{"id":14387,"date":"2024-04-13T11:48:00","date_gmt":"2024-04-13T11:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/?p=14387"},"modified":"2025-07-02T16:15:49","modified_gmt":"2025-07-02T16:15:49","slug":"working-episodically","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2024\/04\/13\/working-episodically\/","title":{"rendered":"working episodically"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

magazines, chiarella, mens health, bloggers, herb caen, julie & julia\u2026 talk about tv?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I was a teenager I used to skip school a bunch. The cover story I gave myself was that I was skipping a few classes and lectures to catch up on my homework. I kinda believed it, too. What I\u2019d do is I would go to the Esplanade Library \u2013 I think I\u2019d often bring a change of clothes in my schoolbag. And I\u2019d pick up a stack of magazines to reward myself between homework sessions. I\u2019d go \u201calright let\u2019s read a little bit first before we get started\u2026\u201d and then I\u2019d end up spending hours reading magazines and barely touch my homework at all. In retrospect, I\u2019m glad I did, and I consider reading those magazines a more formative part of my education than anything I did in school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I read a lot of magazines as part of what I considered to be my cultural education. So very naturally I felt drawn to the idea of someday becoming a magazine columnist myself. One of my favorite writers at the time was Tom Chiarella, who wrote for Esquire. A couple of my favorite of his columns include I also really liked advice columnists like Jimmy The Bartender and Nicole Beland, who wrote for Men\u2019s Health. I also read a lot of blogs, and had one of my own, and I still think of myself as a blogger even if the term isn\u2019t so popular these days. (Listing out my favorite bloggers could maybe fill out an entire post of its own, but really quickly\u2013 I was particularly drawn to Seth Godin, Tim Ferriss, and generally anybody else who confirmed my view that the Internet was a realm full of potential and opportunity. Even today I feel that this is underappreciated in a myriad of ways. I remember that Twitter was originally described as a \u201cmicroblogging platform\u201d. The wikipedia page for microblogging<\/a> is a fun quick lil rabbithole to dive down, with some interesting history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I was thinking out loud about this stuff on Twitter a while back, someone introduced me to Herb Caen, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle who wrote jokes, gossip, puns and anecdotes for 60 years as \u201ca continuous love letter to San Francisco\u201d. He wrote 16,000 columns of 1,000 words each, coined the term \u201cbeatnik\u201d, popularized the term \u201chippie\u201d. This is very aligned with the spirit of what I wanna be doing with my writing. His columns offer \u201ceverything you expect from an entire newspaper\u201d. He also cultivated an interesting style of using ellipses (…), described as \u201cthree dot journalism\u201d, which feels quite like Twitter in its disjointedness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt was often said that a single mention in Caen\u2019s column was worth more than a full-page ad in the paper. Caen\u2019s forte was to take a fairly innocuous item and give it his particular comedic touch. He also liked to subhead some of the paragraphs with terms like \u2018pocket-full of wry.\u2019\u201d \u2013 Harry Spencer (source<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Apparently Herb remixed this \u201c\u2026\u201d approach from an older columnist Walter Winchell<\/a>, who approvingly described him as \u201cthe kid who imitates me better than anybody in the business.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Image\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve long been fascinated with the movie Julie & Julia (2009). It\u2019s described as the first major motion picture that was based on a blog. It stars Amy Adams as Julie Powell, a New York based blogger who challenged herself to make every single recipe in the cookbook written by legendary chef and TV personality Julia Child (who is played by Meryl Streep). The movie did well at the box office, and is reasonably well-reviewed, with most of the praise going unsurprisingly to Meryl Streep. My fascination has to do with the blog: how did that go? How does a blog end up as a movie with Meryl Streep in it? I looked it up, and right away I kept encountering interesting details. First of all, the blog developed a large following on its own merit, which makes sense to me. People love to follow along on an ambitious-yet-finite expedition. Many of us dream of doing something larger-than-life, but few of us follow through on it, and when someone actually does, many of the other dreamers are eager to witness \u201cone of us\u201d make it all the way through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fun sidenote: When I was just about finishing up my second ebook Introspect<\/a>, I learned of a similar book \u2013 Man\u2019s Search For Himself<\/a> (1953) \u2013 written by Rollo May, who was peers with luminaries like Alfred Aldler, Paul Tillich and Erich Fromm. In that book I learned about William Cimillo, a bus driver from NYC\u2019s Bronx who one day in 1947, after seventeen years of making the same right turn every day<\/a>, simply decided to disregard his usual bus route and drive 1,300 miles to Florida instead. He was apparently known to be a hardworking guy who never complained, but something seemingly just snapped in him and he decided to go on his joyride. He was arrested for theft of the bus, but there was so much fanfare and acclaim for him upon his return \u2013 hundreds of people had gathered, cheering \u2013 that the charges were dropped, leaving him to uneventfully resume driving buses in NYC for another sixteen years before his retirement. Rollo wrote, “People who live as ‘hollow men’ can endure the monotony only by an occasional blowoff\u2013 or at least by identifying with someone else’s blowoff.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway yeah, back to Julie Powell \u2013 who passed away from Covid at only 49 years of age\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I went looking up the archive of her original blog<\/a>, here\u2019s day 2:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n

