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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.

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 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.

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.

Fewer movies than I might have expected for this month, but I got distracted with television — hi, new seasons of UK and US Love Islands — and also by travel, headed back to the Bay Area for five days at the end of the month. That said, that did allow me to watch some movies that otherwise I probably wouldn’t have checked out by myself, thanks to the cinematic influence of Mr. Jeff Lester, which was a good experience not just because the movies were good. (It’s never a bad thing to step outside your preconceptions, after all.)

Anyway, as we head into another weird month — San Diego Comic-Con is going to ensure that I don’t really see anything for a week or so, TV or movies, because I’ll be so busy working — here’s what I watched in June. (Not pictured, purely because I forgot to add it to the list: Final Destination 2.)

I have to ask: is everyone else getting as many spam texts as I am pretending to be recruiters that want to talk about getting you a new job? For the past few weeks, I’m getting three or four of them a day, and they’re all pretty much the same: variations on “Hi, I’m [made-up name here], a recruiter for [made-up company here]. I’m really sorry to just text, but we have an opening that I think you’d be perfect for,” and then a description of a job that I am almost certainly not only not a good fit for, but in most cases, not even vaguely in the same line of work as. Day after day after day, they come in, and that’s been the case for awhile now.

There’s probably some kind of study to be done in the format and subject of spam messages and phishing hoxes. What does it say about where we all are now that trying to get you work is the topic that the spammers have decided is most likely to lure people in and get them to reveal information about themselves? (Nothing good, I’m sure; people are so desperate for gigs that they’d fall for this kind of thing?) What made the Nigerian Prince who wanted to share his wealth fall out of favor? It can’t just be that everyone collectively wised up and started making jokes about it — we were doing that when those messages were still coming in.

There was a point where the spam texts used to be far more vague that I was fascinated by. They’d come into your inbox with these entirely meaningless messages like, “Hey, are you still up for that thing Saturday?” and I’d immediately think, I don’t recognize this number and I am never up for anything on Saturday, who could even fall for this? before realizing that the answer was “people with active social lives, not like you, you loser.” But I loved how empty and low-effort those messages were. “Wanna get coffee?” Nope, never. If you know me, you’d know that. “I’m going hiking this weekend, can you recommend some trails?” was one of my favorites.

Now, though, it’s job offers. On the one hand, I appreciate the flattery aspect of the whole thing: Oh, this is a job you think I’d be perfect for? That’s so nice! Thank you! I also just end up worrying about the recruiting industry if these kinds of texts are in anyway representative of what it’s actually like out there, and all the recruiters are actually very apologetic people chosing entirely the wrong people for these positions and then telling them via text. Whatever happened to email? Am I just too old now?

Of course, there’s also the horrifying possibility that I’m the only person receiving these kinds of messages and they’re not spam. What if I really am ideal for all these jobs, and I’m just deleting each and every text thinking it’s fake? What kind of life am I passing up by not agreeing to be the head of an advertising and branding agency that specializes in pet food?!?

I’m (more slowly than I’d want) working my way through Bob Stanley’s Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé, with my progress slowed down by a tendency to add songs mentioned to playlists and really try to sit with some of the threads and sounds he’s writing about. (I have a newfound appreciation of Wanda Jackson as a result, if nothing else.)

I’m still stuck on a line from the very start of the book, however, when Stanley makes a stab at defining what makes a pop song — or pop anything, for that matter: “Pop needs an audience that doesn’t know the artist personally,” he argues. “It needs to be transferable.” I read that, and I thought, that’s it.

I love pop, as a concept; I don’t know if that’s something that comes from being British — I always think of “pop” as a concept that’s far more popular for British people than Americans, for some reason — or because I grew up in the 1990s with Britpop and Trip-Hop being all the rage, or even because I went to art school and had that background to deal with. Whatever the reason, I’ve always enjoyed the idea of art created for the masses and the potential it has to shape people’s opinions and change people’s minds; I’ve always been curious about things that shouldn’t have gone mainstream but did, and also things that were purpose-built to sell out and utterly failed as a result. One of the finest joys of pop culture as a whole is the surprise of it all: when the audience en masse doesn’t do what’s expected and what happens afterwards.

