Well on my way into a precipitous, yet slow, decline. I had fallen over the edge of the cliff, but had rolled onto my back, watching the summit vanish to a point as I plummeted to, what I had every reason to believe, was a sudden and messy death in the canyon of broken dreams below. My business had evaporated. I was burning the candle at both ends–barely keeping myself afloat, driving a wine truck three 13-hour days a week, plus delivering food despite immense pain and rectal bleeding. I was job-hunting to no avail, getting nothing but dead-air and static. I was living in a one-bedroom flat in Kerns with my then partner, who I refer to as Justine in Penumbra, a cat and two dogs. Fair or not, Justine had put all her hopes and dreams in my abilities, but things were not working out in my career. She spent every night in bed at the bottom of a wine bottle-or two, resenting me while my social-status was cratering; it was a maudlin self-absorption for both of us I was in so much pain from what I didn’t know was a tumor that I took to sleeping on the sofa to spare her my tossing and turning. I would sit up late nights sleuthing a solution to all these problems; to make her want to smile at me again, touch me again, make love to me again. I was at a loss. My self-esteem collapsed. Any notion that I could do anything to improve my situation felt like fantasy. Estranged from Justine. Estranged from myself. I was lost, lonely, dispirited and suicidal. I did a tremendous job hiding it from everyone. No one knew the state I was in. I always went out of my way to project an air of control; upbeat, positive, optimistic. Inside I was falling apart.

Right. And I won't deny my own agency in that We never truly know that another human being is experiencing; It illuminates for me the need to ask questions, make space to grasp the intricacies of other’s lives, but it also brings home the importance of kicking pride to the curb and sharing authentically.

A man walks into a bar with a giraffe, orders two drinks–one for him, the other for the giraffe. Eventually the giraffe, completely pissed, falls over. Man gets up to leave, not bothering with the giraffe, but the barman shouts at him and says, "Oi! you can't leave that lyin' there!" Man says, "That's not a lion. It's a giraffe." Two things about that joke have always stayed with me (1) There's an aspect of the absurd in everyday situations (2) you must call things by their proper name. Whatever it was I had, it was a problem and before it was called cancer it didn't seem like a problem, no matter how much blood and pain there was; no matter how many painkillers I had to take to make it through the day without collapsing.

Part of what tipped it off was my severe anemia. I was driving the wine truck, out on the most stressful part of my run when my doctor called and told me to stop working immediately. He told me that my blood hemoglobin level was at 5.3. The healthy minimum for a man my age was 13.2. I was losing a tremendous amount of blood every day and my liver could not keep up; I was literally working myself to death. Everyday I would come home and struggle to go to the bathroom, leaving a tremendous amount of blood in the toilet behind me so bright it looked like acrylic paint. I'm not sure how I was able to convince myself that was no big deal. I can recall, at that time, feeling that I was the cause of Justine's unhappiness and our sinking household. Here was yet another problem with me that threatened everything. Nothing ever seemed to happen to her; she skated through life with all the support and grace in the world, yet she drank, and I dissociated.

I was in such a morose state that when this doctor gave me the news, I felt two things: shock, obviously. Justine had seen my symptoms and was convinced it was Cancer. I didn’t take it seriously though because I found her to be prone to exaggeration. I had convinced myself it was just a bad case of hemorrhoids. I felt strong, capable and while there were some alarming symptoms, In my mind, I was too young to have cancer. I was also too broke, had too many responsibilities. I couldn’t afford health-insurance and medical bankruptcy was more frightening to me than death. I carried a card in my wallet that said, “in case of imminent death or grievous injury, DO NOT RESUSCITATE.” The diagnosis forced me to see some things I didn’t want to see: someone turning on you because you're not fulfilling their material fantasy is chilling. Seeing that resentment only intensify when you're facing an end-of-life situation is terrifying.

One thing the COVID-19 panic has revealed is the tenuous nature of most people’s lives. Many of us are one paycheque away from disaster and one disaster away from losing everything. I lived that for a long time–for years, but I was embarrassed about it; I felt it marked me somehow, part of an underclass into which I was never born. After the initial diagnosis, and after biopsies, staging and the consensus that not only did I have cancer but that it has metastasized, putting me at a life-threatening stage IV, I also felt relief. I was so sick and tired of trying to make it in the world and failing. I was sick and tired of feeling left-behind. I was sick and tired of Justine’s coldness. I finally had what I had grown to hunger for in the year leading up to my diagnosis. An excuse to die.

Initially I didn’t want to undergo treatment. I wanted cancer to kill me. I felt I deserved it, since I couldn’t manage to sort my life out and I saw the resentment in Justine’s eyes every day. I had once been very successful and had got there by being brutal to myself, like models who crash-diet, or athletes who practice their routines unto delirium. To me the price for success always seemed to be an ascetic dedication, a singular devotion to mastery. I had a sudden and embarrassing hemorrhage, ruining Justine’s Christmas Eve dinner. I had to be rushed to the ER and hospitalized for over a week. Day-after-day, I lay there in the hospital bed often refusing to see anyone because I was face-to-face with my own demons. At one point, I was in a particularly low-state–needing space to sort things out, refusing everyone’s phone calls–even Justine’s. Scared, she called the hospital administration, presumably saying she feared for my life and asked them to send a Rabbi to my room, or someone to talk to. I’m sat there, in a maelstrom of self-attack, fending off these demonic presences in my head, quite literally battling for my soul, when in walks this young guy who looks like Frued and John Lennon’s genetically engineered love-child, right?

I mean beard, grey-cardigan, super affable. Against my better judgement, I liked him immediately. He was the hospital Chaplain. We talked for hours, not about God or belief, but about the pain of living and the virtue of the journey of finding virtue. At one point, we were discussing this Bhuddist metaphor; a man sits on the edge of creation, watching storms gather up from the sea. He knows that rain is coming, wind and hail, but he stays put. He says to himself, “yes, but it will pass. Then there will be more rain, that will pass too,” and so he sits through wave after wave of storms, getting soaked in the rain each time. This is not some passive act of surrender, not at all. It is a willful act of embracing the experience, embracing the gift of being alive to even have it in the first place. I only saw him the once, but that stayed with me such that the next day, I did something I hadn’t been able to do. I hauled myself up out of the hospital bed, and walked one lap around the vast expanse of 7 North where my room was. Prior to that point, I hadn’t been able to move from the immense pain and even greater depression. While I may have resented Justine’s violation of my preference for solitude, and forcing me to talk to someone, I was soberly aware of what I had gained from the interaction.

The next day they were going to take me down to Radiation Oncology to create the cast in which I would need my body to be suspended in the machine, and to give me the medical tattoos for the machine’s alignment. I recalled the conversation with the chaplain: Right, here’s a storm coming, maybe it’ll last for 15 minutes. What can I do in that time? They get me down to Radiation Oncology. Here’s another storm brewing, maybe it’ll last for another 15 minutes. What can I do in that time? They give me an IV and a warm blanket and I lay there for an hour while the ready the CT machine. It was an expanded moment of contemplation; like that scene in Dunkirk where Tom Hardy realizes he's just reached his fuel threshold. It's his last chance to continue back over the channel, back to the relative safety of Blighty... He hangs there for a moment, then turns his Spit back towards France, throttles up committing to do what he can with his remaining fuel and ammo. There I am, in a dark prep room in Radiation Oncology. Here’s another storm coming, maybe it’ll last for another 15 minutes. What can I do in that time? Then I'm in the CT machine. 15 minutes. Then they’ve given me one medical tattoo; 15 minutes. One more to go; 15 minutes. On and on it went, for months until it was a storms every 30 minutes, then an hour, then a day. Until I found myself going to radiation and chemo appointments five days a week; clean shaven, hair pomaded, shoes shined, dressed to kill despite my wasted, fatigued, pained condition. I just took it moment-to-moment and remained open to and even grateful for the experience. There were days when it was too much, when I was throwing up every meal from the chemo, violently shitting myself from the combination of chemo and radiation. My body hair fell out. I started losing hair on my head, couldn’t feel anything cold or feel my extremities, but I took everything moment-to-moment and took care of myself, my body and appearance and something astonishing happened: I began to feel like I was worth something again, like I had a valid reason to go on living that existed a plane of experience distinct from the material realm which had dominated so much of my thinking in the years prior. Living became not merely something I felt I deserved, but something I wanted again.

Justine left me, in the middle of that experience of chemo and radiation; no good-bye, no see-ya-later, just moved out of our flat, leaving behind her keys and a nasty letter about how unsatisfied she was and how my cancer had traumatized her. I didn’t react or engage. I just let her fade into the background radiation of the universe, kind of floating by my awareness, because I was just focused on taking each moment as it came to me. Until one day, they disconnected the chemo pump from my chest and told me I was all done.

As of now I remain under strict medical surveillance. I go in every six weeks for my port flushes and every 3 months for alternating MRIs and CT scans. I have to see a Pulmonary specialist for chemo-induced dyspnea and physical therapy for pelvic neuropathy. My body is healing at its own pace; i suppose my spirit is too, although it isn’t easy to accept that even cancer treatment comes with its own set of implicit traumas that linger even after a cancer patient has achieved survivorship. I’m restless, ready to get on with life. I’ve seen my colleagues advance and move up in their careers and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t experience some envy at that. “Be kind to yourself,” some might say, “you’ve spent the last two years just fighting to stay alive. Can any of them say the same?” That kind, nurturing voice is downed out by the inner-critic; the achievement obsessed tyrant who can’t bear his own mortality.

Absolutely. There are a few levels of angst underlying this bad old habit. I have always been an overachiever. I was never good-looking, popular, or cool, so I compensated by being the best at everything I could. Worse, I had been inculcated into the belief that, because of my heritage I “had to work twice as hard as everyone else to be thought of as equally competent.” A gap of competency perception does exist, so there is a certain truth to that axiom, but that refrain must be counterbalanced, to not become poisonous. For me, it became poisonous and it was exacerbated by some of my experiences on set.

I was shooting a big job for Wacom, about six months after moving to Portland. The plan: execute a shot-list, with models at a battery of locations around the city. Three camera teams, each with their own Hair & Make-ups, Grips and assistants. I was [Director of photography] on one of them. Now, to execute a job like this requires immense planning. At the very least the producers must go in and clear the location–making sure we have permission to shoot there. Making sure the location’s owner understands what to expect–well in advance of the shoot. One of my assigned shooting locations was a laundromat in downtown Portland. I rock up at my stupid ‘o clock in the morning call time, get inside and set up. One of the [Assistant Directors] was with us. It was his job to contact the business owner and give us space to build the camera, light and set up and generally run interference while we do our work.

