I have a plan. Plane tickets are being purchased. Schedules are being drawn up. I'm going to be heading back east at the beginning of June, to finally see my mother and sister, and to have a belated service for my father. I am both excited and trepidatious – after over a year not being around more than one person at a time, I'm not quite sure what to expect when out in the world again.
Will you be in the New York area in early June, vaccinated, and ready to be around other people with only minor freakouts? Let me know.
Nightmare Factory
If the actual world isn't unsettling enough for you, check out the utterly creepy and gorgeously upsetting horror short In A Foreign Town, based on the stories of Thomas Ligotti.
Huge congratulations to my friend and all-around mensch Michael Shlain on the release, and to the always amazing star Yuri Lowenthal, about whom I've made my feelings very clear:
Quilt
Panels from the COVID quilt – including the one with my Dad – are on display at the California Science Center.
The quilt was made by 14-year old Madeline Fugate, who wrote:
Thank you again for sending me Memorial Squares and allowing me to honor and remember those you loved and lost to COVID-19 on the Covid Memorial Quilt. My hope was always to display the panels of the Covid Memorial Quilt as a living memorial to be seen in person so we can all grieve together and honor those we lost. I am proud to say two panels were chosen by the California Science Center in Los Angeles, California, to be on display in their Covid-19 themed exhibit called "All In This Together." That exhibit is now open to the public.....Thank you again for letting me tell their stories. I feel like I got to know each person myself and it helped me heal. I promise I will remember them.
Thank you, Madeline.
Happy Birthday Evan Chan
This week was the 20th anniversary of an event that altered my life in more ways than I can count. Sometime around April 11th/12th of 2001, the Cloudmakers message board was started on Yahoo Groups, where it quickly became the main hub for players who were following "The Beast," aka The A.I. Web Game, aka the first Alternate Reality Game. One of the first things I ever wrote for publication was a memoir of playing this game. I could fill a hundred newsletters with all the ways this game changed my life. But the most important of them all is that I can honestly and factually say that I first met my wife at a rally for the Anti-Robot Militia.
ARGs are an ephemeral art form. Most of The Beast has been lost. I keep hoping someone will write the definitive history of ARGs and create a repository for all of these incredible experiences.
Fun And Pretty Things
Since "The Beast" knocked my career sideways, I've had the privilege of writing several ARG and ARG-adjacent projects. One of them was an ARG for the movie 10 Cloverfield Lane, which was just covered on the ARGonauts podcast.
I had a total blast listening to this, and it brought back some really fun memories of working on the project. (And yes, I did get Yuri into this one too.) But it also reminded me of something that I had totally forgotten, or perhaps never quite realized.
By the end of 10 Cloverfield Lane, the film tells us exactly how delusional John Goodman's character Howard is, but much of the tension of the movie revolves around trying to figure out how much he knows about what is really going on outside the bunker in which they character are trapped.
The ARG we made took place in the weeks leading up to the events of the movie, which meant that we needed to know exactly how delusional Howard was, while also creating a scenario in which he could live inside of that delusion. Not knowing the reality, players could sense that he wasn't playing with a full deck, but they would not know the full extent of how much until seeing the film.
The conclusion of the ARG came when the little fantasy world Howard had created was punctured by a message from his ex-wife, a blistering denunciation that called Howard out for his lying, manipulation, gaslighting, paranoia, stalking, and violence. (Or as the ARGonauts delightfully called it, "Fuck Him Up, Denise.") It ended with a direct plea for Howard to stop harassing her and to let her move on with her life.
I went through a very difficult divorce in 2003. I generally don't like to talk about it, and for years I would say that it was just a sad story and better left in the past. But the truth is, it was a scary, dramatic, and traumatic time. After we split, my ex would not leave me alone. She blog-stalked me, she harassed me and my friends, she threatened violence against me and against herself. I think in a lot of ways I just wanted to forget about it.
