FULL BLEED: YO MAN, YOU GOTTA BE, YOU KNOW

I think that’s a first, Chemical Brothers being lifted for a title. I guess an old dog can learn old tricks. Hey, this album’s only 30 years old this year. Pretty good for me.

The season of digging out and reassembling. Or of robbing one’s own grave and cobbling together a more fetching mummy out of glittering pieces and dust-coated bone and wrappings. Does feel like that sometimes. Autoarchaeology. Memento mori by way of grand theft personal cultural heritage. Report myself to the whoever I should be reported to so that this travesty is stopped and undone. Return those artifacts to the dust where it’s quiet and cool and forgotten. If you don’t, Anubis is gonna weight your heart against a big block engine spurting oil and coolant and you’re gonna be found wanting as that side of the scale lifts higher and higher, outweighed by the wicked deeds nestling in one’s own heart.

Been doing a lot of avoidance, taking care of stuff that I’d been putting off. Pretending to promote my books, dealing with financial stuff that’s so stultifying that I’m afraid to touch it. Business licenses. All the horrible stench of decay of meat surrounding things while my immortal and untouchable soul is afraid to sit down and write. Stupid soul. Get with the program. You’re just the ghost driving around this charged meat and bone. Give a monkey a brain and he’ll think he’s the center of the universe.

Or become neurotic and cigarette-addicted, unable to make more than a couple desultory taps on the mechanical typewriter in front of them, a sort of morose morse strung out over hours and days where even the possibilities of infinite other monkeys stumbling on something great seems horribly out of reach. Oh, just create. It’s what you need to do. Just make it before you make it good. You really need to make something, get it out there. And who supports it or contributes to it once it’s out there and the cheerleaders will just keep staring like you’ve asked them something they simply can’t answer. ‘Cause they can’t. The creators are too many and the readers are too few.

The creators are too many and the readers are too few.

This is an old, problem. I joked (not really) about this when I was a commentator around comics (twenty goddamn years ago.) And the problem is no less solved now than it was then, even though we’ve had blockbuster after blockbuster that was supposed to bring readers to comics, when the fact is that the people who like superhero movies like movies and aren’t largely going to become weekly habitual comics buyers. The thing that comics has been carefully tending since the direct market. Doesn’t mean that things are immediately doomed. It does mean that the market is overall aging out and there’s not much being brought in to replace, at least not in what we know as Direct Market comics readers. I hear Scholastic comics are doing just fine, because they’re in a distribution network at a far remove.

And if the discourse is anything to be believed, we’re at a critical critic shortage. Or at least funding for critics to make criticism their primary means of income. Which, given that writers have been strung out on this particular issue for a very long time, comes as… I don’t know. A surprise? For a long time, it wasn’t so much that the cultural object (comic or movie or show or record) as a monetary transaction wasn’t the most important piece of the puzzle. Once ISPs started figuring out how to sell ads alongside every forum page or post, the idea of discourse around an object itself generated a significant amount of related economic activity, addictivity. We couldn’t get enough of [cultural thing] so we went to forums to discuss it and wage flame wars about it online or discourse about it on various microblogging platforms. These things all had second lives on culture pages and online.

Only I guess that’s not happening as much as it used to. Or not at a level where it can be sustainably yet growth-orientedly maintained. Or all the juice from that has simply been handed off to the social media platforms themselves who don’t care what’s being talked about or at what level (lofty or base or rank amateur) just so long as people are willing to watch thinkpieces and like and subscribe and comment and keep those ad hits rolling in. Why make a magazine about music where subjects are engaged with in a deep fashion and editors make decisions based on contemporary currents and tastes when anyone can make a youtube channel and proclaim themselves an expert and rack up the casual hits and likes and subscribes and shared ad revenue and sponsorships for themselves. Hell, who’s going to make the canon now?

I joked about this yesterday. *scratching into picnic table with comically oversized survival knife* “No canon but the one we make.”

And we are there. Yes, there’s still critics with platforms and followings (though heaven help you if you’re trying to get tied to a print platform and talk about this stuff now) and maybe they’ll be able to convert their audiences and hold onto things. Or maybe putting up a youtube reaction face and the block type TAYLOR SWIFT’S NEW RECORD! BEST OF THE DECADE?! will get the clicks. I know. I can’t tell you how to spend your time. I wouldn’t presume to. If you want to watch or create this manner of stuff, then walk in the path of the Maker. I guess that’s the more important lesson. In this time of academic and culture coverage disintegration (yes, little Chicxulubs hit even there) then you gotta cover the stuff that makes your heart soar, not sore.

And that’s what I get for stepping back to Bluesky for a moment. Another “Making art is a stick in the eye of the technofascists” post. That’s great, buddy. You gonna buy a fuckin’ book? You gonna leave a review? I’d love to do this for free but I been doing that for a long time and it fucking sucks. Yes, I’ve made friends (comics folks are the best, really) but I’d have made friends even if I wasn’t struggling with trying to get my books into Diamond or get stores to buy them and that was two decades ago. One must imagine me happy jumping from discipline to discipline.

I guess it just bothers me that it’s easy to post how you’re going to support art and it seems to end right there. For the mainstream creators, those already with audiences, it’s probably true that nobody can replace the loss of coverage on newspaper and magazine culture pages, which are being slashed left and right. But those same creators are the ones who are likely to be covered in this new media ecosystem for the simple fact that they’re recognizable and might have small marketing budgets behind them. The folks who aren’t already in this set of systems? Yeah, go build audiences by word of mouth. G’wan. Who wants coverage of nobodies?

As much as this is terrible and awful, there’s an opportunity to reshape what actually gets covered, what’s worth covering, what’s worth expending a little bit of reputation on to maybe get in front of a few more people. This set of ecosystems could become a weird and mutant rhizome (go back to Deleuze and Guattari for that one – sidebar: I’m a little done with the whole fungal metaphor and aesthetic set in horror, I realize that all of these things are fashions but this one feels a touch played-out that said I’m still looking forward to Bitter Karella’s Moonflow out real soon now). We could tilt things in the time of this capital retreat. Which is what it is (and yeesh, I first talked about this a couple years ago). That leaves an opening. An opening for what isn’t yet decided.

But folks are going to have to do more than post. Or repost.

Because for all the jokes of writers being involuntary introverts who are hard to deal with around other people, much less crowds, most of them don’t feel that way about their work. Ain’t a writer I know who wants to finish a book and respectfully box it up and leave it in a trunk, glowing in the knowledge that they’ve written something great or at least entertaining. Come on. Asking folks to expect to just do it for the love is something akin to a threat. Yeah, I’ve said that sometimes the only reward you get is having created something you wanted out in the world. That’s pretty fuckin’ grim gruel. They wouldn’t even serve that in the gladiator pits of whatever fantasy you care to describe. But that’s what’s what. I never said it was good. I said it was where we were at. But we should all be imagining and striving towards a place that’s better than that. And no, I’m not clear on how to get there.

Whew.

Anyways. I guess I’m back to it. Feels like this should be easier but it never gets there. Wish I knew what I was on when I started this whole process that made it doable. I suspect it was that when I first started what would become Hazeland, it was an opportunity and things would turn out different this time. Readers, they did not turn out different. And if I knew what would make it actually change and transform, I’d do it. As it is, I guess it’s back to fumbling around in the dark and picking up the glittering pits and sticking them together as best I can.