Being an internet refuge for Graeme McMillan
I feel like my subconscious is making some kind of religious suggestion with the pattern of these files on my desktop.
(All of these are stories that are finished and submitted to various places — I keep them around in case I need to go back and check something before they go live. Normally, they go inside the “Stories” folder you can see on the top left, but I hadn’t gotten around to that yet.)
Got myself a copy of Alec: The Years Have Pants from the recent online sale from Top Shelf Comix, and read through it last night — it reminded me how weirdly important Eddie Campbell was to my development both as an artist back when I was in art school, and as a writer. There’s something remarkably amiable and offhand about his work, as if he’s effortlessly just sharing something with you, that I strive for even now with non-work writing (and, usually, fail). Thinking about my shortlived late ’90s diary comics — honestly, created as somewhere between decompressor and way to have another sketchbook full of something for my final year of the BA (Hons) program I was in — I can see Eddie Campbell’s fingerprints all over them, alongside (slightly less obviously) those of Kyle Baker, Evan Dorkin and Nick Abadzis.
I don’t have those comics now, for the most part — I got rid of almost all of my student work when I moved to the U.S., because it meant less to move and I was trying to travel light to save money — but I think about them sometimes. For some reason (Perhaps a Facebook posting that reminded me that it was 20 years since I matriculated for art school, holy crap), I’ve been thinking about that whole era of cartooning and writing and everything recently. Somewhere out there, there’s a me who kept doing all of that stuff. I wonder what happened to him?
(Image above from Graffiti Kitchen, one of the stories in the Alec book; probably my favorite, and possibly my favorite comic of all time.)
It’s been a week for writing things and then starting over from scratch, for multiple reasons, and multiple projects — the sheer volume of material written that’ll never see the light of day this week is both staggering and ultimately depressing, considering the time wasted that it represents. Here’s the opening to a TIME piece that ended up being entirely re-written and re-positioned.
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It’s been a very strange experience to watch the online anticipation to the final episode of Breaking Bad grow over the last few weeks as an outsider. At times, I’ve felt like a cultural anthropologist, studying fandom — and Breaking Bad has a very large, very active fandom judging by the online activity surrounding the show over the last few weeks; fandom isn’t just for nerd stuff, you know — as it’s become ever more obsessed and obsessive about each episode as we get closer to the end, and I’ve grown obsessed with the obsession being exposed.
I should rewind for a second and confess, with some small level of humiliation, that I’m not just slightly behind on Breaking Bad, I’m actually years behind — the perils of coming to the series significantly later than most, and still playing catch-up on Netflix. But that level of disconnect — not total, so I have some idea of what’s being discussed and who the main players are (for the most part), but enough that I don’t feel like I’m being told immediate spoilers for where I am in proceedings — feels strangely comfortable for the voyeuristic position that I’ve taken in regards to the mix of anticipation, fear and expectation about what the end will finally turn out to be.
A lot of what I’m seeing online is particularly familiar, as someone who was this plugged-in and excited about the finales of other recent shows on a popularity/obsessive level with Breaking Bad — I was one of those poor deluded fools who tried to convince themselves that the final episode of Battlestar Galactica was brave and meaningful, and not misguided and a narrative mess! — especially when it comes to the strongly-held belief that of course the final episode will be great and that there’s no chance whatsoever that it could disappoint longtime viewers at all.
That particular reassurance — one that seems to be as self-directed as it is outwardly directed, at times — is one that grows particularly brittle in times like this (I write this just days before Breaking Bad‘s finale); there’s an internal battle in fans’ minds between “Well, it’s been this good for so long, how could it make a misstep?” and “It’s been this good for so long, if it makes a misstep now, it’ll ruin everything retroactively” that manifests itself in this need to believe that following the show for all this time won’t end up being something that ends in disappointment.
Some things just take longer to write than others, it seems. I’d been struggling with this week’s Time piece — I really am still filing them weekly, but they’re published whenever these days; there’re something like five just waiting to run or not, as the case may be — for a few days, unable to get it to sit right. I knew that I liked what I was saying, just not the way I was saying it.
