You are walking blindly through the dark streets in the middle of the night. A fog has settled and nothing seems to be happening. The world seems empty. You wander off the beaten path and realise you are lost. Then you hear some music coming through the mist from up ahead. It sounds good. Damn good. The sort of thing you’ve always been looking for but didn’t have the words to express. You see lights. The fog clears and a bar appears ahead of you. The sign says “Mick’s” and the door is open. You go inside.
Mick’s Café is a sub I recently created on Reddit. The intention was to establish a place to find and share the creative gems hiding in our contemporary culture. It hopes to amplify artists who ought to be better known, to try and counteract a culture that seems to gaudily push superhero movies, autotuned music and superficial fiction into our faces.
If you feel that our popular culture doesn’t offer up much of worth, Mick’s is the place for you. If you’ve ever told a friend about a great book or band or film and been met with indifference, here’s the place to find receptive ears.
The subreddit was founded on 4th July 2021 and has been steadily growing its membership since. The idea behind it came about for two reasons. The first was when I realised that whenever I came across an artist I liked, it had always happened through serendipity. The things that were promoted in the media were always corporate, superficial, juvenile, but every so often I would stumble across something by chance and think “there should be billboards dedicated to this”. There would be – if our culture still had a healthy appreciation for art, instead of platforms manipulated by money, hustle, networking and the general decline in standards. I wanted to find a happening place where I could be introduced more reliably to the stuff I only really found infrequently and by blind chance.
The second reason was a more selfish one. Much earlier, I had realised there didn’t seem to be much genuinely literary writing around. I wanted to provide some, and so I wrote a novel. However, when I finished the manuscript, it was rejected repeatedly by the publishing industry. They said (those who replied, at least) that the book was good – but not commercial enough. I increasingly noticed articles and tweets from literary agents and publishers who glibly mentioned that they’d found great writing in their slush piles, but had rejected it because it was “too difficult to sell”. I read these tweets and thought, “I’d want to read that book”, but a gatekeeper had decided I never could.
I came to suspect that perhaps one reason there weren’t many impressive books around was because they were being nixed at source. Regardless of whether my own writing was of any worth, it seemed the industry was prioritising pulp that could be sold easily, and then blaming “market forces”.
The good stuff must surely be out there, but the people creating it aren’t being backed by the shot-shy creative industries. Where are our contemporary Dylans, Hemingways and Van Goghs? Perhaps they’re toiling away without an audience. Meanwhile, celebrities and vloggers get multi-million-pound book deals, and there’s a deluge of derivative, formulaic fiction.
I decided to self-publish some of my own writing but, as I suspected might happen, I found it just about impossible to find an audience. For writers, it’s a hostile environment. Good writing can’t stand out amid that same deluge of formulaic trash, and honest artists are drowned out by those who shout the loudest. I found that my promotional efforts were unfocused and ineffective. Social media in particular seemed a mess, pandering to outrage, short attention spans and the lowest common denominator. Even on Reddit, for which I initially held out some hope, I discovered most of my posts had been shadowbanned – even, ridiculously, from subs that explicitly said writers could promote their work without fear of being shadowbanned.
My suspicion is that many people are yearning for art with integrity, but don’t know where to go. Creatives lose confidence and are distracted from their art by the exhaustion of the self-promotion hustle. Audiences are starved of real, sustaining art to experience and they lose faith in their own culture. It’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, the sound from the noise. People can’t connect. That’s when I realised that if I wanted to find a happening place I needed to make one myself.
Mick’s Café takes its inspiration from Rick’s Café in the classic film Casablanca. I hope the subreddit will, in time, generate its own vibe and culture; a place to find hidden gems, cultivated by a community that has standards. I also hope it will become a place for sincere artists to find a platform and, in this respect, Mick’s is inspired by the dissenting force of the French Impressionists. When Monet and artists like him were prohibited from displaying their work at the official Salon in Paris, they set up their own exhibition instead. It changed the course of art history.
It may seem too ambitious, even hubristic, but it’s hoped that the sub will become an influential hub for the sort of creative endeavour that has integrity, purpose and meets a certain artistic standard. A place for things that are dying out of the world, that aren’t really amplified elsewhere in our society. If you’ve ever thought that the films released today don’t match the standards of previous decades, that musicians or writers don’t compare with those of the past, this could be your opportunity to try to change that. At Mick’s, you can join a community of people who are trying to find those artists who do compare: exciting new films which don’t get the box office returns; musicians who invest in melody and musicianship; writers who work for years on an original manuscript instead of weeks on a formulaic thriller.
If this sounds appealing, you might want to head over to this obscure corner of Reddit and take a look around the Café. Come up to the bar and tell us about the hidden gems you’ve found: the books, the bands, the films.
And if you leave and you pass any recommendations on to others, let them know you heard it at Mick’s.
You can visit Mick’s Café on Reddit by clicking here.
‘Night Shadows’ by Edward Hopper is a public domain painting accessed via Wikimedia Commons.
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