A guy at work has been going through episodes of The Man from UNCLE and convinced me that it was worth trying out. I don't remember ever having seen it before - far too young during the original run and while it almost certainly was syndicated either it didn't show in my area or I skipped it. So from Netflix comes a disc with the first three episodes.
* Illya only very briefly appears in the first two episodes with Solo instead going solo. Turns out that there was originally some idea that the series would focus only on Solo, probably one reason the show's title is singular. In this incarnation it's very Bond-ish though apparently it got campier later on.
* The whole thing is very much b-movie level though mostly with a little bit of style rather than a point-shoot approach. Richard Donner directs two of the episodes and though he never became a director of any note he at least was professional. There's often some low-angle shots, a few in near darkness (which must have been hard to see on 1964 TV sets), takes are fairly short, there's some efficient framing, etc.
* Still, the third episode breaks down on the script level with all sorts of nonsensical jumps and characters acting much dimmer than they should. The quickness of shooting becomes apparent in a few mistmatches. Most notable is a scene where Solo & Illya have landed in a helicopter only to be stopped seconds later by a partisan/smuggler - he clearly would have been visible and right next to them but Donner resolves this by simply having him walk around from behind the camera where he was supposedly not seen.
* The b-movie serial-chapter feel reminded me of Alias though clearly it's true of almost all episodic TV dramas. I've only seen two episodes of CSI (both in the Miami branch) but all these procedurals are clearly b-movie equivalents.
* It's odd to see the shapely UNCLE assistant whose sole function appears to be eyecandy - Solo openly leers at her a couple of times. Even in the story she actually sits in a bikini under a sun lamp while at work!
* And why is UNCLE headquarters "hidden" in a small NYC laundry? The very first episode shows that the bad guys know exactly where it is and the civilians that Solo meets have read about UNCLE so it's not highly secret. I know this looks cool and is probably better than them just showing up at, say, the Baxter Building for work but really the neighbors would have to notice all the activity every single day in such a tiny business.
* The guest stars are I suppose another attraction to the show. These episodes have Slim Pickens (Dr Strangelove opened that January), Anne Francis (Honey West would be the following year) and Jill Ireland (who was married to David McCallum). Variety and the ever-popular star appeal are operative though Ireland is completely wooden.
* I think this disc was as much as I need to see.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Nine Years & Counting
Well I missed the anniversary earlier this month but hard to believe this has been going nine years. In that time I've worked like a dog and done about fifty posts - a bimonthly blog posting schedule is just grueling. In the next nine years I'm hoping to have sixty posts done. Can always dream.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
The Imperfectionists
The title page of Tom Rachman's 2010 The Imperfectionists states "a novel" though this seems more like the work of a marketing person who realizes, or at least has heard the conventional wisdom, that short story collections don't sell than the work of, say, an author who's written an actual novel. Genre designations are in some sense irrelevant but the "novel" claim raises expectations or hopes or even a reading mode that there will be more connection or sum-greater-than-parts result. In the end we're left with several stories that sometimes mention characters from another and sometimes reference an event from another story but never to build - clip those out to make a pure short story collection and the result would have been almost identical.
Still, the book is entertaining, if that's the right word for a series of examinations of loneliness. In this, Rachman is helped by starting-writer clumsiness and a general heavy-handed approach to almost everything - a more subtle or experienced writer doing this wouldn't have been entertaining so much as depressing. Just take the story of an unambitious obituary writer in dead-end job who then interviews somebody who gives a philosophical digression on death but unexpectedly he has a death in his family only to create a new life out of the crash. So far ok I suppose and my synopsis did pile it on a bit thick (though didn't distort). The catch is when the obituary writer pulls an underhanded scheme to replace his boss - we've been shown how mean, even cruel, the boss is and how incompetent so apparently readers are intended to feel accepting of the scheme.
