The news of Rob Reiner's death has really shocked me like everyone else and I cried last night finding out. One of the worst nightmare tragic ways to pass through this world. He seemed to live a good and fulfilling life. Trying to do meaningful things and able to exist in a creative paradise and it was taken away violently and coldly. I guess the only consolation is he had many years that fulfilled all of these aims and dreams. I hope light and peace are on the other side of this cruel and callous plane. R.I.P. to him and his wife.

I'm rewatching all of Stranger Things with my mother to prepare for the finale and I couldn't help but think of how these fandoms are so awful to people, and the exposure these kids had to endure and the eventual turning and backlash, because people didn't like creative decisions made. They were angry. They wanted their time and money back, which you're not going to get, that's not how it works. So hordes of people not sure what to do with this uncomfortable feeling, they can't sit with and go off to their own spaces. They have to spill out and lash out they wasted an hour or 8 hours of their life for work they didn't like the end result of. I get that feeling, I've been upset by creative choice and such and vented. Yet there is this appetite in the culture for people to be demanding that they have been wronged. They have been burned. They have been betrayed of the end product that they wanted served for them on demand.

It floods in the formal media press pieces, to rapid over the top emotional complaints/rants on social media and that's how it goes but yet they can't even leave it at that, it's not good enough. Rapidly to the source, go onto these people's special social media pages and let them know. Who wouldn't fucking hate that? Why wouldn't people be resentful, check out or lose their minds and the grasp they once held onto with their creative work. Being an actor is like being spilt into a haunted ventriloquist doll the audience wants to never forget and continually interact and be entertained. 

I think of the actress who plays El on Stranger Things, Millie Bobbie's trajectory. The way she was turned on, dissected apart, and eventually despised far away from the clever fun kid rapping Nicki Minaj's Monster verse to eventually being sexually mocked and exploited, and told she's no good now, she's actually trash. She actually can't act we found out. 'I'm tired of her', etc. But outside of Millie it goes to all those kids, the older actors, the creators and other TV shows. Like the now despised Game of Thrones. 

'How dare this didn't work out the way I wanted this thing that I loved!? Well you know I actually hate it now. It's ruined! Toss it, discard it into nothing...What's next on the menu?'

Art isn't for you on demand. This has repulsed me over the past over a decade seeing this new kind of consumption for the audiences of these enterprises who become determined to bend art to their will from their favorite creators and creatives. 

'You need to rewrite this.'

'You need to re-shoot that.' 

'Re-record now!'

 'When that gets released again you need to remove this.' 

Chasing people over their social media platforms the fans demanding they want to the art they want from you, not what YOU yourself the artist wanted to put out.

'How could you disappoint us like this?!'

'The audience, you need to listen to your audience and fans! They are communicating their wants and desires outside of what you want to do, you the creator of ___. It doesn't matter they are in control now!' 

'You don't just need to listen, you have to directly cater or what good are you? You're not listening hard enough!'

'You didn't think of me in mind!'

All these giants and masters in the photography world who shaped it have been passing away rapidly the past few years. Martin Parr just passed away a couple days ago.There are no younger equivalents of these kinds of people and I find that scary for my medium. And the kinds of institutions, schools, donors, and media outlets that helped all of it exist has been collapsing with no equivalent either. Much art of the mediums photography, film, television, and music is in grave trouble. Photography is the most vulnerable because it has never been a large commercial enterprise on it's own in the way the other mediums are and the art world likes to keep photography at a friendly distance. More people photograph than ever and know less about the use and history of it more than ever. All the work that is being created to not even be properly archived. What a strange and sad time in this arena.

*12.20.2024, still tapping the sign 

It would be really nice and helpful and ever so insightful, if a mainstream publication could do an article of how digital storytelling with images, videos, and social media has created a time of mass radical empathy of regular citizens when it comes to Gaza. Would be so wonderful if a PHOTOGRAPHY or ART publication would care to do so. There is so much talk of the desensitizing of others through social media, and the final conclusion that somehow that's all social media can be when it could obviously go the other way also and it has. The Floyd protests was an example that everyone wants to memory hole cause it only went so far, because consciousness raised and empathy felt can only do so much to the people who hold the gavel over us.

Now we have the protests and outcry against genocide yet I get that is not comforting because it is not political power in the sense of stopping the bombs. However I think it must be acknowledged for the future, one we want for ourselves and the world. I mean for those of us who want good things. For the fascists & capitalists' (and collaborators) and their visions of the future, I hope your projects politically die a thousand humiliating and self defeating deaths. 

It's good to understand that what the powers that be/that are will want/do want to make sure people are stopped in their feelings and empathy. That those who are feeling for Palestinians yet also feel helpless in the horror of witnessing become overwhelmed, disorientated, and in despair, and disgust become burnt out and bitter from all the compassion they felt for others. There is a very evil man who positions himself as a philosophical nazi figurehead whom I won't even bother to say his name but wrote early on about it's not worth caring about the Palestinians and to not concern yourself with that. Though this person is on the far right this attitude is part of a larger project reaching across the political spectrum, to liberals who cry that Israel is one of the only beautiful and honorable democracies in the world, and those who say they are progressive and believe in propaganda that Zionisim is decolonization. 

When you care about a nation state more than a child getting blown up you lost your humanity.  Now you can go find it again but you have to admit it's lost before that, or you won't be able to adequately put it back in place. 

What are three things the average American loves? What are some characteristics that make up this nation and their inhabitants? Punishment, humiliation, and surveillance. Those are pretty top tier. Totally out of my hemisphere of what I desire to do and engage with, and the mark I wish to leave in the complex and ravaged timeline of the lifetime I am alive in.