The New Self-Publishing
Books ought to be so cheap that we can throw them away if we do not like them, or give them away if we do. Moreover, it is absurd to print every book as if it were fated to last a hundred years. The life of the average book is perhaps three months. Why not face this fact? Why not print the first edition on some perishable material which would crumble to a little heap of perfectly clean dust in about six months time? If a second edition were needed, this could be printed on good paper and well bound. Thus by far the greater number of books would die a natural death in three months or so. No space would be wasted and no dirt would be collected.
- Virginia Woolf (via Snarkmarket and The New Yorker’s Book Bench)
People will continue to read fiction for as long as people read text. The real questions about the state of publishing pertain to the ways fiction will be produced and distributed. Right now the business is cutting out middlemen, like so many industries before it. Many of the traditional ways of marketing books are, in a networked world, improper allocations of time and attention. These shifts occurring may be dramatic. It may seem like the recession alone is to blame, but what’s taking place isn’t just cost cutting. In the long run I think we’ll see publishers better equip to take on riskier authors, as well as find sympathetic audiences and build communities for them.
Right now, publishing a book takes too long, the results are enormously uncertain, and the economic risks are too great. This means less money upfront for authors, making alternatives to the book deal more and more attractive.
A recent article in Crain’s points out just how much less an author should expect to sign for, compared to last year: “$35,000 is the new $75,000,’ “ says Michael Morrison, president of the general books division at HarperCollins Publishers. But you can make $80,000 on Scribd, if 10,000 are willing to download your book for $10. This is a liberating alternative for someone who already has an audience.
Harland Miller, Too Cool to Die, 2002
One of the best known self-published authors, Wil Wheaton, tells Washington Times’ Kelly Jane Torrance, “The incredible ease of distribution online and the fact that more authors — and actually, all creative people — can reach their audience and their customers more easily and more directly than at any other time in history, I think makes self-publishing an option that can be considered in the first round of choices rather than the last resort it’s been perceived as up until, let’s say, 1998 to 2001.”
Torrance also speaks with Lulu’s Gail Jordan, “Who needs a travel agent when you have Expedia? We’re much more used to taking things into our own hands and controlling them. Lulu is not going to tell me they don’t like Chapter 10 … It’s up to the marketplace to decide if it has value.”
For now, a success story, like Lisa Genova, interviewed by Lev Grossman last winter in his story on the future of publishing, still ends with a big publisher making an offer and catapulting the book to the top of the New York Times Best Seller List.
I don’t believe any recent self-published books have topped best-seller lists, but it has happened in the past. A NYT story, dated July 9, 1990, is an interesting look at the model’s break from its stigma as “vanity publishing,” paying to see your name in print.
A bunch of mid-90s self help best sellers (What Color is Your Parachute, Chicken Soup for the Soul) were self-published. There was demand for self-help that the speed of publishing wasn’t able to address at the time. Trends are difficult to capitalize on in this industry and there are no publishing “coolhunters” looking out for what we’re going to be reading, thinking, talking about in 2011 — the earliest, conceivably, your book purchased today may be published and distributed.
For someone who’d never deign to read a self-help, much less write one, self-publishing might feel like giving up. I was talking about some of this the other night with Diana Kimball, who recently wrote a paper on the subject. (Update 5/25/09: Kimball’s paper, “Paper Houses: Vanity, Doubt, and the Perils of Self-Publishing”.) She made the often lost point about a major publisher’s role as validation for the author, as well as the reader. The author needs to know someone with expertise and good judgement found his or her material worthwhile. Otherwise, why risk the embarrassment of bringing unsatisfactory material to a wider audience?
For someone brave or crazy enough to believe the rejection letters were unjust, the creative control in self-publshing could be more of a draw. Moreover, if you do it and you’re a success, you could handpick your editors and build your own marketing team. You no longer need to worry about an agent or editor not getting you or wanting you to change something essential to your vision.
The worst argument against self-publishing is that it further floods the sea of books, making it harder and harder to find good reading. This is why I love that Virginia Woolf quote. We’ve always had more text than time to read, the limitation prior to the Internet was based on libraries within driving distance. Things will get lost, certainly, but a ours is the first generation whose process of learning involves retrieving obscure interesting information and feeding it to a wider audience.
Still, the major stumbling block for a self-published author is audience building. Maybe Wheaton could sell as many books this way if he never appeared on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” But there’s no way self-publishing could be profitable for him without his broad Internet fanbase. Authors, by nature, tend to be a shy sort, who would rather not go about the business of shaking hands and kissing babies. But that’s also an issue easily corrected with folksonomy and greater participation in the book world social media like GoodReads. It’s pretty hard to find books similar to that last book you really loved, for reasons I described earlier. If I could enter Max Frisch’s “I’m Not Stiller” in a search engine and receive several recommendations of similar books, you bet I wouldn’t care if they’re self-published or not.