At his happens the laundromat was owned by a very cantankerous and older-than-dirt Asian lady who, when she saw me with a big camera–I think it was a RED Epic–on my shoulder directing the grip to set up lights, she went ballistic, marches up to me and in broken English peppered with Cantonese, points at the front door and says, “you go! You go!” I stopped outside, keeping eye-contact with the AD hoping he could resolve the situation. Long story short, the owner had a bigoted attitude and would not permit me to be in her business. So the production had to cancel one of the other locations, bring a white DP from one of the other teams to shoot my shot-list instead while I sat outside. At no point did anyone on the crew ever say to me, ”dude, that's f#cked up;” everyone just gawked at me; that 1000 year hipster stare when no one wants to add to the pile of awkward stinking up the room.

The narrative that developed in my mind was, “I’m a liability by default. If I work hard enough, I’ll level up into this transcendent state of being where I will no longer be perceived as a liability: whether it’s a threat to person or property, or a threat to ego in the form of lacking the competence to execute a project that some creative director has a lot riding on. I need to make myself so valuable to these people that no one would tolerate, let alone ignore a situation like that.” I doubled-down, taking on more responsibility, pushing myself to work harder, longer, do more. Be more.

I put an immense pressure on myself because I often felt that, if I fail, no one will be surprised. I have, at times, been insanely envious of my peers–a weakness I’ve had to work on. I wasn’t always this way, but in recent years I began to sense disquiet inside. Especially in the year leading up to my cancer diagnosis, I recall feeling, “I am working tremendously hard to tread water while I see my colleagues cruising along all-smiles and without a care in the world.” There has been nagging suspicion that, despite putting in the work, my outcomes aren’t what they could be. Still, comparisons are often dangerous; you never truly see what's going on behind the scenes of other people’s lives. It's hard to keep that in mind when you're on the outside looking in and when you’re not having real conversations with your peers from a place of candour and vulnerability.

What happens when we’ve become so fixated on grappling with the external wages of status and success that we neglect the internal battle necessary to reconcile our own relationship to those things? It’s like owning a house; you have to invest as much energy into the particulars of maintaining and improving its value as you do retaining it. Neglect those inner landscapes for too long, things fall apart inside. I was so preoccupied with keeping my head above water, being responsible that ethics or philosophical principles seemed like luxuries. I think there are many out there who can say the same. Being forced to set the camera down gave me the chance to re-examine my own relationship to the industry – my own place in the landscape. I didn’t like what I saw.

At worst, cancer took away my trust in my own body. It tore me apart, ripped me in half down to the soul level. It robbed me of things I thought that I had cared about; my business, my relationship, my home, my sense of myself. I lost what are supposed to be the best years of a man’s life, his late 30s when it’s supposed to be going well, he’s at the best of his health, his earning potential; finally taken seriously; finally feeling secure enough to make some commitments in other areas of his life–start a family. Cancer robbed me of that time and that security.

At best, cancer tore me apart, ripped me in half down to the soul level. It robbed me of things I thought that I had cared about; my business, my relationship, my home, my sense of myself. It forced me to get down to the roots of what I really value. It forced me to be vulnerable, be naked, speak my mind, take risks again. It put me back in touch with my creative authenticity, which I had to disavow to show up in the way the industry preferred me to. It gave me an excuse to rebuild myself unapologetically. I’m still in that process. It's bizarre, but cancer saved my life. It saved me from an oblivion of self-erasure.

Sure, and it doesn’t even have to be a life-threatening situation, really. There’s the notion of Grenzsituationen “limit-situations,” the Karl Jaspers concept of living so close to the edge in a moment that we lose our inauthenticity. I can’t speak for others, but my own suicidal ideation was wholly inauthentic; it wasn’t about escaping pain, it was about punishing those with whom I refused to have any boundaries – the ultimate person I refused to have any boundaries with was myself! Living meant to establish boundaries, otherwise how else can you navigate?

Penumbra largely arose out of my being forced to put the camera down and the identity-crisis that caused in me. I had identified with my chosen craft for twenty years. Loosing that was a certain kind of death; having no choice but to sit with the grief, tasting every aspect of it and re-defining my relationship to loss in almost a Neitzchean sense... What if loss and gain aren't only things defined on the spectrum of human experience? Isn't there room for transmutation between those two extremes as well? Death is a transmutation, there's no choice but to surrender to it – to the process of becoming other than what you were. "Okay," I thought, "I am dying and becoming something else, but if this death is a metaphorical one, who says I can't choose what I become?" I don't think I've ever lived more. I set out by at least taking stock and mapping the terrain, where I had been and what I could see. in that Penumbra is definitely a Künstlerroman –James Joyce, especially Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man, Marcel Proust Remembrance of things Past, Karl Ove Knausgaard's Min Kamp; At times I think Turgenev too, especially given that he was politically homeless in his time just as I find myself in mine. Also there’s a dash of Erlend Løe’s Naiv Super, Robert Graves with GoodBye to All That; there’s definitely some Jack Kerouac influence in there, and of course a blistering gonzo badinage from my late friend Hunter S. Thompson.

I did! I worked on a documentary that shot up at Hunter’s place up in Aspen and got to know him rather well over about four years until he shot himself. That was a dark day, but I understood why. After all, what could be more gonzo than going on on your own terms? Returning to further influences, oddly enough there is also a DNA strain from genre fiction, a bit of Raymond Chandler and Georges Simenon. I find what I write has a hard-boiled quality to it, an immediacy, so there are aspects of Film Noir there too; it’s a very dark story, a descent into Hell–voraciously sexual and unapologetically primal in places, in the vein of Henry Miller’s work, in fact I have left a lot of those blistering passages on the cutting room floor, saving them for a novelized version.

I don’t want to be misunderstood as courting obscenity for obscenity’s sake. I do see myself after something very specific in my writing: if I was marked to die, then I did not want to die with so many secrets still on my lips. I also want to create a new genre, a collision between memoir and hard-boiled noir that is direct and confrontational, yet beautiful and transcendent. There was a morning when I woke up and said, “f#ck it. I’m going to be the Hemingway of writing about cancer.” I have a long way to go.

It has in the sense that I think mundane moments are pregnant with beauty. I have definitely been partial to non-American cinema and that has greatly informed my sense of mise-en-scène; I like to let shots breathe. I like more meditative pacing. I like to appreciate and contemplate a moment in the life of the story I’m telling. We live in such an age of distraction; quick-cuts, jump-cuts, everything NOW NOW NOW! MORE MORE MORE!

Slow media, say books, is far more palatable. I’ve always loved literature, but I’ve actually grown to love it more than cinema now because of that methodical pace. A very dear friend of mine, of nearly a decade now, Cliff Sergeant who runs Better Than Food Reviews and I were talking the other day about modes of media consumption: passive versus active. Modern cinema is wholly passive, I’m sorry to say; largely because in The West we have moved away from literary canon as a society. We want instant gratification and titillation; these stupid and wonderful devices in our pockets give us access to so much sensory junk-food. It started with Television, but you still had The Silent Generation before the Boomers who had a grounding in slower media like books. The Boomers, while still more literary than the younger generations, are a massive cohort of media-obsession and their mass-media is considered antiquated by anyone younger than them. Where does it end? When do people rediscover the classics? Will there be a second renaissance; a slow-media revival?

I think that may well be the case. While I feel sorry for all those employed by movie theatres, the industry is overdue for a shake-up of the centralisation that has resulted from decades of vertical integration. Remembering the ‘80s, I can distinctly recall a culture wherein the relationship people had to their content wasn’t passive. You had to seek out new content, and were often introduced to or initiated into these things by others – albums, books; music especially. This allowed me to establish my own relationship to media, take it in on my own terms. As a kid of 6 or 7, during the summers my mother would drop me off at a library to self-entertain while she worked. This was back in the ‘80s when they had media stations with those old reclined Death Star space-age Bakelite encased CRT Monitors; monstrous top-loading Betamax machines with rows and rows of tapes. Without fail, every single day I would rock up and order the same tape, 2001: A Space Odyssey. I would watch that wondrous, cryptic, acid trip of a film on a loop. I watched it more than I did Star Wars; I was enraptured. That is a ponderous marathon of a film too. Kubrick was not interested in pandering to the audience, he wanted you to work for the meaning. I saw his entire canon before I turned 10. The idea of pacing, making the audience do a little work instead of spoon-feeding them is really something that has largely gone the way of the dinosaur in American Cinema, so to get that experience now you have to go elsewhere. The Americans make the best movies. Everyone else and their dog makes the best cinema. There’s no need to place a value-judgement on this either; exporting spectacle certainly has its value and I think there’s room in the world for everything. Outside of the US there is a greater cultural appreciation for interiority.

I think it’s to do with the retention of a literary tradition in other places; especially in places where political and cultural upheavals have been the norm. When entire societies have been shaken up, that trauma is reconciled through the art produced in the ashes–this is an interior process. The US has been uniquely stable for 140 years; the art reflects that stability in that it seeks the antithesis: spectacle, disaster, titillation. The great American export, apart from bombs, is American pop-culture. The irony is that there is no distinct American culture anymore; it’s an amorphous pastiche of consumer fixations. When you export that to places that have an intact sense of heritage–usually manifested by literature, or the trauma processing of great art–I think there is at least an attempt to reconcile it with tradition and that happens inside. That cinema of the interior fuels my fire. When I watch a film, I want to be invited into the inner landscape of the characters. American films will beat you over the head with an entire lexicon of semiotic manipulation–musical cues, the famous “push-in and cut-to the wonder observed” invented by Spielberg. When you want American films post-1977, you can forget about the mental workout of empathizing with the characters. Literature does this better. Non-American films tend to work closer to literary tradition. I want my audience to consume my content actively; I want them to get a workout and come away feeling in touch with something confronting yet life-affirming; feeling like they are wiser somehow. I don’t offer quickie soundbites, platitudes, or glib answers. Life is way too complex for that garbage.

That is an excellent point! I don’t think the “Golden Age” of TV is going away any time soon, certainly not in the age of COVID. Plus, if the studios collapse, I can see this “Golden Age” lasting a generation or two. With more and more people disillusioned with Hollywood and the Dinosaur Media and production technology and techniques demystified, we may actually have something the Entertainment industry has never enjoyed: An bona fide free market!

