How the hell are you?

Also, some foreign songs

Been a minute since there was a non-folklore or story post, for which I apologize. It’s quite the summer, what with one thing and another. So I thought I’d talk a little about what’s going on, about things that are on my mind, and invite you to do the same: to chat about what’s good, what’s pissing you off, or anything in between.

To intersperse this there’s a few pieces of music you might not have heard. I’m in the middle of building a long/endless post on Bach to bore you with, and it struck me how songs in other languages share some of the qualities of classical music: the voice simply another instrument, meaning conveyed by melody and arrangement alone. When I’m writing I rarely listen to music except when I need to be completely surrounded by an emotion or atmosphere, and then it’ll be classical, soundtrack or foreign language for precisely that reason — feeding the soul without words to pick at my ears. Each of the pieces here has got me through the writing of a scene or chapter.

So to kick off, here’s the very poppy but (for me) endlessly uplifting: Tant Que J’existerais, from Natasha St-Pier. If you like it, you might also like this.

The Writers’ Strike

The first thing about this of course is that, as a writer, I’m not 100% sure whether there should be an apostrophe. Hardly anybody else seems to put one, but it seems to me it’s the strike belonging to the writers, and so… anyway, not the point.

More importantly, you’ll doubtless have gathered that the 11,000 members of the Writers’ Guild of America — now joined by 160,000 actors in SAG — are on strike for the first time since 2007, and the first time together since 1960 (when Ronald Reagan was the actors’ president, oddly enough). So why are they so incensed?

There are a ton of reasons, but a sample three:

• Pay, in all its forms. Basic minimums for writers are absolutely failing to keep up with inflation. Writing contracts are getting shorter and shorter, so you get paid less for fewer weeks (and fewer writers end up getting production experience, of which more later). The streamers refuse to release figures about how many people see their “product”: so it doesn’t matter whether your show is a massive international hit that rakes in hundreds of millions for Netflix — you don’t get a penny more. That’s like a novelist getting a pittance of an advance, then being told that it doesn’t matter if it sells a billion copies, all the cash goes to the publisher, forever. Look around the web and you’ll see plenty of examples of the parallel situation for actors: those people you recognize from that show that went gangbusters a few years ago? A lot of them kept their day jobs while filming and are now getting residuals literally in the range of a few bucks a quarter. Meanwhile men like Bob Iger — CEO of Disney, who very recently went on a rant about how “unreasonable” writers were being — are making $20M a year, and the tech streamers are recording profits in the many billions.

• A side-effect of this is the shrinking size of writers’ rooms. Back in the day, a dozen people would work on a show. There’s an argument not every show needs that. But now it’s often shrunk to four, or even fewer — with accelerated writing schedules. Not only does that mean fewer writers are getting paid less for more work, it also conflicts with the drive for diversity that the studios claim to care so much about. In these circumstances producers and show-runners know they need proven workhorse writers who can get the work done, and fast. This leaves no openings for developing writers of any race or gender to get the experience they need of both writing and production. Of course ideally the studios would like to dispense with the pesky writers altogether, which leads us to…

• AI. Now, you all know from my posts here that I’m being as open to this brave new world as possible — and actively finding inspiration there (the images which top and tail this piece were both generated by me in Midjourney). I have a “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” attitude to new tech, always have. But this is different. The studios want to be able to generate whole shows using AI, perhaps throwing some human a few bucks to give it a polish; in the meantime giving actors a one-off payment to use their likeness in perpetuity. Like watching a barista make coffee once, then having an unpaid robot do it the same for ever, while firing the human… into a world where there are no such jobs any more.

There’s a lot more but the bottom line is that the WGA’s proposals would require about an extra $430M a year from the studios. To put that in context, just the seven highest-paid execs in Hollywood earned twice that between them in 2022, and at the end of March this year, Amazon alone reported a profit of $234 billion.

In other words, Bezos could start collecting money on the morning of January 1st and by late afternoon — that same day, January 1st — he’d already have accumulated enough profit to pay for everything the writers are asking for. The rest of the year, from the evening of January 1st onwards, those 364 and a third days… that money’s all for him and his shareholders.

And so how are the studios responding? Silence. No attempt to negotiate. As you may have seen from the quotes going around, at least some of them are explicitly stating a plan to simply starve the writers into submission. People won’t be able to keep paying the rent. Healthcare — which you access via the WGA through earning a non-trivial amount through screenwriting in a given quarter — will lapse. The studios have enough back-stock, they believe, to play a waiting game.

