One of the biggest changes is shorter, more focused posts like this one. If you want to skip the preamble for a link to the Q&S Shop, scroll to the bottom.
The price for paid subscriptions has been lowered to $48 per annum/$4 per month. It also comes with a 20% discount on unlimited purchases and free shipping within the U.S. We’re also having a holiday sale of 20% off annual subscriptions from now until Quibblers & Scribblers’ first anniversary on February 8, 2024.
THE SLIPPERY IDENTITY OF A MULTI-HYPHENATE
Damon Albarn self-describes as a “polymath musician” in his Spotify profile. That’s not nearly what ‘polymath’ means; he would need to be like the ur-polymath, Leonardo da Vinci, and be an expert in disciplines across the arts and sciences.
Such are the times we live in: If Albarn identifies as a polymath, we’ll pat him on the head and say, “And such a shiny one at that,” but silently observe that he’s a bit of a wanker, albeit a talented one.
A creative polymath is a multi-hyphenate, which is what I’ve been since I accidentally fell into scribbling at Pamela Hanson’s suggestion after she received my voluble letters from Melbourne when I was down there trying to become a film director in the early ‘80s. I’d thought I’d find my way into directing via cinematography, but screenwriting was a more sensible idea for a career in the most insensible profession.
My first hyphenate was writer-director. Midway during the relentless Navy Seal hazing that filmmaking is, I also picked up ‘producer’ after another friend said about my gorgeous problem child Hatter, “Nobody is going to make this film but you.” So I began tilting at the dragon-windmills of fundraising and production management, too.
Up until perhaps the end of 2021, Google listed my profession as "Screenwriter." I was happy with that: Of all the titles in my multi-hyphenate, that's what I’ve spent most of my time doing. It also underscored the current status of my professional relationship with Rain Li, who was once my cinematographer, but since she added ‘director’ to her multi-hyphenate, I’ve become her bitch writer.
I Google myself maybe once a quarter, mainly to make sure the teen regional baseball star in Texas with my name isn't creeping so far up the first page of a search for my name that he might've finally made it above the fold and threatened my entire raison d’être.
Then I found myself in court one day in March 2022, facing off against our evil landlord in a conference room, working out an agreement over his egregious breach of the Habitability Clause in our lease. My flatmate, Tyler, our Ruth Bader Ginsburg-lite lawyer and I were on one side of the table, the landlord, his advocate and the deceptively charming property manager on the other.
The Evil One was reading out an official report filed by the inspector of the City of West Hollywood in this taunting, cavalier tone like it was sides for a sitcom audition.
I'd promised everyone, myself especially, that I'd be on my best behavior. But every word he uttered was goading me into leaping across the table and jamming a pen into his eye.
I summoned those many years of Sufi meditation, willed my zikr to take over my thoughts, and focused a spot on the carpet between my Yohji Yamamoto boots. "In with the love, out with the rage… such great boots... the best £80 I ever spent... in with the love, out with the rage... I mean, almost 20 years later, only had them resoled once... in with the love —"
The silence snapped me out of it. The landlord repeated a question to me contemptuously.
“Is that you?”
“What’s me?’
“It says here ‘the director.’ I assume that’s you?”
“Actually, I’m a screenwriter. I have no idea where that came from…”
“Yes, that’s him,” Tyler said, knowing full well the multi-tangents and anecdotes that might have spilled from my AHDH-addled mouth had he not cut me off.
I happened to be doing my quarterly self-search the following week and noticed that Google had changed my title. I was now “Film Director.”
I was so embarrassed. I imagined every director I knew and worked with guffawing. Much as I love directing — despite how difficult it is and how it doesn’t love me back — I would hardly describe myself as that unless it’s in an official bio.
All banal narcissistic injuries aside, that was obviously what came up for the city inspector when he Googled me rather than asking me what I did exactly as a film person.
Despite the undeserved departmental promotion, I wanted “Screenwriter” back — I’m getting worse about honesty and authenticity as my therapy progresses and I get older. I followed all the procedures for getting a correction made on Google; it turned out to be like trying to get one of my many unwarranted Facebook bans lifted.
(“So what if they’re tits? It’s art! Furthermore, she’s a friend of mine.”)
Earlier this year, Google dug in further with the misrepresentation and promoted me to “Film Producer.” I was despondent: It’s a terrible insult to someone on the creative side to be given an executive title. Was this my comeuppance for being so critical of corporate Hollywood, now that they’ve driven theatrical releases into the ground…?
I won’t get me started.
Over the summer, I briefly became “Film Writer,” which isn’t a proper title; it means I could write about film, which I suppose I also do. It was clear that Google’s nascent AI was all over the place, hallucinating roles like a gender-queer activist deciding what they feel like being this morning, as opposed to merely being on the dissociative identity disorder spectrum.
Most weirdestly, Google’s AI excerpted my IMDb bio in the overview just beneath my photo, name and title, even bolding “James Killough is a writer-director-producer.”
After writing that sentence, I searched for myself again. I’m back to “Film Producer.” Everyone’s laughing at me. I suspect sabotage from Sony Pictures over my claim to be the inspiration for Call Me By Your Name. (Kidding. Well, kinda. No, seriously kidding. Um…)
The good news: the Texan teen is nowhere to be found in the first 20 searches. Now I feel sorry for him.
OH, JUST GET TO THE POINT!
The truth is, “writer-director-producer” isn’t all I am. Somewhere along my meandering career path, I became the creative director for a small charity imprint and began doing graphic design when I quit film forever and ever for five years and took a job in the communications department at Citibank, “The most sensible thing you’ve ever done,” Mum still says whenever she can, ignoring the fact they eventually had enough of my multi-hyphenated subversions and laid me off.
