7 mini-essays in a trenchcoat

mostly about media. I think this is going to be a recurring thing

vincent adultman, from bojack horseman. definitely a real proper adult.

I've been wanting to write a beautiful, intricate series of essays about media, but I frankly have been stewing on them for years at this point and as the parent of a 10-month-old I don't have the time or energy to do it, so I've decided I'm just going to blurt out a bunch of snippets with minimal explanation and see what happens. I have a sprawling draft about my backstory here, but long story short is simply that exposure to books, music, games and tv expanded my worldview, my sense of self, my collection of concepts, everything — and I just love the stuff and I want to devote myself to writing about all of it.

— 1 —

Not all media is produced equal, that much is obvious. We can try to get into the reasons for that, which are complicated. But what I want to focus on is actually this: even if we isolate the class of media products that are widely or critically acclaimed (and those are really two separate categories), the amount of quality attention they get over time differs. And I'm curious to understand that, almost more than I'm curious to understand how to make something good in the first place. I think it's a great tragedy when good stuff gets forgotten and overlooked. If you reintroduce something good into the commons, you are, from the perspective of the audience, just as valuable as the people who actually made the thing. This strikes me as a remarkable way to contribute value for, what to me seems to be like an unusually low amount of effort (compared to actually making good things.) Though here I ought to revisit something a mentor has repeatedly reminded me of, which is that the things that seem like “an unusually low amount of effort” to us are typically the things that we happen to be unusually well-suited to do.

— 2 —

Not all great movies win Oscars, and not all Oscar-winning movies are great. We can dispute the greatness of individual movies, but it's striking to me that the following movies didn't win any Oscars: 12 Angry Men (1957), Psycho (1961), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), The Shining (1980), The Terminator (1984), The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Memento (1997), Contact (1997), Mean Girls (2004), How To Train Your Dragon (2010), The Martian (2015). In contrast– I'm not sure if this is the best example to use, but– the Oscar winner for Best Picture in 1990, Driving Miss Daisy? I never hear anybody talking about it, or suggesting that anybody should watch it. It doesn’t seem to be anybody’s favorite film. It does get referenced quite often in other media though, which is another variable to consider.

I wanna examine this across other domains too. What are the weakest Grammy-award-winning artists and albums? What are the strongest that have never won anything? What about in video games? Dragon Age: Inquisition was 2014 Game of the Year and it’s largely vanished from discussions. There’s an interesting reddit discussion about why that might be the case. Explanations include: The Witcher 3 came out soon after and made it look weak in hindsight. The reputation of the game developer Bioware was on the decline and declined more sharply after it’s release. What else?

— 3 —

It’s rare that anybody makes their best video game on their first serious attempt. I want to point particularly at video games like Final Fantasy 6 and 7, and Heroes Of Might And Magic 3, and Diablo 3, and Borderlands 2, and The Witcher 3. In all of these games, it seems like the creators first experimented with simpler versions of of gameplay loops, features and assets that gamers learned to love, and then they refined those loops over time.

Tragically, there’s a flipside to this, which is that game sequels in particular don’t keep getting better. Diablo 3 was bad. Borderlands 3 was bad. Mass Effect: Andromeda was bad. Final Fantasy 13 was, I’m sorry to say it, bad. In all of those cases it strikes me that the people who were making those games seemed to not understand what was really good about their predecessors, and the likeliest explanation is that the actual talent that made the earlier games had left the teams, often in frustration with management. Other people have written about this in much more detail; I’ll just leave this here for now.

I suppose I want to think breadth-wise across other mediums. Iron Man 2 was weak. Thor 2 was terrible. Maybe they were rushed. I know that producing large works like movies are far more complex operations than they are for consumers to watch and critics to review. Still, something I might want to dig deeper into.

— 4 —

I periodically wonder if Lin-Manuel Miranda will ever find the time and space to create another work as dense and detailed as Hamilton. It took him 7 years the first time. The phenomenon around Hamilton is something that likely cannot be replicated, that’s one of those “right place, right time” events. But it’s easily conceivable that at 44 years of age, his best work is surely not done yet.

I think often about Akira Kurosawa’s birthday letter to Ingmar Bergman: "I fully realize that a human is not really capable of creating really good works until he reaches eighty... I am now seventy-seven (77) years old and am convinced that my real work is just beginning."

Similarly, Hokusai, who painted the Great Wave Off Kanagawa (🌊) once said, “nothing I did before the age of 70 was worthy of attention.” This resonates with me deeply, as a 34 year old author who’s been writing for ~20 years. But it does put me in a pickle. How am I to treat my early writing, while I’m still currently writing it? Do I tell people not to care? I guess I can say, “This is a work-in-progress. I’m trying my best. Check it out if that’s what you want to see.”

— 5 —

The trajectory of representation: The earliest thing I can remember pointing to in this regard is how Russell Peters blew up when his 2004 Comedy Now special was uploaded to YouTube. I remember my secondary school classmates were sharing it around, referencing his bits. I’m rewatching it now as I write this, and it has a bit of the ‘Seinfeld is Unfunny’ effect, where the things that made it funny in 2004 now kinda make it commonplace, some would say overplayed. People who weren’t around to watch it in the original cultural context will probably find it cringe. But the thing that’s hard for younger people to properly imagine, is that in about 2000 or so, you basically never saw international-facing brown comedians. And when there’s no representation whatsoever, the first ones on the scene invariably dabble and trade in stereotypes. Lilly Singh is another example of someone who was a breakout youtube star who got a lot of mileage out of doing caricatures of her immigrant parents. ‘Uncle Roger’, a character played by Nigel Ng, is a more recent example of this. I have a lot to say about this but it’ll take a bunch of effort to say it correctly, so I’ll leave this hanging for now.

