Fringes
Transcript:
Hi, my name is Joe, and I work in an underappreciated medium.
Is this the support group?
We're into our 5th year doing Midnight Burger.
And Finlay and I are very proud of the little community that's formed around the show.
And sometimes I think about the fact that I would have no idea how to explain all this to your average human being, you know, that guy sitting next to you on the plane, who asks you what you do for a living.
When you think about sci-fi or any kind of fiction, really, you think of the usual places you go to find it. Books, TV, film, graphic novels.
No one ever thinks of it coming from an audio medium.
And so because of that, you have to stick to the sort of lawless outer rim and set up your own little outpost.
Never taken seriously or let into the wider conversation that's taking place in the zeitgeist, and all of that's fine.
In the end, maybe it wasn't that interesting of a conversation anyway.
It does get you thinking, though, about people's brains.
In the Midnight Burger community, for whatever reason, the neurodivergent is the neurotypical.
Throughout our community, there are all sorts of people with all sorts of oddly working brain parts, like an island of misfit toys, but for brains.
And I'm no brain expert, but I don't think that's an accident.
I don't think that's a coincidence.
People gravitate toward the thing that speaks the best to their particular syntax.
Sometimes that's not a book.
Sometimes that's not a graphic novel.
Maybe it's a TV show or a movie, but a lot of those, uh, suck these days, I could go off about the new generation of Star Trek shows, but I don't like to talk shit about people.
I'm not exactly sure where audio drama fits in with all of the other forms of storytelling, but it has something to do with what a friend of mine told me one time.
He had just been to see Captain America the Winter Soldier.
And I asked how he liked it, and he said something weird.
He said, There's this part of the movie where he, Captain America, has a list of all the things that he missed, while he was frozen under the ice for all those years.
And they're random things like, you know, Thai food, right?
And my friend said that he would have watched an entire movie of just Captain America doing that list.
And I agreed, actually.
That does sound like you know, an interesting movie.
Audio drama comes in somewhere in there.
I'm not sure what you call that place.
What my friend described was not a book.
It was not a movie or a TV show or a comic.
It was something else, and something that was needed.
His brain needed something that he wasn't going to get from anything out there.
The common conception is that if it's not a book, and it's not a comic or a TV show or a movie, it's not real.
But people slip through the incredibly large cracks between these mediums.
And audio drama can be there for those that slip through.
There's a 1000000000 brains out there.
They're not all going to fit into the few boxes that are out there.
The same goes for people who write things.
A long time ago, I met a playwright named Michelle Carter.
Michelle was a bit new in the playwriting world.
She had just gotten some notoriety for writing a play called.. Called Hillary and Soon Yi Shop for Ties.
And a lot of people really liked it.
And she was relatively new to playwriting.
And I was at a playwriting festival with her, and she was talking about how she ended up writing plays.
She was a novelist.
She wrote primarily short stories and taught short story writing at University of San Francisco, and that was her life.
And then she got into a car accident.
And she got really, really bad, brain damage.
And after a long time of recovering and that whole process, when she finally started to get back to her life, she realized that she couldn't write anymore.
For whatever reason, she sat down in front of the keyboard and she just couldn't do it, like it didn't make sense.
She could still read books, and still teach people how to write them, but writing herself became this foreign thing after she had received this brain damage, which is wild, right?
So she just thought that was her life.
And then, one night, a friend drug her out to see a play, and she's sitting there in the audience, and she's watching this play happen, and she thinks, wait, I think I can do that.
And so she sat down in front of a keyboard, and she could write dialogue.
She just couldn't write narratively anymore. And did really well for herself too.
She's won the Penn Award for drama a couple of times.
Maybe there are too many brains out there of different shapes and sizes for us to say that these things, books, TV, movies, these are the things that everyone enjoys, and so you now must find a way to fit yourself into one.
And then as I was thinking about this, a whole other conversation came into my head, and since this is the place where I think out loud about things.
I'm gonna keep doing that.
There's a lot of people out there, these days, lamenting the loss of the monoculture.
We don't have rock stars anymore.
We don't have movie stars anymore.
Rather than that one show or one book or one movie that everyone engages with, We have a 1000000 tiny little fandoms all over the world.
How will we be able to ever have a cultural conversation ever again as a society?
And I understand that sentiment, but it's not as though all of these differences in people's brains showed up all of a sudden.
It's entirely possible that those different minds have always been there, and the only difference now is our awareness of them.
And I wonder if there ever really was a monoculture.
Back in the day where there were only three TV channels, and everybody watched I Love Lucy.
Are you trying to tell me that no one was left out in the cold culturally?
For a long time in our history, there have been people out there languishing in the cultural darkness.
And with this kind of diaspora from the monoculture these days, they can find a home now in weird fandoms and antiquated art forms.
Somehow, our show has become one of those.
I don't know that the audience for audio drama will ever be big, but I do think it's always been there.
And it's only now that they've been able to find this home.
So I'm thinking about two things in my mind right now.
I'm thinking about, one, this idea of this sort of universe of fandoms out there.
And the other idea of the monoculture, and how everyone seems to be abandoning it, and how it doesn't work anymore, and how the closest thing that we can get to a unifying cultural moment is like Barbenheimer or something.
