Being an internet refuge for Graeme McMillan
I’ve been re-reading Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly’s Local recently, and oddly one of the things that’s stuck with me the most has been Brian Wood’s design and specifically the use of type. I’m not entirely sure why this is, but I find images like these resonating with me for reasons I can’t even begin to understand, never mind explain:
I spent it working.
That hadn’t been my plan, of course; I had wanted to spend it relaxing and treating the holiday as a holiday, spending it with my wife doing little requiring much effort. The problem was that it fell on a Saturday that year. I worked on Saturdays at the time – in fact, Fridays and Saturdays were the heaviest days of my week by a considerable amount as I ramped up to have enough material to be able to write the majority of the material appearing on the site over the weekend and edit the other material that appeared on Saturday and Sunday – and I had found myself really looking forward for the chance of the day off, and a break from the weekly grind just a little bit. I could spend my Friday prepping for Sunday, instead, and spend my first July 4th as an American citizen doing what the majority of other American citizens would be doing: as little as possible other than relaxing, eating and watching some fireworks.
And then I was told by the site’s editor that that wouldn’t be happening. The way it was explained to me was that, because July 4 was a Saturday, that meant that everyone else on the site (who all worked Monday through Friday) wouldn’t actually get a paid vacation, they’d just get their regular weekend off. And so, in order to make it more fair to everyone, I was told, July 3 would be the paid vacation, and July 4 would be a regular, full day of posting on the site, and a regular, full day of work for me. You know, kind of a “needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” thing.
The additional problem for me – because having to work on what I’d been considering this oddly symbolic holiday considering my newly-sworn-in status wasn’t enough – was that, in order for me to be able to handle a full day of posting on Saturday, I’d have to do prep work on Friday; there was literally no way around it unless I wanted to spend all of Saturday running behind deadlines, hacking out shit in order to have something on the site and, even then, I might not have been able to do it. So, the Friday paid vacation that I was getting instead of actually being able to take July 4 off ended up being spent working, as well.
That was not my favorite July 4, needless to say.
Another song that has little to do with the holiday it’s named for, but it’s been tradition for me ever since I arrived in the US a decade ago that I’d listen to this song on July 4 nonetheless. Clearly, I just like the train-like drums, or the electric piano making this sound like it belongs in the 1970s, as well as the “ah-ah” harmonies in the back, and the wistfulness of Elliott Smith’s “Everybody knows/Everybody knows/Everybody knows/That you only live a day/But it’s brilliant anyway.”
Everybody knows.
I was a big Aimee Mann fan, back around the time of her first solo album. I can remember seeing her live, in Aberdeen during my first year of art school, and just being… smitten, perhaps? Being very wowed by the whole experience, the quieter folky-songs like this, and the more power poppy numbers that ripped off the Byrds so gleefully and openly. Listening to this again, years later, I find myself focusing on the oddness of her voice and how melancholy the song is, how little it has to do with the Fourth of July aside from the wonderful “What a waste of gunpowder and sky” line.
This week’s Time piece is an essay inspired – if that’s the right word – by seeing Safety Not Guaranteed last week and watching trailers for Ruby Sparks and Lola Vs beforehand, with each film seeming curiously like the others. It was one of those things that just killed me to write; I ended up starting over and trying to find what I was trying to say more than once (I almost ran one of the abandoned versions here, but then thought better of it; there’s only so much of my dirty writing laundry that I can expect other people to want to see, after all), and only realized after a number of hours that what I was thinking about as the middle of my piece was actually my end point.
Along the way, it made me realize a couple of things about the way I write things. Firstly, and frustratingly, I can’t redraft; I have to start over, and rewrite from the beginning, even if all I’m doing is rewriting things that worked the first time around until I get to the problem parts. I have no idea why this is the case, but it is; cutting and pasting things into a different order or working around them just doesn’t work for me, my brain doesn’t hold the information the same way. Secondly, and more interestingly to me, I think of essay structure as song structure. The part I ended up pushing to the end of the essay? I found myself thinking of it as “the bridge” at one point, and then as “the coda.” I constantly worry about the rhythm of what I write, too. Maybe I’m a frustrated song writer and I didn’t know it.
In lieu of new content – I’m trying to wrap up enough work so that I have all of July 4th to myself – here are some portraits I did about a decade ago for a friend’s book project. I hadn’t thought about these for quite some time, and then got an email the other day asking if they could be used in a reissue of said project. Nostalgia!
Purely because I’ve listened to this a lot today, now that the studio version has been released, and because it – if anything – adds to the melancholy of the live versions leaked online earlier:
It’s still just lovely, isn’t it?
It’s invoice time, which means I have to go back through everything I’ve written for money in the last month, counting up what I did and where it is and then asking people for said money. But, in the process of coming up with that list this month, I thought I’d share with you what I got up to last month, in terms of output:
Newsarama:
64 blog posts
3 Top 10 features
Contributions to another 3 Top 10 features
1 news story that never saw print for some mysterious reason
Digital Trends:
44 news stories
SpinOff Online:
18 op-ed pieces
Comics Alliance:
42 news stories
Robot 6:
4 op-ed pieces
Time Entertainment:
4 longform essays
Maybe it’s just me, but that feels like a lot of stuff for a month. If nothing else, it’s having to write anywhere between, say, 200 and 2000 words on 183 different subjects. Yes, there’s a lot of overlap (and a little repetition) in those subjects, but still. I am a little bit in awe of myself, and also finally giving me a break for (a) constantly feeling overwhelmed and (b) slacking off on this here blog when I do.
(For those wondering about word counts, it’s at least 19,800 for Digital Trends, where stories have to be above 450 words, and I’d guess somewhere in the region of 6,000 words for the Time pieces, which tend to even out somewhere in the region of 1,500 words all told. You’ve got me for however many words I write on average for the other outlets, though.)
As you can see, I’m continuing with my Star Trek and Greg Rucka reading habits. Critical Space is a weird, fascinating read because it’s a novel that changes the Kodiak series from one thing into another, and also the format of Rucka’s novels, as well; I have to doubleback and read Shooting At Midnight again to see if he actually started it there. Fistful of Rain, meanwhile, I just loved for the Portland-ness of it all (This is maybe the third time I’ve read it, and each time I feel like I recognize a little more of the city). As far as the Trek novel goes, it’s fun enough but has a truly ridiculous ending that reads as if it is missing a chapter or two somewhere along the way. As far as cliffhangers go, though, it’s pretty fun.
Next up on the bedside table: Alan Bennert’s Time and Chance, a recommendation from none other than comics’ own Kurt Busiek, and the Shooting At Midnight that’s waiting for me at the library.
I have no idea quite why getting a shout-out in Reader’s Digest Recommends is such a thrill, but it is. It feels like mainstream validation in some respects. I’ve made it!
(This isn’t sarcasm; I’m actually weirdly thrilled by the link.)