It’s been a while, but welcome back!
This time in The Pickup Truck Diaries, we’re going to take a look at the wide world of entertainment, news, media, and production! There’s a whole lot of nuance here, ranging from small-time indie internet sensations, to enormous corporate giants – long bought out by billionaire right wing interests.
Now I have a rather strange and winding path through the realm of content creation – mostly through the lens of a few very specific avenues – Reality TV, in which myself and my family featured on Ax Men Season 8 back in 2014 or so, my myriad of theatre experience as a younger human, and my own indie projects I’ve attempted to cultivate over the years, most of them in this new digital internet broadcasting age where streaming is dominant.
Not that they’d ever acknowledge that I even exist, but I also have family via marriage in the business, who have made a comfortable Hollywood career via B-list for-TV movies and shows. This led to me keeping a pretty close eye on Hollywood and the realm of entertainment over the years, often with disdain at the falseness of it all. As a punk-minded individual, I tend to dislike bigger names and prefer indie stuff. Some specific names and faces I’ve been keeping tabs on for almost two decades now! It’s kinda terrible how LA devours talent and holds it like a nepotism & cronyism fantasyland, eh?
I wonder if my cousin realizes that when I last saw him, at his mother’s funeral over a decade ago – she was more of a constant in my life than his, perhaps. Small town families are interwoven like a million threads. She’ll always be that sister of my great uncle – sat at the bar in his house with a budweiser at the elbow and a cigarette in the lips. I learned lots just from listening. Critical thinking in silent learnings and secret wisdoms. Same as my great aunt and grandmother. Chain smoking and drinking and talking. Which was rather tame compared to the hard bar slinging loggers they were all often married to. PTSD-laden World War II vet grandfather and all. It is these little scenes, the truths of life that get lost when entertainment or art becomes a multi-billion dollar game.
Not that I’ll ever take down the entertainment industry in my lifetime. My goals are already lofty enough – desiring to devour the zeitgeist in entirety – to know and experience everything like a little sensation gorger. Great emotion through art was one of few releases as a repressed little disabled logging family kid. So I have learned to cherish great art and expression more than any amount of money. Then again, I am that bizarre relic of another time – a neurodiverse poor person wreathed in intergenerational traumas. Meaning I operate on systems like honor, justice, or integrity.
Such poor belief systems for a capitalist hellscape such as this – where you are a mere commodity to be bought or sold.
Then again, that’s the demise of every artist, is it not? Were this a thesis for a paper – my abstract would probably lay out how consumerism and capital erodes art as a whole, as relegating different types of art with different purposes to a simple dollar value cheapens them a hundredfold from the very start.
Go ahead – compare the value of a Cirque Du Soleil show (one of my guilty pleasures) to a Taylor Swift concert to a fine art exhibition promoting gallery work by people of colour. You’re fucked already when you begin to place value on each of those individual pieces with very different end results and purposes. Every single one is art, but the zeitgeist, fucked up as it is, already dictates some starting balance or ticket price.
Anyways, enough griping. Most clever folk reading this article already have a gist on how the media is crooked and arts and entertainment is fucked up. So let’s get into the nitty gritty.
What the fuck am I doing to declare a mastery of the arts and entertainment scene? Or at least a comfort and experience enough to speak to it confidently?
It began with THEATRE! And anime. And daytime TV like Star Trek. As an ADHD kid, I devoured media like a fucking siphon. A hundred masterpieces or complete farce pieces.
I was also blessed enough as a dumb youth with a myriad of unmedicated mood disorder, depression, and ADHD issues to have a queer butch presenting drama teacher. There’s no greater positive to a young mind than to see neurodivergence or queerness in the lived world as a new possibility or way of existing, especially when it overlaps with your own explorations of identity. Especially when you grow up thinking you’re nothing but fucked up and poor. Suddenly some of these defects were positives! Expression through art – and I didn’t realize the weight of what she saddled me with until long after the fact when I was exploring very familiar pieces through university level drama and theatre concentrations.
I played Moliere, Shakespeare, but even more contemporary figures such as Coach fucking Bolton from High School Musical or sacrificial Jesus-like characters, saddled with promoting great change in others. God I hated that typecast to shit musical role, but sometimes showing width and breadth is one’s experiential growth path.
