Tag Archives: art

It’s all about perspective.

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So I was standing on the porch drinking a beer at Thanksgiving, talking about Star Trek. You know, like you do. And my buddy asked, “What happened to Wil Wheaton? Is he still alive?” And I, in my slightly drunken and totally appalled state, said, “Oh, no, he’s fine. He’s written a bunch of books and his Twitter feed is hilarious. Hot wife, a couple of sons. He’s been on The Guild, Eureka, Big Bang Theory, TableTop. Mostly small parts and cameos, but all pretty awesome shows. He doesn’t seem to do anything that wouldn’t make nerds happy. There’s this really cool thing called w00tstock…” At which point I trailed off because, my Trekkie buddy having wandered away, I noticed that no one I was talking to had any idea what the hell I was babbling about.

Such is my curse, this geekdom.

And I realized that I was talking about Wheaton like he’s my friend. And as much as I wish that were true, it simply isn’t. Someday, Wheaton, someday. Meanwhile, it got me thinking about the changing definition of celebrity. With the interwebs infiltrating our lives, even out here in the middle of bloody goddamn nowhere, I’m in constant contact with the media. I don’t have cell reception, access to Chinese food, or cable (these are my touchstones for reality in America – how shallow am I?). The people two houses down from me don’t have electricity. I have a buddy who runs his whole life on one solar panel and a car battery. Seriously, what the hell, hippies? But I, here in my electrified and internetted Babylon, manage to watch all my tv shows every week, listen to all my podcasts, read all my favorite blogs with my morning coffee, check my tweets, check my Facebook, check my email, read the BBC news feed, and still have enough time to do my actual job. So I end up feeling super connected to the real world even though I’m clearly not. There isn’t a human being close enough to hear me scream, but I can tell you what Neil Patrick Harris had for lunch five minutes ago, and probably show you a photo, because you know NPH is all kinds of into food porn.

And Wheaton’s a great example of this, right? I read his blog, follow him on Twitter, and watch his webshow. I just finished one of his books (Just a Geek – it was awesome). I’m in daily contact, somehow or another, with Wil Wheaton (not in a stalkery way, I swear). But it creates a type of theoretical, binary, electrical friendship which is totally in my fucking head. Maybe “friendship” is too strong a word. Familiarity? Acquaintanceship? Basic understanding of Wheatonalia? Putting aside my being painfully up to date on his goings-on, just these couple of connections give one the impression that he’s honestly a really nice guy. One of those who you feel like you could go grab a beer (an excellent and expensive dark beer, probably an IPA) with and have a good laugh. Or at the very least, walk up to him the street and say, “Hey, how’s it going? I’m a big fan,” and not get yelled at. The epitome of a celebrity non-douchebag, right?

But here’s my question about these sorts of modern fan/celebrity relationships: how many of them are fake fronts? Wheaton aside, because I think he’s on the level and a sincere kind of dude who wouldn’t lie to us and tell us he’s nice when he’s not. But I think some celebrities totally would. To make you like them and go see their movies or buy their albums or participate in whatever their moneymaking gig is. Because it’s a business, being famous. I think we forget that, as fans. It’s all about the money from their end (or from their wranglers’ perspectives, anyway). And, luckily, that’s changing. New media has given us the opportunity to make art for art’s sake, allowed people to do what they love and tell the corporate asshats to fuck right off. And I think that attitude has made artists less concerned about money, as long as they get to do the thing that makes them happy, that makes them complete. Which is a slow cultural change, but it’s a necessary one. Right now we’re still in the beginning stages, on a cusp, and it’s a hard transition. Especially for those old-school corporate scumfucks. They’re still hanging on, trying to use the new system to their advantage. Let us all rest easy in the knowledge that all those old guys will die soon and we can run this show any way we damn well please.

That came off super bitchy. Sorry. I don’t want any greedy old men to die.

But they will. Eventually.

Anyway. I just think it’s interesting, this interconnected situation in which I suddenly find myself. You guys may or may not know, if you haven’t been reading my blog from the beginning, that I went almost ten years without television or internet. In high school I could have built a computer from scratch and programmed it. When I moved to California last year, it was like I’d stepped into a whole new universe of technology. A lot of it was completely lost on me. The world keeps turning, whether we’re aware of what’s going on around us or not. My years of hitchhiking and Rainbow Gatherings and reading Kerouac, and the college years in which all I needed was a pen and a library card and beer and the occasional dose of ramen noodles to survive, and then the years of retail shilldom when I was too broke to afford internet service (yes, internet service costs money – it’s a luxury, not a necessity, remember that) – all those years seem to have added up very, very quickly. The growth is exponential, and it’s constantly becoming more and more necessary to be tech savvy just to get by. I’m just now catching up to where I feel like a normal computer-using human being, and lately I’ve been feeling like I need a fucking smartphone just understand where other people are coming from in conversation.

