Archives for February 2010
I don’t know why I keep doing these. But here’s another podcast in defense of anonymity.
Like CD jewel cases, paperbacks, and other things, for better or worse the internet makes redundant, gone will be handmade “Missing” posters. Google’s Person Finder made me pause and think how far we’ve come. And of course I’m thinking about 9/11. Townes Van Zandt singing about his daughter. Here’s Dan Fox on Spacemen 3, and “The many uses of the Zeitgeist,” and pretentiousness, “The optimist sees pretension as innocent, tragicomic even: excess of effort, a lack of awareness that ambition might exceed capability, being unable to laugh about your own limitations. In this sense, it’s related to certain aspects of camp – to what Susan Sontag described as ‘the sensibility of failed seriousness’. (What often lurks behind pomposity is sad insecurity.) The cynic recognizes pretension only as the cousin of affectation, one of the dark arts of charlatanry; disguises to pass yourself off as something you’re not, talking yourself up, showing off about commodities or experiences you’ve acquired. But one quality of pretentiousness is a willingness to at least have a stab at something, for better or for worse, and you can only accuse someone of pretentiousness if you can identify both what is being aspired to, and just why it is that the person in question fails to make the grade.” New one from Jon Rafman. Best game of Twister EVER. The Atlantic on Matt Kirschenbaum’s work in video-game preservation. Brett Easton Ellis wants James Franco and Angelina Jolie to play Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan. China Mieville writes about JG Ballard, whose childhood home was just gutted. Luzinterruptus, replacing traffic with literature. The Power of Text (and Google Search Stories). Bunch of Pavement links, Gold Soundz is my favorite. Against speculative design competitions. Neoteny is the retention of childlike attributes in adulthood. UK’s web heritage at risk. When in your life were you most afraid to talk to strangers? “When I talked with (adult) friends about the experience, some wondered if kids today are acculturated to be more afraid of strangers than kids were in generations past. I’m not so sure this is true. Until I was about ten, I was scared to ask for directions or talk to strangers in public. I don’t think I was afraid of the strangers–I was afraid of exposing and embarrassing myself.” I don’t think I ever stopped being afraid, I just learned to hide it.
Not this Justin Wolfe. What is it like to share a name with someone (possibly) wrongly accused of murder? The other Justin Wolfe is a very talented writer and creator of two delightful websites, who can do better than the suburban wasteland that is Northern Virginia.
I’m in New York next week starting Tuesday for the Armory Show. Please email if you’d like to meetup: joanneDOTmcneilGMAIL. I’m also moderating a panel Saturday, March 6, at the Winkleman Gallery with An Xiao, part of #class Here’s more on #class on WSJ Speakeasy.
Remember warblogging? Somehow, I managed to talk about the history of blogs for nearly 10 minutes while alone in my car earlier this evening. Here’s another podcast on search referrals and breaking news. And here’s an interview with the very talented artist An Xiao as she set up for the #class show. Her blog, btw, is a must read.
Crowdfunding or What?
So much of the future of media debate concludes with little evidence and much conjecture on how the latest idea or gadget will or will not “save” publishing. Therein lies the problem. The Internet presents us with limitless possibilities. How could anyone believe in a silver bullet?
If a savior is what publishing needs, the best thing anyone could hope for is that more people will draft their wills like Ruth Lilly (she left Poetry magazine 100 million.) Really, the goal should be business models as unique as our creative strengths, but sometimes that feels just as unrealistic.
The trouble I see with crowdfunding for creative projects is not that it doesn’t work, but that it couldn’t possibly work for everyone. First of all, the very act of crowdfunding requires a level of self-assuredness that does not often come naturally for artists and writers. Mikita Brottman, literature professor at Maryland Institute College of Art, talks about the problem her students have selling themselves to the public “I have art students who grasp pretty complex ideas but can’t put them into words. If someone is a great video-game designer or great artist or a great musician, when if comes to speaking about it, if they aren’t articulate, they’re seen as freaks.” This often comes at the expense of grants and other opportunities they are more than qualified to receive, but fail to articulate the need. That point reminds me of something I read about Dr. Suess. He was invited all the time to speak at schools but mostly declined. As a very shy, somewhat awkward person, he worried children would be let down as he does not appear as carefree and spirited as the narrator of his books.