Previously:
Save or Delete: Post-Scarcity vs e-Clutter
Reading Only Devices: Why iPhone, Kindle, and Tablet PCs Might Mean Smarter Blog Comments
Literary Novels and Fan Culture
Matching Books and Readers: Publishers Need Better Websites
JG Ballard, Our Greatest Living Novelist is No Longer
When I read JG Ballard, I go into a particular kind of trance. The effect of his books isn’t comparable to those of any other writer. His prose, right from the beginning, has a mesmerising pace, rhythm and decorum all its own. Even more remarkably, Ballard has established his own set of visionary locations. Plenty of other writers now fictionally venture into multistorey carparks, airport hospital wards, decaying hotels, but they do so in the knowledge that they’re trespassing on Ballard’s territory. He was here first; he was the pioneer – back when these places were seen as totally unliterary. What could possibly happen on a motorway embankment that was of interest?
The world’s finest living novelist died today. Most fans were expecting this, as he announced he had advanced prostate cancer over a year ago. Still, there’s something distressing in learning his yet to be published book, a memoir, Conversations with My Physician: The Meaning, if Any, of Life will be his last.
If you don’t know his work apart from Empire of the Sun, start with Millenium People and work back in time. Or, if you’re a fan of Crash, start with The Atrocity Exhibition and move forward toward his more conventional narratives. Whether an experimental novel or traditional literary one, the themes were all the same. And it’s almost impossible to describe his themes briefly without calling them “Ballardian.”
A pretty characteristic Ballardian moment comes up early on in Concrete Island. The protagonist has crashed off the highway and on to the land below. He is thinking about his son he was supposed to pick up from school, “Ironically, in this warm spring weather the line of crippled war veterans would be sitting in the wheel chairs by the park gates as if exhibiting to the boy the variety of injuries which his father might have suffered.” The motorists, if they even see him, continually mistake him for a homeless person and are therefore unwilling to assist him. He is left stranded on the “concrete island,” and depends on the totaled car for survival –even seizing the water reservoir of windshield wipers for something to drink.
Squint/Opera images inspired by The Drowned World
Another great one is The Drowned World. The title is pretty self-explanatory, but it plays out with a sensitivity to the natural world typically absent in science fiction. When the city of London is finally drained, the characters aren’t pleased, in fact they’re horrified. They can’t believe people actually lived in these structures and streets so far removed from nature. London “looked like a sewer.”
It helps to know a little about JG Ballard, to appreciate his particular sort of darkness. He grew up in Shanghai during the war, and spent part of his childhood tiptoeing through dead bodies in the streets. He was even sent to an internment camp. Rick McGrath has a very comprehensive look at this period in his life. Later, he moved to England, married and had children in Shepperton, his home until his death. His wife died unexpectedly, living him a single suburban father at the age of 32. Trauma and mortality is in every sentence of his books, presented scientifically, without any treacly navel-gazing.
Ballard’s lifelong work station(note the typewriter.) The Delvaux was commissioned from a photograph (the original was destroyed during the Blitz in 1940.)
There is a distrust of technology and human nature in Ballard’s novels, a sense of the absurdity of shopping malls and an intuitive understanding how architecture, especially in its most banal forms, affects our emotions. Ballard shunned email and Internet, it was irrelevant to his obsessions. His concern was space, the body, travel, the dark underbelly of a suburban tract housing development.
Apart from maybe Beckett, no other modern writer crossed as many cultural mediums in his scope of influence. Artists, architects, philosophers, and musicians took to his books immediately, but strangely — for reasons I still can’t understand — he is still largely ignored by the “book world” outside of the UK. His fanbase speaks for itself. Ian Curtis, hugely influenced. David Cronenberg, of course. Jean Baudrillard, Susan Sontag. Filmmakers Mary Harron and Vincenzo Natali. Just about every artist I meet has Super-Cannes on his shelf. Here’s a fascinating post and another from Ballardian on “Autopsy of the New Millennium,” an art show in Barcelona last summer entirely dedicated to dedicated to the life and work of JG Ballard. New wave (and its brief c. 2003 revivial) was largely inspired by some of his wilder sci-fi novels. Gary Numan, The Normal, Anne Clark and John Foxx very clearly articulated his concepts in their music.
JG Ballard ideas are so vivid, they almost have to be played by an instrument or drawn to discuss. If you are at intrigued, take a look at Simon Sellars’ fantastic website Ballardian and listen to some of his fascinating interviews. And more to come here, (when I have the chance,) to discuss what I consider his most important novels: High Rise, Super Cannes, The Atrocity Exhibition, and Millenium People. But a final note, it’s really a shame how long American publishers have ignored Ballard. Just look at Google Trends: US search strings for his name come 5th, after UK, Ireland, Australia, and Canada. And Spielberg made a movie from one of his books!
Update: wonderful point made by Ekstasis: “…The death of a futurist is always a strange thing, losing access to all the possibilities they saw, to their perspective on our collective future. Limited access is still possible, of course, through the arcane procedures of interpretation. This is cold comfort, though. Interpretation can, necessarily, only yeild ideas colored by our own perceptions, our associations, ham-strung by our particular paradigms. Surely, as always, the world will go on, but now with more limited options, whole avenues closed off to us because we lack the vision. We’re lucky to have had him as long as we did.”
