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Housekeeping
Are you planning to play Vulture’s Movies Fantasy League this year? Have you ever played before? I frankly HAVEN’T: I’ve always been too scared to escalate my casual Oscar betting against my parents into something more stats and numbers and early predictions-driven. But sometimes I am motivated to do so because whatever year it was that The Shape of Water won Best Picture, I called it like five months in advanced to the awe and disbelief of many around me. “That movie is too horny to win an Oscar,” they said. Wrong: that movie wasn’t horny at all.
Anyway, I will be playing Vulture’s Movies Fantasy League this year, and I will be spearheading a Creator (lol!) Mini-league! So you can compete against me and other Fran Magazine readers. There are also mini-leagues lead by Fran Magazine friends:
, , , and others. I don’t totally understand if you can be in multiple mini-leagues, so “choose your fighter,” as they say. The Fran Magazine mini-league is called “Fran Magazine,” which is what you will enter as your league upon registration. Let’s not over think this. There are very real, very expensive prizes if you win Vulture’s overall Fantasy League, but let’s just say that the winner of the Fran Magazine Movies Fantasy League will win a free Fran Magazine mug. (If you already have one, I’ll send you something else. Maybe a book! Or a blu-ray!)You can read all about the game HERE and sign up to play HERE!
Promises, promises
Twice over the course of my life, I’ve watched people I know in various creative fields accept offers from disgustingly wealthy people in order to do whatever work they want — seemingly carte blanche — for as long as they want. I understand why they do this. It makes sense. I’m not talking about taking a job that might be soulless, but pays a lot of money — “golden handcuffs” — but an actual exchange of money from a singular(ish) person who has at least nine figures to their name for work that is motivated by creative expression and not fulfilling any ego-driven purpose. I’m talking about, like, 19th century patronage, like when a wealthy old widow paid Tchaikovsky to live in her backyard and write symphonies. Is the money evil? The money is money. Were the guys evil? One of them was and still is legitimately, profoundly evil, and also very stupid. The other is sort of run-of-the-mill evil, which is to say, people with that amount of money have definitely not done good things to get that amount of money in the first place. Again: I understand why people accept these offers. I always think an an anecdote in Leigh on Leigh when Mike Leigh is agonizing about taking money from some company that he believes is bad, and he goes to ask Ken Loach for advice, and Loach is like, “are you a fucking moron? Take the money.”1
Anyway, any time I have watched someone accept one of these offers, the countdown begins until the wealthy patron’s board of directors or advising officers or bullshit hierarchy is like, “wait a sec, you’re giving HOW MUCH to WHO to do WHAT?” and the funding gets pulled and everyone is at a sudden and strange loss. It sucks. And every time this happens, the person or people I know who have been taking this money to make their work is blindsided and heartbroken. It is difficult, I imagine, to see the future when the carrot dangling in front of you is that big. I can say all this with some degree of bravado and flippancy because I have not ever had such an opportunity in my life, or at least not to such a literal degree. I have benefit from things like this, but I have not been the person in charge of making the decision: yes, I will take this money to do this work.
Every now and then I get an email from a student or a young person asking for advice about professional writing. There is some advice I can concretely give, especially when it comes to pitching or working with editors, but for the most part, I am skeptical to say anything with any certainty. The path I followed was extremely unorthodox at the time, and not in any way replicable now, unless you too can be in a position of slowly befriending people who can give you a job while working in food service. What I do tell people, and where I think I dissent from many of my peers, is that I think it’s more or less completely fine to work for free. Often I think it’s really good.
I graduated from college in 2013, and I was not paid to write until late 2015, and not in any substantial way until midway through 2016. That’s not to say I had no money at the time: I worked about 38 hours a week in food service (if I worked 40, they would have had to give me health insurance, which they did not want to do <3 but they paid me well above minimum wage and I was on my parents’ health insurance so it was fine) and picked up odd jobs here and there. All the writing I did was for free, and the bulk of it was for Bright Wall/Dark Room — a then-Tumblr, now online magazine that runs a number of hybrid critical/personal essays on film (and TV, and the internet, and all sorts of stuff). BW/DR was and is a small operation, run by people who have extremely normal, modest paying jobs. I did not care that BW/DR could not pay me $400 for 2,000 words. I cared about writing 2,000, and having an editor look at those words and give me notes and thoughts and suggestions. No one else was doing that for me at the time: I did not have a writers group or a regular meeting workshop. No one else was guiding me in any kind of professional capacity towards actual improvement of skill, which is more or less what it’s all about.