This lady won local youth theatre awards pretty consistently, and I later credited her with helping me figure out my ace spectrum identity in late university. If only my neurodivergent journey had taken place almost as quickly. Poor bastard of a 28-year old I was.
I bailed out of theatre in the first year of university, when I gained a fuck-ton of weight for the second time in my life, and became a dysphoria shut-in playing World of Warcraft non-stop for a year until I later hyperfocused on the gym next door to my apartment. Funny how I went from a long-haired fat guy to a muscular dude with a shaved mohawk whose Ultimate frisbee teammates called “Bebop” after the Ninja Turtles Character. But live theatre, as much as I despise it now for reasons of knowing my social anxiety disorder better, was a foundational building block.
The internet got me good early on, and I understand the virality and reach of the internet from as early as being allowed to play Starcraft unsupervised in the mid-90s. We hung out in the battle.net chat room aptly titled “sex.” A room no seven year old masquerading as a twenty year old could truly realize the knowledge or rapid experiential growth of. We are in a digital age and culture now, and as diasporic as some populations seem – the internet has us all by the balls as a content nozzle or outreach tool. World of Warcraft and Starcraft taught me the value of production, around the same time as my numerous side hustles and LetsPlay schemes fell apart due to lack of interest or effort by the other parties. Shout out to brands like Funhaus and Critical Role for surviving and persisting in these new hellscapes we find ourselves in. I’m still consistently a fan.
As my first gaming channel aspirations fell apart around the time I was finishing university, and I had also quit writing for the prior 4-6 years for the most part entirely after finishing a very early first person draft of The Marionette Man, I found myself joining the cast of my family’s portrayal on Reality TV due to an ongoing teaching strike that slowed my entry into the profession. I still remember bailing down the mountainside to get picked up from the side of the highway for a teaching interview at the end of that summer after we wrapped. Luckily I had time to swing by home and change out of my logging clothes and shower first! While I had an idea of what productions looked like from my family’s early fascination with “Survivor” (shout out Ryan Hailey, [even though I’m no longer a watcher myself]). I had never experienced what filming a TV show was like outside of vague knowledge of my Hollywood cousin or my own production experience with cameras and sound and computer editing and the like. Unfortunately to this day, I still haven’t learned all that cool After Effects Freddie Wong shit.
The crew was cool. Headed by a guy named Elliot who lived in LA when he wasn’t crouched in the cab of a long haul truck in Alaska or stuck in the bush with us logger fuckheads. He partied REAL hard when in LA, which my younger brother got along with at the time despite having mellowed out a ton now. The show was produced by History, although I’m not sure if it’s been cancelled or not. (Probably.) From the beginning, it felt weird. But as a fan of shows like Jackass, the fake hype and blow ups were easy to fall into. The camera crew was always nudging us to fight with each other for the drama, which made the actual day to day job of logging hellish and slow, barely breaking even with what the show paid us. I was crushed to learn after we wrapped that summer for fire season that all the B footage of the in-cab cameras where I talked to an imaginary production intern for hours was only ever scrubbed through for highlights. I wonder if it still remains in some dusty Hollywood server even now.
I think if the job had paid enough to let us purely be actors, we could have played it up – knowing it was mostly fake from the start. My father wanted the truth and wisdom of his profession to be taught to the world, which despite the veneer of the show was never the intent. Ratings meant we needed to be dramatic and explosive, not passively educating the audience on our job like my father thought would happen a la Mike Rowe and Dirty Jobs. Our century of logging experience as a family meant nothing, as load counts were entirely fabricated and a problematic narrative was developed for the sake of cheaper and cheaper entertainment. They wanted big screaming matches, huge dangerous fuckups, and high stakes – all terrible things as I was the machine operator slash safety officer at the time.
But at least I learned what Hollywood truly wanted – shock value and the mean average for audience and engagement. I ended up getting cut down to barely an episode or two of the season, and my brother aside from a couple grand or something thusly endured love letters being sent from lusty cougars in the states who saw him in the show. My father left the entire affair heartbroken – seeing the final result crushed his spirit and made him depressed and regretful, as he thought he would be helping to teach the world about his passions. Instead the whole affair on an already terrible timber sale was made even more costly and problematic.
