culture

Yes, I’m being hyperbolic in my title. Given the choice between rubbish and life I’ll take life every time. But I like what is often considered to be “crap.” There are only two things about it that I object to: excess and exclusivity.

I object to the way, when something has some degree of success, it is milked for all it is worth. I also object to the idea of a world that is crap and nothing else.

I’m speaking here about entertainment and/or art – books, movies, television, music, games and so on. We go through recurring phases where many of us feel that the world has gone to hell in a handcart and the end of culture is nigh because we have succumbed to the avaricious tendrils of crap. I don’t think it has ever been true.

I recall when everything was Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code (which produced many copycats and inevitably became a movie). Loads of people told me it was crap. It wasn’t real writing. It was just awful.

I should write so badly!

If I could write a book like The Da Vinci Code I would. I might then buy an island to retire to and write a real book, but I doubt it. I’m pretty sure I would like my successful book and probably would try writing another. I can’t write a book like The Da Vinci Code if only because I’ve not the fortitude for the research involved.

I did read Brown’s book though. I thought his sentences were pretty pedestrian. But wow! He had the “what happens next?” aspect nailed. Yes, it’s a good, entertaining book. It’s not Dostoevsky but then it doesn’t try to be.

Currently we’re overwhelmed by Twilight – the books, the movies, the 24-hour feed of entertainment news about New Moon, the actors, the food they ate … all that stuff. Yes, it’s certainly annoying and I think you could probably set an egg timer on how long before the backlash starts (if it hasn’t already).

Like all backlashes, however, it will appear to be about the movies and books – they’re awful! They’re crap! They’re artless! The truth is that the backlash will be about the excess and it will be about the perception that the world has become exclusively about Twilight (and that won’t be quite true).

(Twilight, by the way, is simply the most visible example of an obsession with vampires and zombies in movies, books and games – an obsession that will pass as it always does.)

I think the only legitimate criticism of books and movies like these is the way the excess of marketing obscures other works – works themselves that may be well-made crap that is lost to us and works that have a more serious intent to them, equally lost.

People, however, like their crap, including me. And why shouldn’t we? There is a long history of art and literature that was the product of what is discounted as crap. Shakespeare, for instance, wrote people-pleasing rubbish. He, however, saw that it is possible to do that and make something more meaningful at the same time. Had plastic explosives been around in the Elizabethan period, I’m pretty sure old Polonius would have died in a car bomb incident in Hamlet.

The thing about crap is that when it succeeds it is fun and it is communal. You can talk to just about anyone about The Da Vinci Code, just as you can talk to everyone about Twilight. Even people who haven’t read or seen them have something to contribute.

I saw quotes from some well-known actors recently bemoaning the state of films today. The complaint is essentially that there are few roles with any weight, studios and audiences only want crap. I can sympathize with their plight but at the same time I can’t help thinking they are seeing it through actors’ eyes and not those of the audience.

Those making the complaint are also what is often termed “seasoned,” meaning they are older and have years of experience as actors. I’m not sure a younger actor would make the same complaint. I think they tend to be thankful for the work, are enjoying the ride and the gaining of experience, and are likely a bit bedazzled by the zoo that attends success.

Whenever I speak to people who are not cinema lovers, those people who make up the majority of the potential audience, people who simply want to “see a movie,” they are almost always reluctant to see something they perceive as “serious.” They simply want spectacle and/or laughs. They don’t want to go to a movie for an insight into life and people. They want escapism. What’s wrong with that?

If this observation is accurate then it is sheer dreaming to expect anyone to invest big money into something that might have a bit more meat on it. The kind of money that attends filmmaking, such as salaries, production costs, distribution and everything else, dictates trying to make a crowd-pleaser – bombs and bums. Comic books. Vampires and zombies (until it changes to something else).

The really good writers do what Shakespeare did: give the audience what it wants and, while doing that, subversively work themes and ideas into it that bring it an unexpected weight. It is definitely not an easy thing to do and it succeeds rarely.

Movies that are considered serious still get made – I think they get called dramas, usually independent films popular on the festival circuit. They succeed too, occasionally surprising us by doing so. But generally their appeal is to a much smaller audience and so, when made, that has to be considered and that means a smaller budget. To spend $200 million on a movie about surviving cancer would be to flush $200 million down the toilet despite the best intentions and the best outcomes.

