If They Don't Catch You, It's Not Wrong, Right?

10.23.2006

I'm doing NaNoWriMo again this year. You can follow my progress, if you like by clicking here. For those who don't know the premise National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is the month of November, in which the aspiring writer attempts to write at least 50,000 words. That boils down to about 1667 words a day, which is tough, but doable. Last year it went well; I finished my 50,000 words, but I came nowhere near to finishing my novel. To be honest, it wasn't a novel, but a glorified story where characters were more important to plot. There was, in no uncertain terms, no plot. I suppose that in some ways I ought to be grateful that I didn't finish it, because it saved me from laboring under the delusion that it might ever have been a good book, which it could never have been because of my lack of planning.

This year is different. This year I have goals. This year I have a plot! On the ashes of my incompletion shall rise an empire, or at least a book with a story. I'm still writing in the fantasy genre for many reasons, but this book, tentatively titled A Thief in the Field, will be much less Sword and Sorcery and more magical realism. I'm trying to capture the unreal but pervasive quality of life when it really is magical; when the bizarre and impossible seem not on plausible, but inevitable; those times when we seemed to have slipped through the slimmest of openings between worlds into a reality that looks like ours, but differs in some fundamental and profound way. I want, in short, to be Hayao Miyazaki, sometimes referred to as the Japanese Walt Disney, the man who brought us Spirited Away and, lately, Howl's Moving Castle.

It is impossible to duplicate Miyazaki merely by stealing some of his tropes, but I'm not trying to duplicate him, only to be successful where I have failed before, but where he has triumphed regularly. My characterization is already good, but I have no grasp of story beyond the vague placation that "it's what happens." And so I am taking a page from the Miyazaki school, if there was one. And if there was one, the school's Plot 101 would read something like this: Young girl encounters overwhelming and heretofore unknown magical/supernatural force and by the toughness of her grit and the charm of her innocence is able to not only triumph over the force, but heal the wounds of the community in the process, usually by being honest about what's going on, rather than succumbing to the illusions that everyone around her has become comfortable with.

Will this essence of Miyazaki help me? A little, but it won't make me a storyteller, not by a long shot. Sadly, stealing the product in no way reveals the process, although I'm not sure that most movie makers honestly care about the process. Perhaps the difference between Miyazaki and new Disney (a lot like New Coke: All of the hype and none of the flavor of the original) is that Miyazaki has a process, and Disney has a board of directors. "A ha!" you say, sensing an advantage, "But Disney bought Pixar!" Big deal, I reply, Disney will just poison the well.

If Disney had merely acquired Pixar as a financial interest and left them all alone in their Emeryville compound to make movies, then Pixar might have continued to make great movies. But they didn't. Disney named John Lasseter head of animation at Disney, and I don't believe that he can fix Disney. I haven't talked to anyone on the inside, I don't hear industry gossip, I just believe that John Lasseter is one person who can be in one place at one time and it's pretty damn hard to run one wildly successful movie studio, much less maintain the uncompromising quality of one while painstakingly pulling the other out of the quagmire it's been stuck in since The Lion King.

It reminds me of the scene in The Neverending Story where Atreyu trying to pull his horse, Artax, out of the Swamps of Sadness; he couldn't do it because Artax gave in to the melancholy of the mire. And John Lasseter doesn't even have the help of the AURYN or the blessing of the Child-Like Empress. The implication of that long-winded metaphor is that Disney animation is bound to be swallowed up by the Nothing if it's not gobbled up by the Gmork first.

I think we can all agree that Disney is broken; Chicken Little proved that, if nothing else. And it's possible that Disney can be fixed, but I don't think the purchase of Pixar will be the move that does it, because Disney is trying to buy change, not make it. They are, like me with Miyazaki, trying to own the product without emulating the process. Putting Lasseter in charge may appear to be implementing the process, but I don't believe it is.

Ultimately I believe it's a lot easier to ruin Pixar than it is to fix Disney. I'm sure that Disney's animated movies will improve, but it would be hard notto improve them at this point. But I don't believe that Disney is committed to the kind of holistic change necessary in order to become the embodiment of quality animation that it was in the past. If they were; they wouldn't have needed to buy Pixar in the first place.

Bibliography

At least Disney paid Steve Jobs for Pixar. When they "borrowed" the plot and characters for The Lion King from Miyazaki's Kimba the White Lion they didn't even acknowledge it.

A press release from Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli fansite Nausicaa.net describing Disney's alleged theft, and Disney's reaction to the accusation.

A Kimba the White Lion fansite that details the Disney theft point by point.

Save the Album (As though it ever existed)!

But we're not selling anybody anything for ninety nine cents. And we're not breaking up the album.