Sidenote: while I wouldn’t necessarily point to Russell Peters as an example of the pinnacle of comedy, he does have one little throwaway riff that’s stuck with me, which he said in the lead-up to a funny story: “Most of you, in a normal social situation, would be able to keep your mouth shut. I’m not. That’s why you’re in the seats, and I’m on stage.”

— 6 —

Standup comedy in the 2020s is definitely changing thanks to tiktok and instagram reels, maybe roughly like how ‘poetry’ changed in the earlier age of Instagram (Lang Leav, Rupi Kaur, ~2015). Of course, “poetry” in the broadest sense remains universal, anybody can write a poem at any time, and what’s popular on Instagram isn’t necessarily representative of what constitutes ‘good poetry’.

We’re once again looking at the clash between popular vs critically acclaimed, and how that changes when the media landscape changes. There were surely many more cycles of this in the past, and I’m curious to get to know them better in detail, and may write about them here as I do. I do once again find myself thinking “time reveals” — what is fashionable might make a big splash in a given moment, but if it doesn’t also have some timeless quality about it, then it’ll become unfashionable quickly soon after, too. Schopenhauer complained about this re: the populist public intellectuals of his time. And I’m reminded also of the following complaint:

The market for slop does yield more material rewards than the market for quality. This is doubly true in a media age where one can reach an incredibly large audience. Each creator has to ask themselves honestly in their own hearts, do I want to focus on producing quality, or on producing slop? “Oh, it’s not that binary,”– yea, there’s a spectrum in between, and sometimes you can even do some really clever layered things like put something smart inside some slop, and so on. One can be both smart and sexy at the same time, and seemingly get the best of both worlds. And yet, there’s an orientation to every decision that one makes about what to do next, about how to spend one’s time, where to direct one’s attention.

— 7 —

I didn’t actually get around to discussing the comedy part. Actually I’d say comedy started changing even before tiktok. Twitter “ruined” some aspects of comedy, roughly the same way it “ruined” some aspects of journalism. I hardly see the phrase “citizen journalism” anymore, why is that? Maybe, like the phrase “information superhighway”, it just became redundant, because once something is everywhere, once everybody is doing it, there’s no particular reason to mention it anymore. Anyway– so everyone who tweets about whatever they see is a citizen journalist now, which makes it harder for traditional news outlets to compete when it comes to breaking news. So they’ve had to change their approach. It seems like a lot of it is about publishing opinion pieces now. (I know there are some longtime commentators who’d say that it was always thus, that the news media has always really been in the business of manufacturing consent. Gossip tabloids, like the Baghdadi food bloggers, more have always sold more copies than “truly scientific subjects”. Did you know that the original bound prints of The Federalist Papers barely sold 200 copies? That’s the nature of the game! The lesson for creators, I think, is– if you want to write something like The Federalist Papers, don’t count on being ‘properly compensated’ for it financially, not directly. Would be nice if it happens, but don’t count on it.

I still haven’t gotten around to discussing the comedy part, lol. Point is, it’s very difficult for any comedian telling individual jokes to compete with the funniest of what the internet can collectively come up with about any scenario. I think the result is that comedy in general has started to seem less funny. Comedians have had to change their approach to telling more personal stories, having more of a unique voice. (Once again we can have someone say: It Was Always Thus. It occurs to me that if this substack were a youtube channel, this could be a running gag. It Was Always Thus!! 🌍🧑‍🚀🔫🧑‍🚀)

I’ve actually encountered tiktoks where a comedian is at a comedy club and they’re basically telling the audience about what had happened on social media recently. That does strike me as a public service of sorts. One of my favorite comedians in recent times is Taylor Tomlinson, and she does have great material of her own, and she also hosts a show called After Midnight which spends a lot of time… talking about what’s happened on social media recently. And honestly, I enjoy it and I appreciate it. But what I want to say is that– if that’s the only thing someone does as a creator, or a comedian, etc– just doing roundups– then people won’t really care about anything you have to say other than that. Another youtube show I like to watch is Scroll Deep, hosted by Benedict Townsend, which I initially got into out of curiosity about the subject matter, but really stuck with and subscribed to because I’ve grown to really like Benedict. He– and actually Taylor too– has this just-right mix for me of wit, charm, chill, generosity, light-heartedness and so on. They both make “unnecessary” references to things beyond the thing they are discussing, building out a wider shared context for others to participate in. And it’s slowly dawning on me that as I try to praise them, I end up describing what I like about myself at my best.

— fin —

Alright, that’s it for today’s little experiment, I gotta go to bed. I like where this is going. I think I’m probably going to do more posts like this, which are made up of multiple sketches. They require less labored exertion from me, which is great. I feel like I can “clear out” a lot more of my drafts and notes a lot quicker this way, which is also great. Instead of fussing for hours and days about how some post seems not quite right, I can just say “this is not quite right” and move on to the next sketch. Brilliant, what will he think of next? I do still want to do more “big, serious” essays eventually, but there’s a lot of territory to cover, so this is going to be a transitional stage. Not EVERY post is going to be like this, I do want to do some book reviews and stuff. But this just feels right for me right now. We’ll see. Toodles.