obsession

It's of course fitting that Terry Gilliam's adaptation of Cervantes' masterpiece, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, is a rolling disaster. It was immortalized in the documentary Lost in La Mancha -- essential viewing for anyone who has produced a play or film -- but beware, it's our version of a horror film. It looks like we might need a sequel:

Terry Gilliam has said his latest attempt to make a film about Don Quixote has stalled after his financial backers pulled out.

The director told Variety magazine that financing for his take on the Spanish knight-errant "collapsed about a month and a half ago".

His film, in the making for more than a decade, has been beset by problems.

By the time the book closes on Gilliam's career, it will stand as a parable for the many hazards of film making: loss of creative control (Brazil), tragic acts of God (Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus), and the pitfalls of chasing one's obsession (Don Quixote).

The danger of producing a work that obsesses you is that, if you're honest, you don't really know -- you can't know -- if your end product is any good. Obsession necessarily shuts out actual perception: you have an idea of what the final product is already going to be like (otherwise why would you be obsessed?). When you a chase an idea that passionately, you condemn yourself to never actually consummating the project, since you'll be chasing just the idea of it all your days.

It feels like this, right, TG?

This is not the finger-wagging of a pedant, but the lament of a fellow-sufferer. But good luck, fellow obsessives, everywhere.

pretty obvious answer

In their recap of an interview with author Daniel Pink, the CS Monitor asks:

Author Daniel Pink argues that once you have "enough" money, it's not much of a motivator to work harder. So why do wealthy entrepreneurs keep starting new businesses?

Because sufferers of unfettered avarice and megalomania are too obsessed to bother with counting their money.

short memories

I grew up hearing tales of great-grandparents who, having lived through the Great Depression, behaved in anachronistically austere behavior that during my parents' childhoods (the full-bellied Fifties) and my adolescence (the swinging Nineties) seemed bizarre -- scraping the wrapping paper on sticks of butter, etc -- but it seems the memory cycle has tightened considerably.

A case in point: why would anyone, anyone, who has lived through the past three years give this quote to a newspaper reporter:

“We have had enough artificial support and need to let the free market do its thing,” said the housing analyst Ivy Zelman.

Yup. "Experts" are saying that -- with unemployment at 10% and the economy turning towards a double-dip recession -- the problem with housing prices is that the government is simply doing too much.

Having just survived a failed attempt to be a homeowner myself, these articles fill me with terror; if, as it seems many argue, the Obama Administration has run out of tools in its toolbox to prop up house prices, that doesn't necessarily mean that some laissez-faire hegemony returns by default, does it? We've been here before. But, oops, I guess that was too long ago to remember in the internet age:

As the economy again sputters and potential buyers flee — July housing sales sank 26 percent from July 2009 — there is a growing sense of exhaustion with government intervention. Some economists and analysts are now urging a dose of shock therapy that would greatly shift the benefits to future homeowners: Let the housing market crash.

Guys. Seriously. You're not even changing the terminology?

While I support (most of) President Obama's policies, it has become clear that he has continued many of President Bush's initiatives in everything but name -- especially the conduct of the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the human rights abuses perpetuated in our name in extra-legal detention centers around the world. But while he has abandoned the eye-rolling terminology of George W. Bush's ownership society, the Obama Administration's efforts to prevent mortgage defaults at all costs is the same desperate attempt to prop up unsustainable levels of consumption.

Which begs the question -- which bothered me the entire time I was failing spectacularly to purchase property -- if home ownership is the hallmark of stability that everyone seems to think it is, why would messing around with tax credits of $6,000 to $8,000 (a fraction of a home's purchase price) create such earthquakes? Could it be that it's a concept based on a fallacy? Like the ownership society? Like capitalism?

(Seriously, just read Naomi Klein.)

let there be light

It's hard to see the bigger picture inside a violent disruption of the status quo, but it's still entertaining to watch newspapers discover the concept of audience feedback, as the New York Times did on Monday:

In most businesses, not knowing how well a particular product is performing would be almost unthinkable. But newspapers have always been a peculiar business, one that has stubbornly, proudly clung to a sense that focusing too much on the bottom line can lead nowhere good.

