Žižek tells me a story about a friend of his going to meet Noam Chomsky, the "most influential public intellectual" in America. "My friend told me Chomsky said something very sad. He said that today we don't need theory. All we need to do is tell people, empirically, what is going on. Here, I violently disagree: facts are facts, and they are precious, but they can work in this way or that. Facts alone are not enough. You have to change the ideological background."From The New Statesman interview with Slavoj Zizek
Well, the last laugh is on me. As I have spent the past week hunched over a laptop, channelling and broadcasting as much information, video and debate about the momentous events in Iran, nothing quite captured the mood and pace of events like the tweets coming from the people of Iran…The effect was far more powerful than I had expected. A mix of fact and feeling, rumour and message…Kinda dramatic, but makes the point well. Because information can be transmitted so simply (and the “transactions costs” of it are so low), some forms of attempting to suppress information are no longer as usable as they once were. With Trafigura, the issue was a "superinjunction," intended as a gag-order (with the intention to keep the issuer of the injuction secret as well.) After becoming aware of it, hundreds had...
When you review the Twitter stream of the past week, it reads like a stream of constantly shifting consciousness. It is a kind of journalistic pointillism. From a distance it gains heft. It is history rendered in the collective, scattered mind and it has never happened before - millions upon millions of tiny telegram messages sent to the world.
“…sleuthed down [the gag-order mystery], published the relevant links and were now seriously on the case. By midday on Tuesday "Trafigura" was one of the most searched terms in Europe.”The next day the gag-order was lifted and the details of the case came out.
...for m'day job's monthly company newsletter. The comic chosen (I assume) for the shopping cart content (our customers are grocers/retailers), i was given 5 minutes and an injunction to come up with text for it (I think the original caption was too punchy for 'company newsletter'). My first two suggestions were nixed for space (too long) and this third was chosen. (Click for large)"What’s nice is that unless you need to be a multimillionaire, you don’t have to go after that mainstream audience,” Wareheim says. It’s a few hours after Awesomecon’s conclusion, and the two men are sitting at a poolside hotel bar. “We’ve carved out an audience. And that’s enough.”
“I feel like we’re too popular as it is,” Wareheim says.
He’s only half-joking. Years ago, the next step for comedians like Heidecker and Wareheim’s would have been to cash in their cult status for something more visible and bankable — a sitcom deal, maybe, or a role in some mawkish Jim Carrey comedy. Now, thanks to the devoted audience they’ve developed both on the air and online, they can bypass those comedic rites altogether and instead beam their grody capers straight to fans. At least for a while. “Later on, we’re going to have to conform to some standards,” Wareheim says. “We’re not going to be very funny together when we’re 45.”
Perhaps the most provocative of all Taleb's many provocations is his hypothesis that, as a result of globalisation and the speed of electronic communications, the world is becoming more like Extremistan and less like Mediocristan.
Yes, the integration of international markets seems to reduce economic volatility. But by magnifying the effects of herd-like behaviour (another of our evolved traits), it also increases the tendency for winners to take all - the Harry Potter phenom-enon - and for disasters, when they strike, to be comparably huge. Just as there will be fewer but bigger bestsellers, Taleb argues, so there may also be "fewer but bigger crises" in the realms of finance and geopolitics.
Other than aim for a blockbuster hit, what can an artist do to escape the long tail? One solution is to find 1,000 True Fans. While some artists have discovered this path without calling it that, I think it is worth trying to formalize. The gist of 1,000 True Fans can be stated simply:The opportunity for escape - to an alternate path of success for a creator - is something the internet is beginning to usher in (I don't believe the 1,000 True Fans model has yet reached near its full potential).
A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.
A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They can't wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans....Let's peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.
One thousand is a feasible number. You could count to 1,000. If you added one fan a day, it would take only three years...The technologies of connection and small-time manufacturing make this circle possible...You don't need a million fans to justify producing something new. A mere one thousand is sufficient.
But the point of this strategy is to say that you don't need a hit to survive. You don't need to aim for the short head of best-sellerdom to escape the long tail. There is a place in the middle, that is not very far away from the tail, where you can at least make a living. That mid-way haven is called 1,000 True Fans. It is an alternate destination for an artist to aim for.
"I sincerely believe I am by far the best prime minister Italy has had in its 150 year history (since unification in 1861)," Berlusconi said in televised news conference in Sardinia with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.---------------------------
"A tailor at work resembles the poet cutting, trimming, and stitching his verse. The needle is the sudden penetration of insight, while the flexible thread, assuring continuity and shape, is dragged in the rear as a secondary process. The result is “my misshapen son”: Art-making by men is an appropriation of female fertility. The end product, like Frankenstein’s “monster” with his stitched-up face, may seem ugly or distorted (in an avant-garde era). But the artwork is the artist’s true posterity, a child of the intellect rather than the body—a distinction made by Plato. "Thanks to Foreign Policy Passport blog for photo
- Camille Paglia
"The improviser has to realize that the more obvious he is, the more original he appears. I constantly point out how much the audience like someone who is direct, and how they always laugh with pleasure at a really 'obvious' idea. Ordinary people asked to improvise will search for some 'original' idea because they want to be thought clever...The mind can immediately generate a response for what something (imaginary) is - it is more one's desire to appear imaginative (or the fear that an immediate, subconscious response will negatively reflect on oneself) that slows its expression. Our imagination, then, (*without prompting*) is a near-infinite generator of what something could be. Johnstone again:
'What's for supper?' a bad improviser will desperately try to think up something original...he'll finally drag up some idea like 'fried mermaid.' If he'd just said 'fish' the audience would have been delighted. No two people are exactly alike, and the more obvious an improviser is, the more himself he appears."
"...I explain that I'm not interested in what they did, but how their minds worked. I say that either they can put their hand out, and see what it closes on; or else they can think first, deciding what they'll pick up, and then do the mime [of the object]. If they're worried about failing, then they'll have to think first; if they're being playful, then they can allow their hand to make its own decision."Johnstone goes on to show this at work - having a student repeatedly take something from an imaginary box, continually changing the context so they can't plan what (potentially 'clever thing') to take next. J-stones:
"If I make people produce object after object, then very likely they'll stop bothering to think first, and just swing along being mildly interested in what their hands select. Here's a sequence that was filmed...I said:Note this student is not planning these things, but they are being supplied instinctually. I've done this same exercise as a director and the results are the same - eventually the mind supplies its own items without them being consciously planned or strictly supervised.
Keith: 'Put your hand into an imaginary box. What do you take out?'
'A cricket ball.'
'Take something else out.'
'Another cricket ball.'
'Unscrew it. What's inside?'
'A medallion.'
'What's written on it?'
'Christmas 1948.'
'Put both hands in. What have you got?'
'A box.'
'What's written on it?'
'"Export only."'
'Open it and take something out.'
'A pair of rubber corsets.'
'Put your hands in the far corners of the box. What have you got?'
'Two lobsters.'
'Leave them. Take out a handful of something.'
'Dust.'
'Feel about in it.'
'A pearl.'
'Taste it.' What's it taste of?'
'Pear drops.'
Take something off a shelf.'
'A shoe.'
'What size?'
'Eleven.'
'Reach for something behind you.'
He laughs.
'What is it?'
'A breast...'
Notice that I'm helping him to fantasise by continually changing the 'set' (i.e. the category) of the questions."
"To live is to crochet according to a pattern we were given.from The Book of Disquiet, mentioned in this post
But while doing it the mind is at liberty, and all enchanted princes can
stroll in their parks between one and another plunge of the hooked ivory needle."
-Fernando Pessoa
Anderson:"If you're given infinite choice and the tools to help you find stuff, then we will start to diversify our choice, and define our communities of interest," he told the audience. "It often turns out that the stuff we love the most is the stuff that's not the blockbuster. The stuff that we all like collectively -- the Super Bowl -- are things we don't feel as passionately about. Less popular things are actually more meaningful to us as individuals."The direction that Anderson says the Smithsonian should move towards due to the internet is an important distinction that the universality of the internet allows. The "Passionate Expert" on any given subject is (almost absolutely) not going to be the most famous person related to that topic.
