Musings on the George Floyd situation at present: riots occurring nationwide, just as the American people were starting to transcend their differences and unify in the face of COVID-19 lockdowns. Very interesting timing. I think these reactions speak of atomisation and conditioning; We saw it in Watts; We saw it after Rodney King; Ferguson; Baltimore and on it goes. The political dialectic and those who speculate on it profit, while everyone else loses. Be that as it may, I do wonder how many of the armchair activists on social media, lamenting the tragic death of this man, ever hired a black person?

How many, pre-pandemic, championed the dogma of social-justice to their mostly white-liberal / progressive friends on social media while sipping soy lattes at their trendy coffeeshop; biked from their mostly white-liberal / progressive apartment buildings to their Tech or Creative job at their mostly white-liberal / progressive office? I never knew George Floyd. I’m sure he was a shade-of-grey just like the rest of us, but I can tell you that he was a human being; not a mere prop to be used in the virtue signaling gamesmanship of narcissistic protocol. We should not flatter ourselves by pretending that we suddenly care about the fate of this man whose name was unknown before the events and circumstances that ended his life. We should not presume to stand on the bodies of the dead, shouting our yawp of faux virtue across the rooftops of the world; expecting to be regarded as virtuous while doing nothing, sacrificing nothing in the everyday space between outrages. We should not delude ourselves that virtue is to be gained merely by thinking the “correct” thoughts; action and sacrifice have always been the minimum price to be paid for virtue. We should be able to distinguish vanity from virtue. I think opportunity and entrepreneurship is what’s needed, not riots and protests; not puerile reactivity, or the wanton, thoughtless destruction of our own communities and futures. We should not be the dogs fighting for scraps under the master’s table.

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Corey Drayton is a Cinematographer and Photographer, whose world collapsed when he was diagnosed with Stage IV colorectal cancer at the age of 36. Putting the camera down for treatment, he is rebuilding with pen and paper; writing about his ongoing battle with cancer–and other philosophy–at www.penumbra.online.

“Aren’t you panicked?” my friend asks me over bowls of fresh salad, referencing what the public is calling Coronavirus. I eased back in my chair, looking into her deep-set steel grey eyes, collating mental objects. No, in fact I’m not in a panic. I’ve spent the last year-and-a-half battling terminal cancer, I survive–against the odds; my relationship to panic forever modified. All I encounter, lensed through the reality of partial remission, focusing on stability and balance, pursuing as much a return to equilibrium as can be expected form that first tenuous step back from the brink of the abyss.

Those around me marinate in media medium anxiety; a school of fish weaving, uncomprehending amidst disruptions from far above on the surface. In the months of radiation and chemo the sole minim within my locus of control was my self; my emotional state. Panic would not have saved my life. I had to surrender to process; to the degrading and painful effects of radiation, the debilitating discomfort of chemotherapy. There was little else for it: the alternative inexorably unclouded, uncomplicated–death. Instead, I embraced autopsis–the act of seeing clearly with one’s own eyes, preparation and contact; defiance against atomisation. As many strangers helped me fight cancer as did friends; as to my body, I hold the body politic: people will help each other, we always do. Deadliest are the diseases of the mind. Panic is its own contagion.

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Corey Drayton is a Cinematographer and Photographer, whose world collapsed when he was diagnosed with Stage IV colorectal cancer at the age of 36. Putting the camera down for treatment, he is rebuilding with pen and paper; writing about his ongoing battle with cancer at www.penumbra.online.

ABSURD INSTANCES RESURFACE FROM THE STEAM OF QUIET COFFEE MOMENTS. Echoes of the distant normal: Justine once said, over Sandy Hut ciders, the knowledge of the tumour inside me fresh in my umwelt, “What, are you trying to advertise it to everyone? They’ll hear you!” that I “was far too up front about my diagnosis! Did [I] really want everyone knowing?” By extension; that I should feel ashamed, marked; keep it under wraps, not talk about it; smile! Pretend everything is just hunky-dory, y’dig? Just Livin’ the dream, daddy-oh! Trippin’ the light fantastic! Kick back and crack a bottle of Vita obscura suds in the tepid summer sun of planet small.