Now, because of technology that can pinpoint what people online are viewing and commenting on, how much time they spend with an article and even how much money an article makes in advertising revenue, newspapers can make more scientific decisions about allocating their ever scarcer resources.

Throughout the Times piece, the ability to track a published article's popularity and audience is couched in careful terms stressing it's benefits, instead of being seen as an unqualified technological advance. Hewing too closely to audience feedback is pooh-poohed as some sort of degenerate rabble-rousing:

The New York Times does not use Web metrics to determine how articles are presented, but it does use them to make strategic decisions about its online report, said Bill Keller, the executive editor. “We don’t let metrics dictate our assignments and play,” he said, “because we believe readers come to us for our judgment, not the judgment of the crowd. We’re not ‘American Idol.’ ”

Instead of being a flawed (or, if not flawed, at the very least limited) business model, the era when newspapers didn't know (or care?) what interested their readers is held up as some sort of halcyon ideal:

Looking to the public for insight on how to cover a topic is never comfortable for newsrooms, which have the deeply held belief that readers come to a newspaper not only for its information but also for its editorial judgment.

A couple items for your brilliant editorial judgement scrapbook, Times:

(And what the hell, let's obey the rule of threes.)

Thank goodness the Wall Street Journal's Alan Murray has the right question:

How can you say you don’t care what your customers think?

How, indeed? It's something Michael Roderick over at One Producer in the City noted well:

If you haven't ever asked your customers to give you feedback, it's like trying to catch fish with your [b]are hands.

Working in theater, audience feedback isn't an abstraction or some violation of principle, it's our very lifeblood. Some generic newspaper's principled stand against knowing what their readers think when  technology makes it possible is incomprehensible, and baldly suicidal.

But this obligation works both ways.

While there are raw numbers of site traffic and counting clicks, the article tracks more advanced news organizations that rely more and more on readers to answer surveys filling out their demographic picture. I'm one of those annoying minorities who refuse to answer questions about my race -- now that content providers pointedly ask for this information, is my tetchy obstinacy contributing in some part to unrepresentative media? Much as I resent it, media companies wouldn't even be asking the color of my skin ten or twenty years ago.

what you do with bullies

Last month, Michael Ian Black logged his exchange with what we're (I guess) now calling Tea-Party fellow-travelers:

Last night, as I was talking about how much I love the president (because I do), somebody yelled out “Heil Hitler.”

Heil Hitler?

My immediate reaction was to crumple to the floor, which I did. I don’t know why, except that it seemed to me in that moment that the show had now gone south very quickly, and if bottles were going to be thrown, I didn’t want to get hit.

But then I stood up and asked the person (shrouded in darkness, as people who scream “Heil Hitler” often are) why he yelled that, thinking maybe he thought it was funny in some obtuse way, like maybe he though shouting that would be interpreted as clever satire. Or maybe he was being ironic. Grasping, I know, but I honestly had no idea why somebody would yell that outside of a Klan rally.

But I am still being polite.

The guy in the dark says, “Because when you say you like Obama, that’s the same thing to me as saying ‘Heil Hitler.’”

The audience, predictably, starts booing. I ask them to please calm down, that I will handle this in a mature way. While I am saying this to the audience, I am thinking, How do I possibly handle this in a mature way.

So the audience settles down, and I turn to the gentleman and say, “Sir, I say with this all due respect - you are a fucking moron.”

And then I kind of lost my shit.

How, precisely, MIB lost his shit is worth reading through, but he ends his post with an apology to the anonymous heckler for losing his shit, with qualifications:

There was no reason to meet your idiocy with my own, even though you are a fucking moron.

That, in turn, brings to mind Shoutey McGlasserson's cogent rebuttal to opponents of the Islamic Community Center in Lower Manhattan. (Yeah, we're not calling it the G****d Z**o M****e, because it's not. Here are other things it's not: a dirigible tethering station; a BP oil derrick; an ice skating rink.)