One last thing … For all the nonsense that gets hyped, critiqued and discussed, the really big winners rarely do so simply because of their spectacle aspects. Say what you will about The Da Vinci Code, it worked because it was a well-executed mystery. Twilight? Yes, it’s about vampires, just as Titanic was about the spectacle of the world’s largest ship sinking. With all the vampire books and movies however, why would Twilight be so successful? From what I’ve heard it, like Titanic, is a love story. You may find them corny, unrealistic love stories, but that is what they are. And those who think they are nonsense should consider the age of the demographic they most appeal to and maybe ask themselves if somewhere along the line they have forgotten what it is to be young.

Share:

Hide Sites

I really am tired of the repetitive and now long-redundant either/or debate around traditional and social media. Apart from being well worn, it risks obfuscating other issues. A good example of what gets lost lies in the Michael Valpy essay, Is this the end of social cohesion? and David Eaves’ response, Dear Valpy: social media isn’t killing democracy, it’s making it stronger.

We can probably blame Mr. Valpy because he brings up the subject of newspapers and social media and certainly makes some valid points (such as quoting Carleton’s Christopher Waddell’s speculation about seeking out confirmation online rather than challenges).

The problem, however, is that if you accept the argument that newspapers provided some social cohesion and, through challenges and debate, unifying ideas (something Mr. Eaves flatly rejects), surely we can take it further. If we were all made to own and read and study Bibles, and all made to belong to and attend Christian churches and their services, regardless of whether we were Christian or not, surely we’d have the cultural coherence and common touchstones that they had in Elizabethan England. Now that was coherent and that was a world with things in common, including shared values.

The problem is that in a democratic society that can hardly be considered democratic.

We’re told, however, that social media is. It has the potential to save the day. But who exactly is social media democratic for? The homeless? Personally, I’m not aware of any homeless people online, but maybe my social circle is limited.

Canada’s aboriginal people, those living in far off, rural areas with no Internet access? Or the ones living in poverty – do they have access? Do they even have computers? (I recently approached Canada’s food banks with the idea of using social media as a way to facilitate what they did, to reach more potential donors and volunteers etc. They liked the idea but had some huge obstacles: their disparate nature and the fact that many food banks don’t have Internet access and/or don’t have computers. The real world gave me a wake up call.)

Yes, I’ve written about this before.

Here’s the thing about social media: you need a computer or some handheld device. And you need access. And even if you do have the wherewithal for those things, you need to know how to use them and have a facility for doing so. It may be hard to believe, but some people don’t. Just as some people couldn’t balance a bank account to save their lives and some people couldn’t sing on key no matter how many lessons they took.

Social media comes with predicates. It makes assumptions about who you are and what you have. You meet those, you get to use it. Otherwise, you’re outta luck pal.

So let’s be careful when we speak of the democratizing nature of social media.

Our beautiful mosaic

But getting back to Michael Valpy’s essay … Mr. Eaves says Mr. Valpy enters the conversation three years late and that is true if the conversation is this endless traditional/social media thing. But the science fiction author Samuel R. Delany was writing about this back in the 1970s and 80s. However, he wasn’t writing about social media because what is at the heart of Valpy’s essay is not tools but people and society and our ability to find and talk to each other. Social media is a tool and nothing more.

What Delany was writing about was social fragmentation and the “What if …?” that follows when you follow it through to its extremes. In one of his novels (Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, I believe) the risk is cultural fugue, a kind of social catatonia. The economist Herbert Simon has said, “A wealth of information leads to a poverty of attention.” Delany’s novel seems to suggest, “A wealth of choice leads to an inability to choose.” Fugue.

To use a Canadian cliché, if we are a cultural mosaic what are we a mosaic of? Cultures or gated communities of the mind and spirit? Mr. Eaves doesn’t like the quote by Carleton’s Christopher Waddell about us seeking reinforcement rather than challenge online but I suspect Waddell is correct. But I think that is a human tendency the Internet facilitates rather than being a consequence of it being the Internet bogeyman. And it may be we tend to do this the more fragmented our world becomes.

