Reminiscence on New Orleans

I’m in Mississippi.

I’m drinking a cup of coffee black and ominous as a tar pit in La Brea, listening to the Stray Cats and watching a sunrise unlike anything I’ve ever seen. A sunrise like bright gold blood welling up under the skin of the sky, everything bent a little to the left of real in the early heat haze.

It’s beautiful here.

Bird and I flew in to New Orleans on Tuesday morning, after a few vertiginous flights (airplanes, the necessary, nauseous evil). My parents picked us up. Seeing as we were already in the heart of the vital, vibrant south, we spent the day in the city, starting with a cemetery tour, and ending with a slosh of drinks in the best damn hole-in-the-wall I’ve ever set foot in (Coop’s Place, in the French Quarter).

I hate cities, as a general rule. Chicago, New York, Detroit, Philadelphia...these places felt unkind to me, full of paranoia and mistrust, all the people surrounded by brick and steel becoming unyielding and hard as their city. I visit with unease, and leave with relief.

I love New Orleans. New Orleans is a dirty place, a dangerous place, and--according to my wife--a pungent place. Tired cops roust tired bums and drunks from park benches outside open-air shops where plumes of beignet-praline-steam mingle with cigar smoke and laughter. It’s a loud place, a place not afraid to shout at you. Walking down Decatur Street, a big black Creole woman drags me into her gallery. “Look, sugar, we got Mucha here, Mucha here. This is Mucha, three for fifteen, your girlfriend, she like dis one: dis one the rollin papers Mucha. Look here, sugar, look here.” Then she answers her cell phone and tells the man on the other end that she was going to kill herself yesterday. Her hand is on my arm. We walk around her shop arm in arm, a promenade of two lovers in a land of Art Nouveau, as she scolds a credit card company man. Her lawyer is her best friend, and he stopped her killing herself yesterday.

Then I’m back on the street with my family, stepping over human shit on the sidewalk and wondering where the saxophone is coming from. Men in top-hats and buffalo bill bone coats laugh toothy, round syllables at us as we go. There’s punks old as their leathers on every corner, pins and hooks and smiles in the corners of their eyes, voodoo ink and Social Distortion on their arms.

Coop’s Place is worth the wait. The best sazerac I’ve ever drunk, the best jambalaya I’ve ever had, actual rabbit and crab with the claw still on. The mint in Bird’s mojito is clean and clear and sweet and sharp, cutting through the spicy smoke pouring from the kitchen crammed in the back of the tiny old bar.

Everyone in Coop’s is laughing. It seems like everyone in New Orleans is laughing: the shopkeeps and beignet ladies, tattoo artists and tour guides, even the dead in the beautiful brick wreckage of their tombs. Even the broken people propped against bare brick walls. Even the ragged dazed with no walls at all.

As we roll away on Interstate 10, the car overheating in the last of the living Louisiana fug, crawling toward the clean heat and salt of Long Beach Mississippi, I can almost hear it: the laughter of New Orleans; the spirit of a city worn old and soulful as a good blues guitar. New Orleans is a city missing strings, a city of cracks and rust. The cracks in the brickwork hum and buzz, the rusty strings of the city today resonate with the empty spaces of the city gone silent, and the music that’s left ringing in my ears as we leave will echo like an old man’s laugh in my soul as long as I live, and live in my mind like the anguished wail of a woman in the night.

- Max
From a Sunny Mississippi Porch

Good News, and the MARLON To-Do List

Hey everybody. Wanted to spend a little time letting you all know what's going on. I've been so busy pushing papers and playing phone tag that I haven't had much of a chance to update the site (though I did add my personal shooting script to the Merchandise section).

So. I'm going to post my to-do list. Hopefully I'll be checking a lot of these off in the next couple of weeks. The movie isn't done yet, but every day it's closer than it was the day before.

