Genji Press

When dealing with storytelling and writing, one of the fun exercises I like to run through is something I call Turn That Around. It comes out of something Ridley Scott talked about having picked up from Stanley Kubrick: when you are confronted with something where you have an automatic "oh, I'd do that" response, you stop and ask yourself: What happens when we turn that around?

The first time I heard Scott talk about this was re: Blade Runner, when they were assembling the opening sequence where Leon shoots Holden under the table during the V-K test. Scott was uneasy about just showing a regular shooting with a regular gun, and toyed with the idea of the gun behaving differently. Maybe it didn't shoot bullets but instead caused the target to implode, he theorized. The idea ultimately never went anywhere, and so for various reasons (most of them budget and time) they just went with a more conventional gun-that-shoots-bullets approach. (I wondered if he had been thinking, however distantly, of the striking-looking "gas gun" that was featured in Logan's Run.) The idea itself might not have gone anywhere, but the impulse to not take on face value ideas that come automatically to mind stuck with him.

It's a good habit to get into — as long as you're using it to break the ice of habitual thinking and not using it to overturn a way of doing things that exists for a very good reason. If you break a rule, you have to replace it with something at least as good or better. Science is the same way: no junking a theory unless your new one encompasses the old.

So, no, I don't think Blade Runner would have been better off with Deckard firing a "black hole gun". That would have been like putting a fringed doily on the hood of a racecar.

Most authors, we read, and that's about it. They produce the words and we consume them like we're slurping down so many yards of some restaurant's house-recipe pasta.

A few of them, a very small Elect, seem to be whispering right into our ear and our ear alone. The authors in question will vary among us, but the effect is the same: we feel, without an explanation being possible or even needed, that they are talking to us through the pages and right across time's walls.

My own list of such authors is as esoteric as anyone else's: Hubert Selby, Jr.; Ryūnosuke Akutagawa; Dostoyevsky (reading him in a good translation was like discovering an entirely new author); Philip K. Dick, whose Electric Sheep?  inspired me to say to my brother "I think I've found the first writer who understands how I see the universe"; maybe Theodore Sturgeon, too; and a small fistful of others.

Then there are the authors I have wrestling matches with. Authors which I do not exactly hate, but which I cannot help but argue with at almost every line, because they may be brilliant writers but espouse world-views or social theories way the heck out of phase with anything I could call my own. Mishima was like this; Heinlein; Henry Miller; William Burroughs; Céline (somewhat mitigated at this point, I admit).

Both parties are indispensible. Sometimes, you need to someone to tell you something you already know deep down, in words you'd never think to use. Sometimes you need someone to tell you something you never wanted to hear, and in a way that could seem like the only truth there is.

Earlier today someone else posted: "Part of growing up means admitting to yourself that you don't matter."

Like a lot of things, I suspect this lends itself to all kinds of wrong interpretations. Here's what I hope is the right thing (which I posted in reply, with some editing and extension here):

With enough care and introspection you reach a point where you realize you don't mean much in the big scheme of things, but that — paradoxically — you are of vital importance to the things that you are nearest to. Everything's interdependent, which means that no one thing is the most important thing.

Now we get to the part that screws people up. If no one thing is more important than any other, then how do you decide what to do next? There's a long and involved answer, but the short one goes like this: you pick the things that will bring the people around you that much closer to liberation. Yourself included, but by putting them first you do more for your own salvation than it might seem, because you're allowing yourself to be surprised.

It's entirely possible you will matter to millions, but what's more important is what effect you will have on the people immediately around you, and yourself as well. Start there, get that right, and odds are you'll transpose that behavior onto everyone else — including, potentially, those millions many people dream about being able to affect. You'll have gotten the practice right where it counts. The rest is just gravy.

Two ends of the spectrum. Or maybe better to say two pieces of it.

On the one hand, there is Cat Valente's impassioned defense of traditional publishing over the freemium money-later model, where (in her purview) a few short-term gains are weak compensation for a long-term denaturing of publishing as a whole.

Then there is C.E. Murphy's notions about sustainable crowdsourced funding for fiction, a way to get the fanbase to support you in a more graduated way.

I don't think these two points of view contradict each other or are in competition. I think they're highly complementary.

Yes, on the one hand, the current system of publishing is monolithic and clumsy. But the alternatives that have been proposed — the solutions that amount to dumping the whole stinking system and living with the consequences (as the UNABOMer once put it) — are not solutions. Scrapping publishing as we know it and replacing it with what amounts to a long-term honor system will only insure that the people who get paid poorly enough now (both authors and publishers) will get paid that much more poorly and inconsistently in the future. By and large, a tip jar is not a business model by itself — unless you're a waitress, and even then it's not really a business model either.

