The Blog and I

    Welcome, one and all, to The Midpoint!

     My name is Garth, and after years of extreme introversion with above average pop culture consumption, obtaining degrees and certificates from various academic institutions for film, television, and writing studies, and moving my lazy millennial ass to the west coast, I am exactly nowhere in my desired writing career! Sure, I have some scripts under my belt and some connections, but so does everyone else. So I thought to myself, “I’ve been trained to the point of obsession to talk about media and everything it entails. Why am I waiting for somebody else to tell me when to start?” And now you’re here.

    On this blog, we're going to talk about films, television, music, video games, and any other kind of art I can summon the energy to write about. At this point, you may be thinking, "Who the fuck are you, and more importantly, why should I give a shit?" Well, those are both great questions, anonymous perpetually enraged internet friend who lives in my head!

    Like most people on the internet, OF COURSE I believe everything I have to say is worth hearing, and I immediately assume that you feel the same way. However, if that isn't the case, allow me to try to lay out my tastes as much as possible and how they came to be in the hopes that maybe you can relate.

    Also, when I inevitably piss you off, at least you might know why:

Film

    I got into film the same ways most people do. When I was a kid, I saw X MOVIE in theaters, we had X VHS tape that I watched over and over again, my dad showed me X RATED R MOVIE when I was little and told me not to tell my mom. I had a Star Wars phase, I had a James Bond phase, I had an Alien phase. The usual stuff.

    For a while, I liked whatever was in theaters until I discovered independent filmmakers. David Lynch. Quentin Tarantino. Werner Herzog. The usual people budding film buffs get excited about when they're discovering what movies can accomplish. I differed in some ways. I never really got into the quirky comedy stuff like the Wes Andersons or the Noah Baumbachs that a lot of my peers did, but save for a few similar exceptions, I was the cliché. Say you liked a movie that I didn’t, and I’d be more than happy to whip out my giant nerdy DVD binder and point out how wrong you were. Then scoff.

    Soon, however, I discovered screenwriting, and from the moment I knew screenwriting was a thing, I knew that’s what I wanted to do with my life. I read Campbell and McKee. I went on screenwriting blogs. I bought scripts on Amazon to read. Through this process, I became less interested in unpacking the subtext of a film and deciphering the symbols and the meaning, and more interested in how storytelling structure prompts an emotional response from an audience. How do stories affect people? Why do I feel emotionally connected to one story but not another? 

    As a result, my tastes have shifted back towards the mainstream in certain ways, but really, I’ll watch any movie that’s put in front of me. It does’t matter what genre or whether it’s a big Hollywood blockbuster or a micro budget indie film. I’m looking for a meaningful narrative, whether that’s through the structure of the script or the visuals or any aspect of a film that can make it great. There was a time when films were more of an conceptual exercise for me. Now I just want to feel, and I want to understand why.

Quirks:

• I seem to have a higher capacity for depressing movies than most. 
• This is an article for later, but I try not to let nostalgia dictate my tastes. Just because I liked something way back when doesn’t mean I should continue to defend it on the grounds that it meant a lot to me when I was child with no developed tastes.
• Though there are a few exceptions, generally speaking, I’m not one of those people who likes bad movies because they’re bad. Don't get me wrong, I love watching The Room just as much as everybody else. However, I don't actively seek that kind of thing out.
• I have a very weird and very irrational bias against movies about the poor lives of people who live in the suburbs.  Ordinary People and The Ice Storm and stuff like that. Article on this later.
• I also haven’t outgrown my disdain for all things quirk and twee. Again, article for later.

Music

    I became aware of music during the late 90's resurgence of boy and girl bands. My dad played The Beatles and Prince for me and my brother, but that’s the only good music I was exposed to at the time. Through the end of lower school, I had an unfortunate nu-metal phase. Korn and Limp Bizkit and the like. They were loud, angry, and they swore a lot so I felt rebellious listening to it. That and curse words made me laugh. Thankfully though, my brother put me on Nirvana and The Red Hot Chili Peppers, so things got a little better for a while.

    Then on a fateful Middle School day, I heard "Get Low" by Lil Jon and the Eastside Boyz. Maybe it was the energy. Maybe it was the bravado. Maybe it was the effect of all this talk of hoes and skeeting on a newly pubescent mind, but my brain chemistry was forever changed. My tastes branched away from 90's grunge, and I started exclusively seeking out hip hop. With what was in the mainstream at the time, let's just say these weren't good years for me. I may have bought a Mike Jones album. Who? Mike Jones. 

