PROLOGUE

So… anybody need a writer or project manager or director for the summer? Or longer? It was devastating getting an email from Idealist recently with the subject “Looking for that first nonprofit job?” that had the advice to ‘use my skills, do my research, and… use Idealist.’

Now, I like Idealist. It’s the job search platform I default to when Indeed is drab and inconsistent and LinkedIn is… LinkedIn. But I wish they could have offered advice there that actually felt useful, if they were gonna try to hook me for yet another round of pre-summer job-searching. If they wanted to tantalize me to stay with their service by compelling people to respond affirmatively to my numerous applications, that would be something.

I can’t complain. I’m fortunate to be balancing a couple awesome projects with my friends at the moment. It’s just disheartening the way success, or hopefully at least something resembling it, is built on so much rejection.

ART

The Bear versus Sonic the Hedgehog.

I started watching The Bear relatively late in the game, much as I did with Succession and Severance. I don’t know if this is a product of me being a contrarian—“I can’t watch that! It’s too popular!”—or that it simply didn’t catch my interest until more recently.

Anyhow, I’ve been on a food/restaurants kick, and struck me that this show is about restaurants—not to mention I was waiting for the next season of Andor to come out. Perfect storm.

The Bear has blown me away. As of my publishing this, I’m all caught up with the show and am breathlessly awaiting the next season. I love the show’s pace, its refusal to overexplain its various industry elements to the audience, and its love of Chicago and food as a whole.

I love the show’s humor, too. I can appreciate people’s frustration with its tendency to snap up comedic awards, but the show is a comedy. It’s just that its comedy, I hypothesize, is primarily constructed around a release of tension rather than a build to a joke. It boils a fast-paced world rife with stress and anguish and allows humanity and hope and love to bubble to the surface rather than taking the concoction off the heat.

It’s stressful as hell to watch a lot of the time, though—especially when I got to the third season, which takes place directly in the fallout of the second season’s devastating finale. Not to mention, around the exact time I reached the third season, I developed an unpleasant cold.

I’m a bit of a baby when it comes to colds; I blame the biological realities of the “man flu” phenomenon, though I also just hate feeling sick, or anything less than 100%. When this little cold wiped me out at the beginning of April, then, I found myself laid out, desperate to do anything I could to recover as quickly as possible. 

One of these measures was to reduce stress. The easiest way I saw fit to do this, much to my dismay—I was in the middle of the season!—was to quit watching The Bear for as long as I could bear to be away from it and its chef’s kiss writing.

But what to replace it with? I like to set aside a block of time at the end of my day to just do something like watch TV or play a game, something that just allows me to relax and appreciate someone else’s product rather than generate my own. Facing a dearth of compelling options—“dearth” being relative amidst today’s nonstop content churn—I decided to pick up a movie series I’d been intending to watch for a long time: the Sonic the Hedgehog movies.

I’ve been a Sonic fan via the video games for at least around a decade and a half, and the buzz around the movies was that they were actually pretty good. Not to mention, they had received enough positive regard—and money—that by the third movie the producers had been able to hire Keanu Reeves himself to play the brooding edgelord Shadow. How could I miss the appearance of a beloved actor giving voice to a childhood idol?

So, I put The Bear and its pot of Emmy awards on the back burner and fired up the Sonic movies instead, watching all three over the course of three illness-addled nights. I was ready to be tickled, entertained, reminisced; I was ready to be relieved I had finally checked the series off my “Movie Backlog” list so I could get back to indulging in Serious Art.

I was not anticipating quite the level of hype for the franchise watching the third movie instilled in me. By the final scenes of the Blue Blur’s confrontation with Shadow and the battle’s aftermath, the homecoming tour of all my childhood nostalgia was banging around in my head to the soundtrack of Crush 40’s idealistic butt rock. I was rewatching playthroughs of Sonic and the Black Knight on YouTube and muddling out the chords to “I Am All of Me” on the acoustic guitar.

Why are the Sonic movies so successful? I think it’s because their team loves them. 

Love is evident in the actors’ commitment to their characters—a feat made all the more impressive by the way CGI necessitates that the actors playing human rolls engage emphatically with a green screen—love is evident in the writing’s references to the source material, and love is evident in how much fun it seems like everyone is having.

Once I was good and recovered from my cold, I refired The Bear. It’s excellent. It’s a phenomenal show. One of the best I’ve seen in a while. But, lesson lived and learned: let there always be a “thank you, chef” set aside for the artists who are in it for the fun.

CRAFT

Back to school.

My original draft of this section was going to be a long-winded explanation of wanting to take a class in the city, agonizing over which class to take, deciding on a directing class, and gushing over how transformative it was.

I did, indeed spend the past two months taking a directing class at the Barrow Group, thanks to the generosity of my parents and my grandmother. I did indeed pick up a wonderful array of tools to use, and learned a fresh perspective on directing from the class’ wonderful instructor, Shannon Patterson. I met a roomful of cool people from a variety of backgrounds, each with their own experiences and aims.

And, simultaneously, to gush would be disingenuous, and I have sworn myself from disingenuity in this newsletter. I walk away from this class, I think—the final session will take place the afternoon this newsletter releases—with two essential takeaways:

1. The most important part of an education, or at least the most impactful, is the people involved in it. It’s been wonderful learning alongside my cohort, and I’m looking forward to seeing how our paths may cross in the future.

2. I’m done with school. I want to do.
   That’s not to say there aren’t things left that I want to learn. I want to refine my guitar skills. I want to learn more about stage combat so I can get certified and choreograph for stage and screen. I want to revisit acting and experiment with new styles of writing. It feels apparent to me, though, that the way forward lies in doing, not studying.

I always want to keep an open mind. I always want to be ready to grow and challenge myself and be open. And, I have had so many amazing teachers and mentors and instructors over the years: I want to utilize the gifts they’ve given me. I don’t want to practice—I want to put my practice into practice.

I’ll probably have more to say as I reflect on this particular class in the months to come. The fruits of a writing class I took in Boston, after all, took years to bloom into a professional opportunity, thanks to the help of the class’ instructor, Mark Fogarty. For now, though, I want to cut the starry-eyed pontification and just say… I’m ready to move forward.

I have had the immense good fortune to be surrounded by phenomenal mentors—maybe that’s why I’m so hesitant to step away from the classroom. I’m looking forward to taking more classes in the future, if only to meet more awesome people.

Annnd… I’m ready to do something. The only thing a class has yet to teach me is what seems to be holding me back from that.

Well—live and learn.

—

Michael