Filed under: advice, Creative Process, podcasting, writing | Tags: growing your audience, JoJo Siwa, podcasting, promotion, Social Media, spotify, videos
Since I have several podcasts that are now hosted by Spotify, I receive their newsletter (four copies, one for each podcast) which offers podcasting tips. I mostly ignore them, as I have read MANY tips previously and there’s rarely anything new. I clicked on the most recent one though, since it was about how to grow your audience. I’m in the middle of putting out a new podcast so I figured I could use some reminders of that kind of information.
Ultimately, there was nothing in it I hadn’t seen before but something about it made me think about what they were suggesting in a new way. So many tips involved making some other form of media alongside the podcast. It felt like they were saying that in order to have success as a podcaster, you had to make videos. To bring ears to your podcast, you should also write a newsletter. It struck me as absolutely absurd. In order to create one thing, you have to become expert at several others. Let me tell you, I didn’t get into audio to make video. If I wanted to make videos, I’d make videos! (And I have made a couple!)
And as annoyed as this advice made me, I acknowledge that it’s probably correct. I’m already doing it, honestly. For my latest audio drama, our producer has made multiple videos, some of which have done better than almost anything else we’ve put out in the world. I think they might help us bring people to the podcast. But I find the whole notion of having to do it infuriating. In order to create one thing, we have to now become masters of several other things to even be seen (or heard). We have to become advertisers, video makers, newsletter writers, copy writers, audio experts, etc. This is why podcasts that come from public radio stations do so much better than the rest of us. They have a staff for all those other aspects.
It didn’t use to be like this back in the early days of our theatre. If we put on a show, we put on a show. That’s pretty much it. We made postcards and posters, sure – but that’s about the extent of it. We did the art we were there to do.
I find it ridiculous that the way to “grow your audience” in one medium is to increase your presence in another. It feels like I wanted to get better at driving a car and instead of driving cars, someone advises me to start driving boats. It just very much feels like very different things. You might say, “Well, it’s all media” – but really? Driving a boat and driving a car are both driving but they are also VERY DIFFERENT. It also feels like this advice to grow a podcast by doing all these other things is essentially asking every podcaster to become a whole media studio. Make videos! Make ads! Make calculated social media posts! Interview famous people! And I see how these things help. I really do. But people do all those things for jobs these days, and I don’t love my chances in competing for social media eyeballs when everyone else has training and a salary. In that podcast I wrote about last time, Ezra Klein said that the middle is competing with the huge. That is, in the fight for attention, even things like the New York Times are the middle now and Facebook and Google are at the overwhelming top. The little guys down at the bottom of the attention economy don’t stand much of a chance when even the big guns aren’t the big guns anymore.
The thing is, it’s clear from everything I’ve read that no one knows how to grow an audience, especially for podcasts. It’s a crapshoot, like anything.
I was just reading an article about the girl group started by mega tween pop sensation, JoJo Siwa. You’d think the people who got Siwa’s career started (her mom, really) would know how to make a girl group a hit – but as the article said “The world did not pick this group…They’ve pulled every lever…It’s been almost two years. They’re not going to make it.” These people were making videos and social media content out the wazoo (and doing it mostly unpaid) and the world has mostly shrugged. Maybe instead of doing all that promotion, they could have made some more music, developed the songs a bit more (and maybe not behaved abominably to the girls, which is what the article was actually about). I don’t know. But I do know that that story highlights an arts and media landscape where everyone has to do everything, where there’s always another job to do, even for people who have already experienced some success.
But also, I’m not 100% convinced that a success in an adjacent media actually translates to success in the thing you’re trying to promote. We got 830 views on a TikTok video but that didn’t lead to any uptick in listens to the podcast or ticket sales to the live recordings. It was basically meaningless. 830 views is just 830 views on the platform it’s on. Likes on your promo material don’t necessarily lead to eyes or ears on the thing you’re promoting.
I think of novelists now who are required to be on social media, promoting their work. They can’t just write novels; They also have to create media followings and probably their publishers are telling them they should make videos, too. I doubt that most novelists are videographers at heart. Everyone’s a videographer these days. And sure, I’ll do it. I’ll make videos if I have to because I don’t make things for no one to see them and it somehow seems like the thing to do now. At least that’s what everyone says but the business around it all feels pretty dark and terrible.
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Filed under: art, community, technology, voting, writing | Tags: clicks, Ezra Klein, Internet, Jezebel, journalism, local news, New York magazine, Rebecca Traister, Search Engine, tech, The Onion, weird quirky websites
The podcast I was listening to was about the crisis in journalism – about how so many news sites were disappearing, how so many journalists are losing their jobs and about how the landscape was changing so dramatically and not for the better. (This country has lost one third of its newspapers and two thirds of its journalists since 2005 and it is accelerating.) I was only half listening – truth be told. I was still pretty wiped out from COVID and I was dozing a fair amount. But then – after a history lesson in how journalism was funded and then how that landscape shifted and then shifted again – I sat bolt upright at a concept the guest (Ezra Klein) brought up. He said we should not think of ourselves as consumers of the internet but as generators. His feeling was that we are all rather passively engaging with the internet, without realizing that we are creating it while we do that. Basically, the idea is that we are creating with our clicks. What we engage with and look at and pay attention to is the internet we create. If I want to see local news, I have to subscribe to local news – or at the very least – visit local news sites. If I want more independent media, I have to read independent media. I can’t just wish for these things to exist.
I recognize my own behavior in this. When Jezebel was shut down, I was pretty upset! RIP the last popular feminist media! But I hadn’t visited Jezebel in ages. Truthfully, since they were bought by G/O Media – they were starting to fall apart. But even before then, I wasn’t over there much. I appreciated that Jezebel existed but I didn’t do anything to help continue its existence. (I learned while researching for this that it is coming back via Paste Magazine. Hooray for Zombie Jezebel!) As Klein said, if you want the publication to continue you have to read it. If you want the podcast to continue, you have to listen to it. If you want an internet with blogs and independent media, you have to read them. We create our own internet.