No Twitter for the Rich
Siren by Marc Quinn (Kate Moss)
First, lets get something out of the way, for once and for all: if you work in media and you still don’t get Twitter (today, three years after you should have) you should probably just quit or wait until you are eventually fired. Really, if you are pitching a “who cares what you had for lunch” article to your editor, you are no different than a major car manufacturer who doesn’t understand what the fuss over fuel-efficient vehicles is about.
But Virginia Heffernan, whose NYT The Medium columns lately have been, uhhh, questionable, has an interesting take on the old MSM “twitter is narcissism blah, blah…” She mentions Bruce Sterling’s talk at SXSW on how the new sign of poverty is, “dependence on ‘connections’ like the Internet, Skype and texting… Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.”
This reminds me of a conversation I had with Rex when I was in New York. What celebrities won’t join Twitter? I said Angelina Jolie, but he pointed out she’d probably hire someone to post UN Press Releases. A non-Twitter-ing celebrity would be someone like Catherine Deneuve, or less obviously Naomi Watts. Someone who is essentially content with their station on the Hollywood totem pole.
Some will say, as @biz explained on The Colbert Report, they Twitter to create and control their own PR –a wrecking ball to gossip glossies. But all the celebrities on Twitter are in some ways striving for something. Just browse CelebrityTweet (yes, it exists.) Witness the enormous explosion among hasbeens like Liam Gallagher, Donny Wahlberg, Soleil Moon Frye, and Danny Masterson.
If the celeb-twitterer is someone who might not seem to be the sort to bother with this kind of thing (eg @bjork) the account is inevitably run by someone else as a PR station. (The two clear exceptions being @DAVID_LYNCH and @yokoono, which are part art project, part PR.) Maybe every celebrity will eventually have a Twitter account. But only the striving will be the ones engaging its social aspects.
What Was the Hipster?
Trucker Hat by Jon Rafman (Found on Art Fag City)
Last week n+1 posted a bewildering and intriguing event listing “What was the Hipster?” A “Panel, Symposium, and Historical Investigation.” As it coincided with my last trip to New York, I stopped by and ermm, live-tweeted some of it. (Read The Observer’s take on it here.)From the invitation:
Who was the turn-of-the-century hipster? Who is free enough of the hipster taint to write the hipster’s history without contempt or nostalgia? Why do we declare the hipster moment over—that, in fact, it had ended by 2003—when the hipster’s “global brand” has just reached its apotheosis?
A panel of n+1 writers invites n+1 subscribers and the public to join a collective investigation. Short presentations will be followed by audience debate, comment, and recollection, to be transcribed and published in book form this year.
Mark Greif started by pointing out the term hipster is almost always pejorative. (viz. This website) He defined the two major hipster tribes: the aggressive and non-aggressive. The former is epitomized by Kari Ferrell. The later, most of her victims. The first kind of hipster gained prominence in early-aughts, about the time Gavin McInnes moved to New York, Vincent Gallo released Brown Bunny and aligned himself with the neoconservative movement, Williamsburg still had some semblance of edge, and mustaches started appearing at shows. This kind of hipster clings to the angriest forms of Americana: trailer parks, guns, alcoholism, (overtly or discretely) racist humor. It also is self-contained in New York City. The point of this kind of hipster charade is obviously lost outside the US (sure, there were trucker hats in Europe and Asia in 2003, but the wearers never quite got what a trucker hat means.) Inside the US, pretending to be white trash only works in a city where white trash doesn’t exist. Otherwise you’re bearing the stigma of America’s deep-seated classism.
The second kind of hipster, emerged at roughly the same time. They volunteer at 826, eat vegan, wear sweaters in bright colors. If female they have Etsy stores. Male twees tend to be “beardos.” Think Wes Anderson, Dave Eggers. Grief called their breed of preciousness “knowingness and naivete… irony without sarcasm.” Both the aggressive and nonaggressive hipsters are defined by their taste. They do not create their own art, so they define themselves by what they consume. This is a way to build “status as possessors of knowledge.”
Self-aware graffiti in the East Village
Christian Lorentzen, an expert on the subject per his New York magazine article, Why the Hipster Must Die, talked about hipster mating rituals and hipster diaspora. The “hipster is disgusted by anything erotic and confused by what is known as love.” Every hipster must decide in early 30s, to stat a family and return to the suburbs (his likely origin) or continue as a sad aging hipster. A fascinating point was made about older, somewhat twee, literary hipsters — they are equal parts “Kurt Cobain and Adam Gopnik.” Grief wondered whether Cobain himself may have “applied his considerable literary talents” as a New Yorker staff writer, had he lived and gone on to enjoy fatherhood.
Jace Clayton (dj/Rupture) talked about hipsters abroad. Peruvians translating Pitchfork reviews into Spanish. And the false positives you might see in Spain, a country where the mullet is not an ironic revival but a haircut favored by civilians. Or those white guys with dreads that show up at hipster parties because there aren’t enough people sporting skinny jeans and real hipster threads to merit their exclusion.
