Substackers Should Be Close, Don't You Think?
I've Received a Sunshine Blogger Award from Luke Y. Thompson (The Notorious LYT)
Why I am So Touched that Luke Nominated Me for a Sunshine Blogger Award
Way back in the before times in the not now, Jody and I moved to Los Angeles so that she could attend graduate school at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts to earn her MFA in Film Production. At the time it was called until 2006 School of Cinema-Television, but that was also when the “Lucas” building was the Marcia Lucas building. That building has since been torn down and Marcia Lucas is but one of many names listed in small print on a plaque somewhere in the new Cinematic Complex. Though George has tried to erase Marcia (who edited The Taxi Driver and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, in addition to the first three Star Wars films), the failure of many recent Star Wars offerings to connect with audiences has led to a re-examination of Marcia’s very valuable contributions.
Such is the way of the world. Something gets built. Something comes along to replace it, but in the end the original artifact (or in the case of Marcia, person) is brought back into the social milieu in a new light. Lucas had real, and very legitimate, reasons to be furious and end his relationship with Marcia, but it is also true that she was an important collaborator on the franchise as all good editors are. Editors are vital in a writer’s life. They keep them on task and prevent them from going down rabbit holes…like this one.
All of which brings me to my recent Sunshine Blogger Award nomination by
, who was my editor in the past when he worked for Voice Media Group. I have a ton of respect for Luke and I am deeply honored that he nominated me for this meme award for a variety of reasons. Chief among them is that the nomination for this positively spirited meme award, and the recent spread of nominations across Substack, signals the return of a valuable and beautiful artifact of the nascent days of social media. Where a lot of the professional critical space (by which I mean actual “critics”) was filled with negativity, the pre-political blogosphere was different. It was a space where people shared things they loved. People wrote novels, wrote recommendations, did thorough critical analysis (not critical theory analysis, of which I share Noam Chomsky’s and David Foster Wallace’s opinions), but actual openminded analytical examination. Luke was an active participant in that earlier critical blogging community and was a regular read for me.More importantly, he participated in a particular Los Angeles based blogging subculture that was in the orbit of a journalist named Cathy Seipp. While Cathy Seipp was a conservative journalist, the circle of journalists and bloggers around her came from a wide array of political backgrounds and an even wider array of socio-economic backgrounds. People in the Cathy Seipp circle included Sandra Tsing Loh,
, , , Ray Richmond, Rip Rense, , Paul Feig, , Kevin Roderick, Jill Stewart, Bradley Fikes, Luke Y. Thompson, and well…me. I think of it as Cathy’s Circle, but some of those connections were certainly through the L.A. Press Club of which I was a “blogger member” for many years. While some of these individuals were only professional colleagues, more than a few of them were real life friends of Cathy and dropping her name in an email did get me an interview with Tim Minear on my old podcast not because he agreed with her politically but because he respected her as a journalist. She was one heck of a journalist and was a hub, for me and others, in the Los Angeles journalist community.
The reason Luke’s participation in this circle is so important is that these were many of the people who made Los Angeles feel like home to me and Jody. Los Angeles is a massive city. I know, I know. You’re saying, but New York has 9 million people and London is significantly larger. You are, of course, correct, if you think of Los Angeles as just the City of Los Angeles, but that is only part of Los Angeles. While tourists might think that Chinatown is a place to get great Chinese Food, Angelenos know that you drive out to Alhambra, because Alhambra (and the rest of the 626) are also Los Angeles. We also know that Hollywood is a tourist trap and that movies and television are made in Burbank. Pasadena? That’s LA. Sierra Madre? Yep. Glendale? Of course. Santa Monica? Yes. In fact, most of what people see advertised as “Sunny Los Angeles” in film and television is Orange County, or at minimum Santa Monica or Venice.
Now I’ll admit that “my personal Los Angeles” wouldn’t necessarily be accepted by all Angelenos as canon, especially by those who life across the “great divide” that is the 405. Notice the “the” there, that’s a Southern California-ism just like “yeah, yeah, no.” My personal Los Angeles stretches from Port Hueneme to Riverside and from Santa Barbara (or at minimum Ventura) to San Clemente. It’s a vast area filled with millions of people and unlike London or New York, it requires a Thomas Guide to find all the right neighborhoods for various activities. A big part of the reason that I think of all of this as Los Angeles is that one of the first things I did upon moving to the city, my wife and I lived in the Chesapeake Apartments in Crenshaw, was to look up where all the game stores that sold role playing games were and drive to them.