1) Finish Color Grade with Bird (Test Pass, polish, blu-ray test, polish, FINAL)
2) Finish Credit Crawl, Title Cards, and Opening Credits (Add Ryan's Friends)
3) Piano and Vocals for "Ave Maria"
4) Piano Suite from Enron
5) Bass Parts for all songs
6) Release from: Subaru
7) Release from: Woodford
8) Contact Artist from Brandon's House: Release
9) Get all Location Releases Signed
10) Get all Cast and Crew Releases Signed
11) Lead Guitar Parts
12) Vocals for Last Two Metal Tracks
13) Soundtrack Final Mixes
14) Foley
15) ADR
16) Preliminary Sound Mix (polish, blu-ray test, polish, FINAL)

And that's that. No small amount of work, of course, but we're making progress. I meant to write about this some time back, when it actually happened, but I got so swept up in the momentum of the moment that I just kept working, instead of updating the journal: I've gotten in touch with Pro Impact Sports and the Chicago Blackhawks, and both have given me clearance to use their logos in Marlon! Every company that gives me the okay to leave the logo in adds a little more legitimacy to this odd little indie. Both organizations were lovely about the whole thing, and the people I worked with while obtaining the permissions were absolutely incredible. The feedback on Marlon from Pro Impact Sports in particular has been a major inspiration and motivator for me these past few weeks as I continue to slough through reams of paperwork.

As far as Location Releases go, most of them are signed. The FRT signed off immediately, and with good luck and wishes well. I've gotta say, all my cast and crew came from the University, and whatever my opinions on higher education in the United States, it really is a vibrant, creative environment if you look at it from the right angle (from the wrong angle, many of the writing and theatre students look suspiciously like pretentious, entitled, immature douchebags, but I digress). I wrote the script for Marlon as soon as I graduated, enabled in large part by my horizon-expanding education at the hands of such Educational Outlaws as Lisa Coutley, Austin Hummell, and Beverly Matherne. It is to these three that I owe almost all of my higher aspirations as a writer.

(All the sex jokes in Marlon, you'd never know I had any.)

Cast and Crew Releases have been easy. I can't cross it off the list yet, because I'm still waiting for signatures from a few out-of-staters who are dealing with digital copies, but everyone has gotten back to me and confirmed that signed releases are on the way. Hopefully I'll have that done in the next few days.

The rest is audio. And that is proving incredibly difficult. For whatever reason, I'm working way more than I usually do: Marlon was only possible because I've been in a situation for a few years now where I have had enormous flexibility in my schedule. Lately, that's changed, and my schedule is not only inflexible, but I'm working twice the hours I used to. It isn't that I have a problem with working: it's that Dan also has a job (go figure), and where I used to be able to say, "Fuck yeah, I can come over right now/tomorrow at 2:00 a.m./whenever you need me," now I'm locked in. Dan's availability and my availability are clashing in an incredibly counterproductive way, and that's been our major holdup in postproduction so far.

The man has been working like a maniac to find workarounds and small windows for us to meet, and every time we do, shit gets done. Making a full-length, legitimate film in your spare time is hard. Seriously hard. But if we do it right, maybe it all pays off, and we go get to make pretend for the rest of our lives, on-set forever. The reward outweighs the cost a hundredfold.

Now the trick is finding the time to pay the cost.

More to come. Right now I have to message a woman about dying on-mic, and add a few names to a credit crawl.

--Max Peterson
7 Days Before the Last Sundance Deadline

Massive Collection of Old Homepage Entries, Part I

The DONATION STATION

You may have noticed the extremely obvious DONATE button at the top of the page. Well, it's that time again, folks: Marlon is in the closing stretch of postproduction, and we're gearing up for FILM FESTIVAL SEASON. We want to take Marlon to 25 film festivals across the United States (and Canada), to maximize our chances of picking up a distribution deal, or landing jobs for the cast and crew (or winning awards. Let me dream).

Unfortunately, Festivals aren't free. To take it out across the country, we're trying to raise $1,000 to help cover submission fees. Everyone who contributes will be thanked in the credits, because we truly can't do this without you, just as this movie couldn't have been made without your help. So please, give what you can, so we can get this movie to the masses.

We're so close.

P.S. - Just tested the donation button myself. It works, is secured through Stripe, and made me ridiculously happy.

The marlon curse and the failure of pianos

So.

A podcast was supposed to go up yesterday, but rather than record it, I spent the day prepping for what was supposed to be a five-hour recording session in Escanaba this morning. The plan was for my pianist for "Ave Maria")and I to drive over to Esky with her kick-ass electric piano, meet Dan Zini (audio god) and Enron (pianist for the epic, three-part "Marlon Suite") at Studio 10, and record all the piano parts for Marlon morning. Wake up at 5:00 a.m., pick aforementioned lady pianist up, drive drive drive, start recording at 7:00 a.m.

