Posthumous Life

2002-03-05T02:36:00.000-08:00

Or don't. Whatever.

2001-10-04T01:45:00.000-07:00

Six months slide by in a dream. Amazing.

I've been to Sydney and come back to New Zealand months ago. In the process I forgot all about this blog. It's ironic, really, because I had set it up in the first place as a way of staying connected while in transit. Ha!

Well, okay. Start again.

2001-04-02T07:37:00.000-07:00

I've been a bad communicator. I haven't been keeping up my weblog (or much else for that matter). But I have a good excuse - I've been, uh, busy...

Well, I have.

In fact, I'm all but in transit. Fourty eight hours from now I'll be in Sydney once again, home of my heart. In the meantime, I'm doing this and that and a few other things and trying to remember stuff I can't and just generally chasing my own tail around in circles. And I really should get back to it.

So, bye.

2001-03-18T02:02:00.000-08:00

I'm just going to go for it, okay? Blogger (which I've only recently come to grips with) is such a marvellous tool for a writer, a lovely combination of draft notes and end product, that I should use it while I can.

So I'm opening up a second, far more focused blog.

The ideas I want to get down in it - half insane, half pretty much on the ball - have been rattling around in my head for the best part of a decade without my ever having tried to order them. Of course, I have talked them out at length, on many occasions, to pretty much anyone who'd listen.

You can find it here.

2001-03-17T18:47:00.000-08:00

I write a monthly column for a Sydney film magazine called IF: Independent Filmmakers Journal. What follows is a draft copy of this issue's installment:

tURING tEST cRASH #2

A Brief History Of Storytelling

Anecdote became parable became poetry became drama, which gave birth to opera and the novel, which, thanks to advances in mechanical reproduction, came together as the movies which, having split into large and small screen formats, are now going online and becoming [some as yet unrealised form of interactive virtuality].

The evolution of journalism from Herodotus to CNN and fuckedcompany.com and Temptation Island runs parallel to this, as do the various forms of advertsing.

These streams are obviously (and always have been) converging.

Nowadays, the difference between fiction, factoid, infomercial and straight reportage is one of emphasis or intent. This is a small thing. The real differences between the 'forms' involve what revenue model is being applied to them.

Follow The Money

Does the income of, for example a film, result from sponsorship and peripherals or from direct sales? Does the audience buy a ticket or get in for free? Are t-shirts and little plastic dolls being sold in the lobby? If entry is free, then the profits are coming (or failing to come) from somewhere else. From where? To whom? The answers to these questions will help you classify a particular work as content or product.

These are the two basic categories of public entertainment/art.

Most TV is content. Most movies are, at least superficially, product. But if more money is made off t-shirts and accessories than ticket sales, then you'd have to say the film itself is 'content'.

Content always and everywhere exists for product. This is not negotiable.

The content of a sentence is words. The contents of words is meaning. It's a Chinese Box situation, in which the sentence itself will generally be content in regard to some higher product, which might be a novel. This novel will in turn be content for a printed book, the 'end product' of a publishing firm. But it doesn't stop there. The physical book itself is ultimately content as well, subservient to the highest, least trivial product of all - shareholder profits.

This terminology is counter-intuitive. When a publisher talks about shipping product he is treating books as content, not as product at all. Treating a book as a final product is what readers do, not publishers (or at least not while they're wearing their publisher's hat).

Another example. If you consider Star Wars as a product, the story of the rebels and the Empire and the performances of the actors and the whizz-bang effects and cinematography are its content.

If you consider Star Wars as content, the product is ticket sales and peripheral marketing opportunities.

Likewise, as actors become bankable their status changes. A real star is almost pure content. Eventually, like Tiger Woods, all they have to do is turn up, at least while their glamour lasts.

Sidebar: New technology stocks are currently in trouble because the line between content and product has not yet been clearly, realistically drawn.

Television, on the other hand, has no illusions. A prime time TV show (whether situation comedy or drama or news/current affairs) is basically all content. The actual product is not the show itself, but the cars and beer and perfumes being hawked during the adbreaks. High ratings mean higher revenues for the networks and, at least theoretically, for their clients, the advertisers - and their clients in turn.

