Category: Uncategorized

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Not All of Us Have An Ace Rock and Roll Club

There comes a point in everyone’s life, I’m convinced, where they fall victim to their own self-mythologizing. Or, at least, start their own self-mythologizing, which is practically the same thing as far as I’m concerned; that time in life when you become convinced that everything is exactly right, that your life is full of fascinating things happening and interesting people and that this is the moment that you’ll always remember and that other people would want to know about.

This may, of course, just be my own rationalization for having done it coming into play; my personal self-mythology begins around 1995 and ends about three years later, spanning the end of my art school experience (as a student, at least; the dark lost years of teaching followed, thereby firmly ending a period I’d like to remember). I’m not necessarily sure why I was convinced at the time that those were going to be the Best Days Of My Life – they weren’t, by the way, and I’m still unsure that I’ve found those particular days yet – but I was, and because of that, every day was lived in some strange mix of expectation of the amazing and constant feeling that I should try and remember everything for posterity… both of which held me back, ironically, from actually doing that much worth remembering years later. Instead, I lived a familiar routine of friends and relationships that were almost certainly doomed from the start, of studying during the day and going to the same clubs at night with the same people and listening to the same music week after week.

To put it like that makes it sound more depressing, more mundane than it was – definitely more than it seemed at the time. But when I think back at everything that was happening, and how caught up in it all, I wonder whether the reason I was so convinced that everything that was happening was so special was because I was trying to make it come true by believing hard enough.

(Originally posted July 6, 2009 at iamgraememcmillan.com before it got retrofitted as a work site.)

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And In The End

But this is, for me, also about the adjustment away from the weekly and daily deadlines I’ve been on for the last twenty years.  Now I actually have a little bit of time to do something other than write scripts.  Not that’s made me a better blogger, oddly enough — I was more productive on warrenellis.com when I was writing eight things at once than I am now.  Funny how that’s worked out.  Presumbly a result of a mind being overclocked in pursuit of getting all the words out now now now now.

That’s Warren Ellis, from his latest MACHINE VISION (It’s all in caps, apparently) email newsletter, quoted because… Well, because it’s a Friday afternoon and it’s been a long week (I didn’t have the holiday Monday that regular folk did; freelancer, you see), and because I am all too familiar with the mindset of getting all the words out now now now now. It’s something I’ve been struggling with, recently, the problem of (a) meeting deadlines, (b) writing a lot of stuff without it all becoming mush – I’ve really had problems with that this week, and feel like I screwed up at least a couple of times – and most importantly for me, (c) stopping afterwards. What I’ve found myself doing is being trapped in this loop of just feeling constant… anxiety isn’t the right word, but as if my brain is a train that refuses to stop, even though I want to get off. It takes too long to calm down, which is a problem.

Weirdly enough, I’ve discovered that Star Trek novels work; they do something that somebody smart enough to know these things once told me: They give your brain enough to distract it, but not enough to actually tax it, so you get to decelerate and, if you’re lucky, stop every now and again.

Plus, now I can tell you all about the Thallonian Empire and what happened to the crew of Deep Space 9 after the series finished, which is something.

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All-Old! All-Different!

Classic X-Men feels like it was the first comic that I actually tried to collect, as opposed to just pick up and keep track of (The second was DC’s Justice League/Justice League International). I was there for the first issue! I could get in on the ground floor! I remember my excitement as I picked up the first issue – the first couple of issues, I think, I’m pretty sure the first two were out by the time I managed to get up to the city and buy them – and thought “Now I’ll be able to catch up on everything!” There’s something so amazingly nostalgic for me, looking at the above cover, now. I was 11 years old, and this was stupidly exciting for me.

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Keep Your Comments To Yourself?

This is Warren Ellis, talking about comments sections on websites:

Which brings up another thing, and I’m not going to ascribe it to Charlie, who is a nice man, but it’s real – sometimes, your commenters, by which you often mean your audience and your readership, are really fucking annoying, and sometimes you don’t like them.  Which you can’t say.  Who’s going to pick up another book by a writer who says “My readers are awful pieces of shit and I can think of twenty of them, right off the bat, who should be drowned in hot pig blubber”?  Nobody.  “My audience are all complete pissflaps.  Have you read my website comments threads?  Utter inane gibberish.  I would like to train a giant horse to fuck out all their eyes.”  Who’s going to say that?

I guarantee you that even the sweetest and kindest writer has thought that exact thought more than once in their lives.  And its corollary: “Oh god, my readers are such horrible demented shitbags, what am I doing so wrong that I attract them all to me?”