And here’s the bottom line: all that shit? It’s not true. It’s not real. That same friend who I had the Wil Wheaton conversation with at Thanksgiving? I was bitching to her about missing texting and using cell phones (out here something like calling to ask The Husband to pick up milk on his way home? – completely impossible, and that’s a drag). And she put her hand over my mouth and said, “Do you love the quiet? Do you love seeing the madrone trees dripping with dew in the morning? Do you love not having to deal with assholes being all up in your space all the time?” (I nodded at this point because she still had her hand over my mouth.) “Yes? Then shut the fuck up.” And she’s right. As much as I appreciate the creature comforts that the real world has to offer, things like bookstores and fancy coffees and concerts and cell reception, I wouldn’t trade this life for that one. I like growing my own food. I like living off the land and getting dirt under my fingernails. I like swimming in the river in the summer and taking walks in the rain in the winter. I like playing music on porches and enjoying beers with my buddies while they talk about their plants like little old ladies. I like being able to go into the city and have it be exciting every time, and not just a run-of-the-mill hassle. I like being able to stand in my backyard and see all the way down the river valley to the ocean, so still I can hear the birds’ wings flapping as they buzz by me (probably on their way to devour my cherry trees, those awful, awful bastards).

And, as a side note, I should probably go ahead and apologize for my “what the hell, hippies?” comment earlier. It takes a lot to live this way, and it’s even more impressive to do it without your socially accepted “basics” like electricity. Mad props to those who kick it off the grid. I don’t have the stones to do it right. I enjoy being able to flip a switch and have lights. Maybe I’m spoiled in that regard. Lights and running water are my basics, but that’s not necessarily true for everyone. Much respect to those who do it up and find it somewhere in themselves to truly, simply, enjoy every single thing they have. And that particular friend I was referencing? He’s in his sixties. Fucking awesome old homesteader family. Amazing. They make things like the interwebs seem absurd, and I thank them for the perspective. Although I still stand by my statement that I would give away an extra body part for constant Chinese food delivery.

(Cue the completely sloppy post-script.)

I wrote this blog the week after Thanksgiving because that drunk-on-the-porch interaction was fresh in my mind and I was thinking about it a lot as I read Wheaton’s book (which is a weird coincidence, actually, that timing). Since then, something happened which is the perfect example of what I’m ranting about here. And it’s big and meaty and important, so I really felt like I should tack this bit on. Sorry this post is getting super rambly.

You guys remember my post about Amanda Palmer? I do love her so. She wrote a blog post the other week that made me have a sobbing breakdown. Her best friend has cancer and is starting treatment for it. Which is one of the hardest things anyone can go through. Fuck cancer. Then, this morning (as I’m writing this, not posting it), she cancelled the rest of her current tour and put up this piece about why. And good on her. Being there for someone you love as they lay there, sick and scared, is truly horrifying. But it’s necessary, and it’s the right thing to do, and showbusiness be damned. Here’s the thing: I sort of expected a tidal wave of outrage from asshole fans about not being able to see their favorite monkey prance about on stage. Instead what flew forth was the biggest show of love, support, and respect for Palmer’s decision. I hate to be corny about this, but it really made me feel like people can be alright sometimes, in groups. It’s a shame that so often it takes a tragedy to make us rally like that.

But you see, I realized that I’ve been thinking about those celebrity/fan relationships from my end and not from their end, and it kind of made me feel like a dick. Because sometimes life sucks, right? It’s inevitable. And being in the limelight can make folks feel isolated. So I wanted to make it clear that I am glad we’ve got this interconnectedness. The love and sympathy and empathy and support that Palmer’s getting is truly amazing (and I mean really astounding – I particularly like this piece from Jenny Lawson, The Bloggess). And I hope, from the bottom of my heart, that it helps her and all the people effected to get through this. The world is getting smaller. One tweet from me may not make someone’s day, but it’s a drop in a very important bucket, I think, especially at times like these. That’s worth something.

If you’re going to have an epic showdown, try to do it in Texas.

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I decided to take a day off this week to read comics. Yeah, I know. I’ve got shit to do and the comics will wait patiently on the shelf for me to read them later. But I just really needed a day off and it was either comics or more Star Trek. I chose comics. Preacher by Garth Ennis, to be specific. Which is one of the best comic series ever EVER EVER! If you don’t know Preacher, get thee to a comic shop posthaste, friends. Because it is fantastic. So fantastic, in fact, that I’m putting off reading the final issue so as to increase the deliciousness of the conclusion. Which is sort of pointless, seeing as how I’ve read this series before. But you see where I’m coming from.

There’s too much going on to sum up the series well. But, briefly, you’ve got your alcoholic vampire, your classic love story with an angry gun-crazy woman, your crazed inbred mutants, your church-run global nuclear apocalypse conspiracy, your badass German hitman and his merry band of psychos, your immortal murderous gunslinging cowboy, your illegitimate angel/demon lovechild run amok, and your hero ex-preacher who’s been endowed with the power of the word of God and is hunting Him down to make Him answer for abandoning humanity in our time of need. It’s a smorgasbord of fucked-up, irreverent awesome. Plus, the art is amazing. Which, with so many ethereal, conceptual things going on, is pretty impressive. Steve Dillon takes the unimaginable and makes it gory and dynamic and wonderfully funny. Genius.