Anderson's fetish, for example, is Lego robots. In what might be a mammoth understatement, he revealed that there is no place for this interest in his magazine. But online, he has found a community of people like him.
..."The Web is messy, and in that messiness comes something new and interesting and really rich," he said. "The strikethrough is the canonical symbol of the Web. It says, 'We blew it, but we are leaving that mistake out there. We're not perfect, but we get better over time.' "
The problem is, "the best curators of any given artifact do not work here, and you do not know them," Anderson told the Smithsonian thought leaders. "Not only that, but you can't find them. They can find you, but you can't find them. The only way to find them is to put stuff out
there and let them reveal themselves as being an expert."
Take something like, oh, everything the Smithsonian's got on 1950s Cold War aircraft. Put it out there, Anderson suggested, and say, "If you know something about this, tell us." Focus on the those who sound like they have phenomenal expertise, and invest your time and effort into training these volunteers how to curate. "I'll bet that they would be thrilled, and that they would pay their own money to be given the privilege of seeing this stuff up close. It would be their responsibility to do a good job" in authenticating it and explaining it. "It would be the best free labor that you can imagine."
North America's City-to-City Internet Connections via Chris Harrison
Freedom of speech and protection of a counterculture are more than just abstract features of a Western liberal morality. Freedom of speech and protection of "deviants" comprise essential economic infrastructure in the twenty-first century. As we move into an Information Age, societies that offer strong protection of freedom of speech and individual expression will trump those Confucian societies that emphasize obedience and silent submission to authority. As unlikely a winner as oft-benighted India may seem to be, I would still put good money on India and the individualistic U.S., in collaboration with the European Union, as the future leaders of the non-local sphere of Information and Cyberspace, leaving the Confucian societies not yet visited by glasnost far behind. Freedom of information should be treated by Khanna as one of the most important traits of an economic superpower, far more important than good roads, canals, and oil rigs. Confucianism, as it exists today, is a mimicry engine producing only commodities; free societies such as India have the potential to become creativity engines, producing entirely new economic niches.Economies open to harnessing the (positive) Black Swans, as Taleb would say.
Unless we are driven into a new Dark Age by war or resource disasters, the relentless Information Age will reward societies with strong creative classes (Richard Florida's term); reward societies with a protected counterculture and bohemia; and will punish societies ruled by conformity and fear of "deviance"; will punish societies without their equivalent of Mad Magazine; will punish societies that imprison dissidents. Until Chinese glasnost emerges, the United States, Europe and India will rule cyberspace, and hence the future.
"Whitehead and Richerson's models highlight the perils of cultural conformism in red-noise environments, particularly when populations are small, but also show how other styles of learning can mitigate the problems. For instance, 'prestige bias' means that people only copy successful role models, rather than simply imitating what everyone else is doing.
"Societies should promote individual learning and innovation over cultural conformity, and the models for social learning should be individuals who have demonstrated that they understand how to live with the current environmental trends," says Whitehead."
Not just imitation (a natural human instinct), but imitation of qualities of those who have shown success in the environment.
AVC: So do you know what the immediate next step is in your life?Copley speaks to the psychology of acting: having to strip down/stripping away protections that you've built up for yourself-- recognizing those, and having to let go of them. To be able to truly portray a character you have to truly portray yourself.
SC: No. It’s the first time in my life… Before, if you’d asked me that, there was always a definite master plan and sub-plan and plan linking into that plan. So I’m just really trying to live differently for a bit. It’s a very different world. The acting world is a humbling experience, I find. It very much, for me, it shut me up. This whole thing. It was like, “Well, you think you can be a hotshot because you started this company and you started a television channel when you were 24, or whatever.” And it’s really… [Pauses.] The process of finding a character—stripping everything off, all those things you have to protect yourself, that you think are your clever things, was in a sense mirrored in my work life. I let go to see what’s actually out there, or what I’m meant to really do, if there is such a thing. And certainly this experience leads me to feel like maybe it is."
