I am representative of GenrerationX. We aren’t the darling of the media anymore like the Millenials are or a dominant group like the Boomers but we have our own unique ‘damn the man’ attitude that has produced some excellent art over the last twenty years.
One of the many talented individuals of GenX is named Kevin Smith. Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma — he has captured the voice of our generation and the way we talk and perceive the world. He talked about geeky stuff before it was cool. His characters were comic book writers and illustrators(tracers) and convenience store clerks and loveable drug dealers. Star Wars, comics, religion, sexual orientation and so much more were voiced through his incredible dialogue well before most of his topics and characters were mainstream.
I admit I lost touch with Kevin Smith and his work in the early 2000’s but I became interested in podcasts around 2007 and one of the first to embrace this new medium was Kevin Smith. I started listening to Smodcast about six months to a year in and was hooked instantly. He is a natural and Scott Mosier is perfect in his role of straight man/foil/impressionist(best damn impressions ever).
Jump ahead to Fall 2008 and the last we hear from Kevin Smith is him in an excited state over the upcoming release of Zach and Miri make a Porno. We had heard much about his movie over the previous months including his run-in with the MPAA over the rating and then — crickets.
What happened?
Zach and Miri hadn’t done as well as Kevin had hoped. I think it is a great movie and makes me laugh every time I watch it, but Kevin was reaching for new heights in this film in terms of box office revenue and when he didn’t reach them, he was crushed.
When the next Smodcast drops in December(Ep 68) he and Scott walk through the reasons why Zach and Miri failed(in his eyes) and we begin to see this master of reinvention form a plan to get back to his indie roots.
Listen to the post-mortem here:
The Talking Cure 12-16-2008 Part 1
You can hear in his voice that he hasn’t quite recovered.
Why did this get me writing? There are many reasons that I will get into in the next post, but mostly it was his self-pep talk about there being no reason in this day and age not to create something and bypass the traditional routes of delivery.
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