
The show itself doesn’t begin for two more days, but basically everything from two weeks out is utterly eaten up by the event itself. Like New York Comic Con in October, San Diego Comic-Con (which has the hyphen, NYCC doesn’t, because “Comic-Con” with a hyphen is apparently a trademarked term; something to bear in mind) is less of a traditional event than an existential happening with an event horizon that consumes everything around it; time gets weird, and it’s probably very likely that I’ve been so nose-deep in planning for the show when you’re reading this that I have already lost track of what day it actually is.
Making things more complicated this year is the fact that I am an editor and not just a writer at Popverse this year, so I actually get to contribute to the planning of everything this time out, and also that we at Popverse have also been dealing with a wholescale switch of behind-the-scenes hosting, organizational tools, and CMS for the last couple weeks. There’s been a lot going on, roughly four or five times what I’m used to at this time of year, so it’s been… a thing.
(Again, I’m writing this weeks ahead, but to give you an idea of how much everything is this year, it’s three weeks until SDCC as I’m writing, and I’m already doing things I usually leave until week-of. There’s no way around it. Light is bending! We’re already on the edge of the black hole!)
The thing that’s keeping me afloat at this point is, unexpectedly, that I keep remembering that I like San Diego Comic-Con. I like seeing friends I rarely see outside of that show; I like the strange feeling that mixes the intense work pressure and the sense that maybe I’m on some kind of holiday just because everything feels so different and unexpected. I’ve been going to the show in one way or another for the past 16 years without fail — aside from the Covid period when it was canceled — and for a handful of years before that more irregularly; I have very strong, complicated but important memories and life events tied to the show. For better or worse, SDCC has become a pilgrimage in its own right for me, and something that almost always feels worth the stress by the time the show is over each and every year. As long as I remember that, then everything becomes easier to work through.
It’s just that, already, I’m having to remind myself to remember that, and not lose my cool. There’s weeks to do that — although it’s probably happened by the time you’re seeing this.
Missed Connection (Film Edition)
When I think about the various experiments I tried as an art student — I’m speaking about in my work, please understand — one of the things that sticks out to me as a Road Not Taken is the idea of filmmaking. It wasn’t something that I ever really seriously considered, nor investigated past a year or so of half-assedly playing around with a borrowed video camera to create footage that I never got around to editing, because the school wasn’t set up to do such things. (The university my art school was attached to did have an edit bay, but getting access proved to be more trouble than anyone had considered, and something I only managed to successfully achieve once, alas.)
Nonetheless, there was a period where filmmaking seemed like something I wanted to at least attempt more seriously. I was then, as I am now, obsessed with ways of telling stories and sharing narratives, and what little chance I had to be exposed to experimental short films, and “art” movies, made my brain whirr in an excited manner that felt as if everything was possible.
This wasn’t helped — or, rather, was helped, but not in a practical manner — by the fact that I was simultaneously devouring film theory books and collections of essays by filmmakers (I spent a long time reading and re-reading essays by Wim Wenders, whose writing in those essays influenced me far more than his films have) that made the moving picture feel like the ideal vehicle to share ideas and emotions and stories. I felt entirely energized about the potential of the medium in such a way that my limited experience never even vaguely had a chance to live up to. It’s not that I ever decided that these experts and practitioners were wrong about film, as much as I realized that I wasn’t skilled or patient enough to make it work for me.
I think about that often, lately; I’ve been watching more short films again, and thinking about what works for me with them, and whether or not it’s something I could see myself doing with the tech that’s available to me now. I’m probably still too impatient — and certainly too busy — but still; the idea remains as this temping thing in the distance, a chance to complete a thought I first had decades earlier.
Our Summer Years
Pivot to
For someone who makes their living from being a writer, it’s surprising how little I think about the written word as a concept. (For someone who reads as much as I do, it’s weird, as well; but that might be in part because my head makes a split between what I read and what other people read otherwise I get oddly self-conscious; I can’t explain it.) Nonetheless, I’ve been thinking about the written word, and the past, and about how they interrelate recently.
Specifically, I’ve been asking myself if people read more now. I was thinking about the fact that I can remember life before not just email and the internet — because I’m old — but I can also remember life before texting, because I’m very old. (Was it really called SMS messaging back in the day, or is that something that we just all agreed to collectively hallucinate after awhile because it sounds old-fashioned and awkward?)
I don’t mean this in the crotchety-old-man sense, but there was a period of time when the primary mode of communication amongst friends was verbal, not written, and then… writing just started to take over: texts, emails, DMs, and so on. We all started writing more, and we all started reading more. There have been all kinds of discussions about whether or not the actual writing itself has downgraded language — remember the weird but seemingly legitimate panic surrounding “text speak”? — but I’m not sure I’ve ever read any serious study about to what extent people just started actually reading more often as a result, even if it was just emails and texts, rather than newspapers, letters, or “literature,” as much of a moving target as that last thing truly is.
Of course, history will make the final decisions surrounding what counts and what doesn’t, as it always does; it’s an unreliable beast at best, but part of me is oddly excited at the prospect of, centuries from now, texts between friends and emails with abbreviations and in-jokes and references that no-one else could ever understand will be held up as “proof” of a literacy that has been lost to the ages, and a society that treasured the written word even as we, living in this moment, never ever consider the possibility.