In other words, wailing about the evils of social media while continuing to scroll through it for hours, doesn’t help create alternatives. If we go through the portals of social media to get to our media, we are enforcing the need for social media to filter our media for us. I do this. And I get the internet that I create – a world filtered by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Bsky, Mastodon, etc. If I like something, I can’t wait for it to show up in a feed, I have to go directly to it. Additionally, Facebook has been showing people less and less news in their feeds. This has throttled traffic to news media which has, in turn, lost them a lot of advertising dollars and threatened their existence. Or killed it entirely. If I want it, I have to go to the thing and click there.
I have often thought of this from my own perspective of my needs as an artist, engaging with the internet. There are a lot of people who express that they’re glad I do what I do but only a handful that engage with my work and even fewer that support it. This is as true of my off-line theatre making as it is with my podcasts, my blogs or music. I know directly what happens when people don’t engage with my work. (I feel bad mostly.) But there have definitely been times where the direct line of a project living or dying is very clear. Our first season of our first audio drama, The Dragoning, took almost a year to finish because the funding was so slow to come in. We weren’t holding episodes back because we wanted to be withholding – we just literally couldn’t make a new episode until we reached the episode budget. Eventually, we got there. And the show has charted around the world. But it was clear there was a big disconnect for a lot of people between support for the podcast and its ability to be made. And it’s not just about money. If more people had listened to the show, (downloaded the show, even put it on play and walked out to do something else), if we’d gotten more numbers, perhaps we could have found some funding through advertising. But podcast advertising is a numbers game and if you’re not getting a minimum of a thousand downloads an episode, it’s not a game you can play. I had ads on the podcast version of this blog for a week and a half and made a grand total of $1.38. It’s very clear to me, as a creator, how peoples’ investment can make the life or death difference in a creation. I don’t know why I hadn’t really put it together as a user of the internet.
As Klein put it, “If you want Pitchfork to exist, you have to read it.” Anything we want on the internet (and I would argue, out in the world, too) we have to engage with it. Ezra Klein on Search Engine:
“Every time you read one thing over another or watch or listen to our spend time on, you are creating more of that thing and less of other things, right? There is still some money that comes from just, like, your attention. Then a level above that, when you pay for anything, when you become a member or subscriber, then you’re really sending a signal to generate more of that thing and not of the other.”
We turned the vibrant disparate quirky internet into a series of social media sites. And if we like that – cool – that’s what we have. But if we want other things, we have to engage with them and we also have to pay for them. I really want to do this. I want more art; I want to pay for more artists. (I’d love to support my fellow artists on Patreon: like Alexandra Scott, Betsy VanDeusen, Dance Naked Creative, Monica Byrne, Michael Harren and so many more.) And when I start to make a living wage, that’s the first thing I’m going to do. Meanwhile, though, to create the internet I want to see in the world, I have to actually click on my values. I can’t just like the funny Onion headline on Twitter, I have to click on the article and go read it – on the Onion’s website. If I want more Onion, I have to read the Onion.
But this is the thing, though, I used to read the Onion cover to cover when it was a paper publication I could just pick up on the street. Now I have to remind myself to click when I see an article go by on social media. And once I get over there, I don’t read that whole issue. I just read what I came for and get out. I’m guessing we’re not going back to paper but it was a lot better for some things. I currently read every issue of New York magazine because I subscribe to it. It comes in the mail and then I read it. For me, subscribing means I get both local news and a way to voice my support for one of my favorite journalists (Rebecca Traister, who writes there). I know other publications languish because I chose that one. That’s my current vote – since I don’t really read much news on the internet. Which I guess is also a vote. But if I want the old quirky internet full of funky weird websites, I have to visit those!
Oh hey, if you need some ideas on stuff to click on, I put a bunch of links in this piece. Click away!
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Filed under: art, Creative Process, feminism, theatre, writing | Tags: art, Elizabeth Gilbert, pairs, theatre, theme, writing
Close observers of my work might notice some commonalities between my most recent audio drama, The Defense, and my previous audio drama, The Dragoning. They both feature nice women who develop magical defensive and destructive abilities. They both hinge on fear and power. They are structured very differently and the contexts are not the same, but at the center of both are nice and dangerous women. You might say I’m trying to work something out.
We’re in the middle of rehearsing for and recording The Defense and sometimes I’ve found myself self-conscious about the things these audio dramas have in common. I imagine some critic saying. “Doesn’t this woman have any other ideas?” But, of course, I do have other ideas. I have so many other ideas! But when an idea presents itself for realization, sometimes you just have to move forward, even if you’ve looked at a particular theme before. You don’t throw ideas back into the muse’s face when she presents them to you, even if they look a little like one you received before.
I think a lot about Elizabeth Gilbert’s concept of ideas floating around in the atmosphere, waiting for artists to grab them and bring them into being. It explains why multiple artists get the same idea at the same time sometimes. And it also explains why the same artist might take another crack at a concept or idea they’ve explored before.
In thinking about it, I realized that I have previously created in pairs like this before. When the Dobbs decision went down, I wrote two short speculative fiction abortion plays – one right after the other. They’re very different from one another – different futures, following the lines of logic in the anti-choice movement. But the plays were both between ten and twenty minutes long and they both extended their speculations in kind of extreme ways. You might say I was trying to work something out.
Watching this happen with my creative writing, seeing how I’ve been writing in pairs, I wonder where I might have done this before. I was pretty hung up on Greek myths in the early days. I wrote way more of those than two. But I was definitely trying to work something out. But I don’t think the other things I wrote in those days obviously pair up like this recent work.
I suppose the thread that flows through most of what I’ve made in the last eight years has been my rage at watching women’s rights roll back, at watching the patriarchy claw its way back up on top. I guess I haven’t had much space for other things. I’ve had to be responsive to this disheartening world that began to show its face in 2016. I think I will maybe stop writing in pairs like this if and when things turn around for the better. If they don’t, I guess I’ll be working things out in multiple ways for a long time to come.
