Being an internet refuge for Graeme McMillan
Don’t always be a wiseguy, Harry. It’s like a plaid jacket that goes good with some outfits, but with others it looks like shit. You want to ask an important question, ask it. Don’t always hide behind a plaid jacket.
Words to remember, and maybe to live by. From Outside The Dog Museum by Jonathan Carroll.
Because some people may not have ever seen The Day Today or know of the genius of Chris Morris:
It’s the mix of surrealism and seriousness that appeals to me so much. Morris’ newsman persona captures the mix of the ridiculous and the self-importance of news media, decades before that combination reached the epic proportions of today. I’m pretty sure this show is out on DVD in the U.K. now, but is sadly unavailable in the U.S. It’s a shame; this may be some of my favorite comedy ever.
In the traditions of Warren Ellis, Dylan Todd and David Brothers:
The World That’s Coming is the personal blog of Graeme McMillan, a pop culture and tech writer who gets paid to write for Time.com, Wired.com, Newsarama.com, and Digital Trends (An explanation of the blog’s name can be found here). His work has also appeared in Playboy magazine, Gawker Media’s io9.com, AOL’s dearly departed Comics Alliance, Comic Book Resources and many, many other places. He has appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered Weekend Edition, CNN Radio, CBC and Sky News as a guest talking about pop culture.
Three times a month(-ish), he talks about comic books with Jeff Lester on the Wait, What? podcast and once a month(-ish), he participates in a comic book review round table on Kotaku.com with Evan Narcisse and Douglas Wolk.
He can be found on Twitter, Facebook (which he rarely checks, be warned) and Google Plus (which he checks even less often than Facebook). You can listen to his “jams.”
He lives in Portland, OR with his lovely wife Kate and their loud but adorable dogs, Gus and Ernie. If you want to get in contact for whatever reason, you can email him and ask if it’s weird writing about yourself in the third person (It is).
So, yeah. I was on NPR awhile back.
It was a surreal, but ultimately enjoyable, experience – Although, I’ll admit, it didn’t end up with “ultimately enjoyable” until after everyone had heard the interview. I was (and still kind of am) surprised and unsure that it aired at all; I had managed to convince myself that I had screwed up and the entire thing would’ve been unusable because I was so boring or something. I was also amazingly nervous, because look at that studio I was in. That’s a real radio studio, with multiple mics and someone that you can’t see through the glass working to produce the whole thing, even though I was in Portland and the interviewer was somewhere on the East Coast.
I meant to post this picture back then, when the episode of All Things Considered aired, but I forgot; I’m kind of glad, now. Enough time has passed that I feel like I can say that I’d happily go back, if I was ever to be asked. I guess for that to happen, I’ll have to write something suitably sticky for Wired again…?
It hasn’t stopped being surreal, though.
Kurt Power was Niles Golan’s signature character, a no-nonsense private eye and ex-lawyer who, on the days when he wasn’t solving cases involving serial killers, consulted for the police and anti-terrorist forces. He was divorced, with a drink problem and – the clever touch Niles was most proud of – an autistic six-year-old daughter, whose unique insights often provided the key to a difficult case.
In The Fictional Man, every now and again, writer Al Ewing will drop in the title of one of his lead character’s novels into the narrative. Here, thanks to the wonders of searchable Kindle books, are the collected Kurt Power works of Niles Golan (that we know of):
Pudding and Pie: A Kurt Power Novel
Down to The Woods Tonight: A Kurt Power Novel
The Saladin Imperative: A Kurt Power Novel
Power of Attorney: A Kurt Power Novel
Murder Force: A Kurt Power Novel
Edge of Doomsday: A Kurt Power Novel
Pocketful of Posies: A Kurt Power Novel
Little Pig, Little Pig, Let Me Come In: A Kurt Power Novel
The Moon Comes Out As Bright As Day: A Kurt Power Novel
Eye of The Scimitar: A Kurt Power Novel
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe: A Kurt Power Novel
In a perfect world, there would be garish fan art for these books already.