I got a text at 2:30 a.m. from the girl who was meant to be playing "Ave Maria" in a few hours' time. Her boyfriend's radiator had exploded in his face and she was dealing with a crisis of infinitely greater importance than my little indie. The fact that she contacted me at all (and perhaps even suggested she might still be able to record) is a testament to the fact that I found the right girl for the job. She's got that thing you need to be part of a Marlon crew: that tilt of the chin, that razor glint in your eye, that "Why not?" attitude that takes you to a horror movie set in the middle of the woods at two in the morning, or driving to a recording studio at five because fuck it, why not? Why not make pretend with fun, funny people?

Of course, she's not insane. She stayed with her fella, tended her wounded, and told me to tell her when another recording window opened up.

This isn't the first time something like this has happened on Marlon. I think it was Ryan Sitzberger who said it first, but I might be misremembering. He called it "The Marlon Curse."

The night before we were scheduled to start shooting, my lead actress emailed me and told me she couldn't be involved with the film anymore. (I redrafted the script the following morning and cast John Scheibe as "Jules" a few hours later.)

The night before we were meant to shoot a party scene in my friend's basement, her house burned down. We had considered hauling the gear over a day early, but didn't. (We shot it elsewhere, and I never ended up using it after all.)

Arriving at the cabin location one day to shoot all the scenes set in my Uncle's sauna, which was situated at the back of his garage, we discovered that his garage had collapsed. We ended up having to crawl through wreckage, under icy, bent metal beams and over leaking, ruptured fuel tanks to get to the sauna. We lit the scenes with deer shiners and clamp lights on hundred-foot extension cords running out of the rubble, but we got the shots. They look great.

The day my brother and I were meant to haul all our gear (guitars, drums, amps, speaker cabinets, etc.) to Escanaba to start the soundtrack recording sessions, Dan's computer and the sound board for the theatrical show he was working on at the time were completely fried...the day before opening night. He had to spend the day redesigning an entire show and replacing the destroyed electronics. (Sam and I hauled the gear two days later, and recorded all the tracks we needed in two days. We'd scheduled six.)

Then this morning. Marlon hasn't made it easy, not once, not ever. But it's been mostly fun, and my revolving-door crew and I keep making it the way we always have: one step at a time, one foot in front of the other.

I ended up going to Escanaba this morning. Poured my coffee, left at 5:30 a.m., and got there on time. Dan and I discussed what we could do instead of recording piano parts (Enron was tied up all morning and we had to reschedule him as well). I recorded the vocal tracks for four of the six metal songs: "Churchburner," "Dogma," "Sick on Sunday Morning," and "White Whale." I've got the sore throat familiar to me from the good old days of high school, tracking original metal with my brother in our bedroom / studio / jam space.

Now I'm drinking green tea with honey and listening to the Cranberries with my wife. She's mainlining caffeine and plowing helter-skelter ever-deeper into the color grade. She's working on the scene that makes me cringe every time I see it (Mariah knows which I mean), and everything feels right.

It's a dog's August, hot and clinging and salt, but fall is in the air.

And this fall, I'll have a finished film on my hard drive. Marlon will be ready for my friends, family, the festivals, and the world.

--Max Peterson

August 13th, 2015

The Ultimate Update - August 11, 2015

Where do I begin? Not at the beginning. We covered all that. Me begging for money, fueled by a podcast, a good friend, a stoned cult film giant, an idea.

Then I shot a movie.

Then I pretty much disappeared.

Sorry about that.

Let’s start with this, since it’s taken on as much a life as Marlon ever did: I’ve got the podcasting station set up again in the upstairs office, and Bird and I are going to be dropping Chat-Man and Robin Episode 21 on schedule, on Wednesday, and hopefully will keep on track from now on. The move from the Brookton house threw us off a bit, and audio postproduction for Marlon took up so much of my headspace that I just never got back to it.

Bird and I have been working opposite shifts lately, her in the morning, me at night, so that I rarely get to see her for more than an hour at a time, and then we’re both so exhausted from work that we can’t manage more than some stupid television show and going to bed early. I miss talking to her, hanging out with her, engaging with her on a level deeper than “How was work? Tiring? Me too? Good night.” Maybe it’s strange, but Chat-Man and Robin is one of my favorite things in the world to do, and since it’s something I can do with her, yesterday I dug out the mics and the mixer, dusted off my more colorful pieces of profanity, and turned the office into a podcasting station again.