- InSound, from SavetheAlbum.com

This discussion starts with Sophie and Ives. At work (I know, it's hard to believe this superhero needs an alter-ego, but even though we know my opinions are worth their weight and gold I've yet to find a buyer) I listen to Groove Salad on SOMAFM and honestly there's not enough fresh electronica music to sustain even a seven hour work day, so I hear a lot of the same music over and over again. One of the songs that caught my ear was Awaken by Sophie and Ives. I was intrigued enough to explore the idea of buying it, and stumbling over Ova Remixed I discovered that a bunch of remixes of that very song had just been released electronically! Well I rushed out and purchased them, and by rushed out and purchased them I mean sat on my ass and alt+tabbed over to iTunes and purchased it there.

The thing that got me thought was the album art. It's catchy in a restrained, elegant way; the leanings of Modernism that I'm always enchanted with. No pictures, just word-pictures. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought "skeuomorph", taking me all the way back to my senior year in college when a TA introduced me to Thomas Pynchon, Neal Stephenson and N. Katherine Hayles, whose book How We Became Posthuman I managed to penetrate only about 30 pages or so into. Nonetheless, I have carried my hard-won gains with me for a long time, pointing out skeuomorphs like monkeys point out bananas. And moment that I saw the album art for Sophie and Ives' Awaken was the moment that album art became a skeuomorph, and that the concept of the album itself came into question.

With this in mindI was happy to surf over to Save the Album when I saw their ad in a suitably hip/alternative/indy magazine that I might purchase but be caught not reading any given afternoon. Their site contrasts the "traditional" idea of the album against the music industry's "destruction" of the album via its electronic dissection into MP3s and its shameful auctioning off of albums piece by piece rather than with the dignity that the holistic musical experience it was crafted to be deserves. The ugly implications here and subliminal finger-pointing embodied in this argument immediately crowd forward in my mind, having divided themselves into two distinct groups each shouting epithets at the other. On one side of my imagination is the "industry" backed by the RIAA and led by Fergie and Avril Lavigne, who curse the shoddy product that the indies produce. Said indies on the other side of my head are led by Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsome malign the shoddy product that the industry produces. Somewhere in between Mike Doughty and Ani DiFranco share a cigarette and watch in bemusement.

In this case, I think industry is closer to right than the indies are. For one thing, Save the Album is just an insulting attempt to sell albums by capitalizing on a false conservativism that exists only because InSound said it does. By creating an ironically hip faux-movement around the whole concept of album-hood in order to congratulate themselves for not giving in corporate greed the way iTunes has InSound proves itself incredibly arrogant in a way that only hipsters could appreciate, which proves only that their ad campaign is right on. But I personally believe that the industry, as embodied by iTunes, is merely the culmination of something that happened a long time ago. The destruction of the album starts with the moment the album is invented, with Thomas Edison's phonograph, the popularity of the vinyl LP and most recently with the introduction of the compact disc and the invention of something called random play, embodied today in the iPod shuffle.

The moment that the possibility of nonlinear reproduction of music became possible was the death knell of the album, because InSound is right about one thing: the album is more than just a collection of songs, though that might well have been what it started out as. Listening to August and Everything After the other day, I was too lazy to turn shuffle off on my iPod and so I listened to the songs out of order, and realized exactly how trite the album could have been if the songs were ordered differently. But the album is more than song order too; it's also the album art, the materials the album holder is composed of. A thousand little things that have nothing to do with the songs themselves. The heart of the album, the heart of the music, the warm, fuzzy center of art is the artist, and only when the artist is in control, at a show or at a reading, can the vision really be said to be pure; all other reproductions are merely imitations of the moment of clarity we are drawn to in art.

Which is where InSound got it wrong (and why their self-aggrandizing manifesto makes them look like schmucks), because the purist knows that any recording of music is inherently compromised; the vision of the artist is only as strong as the will of the audience. The author knows her book is only as good as the reader who savors the words; the skimmer, the chapter-skipper, the end-reader all compromise the vision of the author, but no author ever suggested making sure the pages were glued together to stigmatize the skipper and open them to public ridicule. Any artist who decides to record (and I mean that in the most literal sense, from writing to painting to vector design) their work relinquishes her right to complain about a vision compromised by the audience, both because the vision is independent of the audience and because the vision is the fiction of the artist, just as InSound used the fiction of the album to capitalize on the anti-establishment tendencies of its target demographic.

How does this relate the future of album art? Well, it means the book is wide open. The end is far from near, because music and art will always go well together, but it is certainly the death knell for album art as we know it. No longer will it be limited to a 5.5" by 5.5" square, but is nearly limitless in capacity. Perhaps 1024 x 768 pixels for now, but who knows? I don't, but someone does, even if they don't know it yet.

Bibliography

How We Became Posthuman - Hayles, N. Katherine, Chicago, Ill. : University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Gravitas and Space Fables

One of my early criticisms about Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip has been that you can't compare the importance of television and national security, at least not without it becoming a soap opera. Watching Josh Liman (Bradley Whitford) on the West Wing deal with the post-traumatic stress disorder after being shot is incredibly compelling television. Was it dramatic that someone got shot in a show about politics? Yes. Was it melodramatic? No. Would it be melodramatic in a show about television writers and producers? Probably. Ultimately what I believed it boiled down to was that lives weren't at stake in a show about TV and if that were the case then it's hard to build up the kind of drama that West Wing had.