The couple of weeks I spent driving to all the various stores — the now closed Aero Hobbies in Santa Monica and War House in Long Beach were among my favorites though I loved also now closed The Last Grenadier in Burbank as well — left me with a very good understanding of the geography of the city and I rarely needed to look at the Thomas Guide beyond the initial “where is this” phase of navigating the Gilded Geode that is Los Angeles.
It’s easy to feel alone and lost in a city, and area, this vast and I felt very much alone. The saga of the quest for the perfect game store was but one of many attempts to find and make friends. I did eventually make many good friends, but it wasn’t easy. Not because Angelenos are rude, I’ve always found them very friendly, but they are also very busy. They say that “everyone in LA is a screenwriter,” and there is some truth to that, but the real truth is that every Angeleno has a side hustle. Time is at a premium in the Southland, so you’re “I’d like to be your friend elevator pitch had better be money (to paraphase Vince Vaughn in Swingers).”
Unlike a lot of the journalists in Cathy’s Circle, I had never worked for the Herald Examiner, Buzz, Reason, The Los Angeles Times, or LA Weekly. I did have brief opinion column in The Sagebrush school paper at the University of Nevada for a second and wrote a few film reviews with my friend Jay for the Spark Tribune, but I never attempted to build upon those to create a career. Sure, I fantasized about being something like the Reno Gazette Journal’s local columnist or
, but those were fantasies and I never put any work into that career path. What I did do, and I started it early in the life cycle of the medium, is start a blog called Cinerati. My initial entries were terrible. They were the length of Tweets, which weren’t even a thing yet, but they were almost always recommendations rather than critiques. Eventually, my posts got better, if more obscure as they began to focus more on role playing games than film and television, and I began commenting on Cathy’s site.I found the site after reading a review of The Last Samurai by Thomas Hibbs for National Review (a conservative magazine) which kindled my rage. A friend had directed me to the article. It infuriated me, so I began examining what some of the other writers on the site. I found Cathy’s column and then her site, where I discovered the comments section. They say the first rule of the internet is “don’t read the comments,” but the first rule of Cathy’s World was “read the comments.” The comments weren’t what I expected. Yes, they were filled with arguments of all kinds, but the people participating were often funny and even when they disagreed they seemed to like one another. More than that, Cathy seemed to like them all and engaged with everyone with humor and courtesy. She may have been a snarky conservative in her columns, but she was kind and funny to her commentators.
I didn’t comment too much, but when she promoted an LA Press event where Paul Feig (Freaks & Geeks), Rob Long (Cheers), Scott Kaufer (Gilmore Girls), and Tim Minear (Firefly and Angel) were going to be there1, I attended. I also had the honor of meeting Mel Stuart (director of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) when Cathy introduced Jody and me to him at the event. I attended a couple more Press Club events and met Luke. It wasn’t long after this that O knew I had found a home in Los Angeles. Luke, along with the rest of Cathy’s Circle, gave me a sense of place. It was a world of diverse opinions and when she died it slowly faded away. Blogs continued to exist, but as new social media arose, they largely stagnated. The other social media was more “engagement” (in particular, negative engagement) rather than conversation oriented and the internet became worse for it.
When Substack came along a few years ago, I noticed another change. I found a platform that had writers of the kind I saw in the old blogosphere and in Google+. They were collaborative. They were about building community. In short, I saw a revival of the old blogosphere and I wanted to build a new community of friends. In part, because I now live in Boise, Idaho, which is smaller than Los Angeles, but also a place where I have yet to find “my people.” So I started up the Geekerati Newsletter in the hopes of building my own community and I’m continually working on it. This being a pop-culture, and not a political site, I want the community to represent a wide variety of opinions about popular culture. Yes, this does mean that there will be political diversity, since many of the things that divide us in pop culture are related to the political and vice versa, but it does mean that the kind of diversity of opinion I’m looking for is aesthetic and theoretical and not political.