But not all things can be as they were. I’m officially retiring Chat-Man and Blabbermouth, which I did with Mariah Rosado once upon a time (we’re both live busy and much different lives than we did two years ago, when we recorded the first episode), as well as Morning Word. Morning Word was at its best when it was me and Alice Snively in the early morning, with our coffee and our booze and Carey Grant and controversial subjects. Without her, there’s something missing. Besides, I couldn’t fill the guest spot on even a bi-weekly basis. It’s harder than you think to get people to come hang out and bullshit with a microphone in their face. Who knew?

So CMR continues, the others go to the dustbin (maybe I’ll put all those old episodes up somewhere on the site someday, but for now I’m just pulling them down to make room for the future.

The future? Oh, let me tell you about that.

To get some more time in front of these mics I love so much, I’m currently putting together a new podcast to fill the hole Morning Word will leave behind. It’s one Joe McAuliffe (a longtime friend to Marlon and me in general, and one of the coolest, kindest guys I know) and I kicked around back in the day, back before ever I’d said word one into a mic. The concept was simple: once a week, we’d get together and indulge in our vice of the moment while talking about shitty old movies. It sounded like a roaring good time then, and I still think it does.

I’ve updated the concept a bit: I’ll sit down once a week with my clever, funny, movie-loving friends, we’ll imbibe, and we’ll talk about good movies. Each guest will have a genre we’ll work within, so the listeners can have some sense of what to expect week to week. For example, Mike Rutecki and I are going to make commentary tracks for movies about music (probably mostly rock, punk, and blues); when Matt Nicely drops by, we’ll dig into weird, cerebral, outside-the-box flicks like Killer Joe and Requiem for a Dream; when I finally wrangle my brother into the chair, we’ll watch fighting flicks and action movies: think Warrior, Rocky, Die Hard...that sort of thing.

When my filmmaking friends are in town, I’ll do guest spots where we watch whatever we damn well please.

Some of my favorite podcasts have been the ones where I sit down with Alice or Bird or whoever and just yammer over a great flick. Obviously, movies hold a dear place in my heart and have had an enormous presence in my life. I’ve said it before: watching movies is like going to church for me. My Pulp Fiction and Godfather DVDs are my bible study. Thomas Theaters is my Cathedral. I pray in slug lines and Courier New. This is a great excuse to watch wonderful movies with wonderful people and hopefully hit you with a couple laughs as well.

I still haven’t decided what to call it yet. I’m thinking “Through the Lens,” “Behind the Lens,” “The Monday Movie Mumble...” Any suggestions? Hit me up on Twitter (@MaxJPeterson) and let me know, or leave a comment.

Now then.

Marlon. That’s what this is all really about, I suppose. None of this comes without that, and everyone’s been waiting so patiently while I go to film school day to day on this thing. So let me tell you where we are:

1) THE COLOR GRADE: Once Bird and I finish the color grade, Marlon will officially be picture-locked, which means that the final cut is completed, the color grade is finished and just the way we like it, and that’s that. Once this is done, the video portion of Marlon is completely done.

Come hell or high water or ulcers from coffee, Bird and I will have the color grade done by Sunday, August 16th. (Renowned FRT Actor Adam Lowe is getting married on Saturday, so we’re undoubtedly going to lose that day. What an asshole, right?)

2) THE SOUNDTRACK: There’s a studio down in Escanaba, called Studio 10. It’s run by Shadd, Kevin, and Dan (when he’s not being the busiest man in the world), and they are the coolest crew of audio nerds I’ve ever met. Incredible guys, who went way beyond the extra mile, and made recording 16 tracks in two days possible. We had scheduled two weeks to record those tracks (see Marlon tab for a track listing for the soundtrack), but because of these guys, we did it in two days.

I’m still not sure how. After our first day of recording, I swear to god I thought the session had been a dream, because a dream was more likely than recording an entire metal album in a single day (we did metal first).

So where we are with the soundtrack is this: all the drums and rhythm guitar parts are recorded. The vocals are recorded for all but the metal tracks (I had to sing at a wedding, and didn’t want to blow my voice out screaming my balls off the day before).

This Thursday, I’m driving over to Escanaba with Alyssha Ginzel to record the piano part for our version of Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” My friend Enron (who lives in Esky) is meeting us at the studio to record a three-part piano suite we’re calling “The Marlon Suite.” (Bit on the nose, but hey.) My cousin Kate Williams will be heading down to the studio sometime the following week to record the vocal part for “Ave Maria.”