And who knows? They may be right — because of all the hard and often ill-paid work that writers and actors have already done. This is why writers are so pissed. And if they beat us, if they demonstrate with writers that the people who actually produce this stuff are expendable, then these late-stage capitalist tech bros, so proud of their mission to “move fast and break things”, will come for everybody else next.

One a personal level, this is a nightmare. As both a writer and the Creative Director of a production company, I’m getting it from both ends. I’m lucky in that my mensch of a boss is keeping the ship floating despite everyone having to down tools — but there may come a time when studios start using the strike as an excuse to force majeure the end of first-look deals: we also had a bunch of very promising projects (including a couple in particular that I’m hugely fond of, and have spent a while bringing up) ready to start pitching… and they’re now on hold, for who knows how long.

As a writer I was a couple of counters away from closing a deal as a writer/showrunner myself, and that too has hit the wall. Will it restart afterwards? Who knows. My entire screen-related career is in limbo, and I ain’t getting any younger.

Because of people making $641,000,000 a day.

Rosenstolz — Ich Bin Ich. There’s a rousing live version here and acoustic here.

The emptying nest

Time, it turns out, really does pass — and so Paula and I are now (so suddenly, it seems) facing the prospect of our son leaving home to go to college. And not just down the road, either — he’s off to Colorado, a chunky thirteen hundred miles away.

On the one hand, this is great. It’s a very good school, I’m extremely proud of him for getting in, and the literal job of parents is to help their kid to the point where they feel confident enough to leave. The thing is… we kind of like the little bastard (I say “little”, he’s now a couple of inches taller than me) and will miss him like crazy.

It also cannot help but feel like a whalloping great chapter end. Perhaps the conclusion of an entire book, in fact, or the finale of a beloved and long-running television show (those whacky Smith-Graingers, with their endless scrapes!) He will spin off into his own show now, one that hopefully will be massively successful (in the sense of giving him comfort and pleasure) and go on forever.

Meanwhile his parents either continue their roles the show he’s left behind or, more positively, develop their own spin-off — bringing many of the same characters along but with the IP refreshed and reframed, suddenly re-centered in the action, finding (or remembering) new ways of being together after a couple of decades of always, every day, often every waking hour — along with some sleepless nights — being focussed on someone else. That’s gonna be weird.

Great, and possibly exciting, but weird.

Especially in the light of…

ZAZ — Eblouie par la nuit

The Dad of it

I’m not going spend long on this because it’s not a cheerful subject, but lord: grief does go on, doesn’t it. It persists. There are days I feel I’m out the other side (or at least in a place where it’s incorporated as well into life as it can be: as the great neo-Jungian James Hollis put it — “absences are still presences, and […] death, divorce, or distance do not end relationships.”) Then a memory or emotional leadenness or forlorn dream lets me know, sometimes gently, sometimes like a kick in the nuts, that the process continues. On the way back from a brief vacation in London a few weeks ago, for example, I happened to be confronted with one of Dad’s very favorite pieces of music while in the restroom in Heathrow, and bang: I was a mess.

And that’s fine and how it works. But still. It’s been over a year and a half now.

Of course this relates to the child leaving home, too: men disappearing (or at least moving away) from either side of the chronological span. For much of your life — all of it, in fact — you are at least in part defined by your ever-shifting position in a fluid constellation of relationships: by their effect on you, and your effect on others. You will be someone’s child, and you may be someone’s parent. Those relationships are eternal, and persist past the point where the people involved are close to you geographically: past the time, in fact, where you’re still on the same astral plane. That may for some be a curse, for many others a blessing. The bottom line is that nobody ever goes, and once you get your head around this you’re better able to take the rough with the smooth of the aftermath. On most days.

But sometimes you still wish you could just pick up the phone and talk to them.

Rachid Taha — Barra Barra. One of the great all-time song builds: I have more than once written an entire chapter with this on endless repeat.

So how about you? What’s in your life, defining this summer of 2023 for you? What’s getting you out of bed with a spring in your step, or making you want to stay there until it all blows over? How’s your cat? What’s a cool thing that happened recently?

This is life, and there’s a lot of it, and sometimes it needs to be witnessed and marked.