The least remarkable novels I read seem written as though the author knows his mother will see it one day. Imagine an author who feels accountable to hundreds and hundreds of people — context collapse as the death of creativity.
My friend Ed Champion was once explaining the difference between writers who write to write, rather than write to have written. I worry crowdfunding works best for the latter — those who see writing as the means for prestige rather than a greater calling. When I look at my bookshelf, I don’t see a single author who was ever described as “salesman-like” or even “good with people.” In a country where 81% of the population “feel they have a book in them,” there’s already a problem of loud voices crowding out raw talent, with or without crowdfunding.
As Joseph Epstein once put it, “I wonder if the reason so many people think they can write a book is that so many third-rate books are published nowadays that, at least viewed from the middle distance, it makes writing a book look fairly easy. After all, how many times has one thought, after finishing a bad novel, ‘I can do at least as well as that’? And the sad truth is that it may well be that one can. But why add to the schlock pile?”
Last week there was an informal discussion about crowdfunding on Twitter, preserved here by Tim Maly. More from Maly, Michelle Pauli at The Guardian, PD Smith, and Paul Raven at Futurismic. Will Wiles expanded on some of his points in the debate, with a thoughtful post, “I Have Always Relied on the Strangeness of Crowds”. I like his footnote, “Here’s an idea for redistributing the risk in publishing – crowdpledging. How about a publisher says ‘get 1000 people to say they’ll buy a copy of your proposed book, and we’ll give you a contract?’ Could that be made to work?” I also like the idea of publishers, indie or otherwise, using Kickstarter and other crowdfunding methods to find new voices. A writer who is his own cheerleader, probably isn’t maxing out his talent. But so long as demand for outstanding work remains high, there’s still potential for alternatives.
What happens when three art bloggers go on Chatroulette together? We ask everyone “are you an artist?” Paddy, Hrag, and I were unsure what else to call this. This year there are more women than men showing in the Whitney Biennial. The Atlantic contributors are sharing their media diets. Here’s Nicholas Lemann, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Marc Ambinder. Good points here on the confluence (not the intersection!) of culture and technology. Please can all novels from now on have floor plans? High Line designer Field Operations is now working on a park in Santa Monica. S2H replay “feels way more like the future than the fitbit because it’s cheap, fashiony and simple.” And Xiu Xiu’s latest album streaming. (via.) Simon Senn’s L’hôtel des sapins (NSFW). Marina de Van’s In My Skin is one of my favorite movies. She’s got a new one coming out. The first black Olympic pairs skaters Vanessa James and Yannick Bonheur, met on the social network “Ice Partners Search.” From Time magazine: a look at Syrian lingerie. Leeds, Infinite Thought’s “most depressing photo-essay.” The Bygone Bureau has a Paula Deen potluck: Bad for you and disgusting! Meanwhile, two kinds of Tumblr cliches produce a really interesting tumblog. Steve Lambert on Utopia at Transmediale 10.
So, as I explained earlier, I’m finding it tricky to wedge in time to post here and it’s not out of disinterest. So I thought I might post some of the VoiceNotes I’ve recorded in my car as a way to capture fleeting ideas. It should go without saying, but these are all very unfiltered and incomplete thoughts. I’m a tiny bit worried I sound humorless and stressed, the later is certainly the case this week, but whatever. Here’s the first podcast about writing for the web, and another on curation, which is tedious for the first few minutes, but at 2:30 I give away a big blogger protip. Another podcast about redundancy and novelty online. Less recommended but also on the website is a podcast of me exasperated about email and a Miss South Carolina style talk about crowdfunding. Check it out before I get super embarrassed and delete them all
Wonderful post from Tim Jones at EFF explaining the Google/Blogger deletions of music blogs due to copyright complaints, “Music Journalism is the New Piracy.” Many of these blogs had substantial readership. Pretty much anyone posting music is at risk due to the confounding difficulty of these charges. One blogger had explicit permission for every file on the blog. “In other cases, it appears that the bloggers may have posted or linked to copyrighted material without permission. But, as targeted blogger Patrick Duffey explains, it’s often next to impossible to know exactly which content is being accused of infringement”.
Trying to explain Jerry Saltz’ Facebook page to non-art world people is almost harder than explaining Facebook to non-user artists. In The Observer, Leon Neyfakh does a pretty good job explaining size and community involvement on his page, but also the kind of humor about it.
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