One of the problems with juggling The Hollywood Reporter, WIRED and Time (Yes, WIRED is supposed to be all-caps, apparently) is the differing speed of publication, and therefore, writing; THR is multiple daily posts, and therefore short and fast is the order of the day, whereas Time needs to be slower, more considered (WIRED falls between the two, depending on the piece) and sometimes my brain can’t switch between the two modes easily — I spend time just hitting a wall with Time pieces and just keep trying to break through instead of walking away, and coming back later.
This week’s piece was one where I drove myself to exasperation on Monday, and to a lesser extent yesterday, trying to get the words to match what was in my head, and still coming in underneath my prescribed word count. It wasn’t working, and each time I put it aside, it was out of frustration more than anything; I felt like I’d failed, and that I was stopping not because I could, but because I had to if I wasn’t going to just delete everything and start over (I did that, too; twice).
Today, though, it all just worked. I needed to go through all the wrong versions to get to the “right” one, of course, and that makes me feel a little bit less like a fuck-up, but I’m left nonetheless with this feeling of “Oh, I should just remember that I can take control of my schedule and not have to just push through and finish everything once I’ve started it just because.” This mindset I still have is one of the many reasons why I don’t write longform work just yet. It would kill me, I suspect.
This past Monday marked the tenth anniversary of Fox’s The O.C., the increasingly weird and intermittently wonderful teen soap that introduced the world to the questionable charms of Seth Cohen, Ryan Atwood and the ever-troubled Marissa Cooper, a literal girl-next-door gone so horribly, horribly wild. The show’s mix of meta-commentary and achingly sincere emotional melodrama – Ryan loves Marissa but can’t help her as she self-destructs in front of his eyes! – was, for someone like me who sneaked in episodes of Dawson’s Creek like some dirty little secret back in the day, an utterly irresistible combination. Here, finally, was a show that I could embrace and adore, unapologetically.
Well, almost unapologetically.
The start of something for TIME that I started, then abandoned in favor of something else, this week.
This comes from Kai, my wife, who produced the film. She [quotes from] Rio Grande: ‘Get it done, Johnny Reb.’ It’s like, don’t make excuses. There aren’t any anymore. If you’re talking about it, you should be doing it and she doesn’t like to see talent go fallow. She doesn’t like to see people repeat themselves. She likes people to get it done, purely out of love of the person and then joy for the product itself. And that’s the thing: I talked about Much Ado for 10 years and it was Kai who finally said, ‘What if instead of talking about it . . . ’ and I went, ‘What?’ Someone will always tell you that you can’t. One of the things that she delighted in was the fact that, apart from telling the people at Marvel so that they didn’t freak out when they found out that I was directing another movie [while we were in postproduction on The Avengers], we really didn’t tell anybody. It was just our little thing. There’s an old thing they say: Writers never tell somebody what you’re writing because then you won’t write it down, and it’s kind of applied to the production in a way. If we let this get out and balloon into something that mattered to anybody besides us, we might not finish it.
From here. It’s Joss Whedon talking about tips for getting stuff done, which is at the top of my “I should get better at that” list currently.
Okay, so I meant to stay a little bit quiet on here around the time of the San Diego Comic-Con, if only because I was working it for Wired and live-blogging the experience over there. I didn’t, however, mean to stay quite so quiet for so long. Blame the weird two-week mental hangover that followed.
For some reason that I can’t explain, Comic-Con was both better than usual this year – No nights spent awake, working all the way through to the early morning! – and worse, at least in terms of inability to fit back into my regular schedule afterwards. The first week back, I was thinking through sludge; I got to the Tuesday and my brain pretty much locked up with the rest of that week seeing me run on fumes as much as anything else. Last week, too, I found myself curiously overwhelmed by everything that needed doing. Why? I really have no idea. Everything just got to be a little bit much, I guess.