If snuff movies (legal issues intrude at present) or readings from the phone book (low public interest) were able to draw and hold large audiences, then that is what would fill our screens.

Sundance or Ghostdance?

Alternative/independent cinema made great strides in the 1990s because it almost perversely concentrated on the film being made as a final product, a thing in itself. This was a refreshing and often surprisingly workable approach.

But the very success that makes players of indie filmmakers can, in the long run, only work to relegate their films to the status of content. This process was institutionalised in popular music decades ago, and is played out again with each new genre (the textbook case being Seattle grunge).

Content art is most open to interference from outside or 'above'. TV shows get cancelled because sponsors complain. Indie movies just fail to find funding or distribution - but if they do get funded, they often end up being made as originally planned, with actual filmmakers actually in charge.

This happens more often than might be expected because the men in suits are so notoriously poor at predicting what kind of content is going to work best for their purposes that they must depend on filmmakers and other creatives to provide it for them.

So the movies become the R&D branch of mass media, an experimental test bed of 'pure' product striving to be applied and marketed as branded content.

(more next month)

2001-03-16T03:05:00.000-08:00

Big day of trying to take control of my own website. I've been putting it off for weeks because it's such a huge, frustrating task. I'd prefer it was just done without me having to sit down and meticulously do it. Ha! But presenting poetry or any text online is difficult. There are two often conflicting imperatives at play: (a) it has be readable, and (b) it has to be worth reading. Spending too much time on what stuff looks like and ignoring the content, the actual words of the poem is not smart. But then neither is assuming that the poems are so marvellous that readers will be content with any old layout and plough on regardless.

The same applies to this blog. I want it to be at least potentially readable by others, and read by a few - although the actual number isn't all that important. One is a good beginning. One is fine. As reported by his widow in Hope Against Hope, her memoir of their life under Stalin, the great Russian poet Osip Mandlestam was fond of the term "first reader". He meant his wife basically, but he was also pointing to the fact that once a poem has been read (or listened to) with attention by someone other than the poet - it exists. The second, third, fourth and one millionth readers are all gravy. But the first is meat.

So I'm preparing my website for its first reader, and will continue to do so, no matter how many hits it gets or doesn't get... if you know what I mean.

(I've begun smoking again btw - no surprises there. Da hell wid it. I cheerfully choose death.)

2001-03-14T18:49:00.000-08:00

I've got nothing at all to say to anyone at the moment. Nothing. Not a single damn thing. I don't even want to think about anything.

2001-03-13T15:28:00.000-08:00

Today is the day I finally give up smoking. I'm really looking forward to it. Yeah. It should be great.

Smoking is a evil habit, and I'm sick of it. It's expensive and unhygenic and it makes your clothes smell disgusting. Not only that, but it's bad for you and quite possibly addictive. I mean, I've only been smoking heavily for a little over thirty years, but even so, I've noticed some side effects that can really only be described as negative. There's the whole shortage of breath and coughing thing, of course, but there's also the trembling. In fact, my entire body must be under constant, low grade, but significant stress... and my mind as well. For example, when I go to sleep my thoughts are (and I blame smoking for this) a pretty second rate combination of racing and sluggish. And I wake craving, craving. Then I have a cigarette - and it starts again.

The body thing is probably worse. On a cellular level, I'm shaking to bits.

So, all in all, I'm glad that I've decided to give up. It's undoubtedly the best decision I've ever made. I'm going to do it tonight.

(Uh, I should admit at this point that I'm actually smoking while I type this. I mean, I know I probably shouldn't be, but just exactly right now at this very minute is not a good time for me to stop because - well, because of a number of reasons. I don't want to talk about it. But tonight will be different, tonight everything will change.)

Now I'm getting incredibly excited just thinking about it. In fact I can't sit still. A brand new, better life! Oh, wow...

Tomorrow belongs to me.

2001-03-13T14:27:00.000-08:00

Item: Before I went to sleep last night I ate some peanuts. As a result, there were all these horribly gooey little peanut-flavoured chunks of partially decomposed matter stuck between what's left of my teeth when I woke up this morning.

