Updates and thoughts (Happy Halloween!!)

The embedded video is my old haunted house mini documentary which I also released on Halloween! Four years ago! Jeez!

Anyway!

I quit my job at the beginning of this month. I have a new part-time/contract gig I've really been enjoying but am still looking for other part-time (or full-time, depending!) remote work as well if any patrons know of a company hiring a remote editor. And if you know any eccentric rich people who would pay me to make a documentary, that's on the table too.

I don't really want to talk about my (now former) job here or publicly in general lol. I am a much, much stronger editor now though which I think will be apparent in my new video essay work. If you watch some of the Kickstarter stuff I've been cutting it already is apparent, I think.

I have been working more on the new essay, mostly doing research and more work on cutting selects. Lutsko also released a new series of fantastic and bizarre songs this month and while I don't care for the use of AI art in one of them (I'm sure I'll briefly mention it in the essay) they're all bangers. I was thinking PUMPKIN MAN was my favorite but I listen to Crickets more.

One thing I've been struggling with more than I used to is how to criticize art without drawing what I would consider disproportionate anger towards the creator, especially when the given topic is sensitive. While I always try to be charitable and even-handed, I'm also obviously fine being blunt and sticking to my principles and priorities as a critic. But I do think audiences can have a really weird and unhealthy process of splitting where they latch onto one aspect of what's presented to them as a moral rationalization to harass an artist, or if something conflicts even slightly with their conceptualizations re: what is acceptable they shut down and don't want to hear anything else which can lead to weird angry reactions towards me or the artist I'm covering, or to them not being receptive to all of the positives about a given artist and thus not receptive to my overall thesis statement or point of the video. With people getting mad at me it's whatever, I'm used to it, but as far as possibly directing ire at independent artists I want to be more cognizant of what I'm saying and how it'll be interpreted without holding back as a critic or using kid gloves, or giving credence to whiny artists who can't handle any criticism at all. That's difficult to balance.

During my video essay break I've also had some concerns about how alienated disempowered people perform politics by being hyper-scrutinizing in their media consumption choices or only measuring the merits of a piece of art by how well it reinforces their worldview and I worry my previous style of criticism contributed to this. Of course I still greatly value subversive progressive art made by marginalized people and thoughtful representation of queer/trans people and people of color and so on but I want to be more careful in how I approach it all. If someone feels like a good person because they watch something I told them to watch, but they don't actually do anything tangible to improve material conditions for anyone outside of making some view counter somewhere go up by one notch, that feels like a huge failure on my part and in some ways worse than me having done nothing (if that "I'm a good person" energy could have gone towards a more tangible real-life source and I'm part of the process that's redirecting and funneling it all towards passive media consumption instead, I mean).

A lot of the video I'm working on will probably be about misinterpreting consumption for praxis. I am trying to get away from a mode of art criticism/video essay writing where I feel like I'm Anubis weighing an artist's sins against a feather and reporting back after I've made my judgement so the audience doesn't have to 1) think for themselves or 2) do anything actually challenging or difficult or that will actually help change the world and can instead subsume all of that energy into consuming "good" media. The way I want to try to explain and handle this is to de-emphasize that hyper-scrutiny of art and artists somewhat (of course still scrutinizing anything egregious and still being honest about my appraisals) while re-emphasizing actual tangible political action. This is largely inspired by how Adam Curtis talks about art and individualism in his work I'll be covering in the video. BUT ALSO I want to balance that with studies on parasocial contact hypothesis (good rep reduces racism etc in audience members) and the way in which seemingly inane media consumption and media culture trends have ended up having massive consequences for the wider culture, like gamergate influencing the alt-right movement, and never dismissing the inherent value of supporting independent art and marginalized artists and seeking cool subversive art generally, or the positive impact art has on us as individuals.

With how youtube works now as well, I have to make something that's not meant to just appeal to my own core audience, so I'm also trying to figure out how to avoid what I'd describe as "preaching to the choir" material without (again) abandoning my principles and politics or my own individual expression. I would not have cared about this previously but it's a necessary concern, both in reaching people outside of my bubble and in actually being successful at youtube. lol. The positives of trying harder to reach and get through to people outside of those who already like/listen to me/agree with me are self-evident, at least.

I have all of this in the back of my head as I'm also doing hours and hours of research and writing and cutting selects.

So even with something as small and as relatively inconsequential as the topic of Lutsko using AI art to make a political point in a music video, I have all these new concerns in my head as to how I want to approach it if I want the whole video to be true to my own values and feelings but also reach the maximum number of people with my overall thesis statement and message. AI art is nasty and exploitative to be clear- I just mean the actual real-world harm of how he used it is pretty negligible and while it's worth criticizing I don't think it makes him a "bad person" or somehow negates all of his work that's so creative and touching and vehemently antifascist and anti-white supremacy and so on in that Anubis conceptualization I mentioned earlier.

A lot of this may seem like pretty common sense critic stuff I've already considered previously but people are soooo much more polarized and volatile now over minor things. I also don't want to appear biased in this instance (because I may end up accepting paid work from Lutsko after this video) so now I'm worried I'm gonna be MORE critical than I would have been otherwise to compensate and trying to balance that as well.

Anyway there's a multi-paragraph neurotic ramble. Maybe next update I will go over a fun abandoned script instead, like the tide pod one I wrote years ago but never made a video out of.

Thank you for the support!!!

-Shannon