I’m 34 now. I don’t know what to feel about it because it’s very much a way-station age. I may as well be 35. 

Nothing has ever been easy but I don’t really want to be anywhere else. Nevertheless, to be reflective: my life up until this point has felt like it’s been a lot of false starts. I’ve been trying to go back to grad school since I left school, but have never quite made the space to do the things I need to. Some of that has been my own back and forth about if I want to be in academia, even temporarily. I’m now of the belief ignoring the things that made me tick and interested in life were a mistake. I will not become a Grad Student just because I’m a grad student. I’ve had 12 years of enough ‘real lie’ experience. In other words, yes, I think I might try to get my MFA finally, even if the academic market is bad, especially for the degree. Writing is the only thing I’ve ever felt like I’m good at and while I don’t need an MFA, there’s only so far I can get being the primary editor of my own prose. All the “fears” about studying writing making my writing worse feel silly to me now. 

I write about this because I fear aging out of writing, never mind that writing is traditionally an art where “young writers” are treated semi-condescendingly. It also takes a long time to figure out what you want to do, and for the longest time I was writing to possibly adapt a screenplay and work in TV/Film. It only took realizing you can write a pilot and it never get produced for me for me to feel like it’s a waste of time. Only writer-directors get to call shots about their story and I never went to film school. Beyond that: a lot of screenwriters are hacks, obsessed with pushing buttons in the most obvious way to make a story move forward. In that vein, I have a story for you. I took one screenwriting class at college from a guy who took my dream career path. My script was about a guy who has a nervous breakdown at college and comes back to his hometown, only for his jock brother to commit suicide. He doesn’t buy the official story about the death so he starts doing some investigation into the death only to fall into a conspiracy revolving around his brother’s tennis team committing a gang rape. Steubenville, Ohio was fresh on my mind.

During one of my script criticisms, he flagged a line where somebody asks the main character what he did at the mental hospital. He says, “Sat around and slept.” My teacher scoffed. “That’s not what happens at a mental hospital.” 

Years later, when things got difficult, I realized how wrong he was. 

NEW WORK

“Perfect Strangers: How Commentary Youtube Talks To You” is Apophany #18, hosted at Kittysneezes. I wrote an essay that took an attempt to think about some of the bad things about commentary YouTube. That being said: my entire life I have demanded quality, even finding beauty in the goofiness of kaiju films like Godzilla V. Mothra and Pulgasari. Commentary YouTube is the closest thing to traditional “trash” I have. If I don’t find you particularly noxious-- and sometimes if I do-- you essentially get in because it’s fast food. It’s fun to react to. I say this all to say critical watching isn’t about praising something to high heaven or damning it to the lowest hell, but about trying to understand what it does and the effects. 

Here’s a small bonus for the Buttondown subscribers: here are the official “approved” Chris Sloce YouTube channels:

Various Jon Bois joints: I’m sure you can guess. Jon Bois taught me a lot about structure and how it can be novel. He also influenced what humor there is in my Typebar articles. 

FD Signifier: easily the best “Breadtube” (I say that with strong emphasis on the skeptical nature of quotes) guy. Helps he's actually a sociologist.

Regular Car Reviews: applying literary criticism and observational and scatalogical humor to normal, everyday cars, attempting to read the car itself and its history as a “text”. You’ll either love it or hate it but most Youtube is just vaguely agreeable, anyway.

Sip and Feast: I love Italian food after a life of hating it, but the hate tomatoes have for me is eternal. I watch Sip and Feast to yearn. Once I clear up this acid reflux, we’ll be back.

Frankie’s Shelf: Canadian university student goes through books, some good. But the ‘bad’ reviews are what you want here. Frankie arguably broke the Mia Ballard-AI scandal (if I’m understanding the timeline correctly). He’s funny and mean and the videos are long. Good to take a nap to. 

My Audio Journal (MAJ): vinyl DJ sets of world music. Every DJ is the coolest or hottest person you’ll see on a screen that day. 

Eric Haugen: most guitar teachers are bozos with horrible music taste who teach you tabs like stream of numbers. Eric Haugen teaches you how to play music and tries to make you cool down and enjoy your relationship with the instrument. His music theory videos humanize the general idea of music theory. As a guitarist goes, he has good music taste. All guitarists take a debuff to their music taste the minute they learn the pentatonic scale, and you spend your whole listening life trying to make up for all the Eric Clapton you listened to when you were a virgin.

SCENE, HERD, READ

• I wanted a palette cleanser after Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Luckily YouTube’s free movies came to the rescue with John Boorman’s five alarm banger classic Point Blank. Both one of the great tough bastard movies and an existential journey into a life after “death” (ignore the “Walker died at the beginning!” nerds). Adapted from the first of Richard Stark’s Parker novels, Lee Marvin-- one of my Guys, he looks like he could be a long lost cousin of my granddad’s side-- gets left for dead at Alcatraz and decides to make it everybody else’s problem. The best crime fiction creates a believable other-economy connected to our legal economy. Here, it’s the shadowy corporation known as The Outfit, full of spy tv bells and whistles and menacing guys called shit like Thompson and Brunner. Walker, our version of Parker, goes around and basically owns a bunch of lackeys. He’s not doing John Wick gun stuff or high powered kung fu. You just get the feeling he’s meaner and tougher than everybody else in existence. It’s also been the beneficiary of a push on Criterion and Letterboxd; no earthly idea why, but that’s okay. It’s fucking Point Blank.  

• By the next time we talk, I’ll have finished Myriam Warner-Vieyra’s Juletane. My day job often required me reading mounds of paperwork very carefully, so my reading went slack. Juletane, however, is the crown jewel of the year so far. One minor comment: feminine madness narratives very much tend to now be pitched at a middle class feminine rage, that you should go chew the cords in the office and shit on somebody’s desk. I get it, but that also gets to the point it flatters middle class people. Jia Tolentino stealing from Whole Foods does not make her some working class hero, her parents literally trafficked workers into the states. Juletane has a quiet, simmering rage beneath it about how polygamy tends to assist in patriarchy. I didn’t find this on my own. My partner read it for a class and I am going to finish their copy before they have to give it back to the textbook rentals people. 

• Every Pistons-Magic game I’ve kept up with has been a loss. Everyone where I’ve decided the Pistons already lost they’ve won. The Pistons, when they are mired in failure, become psychically hazardous to me in a way no other sports team does. This has not been a great week, but I’m writing this after Cade Cunningham decided to go off in a do or die game 5 to keep the Pistons alive, scoring 45. It’s hard to love 6 turnovers, but the #2 scoring option this game is Tobias Harris.

COMING SOON

I declare an opp publicly.