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Up The Ephemeral

This, from Christopher Cantwell’s newsletter, has been on my mind pretty much daily since I first read it:

“In Halt and Catch Fire, at play was always the notion of people in need of connection trying to use technology to bridge the gap. We are living in the ironic end result of it not working. Of course, it also has in a multitude of ways. I’ve met some great friends through technology and established an entire second career. But it feels easier to maintain those connections the old fashioned way now, outside a swarm of wasps and detritus and deafening, meaningless noise.

“None of what the characters in our show did worked. Life has greatly improved in ways that can’t be discounted because of machines, but not socially. Technology has fueled cruelty and eradicated humility and assailed ideas of empirical truth and understanding. It has led many to believe that humans are data to be harvested or deleted, based on whether or not they please us on a whim. It has propped up the ephemeral and turned it into idolatry, it has aided in the denial of and / or the worship of real evil, all in the fearful hope of retaining or gaining even more power.

“It’s a failed experiment.”

Ignoring the fact that this makes me want to go back and rewatch Halt and Catch Fire — a show that I dearly love, and loved more and deeper the more it went on, and the more it became kinder to the very flawed characters at the heart of it — I return over and over to the idea that the internet is a failed experiment, and one that has made us crueler and worse people. The internet is responsible for all manner of good in my life, personally; it’s been where I’ve discovered love both romantic and platonic, and where I found my career, after all. But I can’t deny that, as a whole, this whole thing has been… probably not for the best?

And yet, we’re still here. There’s nowhere else to go, is there? Not really; we can’t all just unplug and step away. Such a thing is literally the stuff of dystopian sci-fi because our imaginations can’t really comprehend the idea that it might actually be for the best. How could it all work without the internet, again, knowing what we know? Would things really be better, or have we just had a shift it will take generations to recover from?

And now this question can live in your head for days after, too.

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And It Would Be Alright Now

I’ve shared what I’ve been reading in terms of comics all year so far, but I figured as we’re approaching the midpoint of the year, I’d share my 2023 Spotify playlist. I started it at the very end of 2022, as you’ll be able to see below from the screenshots, but this is the second year I’ve done this: made a playlist that’s either new songs that I’ve not heard before but become obsessed with, or else things that I’ve not listened to in awhile that I felt the urge to dive back into. (More of the former than the latter, so far.)

Consider all of these songs recommended, of course.

The playlist so far goes beyond 50 songs, but that feels like a good place to stop for now. I should add that I try to make sure that no artist appears on the list twice, but I’m fudging the details a little on that here: “Neil MacArthur” is, in fact, Colin Blunstone under a fake name. (For those who don’t know either name, but generally know their pop: Blunstone was the lead vocalist for the Zombies. The Colin Blunstone track here is basically a Zombies reunion a handful of years after Odyssey and Oracle, and it’s glorious.)

Go on; sample some stuff. See if there’s some new (or old) favorites in there.

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Me/Not Me

Discovering my name on a newly-published story at The Hollywood Reporter the other day was a trip, as someone who hasn’t written for the site in a more than a couple of years at this point. It was attached to an obituary for John Romita Snr., one that I can remember writing in advance many years earlier; still, it’s an odd thing to see yourself suddenly out of context like that.

(It was written, darkly, just after the death of Stan Lee in 2018; we’d had a meeting that was, essentially, “Which other comic creator is old and is likely to die soon? We should write obituaries for them just in case.” Even then, Romita was 88 years old. He was, of course, on the list.)

The THR story wasn’t the first time that I’d discovered my name on “new” stories without any warning, mind you; Newsarama as-was — I think the site is officially called Games Radar now — used to do that kind of thing as a matter of course: taking old stories and updating them and republishing them as new, with the name of the original author attached. Going by their business practice, which I should emphasize I knew about ahead of time so this wasn’t a surprise, I was working for them years and years after I’d actually stopped. “New” stories would appear while I’d moved on to multiple other sites.

It’s a strange feeling, this particular lack of autonomy. It’s one thing to search for background material on a story and find something you’d written and utterly forgotten about years ago — that happens all the time, which only makes sense considering how long I’ve been doing this, and I’ve gotten used to it — but to find things that appear to be written contemporaneously, referencing events that have only just happened, that claim to be mine and I didn’t do it? That’s a whole different level of strangeness.

My writing will live on, on the internet, after me. But sometimes, it’ll be born on the internet without me, as well. It’s a disorienting feeling, at times.