That's hardly the stuff of serious writing and Rachman doesn't stop there. Another story features a lonely woman who eventually falls for a sloppy, careless man who steals from her (maybe - the story is a tad vague, probably unintentionally) but stays with him. Rachman has the woman state outright how lonely she is even though he's already shown her alone in her apartment or ignored by waiters in favor of her "buxom" friend. There's no need to underline the motive but that's Rachman's approach. Other stories are similar and the final story in fact just falls apart. The protagonist comes across as mentally deficient though I really doubt that was the intention, we're asked to believe that his grandfather's private letters have been easily available in a desk for over four decades, that nobody at the newspaper realized it was about to close (and these are mostly reporters!), that one of them would be angry enough to kill a dog and finally that it's even possible to easily "snap" a large dog's neck. It's one of those pieces that feels misjudged all the way through.
Rachman sets the book in Rome but apart from names of streets and food there's almost nothing actually about Rome (which I heard somewhere is not a boring city) or about how foreigners would live in the city or negotiate the culture. Even the Italians who appear don't seem any different than the Americans who mostly are the other characters. He also puts his characters in an English-language newspaper and does get a bit more mileage out of that than Rome but the stories generally have little to do with work or even with the people being together at work. The book could have been moved to a shipping firm in Oakland and probably would have needed little change.
I realize all this is mostly a contemporary approach to the short story - avoid description, give us some moment of clarity (or at least a twist), keep it tight, focus on character. Which may not have been the best idea since Rachman adds his own faults (including a weakness for Big Themes and a peculiar idea to use present tense) to this often bland style when really a more novelistic book with digressions and smells and odd etiquette and journalist habits and other real bugs in the imaginary garden would have been so much more interesting even if it really wasn't any better.
(For what it's worth the OED has no listing for "imperfectionist".)
Still, the book is entertaining, if that's the right word for a series of examinations of loneliness. In this, Rachman is helped by starting-writer clumsiness and a general heavy-handed approach to almost everything - a more subtle or experienced writer doing this wouldn't have been entertaining so much as depressing. Just take the story of an unambitious obituary writer in dead-end job who then interviews somebody who gives a philosophical digression on death but unexpectedly he has a death in his family only to create a new life out of the crash. So far ok I suppose and my synopsis did pile it on a bit thick (though didn't distort). The catch is when the obituary writer pulls an underhanded scheme to replace his boss - we've been shown how mean, even cruel, the boss is and how incompetent so apparently readers are intended to feel accepting of the scheme.
That's hardly the stuff of serious writing and Rachman doesn't stop there. Another story features a lonely woman who eventually falls for a sloppy, careless man who steals from her (maybe - the story is a tad vague, probably unintentionally) but stays with him. Rachman has the woman state outright how lonely she is even though he's already shown her alone in her apartment or ignored by waiters in favor of her "buxom" friend. There's no need to underline the motive but that's Rachman's approach. Other stories are similar and the final story in fact just falls apart. The protagonist comes across as mentally deficient though I really doubt that was the intention, we're asked to believe that his grandfather's private letters have been easily available in a desk for over four decades, that nobody at the newspaper realized it was about to close (and these are mostly reporters!), that one of them would be angry enough to kill a dog and finally that it's even possible to easily "snap" a large dog's neck. It's one of those pieces that feels misjudged all the way through.
Rachman sets the book in Rome but apart from names of streets and food there's almost nothing actually about Rome (which I heard somewhere is not a boring city) or about how foreigners would live in the city or negotiate the culture. Even the Italians who appear don't seem any different than the Americans who mostly are the other characters. He also puts his characters in an English-language newspaper and does get a bit more mileage out of that than Rome but the stories generally have little to do with work or even with the people being together at work. The book could have been moved to a shipping firm in Oakland and probably would have needed little change.
I realize all this is mostly a contemporary approach to the short story - avoid description, give us some moment of clarity (or at least a twist), keep it tight, focus on character. Which may not have been the best idea since Rachman adds his own faults (including a weakness for Big Themes and a peculiar idea to use present tense) to this often bland style when really a more novelistic book with digressions and smells and odd etiquette and journalist habits and other real bugs in the imaginary garden would have been so much more interesting even if it really wasn't any better.