Like I said, I’ve read these before. But I was much younger and I think that, at the time, I liked them for different reasons. I was in high school (and maybe my first year of college – that whole period is really fuzzy), which as we all know is a tremendously weird time. Why does adolescence have to suck so much? Stupid brains, being all soaked in hormones and new sociocultural constructs and tears and shitty marijuana. Anyway. There are a lot of religious questions raised in Preacher. It’s a pretty basic good vs evil kind of story, but the sides are unclear and the players are sometimes ambivalent about which side they’re on, both to each other and to the reader. And I can’t think of another story, off the top of my head, where the author made not only the church but God himself the bad guy. Not in a bitchy, whiny way, either. It’s completely logical within the context of our hero’s morality. “I believed in you and gave you everything and you still disappeared and left us all hanging so fuck you.” But where most of us would let it go at “fuck you,” the Reverend Jesse Custer takes it upon himself to hunt the bastard down and make him answer for his behavior. Brilliant. Point is, when I first read these comics, I was having a huge crisis of mind about religion and my own beliefs. You know, like most people do at around sixteen or so. “What do I believe and why?” is a new and exciting (and occasionally painful) question at that age when we’re just learning how to ask those questions subjectively and how to stand by our answers. Sixteen is about the age when we stop just repeating what we’ve always heard or been told. Ideally. I mean, if one just keeps doing that forever, that regurgitation, one becomes a tremendous waste of space and electricity. I sympathized only with Custer’s anger at the time, whereas now I feel like I sympathize more with his logic and steadfast dedication to an ideal. It’s interesting to revisit those moral and ethical conundra as an adult. A kind of intellectual nostalgia.

Something else I find weirdly intriguing that I probably wouldn’t have taken much notice of as an angry teenager: Preacher is unabashedly patriotic. Not in a hamfisted all-the-bad-guys-are-foreigners kind of way. But in subtle ways, and some really beautiful ones. Having John Wayne be Custer’s spirit guide. His leaving his father’s Congressional Medal of Honor at the Vietnam Memorial. Blowing up Monument Valley with an atomic bomb (if only to later point out that there were millions of native Americans murdered there and hundreds of atomic bomb tests happened nearby so it could’ve been worse). There are a lot of flashbacks from the characters’ lives, so their travels all over the country are also, oddly, all over time. They show the Empire State building as it’s being finished, New Orleans in several different decades, the western frontier at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as soldiers in Vietnam and World War II. It’s a love song to America and Americans, cheesy as that may sound. And not the sort of homogenized strip-mall America where every city in every state looks exactly the same. Dillon’s done a great job of making each locale have its own personality, even if it’s as simple as changing the color of the sky or the types of trees in the background. Excellent work. And don’t even get me started on Texas. There is a drooling appreciation for Texas here that I didn’t know could exist (that is, without riding a horse through dusty streets, naked and covered in barbeque, shooting Colt revolvers into the air, and screaming “Yeehaw”). But it’s not one-sided, blind faith-type Texas love. Ennis takes great care to point out the racism, classism, redneckery, and utter madness that also make Texas the wonderfully weird place that it is. You take the good with the bad. That’s America.

The other thing that I find cool about Preacher is how well its early 90′s cultural references hold up. There’s a whole Vietnam/Desert Storm analogy between Custer’s timeline and his father’s timeline. Another character has a fucked up face because he tried to shoot himself in the head following the death of Kurt Cobain, a sad but real phenomenon that happened worldwide in ’94. There’s a group of pathetic pseudo-vampiric goth kids who hit particularly close to home for me. Bleh. I don’t want to talk about my black fingernails and heavy eyeliner phase. Double bleh. And, probably my favorite, Custer says at one point that he started out on his quest because of the death of Bill Hicks. One of the best descriptions of Hicks I’ve ever heard: “Guy kept goin’, kept performin’, with the license granted a dyin’ man to say what he likes without fear…An’ a guy who’ll tell the truth in this bullshit world, he’s worth his weight in gold.” I should really do a blog post about old Bill. I’ll do that soon. He’s amazing, and it made me really happy to see this nod to him, especially since it was done well. The 90′s may seem like a cultural wasteland to the outside observer, but to those of us who were teenagers (read: sociopaths) during that time, I think it means a lot to see the things we thought were important treated properly. That’s not just the 90′s, obviously. That’s anybody’s view on their own youth. Maybe it’s just that I’m getting to an age that demands I look back with positivity instead of angst. And I’m sure these sorts of culturally reliant things would read differently if they were written now, rather than in the thick of it, what with the wealth of irony that hindsight affords us.

So, yeah. Go check out Preacher if you haven’t already. It’s totally worth the read. I will offer a disclaimer (“disclaim”? Is that a real verb?), and tell you that if you hold religion, particularly Christianity, dear enough to say that it shouldn’t be satirized or criticized or even closely examined, this is not the comic for you. It turns dogma on its head and shakes the shit out of it. Which is fearless and hilarious and awesome, but I can see how it would offend. It’s also bloody and violent and overtly sexual (often in twisted ways) and uses a lot of fuck words. But still, awesome. I can’t recommend it highly enough to those of you with a dark sense of humor and a thick skin for controversy.

