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San Diego Syndrome

Have you ever seen Hearts of Darkness, about the filming of Apocalypse Now? In it, one of the actors talks about the experience of filming, and how deeply life-altering it was for all of them. Obviously this is a very extreme and prolonged example of the kind of experience we’re talking about, but back when I saw it, it was the first time that I’d ever heard someone talk about this kind of emotional upheaval outside of a therapeutic context. It opened my eyes to what is possible when people come together and, for a short period of time, agree to live in a reality that is completely saturated with something outside of their daily lives.

– From here.

That comes from a piece about San Diego Comic-Con, which officially opens tonight. It doesn’t directly connect the making of Apocalypse Now with the mindset of SDCC in terms of “the horror… the horror,” but that’s a connection that I admit to tenuously making in the past. Every single SDCC I’ve covered as a journalist has had that kind of weird disassociation with reality at some point along the way – A sense of “I know this isn’t what life is really like, but it’s all I can remember now, and that’s not a good thing” – that, even when you know it’s happening, is astonishingly unsettling. It’s like comic convention as Stockholm Syndrome or something.

When people ask me whether or not I miss going to San Diego, that always comes to mind. I think I do… but is that really me thinking it…?

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War, Huh? What Is It Good For?

Not every staffer is so happy to dive in to the comments, not the least of whom is Gawker editor A.J. Daulerio, who described Gawker comments in April as “a tar pit of hell.” Any journalist writing for a highly trafficked website knows what a miserable time suck that can be. But that’s their job now. Gawker staffers are essentially professional commenters now — or maybe commenters are amateur bloggers. [Gawker boss, Nick] Denton does not even like the word “comments.” Supposedly he imposed a $5 penalty for any employee heard using the word. “These are posts,” Denton told the Observer in June.

(From here.)

That sound you’re hearing might be me screaming in frustration. I feel, sometimes, like my feelings towards comments mirrors comic creators’ feelings towards blogs in general, creating some kind of weird Internet hierarchy by accident, but I can’t help it; while the best comments sections can illuminate and expand the conversations and ideas coming from any particular online piece, all too often – by which I mean, “almost always” – they devolve astonishingly quickly into vitriol and ignorance, namecalling and side-taking. I genuinely wouldn’t lose that much sleep if I could remove the comments from almost every venue I write for*; seeing Denton allegedly fine people for not referring to them as posts is astonishingly depressing to me, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I feel it devalues the actual posts that the comments appear under, by suggesting that they’re the same thing, and secondly, it underscores how much of the Gawker business model is built upon essentially selling the unpaid writing from each site’s fan community, which gives me all kinds of depressed Huffington Post flashbacks.

(* Despite that, I find myself longing for comments on this blog, sometimes; it’s weird, it started as me writing in secret in public, if that makes any sense, but occasionally I find myself wanting to know who reads it.)

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366 Songs 180: Zoom!

This is a spectacularly overblown song that should, by all rights, collapse under its own weight – especially as the choir(s) come in at 3:58, and the whole thing starts sounding like a stoned take on a Bond theme from Bizarro World – but somehow the momentum keeps it going even as things start falling apart (I’d say around 5:11 is where it really starts shedding pieces, and feeling like a rocket that’s trying to achieve orbit). But what this song has always been about for me, is the electric piano. Seriously, by the time you reach 6:24 and there’s just the awesome jamming/collapsing piano solo, I’m gone, man. I love that so, so much. More songs should be ready to give you the full breakfast that this one does.

(Somewhat randomly, but worth pointing out: This is the lead track from Super Furry Animals’ Love Kraft album, and it definitely puts you in the mood to expect something epic. If you are listening to the album for the first time as a result of this song, I have a word of advice for you: Stop after this song. Everything else on the album is a terrible letdown after this.)