The take-away here, aside from the helpful neighborhood context, is that "this is America, dammit" and banning houses of worship isn't really how we roll.

Which brings us to today's news that the Justice Department has taken "America's Toughest Sheriff" Joe Arpaio to court for his enthusiastic enforcement of the Nuremberg Laws not cooperating with an investigation into his enthusiastic enforcement of Nuremberg-like Laws. What sayeth thou, Grey Lady?

Obama administration officials called the suit the first time in 30 years that the federal government had to sue to compel a law enforcement agency to cooperate with an investigation concerning Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

“The actions of the sheriff’s office are unprecedented,” Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for the department’s civil rights division, said in a statement. “It is unfortunate that the department was forced to resort to litigation to gain access to public documents and facilities.”

At a news conference on Thursday, Sheriff Arpaio said he was surprised by the lawsuit since he thought his lawyers and those of the government had been close to an agreement. “I’m not going to be intimidated by the federal government going to court against us,” he said.

[...]

The Justice Department issued 51 requests for documents, most of which Sheriff Arpaio’s department ignored, as well as asking for tours of department facilities and interviews with commanders, staff members and inmates.

Sheriff Arpaio, who has denied that he engages in racial profiling, has remained defiant of the government’s investigation. His lawyers have repeatedly refused to provide the documents sought by the Justice Department or provide unfettered access to its facilities.

“It is ironic that the very sheriff who regularly demands that others turn over their papers has refused to turn over his papers,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, which has been critical of Sheriff Arpaio.

(Snip snap.)

The bigger point is, just like Olbermann says above, when people are being idiots, it's your stand up and call them out on it. And hopefully not just in comedy clubs.

from the minds of others

While there must be an element of schadenfreude in watching the self-aggrandizing and over-hyped get taken down a peg, there's an interesting nugget buried inside the Guardian (UK)'s summary of new plagiarism allegations being leveled against blowhard and animal-cadaver-defiler Damien Hirst. First, the basic rundown:

While Hirst has previously faced accusations that works including his diamond skull came from the imagination of other artists, the new allegations include his "crucified sheep", medicine cabinets, spin paintings, spot paintings, installation of a ball on an air-jet, his anatomical figure and his cancer cell images.

Charles Thomson, the artist and co-founder of the Stuckists, a group campaigning for traditional artistry, collated the number of plagiarism claims relating to Hirst's work for the latest issue of the Jackdaw art magazine.

Now the money quote. Quoth Thompson:

"Hirst puts himself forward as a great artist, but a lot of his work exists only because other artists have come up with original ideas which he has stolen," said Thomson. "Hirst is a plagiarist in a way that would be totally unacceptable in science or literature."

Maybe he's just getting himself a bit overwrought by his own rhetoric, but the thing is, as copyright law runs now visual art is treated the same as literature now that (shock of all shocks) it's been warped and corrupted to protect the interests of well-heeled corporations with little to no interest in the actual creative process.

The point of this little jig is not to debate the originality or quality of Hirst (he's terrible) but instead to underline the point that intellectual property law is a god-awful hideous mess.

Just like Damien Hirst's body of work.

let's stop the fussing and the feuding

COI's central computing unit has returned from its second sojourn at the sanitarium. On its way out, during its final session of the talking cure, the doctor thought it would be best to hash out some thoughts on healthier living to prevent a relapse.

Since the unit is the final repository for the COI podcast (readers of the blog have even seen it in action), grant application materials, playscripts, and input for this humble blog, it seems a prudent course of action.

Things we should do, but probably wont

• Not keep the COI podcast, grant application materials, playscripts, and draft blog articles in one place
• Use cloud computing services to keep said materials available [not until a tablet that ain't tethered to ATT comes out; lookin' at you, Verizon]

Things we should do, but definitely wont

• Not live in the digital domain quite so much, return to paper notebooks

Things we will do

• Continue backing up data like it is a religious duty
• Treat the laptop as a fragile, valued, and expensive colleague, and fully acknowledge that it owns the entirety of our creative output so we'd better shape up

That was therapeutic.

This time it's not Rudolph, it's sick.