Whatever the truth is, there is a problem and reducing it to a traditional versus social media argument misdirects attention. It misses the real world.

We think we know Canada and Canadians but what we know is the parameters of our own lives: friends, work, family. To everything else, we are tourists. The old saying, “Out of sight, out of mind,” applies. We don’t know the rest of the country, we don’t even know the rest of our own provinces. (How many people in Vancouver have ever been to, much less lived in, Fort St. John? How many of us have lived in Smiths Falls? How many in Toronto have lived in Elliot Lake? Who has been to and lived in Bathurst, New Brunswick?)

Social media can facilitate this but only if we are listening. Waddell’s question (“Do we?”) is one worth asking along with, “Who are we listening to?” Despite all the online voices, we have to constantly ask, “Who am I not hearing from?”

You can be sure someone’s voice isn’t there.

Share:

Hide Sites

Years ago I had a subscription to The Nation. Online, they pop up in Google with this description: “Weekly journal of opinion, featuring analysis on politics and culture. Founded in 1865.” I must have subscribed sometime in the very early 80s because I know it was around the time Ronald Reagan was President of the United States (January 1981 to January 1989).

I thought it was a left leaning magazine and that roughly reflected my politics at the time. And it was. And it did. Roughly. (I’ve no idea what they are like now – I haven’t read them in close to 20 years.)

I quickly came to hate it. While it did, in broad terms, reflect my views, it did not even remotely come close to reflecting how I thought issues should be debated, questioned and considered. It was a cranky child spewing hate and spite at anything and everything it despised – not disagreed with, but despised.

The cartoons they had, especially the caricatures of Ronald Reagan and the accompanying captions, were so juvenile and so removed from anything that was true the magazine was unreadable.

It was pretty much everything that today is associated with the far right, the extremes of conservatism that we see, for example, in the absurdities of the healthcare debate in the U.S., or the nonsense we’ve seen for the last decade or so.

It was all that, only the inverse of it. Over time, with conservatism becoming increasingly strong and more vocal through the 90s, and with the liberal responses to it, it became clear that in all these dubiously named “debates,” everyone becomes the thing they hate. They’re on different sides of a fence, to be sure, but they are the same thing.

I’m frustrated, annoyed but also often amused when I see items on the creation-evolution controversy. On the one side, given the tone and rhetoric, those on the creation side sound utterly detached from God, or any deity, sounding more like little boys who want the football. On the other side, again given the tone and rhetoric, those on the evolution side sound as if they’ve never heard of science, or the scientific method, and are simply interested in asserting, “I’m right!”

(I’m not a creationist but in the interests of objectivity I find the Wikipedia article linked above interesting in that it refers to the debate as, “… between those who espouse the validity and/or superiority of literal interpretations of a creation myth, and the proponents of evolution, backed by scientific consensus.”

(The “creation myth?” Doesn’t that make an assumption? Wouldn’t a word like “explanation” be, objectively, more accurate in that it makes no assumptions? By the way, I personally think this debate has nothing to do with the ostensible issue. It is really about who gets to tell young people what to think – not how to think, but what.)

I suppose what most annoys me with politics is the abuse of rhetoric and the constant use of false arguments and the misrepresentations of opposing views. Here in Canada, we are constantly getting messages from both sides that have been laundered through polls, studies and public relations people so that what actually comes to us is utterly meaningless, completely devoid of information or, frankly, truth. The two major parties have the same position, though each is the inverse of the other. The Liberals should be supported because they are not the Conservatives. The Conservatives should be supported because they are not the Liberals. Rarely do they actually represent anything you might actually want to support – thus the dwindling voter turnout.

And both, in my opinion, place the country second. Their number one priority is their own party.

Not only is it incredibly depressing, it defies logic. The left cannot always be wrong. Sooner or later, they must be right. The right cannot always be wrong. Sooner or later they must be right.

But you would never know that because each must be opposed, misrepresented and slandered.

In a sense, politics is intellectual abuse. And as we see constantly in politics, abuse is okay as long as you abuse the right people.

My favourite political statement comes from Ray Davies of The Kinks in a song called, “Uncle Son”:

Unionists tell you when to strike,
Generals tell you when to fight,
Preachers teach you wrong from right,
They’ll feed you when you’re born,
And use you all your life.