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They also bring you the podcast version of the blog.
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Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are on Spotify, Apple Music, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer, Bandcamp and Amazon Music.
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Filed under: business, economics, writing | Tags: business, drugstores, enshittification, locking up the stuff, Postal Service, Rot Economy, shoplifting, toothpaste, USPS, zines
A while back, I wrote about how they started locking up the toothpaste at my chain pharmacy/drugstore. Since then the drugstore has only expanded their lock-up program. Now, they lock up soap and deodorant and vitamins and eye drops and much more. There were a lot of news stories about this; These big drug stores (CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid, etc) were claiming that there was a massive theft problem at their stores and they needed help to fix it.
But then, those stories were debunked. Not only has theft not gone up, it has, in fact, gone down. It turns out that these big drug stores are attempting to make more money by getting governments to pay for their security – because of all this CRIME that’s increasing. This has worked for them. Here In New York, our governor just launched an initiative that would give these places a tax break and provide extra security for them.
And this is after the idea of a shoplifting crime wave has been debunked. Despite the reporting that reveals that the “crime wave” numbers’ only source was a lobbying group, these places are apparently still crying “shoplifting” wolf and given Hochul’s response, they’re getting away with it, big time.
I guess they’re still trying to push this fiction because they’re locking up more stuff than ever before and I know at least three people who don’t buy stuff there because of it. Are they trying to go out of business?
The only reason I go in to the drugstore where they lock up the toothpaste is because my prescriptions got transferred there when my more local pharmacy stopped taking my insurance. Then, the pharmacy I wanted to transfer to went out of business last year. These big drug stores push out the little shops so they are the only place to buy vitamins or toothpaste or whatever – but then they lock up those things and drive us right into Amazon’s arms. And once the Vitamin D is being delivered to me, why would I go back to the drug store?
Then I started to think about all this and the post office. Every year I mail out the zines I make for my patrons on Patreon. Every year, I bring the envelopes to the post office, get the stamps required to mail them, affix them and off they’d go around the world. Mailing day was kind of a fun annual ritual. This year, though, when I went to the very same postal worker as the year before, she told me that my zines were books and must be mailed as parcels. This process was twice as expensive and required that the postal worker type in the zip code for every single package, print two labels for each and then affix them to the envelope. It took ages and the line behind me grew and grew as the afternoon went on. There was only one window open and I was at it.
Type. (Clickety clickety clickety.) Press Yes. Wait. Wait Again. Okay they’ve printed. Stick. Stick. Throw it in the mail bin. Next. Repeat twenty times.
They had a perfectly reasonable system for years. Many years. I’ve been making these for eight years, I think? But some policy change means that a perfectly efficient system of mailing little envelopes of homemade goodness has become twice as expensive and an incredible time-waster at the post office, not just for me but for the workers and all the customers in line.
I didn’t send all of them, though. To send these zines to Europe this time, they told me, would cost $20 so I decided I would explore some other options. It just doesn’t make sense to pay $20 to send 27 pieces of paper over the ocean. As I walked home from the post office I thought, “Are they TRYING to go out of business?” And then I remembered how Trump had appointed DeJoy as Postmaster General and remembered how we still have that guy in the top postal job. He’s a businessman who seems wants to run the Post Office into the ground and so I thought, “Yeah, I guess they ARE trying to go out of business!”
Everywhere it feels like business are trying to go out of business. So many places don’t worry about alienating their customers. Every tech platform has gone through an intense enshittification and everything seems to be falling victim to the Rot Economy (a concept I heard about on a podcast). It would seem that the preferred way to do business these days is to try to go out of business. It goes like this. First, create a business that meets people’s needs. Then kill any other businesses that might meet people’s needs in a way similar to yours. Then provide only the most minimal service one can provide and throw up as many obstacles as possible.
The thing is, even though they seem to be trying to go out of business, in a lot of cases, they’ve grown “too big to fail” so they remain. And we all just get more and more frustrated. Anyway – I don’t get anything but my drugs at the drugstore anymore and I just went to a different post office to mail my international zines at a more sensible rate. Hilariously, though, at that post office, their system was down and only the self-service kiosk was working. Someone came in with a big package and they told her she’d have to go to a different post office. “I’ll just come back tomorrow,” she said. But they told her it wasn’t likely to be fixed tomorrow. (Why would that neighborhood need a working post office?!) Giving our post offices inadequate tech seems like yet another way to send the post office out of business. I don’t mind if the big drug stores take themselves out of business with their silly locking the stuff up policies. Maybe we’d get our local pharmacies back in that scenario. But the post office? I’d very much like for our country to have a reasonable postal system again
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Filed under: art, Creative Process, dance, dreams, theatre, writing | Tags: choreographer, Drama Bookshop, friends, future gazing, good news, Mikhail Baryshnikov, playwright, Success Stories
On my way to go see a dance piece, I stopped off at the Drama Bookshop and noticed that they had a collection of plays written by my old friend. I figured I should buy it, since I have a goal to dedicate a shelf, nay, a bookcase, to the work of my friends. Also, I wanted to read the plays. Over the years, we’ve been less in touch so I haven’t managed to see everything or read everything.
In our twenties, we were very close. We talked on the phone many nights a week and we’d go out and wander the streets of New York, finding delicious tidbits to eat. We talked about our ambitions and our hopes. He dreamed of seeing his plays on Broadway and I wanted that dream for him too. It was a time of much angst and sometimes we’d both of us slip into hopelessness. You really have no idea what’s coming. I guess we never do.
