I’ve started a project — actually, four projects — in various stages of formfulness, and the result is, anytime I sit down to write, it’s more opportune to work on one of them than to write anything internet-facing — which in the post-Twitter world means this blog, cuz I can’t make any of the other “things” “work” — and so now this blog is kind of a harbour of last resort, creativity-wise. Pushing words around the pixelboard is so weird. On the one hand, I am working so hard to release myself from any sense of expectation, regarding where any of this work may be going. On the other hand, I have learned at great hardship that writing without a destination is … usually dumb and bad. Just ask J.J. Abrams.
Did you really summarize a babbling statement about your creative process with (yet another) shot at The Rise of Skywalker? Wow.
Sure did. Actually, last week on the way to seeing Avatar: The Way of Water and having recently emerged from a hot dog shop, Matty Price went on a rant about Ben Wheatley for about the kajillionth time and and he dug back with a comment about my overweening need to talk about how much I like The Last Jedi, which — fair — but if I may offer a light edit, the better reference is my apparently endless interest in hitting TROS, and J.J. Abrams, over the head with a brick.
Think about something else.
Sure. Has there been a bigger, naked-er self-own in 2022 than Elon Musk’s? Even a month after dropping out of Twitter, I can’t stop staring at the warm glow of the fire. (It’s the day after Christmas, so I may not be fully caught up on wherever he’s at with the thing right now — a nominal irony that the best way to keep up with the demise of Twitter is… by getting on Twitter.)
Now, it is by no means surprising that the wealthiest man on earth is a sham (and, by the past 8 weeks’ worth of the evidence of his decision process, possibly one of the stupidest people alive). It is, however, refreshing just to watch the thing. Time Magazine recently, predictably, and likely gave Zelensky Person of the Year, but I can’t imagine looking back at 2022 without thinking about Elon burning $44 billion dollars to a cinder in front of the entire world, i.e. the entire population of people he desperately, sociopathically needs to impress. He might as well have chopped his dick off on YouTube and put it in a sandwich and proceeded to choke on the sandwich.
Churn is such a great word — broadly, and in its capitalist referent as “the rate at which customers stop doing business over a given period of time.” It is used more widely now. People churn out of jobs; churn out of fads; churn out of social networks, both real and imagined. When the latter means “social media,” we’re back to the top: the money-sucking business of social media, which is all any of those platforms ultimately are, has a churn rate.
There are, I think, two kinds of people: people who are enthralled by “drama,” and people who find it distasteful. I want to be clear that there is no moral lens on this. One is not more righteous than the other. They are basic human behaviours and reactions, and they connect to activities as far-ranging and differential as whether you enjoy watching movies that are so-bad-they’re-good or if you tend to find such things just-bad.
So, like, I should not enjoy watching Elon ruin himself (he will not, of course, face any actual real-world consequences of any of his failures; this is more of a MySpaceification of a human being), because generally speaking, I am not enthralled by drama. I find it distasteful. But fuck, this was fun, and funny. And I hate that guy, so I am excepting myself from my own rules. The only thing better than any of this will be when he puts himself and all his idiot friends on a rocket and gets lost on the way to Mars, and it turns out Avenue 5 was actually written in 2042 and sent backwards in time to be ignored by North American television audiences.
I am nominating Elon for Tederick.com’s Person of the Year. Not because he’s good at anything — he’s not — but because he is so fucking bad at it. Being a person, I mean. And that might actually, with all the compassion I can summon, be the whole thing. Being that bad at it, that publicly, is the sort of lesson in human failure we could all stand to look at for at least fifteen minutes, and think really hard about. What if being human and alive is just fucking mind-alteringly hard. And the harder you try to con the world into thinking you’ve figured it out, the worse at it you actually are.
What else ya got, slappy
Here’s something: The Many Deaths of Laila Starr.
Wait, back up. I told a lot of people that Andor made me angry.
Star Wars again? Really?
Shut up, it’s germane
I told a lot of people that Andor made me angry and it was easy to let those conversations go down the one path, the obvious path, the one about how it’s infuriating that shows like Obi-Wan and Boba Fett got made as poorly as they did, when it was clearly possible the whole time that Star Wars could be made by people who take it seriously and are interested in finding new and interesting things to do with it.
Sure, that’s anger-inducing. But that’s never what I meant.
What I meant was: now and again, I’ll encounter a piece of art that is so fucking good it makes me furious. And that is an unkind way to express it, because what I really mean is, it’s a piece of art that is so fucking good, I simultaneously feel
a) a profound, personal sense of shame and inadequacy that makes me want to kick rocks and give up entirely on everything;
b) a vertigo-inducing powers-of-ten sense of the sheer number of branching pathways, trod successfully, that lead the artist and the artwork to where they ended up, at such a high level of success;
c) almost religious humility at the above, and reverent joy that such things are even possible.
Maybe anger isn’t the word for that triple-cocktail of profoundly powerful punches to my heart’s core, but, it’s what comes out of my mouth when I try to talk about it.
Anyway, this week, The Many Deaths of Laila Starr is what’s making me angry.
I don’t suffer much from imposter syndrome, creatively. That’s probably because I am not a … uh … poster. (Whatever the opposite of imposter is.) Maybe if I were being paid to do this and/or staking all of my income on it, imposter syndrome would become a problem for me in a big hurry, but as long as I’m at the pushing-words-around-the-pixelboard stage, I don’t feel like my inadequacy manifests as often as fear that I’m not good enough to do it, as it does as simple naïveté about what it takes to do it.
I was working on a television project for a couple of years which is sort of in an unofficial deep freeze now, but something that stood out for me in all the bravura confidence that I had about that work — I really thought it was well on its way to becoming something real, big, and popular — were the glimpses of how catastrophically simplistic I was being in my thinking. Not about the content of the show itself, of course, but about the meat and potatoes work of actually getting that proposal from where it was (two idiots on a typewriter) to where the execution of the idea actually lives (professional screenwriting and showrunning).
It’s a hell of a boon being so fucking out to lunch on the actual mechanics of building a career in creative production that you think it will be easy. And by “boon,” I do of course mean “privilege.” Everyone out there actually doing it is braver than the marines.
How was the A.G.M.?
Solid. Like last year, I took a day to do a personal Annual General Meeting, an idea for which I am indebted to my friend Kali. I set goals against 2023, reviewed the year that was, and ate a lot of fruit and scones and scones with fruit in them. As one does.
I’ve set titanic creative goals for the next 30 days, to “break and reset the bones” on how and where I sit down to write, and in what mindset. I spent the holidays putting back some of the flab I spent the fall taking off. There’s great energy in this, in my January, in all the dominoes being lined up to (ideally) scatter as I start them falling.
I recommend this approach to year-end to everyone. This coming week, this Dead Week, this Week That Doesn’t Exist But Somehow Does… use it to pull the slingshot back. Fire a rock straight into the heart of the three months of ugly that are coming our way. Make the bastard bleed.