If I can find a crack in her schedule anywhere, my cousin Katie Jarvi is supposed to record some creepy cello for me as well. Fingers crossed, I can get her in next week as well...we’ll see what happens. If I can’t get her, the music I have will see us through, but I’d love to have some weird cello harmonics in the score.

I have to record lead guitar for some tracks and vocals for the metal. Dan has to do his bass parts for everything.

Then the soundtrack is done.

3) THE AUDIO MIX: This is the one thing I’m not sure about. Dan is working on this at home and at the studio in Escanaba. Since the soundtrack isn’t completed quite yet, what he’s working on at the moment is cleaning up the dialogue and the on-set audio track. He’s told me that everything we recorded while shooting the movie is usable, so Marlon will need almost no ADR.

Which, to be honest, is a miracle.

Mariah Rosado is going to record some Foley next week. I’m going to start on Foley next week as well, to take some of the burden off Dan, to free him up to finish the soundtrack mixes, so he can dive into the final audio mix. Like I said, this is the timeline I’m least certain about (Dan is the audio wizard. I’m basically an audio idiot, so I have no real hand in this bit, which means I’m flying a bit blind, here. But if there’s one person in the world I need to put my faith in for Marlon’s audio, it’s Dan Zini. He knows his shit, and he works harder than anyone I’ve met since the original Marlon production crew.)

Dan has told me that September 3rd is our deadline, and I believe we can do it. We’re going to have to work our asses off for a couple weeks, but that’s nothing I haven’t done before. Just ask anyone who shot with us in May, when the snow was starting to melt, or the crew that shot in my basement the day we filmed half of Marlon in a single day.

4) THE OTHER STUFF: I still have releases and contracts to send out to a few people. That’ll be done by September 3rd. Since we’re going to be done with Marlon by then, I’ll be holding the cast and crew screening the second week in September. Then a small test screening the third week in September.

Which means we’ll start submitting Marlon on October 1st.

Of course, the best laid deadlines of mice and men are often missed, but I’m going to keep positivity in the air. I’ve surrounded myself with YES People, and it hasn’t failed me yet. Besides, I’ve been working on this thing long enough. It’s about damn time it was finished.

###

So that’s where we are. That’s what I’m doing, what I’m up to. We’re almost done. I think that I can bring it in on time, with my current crew.

For everyone who has Indigogo perks coming:

I’ll get digital copies of the movie out right after the final test screening, to ensure you get a bug-free, totally final copy. If you got a DVD, that’ll be a little longer, while we finish the special features and commentary tracks and such, but you’ll get your digital copy the day it’s done. You have my word.

Soundtrack people, you’ll get that as soon as Dan is done with the mix and my brother and I decide on the best track order. Think mid-September.

The Art Book is going to take a bit longer. Working on the movie means I don’t have time to put together the art book right now, but I’ll do my best to have it done by Christmas. I’ve got a lot of cool stuff planned for it. I haven’t decided whether or not to include the shooting script for Marlon or the draft just before, which was much sexier, much more violent, and was written before I switched “Julia” to “Jules.” Thoughts?

T-shirts are getting made in October or November, and we’ll send them out as they come in.

And that’s where we are. Expect another blog in the next week or so where I start begging for money again, so we can trot this out to as many places as possible, but for now, just enjoy these little snippets and clips from the soundtrack recording sessions.

And thank you, again, all of you, for everything you’ve done for me and this movie over the past two years. I can’t tell you what it’s meant to me (but maybe I’ll try to write it into the art book).

--Max Peterson

In the third house he’s lived in since he wrote Marlon
August 11, 2015

Edit to Add: The podcast did not go up on time. Go figure. There was a very good, somewhat alarming, somewhat scary, and somewhat tragic reason for this. I'll write about it tonight or tomorrow, and the podcast will hopefully be up soon.

Summer Marlon Update...Where the F*ck are the Perks??

Hey, everybody! Wanted to let everyone know what's going on:

Summer's here...which has freed up my post-production crew again. The end of this last semester has been a real bear (for them; I graduated, so it was a cakewalk for me), and work on the final two stages of the flick floundered and stagnated a bit:

1) The color grade halted while Bird and I moved out of our old house and into our new one. As of yesterday, she's taken over as the official colorist on Marlon, and we're putting in 3 - 5 hours a day together to get the grade done. (It's actually a lot of fun: an aspect of filmmaking we can work on together without trying to kill each other. See "Married to Marlon, Parts I-V")
2) Dan, official sound guy of Marlon, finishing up his degree, understandably had to set the Sound Design aside and focus on his classes. In the past few weeks, however, he's helped complete the constructing of a professional sound studio and will be resuming work on both the sound design and the recording/integration of the score as soon as the studio is officially done.