Anyway – here we are in 2023 in the new Drama Bookshop and I’m buying a collection of his plays. It’s not the only work of his they have for sale, either. His plays take up about eight inches on the bookshelf. I take the book up to the cashier and she gets instantly excited about it. “I love his plays,” she says. And all I want to do is go back in time to some night when we were on the phone and my friend was so despondent and hopeless and I wish I could be like, “Hey, I’ve just come from the future, where I’m buying a collection of your plays at the Drama Bookshop. The cashier is delighted with my purchase and tells me how much she loves your plays. When I tell her you’re a friend of mine, she acts like I told her I was friends with Beyonce. You don’t know who that is yet because it’s the mid-90s – but trust me, a time traveler from 2023, this cashier is crazy for your work.”
When I left the Drama Bookshop, I went on to the dance show – a little ways down the road. The choreographer is a friend, though one I haven’t seen in at least a decade or two. From the back row of the house for these two world premiere dances, I can see Mikhail Baryshnikov settling in to his seat in the third row. Baryshnikov is here to see my friend’s work! This piece is at Baryshnikov’s art space so it’s highly probable that this is not my friend’s first encounter or interaction with Baryshnikov. It’s possible that this sort of thing has become normal to him. It’s not to me, though. I’m excited for him. Here, too, I want to go back in time and tell this sweet boy I knew decades ago what success awaits the man he will be in the future.
I mean, maybe me time traveling to tell stories about future success would spoil the surprise but I feel like a life in the arts is so full of uncertainty, a lot of us could do with a visit from a more successful future to just let us know that there’s a little bit of hope. And sometimes we could do with a little reminder of our milestones, as we sit in that future that doesn’t feel nearly as successful as it would seem to our younger selves.
We all have friends who have given up. We’ve all considered giving up ourselves. A little visitor from the future with good news would be really so sustaining. If a future me came to tell me a story like one of these, I’d be charged up for a long time.
But, of course, let’s say I did manage to time travel and tell my playwright friend the story of the cashier at the bookshop. Odds are he wouldn’t believe me, or believe I was from the future. But I guess the me back then could have just made something up on one of those days hope was in short supply. I could have claimed to be back with a message from the future and maybe a little faith would sneak in. I could try that now and I wouldn’t even have to get a time machine.
This post was brought to you by my patrons on Patreon.
They also bring you the podcast version of the blog.
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You can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Filed under: art, podcasting, technology, writing | Tags: AI, algorithms, bots, congratulations, Goodpods, grant writing, podcasting, promotional text, robots, technology, writing
When I heard (in an Audio Drama group), about the AI descriptions taking over podcasts on Goodpods (a podcast platform), I headed straight over to see if my audio drama (The Dragoning) had been subjected to this treatment. It was not, so I moved on with my week, not thinking much of it. Then another audio drama group began to talk about how outrageous and wrong these descriptions were and how they were pulling their shows from the platform. So I went back to check and, still, The Dragoning was unaffected. But this time, I thought to check my other podcast, the audio version of this blog, and lo and behold, there was a whole bunch of text I’d never seen before.
There was a description of my podcast, a paragraph about who should listen to it and a summary of three episodes. And unlike the descriptions of my colleagues’ podcasts, it was pretty accurate. Actually, it sounded like a PR person got ahold of my work and went to town. It sounds like a pretty nice review. If a person had written it, I would be flattered. But a person didn’t write it so it just made me confused. Does the AI who created this text really think I’m insightful? No. It doesn’t think. Period. It doesn’t even know what insightful means. It’s likely just using predictive text to write a reasonable sounding bit of copy.
A lot of my podcasting colleagues were pretty upset about having their podcasts saddled with text generated by AI that they didn’t ask for or choose, and understandably so. I find myself more flummoxed by it.
The AI “wrote” these things in a very particular style. It says many things that I would never say about myself that I would, nonetheless, like to be said about me. It feels like Goodpods got me a publicist who makes me feel a little uncomfortable but who I wouldn’t complain about, if they got me more visibility. And I already have three times the listeners on their platform than I did before they added this made-up description. So…I’m very torn about this new development. When I read it, it feels as though this AI has made some interpretative choices, that it listened to my podcast and summarized what it heard. But, of course, that is not what happened. I don’t know how it came up with what it came up with but there was no interpretive work done by the robot. And if I understand the purpose of this text, it is to draw the attention of the algorithms that suggest podcasts to people. That is, the AI chose words that would get the attention of some other AI and theoretically put my podcast in front of more people. It’s the robots talking to each other. If it gets me some clicks, is it okay to let it do that?
The thing that becomes so plain here is how promotional language is so formulaic and meaningless that an AI can convincingly do it. This is probably one of the most productive ways AI can be used. It can handle anything that is, essentially, a formula without too much originality required. It reveals the simplicity and emptiness of advertising copy. Lord knows I don’t want to write things like this. If AI can do it for me, why shouldn’t I let it? There are a lot of bullshit things I have to write –promotional text, artist statements, grant applications. I mean – for sure an AI could do as good a job of writing the bullshit for a grant application as I do. In fact, it’s likely to do a better job, as it’s not afraid to use self-aggrandizing words and ideas and could be programmed to tell grant readers exactly what they want to hear. If there’s one thing I am not good at, it is talking myself up. And, it would seem, if there’s one thing AI can be good at, it is talking things up. And, in fact, they could use an AI to read all these bullshit grants, too. One AI could talk up the artist and another AI could search for the words it wants to see, i.e. “read” it. Artists need not set down a single word.
Is it more important that I write a grant application in my actual voice or that I use the phrases that are likely to yield good results? A good grantwriter knows what those phrases are and you can bet they make sure to include them in their grant applications. Is it possible this whole exercise of writing grants for artwork might be bullshit? If an AI could do it better than I can?
I’m in the middle of writing a grant now and I am absolutely tying myself into knots trying to invent the right text for it. I could, even now, probably plug some of my usual arts project language in to some large language model and end up with something usable. I won’t do that but I’m not sure I shouldn’t.