Bless you Uncle Son,
They won’t forget you when the revolution comes.

Share:

Hide Sites

We’re only in it for the money – Frank Zappa

Chris Anderson has a new book out July 7th and that appears to have resuscitated the question of “free” as it applies to digital stuff, like news and other content (what use to be known as literature, pop culture, art, music and so on).

The entire idea of “free” content is informed by a belief in inevitability. Like gravity, it is a natural law. No one will pay for anything once it becomes digital – it will be free, and to go against this is to tilt at windmills.

Let’s ignore all that for the moment and ask a different question.

Is free right? Is it morally acceptable to insist that one person work for free while another person, or company, is paid for their work, albeit a different kind of work?

We skirt the moral issue by throwing up our hands and saying it is inevitable, it is the tide, the movement of the sun, and whatever else cannot be changed. “That’s just the way it is.”

Except it’s not. The inevitability here is not the result of physics or nature but of human behavior.

Dichotomies

There are a number of strange dichotomies about this whole idea of free content and its inevitability.

I suppose the first that occurs to me is that on the one hand we feel no obligation, no ethical imperative to pay someone for their intellectual creation (music, news, literature etc.). On the other hand, in this same world, we expect a level of altruism from artists, journalists and others, rather like the Star Trek universe, to do it for the love of it – to achieve our full human potential, as the Federation might have it.

Huh? On the one hand, we don’t feel morally bound to compensate for work but on the other we’re so morally high-minded we don’t seek compensation anyway. Let’s be clear: that is idiotic thinking.

The idea of free that is circulating also conveniently confines itself to the digital world. Once it’s in digital format, it’s free! The problem here is that not all things are digital and, as far as my limited awareness goes, not all things can be converted to digital format. So as long as fossil fuels, trucks, roadies, mother boards, bikes, plates, clothes and so on cannot be digitized, we’ll have to pay for them. We’ll have to pay for the labour that goes into them and we’ll have to pay for the infrastructure that surrounds them.

If you are writer, then, on one hand you will work for no compensation but, on the other, you’ll still have to pay your bills: water, hydro, mortgage, lawn care, clothes, food and on and on. In other words, you have to find other work.

Still, you love writing so much you’ll continue to so, altruistically, in those free moments that you have.

Call it my limited thinking, but that’s horseshit.

I may still write because, yes, I do love it, but I’m certainly not going to bust a hump fact-checking, verifying accuracy, confirming quotes etc. You, the reader, can do that if you’re so inclined but I don’t have the time or energy. I have to wash dishes, walk the dog, and get ready for work tomorrow, the job that pays me so I can pay the bills.

If I’m a musician, I may still make music and even throw it out there to the digital world of free but my real energy and time will be put into marketing, learning how to dance, finding a perfume line, wheedling a way into the world of acting and generally spreading myself very thin in order to make a living at things that actually do pay – as opposed to music, which doesn’t (at least in itself, it has some potential to jumpstart you into something other than music).

Off with their heads!

It may well be that “free” is inevitable. I’ve yet to see any practical arguments for managing the trend, in part because the discussions remain polarized. But I can’t help feeling the discussions are, at their heart, informed by a kind of cultural elitism.

I’ve no doubt things like news, in the traditional sense, will continue (on a much smaller scale) and that there will be people who will, altruistically, create wonderful material on their own, diligently, passionately and creatively. But those people will be (to use a Vonnegut term), the “fabulously well-to-do.” They will be largely a group that can afford the time and lack the need for significant compensation.

It won’t be done by some schmo making minimum wage at three jobs in order to pay the bills. It won’t be done by a single parent with an average income.

It will be done by people who have the time and the means to do so. An elite.

To greater or lesser degrees, an attitude not unlike the famous line, “Let them eat cake,” is taken when some react with alarm at where the trend may be taking us. The fear I have is that that attitude often leads to a counter, antagonistic attitude of, “Off with their heads!”

There is a divide and it is widening. Those who have, will have more. Those who don’t, will have less. It all reminds me of something Gore Vidal said back in the 1970s: “Welfare for the rich; free enterprise for the poor.”