Someone now asks, “what is the part of battling cancer that you’ve struggled with the most?” My mind revisits the experiential rolodex: The melting skin, passing glass at 2:00 am incontinence of radiation? The chemotherapy malaise, everything I eat tasting like 1945 Nagasaki sidewalk; my mouth filled with the briny ashes of amorous desertion? A grim diagnosis? The 27% chance of survival dancing in Fantasia nightmares with an elephantine 80% guarantee of big C recurrence? An overwhelming sense of injustice that these horrors never seemed to visit the machiavellian monsters of interstellar Faustian renown.

For me, it’s actually quite simple: a staggering aura of futility–not against the cancer itself, but the undefined, grey substrate of its genesis. I can’t determine if the daily futility with which I do combat, alongside the carcinomic Gorgon inside me, is a manifestation of the disease, or its catalyst? Biting into an apple, only dust hitting my tongue. I have felt a caustic sense of fruitlessness for a long time; a sisyphyean doom lurking on the edges of my awareness. The ego meets the reality cheese grater: a panicked urgency upon which compels one to act while simultaneously limiting one’s options. Then I borrow a deep breath, and on my next inhale perspective returns: limitations are often the embers of creativity. The iconic arises out of the formerly impossible; against the odds.

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Corey Drayton is a Cinematographer and Photographer, whose world collapsed when he was diagnosed with Stage IV colorectal cancer at the age of 36. Putting the camera down for treatment, he is rebuilding with pen and paper; writing about his ongoing battle with cancer at www.penumbra.online.

I WONDER IF THERE IS A SEASON FOR IRRATIONALITY? If, at times life presents one with such contradictory evidence that the only sensible course of action is to be nonsensical? The commitment to empiricism can leave one at the mercy of a dictatorship of probability; a reasoned set of expectations that, supported by evidence, imply inevitability. To resist such predictions is as productive as shouting at a gale to change direction. There are times, when predictions are so utterly disagreeable that to accept them would feel like nothing short of betrayal of the self; a solemn acceptance of futility, or in the face of cancer, frailty.

When my last round of Chemo ended and the long state of Détente I currently endure became the order of the day, I promised myself that in early 2020 I would begin to rebuild my professional life. Limited by the reality of treatment having closed, albeit temporarily, the door to 16 years of working on set as a cinematographer and 1st Assistant Cameraman, I sat with my grief. Once it passed, the choice of where to strike out next was clear. See Cancer as a blessing in disguise, an opportunity; like the Phoenix, arise from the ashes renewed, and live. I hauled myself out of a well of grief, back onto my feet, dusted myself off and strutted to the horizon, to whatever lay in store for me… plowing head-on into the concrete wall built of my own expectations. The same closed doors, dead-air thick with apathy. These are the carcinomic cycles, the semiotic roots of my disease. It wasn’t long before the irrelevancy despair set in, ye olde familiar Zeus-style “so what,” caterwauled down from the stormy peaks of Mt. Who Gives a Fuck. In the face of Nihilism, so prolific that if it had form “Made in China” would be stamped just under the seam, how does one know that the path trodden is the right one? That the task is meaningful?

The choice is clear: operate from first principles, the position of what is fact and so I revisit my diagnosis; metastatic adenocarcinoma stage T4 N2 Mx. “Tumour invades adjacent organs/structures or through the visceral peritoneum, including Prostate gland” “Metastases in ≥ 4 lymph nodes.” 5-year Survival (%) = 27%.

Translated into the Queen’s, people with my diagnosis survive five years (after treatment) 27% of the time. A small number, but not vanishingly small. A hair over 1/4. A small number to arrest a life; what to do? Do I let 27% determine what I do next? Do I allow it to put me off writing books? Returning to set? Finding work? Start a new business? Allow myself to fall in love; start a family? Do I move forward, assuming I have time, gambling that I’m going to be in that 27%? What promises can I make? What contracts can I keep? What odds are necessary to determine one’s will? To believe that I am one of that 27% requires something that flies in the face of my empiricism: irrationality. A stalwart resolve to stick two fingers up at the data-sets and cry, “Not me! Not today!”