    The good news though is that right before what might be the worst few years of hip hop in my life time, a teacher put me onto Native Tongues, as well as the Neo soul rappers: Basically everyone from Dave Chappelle’s Block Party. (By “worst years”, I’m talking about roughly the end of 2006 through 2009. It seemed that for every Hell Hath No Fury or Graduation, we’d get a Soulja Boy or a Jibbs or whatever. Remember snap music?) Off the samples in those songs, I discovered 60's and 70's soul music, R&B, jazz, and all the music that I love today. 

    Since I spent all my adolescence listening to black music, I missed a lot of what was going on in indie rock. (I would say mainstream rock as well, but I was painfully aware of the horrors going on there thanks to morning radio.) I caught some of it here and there, but to put it into perspective, I didn’t listen to Funeral until my senior year of college. To broaden my horizons and what not, I’ve spent a lot of the recent years catching up on indie rock, and if I’m being totally honest, white music in general. Though I often disagree with my indie rock loving peers, I wish I had a more open mind in my adolescence. However, my heart will always belong to black music. 

    And my heart still grows ever fonder for “Get Low." 

Quirks:

• Years later, I saw Mike Jones live at my college. It was glorious. 
• I realized I talked about hip hop too much, but fret not. We'll be talking about all genres here.
• I had a deep fondness for the Minneapolis scene during my formative years as a hip hop fan. In a lot of ways, I still do.  
• I’m not a fan of Drake/Drake-y hip hop, which I’m sure we’ll get to at some point. In response to all this Drake-ification, I've been listening to more gangster rap lately. The more ignorant, the better. 
• Nina Simone is my favorite singer of all time. 
• In my mind, I don’t really distinguish between mainstream and independent music. As Questlove once put it, there really isn’t good or bad so much as effective or not effective. This is all a very roundabout way of saying that I like pop music, and we'll be talking that as well. 
• I try to be open to all genres, but I’ve never come around to modern country, though I haven’t really explored it as much as I should have before making that comment. However, I'm aware that "bro-country" is a thing. Make of that what you will. 

TV

    Before June 11, 2007, I was mainly into comedies. I’ve been a life long fan of South Park, as well as Futurama, The Daily Show, and a few others. I had a huge obsession with Chappelle’s Show from season one. (Yes, season one. Before the Rick James skit. Give me my hipster points.) Other than that, I honestly don’t really remember what I was into, because on June 11, 2007, I watched the first episode of The Sopranos, my all time favorite TV show. 

    I remember the date so well because it was the day after the finale aired. My stepfather had, luckily, borrowed the season one box set from a friend. I was hooked from episode one, and soon after I made my parents spend a lot of money on the rest of the series. After I was done with the The Sopranos, I moved onto The Wire, which I also loved dearly. (I watched the finale of The Wire air. More hipster points for me.) I also watched Six Feet Under and Deadwood and the rest of the elite HBO shows, all before entering college. 

    Luckily, other networks were catching up to HBO in quality as well, so as I entered college, I was also a huge Mad Men and Breaking Bad fan, which is all to say that for a while I was kind of a snob. I watched trashy reality tv for irony’s sake, but other than a few exceptions, I generally thumbed my nose at network television. Sophomore year, however, is when I started Community, which is when I realized that great television can come from anywhere, especially in an era where the line between television and the internet is becoming more and more blurry.

    Other than what’s in the quirks, I don’t really think my tastes these days differ than that of most people. We are, as you know, currently in the golden age. (I would actually argue that we’re a little past the true “golden age”, but that’s just me.) There’s still only one or two network shows I watch, but that has less to do with ill informed expectations of quality and more to do with with what I have access to and what I’m willing to pay for. Really, the only area of television I’ve left unexplored these days are the deep cable networks. Your Sundances and WGNs and what have you. 

    I don’t really value one genre or network over another anymore. I just want the quality TV train to keep rolling.

Quirks:

• Consider me a member of The Leftovers cult. I loved the show from season one, and I genuinely think season two might be one of my favorite seasons of television ever. 
• I hopped off The Walking Dead at the end of season three. Some people have told me to go back. I probably won’t. 
• I own the first season of A Shot of Love with Tila Tequila, both seasons of I Love New York, and the first four seasons of Jersey Shore on DVD. I bought those Jersey Shore seasons because I wrote a paper on it in college, but the other two shows I bought because I thought it was funny. 
• I’m in the probable minority of people who would rank Mad Men over Breaking Bad. There are plenty of reasons why, which I’ll write about some other day, but the main one is that The Sopranos is my favorite show of all time and Mad Men embraces that kind of short story-esque structure that I find so rewarding.
• Over the last few years, I’ve gotten really into Cutthroat Kitchen and Good Eats. Love me some Alton Brown.
• Remember when people loved having the 30 Rock vs. The Office debates? Though I love 30 Rock to death, consider me on team The Office.