(For what it's worth the OED has no listing for "imperfectionist".)
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Last two years of Grant Morrison's comics in one sentence
A bit long to quote so just go to http://www.newsarama.com/comics/11-comic-deaths-didnt-stick-110126.html and the Batman entry.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy 2010)
I'd read very little about Exit Through the Gift Shop (which opens with "A Banksy Film" but otherwise has no credited director though everybody seems to be assigning that to Banksy). So perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that the film wasn't really what I expected since such expectations after all were based on almost nothing. Somehow I had the impression that it plays with "reality" and documentary form and would fit in with F for Fake, some of Kiarostami or Herzog's work, or even on a different track James Benning or Waking Life. In short I didn't expect what is almost an A&E Biography-styled narrative though to be fair some of this (such as the portentous voice-over) seems to be tongue-in-cheek.
Looking up reviews afterwards what I'd picked up is the idea that some of the film might be a hoax, something that pretty much every reviewer does (even me). As Andrew O'Hehir at Salon aptly put it, "One can only wish the New York Times had viewed the Bush administration's call to war with half the caution with which it has approached Exit Through the Gift Shop, the new documentary made (or presided over, or something) by the mysterious British street artist Banksy." Much of the events in the film can be verified independently so most reviewers tend to answer eventually with a shrug and comment that what's real doesn't much matter because after all that's the point.
But at least some of it does matter. If the Sotheby's auctions for instance are staged then some of the target of art world commercialism is manipulated too much to be effective. If that's really not Banksy talking then can we assume he's speaking Banksy's opinions? There are some oddities within the film. Much of the first half is Guetta's tapes of street artists but at one point there's a shot of him in action so who made that? If Guetta wasn't yet involved who filmed Banksy at the West Bank when he claimed they weren't documenting his work? Though filmed over a decade the people don't always seem to change that much. Why does Banksy become so definite about how bad Mr Brainwash is? Why does he knock Guetta's original film when he would be more likely to applaud something unconventional? For that matter the DVD includes a 15-minute "lawyer's edit" of the original that seems suspiciously like this was only made to be included in Exit itself.
In a way none of this matters. It would have been simple for another person to be taping; somebody familiar with the area remarked that one of the decade-old shots must be that old since it doesn't show some recent buildings; etc. The entire thing could be completely legit but what seems plausible (though "likely" is hard to judge) is that Brainwash was actually a Banksy et al project so Exit is more or less documenting a hoax without itself being a hoax (if such a distinction is possible).
So having written all this I suppose Exit does in some way play with the idea of what is real though it's notable that this only comes from extra-textual information. Watching the film there's no tip-off even if moments do feel a bit out of place or staged but then documentaries have been doing that as long as there have been documentaries. What to me is more problematic is the subject. The street artists are mostly of minor interest, more on the level of craft than art. Really, thousands of images of Andre the Giant's face with the word "obey"? Gosh that's really sticking it to our consumerist society! This may be why the film's interviewees continually mention how subversive this is but only once notes that by the time the film opens this stuff was about two decades old. Banksy turns out to be something almost completely different - imaginative, inventive, sometimes ambiguous and often with what can only be described as a real aesthetic charge. (In fact it wouldn't be too surprising if "Banksy" turned out eventually to be a collective name rather than an individual's.) Which is yet another reason the film's final half hour focusing on the sub-Warhol Brainwash and done in reality show will-he-succeed-or-not mode becomes so tedious.
It's a commonplace idea that today we're in a society of images and shifting realities so maybe that's why so many reviewers are interpreting Exit as being somehow about those processes. But if so the film is fairly toothless. The quote that's often included in reviews comes near the end: "At the same time, the joke's on.... Well, I'm not sure who the joke's on. I'm not even sure there is a joke." This is presented as an insight but I feel it should be taken at face value - there's just not as much here as most of us would have liked to see.