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Everything Is Exactly Right

I am, as I’ve written here before, a fan of stillness and silence. There’s a particular pleasure that comes from the absence of noise and clutter — mental, as well as visual and aural — that I couldn’t even come close to explaining even if I had years to try, but it’s something that I find especially important and fulfilling the busier and more frenetic the day-to-day becomes.

This thought occurred to me recently while sitting on the couch, waiting for something to happen (a specific something, I should clarify, not the generic “waiting for something to happen” that denotes ennui or boredom). I was finishing up an unusual piece of evening work while no-one else was around — they were asleep, making all parts of the house surprisingly still and silent — and for once, there was no music playing and no television making dramatic noises off in the background somewhere. Instead, when I finished typing and closed the document in question, I suddenly realized how quiet it was.

And yet, it wasn’t entirely quiet. At some point, without me really being fully aware of it, two cats had started to lay on me as I worked — one on my legs, another against my shoulders and draped across the upper part of my arm — and both were asleep, cozily snuggled up to me and snoring. The sound of those snores, almost comically gentle and understated as if a human was trying to conjure up an approximation of the cutest snore imaginable for an animated movie, was effortlessly comforting, and somehow underscored how silent and still everything else was around me.

Even as one of the cats pushed against me, as if trying to sleepily will my leg to change shape and become more comfortable (Sorry, cat; there’s bone in there to prevent that from happening), I felt at peace, entirely comfortable and thinking I can’t move, I cannot, I can’t disturb these cats at all over and over to myself — reader, I did eventually; the ache in my leg demanded it — it felt as if I was receiving an unexpected, inexplicable gift: a small strand of the world that was not moving for just a second, letting me exist quietly and happily. That thought came to me, and was immediately affirmed by a low purr right next to my head.

Sometimes, in the midst of everything else, things can feel at least temporarily perfect.

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We Won’t Care, Just You See

A side effect of getting older as a lover of pop music is, I think, coming to accept that The Kinks were one of the greatest bands of the ’60s. Oh, sure; everyone knows their hits — “You Really Got Me,” “All Day and All of The Night,” even “Lola” — but the older I get, the more I just kind of step back and think, holy shit, they just kept putting out shockingly great music for fucking years, didn’t they?

I’m not entirely sure what it is about the band that prevents them from being up there with the Beatles and the Stones, the two iconic bands of the era; listen to songs like “Stop Your Sobbing,” and it’s got the arrangement (vocal and instrumental) of an early Beatles song, while “I’m Not Like Everybody Else” has all the sneering posture of the Stones at their anxious, nervous angry best. (Something like “Nothin’ In The World Can Stop Me Worryin’ ‘Bout That Girl” has the blues riffs and rip-offs of the Stones’ early days, too, but paired with a vulnerability that Mick could never.)

There’s so much more the Kinks are capable of, though, at least for that first decade of their existence: songs like “Days” and “Shangri-La,” or the so-famous-you-forget-how-good-it-actually-is “Waterloo Sunset” have a wistfulness and longing and sadness all their own, while “The Village Green Preservation Society” and “All of My Friends Were There” are informed by the British Music Hall tradition in a way that other bands only claimed to be, outside of things like “Your Mother Should Know” or brief intros to more raucous songs. (Hi, bands like The Move and The Creation.)

Maybe that’s what I missed before, and am only coming around to now — a recognition and appreciation of how vast and varied the Kinks’ output was at their height, and how restless a band they were during that period. It’s not just that they could do it all, it’s that they did, for a time there… and that’s something that I find myself thinking about more and more often, as I age.

Maybe I’m just jealous, at the heart of it.

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I’ve Been on Tenterhooks, Ending in Dirty Looks

In the 1990s, I was astonishingly, fearlessly sincere in my writing. I was fueled by things like Jonathan Carroll novels, Neil Gaiman comics, Alex Chilton’s Big Star lyrics, but more of all, youth: I felt the heartfelt need to be heartfelt as I stumbled into writing. This wasn’t true of everything I was writing — the stuff I wrote for the university newsletter was, thankfully, not impassioned and emotional, because I don’t think anyone would have wanted that — but if I was writing something “for me,” which is to say, for art school purposes or worse, gulp, a diary or something similar, there was this pained need to be understood right there at the center of it all.

