One of my more important exes — the first one in the “oh, I’m going to be in love with this person for ever” line — wrote a book of poems. I found that incredibly encouraging, not least because I’m in the throes of my own situation at the moment and every bit of borrowed courage helps. I ordered it! I’m gonna read it! Order and enjoy your loved ones’ major creative accomplishments!!
The secret hack on this is, I can’t escape the overall sense that making books is maybe the most touching thing a person all alone in this world can do, surpassed (I think) only by having a vinyl record of one’s music. But I’m biased.
Speaking of writing, one of my favourite newsletters right now is being written by my friend Malcolm, who is out here writing with his whole chest — which is not easy to do, by the way — about what it takes to be a saner, more self-loving person in a world that works so hard to break all of that down, while your own psyche does the same, for free, on the side. I was thinking of Malcolm the other day when I had a rather delightful evening with friends — telling them all about where I was at on the book, and on the television projects, and other things not-writing-related — and came away with one spectral, elusive thought: what if all of the imposter syndrome is wrong?
I was asking myself the question because of the way I back into so many conversations about the chances of any of this creative work “succeeding,” by whatever yardstick I lend against such things. I like to state “the odds” up front — very negatively — mostly to assure my conversation partner that I’m not an actual high-functioning lunatic who thinks that earning a living wage as a practicing writer in 2024 is, uh, easy.
But I also sniffed, for that half second in the wind last week, that maybe my doing all that was also just my way of saying, “I know I can’t actually be this thing. Don’t worry. I’m not getting my hopes up.”
That’s imposter syndrome shit. And hey, it might be right! But, equally hey, it might be wrong. I have a long history of being told not to get my hopes up by people I trust, and at some point, I guess I started doing it to myself.
Something like a newsletter
As I change tracks heading into the summer, I realized that I wanted to start, like, actually updating this blog on something like a cadence, thus contradicting about a year of previous posts on the subject.
I think it’ll be a Friday thing, except that today is Wednesday and I didn’t want to hold this post back. But generally, a Friday thing, and maybe that thing will only be a catch-all of the week’s machinations, or maybe it’ll be a special essay, or maybe I’ll abandon the whole idea in a month because who cares. You, the reader, get to be here to find out!
And if I can stick to this plot for more than, say, a month, I might investigate various plugins that let you actually subscribe to this type of post and receive them in your email, which is all the vogue these days. Stay tuned.
The death of theatrical moviegoing
I must report that I have no further tears to shed on last week’s most popular topic in the Discourse (the film Discourse, anyway), which is the “under-performance” at the theatrical box office on Memorial Day.
We called this play mayyyyyyybe fifteen years ago on the Mamo! podcast, and that was without even seeing Covid coming. Now, the twinned forces of two decades of cinema exhibitors’ ruthless efforts to destroy the experience of going to a movie, and a half a decade of cinema studios’ equally psychotic efforts to destroy the need to get up and go out to a movie, have simply paid out the exact outcome that anyone with half a brain could have predicted in the middle of the last decade:
It’s. Not. A Thing. Anymore.
Mass-market moviegoing as we knew it is extinct; fighting over the scraps in the Wasteland is all that’s left. Sorry, friends!
It’s only annoying because it was so avoidable; and because, for all the wealth of problems that were certainly baked into the prior system, that system held moviegoing in a stable (and lucrative!) state for like a hundred years or so. That system was also, one might say, an example of properly-regulated capitalism, of which we have few remaining examples. The film production and exhibition industry was shaped by strong antitrust laws (the Divestiture Decree) and strong unions, and still managed to make stable livings for a good percentage of the people working within it. Then badly-regulated capitalism came along, and pretty much went about murdering it, because unregulated capitalism is basically uncontrollable cancer that eats the entire body it’s feeding on and then looks around and goes “oh shit, I’m gonna starve.”
So no further tears to shed, just a thought experiment: what if the American government (because this one, specifically, is about the American government) put on their big-boy pants and actually started regulating Big Tech, and strengthening the legal protections for guilds and unions? It would be a start.
Oddments & Tweaks
Some roundup items:
- I reviewed the new 4K of Peeping Tom, just released by The Criterion Collection.
- I also took a crack at All That Breathes, and my environmental anxiety was showing again.
- I gobbled up Amazon Prime’s Paper Girls adaptation and it… ruled? By which I mostly mean: the four lead actresses were so startlingly charismatic (and so unusually on-model for their comic book counterparts) that any roughness in the production (and there was clearly some!) was just irrelevant to me after a few episodes. I hope Camryn Jones, Riley Lai Nelet, Fina Strazza, and particularly Sofia Rosinsky (whose Mack is an indelible performance and character) are heading towards huge careers after this. I keep checking their IMDb pages, hoping for the best.
- I finished Atlas Obscura’s Facts-Based Worldbuilding course and it was so much fun (thanks to my pal Scott for the tip!). I wrote an entire magic system for The Last Alchemist in a few easy moves after having nothing but a bevvy of highly disorganized and self-contradictory notes prior. Also, taking classes is fun and everyone should do it [Hermione hand waving in the air dot gif]