Zen in the Art of Awesome
A RED LIGHT BYTES Special About Keeping Perspective in the Entertainment Field and the Culture Wars
I don’t have much to update you on. I was hoping to set a new everyday low price on Substack like the huckster I am, but the site locks you in with a $5 monthly minimum. Kevin is making damn good time on the 2024 Annual Collection, but I still need a few more things in order to properly sell that as well. Beyond that, I’m actually behind on where I want to be with Issue 12, not that I plan to dwell on it.
It is far too easy to become part of the perma-flogging cycle a lot of people go through in this business. Missing personal deadlines which then leads to demoralization which then leads to further delays, and more paranoias about losing readers, your face on a YouTube drama channel thumbnail, and so on. I intend to break this cycle because I’ve come to a quite comforting realization: I don’t need to worry about this series anymore.
What I’ve come to terms with in my work on 365 INFANTRY is that people aren’t here to dump pressure on me. They’re here to read, relax, and unwind. They’re here to enjoy some fun tales of daring-do or some speculative fiction dressed up in a peculiar world of metalhead wolves and cybernetic insanity.
They’re not here to listen to me gripe and moan about how nothing’s going right. They aren’t interested in me screaming about “woke” this or “based” that. They’re not interested in me delivering deeply personal diatribes on hot-button political or social issues. Even more importantly, they aren’t glowering over my shoulder, all day and all night, like a full-time sleep paralysis demon. They aren’t dangling the sword of Damocles over my head, waiting to come down on me for the slightest transgression.
They’re here to have fun. I’m here to help them.
Furthermore, I’m here to help them along in a way only I can. Through my combination of historical knowledge and deep immersion my various chosen fields, in the wonderful work of my coconspirators, from artists to audio editors. I am not your politburo, soapbox or bully pulpit. I am a 20-something maniac with a broad palette, an insatiable imagination, and about a million ways to spin up a story. When you work remotely as I do, it is insanely easy to get inside your head the way I got last year, but also insanely easy to get sidetracked by a myriad of things you have no control over.
I’m not at the reins of our beloved multi-national conglomerate slop factories. I haven’t received any grants (yet, depending on how my Patriot Score™ rates with the new admin), I don’t have many industry connections. I’m still early in my career, and even then, lightyears ahead of most of my peers in this regard. Yet all the same-old fears and frets apply. These also aren’t helped by stewing in the death by a thousand crap products damn-near every beloved franchise from the 20th century faces in the modern day.
I COULD piss-and-moan about the latest in Star Wars direct-to-streaming series. I COULD whine-and-cry about the latest Kurtzman botch-job on Star Trek. I COULD be up in arms about whatever pap Marvel or DC are polluting store shelves with.
But I don’t, because I don’t have a dog in these fights (pun marginally intended). I literally just finished the original Star Wars trilogy this past New Years after having left poor Han frozen in carbonite since 2018. I’m happy as a clam now that I own the original three seasons of Star Trek. And thanks to the collector’s market numpties who the sent the comic industry crashing in the 90s, I didn’t see a funny-book in store shelves until I started thrifting.
This is all not including the fact I started collecting Heavy Metal Magazine as my first real exposure to comics after falling head over heels for that 1981 classic I will never stop referencing. I say all of this to point out the key factor of why I don’t badger on about the latest “woke” development: I value my authenticity more than short-term growth. I respect my audience’s intelligence enough to not play poser and pretend like every grievance in modern entertainment is a shot through my heart. I get why it stings for plenty of people, and I can sympathize.
What I can’t do is pretend I have that same depth of connection. I have seen riches you people wouldn’t believe. If you want to see the kind of crate-digging I do in cinema, go check out my Letterboxd and savor the variety. I’ve discovered fantastic curation spaces like ROVR and legendary music producer Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton. Most importantly, look at what I surround myself with:
The only things that aren’t on screen are in storage or beneath my desk. The latter includes a jam-packed record crate and a pile of those previously mentioned franchises and others, from James Bond to Godzilla to the original Planet of the Apes.
I am not a sane man by the metrics of what is “popular” or “relevant.” I’ve weaponized my idiosyncrasies to create a wholly original fun factory with this series and multiple other projects yet to be seen. I’m a collector, a curator, someone who has actively chosen to surround himself with art and entertainment he loves and is curious about. There’s much talk about writing adventure stories, but precious few seem to take that step into true adventure, whether artistically or in the real world. This cauldron of influences churns eternal in my mind, always welcome to new ingredients, and always simmering at just the right temperature to add or eject what’s needed and what isn’t.