So far, I think I’ve done a very good job and have found a number of voices here on Substack, and on the revived counter-Substack blog revival space, that have once again given me faith in the connective power of social media.
If you read this far, that is my way of saying “THANK YOU for being here.” It’s also my way of turning what Luke wrote in one paragraph, into an entire essay. What was I saying about the importance of editors earlier?
What is a Sunshine Blogger Award
As Luke mentioned in his nomination post, the Sunshine Blogger Award is one of the old school meme questionnaires that used to fuel a lot of blog content back in the day. In this case, it is an award that bloggers (or Substackers now) give to their favorite writers. The meme has been working its way through Substack lately, another sign of how Substack is resurrecting the older and more community based blogger culture, but the meme has been around since at least April 2010 when I was able to find a response from Bill Crider to a nomination from J. Kingston Pierce’s The Rap Sheet blog. Bill Crider was a Ph.D. and author of Crime and Western fiction who passed away in 2018. I am not familiar with his work, but I will be soon. J. Kingston Pierce is a Seattle Journalist and reviewer of Crime fiction and The Rap Sheet is still active as of yesterday.
The rules for the Sunshine Award in 2010 were the following:
Eventually, the rule was added to have 12 questions for the nominees to answer, but a main focus was rule #5. Share the love and link to the person from whom you received the award, as well as passing the award along to 12 other people. This meme was a brilliant way to build readership while sharing praise. It solves the “Substack Problem” of “too many writers and not enough readers” rather brilliantly by reminding us that we writers should all also be readers and we should share with others what we read. In other words, that we are communities. We are happy little platoons sharing the things that we love. Luke’s variation is of the “11 question, rather than 12” variety and I’m happy to answer them.
So…here goes.
My Responses
What is your favorite discontinued (permanently, as far as we currently know) fast food item, and can you name one memory associated with it?
There is only one answer to this question. It’s the Enchirito from Taco Bell. It goes in and out of circulation, but the more recent revivals have had the right “sauce” but everything else was wrong. I remember eating these divine victuals after soccer (that’s “football” for those of you in the UK who don’t want to acknowledge that it is As"soc”iation Football in some sort of very American historical amnesia) games as a kid. The savory but not umami, and not at all hot, sauce had the proper balance of salt and cumin, but it was the sliced black olives and half melted cheese that always stole the show for me. Sure, I’ve had wonderful mole enchiladas at CaCao in Eagle Rock, and my Aunt Connie’s (Consuela) home made enchiladas. Those are all fantastic, but the combination of exhaustion and electrolite depletion with Taco Bell’s unique combination of salt and fat was pure heaven.If you could erase one movie from existence, including everything it inspired thereafter, what would it be and why?
I’m pretty sure that Luke asked this question with something I wrote a while back on the Book of Faces where I absolutely went off on this movie. I don’t often write negative reviews, but when I do, they are about Ulysses Gaze. I was responding to a meme image that asked, “What movies are played on an endless loop in hell?”
My response, which took exactly zero second to come up with, was:
Ulysses Gaze.
Except it isn’t being played on loop. It’s still being played the first time because that movie never fucking ends. How long do I have to circle around Lenin’s head in a helicopter as it is being transported down the Danube? That scene alone was 7 years long, or was it 17? I forget because it was mind numbingly dumb.
It’s an art film that received praise at its initial film festival releases, bu as more and more people saw it began to grate on viewers. Roger Ebert said of the film in 1997, “A director, having chosen to work in a mass medium, has a certain duty to that audience. I do not ask that he make it laugh or cry, or even that he entertain it, but he must at least not insult its good will by giving it so little to repay its patience. What arrogance and self-importance this film reveals.”
I agree with this sentiment entirely. The film is an epic work of self-indulgence that lacks any real sincerity. Geoff Dyer, in his book Zona discussing Tarkovsky’s Stalker, says of Ulysses Gaze, “it was another nail in the coffin of European art cinema (a coffin, cynics would say, made up almost entirely of nails), opening the floodgates to everything that was not art because everything seemed preferable to having to sit through a film like that, epecially since the whole thing could be boiled down, anyway, to a single still photograph — a statue of Lenin gliding along the Danube on a barge, a petrified Pharoah floating down the Nile of History — by Josef Koudelka.”