The author of The Hipster Handbook, Robert Lanham, was in the audience and I wish they had talked more about the book. One of the weirdest trends in the high hipster days of ‘03 was in reference to it. “Deck” was a made-up synonym for cool. As soon as the book went mainstream, hipsters called things “deck” — as a laugh at the book? At themselves? Whatever, they did it.
There was some discussion of class. The “trustie” hipster is really a NYC novelty. In Portland or Austin or Chicago, most hipsters come from humble beginnings. Moving to the city and entering a culturally literate scene is generally an upwardly mobile step. Lanham called them the “wash class” as they are the waitresses and bartenders at the establishments frequented by trust fund hipsters who don’t have to work. This is a pretty curious internal class divide and probably worth a “historical investigation” of its own.
The hipster, as he was known up until 2003, is now dead. He is a victim of the Internet, the ease and low cost of finding This Heat b-sides or obscure cult comics. Moe Tkacik called the Internet a “deregulator,” of all the kind of cultural artifacts time, dedication, and money once kept hidden. Losing My Edge really was an elegy.
What remains is just the shadow of homo hipsteromicus. The kind who “sing[s] theme songs from syndicated television programs from the late 70’s, early 80’s” although she was born in 1988, and is nostalgic for something she never knew.
Paddy Johnson questioned the panel’s use of the word “nostalgia” as it suggests this is something people actually like. But no one actually liked Charles in Charge, did they? Her comment inspired the most n+1-y reaction from audience, “Can’t [hipsters] protect things culturally worthwhile?”
Video is Justice
I dragged the text file that was Cell Phone Camera Forever out of the trash before posting it last January, because I was second-guessing up to that moment whether it wasn’t too obvious or incoherent. Since then, it is still one of the most popular posts on this website. It seems none of us quite know what to make of our cheap, immediate access to creating media. Does anyone really want, what Momus called, a “1:1 ratio of experience to writing” (replace “writing” with your media of choice)?
A 1:1 ratio of experience to writing means that you’ve become an efficient journalistic machine: nothing you do ever goes to waste. Every single thing you experience gets written about somewhere. It doesn’t have to be experience in the real world; it almost seems like I write, now, about every website I visit too.
I need to revise the ultimate point in that post. A camera can be an interruption, it can create a barrier between you and the moment in your life you mean to be enjoying. Mrs. Tulip give a great example of this:
Two schools I have taught at in the past couple of years ban camera use at their high school musical night. One of the reasons is because students look out to the audience to see if mum and dad are watching. If they see only a sea of lenses instead of adoring eyes they are met with technology rather than soul.
We are obsessed with recording life from our point of view, even when it is only 30 cm from the next person’s POV. The Mona Lisa is photographed by every visitor to the Lourve when we have ready access to pristine images of her taken in optimum lighting etc.
We humans are strange creatures.
But the ubiquity of pocket-size video and point-and-shoot cameras is something we shouldn’t ever take for granted. It brings people to justice.
By now you may have seen the horrific footage of London police assaulting 47-year-old newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson, who was walking home from work by the g20 protests before he was attacked, had a heart attack, and died. (More.) The video was filmed by a bystander who “attended the protests near the Bank of England out of curiosity.”
While there was some whispering on Twitter and message boards that Tomlinson was beaten with a truncheon, until the video was released, his weak heart seemed to suffice as the cause of death.
Most people generally trust that while authorities aren’t angels, they don’t act widely out of character. It just doesn’t make sense that they might beat, to the point of possibly inducing a heart attack, an old man who doesn’t even look like he was protesting anything. Well, now you can see for yourself.
If you are at all interested in the subject of sousveillance for human rights, take a look at WITNESS. The organization was founded in 1992, the year after George Holliday heard commotion outside his apartment and took his brand new camcorder to record police savagely beating Rodney King. The odds of having a camcorder on hand, (let alone at all) were pretty slim fifteen years ago. But today nearly everyone can document an abuse of power as it happens.
[By the way, Massachusetts has an obscenely antiquated law against what it calls "wiretapping," “intended . . . to prohibit all secret recordings by members of the public, including recordings of police officers or other public officials interacting with members of the public, when made without their permission or knowledge.” I believe New Hampshire and Pennsylvania have similar laws. Stupid, unjust, and yet on the books.]
Images from Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Phantom Limb series.
Update 4/17/09: Very interesting response from William Shaw at RSA’s Arts and Ecology Centre blog: “having met Rodney King a couple of times while I was working in South Central Los Angeles, I wouldn’t envy anyone who becomes part of the info-maelstrom. The film of Rodney King’s beating became a focal point for civil rights activism, but King himself was not a man who ever asked for the attention, who felt tragically responsible for the deaths that happened in the ensuing riots, and who appeared to be just as much a victim of the all attention he had as of that original police assault.”
Survival Creativity: Return to Pencil and Paper
Tara Donovan Haze, (Stacked Clear Plastic Drinking Straws)
Luis Buñuel’s daughter once said he never would have had a creative outlet without the invention of film. (I think the interview is part of the Phantom of Liberty DVD extras.) But he wasn’t just lucky to be alive in the era of filmmaking — he was lucky to afford a camera, to find collaborators who didn’t bail on him, to have the time to make a picture.