When I tell people it’s fine to write for free, I don’t mean that it’s fine to be exploited. At the same time I worked in food service and wrote the odd essay for BW/DR, I was interning for a small marketing company. The internship, on paper, was five days a week, 9-5, for three months — for no money. I said, that’s crazy, but the M.O. at the time was that if you were an English major, you’d better get a job in marketing and advertising ASAP if you ever wanted to be able to pay rent. I told the company that I had to keep my food service job in order to justify doing that much work for free, and all considered, I wouldn’t be able to work more than three days a week. They agreed to that, so I worked Monday thru Wednesday, and picked up five or six shifts a week in food service. I also wrote when I could — which was at one in the morning. At the end of the internship, I did not get a job offer, in part because I was told by the then-VP of the company that it was clear I “did not want it badly enough.” The company folded eighteen months later, and the founder is now a “global entrepreneur” who has been living on a sailboat for seven years.
During this time in my life, I also worked a handful of internships — either non-paid or with a very minimal stipend — that were predicated one “a job that might be available soon.” Hang in there, I was told time and time again, a job is coming. Those jobs never came. BW/DR, on the other hand, promised no such thing. There was a vague gesture towards “we’d like to be able to pay” (and “we’d like to be able to pay more” later down the line), but there was no stick and no carrot. The reward was the work in and of itself. It was never unclear. Had I wanted to walk away or cry exploitation, I could have, but I didn’t want to. I got what I wanted out of the exchange of goods and services. I felt myself improving slowly — being tested, challenged, corralled into a style that was both coherent and wholly my own.
I write all this now as a long-winded pledge drive speech in part because BW/DR just lost a chunk of their funding earlier this year, which has made me think a lot about the “future” of “writing” and what is paid to get what end result. I think it is a magazine well-worth subscribing to, not only because the writing on there is quite good, but put together by people who have had the option at every other point in their life to stop doing this. I have no great thoughts on the foreseeable future of cultural criticism (see: Richard Brody and BDM, and also Vikram’s tweet paraphrasing Brendan) which is not so much an “industry” so much as it is full of people who have niche interests forced to become generalists to make due. I have no delusions of grandeur about the future of media, and I have no faith in the fictional one billionaire who actually understands art and wants to fund it, no holds bar, the board of directors be damned. Be serious. I assume that if — but more likely when — I am given the axe at my current job, I will move on to brighter and/or duller but definitely different pastures. But I think paying for this stuff, if you can, while you can, is a good use of your time and money. It does not pay for people to get full-time jobs, or health insurance, but it supplements time and labor spent on earnest attempts at artistic improvement. I would not be half the writer I was if I did not write for free for editors who edited for free. If there are two things I am driven insane hearing about, it’s when people I know confess to be low or non-tippers and when they complain about paywalls. Look, I’m sorry they took away 12ft.io too, but either learn to pirate in a real way or cough up.
An essay I’ve started and left hanging for the past six months is about my slow breakup with WQXR, the New York classical music station, whose programming is excellent yet chock full of ads decrying “rising anti-Semitism” wore me down to the point of exhaustion and rage. I feel about those ads the way I do the giant “JewBelong” billboards I see in Times Square or on the highway back in Chicago — cheap attempts to stoke divide and discredit student movements and legitimate criticism of Israel amidst an ongoing, violent war for which our country is largely to blame. For a long time, I donated to WQXR, believing it to be a PBS-like necessity, and I felt mocked, almost daily, by the reminder that the station had sponsors who could pay for ad space compared to my measly $50. Why does the radio station need my money if they have other money? They don’t, is the answer, and whatever moral clarity I felt like I got from donating vanished. My $50 is better spent on a GoFundMe that I come across on my feed 100% of the time. I come back to WQXR every now and then, where it seems they have mostly stopped running these ads.
When I am asked about the future of “the industry” — which industry? most of them, I guess — I think of small money as the driving force. Cheap zines, small presses, novellas, independent sites, microbudget cinema, etc. I do not think about AI, which is ugly, but $10,000 films with 58 minute runtimes, which are ugly in a different way that is actually so beautiful and yay. Most everyone I know who is working in this space is happy, albeit stressed and broke, which is kind of the best you can hope for — at least for now.
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I’m paraphrasing.
The JewBelong billboard outside my workplace was replaced last year by an advertisement for Tim Pool’s radio show that features his trademark beanie-topped scowl. I have not yet decided if this is better or worse.
JEWBELONG is kind of rhythmically similar to UNABOMBER in wordplay and aesthetic impact