David’s recent post —“I Am An Audience, First and Foremost”— was about two years in the making. When he first started work on it, my son hadn’t been born, I was in the process of moving back home, both of our mothers were alive, and I hadn’t even grown the mustache I have now shaved.
In this chat, we discuss how such a post comes to exist: how improvisation over time can let structure emerge, how themes develop that weren’t imagined at the outset, how the Internet and multimedia make certain kinds of output possible, and how much genre cliche constrains expressivity, as when e.g. something being “a movie review” makes the entire thing a mere iteration of a form everyone already knows the beats of!
We typically create shorter works whose resonance for different audiences is more obvious from the titles alone, resulting in the strange fact that among our posts on e.g. religion or video podcasts about the Enneagram, a piece on the biggest movie stars of all time and their most popular action vehicles is likely the most illegible and niche-iest thing on this publication; it’s also IMO the best.
David also shares some sources germane to these and other issues:
Dana Stevens’ (highly worthwhile) book Camera Man.
Rebecca Solnit’s River of Shadows, on Eadweard Muybridge.
Changing the Time Between Shots for the Sniper Rifle from 0.5 to 0.7 Seconds for Halo 3:
• And Frank Lantz on a Go move that contains the history of Japan:
And if you haven’t read it yet, the post in question is here:
