Post-Self is a grim survey of all the ways we attempt to escape the limitations of our physical forms—technology, rapture, drugs, death—with a Foreword by the cultural critic Mark Dery titled “Welcome to the Misanthropocene.”
“We are all perpetually holding ourselves together. Our breath, our blood, our food, our spit, our shit, our thoughts, our attention—all tightly held, all the time. Then at death we let it all out, oozing at once into the earth and gasping at last into the ether.” — from POST-SELF
The back cover copy reads as follows:
In the 21st century, the body has become a prison—a problem to solve, a boundary to break. Post-Self plunges into the dark urge to escape flesh and mortality by any means necessary: technology, cybernetics, drugs, death, or pure rapture.
From horror movies to heavy metal, from radical philosophy to science fiction, this book explores how artists, writers, and visionaries have imagined transcending the human form. What drives our desire to shed our bodies? What lies beyond the self?
Bold, unsettling, and fiercely intelligent, Post-Self journeys through the shadowlands of the modern imagination—where dissatisfaction becomes inspiration, and escape is the ultimate creative act.
“Once the soul looked contemptuously on the body, and then that contempt was the supreme thing — the soul wished the body meagre, ghastly, and famished. Thus it thought to escape from the body and the earth.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
What other people are saying about it:
“Too often philosophy gets bogged down in the tedious ‘working-through’ of contingency and finitude. Post-Self takes a different approach, engaging with cultural forms of refusal, denial, and negation in all their glorious ambivalence.” — Eugene Thacker, author, In the Dust of This Planet
“Using Godflesh—the arch-wizards of industrial metal—as a framework for a deep philosophical inspection of the permeable human form reveals that all our critical theory should begin on the street where wasted teen musicians pummel their mind and instruments into culture-shifting fault lines. Godflesh are not just a ‘mirror’ of all the horrors and glories we can inflict on our bodies, but a blasted soundscape of our moans. Roy Christopher’s book is a thought-provoking and delightful crucible of film, music, and the best kind of speculative thought.” — Peter Bebergal, author, Season of the Witch
“In his trademark breezy yet precise style, Christopher discusses everything from stimoceivers to Southland Tales, everyone from Henry Lee Lucas to Brummbear, and all without ever losing sight of his central points of reference: our all too malleable somatic limits and Godflesh’s Streetcleaner. And the combination here could not be more apposite, for however much we stretch and augment the reaches of our physicality, imagining ourselves the theophanies of some as yet speculative deities, we get no closer to getting away from ourselves, becoming Godly it seems only in the sense of becoming increasingly empty.” — Gary J. Shipley, author, Stratagem of the Corpse
“Through the lenses of Godflesh, J.G. Ballard, UFO phenomena, psychedelics, serial killings, and so much else, Christopher investigates humanity’s growing inclination to escape our bodies, to escape our species, to escape life itself.” — B.R. Yeager, author, Negative Space
“A peculiar hybrid of Thomas Ligotti and Marshall McLuhan.” — Robert Guffey, author, Operation Mindfuck
“An interesting read indeed!” — Aaron Weaver, Wolves in the Throne Room
I am proud to announce that the University of Georgia Press has deigned to publish The Medium Picture. To wit, I was born in Georgia, and I attended UGA briefly during my first attempt at grad school. This project is very close to my heart, and I am stoked to have the UGA Press putting it out.
Here’s the brief overview:
The ever-evolving ways that we interact with each other, our world, and our selves through technology is a topic as worn as the devices we clutch and carry everyday. How did we get here? Drawing from the disciplines of media ecology and media archaeology, as well as bringing fresh perspectives from subcultures of music and skateboarding, The Medium Picture illuminates aspects of technological mediation that have been overlooked along the way. With a Foreword by Andrew McLuhan, itshows how immersion in unmoored technologies of connectivity finds us in a world of pure media and redefines who we are, how we are, and what we will be.