In the process, I taught myself Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator. I’ve quietly paid many a bill over the years in this most insensible of professions moonlighting as a creative director, copywriter, and graphic designer for brands and corporations.
Truth is, I love it. In terms of rewarding experiences, I far prefer it to the relentless struggle, ego-wrangling, duplicity, back-stabbing, cultural sleaziness and general disappointment of American filmmaking.
Writer-director-producer-creative director-copywriter-graphic designer. Oh, and blogger and website builder. How’s that for creative polymath, Damon?
Whatever. Just don’t tell Google and send it tripping balls.
CREATIVE DIRECTOR, BRAND THYSELF!
At 1:30 AM on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving — having been working flat-out with four hours of sleep a night thanks to double-my-usual Adderall dosage, coffee and anxiety-induced adrenaline over the thought of not launching our new online store, Q&S Shop, on time to take advantage of this Black Friday thing I’d never paid attention to — I sent a text message to my colleague Andy Smith, the frontend developer who takes care of the actual building of the websites we’ve created together over the past ten years:
“I have no idea why I’m doing this.”
I woke up the next morning, looked at my phone and had the sort of clarifying response I was hoping for, in Andy’s comfortingly sparse, yet well-meaning Anglo-American phrasing: “To build your brand.”
There you have it, what I’ve been doing for the past 3 months: building my “personal brand.” Those who’ve been following my meandering thoughts about the negative residual effects of the Selfie Age would understand how distasteful the notion of a personal brand is to me, but Andy is right — it’s the most accurate term for what we’ve been developing.
Deploying a clutch of my multi-hyphenate skills and talents, I’ve designed a collection of designs for creative professionals, readers, spiritual seekers and their allies that are applied to casual apparel and gifts through on-demand manufacturing. While the price is a bit steeper than similar mass-produced products on Amazon, on-demand manufacturing means that each piece is made individually for the customer after an order is placed, eliminating waste from unsold inventory and a surplus of raw material.
I think of it as super just-in-time inventory.
Ever since I began my long creative multi-hyphenation assisting Pamela Hanson at 19, which I mark as my first gig as a creative professional — photos I took during that year were published in Tatler magazine — I’ve always kept a foot in the fashion world. As the Master of my Sufi order once observed about me, “And the clothes… my God, the clothes!”
Hey, even Yohji boots are meditation.
I like to say that I know three things: filmmaking, writing and clothing. As every school kid knows, the three things that are essential to human survival are food, clothing and shelter. It follows that the safest professions are in food manufacturing, apparel and housing. Filmed content and subscription newsletters are the dumbest riskiest.
I began this eCommerce venture when I developed a workwear label as a brand extension for a field-services client Upstate New York, for whom we’d created such stand-out branding, marketing, and website design that he was catapulted to number one in a competitive, conservative market in under two years.
When that relationship fell apart for reasons so baffling that I’m not sure I’ll ever know how to talk about it properly, I thought I would easily adapt the concept for Q&S Shop. Instead of workwear, it would be geared toward the aforementioned group, which is also within my expanded social network.
It was the opposite of easy, three months of exhilarating, maddening, misery-making creative mash-and-churn, what I’ve termed as Shiva’s Method, destroying the self to create superior work. Or as I put it to Dr. Borkheim in yesterday’s therapy session, “That scene when Picasso is furiously painting, cigarette dangling from his lips, monomaniacally focused on this monumental canvas, and out pops Guernica.”
Did I just compare an online apparel shop to Picasso’s masterpiece? Just the process, not the product.
According to our vendor when I pitched them the workwear label, Q&S Shop is the first scalable, proper apparel brand targeted to a specific, underserved market niche built from on-demand manufacturing.
As of today, the store is live and taking orders. If you want to order Christmas presents, you’ll need to get it in by December 10 for the U.S. — we’re beyond the cut-off for international. However, our experience ordering samples from the vendor — they’re top-notch products — tells us that’s a conservative date intended to exceed expectations, which only drives creators like me even crazier trying to meet deadlines that in reality have little value to our client base:
SO WHAT ARE THE CHANGES?
The wisdom is that whatever we’ve just been through designing the product and building the website is only half of the endeavor. As much time and effort will go into marketing the brand and building a customer base.
The store is the second part of three components that complement and help each other, the first being this newsletter. Aside from building awareness of Quibblers & Scribblers, it also approaches the over-extended subscriber market from a different route, offering subscribers something tangible to own and use over years rather than just decent writing and provocative opinions that flit from the mind in seconds.
The third component will be a video podcast, or videocast, which I’d intended to launch in January, but I’m moving that up to March or April 2024. It will cover the diverse range of topics that I write about, with a primary focus on building a bridge between America/the West and my India. I will be transitioning to living there for at least half of the year, where we’ll begin manufacturing clothing, specifically the Headstand label of yoga-wear that you’ll see in the Shop.
That means that I can’t spend a minimum of a week writing and illustrating the sort of meandering, long-form essays that I’ve posted so far. From now on this newsletter will be mostly shorter posts with more targeted subjects like this one, which will be available to all subscribers. Occasional longer-form pieces like those I’ve been posting will be available to paid subscribers only as premium content.
I apologize for my long absence. Again, I never intended it to be that way, or I would’ve put the newsletter on pause and sent out an email. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy the outcome of my efforts. Paid subscribers already know they will be getting a three-month extension on their annual subscriptions.
We’re still tweaking and improving the store. The image I have is we’re opening while that scaffolding is still being taken down; workmen are sweeping up and making final touchups. Please let us know if you spot any errors or have any questions by sending an email to support@quibblersandscribblers.com.
Thanks for reading and your patience, most of all.
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