Item: While eating those peanuts I had been enjoying a novel by Paul J. McAuley.

Although the book was new to me, deja vu set in somewhere around page two hundred. Suddenly, for a chapter or so, it began to feel like I'd already read it. (This is not a snide way of bagging McAuley's work as derivative, but a specific, if trivial phenomenon that actually took place.) However, my sense of having passed this way before was brief, only lasting for a few pages, so perhaps a previously published short story had been been integrated into the novel at that point. I wouldn't know.

Anyway, it's a great book. It's set in the second and third decades of a rapidly mutating, yet still recognisable 21st century. Nano technology, climate change, genetic modification, IT - all the usual suspects are present. The end result is Fairyland.

It's definitely post-cyberpunk, but also reminiscent of stuff as old as Samuel Delany's insanely huge and disorienting Dhalgren (1975).

But then a surprisingly coherent vision of the future has been offered by hip sf for the past half century. Of course, this isn't all that weird, because sf (hip or not) is always being written in, about, and as a result of the shared present, but I find it interesting. I think it shows the continuity of change since WWII.

In fact, once you get past the surface, 1950s sf feels surprisingly contemporary. In the seventies and eighties (from approximately Dangerous Visions to Neuromancer) it had begun to seem quaint and old fashioned. Now it's smarter than ever.

+

William Burroughs once said (in some interview, I forget where) that the nineties were going to make the sixties look like the fifties.

At the time I thought: cool. But as the decade unfolded I began to change my mind, and ended up deciding that the nineties had, in fact, only proved that the fifties were what was happening all along.

2001-03-12T01:42:00.000-08:00

Today began with a dream about my father. In the dream he was still alive, although very ill, and we were talking. Then I woke, or seemed to wake. But in fact I was still submerged in one of those transitional states, another layer of the same dream - and he was gone! This freaked me out, because the only memories I had to draw on at that point were from the first dream, in which he'd been sitting in the same room with me about two seconds ago.

Everything I knew had suddenly become useless, referring to an entirely different reality to the one I was now lost in. So I flailed about stupidly like a drowning lemming for a while and popped back up into this world, our world, with my heart racing. And remembered dad was dead. He'd died in August, 1995. I mean, there was a lot more to it, but that's the bit that counts.

I didn't know what was going on, but it felt significant.

So the day began. It was a busy one. Apart from anything else, my keyboard had inexplicably died on me last night, which meant that today I had to go looking for a new one - in a small town in New Zealand that has about about six shops in it. I didn't have high expectations, but somehow managed to stumble onto this place hidden down behind the local funeral home. It was piled up to the ceiling with monitors and connections and lengths of wire and all kinds of vaguely electrical/IT apparatus and what have you. There was even a little room off to one side with a pasty faced bespectacled geek in it. I was so impressed.

But then I went to home for my bankcard, which I'd left on my desk, and, just for the hell of it, tried turning on the computer. And the keyboard was back! Well, naturally. Of course. (But I'm still glad I found that shop).

2001-03-12T01:21:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but then who would? So let's just start from here.

This is what I am trying to say. This is the thing.

Growing older is what is. It just happens. And one aspect of it is that you eventually have to acknowledge the fact that this sad parade of errors and things left undone is actually your life. This is the way it all worked out in practice. Oh, boy. Great...

And this is where I am today.

I used to think that no matter what I did or didn't do along the way, I'd somehow magically get things right at the last possible moment and come up trumps. It was a kind of My Life Is Not Only A Movie, But A Pretty Stupid One approach, and basically retarded. But the whole point of thinking like that was that it allowed me to put things off without fearing the consequences, or even considering them.

Due, not to spiritual growth on my part, but to a depressingly predictable combination of passing time and the sheer concrete unavoidableness of what actually happens, I know better now. I'm wiser than I've ever been. So what? It doesn't help. I mean, a real problem with the Slowly Maturing Wisdom That Comes With Age is just how flat out old it feels. It's all been said and heard before too many times. It isn't even interesting to me, really. Or at least not at this point of my life. I'm sorry.

Sigh...

Blog it. Just keep going.