The book uses ideas from William Gibson, Marshall McLuhan, and Brian Eno, examples from Fugazi, Radiohead, Gang of Four, and Run the Jewels, and artists like Christian Marclay, Richard Long, and Laurie Anderson. It’s post-punk media-theory!
We are all perpetually holding ourselves together. Our breath, our blood, our food, our spit, our shit, our thoughts, our attention—all tightly held, all the time. Then at death we let it all out, oozing at once into the earth and gasping at last into the ether.
In the 21st century, the body has become a prison—a problem to solve, a boundary to break. Post-Self plunges into the dark urge to escape flesh and mortality by any means necessary: technology, cybernetics, drugs, death, or pure rapture.
From horror movies to heavy metal, from radical philosophy to science fiction, this book explores how artists, writers, and visionaries have imagined transcending the human form. What drives our desire to shed our bodies? What lies beyond the self?
Bold, unsettling, and fiercely intelligent, Post-Self journeys through the shadowlands of the modern imagination—where dissatisfaction becomes inspiration, and escape is the ultimate creative act.
Advance Praise:
“Too often philosophy gets bogged down in the tedious ‘working-through’ of contingency and finitude. Post-Self takes a different approach, engaging with cultural forms of refusal, denial, and negation in all their glorious ambivalence.” — Eugene Thacker, author, In the Dust of This Planet
“Using Godflesh—the arch-wizards of industrial metal—as a framework for a deep philosophical inspection of the permeable human form reveals that all our critical theory should begin on the street where wasted teen musicians pummel their mind and instruments into culture-shifting fault lines. Godflesh are not just a ‘mirror’ of all the horrors and glories we can inflict on our bodies, but a blasted soundscape of our moans. Roy Christopher’s book is a thought-provoking and delightful crucible of film, music, and the best kind of speculative thought.” — Peter Bebergal, author, Season of the Witch
“In his trademark breezy yet precise style, Christopher discusses everything from stimoceivers to Southland Tales, everyone from Henry Lee Lucas to Brummbear, and all without ever losing sight of his central points of reference: our all too malleable somatic limits and Godflesh’s Streetcleaner. And the combination here could not be more apposite, for however much we stretch and augment the reaches of our physicality, imagining ourselves the theophanies of some as yet speculative deities, we get no closer to getting away from ourselves, becoming Godly it seems only in the sense of becoming increasingly empty.” — Gary J. Shipley, author, Stratagem of the Corpse
“Through the lenses of Godflesh, J.G. Ballard, UFO phenomena, psychedelics, serial killings, and so much else, Christopher investigates humanity’s growing inclination to escape our bodies, to escape our species, to escape life itself.” — B.R. Yeager, author, Negative Space
“A peculiar hybrid of Thomas Ligotti and Marshall McLuhan.” — Robert Guffey, author, Operation Mindfuck
“An interesting read indeed!” — Aaron Weaver, Wolves in the Throne Room
We are all perpetually holding ourselves together. Our breath, our blood, our food, our spit, our shit, our thoughts, our attention—all tightly held, all the time. Then at death we let it all out, oozing at once into the earth and gasping at last into the ether.
The physical body has often been seen as a prison, as something to be escaped by any means necessary: technology, mechanization, drugs, sensory deprivation, alien abduction, Rapture, or even death and extinction. Taking in horror movies from David Cronenberg and UFO encounters, metal bands such as Godflesh, ketamine experiments, AI, and cybernetics, Post-Self is an exploration of the ways that human beings have sought to make this escape, to transcend the limits of the human body, to find a way out.
As the physical world continues to crumble at an ever-accelerating rate, and we are faced with a particularly 21st-century kind of dread and dehumanization in the face of climate collapse and a global pandemic, Post-Self asks what this escape from our bodies might look like, and if it is even possible.