Now It’s Easy To Define (Yeah)
As is my wont, I’ve been noodling around with Garageband recently, making loops out of old 1960s songs without any real purpose beyond just wanting to see if I can do it and make it sound pretty good. (So far, the answer is yes, but it helps that I’m playing with music that I know and love as closely and clearly as I do.) It’s a mental exercise as much as anything else: finding something and reshaping it to create something new, but in a method (and a format, let’s be real) that is somewhat alien and I’m uncertain about and uncomfortable in. It’s play, but play in such a way to keep me on my toes and allow for all kinds of mistakes that could end up being as thrilling as they might be frustrating.
I mention this, as much as anything, because I’ve been revisiting a bunch of music I loved from years and years and years ago — Primal Scream and Delakota and a bunch of the late 1990s “dance” music of the era — and realizing how much of it is, if not born from the same lack of skillset and incompetent bumbling around in software I barely understand, then the same approach of playing and building things block by block and seeing what happens.
I shouldn’t be too surprised, of course; there’s part of the wonderful Beastie Boys Story documentary where they talk about making Paul’s Boutique and that’s not a million miles away from their attitude with that album — of course, they had more patience and more skill behind their efforts than I did, as well as infinitely more taste and finer record collections — and it even feeds into a similar version of how the Beatles went around recording their albums, with a sense of, “I think I want to do this, but I don’t know how to get there, so let’s just see what happens and hope for the best.”
As I said above, the core of all of this is play: of doing something with no set goal in mind, and being ready to embrace and appreciate the journey as much as the destination, in large part because there is no destination when you set off. As I find myself approaching more and more defined goals professionally, such play outside of work becomes so much more important to me — a way to connect back to what animated me throughout so much of my life, and what makes me happy and curious and, well, what keeps me going even now.
Now Face North
I Remember You
While looking through old, quasi-recovered files from the distant past the other week, I came across something that was a real time capsule: a document that was, from what I could make out, a collection of everything I’d written on that particular computer in the year 1999; notes to myself, emails to friends, an entire report for something I was working on, and so on. (Thinking back, I’m not sure it was everything everything; I’m pretty sure I was editing the newsletter for an arts group for a time and wrote stuff for that which doesn’t appear anywhere in the document. I might be wrong, though.)
It’s very strange, revisiting that document and seeing where my head was at, at the time, and also just the way I thought, back then. I don’t mean that in the sense of, “what was I thinking” but literally, the method and sequence of my thoughts. I had an shorthand in much of what I was writing, and a language and cadence that I can vaguely remember but which also very much reads like the work of someone else. There are moments I don’t see myself in, and others where I wish I was still that person; there are sentences I couldn’t even imagine writing now, and others that I can see every keystroke being typed in my head with a worrying clarity.
I can’t remember why I saved all of these things in one document at the time; I’m not sure if I meant it as a message in a bottle, an important document of a particular time in my life — ironically, nothing was really happening at that time for me, although everything felt so filled with possibility — or simply that I was being particularly anal for reasons that didn’t exist beyond maybe this will be useful someday for some reason. Reading it all over 25 years later, when I’m literally twice as old as I was when I was writing it, feels like a message from the past that helps put everything in perspective, and reconnect with at least one of the whos I used to be, at the same time. It’s sobering and welcome at the same time.
Hello, whoever I used to be. Hope I don’t disappoint you too badly.
Oh Sorry, Haven’t You Heard?
Thinking about the General Election results in the UK — for those who weren’t paying as close attention as I was, it was a massive swing towards the Labour Party, which won in a landslide — leaves me with the memory of the last big swing from the Conservative Party to Labour, which also happened to be the first General Election I ever voted in, back in 1997. (I was… 22 at the time, thinking back? I might be misremembering.)
I remember, weirdly, the feeling of excitement felt on the night of the election itself, more than the actual details of where I voted. (I actually can’t remember anything about that at all.) What I remember, more than anything, was the curious feeling of “There’s something happening, everything has reached some kind of critical mass, something is going to change” that felt entirely inevitable, tempered only slightly with the fear that maybe we were all wrong and nothing would change — something that, had it happened, would have broken our spirits in ways I don’t think any of us could have fully comprehended at the time.
I also remember one of my friends telling me they’d voted Conservative, and the rest of us all just ripping the shit out of him, telling him how wrong he was, how he knew better, how upset we all were. To his credit, I think he’d be mortified himself, in retrospect.
I can remember the sense of excitement when the results came in, and the feeling that everything was different as a result. To some degree, that was true; the Labour win of ’97 meant that the Tories weren’t in power for the first time in my conscious memory — they’d been in power for 18 years by that point — and, given how cruel and callous the Thatcher era especially had been, that alone felt celebrating. Sure, none of us had really fallen for Tony Blair’s smarmy smile and promises, but some change was better than no change, we all thought at the time. It still meant that things were different, and that meant that anything could happen, maybe.
(Cut to us, years later, looking at what the Blair era gave to the world, shaking our heads.)
I wonder what it feels like in the UK today, waking up to a non-Tory government for the first time in 14 years. I wonder if there’s that same sense of a new world, and of possibility, or if everyone is just relieved to see the end of that particular era and too exhausted by it to imagine something better on its way.
The Movies of June 2024
June was a weird month for movies; I watched some of my favorite movies of the year this month — Godzilla Minus One! I mean, come on — but I also got distracted by the reality TV of it all and didn’t spend as much time with movies as I have done recently. (Five of the above movies are shorts, for context.) I do think that Lovelace and Boogie Nights prove to be an accidental but fitting pairing, as both simultaneously glamorize and sterilize both the porn industry and the 1970s/early ’80s in very similar ways. Given that July has two separate Love Island series running simultaneously and San Diego Comic-Con, don’t be surprised if next month’s list is so short as to barely exist; I apologize in advance.