PROLOGUE

And that’s all, folks—my time as a teacher for The Reading Team came to a close this month. I’ve said it a billion times to the people there, but I’ll say it again here: the experience highlighted the importance of a good team to me. I’m immensely fortunate to have worked with a phenomenal cohort of fellow teachers and administrators alike. They made the difficult work of serving the interests of a bunch of elementary-schoolers feel achievable, and I walked away from the year with a lot of warmth in my heart for my students and what comes next for them.

That said, if anyone has any summer work they need done, let me know; I’m currently looking for ways to be employed following that aforementioned lovely experience. The time crawls by until there’s barely any left—and then, just when you realize it, it’s gone in an instant.

In other news, I recently submitted a TV pilot script to a number of screenplay festivals! I’m always dismayed by how pricey screen media submissions are, but I feel good about having bet on myself like that—I’m very pleased with the state of what I submitted. It was the first bit of writing of mine that I sampled in this here newsletter! First issue, if I’m not mistaken. 

Fingers crossed. I’ll know more of the results in August-October.

ART

How long should I look at art for?

That's a serious question, prompted by a few recent excursions. From late May to early June, four friends of mine visited NYC in succession. A shared interest of nearly all of them was in the city's many art museums; I joined in on a couple such outings over the course of the visits. 

The first friend of mine who dropped by, a TV/film professional herself, wanted to see the Museum of Modern Art—the second pair was compelled by the Whitney Museum of American Art. Something shared by all of them, though, was the immense speed with which they moved through the museums—at least comparatively to my own. At the MoMA and the Whitney alike, it felt like my friends were rocketing through displays at a blistering pace. I often found myself deeply focused on the various paintings and exhibits, only to look up and find myself thoroughly separated from my pack.

Why was my tempo, measured against theirs, so slow? I was struck by a barrage of questions: 

• Are other people processing the images faster than I am? Are other people not thoroughly reading the informational plaques like I am for every detail, material, and scrap of context? Are other people not being waylaid by their internal monologue while examining the art?

• Do other people just find the art less interesting than I do? (Are my friends bored)??

• Do I feel like I need to extract a certain value, in time or in psychological occupation, for the admission cost of the tickets? I had gotten all my tickets for free, thanks to NYC’s amazing Culture Pass system and the Whitney’s policy of free admission for anyone under the age of 25, so this one thus struck as less likely, but still… time spent is time spent.

• Am I preoccupied with the idea of looking like I’m Looking at Art?

• Am I seeing things other people aren’t seeing? Am I being spurred to thoughts other people are not having? 

I would detest any notion rooted in a sense of personal superiority for sure, I just… wanted to know why our paces were so different! I asked my sister if it felt to her, too, that other people made their way through art museums rather quickly, my reasoning being that we may have absorbed a ponderous approach from our parents. She said:

“if you spend more than 20 seconds looking/reading a piece, and care about looking at more of what's in a room rather than less, then I think you're on the "slower" side this is what I've learned :[”

When I’m in a museum, I read each plaque, observe as many angles of each exhibit as I can, reflect on how they make me feel, stick around for as much as I can of any exhibits that “cycle,” like the filmed ones. Does this make me someone who is seeking as deep an appreciation of the art as I can, or does it make me a snob? Am I just cosplaying as someone of a formidable cultural intellect for my own ego? I don't… think so. I think a lot of the things in these museums are really cool.

There's a play called Red, a Tony award winner in 2010, where Mark Rothko describes the intended experience of looking at one of his “color field” paintings. They're huge slabs of canvas adorned simply, featuring no more than a few broad, horizontal rectangles in bold color. In John Logan's play, an imagined Rothko says:

The Rothko in this play is a snob, for sure, but he says something about the active nature of engaging with art—even, the play makes clear, as his own abstract expressionist style is being rapidly eclipsed in popularity by pop art. Both styles are now on display at the MoMA—artifacts of artistic traditions which have been succeeded many times over by our present day.

I love Rothko's work. I read Red early in my theatre education and it left me with a driving fascination for artwork that reveals great depths to attentive viewers. One of the most naturally-captivating art exhibits I have ever seen, though, I saw at the Whitney. Prior to our arrival, my two friends and I had walked down the High Line on a torrid NYC summer day. From there, we trekked further to Christopher Street, where we ate pizza and baked in the sun. By the time we arrived at the museum, we had been walking for hours; we were sweating; one of us was red as a lobster from the exposure.

And then we stepped inside the Whitney, which offers itself freely to under-25s. Inside this air-conditioned sanctuary, we saw Mary Heilmann’s Long Line. 

It's a bunch of chairs arrayed before a massive floor-to-ceiling window—more a wall, really—overlooking the piers along the Hudson River, just south of Little Island. That's “it”; buncha chairs and a window.

After a long walk in the summer heat, I fell asleep in an air-conditioned room staring at the riverside of my phenomenal city while my friends discussed Elden Ring boss battles next to me. We took in that exhibit for an hour all by itself. In Heilmann’s words: “Museums are places to hang out.” I maintain that the best art, no matter what its shape, warrants taking your sweet time to absorb.

CRAFT

How much research should I do before I make something?

Recently, I’ve been designing a tabletop role-playing game setting in the style of Metal Gear. The titular series is a zany military espionage epic with more twists and turns than a Boy Scout’s favorite showing-off-cuz-I-just-got-my-merit-badge knot. It mixes historical backdrops and real-world weapons and crises with absolutely bonkers science-fantasy flourishes—cyborg ninja, nanomachines, and the titular giant robots.