It struck me, this past week, that March and April are cursed months for me. Both this year and last, I got into this weird hermit mode where I’m neither overly productive nor overly social, if that makes sense? I don’t know where the time goes, or what causes it, but that’s two years in a row where I look back at March and April with a sense of “What actually happened there?” all confused and wondering if I was somehow living in a cave without realizing it. I should remember this next year, and try to do something to thwart it happening again.
(Of course, thinking like that simply invites whatever the curse is to come in and try to flatten me next year.)
So, at the end of last week, I met comic writer Ales Kot for the first time, and we ended up talking for a couple of hours about… Well, a lot of things, really, from gossip-y comic industry stuff to the importance of fearlessness in both creativity and everyday life (and also what “fearlessness” actually means as a concept to both of us). It was a great, really enjoyable conversation that happened at just the right time; earlier that week, I’d been thinking about an idea I’d had a year or so earlier and completely abandoned, only for it to pop back up for a couple of reasons last week – An interview podcast or radio show with no agenda whatsoever; just two people (Me and a guest) talking about whatever comes to mind during the conversation. Not aiming to stay on any particular topic or plug any particular project or whatever, just… a conversation that’s almost purposefully all over the place.
(Those who listen to the Wait, What? podcasts that I do almost-weekly with Jeff Lester will recognize this as, essentially, what the two of us do every episode. And that was the inspiration, as well as listening to the Nerdist Writers Panel and, perhaps less obviously, BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs.)
What crystalized this as an idea for me way back when was the name that I came up for it. I wanted to call the series The Freewheeling with each episode being named after that particular guest. So, if I was talking to Ales, it’d be The Freewheeling Ales Kot, and the next episode I’d talk to, say, Jeff Parker and that episode would be called The Freewheeling Jeff Parker and so on and so on. Obviously, ripping off this, but the obviousness of the reference was intentional and part of the appeal.
I’d still like to do this; I kind of dropped the idea when David Brothers was publicly wondering about something that felt very similar (although, looking at what he was writing back then, maybe not as similar as I thought at the time — especially because I was thinking longer conversations and not just with comic people), but I’ve circled back to it recently in light of being on NPR and also just becoming more interested in… freeform conversation, perhaps? Or wanting to play with something less structured, in light of a workload that feels increasingly restrictive in terms of format? (There’s another element that I’m not really discussing, for reasons along the lines of (a) it may not be real and (b) if it is real, I don’t want to jinx it; rest assured that either way, I’ll spill those beans sooner or later.)
But, yeah. The Freewheeling. It could be fun, right? And maybe interesting, and maybe do-able. One of those things that you throw out into the world, just in case.
The blogging panel on which I participated was weird because I think it was supposed to be a kind of Laura Hudson + current CA people reunion panel but instead became a more general news panel where none of us could talk about the weekend’s big piece of news: that CA had been shuttered. There was some talk about blackballing and the fear of not having publishers cooperate with your site, which the panel felt wasn’t all that significant a thing except for that fear. Laura Hudson described having an app on her desktop that measured traffic in either real or almost-real time, which sounds terrifying. We talked death-threats and rape-threats, or the lack thereof. Graeme McMillan was once actually threatened with an ass-kicking right on the floor of a con, which cracked me up. Who would want to fight Graeme McMillan? It’d be like cuffing your best friend from kindergarten to the floor.
From here. I’m still trying to work out if that’s a compliment or an insult.
Three Colors Red – and Three Colors Blue, as well, although Three Colors White left me somewhat cold – rewrote my brain when I first saw it as a teenager in the U.K. There was such precision in the filmmaking, such humanity and affection and empathy in the writing, but also such ambiguity and uncertainty. It’s not just that the characters were flawed, or whatever would be the traditional way to describe them in American movie terms, but that they were also clearly lost and confused and didn’t have all (or, at times, any) of the answers. Blue and Red hit me like a brick to the head when I most needed it, and changed what I thought movies, and mainstream pop narratives in general, could do.
