Author: M Van Vleet

6) Darin Morgan – The guy wrote a few episodes of X-Files and Millennium and while he wasn’t prolific, just about everything he wrote simultaneously embodied the best elements of the show and skewered/undercut/recontextualized them as well. They demonstrated a deep knowledge and an irreverence that were just amazing, but a lot of the times, the guy wasn’t really putting much out. I’ve always been inspired by the sniper-type writers who laze about but when they do go off, they go off. In part because it gives me some hope that my slow output is still “okay” according to some vague, externalized authority. (There is no such authority.)

7) Kanesha Bryant’s monster designs and detailed world-building

8) Neuroscience and philosophy, in general. How much of the world can we actually understand, considering that we are forced to understand it with imperfect tools and a brain that uses shortcuts to create a living fiction just so we can navigate? Like: The optic nerve at the back of our eyes has no rods and cones, so our field of vision should have black holes in the middle. But they don’t ’cause our brains just estimate what should be there. We’re out of the loop.

9) Aphex Twin. Radiohead. I listen to a lot of music. Been making music mixes for over a decade of whatever stuff I’m finding new & interesting.

10) The moment when the pain of not-creating outweighs the pain of creation, may its orbit ever tighten.

One recurring theme in my creative influences is I truly appreciate creators who make it plain that there are no rules or guidelines or limitations on what can be created. I frequently worry that all I come up with are tropes, that I’m following along channels carved by others, like water seeking the easiest path downward. It’s probably true.

Reminders that it doesn’t have to be that way are a welcome counterbalance.

1) Vaporwave artists – Everyone knows what this is by now, yeah? Bedroom producers taking music that was previously “invisible”– mall music, synth garbage, smooth jazz– and like dub producers adding weird production to make the invisible visible and alienating. Music for haunted corporate spaces. Elevators with no doors. They create and discard personas at will, name their tracks unpronouncable things, sell 20 albums for pay-what-you-want, plunder CD-ROMs for graphical inspiration. It was and is a punk anti-corporate musical subgenre for something that sounds the way it does.

2) William S. Burroughs and the espontaneo. I had never had any interest in the Beats, but an artist I admired said NAKED LUNCH was actually funny, so I figured I’d check it out. There’s a bit in there where Burroughs is telling the story of a ridiculous surgeon, Dr. Benway, bragging about how surgeons have it easy these days, etc. etc. and then I hit this stretch:

—

A young man leaps down into the operating theatre and, whipping out a scalpel, advances on the patient.

DR. BENWAY: “An espontaneo! Stop him before he guts my patient!”

(Espontaneo is a bull-fighting term for a member of the audience who leaps down into the ring, pulls out a concealed cape and attempts a few passes with the bull before he is dragged out of the ring.)

—

Again: there are no real rules, right? Burroughs wanted to use this bull-fighting term, so he used it, but he also wanted you to know what it meant so he just– completely interrupted his narrative to put an inline footnote. This blew me away. It’s a small thing, but this gesture of contempt toward narrative conventions stays with me.

3) Itch. I mean, dang. Look at all those games.

4) Coffee. Just… gettin’ real jittery.

5) The grim spectre of Death. I could talk about this one for a while, but I won’t.

All these old video games getting remastered but no one has remastered the classic game “King Cobra” where a kid has to move on their knees to tag other kids but only if they set foot on the front lawn. We all know this classic game from CA in the 80s from in front of my house.

Hop on your steed and head out after the bank robber Bantam! Seek your own doom in the pursuit of fortune in this self-contained adventure!

Adulthood is realizing that the werewolves were out there every night, bones cracking as eldritch energies wrenched them from their human form, twisting them into something new and terrible… it’s just that it took a full moon to SEE them back then.

Now we have light bulbs.

man it’s only been 3 weeks and already I’m so nostalgic for when we’d all get together with no social distancing, dress me up in rags and straw, drag me through jagged cornfields and leave me out for the Summer Queen to devour after rising from her deep winter burrow, crushing my bones and blessing the harvest