Category: Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

I remember when Office Christmas Party hit cinemas, and I’d planned to go see it. The film looked awful, a little slice of seasonal narrative that was going to be equal parts debauchery and twee, but every time the trailer’s played I kept noticing actors whose work I dug in the supporting cast: Kate McKinnon, Olivia Munn, Courtney B. Vance, Randall Park, Jennifer Aniston. “It will be terrible,” I told myself, “but it could have some great moments.” Then life got busy, ’cause it was the holidays, and it’s time in cinemas was incredibly short. There was always a movie slightly more appeal playing at the same time, and I went to see that instead. Fast forward to last week, when my partner and I settled in for a trashy movie night and scrolled through the new releases on Netflix. Office Christmas Party flashed up, and the graphics were basically Kate McKinnon in a terrible holiday sweater, and my partner

Yesterday I hit a milestone: for the first time in nearly four years, I’m a week ahead on writing blogs. Which means the temporality of these posts gets a little weird, because “Yesterday” can now mean a week-in-the-past-when-I’m-actually-writing-things, or one-day-back, when-I-was-posting-about-a-thing. Getting ahead has largely been a function of the first major change I made when setting up my new workspace: adding in a whiteboard that sits in front of the “goofing off” computer, tracking my weekly to-do list. Thus far, it’s kept me on track with writing, with reading, with blogging, with newsletter creation, and with a bunch of little things I need to do throughout the week. It’s not a bad result for something that cost me $20, in terms of the value it delivers. I get quite gushy about it, when talking to folks about getting shit done. The other pieces of new kit i’ve added to my workspace is this: a Logitech MK850 wireless Keyboard and

My partner bought me a copy of Ibi Zaboi’s Pride: A Pride and Prejudice Remix for my birthday earlier this year, and she’s been waiting anxiously for me to read it and let her know what I thought. In a moment of rather unfortunate tijming, I spent my birthday in a hospital this year, sitting at my father’s bedside while it became apparent that he wasn’t getting any better. He was gone twenty-four hours later, and I’d barely looked at any fiction in the months that followed. Anything I picked up was generally for the thesis, and the idea of reading for fun disappeared as dad’s death was followed by pet’s getting sick, my sister being ill, and other things that kicked the idea of “normal” into something unrecognisable. Over the weekend, all that shifted a little. My partner started reading one of the books I’d given her, breaking her own reading drought after a tough couple of months, and

When my partner first moved in and we struggled to find the space for everything in my tiny one-bedroom, the old 5-disc changer stereo got put away for a stretch. Now, don’t get me wrong, I loved that stereo. Much as I enjoy being able to log onto Youtube and track down pretty much any musician I own, there is a part of me that will always be attached to physically owning the media that means a lot to me: Hardcopy books, DVDs of beloved movies and shows, CD and LPs of the music that really speaks to me. Good art is an experience that changes your worldview, but the great art that you truly love is more than that. It’s presence in your space is a statement–this is me; these are the things I love. Online spaces offer the space to do something similar, but it’s never quite the same thing. Earlier this week, I set up the stereo

I’ve spent a good chunk of the last week reading through Carol Dweck’s Mindset: The Psychology of Success. It’s an interesting book, presenting concepts that you’ve probably come across online in all manner of articles about praising effort instead of intelligence, or assuming character traits and intelligence are fixed rather than malleable. Mostly, though, I spent the book thinking about Yoda. You’re familiar with Yoda, right? Little green muppet guy from Star Wars with irregular sentence syntax? Owner of one of the most quotable lines from The Empire Strikes back. The one that goes: Do or do not. There is no try. Possibly one of the most iconic mentor figures in science fiction film, and beloved of nerd-types everywhere despite the prequels turning him into a pingpong ball? Well, here’s the thing: it’s really hard to read Dweck’s book and start figuring that, really, Yoda is a bit shit as a Jedi educator. The whole idea that you succeed or

We recently started watching Glee for the first time here in Camp Brain Jar. It’s not a choice I expected to fall into, given my dislike of the musical as a format and my partner’s dislike of autotune, but I was lured in by some smart writing, some really sly dialogue in the opening episodes, and their ability to sidestep the thing that I dislike about musicals for the first half of a season (to whit: everyone verbalising internal states through song, rupturing my feeling of verisimilitude). Also, Harry Shum Jr, who is the best part of the Shadowhunters TV series and criminally underused as a back-up dancer here. Of course, now we’re in the second half of season one and the musical conventions are seeping through a lot more often. I’ve grumped through the last two episodes, which have been very music-heavy and very light on plot as they work to get the conflicts for the second half of

I finished The Artists Way over the weekend. It did less of the stuff that really irritated me in the back half of the book–a tactic that only served to irritate me more when it did intrude. I don’t necessarily regret reading it–there’s plenty of useful points to noodle over–but I don’t know that it’s a book I’d ever recommend. The most useful part of it was comparing the spiritually tinged processes laid out with something like The Accidental Creative, which gives you a toolkit for much the same kind of focusing-in-on-process and refilling-of-the-well in a much more pragmatic (and, to my mind, sustainable) way. I’m following Cameron’s book full of frothy writing-and-spirituality with Lilith Saintcrow’s collection of writing posts, The Quill and the Crow. It’s an interesting contrast–Saintcrow’s very much from the school of “So you want to be a writer? Have you tried, say, actually writing? This shit is work” school of advice, but it’s undercut by a

So I’m reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist Way for the first time this week, following close to two decades of people recommending it. I’d been resisting it for a long time because the first person to recommend it to me was a friend with rather undiscerning tastes when it came to self-help books, the kind of person who’d press books about becoming a millionaire into my hands then seem put out when I argued that it was basically a ponzi scheme wrapped up in woogy language and siphoning expertise from others like a vampire, while the writing engaging in rhetorical cheats on par with Who Moved My Cheese. So I was primed not to like The Artists Way, despite the fact that it seemed to help an awful lot of people over the years. Right now, I’m about three chapters into the book, and I’ve thus far come to two conclusions: the first is that I really, really hate the

So I’m gearing up to release the next Short Fiction Lab release in two weeks, and the pre-orders are going out with a 99 cent price-tag in the US. Naturally, this meant today started with me dropping a Macklemore Thrift Shop reference while writing up the promo for the newsletter, because that song always gets in my head every time I price something at 99 cents. Given that song was everywhere in 2012 you probably don’t need a refresher, but here’s a link in case you were very young, trapped in Antarctica for a few years, or you’re just feeling nostalgic. Going down the youtube hole obviously led me to the Post Modern Jukebox cover, which deploys Thrift Shop in a swing jazz style and is just all-around fantastic. You can go listen to it here, and I recommend you do. Which, of course, now means I’m reading Kelly Link’s The Faerie Handbag because it’s the greatest thrift-shop-based fantasy story