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Corey Drayton is a Cinematographer and Photographer, whose world collapsed when he was diagnosed with Stage IV colorectal cancer at the age of 36. Putting the camera down for treatment, he is rebuilding with pen and paper; writing about his ongoing battle with cancer at www.penumbra.online.

ONCE YOU’VE EXPERIENCED A THING YOURSELF YOU SEE IT ALL AROUND YOU. The “Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon,” Cancer has been that for me. I keep seeing my peers drop like flies to it. I see even more people, part of a contemporary zeitgeist that knows little real hardship, taking to social media and leaving what in our superficial, atomised culture passes for support. “My hopes and thoughts go out to you!” “Hope you get well soon!” While we all lead busy, hectic lives and taking a moment to send along one’s thoughts is always appreciated, I have often found something about this phenomenon unsettling.

An etymological examination of the word “hope” leads one to the Old English word “*hopian*” where it is positioned as a theological virtue linked to salvation and the mercy of a deity or higher consciousness; to trust in an outcome with confidence, based not on any empirical proof or methodology, but merely upon one’s faith in the divine superintendence of unseen forces. It is fundamentally a childlike state, built upon the a priori expectation of an outcome without any synthetic justification for that expectation in-hand.

Where the absence of any real faith is the order of the day, hopeTM is little more than nihilism masquerading as compassion. Hope is something that is sold, by my industry, as the sine qua non of life. If you just trust in hope, everything will be fine! Vermithrax will be slain. The prince will fall in love with you. The evil empire will be brought low. “Rebellions are built on hope.” “Hope is like the sun, if you only believe in it when you can see it, you’ll never make it through the night…” This is all incoherent nonsense. Hope is a passive state. It is the abdication of all personal agency; the abandonment of critical thinking for the quicksand of magical thinking. It is an insidious mind-virus meant to condition the individual into a hand wringing, anemic mindset wherein the peasant looks to those imperial forces, imbued with power, to act as the sole agents in the world; because powerlessness, sold as an identity, is profitable. Hope is not a substitute for social bonds. Hope is not enough to live on. Get busy! Choose risk! Show up! Stand up and do something! Embody empathy, for others, for your present and future self! Be an agent in the world! Do not surrender what precious little power you have in this life to externalities! FUCK HOPE, TAKE ACTION!

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Corey Drayton is a Cinematographer and Photographer, whose world collapsed when he was diagnosed with Stage IV colorectal cancer at the age of 36. Putting the camera down for treatment, he is rebuilding with pen and paper; writing about his ongoing battle with cancer at www.penumbra.online.

Under no circumstances are you to tell them, unless you are fully prepared to make good on your attraction and own your part of the inherent risk. Cancer is existentially terrifying. It is isolating, it robs people of time, opportunity, dignity and spirit. In some cases, it has already cost cancer patients their relationships. Take my case: My partner split when I was nine weeks into radiation treatment for stage IV cancer. No goodbye. No see-ya-later. She simply packed up and moved out of our house; Gone. This is disturbingly common and there are no social sanctions for betrayal.

Over my year of chemo and radiation. I have had a few women, drawn to me, reach out with attraction and desire, only to cut and run when the cancer reality asserts itself. That’s caustic enough when both parties are healthy. When life-threatening illness is involved, banal indiscretions are amplified into the visceral. There’s little worse when one lives daily in Bergmanesque tête-à-tête with death. When it comes to matters of the human heart, all the ineptitudes of youth take on new dimension when cancer lurks in the calculus.

Cancer changes the rules, makes the mundane dire. I see more and more of my peers facing this life-altering disease; playing by the awkward and passive social rules they’ve always been comfortable with; holding no guiding moral philosophy. With cancer, now is not the time for clumsiness; it’s time to set some ground rules.

