MONKEY MAN dazzles at SXSW and we dig into the James Cameron 4K controversy

Plus we look discuss the ugly side of nostalgia

I think this is the first week that I feel genuinely old.

I was chatting with a friend a little over a month ago. He works for SXSW, and he’s become more integral to the festival over the last few years. He told me about some of the things he’d programmed for the year and talked about how exciting the line-up was, and he offered me a chance to attend the fest in exchange for a little work in the form of some mentor sessions. That was one of those instant easy decisions. Of course I would like to attend, I told him, and as soon as I cleared it with the people I’m working for right now, I booked my tickets.

It has been years since I’ve attended a festival. I’ve had a few near-misses (I’m still heartbroken about having to drop out of last year’s Make Believe Fest) but it just hasn’t lined up. As I got ready to leave for my trip, I also found myself thinking about previous festival visits, and especially some of my favorite Austin experiences. I am not one for wallowing in nostalgia (says the guy who writes The Last ‘80s Newsletter) but there are times you get absolutely walloped by it, and this was one of those weeks. I can’t think about Austin without thinking about my entire complex relationship with it, which is part of my larger complex relationship with my two different writing careers, one of which is no longer a viable path for anyone who wants to do it. I just hit my 30th anniversary of joining the WGA, which is what I consider the year I “really” became a writer, and I find myself in a very reflective place these days.

I am physically worn out from a four-day trip in a way I never would have been a decade ago. I used to fly so often that I kept a suitcase partially packed at all times because it was easier than doing it over and over. There was a good stretch of time when I would go to Sundance, SXSW, Comic-Con, Cannes, Toronto, and at least eight or ten set visits every single year, and most years, I would add other festivals or guest appearances at events, and it would add up to something like three months of the year that I wasn’t home. I wish now I had done far less of all of that considering what value it ultimately had. I don’t miss that schedule, especially considering the transitive nature of so much of that work thanks to the various terrible media companies that have purchased and destroyed so many good outlets now. If the things I wrote and published were still archived and you could look at them and read them as a record of what that time was like? Great. But that’s not really the case. The internet, as it turns out, is written in sand, and there is a fan that blows through it from time to time, wiping away huge chunks of what was. I know, I know, there’s the Wayback Machine and the Internet Archive and I respect all of those efforts to create a curated place where things never quite disappear, but that’s not the same as actually keeping these sites up. Every website that gets purchased gets a little bit worse each time it changes hands and more and more often, the purchases only happen so one company can use another company to hide some debt. They don’t care about the things they buy, and they have no interest in running every new company they purchase. I’ve watched it play out over and over as a company swoops in, offers an Internet company the world, and then absorbs them completely without any regard for how the people involved might feel.

In a much larger sense, I don’t really recognize the internet these days, and it has helped put several things into perspective for me. For me, the early days of the internet were purely about figuring out what this weird experiment might actually become. Today, that experiment feels like it has conclusively failed and all we’re left with are the shells of good sites, owned now by corporate dickheads and venture capital ghouls who only own things so they can hide debt. In every possible way, the corporations won, and the result is something that is barely functional at this point. Having watched the entire thing play out, start to finish, I am left with some deeply mixed feelings about all of it, and I am working on a larger piece about this, something that may end up working best at book length. While I think we were total brats at Ain’t It Cool, disruptive and almost joyous about the trouble we caused, I can tell you that I always felt like I was advocating for film as an art form and film fandom as a way of building community. It seems almost quaint now to say that, and it feels deeply naive to think that fandom will ever be something united and inclusive again.