But that is, I hope, over. My new work schedule – I’m now writing for the Hollywood Reporter, Wired and Time – is still something I’m trying to get used to, but I’m getting better at it. I’ll really, seriously, try to write more here now. Honest.
So, I may have accidentally disappeared from this site a little last week. It wasn’t intentional, I promise; I just found myself entirely snowed under with work as I started writing for the Hollywood Reporter’s Heat Vision blog and realized worryingly quickly that I had underestimated just how much additional work that would actually be in reality (I gave up two other gigs in order to free up enough time, but the workload didn’t translate as I’d initially thought). That it was also a holiday weekend – Huzzah for July 4, which came at the right time to stop me feeling completely overloaded – both helped and didn’t help everything, as it frontloaded things onto the start of a week that was already busy but also gave me some breathing room that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. Anyway, I’m sorry for disappearing without notice, and will try not to do it again in future. Well, except for next week, which is Comic-Con which I’m working for Wired.com, and therefore will be crazy and quiet and AIEEEEEE.
(That I am now writing for Wired, Time and the Hollywood Reporter, by the way, is both surreal and slightly scary to me. This has to be the peak, right? It’s all downhill from here on, as I flame out in spectacular fashion.)
From the New York Times, here.
Just to get this straight: Glenn Greenwald breaks one of the biggest politics stories in years, and the New York Times writes a story that calls him a “blogger” repeatedly, while others who work on the stories are called “reporters,” because… Well, I don’t know, really. Also, the piece points out:
Mr. Greenwald’s experience as a journalist is unusual, not because of his clear opinions but because he has rarely had to report to an editor. He began his blog Unclaimed Territory in 2005 after the news of warrantless surveillance under the Bush administration. When his blog was picked up by Salon, said Kerry Lauerman, the magazine’s departing editor in chief, Salon agreed that Mr. Greenwald would have direct access to their computer system so that he could publish his blog posts himself without an editor seeing them first if he so chose.
These bloggers! They’re not like real reporters! They don’t even have editors!
(Of course, I have editors for my blogs, so maybe the NYT would be more okay with me.)
Ana Marie Cox on the important takeaway:
I wrote a bunch of recaps/reviews/something-in-between of this past season of Doctor Who for Wired that ended up not running, so I decided to run them here, instead. Here’s the one for S7 E13, “The Name of The Doctor”:
With “The Name of The Doctor,” this latest season of Doctor Who came to an end with something that was neither a bang nor a whimper — in large part because the final few moments of the episode turned it from a revelatory finale into confusing, frustrating glimpse of things to come.
Ignoring for a second the final scene of the episode, “The Name of The Doctor” oddly crystalized a lot of the problems this seventh season has suffered through. Like so many episodes this run, Saturday’s final episode was good enough as opposed to particularly strong, and found itself relying on familiar characters, ideas and audience goodwill to distract from writing that was surprisingly messy given the series’ recent history, and filled with plot holes and unexplored ideas that could upset the story’s movement with just a minute’s exploration.
And what distractions the episode provided! We saw Clara with each of the previous Doctors in scenes that demonstrated seeming lack of convincing green screen technology (The second and fifth Doctors, in particular, appeared in scenes with a Clara obviously shot elsewhere and elsewhen. By comparison, the scenes with the first and third Doctors seemed to give her a graininess that matched the original shots), as well as henchmen that were reminiscent of both the popular Silence from the show’s sixth season and also Buffy The Vampire Slayer‘s Gentlemen, from way back when, and a third appearance this year from the increasingly popular Madame Vastra, Jenny and Strax, the alien detectives from the Victorian era. Underneath all of this, however, was a script that ultimately failed to convince.
The basic plot of “The Name of The Doctor” was, at heart, very straightforward. Our heroes were lured into a trap by a former enemy out for revenge, which they only survived due to self-sacrifice on both of their parts. It was the meat on those bones where things got somewhat convoluted: The Doctor and Clara found themselves on Trenzalore, the site of the Doctor’s grave at some unspecified time in the character’s future in order to save Vastra, Strax and Jenny from the Great Intelligence — the villain from a storyline from the series’ original run, as well as the most recent Christmas Special and the first episode from this most recent run. After death, all that remained of the Doctor in the tomb wasn’t a body, but his personal timestream, which was less an abstract concept than a quasi-physical lightshow that could be “entered” by first the Great Intelligence seeking to undo all of the Doctor’s good works, and then Clara — attempting to stop the Great Intelligence — and the Doctor himself.