So.

It's been brought to my attention that the original timeline for receiving the perks promised was July of last year. I'm sorry it's taken us so long to put this movie together, and that I'm so far past due on delivering the finished product (and all the ancillary swag), but the end is coming, along with a slew of Digital Copies, DVDs, CDs, and T-Shirts. I've given a strict completion date deadline--August 31st--and if it takes us longer than that to finish this thing, I'll probably jump off a bridge.
(I don't think it'll come to that. We're mighty close right now.)

SO. Thank you all so much for your patience and understanding. Making a 90-minute, festival-ready Black Comedy Horror, then writing the entire score yourself, editing yourself (color correct by Tyler LaTendresse, color grade by Bird Peterson: Love you, hon (not YOU, Tyler: you're getting married, you dog, you)), while one mad, brilliant man takes on a Dolby 5.1 surround sound audio design by himself...well...

It's harder than I thought it would be. And it's taken longer. And it's been infinitely more rewarding. Because now I know what I can do, and that what I can do is amazing.

What we can do is amazing. Because I couldn't have done any of this without you and your support. All of you.

I can see the finish line, there at the end of this summer, and we're all going to cross it together.

--Max Peterson
May 18th, 2015

Another Ranting Millennial

Maybe it’s just me, but I dig Netflix telling me to fuck off out of the digital world and back into real life. Every time I finish an episode of Dexter or a Joe Rogan stand-up special on that glowing, golden-brown stream of entertainment, where thirty-million-dollar bits of shit float hand in hand with masterworks and quirky little indies, Netflix suggests that I take my hand out of my pants, toss my pint of Chubby Hubby and go interact with the real world. Seriously. Go watch something: your “Recommended for You” will pop up as “Walk the Dog,” “Do Your Homework,” “Visit Your Friends,” or “Get Off With a Fetishist.”

(Not really, on that last one. I was just thinking of fun things you could do that involve human interaction.)
It’s a ballsy move on the part of a company that provides the most effective anesthetic since methadone. Total OTS (Over the Screen) availability, and that sweet dealer’s price of eight bucks a month have kept me eyeballs-deep in video entertainment for years.

Then, suddenly, here’s the pusher telling me I’ve got a problem. And goddamn if he isn’t right.

I’m one of those people with dreams that you read about. And for a while, in college, in the creative writing classes and in the living rooms of poets and playwrights infinitely smarter than I am, it looked like I might actually achieve them.

As it turns out, I’m too clever to be really smart, and too dumbed-down by two years of binge-watching snack-food entertainment to be really clever. What I’m left with is trendy milquetoast nihilism and a carefully-constructed faux-cynicism that I’ve incorporated into my writing in order to mask the unfashionable naked optimism still trying to claw its way into my diction. Like so many People with Dreams, I’ve done as much as possible to sabotage myself and squander my talent in the fear-filled lurch immediately following college: the real world is a scary fucking place, where nobody’s tossing around attaboys or accolades, and people as clever and cynical as you are are a dime a bag.

I got into a conversation about ISSUES today. Assorted: gender politics, abortion, religion...you know. The big taboo ones that everyone has an opinion about, but we’re not supposed to talk about to other thinking people. (Why the fuck we would talk about anything else, I have no idea. These things seem kind of important.) So here I am, talking about feminism, and I realized that my opinions weren’t very well-formed, and what little I did have to offer was mostly rhetoric regurgitated straight from the electric tit of a two-year orgy of television and Hollywood. I realized I hadn’t actually thought about feminism (or abortion, or war, or politics, or etcetera etcetera) for so long that I wasn’t sure what my opinions were. I mean, let’s not get crazy, here: I know I’m basically in support of feminism, I’m all for gay rights, war is fucked up and bad, freedom of expression is good. But I didn’t have a deeper dialogue to tap into.