AVC: On The Thick Of It, Malcolm is a fire-breathing Scot in a world of posh Englishmen whom he can generally run right over, but the Americans in In The Loop give back as good as they get. How did it change things to have Malcolm taking on enemies in his weight class?Peter's intuition of what's "more interesting, and funnier for the audience" falls right in line Keith Johnstone's heady, resonant concept of Status. (Keith Johnstone's Impro has been a defining book for me - not just for what I've learned from it, but for how its changed my perspectives and led me down roads that I likely wouldn't have otherwise considered.) Becoming aware of the subtleties of everyday socializing and interaction can lead directly into answers to the question, "What is interesting?"
PC: I think for me, that was a wonderful thing. Malcolm is largely the top dog on the TV show in terms of power. So to have people who were superior to him, and cleverer than him, and darker, was great, because then it gives you somewhere to go. So for me, that was a good development. I’d be happy to see more of that. It makes it more interesting. There’s only so long that you can go on screaming and shouting and swearing. There’s a sense of diminishing returns about that. But if you actually have to engage with somebody who’s superior to you and actually battle with them, struggle with them, I think it’s more interesting, and funnier for the audience."
As Peter says, Malcolm's character is generally higher status than the others on the TV show. To have him engaging those equal or near equivalent to his status (in the movie) is even more interesting - every subtlety affects the status positions each is jostling for.
"When played in this way, conflict transpires on an almost invisible plane which the audience will unconsciously pick up: the most mundane gestures and casual behaviors -- where to sit, who speaks first, what the choice for dinner will be, etc. -- become sites of struggle in virtually imperceptible ways. Every sound and posture implies a status, and recognizing this leads to a change in one's worldview.A great deal of the comedy or tension [is derived] from the tiny ways that people vie for power by trying to raise their own status or lower the status of others in an implicit rather than explicit way."
"Keeping it grounded" helps signal the audience that whatever happened, just happened in the real world - the reaction shots help put to the screen the incredulity the audience is feeling at that moment. The reaction shot can be a tension release-r - audience can enjoy the previous moment through the reaction shot.
AVC: What kind of subtle moves?
KJ: Just reaction glances. Both of those guys [Paul Rudd, Jeremy Piven], I think alot of comedic actors, on their close-up they can deliver. But when it comes to reacting to other people being funny, that’s work in itself. I hate to sound so Comedy Theory 101—I know it’s sounding really boring—but for me, Rudd in Role Models, when he reacts to things that Seann William Scott does, he does certain things that help stretch the scene a little more, and it makes Seann look better. I felt like Piven would do the same thing. He would make all of us look better by his reactions. It’s a very subtle thing, but when the movie comes for a close-up, and they show that quick shot, it makes it funnier. Because we’re trying to dunk and do fancy moves to the basket, but what you really need is a point guard who can direct the flow. I really realize the more movies I do just how important—it’s so cliché when people say it, because everybody says it nowadays—but it’s so important to keep it grounded. I totally understand what that means.
The Situation's Changed: Outtakes from IN THE CAR MEDIA
some "deleted scenes", outtakes, and improvised bits - during the filming of The Situation's ChangedThe modern atheist thinks he knows that God is dead; what he doesn't know is that, unconsciously, he continues to believe in God. What characterizes modernity is no longer the standard figure of the believer who secretly harbors intimate doubts about his belief and engages in transgressive fantasies; today, we have, on the contrary, a subject who presents himself as a tolerant hedonist dedicated to the pursuit of happiness, and whose unconscious is the site of prohibitions: what is repressed are not illicit desires or pleasures, but prohibitions themselves. "If God doesn't exist, then everything is prohibited" means that the more you perceive yourself as an atheist, the more your unconscious is dominated by prohibitions which sabotage your enjoyment. (One should not forget to supplement this thesis with its opposite: if God exists, then everything is permitted - is this not the most succinct definition of the religious fundamentalist's predicament? For him, God fully exists, he perceives himself as His instrument, which is why he can do whatever he wants, his acts are in advance redeemed, since they express the divine will...)- Slavoj Žižek
"When you write humor, it’s not funny to you. It’s not even really that funny when you first think of the idea. There may be a glimmer of humor because it still seems vaguely original, but after a couple of days it’s not funny at all. You’re just trusting that it was, at some point, funny, and that your honing and tweaking is really improving it. I would eventually reach a point where I would just think, This feels old, even though nobody’s seen it but me."