Atomisation is a technique involving lexicological warfare. The use of critical theory–such as intersectionality–to break individual human beings away from a continuity of knowledge or individual agency; conditioning them into a state of reactions that can be commoditized to serve a given end, for instance a political dialectic or media narrative. Fundamentally dehumanising, in my view. Combatting this is the ultimate Punk Rock, perhaps even taking the essence of the Situationist Internationale minus the ideological baggage; using the Humanities, the sciences and discourse to transcend dialectics. To me, the lexicological warfare aspect of Atomisation is most pervasive in media, manifested by the dialectic of identity politics. An example of Lexicological warfare would be the phrase, “as a_____ as a person of colour. As a woman. As a fill in the blank,” This sort of language is prescriptive, it assumes and allows to be assumed, a certain set of reactions or beliefs based on a superficial category. It supersedes individual agency. I think that is incredibly dangerous because Atomized institutions can’t function.

We’ve seen the outcome of this in microcosm; Evergreen College in Washington for instance. Student activists, claiming to oppose an existing hierarchy–on an ideological construct of equity, upset that hierarchy merely to replace it with their own hierarchy–based on the magnitude of collective grievance that could be subjectively claimed by certain groups. This erased the individual lived-experiences and perspectives of the campus populous and the value of a degree from Evergreen has plummeted as a result, along with enrollment and tuition. These activists subverted their own institution right into irrelevance and potential bankruptcy. To paraphrase a really bad TV show, “sheer fucking hubris!” Reactivity is a corollary to Atomisation. You know the song "Die Eier Von Satan" by Tool? Something I've done is play that song randomly with others in the room–apropos of nothing–as a test. I have actually had a few people react very strongly, "what is this? Some weird black metal nazi sh!t? Turn it off!" The song is nothing more than a recipe for baking egg-free weed cookies in German; but it’s conditioned responses to a certain aesthetic; cues in the presentation that people react to–no curiosity, no analysis, no thought; just reaction by fiat; that's part of Atomisation. I’ve been thinking about the reaction to the killing of Geroge Floyd: riots nationwide, just as the American people were starting to transcend their differences and find common-ground in the face of COVID-19 lockdowns. Very interesting timing and I’m not saying it’s entirely managed or deliberate. On some level these reactions speak of atomisation and conditioning; We saw it after Rodney King, the endless race-hucksterism manifested by the likes of Al Sharpton; Ferguson with rioters being bussed-in from other cities to fan the flames. The political dialectic and those who speculate on it profit, while everyone else loses. Concurrent to this is a sort of religiosity, or a cult–the church of woke, the neo-flagellum religious ritual of taking a knee in supplication before the venerated, the washing of the feet of the activist priestesses; even a caste system based on subjective experience.

In our day we had televangelists. Now we have CNN serving much the same function. It would be bizarre if not for historical precedent; we saw something similar arise in the Outer Hebrides in 1949, a fervid Christian revival which culminated in the obsession with Billy Graham amongst sectors of the British public. When people have collectively undergone a mass trauma, such as a world war or a pandemic, there is often a religious revival shortly thereafter. It’s so difficult to decouple this aspect from the political matrix to which we’ve grown accustomed. Did George Floyd deserve to die as he did? No. What's lost in all this hysteria is that he was a human being; not a prop to be used in the virtue signaling gamesmanship of narcissistic protocol. We are very selective about the deaths we publicly react to; the shooting death of David Dorn, a retired black St. Louis police officer, at the hands of one of the rioters who streamed his death on Facebook Live, has gone largely unreported; his death doesn’t fit the narrative. I wonder if what we are seeing is a conditioned response to specific semiotic sequences of event and narrative; Floyd’s death exploited to facilitate this conditioned atomized reaction on the part of a number of interested parties, to what end who can say? In order to break the atomisation, we need to be very careful of the news media. Did you know Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN worked in reality TV? Did you further know that he signed none other than Donald Trump for The Apprentice? Is it unreasonable to surmise that both sides of this dialectic are profiting? As I wrote in Penumbra: We should not be the dogs fighting for scraps under the master’s table.

I have both German and Austrian Jewish heritage on both sides of my family, but I was raised an atheist by default–my mother really wanted me to sort it out for myself. It’s always been frustrating to know that aspect of myself and never quite feeling comfortable enough to own it. I knew I wouldn’t be accepted. I underwent Genetic testing as a course of my chemo, which confirmed it. Big deal.

Exoticism ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. Due to my skin colour, I have always had to justify and in a sense fight for that aspect of my heritage–ironic because I am mostly around people who would self-describe as being very progressive–they will accept 112 genders without question in the name of tolerance, but regard me with skepticism when I mention my Jewish heritage; double-standards and determinism are still very much in play. I know far more about my Jewish and European roots than I do my African. How can I be expected to claim kinship with a culture I don’t know? I never had a single black friend growing up; I was “too white,” not really one of them. People are shocked when they hear my scouse-dusted English accent, my '50s greaser hairstyle, my penchant for motorcycle jackets and heavy-metal. We have a gross habit in America of presumptive prescription, rooted in materialism–and I don’t mean the sort of materialism associated with consumerism; rather, a preoccupation with assigning people to categories and lanes based on appearance. We don’t look deeper into the being of others. We’ve strayed away from the optimistic individualism of yesteryear; when people were just people. I hate being relegated to a prescriptive category based on other people’s perceptions. I’m sick of having to explain my unusual roots; it doesn’t amuse me.

Exactly. Collectivism encourages us to externalise our locus of control – it undermines our individual agency. The more interesting question, I think, is the degree to which that aspect of my identity influenced me philosophically. Cancer was the perfect opportunity to reconcile Jewish philosophy with my already embodied stoicism; this was an initiation into anti-materialism: In typical Rabbinic doctrine there is the concept of Yetzer Ha-Ra and Yetzer Ha-Tov; a duality of the human soul between material and higher, more spiritual inclinations–animal impulses that drive the desire to live and sustain life, and the higher consciousness which masters those instincts. Both are vital. Both must be in balance. I’ve talked a little about Limit Situations in Penumbra, moments where we experience an awareness of the ephemeral in everyday situations. Undergoing Radiation and Chemotherapy, having all of these horrific side-effects, never knowing that the treatment is making any difference and having every reason to believe it’s all in vain; experiencing the effect the nature of your disease on others, loosing friends and a lover to the reminder of their mortality you have come to represent–through no fault of your own. To be chained to materiality in the face of all that would drive the strongest person insane. I had to shift my awareness more to the Yetzer Ha-Tov, to a mastery over the human animal. The irony is that I work in an industry were a certain type of Jewish identity is heavily represented, yet I live in a body-uniform that prescribes me to a certain extrinsic team and therefore certain precluded capacities and outcomes in some people’s minds. I found that in order to transcend alienation I must either lose myself in a fragmentation of identity, with no home in any tribe, or become a tribe of one, with a strong core sense of self. I chose the latter, which has served me well, but it’s also exhausting. I remain modest about it, very much a gonzo Jew with other ideas from other traditions in the mix as a unified philosophy of myself as Corey. It works for me individually. I think that’s the point of belief, your relationship with the else and else if?

Another aspect of this is the degree to which these aforementioned collectivists remind me so much of the Yetzer Ha-Ra. It's more than just the evil inclanation, it's the part of yourself that says, "why bother? What's the point? You'll only just fail, or people will take a set against you – whatever your poison is." Sound familiar?

This has kept me up nights. My take is a spicy one; I fully expect an unpersoning by the brownshirts of woke culture on twitter. I hate politics with the burning passion of a thousand suns. That needn’t mean I am politically ignorant, quite the contrary. My politics haven’t changed in 20 years. What has changed is that I have outgrown my shy nature. I used to go-along-to-get-along. Some people have been comfortable with me being that way. We all wear masks; facing the world, facing the tribe and facing our self, which nobody ever sees. The thing about cancer is that it brings, into sharp relief, the certainty of death. If you’re able to walk away from that, you don’t scare easily. When it comes to politics, most people I’ve encountered will project their own expectations of my politics onto me. It’s based in part on who they need me to be and in part on my skin colour; people automatically assume I’m hard left, but I never have been. That also needn't mean I’m hard right either! In 20 years no one has actually asked me what my views are; or for my stance on a particular issue. As Joe Biden’s “you ain’t black” gaffe illustrates, there exists a soft-bigotry of assumptions, identities that are that are prescriptive rather than descriptive.

It’s amazing what you can get away with when you’re on the “right” side of history, no? The big lie, peddled by mass-media and enabled by a vacuous pop-culture where critical thinking has gone out of fashion. I think politics is complex and nuanced. I’m instinctually skeptical of anyone who adopts the mantle of a party or a label; one would be well-advised to take the issues individually. I’m a stoic, so I accept what I cannot change. Sticking to first principles and moral philosophy works for me. I recall an instance involving a mutual acquaintance of ours in Denver saw me laughing online at a particularly dank meme, posted by an actor I worked with on a TV Pilot. He was summarising the 2016 election as “Truck Nutz vs. Corporate Vagina.” She eighty-sixed me from her life merely for laughing at the wrong joke; writing me this scathing letter, “You’re not the person I’ve known you to be! I am so shocked and disappointed in you!”

Not just a product of Boulder. A product of a certain mindset that emerges from the universities and the cultural centers; a conviction that they, and only they, are instilled with moral virtue perfected into a science. With that monolithic subjective truth in one hand and a dog-eared copy of the only Foucault book they’ve ever read in the other, they set out to fix in the world what they’ve left unprocessed in themselves. In this case it was a level of hysteria completely out of proportion to the innocuous nature of the incident. In retrospect, I reckon she wasn’t so much angry at me as she was unsettled by how my behaviour had cast doubt upon her own character-judgement; it broke the world. Affiliation is marketed to us as an extreme binary: life or death, "You’re either with us, or one of them!" It’s a regression to tribalism; nothing is that simple. My former friend now must question everything and everyone around her; her sense of security–tied into her social standing in the tribe–is at stake. I can understand that reaction. It’s sad because the nature of our friendship, before our political differences surfaced was quite intimate; It’s perplexing to see the love and care two people have for each other evaporate because media have atomised us, told us ad nauseam that we can’t disagree and still love each other. I don’t think this is by accident either.