It’s clear that the podcast AI has thus far rewarded me for the formulaic language it made up for me. I have three times the listeners that I did. (Maybe. Are those numbers representing real people or bots? Does it matter?) So, if an AI program can get me more podcast listens, who’s to say I shouldn’t use it to get some arts funding, if it saves me pulling a muscle (a muscle made of bullshit!) every time I write one? I am fundamentally opposed to AI doing artist’s jobs. I am incredibly grateful that the Writers and Actors’ unions have fought to keep the robots from taking their jobs. But I’m starting to see the value in AI for the bullshit part of our jobs. If the AI knows which words to use to get other AI to move me up the charts, I’m grateful. There’s no virtue in me trying to guess what those words are to try and game the algorithm.
I think about how writing “Congratulations” in the comments on Facebook puts a post in front of more eyes. If lots of people write congratulations, it increases those eyeballs even more. These descriptions seem to be a version of saying “Congratulations” on Facebook. It’s all just ways to game the robots, I guess.
Do I feel good about living in a world where we have to think about how we manipulate the programs of robots? I do not. But I acknowledge that the likelihood is low of a real human person stumbling upon my work by chance, without the help of some robots. As much as I am a little disturbed by the language a robot invented, I think I might leave it there, just as an experiment. I feel very weird about having an unattributed piece of language on a page about my work but it’s also very hard to argue with, probably because it didn’t come from a person.
To be honest, I haven’t paid much attention to all the hype around AI. As an indie artist in an unprofitable corner, I really couldn’t imagine a scenario in which it would be relevant to my life. But those bots are full of surprises. And AI is so trendy, it’s fixing to show up everywhere. There were rumors that Goodpods was readying itself to get investors and that AI is a thing big companies use to get the money people interested. Say you’re going to use AI and you get more cash! We’re probably all going to be wrestling with AI here and there now. Would I let an AI write a blog for me? Hell to the no. That’s for a person to do. And that person is me. But would I let it write my grant application? I might. (I mean, I won’t. Please don’t reject my grant applications because I said I might let a bot do it. I’m doing it, okay?) In a way, this all just makes clear what is bullshit writing, for which we can accept the work of a bot, and what is writing we need a human for, a face for, a voice for. Maybe a bot could do this. But it would be meaningless without a person behind the words.
And in the latest development over on Goodpods, my moral dilemma has taken care of itself. I guess they had enough complaints about their AI that they just removed it all. Now, where there was once a puff piece, there are the three questions that the AI previously answered. Now it wants me to answer them? I am unlikely to. Can I just type in what the AI wrote for me? I don’t think I have the self-aggrandizing stomach for it. Also – I looked at my nine new listeners and I’m pretty sure they are all bots. Their user names are things like GuestUser947 and such. So… nothing’s really been ventured here. And nine bot listeners are all I’ve gained.
Want to see what a bot wrote?
They may have deleted this bot-authored promo text but not before I got a screenshot!
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Filed under: age, American, art, Gen X, TV, writing | Tags: 1983, 80s, 99 Luft Ballons, 99 Red Balloons, AIDS, Deutschland 83, Generation X, history, HIV, period drama, The Normal Heart, TV
Sometimes you have an awareness of the historical quality of the moment you’re going through. I had a very clear sense that things would never be the same after the eleventh of September, 2001. I could feel the day being engraved in the land, in our memories, in our timelines. But a lot stuff doesn’t FEEL significant while it’s happening, especially childhood events, even if people TELL you a moment is momentous, sometimes it just all blends together in the fabric of a life.
I’ve lived long enough now that folks are making historical period dramas about eras I remember. It is super weird to see production teams get this wrong. Or to watch styles be elevated from a niche corner to a dominant style. (“No, 7 Lives of Lea, we did not all wear mesh, tiny tank tops and chokers all the time in the 90s. Your research included too many promo shots from the WB.”)
But sometimes, the events are so far in the past, I question my own memory of them. I know I am often wrong about what year a pop song came out, for example, so it’s very possible I can also misremember historical events.
I started to think about this while watching Deutschland 83, which, you’ll be shocked to learn, takes place in Germany in…1983. Now, I turned ten in 1983 so it is a year I remember, more or less. But I had no sense of what was happening in Germany (nor East nor West) in that year. I guess I knew Nena’s “99 Luft Ballons” (which, like a lot of Americans, I preferred to their “99 Red Balloons”) which came out in 1983 but, again, I would have guessed it came out two or three years later – based purely on my perception of when I started paying attention to pop music. My perception is usually wrong about anything before 1989. Everything before ’89 is all mixed up.
Deutschland 83 (the TV show) apparently chose to set their show in 1983 because of the music. In addition to the thematically appropriate music of Nena, the theme song of the show is also from 1983 – “Major Tom” by Peter Schilling (which is not a cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” btw – just in conversation with it). The fact is, I was a big fan of a lot of the songs that were big in the West German charts of 1983. (Culture Club’s “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?”, Paul Young’s “Come Back and Stay”, Kajagoogoo’s “Too Shy.”) So it is clear that my perception of when I started to care about pop music is WAY off.
But – I found myself talking back to the show at one point, not about pop music, but about the AIDS crisis. A woman opened her desk drawer and there was a magazine with a story about AIDS on the cover. And I said, “Really? In 1983? Come on.” This is not because there wasn’t AIDS in 1983 because I’m pretty sure there was – but because I was skeptical of it being front page news in 1983. (I saw a production of The Normal Heart not so long after it was written. I feel like that’s part of why I felt so sure that the media coverage was later.)
And of course, I’m basing this on my own blurry memories of my childish knowledge of the AIDS crisis. My sense was that the mainstream media didn’t start talking about HIV until a couple of years later than Deutschland 83 would have us believe. I would have said there were no big stories about the AIDS crisis until 1985 or so. For me, the story loomed largest when Ryan White, a thirteen year old kid (only a year or so older than me!) got HIV from a blood transfusion, but I had a sense of the disease for a least a year before that. I asked my Gen X friend what year he thought AIDS became big news in the United States and he asked, “When did the Rock Hudson story break?”
