DISPATCHES FROM THE BLACK HOLE #1: Rebooting
Welcome back, or just plain welcome, dear readers to Cultural Conversation.
I’m in the process of giving the blog a bit of a reboot as I transfer over from Wordpress to Substack, and I’ve decided to bring back my own personal missives which I did do some years ago that give a little more insight into what I’m up to, what’s coming up, and what I’m thinking and writing about, as my guess is if you’re following this blog, you might have at least a modicum of interest in me and my workings.
Cultural Conversation came about in 2017 when I decided to stop just writing film reviews on Letterboxd and upped my content into blog form. I’ve since written several hundred primarily film and TV reviews, long reads and articles, with gaps and breaks in between while I’ve started building a podcast empire—We Made This—and penned several books. More on that later.
I do miss regular blogging on popular culture, however. It’s been very sporadic of late. I’d like to build more of a readership on this site and more interaction with people. The question has always been how. I have a fair few people who are very supportive on social media, especially Twitter, and I hope many of you are reading this right now. I can only encourage you to comment on posts here where we could really drill down into conversations.
One factor is where you sit, as a writer, in the ecosystem online. There are more bloggers these days than trained doctors, at least it feels that way. Everyone has an opinion. Everyone has a take. Many people have migrated onto YouTube, into video essays, breakdowns etc… Never say never, but I’m not sure that’s for me. I’m increasingly old fashioned in preferring the written word, even if that’s not where the biggest traffic is.
That’s the thing - does traffic matter? I’m a one man band. I tried creating an entertainment site but I enjoyed editing other people as much as listening to Coldplay, as great as many of those writers were (and continue to be). I have now started getting paid work for certain sites fairly regularly and in the last year or two have written for some bigger or relatively prestige sites. I hope that will continue and I now will only write, outside of here, for sites that can afford to pay (or are, you know, big deals). I feel I’ve reached that threshold now.
So I’m not really chasing clicks with this site. It’s why, although being Rotten Tomatoes verified, I don’t think I’m going to mercilessly try and review new content. It’s a zero sum game chasing PR companies, getting previews merely days ahead, writing furiously to deadlines. That’s not for me either. I’ll do the odd thing for a company I like (such as Second Sight, who are releasing some great stuff lately). But unless you’re in London, and working for a major site or publisher, it feels largely pointless anyway to chase that dragon. You’re up against so many other writers it feels exhausting and demoralising.
That’s not to say I won’t write about a new film or TV show but the passion has to be there. I remember seeing Nope straight away in the summer and intended to write about it, but I didn’t enjoy the film as much as expected anyway and I realised I had nothing to say that wasn’t already being said, better, elsewhere. That helped informed my decision to make peace with not being driven to cover everything new relentlessly and think more about what I want to drill into on here.
That thought process is kind of still ongoing. I really want to finish my analysis of Alias, which I started way back in 2018! Two seasons to go. I really want to eventually review Lost in the same level of detail, and Game of Thrones. I would like to do more Scene by Scene breakdowns and do more with Partisan Cinema/TV & Causality Loop, which allow me to dial in on specific points of interest in entertainment. Those feel like fun ways of tapping into work that I can get my teeth into. Lots of other ideas too.
All of this is of course contingent on everything else I’m working on. Chiefly, books. My latest, The Cinematic Connery: The Films of Sir Sean Connery, arrived on October 13th. The response to that has been fab considering I’m not in any way a big name author. Radio appearances, a stage invite, reviews and hopefully one or two other fun things. People seem to be buying and enjoying it and it’s certainly helped raise my profile a little bit.
The next one I’m currently hard at, with the working title of Lost Federations: The Unmade History of Star Trek, which tracks all of the films and TV shows or episodes that were planned but never filmed. There’s already a trove of information across 60 years out there for this but I’ve never seen it all in one place, which is the aim of this book. It’s a fun journey for me learning lots of new tales that would have been fantastic (and in some cases less so) to see made so I think Trek fans are going to love this big picture. That should be out late in 2023 is my guess.
Around that too is the podcasting for We Made This. That’s approaching its fourth year of life and is happily slowly growing. We will have nailed a million downloads by the end of 2023 on current form. Small change for some bigger podcasts or networks but I’m proud of what our shows have achieved and are achieving. There’s a real community around it now that is lovely, full of people I consider pals from around the world. That’ll hopefully grow too into next year. I’ve recorded more podcasts in 2022 than any other year, over 100, and I think that will slow down next year for a few reasons, but I love doing it - both on WMT shows and beyond.
So in other words, there is a lot happening. But I really want Cultural Conversation to sit at the heart of what I do. I want all of these areas and networks to combine into one amorphous, interlinked mass as I not just build my profile and edge closer to making what I love to do the most as a hobby into a living, but have a real web of friendships & brilliant fellow creatives alongside me as I do that. It’s really started to happen in the last couple of years and the sky, I think, is the limit where that’s concerned, especially as social media evolves in the 2020s.
If you’ve reached the end of this, WELL DONE. Have a biscuit. You’re now a Black Belt in listening to me ramble on, which must mean you’re interested and you care. Cheers for that. I hope you do subscribe to the blog as put all of these things into action over the next year and beyond. At the end of the day, you guys are why I do this. To share my love of everything I’m interested in with you so we can enjoy it together. So thanks for coming with me.
To quote the big man Captain Jean-Luc Picard, “Let’s see what’s out there…”
If you enjoyed this piece, please consider supporting my work with a one-off Ko-Fi donation: https://www.ko-fi.com/ajblackwriter