But buried trauma always comes out in other ways. And it wasn't until this week, listening to that podcast, that I realized that everything Denise said to Howard was really me talking to my ex.
ARGs - they're not just about depressed robots and space/sea monsters!
Cry Wolf
Up until now, DanishTV-fest 2k21 has been mostly about watching shows from ten years ago. But now we've been lucky enough to be ahead of the curve by getting a preview of a highly regarded show that has yet to land American distribution. When it does, you're going to want to immediately watch Ulven Kommer, or Cry Wolf.
This show is a miracle. Its subject matter is heavy, but it's handled with incredible delicacy, precision, and above all, quiet. It also features two performances that are going to stay with me for a very long time.
Bjarne Henriksen broke hearts as the bereaved father Theis Birk Larsen in Forbrydelsen, so we already know what he's capable of. And if you know him from that, he's practically unrecognizable as Labor Party leader HC Thorson in Borgen. In Ulven Kommer, he plays the social worker Lars Madsen. Lars has a very strong sense that he knows what is going on in a confusing situation, and he acts on his feelings, but he never once pushes, he never argues, he never overplays. This huge bear of a man wears heavy metal t-shirts and usually has a tiny backpack slung over one shoulder, but he is also incredibly delicate, gentle even in the most heightened and potentially violent situations, sure of himself without needing to prove anything.
What the actor, writers and director have delivered is nothing less than a model for what non-toxic, non-performative masculinity can be. I can’t recall seeing a character like him anytime recently. The show has the confidence to let Lars quietly reveal himself over the eight episodes, ending with a quiet sledgehammer of a scene that I’m still thinking about.
If you told me that 16 years ago, Danish scientists had stolen DNA from Clare Danes and Sarah Polley and fused them in a lab to create Flora Ofelia Hofmann Lindahl, I would believe you. She's got that same quality where it feels like the camera is picking up every single thought that goes through her head.
Playing Holly, the character at the center of the drama, is an unbelievably difficult task. Much of the drama revolves around whether or not what Holly is saying is true, and if it might not be, what does it mean. She has to be vulnerable and guarded, transparent and opaque, all at the same time. And she makes it look easy.
I have a hard time imagining it could even get made in the US – we'd feel the need to amp up the drama, to clarify who was "good" and who was "bad," to fill all the empty space – when it's exactly that empty space that makes the show so compelling.
Some smart streamer will snap this show up and when they do, put it at the top of your list. I don't want to be the only one out there to rock some Lars Madsen cosplay.
Links
NFTs? Yeah, I don't get them either. Sean does, though. I worked on a project a few years ago that was built around NFTs. That project never saw the light of day.
Meanwhile, always listen to Polly.
I'm getting my second vaccination next week, which is as good an excuse as any to reuse this graphic.
Speaking of which, here's a lovely reminiscence about Homestar Runner, which has to be one of the most successful pieces of indie art in my memory.
That sound you heard emanating from Los Angeles on Monday? That was a sizable portion of the city screaming "shit!" in unison upon the news that the Arclight will be going out of business. It's a real "they paved paradise and put up a parking lot" moment.
“Welcome to the S.H., Bitch”
John Cabrera is a deep-thinking creator who I first met on the digital media conference circuit when I was talking about Lizzie Bennet Diaries and he was promoting his groundbreaking show H+. We've had some great conversations about storytelling, worldbuilding, and technology. John's also had a career in front of the camera – you may know him from Gilmore Girls where he played Brian, the stalwart bassist of iconic Connecticut-core rock gods Hep Alien. Turns out, John's never watched the show all the way through, so he's embarking on a weekly watch-a-long on Clubhouse. I’m going to try to drop by sometimes, schedule-depending. If only to rep the ever-unpopular but actually correct #TeamLogan.
Let’s close this out by bringing the whole mishpocha down to the dance floor with Hep Alien’s greatest hits.
Til next time,
Jay