Writery thoughts

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The weirdest thing happened to me this week, you guys. I wrote a short story.

Ish. Kindasorta.

I wrote a first draft of a thing. It wants to be a short story.

What’s weird about it is that I haven’t written any new fiction in almost two years. It’s a little daunting. I fiddled about quite a bit with my novel until the whole Doctor Who thing happened and took the wind out of my sails. But new stuff? There’s been nothing for quite some time. And that’s terrifying.

Oddly, what’s even more terrifying is looking at this new thing and thinking that it might be awful. What a fun quirk of the writer’s brain that is. And I wasn’t weirded out by the story at all, at first. What hit the panic button was asking someone to read it. The second I did that, I lost all momentum. The observation of the thing changed the creation of the thing. Heisenberg’s uncertainty short story. Or something like that.

And that’s really why I’m bringing it up now. Every week I spout some verbose nonsense and put it up here in blogland, where it is habitually read by fives and tens of people. That doesn’t make me nervous at all. Because these things I say are opinions, things that I can defend, things that are (usually) based on some objectify-able outside influence which you can absorb into your own satellite system of nerdiness, or not, at your will. My opinion doesn’t change your experience of a thing.

But when it’s something that I’ve created? Out of thin air? Out of my own tortured little brain? The thought of someone telling me it’s horrible? That actually hurts. I suppose it’s that juxtaposition of feely things that bothers me. I want to write but I don’t want to be harshly judged. But I write every week and throw it out into the interwebs for summary judgment. What hypocritical bullshit is that?

“Well, suck it up, furball. Criticism is an intrinsic part of art.”

Yes, yes, I know. If I want to be a writer (a fiction writer, an author, not just a small-time blogger) I need a thicker skin. And the only way to get a thicker skin is with scar tissue, I guess. Take the hit. The hit is necessary.

But taking the hit fucking suuuucks, man.

Why are they so different? Writing fiction and blogging? I’d like to ask a professional brain-poker about that. Am I using some other part of me to write fiction? That moment when I get a little seed of an idea, an image or a line, and I feel like I’ve got to feed it so it will go the hell away, that’s an amazing moment. Those are the moments that artists live for. Inspiration. And then, after you feed the idea and it grows into a thing and you work on it and polish it and make it pretty and it’s done? That’s amazing, too. I feel like it’s worth the fear. Isn’t it? I just think it’s interesting how nonchalant I am about the blogging and then the fiction writing gives me the creeping horrors.

Here’s the bottom line: I don’t know what else to do. If I’m not a writer, I don’t know why I’m here. Maybe I’m doing the wrong kind of writing. I’ll grant you that. But I had kind of a weird childhood and was trained from a very young age to value the written word, to take shelter in escapism, and that storytelling is one of the most important things that people can ever do. Fuck thumbs, stories are what make us human. And this fear, when it pops up, makes me question that. Makes me question my purpose on this planet.

I had a conversation with a very dear friend the other night. She’s nervous about applying to grad school, questioning herself a little. And I told her that she’s not allowed to quit until she tries. Being a failure is more noble than being a quitter. Being a failure means that you have gained the knowledge that you can’t do something. Being a quitter means that you’re ok with never having learned whether you can do something or not. And that’s cowardly. So she and I had this chat (and she’s still applying, hooray!) and then two or four beers later I was telling her about the new short story and the reader fear I have about it. All this existential questioning. And I realized that we were having the same conversation again, only backwards. And more slurring was involved. So what’s the difference? There is no difference. I just have to suck it up and be a big girl and do the thing I’m scared of. And that’s that.

So what have we learned? Probably not much. But I’m going to go ahead and give you fair warning: once I’ve gone through another couple of drafts of this story I’m going to post it on the blog. This may not be the right forum for my goofy fiction, but I’m comfortable here and I trust you guys. (Thanks for that, by the way. I owe you all a big fat lot of hugs and high fives.) And if I say I’ll post it, I have to. Hopefully that will take the fear away and make it just a plain old blog deadline. We’ll see how it goes.

Oh, and sorry for getting all deep and heady on you. Watch this and it’ll lighten your mood.

We ARE the media

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I may have overdosed on Amanda Palmer, you guys. Unfortunately, most people I’ve mentioned her to don’t know who she is, so let me illuminate your lives for a minute. Because that’s why we’re both here, right? (Warning: there is much more link clickety fun than normal in this blog post. Just do it. It’s worth your time. Mostly.)

Back in the day, Amanda Palmer was the lead singer for The Dresden Dolls. She went solo and then ditched her record label. Somewhere in there is when I started listening to her, right around the time she released a badass album of Radiohead covers all played on the ukulele. That’s right. That’s what I said. Radiohead covers. On the ukulele. A whole album of them. Because that’s how one rolls with no evil corporate scumfucks looking over one’s shoulder. Art for art’s sake. Anyway, she’s just a great big tornado of weird fun and I love everything about her.

