Creativity

Hard Because We’re Inside

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Writers, artists of all kinds, can be incredibly hard on themselves. If you’ve dealt with such creatives, you know it. If you are such a creative, well, you’re nodding along. I myself can be harsh towards my skills, abilities, and works.

I’ve wondered why we do this. I mean sure, not every artist or writer self-flagellates, but it’s common enough that I feel there’s something to it. We creatives can turn on ourselves.

A book could be written on this – indeed I’ve written about it before. But one of the reasons that comes to mind is simply that we’re inside something no one else can experience.

Each creative person is living inside their own unique experience and creations. No one can see the flaws of our work because only we have them inside our head. No one can see the flaws in our process like we do as we are the process. No one lives with them as much as us – only we know what that’s like.

We experience our creations and creativity so intimately its easy to see the flaws. It’s also hard to express or connect as no one can really get what’s going on as they’re not us. It’s lonely, in our face, and intense.

Solving it is also hard because our self-loathing is so intense and personal. For us creatives wanting to mitigate this – and help others, I think there’s a few lessons.

First, any creative has to be aware of their own mental health and use our awareness of how personal our experience is. Being aware that yes, we have unique experiences, yes its hard to share, we can approach our own well-being better.

Secondly, I think we can network and connect with fellow creatives so we can support each other better. Being aware we’ve got some isolation, we can mitigate it as best we can socially, in writer’s groups, etc. It may be hard, but we can try – and our fellows can tell us when we’re being too cruel to ourselves.

Third, we have to remember creative support groups – writer’s groups, art jams – have to be about more than what we make. We have to talk challenges and problems in being creative and what we face. You can’t just talk word count and editing them go away. Creative people need people because hey, we’re people.

We might be in our heads because we do a lot of work there. But we can have guests and we can visit. With a little less sense of disconnection, with more people to understand, we can get more done and maybe get over those times we’re hard on ourselves.

Steven Savage

The Past Is Raw Material

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Last column I wrote about my love for Star Trek: Lower Decks, considering it a capstone to Star Trek. I felt there was no where for Star Trek to go after this, as it was both parody, home, and extrapolation – somewhat like a more serious Venture Brothers. The announcement of yet another Trek series set at an the (in)famous Starfleet Academy didn’t interest me unless, as I joked, it was more in the vein of college comedies like Animal House.

That statement led to some friends and I to an actual serious discussion about how yet another Star Trek show (which, again, I should note I’m usually tired of) might work out. We started asking what it would be like to see more focus different species and cultures in the Academy, really digging into the meandering if interesting Trek lore. In short, we did what Star Trek: Lower Decks had done, just in a different part of the setting.

Also, it will surprise absolutely no one who knows me that it made me further analyze the state of media.

I looked at our brainstorming and at Lower Decks, both taking established ideas and digging deep into them. Both involved mining current material I would consider stale and often overdone, and finding new takes. Both in a way treated something beloved – and rightfully so even if I have felt it’s overdone – and using it as raw material.

As much as I love original media and want to see new things, perhaps there is some virtue in treating creative works that might be stale, stagnant, or that have lost attention and reusing them. Treat them not as something to be devoted to, nor sit on a shelf, nor make endless sequels about – with all the rampant continuity modification. Treat it as something to be recycled.

I’ve written before about the shockingly good He-Man CGI reboot at Netflix which did exactly this to fantastic effect. We’ve seen the same thing with She-Ra– which perhaps suggests that many a toyetic cartoon is worthy of recycling. Something can be beloved and reused.

(Now I don’t expect an actual Star Trek total reboot, Paramount more seems to be trying to rewrite it incrementally. But I digress).

I think this “recycling” works because by taking something you love, analyzing it, and breaking it down you find what’s really good about it. Once you find that core, you can then build it back up again into something amazing – and perhaps better than the original, or at least more relevant.

Perhaps such thoughts are less relevant in the current media environment, of cinematic universes and suddenly-canceled brilliance. It’s also less relevant in an age of political and climate chaos. But perhaps if we can find the heart of something forgotten or overdone, maybe we’ll find something out about ourselves as well.