That doesn't mean we can't find transitional steps, which is what Item #2 above is about. Yes, by all means explore ways to make use of your current fanbase to more directly support the work you want to do as opposed to what your editors simply think will sell. Given enough time and enough variants on that basic scheme, I suspect we'll be able to see just how sustainable — and with what specific types of fanbases — such work models can be.

This last part, the matching of the work model to the nature of the fanbase, does not get nearly enough discussion. Stephen King's pay-as-you-go experiment tanked because the biggest and most valuable chunk of his readership are people who are accustomed to paying one upfront price for everything. He might have better luck with it now than before, but I suspect the people who'll have the best luck with such things are folks who have a closely-knit connection with their fans and who started off having no choice but to develop such a thing. The newer generations of 'Net-savvy authors, the ones who start with webcomics or whatnot, they seem to develop this sort of thing far more easily. They're used to talking one-to-one via blogs and LJ and TwitterBookFaceFeedTubeSiteEtc. They don't need a PR guy or two to three levels of remove from their own readership to keep from stepping on their own tongues.

This stuff's hard to cultivate. It should be. It means the people who can't do it (or do it badly) get weeded out, and the attention goes to the people who know how to create and keep an audience. Kind of the point of being a writer. Communication to an audience has to continue even outside the pages of the work itself.

So from now on, it's in our best interests to find out what else might be possible — how to take the existing citadel and add new wings to it without wrecking the foundation and letting the roof collapse from neglect. Feel free to invent your own metaphor.

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What we have here is not a sequel to the original Ong Bak, and most everyone with some clue about either film knows this. It’s Tony Jaa’s attempt at creating the sort of spiritually-fueled martial-arts epic that Bruce Lee was exploring immediately before his death. Check out the bonus features on Warner Brothers’ Enter the Dragon DVD for some hints of what Game of Death was to have been if Lee had lived to finish it.

I can’t yet say if Jaa did in fact pull off something that ambitious, because 2 isn’t really finished either. It’s a part of a larger whole that will only snap into place when the third film in the cycle comes out later this year. I can say that as far as action on film goes, the bar raised by the original Ong Bak has been blown off its supports and left protruding from the ceiling. I have my quibbles with the story construction, sure, but they take a major backseat to the stuff Jaa does in this film with sweat, muscle, sinew, blood, fists, elbows, knees, knives, swords, arrows, and … elephants.

Is anime still an "underground" taste? That's the claim from a Baltimore City Paper article — although funny they should make that claim since Baltimore annually hosts the country's biggest anime convention every year, with an attendance of 35,000 and climbing.

Still Underground: Despite a growing American fan base, anime remains a moviegoing niche

... Ponyo's reception, in Baltimore and nationally, typifies the problems anime has had since it first arrived here in the 1980s. American anime fans are legion, but their enthusiasm for the form has not spread to a broader public, or even to the broader moviegoing public.

This is true, though: the fandom is fierce, but still tends to be insular. There really hasn't been a single, big, breakout / crossover hit. Not even the CGI Astro Boy movie, although that also opened during a year of pretty stiff competition from other genuinely good, creative animated films (Fantastic Mr. Fox, Up, Coraline).

What there has been, though, is a series of little chiseling-aways at public awareness. No one title, character or author has really made a major impact, but there are minor success stories. Vertical, Inc. brought much Osamu Tezuka's more daring and adult-oriented work into English; VIZ had been doing some of the same with his Astro-Boy manga (and also, it has to be said, his inimitable Phoenix). Here and there, people bump into the broader outlying edges of the whole thing without ever really delving into it. Many fans themselves never find out about such things, but I suspect that's mostly because in any field the only attention paid to things like impact and influence is by people with some interest in the history of the field — a minority. It's not a conscious snub; it's just that they're interested in what's new now.

I am currently working on a longish post about fan-evangelization, about the whole process by which fans communicate their fandom to nonfans (sometimes successfully, sometimes not). There's actually two parts to it — one is a quick-and-dirty guide to anime/manga recommendations, a list of titles to suggest to people based on their existing interests. The other is something I might as well talk about here.

Fans, by and large, make the mistake that other people (the Great Non-Fan Unwashed) are always curious about their fandom. By and large, they aren't. They have their thing(s) and stick to them, and anything outside of that tends to zing right off the walls of their Reality Tunnel like bullets off Superman's gluteus.

We are all like this. Even other fans are like this: viz., the number of Trek / Stargate / Firefly / $FRANCHISE_NAME fans with a studied disinterest in That Other Fandom With The Starships. Or even anime fans themselves.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't try to reach out. What it does mean is that you need to cultivate some degree of diplomacy about it, and accept failure or indifference as gracefully as you can.

