Progress + may switch to monthly charging in Jan + BIG SECRET

I rewrote more of the script and made progress on it. I pulled an all-nighter to catch up on other work and at like 1 PM in a delirium cut the rough of the above video and I'm enamored with how weird/stupid/sincere in expressing the video's thesis it is. It'll be part of the intro to the video.

The big secret is I emailed Nick and was like "hey would you be interested in my friends and I coming up to Chattanooga to interview you?" and he agreed. We have not worked out a date yet or anything but if we're able to do it I think it will change the essay a lot for the better? At first I was worried about it influencing the shape of the video too much but I have ambitions to be more of a documentarian/filmmaker in how I look at my work (just on YouTube, not traditional outlets) and it makes sense to do if I'm spending half a year to a year on the video to do something like this. I need to trust myself to be objective and not pigeon hole myself into recycling clips I find online. I used to interview people for an old job and on panels at Monsterama so I have a lot of experience doing it and it'll be fun to go back to.

There's a bridge in the Pumpkin Man video that I hung out on when I went to the Chattanooga Film Festival. I have not run this past Nick at all but I think it would be funny to pretend I'm shooting in/visiting Chattanooga for unrelated reasons and talk about the bridge as a location he shot on then have him walk into frame behind me and startle me as the big reveal he's in the video. I can't guarantee I'll ask them but if anyone has questions you'd want me to ask in the interview feel free to comment with them. I have a lot in mind already though. I have to know what the hell this song means lol

I'm going up with my friends Graham and Devon and they're gonna film the interview for me (I will probably be onscreen for it). If you've seen some of my non-video essay stuff on my channel, you've seen them both multiple times.

I want to cover costs for the Chattanooga trip and also commission some folks for the video as well. If you're an Oddity Roadshow fan you're familiar with Sarah's incredible artwork and I'm gonna pay her to do key word art for onscreen lyrics (mostly song titles). Nick (not Lutsko lol) is an awesome VFX artist I know and I've talked about commissioning him as well to animate Sarah's art or do some of his own. On top of that I still need to buy at least two more books for the video- Curtis only vaguely alludes to the guy who came up with the word "Hypernormalisation" and I want to read how that guy came up with it (Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation) and also read the source of what Curtis quotes in the above video (The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy).

Once I work out a date for the interview I also wanted to see if my friend Molly could come and take behind-the-scenes photos. She's taken all of my headshot stuff over the years and also the Phil Braun video from the Atlanta Lutsko show I tweeted. I am trying to embed some of her photos here but am struggling with the Patreon UI so maybe I will do that some other time. You can see a bunch here though.

All of this together will more than likely cost me way more than $600 and I don't want to lose money on this video. So switching to monthly would help a lot.

How are y'all liking the updates? I know keeping people updated was a concern patrons expressed when I talked about switching. What should I do differently with them if I switch to monthly? I have tried to update as often as I have something interesting to say but it depends on what y'all want. I still want to read off old scripts but haven't had time. If the Lutsko interview works out I'm sure I can get some fun behind-the-scenes stuff from that too.

Also here's the rewritten intro. Still a rough draft so I want to tune up the phrasing but I like it a lot more now-

If you had walked into the Spirit Halloween at the Hamilton Place shopping mall in Chattanooga Tennessee just a few days before Halloween 2023 looking to buy you and your family last-minute costumes, you would have been met with a man in an orange blazer playing acoustic guitar accompanied by a full country backing band and a half-human half-gremlin hybrid singing about ghouls and Jeff Bezos. (this section will use this footage)

That man is Nick Lutsko. (insert intro clips of him spitting milk etc)

This video is about Nick Lutsko. It's also about British documentarian Adam Curtis, comedian Connor O'Malley, filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Russian sci-fi authors The Strugatsky Brothers, and Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's book about the slow erosion and death of American community bonds.

You ever feel like something’s wrong? Like, off?

I mean we all know something’s wrong, here in the west every luxury we have is at the cost of horrific exploitation, of our own people or even more brutally of people in the global south, and even at whatever level of relative privilege you have unless you're in the tiny tiny minority of the super-rich and powerful you're still lied to constantly by those in power as we all get sick and the globe heats up.

But is what we're going through uniquely wrong or is that just generational ego and recency bias?

And is there a way out? Especially a way out that doesn't involve tremendous personal sacrifice in a desperate gamble to try to tip the scales of history even a little bit? Does art- media consumption diet choices, individual expression- have anything to do with a way out, or is it just a distraction?

I felt compelled to make this video because Nick Lutsko's work has helped me better understand and process the strange and horrific time we're all living through and come to terms with my responsibilities or lack thereof as a filmmaker and as a consumer, and my take on your responsibilities as an audience member and also consumer.

I have also felt so compelled to share the weirdly robust connections I found between Lutsko's work and documentarian Curtis'- both Lutsko's serious work and his unhinged comedy character work as a red-faced egomaniac. Combined it's all is an ultimate expression of what Curtis meant when he said, let me paraphrase here, we are living in the zone now, which I'll explain in a second.

Be advised that this video will cover some pretty heavy topics.

(insert the clips embedded in this post)

So, what is the zone?

Then I rewrote a lot in the Swords and Songs on the Computer sections but they're not nearly ready to share yet.

My contract work should wrap within the next couple weeks unless they offer me more in which case I probably have to take it! Lol! If they don't though I'm going hard on this essay in December.

Hope everyone is doing well!

Shannon