Throughout all of this, though, I’ve found myself caught up in how to define “pop” to people who ask for a definition of what, to me, has traditionally been indefinable; “pop” has been something I’ve felt or instinctively understood on a level I struggled to explain. Stanley’s definition comes the closest to something that works for me, even if I think he’s more broad in his thinking than I might be. (I’m a snob in certain ways, I admit.)

It nonetheless touches on the idea that many things can be pop that aren’t immediately obvious; visual artwork or graphic design, for one. Graffiti, for another. Anything that’s a message in a bottle to a world where someone wants to reach a stranger and see what happens.

We’re all pop, deep down, perhaps.

Perhaps it’s my job, or perhaps it’s simply who I am, but I think about ways to communicate a lot. I read more than my fair share of newsletters these days, for example, and spend my day — for my job, I promise! — online scrolling through the internet for information. In years past, I practically lived on social media or listening to podcasts, although my fervor for both has dimmed significantly as both spaces became overwhelmed by right wing voices that were more interested in demonizing everyone that wasn’t like them, and profiting from it. (I know a bunch of people who’d disagree with me about that characterization; they’re wrong.)

I think about the voices we put on for our different spaces, and the ways in which people write for newsletters or personal blogs are different from other spaces. The me I am “here” is more digressive, and less definitive than the one I am while working, for example, and less likely to make a cheap joke to close things out. (Well, I hope so at least; bad jokes are ingrained in who I am no matter where, however.) This is the space where the Elliott Smith line about being “not uncomfortable feeling weird” lives, which is fully not something I can embrace in professional spaces.

Different people flourish in these different spaces, to my eye, finding voice in a way they can’t otherwise. I’m fascinated by that — by the empowerment that different formats and outlets provides to different people, and seeing who finds themselves in each new incarnation. I think back to what it felt like doing Wait, What? with Jeff for more than a decade, and how that felt like a different thing to every other way I presented myself online, and how freeing it was; to this day, I recommend podcasting to people whose minds work certain ways because of the opportunities it presents that writing literally can’t.

I read something recently that suggested that the written word was authoritative, whereas the spoken word was conversational, and that the difference is something that needs to be considered more seriously as we move into a post-literate society; it’s an idea that’s been lodged in my mind ever since, as I play with it and try to work out what to do with it.

I don’t believe it fully, of course — social media is written, and inherently conversational and non-definitive, surely — but there’s definitely something to it that I’m trying to unpack. Am I trying to find a way to make my preference (Writing) do something that is better handled in spoken word form? Am I a square peg, trying to find a way to fit into a round hole? And how am I supposed to deal with the very idea of a post-literate society, anyway…?

The local bar just down the street has started to have bands playing every Friday and Saturday night during the summer. No matter how cold it might be — Portland Spring means that the weather can go anywhere from that’s really nice, actually to why do we need heavy coats again, it’s fucking June at a moment’s notice — around 7 o’clock each of those nights each week, we get the soundcheck starting up, and then somewhere close to 8, the bands start up.

It’s a weirdly nostalgic, pleasant experience hearing it all from inside the house each time. We’re close enough, and the bands are loud enough, that we get more or less the entire show no matter what — I had the weird experience of having to turn up a horror movie one night because I couldn’t hear the blood-curdling screams, the music was so loud — but it’s that kind of distorted version where everything’s kind of bass-heavy, and the vocals are echoing and indistinct. Given the types of bands (and especially vocalists) that are invited, the odds that the night will be soundtracked that resembles nothing so much as a Pearl Jam dub remix are high.

The nostalgic part of it all is very specific; for reasons I can’t completely decipher, every time it happens, I’m reminded of living in Aberdeen when I was a student and walking home after seeing friends, past pubs where bands would be playing and you wouldn’t hear anything properly, just this muddy hum of almost-music and occasional applause that I’d walk past as my teeth were chattering.

The music is nothing alike — there aren’t so many Britpop wannabes in Portland in 2025, unsurprisingly. Although, it’s been 30 years; someone is probably planning on reviving it again momentarily. But the feeling is the same, somehow; the sense of… almost the opposite of FOMO, if that makes sense: taking pleasure in other people’s pleasure of being in that musical moment, even if it’s very much not my particular thing. Knowing that the dull thud of the drums and the meandering bassline is thrilling the audience in question, and smiling everytime the song ends and there’s a breath before an inevitable cheer.