Advance Praise:
“Too often philosophy gets bogged down in the tedious ‘working-through’ of contingency and finitude. Post-Self takes a different approach, engaging with cultural forms of refusal, denial, and negation in all their glorious ambivalence.” — Eugene Thacker, author, In the Dust of This Planet
“Using Godflesh—the arch-wizards of industrial metal—as a framework for a deep philosophical inspection of the permeable human form reveals that all our critical theory should begin on the street where wasted teen musicians pummel their mind and instruments into culture-shifting fault lines. Godflesh are not just a ‘mirror’ of all the horrors and glories we can inflict on our bodies, but a blasted soundscape of our moans. Roy Christopher’s book is a thought-provoking and delightful crucible of film, music, and the best kind of speculative thought.” — Peter Bebergal, author, Season of the Witch
“In his trademark breezy yet precise style, Christopher discusses everything from stimoceivers to Southland Tales, everyone from Henry Lee Lucas to Brummbear, and all without ever losing sight of his central points of reference: our all too malleable somatic limits and Godflesh’s Streetcleaner. And the combination here could not be more apposite, for however much we stretch and augment the reaches of our physicality, imagining ourselves the theophanies of some as yet speculative deities, we get no closer to getting away from ourselves, becoming Godly it seems only in the sense of becoming increasingly empty.” — Gary J. Shipley, author, Stratagem of the Corpse
“Through the lenses of Godflesh, J.G. Ballard, UFO phenomena, psychedelics, serial killings, and so much else, Christopher investigates humanity’s growing inclination to escape our bodies, to escape our species, to escape life itself.” — B.R. Yeager, author, Negative Space
“A peculiar hybrid of Thomas Ligotti and Marshall McLuhan.” — Robert Guffey, author, Operation Mindfuck
“An interesting read indeed!” — Aaron Weaver, Wolves in the Throne Room
My post-punk media-theory book, The Medium Picture, is now available for preorder from all of your favorite places: UGA Press, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, and even Amazon! Preorders mean more than you think. They’re very important for the life and success of the book. If you know you’re going to buy it, please consider snagging a copy early.
Preorders serve as an early indicator of a book’s potential success. They signal to publishers and retailers that there is interest in the book, which can lead to increased marketing efforts and larger print runs. For authors, preorders can be crucial in boosting their book’s visibility on platforms like Amazon. This can improve their sales rankings and increase exposure. On Amazon, preorders can affect the sales ranking before release, which might influence the platform’s promotional efforts. If you’re not sure, read on! Thank you!
Of all of my books, this is the one I’ve worked on longest and hardest. It’s the closest to my heart.
Here’s what other people are saying about it:
“Exactly the sort of contemporary cultural analysis to yield unnerving flashes of the future.” — William Gibson
“Like a skateboarder repurposing the utilitarian textures of the urban terrain for sport, Roy Christopher reclaims the content and technologies of the media environment as a landscape to be navigated and explored. The Medium Picture is both a highly personal yet revelatory chronicle of a decades-long encounter with mediated popular culture.” — Douglas Rushkoff
“A synthesis of theory and thesis, research and personal recollection, The Medium Picture is a work of rangy intelligence and wandering curiosity. Thought-provoking and a pleasure to read.” — Charles Yu
If you’re so inclined, you can post one these on the social medium of your liking. Link ‘em to your favorite online book outlet or just to http://www.themediumpicture.com
Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future by Roy Christopher: We started making Dead Channel Sky because we’d made the song “Run It” for a video game that didn’t end up using it. But it wasn’t until I read Roy’s book about the parallel evolutions of hip-hop and cyberpunk fiction that I could wrap my head around creating a whole cyberpunk project. In the book, he draws connections between the two forms’ repurposing of technology, and making art out of the scraps of industrial capitalism (think: computer hacking and turntablism) as two potential visions for the future. I asked Roy to summarize his argument in the press release for the album, so I’d ask you to read it there, rather than have me stumble through it myself.