A nearly terminal diagnosis with Stage IV Cancer in my late thirties cost me everything: My home. My relationship. By business. My sense of trust in my own body. One year on, I am still here watching the world go by without me. Feeling robbed of time. Trying to stay alive, rebuilding in the ashes. Witnessing others get on with life, taking it all for granted. Being sidelined from the world doesn’t arrest one’s desires. The clock keeps ticking down; one does not get that time back. Feeling like nothing will ever change, disqualified from life and love; marked by an infirmity in all probability not of one’s own making. Claustrophobia creeps in at the margins; an urgency to seize whatever opportunity for escape from present reality manifests in the form of work, or the warmth of a woman’s hand on yours.

How to preserve one’s character in the face of the absurd: A man must be friend and intimate to himself in that solemn and solitary province. A pilot traversing the Scylla and Charybdis of human intimate collision, cautious with his accumulation of intimacy lest he wind up wrecked on the shoals of expectation. In my battle with cancer, my only armour is to have no expectations. They tend to grow into metaphysical tumours, invading the organs of reality processing.

For those facing cancer, do not assume others grasp the gravity of your situation. The internal no-man’s land that characterises your daily existence, pockmarked with the vagaries of endeavour while you try to stay in the world — holding out hope that if you survive there will still be a place for you in it. Instead, arm them with the charts of your inner boundaries, so they can navigate what bonds you enjoy with competence and grace. To live in expectancy sacrifices today for an uncertain tomorrow. There you place too much hope in what lies within fortune’s dominion, while abandoning that which lies in yours. All you owe each other is the truth, but some things are better left unsaid until the soil has been tilled and seeds planted can bloom.

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Corey Drayton is a Cinematographer and Photographer, whose world collapsed when he was diagnosed with Stage IV colorectal cancer at the age of 36. Putting the camera down for treatment, he is rebuilding with pen and paper; writing about his ongoing battle with cancer at www.penumbra.online.

It’s oldest chestnut of clichés. My dog, Huckleberry Finn, is my best friend. With fierce intelligence, a perfect listener, noble, patient, and loyal. We rescued him knowing nothing of his stray-dog history. What ever he’s seen remains locked behind those happy-go-lucky brown eyes. 90% shepherd, 10% Dingo; The Australian Kelpie’s reputation as a breed fit only for dog aces. I managed to pay-off my beer and pretzel debt keeping him busy; hiking, camping, five plus miles of walks per day. Physical exercise isn’t enough for a smart, active breed. Dog puzzles and parks, essential deterrents to boredom-based dog criminality. When the other dogs at the park can’t keep up with his herding drive he’ll grab his tail and spin like a doughnut with legs. Meanwhile a good chunk of the other dog owners leash up their dogs, making a quick Irish-Goodbye out the back. Ever tenacious, the more determined he is to get his tail the faster it’ll get away from him. I have only a critical nanosecond to re-direct his energy. Once it’s transmuted into another form, he’ll come back to Earth as if nothing happened. Perplexed, the “what-ifs” rapid firing: What if he gets going and can’t stop? What if he chews his tail off? What if his tail-chasing scares off the other dog-parents? What if this is a sign of doggy- dementia? What if we have a F****d up dog who will never be able to socialize? What if he’s a malfunctioning alien cyborg probe disguised as a dog?

Dogs are amazing creatures. Their sense of smell is 1 million times better than ours. They can hear frequencies we’ll never hear. They can even detect cancer. Our companions for at least 20,000 years, dogs know us better than we know ourselves. They can smell our emotions and read our intentions. Anthropomorphism is easy. Dogs have big personalities, if not big brains. Implicit in their cognitive limitation is an enviable freedom: They have no ego defence against failure standing between them and the goal of the moment; thus no apprehension. Humans rely on failure. The ability to abstract failure helps us navigate life. It’s a milestone to success in many things. A failed patent clerk put Sir Issac Newton in the back seat. The lesson of history might be: “Fail often. Fail spectacular”.

Much of what we do in life revolves around avoidance of the ultimate failure: Death. In the developed world, most of us don’t face death on a daily-basis. Yet our instincts are still primed to avoid what will kill us. Failures in the market feel like death, but we often walk away from them intact. No stranger to failure myself, I’ve come to re-frame these failures as Failure-Lite. When failure is survivable we sift through the detritus, identify root causes and plan to hedge other failures. Failure-Lite is an opportunity to come back stronger, and better than before.

