As a byproduct of you, everything you create will be good because the source from which it came is good.

remembering our goodness, weaponizing "not listening", and caricaturing Karen

¿What you heard?

Holding the mic at a Sunday afternoon abundance gathering in Arlington Garden, Winston reminds us all that “you have intrinsic value.”

“As a byproduct of you,” he says, “everything you create will be good because the source from which it came is good.”

But then, the obvious pushback is so where does all the bad art come from? From bad people?

I didn’t ask this question because I don’t believe that’s the claim Winston is making.

Rather, he operates within a marginalized semantic environment wherein “good” and “value” aren’t quantified by mainstream metrics like box office numbers or view count.

In Winston’s underrated rubric, success is measured through a qualitative audit of a work’s emotional resonance in the world, where a creative piece is considered good or valuable even if it only resonates for you.

What you doin’?!

Non-profits have a very practiced way of talking.

In my latest non-profit meeting, I finally cracked through the surface — the formulaic validation and redirection, the calculated lack of you-statements, the carefully-controlled tone — and I interpreted a clear implication beneath it all: You’re not listening!

Whenever I’ve heard this said directly to me in the past, I’ve believed it because Ancient Alex really wasn’t good at listening.

Present Alex though actually listens very well. When I was a journalist, half of my job was deep listening to interviewees!

So now, I’m learning to second-guess these claims.

I’m recognizing that, sometimes, the implication — or accusation — you’re not listening is a power play, a sly form of silencing, a way of people not listening themselves.

What you seen??

KAREN (2021) is about exactly what you’d expect a film with this title made in this time to be about.

Here’s its opening image…

Here’s its antagonist’s bathroom…

If it isn’t already obvious from these two short clips, the problem with this film is that Karen is not a character but a caricature.

As I struggle to write a script that features someone as detestable to me as Karen is to the writer-director of this movie, I have been thinking a lot about caricature and how to avoid it.

What always trips me up though is A Christmas Carol (1843).

Unlike Karen, which has a 1.6 on Letterboxd, people fucking loved this story when it came out nearly two centuries ago, and folks still go bananas for it today, but isn’t Scrooge just as much of a caricature as Karen before he goes on his ghostly journeys?

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