When I went into teaching and stopped logging and running excavators and the like, I didn’t actively create again until a few years before I stopped. But in 2015 I started playing D&D and got hooked. Five years of playing and dungeon mastering later, I tried to cast my own DnD show. We had a successful run for a while, but I’ll leave the obscure ending of the show wreathed in mystery aside from the fifteen to twenty viewers who saw the last few live twitch episodes and know the truth.
Getting back into writing both poetry and prose of multiple mediums has really doubled down my distaste for the consumerism and capitalization of art and entertainment, especially in writing where commercial success dictates the quality of the art. Unfortunately, due to bell curves of average audience intelligence – this tends to trend art lower in terms of depth in order to hit better with wider demographics.
Aside from art designated to support or raise awareness for specific marginalized communities – how the hell is unique and passionate art supposed to compete with art that strives for mediocrity and widespread appeal? Where will the boundaries ever be pushed if the biggest productions with the most dollars become gatekept and controlled by suited business corporates with a background in business and not creation of art? The ongoing writing and acting strikes (as of right now) are excellent pushbacks to the sheer multitudes of corporate injustice.
Still, in this digital age – we find ourselves lucky. While the availability of an audience is crazy difficult to grasp because of the easy access and a hundred thousand other creators trying to edge their way into the zeitgeist – it means more art is being made, and thus the best of the best can still through great time and effort and dedication rise to the very top! Or at least ongoing self-sustaining success. I loved new art forms like the original live Acquisitions Incorporated shows at PAX conventions or the cool internet mini series of yore such as The Legend of Neil or The Guild.
Nowadays, the majority of media is being bought up at an extraordinary rate. Large conglomerates can swoop in and buy up smaller productions or companies once they shoot to fame in the viral internet sphere. The entropic and top-heavy nature of capitalism (see finite systems and entropy in general) means this effect will accelerate. When competitors begin to falter, larger entities will snap them up to either part out, liquidate entirely, or amalgamate into themselves. See how Disney has been buying up properties over the last twenty years? Yep. Like that. Don’t even get me started on media conglomerates like Post Media or right-wing billionaire owned newspapers and news outlets.
So what can we as consumers of art and culture do? Well, all the old adages are still true! Support indie and local art and entertainment with your dollars and voices. I remain committed to being an indie writer and content creator myself purely to remain autonomous and unmuzzled. I might sell out for the right price, but I’ll likely put my personal projects on hold if it’s my new bread and butter to avoid being a hypocrite. After-all, capitalism is a hellish pile in which those on the bottom are forced to clamber over others in an attempt to reach the top. It’s overall a terrible hierarchical system doomed to apocalypse. But most of the intelligent people know that already. At least those wise enough to know about the general heat death of the universe.
We can support striking workers, especially in the arts and entertainment industry! We can also support artists and entertainers with our dollars directly via a myriad of websites and companies and methods dedicated to doing so, such as merch, swag, and the like. I despise shilling my own stuff – you all know where the links to buy my books are. But I realize that most artists still have a day-job until they reach the nigh pinnacle of their art. Not that my twenty years of writing or two degrees in art and literature mean much when they don’t buy me much more than a coffee a month, mostly via my old teaching resources! (Although it IS nice to know my old work is still shaping minds across North America and beyond! I do consider building entire courses in packaged lessons and the like… But time versus payout dictates otherwise.)
I wish some things were like ancient Athens, where the cleverest of the clever sought savants like me out to seek individual mentorship and education for their children. I’d love playing Socrates or Plato. I could make bank pumping out super-smart, critically thinking kids I bet. But doesn’t that just prove the point? That art hasn’t been truly sustainable in an equitable, accessible fashion for many – for decades, if not centuries! I’m having to concoct schemes to continue working as an artist? Isn’t that crazy?
For now… I’ll add these problems of zeitgeist and corporatization of art to my long list of things to fix when I am a billionaire or at least making enough money to truly extend my influence, clout, and education across the world. So, if anything, get out there and support indie art, local entertainment and performances, and try to stick to indie productions that consistently pump out excellent content!
If you like this sort of meandering, you know where you can support me. But I don’t really want your money. I value truth and education more. So here’s hoping the facade of the media and production landscape has been pulled back, even if only a little bit.
Oh, and don’t forget – wrestling is fake too.
Now let’s get the fuck out of here!
-McRae