It’s not exactly the same, of course, but the division is similar. Large corporations will make oodles of money because, to put it in old 20th century terms, they own the means of production (the servers, tools, the access etc.). And those who provide the actual material that makes all of that of value, will get less and less, until it is the inevitable “free.”

There will be unrestricted capitalism for some; the Star Trek world of personal nirvana, no need for money, for others.

No, it does not make sense. And I think it comes down to a morally unsound attitude of free for some, not free for others. Some get paid, some don’t.

And that’s just wrong. And as it all evolves it reminds me of Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold …

Note:

This is NOT a commentary on the Chris Anderson book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price.” I have not read it so I obviously can’t comment on it. For all I know, I would agree with it one hundred percent. I have, however, read the review of it by Malcolm Gladwell (which I found interesting, to say the least).

This post is about my sense of the discussions online and elsewhere surrounding the whole notion of “free” and about how we appear to view it, how we behave and what I think informs much of it.

Share:

Hide Sites

I have a great dislike for the knee-jerk cynic. I have one residing in me and it’s often a tussle keeping him bound and gagged. But sometimes I let him have his say if only because he makes interesting observations (though not always for the right reasons).

An aspect of the tsunami tragedy in South Asia, and the ongoing tragedy of its aftermath, struck me after seeing some of the media reporting of the disaster. It has me wondering if, despite the scope of human tragedy, it would receive the attention it is getting here in North America if celebrities were not involved, if it didn’t contain the spectacle of scale. Would we care as much?

Countless tragic events occur in the world but most don’t get the media play this one has.

If it’s true we have more interest in this tsunami disaster for these reasons then I think it should also be pointed out that it doesn’t mean we are a hopelessly self-absorbed people. (Though I do despair sometimes over our obsession with celebrity and scale.)

What it means is that even with an event as horrific as this we find it difficult to be anything more than instinctively and briefly shocked by the spectacle of its scope. Most of us require relatable, human touchstones within such an event in order to connect on a visceral level. (I think this is where organizations like World Vision succeed. They have child sponsorship programs and these connect people with a bit more immediacy, putting a face to people living in places and cultures so distant from us.)

Our brain, with its moral sense, may be jogged by seeing and reading about an event like this – on the other side of the world, to a seemingly faceless people living lives we usually have no awareness of – but in order to be emotionally engaged we need something we can identify with. And crass though it may seem, celebrities and white-skinned tourists in bathing suits and shorts provides this. Scope grabs our attention. Distance (geographical and cultural) creates a disconnect.

So while part of me may see reports of celebrities and tourists and have a knee-jerk cynical response to it, I also know tragedies like this one will soon pass from sight without doing anything more than raising an eyebrow if we don’t find ways to connect people to these events and relate to them somehow. Celebrity and spectacle may not be the best, most seemly way of doing this but it is effective, to some extent at least.

And if you’re inclined to make a donation to the relief efforts, please do. Here are a few places you may want to consider:

• Red Cross — Tsunami Disaster Relief (on Amazon.com)
• World Vision – Help Tsunami Victims

UPDATE: Some of what I made a poor attempt at articulating above is touched on in David Akin’s blog entry, Reporting the disaster of our lifetime. My take regarding celebrity and spectacle is not what he discusses; rather, he looks at blogging and journalism. But his example of an article in the NY Times is what I was getting at when I referred to connecting people to an event on a visceral level. (His is an example of an excellent story, one that doesn’t rely on endangered celebrities or shocking us with spectacle but instead deals with the enormity of the event by humanizing it through individuals and their experience.)

As for the issue of blogs and journalism that he speaks to, this isn’t an issue for me. I think a blog can be a vehicle for legitimate reporting, in the right hands. But for me, this isn’t what I look to blogs for. Blogs alert me to what is happening, interesting ideas and so on. I take the blogger’s perspective with a grain of salt (though there are some exceptions). This isn’t because I distrust the blogger. Rather, I prefer to get a variety of perspectives – the traditional media, blogs and so on and then draw my own conclusions.

I know there is a debate of sorts about blogs and journalism. It strikes me as a debate over form rather than content. Both can be excellent; both can be garbage. The vehicle is irrelevant.

Share:

Hide Sites