Your readers may want to look up an interview from 1984: G. Edward Griffin and Yuri Bezmenov. It is very interesting. I refuse to fall into the same confirmation bias fallacy as others who have cited Bezmenov – I think people should be free to draw their own conclusions.

Then are they your friends? If they're not willing to make room for information that you've presented and if they care enough to ask you why it is that you thought it was worth sharing, then... I don't know. With friends like that who needs friends? If they’re more interested in virtue-signalling to the tribe then trying to understand each other, and you in an authentic way, then what value are they bringing to your life?

Still, I can also remember a time when it wasn’t this way. We were more elevated, had a sense of live-and-let-live. By nature, I’m an autodidact–I like to seek out a broad view; explore conflicting arguments. Despite being the most potentially informed society in human history, we still have remarkably medieval attitudes towards ideas, books, media, and heretics. We now have book-burnings and witch burnings all the time, it’s just now we call it tech-censorship or cancelling. I don’t think the mere reading of a text or attending a lecture necessitates the complete and total adoption of the worldview contained therein. I was reading Ludwig Von Mises, Murray Rothbard, F.A. Hayek, Karl Marx and even Mein Kampf while everyone else was reading Harry Potter–total Ravenclaw right here, by the way. We are seeing a growing call to ban books, ban speech, ban art. Isn’t that flying too close to the white-hot sun of fascism? When you create a culture that shuns critical thinking of course you want to limit their access to information; they might think critically about you! It’s interesting to see Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon–that conceptual prison where implicit surveillance encourages self-policing, come to fruition. It’s that “New York is the new model for the New concentration camp” scene from My Dinner with Andre. Not only was that film making a statement about perceptions of New York life in the 1970s it was a perfect example of a collision between distinct worldviews that is civilized. Do you think that would happen now?

Two things have happened in the last 20 years: (1) The Overton window of discourse has shifted; political stances once considered liberal are now regarded as right-wing, plus people have short memories–a dangerous combination. (2) In pop-culture and The Academy, the mainstream Left-wing are no-longer the subversive underdogs, they have become the establishment; absolute power corrupts absolutely. History has shown that often revolution starts when the moderate revolutionaries gain power and become the establishment. There is a revolution against the revolution, manifested by radicals; from Sans-culottes partisans to woke culture. Gaining un-checked power over the culture is disastrous, you become what you despise. What we’re seeing in pop-culture now is, despite dominating the institutions that manage the narrative, the mainstream Left is un-sexy. Everything is marketing and sex sells. I wonder if there is a biological aspect to this; we don’t think of our parents as sexy. If we elevate those in power to substitute parents–as we have done with our institutions–power becomes dour, priggish–the antithesis of fun; inherently un-sexy to the masses. To be sexy, to be punk-rock, one must stick two-fingers up at this frumpy, schoolmarmish, anhedonic establishment–be the anti-hero; be a little bit dangerous. So you get a partisan reaction, manifested by woke culture, for example and Right-Wing populism; they are reacting to each other. A battle for the soul of The Left rages within its own ranks. A lot of very reasonable, Left-Moderates have been alienated and feel politically homeless. Others have embraced a new authenticity offered in part by right-wing populism– for better, or for worse.

About as much as the garbage education system. What else can you expect of a populous that isn't taught how to think critically? Worse so many of us are traumatised, economically stagnated, lied to. Any port in a storm. To me, that explains the memetic tribes.
The old dichotomy wherein there was enough overlap between the core ideology of each camp no longer serves the silent majority who just want to be decent people and live quiet lives of material comfort. Discourse has been co-opted by the extremists. “I have seen the good and evil that exists on both sides of the managed dialectical political debate and as such have never been a part of either camp.” The primacy of politics in our lives needs to be dialed down a bit. I think it helps to put it in literary parlance: I think in terms of Socs and Greasers [referencing S.E. Hinton’s 1967 book, The Outsiders] instead of Democrats and Republicans, or Labour vs. Conservative. It’s not a perfect analogy, because you have to miss out the class distinctions between the two gangs, but it highlights the point: two rival gangs each holding no more legitimacy than the other and who actually have a fair bit in common, fighting over abstractions. I greatly dislike the “left vs. right / Liberal vs. Conservative / love vs. hate” political paradigm. I think it’s puerile, reductionist and an outright lie. I don’t think it’s useful or accurate. I think that what we currently have is a managed Hegelian dialectic masquerading as an ideological debate. People are caught in that Matrix and the actual debate is one we’ve been having since Rousseau's day: What is the appropriate degree of liberty relative to the axis of Collectivism vs. Individualism. If you look deeper at the striations you find collectivists and individualists within both camps! The Left is usually thought of as collectivist, yet there are strains of The Left that are deeply libertarian. The right is associated with laissez-faire but there are aspects of The Right that are deeply collectivist (elements of the Alt-Right for instance; what else would you call an ethnostate?). I think there is a growing awareness of the degree to which our politics and associated institutions (e.g. The News, Hollywood) are instruments of this managed dialectic. Divide et impera, “divide and rule.” We plebs are the dogs fighting for scraps at the master’s table. What if we say, “enough is enough!” declare a truce amongst ourselves and claim our place at the table as peers? Carl Jung offered in Man and His Symbols that “man’s real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites… We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other,” we turn to institutions for guidance. In the context of his statement he was discussing religious moral guidance versus psychotherapy. Now we seem to have a strange Hegelian synthesis of both–manifested by media–that runs the discourse; it has its priests–woke culture and its critics for example. The partisan social justice warriors on both sides are part of an an old counterintelligence strategy of controlled opposition: Back both sides and play them against each other to suit your own ends. By no means does the term “Social Justice Warrior” in my usage mean exclusively woke activists, not at all! To me the term includes people across the political spectrum–from Shaun King to Richard Spencer. This is because there has not been argued an objective standard by which one can derive what constitutes Social Justice–that is a subjective construct; subjective constructs kill conflict resolution. Further, both King and Spencer are collectivists in that they have proposed the leveraging of institutional power, manifested by state force, to enact their respective versions of social justice. I think that’s immoral and I can support neither.

I think Treebeard said it best when he said, “Side? I am on nobody’s side because nobody is on my side.” I have seen the good and evil that exists on both sides of the managed political dialectic and as such have never been a part of either camp. Perhaps this is an extension of my heritage, never having a distinct place ethnically and never being completely embraced anywhere; I’ve wandered the desert, navigating by my own compass. Naturally, I despise labels, but if I was forced to paint myself with one: I am an individualist who has been and remains firmly in the center–like the middle-child caught between two squabbling parents, thinking to himself that both are complete morons. I don’t need politics, Instead I have philosophical principles. Freedom of speech and freedom of thought is sacrosanct: We can all say whatever we please, no matter how stupid or offensive, so long as we own our utterances. I will not tell anyone else how to live, so don’t tell me how to live. I will take responsibility for my own life, bring value to my community and I trust that others will do the same. I will respect the lifestyle choices of others, so long as no force is being initiated. I will treat others fairly and with dignity, regardless of immutable characteristics such as sex, race, or beliefs and on the basis of their individual merit, so long as they treat me the same way.

Antifa is the last refuge of the historically ignorant. People with any command of history would not pal around dressed like the Goodwill version of Mussolini's blackshirts and claim they are engaged in a moral battle against facism. I am more critical of them because I see them as a more direct threat to me than their opposition. I live in a part of Oregon one might decribe as decidedly Trump country and people are very decent to me here, very affable. Antifa and their ilk claim to act on behalf of people who look like me, but look at their track record and beliefs: I'm not sure I want people who feel entitled to property destruction, violence, assault and outright murder acting on what they project is my behalf. I thought consent mattered to these people? What if I don't consent to the questionable benefits of their "protection?" Thanks, but no thanks.

Exactly. People can believe what they chose. I may or I may not engage with those beliefs. I will not initiate force against others, either directly, or by proxy, but I will defend myself, my family, my property, my thoughts, my liberty–and my natural right to take on that responsibility of armed defense–with direct force if necessary. I’m not part of the Antifa mindset that went from Kumbaya to Kristallnacht in 60 weeks, but I’m also not part of the mindset that argues a dusty conservatism is somehow the way through this minefield.

Low-intensity conflict, that was the M.O. of the Bush/Obama state-department. Civil chaos between factions aided and abedded by elite interests. Only American hubris supports the fantasy that it can't happen here. If we all stopped dealing in the tepid intellectual laziness of labels, instead actually holding discourse, from a place of civility and respect, we’d be a lot better off. Of course, drama sells ‘natch; people want Springer, not Socrates. Politics has been substituted for purpose. People have been debased in a Nietzschean Will To Power environment and feel they have little expectation to achieve any meaningful power individually; they’ve been dehumanised, atomised, reduced to consumer behaviour patterns, economic units; rewarded for narcissistic vanity. They don’t pursue intimacy, instead consuming each other as commodities, ending up with no real bonds or connections to anything tangible, plus they are aware of death creeping in at the margins. It’s a massive existential crisis of meaning and I think that many are cleaving to these grandiose political spectacles to infuse their lives with meaning. There is so much more to life than politics. What has changed since is my ability to speak freely about what I have always believed and who I have always been. Facing death brought that front and centre. Suddenly, I was diagnosed with terminal cancer and had to walk away from everything I was to undergo treatment. There was tremendous outpouring of support and donations. I didn’t care about the political affiliations of the people supporting me, or how they voted, I just appreciated that they did support me. When the chips are down, people by-and-large pull together. Mortality, suffering, those are universals. We are all just human beings; we are all mortal, finite, contrarian, creative, brilliant, idiotic, odd, sock-wearing, farting, laughing, horny, eating, sh!tting, screwing, little creatures thrown together into a bewildering, complex and all-too-short experience. In the end, we’re all equally dead, so in the immortal words of Gad Saad: “Don’t be a schmuck.” Words to live by.