Those are luxuries that many of us can’t dream of, even in the era of Flip video and desktop editing. True, you can fake a student ID, borrow equipment and use FinalCutPro for free. But the human capital, the coordination, the time, the planning. The depending on other people. It’s not that easy. You can’t rely on any outcome. There’s nothing a creative person can rely on more than a pencil and paper.
If you are enslaved to expensive tools, you cannot be creative in a down economy.
When everything is unprecedented, nothing can be relied on, nuclear holocaust seems in no way outside the bounds of possibility, we might one day wheelbarrow a stack of bills to buy a coffee, and some of the sanest among us are stockpiling soup cans — nothing is as critical as the cost-free transfer of ideas from brain to paper.
Survival Creativity.
If your tools chose you, they can also choose to leave you if you can’t afford them. But everyone has access to pencil and paper. Everyone can archive their thoughts in the most basic form available.
Tara Donovan Untitled, (Styrofoam Cups, Hot Glue)
Many gold medal runners come from third world countries. Not so many divers, fencers, skiers, or golfers. Why is it, other than the ease of running. No required uniforms, no required equipment. You don’t need to ask your friend, (leisure time is a scarcity too in poorer countries.) All you need to run is your own body.
In the west, we get hung up on sneakers for overpronators and iPod-plugin pedometers. In actuality, running is the sport that anyone can do — and do well with natural gift and determination…. Like writing and sketching.
The artist who needs 50 tons of steel for the next project is vulnerable to a choking of his creative talent due to grants denied and such things. The one who can make something powerful with nothing more than paper and pencil knows no matter how hard life gets, he can always create.
For writers, it’s difficult not to rely on a keyboard. No, not for want of internet or email. But for transcribing ideas as soon as they happen. As soon as I retreat to my notebooks, I get frustrated. I can’t write as fast as I think and sit and watch as the end of my sentence gets lost in the jumble of ideas I’m trying to jot down.
Cursive handwriting is understood an antiquity, but writing at all feels unnatural to a digital native. And that chicken scratch I’m guilty of, no matter how hard I practice, is largely unintelligible — even to me — after I’m finished.
“If everything we do still had to be done by hand, there would not be enough hours in the day” aregistration manager tells the BBC in an article about the “Slow death of handwriting.” More on the subject from Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting by Kitty Burns Florey.
Modern writers are making writing more expensive. A laptop isn’t a necessity. Nor is a coffee and scone at a quiet cafe as you poach the neighborhood wifi. I should be able to write as well in a dark, cramped room in the worst neighborhood with no heat and no light. If not better than I do, say, at Starbucks on my Macbook.
Ironically, after splashing out recently on a new one, I can’t get in my proper writing form. My wrists, even after three weeks, haven’t adjusted to the new keyboard. I feel more mechanical and disconnected from the process. Sort of like it feels going through a daily routine without a good night’s sleep.
Tara Donovan Haze, Strata, 2000-2001 (Elmer’s Glue)
Michael Agger, one of my favorite tech culture reporters, (“How we read online”, “Thoreau’s Worst Nightmare”) has another provocatively titled article “Kill Your Computer” for the Big Money:
[Quicksilver] presents itself as a powerful “program launcher”—allowing you to load Web sites, find phone numbers, and e-mail files with a few keystrokes—but it’s really a philosophy. If you become adept at Quicksilver, you reach a state of wei wu wei—acting without doing. Here’s how the site puts it: “Quicksilver becomes an extension of yourself; the process fades away leaving only results.” Ohm.
This philosophy seems right to me—in my experience, the best computer is one that disappears when you are using it. Many of us who use computers all day don’t really “like” computers. We just want the box to work—i.e., get out of our way so that we can get things done. Sometimes, with your computer, it’s unclear who is serving whom. Watch as the user attends the computer during program installs, crash recoveries, and tedious system upgrades. Watch the user clean the hard disk and cure it of viruses.
I just still haven’t got a handle on this button-less touchpad and the keyboard feels just a little too smooth, too indefinite. Which is why this post is probably a little jerky to read. But maybe it is better to be ever vigilant of the device with which you engage your ideas. A reminder that one should not rely too much on it.
Forget for a moment that digital cameras, video is getting cheaper and cheaper at a higher and higher quality. For some people a $300 camera is still simply unaffordable. If the worst collapsitarian fantasies come true a camera, just $300, will seem even more decadent.
Which is why its important to preserve one’s skill with pen and paper. Worst comes to worst, you can still create.
Previously:
- Handmade Looking Writing
- Saying Yes and Hearing No
- Reading Only Devices: Why iPhone, Kindle, and Tablet PCs Might Mean Smarter Blog Comments
- Crazy Artists, Crazy Authors, and Blog Comments as a Slush Pile Unfiltered
The Problem with Shepard Fairey
Shepard Fairey’s much hyped Institute for Contemporary Arts show, “Supply and Demand”, probably never would have happened without the new president. But that famous image fails as anything more than a reminder. It is not that it borrows so obviously from communist propaganda design, but because it doesn’t transcend its source of inspiration.