the office, brooklyn 99, these are easy to binge<\/p>\n\n\n\n

breaking bad, very cinematic, a little slow moving now<\/p>\n\n\n\n

prison break, was super exciting, rewatching now is a little weird because of all the cliffhangers at the end of every episode. feels forced but it was an artefact of its time<\/p>\n\n\n\n

avatar the last airbender\u2013 distinct commercial breaks<\/p>\n\n\n\n

famous books that were episodic<\/p>\n\n\n\n

it can be somewhat good to think in chapters\u2026 jk rowling storyboard<\/p>\n\n\n\n

beats, scenes<\/p>\n\n\n\n

as i write this i wonder if this itself should be a multi-part essay. part of me always wants to go meta, always wants to digrss, take branching paths. hint at a broader, wider world. how to do this skillfully? rhetoric of the hyperlink….<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Quote from Boys show runner: \u201cOne, when it came to shocking shit, we just wanted to make sure it serviced the story or characters, so it wouldn’t feel gratuitous. As for story, the interesting thing about the Boys comic is that it’s pretty episodic, self-contained stories. Every couple issues, they’re on a new case. It would really work on a rated X-version of CBS. But streaming (and its necessity for binging) dictates one continuous story. I had dinner with Garth Ennis, and he mentioned the book was inspired in part by James Ellroy. So wanting to keep Garth’s spirit, we had the notion to create an Ellroy-like noir mystery, like LA CONFIDENTIAL, where something simple (Robin’s death), eventually twists into a large and dangerous plot (Compound V). In that framework, we then tried to fit in as many of the moments from the comics that we loved. It’s kinda like a remix, at the end of the day. The plot specifics change, but you work hard to hold onto the spirit.\u201d https:\/\/old.reddit.com\/r\/television\/comments\/cjt17f\/im_eric_kripke_the_cocreator_of_the_new_amazon\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

(The hardest thing about adaptation is) getting the rhythm of the story right. A comic book artist told me once: comics are based on space — the graphics of the page. Film is based on time — the timing of a beat, the speed of a cut. Totally different mediums. So if you ever tried to completely faithfully capture a comic, it would suck out loud in my opinion. You have to take the elements that work, remix them for a new medium. The Boys comic and The Boys show are different animals. I hope people love both! https:\/\/old.reddit.com\/r\/television\/comments\/cjt17f\/im_eric_kripke_the_cocreator_of_the_new_amazon\/evfwwjb\/<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

magazines, chiarella, mens health, bloggers, herb caen, julie & julia\u2026 talk about tv? \u2731 When I was a teenager I used to skip school a bunch. The cover story I gave myself was that I was skipping a few classes and lectures to catch up on my homework. I kinda… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[730],"class_list":["post-14387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-substack"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-3K3","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14387"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14387\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14811,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14387\/revisions\/14811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}