There has been a consumer revolt happening for some time now and it started with geek culture. What Gamergate and Comicsgate demonstrated was that the relationship between producers and consumers had fundamentally shifted. To me, this is evident in the lexicon, specifically the language we use to talk about content. We used to say that an album or a film was “released.” The implicit understanding used to be that a work was being let into the world for interface by our peers on its own merits–we were all equal; this at a time when vertical integration remained in process–it’s the mindset that has changed. Now people say that a work–a film, an album, a trailer, “Drops,” implying a hierarchical dynamic between producer and consumer; making consumers sound like the chicken waiting for food pellets to drop into its cage from on-high. Producers have absolutely no claim to dominion over consumers, nor do producers work for consumers; it is a symbiotic relationship between peers wherein both offer and gain value: capitalism, not perfect, but a example of the market at its finest. With that shift we’ve seen a particular attitude from producers towards consumers, which is evident in the remarks of the Rian Johnsons, Taika Waititi’s and Alex Kurtzmans of the world: “You should be thanking us. SHUT UP. CONSUME. OBEY.” It’s a condescending, entitled attitude that alienates customers. Plus, you have a media establishment that will peddle the narrative of the far-right toxic fan in exchange for access. To wit: “It’s not that our product is slipshod, nihilistic, preachy and derivative. You fans are just card-carrying sturmtruppen of the alt-right!” The product is lousy and the producers are hiding behind a veneer of political grandiosity. It’s cliché now, but a 90-lb woman beating up two 250-lb guys in every action movie says, “Ladies! We’re going to use wire-work and motion-control rigs to bend the laws of physics so you can feel empowered!” A lot of women find that kind of pandering insulting and have been very vocal about it. They get called misogynist trolls too. The biggest affliction in Geek culture is the same thing as in everything else: Gotcha-culture. Virtue-signalling taking precedence over good storytelling and bringing together fans across disparate backgrounds.

Hey, I like him too. I think he's a good director. Still, don't shit where you eat. We have a long history in Hollywood of condescending to the audience. We need to knock it off; the audience not only study our product meticulously, they can go buy REDs and Alexas and Stedicams themselves and make their own product. The comic book industry is already doing it, guys like Ethan Van Sciver are crowdfunding their own books. The era of gatekeeping is coming to an end. If Hollywood, and by extension the greater entertainment industry want to remain relevant, we need to find our humility – quick.

If a bunch of jerks rocked up at Fenway, never having watched or played Baseball – in fact hating Baseball, chucking rules they didn’t like, mutating the game into something subjectively more suitable, and insulting any who complained, fans would riot, and no one would blame them. That’s what’s happening in Geek culture. When the teaser for Sonic The Hedgehog released, Sonic’s initial design was not well received. Director Jeff Fowler’s response was essentially, “I hear you. We can do better.” They went back to post on the show, re-designed Sonic, pleased the fans with the new design and as of this writing, Sonic The Hedgehog is the second-highest grossing film of 2020. There’s a lesson in that. Fans can be irritating, but we are also dedicated.

I can buy that. This is some extension of Revenge of the Nerds (the other wing of that being silicon valley). When the previously marginilised gain power they often become even bigger assholes. I do miss the quaintness of the good old days of geekdom. I still have my original Gary Gygax Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition Dungeon Master’s Guide from 1978 – we can be a little precious about our fandom. What the normies don’t understand is why. Anyone who was a geeky kid in the ‘70s, the ‘80s or the early ‘90s–before this stuff was cool and trendy–will tell you, Star Wars, Star Trek, Dr. Who, Conan, Comic Books, Hammer Horror, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, D&D, Dragonlance, Babyon 5, Hell even Space 1999 was for many of us a refuge from bullying, ostracism, marginalisation, loneliness, divorced parents, family dysfunction, nihilism and the constant stress of looming nuclear armageddon. Still, that doesn't excuse those of us who would rather complain and abuse others. If we're unhappy with how our precious IPs have been handled, we should write our own content; some of us will find it's much harder than we think.

There was no internet back then as exists now. We had to go out and risk in-your-face rejection meeting other kids. Not all of us were athletes, good-looking or socially competent. Finding common ground was hard. If you could connect over a love of Star Trek, or The Twilight Zone it was like finding a long lost sibling. I was an awkward, asthmatic, masking-tape on the glasses nerdy, butt-ugly mixed-race Jewish kid who moved every two years with his parents growing up. I had no siblings and was pants at making friends. If I met someone else who liked Star Trek, Dr. Who, The X-Men, or D&D, BOOM. Instant connection. What’s really special is that fandom brought together kids who might not normally have played together; across class and ethnic divides. As fans we absolutely can be hard to please; we absolutely can allow our purity tests to stymie innovation and we often overlook the degree to which much of what we regard as definitive within the canon of our favourite IPs did at times challenge our own purity definition. For example, most Star Trek fans will tell you they love The Next Generation, but especially season 3 onward when the show “finally found its feet.” What changed? You had 99% of the same cast, same Enterprise, same composers, same universe, same concept. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek was less involved in Season 3, and appointed Rick Berman and Michael Piller as showrunners. It was these two who set the standard for what fans laud The Next Generation to be; they tightened the pacing, fleshed out the world, deepened the characters and established a signature look and feel for that era of Star Trek. They hired and retained great writers. They continued innovation on subsequent shows nothing like the original 1960s series and fans love them; it’s still Star Trek. Why? Because despite inconsistencies, or occasional canon violations, they were quality shows done with love and care–even the worst episodes of Voyager. Case in point, Star Trek Deep Space Nine’s season 5 episode Trials and Tribble-ations: Sisko and company go back to Kirk’s day and participate in one of the iconic episodes of the original 1960s show, The Trouble with Tribbles and it is magic on celluloid! They faithfully recreated, props, sets, costumes, even the lighting ratios and sound mixing to match that (at the time) 30 year old footage and it is a delight to watch. Even if you’re not a fan it should be on your list for the sheer technical achievement. That was in 1996! Here we are in 2020 with 8K RAW camera systems, a smorgasbord of lense options including the vintage glass that used to work these shows, incredibly fast computers and thousands of technicians, many of whom are fans. Kurtzman is setting his shows in that era, but they look cheap and generic–more like a simulacrum of Star Trek. Don’t even get me started on the writing. That joke of a writer’s room is chock full of soap opera scribblers to wit: Seven of Nine. Her arc during Voyager, “my humanity was stolen from me by The Borg. I suddenly have it back. What am I supposed to do now? What is my purpose?” after Star Trek Voyager, “Well, I’m human again and God is dead and the galaxy is absurd, so I guess I’ll hit the booze, casually sleep with every woman I meet and kill people because I can’t be bothered to negotiate or use my superior Borg ingenuity.” How is that even logical, let alone satisfying? These are not people who know anything about Star Trek or have ever even seen an episode. I’m sorry, but if you don’t know what THAC0 is, I don’t want you in the writer’s room of any Geek property! Not that long ago, I was going to pitch a Star Trek show myself, something I had wanted to see done for years. I wrote a treatment and called a friend of mine in LA for a second opinion–an insider. He told me that whatever I did, if I got a meeting with anyone hearing pitches for CBS and Star Trek I would be well advised to downplay my fandom, “They do not like and will not hire fans,” he told me, “as far as they’re concerned, you’ve never watched an episode of Star Trek.” That treatment has stayed on my desk collecting dust ever since. It’s inconceivable to me that I am in an industry, in a place and time wherein, knowing zilch about the product actually gets you the job. In what other industry would that ever be acceptable? I do understand that you can’t have a production that is entirely run by fans. I think the ideal ratio might be 60/40 fans to casuals; the fans know the lore and have a passion for the narrative universe, but they need casuals there to provide a foil and keep them grounded; throw up enough resistance to nudge fans out of the comfort zone and foster innovation.

I don’t think the fans are off-base regarding Nu-Trek under discount Lebowski Michael Chabon and Bad Robot alumn Alex Kurtzman. Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek Picard are dark, dour, violent shows that embody the worst of aspects of our declining culture. Trek used to be about humanity at its best, having grown out of our barbaric past, confronting the unknown; sometimes encountering as aspect of its own past manifest in the alien of the week; sometimes a little cowboy diplomacy was needed to solve problems, but most of the time knowledge, ingenuity and philosophy were relied on to save the day. What they’re passing off as Trek now where our heroes are inveterate narcissists, snarky self-involved trainwrecks, awkwardly dropping F-bombs and shooting or screwing everything in sight, is crass and boring. Worse, it’s nihilistic. There’s nothing to aspire to; no exploration–without, or within. It’s a slapdash, hollow, off-brand cereal version of the Star Trek universe with forgettable, grating characters and they keep threatening us with more of it in a feeble attempt to appear successful to the media.

I’m not saying you can’t be edgy, nor am I saying you can’t be political–old Trek was both at times, but first and foremost, you have to tell a good story with characters viewers can connect with. As fans we want to escape the bewildering dystopia of the 21st century, not watch our heroes perpetuate it in the ashes of some bleak fictional future. Star Trek Picard should have been about getting the band back together, catching up with Picard and company.

Instead, rumor has it due to internal studio machiavellianism, we got Jean Luc sidelined in his own show, the plain Jane who’s the key to everything trope, the other Amos Burton, space crack-addict from those rocks where Kirk fought the Gorn, The drummer from Scott Pilgrim, Romulans from the mean streets of Kildare, and space Legolas. A few days ago a new prequel series was greenlit at CBS. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, set in the decade before Jim Kirk was captain of the Enterprise, featuring Spock, Number One and Christopher Pike. I can forgive them for doing yet another prequel–a prequel can be done well. In the hands of anyone but Alex Kurtzman and Akiva Goldsman I might even be thrilled. I’m not. I have no confidence in the creative team behind this show; I have tasted of their broth and found it wanting. They’re really laying it on thick, selling the show under the message “the fans spoke, we listened,” but no one cares. It’s too little, too late. To say nothing of the fact that these are the same fans Kurtzman and his ilk habitually insult by calling us far-right trolls. It’s bad form and worse business to insult your customers and then berate them for not consuming your product. Game over, man. Game over.

This sort of hubris, like we saw on Picard and continue to see on Discovery really worries me. If the studios completely collapse do those of us in production get to file class-action lawsuits citing gross negligence over the sraps? Those of us who work on these sets have a stake in the success of the IPs. When do we get to vote "no-confidence" in the Alex Kurtzmans of the industry?

Hah! Remember the time we met Chuck Klosterman and I asked him for his take on Black Metal and he said, "oh you mean like Living Color?"

Level four spicy. I’ve been hesitant to discuss this publicly for a long time; the outrage machine is always churning. My opinion will likely put me in the crosshairs of cancel-culture; like Sentinels from the X-Men, only soy-based, hassling every mutant they see. Suffice it to say: The question so many are grappling with is, "how authentic can I afford to be?" This is a frustrating anxiety to grapple with in what is supposed to be a liberal society. One must fear loss of social standing and ability to make a living simply by having an opinion that some people don’t agree with. Orwellian much? Should we not have an urgent discourse about whether or not that is a justifiable feature of an ostensibly free society?