There is nothing about it to communicate that this is about 2008, and there’s an election in America, a country deeply fearful, frustrated, and cynical. It is as it looks: a Dear Leader-like swoon….which could work only if you interpret it at it as a self-mocking, self-aware rub at “drinking the Obama kool-aid.” However, the poster came out early in the primaries, before thousands of people stood in queues to hear him speak. Fairey himself admits the famous Che Guevara image was a major source of inspiration.
True, it is an inspired choice of image of Obama. He is captured exactly as we like to think of him: looking caring, but just a bit distant and analytical. That is precisely why people who really like Obama tend to really like Shepard Fairey’s Obama poster.
Now that the right person for the job ended up the White House, it’s worth pointing out Tony Puryear’s poster of Hillary Clinton was a hell of a lot better:
Puryear is also taking inspiration from propaganda posters, but by using a photograph, rather than illustration, it moves beyond its source. It mocks the Communist propaganda that was the inspiration. You can see the lines on Clinton’s face, she looks relaxed. She radiates warmth as much as power and intellect. She’s a human being, not an icon.
There is a twist to the Clinton image. But with Shepard Fairey, what you see is what you get.
Before the Boston show opened, Fairey came to town to wheatpaste images, mostly around Harvard Square. The first one I noticed, was outside the Gap. At first glance, I thought the Gap commissioned it. It’s next to the door and looks “urban” but in a way that wouldn’t scare the suburbanites off from buying socks and down jackets. It is intricate, but so totally inoffensive, it is virtually indistinguishable from contemporary jeans advertising. Positioned by a store front, it only looks like an extension of the store.
Image of Fairey in front of the Gap from ICA’s Flickr
What’s the point of street art that only encourages more foot traffic at the Gap? Was the Saks campaign pro bono too? I don’t have a problem with artists doing commercial work to pay the bills, but if and when you do work for free, why not make something that doesn’t look like the Gap commissioned you to do it?
And before someone comments that the wheatpaste is all about the juxtaposition and its placement in the city and the street — hold on.
It communicates nothing in the context of this space. For the non-Cantabrigians: Harvard Square is Boston’s equivalency of Santa Monica. Nor is it more of the They Live-inspired non-advertising like the Andre the Giant stuff.It’s a poster in front of a Gap that looks like the Gap paid him a few grand to put up.
If you aren’t easily frustrated by visually interesting things which can only be considered at surface level, you may enjoy his ICA show. Otherwise you’ll likely get annoyed by many parts of it.
An entire room is filled with about 40 screen printed images of Joe Strummer, Tupac, Lou Reed, Ian MacKaye, even, good lord, Henry fucking Rollins. As the ICA explains, “Fairey’s graphic style, which takes celebrity portraits and transforms them into iconic cool, is a perfect fit for the music industry.” There’s nothing to the images. The design is nothing above what you’d see in Spin magazine. Is it an attempted visualization of the “favorite music” section in Fairey’s Myspace profile? Or is he really this low concept?
Another room has as a quote, “I use figures in my work who I feel are used and abused as symbols, but without telling the viewer how to feel about them.” And to be honest, the image of Angela Davis is just that. He illustrates her from a unique angle. It’s a dramatic image, but, while I wrote down in my notebook to praise it, I now can hardly remember what it looks like or why I liked it in the first place. Nor can I whole-heartedly recommend my favorite piece in the show — Commanda. It’s an image of a veiled ambiguously Asian/Persian woman holding a spraycan furtively, with the cap facing forward about to be pressed. It’s nice. It’s clever. It’s kinda like something Banksy would do but with lots of pretty embellishments.
As a political street artist, it’s hard not to compare him with Banksy. But Banksy couldn’t possibly create work as moving as he does without staying well-informed of politics. Fairey’s work makes you wonder if he even quite knows what’s going on in the Middle East or what Guantánamo Bay even is. What Fairey communicates about politics is apathy and a vague directionless feeling of dissent. The ornate details that set him apart may add prettiness but no depth to his work.
I was tempted to title this post “Rubylith without a cause,” because that seems very much like a Shepard Fairey pun. Like his fake currency that says says “No Cents” on it. Or the title of the show: “Supply and Demand.” Is this all a commentary on the recession/international economics/ geopolitical risk? Naw, man.
A gallery assistant played up Fairey’s attention to detail, pointing to how precisely the rubyliths were carved with an X-acto. And that’s about right, Fairey does seem to be a perfectionist. But a workhorse isn’t always a great visionary. And his art mostly deals with politics, the limits to his vision are made obvious.
You can find art right down the hall that combines beauty, ferocious attention to detail, and a clear, eloquent, unmistakable political message: Paul Chan’s 1st light (hands down the ICA’s finest piece in their permanent collection). It’s not like artists can’t be both. While a hardworker and gifted graphic artist, Shepard Fairey’s show is verging on boring.
