Metaphor-Sickness

It's morbidly fascinating for boomers like myself to feel our wires getting fondled and pulled free and reconfigured by a rapidly morphing media environment. Or, to use a new-school metaphor, sometimes I feel like a device who's been set to automatically update with the latest paradigm when I plug into the stream. What's the paradigm of the week? Podcasting and YouTube are installed and running smoothly in my mental hard drive, while Flickr and MySpace are still just, uh, a little too immersion-driven for this passive consumer to run without fear of crashing my system. My point here is that it can be a truly visceral experience: I can practically feel my neurons pushings out shoots and branches to handle the load. But (metaphor number three— or is it four?) it'll be a while before I develop the gills and fins to swim freely in this new ocean with all the newbies.

Speaking of which, Gen X and Gen Y are probably not quite as self-conscious of how they engage media culture, or else don't very much care... Whatever. Gen X took to PCs as naturally as we took to TV, and certainly Gen Y is genetically equipped to morph on command; clunky "re-wiring" is of no concern to them. In fact I'm sure I've got the wrong metaphor here: the appropriate technology hasn't arrived yet. In any case it'll be something more organic. No wires or sparks. Something to do with flux, or clouds, or ecosystems, or glands. You know, like how in Alien the android Ash turns out to be all soft and sloppy inside like a real organism?

Alright, that's it. I wash my hands of the matter. Let the kids figure it out; I just ate breakfast.

Kicking the Movie Habit

Two of cinema’s die-hard champions of blockbuster entertainment have now gone on record to announce its demise. A while back, sometime between the phenomenal success of The Lord of the Rings and the disappointing returns of King Kong, Peter Jackson claimed to be much more interested in the future of gaming than in the future of movies; indeed, he seems to have begun the transition by taking on the next big game-to-movie project, Halo, as executive producer. And yesterday’s Daily Variety quotes George Lucas at the groundbreaking ceremony for the renamed School of Cinematic Arts at USC:

“We don't want to make movies. We're about to get into television. As far as Lucasfilm is concerned, we've moved away from the feature film thing because it's too expensive and it's too risky. I think the secret to the future is quantity.”

Hold on there, roll back tape. Did the man say this at the groundbreaking of a film school? Well, yes and no. While George is nothing if not perverse, (ask anyone in rank-and-file geekdom), his choice of words bear some examination: he’s not quitting cinema, he’s quitting movies; specifically that, uh, “feature film thing.” The University of Southern California, for that matter, never had a “movie” department; the School of Cinematic Arts was previously known as the USC School of Cinema-Television. The operative concept here is “moving images” on an elemental level; the economic, technical and cultural specifics are transient: mass audiences lining up for tickets and filling theaters are gradually becoming obsolete. Here's Lucas musing on big budgets (something he knows a thing or two about):

“For that same $200 million, I can make 50-60 two-hour movies. That's 120 hours as opposed to two hours. In the future market, that's where it's going to land, because it's going to be all pay-per-view and downloadable.”

And then he gets to the core of his argument, the future of consumer behavior (a subject he's gotten grievously wrong in the past— but he just may be on to something here):

“I don't think anything's going to be a habit anymore. I think people are going to be drawn to a certain medium in their leisure time and they're going to do it because there is a desire to do it at that particular moment in time. Everything is going to be a matter of choice.”

So, Americans are kicking the movie habit, mostly because there are just so many ways out there now to see and to do. Time and again, the first thing that new media rejiggers is language, even as we try to sort out our new behaviors— which I believe will eventually be called “habits.” And so we find ourselves again at a semantics crossroads: perhaps it’s time for ”film,” “cinema” and “movies” to part ways, once and for all.

“Buy Me This If You Wanna Be My Pal for Life” Dept.

Just when I think “I’m strapped... can't look at another art book or my wallet will turn into a black hole and suck me bodily into the pits of bibliomania hell along with a few semi-innocent bystanders...” along comes this. A gargantuan hardcover tome of Winsor McKay's classic early 20th C. Sunday comics reproduced in the original tabloid proportions—lavish and precious and unexpected, but likely to be injurious to my tendons nonetheless. Likely to end up as ballast for my swaying IKEA bookcase—you know, just in case my cats decide to grow opposing thumbs and try pulling the damn thing over on its side once and for all. Of course it would be very pretty ballast, compared to that unread slab I've had for years, the one with the hundred and one views of the temple of Karnak.

Archaeology in the Age of Transparency, Part I

Pulled from the bookpile:
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
VALIS by Philip K. Dick
Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed

Let's begin with a deliciously sublime bit of hokum, concerning the Old Testament, deserts and rivers, the genesis of an art form and the end of a continent. In 1996, the ruined sphinxes of Rameses II saw daylight once again, in the burnt deserts of outer Los Angeles, gradually uncovered by the mute and inexorable elements, until discovered by roving bands of bored youths. “Ah,” say you, “That surely is a piece of hokum, and what, have I wandered onto some saucer nut’s website by mistake?” But, no, trust me, this is documented. The sphinxes themselves are the hokum, or as Ish Reed might put it, the Mumbo Jumbo in question. Whether those first discoverers assumed they were the lucky victims of a fabulous hoax I don’t know, but here we have crossed over from the realm of hoaxer to its close cousin, the Hollywood impresario.