We understand historical events’ placement in history by fixed points, by particular stories. Ryan White. Rock Hudson. I imagine that Tom Hanks will play a big role in our memories of the start of COVID 19. (Or maybe he won’t! We can’t know from here! He got through it just fine!)
Anyway – this subplot of the AIDS crisis in Germany in 1983 got me very curious because things could have been different in Germany! While American media was slow to pick up the story of HIV, maybe German media was quicker. Maybe the German government was less moronic about caring for its sick. Maybe my perception is overly American and there really were front page stories about HIV in Germany in 1983. Maybe they didn’t need a play like The Normal Heart because they were ahead of the game!
I looked into it. And I learned some things. For sure, 1983 was too early for American media addressing the crisis – and it wasn’t really a mainstream conversation in Germany either. However, the magazine that the secretary opens her drawer to reveal WAS a real magazine cover in June of 1983. So…a fair number of people were probably talking about it. Certainly, the German government’s response was actually much better than the American government’s response. (And to be clear, we’re talking about West Germany here. East Germany maintained that it had neither gays nor HIV until 1986, according to the show.) The level of care in West Germany was so much higher than it was in the US, with greater compassion and a much lower mortality rate. So – while I think Deutschland 83 may have been stretching the bounds of historical accuracy with the general population’s awareness of AIDS, there really was some journalism about it and investigating it did help me understand how much further ahead in health care West Germany was.
My conclusion:
Accurate for 1983: “99 Luft Ballons”, a NATO military exercise that nearly started a nuclear war and the AIDS crisis beginning to destroy communities of gay men, leading to a front page article in a magazine.
Probably Inaccurate for 1983: An East German spy single-handedly preventing a nuclear war, a mother telling her daughter to use a condom because of AIDS. But – hey, maybe!
My understanding about Deutschland 83 is that it was inspired by one of the writers’ military service in West Germany, when he was put to work translating Russian messages. But that work was later. In 1983, he was thirteen or fourteen years old, so his memories of that year, while likely better than mine, are probably a little blurry too. Maybe it’s all more accurate to the feeling of history if it’s a little mixed up. I guess that’s why we shouldn’t use period dramas as history lessons. Or maybe we can just use them as jumping off points to learn the real history.
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Filed under: art, feminism, writing | Tags: fatphobia, kid's lit, Lockwood and Co, middle grade, sexism, writing, writing for children
After I finished writing my novel for kids, I realized I was not particularly well versed in what kids were reading these days and so set out to read all the contemporary middle grade fiction I could get my hands on. Top of my list: The Secret Keepers, The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place, The Bromeliad Trilogy, The Girl Who Drank the Moon and Miss Ellicott’s School for the Magically Minded. There’s a lot of great stuff out there. And they tend to be real page turners compared to a lot of adult books.
One of the books I encountered on my search was The Screaming Staircase, the first book of the Lockwood and Company series. It takes place in a world where children work as ghost hunters because adults can’t see spirits. It’s somehow both Victorian and contemporary and has the charming quality of being a workplace story for kids. I know the youth love a ghost and here kids can see them and hear them and fight them every night. I liked it. In theory. But I wasn’t compelled to read more than the first one for some reason, even though the story was clearly not complete after Book One.
Then the Netflix series came out and it was charming, well done, and smoothed out some things that had troubled me so I returned to the books, because I wanted to know what happened next.
As I’ve read them, the things that were somewhat slight irritants have gained more power, like a pebble in a shoe, moving around and getting more irritating. I suspect these irritants were why I stopped reading the books in the first place, even though there was clearly more story to tell.
The chief annoyance is how casually cruel this author is to several of his characters but especially one in particular. That character is called George. While George is much beloved by this team of ghosthunters, he’s also relentlessly teased. In the book I’m reading now, the team are on a field trip to a haunted village and no one wants to share a bed with George. I guess because he’s fat and they all find him disgusting? Over and over, he is the butt of the jokes, both in the narrative and the commentary of the narrator. The one that made me pick up my pen to write about this was, “And, in the far corner, it was either the world’s biggest salt-bomb or George’s bottom poking out from behind a crate of magnesium flares.” We know it’s George’s bottom there. Aren’t butts funny? Sure. But in this book, only George’s butt is the butt of jokes. Poor George. He is kind and smart, with incredible research skills and a brilliant scientific mind and he is always treated as the literal and figurative butt of this story.
And you know, I know that making the fat kid the joke is a standard comedy trope but it’s a hack move and not at all kind to this character or any fat kid reading this book. Whenever the author wants to lighten the mood of this scary ghost hunting story full of graves and violence and decay, he resorts to someone making fun of fat George. George mostly doesn’t seem to mind much but I honestly don’t think the author realizes that he could or should mind.
The story is narrated by a teenage girl who clearly has some feeling for her teenage boy boss (the titular Lockwood) and the narrative has a lot of “Will they or won’t they?” romantic comedy energy. But no one ever imagines she could have or develop feelings for George. It’s like he’s not a person, just a target for funnies.
And speaking of this Will They or Won’t They “romance“ between the leading man (boy) and the leading woman (girl), in the third book, a new female character is introduced and while they all fight ghosts, the real battle becomes which of these girls will get the boy. Lockwood. Not George of course.
This plot development with the new girl made me bananas because, sure, girls can be competitive and envious of one another but spatting over a man is such a man’s idea of what competition between girls is about. I appreciate that this guy wanted to write a girl protagonist – but this attempt to do relatable girl content was endlessly irritating. Especially since this girl of whom the protagonist is so envious is the first explicitly non-white character that he’s written – so it not only feels weirdly petty and misogynistic, it also makes the protagonist seem racist. It’s not so nice when I came in here to watch some ghosts scare everyone and then get defeated by a bunch of professional kids.