There is simply no room for the latest ass-backwards fumble from Embracer Group or getting up in arms over a celebrity running their mouth on the promotional circuit. There can’t be. There can only be the work, its foundational qualities, and what I hope it can bring to you, the readers, and the public at-large should everyone be miraculously blessed with fine taste in hot-rodding wolven science fiction, or whatever other confection I’ve cooked up.
This is what I mean by that title: Zen in the Art of Awesome.
I am not only at peace with the fact I’m charting my own path in the work I create, but that I’m charting my own path to growing and expanding my reach, well beyond the confines of 365. It won’t be as juicy making increasingly ineffectual protest art about the current president, nor pwning da libs with facts and logic. I won’t get as many clicks as the next guy, and that’s fine. More power to the next guy, because the next guy ain’t me. And he’ll never be me, and he’ll never become my opposite number. Not because I’m that “wizard up on the crystal mountaintop” as Harlan Ellison once described, but because there’s only one of me to go around, and he’s plenty well-spread. There’s only one man crazy enough to make a series like 365 Infantry, still leave room for a half-dozen other ideas, and still have found the focus to juggle them all.
I’ve got sword-and-sorcery stories forthcoming. I’ve got a collegiate short film I haven’t locked a final cut on in several years. I just released the music I wrote for a friend’s short film with more on the way. I am, still, revamping that YouTube channel. I got a lot of good shit in me, and I’m taking advantage of my 20s to get these irons up and in the fire. This is the career I want: an artist, and an entertainer. Not a pundit, not a doomsayer, not someone in it for a quick-and-easy fix to the problems at hand. I’m in it to share the stories I want to share, to encourage the kinds of heroes and creative thinking I respect, and to experiment with forms and aesthetics as I see fit.
There’s a lot of hay made about young men being disenfranchised in the modern day, something pulled into laser-focus with the recent American election. And as you can imagine, having been one of the potential members of this growing party, I’ve got my ideas for that. I know the kind of strong, compassionate male role models I love writing. I know the kind of strength in the imagery I work from: classic American muscle cars, leather-clad delinquents, cowboy warriors. But I also know that keeping people angry forever with no vector for progress is a recipe for disaster. That’s why I spend most of my time here celebrating what I feel is good, rich and nourishing in this world.
It’s also why I’m a terrible ideologue, flitting freely from the ancient archetypes cultivated by the likes of Robert E. Howard and the great painters of yore to a free-wheeling embrace of modernist art & even the finer fruits of postmodern invention, wherever I find them. If I wanted to make a meal of old internet bloodsports phenomenon, I could catch and throw strays across the board.
But I don’t.
Because what I care about are genuine growth and progress. I want to see people get and be better, and I don’t think I’ll get there by beating the fuck out of them for the crime of disagreeing with me (because again, that vector easily goes in all directions). In the words of another inspiration, Ray Bradbury, “I’m an optimist, folks. Sorry to spoil your day.” I believe things can be made right again, and I think we will, at some point, learn to get along again. And not for nothing, I exercise this belief in my work regularly.
My tales are of heroes teaming up when faced with greater evils to tend to, no qualms in the name of faux dramatic tension. I love that scene from Ride the Black Country where Grim and M.A.D. Dog pocket their pride on the quietly held Auto-Moto Corp feud by sharing a swig of brandy.
“It’s not bread Señor,” [Grim] teased, “But it’ll do.”
That’s what I’m talking about. All of it in a single scene: two cowboy badasses— one of whom (Grim Herrera) I’ve all but described visually as a Latino Angel of Death—recognizing when it’s time to cut the crap and get down to business. Whole fucking package in a nutshell.
If you want to understand everything about why I do what I do, that’s it right there. I write about good people, warts-and-all, going to war. I write about heroes you’d like to share a drink with. I share freely the wealth of history and ephemera I’ve collected because they are the things I love dearly, and I routinely pour into story after story, song after song, film after film. All it costs me is the pauper’s sum of short-term attention and perpetual datedness. All I stand to gain from it makes that sacrifice beyond worthwhile. I’m content, yet striving. Focused, but furiously creative.
I shall forever remain your humble, overly cultured maniac, dishing up probably too much fiction for a lifetime, but enough to get my point across: it’s okay to just relax. It’s okay enjoy yourself when engaging in what we all have generally agreed should be a nourishing force for good, whether the simple escapist thrills of pulp fiction or the contemplative beauty of a Rembrandt. It is okay to not be jacked into the Matrix, obsessively shoving pills of all sizes, shapes, and colors galore into your open maw. And of course, the one message that I will cop to subconsciously including in my work, in the form of an old favorite credo:
Think that, but with a little more blood and a helluva lot more headbanging.
May God Bless You & This Force. Will catch you soon.