The Overexamined Life: Finding Bits of Ourselves in Digital Ghost Towns
I lol-ed when I read Emily Gould’s post a few months ago about dreams:
The symbolism in my dreams is usually so obvious and hackneyed it’s ridiculous. Like, if my subconscious was enrolled in a creative writing class its classmates would constantly be making “Oh my god, not again” eye contact with each other behind its back. Example: when I used to (over)work at a publishing house, I had a recurring dream that I was preparing to leave the house in the morning by picking up various of those canvas totebags full of manuscripts by which we can identify low-to-midlevel publishing staffers on the subway. I tried to pick up two ordinary-looking bags and found that I couldn’t — they were so heavy I was unable to lift them. Whoa! Like, what’s that about?
The other evening, after mulling over the music career that never quite happened, I had a dream that I was watching a guitar fall from the back of a pick-up truck from the side of a highway. Cars kept driving over it until it was a wreck of wood and strings.
I’ve been having too many cars-running-over-a-guitar dreams, which is why I haven’t bothered updating my “dream journal” much this month. Well, actually, no, last night I had a dream about that mall in China that is all stores of counterfeit items. But it was a dream I had and lost in the hypnagogic state between the first alarm and snooze reminder.
I never hear people talk about Dream Journal, although it could be catergorized with Mint, Month.ly.info, and Dopplr (which I just joined), as a useful social-stat tracker. (I wish it had an iPhone app.) You enter your dream and the program scans for keywords. Here are some of mine: DOOR – 5 MALE – 5 GIRL – 4 HOUSE – 4 WALKING – 4 WOMAN – 4 TOWN – 3 FRIEND – 3 RUNNING – 3 STAIRCASE – 2 SUN – 2 BASEMENT – 2. Five of the 17 dreams I’ve made public had men in them and four took place in houses, and five involved opening a door. So a typical dream of mine involves walking upstairs in an unidentified house, in an unidentified city, opening the front door, and seeing an unidentified man. On the site, I can click on my frequent key words to see what they may signify:
DOOR The door often represents opportunities, the openings life offers. It can be an opening or realisation of new parts of you, new feelings, or new ideas. It can be a barrier put between yourself and others, yourself and life, yourself and God. The opening or closing of this door represents the movement of your feelings and attitudes. Death is sometimes spoken of as the other door, birth being the first.In some dreams the door, or passing through it indicates the shifting from one situation or perception of life to another.
MALE If the man is someone you know look at what you feel about that person, how you see them and what sort of qualities or weaknesses they have, because they depict your feelings about that person. For instance if I see a male friend as very loving or sexual, then they depict those feelings or qualities in myself.
In a woman’s dream – your dream male depicts the feelings or pains you have about relating to men in general, and about that person in particular. If it is a man you are in relationship with, or want to be, then he illustrates all the difficulties or ease of your feelings and your response to him. In general a man represents your positive outgoing and capable qualities.
In a man’s dream, he will depict some aspect of your own character. What aspect he depicts depends upon how you see him. So define how you would describe his qualities or weaknesses to someone else.
Last year, the Wall Street Journal had an article, The New Examined Life, interviewing people who obsessively document their lives in spreadsheets, graphs, lists, and maps. Nicholas Felton, a graphic designer interviewed for the story, tracked every “New York street he walked and sorted the 632 beers he consumed by country of origin” and included it in his “Feltron Annual Report.”
On this subject, I also recommend This American Life Episode 88: Numbers (which is worth listening to if just to hear the opera singer rap about cowboys,)
But, I haven’t even come to the interesting part of my history with Dream Journal yet (and I’ve had a few too many glasses of wine, so apologies if this is a totally weak transition from one idea to the other. Or for the spelling errors.)
The Dream Journal is something I happened upon while googling my most frequent handle: jomc. Filtering out everything related to UNC’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, I found a whole bunch of bits of my personal history. There’s a gap of four entire years — from May 2004 — until I found it again in September last year. But the themes and concepts of my dreams are still the same.
Perhaps I’m at a similar stage in my life. I know why I gave up the dream journal before — I was moving from four different cities in four months before landing in Chicago. I forgot all about it, but now I’m entering in it again, fairly regularly.
Dreams are typically about fears and insecurities. No one ever has a dream that clearly communicates to oneself: hey, you’re doing an awesome job at life! And to record it is to acknowledge that the fear exists rather than continuing to hide from it.
But, odd about the site, is how many pageviews my dreams receive. Something I entered a week again has about 60 views. Who are they and why do they care? Not that I mind…it’s public. But I type all the information bleary-eyed as soon as I wake up so I won’t forget. And it’s pretty incomprehensible anyway.
I haven’t spent enough time exploring the site or using it for anything other than narcissistic purposes, but i get a hunch it is a thriving community still for those on livejournal (another digital ghost town for some of us.)
There is that process of packing your bags from Friendster to Myspace to Facebook and never looking back, because whatever purpose the previous site had is now exceeded by the newer one. There’s no brand loyalty in social media. When one network gets crowded with too many people too unlike the early developers, they will flock elsewhere.
If I were to log into Friendster today I would see a perfectly preserved document of my life in 2003. The people I was friends with then (most of them, sadly, I’m no longer in touch with) and the inside jokes we shared, not to mention the photos of me at that age. It makes me really want to not log in or log in and destroy it all. That’s almost too many memories worth keeping and for someone who prefers to think about life in the present rather than relive past experiences in my mind, it’s just baggage.