I’m sure the author feels like his little jabs at George, the fat one, are just a bit of comic relief – and maybe those “cat fights” between the two girls function the same way for him. Aren’t they funny spatting over nothing when we secretly know it’s all over a man? Even the heroine’s talking skull/ghost finds it hilarious and endlessly tries to instigate trouble between them. But I don’t find it at all amusing.
The thing is, of course girls can dislike one another and be jealous of one another’s bodies or style and they can, in fact, flirt with the same guy – but this is a pretty standard patriarchal trope. There’s only one girl and when another appears, they will compete for the same leading man. This is why a key piece of the Bechdel Test is that the conversation between women that lasts for longer than thirty seconds has to be about something other than a man. And the conversations between the girls in this book do technically pass the Bechdel test but because the narrator tells us her feelings, we know that the subtext is actually the man/boy. The handsome one with a troubled past, not the nice fat one everyone is disgusted by.
And now that I’m looking for it, I notice the erotics of slimness in the language about everyone in this world but George. And yes, yes, I know, the slenderness is key for a lot of people in understanding who the heroes are. “Even with his coat, his slim, spare form slipped through without difficulty.” Oh, did it now?
The thing is, this is all very normal. Lockwood and Company is far from the first story to utilize these patriarchal fatphobic tropes but do we have to indoctrinate kids with them so early?
It’s just so mean. Like, at one point, George is trying to understand a carving on a tombstone and it’s described as “He was tracing its shape with a chubby finger.” Why can’t he just trace it with his finger? His perfectly normal human finger. Meanwhile, Lockwood’s are “long, quick fingers.”
I am so tired of fat people being written as jokes, or worse, disgusting and/or evil. (So many villains are fat. In this book too. All the fat ghosts are especially terrible.) I am tired of women being pitted against one another. (The drama of the two girls is instigated by the two boys hiring the new girl without discussing it with the old girl. That, my friends, is a real set up.) Meanwhile, I think these books actually have something important to say about what kids can see and do that adults cannot. I just wish it could do that without throwing George under the bus or relying on sexist girl fight tropes. Maybe the next book will be better.
I’ve started it. It’s worse. In the first chapter, the author compares George to a beluga whale and not in a good way.
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Filed under: age, art, movies, TV, writing | Tags: Austria, Cake, Corsage, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, German, Greek, movies, nihilism, Sisi, The Empress, TV
After reading a bit about the history of Empress Elisabeth of Austria (because of questions that came up after watching The Empress), I learned of another Empress Elisabeth (AKA Sisi) project in the pipeline. The film, Corsage, was reported to look at the darker side of the empress, dealing with her fatphobia, her tightlacing and obsession with her extremely long hair. After the overly romantic fantasy version of this woman in The Empress, I was ready for a thornier Sisi.
I thought this new film might be a more historically accurate version of events because of the inclusion of these less attractive aspects of her personality but as I watched it, I didn’t need to read more history to notice it was just as made-up as The Empress, if not more. The thing about The Empress was it was clear to me why they made up the fictions that they did. A love story between relative equals is a lot more attractive than the Emperor marrying a young teenage girl. It is a beautiful fantasy to imagine an empress wanting to help the poor so much she would give a factory urchin her shoes. I actually understand these impulses, even though they irked me.
With Corsage, I am struggling to understand why they bent history in this particular direction. Is there a word that means the opposite of romanticize? Like, darkify? Depressify? Simplify to a sadder story? And it’s not that this movie was particularly depressing. It’s more like….they tried to make legible some illegible behaviors, which then turned this woman’s tragic end to an entirely different, (actually less tragic maybe and definitely less complex) end.
But that’s not why I’m mad at it.
Here are some facts I learned after my first encounter with this empress.
- She was assassinated at the age of sixty, while traveling.
- She endured a really awful family tragedy in her fifties, when her son killed his mistress and himself
- She studied Greek during the two hours it took to wash her hair. In addition to her native German, she was also fluent in French and English.
- She studied philosophy and wrote poetry
- She facilitated the uniting of Austria and Hungary – which indicates some political power and interest.
Only one of these things appears in Corsage. (She speaks French and English.)
Corsage is the story of Elisabeth turning forty and having a hard time with aging. We watch her restrict her food, tightlace her corset and throw herself out a window. Two of these are things she actually did. (The food restrictions and the tightlacing.) This movie Elisabeth is clearly a woman going through it. Her interest in the mental health wings of the hospital (the real Sisi did have an interest in mental health care) is clearly a mirror for her own experience of mental distress. In Corsage, we are watching a woman self destruct. I think we are meant to feel that this woman’s constraints and boredom ultimately send her over the edge.
But the real Elisabeth’s life was clearly much fuller than this fictional version. The real Elisabeth was engaged with ideas, with travel, with learning. Yes, she was worried about her hair and her waistline but her inclination to learn Greek while having her hair washed suggests to me a woman who has NOT given up on life but who wants to make the most of every minute. She made an enormous difference in the alliance of Austria and Hungary. She was not a helpless trophy wife for the Emperor.
The Empress TV show reduced Sisi to a romantic modern manic pixie dream girl. The Corsage movie reduced Sisi to a dysfunctional Cosmo girl. It literally had her entourage drinking what looked like cosmopolitans on a ship.
And then there’s the main thing that made me mad at it. This is going to be a spoiler so skip ahead to the last paragraph if you’re planning on watching Corsage and want to be surprised. And yes, I know I already told you about her throwing herself out a window but it’s not a big deal in the story, actually, so that’s not the big spoiler.
SPOILERS follow:
After cutting off her beloved hair, eating forbidden cake and becoming a heroin addict at her doctor’s insistence, Elisabeth formulates a plan to kill herself and have her companion impersonate her. The film ends with her diving off the prow of a ship, presumably to her death. The moral of the story appears to be, when you hit forty and can no longer count on your appearance to win you things, you should just throw yourself into the sea.