And I think the reason why I'm thinking about these things at the same time is because there's a relationship between the two of them.
I don't think that any of this is going to stop.
These weird things that we make out on the fringes are just going to get easier and easier to make.
And the big dinosaurs of monoculture are just going to get more and more expensive, and there will be more and more pressure put on them to make a zillion dollars in the 1st 5 days of something's existence.
Everybody's best friend Netflix is currently in negotiations to buy Warner Brothers.
To the tune of about $86 billion, giving them access to a massive library of movies and television.
Netflix isn't buying Warner Brothers because they love the WB.
They're buying Warner Brothers because they don't have any choice.
It's expand or die, because, for whatever strange reason, none of the major streamers seem to be able to compete with just plain old YouTube.
YouTube is the most popular reason why people watch a television these days.
And it's an existential threat to them.
Such an existential threat that they are buying literally a cursed company.
To quote Julia Alexander in the verge.
"Every company that has ever bought Warner Brothers has killed itself."
AOL in 2000, AT&T, and 2016.
At 1st glance, you may be thinking to yourself, well, this is great.
I'll be able to, you know watch more stuff on Netflix now.
And that may be true.
But the unfortunate fact is that when corporations are allowed unfettered access into any sector of our lives, they try to turn it into an ATM, and they ruin it.
I was 8 years old when I moved to Los Angeles and I turned on KROQ, 106.7, and it was an independent station playing alternative music that I had never heard before.
And it was transformative for me.
It changed my life, that music.
It was the soundtrack of my life.
That station is still there, but that station is gone.
Because at some point along the line, corporations were allowed to buy as many radio stations as they wanted to.
And they absolutely ruined terrestrial radio.
Sadly, we see all of that happening again.
Just like they did with terrestrial radio, major corporations were allowed unfettered access into a space, and they are now in the process of ruining it.
And as chaos reigns supreme, and everybody buys everybody else, here we all are, out here in the lawless provinces, making as much stuff as we can.
As it turns out, people out here making weird things for weird brains were at a safe distance from the massive cultural train wreck that's going on right now.
So what does that mean for us?
We weirdos out here.
In 1995, Thomas Cahill wrote "How the Irish Saved Civilization," offering the theory that Ireland became a safe space for Western thought while the European continent descended into the Dark Ages.
And that's a wildly simplistic and perhaps a bit biased view of history.
But the idea is interesting.
What do we, out here, keep safe?
While everything else goes to shit.
Are we the proverbial meek, inheriting the proverbial earth?
Honestly, that's probably a bit too simplistic and biased too.
So I started this, wanting to talk about how there's no ideal medium, and there needs to be different mediums for different brains, and wound up on this sort of global thing that I'm doing, but to connect the two...
Making things on the fringes is very gratifying, and also takes a lot of work.
But it can feel a little bit lonely.
And it can make that conversation you have with the guy sitting next to you on the airplane pretty awkward, and your parents will never really know what the hell you're talking about.
But it's very possible that operating on the cultural fringes is actually the key to survival during the sort of cultural upheaval that we're currently in, and that we'll see more of in the years to come.
I know I sound like some sort of cultural doomsday prepper right now.
I know I sound like a person who is foreseeing doom and gloom.
But right now, what we're seeing in the world of culture and entertainment is conglomeration, everybody buying everybody else, and everything moving towards, you know, eventually in the future, there is only Netflix.
And that is the only place you get television and movies from.
That is, of course, very bad.
Because, like I said, when a major corporation moves into any space, they just ruin it.
And are we eventually going to be left with just rewatching the office over and over again?
Maybe not.
Because certainly, there's all kinds of wonderful things still being made out there. 10 years down the road?
I don't know.
What I can tell you is that making things out here on the fringes like this, in times of upheaval and conglomeration and chaos, it's nice to be out here.
It's nice to feel a little bit untouched by it.
And that way out here, you know, on the lawless outer rim, if you can build a thing, get some people to come to it, then you can kind of, you know, take care of your people, tell your story, do your thing, and just kind of watch as...
Well, things kind of burn to the ground, you know?
But beyond the survival part, I go back to Thomas Cahill and his possibly imagined Ireland, where you are keeping something safe, keeping something preserved.
And on the mainland, as people descend into this cycle of doing the same bullshit over and over again, you as an independent creator, a bit untouched by all of that, can continue to say ever forward.
That way.
Now, I can hear my own bias as I'm talking, right?
Thomas Cahill, as an Irish American, imagined the Irish as saving everybody.
Myself as an independent creator, sees independent creators as saving everybody.
I can hear it.
But, I think for the time being, I will operate as if I am correct.
And honestly, I think you should, too.
If there's ever anyone I really want to talk to when I'm making these things, it is 2 particular constituencies.
Either the people who are mid making something and doubting themselves, or people who have not gotten to work yet.
It is time to get to work.
No matter how stupid you think your idea is, no matter how much you think it sounds like this other thing, no matter how much time you don't have, the time is now to get to work.
Things are on fire just a little bit, guys.
And we are out here, trying to build, while other things burn down.
So I'm afraid it's time to get to work.
This is me calling you in.
I'm tagging you into the ring.
The time is now.
Pick up the pen, or whatever implement you use.
It's time to get to work.
It's entirely possible we've got a world to save.
-j