The existing tabletop game system I’ve been using as a foundation to emulate this series is called Twilight 2000, and was published by Free League Games, a Stockholm-based outfit that has been on an absolute roll for the past while. T2K, as it is abbreviated, simulates modern tactical and survival scenarios—its assumed setting is in the nuke-blasted remains of Sweden, following the struggle of surviving soldiers from both sides of World War Three. It’s a crunchy system—meaning it has defined mechanics for a variety of different scenarios—while also being flexible enough to support the wild weirdness of Metal Gear. I’m calling my tweak on the system Twilight Gear.

The scenario for the game I’m designing is set during the United States’ invasion of Panama in 1989, known as Operation Just Cause. Despite its name, the operation was not a particularly moral or ethic invasion in any way; it was a military incursion aimed to depose CIA-funded arms/narcotics dealer Manuel Noriega after he ceased to be useful to his federal handlers as the de facto leader of Panama.

The operation was a proving ground for weapons later used in Desert Storm. It saw civilians as the targets of American military technology, with neighborhoods burning while the Army turned reporters away from the wreckage. I should mention, my primary source for understanding the conflict was the documentary The Panama Deception, which features the little footage and photojournalism which got past the US military’s information embargo on the ground.

I wanted to create a game set amidst this conflict for two primary reasons. First, I had not known much about the invasion beforehand, and wanted to share my newfound awareness of the brutal event. Second… it makes for a narrative scenario that is rife with things to explore about the United States’ application of military power. It’s the sort of operation that I would expect there to be many more books and movies about, were it not so clearly a heinous use of American power—one which has a threat of being repeated in the present day.

To prepare to run a tabletop game around a fictionalized version of Operation Just Cause, I’ve had to read about:

• US relations with South America in the 80s

• Weapons technology of the 80s

• Panamanian geography and points of interest

• US military units

• Panamanian military units

• Strategic plans for the US military

  • …and specific timing of different actions

  • …and the personnel involved in the actions

    • …and the role of women in the US military at the time

• Foreign and domestic reactions to the invasion

• Panamanian religion and folklore

• The colonial history of Panama

• The political lead-up to the invasion

• The status of the Cold War in the late 80s

• US culture abroad

• Michael Jackson and Madonna (There’s a motif in the game campaign based around the influence of American pop culture in shaping narratives about the US on foreign soil).

After a certain point I wonder… when have I researched too much?? I have spent countless hours watching documentaries, pouring over Wikipedia articles, searching up service records of US military personnel; what is gained from verisimilitude? Am I researching out of interest, out of utility, out of fear of not being prepared enough, or out of fear that what I ultimately write will be bad? It’s gotten to the point where I perhaps could have presented the game to my friends weeks ago—months ago?—had I not pulled up a new Wikipedia article every time I wrote a new header in my planning document. It leads me to wonder: will all this notetaking pay off when I sit down to run the play sessions with my peers, my friends? How much do I owe it to people and their history—the real violence which took place—to nail details for a personal tabletop game?

I don’t seek to make light of an invasion that left civilians dead and homes destroyed. Partway through designing the given circumstances for the game, I decided it would be morally impossible for the players to play as personnel in the US military; I don’t want to pretend the US plays some heroic role in the operation, and I don’t want to pretend there were misunderstood or unseen actors who were secretly doing good in the name of the USA when there wasn’t, much as I can tell, any good being done.

It’s also not a manifesto, or anything I plan to publish; it’s a game I’m preparing for maybe five friends. Still—I’m putting something into the world. That counts for something no matter what.

Apply this quandary to any creative project: how much is owed to the details, period? I love when a piece of media, fiction or nonfiction, captures brilliant details, be they historical elements that line up perfectly with events as they actually happened or pieces of an imagined world that enhance the verisimilitude of the place. Obviously if I obsess over details so long that we never play the game/write the script/finish the draft that’s one thing. In the realm of being reasonable, though—what choice is to be made? Is there a quota to fill? A standard to meet? In the case of preparations for a game, I suppose the question is simple: did everyone have fun?

…But then again, how many small details does fun require? Not to mention, fun probably isn’t the only factor in my sample case here, given its grim subject matter.

In some cases, details can be engaging. In the case of a game where players create characters to occupy a given world, details allow those players to better place their characters in said world. In the case of a fictional story, details are things an audience member can latch on to, things that make a world feel more alive; Andor is chock-full of brilliant features that enrich its fictional setting. In the case of something more historical, details help promote truthfulness, and can be gratifying to see for people for whom they indicate the history of; Shōgun is a phenomenal show that benefited greatly from a multicultural cast bringing its world to life.

So… I dunno. I feel as if, for Twilight Gear: Operation ______ (I haven’t decided on a name yet), I owe accuracy to the real, serious tragedy that occurred, as well as accuracy to the historical circumstances that make the whole thing compelling to examine in the first place. Without those, the story could be anywhere, anytime. That I suppose begets the question—why not just set this game in an entirely fictional setting or set of circumstances with entirely fictional characters?

I don’t quite know. There’s something compelling about an “alternate history” story; I think they call upon us to examine our understanding of a thing and the relationship between our perception of it and what we think it could have or might have been. To do that examination, the materials we’re looking at have to be honest. I think, given that, the more details, the better. But I’ll have more to say once I—finally—run the thing.

And to do that, eventually I just gotta write.

—

Michael