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“I Am Just As Bad As Everyone Else”

The crossword would start the day, and then she would glance at the new itself, trying to avoid the salacious court cases which seemed to take up more and more newspaper columns. There was such an obsession with human weakness and failing; with the tragedies of peoples’ lives; with the banal affairs of actors and singers. You had to be aware of human weakness, of course, because it simply was, but to revel in it seemed to her to be voyeurism, or even a form of moralistic tale telling. And yet, she thought, do I not read these things myself? I do. I am just as bad as everybody else, drawn to these scandals. She smiled ruefully, noticing the heading: MINISTER’S SHAME ROCKS PARISH. Of course she would read that, as everybody else would, although she knew that behind the story was a personal tragedy, and all the embarrassment that goes with that.

– Alexander McCall Smith, The Sunday Philosophy Club.

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No-One’s Listening

There’s something to be said for blogging in anonymity, like this; I’m so aware of “the audience” (or the potential audience, or the need for an audience) in my work that it makes me far too self-aware at times, too self-censoring or second guessing whatever I’d initially wanted to say – even if all I really wanted to say was oh please I have to do x number of posts still and there’s nothing to write about oh god – and, ultimately, that’s a weirdly depressing thing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that there’s an artistic muse to my blogging that must be followed or else, woe, disaster; I’m too much a believer in Bill Drummond’s idea of pop and the requirement of an audience for that, if nothing else, and too much a cynic and pessimist when it comes to whatever artistic value I can offer the world with my writing. But there comes a point, eventually, when you start to write what people expect or what you think they want with so little of yourself or your interests in there that it feels not just like “work,” but like the worst, shittiest work imaginable, and that’s never fun.

Here, however… I genuinely don’t know if anyone is reading this, because I haven’t really told anyone about this site yet; I made a passing reference to it on the old iamgraememcmillan site, but that’s it. I haven’t tweeted about it, or linked it on Facebook or wherever. I should, I know that, because I’m selfish and want an audience to hang on my every word and all that, but for now, I’m writing this honestly thinking that no-one is going to read it. And while part of me thinks that that’s very self-indulgent, I think that’s good, in a way; I think we all need to remember to be a little self-indulgent sometimes, if we can keep it in perspective. And, after all, isn’t that what a blog is supposed to be, just a little?

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A Startling Look Into The World That’s Coming!

“The World That’s Coming” is a phrase that comes from OMAC, a Jack Kirby comic cover-dated October 1974, which just so happens to be the month in which I was born. The idea that OMAC is the same age as me seems weirdly wrong, somehow; Kirby comics feel eternal in some way to me – I have no problem accepting that it’s 37 years old now, for example, but the idea that it was just 20 years old when I was in school, or in its teens as I was struggling with acne and puberty seems somewhat mystifyingly wrong in ways that I can’t properly explain.

It struck me, awhile back, that I am always living in The World That’s Coming, these days; not just in the sense of living in the future that Kirby was writing about in the mid-70s (OMAC is filled with futuristic devices and ideas that have come to fruition in one way or another) – although we’re in “the 21st Century,” a phrase that still feels like the future to me sometimes, more than a decade in – but also in that I make a large part of my living writing about technology, social media and the like, and so am constantly thinking about what’s to come (Another part of my living is made writing about comics that are months from coming out, speculating as to their meaning, their plot, their quality, the whole shebang). And so… The World That’s Coming.

The plan, such as it is, for this blog is pretty much a personal challenge: To write more for myself in 2012, without making myself crazy. There’ll be 366 posts about pop songs over the course of the next year – intended to be one every day, but that’ll slip at some point, I can tell, so then I’ll have to double up or whatever to get caught up – and lots of other ephemera, me working out ideas that I might use at Techland or Newsarama or whatever, as well as just… random things. Photographs, memories, commentary on whatever’s on my mind at the moment. We’ll see what happens together, I guess. Are you ready for The World That’s Coming?, as DC Comics used to ask.