Stranger Things in the Desert

Sometime last week between the 4th of July and the weekend my jetlag morphed from exhaustion and body aches into one of those unhinged anxiety headaches caused by my inability to fall into a routine.

America’s Birthday was well spent. I drank box wine with my wife’s extended family, swam in a mossy lake, and watched desert people light up the sky with fireworks. The mood felt subdued, the patriotism not as reverent as in the past, but my daughter enjoyed watching fireworks, and honestly that’s all that matters.

On the way back to the coast we took the back roads through the desert. I’ve fallen in love with the desert these past few years. Something about dry heat, Joshua Trees, and the brain-fried mentally deficient inhabitants appeals to me on a spiritual level. The desert is an environment that unlike other biomes just wants to kill you. I like that kind of romance.

Somewhere in Antelope Valley my wife, a former desert inhabitant, had us stop at this insane roadside monstrosity called Charlie Brown Farms. Six acres of BBQ, gift shops, candy stores, giant plastic dinosaurs, creepy dolls, life-size Blues Brothers figures, and every kitschy bit of pop culture nonsense you can imagine. The place is a seizure-inducing maze of random crap. On one aisle you have Harry Potter junk and on the next a collection of Elvis and Marylin Monroe Zippo lighters. It’s like an inter-dimensional space where every giftshop in America dumps old merchandise.

I loved it. It felt like being in a large lymph node in America's lymphatic system. A system made up of diners, biker bars, and greasy BBQ joints. I can’t think of a more patriotic place to visit at the end of the 4th of July weekend.

I made the mistake of drinking a large World-Famous Date Shake, not that it was bad, but I’m lactose intolerant so I paid the price physically and financially.

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Audience

Alexander dropped another great piece about Choosing Your Audience. Alex seems to be subconsciously tapping into my brain because he writes essays about the exact topic running through my mind, and these last few days I’ve been thinking about creating art for an audience. Must be that Jungian universal artistic subconsciousness.

First, let me get this out of the way. You create art, music, and write because you must because you love it. If you decide to write or do any of the above because you want to make money you are a fucking tool. There’s nothing wrong with money, you need money to support yourself, and the more money you make the more art you can create, but the goal should be that you want to create great art to make money so you can make more art. Also, you’re a dumbass if you chose to make money with writing or art. If you want to make money and you aren’t a hot chick your best bet is to become some sort of hedge fund hustler or marketing vampire.

In today's Post-Empire world movies, music, and art are curated by committee. In the old Empire days film directors, music producers, and publishing house editors, who had great taste and style discovered, took risks and encouraged unique talent. But now, all the above is decided by groups of business executives whose goal is mass appeal. Marvel movies are made to be comprehensible to the lowest IQ simpleton watching the poorly translated mass-market version the studio vomited out into the world. To appeal to everyone is to appeal to the lowest common denominator. For some of you that might be your goal, I’m sorry.

What I’m trying to say in my incomprehensible babble is that you don’t have to write or create art for everyone. Pick your damn audience. It’s ok to be exclusive. I don’t what everyone reading my work. Find your scene and work in it. Creating for an exclusive audience allows you to be Avant-Garde and experimental.

There’s this weird trend in writing circles to simplify and infantilize writing, to infantilize art. You see it in the mass-produced YA crap, dumbed-down imbecilic genre fiction that is simplified for “young readers” but is marketed to chubby cat ladies with danger glasses.

Art should challenge. A novel should leave you thinking about it for days, years if it’s a masterpiece, a lifetime if it’s Dostoevsky. Read difficult novels, watch complex movies, and create challenging art. We need to stop infantilizing our culture.

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Stranger Things

I got into Stranger Things when the first season came out. It’s a show fascinating for its post-modern Baudrillardian use of pastiche. The creators were born in 1984 and are a year younger than I am. The show takes place in the 80s but it’s not an 80s show. It’s a simulacrum of the ’80s created by people that did not come of age in the 80s, because we are 90s kids, through the lens of 80s movies. Every bit of the show is some sort of reference to Spielberg and Stephen King, with the first season riffing on E.T. and Poltergeist through an IT horror lens and dashes of 80’s pop culture John Hughes fantasy.

The cast is really good, specifically the young actors and Wynona Ryder who was my movie star crush since I first watched Beetlejuice when I was six years old. Season One was great, two dropped the ball, but three came back and made me interested in watching four.

Season four is great when it hits the sweet spots but often gets bogged down in useless side plots and bloated storylines. But, the sweet spots are great, the highlight being the closing scene of episode 4 involving Max and Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill.

The season, well the whole show, is great when it sticks to the core characters in the main town of Hawkins. In this case Dustin, Steve, Nancy, the new standout Eddie, and the highlight dynamic of this season Max and Lucas. Teens and young adults vs supernatural evil in a small town is a winning dynamic.

The season is less interesting when it sends some of the characters to California and misuses them for the entirety of the season. It might be my prejudice against sci-fi elements but the storyline rehashing Eleven’s time in the lab just bored me, and I don’t even want to get into the stupidity of the Russian Gulag side-plot.

But, for all its flaws the show is a fun spectacle, and watching likable characters go up against a sinister evil with a Wes Craven Kruger vibe is a good time. The constant self-referential use of pastiche and easter eggs almost gets old but the whole production is saved by well-written and well-acted likable characters.

Steve Harrington is the best subversion of the evil jock character I’ve ever seen. The show is worth watching for its character and style.

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Writing

I’m working on a short story tentatively titled der Magierin, which should be done by the end of the week. This one is for an upcoming anthology that based on some of the stuff I’ve read is going to be pure kino. Once that’s done and I’m a bit more settled I have a few reviews to drop, more stuff on Eliade, and continuing work on the collection I want to have done by the end of the year.