My parents are the furthest thing from fans, but I thought they might be amenable to the odd show that stands out from the pack by dint of being artful and thoughtful (e.g. Mushishi). They watched it, but were only politely interested, and were at least as bewildered as they were curious. (I'm growing certain that some people use a certain degree of self-imposed confusion they don't actually suffer from, as a defense mechanism against things which they feel are simply not worth their time.)

Me, I took it in stride. Anime's a loss? Big deal. We can always talk about Pedro Almodóvar.

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The two hardest things in writing are being funny and playing stupid. Gilbert Sorrentino must have been touched by genius, because he did a better job of portraying an irredeemably bad writer — i.e., playing stupid — than anyone else I’ve read yet. He also managed the difficult juggling act of of being both highbrow and lowbrow at the same time, without letting either extreme eat him up. He did this sort of thing through a number of books, none of them bestsellers but many of them worth seeking out, and of the bunch of them Mulligan Stew remains a perennial favorite. (Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things is my other favorite Sorrentino overall, but it’s so dissimilar from Stew that it would be unfair to talk about it in the same review.)

To paraphrase from a press release for a film I hated, Mulligan Stew is “a car bomb of post-modern textual self-deconstruction”, rammed head-on into the present-day crop of literary pretensions. In plainer language, it’s a hoot, an indictment of the self-importance of those who seem more interested in pleasing critics and snobbish literary professors than they are in telling a story (!) or communicating something genuine (!!). Sorrentino accomplished all this by taking on the form of the very thing he wanted to critique: a Post-Modern Novel, consisting of books inside other books, with all the characters in search of an author. It’s not bad enough that they have to endure the indignity of being mere fictional creations, but they’re doubly miffed that the one who created them is such a humorless, egomaniacal twit.

So not only is Criterion's Ran out of print no thanks to Canal+'s licensing, but a whole slew of other Criterion titles are also getting deleted. According to a post at Blu-ray.com, they are:

Alphaville
Carlos Saura’s Flamenco Trilogy (Eclipse Series 6)
Le corbeau
Coup de torchon
Diary of a Country Priest
The Fallen Idol
Forbidden Games (Criterion and Essential Art House editions)
Gervaise (Essential Art House edition)
Grand Illusion (Criterion and Essential Art House editions)
Le jour se lève (Essential Art House edition)
Last Holiday (Essential Art House edition)
Mayerling (Essential Art House edition)
The Orphic Trilogy
Peeping Tom
Pierrot le fou (DVD and Blu-ray editions)
Port of Shadows
Quai des Orfèvres
The Small Back Room
The Tales of Hoffmann (Criterion and Essential Art House editions)
Trafic
Le trou
Variety Lights (Essential Art House edition)
The White Sheik

All of them are probably going to surface again in other editions, but I have no reason to believe those versions are going to be anywhere nearly as good as Criterion's work — and they're almost certainly not going to include Criterion's wonderful extras.

If you hit up Criterion for these titles directly from their site you'll get a $5 discount; grab $50 or more and you get shipping free in the continental U.S.

How's this for a nyah-nyah duel? Amazon Vs. Macmillan, Round Three: Amazon caves and agrees to allow e-book pricing to be set much more competitively, but does so via an announcement worded for maximum acidity:

Macmillan, one of the “big six” publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for e-book versions of bestsellers and most hardcover releases.

We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it’s reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book. We don’t believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative.

Kindle is a business for Amazon, and it is also a mission. We never expected it to be easy!

Good going, both of you. I guess we should quit expecting corporations to exhibit anything like civility or class or decorum — but silly me, I keep getting my hopes up.

Press releases this snarky are events all by themselves. I remember 20th Century Fox being every bit as blunt when they axed the director of one of their biggest flop-busters of decades past:

In exchange for top compensation and a considerable expense account, Mr. Joseph Mankiewicz has for two years spent his time, talent and $35,000,000 of Twentieth Century-Fox's shareholders' money [in 1963 dollars] to direct and complete the first cut of the film Cleopatra. He has earned a well-deserved rest.

Ow.

A few words about J.D. Salinger's self-imposed silence:

Op-Ed Contributor - Raise High the P.R. Blitz - NYTimes.com

What was sad and strange about J. D. Salinger is not that he didn’t want to be our terrific friend. It’s that, at the pinnacle of his fame, he yearned for the very thing many writers fear most — a world without readers.

People have speculated about Salinger's reclusiveness as being everything from an untreated social-anxiety disorder to a simple shift of taste: for whatever reason, he found dealing with the attention other people gave him because of his work (or just him in general) was exhausting. Unfortunately, that just made him all the more interesting to the outside world, which sees reclusiveness as a sign of something fascinating being cultivated in secret.

There's something Salinger could have done to completely dispel interest in himself, if that's indeed what he wanted. He could have come back out and said, "I gave up writing a long time ago. I'm going to be a financial consultant." Nothing kills people's interest in a creative person faster than finding out they've become anything but.