Front Page – Page 3

This one time, I moved to Melbourne for a job. Now I don’t mean a career, like one of those fancy gigs where you have a salary and a future. No, I mean a job, like with hours and shit that directly pertain to whether you get paid or not. I was also really drunk when I made this decision. I was really fucking drunk and made the decision to move to a whole new city for a whole same 21 dollars an hour goddamn job. I made that bed and I lay in it for 6 months of way less than expected hours. This one time I also decided to write about every episode of The Simpsons.

There’s a small trickle of money coming in for me now via Patreon. It’s small, but when you are used to living on the bottom that small is large enough. Enough that I felt obligated to it. I felt I needed to do more than the video yammering as, exhausting as a day of that can be, I struggle to honestly treat it like work. I spent a weekend stripping weatherboarding one time, that was fucking work, a lack of air conditioning and Aaron’s peculiar shape don’t add up to the same level of hassle. “So”, thinks I, “I’ll put my degree and decades of honed skill to some use and provide the paying audience with some bonus material. I’ll write about The Simpsons, I think about it at least once a day, how hard could it be to write about it once a week?”

I think I’ve committed myself to over a decade’s worth of work. It’s my bed and I’ll fucking lay in it. Speaking of which, I’ve finished season 1.

I’ve been aiming to make these a mix of entertaining and educational, both a challenge as “The Internet” is a broad target audience, but I’ve not seen much (if any) discussion on any of the major forums outside of mere spouted opinion so I believe I’ve brought up useful ideas. Spouting your opinion is fundamentally selfish. You do it to vent or to feel meaningful, it doesn’t deconstruct or educate, nobody can use it to structure more effective art. People use IMO as a defensive tactic when they lack the vocabulary or knowledge to explain their actual point about a work, if they even understand the difference between taste and assessment at all. So what’s the point? If I’m not going to learn anything deeper than what xXm0viefanXx likes, why should I give a shit? Your taste is meaningless and your assessment is only useful if you’ve managed to separate the two. Otherwise you’re another blithering internet numbskull operating under the delusion that their taste and objective quality are parallel tracks by some amazing cosmic coincidence. Practise by liking something by someone you hate. If you can separate artist and art, you are on your way to being useful.

Go to any thread and you’ll see this in action. It’s a shame as text response is, in the age of mid and post episode threads, probably the most actively engaged form of writing for the average person and the problem is fundamentally an issue of a little education. If this can accomplish anything, a probably naive hope, I’d hope it stimulate a desire to learn a little more about how to better approach the art you like.

So I’ve yammered on about things like reality balancing because that’s at the root of the more vague posts people make when they go on about how something “feels”. In that, the first series has been a fun experience. The balancing act that gave The Simpsons it’s cultural status couldn’t have existed out of the box, at least not in the era it came from. The earlier seasons needed to be simpler to create the baseline reality and character core. It’s this that grounds the wackier absurdity of the golden age and separates it from things like whatever 10 minute animated nonsense-vomit Cartoon Network is currently playing after 10pm. The thing about these grounded points is that freezing them in time is absurd, and eventually the frozen grounded reality dies and leaves only the screwball shit. But between the frozen and the burnout is a Goldilocks zone of yellow cultural institution that couldn’t have existed without the others.

I’m looking forward to season 2 as it is a far more confident season. The intro is solidified into the familiar one which lasted the show’s quality span and then some, only being retired after 19 goddamn years. The story world is on much firmer footing too, with the idea of Springfield being a theatre stage with a variety of semi-regular background characters giving the writers more points to craft jokes around. I’ve not watched any of it in quite some time so I’m hoping for some funnier fare. When I started this, the idea was to explore some of the weirder jokes if only to better understand why some of them have remained with me for so long. Season 1 didn’t give me that, but it proved a nonetheless fascinating journey into the foundations of the show and good fodder for explorations of character, tone, and the construction of fictional realities.

I’ve no idea how many of you read these. It is possible that I’m preaching to digital birds. But I undertake things like this selfishly so I’ll be pressing on, regardless. I tend to flip a coin to see if I lock any behind the Patreon wall but now that there’s a decent backlog of example material, more if not most subsequent pieces will become patron content. It’s an incredibly small wall so if you complain about it, congratulations on ousting Mugabe and I hope your money is worth something again one day.

Beefily yours, Gabriel.