One day I’ll likely look at my Twitter page with the same sense sense. Like that moment in Back to the Future 2 when teenage Elisabeth Shue sees herself as an old married Elisabeth Shue and they say in unison “I’m Old!”/”I’m young!” and they both faint.
But a vague internet memory doesn’t doesn’t even have to be from that long ago. You might to be look around on the web one day, narci-searching and you’ll find you had filled out a profile a few months back.
I can’t find any sort of neuro-scientific study phrased exactly this way, but my theory is, (and I’m sure science already proves it) that online media almost always processes in one’s short term memory. It’s not experienced enough to kick in the cerebellum and the striatum. Your five senses aren’t all at work. I have trouble retaining information I get from books, but it’s nowhere near as difficult as it is for me to remember what I read or saw online. Turning pages slows me down and maybe makes me think about the knowledge I’m acquiring as a stage in a process.
To give another example. Everytime I check some “social media expert” homepage (which isn’t often, and when it happens is usually a mistake) I always see my name right there in the side bar as a “MyBlogLog” visitor: “Joanne McNeil has visited just now!”
One day I actually clicked on my profile to see if I actually filed anything out. I did, and I even joined a group — a group of fans of Coudal Partners. I have no memory of filing out the profile or signing up as a fan of their blog at all. I mean, I read Coudal and I like it–a lot!– but if i were to join a community of blog readers for a certain blog, I can’t say it would crack even my top ten.
But apparently, I did. At some point. One some evening. Maybe drinking alone at my laptop and ignoring a major sporting event like I am now.
Dreamlike art by Anette Harboe Flensburg
Someday Twins Will Rule the World
Since 1980, the number of twins has climbed 75%. I wonder how this is changing elementary school friendship dynamics. Are twins more or less likely to be bullied? Are there non-twin on twin rivalries? My favorite band at the moment — School of Seven Bells — is fronted by twins. By 2030 or so, will they be icons for some future hipster twin subculture? Could a twin ever get elected president?
Right now there is some hrmphing at mothers of twins, as it indicates later age at the birth of the child or using IVF or both. On Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style last year, a mother of twins received a makeover. She was quite horrible and deserving of all the hate from Television Without Pity. But then some comments started mocking her because she had twins. Like it’s something pathetic about her femininity if she needed … help. I hope I don’t need to point out how disgusting and wrong that is. After all, so did Angelina Jolie (probably.) Anyway, I was just thinking about all that as today John Mullan in The Guardian lists the best twins in literature (via.) And then some chilling news in The Telegraph about a village in Brazil where, attributed to Josef Mengele’s experiments, “as many as one in five pregnancies in a small Brazilian town have resulted in twins – most of them blond haired and blue eyed” (via.)
Cell Phone Cameras Forever
It seems like everyone had the same thought I had watching President Obama’s speech at the Inaugural Youth Ball last night. Cell phone cameras!!! Whether or not it’s appropriate, (I see nothing wrong with wanting to document “history”) I found myself wondering if any technology might replace the camera now that it is more essential today than television — and constantly with us. I just can’t imagine a world without cameras, no sci-fi scenario where they are replaced with something else now that they are cheap and omnipresent.
We like to remember people and events as static images, framed in our minds. And we want to remember images from precisely the vantage point where we stood at that place that night. Even knowing a million other people captured the same thing and we can search for it on Flickr, on Tweetpic, on anything really — it’s not the same if we didn’t snap it.
What was distressing was no one put the cameras down. It wasn’t a sneaky thing…take one snapshot and it’s back in the bag. No, most of the people there seemed to be observing it all through their viewfinder, which is, oh my god, the most cliched of cliches in modern life.
But what kind of things don’t we photograph? You don’t take a photo of the bride when the priest is about to pronounce you married. You probably didn’t take a photo (you forgot to, didn’t think of it) during nearly all of your happiest memories. Why would you want to interrupt a blissful moment? Distancing yourself from the action taking place and denying yourself the opportunity to experience it with your full attention?
Image from VentureBeat via Ekstasis, who points out cameras are what lighters used to be. Clayton Cubbitt quotes A Clockwork Orange, “It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen.”
It made me think of an Aldous Huxley essay:
The saddest sight I ever saw was in a Montmartre boite at about 5 o’clock of an autumn morning. At a table in the corner of a hall sat three young American girls, quite unattended, adverturously seeing life for themselves. In front of them, on the table, stood the regulation bottle of champagne; but for preference – perhaps on principle – they were sipping lemonade. The jazz band played on monotonously; the tired drummer nodded on his drums; the saxaphonist yawned into his saxaphone. In couples, in staggering groups, the guests departed. But grimly, indominably, in spite of their fatigue, in spite of the boredom which so clearly expressed itself on their charming and ingenous faces, the three young girls sat on. They were still there when I left at sunrise. What stories I reflected, they would tell when they got home again! And how envious they would make their untravelled friends. “Paris is just wonderful…”
Cameras remind us to feel something, when perhaps we aren’t as much as we would like to be.
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