Celebrating 1000 Articles

There is an alternate timeline where today’s thousandth entry of The Memory Tourist was published sometime in the middle of 2022 (or possibly earlier). In that timeline, there would be an enviable level of productivity reflective of a foolish young person’s quest to strive. At some point you’d be putting your work out there without doing real quality control or even feeling invested. I say that because in 2020, I was releasing material on a daily basis with sometimes up to three essays a day. For me, it was a great distraction from the doldrum days of quarantine lifestyle. However, there was a point around December where I realized it wasn’t sustainable.

I start with this because for the thousandth entry, I wanted to highlight the ways that this website has evolved since the early days of March 2020 when I said goodbye to my original website Optigrab and decided to make something more personal. I ran the original website between 2008-20 with moderate success. It was the necessary platform to experiment and find a voice. However, I needed to start anew and create something more reflective of where I was at 30. I needed something more consistent and challenging. Originally, this was designed similar to Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place website where I’d mix critiques with occasional check-ins. It was something I always admired about Rabin and while I’ve moved into my own lane, I give him credit for helping light that spark. 

Short of recounting the entire first year of The Memory Tourist, I will simply mention that releasing daily material had its pros and cons. It allowed me to be more ambitious and curious about the world around me. However, I think the bulk meant I wasn’t also processing anything on a more personal level. The media lacked significance and I guarantee you that at least 70% of the albums I reviewed at the time I haven’t thought about since. Part of that is simply taking big swings and exploring fields that weren’t “my thing,” but it was also because I didn’t know how to engage on a more intimate level.

In the grand hypothetical of reaching 2,000 entries, I have to confess that I don’t think two years is obtainable nor the four years it took to get here. While the work has become more infrequent, I want to believe that what I post has more meaning behind it and reflects passion. This website was always designed as a grand statement of “This is me!” and the many fragments that it makes up. Whereas Optigrab has a lot of interesting work, I wanted The Memory Tourist to be more of a time capsule. Not everything had to be formative, but enough had to be something I’d want to revisit years on and figure out what I was thinking in the two hours it took to write it up.

For this piece I wanted to explore the ways that this website has evolved since it launched in the late days of pre-quarantine life. It was a time where grocery stores were madhouses and people were buying up toilet paper by the bushel. I’m not going to pretend like I wasn’t one of the most paranoid people in my family. It would take its toll on my mental health leading to my worst depression throughout early 2021. In that time, it took a lot of soul searching not only of what I wanted the website to be, but if I was genuinely satisfied with what I was doing. As hard as it is to believe, I wrote myself into burnout that made it a miracle whenever I’d step behind a keyboard. 

I had lost sight of what I wanted the website to originally be. When it started, I was wanting it to reflect what interested me. At the time it was everything. Music, film, TV, literature, advertising, Broadway, and so much more. The indulgence was thrilling and gave me an excuse to do research for just about anything. Even if I was 30 and approaching a point where youth culture was ostensibly “not for me” anymore, I wanted to try and understand what was cool. It was why I sometimes wrote up album reviews before turning to Anthony Fantano videos and becoming disappointed when I realized I couldn’t convey my opinion as thoroughly as he could. 

Then again, music was always a central function of the website. For whatever reason, the entire 2010s remain a blur because I stopped caring about what was new. I heard some stuff that interested me – notably Lana Del Rey, Liz Phair, and Courtney Barnett – but I wasn’t engaging with art outside of that context. Whenever I wanted to discuss art, I often broke down lyrics which meant I was treating it less as a record and more a novel. It’s a terrible trope of mine to fall back on quotes when I feel an article is coming up short.

A big reason for getting into music was due to a podcast I heard in my early 20s. The Cracked Podcast, then hosted by Jack O’Brien, discussed how adults tended to have their opinions set in amber by their Mid-30s. The fear of becoming closed off was irrational and I needed to do everything to be in touch with what I saw as vital. Music is expression and informs something deeper in our core. In fairness, I have come to realize that while Cracked’s website has a lot of great infotainment pieces, they weren’t always the most vetted so there was a lot of misogyny hidden in factoids. While I believe O’Brien was more professional, I’m willing to accept that some editors weren’t checking everything.

But that opinion was enough to get me motivated. I think 2020 was an embarrassing year for my music criticism career because I wasn’t placing it in a context or giving every element the time of day. Whereas I could break down film or TV with ease, music evaded me for a good two years of the website’s existence. I still tried, but every now and then I’d put on The Needle Drop and realize how badly my opinions were expressed. I don’t know that in 2024 it stands as my strongest element, but it’s gotten much better if just because I’ve picked records that mean more to me.