Harry Allen, Hip-Hop Activist and Media Assassin, will be presenting a colloquium on Wednesday, March 12 at noon EST at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center. harbanger is the turntablist septet formed by Harry Allen at MIT in 2020. He is currently working with them as his research project at the center. During the colloquium, He will discuss how the idea for harbanger came together, why he did it, his challenges, his objectives, and his vision of the future. In addition, he will play some videos they’ve shot and some music they’ve made. The whole lecture will last about 90 minutes, including a Q&A session. Join us!
You don’t know the name Angela Britt, but if you were familiar with the deepest details her story—from runaway to ranch hand—you might recognize her as a dozen or so characters in the novels of Cormac McCarthy. She was the model for both the bumbly bum Gene Harrogate and the young and doomed Wanda from Suttree for instance. As I read Vincenzo Barney’s article in Vanity Fair, not only was I surprised that McCarthy didn’t have all of that horse knowledge firsthand—like all of his writing, the bits about ranching are very convincing, rife with expert detail—but also how many times the number 47 kept popping up.
Forty-Seven
I was interested in the story because of how frequently and thoroughly McCarthy had alluded to Britt in so many characters in so many of his novels. I thought the allusions to a living yet unknown person was an interesting angle on the figurative phenomenon. Britt knew McCarthy for 47 years. Coincidentally, she has 47 extant letters from him. McCarthy didn’t send her one letter a year, but she managed to keep the same number of letters.
Sometime last century students at Pamona College in California noticed the number 47 popping up around campus. For one, the college is just off exit 47 of I-10. In her article, “The Mystery of 47,” from the October 1, 2000 issue of Pomona College Magazine, Sarah Dolinar writes,
Depending on your point of view, you might call it a tradition built around trivia, or you might call it Pomona’s link to the deep structure of the universe. For instance, were you aware that the organ case in Lyman Hall has exactly 47 pipes? Or that Pomona’s traditional motto, “Pomona College: Our Tribute to Christian Civilization,” has 47 characters? Did you know that at the time of Pomona’s first graduating class in 1894 there were 47 students enrolled? And if you want to go deeper into the mystery, did you notice that the last two digits in that year equal 47 times two?
Many Pomona alumni have deliberately inserted 47 references into their work. Joe Menosky, class of 1979, a writer for Star Trek: The Next Generation, inserted 47 mentions into nearly every episode of the show. Starting on Star Trek, continuing with Menosky on TNG, and through all of J.J. Abrams’s work (e.g., Alias, Lost, Fringe, the Star Trek reboots, etc.), the number 47 has a long history on the screen. Wherever there’s a stray number in the dialog of one of these shows—a time-stamp, an evidence tag at a crime scene, an apartment number—47 does its numerical duty, threading through and connecting the pieces to a larger whole.
David Lynch’s last feature film, Inland Empire from 2006, partially takes place during the filming of a movie. The movie within the movie is called On High in Blue Tomorrows. After an unnerving disturbance during a table read on set, producer Freddie Howard (Harry Dean Stanton) and director Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons) confess to the two leads — Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) and Devon Berk (Justin Theroux) — that they are shooting a remake of an unfinished German production called Vier Sieben — 47, which was itself based on a cursed Polish folktale. The previous project was abandoned after the two leads were found murdered “inside the story.”
Before that revelation, we are treated to a surrealist sitcom featuring a rabbit family going about their day in their living room. Later on in the movie, after an altercation with a some sort of phantom, Nikki flees into Room 47, which, unbeknownst to her, is the living room of the rabbits from television. These allusions start out unbeknownst, but soon they seem ubiquitous. For instance, after the earth’s human population reached 2 billion people in 1928, it took 47 years for it to reach 4 billion in 1975, and another 47 years to double again in 2023.
Let’s look at another one.
Forty-Three
It started as an amount of change.