It’s an odd film where the cinematography of the filmmakers (Giorgos Arvanitis and Adreas Sinanos) pales in comparison to the behind the scenes photography of a man on his first assignment. Josef Koudelka’s photo-essay is far more powerful than the film. It is also more personal and sincere. You can see the images here in an essay by Joanna Cresswell. It was in Cresswell’s essay that I learned that, “The entirety of Ulysses’ Gaze is made up of only around 60 shots, while the average film of a similar length would be constitured of over 1250.” The length of the single shots are what make the film seem unbearably long, even as it is well shot.
I have a rule that I don’t tend to talk about things I don’t like. I think far too much criticism is aimed at ranting and not in useful critique or promotion of what you love. The only exception I make to this rule is Ulysses Gaze because it symbolizes everything I hate about a particular artistic subculture that is more about navel gazing and Onanism than it is in the creation of anything entertaining, let alone Sublime or Beautiful.
While I get the way the film is a fusion of the Odyssey with the message of Shelley’s poem Ozymandias, that’s content for a beautifully shot and symbolic short film and not a reason to wallow in static imagery. I don’t want a film to progress in real time in accordance with Aristotle’s unities when there is no action. Sure, I’ll watch the heck out of a season of 24, but this? C’mon. I love art films like Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, which also have long static shots, as much as the next person, but this was too much. In Herzog’s films, the characters, the crew, the actors, and the director all suffered in the creation of the films. In Ulysses Gaze, the only people who suffer are the audience.
In a battle royal of every major cinematic horror franchise killer, who wins and how?
Freddy Krueger because he’d be “in their Dreams.”If you are not religious, and had the power to make one religion absolutely true, which it would be? If you are religious, what aspect of your faith, as dictated by its ministers, would you change if you could?
Since I’m Roman Catholic, the one major change I’d make is that animals also have immortal souls and not merely sensitive souls. I’ve been saved to many times from the sin of despair by the animals in my life to think of them as any more temporal than mankind.Do you distinguish between your favorite movie and the best movie ever made? If so, how? If not, do you feel you like any movie that you consider “bad”?
I’ll have to amend this question slightly, since I don’t have a favorite movie nor do I have a film that I think is the best movie ever made. I do however think there is a difference between movies I like and movies that I think are well made and important. I think Citizen Kane is a masterpiece, yes genuinely and if you’ve seen it through the lens of what was achieved in the making of that film you would too. There is so much to learn from that film about acting, storytelling, editing, cinematography, effects, sound, and every other aspect of film.
recently commented that Picasso first said you had to learn the rules before you break them. That was, in essence, Coleridge’s position as well. I think there is merit to that position. The rules are “fuzzy around the edges,” but they are there.
I even like Citizen Kane, but it’s not on my rotation of things to watch on the regular. It has some entertainment value, a ton of spectacle, but Welles is doing so much in the film that it’s work to watch it and I don’t always want to work when I’m watching a movie.
Most good films practice the cinematic principles of Citizen Kane, even as they are tighter and more focused on story than spectacle, and so when I watch a film like Charade (which I also think is brilliant) I can see the influence of Orson Welles’ masterpiece. All of which is to say that yes, there are objective standards as to what are good film making and good storytelling, but that I sometimes like things that violate those rules. I believe
Oh, and I like a lot of movies I consider bad. I’ll watch Beastmaster or The Last Dragon at the drop of a hat and Wild in the Streets is a go to film for me. All of these are bad on some level, but the sincerity of the artist shines through. It’s what makes them so much better than Ulysses Gaze.What character (real, fictional, or whatever) would you buy an action figure or statue of if they made it?
This is a big list, since I already buy action figures, but since I mentioned The Last Dragon in the prior answer, I’d buy a Shogun of Harlem action figure in a second. Straight up one of the most charismatic villains ever to exist in cinema.What is your favorite soda of all time?
Right now, it’s the Mug Root Beer Zero Sugar variant, but historically it’s been Sunkist Orange.You get to invent your own fast food item. What is it?