Worse, faux outrage is the new fiat currency. Waxing loudmouth snark-o-tron on Twitter slinging zingers is a prerequisite for social standing. No one's really interested in the content, they're fixated on the semiotic bloodsports; they're at the behest of 23 year-old serotonin technicians who populate big tech and the algorithims they service. It's conditioning. You know the old bit about the chicken pecking a light for a food pellet?

Ronson's book (So You've been Publicly Shamed) is the stuff of nightmares and we're heading at something much worse at ludicrous speed. I can hear Slavoj Žižek now, “This is how ideology functions!” I do believe it is vital to interrogate ideas and ideologies, not attack people. I want to stress that point. I should do my philosophical due-diligence and get clear about my definitions. I am a fervent critic of Woke Culture and Intersectionality: what I’m referring to is a specific brand of postmodern ideology arising from Marxist critical theory. (1) It collectivises people based on immutable characteristics (e.g. race or sex) into groups that suprecede their individual will / agency and determine their consciousness, or experience; (2) arranging them into a stratified hierarchy based on Marxian class structure and subjective grievance. (3) It then weaponises this grievance hierarchy in an attempt to gain institutional power. Ho does this pertain to the entertainment industry? What strikes me is the degree to which the old Hays Motion Picture Production Code, the set of moral guidelines the used to govern the decency standards of Hollywood films, has been spiritually dusted off and repurposed by the new intersectionalist ideologues who've become what they despise; Puritanical dogmatists. They've painted themselves into a corner creatively by injecting a new set of ideologically-based tropes into pop-culture. What results is commercially unviable and diabolically boring. Irony is, filmmakers today have to play iconoclast to a new intersectional faith just as our predecessors had to creatively circumvent the Hays Code. It could be exciting if not for the conditioning to spectacle audiences have become accustomed to. I wonder if there will ever be be a return to roots movement in cinema, a sort of celluloid minimalism that takes the craft back to performance and human collision; Bergman, Cassavetes and Godard for those heretics questioning the church of woke? It's really interesting witnessing this from inside the business, it's like being on the hush-hush side of a two-way mirror. I was day-playing as a [2nd Assistant Cameraman] at the time and recall a conversation at craft services between two grips. Antoine Fuqua–a black director–had just been hired to direct King Arthur (2004), “Interesting they hired a black director to direct a movie about Medieval England,” I heard it with my own ears more than once and this from people who would tell you they were staunch Democrats, hated George Bush, dyed-in-the-wool progressives. If the ability of a director to tell a story was dependent on his/her ethnic heritage, then a large majority of the Western cinema canon would de-legitimised. Certainly Star Wars wouldn’t be Kosher–no one on the planet is from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

It was ludicrous to me on a few levels: Arthur, the son of a half-Roman king, would have reigned in the sub-Roman period, a little grey sliver between the end of Roman rule in Britain and the Medieval period. Britain was not yet England until the Saxons became dominant there. Hearing this, I quietly resolved to bring authenticity and historical accuracy to my own films. I had been able to trace part of my own heritage to 11th century England, including a few knights, played a lot of D&D growing up and always wanted to direct a film about Richard III’s defeat at Bosworth Field. In my daydreams the village idiots who doubt my ability to tell that story fall into embarrassed silence when, unfolding before them is not only a great story, but also authenticity: a disciplined English army with billmen, Half-swording, the sheer press of thousands of men-at-arms being more deadly than the combat itself; artillery, the proper “loosing” of the Longbow (one does not fire an arrow!), and Stanley’s refusal to commit to the melee until he was sure which side would win. What matters is a director’s resolve to tell a compelling, authentic tale; his willingness to learn about the setting he is working with. Growing up, did I have the schoolyard bully telling me that I couldn’t be Luke Skywalker for Halloween because Luke wasn’t black? That I could only be Lando? It was a rare occasion, but sure. Did I care? Nope. I threw those pint-sized assholes The Bird and cracked-on with my day. Kids can be mean sometimes; it’s a universal feature of growing up. You don’t see me guilt-tripping an entire industry into appeasing my unprocessed childhood wounds by creating more mixed-Black Jewish characters, so I can feel personally represented; there's an inherent narcissism of collective experience underlying the representation trend in the industry. I really detest identity politics; It's reductive, it's insidious and it's insulting. For example when people say things like, "the black experience in America," or "the Jewish experience" and so on. That's peak idiocy. There is no such thing, there are only individual experiences and they may or may not be influenced by a person's identity.

The church of woke would have us believe collectivising experience is the ethical, wholesome way to approach social problems. This leads to an abrogation of any individual experiences that don’t support that dogma. Any person of colour who questions it is deemed a “race-traitor” by the church of woke and unpersoned; Dismiss, ignore and suppress–that’s what the woke do to those who think for themselves; who critique or question the intersectionalist narrative. By their own axioms, they can't cancel me! Look at my skin colour: mixed-race Afro-Semetic Jew. I'm a walking contradiction! If they canceled me they would be engaging in anti-semintism and oppressing a double minority of colour, no?

There has been an activist presence within the industry for at least 30 years, but I have never sensed it was always hegemonic. Over the course of give years we’ve seen a fixation on preaching what was once a niche academic postmodern gospel of identity politics and intersectionality in mainstream entertainment. It would be hasty and reductive to blame it entirely on social media; this was around well before Social Media but it was always fringe. There was Women in Refrigerators that started back in 1999. What we’re seeing now is more fervent, more concentrated. I think it’s related to the religiosity I was talking about before. The-Right and some of my fellow centrists have argued it’s evidence of Communist dominion over the industry. Maybe, I don’t know. Sometimes you have to put on different lenses to examine the facts of a phenomenon, I may not agree with all of their conclusions, but The Left are correct on this point. At the academic level, what we call the “culture war” is a battle for who gets to dictate universality–Western Canon.

Hollywood's critics, like The Fandom Menace, have pointed out the woke agenda where Western Canon is concerned, but the right doesn't get off scot-free with this stuff either. Inasmuch as they extolled the virtues of Western Canon, their interest was largely academic; they didn't value The Arts enough to maintain a presence and now they complain that their view isn't represented and that they’ve been pushed out by the Communists. Can you claim to have lost something you didn’t value in the first place? There's enough guilt to go around. At the media executive level, Wokeness and the controversy it creates is a product; what we have is a grievance industry. It’s the old strategy of controlled opposition (playing both sides against each other) and a lot of people are making money from the culture war dialectic. A managed dialectic makes the most sense to me, but we should examine that which lies beyond politics. There are aspects of all of this that resemble the cycle of narcissistic abuse, where dredging up trauma is used to control the reaction of the co-dependent. The genesis of the church of woke may also lie in the collective trauma of 9/11, the low-intensity anxiety of War on Terror and the economic trauma experienced by The Millennials during The Great Recession. Collective trauma incites religious revival, manifested by the church of woke–Millennial evangelicalism. I see aspects of each of these modes of analysis that are part of the picture. How does being an industry insider inform your viewpoint? Everyday people, outside the industry, might assume the political grand-standing is genuine. Being an industry insider, I know that isn’t the case. I have the receipts. Despite what woke Hollywood would have you believe, it is anything but. The industry golden oldie goes a little something like this: “Let’s pat ourselves on the back for saying all the politically correct things, while doing absolutely nothing to uphold the values we are peddling. Worse, let’s expect the public to pay for the privilege of consuming our holier than thou moralising.” Criticise them and you’re an “-ist,” a “-phobe,” or “far-right.” It’s tiresome; it’s also Bullsh!t; they don’t walk their own talk. Exhibit A: Kathleen Kennedy, CEO of Lucasfilm, chin-wagging wanting more female directors while hiring all male directors–except one: Victoria Mahoney, who directed Second Unit on Rise of Skywalker. I’m sure she did a fine job; I wouldn’t know, I stayed home. Second Unit Director is not an insignificant position. I have both shot and AC’d Second Unit on features–this is very technical stuff; by no means is it the B-Team. Still, that’s all there is, Kathy? Bluster about “the force is female” and hiring female directors and the one she does hire–who just so happens to be a woman of colour–is relegated to backup dancer? Maybe that was Ms. Mahoney’s preference, but taken at face-value, Kennedy’s hiring stats do not reflect those of someone committed to her professed intersectional beliefs. This was reinforced recently when she hired Leslie Hedlund, who worked closely with one H. Weinstein to head up a female-centric Star Wars project. You can’t make this stuff up. Worse, Kennedy’s apologists wax apoplectic about how the “toxic fans” would never accept a female director on a Star Wars movie. You know who I would give my left eye to see direct a Star Wars film? Kathryn Bigelow. Point Break. Strange Days_. The Hurt Locker_. These are iconic films. The woman can direct action and suspense; she knows quality, is a master of her craft and it’s a crime Lucasfilm didn’t crawl over barbed-wire and broken glass with suitcases of gold bars to have her direct all three. Disney Lucasfilm could’ve had their cake! We would’ve had an iconic, engaging sequel trilogy instead of the phoned-in, milquetoast mélange of incoherent broken dreams Disney served up. It’s not all bad, I quite liked Rogue One and didn’t mind Solo, but the sequels were the single-greatest blunder in cinema history to-date. They let ideology, lazy writing and poor storytelling into the most iconic franchise of all time. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. I don’t see how Star Wars recovers.

I retract my earlier statement – I didn't go far enough: The greatest affliction facing geek culture today is a lack of backbone. How many times did we, as kids fed up with the bullying, simply take our toys and go home? There are millions of fans, many of us are in the industry. As much as I enjoy and respect the critiques of many in The Fandom Menace; it’s easy to complain. At some point, you have be willing to offer a solution. Can you imagine if we all pooled our resources, started a studio to produce the content we wanted to see and stopped giving our money (as much as is feasible) to Disney and Viacom? We are so attached to these old beloved IPs–I get it, But we can create our own, carve out a new market. Some of us in The Fandom Menace are creatives, others are finance wizards. We need to talk. We need to take our toys and go get busy someplace else.