In 2016 my freelance business failed. Add a totalled car, a resulting near-fatal illness and the balance comes out to one rough year. Picking up the pieces cost me ten months. Like an air crash investigator over a heap of pulverized debris, there were questions. What were my preconceptions around my business. How did they fit together? What systems were functional? Which were dysfunctional? As a hedge against rejection, I grew obsessed with effectiveness. Who likes to receive a “meh” when you’ve contorted your brain to get a “maybe…”? I was getting crickets. Without data in hand how exactly was I to know what to take back to the drawing board? Ravenous for feedback, it was the “why” behind failure that I’d fixate on. “Something I did sucks? Fantastic! What about it sucked, so I can take it back to the shop and use the Anti-Suckitron 3000 to make it better!” I Hyper-focused on tweaking. I’d become completely disconnected from the why that brought me into my craft. Worse, I was guilty of the penultimate act of self-erasure, contorting myself to fit into other’s needs.

To shift one’s locus of control to the wilderness of colleagues, social trends, or the market, jives with what evolutionary psychology suggests about Humans. We’re a tribal species. Our instincts tell us that our survival hinges on being part of the “in” group. To be cast into the “out” group signals to our genes that no one’s invested in our survival. That we’re naked in the face of the elements, minutes away from being food for wolves. Facing scarcity or existential danger, that shift shows up as a mandate to master your immediate environment. The outcast on the Asian Steppes a thousand years ago has a simple mandate: Find shelter. Make fire. Find Water. Find a food source. Today’s Freelancer navigating a sea of contradictory data, often faces a scarcity of three abstract resources.

Effectiveness. Reputation. and Presence.

Like so many other technicians who became accidental business-owners, I had bought — hook, line and sinker — into The technician’s myth. “The Answer to everything is: Work harder.” Push through it. Forget sleep. Forget food. Foregt sex. Forget relationships. Forget life. I lacked the awareness at the time to sense the escalating danger, the cliff edge into oblivion. It took a near-fatal medical emergency to do that for me. In the absence of recognition of the body’s needs, the body will force you to stop and listen. In that halt and catch fire moment, from the base of a mountain of medial bills, I recognized what I’d been doing all along: Chasing my tail. Expending tremendous amounts of mental and physical energy, getting nowhere. And hurting myself, like my dog.

I can’t install a “Reset” switch in him, but I can build one into myself. The best tweak of them all. Change the script that plays out when failure-lite and ineffectiveness occurs.

First, find shelter.

De-escalate the “just work harder” paradigm. Triage is key. Identify what is urgent and what can wait.

Second, build a fire.

Take back the Locus of control; Re- internalise it. I can’t do anything about what colleagues or competitors think, do, or value, meteors hitting the planet, or shifts in the market. I can keep the data gate open, and be flexible to whatever happens out there.

Third, find nourishment.

The Lizard-brain now out of the driver’s seat, higher cognitive functions take over. Thinking resumes. Here’s where mindset matters. Being an INTJ on the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator, my nourishment comes from within. I can frame externalities to navigate them. A given offering may not align with the client’s current need, but human needs are diverse and infinite. There’s always a shot at meeting a future need, so I don’t have to be a contortionist.

Fourth, self actualize.

Reconnect with my values, and make them actionable. I value Effectiveness. What works in the market? The action: Effectiveness requires data. That means creative ideas, like products and services, must be out there in the world and tested. Recognize my blind-spots, and re-integrate them into my process. Mine is authenticity. I value it, but it’s been the first on the chopping block in the face of ineffectiveness. I used to operate from the mindset of “reputation is a scare resource in my market, and only a few could own it!” Putting emphasis on authenticity could be the key to generating reputation and building a fire. Fires attract audiences.