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366 Songs 179: Suckers

There’s something to be said for a good song that builds before your ears, adding instruments and depth as if unfolding before you. Super Furry Animals’ “Suckers” is a fine example of this, adding a particularly plaintive vocal from Gruff Rhys and the occasional aural joke as it grows into full bloom by its end (The showy guitar effect at 2:41 after the lyric about “power ballad songs”), but underneath it all, a simple little heartbroken song about the end of a love affair. “It’s over/And we’d just begun,” Rhys sings somewhere between tongue-in-cheek showmanship and sincerity, “Oh, we’d just begun.”

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On Owning It (Or Not, As The Case May Be)

I actually came across this in a different way recently — a startup, Hyperink, wanted to publish an eBook that was a collection of my previous posts. No brainer, until I realized that technically AOL now owns a majority of the things I’ve written online (after their purchase of TechCrunch in 2010). They were totally cool with me repurposing the content — kudos to them — but it’s interesting that I did have to ask. And it makes sense — they paid me to write those words.

I guess my point is that while I do actually value owning my own words, I’ve also spent the majority of my career not actually owning my own words.

– MG Siegler, from here. This is something I’ve been thinking about since my Feb-May rush of looking for work and wondering where my career was going. Almost everything I’ve written since… what, Fanboy Rampage!!! (which was a linkblog, and as such not original-content-heavy), has been the property of someone else. Certainly, the work I’m most proud of doesn’t belong to me in any legal sense. That’s depressing and worrying, but I can’t necessarily see a way past that right now; I can’t afford (financially) to take the time to write something that I do own, and I don’t have the clout to build in a rights-reversal clause into contracts with outlets that I’m working for these days. But it’s something I think about, often. Here’s Gina Trapani, from the same conversation thread:

Similar to what MG said about TechCrunch, it’s been difficult for me watching 4 years of my daily work on Lifehacker suffer from linkrot and broken images over the years. Gawker owns that content and I got paid for it, but it’s something I think about when I’m *not* getting paid to produce content.

Sometimes, I get depressed when I think about some of the things I created for io9. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot – a lot – of content I wrote for that site that was so of-the-moment or of-the-quality that I wouldn’t be too upset if it disappeared in the memory hole and was never seen again (It helps/hurts that, the more I look back on that time, the more I feel like it was bad for my development as a writer, but that’s another complaint for another day), but there were also plenty of stories/posts/essays/justplainideas that I wish that I had some ownership over. At the time, I didn’t think too much about it because (a) I had to come up with new ideas on a regular basis to hit deadlines and quotas, and (b) I had a sense of equity in the site, stupidly, because I’d been there since Day One (Since before Day One, even; I was part of the team writing for the beta version of the site before it had a name or went live), but now…? Yeah. There’s a bunch of things I wrote for io9 that I feel sad about not being able to use/recycle elsewhere.

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Are You Ready For…?

This is apparently a presentation drawing by Jack Kirby used to sell the OMAC series to DC Comics, back in the 1970s. Firstly, it’s an astonishing piece of work. Secondly, OMAC is the comic that originated the phrase “the world that’s coming,” so this drawing is, oddly, directly responsible for this blog.

Thanks, Jack.

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“Only Now Have I Come To Realize How Important Leaving Was For My Sanity, As Well”

When I moved out of New York, I knew at the time that it was the best decision for my career and pocketbook. Only now have I come to realize how important leaving was for my sanity, as well. Not that I was afflicted with claustrophobia or exhaustion or any of the pseudo-ailments with which so many hypochondriac New Yorkers diagnose themselves. Rather, I’d deliberately forgotten that life outside New York is just as pure and valid as life inside New York, which is a hazard of the City just the same as street crime, and one that’s far more prevalent.

New York makes it easy to forget that there are millions of people with hundreds of interests—NASCAR, surfing, raising chickens, owning land—for whom a tiny constellation of concrete boroughs that are frozen for half the year is not adequate. New York makes it easy to forget that many Americans would probably find paying $950 for a 10-by-10 room overlooking garbage cans either unaffordable or unappealing, or both. New York makes it easy to forget that the vast majority of people in the world don’t read Gawker, The Awl, the Observer, the New Yorker or even the New York Times, and that that doesn’t necessarily make those people uninformed.