That Clara was successful was hardly a surprise; the show could hardly let the Doctor die with episodes left on the clock (and anyway, we dealt with the faux threat of the Doctor dying last year). Instead, the interest in Clara’s attempt came from the fact that, by entering the Doctor’s timestream, she became scattered across his life as multiple people with no recollection of who she had been — the multiple Clara’s we’d encountered up to this point, and the “impossible girl” who had captured the Doctor’s attention in the first place, leading to his meeting the “main” Clara for the first time. Well, that and the other character Clara and the Doctor met inside the Doctor’s timestream, but we’ll get to him soon enough.
For every smart idea in the episode — The explanation for what made Clara the “impossible girl” after all, her remembering events that had been wiped from history because the Tardis was leaking time, the post-Doctor’s death slow revision of the universe’s history, and how that altered character relationships — there were moments that just seemed unfinished or needlessly rushed. The Doctor warned about crossing over with his own timeline and later collapses from having done so, but just two season finales ago, “The Big Bang” relied entirely on his doing just that without any ill-effects, for example; similarly, the surprisingly speedy and easy discovery of Clara within the Doctor’s timestream felt unearned, and undercutting the drama of her having seemingly sacrificed herself doing so just minutes earlier.
But see, we’re already at the final sequence I mentioned earlier. Up until that point, “The Name of The Doctor,” for all its flaws, felt like an ending (albeit a disappointing one). Then, in the midst of the Doctor’s personal timestream, Clara and the Doctor met a shadowy figure with his back to the camera; he was someone the Doctor was seemingly afraid of — or afraid of Clara discovering, perhaps — describing the figure as, essentially, the incarnation he’d like to forget, the Doctor who doesn’t save the day.
That this new Doctor — A future incarnation that “our” Doctor knows about because he, too, has entered his timestream? A past one? — is played by John Hurt is important only for the BBC, who’ll doubtlessly like to boast of an actor of such popularity and credibility taking on the role (How else to explain the hilarious “Introducing JOHN HURT as THE DOCTOR” credit once he turned around?); for fans of the show’s larger mythology, what is more important is that this brings the number of incarnations of the Doctor to twelve, leaving the character with just one more regeneration to go before his death, according to rules set up in the original run of the show. In recent years, it’s been teased that the rule no longer applies, but never definitively stated within the series itself.
With just one scene at the end of the episode, “The Name of The Doctor” went from disappointing closure to a shameless tease for November’s 50th anniversary episode: What has this new Doctor done that is so terrible (Being responsible for the death of every other Time Lord, an established part of the character’s backstory since the show’s 2005 revival, would be the most obvious guess)? Does the thirteen incarnation rule still exist, and if so, is the Doctor close to his final life or is there another incarnation that we don’t know about? And, more subtly, but arguable more importantly, will the Doctor be able to reconcile his actions in that incarnation with his self-image, and stop repressing an entire period of his life?
The scale of the final scene of the episode ultimately overwhelmed what had come before; it left the audience feeling energized and excited, but it was a cheap thrill in many ways. Despite the title of the episode, the name of the Doctor wasn’t revealed on Saturday, and the slight of hand that managed to make that disappointment (or relief, perhaps) disappear from fans’ minds was a sign that — perhaps, if we’re lucky — the Who that lies ahead will be as bold and fun as the one they fell in love with. It may have been a sign of better things ahead, but that doesn’t change the fact that what came before was underwhelming at best, and a sign that, when it comes to this series, familiarity may be breeding contempt after all. In more ways than originally intended, perhaps, a lot depends on the 50th anniversary episode coming up in November.