You Don't Know the Power Of the Dark Side

There are days when the creation of these posts are volcanic, the fiery release of an all-day (or on rare occasions, all-week) build of molten thought, spraying white-orange, then pooling red, then cooling to steamy black in the form of words on the electronic page. Normally it's about as useful as an actual lava flow, pretty to contemplate in the abstract, but hell on real estate practically. Unless we're talking about geologic time, then it is real estate, eventually. Really I'm just hoping some day someone will be able to use something I've written to murder an ice zombie. It's a small dream, but it seems more practical than the one I used to have about getting published.

Other days the process is a bit more tectonic, with lots of imperceptible grinding over what seems like decades, building up stresses that I can only hope will result in shudders and ripples that unsettle the occasional bookshelf and un-square the wall-hung picture frames. Being a Southern Californian, I'm already uncomfortable with the metaphor. You know how we don't like things to be earnest or over-wrought.

Oh, and also because in Southern California we have earthquakes, which are properly scary and not to be spoken of in great volume lest we accidentally invoke one. We're all aware of how every person has the ability to affect their physical surroundings by thinking about them, but only by accidentally thinking about an undesired outcome at an inopportune time. For example, I can make a traffic jam with my thoughts, but it's outside the realm of possibility that I can think one equally out of existence. How this power balances out when, say, millions of sports fans rooting for both competing sides are having millions of thoughts about millions of things likely to affect the outcome, all of them contradictory (sometimes within the head of one person) at any given second is for more advanced philosophers to consider. For me, all it really says is that if there is a god, he's less an omnipresent sky monarch and more of a cosmic actuary.*

All I know is there's no way I'm going to see San Andreas. Watching a movie about the death and devastation caused by a massive temblor on the fault I actually live on would be as much of an emotional disaster as having United 93 as an in-flight movie. And keep in mind this is all considering my multi-decade attachment to Carla Gugino, both as an accomplished and underrated actor and because there was a period of time, starting from the early 1990s until... well, eventually, where she represented a certain type of physical ideal. Look, it was 1993, I was young and vulnerable, and her appeal was such that I gave half a shit about a Pauly Shore movie for a minute. It's all been very innocent. Even through Sin City. Well, through most of Sin City...

If I ever do see San Andreas, it will be in the more relative safety of my living room, without the added feature of wall-trembling cinema sound, which frankly seems like pushing your luck. Nope, if it comes up at all, it will be viewed through the hoodoo-filtering power of my television and it's on-board tinny speakers, which can barely be bothered to shake themselves, let alone anything else.

Any viewing of San Andreas will have to be classified under the new (to me) category of the hate-watch, wherein media consumers like you and me sit through a piece of filmed entertainment, knowing and expecting to dislike it, strictly for the quality of the negative experience. I've gotten a little sick of the sight of the words "hate-watch" together because, like any neologism, it grates at first for being a) unfamiliar and b) immediately used by every clever boots trying to sound in-crowd-y. It's not quite so bad as "on fleek," but it's treading a dangerous and well-worn path.

There's no real losers in the hate-watch phenomenon as the hate-watcher gets out of it whatever masochistic feedback loop version of self-schadenfreude is working under the circumstances and media companies reserve the right to make not a single fucking distinction between people who love a thing or hate it in the metrics they keep.

The hate-watch phenomenon of the moment is the new Entourage movie. For those of you who don't know, it's an extension of the mid-Aughts HBO series about a big-faced special needs hobo who is sometimes in movies and has baboon friends. In the course of its own series life, it went from being a sly send-up of Hollywood vapidity to some kind of champion of simultaneously identified and reviled bro-culture, to the point that now people are using the power of their loathing of it to raise money for women's health charity, to an insanely successful degree.

Ever since the invention of the DVR, the collapse of the ratings model for television viewership has been a problem and it seems as though the hate-watch might be the answer, at least for part of it. Except for live sporting events, there really has been no reason for anyone to watch anything on a schedule other than whenever-the-fuck. But in a weird way, it seems as though the internet, that which wrought live first-run television's demise as the premier entertainment option for most people, is giving TV (and movies to some degree) a bit of their must-watch urgency back by acting as an echo chamber for the thoughts and feelings surrounding the experience of watching a thing, with immediate effect. In the hunt for clicks and virality, if any bit of culture has any semblance of traction in the consciousness, it immediately spawns a thousand recap, analysis or vent/share articles that become unavoidable in any routine daily scroll through the virtual news landscape. And as with hate-watching, the people counting the clickthroughs and jump-clicks aren't pausing to check the quality--good or bad--of the experience people are seeking to share.

The new need for immediacy, it seems, is the only band-aid on top of the multitude of deep wounds to the bleeding-out industry paradigm mauled nearly to death by binge-watching. If you're not sure what I mean, see what happens if you're a couple of days behind on Game of Thrones. You essentially can't go anywhere online without risking mild to total spoilers, just in article headlines, let alone the articles themselves. The only way to avoid the crash of the wave of information is to ride it, by watching the thing as soon as possible, conforming to the wishes of the crowd to talk about this thing right now OMG OMG.

TL;DR: Worried you guys didn't see "Hardhome" yet, wrote a bunch of nonsense around it instead.

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*ALL THE MORE REASON TO BE AVOIDED!!!