Once upon a time in the early 1980s, the father of one of the Curb Dogs—a loose-knit crew of skateboarders and BMXers in the Bay Area scene that included Maurice Meyer, Dave Vanderspek, Marc Babus, and future Bones Brigade member Tommy Guerrero—walked from the local convenience store into a house party with 43 cents jingling in his pocket: a quarter, a dime, a nickel, and 3 pennies. In a wacky accent, he said to those assembled, “How come every time I come home from the store, I always have 43 cents in my pocket?!” Everyone laughed it off, but the idea was incepted.1 For this group of skateboarders and BMXers, the number 43 was suddenly very important, and they started seeing it everywhere.
BMX nostalgia. Illustration by Roy Christopher.
Maurice “Drob” Meyer, the NorCal BMX local some call the Godfather of 43, says it was Rob “Orb” Fladen’s dad who started the 43 phenomenon. In 1986 (which Drob points out is two times 43), a bunch of those NorCal guys visited Wizard Publications in Los Angeles, the home of BMX Action, Freestylin’, and later Homeboy and Go magazines. These publications were our news networks, and they were all helmed by three hyper-creative dudes known as the Master Cluster: Andy Jenkins, Mark Lewman, and Spike Jonze. If skateboarding was a relatively small subculture in the mid-1980s, then BMX freestyle was even smaller. These guys documented it with an energetic blend of wisdom and whimsy that included not only the adjacent action of skateboarding but also street art, underground music, and BMX mythology.
Soon the lore spread, and the numerology followed. Forty-three started showing up in the magazines, zines, and videos. It was known as the coincidence number. We saw it in receipts and change, bank signs and temperatures, longitudes and latitudes, mile markers and measurements. In the late 1980s, skateboard pro-cum-photographer Bryce Kanights had a warehouse ramp in the Bay Area called Studio 43. Ron Wilkerson’s legendary Enchanted Ramp was just off the 5 interstate at exit 43. Though the letters D and C in DC Shoes stand for Droors Clothing, Drob points out that D and C are the fourth and third letters of the alphabet. In Eddie Roman’s 1991 video Headfirst, Mat Hoffman, who is widely considered the Michael Jordan of BMX, mentions the number, exposing a new decade of riders to the cult of 43.
By the early 1990s, the Master Cluster had moved on from BMX, into magazines for young men (Dirt) and the Beastie Boys (Grand Royal). Soon, they moved into other areas entirely. Jenkins went into skateboard art (for Girl and Chocolate Skateboards), Lewman went into advertising (for companies like Lambesis and Nemo Design), and Jonze, as a music video director (for the Beastie Boys, Weezer, Björk, and many others), was already on his way to fame and acclaim in Hollywood. In 1995 they were the subject of a one-page profile in Wired Magazine. The page number? 43.
Have you ever learned a new word and then started seeing it everywhere? This is what the literary theorist Kenneth Burke called “terministic screens.” Burke would say that the word was always there, but you were filtering it out, obscuring it with ignorance. Once it became a part of your terministic screen, only then did you start seeing it. Forty-three is a prime number. As an angel number, 43 is highly positive and gives you hope anything is possible if you believe and pursue it. Says a popular angel number website, “People who regularly see number 43 should trust their own inner voice in all things they do.” Everyone knows you can do this with any number, but when you share that number with a group of like-minded people, the power is undeniable.
“Today, you can see and hear references to 43 in movies by Eddie Murphy, Adam Sandler, and TV shows by Dave Chapelle,” the flatland BMX professional Dave Nourie writes. In Spike Jonze’s 1999 feature film, BeingJohn Malkovich, Malkovich’s apartment number is 43, a nod to Jonze’s BMX roots. Nourie calls these planted 43s “acts of agriculture,” intentional allusions to an inside joke held by a few practitioners of a niche action sport, but the number has leaked into the larger world. Growing up, the novelist Rachel Kushner ran with Tommy Guerrero and others in the NorCal skateboard and BMX scene. As she writes in her essay, “The Hard Crowd,” “Forty-three was our magic number. I see it and remember that I’m in a cult for life.”