Steven Savage

Stupid or Clever? A Ramble on Parody and Perspective with Popstar

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

It’s such a fine line between stupid, and clever.

  • David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap

Spinal Tap is one of the greatest movies ever made.  It defined the mockumentary genre, absolutely capturing the sense of a cultural space – ridiculous metal bands in the 80s.  It was well-acted, sensitive, and also the music may have been silly but pretty good.  In fact, it was so well done that when the “band” toured, a friend who was a fan ran into people at a concert who didn’t get the joke.

Want to argue with me?  Shut up.  Look. I just like Spinal Tap.

Being such a fan of the film, I checked out a similar movie Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, as a friend said it was in much the same vein.  Popstar was also a mockumentary, but was released in 2016, targeting more modern pop music (with bits of boybands, the Beastie Boys, and rap thrown in).  The movie focuses on one Conner Friel (Andy Samberg) who rose to fame as part of a trio called “The Style Boys,” but being the most charismatic of the group, he ended up solo, leaving one friend traumatized and the other as his DJ.  Connor’s meteoric rise becomes a crashing-to-earth potential extinction event through various bad choices, exacerbated by more bad choices.

The film was a bomb, but I found it quite entertaining, disturbingly spot-on, and the musical performances are pretty good.  However, there were parts of it that seemed, well, stupid – over the top, vulgar, or dumb.  As I watched it my reaction was yes, it was funny, but Spinal Tap it was not.

However, as I watched, I realized that this was a film of a different time.  Spinal Tap was funny to sixteen-year old me as I knew that era of music, the stories of drummer disasters, monsters of metal who just kept going, and strange careers.  Watching Popstar i started thinking that maybe I didn’t “get it.”

Stupid or clever?  A fine line indeed as Mr. St. Hubbins would note.  So I tried to view it as best I could through a modern lens – and I’m the kind of person who hears of Maroon Five and wonders what happened to the first four.

Once I did that, my perspective changed – and with it I got a better understanding of media.

The excesses shown in Popstar were excesses that were distinctly modern – stupidity that was in most cases part of our lives.  Megastars who gain a great deal of fame very fast and do very stupid and immature things amplified by the news.  Oversharing on social media of every detail.  Dumb tie-ins using modern technology to do things no one wants but everyone tells you is cool.

A lot of the things I found stupid in the film were there in real life.  This was a fascinating realization, as well as more than a bit depressing.  Maybe the first four Maroons were in hiding from the dumb world we’d made.

In the end I came to the conclusion that of Popstar’s stupid elements, well over half were completely well-deserved.  Tell me you can’t believe a business called Party Wolves with stellar yelp reviews for providing cute wolves for events.  There’s a scene taking on Daft Punk/Deadmaus techno-costumes and bands that is hilarious as it is believable.  We really do amazingly self-destructive things on social media, especially when famous.

Clever or Stupid?  I had to come down on the side of clever.  It’s just that it was made in modern times where we have invented some incredible kinds of idiocy.

I did note where there was actual stupidity it was due to the film going from mockumentary to parody.  Mockumentaries should adhere to being as real as possible while also exploring the ridiculousness of their subject.  Parody has more of a free hand and allows – indeed may require – some excess to point out the ridiculousness of its subject.  I consider a mockumentary a sub-form of parody, a more disciplined and sensitive one, and to break out of the form is jarring – as this film does occasionally.

I wish the film had been handled with some more deftness, dare I say “more Spinal Tap like,” but perhaps that was too much of a challenge. The musical and managerial traumas in Spinal Tap were of a different time, one without social media, and embarrassing holographic reconstructions.  Perhaps our current times have so much stupidity that it’s harder to handle it cleverly – one needs their cleverness up to eleven as it were.

If there’s a point to all of my intentional rambling  it’s that mockumentaries require some careful handling, but also that audience understanding matters.  I had to take effort to put myself in the right mindset of Popstar, much as a young person might not “get” Spinal Tap with some thought.  Even if Popstar had been handled as well as Spinal Tap (and it is still pretty good) I would have had to make some effort.

Some things just are of their times.  Including me.  Besides, I’d probably throw my back out trying to do The Donkey Roll.

Steven Savage