What the…
This historical figure had twenty more years to live and thrive than this film gave her. The historical Sisi apparently traveled around Europe, often accompanied by Greek men in their 20s. The actual Sisi’s life did not end at forty. I’m very unclear about why this fictional version of her had to. Turning forty is not a tragedy. It wasn’t for the historical empress either. Her actual tragedies mostly came later and were a lot worse than refusing to eat cake. I don’t know why this movie insists on killing off a woman who had another twenty full years to live and enjoy her life. The film-maker is now forty-five, so one presumes she started making this film when she was on the precipice of forty and maybe she thought, “This sucks. Maybe I should throw myself into the sea after a lifetime of worrying about my hair and my calories.”
And I can sympathize with the pain of realizing that worrying about one’s appearance your whole life coming to naught. But – I’m not sure why she had to bring Empress Elisabeth into it.
I mean, if I’m going to watch a fictionalized Empress, I’d rather watch one decide to cut her hair, start eating cake and then go ahead and enjoy her forties and fifties hanging around beautiful young Greek traveling companions around the world. And she doesn’t even need to do the fiction of cutting her hair and starting to eat cake. I think we need stories of powerful women in their forties and fifties, doing what they want. Would I like for her to have cake? Of course. But I’d rather watch her have her real weirdo eating disorder and twenty more years of her interesting life. Having her need to end her life as soon as she experiences a hint of aging is not only ageist but also dangerously nihilistic. I mean, I suppose the filmmaker is Austrian, maybe there’s some cultural nihilism that is hard to steer clear of – but I find it a disturbing impulse to make historic-ish art more nihilistic than life. I think they think they’re somehow empowering Sisi by having her be in charge of her own death instead of getting murdered twenty years later (after all, she gets cake this way) but the message I got from this story was “better to be dead than a middle aged woman.”
Fuck that.
I’m going to need more stories about middle aged and older women doing cool things. The Green Glove Gang was a good start and Dead to Me scratched an itch but I’m going to need more. How about a look at the last twenty years of Sisi’s life? Instead of showing us her youth or the end of her youth, how about a project where we see her bring Austria and Hungary together or, hell, the drama of dealing with the murder-suicide of her son or her assassination by an Italian anarchist? The woman had an extraordinary life. I’m not sure why we’re reducing her to a romance or an eating disorder. History itself is very interesting and dramatic. I don’t know why we have to simplify it and change it in such weird ways for our TV and movies.
Particularly in ways that make me mad.
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Filed under: Acting, art, Creative Process, theatre, writing | Tags: Acting, directing, theatre, time wasting, weird compliments
I’ve been thinking a lot about this thing someone said to me when I was in graduate school. I’d just performed a role I’d always dreamed of playing (Imogen in Cymbeline) and at the cast party was propped up on some chairs resting the ankle I’d twisted during the show. A faculty member came up and complimented my performance (those compliments are lost to my memory) and then said, “I don’t know why you’re wasting your time directing.”
Let me give you some context for this very odd compliment. I was there in that graduate program as a directing student. I was less than one year away from an MFA in Directing. My class had only one director and it was me. This particular faculty member, while not someone I studied with, was married to my advisor – that is, my primary directing teacher. In praising my performance, she was also dismissing my entire purpose in being there.
But – truth be told (and I think this is why I’m thinking about this now) whenever I get a chance to get back up in front of an audience as an actor, I think of this again and I think she might have been right. Why waste my time directing if I could be acting? Acting feels good in a way that Directing hasn’t in a long while.
But the irony is, before I went to that grad program, directing did feel as good, if not better than, acting. It was that program that strangled my joy of directing and I only ever get hints of what that joy used to feel like, mostly in memories.
It’s also very funny to suggest to someone that they give up directing to be an actor. Acting is the lower status job and it is relentlessly difficult. Not that directing is a piece of cake but there are a lot more doors open to directors than actors. There is more agency for a director. There is more power.
But still, whenever I get a chance to perform, I hear this woman’s voice in my head, wondering why I waste my time on anything else.
But, of course, I gave my acting career the best shot I could. I saw the writing on the wall and moved into other lanes. (Is mixing metaphors okay when you’re just using cliches?) I don’t think that was a waste of time. I’ve made a lot of things I’m proud of. In fact, I manage to do a lot of the things I want to do a fair amount. Sometimes I act. Sometimes I sing. Sometimes I write. Sometimes I direct. I’m not wasting my time on any of it. The only time that feels wasted to me is when I’m compelled to do something far away from art.
But I think I think of this weird compliment from years ago when I get back to acting because acting feels good. It’s like when you haven’t had a food you really like for a while, you think, “Why have I been eating anything else? Can I have polenta for every meal?” And the answer is, no, no you can’t and you shouldn’t have an all polenta diet. I love acting but an all acting diet would be likely to become just as tedious for me as an all polenta one.
The truth is, if I’d been given more opportunities to act, I would never have fallen into directing. I think writing would have happened regardless, as I did a fair amount of it, even in the middle of some acting jobs. But directing only happened as a way to a) keep my hand in the theatre game when I wasn’t acting and b) to get my writing on stage. Acting itself almost always wins the “Would you rather – “ game for me but the business of getting those jobs always loses it. Acting is always waiting for someone to choose you and I am much too impatient for that game.
But every time I do it, it feels so right, I end up right back in those chairs, post show, listening to a theatre scholar ask why I would do anything else. It’s a compliment. An insulting one but a compliment none the less.
Given the way most of our memories work – in that we tend to remember negative things more than positive ones – it actually makes sese that this memory persists so strongly, even though it happened something like seventeen years ago.
But of course, it’s also potent because I often wonder if I made the right choices. Should I have figured out how to tackle the acting business a little better? Stayed on the actor’s path? I don’t regret starting my theatre company at all but I do regret going to graduate school – so you know it all gets mixed up in questions of what I should have done differently.
Ultimately, the choices I made are the choices I made and I am lucky to get to shift around into different roles. None of which are a waste of time, thank you very much!
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Songs for the Struggling Artist 