My favorite actors tend to play minor characters. There’s something truly special about the MVPs on the sidelines who score wins for the team without much notice. They get bonus points if they’re also writers behind the scenes. DC Pierson has haunted the edges of my psyche for years. He’s popped up on Community, 2 Broke Girls, Key and Peele, Weeds, and a few Verizon commercials, among other places. Somewhere along the way, I started following his social media antics, subscribed to his newsletter, and found his books. A creator in the true Renaissance style, Pierson can do anything — and make it funny.
DC Pierson. Photo by Ari Scott.
I first saw Pierson in 2009’s Mystery Team, a collaboration between him Dominic Dierkes, Dan Eckman, Donald Glover, and the inimitable Meggie McFadden, that also features Aubrey Plaza, Ellie Kemper, Bobby Moynihan, John Daly, Neil Casey, Kay Cannon, and Matt Walsh, among others. It’s a juvenile adventure that feels like hanging out with your friends, causing mischief during a summer in middle school.
Pierson has also written for the VMAs and MTV Movie Awards. A veteran of improv comedy, his latest creations, “The Architect Who Built New York” video series and an adaptation of his first novel, The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To(Vintage, 2010), are no less silly than his first— and no less serious.
Roy Christopher:I first saw you in Mystery Team (2009), which you co-wrote. In the meantime, the cast and crew of that movie has become a who’s who of modern comedy. How did that project come about?
DC Pierson: That project was the (probably? We’ll see) culminating effort of DERRICK comedy, a sketch group I was in with Donald Glover, Dominic Dierkes, Dan Eckman, and Meggie McFadden. We’d made a lot of videos that got popular at the dawn of the YouTube era and pooled any money we made from touring, merchandising, and the barest beginnings of monetization, and along with some money from friends and family were able to shoot a feature. Prior to that we’d written a feature we wanted to try and get made the traditional way, and when it became clear that wasn’t gonna happen we wrote something we could conceivably make on an indie budget, including using Meggie’s parents’ house or Dan’s uncles’ hardware store / warehouse in Manchester, NH as shooting locations.
Dominic Dierkes, D.C. Pierson, and Donald Glover in Mystery Team (2009).
Production scrappiness aside the most important part of that process was the writing. Time being money and all we knew we weren’t going to have the chance to improvise a bunch on set and do a bunch of takes. There were a few opportunities to do a little of that i.e., Matt Walsh’s scene with Jon Lutz at the office party late in the movie or Bobby Moynihan’s scenes in the supermarket, but at that point it’s not like you’re rolling for ten minutes hoping somebody will find what’s funny about the scene. You already have something serviceable written and are just watching a couple genius actor-improvisers make it even better like five times in a row and then you get to pick the best one. Going into it with a script where the story, characters, and especially jokes were all solid on the page was key. A lot of that was down to Dan and Meggie’s sense of what was feasible and achievable on a production level — and it deserves to be said, Dan’s ambition and visual sense really kind of made the videos and movie what they were in many ways, and Meggie figuring out how we could actually do stuff in a professional way really none of us were qualified to do in our late teens and early, early 20s — combined with Donald‘s experiences writing for 30 Rock that very much set the tone and the bar for the writing process.
And as for the casting, as you mentioned, we were really just pulling from people in the UCB community in New York that we were part of at that time. It was an incredibly cool scene to be a part of, and I’m still super grateful for it.
RC: That was right at the beginning of the social-media age, and you’ve leveraged several platforms for comedic purposes. Have you had a plan for those or do you just improvise as needed?