In the early 2000s, I shifted into a knowing artifice that almost mocked the idea of sincerity or wearing my heart on my sleeve. It coincided with my starting writing for the internet, although I don’t think that’s why it happened. (I hope not, at least.) There’s a line in Grant Morrison’s Supergods where they make a reference to writing in an approximation of Alan Moore’s middle class English voice in order to become more palatable to a mainstream audience, and I remember reading that and chuckling to myself; unknowingly, I was writing in an approximation of Morrison’s Invisibles letter columns and knowing patter from interviews and text pieces at that time. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut puts it.

(Of course, Moore’s authorial voice that Morrison’s referring to is, itself, rooted elsewhere: there’s no small influence from Douglas Adams in there, as well as other English humorists of the mid-20th century. It’s mirrors, all the way down…)

I can remember, with surprising clarity, sitting on a bus headed to work one day in… 2006? 2007? and thinking about the voice in which I wrote at the time, feeling the pressure of the assumed irony and humor on my shoulders at the time. What if I could just write the emotional, vulnerable way I used to? I asked myself, and quickly put aside the idea as impossible: it would be too risky to be so open, I remember reasoning, and also, who really wants to read someone writing like that these days?

My current writing “voice,” such as it is came from… I don’t know… age…? Necessity? I like to think it’s more honest, a truer reflection of who I actually am these days. But then, one thing about this site is, I write this for me. It’s that rare thing where the cliche is true: if anyone’s actually reading this, I’m both surprised and honored. Welcome to the inside of my head.

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As Above, Etc.

As I write this — a week or so before you read it, unless I end up doing what I’ve done before on this blog and just changed around the order of posts before they publish for reasons that even I don’t understand at the time — I’m coming off a pretty sustained period of intense workload. It wasn’t the same kind of workload as, say, a convention or whatever; thankfully, I don’t have one of those again until mid-summer. Nonetheless, I’ve found myself with a bunch to do, and my head swimming a little as a result.

While I’m never a fan of these lots-of-work-no-time-to-do-anything periods — I’m not that much of a masochist — I’ve always found something weirdly fulfilling about them, especially afterwards. There’s probably some sense of unhealthy internal justification going on, for some of that; an idea that, if I do a good job, then I’ve proved my worth on some level in a personal manner and therefore I’m… a good person, or something similar…? That’s a route I don’t feel particularly comfortable exploring, in large part because I know it’s entirely ridiculous but also close to the truth on some level despite everything. (When things were shitty in my marriage, I’d bury myself in work because it felt like an escape. I know that kind of mindset is in there, unfortunately.)

Instead, there’s a sense of reflection and calm that comes afterwards, when the work is done and I can take a breath, let a lot of things that have been floating around in my head go, and reassess how everything went. I had this after the UK trip a well, to some degree, so it’s not entirely a work thing; I find relief in the aftermath of things, in knowing that something big is over and taking that as an opportunity to take stock and look back. It’s a learning experience, in some way, even if sometimes all you learn is “That was too much, let’s never do that again.”

In this case, I’ve learned that I need to re-learn something: part of this intense work period involved writing a long form piece that I found myself struggling with for the silliest reason, in retrospect — that I was impatient with myself for the entire time, and pushing myself to just get it done already. There was no reason for that, I wasn’t up against a hard deadline, per se, but I found myself angry and frustrated that it wasn’t done already very early on in the writing, as if I was letting myself down, and it wasn’t until the third day of proper writing, when it came to an end, that I came to peace with the fact that some things really need the time and distance to get right. (I’d been writing other things during this time, as well; each of those three days, I wrote four or five other stories, because that’s how the internet works.)

It’s a good lesson, especially given that I’m theoretically going to be writing more long form pieces in the future — but also a good lesson that I should apply to all my work, and all my everything else as well: I need to learn to step back, calm down a bit, and remember that not everything can be done through sheer force of will in one sitting. Some things take time.

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The Comics of May 2023

Okay, I admit it: I have no idea what happened in May that I read quite as much as I did. When I came back from the UK and had barely read anything, I feel like I worked especially hard to try to “catch up,” and I think that mindset continued into this month for some reason — and “catching up” was pretty much what I did, going back to a bunch of Marvel titles especially and just… reading. (I also went through a period of revisiting Valiant’s output, which I still enjoy a chunk of.) So.. here’s a lot of comics that I read in May, I guess…

(I’ll never read this many in one month again, I suspect.)