I’m not sure I can readily say that it’s been exclusively either, but I do tend to lean more into pessimism on this point. What I think is interesting is the idea that the rise of apocalypse-porn or dystopian futures is really a symptom of a certain societal malaise based on generational striations of wealth and outcomes. If you go back and look at the cinema of the 1970s–the decade where not only the Hollywood blockbuster was born but also the disaster movie genre, the apocalyptic/disaster films of that decade always sought a return to order and a supremacy of the status quo by the end of the film. Today that isn’t the case. The genre delights in the celluloid apocalypse, the exposing of the fractures in our precarious system and people aspiring to be lords of the ashes, finally able to “better” themselves in a material sense now that the institutions of power and wealth are no more. I think the genre has desensitised us to the very real dystopian nightmare that is unfolding around us. Much of our entertainment has made it seem inevitable.

On some level I find it completely understandable given the massive disparity of outcomes between the generations, but I also find it profoundly disturbing because of the complete degree of naivete and historical ignorance on display. All you have to do to see the apocalypse is look at places like Venezuela, Somalia, the transition from Zaire to The Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Right. And you see apocalypse in microcosm; the human animal shows up in a situation of low-intensity conflict. What we have in the genre is a sort of escapist social justice fantasy–people want to escape the economic disappointment of their lives, the slow erosion of their futures and opportunities; attain a sense of liberty and material justice on their own “law of the jungle” terms; and of course in Hollywood the worst is never as bad as actual reality! Apocalyptic pop-culture also smokes of something that Frederic Jameson called “nostalgia for the present,” namely that genre often tries to bask in the allure of certain aspects of the moment they are currently experiencing, only exaggerated by fiction. Look at something like The Handmaid’s Tale, certainly drawing on the perceived experiences of certain women and exaggerated as spectacle, even The Walking Dead is more a musing on America’s current socio-economic landscape and economic predation anxiety than it is about zombies. Is it a bad thing?

What's that line from Apollo 13? "They said we made going to the Moon look like taking a trip to Pittsburgh." I loved The Walking Dead for the first three or four seasons. After that it became apparent the producers wanted to keep the money train rolling. It's hubris 101, don't overstay your goddamn welcome. Tell a tight and emotionally compelling story with satisfying payoffs. Use the goodwill gained for the next project. Know when to take that last bow and exit stage left.

I digress. On the genre as a whole, I don’t want to fall into the moral value judgement trap of becoming like the Jack Thompsons of the world, banging on about Mortal Kombat or any of various satanic panic era fundamentalists seeing Beelzebub in their breakfast cereal–suddenly your Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide as a gateway drug to child sacrifice. I think the arts are a place where we can explore these deep-seeded fears and desires–this is part of why I find the takeover of the entertainment industry by ideologues so distressing. If anything we should be opening up the dialogue by exploring these ideas even deeper; for instance David Brin’s The Postman done as a series could be an interesting opportunity to explore the Overton Window and Postmodern American Identity. That’s one of the problems with postmodernism: nothing is ever merely what it seems. That was the pandora’s box we opened back in the 1960s, now nothing can be simply entertainment.

People often say I'm intimidating, that I have a certain presence that fills a room; yeah, okay. Whatever! Truth is, I'm just like anyone else. I want to feel a sense of belonging and purpose; I want to feel a sense of contribution; like my work is amounting to something in the world. Those feelings have eluded me for a long time and I'm growing a bit weary of wandering the desert. I just want to help people tell good stories, be a part of a community and am growing increasingly alarmed that, hitting my 40s soon, I have never achieved that existential certitude. Why? Ok, 100% of it is my own fault, I take full responsiblity for my life, but I feel like I have brought a lot of value and yet am still struggling on the margins. I'm ashamed to admit that fact, so I don't. Thus people have no idea and of course can't help problems they're unaware of. That's the first thing I have to fix and it's chilling.

I want to quote something from a letter I wrote which I'll explain later; I think it'll set the scene:

"I'm working 1st AC on a commercial; we were doing a dolly shot; a push-in on a Fisher 10 with ARRI Alexa and an Angenieux Optimo 28-340mm lens–wide open aperture, depth-of-field as shallow as a sheet of paper. Plus, the shot is over-cranked (slow motion), so we're pushing in quick. 1st ACs get how demanding a shot this is; it's the proverbial tossing a baseball over a house from the front yard while your buddy tries to hit it with a rock from the back garden. I'm doing my job, pulling focus and two takes were a little buzzy–it was a big move we were doing, on a tiny can of bottom shelf-wine and of course the branding on the can needs to be tack-sharp through the move–it’s the “hero” shot. The DP chewed my ear off, and the phrase "fucking diversity hire" was uttered and of course this is happening with an entire crew watching and no one stepped up to be the voice of reason. You just don't speak of it. It all ends up swept under the rug. This is happening in progressive Portland, right? I asked for a re-take, took my marks, nailed the focus and didn't buzz the remains of the day, but the damage had been done."

I have more of these. They are very painful to talk about, and perhaps just as painful to hear. When I fail at something, or am percieved to be on the "B-Team," bringing fewer resources to bear on whatever it is I'm doing, it is embrassing. There is an inner critic that pours hemlock into my ear, "no one's surprised." It goes back to what I was saying about Identity Politics, but I think people fail to understand that I am a human being who wants to be judged on the basis of his individual merits. The infusion of identity politics into the creative industries has done far more harm for people like me than good. It has directly cost me opportunities and it has closed doors to me that were otherwise open when merit and ability was the metric by which technicians were judged. The mechanism of intersectionality that I hold as culpable for this is the cult of minority authenticity; this is the prescriptive component of collectivised racial identity as marketed by the "progressive" left. It suprecedes individual merit and I think that directly undermines the progress people such as myself have made in these industries. Because of the growing intersectional orthodoxy in the creative field, I’ve been relegated to a diversity hire; people see my skin colour first and foremost. All the education, training, skills and experiences I have cultivated over 20 years take a back seat to how others'preconceptions of my identity fit into their need.

It has been immensely distasteful to realise this. I hear Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols saying, "D'you ever get the feelin' you've been cheated?" I have grown existentially unnerved; there is a sense of homelessness, of unrootedness I often feel now. At least with certain elements of the right I know I'm not welcome for reasons of ideology and aesthetics, but a growing new-left intersectional matrix has become normalised wherein I am unpersoned for different reasons; not an individual but a minim of an abstract collective, employed as a prop to serve their agenda. Where do I and people like me, who want to work hard and get ahead on their merit, go?

It's a cliché, but when I was growing up I certainly heard the refrain, "You've got to be twice as good to be considered half as worthy," but I never experienced it until woke culture became so prevalent. I think about this a lot because it’s difficult to reconcile a sharp decline in my career outcomes with a culture that claims to uphold progressive values; I’ve experienced a great deal of marginalisation as a result of this ostensibly well-meaning mindset. People may say, “dude, don’t take it personally,” well you guys–the "progressive" left activists, the virtue signalers–are the ones who embraced an ideology which conflated the personal with the political; when you do that it’s like opening Pandora’s box, it all becomes relative and no one can claim an objective standard by which things can be judged.

When I was fighting for my life against cancer, a lot of my colleagues in the industry sent me messages with the same refrain: “Get well soon, we miss your enthusiasm.” Something about that really bothered me. I remember thinking, “All the traits and adjectives one can use to describe a person they’ve known and worked with for years and the only one they can come up with is ‘enthusiastic?’ What about professionalism, diligence, skill, vision, talent? Something that’s valuable in a tangible way. Enthusiasm is not valuable; it’s a fleeting emotional state and it can be faked.” I started wondering how I show up to people, do I even show up as a skilled professional, a peer, or am I some sort of strange mascot? Not taken seriously? Allowed to play because I make people feel good about themselves? It was a very strange sense of alienation. I found it disorientating. I wondered if people simply misunderstand just how much I care about professionalism, providing the best value possible, being the best human being I can be. I also think that I project such an air of success and optimism that I think people really misunderstand the degree to which I really am out here on the margins, not exactly holding court. I’ve been silent about the reality of my experience for a long time, trusting that the right people will see my worth. I’m sure I can afford to gamble on that any longer.

At one point, I was nearing the end of a blistering second round of chemo, and a producer called me up, pitching me a documentary project involving All-Black bands in musical genres not considered black. Bands like Bad Brains and Death. I had been in the Punk and Heavy Metal scenes, knew all of that music inside out, obviously I was thrilled. Listening to him make his pitch–he was really laying it on thick, talking about how professional I was and what a great [Director of Photography] I am–I couldn’t help but think, “Now hold the phone: You were the guy who fired me from my last agency job eight years ago, and I haven’t heard from you since. This doesn’t add up. If I am such a great DP, why haven’t I heard from you? Why are you ringing me up now out of the blue, pitching a doco about all-black punk and metal...oh...I see, could it be that you’re thinking if your DP is black you’ll have a better chance of getting access to these bands? So it has nothing to do with my professional merit. Got it.” Such has happened before. It leaves one feeling commoditised.

There was an instance when I was working on an ad campaign and one of the agency people, quite apropos of nothing, launched into his tangential adoration for Black Lives Matter. The whole time he’s looking at me for validation like I was some bobbing head “MmmHmm-ing” in a Baptist church. I wanted to interject, “look mate, you’re free to support whomever you please–we’re supposed to live in a free country, but it’s a bit presumptuous to assume that I am going to give you woke points for supporting Black Lives Matter; I happen to strongly disagree with their ideological conclusions and their methods. I am an individual with his own mind!” At that time, I stayed quiet even though it vexed me. Discretion was the better part of valour, I had a career to protect. When we find ourselves living in a way that is antithetical to our own values, it festers like an untreated wound. Sooner or later it needs to be drained.

I cannot tell you how many creative agencies and production companies champion diversity, publicly lamenting their inability to find diverse hires, only to ignore or reject me when I rock up with a shiny CV and shinier shoes; unless they have a specific project that is diversity-adjacent, or in need of a certain cultural fit. I attribute this directly to the intrusion of identity politics into the industry because it prescribes people’s abilities! The very ideology relies on essentialist, collectivist stereotypes. It strips people of their individuality and assigns them to a category and a rigid field of experiences and views for political expediency! I have worked hard to attain the education, the credentials, heaps of experience, yet haven’t had a full time position at an agency for nearly a decade and it’s for no lack of trying or ability. It’s both bewildering and frustrating. It’s hard not to feel like the prevailing attitude is, “we don’t want you here because your mere presence changes the dynamic in a way that makes us uncomfortable. We got you though, bruh. Vote for our politicians. Your welfare cheque is in the mail.” It’s an effect of the prescriptive versus descriptive dichotomy of the black identity I alluded to; there are certain behaviours that you must adhere to in order to be authentically Black. I come from none of them. I have always expected to be judged on my individual merit.