From Cord Jefferson’s piece, here.

This resonates with me, even though I’ve never lived in New York (and suspect, now, that I wouldn’t enjoy doing so; Portland does that to you, as does age). I feel like we left San Francisco for similar reasons, even if we didn’t know it at the time.

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Ess Dee Ay Dee

It’s San Diego Comic-Con this week, the time of the year when the comic industry gets even more self-obsessed, and the rest of the genre entertainment industry joins in; I’m not going to the show this year – Second time running, although this year I had a period of thinking “Do I want to go? Maybe I do,” unlike last year’s very definite sense of “I don’t want to go, not in the slightest, how can I get out of this?” – but that hasn’t stopped me from having at least one San Diego Anxiety Dream.

On the years when I covered the show for io9, I would get those every single night of the week or so before the show; covering the show for that site was a big deal; we were all (“All” being, in this case, five of us) given schedules for where we were meant to be on each day, what panels we were to cover and write up, what parties or extra-curricular activities we were expected to attend, and so on. Your time very definitely wasn’t your own, but that was part of the thrill of it in a weird way; you were being “a journalist!” and so everything was okay. But with that weight of expectation came the week of pre-show nightmares, each one a melodrama of missing a panel for whatever reason – it was always something mundane – and the result being calamity and disaster. Everything will be your fault if it goes wrong, the dreams explained, and you know you’re going to be late for something, don’t you?

I always thought I was the only person who had these dreams until recently, when I saw various other comic journalists write about them on Twitter. It was a weird moment of shared weight and shame, and also incredible relief that I’m not going to be at the show this time around. As I said, I’m still getting the dreams, but I wake up and remember that I don’t have to be at the convention and everything seems much lighter afterwards.

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Recently Read, Prose (7/9/12)

The joy of a week with a day off in the middle is that you can get a lot more reading done, it seems; I’m as surprised as you are that I managed to get through all of the above in such a short time, but there you go (Then again, considering I ripped through G. Willow Wilson’s wonderful Alif The Unseen in about five hours yesterday, completely sucked in and wanting to find out what happened next, maybe it’s not so surprising; it’s a very good book, by the way. I said to Kate that it’s maybe a little too ambitious for its own good, but goddamn if that ambition doesn’t make it compelling stuff).

Both Time and Chance and What Becomes were, in their own ways, disappointments. I remember loving AL Kennedy’s fiction years ago, when I lived in Scotland, but either my tastes or her writing have changed, and this book of short stories left me unmoved and frustrated by the weight of her prose. The Brennert, meanwhile, ended up annoying me; the book, in theory, gives two different versions of the same man a chance to take the road less taken for a short while, but it felt so weirdly biased in the direction of one of those versions that I couldn’t take it seriously after awhile.

Let’s Pretend This Never Happened was also kind of disappointing; Jenny Lawson’s blog is hilarious, but she tries to keep up the same intensity in this memoir, and it’s exhausting – Blogging and longer-form prose are different beasts, and I found myself wishing that her editor had pushed her to slow down, and to try and come up with something less in-your-face more often, if only for variety’s sake.

Both Four Letter Word and Otherwise Known As The Human Condition were enjoyable enough; the former fell prey to the anthology problem of only being as entertaining as the participant you’re reading, as the conceit (fictional love letters) wasn’t exactly strong enough to overwhelm what might’ve otherwise felt unfinished, and the latter is something I read as much through curiosity of wanting to read more culture essays because of my Time gig than anything else, although it ended up making me want to read even more of them, which is some kind of victory.

And so, then, to the old favorites. I’ve reached the point in Rucka’s Kodiak novels where I lost interest/enjoyment the first time through (Patriot Acts, not Shooting at Midnight), but at least this time I know why – I’ll save that for a post about the series when I finish The Walking Dead, though – and the Star Trek novel was as entertaining as I wanted/needed it to be, which is damning with faint praise far more than it deserves; of all the Trek I’ve been reading lately, the Deep Space Nine cycle is the most interesting, and the most well-written, by some distance.