  1. Gold Key: Alliance #s 1-5
  2. The Sovereigns #s 0-5
  3. Duo #s 1-6
  4. The Amazing Spider-Man (2022) #18
  5. Guardians of the Galaxy (2023) #1
  6. All-Out Avengers #5
  7. Sins of Sinister #1
  8. Strange Tales: Rocket Infinity Comic #1
  9. Rocket Raccoon (1985) #s 1, 4
  10. Batman/Superman: World’s Finest #15
  11. Dawn of DC Primer #1
  12. Justice Society of America (2022) #4
  13. Superman (2023) #4
  14. Rocket (2017) #s 1-3
  15. Rocket (2017) #s 4-6
  16. Captain Marvel (2019) #s 22-27
  17. Guardians of the Galaxy (2008) #16
  18. Avengers/X-Men FCBD 2023 
  19. Spider-Man/Venom FCBD 2023
  20. Marvel’s Voices FCBD 2023
  21. Captain Marvel (2019) #s 28-36
  22. Captain Marvel (2019) #s 37-45
  23. Valiant Bloodshot FCBD 2019 Special
  24. Fallen World #s 1-5
  25. Adventures on the Planet of the Apes #s 1-11
  26. Invasion 1984!
  27. Thor (2020) #s 15-24
  28. Venom (2021) #s 1-15
  29. Avengers: Beyond #1
  30. Titans (2023) #1
  31. Nightwing (2016) #104
  32. Avengers (2018) #s 57-62
  33. Avengers Forever (2021) #s 1-11
  34. Murderworld: Spider-Man #1
  35. Murderworld: Wolverine #1
  36. FCBD 2023: Conan the Barbarian #0
  37. FCBD 2023: Star Trek: Day of Blood Prelude
  38. FCBD 2023: 2000 AD Regened Presents: The Best Comic Ever
  39. FCBD 2023: Dog Man and the League of Misfits
  40. FCBD 2023: The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers
  41. FCBD 2023: Frazettaverse #0
  42. Catwoman (2018) #s 39-42
  43. Catwoman (2018) #s 43-50
  44. FCBD 2005 Comics Festival
  45. FCBD 2007 Comics Festival
  46. Random back issues of The Phoenix x 10
  47. Secret Wars II #1
  48. Wrath of the Eternal Warrior #s 1-14
  49. Eternal Warrior: Awakening #1
  50. Girl Juice OGN
  51. Dark Web Finale #1
  52. Doctor Strange (2023) #1
  53. New Talent Showcase: The Milestone Initiative #1
  54. Venom (2021) #16
  55. The Loving Cup (strip from Misty)
  56. Legends of the DC Universe: Carmine Infantino
  57. The Sandman Universe: Nightmare Country #s 1-6
  58. The Sandman Universe: Nightmare Country – The Glass House #s 1-2
  59. The Sandman Universe: Dead Boy Detectives #s 1-6
  60. Way of X #s 1-5
  61. X-Men: The Onslaught Revelation #1
  62. Legion of X #s 1-5
  63. Legion of X #s 6-8
  64. Li’l Rocket Infinity Comic #1
  65. Legion of X #s 9-10
  66. King in Black: Black Knight #1
  67. Black Knight: Curse of the Ebony Blade #s 1-5
  68. Death of Doctor Strange: Black Knight/X-Men #1
  69. Captain Britain (1985) #1
  70. Captain Britain (1976) #s 1-16
  71. More random issues of The Phoenix x 10
  72. Captain Britain (1976) #s 17-39
  73. Super Spider-Man and Captain Britain #s 231-234 (Captain Britain stories only)
  74. Super Spider-Man and Captain Britain #s 235-247 (Captain Britain stories only)
  75. Marvel Team-Up (1972) #s 65-66
  76. Uncanny X-Men (1963) #s 122-124
  77. Uncanny X-Men (2018) #s 1-10
  78. Age of X-Man: Alpha #1
  79. Age of X-Man: Omega #1
  80. Rai (2019) #s 1-5
  81. Red Sonja: The Superpowers #s 1-5
  82. Vampirella: The Dark Powers #s 1-5
  83. Even more random issues of The Phoenix x 26
  84. Fast Times in Comic Book Editing
  85. Hulk Weekly #s 1-63 (Black Knight and Captain Britain stories only)
  86. Rai (2019) #s 6-10
  87. Unity #s 1-4
  88. Yet more random back issues of The Phoenix x 14
  89. Marvel Super-Heroes (1972) #s 377-388 (Captain Britain stories only)