The reason that I bring her up now is that she’s been in the center of a wee little media frenzy with this new album, Theatre Is Evil. This is like the history of New Media in three acts, for real. What happened was that she crowdfunded the money for the album on Kickstarter, raising way more than she asked for (the goal was $100K and they ended up with $1.2 million). That’s what happens when your fans love the shit out of you and you make perfectly reasonable requests that will have awesome artistic repercussions. So, she made the album and, in addition to regular cds and itunes and all that blah blah, she released it on her website on a pay-what-you-can basis. I paid ten bucks for mine, even though I’m broke and could’ve gotten it for free. Because it’s her music and she worked her balls off to make it and she can do whatever the hell she wants with it! Once you take a record label out of the equation, anyway, and there’s no one telling anyone else what to do. Ever. (Frankly, I doubt very many people tell this woman “no.”)

So when she and her band started their tour they crowdsourced some musicians to go onstage with them. Now, here’s where the bullshit starts to get thick. I, personally, think this is a fucking fantastic plan. Why pay to haul an orchestra’s worth of people and equipment around the world when you can find a few people in each town to play with you, save on travel costs, and give some of your musically-inclined fanbase such an awesome opportunity? Are you fucking kidding me? It’s brilliant. Saves money and gives a bunch of people a huge happy. I love it. But apparently some musician’s union asshats had a problem with it because she was bucking the system. Demeaning everything they’ve worked for as a union and whatnot. Which, I mean, I see their point, too, but it’s not like she hired professional musicians and then refused to pay them. These folks were all enthusiastic volunteers who were aware of the terms when they signed up. (I should clarify that since this nonsense got some media attention, she and her team of minions have revised their budget so now they are paying everyone who comes to play, even though they never asked her to.)

And then, like a ninja, she sneaks onto the Billboard charts (as of this writing, she was sitting at number ten). With a crowdfunded album! With no record label! Which is a pretty incredible thing. Probably the first time all three of those circumstances have come together, although I can’t say that unequivocally. We kindasorta had this conversation when Radiohead released In Rainbows and gave it away. And then we noticeably didn’t have this conversation when Nine Inch Nails did the same thing with The Slip, which I thought was weird. Maybe it’s just being made into a big deal now because the interwebs is becoming exponentially more important each year. Evolution is speeding up. The singularity is getting closer and closer. And although the music industry was among the first to feel it, they’re turning into the whining toddler of the group, that annoying one that won’t leave without howling its fool head off. And folks like Palmer are the thorn in their side, telling them to their faces that they’re wrong. Good on her.

Now, we all know that I’m not a particularly adept music reviewer, but I am great at analogies and will say this: Theatre Is Evil fucking rocks. It’s like if The Cure and Concrete Blonde had a baby who was raised in a traveling burlesque show by Tori Amos and Ben Folds and grew up to be smoking hot and eyebrowless. I definitely like some songs more than others. I have listened to those songs about a thousand times. And I’ve listened to the whole album about ten times in the three days I’ve had it, and I’m just now able to get through the damn thing without crying. I even took the afternoon off yesterday and learned Ukulele Anthem on my uke. (Side note: at this point I feel obligated to mention that you shouldn’t pronounce it “you-kuh-lay-lee” but “ooh-koo-lay-lay,” because if I don’t my mother will yell at me.)

Also, there are a couple of really awesome videos for these songs. Like this one. And this one. That stop-motion ink-crawly weirdness is just so fucking cool. And that’s not CG; it was all practical. This kind of shit makes you remember when video was important, and think maybe it could be again. Most of that money that they repurposed for paying the musicians is coming out of the video budget, though, so I don’t know how much more fun visual stuff we’ll see for this album. Thanks for that, media/musician peer pressure. I really do miss that combo of visual and musical art that was so prevalent in the age of music videos. But Palmer also commissioned a bunch of folks to help her make an art book to go with the album (which I think was part of the higher-level Kickstarter package), so maybe that idea will catch on and we’ll have a new and exciting way to do music-slash-art stuff in this wretched post-video era.

Anyway, check out Amanda Palmer. She blogs (and somehow, inexplicably, overuses the word “kerfluffle”) at amandapalmer.net (where you can also buy the new album), and is @amandapalmer on Twitter. Basically, she’s awesome wrapped in art dipped in punk. You can’t beat that.

PS – I tried really, really hard not to mention this, but she’s married to Neil Gaiman, and we know how much I lovelovelove him. And while that has absolutely nothing to do with her music or her art, this is one of the sweetest things I’ve seen in a long time.

Writery Nerdbait

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This post may seem a little all-over-the-place, but there are so many pieces of awesome involved and I feel like I should talk about them all. Let us begin at the beginning. A while back, YouTube started supporting original webshow programming. Which I suppose they’ve always done, in a way, but they’re officially sanctioning it now. They made channels to aggregate shows that are similar, and you can subscribe to a channel now instead of just one user or show at a time, right? Makes sense. Good on you, YouTube. We’re living in a weird pre-singularity futureworld between the era of television and the interwebs being separate and the era of the two becoming one giant beast. And of course the very first channel I subscribed to was Geek & Sundry, because it’s run by Felicia Day and has all the episodes of The Guild.