Reading Tim Goodman last week, he addressed this very point: "I've read the comments about how it seems 'Studio 60' doesn't work as well as 'West Wing' because the latter had gravitas and the former is merely about the TV industry… why shouldn't [Aaron Sorkin] be allowed to take entertainment and the business of entertainment seriously? I mean, it's only the most powerful medium on the planet, the drug of the nation, why does he have to treat it like it's drastically less important than it really is?" And he's right. In terms of power the two are near equals in terms of influencing the behavior of people. I think the difference is in what kind of power they wield. People find knowing what's going on a governmental level intriguing because they're forced to obey the government, unless they move to Canada, but then they'd have to learn French. Ultimately government wields a hard power, backed by the police and the Army, by force.

On the other hand, people don't have to watch TV; they choose to. Smokers don't want to know what goes into cigarettes and television viewers don't want to know what goes on on TV. If politicians treat us like sheep because they want our vote, well, we have to put up with it, there's no other choice. But if we let television producers do it, then who do we have to blame but ourselves. Perhaps the lack of appeal behind Studio 60 is that we're less excited to see the man behind the curtain than we led Aaron to believe by wolfing down eight seasons of West Wing.

Reading Tim this week also alerted me to the Battlestar Galactica premier on Friday night which was INCREDIBLE. Everything about that show was well done. The pilot was riveting, the plot was incredible, believable, timely. In discussing it with some friends the wife said she just couldn't get behind science fiction and when she said "science fiction" you could tell she meant Star Trek, but calling Battlestar Galactica science fiction is like confusing Animal Farm with Aesop's Fables.

Sure there are robots, spaceships and evil clones, but that's all window dressing on what is the compelling story of a community struggling to save itself in both flesh and idea. It is the story of a people in a time of war trying to decide what's important, what's right and what's necessary when none of those options is the same one. It is the story of individuals becoming a People, and the way that story is told seems without flaw. It is emotional without being mawkish; intense without being melodramatic; and political without being facile or obvious.

And that is the true value of science fiction: to be able to tell a contemporary story in a safer, sanitized context, where the audience, in suspending their disbelief, is willing to be led to conclusions that in the real world might be otherwise abhorrent to them. Science fiction's ability to recontextualize complex moral and ethical considerations in worlds similar, but not quite equal to, ours is a huge advantage over other forms of persuasion, such as satire. Sure, a lot of science fiction is just robots and spaceships, but the best kind, the kind that Battlestar Galactica embodies, can move hearts, and where the heart goes the mind often follows.

Monday is the new Friday

09.26.06 - Monday is the new Friday

I don't think anyone I know would mistake Aaron Sorkin for Woody Allen. It's just not possible. One is a writer fascinated with the chemistry and conflict of groups who do and the other is a self-indulgent filmmaker obsessed with failure and loss. While both will go down in film in television history as incredibly talented men, it would be hard to substitute one for the other.

And yet… Watching the premiere of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip last week something struck me as similar about the two. Bradley Whitford's character, "Danny Tripp" is a cocaine addict. As a fan of the West Wing working my way through season two I was immediately turned off. We've done this already Aaron, I said. You remember Leo, the alcoholic? Isn't this addiction thing kind of played out? And then I started wondering if Aaron is working through something the way that Woody seems to in his film, his flimsy autobiographical re-representations of his life. In the second episode of Danny confesses at a press conference that he tested positive for cocaine use. Explaining his action later to the studio chairman irate at his unnecessary confession Danny replies, "I'm an addict; honesty is good for me." Is it still honesty if you're saying it through a character? While I'm not accusing Aaron Sorkin of cocaine addiction, it's becoming clear that he, like Woody Allen and insecurity, has something to work out.

The other intriguing thing about Studio 60 is its level of meta-ness. Now, I know that with that word I've catapulted myself (Wheeeee! THUMP! Oh god, it's coming through the skin!) into the realm of the academic, but be patient, I plead. The interesting question to me is: Could NBC get away with being as racy in reality as it is in fiction? Because "Studio 60" the variety show on fictional network "NBS" is nested inside "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" the drama on real network NBC there's a buffer protecting both shows from actual viewer response. While viewers may think both shows are trashy, there's no "real" reason to get upset about what happens on "Studio 60" the variety show, because it's a show within a show.

None of the content on "Studio 60" the variety show ever "really" happens; NBC is merely showing another television station showing a variety show where the LA Philharmonic Orchestra sings "We'll give you the intellectual reach around." That's not the same thing as actually having the LA Philharmonic Orchestra sing it on Saturday Night Live. It's a plot on a show, not the show itself. How can you get upset about something that happens in a fictional world? That would be silly, like saying it's inappropriate for Itchy and Scratchy to lop off each others' parts on the Simpsons. They're not really doing, they're presenting it as a form of social critique. As long as the show is merely re-presenting television for its viewers in a satirical fashion, and no one could ever be affected by satire because we're all smart enough to know the difference, right?