Looking up reviews afterwards what I'd picked up is the idea that some of the film might be a hoax, something that pretty much every reviewer does (even me). As Andrew O'Hehir at Salon aptly put it, "One can only wish the New York Times had viewed the Bush administration's call to war with half the caution with which it has approached Exit Through the Gift Shop, the new documentary made (or presided over, or something) by the mysterious British street artist Banksy." Much of the events in the film can be verified independently so most reviewers tend to answer eventually with a shrug and comment that what's real doesn't much matter because after all that's the point.
But at least some of it does matter. If the Sotheby's auctions for instance are staged then some of the target of art world commercialism is manipulated too much to be effective. If that's really not Banksy talking then can we assume he's speaking Banksy's opinions? There are some oddities within the film. Much of the first half is Guetta's tapes of street artists but at one point there's a shot of him in action so who made that? If Guetta wasn't yet involved who filmed Banksy at the West Bank when he claimed they weren't documenting his work? Though filmed over a decade the people don't always seem to change that much. Why does Banksy become so definite about how bad Mr Brainwash is? Why does he knock Guetta's original film when he would be more likely to applaud something unconventional? For that matter the DVD includes a 15-minute "lawyer's edit" of the original that seems suspiciously like this was only made to be included in Exit itself.
In a way none of this matters. It would have been simple for another person to be taping; somebody familiar with the area remarked that one of the decade-old shots must be that old since it doesn't show some recent buildings; etc. The entire thing could be completely legit but what seems plausible (though "likely" is hard to judge) is that Brainwash was actually a Banksy et al project so Exit is more or less documenting a hoax without itself being a hoax (if such a distinction is possible).
So having written all this I suppose Exit does in some way play with the idea of what is real though it's notable that this only comes from extra-textual information. Watching the film there's no tip-off even if moments do feel a bit out of place or staged but then documentaries have been doing that as long as there have been documentaries. What to me is more problematic is the subject. The street artists are mostly of minor interest, more on the level of craft than art. Really, thousands of images of Andre the Giant's face with the word "obey"? Gosh that's really sticking it to our consumerist society! This may be why the film's interviewees continually mention how subversive this is but only once notes that by the time the film opens this stuff was about two decades old. Banksy turns out to be something almost completely different - imaginative, inventive, sometimes ambiguous and often with what can only be described as a real aesthetic charge. (In fact it wouldn't be too surprising if "Banksy" turned out eventually to be a collective name rather than an individual's.) Which is yet another reason the film's final half hour focusing on the sub-Warhol Brainwash and done in reality show will-he-succeed-or-not mode becomes so tedious.
It's a commonplace idea that today we're in a society of images and shifting realities so maybe that's why so many reviewers are interpreting Exit as being somehow about those processes. But if so the film is fairly toothless. The quote that's often included in reviews comes near the end: "At the same time, the joke's on.... Well, I'm not sure who the joke's on. I'm not even sure there is a joke." This is presented as an insight but I feel it should be taken at face value - there's just not as much here as most of us would have liked to see.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
recent viewing
Jonah Hex (Jimmy Hayward 2010) - When I first heard a Jonah Hex film was being made I thought it's about time. There's potential, a huge backlog of stories and Hex could appeal to a post-Deadwood audience. There wouldn't need to be any updating or revision - in fact Hex would make a great TV series and could fit onto either network or cable. Still, my expectations weren't too high and the result is far below that. The entire thing is basically an episode of The Wild Wild West (even down to Lance Reddick in a too-brief Artemus Gordon role and an appearance by President Grant) with a hint of Django-ish spaghetti Western thrown in. (The machine guns and coffin seem almost like Django references but I wouldn't be surprised if nobody connected with Jonah Hex had seen that film.) Hex is given a supernatural ability that's not in the comics (as far as I know anyway - there are a lot of comics) and since this ability really just fills in a couple of plot points that could easily have been done more realistically I suspect this is a holdover from an earlier script. In fact with that, a running time of 81 minutes, Megan Fox in an almost non-existant role, mishmashed generic Indians and some oddities about setting (the film is mostly in Virginia and South Carolina but one bad guy heads out the door and is in the Southwest) I further suspect that the whole thing was cobbled together from several scripts and then had possibly some severe post-filming trims. The filmmakers go out of their way to explain that Hex was a "good" Confederate who didn't support slavery, anachronistically refer to terrorists and in a film about the US Centennial omit any mention of the other big news event of the day - Custer's defeat. Then again at least the whole thing is short. Oh and did I mention the scene where a wounded Hex is rescued by his dog running to get help Lassie-style?
Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (Shawn Levy 2009) - So since I claimed the original was horrible why would I watch the sequel? Mainly the result of being at my parents' during the holidays and nothing else was on. As it turns out the sequel is actually fairly amusing. And by "fairly amusing" I mean in a nothing-else-was-on-cable way. Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon are still onboard as writers and this time even get small cameos but the film mostly works due to fast pacing, a lot of stuff happening, Amy Adams spouting faux 30s slang and Hank Azaria delivering what is nearly a one-man comedy show proving he should be in nearly every film that comes out.
Cop Out (Kevin Smith 2010) - Why was this not on my Hollywood-can't-make-comedies-anymore post? Merciful amnesia is the most likely explanation. I believe this is Smith's first film as director where he didn't also write (though a couple of out-of-place raunch-humor scenes suggest he tried to add his mark). Apparently the idea was to make a tribute/parody/recreation/something of 80s cop films along Beverly Hills Cop lines, even to the point of recruiting Harold Faltermeyer for the music (at least when 20+ year-old-songs aren't being blasted at us). And no, I have no idea why anybody would want to do that. The story is confusing, the jokes thud, Tracy Morgan is almost unwatchable, the pacing limps. Only the indestructible Bruce Willis and goofy Seann William Scott have any kind of dignity or grace.
The Librarian: Quest for the Spear (Peter Winther 2004) - Another why-did-he-watch-this film? Well, io9 had a piece about heroic librarians that made this sound like it might be interesting. Nope. The writers seem to have been going on automatic and be competely unfamiliar with any similar work (maybe because it's fantasy and only geeks do those?). So there's no explanation of what the library really is or who is intended to use it (actually it's far closer to an archive), a peculiar one-librarian-at-a-time backstory that doesn't really make much sense, mostly very obvious mythological references, etc. And you have to wonder if this is all so secret then what about the security guards or if the library houses such powerful artifacts then why don't they prevent the robbery and why an inexperienced librarian for an obviously powerful organization only gets one assistant and so forth. The script is executed in a fairly stodgy TV-movie style and appears to have been shot mostly in front of greenscreens. Bob Newhart and Jane Curtin should have been more prominent.
Unstoppable (Tony Scott 2010) - A b-movie pumped up with a-level money and talent which seems mostly a waste from the finished work. I saw 1985's Runaway Train (partly based on a Kurosawa script apparently) so long ago that I don't remember much about it but I'd be surprised if Unstoppable is any improvement. There's a little bit of human interest backstory thrown in like the writer learned from a how-to book but I doubt anybody would miss that if it was gone. It's nice to see an action film that doesn't have guns since usually the kind of situations that would fit that tend to be absorbed into disaster films or adventures. The oddest thing in fact about Unstoppable is that the government agency man is presented as quite competant and smart - this time it's the slimy business people that do the bad things.
Tangled (Nathan Greno & Byron Howard 2010) - Another in the default mode of high-profile kids movies - injokes for the grownups, plenty of parodies, smart ass attitude, celeb voices. (There's an entire other world of low-budget kids films that hardly anybody without children sees - I probably haven't since my niece and nephew got old enough that these didn't interest them any more.) Tangled is completely in that trend but even so it still seems a bit slight, almost feels like there's not enough story. As it is the filmmakers have enough trouble balancing the fairy tale aspect (where it makes sense that Rapunzel would never have stepped out of the tower or a land full of smugglers, soldiers and hunters wouldn't know about the tower anyway) with more current narrative expectations. Trying to update it makes you question the fairy tale part, at least in the way it's done here. Alan Menken supplies the music and why couldn't they have found somebody else? It's not like the country isn't crawling with fine songwriters. Imagine what Stephin Merritt could have done.
Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (Shawn Levy 2009) - So since I claimed the original was horrible why would I watch the sequel? Mainly the result of being at my parents' during the holidays and nothing else was on. As it turns out the sequel is actually fairly amusing. And by "fairly amusing" I mean in a nothing-else-was-on-cable way. Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon are still onboard as writers and this time even get small cameos but the film mostly works due to fast pacing, a lot of stuff happening, Amy Adams spouting faux 30s slang and Hank Azaria delivering what is nearly a one-man comedy show proving he should be in nearly every film that comes out.
Cop Out (Kevin Smith 2010) - Why was this not on my Hollywood-can't-make-comedies-anymore post? Merciful amnesia is the most likely explanation. I believe this is Smith's first film as director where he didn't also write (though a couple of out-of-place raunch-humor scenes suggest he tried to add his mark). Apparently the idea was to make a tribute/parody/recreation/something of 80s cop films along Beverly Hills Cop lines, even to the point of recruiting Harold Faltermeyer for the music (at least when 20+ year-old-songs aren't being blasted at us). And no, I have no idea why anybody would want to do that. The story is confusing, the jokes thud, Tracy Morgan is almost unwatchable, the pacing limps. Only the indestructible Bruce Willis and goofy Seann William Scott have any kind of dignity or grace.
The Librarian: Quest for the Spear (Peter Winther 2004) - Another why-did-he-watch-this film? Well, io9 had a piece about heroic librarians that made this sound like it might be interesting. Nope. The writers seem to have been going on automatic and be competely unfamiliar with any similar work (maybe because it's fantasy and only geeks do those?). So there's no explanation of what the library really is or who is intended to use it (actually it's far closer to an archive), a peculiar one-librarian-at-a-time backstory that doesn't really make much sense, mostly very obvious mythological references, etc. And you have to wonder if this is all so secret then what about the security guards or if the library houses such powerful artifacts then why don't they prevent the robbery and why an inexperienced librarian for an obviously powerful organization only gets one assistant and so forth. The script is executed in a fairly stodgy TV-movie style and appears to have been shot mostly in front of greenscreens. Bob Newhart and Jane Curtin should have been more prominent.
Unstoppable (Tony Scott 2010) - A b-movie pumped up with a-level money and talent which seems mostly a waste from the finished work. I saw 1985's Runaway Train (partly based on a Kurosawa script apparently) so long ago that I don't remember much about it but I'd be surprised if Unstoppable is any improvement. There's a little bit of human interest backstory thrown in like the writer learned from a how-to book but I doubt anybody would miss that if it was gone. It's nice to see an action film that doesn't have guns since usually the kind of situations that would fit that tend to be absorbed into disaster films or adventures. The oddest thing in fact about Unstoppable is that the government agency man is presented as quite competant and smart - this time it's the slimy business people that do the bad things.
Tangled (Nathan Greno & Byron Howard 2010) - Another in the default mode of high-profile kids movies - injokes for the grownups, plenty of parodies, smart ass attitude, celeb voices. (There's an entire other world of low-budget kids films that hardly anybody without children sees - I probably haven't since my niece and nephew got old enough that these didn't interest them any more.) Tangled is completely in that trend but even so it still seems a bit slight, almost feels like there's not enough story. As it is the filmmakers have enough trouble balancing the fairy tale aspect (where it makes sense that Rapunzel would never have stepped out of the tower or a land full of smugglers, soldiers and hunters wouldn't know about the tower anyway) with more current narrative expectations. Trying to update it makes you question the fairy tale part, at least in the way it's done here. Alan Menken supplies the music and why couldn't they have found somebody else? It's not like the country isn't crawling with fine songwriters. Imagine what Stephin Merritt could have done.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
The future of music?
