Posted by admin on June 29, 2007
The Artist as Marketer and Performer
Ever since the dawn of the digital age ( December, 1974) we’ve been hearing about the death of copyright and intellectual property.
The reasoning goes something like this: Information such as movies, music and writing can now be perfectly preserved, copied and distributed for virtually no cost anywhere in the world in any quantity needed. Because of this it inherently has no worth and ethically it makes no sense to restrict this information to only those willing to pay for it. Information has value only when freely disseminated to those who need it.
In this model “performance” becomes valuable. Intellectual Property owners should freely distribute their property in order to build “Mind share.” If the property is accepted by the audience, they will then be willing to pay for non-distributable performance events ( Concerts, film screenings, book readings, seminars, etc.) that add value to the base product.
There are lots of examples that point to this model succeeding. I-tunes, YouTube, MySpace and Linux all are successful. Yes, You pay a nominal fee for some products, but in most of these models, value rests in the fact that these are all freely available. I type this on a computer running Slax into a form from Wordpress, who will save it in a My SQL database. All free to me, and therefore more valuable to me as an aspiring writer than Office, Movable type and MS SQL.
This Model scares the gatekeepers- The editors and publishers- who cannot afford to relinquish control to the audience. Since they don’t create the product, Their value is in their expertise. Right now Scholastic will make Millions on the last Harry Potter book Both because they did all the heavy lifting on the previous books and they’ve been the ones to have to wade through all the horrible amateur clones trying to get published in an effort to find the next profitable series.
Now the gatekeepers are talking about the Long Tail. In this model, entry barriers have been removed, but the public still relies on the gatekeepers to filter out the trash. for them, they still make most of their money on a relatively few blockbusters, but now they can afford to keep the long tail of works in print. The publishers, having taken the risk to buy the rights, now are fighting for eternal copyright, both in case a popular work proves valuable in perpetuity, and if it does not so they can continue to market the few copies to this long tail.
But this is rapidly changing and the gatekeepers are becoming less valuable.. In the near future, the next Harry Potter, or LOTR or Green Day or Whatever might come directly from the Web- a meme that will be marketed directly by its savvy creator. Already there are author’s like Cory Doctorow
and bands such as Arctic Monkeys that are successful without traditional publishers and editors.
In the future, then, I propose that copyright will become less important to creators as income will not be generated directly from the work itself, but from the performance of the work. as barriers to entry fall,I will be able to publish my work myself in a professional manner with very little financial risk. but the rewards will be greater. I will be able to set my own price, and will have to market myself as a performer.
Coming up next: Long live Copyright!
Posted by admin on June 28, 2007
It’s almost an axiom at this point that movies based on video games stink on ice.
So when my daughter dragged me kicking and screaming to see Silent Hill at the cheap seats last year, I had low expectations. The movie had not received good reviews and did not attract a large audience. But for a buck, it might be worth it.
I was blown away when I realized, however, that the creators were riffing not so much on the games ( Although they were extremely faithful to the plots and conventions of the Silent hill game series) but on my favorite film genre, the Italian horror films known as Giallo.
The plot’s pretty interesting, introducing a varied Scooby Gang and then trapping them in two, no three, alternate realities to unravel the mysterious death and undeath of the Town of Silent Hill.
In the primary Plot, Mother X IS taking her adopted daughter x to the town to help her unravel the frightening nightmares x keeps having. Mom then crashes on entering the mysterious town and wakes to find her daughter missing. She allies with a motorcycle cop who is also trapped in the gray mist world of Silent Hill. At certain random points, they are drawn into a darker, hellish version of the town (right out of the games) where secrets are revealed.
Meanwhile, her husband is both trying to find them and unravel the mystery of his daughters origin in the real world, where Silent hill is just another small ghost town and the survivors are loathe to talk about past sins.
Using nicely surreal imagery and some truly shocking supernatural creatures, the story builds to its satisfyingly apocalyptic climax (set to a Goblin-esque synth organ score), followed by a creepy, but totally expected denouement.
t’s not really scary, and isn’t anything we haven’t seen before, but it’s a nice ride. It’s a shame this film wasn’t more popular. After riding the J-horror train the last few years, it would have been nice to see a rash of I-Horror films in the market.
Posted by admin on June 19, 2007
I’ve always been a sick little kid.
When Other ten-year-olds might have read Spiderman or Batman, The only comics I remember reading as a kid had a decidedly occult bent. House of Mystery, a horror comic featuring the hosts Cain and Abel later used for Sandman, Tomb of Dracula featuring the original Blade Character,and of Course, Ghost Rider
Now, Ghost Rider was always kind of an also ran in the Marvel Universe. It was extremely uneven in it’s stories and arcs- Alternating between horror, occult and superhero on a whim. The villians were both serious and ridiculous and the tone changed nearly every month. Blaze went from being controlled by the demon, to controlling it and back again. I believe there was even a period where the demon was banished an the stories were just about Blaze himself.
So I had high hopes for the movie. And it lived up to every one of them.
Really, there’s not a second of this film, not a single frame that can’t be mocked. From the dead on perfect casting of Peter Fonda as Mephistopheles and Sam Elliott as “Yoda, the Surprise Third Act Reveal-(didn’t see that one from the credits did you?) to the Slama Hayek wanna be Eve Mendes– Everything falls into place perfectly.
And let’s not forget the casting of Elvis as Everyone’s favorite Dead Avenger.
And The Ghost Rider himself. Of course he had to be CGI, and he’s pretty impressive, especially when he’s on his bike tearing up the city. His flames are a vibrant, fluorescent color not seen in nature. However, he neither moves nor looks much like Nicholas cage at all.
The plot is a loopy mess that basically tells the origin of the Ghost rider, throwing in the later Blackheart character and a bunch of Old West/ New west motifs that neither are followed through nor payoff. Perhaps if BlackHeart and his gang looked more, um, like a posse and less like your standard Euro-trash vampires.
Like marvels nearly direct to DVD punisher, the movie sets up Evil-On Evil violence, then doesn’t pay it off in order to get the PG-13 Rating. Take the kidnapping and menacing of Eva Mendes. Blackheart kills everyone he comes into contact with but the Ghost Rider’s old Flame ( Ha). She even gets to hang onto his arm as he gives his impassioned final speech to the Devil, then seemingly disappears.
The result is a gloriously silly romp that is tailor made to ridicule. it is both Pretentious with the capital P and Cartoonish at the same time. A movie that is pulled in so many different directions it ends up competing with itself. This is a movie for the seven year old goth in all of us.
Posted by admin on June 12, 2007
The Lie that Tells a Truth
By John Dufresne.
Dufresne’s book is unusual. First, flipping through it, it looks more like a novel itself than a writing manual. It doesn’t focus on the business end, or even on the basic elements of fiction writing. Instead, Dufresne takes on the persona of an affable grad student teaching a summer class. He assumes you alreay know the basics and are there primarily because, well, of him. Luckily he’s just as interesting as the course catalog made him out to be.
Dufresne can be a little arty- he says at one point that he won’t waste his time writing Sci-fi or fantasy because he wants to deal with real people ( And I have an issue with that kind of genre bashing) but there’s a lot of meat hidden in this entertaining, quick read.