What also helped was that in 2021 I got a Spotify account that opened carte blanche for experimentation. I think the real gateway came with the buzzed-about Phoebe Bridgers album “Punisher” which I often listened to before university classes on Zoom. As more recommendations came from that, it expanded until suddenly I was into bedroom pop, hyperpop, jazz, and even modern folk like Hurray for the Riff Raff. If anything, The Cracked Podcast has felt like a lie because there hasn’t been a time since my teens where I was this actively curious to discover new music whether it be Clairo or Hannah Diamond. 

I focus this much on music because I do believe it has revived a lot of passion that I’ve had throughout the years. Since 2021, I have lost a lot of interest to be a film critic – a profession that has defined me since I was in high school. That isn’t to say that I stopped liking cinema, but there was something about the pandemic that actively turned me off of things like The Oscars celebrating art when there was far worse going on in the world. It dovetailed unfortunately with things like smaller indie theaters shutting down and limiting access to works I actually wanted to support. As much as I recognize and respect that Tom Cruise has an audience, having Top Gun: Maverick (2022) play for months on end has earned it a distractible level of resentment because it couldn’t offer one or two screens for something I wanted. Even something like Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) edging fellow Disney release Nightmare Alley (2021) down to one screen on opening weekend sits uncomfortably. Given that streaming feels largely insignificant even in the best situations, it was hard to want to engage with film on as stringent of a schedule as I formerly had.

I still have made room for film on the website. Columns like A24 A-to-Z, Playing Favorites, Indie Spotlight, and the stalwart Best Movie I Saw This Week all will continue to be released when I find motivation to write something. I’m just not writing about week-to-week releases. While I do think it’s gotten a little better, I’m still not convinced that the modern model reflects a satisfying type of distribution. I knew that I needed to find a new lane because even this discussion doesn’t interest me. So long as we collectively agree that artificial intelligence is a bad call, then I’ll be happy. It’s not good for any art, like, at all. 

Stud muffins

The website has evolved since 2021 to be something more gradual. While I regrettably don’t release as much as I should, I think having more breathing room between essays allowed for me to explore what else mattered in my life. I’ve allowed myself to engage with the world around me and appreciate a more didactic form of existence. Over the past four years, I’ve become less codependent on being online every hour of the day. I’ve actively stepped away from Twitter for long enough over the past three years to mark at least 13 months. It has helped with my sanity and creativity, especially as I realized how desperately I sometimes clamor for validation and lose my mind when I don’t receive it. I don’t totally blame Elon Musk, but he exacerbated it.

To some extent, The Memory Tourist achieved its greater goal as a platform for me to explore everything that was on my mind. I’m sure that I wrote a lot of dumb things in that time, but at the same time I was building to a greater sense of self. Ironically, I started by asking “this is what interests me” only to have that thesis fall apart by 2021. I didn’t know what I wanted out of life anymore and the collapse of the infrastructure I thought America had made me question what a post-pandemic life would be. In reality, the pandemic isn’t gone. I doubt it will fully go away in any living person’s lifetime. It exists in this shared traumatic event that I have processed and am horrified by those unwilling to give themselves that opportunity. 

Part of me believes that the pandemic unfortunately made me more fascinated by the morbid. Not in a cutesy Tim Burton way, but in how we deal with mortality. When I took a philosophy class in 2008, one of the first things I read was about how the only way to accept philosophy was to accept that we all would die. Then again the teacher was a homophobe, so what did he know? However, I think 2020 tested the limits of that as I watched the news consistently of nurses having mental breakdowns over dying patients and learning that bodies were being piled into crates while ambulances were turning away sick patients because there was 0% capacity. Somehow the urge to not be sick only made me feel more uneasy. 

In that time, there was everything that the pandemic was. I don’t feel like explaining it here. I had lost two grandparents in 2019 as well as six cats and two former classmates in 2021. I had another two grandparents who were on house care, which made engaging with strangers especially difficult. I still have some uncomfortable feelings about how their lives ended because that was our version of Covid-19 impacting the farewell process. 

In some way, it made The Memory Tourist go from novelty to something more akin to documentation. Suddenly there was an implicit desire to be this acknowledgment of my existence. I needed proof of who I was. While I have progressively become more mentally stable, there was a long time where it was my outlet for expressing everything that bothered me and trying to search for answers. My hope was that in years to come, I’d be able to look at it and understand who I was during the now fleeting pandemic years. I’ll be able to capture something so vulnerable that it’ll either be embarrassing or telling of something that I hadn’t fully processed at the time.