A bacon wrapped hot dog with ghost pepper salsa injected into the hot dog and with a variety of peppers (sweet to hot) used as garnish. No ketchup or mayonnaise (because neither belong on any kind of hot dog), but a nice spicy mustard added to the mix.What’s your favorite movie that you feel like nobody has ever heard of? Is it available to watch?
I have a real soft spot for the American film T.A.G.: The Assassination Game. The basic story is that a game of “Killer” is being run on the Cal Tech campus where students pretend to be assassins who fire rubber dart guns at one another. Pre-Columbine these games were relatively common and they are returning to campuses now. The most popular film featuring them is the 1985 film Gotcha!, which stars Anthony Edwards and Linda Fiorentino (which alone explains its long lasting popularity).
Gotcha! is still easily purchasable because the Assassination Game in that film gives the fish out of water protagonist the skills to battle Soviet Spies in a manner similar to Cloak & Dagger, which is why those two films are on my regularly viewed “fish out of water vs. Russian Spies” movie marathon list.
T.A.G.: The Assassination Game takes a different narrative path. This time Loren Gersh’s (Bruce Abbott) obsession with being the champion of the game leads him to shifting from rubber darts to real murder after he is eliminated in a humiliating way. Linda Hamilton stars in the film and has Robert Carradine as a romantic foil. It’s a very 80s film, but it’s a ton of fun and was directed by Nick Castle and distributed by New World Pictures. I own an old double feature transfer that is total shit and likely a bootleg and the only way the movie is easily viewable is as an illegal stream on YouTube.If you got to decide what the next Star Trek movie would be, what would it be? (If you know nothing about Star Trek, feel free to go wild with what it should be anyway)
It’s the next entry in J.J. Abrams’ Kelvin Universe. Not only do I really like J.J.’s action Trek-verse, but Abrams was very kind to me when I was an intern on Joy Ride. The crew on that film was fantastic to work with and only Rob Pierson was pretentious, and he had just come off acclaim for his work on Rounders.What is the best British TV show of all time, and don’t say Monty Python?
I watch a lot of British television for an American. I really enjoyed the first few seasons of Shetland and my complaints about the recent seasons deal with it not passing the baton to my favorite character (Tosh), but Dalgliesh is a better show when it comes to subtlety. I was blown away by Rowen Atkinson as Maigret and think that’s a fantastic show. Twenty Twelve, the comedy about the planning behind the 2012 Olympics starring Hugh Bonneville was hilarious, and I enjoyed the sequel W1A, so I am looking forward to the recently announced Twenty Twenty Six. UFO and The Tomorrow People are neck and neck for the best television show introduction of all time, I’ll include them both below for you to judge.The Avengers is among the best television ever made, as is The Prisoner and I think that BritBox and AcornTV are streaming services that everyone should subscribe to.
Having said all of that…my absolute favorite British television show is Yes, Minister. I’m a political scientist with an MBA and this show captures the flaws, and benefits, of the bureaucracy so well without being overtly partisan. One of my favorite moments is when the minister describes all of the newspapers and their world views. It is comedy gold.
My Sunshine Awards
I spent a great deal of time discussing how important building a culturally and intellectually diverse community of people interested in popular culture is to me and I hope that my Sunshine Award nominees reflect that intention. All of these people have made my life better in one way or another, even when I haven’t met them in the physical world. They are a testimony to the power of social media and mass communication at its best.
- and her Substack Dr. King’s Curiousities. If you were to boil down the kind of writing that I wish existed when I was first engaging with horror literature with intentionality into a bullion cube, That cube would be Dr. King’s website. Rebekah is not only an excellent analytical writer, she’s also a playwright and librettist, but she has a delightful sense of whimsy. She’s as comfortable talking about the disturbing elements of horror in the Babadook as she is in engaging with Labubu’s as devil worship. While all her work has provided joy in my life, her ability to engage critically with modern Satanic Panic events with scholarship and humor are a gift.
- through his eponymous Substack account is a go to resource for me when I want to read about how and why to run a role playing game that draws heavily from Sword & Sorcery fantasy. I own his Kal-Arath role playing game and enjoy how he used Traveller based mechanics to create an intriguing Sword & Sorcery setting. The setting is more Karl Edward Wagner and Andrew J. Offutt than it is pure Robert E. Howard (let alone diluted Robert E. Howard through the lens of Sprague L. DeCamp), which means that it embraces even more of the raw barbarity of the setting. There are also touches of Edgar Rice Burroughs I see peaking out at me and I’m a huge fan of this setting and of his work in general. I eagerly await his Science Fiction role playing game Kal-Arathi Sector.