Ann Powers has a new piece about music's "whole new way of doing business" but it's one of those think pieces newspapers generate that extrapolate wildly from a small sample. After all whether the writer is fer it or agin it they have to make it big to attract readers (the arts section version of if-it-bleeds). Doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong - for all I know fluid remixes and unstable musical configurations are where we're heading. But as usual with these pieces Powers is overestimating both the changes and the potential audience for what's happening. After all up until recordings achieved dominance over radio and sheet music (and to some extent live performance) after WW2 music was always in a state of "remix" and process. Classical is constantly an arena of interpretation, folk music a mirror maze of variations and pop itself dealt in multiple versions for decades. (That's one reason the older pop covers of rock, such as Pat Boone's Little Richard, are usually misinterpreted - they were dealing with rock as with any other trend only to have the ground rules changed so much that future listeners incorrectly thought this was bandwagon-jumping.) Some of the changes listed in the piece seem a bit odd. After all whether music was made on an iPad or a laptop or a desktop makes pretty much no difference unlike her example of an electric solid-body guitar which doesn't sound the same. But there are numerous other instances - artist-run labels from the 1950s onward (Mingus is the earliest I've been able to find), fan-only releases (even the Beatles did this), Throbbing Gristle releasing recordings of every live show they did, countless limited-editions, white-label and anonymous techno/electronica, punk one-offs, disco 12-inches, and so forth. I even got Chumbawamba's early albums years ago by sending a blank cassette and a stamped, self-addressed envelope to a guy in NYC who'd duplicate and send it back - a completely authorized alternative distribution system (which is why I was sure I'd misunderstood the name when a radio announcer on a commercial station played what turned out to be their only hit).
Still, the piece is right that it's great to see experiments but as Milton Babbitt might have remarked who's listening? I'm not aware of anybody I know tracking any of this stuff down not even the Gaiman fans or the college students where I work. (And Powers' labelling Gaiman "process art"? He's not Alvin Lucier.) That's where I think the grand claims in the piece fall apart but we'll have to wait another decade or so to know for sure. Really, most people are going to hear something on the radio or that a friend sent then go to iTunes to get it. Most of these experiments aren't even intended for the mass audience (well possibly Radiohead's pay-as-you-please album might have been) but are for the fans, obsessives and, well, critics.
The bigger question that the piece wisely only hints at is how all this distribution flux will actually affect the music. I can imagine somebody downloading that new MIA mixtape because they've heard good things about her (and maybe an earlier song or two) and then deciding she's way overrated (because the release is clearly a throwaway). And those early Kanye mixes didn't seem to have any effect on the final release which I can't imagine would have been any different whether they were put out or not. But who knows maybe this will create the listeners for rougher or less "finished" pieces or a taste for more inventive music. But I doubt it.
Still, the piece is right that it's great to see experiments but as Milton Babbitt might have remarked who's listening? I'm not aware of anybody I know tracking any of this stuff down not even the Gaiman fans or the college students where I work. (And Powers' labelling Gaiman "process art"? He's not Alvin Lucier.) That's where I think the grand claims in the piece fall apart but we'll have to wait another decade or so to know for sure. Really, most people are going to hear something on the radio or that a friend sent then go to iTunes to get it. Most of these experiments aren't even intended for the mass audience (well possibly Radiohead's pay-as-you-please album might have been) but are for the fans, obsessives and, well, critics.
The bigger question that the piece wisely only hints at is how all this distribution flux will actually affect the music. I can imagine somebody downloading that new MIA mixtape because they've heard good things about her (and maybe an earlier song or two) and then deciding she's way overrated (because the release is clearly a throwaway). And those early Kanye mixes didn't seem to have any effect on the final release which I can't imagine would have been any different whether they were put out or not. But who knows maybe this will create the listeners for rougher or less "finished" pieces or a taste for more inventive music. But I doubt it.
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