I’ve talked about Felicia Day and The Guild on the blog before. But this YouTube channel has given her the room to bring us a bunch of new webshow awesomeness without having to do it all alone and run herself ragged and have a nervous breakdown. Must be super gratifying to be able to give all her funny, interesting friends an outlet to do the cool thing they love and then just hand it over to the nerds of the world. There are a ton of great shows on Geek & Sundry. A brief list: Sword and Laser (a scifi/fantasy book club), TableTop (playing board games with Wil Wheaton), Written By a Kid (they take a kid telling a story then make a short film of it with the kid narrating – sounds weird but it’s hilarious, trust me), and the Flog (Felicia Day’s show which is more or less a video blog of her doing stuff she’s always wanted to do and filming it, because she can, because she’s her own boss, ha ha, so there). Anyway, just go to YouTube (and subscribe!) or geekandsundry.com and check it out.

So take a jump to the left (and then a step to the ri-i-i-ight) and recall my rabid Patrick Rothfuss fandom. Turns out that, as occasionally happens in my little nerdy heaven, these two are friends! And I don’t know what crazy behind-closed-doors conversations had to take place under clandestine conditions for the cosmos to line up the way they have, but the end result is that now Patrick Rothfuss is doing a show on Geek & Sundry.

The show is called The Story Board and basically, it’s just a Google+ Hangout with Rothfuss and a handful of other writers having a conversation. The sort of conversations that I imagine them having at a dinner party or something, you know? Just talking about their process and craft, what they think of other authors’ work, the current state of publishing, etc, etc. It’s a monthly show, and each episode has a different topic. This first one went up this week and features Diana Rowland, Emma Bull, and Jim Butcher talking about (appropriately) Urban Fantasy. I don’t necessarily know a lot about Urban Fantasy (for example, should I be capitalizing those words?) and I thought it was really interesting to hear what these guys had to say about it. Like comparing Urban Fantasy to old fairy tales, where the dark and scary city is acting as a stand-in for the forest. Isn’t that brilliant? Because who’s afraid of the woods anymore? Besides me, but we have bears, so that doesn’t count. These are the kinds of writery things I think about anyway. Sort of reminds me of being in a creative writing or literature lecture in college, only funnier, and with people who actually do this for a living instead of hanging out with self-righteous college students all day.

I don’t know. Maybe I just miss my writer’s group.

Hmm, I just made myself sad.

Anyway, I also really love that Geek & Sundry is kind of pushing reading a little. The Sword and Laser show is a book-club-slash-book-review show. Felicia Day has her own book club that does monthly Google+ Hangouts (The Vaginal Fantasy book club – they read scifi/fantasy romance novels). And now this thing with Rothfuss. I mean, obviously I could make the erroneous overgeneralization that because the target market for this company is the nerdier demographic they can get away more easily with talking about books than say, oh, I don’t know, Fox. But I don’t think one can necessarily equate intelligence with interest. Not across the board. This is definitely biased by my literature degree but: books are important. We don’t read enough in this country and the publishing industry is dying. But Felicia Day has serious clout these days, so I’m glad she’s giving people that sort of forum. Maybe someone who never gave a shit about reading will see one of these shows and get really into scifi or fantasy or romance. Or even science. Or screenwriting. That would be worth all the effort, I think.

So, what’s the point? Besides the fact that I think this whole thing is cool? (And really, shouldn’t that be enough? It’s my blog, damn it! I write what I want!) No, no, it is cool. And Rothfuss is following in the footsteps of other webshows that have kind of made it ok to say “Well there’s this thing I want to do, and if I put it on the interwebs it’ll be easy for everyone to see. And free. And if they don’t like it they can kiss my ass because there’s a whole big interwebs out there that they can go watch cat videos on. Oh, and it’s free.” (Don’t be a hater in webshow comments, y’all. They work their balls off to make a cool thing and then give it to us for free. Be nice.) I think I talked about this a bit in my Neil Gaiman post, about how the nature of distribution has changed and is simultaneously changing the way we think about art in the first place. It’s a New Media world, you know? People have to put their amount of “web presence” on their résumés now. Isn’t that weird?

But taking that responsibility on ourselves as creators, and giving a big “fuck you” to the System or the Man or whatever, and just doing what we love because we love it and ratings and sales and money be damned? All of that? That’s our generation’s revolution. It’s quiet and it’s slow and it’s a lot less ballsy than marching in the streets, but it’s a foundation for what’s coming. Telling people that art is ok. That their story matters. That they can say anything and someone, somewhere will listen. Or teaching a kid that the people they look up to like books and that being smart is cool. That’s something I think we need to impress upon them at a very young age. Fuck teaching to the test. Fuck memorizing and regurgitating information. Give your kid a book. Show them how to tell a story, and maybe that story will change the world. All we are is our words.