Being politically unaffiliated, I worked on campaign ads for Democrat candidates–not out of preference. Naturally, political discussions occurred on on-set. Inevitably race-relations would come up–it’s the ultimate opportunity to virtue signal and win woke points. No one ever asked my opinion–they assumed it. I wasn’t there to have one any way, I was there to do a job. On set I check my politics at the door and focus on the task at hand, but they treated me as neither an individual, nor a peer. During the 2016 election, I’m working [1st Assistant Cameraman] on one of these shoots, balancing an ALEXA Mini package on a gimbal; a complex technical procedure that needs to be done quickly and accurately-a lot of moving parts. One of the producers, a big-wig at an agency that does high-end campaign ads for Democrat candidates, rocks up to my Magliner cart while I’ve got all these gear cases open, immersed in a sea of equipment he knows nothing about, and he says to me, under his breath, “just so we’re clear, there’ll be no monkey-business on my set.” Completely out of left-field. Why he felt the need to say that to me at all, let alone single me out when to my knowledge I had done nothing to warrant such an unprofessional and frankly threatening remark was beyond me. There’s a shockingly casual condescension, an assumption that I am somehow unqualified or incapable and this is coming from people who bloviate about their wokeness.

After November 2016 the industry spiraled into plaid-speed Trump Derangement Syndrome and the virtue signalling thickened, so seeking a silver-lining I thought “okay, maybe the industry will make more of an effort to be inclusive.” Not my best deduction! Business flowed like molasses in Winter and I started relying on working food delivery–for three different on-demand companies–to make ends meet. Without fail I found myself delivering lunch to these hip Portland creative agencies, the only person of colour in the room. There was one instance when I was delivering to an agency I had actually shot a job for in 2015! Apparently, no one recognised me! There I am chatting with the receptionist who had done my intake paperwork and she’s asking me how long I’d been a delivery driver, if I liked it, what I wanted to do for a career, and paternalistically giving me the whole spiel about what they do. I interject, “I actually worked with you guys last year on a TV spot for a nationally recognised veterinary hospital, I was your DP.” Poor woman’s face went beet-red. That’s not even an isolated incident; I have experienced a tacit assumption in these agencies that my presence there in any capacity beyond talent is so far beyond the norm as to be inconceivable. Despite 20 years experience, I am sui generis in production.

Creative agencies virtue signal from the rooftops, bang on about how much they value diversity and inclusion, but you don’t see it reflected in their hiring beyond casting; they will hire diverse actors–insidious because these are gigs, not full-time positions! They have the ancillary benefit of semiotic suggestion; giving the public the impression that these agencies are diverse, progressive businesses which they are not. I’m not arguing that diversity for its own sake is even a benefit. It’s the hypocrisy of the industry I have a problem with; It’s become fashionable to make the mere holding of politically correct beliefs the standard of virtue; all you have to do is think the right thoughts, say the right things and you’re golden. This is nonsense. At any other time in human history, virtue required action, sacrifice in-fact. For all of the moralising the industry engages in about identity politics, it is they who are thwarting progress. Who else runs the agencies and studios but the self-described woke? I know there are many good people there who genuinely want to make a difference, but by and large in the agency world, they don’t want to give anything up.

When the Walter Moesely scandal broke–this was the incident involving an expose in the New York Times wherein Moesely, a mixed-black Jewish man like myself, recounted an incident in the Star Trek Discovery writer’s room: he was sharing an anecdote that involved him using the word n!gger. He was reported by another staffer who overheard the anecdote. Moesely receives a reprimand call from HR citing hate-speech to which he responded, “I am the n!gger in the writer’s room,” before quitting the show. Some in the industry have grown so zealous in their woke activism that they create these situational moebius strips that no one can navigate. When I heard about this, I wrote a letter to Robert Meyer Burnett sharing some of my own anecdotes about the doublespeak that goes on in the industry–including my own theory of cause which I won’t unpack here except to say: There is an essentialist fallacy at the heart of intersectionality: “if you ostensibly belong to a demographic that is considered historically underprivileged, then you are inherently incompetent.” The intersectionalists need an institutionalised victim underclass to justify their existence and the very lucrative benefits therein. They have a vested interest in perpetuating the very problems they theoretically exist to solve–grievance is big business. My perspective has evolved since I wrote the letter. I'm sure it will evolve again.

Anyway, Robert was gracious enough to read it on his show, for which I am eternally grateful. This was when I began to first share my own experiences. I’ve engaged others about these issues with no luck. It’s been hard to find a platform. The catch-22 is there seems to be just as many people in the Fandom Menace who virtue signal by talking about this hypocrisy in the abstract, but go silent when an actual industry insider, who has been impacted by the very issue, reaches out with evidence. This is one of the critiques I hold towards those who critique woke culture; they love to score points teasing out intersectionalist hypocrisy, but they exhibit some of the same exclusive behaviours. The temptation to virtue-signal is so strong and I don't think either camp is fundamentally immune to it. I’ve had a lot of doors slammed in my face on both sides. It’s hard to get this stuff out there because it doesn’t fit the narrative, it’s too nuanced. I feel like, if I could do, it would encourage others with similar experiences to speak up. We could really change things.

There are people who will never speak to me again because of this critique. I think that’s too bad. I could have named names, but made a conscious choice not to, because I’m not here to attack people, I’m here to criticise a mindset. The “woke-Twitterati,” who have become the outrage zealots of this decade analogous to what Christian fundamentalists were in the ‘80s and ‘90s–and woke is a secular religion in my view–will “REEEEEE” and rage because they often think they are morally righteous and above criticism and in that, they have become what they despise. Nietzsche said, “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.” I think sometimes we have set aside our view of ourselves, as morally righteous, be humble and open to feedback. We may not always be doing the good we think we are doing. I fully expect doors to be closed to me for “wrongthink.” So be it. I recall something James Joyce said: “non-serviam… I will not serve that which I no longer believe.” I will not serve that which I have never believed.

People think of Portland as this bastion of progressivism, it really isn’t. On a few separate occasions I have been stood in gentrified areas of the city, wearing my trademark perfecto jacket, and have experienced shouts from passing cars, “fuck your jacket, n!gger!” Stay in your lane! The dystopia that has plagued us throughout human history is not absent here; the affluent live in secure towers, pretending not to see the human feces and used needles on the streets, patting themselves on the back for having the correct politics. You’re either in the tech/creative faux-woke camarilla, or you’re working a dead-end service shift. There’s an image of Portland that is marketed to the world that is pure fiction: A quirky place where the dream of the ‘90s is still possible and in our America, love wins.... It’s a sham. It’s an elitist culture and with elitism comes a self-congratulatory social ecosystem.

Portland has long held a reputation for being insular, even suspicious of the motives of outsiders in an endearing if not somewhat provincial way. An infusion of Californicated cash and notoiriety has changed the social and cultural landscape of the city and the everyman feels pushed out. Three striations have developed, that I call “native,” “accepted transplant” and “ungeziefer.” I fall into the accepted transplant camp, I moved here just before it exploded and tried to bring value to the culture through starting a small business. I found a little bit of success but before I could get established and right on my heels, came the ungeziefer–mostly from California and New York, and they had cash and connections someone like me just doesn’t. Naturally, things shifted to cater to and attract more of that set and they now have their playground. As such it’s become even more exclusive. Ten years on and I’m still on the outside looking in; I don’t feel like I belong here anymore.

I was too unsure of myself. I didn’t have a real sense of my value in the market and I underestimated my ingenuity. I lost too much time trying to gain economic security playing Watson while my nature is Holmes. I focused so much on IF, THEN logic: IF I can show up the way people need me to show up THEN life is possible. I never felt extraverted or gregarious enough to be taken seriously running my own agency or being up front, rubbing elbows with investors, so I never had the confidence to pursue all the opportunities I should have. I have always been far too comfortable, running things behind the scenes–it’s just my nature. There was a time when that could be perfectly lucrative–you work some technical job at a company for 35 years blah-blah-yadda-yadda. Now the economics have changed: It’s more of a gig-economy and we all have to at least pretend to be CEOs. I am a meritocracy fundamentalist, but I do question the instruments we now use to judge merit. We place for too much emphasis on personality; kind of an economic death-sentence for someone like me who is so utterly introverted.

Cancer has given me a new confidence because, if that didn’t kill me certainly taking more social risks won’t either. I’m also comfortable knowing that I’m not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, so seeking out people who align more harmoniously must be part and parcel of my strategy going forward. I also think being in a less competitive, more cooperative community has merit right now too. Most big cities are not places where people pay it forward. The best one can hope for is to fall into a clique and I never did in Portland–ten years on, I’m still an outsider. Maybe I can bring my value to places that don’t necessarily have anyone with my assets and skills and find myself in the company of people who do want me in their umwelt.

By the same token I have noticed, of late, myself slipping back into old habits of workaholism; I'll be up at 6:00 am and working until midnight. It's a kind of trauma response–I have a sense of urgency and lost time because of the cancer. I don't want to fall behind my colleagues in the proverbial marathon, but they're already over the next hill. I suppose I should ask myself if I want to keep running in the same race, or cut a new path entirely and run for myself.

In personal matters, I’m learning how children work; every day presents an opportunity to rediscover the world again through a three-and-a-half-year-old’s eyes. Showing up as a step-father is top-priority. That puts me directly into the proximity of my inner demons–who I am and what exactly is my value as a man? I come from a time when a man’s value was strictly economic; the potential to realise that has been shorn away from many of us, by globalisation, automation and especially our naivete in thinking that voting for the correct politicians will guarantee our economic futures. We’ve been hugely negligent in that regard and allowed profiteers to abscond with ours and our children’s future economic prospects–foxes guarding the henhouse and we put them there. For me, those economic pressures feel exacerbated by two years on the professional sidelines battling cancer. It does keep me up at night sometimes; and the world only gets crazier. I’m also battling the trauma of the cancer experience itself. It sticks in the amygdala and it can only be removed somatically. For me it's affected my sense of myself, my self-worth and my relationships. I wrote a piece about it on MEDIUM, which no one read; probably because it wasn’t “relevant,” meaning it was blue-penciled by the apparatchiks curators. That is a whole can-of-worms for another time.

I want to leave behind a body of work that helps propel us back towards individualism. I want to nudge us out of the dialectic and get back to being people again.