Happy Fourth Birthday, Happy Place!

You never forget your first Juggalo March on Washington either.

There are certain years and months and days that will always stand out for one reason or another. I was born on April 24th, 1976, a bicentennial baby. When I was fourteen in 1990 I entered high school, spent time in a mental hospital and ended the year in a group home where I would spend the rest of my teenage years. 

In 1994 I graduated from high school and Pulp Fiction was released. Three years later my life and my career really began when I started writing for the A.V Club in 1997 as a freelance film, music and video critic while still a student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where I graduated with a degree in Communication Arts with a concentration in Radio, Television and Film in 1999. 

In 2013 I left The A.V Club to become a staff writer for The Dissolve, a job I held until I was laid off in April of 2015. April was also the month when The A.V Club cancelled My World of Flops in 2017, something that would have destroyed me psychologically if I were not able to turn that giant negative into a huge positive by making My World of Flops one of the cornerstones of a website I happened to be launching at EXACTLY the same time. 

To paraphrase Kanye West, I took the worst thing and turned it to the best thing, I’m from the Chi I guess it's just a midwest thing.

Four years ago, on April 20th, 2017 or thereabouts, I launched the next chapter of my career in the form of Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place. 

I was motivated by a combination of desperation and inspiration. My columns kept getting cancelled in increasingly dispiriting ways. I couldn’t get work as a film critic despite toiling at the top of the field for eighteen years. I had always prided myself on being a good company man, loyal and hard-working, yet I felt unemployable. Relationships that I thought would sustain me for the rest of my life and career ended painfully. I had nothing to lose and much to gain from getting into business with myself in a big way, in taking a chance on myself when it seemed like no one else would.

So I created something, with your help, support and financial assistance, that would give me a professional home I hoped would be permanent, although if my twenty-four years in the business have taught me anything, it’s that there’s no such thing as forever, and that sometimes you lose the things you love most in the world. 

In the Happy Place’s four years of existence I launched and completed an epic exploration of “Weird Al” Yankovic’s career as a recording artist called The Weird Accordion to Al that launched this website’s publishing division, Declan-Haven Books, in a very satisfying way with its literary adaptation and then the expanded version, The Weird Accordion to Al: Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Edition. 

I could not be prouder or more excited that Declan-Haven Books will be publishing another book adapted from this website in The Joy of Trash, which raised over sixteen thousand dollars through Kickstarter, desperately needed income that will help keep this site afloat financially during a very hard time.

With my friend Clint Worthington I’ve started two podcasts, Nathan Rabin’s Happy Cast and then Travolta/Cage. I am super proud of Travolta/Cage. It’s got a great premise, enthusiastic hosts, great guests and an impressive catalog I very much encourage you to check out. 

Is Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place as popular or lucrative as it could be? Of course not. Page-views and Patreon income are both way down from where they were two years ago, before the pandemic hit. 

But that’s okay. I didn’t start Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place to get rich. I started it so that I would have a home online, a safe place where I could pursue my obsessions with the support and assistance of a lovely community of commenters and patrons. I started this site as an oasis of purity in a corrupt and compromised pop culture realm. 

So happy birthday to me! Happy birthday to us! Here’s to four more decades of deeply personal, deeply non-commercial madness! Thanks for tolerating me and my shenanigans! I cannot say how much it means to me,

Pre-order The Joy of Trash: Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place’s Definitive Guide to the Very Worst of Everything and get access to original articles AS I write them and plenty more bonus stuff like exclusive cards featuring Felipe Sobreiro’s amazing artwork for the book at https://the-joy-of-trash.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders/cart

Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace

Also, BUY the RIDICULOUSLY SELF-INDULGENT, ILL-ADVISED VANITY EDITION of  THE WEIRD ACCORDION TO AL, the Happy Place’s first book. This 500 page extended edition features an introduction from Al himself (who I co-wrote 2012’s Weird Al: The Book with), who also copy-edited and fact-checked, as well as over 80 illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro on entries covering every facet of Al’s career, including his complete discography, The Compleat Al, UHF, the 2018 tour that gives the book its subtitle and EVERY episode of The Weird Al Show and Al’s season as the band-leader on Comedy Bang! Bang! 

Only 23 dollars signed, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here