For example, my depression in 2021 coincided with a lot of questions of self. I think what scared me a lot about those days was my inability to truly understand who I was. Add in the irony that I was taking a creative nonfiction class at the time and it made things especially hard. While I was able to recount the themes of Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” with ease, I was making glaring errors in my writing. I was unfocused, unable to properly read books without audio accompaniment. On the plus side, it did lead to my reliance on Microsoft Word’s “Read Aloud” feature to make sure the grammar sounded right. 

But on a personal level, it was the revelation of being in my 30s and having every start-up plan fall apart. Whereas I reached Mid-July of 2019 and had these grand plans to symbolize a more prosperous decade of life, 2020 had torn it down. Having my writing burnout and lost sense of self only scared me more. I’m 35 now and I feel like the pandemic has stolen too much of my decade. I understand that younger people lost more formative events, but to each their own. 

I’m trying to move forward and compared to 2020, I have made significant progress. I think that time inspired me to document things more. I opened an Album of the Year page solely to chronicle every album I listen to and it has helped me keep track of what I like. At the same time, spending endless nights on TikTok and Google searches helped me come to terms with being autistic and asexual/demisexual. Twitter has connected me with community and the essays have allowed me to not only process feelings but find art that I feel was reflective of my feelings. I won’t go into it all, but I feel in some ways more secure now because I know I am not alone and there’s some great people out there of similar backgrounds.

In the past year, I don’t know that The Memory Tourist has changed significantly enough to really reference. A lot of the formative moments were coming out of 2021 and realizing a need to try and be more honest with myself. At the risk of writing something more “commercial,” I have written essays that I feel give you a better sense of who I am. While I’ll occasionally write something about Emma Stone or Dekalog (1989), my greater goal is to never again write a review for something that doesn’t interest me. I’ll probably be indifferent to a thing or two, but a deeper passion in exploring media will always steer the ship.

Another part of this era has been learning to accept that my opinion isn’t always the popular one. I’ve began following music critics on YouTube who have interesting things to say, but sometimes I realize what a Millennial versus Gen-Z perspective on genres will do (I’m really trying to get Porter Robinson, honest). The rise in pop-punk influenced artists is especially weird because while I think Blondshell and Underscores are doing something compelling, I am distracted by Olivia Rodrigo’s pastiches. I guess it comes down to what feels “genuine,” and I think hyperpop (and what was to come) is what pop-punk evolved into. Either way, I am happy to hear someone passionately defend what they enjoy. I may not agree, but I’m less bothered about feeling “wrong” than I did three years ago. I say this as the one person who still listens to Lorde’s “Solar Power” at least once a month. 

So, what can we expect from the next thousand articles of The Memory Tourist? To be completely honest, I hope you strap in for the long haul because it’s probably going to be a long time. I don’t know that we’ll get there before 2030, but I’ll try. Hopefully whatever this website evolves into will be even more intricate and personal but also much more entertaining. Right now I’m experimenting with video to try and expand myself into that realm. Just don’t expect anything great anytime soon. 

The one thing I want to propose is that after years of considering it, I am using this occasion to announce the launch of a Patreon. I don’t expect this to be a “quit your day job” type of gambit, but my hope is that it’ll allow me to make a few bucks from my writing as I continue to look for more stable work. For now, I envision The Memory Tourist as eventually becoming a side hustle or passion project that is less about profit and more about personal gain. I’d love to say anyone cares enough to invest hundreds in me a month, but for now I need to be realistic. 

My hope is to have an announcement post regarding Patreon in the near future. The goal is to have something by the end of September and will feature exclusive content. Again, I don’t expect the website to be prolific, but I hope having deadlines will motivate me to at least produce work regularly. I know that I’m not famous enough to have this take off immediately, but we all have to start somewhere. 

For now, I end the thousandth entry of The Memory Tourist in a familiar strain of recent posts. It’s a bit overlong, a bit rambling, but connects together in the end. While I don’t know that this presented any grand revelation, I’d like to think it shows where I started and where things are going. I’d love to think there’s more new and returning columns on the way. It all depends on where I’m at in my private life by then. For now, it’s not a bad idea to dream a little bigger, darling. I probably should be a little more prolific, but not too prolific or I’ll just burn out again. Most importantly, I promise to not make it all about ME, but it will all reflect me in some way. All I can say is stick around and you’ll see what I’m talking about.