So exclaimed Johnny, played masterfully by David Thewlis in Mike Leigh’s celluloid Hogarthian allegory Naked (1993). Johnny, in his scabrous diatribe, hit on something that I think those in the creative industry grapple with now and again: Consumer Apathy. Where Leigh’s anti-hero describes apathy as a function of boredom where people are compelled to discard the wonders of life and the treasures of knowledge with all the ceremony of a small child ignoring a once cherished toy and fixating on fresh flash.

What if apathy isn’t just an effect of a consumer culture saturated with content, but a defence against sensory overload? Take a horse race: You’ve bred a stallion for its speed, power, and grace. On any given day he can hold his own against any of the horses in the steeplechase, taking home the purse every time. Against nine other horses yours is a sure bet. What if 25 horses are running? What about 75? At some point your metrics dip below this event horizon and it becomes impossible to predict or measure your horse’s performance in the race. There are just too many variables! Besides, with so many horses running it all more resembles a train wreck in slow motion than a race!

Why should anyone actually care about a beautiful image? The answer may shock some of you: They shouldn’t.

Social Media guarantees that our engagement with say, “Photographic content” is fleeting. It boils down to a “like-and-run” micro-interaction between creative and viewer; the viewer stumbles upon your well-concepted, well-produced (often expensive) image* on Facebook/Instagram, clicks “like/♥” and that’s it. They’ve moved on to the next well-concepted, well-produced image in their feed. Ask them five minutes later and they might be able to describe to you what they saw in vague terms. Ask them a week later and you can forget it — Silence. Even the crickets are on holiday. Your content is already below their horizon, and who can blame them? They’ve been exposed to an average of 250 images per day including yours.

How to get your audience to care about what you produce, especially when what you produce is in constant competition with 91,000 other photographic images in a given year? When photographic art has commercial cachet — being a tool of the sale rather than the product to be sold itself, why should anyone actually care about a beautiful image?

The answer may shock some of you: They shouldn’t.

Care about what emotions the image evokes. When you spark a strong emotional reaction in a viewer, you’ve made a connection. Where you sustain that connection, you create a relationship. Where you create a relationship, you create an audience. Take a walk through any book store and you’ll see Homer’s Odyssey, Beowulf, The Tale of Genji, Gilgamesh. Ancient stories that speak to the universal journey to self-actualization that we all experience. Stories have been with us as a species for thousands of years. Using images to sell should serve a greater sense of story. Traditionally that’s been a staple of content we expect to be story-driven e.g. Hollywood, and Television, but given the shift away from episodics to on-demand content with sweeping, seasons-long narrative arcs, I think the case can be made that commercial advertising must also shift more in the direction of long-term narrative delivery.

I speak with many businesses who are struggling with using video and photography in an innovative and effective way in social media, and they all say the same thing: They’re following all the rules, they’re on Facebook/Instagram/Twitter. They’ve got a dedicated social media person. They do four to six talking head + B-roll = brand story pieces a year in house, and if they need anything bigger, well that’s what Agencies are for, amiright? Sales are good, but growth is meagre; there’s a creeping sense of stagnation at the margins and the younger generations just don’t seem to identify with the brand… Eventually they admit it: They feel stuck, with the pedal to the metal knowing they don’t have the RPMs to crest the hill, but that to release the gas will cause them to roll unceremoniously back to the bottom.

Challenge yourselves to save the branding for the last shot, to treat it as an afterthought.

I think it’s time to flip the script, take a deep breath and let the branding take a back seat to just telling a good yarn. Create content that builds an audience through emotional investment in a story, a character and his or her journey, and do it in an on-line space where people can interact and share in that journey. Challenge yourselves to save the branding for the last shot, to treat it as an afterthought — right now in the 30 seconds you have with your viewer touch them with a universal human truth, and leave them feeling that with you (and, yes ultimately your brand) the self actualization they seek in life is even more possible.

My thoughts on this are still coalescing, and I’m interested in fostering a open discussion about these ideas with creative directors, and marketing teams. What do you think? Does this ring true to your experience? Is it completely off base? Does it evoke fear? Uncertainty? Danger? Excitement?

Let me know what you think at wayfarerfilms.com