I’m getting a little off-topic here, but I’m thirty and I just learned that. Not that all we are is our words. I knew that. But the bit about saying what you have to say and putting it out there instead of hiding it away because you’re scared that no one will ever put it out there for you. A year ago I was terrified to even let my best friends read my stuff and now I look forward all week to blog day (although admittedly I don’t have a whole hell of a lot of exciting things to look forward to out here in bear country). Things aren’t going to just happen to you. You have to do things for yourself. And I think between having the good imps at Geek & Sundry (and other similar organizations) to show me how, and having so many people tell me that they actually like my blog, I learned that lesson with the least amount of crying possible. So thanks for that, you guys. Go make a cool thing and put it out there for the world to enjoy. It’ll totally be worth it.

A perfectly valid reason to overuse the word “awesome.”

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“Who is Neil Gaiman?” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to answer this question. It boggles my little nerdy mind. There seems to be a glitch in the awesomeness-to-famousness ratio matrix here. I recently answered the “Who’s Neil Gaiman?” question by saying that he’s the greatest living scifi/fantasy writer, having forgotten that Ray Bradbury and Terry Pratchett are both still with us. My sincerest apologies to those two elder statesmen, but to say that the three of them make up a triumvirate of badass is the highest form of flattery. That I can muster, anyway. I doubt there’s better company to be in amongst the living.

Here’s the thing about Neil Gaiman: the man can do anything. He writes comics, fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, kid’s books. A multifaceted ninja of the weird, this guy. Which is why it’s even more baffling that people don’t know who he is. Comic book geeks, literature geeks, movie geeks – all of these groups have a damn good reason to adore him, and in a sociological-Venn-diagram-of-normal-human-conversations kind of way, he should be a household name, right? You would think. Although to be fair, my love for Gaiman’s work mostly centers around his novels. Neverwhere blew my mind so completely when I read it. Fucking outstanding. I think I gave a copy to everyone I had to buy a birthday present for that year, which is saying a lot because I don’t normally give store-bought gifts. I could go into a lengthy, gushy review of all of his work, but it’s too much to take on. We’d be here for days.

So why bring him up, then? Well, because he made me cry the other day. (I’ve been talking about crying a lot on the blog lately. You should probably not read anything into that. I’m really ok, I promise.) He gave this year’s commencement speech at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, which was basically just some good advice for young artists from someone looking at them hopefully from the other end of a successful career. The sort of things I wish I’d been told ten or twelve years ago. You can watch and/or read the whole thing here. It’s about twenty minutes of awesome. He’s just so damn charming. One of those guys that you feel in your nerdy bones you’d like to hang out with some day, but you know you’re just not cool enough. Oh, well. One can dream.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what he said in that speech. I can’t imagine someone that talented ever struggling with the sorts of writery problems that schlubs like me deal with. The torture of syntax, the agony of the first draft, the heart palpitations when staring at a blank page. There’s a sort of hero-worshippy thing we do where we imagine those folks don’t sweat over their creations like us, the mere mortals. They just poop out perfect finished novels, don’t they? No, they don’t. Art is hard, but it should be fun. If it’s not fun, you’re not doing it right. (Or, as my mother would say, “If it feels good, do it. If it feels bad, stop.”) I grapple with the idea of being a writer. Well, that’s not entirely true. I know I’m a writer. If I’m not here to write, I don’t know why the fuck I’m here, frankly. What gets me stuck on the hamster wheel is the word “successful.” What does that even mean, in the context of art? That one becomes rich? Famous? Well-known? Happy? I’m incredibly shy and nervous around people, and I hate money. So I’d like to say that happy is enough, that I can write for writing’s sake. And I do. If I don’t feed those ideas, get them out of my head, they just scream and scream and bounce around in there like angry demon children trapped in a ball pit. On the other hand, my brain is wired for words. I think about words probably more than I think about anything else. Putting them together, their sounds and harmonies, their meanings and implications when they’re strung along in a beautiful (or horrible) line. Thinking of them as little gears, clockwork in a bigger machine, and making that machine work properly – that’s heaven.

But to what end? So I can bitch about pop culture on the interwebs? Not really. Don’t get me wrong. This is tremendously fun, and I can’t even begin to express how much it means that you guys actually read this drivel. It keeps me writing; it keeps me thinking. But I look at my novel, sitting lonely in its sad little box, and I feel like I’ve ignored my child, forgotten to pick him up after school and he’s standing in the rain, waiting, trying not to cry. Would it be “success” for me to have it published and make my millions? At this point I’d be grateful to the universe if I could even finish it and be proud of the work. Robert Frost rewrote Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood ninety-two times before he would let it be published. Am I that much of a perfectionist? I really don’t know. But I would like the damn thing to someday see the light of day. To have someone say that they enjoyed it. That it made them think about something they’d never thought about before. That it made them happy. That whole process, the after-the-work-is-finished process? That’s the part that gives me nightmares. And I think that’s the most important part of Gaiman’s speech, that last bit about how the landscape of distribution of art is changing. This is all new territory. There’s no reason to wait for someone to discover you, or tell you your work is valuable. Just do it because you love it. And if it makes even one person happy, or makes even one person think they can do the thing they want or love to do, that’s got to be worth it. Doing it all yourself? We’re allowed to think that way now, and I’m kind of in that weird generation gap where that’s something I have to learn, something I was never taught. Hard to wrap my mind around, still.