Think about that for a second. It scared the shit out of me when I realized it, so ask yourself: when was the last time you really thought? Sure, you’re thinking all the time, shooting from the hip with your friends, creating totally enlightened discourses on all sorts of subjects and ranting on and on on your blog about what you think(something about glass houses, here). But when was the last time you put an issue at the forefront of your mind and really looked at it from all angles? Thought about it, focused on it, searched the deep, hard, uncomfortable part of yourself and fought to look unflinchingly at what you--not Don Draper, or David Fincher, or your friends--believe? The answer for me was “Not for a good goddamn long while.” How sick is that? We live in a world today where Twitter, smartphones, facebook, and myriad other technological wonders have made instantaneous communication a day-to-day reality. Where anybody can fire a half-formed thought out into the world for all to see, with nary a second thought concerning the repercussions of these 140-character thoughtbombs.

I’m not going to argue the pros or cons of social media. It’s been done a billion times, and really, it’s a moot point: it’s a fact of our time and we’re fucking stuck with it. What actually concerns me is the shallowing of the General Mind. There are serious, heady issues facing us right now.

“Us” as in this current generation. Remember Generation X? A generation characterized as fighting against the established way of doing things; a generation of edgy, defiant creativity and experimentation, with a devil-may-care attitude and razor-sharp cynicism in the face of conservative thought.

The Baby Boomer Generation? Despite their flaws, the generation who basically established everything that Gen X was fighting; Captains of industry and Queens of the homefront, creators of the suburban dream and the nuclear family. Hard workers with simple dreams, some of whom became part of a social movement that ended the war in Vietnam and showed the world, for one brief moment in history, that the citizens of a nation can control their own destiny and change the course of history.

You know what they call us? Millennials. So far, we’ve been characterized as unintelligent, unengaged, apathetic, uninformed, shiftless, entitled assholes who are so busy pouring our opinions into a technological fantasyland that we have essentially no concept of reality. The generation offended by everything and unafraid to bitch about it incessantly, anonymously, from behind our bedroom doors. The generation that is simultaneously pro-feminism and wildly sexist; offended by police brutality toward African Americans yet openly racist on our Vines, Tweets, Posts, Blogs, and trendy, affected coffee shop commentaries. The list goes on, but it’s irrelevant. The point is, we’re perceived as idiots. That, as things stand, is our legacy. Up until this post, coming in the form of righteous anger at the tail end of a monthlong depression, I was absolutely one of those idiots. I’m not exempt, not by a fucking long shot. I talked about feminism for hours without really being sure of what I was saying, citing half-remembered examples and ideas from a fucking decade ago.

I put forth that the reason our generation is seen as such is Netflix.

(Not really just Netflix, but come on. Work with me. I’m painting with a broad brush.)

We’re not a thinking generation. We’re not. We’re a generation of Entertain Me. We read less and less as more and more “great” television comes out, as Hollywood produces more and more meaningless visual wank-fests, and bands produce music increasingly devoid of substance. Do any of us really believe that Kanye West is going to be on the Classic station someday, next to Led Zeppelin, Hendrix, or the Beatles? Fuck no. People who say Bieber Fever and Beatlemania are the same phenomenon across generations are...

(Hold it in, Max. Enough vitriol.)
...incorrect. Let’s leave it there.

Our ability to consume entertainment combined with an ever-shortening attention span (NBC reported that the average attention span was 8 seconds in 2013) seems to be shorting out the pathways to deep thought. It’s easy to know a few surface facts about pretty much any issue, and most of us do, but do we really want to go down in history as a bunch of fatuous, plasticine goldfish philosophers? Why haven’t I really thought for so long? Is it really so frightening to dig in past the autopilot of a nine-to-five, a coupla beers, and a coupla movies on Netflix to get in touch again with the deep thought processes and core beliefs that are the core of “personality?” Without that deeper thinking, we stop being people and become a loose collection of sound bytes tied to a series of talking heads, idea colmuns, Op Ed pieces, and loudmouth bloggers (like me). Anybody can regurgitate the opinions of others, but it’s a rare beast of our times who can tell you something they really believe.

I guess what I’m getting at is that I think it’s cool that Netflix told me to turn of the T.V. and do something of value with my life, and the first thing of value that I did was wonder in writing why I haven’t been doing things of value all along. So I’m going to go work on my novel, and get back to color grading Marlon. I’m going to subscribe to Bitch Magazine and see what I can learn from people who seem to know a thing or two about a thing or two.

“Have a conversation,” I think it’s called.

--Max Peterson

From the top bedroom of a soon-demolished house

April 4th, 2015