  90. The Daredevils #s 1-7 (Captain Britain stories only)
  91. The Amazing Spider-Man (2022) #19
  92. Hellcat (2023) #1
  93. Joe Fixit #2
  94. Alien (2022) #6
  95. Avengers: War Against Time #2
  96. Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants #1
  97. Peacemaker Tries Hard #2
  98. Batman (2016) #136
  99. The Daredevils #s 8-11 (Captain Britain stories only)
  100. The Mighty World of Marvel #s 8-16 (Captain Britain stories only)
  101. X-O Manowar (2017) #s 1-13
  102. Captain Britain (1985) #s 2-14
  103. Harbinger (2012) #s 1-5
  104. Harbinger (2012) #s 6-10
  105. X-O Manowar (2017) #14
  106. Harbinger (2012) #s 11-14
  107. Bloodshot (2012) #s 10-13
  108. Harbinger Wars #s 1-4
  109. Harbinger (2012) #s 15-25
  110. Harbinger: Bleeding Monk #0
  111. Harbinger: Omegas #s 1-3
  112. Imperium #s 1-16
  113. The Life and Death of Toyo Harada #s 1-6
  114. Wicked Things #s 1-6 (John Allison/Max Sarin mystery series)
  115. Fly By Night OGN
  116. Secret Weapons (2017) #s 0-4
  117. Secret Weapons: Owen’s Story #0
  118. Harbinger Wars 2 #0
  119. Harbinger Wars 2: Prelude #1
  120. Harbinger Wars 2 #s 1-4
  121. Harbinger Wars 2: Aftermath #1
  122. Avengers (2023) #1
  123. Spider-Man (2022) #5
  124. Fantastic Four (2022) #4
  125. The Invincible Iron Man (2022) #3
  126. X-Men (2021) #19
  127. Star Trek: The Next Generation (1989) #1
  128. Storm (2023) #1
  129. The Incredible Hulk (1962) #s 245-249 (Start of the Bill Mantlo run)
  130. The Incredible Hulk (1962) #s 250-252
  131. Wasp (2023) #2
  132. Sins of Sinister: Nightcrawlers #1
  133. Unstoppable Doom Patrol #3
  134. Green Arrow (2023) #2
  135. The Amazing Spider-Man (2022) #26
  136. The Incredible Hulk (1962) #s 253-275
  137. The Incredible Hulk (1962) #s 276-280
  138. Power Girl Special (2023) #1
  139. The Incredible Hulk (1962) #s 281-300
  140. The Incredible Hulk (1962) #s 301-313 (End of Mantlo run)
  141. The Flash #800
  142. Shazam (2023) #2
  143. Adventures of Superman: Jon Kent #4
  144. Green Lantern (2023) #2
  145. Steelworks #1
  146. Star Trek: The Next Generation (1989) #s 2-4
  147. Star Trek: The Next Generation (1989) #s 5-8
  148. The Seasons Have Teeth #1
  149. Masks #s 1-8
  150. Incursion #s 1-4
  151. The Incal: Psychoverse OGN
  152. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (2013) #s 1-6
  153. Battle Action (2023) #1
  154. Tenement #1 (Lemire/Sorrentino horror)
  155. Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files Vol. 42
  156. Cyborg (2023) #1
  157. 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special 1988
  158. Dega OGN
  159. Savage Avengers (2019) #1-5
  160. Daredevil: Woman Without Fear #s 1-3
  161. The Valiant #s 1-4
  162. Conan the Barbarian (2019) #s 13-18
  163. The Thrilling Adventure Hour Presents: Beyond Belief #s 0-4
  164. Action Special 2020
  165. Savage Avengers (2019) #s 6-10
  166. Savage Avengers Annual #1
  167. Immoral X-Men #1
  168. The Amazing Spider-Man (2022) #20
  169. Savage Avengers (2019)  #s 11-28
  170. Betsy Braddock: Captain Britain #1
  171. Star Trek: The Next Generation (1989) #s 9-10
  172. Ms. Marvel (2014) #4
  173. Prism Stalker #s 1-5
  174. Star Trek (1984) #s 16-17
  175. The Flash (1959) #201
  176. DC Pride #1
  177. DC Pride 2022 #1
  178. Green Arrow (1987) #s 1-2