I’m glad that there are folks out there like Neil Gaiman who, while they may not be household names, mean so much to the people who do know their work and take the time and the energy to share with us what they’ve learned. There’s something tremendously laudable about not just sitting in some high castle wallowing around in a pile of money, and instead choosing to come down to tell us how to be real artists because artists are important. That we are important, and that it’s up to us as much as it is to the people we admire to create good and beautiful things. So if you don’t know who Neil Gaiman is, I’m not going to try to explain him to you. My advice? Go pick up four books right now: The Absolute Sandman Volume One, American Gods, Graveyard Book, and Blueberry Girl. It’s an expensive but comprehensive overview of Gaiman’s…what?…I don’t know, but I can’t use “awesome” any more in this blog post or I’ll make myself ill. Check out all of his stuff and his wicked (haha! I didn’t say it!) blog at neilgaiman.com.

Johnny really IS a homicidal maniac…

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I got a nerd bug up my ass and bought a bunch of comics the other day. I reread Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. It’s still awesome. I had the individual comics once upon a time, but I’m not sure what ever happened to them. One of those growing up and moving all your stuff out of your parents’ house things, probably. Kind of sad, really. The trade paperback version is basically the same, with one extra Happy Noodle Boy. Also, I feel like the subliminal messages are different, but I have no way to prove that. It might just mean that they’re not as easy to read since I’m not stoned all the time anymore. But whatever. I realized, too, that Johnny looks like me in high school. Stupid 90′s. Urgh. Fucking mortifying, that. Moving on.

It’s trippy comic book art at its finest. Vasquez has a really great, super simple, pen-and-ink-meets-woodcut kind of style. The characters are somewhat bobble-headed and the perspective is skewed or off-kilter most of the time. All done in black and white, which makes the blood splattery bits even more striking. There are a lot of fun, subtle details in the background of each panel, too. Little treats for the very close observer. It does date itself with all the goth jokes, but having been there I think it holds up pretty well (nostalgia counts for a lot there, for some reason). And all the girls have undercuts. Remember undercuts? What the hell was that about?

Living up to his name, Johnny’s fucking twisted. He’s such a psycho. Page after page of the most creative, interesting ways to kill people. It’s hilarious. I love it. For the same reason I love zombie and slasher flicks, I guess. There’s something really purgative and awesome about watching people do abhorrent stuff that we’ve thought about but would never do. It’s just an outlet. A pressure valve. It appeals to our baser instincts. JTHM is the oh-so-very deliciously gory result of that idea. I honestly don’t know if the intention is satire or pure shock value. Could legitimately be both. I’m ok with that. I love me some hyperbole. I’m also (on a seemingly unrelated note) a rabid Tarantino fan, so I don’t mind a bit of violence if it’s done with some finesse, you know? Some style, some class. Yeah, the book is awful damn bloody, but there’s a point to it. Or, at least, one could read into it and find a point, were one so inclined.

Cue the violence in the media conversation: apparently it impacts the weak minds of our stupid children, making them into murder robots because they can’t think for themselves and we can’t, obviously, as busy adults, be bothered to parent them (but they turn around and cut school funding – whaa?). Then these heathen brats who are somehow trained killers lose their shit and lash out and kill a bunch of people who have wronged them in a gruesome cloud of vengeance! And it’s all society’s fault. Can we just grow up a little bit here, talk about this like adults? Seeing gore on a screen or a page doesn’t mean that you should think it’s ok and go out and do it. Here’s my theory. We tend to forget what we absorb pretty quickly in our soundbite (soundbyte?) culture, right? So if you watch a lot of horror movies or read a lot of gory books (especially comics), you become desensitized. It all  becomes cartoonish, almost. You end up thinking in more realistic terms when it comes to your own actions and reactions. You know, if your brain is healthy and all. This is just me talking out of my ass about anger management, though. Shrinks would probably disagree with me. They have, actually. But I stand by my statement. I also love that wacky heavy metal, so maybe don’t take my word on this stuff. (Disclaimer: Horror movies are not therapy. Ass covered.)

But why is it always just violence that gets all the blame? Other things don’t seem to come up as often in our “bad influences in the media” discussions. Theft, fraud, lying, cheating, drug use. Or sex. Jesus, don’t even get me started on sex in the media. That’s not a blog, it’s a goddamn dissertation. Maybe the real problem is that we don’t intellectualize or rationalize violence. Too visceral. Our culture has to account for the lowest common denominator and assume that monkey-see-monkey-do will be a pretty typical reaction. Which is fucking pathetic, but I won’t say it’s invalid.

Bottom line, if you don’t mind a lot of blood in black and white, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac is fan-freakin’-tastic in a sick, snarky way. I highly recommend. Get thee to a comic shop.

(To give credit where credit is due, the version I have is: JTHM: the Director’s Cut by Jhonen Vasquez, Slave Labor Graphics, 1997, ISBN 9780943151168)