DCP: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, no. It’s more like just keep swimming and try to stay visible. I think I took to Twitter because for better or for worse, I like wordplay and obscure pop culture references, and those both happened to be things that were valuable in that medium. It’s been a slower time adjusting to things like Instagram and TikTok, but I think I’m getting there now especially since I’ve decided to embrace making essentially short short solo sketch videos. It’s a combination of where the technology’s at, that I can just make them and edit them on my phone and the computer and don’t have to be terrifically skilled, with the fact that I come from a sketch background. And even though I don’t think it will become as bigger universal as Twitter was in a day, I am having a lot of fun on Bluesky, which is largely a text based platform like Twitter. We’ll see how it plays out, but at the moment it has a good community vibe.
I also have to say I share a certain weariness. A lot of people who are freelancers of various stripes, be they visual artists or actors or journalists or Drag performers of constantly having to schlep our wares from platform to platform, most of which seem Paternally hostile to promotion of any kind, even though we’re told that’s what we have to do and to be honest it is what we have to do. I guess in my case, maybe it karmically balances out because what we were making in DERRICK really did come along exactly the right time for how small YouTube was but that it existed at all. Granted, none of these things were as developed or capricious or even pernicious as they are these days and maybe that’s part of what was so lucky.
RC:You’ve been very prolific, and your newsletter is especially erudite and hilarious. Do you publish or perform everything you come up with, or do you save some things for longer or larger releases?
DCP: Thank you! I have fun doing it, but haven’t done it as much in the last year for various scarcity of bandwidth reasons. I would say in all forms I probably execute like 10% of the ideas I come up with, but that might be a very generous definition of the word idea. I also think — and here I’m quoting Tom Scharpling, author and host of The Best Show who I think is quoting someone else from his life: The execution is really all that matters, ideas are cheap. Of things I actually execute, like write a draft or shoot some of, most of those get out there. I’m not sitting on like a giant archive of unpublished work, though weirdly network effects and internet attention spans being what they are, it’s kind of like anyone who makes things is sitting on a giant archive of unpublished work because it seems like if you’re not constantly surfacing your own stuff, the kind of attention span Eye of Sauron immediately moves off of them. That said, I do have a an essay about going to see the Postal Service and Death Cab like a year ago that I wrote around that time and just never sent out for whatever reason, so thanks for the reminder.
Oh also, even as I say that I have a rough draft of a new book completed, and I need to like lower myself into the whale carcass of that at some point and finish it. More than anything it’s just a debt of honor I owe myself at this point.
RC: “Execution over ideas.” Did you find that as hard to hear as I did?
DCP: Oh, for sure! And if you’re like me — which we all are, in this way — you’re getting older. So if you think about it for two seconds, or stop trying not to think about it, you realize that the horizon for doing all the ideas is getting smaller. That’s a panicky feeling but there’s also something freeing about it. Less time for doing things that seem like a generically good idea rather than the most You idea, the thing that you’re the most excited about.
RC:Your books were the next thing I was going to ask about. I don’t agree with them, but writers always seem to talk about how hard and thankless it is. Do you enjoy the practice of writing?
DCP: I do! I think I’ve even gotten quasi defensive of it in the post ChatGPT era — like, as long as we’ve been putting pen to paper or pushing the cursor forward writers have been complaining about the drudgery and the solitude of writing, and now all the sudden all these tech bros are coming out of the woodwork claiming to have “solved” it and it’s like, hold on — that’s our solitude and drudgery! It’s like the line from some 90s kids movie — “nobody hits my brother but me!”
There was a line in Top Gun: Maverick that resonated with me (a lot actually! I loved that movie!) about how even with all this modern war-fighting technology, success or failure in one of these insane dogfights those Top Gun rascals are always getting themselves into still comes down to “the man in the box,” i.e., the human being in the really expensive fighter plane. The movie is a really thinly veiled metaphor for Cruise’s own feelings about old-fashioned movie craftsmanship and exhibition vs. the new degraded and rapidly diminishing versions of those things, feelings I happen to strongly share, so that helped. But also, the phrase immediately resonated with me as a good way to explain that ineffable and sometimes frustrating feeling of being a writer who is actually sitting down and writing.