I have grown to hate comments sections on blogs.

I didn’t used to be like that; I used to love them, love seeing the conversations and different opinions and alternative viewpoints to the ones in the main piece, and so on. But somewhere along the way – and my experience at io9 definitely feeds into this, hugely – I realized that comments sections (and message boards in general, for that point) have become just suckholes of in-jokes, arguments and, most depressingly, people spoiling for fights. Social media has opened up space for conversation elsewhere that’s more democratic and also less likely to end up with people feeling as if they have something to prove, and I think that has weirdly killed off the viability of the comments section as was.

But maybe I’m insane.

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“One of the Only Barriers of People Publishing is People Have to Type. What if That Goes Away?”

I have one of the new iPads. For both my email and Twitter, I’m able to talk into it and get speech to text (with Dragonfly voice-recognition software). It’s become more and more efficacious, which is great and convenient. If you start to think — one of the only barriers of people publishing is people have to type. What if that goes away? Just a huge explosion. Instead of going on the phone and talking about prom night, we’re either at or near a place where they can speak it in their phone and it’ll appear in text. What if people don’t have to type to get it into there? Does that make what we do more or less valuable? There’s more for us to sift through. But we’re the signal in the noise, and it’ll make us more valuable. I’m fairly democratic in my impulses. I don’t want more crap out there, but I think the fact that I need to type my thoughts means I share less of them.

– New York Times journalist, David Carr.

(I have to admit, I have thought about speech recognition software as a way to speed up my writing process many times. I am terrible at typing, somewhat ironically for a professional writer; what keeps me away from using any kind of speech recognition is the fact that I’m convinced my accent will prove so confusing to it that I’ll likely spend more time correcting transcription errors.)

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“It’s A World of We’re All In This Together And A World of It’s All Just A Game, Isn’t It?”

The most amazing and telltale thing about the conversation is not Jason Frazer’s nerve in initiating it, but his blase assumption that it would be alright. It’s another sign of how deeply he, and huge parts of the modern entertainment world, have internalized a set of values in which all parts of the business – and in particular the artists, the tabloids and the paparazzi – have more in common with each other than anyone else outside their world, and in which, despite occasional tensions, they recognize their common interests. It’s a world of we’re all in this together and a world of it’s all just a game, isn’t it? A world of gloss and desperation where fame and money are the only lubricants, and the only goals. In this new pop world, the tabloids and the paparazzi are no longer an ancillary nuisance that comes with success, they are your co-workers in the celebrity corporation, and you are expected to recognize and acknowledge them as such.

– Chris Heath, from Feel: Robbie Williams.

There’s a comic book editor who shall remain unnamed to avoid his seemingly unstoppable Google search who, on social media and message boards and comment threads and now, it seems, in print, can’t stop himself from baiting comic journalists and critics who’ve said anything other than blanket plaudits; he’ll jump in, perceiving personal slights where there aren’t any and throwing out award-winning examples of passive aggression in response, instead of actually addressing what’s being said (I’ve been the… target, which isn’t really the right word, of his ire more than once, but I generally fail to get mad enough, which I think ruins it slightly for him).

The oddest thing about him, though, is his insistence when challenged on his behavior that he’s just having fun and people should stop taking him so seriously. Every time I see that, I think that he’s misjudged the room, so to speak; that what he thinks is happening and what is actually happening are so amazingly different that there’s something wrong, somewhere. Then, this weekend, I read the above passage and thought, Ohhhhh. That’s what he’s thinking.

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Ebony and Ivory, Live Together In Perfect Har-Mon-Eeee

I’ve been thinking about Jaime Hernandez’ art a lot, lately. Like all good-thinking people, I’m a massive fan of his work, especially the way his cartoon simplicity is mixed with the naturalness of his character acting, but lately I’ve been hooked on the design of his panels, and the smart way he balances solid blacks and whites on the page. Hernandez is a master.

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“Remember The First Person Through The Wall Always Gets Hurt”

You’ll meet a lot of people who, to put it simply, don’t know what they’re talking about. In 1970 a CBS executive famously said that there were four things that we would never, ever see on television: a divorced person, a Jewish person, a person living in New York City and a man with a moustache. By 1980, every show on television was about a divorced Jew who lives in New York City and goes on a blind date with Tom Selleck.

Develop your own compass, and trust it. Take risks, dare to fail, remember the first person through the wall always gets hurt.

– From Aaron Sorkin’s commencement address at Syracuse University, May 13 2012. I love that last part even more than I love it when people point out that nobody knows anything, really.