- ’s Critical Hit Parader is a perfect combination of many of the sectors of popular culture I adore. Matt’s articles about music and role playing games highlight a depth of knowledge in both fields and when I hosted him for a GeekChat earlier this year, it was everything I hoped it would be. I definitely found a friend across the country and I was honored to chat with him for the brief time we had.
- is the Director of Strategic Research, School for Professional Studies, Saint Louis University and is one of the psychologists I read on this site and online. Ever since I read literature on conceptual stretching in the filed of psychology when I was working on my paper on Helicopter Parenting, I’ve been impressed with how a segment of the psychological discipline has responded to the replication crisis in the social sciences. Dr. Grawitch, as demonstrated in the first entry of his new series on the “Stress Industry” presents real psychology in a way that will help readers to engage with how the commercial catastrophy complex uses and creates social anxieties in order to profit. I’ve been a critic of Satanic Panics since I was criticized for “worshipping the Devil” (aka playing D&D and listening to punk) even as I was attending church three days a week when you combined services and bible study. This created a disconnect in my mind, but when I saw who the outrage merchants were I no longer blamed those criticizing me in my local sphere and began to study how anger (an active emotion) can be channeled into action. This has helped me with my polarization research in general and it’s nice to see others critiquing catastrophizing and outrage.
I am eternally grateful to Crystal Lewis of
because her writing on Twitter (or X…whatever), her book, and her newsletter changed the way I approached handling data in all of my research. Her advice was spot on and prevented me from having to replicate prior effort time and time again. Her advice on how to use and create a data dictionary, that could be used in R to filter your data without needing to retype variable names again and again, was life changing. In retrospect it seems like such an obvious approach, but I never even imagined it. There are many other pieces of advice she has shared that I’ve incorporated and I am glad I met her online.- is not only a very good analyst of the film and television market, he was one of the first people to recommend and promote me using his much bigger platform. I am very thankful for this and he continues to put out a ton of quality content and analysis. I don’t always agree with him, but I have tremendous respect for his opinions and analysis.
If I didn’t list you above, it’s not because you don’t bring Sunshine into my life, it’s because I only want to give “Sunshine Homework” to a limited number of people. So here are some, and only some, of the “honorable mentions” in my daily routine who make my life better, but whom I’m not trying to get to spread the meme. If they want to, they totally can, but no pressure:
, , (and thanks for the great chat!), , , , , , , . , , , , and YOU if you are reading this. I cannot thank my readers enough.
My 11 Questions
If I nominated you, and if you are interested (don’t worry I won’t feel slighted if you don’t want homework as a reward), here are the eleven questions I’d like you to answer.
What is a movie that you think is highly underappreciated? Why?
What is your favorite subgenre of horror and what is it about that genre that speaks to you?
Who is one of your favorite poets and what is one of your favorite poems by this writer?
Are science fiction and fantasy really the same genre? Why or why not?
What is a role playing game that you think is underappreciated and why? If you don’t play role playing games, what genre or setting might make you try one for the first time?
What is a book you read in school (University or High School) that had a strong impact on you, positive or negative?
If there was a single book you could eliminate from existence, what would that book be?
What is a comic book you believe is underappreciated (this can be a “graphic novel”, comic strip, or weekly if you don’t read “floppies”)?
What is something in pop culture that was around when you are a kid, but isn’t today that you’d like to see return to the world?
What is the best British TV show of all time, and don’t say Monty Python?
If you could tell 10 year old you one thing about the future, either your personal future or about society in general, what would it be?
Okay, that’s it.
I do want to take just one more moment to thank Luke Y. Thompson for his many years of friendship. We may be 800 miles apart, but you are often on my mind in the best of ways. I’d also like to thank all of you again for reading and subscribing to my Substack.
All of these people have gone on to do other projects since then, but those were their main projects at the time.
Thank you so much for the nomination! That means a lot to me!
Thanks so much for the kind words!!