I also have done a fair amount of writing for award shows and things, and when I got to the point where I was head-writing the shows, I realized what a lot of people who’ve done something long enough to ascend into a quasi-management position learn: You get separated from the thing you love that got you there in the first place. I would spend 99% of my time delegating or fielding emails from other people in charge of other parts of the show or in meetings or on calls. I’d be desperate to have time to just sit down and bang out drafts of things we needed for the show but wouldn’t really be able to. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I think I’m pretty good at all that other stuff too, but it’s way less specialized. A gajillion people can type “circling back” in an email window. Not everybody can be (or wants to be) the proverbial Man in the Box. Also the world will intercede in infinite ways to keep you from being that (hu)Man. That line in the Top Gun sequel was a good reminder to try and maximize my time in the box.
RC:My parents were never into music and subsequently have never really understood my life-long love and interest in it. You had a very different experience. Can you tell me a little about that?
DCP: Dang!! Well I’m sorry it wasn’t something you grew up with in the house very much but it doesn’t seem to have stopped you getting immersed in it — maybe because it was something you had to actively seek out or used to define yourself as a separate entity. (That unsolicited uncredentialed faux-therapy will be $125, please). I didn’t grow up in a musical household the same way many friends of mine who themselves are way more “musical,” as in, playing instruments or singing, did — like, it wasn’t a thing where my mom played piano or my dad and uncle would get guitars out and jam at family gatherings. But my parents were both pretty typical boomers (complimentary, in this instance) in that they both had really close relationships to the music they grew up on (The Beatles in my mom’s case and 70s rock in my dad’s) and my dad maintained an active interest in new music his whole life (my mom probably would’ve as well but she died when I was 12 — you can actually just repay me in some therapy about that).
The times I’m most grateful for now, as I wrote about in this essay, are evenings when I’d be visiting home as an adult and some combination of me, my dad, and my brothers would hang out on the couch in the living room in front of my dad and stepmom’s state-of-the-art-at-the-time home entertainment system and switch off playing songs from our laptops. It was a lucky collision of where the technology was at — the peak iPod / iTunes era — and where we were at in our lives as father and adult / college / older teenage sons, and a lot of emotional conversations that might not have happened otherwise were had. Those are the times I most value and the thing I’d most like to have back, though my dad’s gone now too. ROY, MAKE WITH THE THERAPY, PLEASE!!
It’s funny, I’ve been realizing recently that some music has gone from “this reminds me of my dad” — like, folky, quasi-ambient Windham Hill records or cool jazz played by white dorks who looked like NASA engineers — to “this is just music I like and actively want to seek out.” They say you become your parents and if this a form it takes for me, great. I will be listening to some of the mellowest shit of all time.
RC:What else is coming up in the DC Universe?
DCP: So much, I hope! Continuing to work on a feature script adaptation of my first book The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep And Never Had To with my pals Dan Eckman and Meggie McFadden. It’s a process that’s had various fits, starts, and tantalizing near-misses with fruition over the years — and along we made this proof of concept short that still rules imo — and it’s at a phase where it’s the most exciting it’s been a long time <knock on wood>.
I’m working on a live show with my very talented writer, actor friend Robbie Sublett that I’m also super excited about. It kind of ties in with exactly where we are in our lives and careers while also — hopefully — having a hook that gets people in the door. To be announced on that front.
I’ve also been posting a lot more short comedy videos to Instagram and TikTok and such, particularly a series where I play “The Architect Who Designed New York,” basically an excuse to walk around and make short, silly, one-liners I can then cut together based around stuff I see. Been really enjoying that. Every time I set out to shoot one I end up with enough material for almost two, so it keeps rolling.
Aidan Fridman and the Filmmaking Club at the University of North Florida sat me down for an interview about writing and teaching and put together this little video. Check it out!