Video Games

    Save for the Dreamcast and maybe a few others, I pretty much owned every major video game console since the Super NES. For a while, I liked whatever was the big thing. GoldenEye defined my time with the N64, and for the next generation, I had a huge Grand Theft Auto obsession, as well as one for Halo and Tony Hawk and all the other big tentpole franchises.

    I don’t think I really became cognizant of what video games were truly capable of until Half-Life 2. I hadn’t really discovered game criticism yet, so I knew nothing about it other than that it was a sequel to the first one. Something about it struck me almost immediately. I haven’t played it in years, so I wish I could be more specific as to what that something was, but that’s the game where it finally struck me that video games are an art form, and they were capable of much more than shoot the alien things and to do a McTwist, you hit right, down, X. (Assuming I remember that correctly.)

    With the Xbox 360 came the rise of console indie games, and I was hooked on those from the start. I bought Braid a few months after it came out and had a huge infatuation with it, despite not being smart enough to beat it at the time. Over the years, more incredible indie games came out that offered more emotionally enriching content, and the more the market grew, the more I began to shy away from the big AAA games. Mind you, I never stopped buying them, and I never stopped enjoying them. It just changed what I valued in a game and what I wanted out of my purchase. 

    If I ever listed my top ten favorite games, which I very well might for this site one day, it would probably be a healthy mix of AAA and indie games. Much like film, I don’t discriminate based on budget or distribution, nor do I value one over the other. I just want a good game, or, much like film, the marriage of visuals, storytelling, and the added component of gameplay. Of course I’ll play something just for being fun, but what I really want is an emotional connection. Gun to my head, my all time favorite game is probably season one of Telltale’s The Walking Dead. There's plenty of imperfections, but I’ve had the strongest emotional reaction to that game then any that came before it or any that have come out since. I want to care about the game I’m playing. I don’t want to just play it. 

Quirks:

• I’ll go in for multiplayer here and there, but at my core I’m a single player campaign person.
• If I had a PC, that would probably be my platform, but sadly I only have a laptop, so I play on console.
• I try to avoid free-to-play games, whether they be mobile games or on console.
• As for this generation, I only have a PS4. I was going to get an Xbox One, but then the launch fiasco happened, and frankly, I still haven’t forgiven Microsoft. 
• My biggest gaming sin: I’ve never played a Zelda game. Any of them.
• Other than The Walking Dead and a few others, I’m not really a horror guy.
• Despite how much I talk about indie games, I buy Call of Duty every year, mostly because I find the trajectory of that series kind of fascinating. 
• I’ve never played a FromSoftware game, but from the sounds of things, I don’t quite think it’s for me. I don’t really respond to frustration well. I've never felt that sense of accomplishment you're supposed to feel after you beat a hard level or a boss or a whatever after trying over and over again? The only thing I've ever felt is resentment for the game taking up so much of my time. I play games on normal difficulty for a reason. 

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    As for this blog, the admittedly vague scope was designed so that I could basically write about whatever I wanted to write about in whatever tone I so desired. However, there will be some topics and themes we’ll be returning to rather frequently. Narrative structure and effective storytelling. In-depth music and lyrical analysis. Introspection and consumer habits. Race. Me being a snob. (We’ll be returning to that last theme a lot.) Other than that, expect longer articles, expect maybe some lists here and there, and if I’ve had a particularly bad day, expect a needlessly foulmouthed rant on why I hate the term, “think piece.”

    There’s a reason I chose to name this blog “The Midpoint,” or at least there’s a reason beyond it fitting the criteria of being a film related term with a desirable syllable count and meter... also the name wasn't my idea. The real midpoint is a story beat. There are many names and definitions for this beat depending on which screenwriting book you read or which writer you ask. Some call this moment "The False Victory", but I always thought that name ignores the beat's true function. The definition I subscribe to came from a lecture at the UCLA Professional Program: The midpoint is a moment around the middle of the story when the hero seizes control of his/her/its own destiny. Hard times might befall the protagonist again, or at least they will in a well told story, but it's here that there’s a new sense of determination and worthiness. The protagonist is firmly in control, and there’s nowhere to go but forward. 

    As always from here and every article onward, thank you for reading!