7.31.05: Gaming & Narrative

As computer games inch beyond shoot-‘em-ups into the narrative territory of books and movies I wonder how far the medium can actually go. I wonder if a more interactive and involving version of narrative might emerge that will replace, at least partly, those traditional ones.

I believe that narrative — the story, the myth — is something we have a deep psychological attachment to, and sharpening one’s carnage skills or doing a treasure hunt are not acceptable or satisfying substitutes. They are exciting and fun, but they don’t serve the same needs and don’t have the deep and lasting resonance with us as individuals and as a social group. Stories, however fragmented or disjointed, do that.

Games are edging closer, though. Characters have back stories and sort of personalities, but they don’t really change, evolve or “grow” — the popular Hollywood term. They remain the same person at the end as they were at the beginning, but maybe with more stuff or accumulated points. The primal hierarchical struggle for power and status is there, something males have found ways to practice in thousands of forms — from childhood games to office politics — but not much in the way of development. Something else males have been accused of more than once. Women, for the most part, are just not genetically programmed to find any of this of much interest.

We don’t much identify with the characters in videogames either, except to the extent that they are avatars of ourselves. They don’t exist apart from our own decision-making. In books and movies the characters have their own motivations and personalities, we may love or hate them, but they are not us. Somehow the fact that they are not exactly the same as us allows us to invest more emotionally in them and their future. The distance allows us to see part of ourselves — a problem, an issue or a relationship — being acted out to some unknown conclusion. Or even to a known conclusion — many myths and stories don’t lose power even though we know the ending. So it’s not about the surprise of the change, it’s about the resonance and thrill of observing it happen

The imagination fills in the holes when we read, we imagine the places and faces, and movies are mostly photographed, so the people and places resemble our world more or less as we see it. But in games the CG lands and characters are not quite rendered realistically enough to be real — though we can see this barrier being crossed over very soon. Gollum did, in LoTR, but that CG actor was following the motion capture of a live actor most of the time. But eventually that umbilical cord will be cut and the CG actor will have their own personality and be able show expression and emotion that corresponds to invisible interior states.

Another feature of games is multiple ending possibilities and decision trees that can go to more than one place. I believe that open-ended narratives and multiple endings are not what we are really after. Myths and fairy tales, the ur-narratives, gain so much of their power by their construction, their endings and conclusions, that to offer multiple ending options is to sap them of their resonance and power.

Games are getting pretty clever at this — they often appear to be offering multiple scenarios, but somehow they all end up at the same place. The detour brings you back to the main road. This may have been designed for pragmatic reasons — to keep the branching from getting out of control, and therefore taking up more storage space than is available, but it also serves to bring the structure closer to a narrative.

Maybe this “false” interaction will be how the gap is bridged?

I can imagine a time when there are games that do have involving characters that learn, have realizations and change over the course of the story. And because it is a game there would be some (simulated?) player involvement and, most significantly, it would take longer to play than a movie. It might take a week to get to the ending, which is typical for a game, by which time you the player have become so invested in the people and the story that it has the power and depth of a novel, plus the visual impact of a film. Wow.

7.30.05: Payola

The Supreme Court has ruled that file sharing networks can be sued for copyright infringement if they induce or encourage illegal downloads. Grokster was the example. Acquisition, for example, was not.

At the same time, a study in U.K. was made public and it showed that music file sharers buy more CDs. Indeed, as argued, the access to free music seems to simply deepen the knowledge and appetite for recordings.

Payola:

Eliot Spitzer, the New York State Attorney General, indicted some major labels for payola… Sony BMG settled out of court. Some say Sony was caught because another major label tipped Spitzer’s office. Corporate infighting and backstabbing. But they all do it, so won’t they all be under surveillance now? At least temporarily. So who ultimately benefits if one told on the other?

An Op-Ed piece in the Times [link] points out that payola has always been with us, but that laws and indictments have merely driven the practice higher up the corporate chain of command, leaving the upstart and indie labels out in the cold.

My own experience with payola is limited and of course subjective. I’d heard of payola as I entered the music business professionally in the mid seventies, but naïvely thought it would never apply to me. I figured that it was a practice that was dying out and existed mainly around the disco, country music and R'nB worlds — which seemed not to be mainstream in those days.

Soon enough I began to hear stories, but still these didn’t apply to the circle of musicians I moved in. We could pretend that we were immune.

By the mid eighties, when Talking Heads had had some hit singles, the biggest of which was “Burning Down the House”, I got the news. “Burning Down The House” had some serious “indie” promotion money behind it. It got played on some college and other stations without financial prompting, but the jump to “commercial FM”, as I think it is called, was helped by cash and whatever else was used at the time — probably coke and women.

The band was in the midst of a tour, the one that was eventually filmed as Stop Making Sense. As we crisscrossed the continent (due to technical miscalculations this tour never really went to Europe) I could see that audiences were reacting more and more vociferously and positively to this relatively new song. How exciting! But as I began to hear rumors about the promo money being spent to help the song on radio all sorts of thoughts ran through my head.

I wondered if every pop song that had moved me on the radio, from when I was in my teens, had been paid for. Oh jeez! Therefore, other than a few free-form stations around at that time I was being treated like a Pavlovian dog — what I had believed were my subjective passions and discoveries were actually the result of a concerted program to pound certain tunes into my innocent brain. I had been totally manipulated! What I thought were decisions and loves that were mine and mine alone had been planted in my head by sleazy characters I could barely imagine. Free will? Hah! My entire past was called into question. Who am I? Am I not partly what I like? And if those things I like were not completely of my own choosing, then what am I?

Obviously, this insight applied to our audiences as well. And now, with the success of this single, to our own songs! I caught myself thinking to myself, “they APPEAR to be loving this song, but little do they know they’ve simply been manipulated to like it, just like I was manipulated to like the stuff I like!” They don’t REALLY like it all THAT much, I shouldn’t believe what I see. In fact, I began to doubt whether the song was as good as its reception seemed to imply. As a songwriter and musician I of course would like to believe that when an audience shouts for a song it’s because we’ve written something pretty good that touches them in some significant way. The implication is that my fellow musicians and I are pretty talented. We should pat ourselves on the back, be proud, we deserved some of the perks that were coming our way.

Knowing that the song was partly paid for throws all that ego boost material out the window. Ooops, maybe the song is just O.K., and we’re all so easily manipulated that it doesn’t really matter if it’s good or not. And, as well as thinking less of myself, I began to think a whole lot less of our audience. When people would come up to me and say “boy is that a great song, I LOVE that song!” I would be tempted to tell them, “no you don’t, you’ve just been saturated with it and manipulated like the rest of us. You like it because your soul, your likes and dislikes, are up for sale to the highest bidder.”

Cynical stuff.

In case some of you think this only applies to rap or mainstream pop or dance music or whatever you and your friends don’t listen to, think again. Alt rock, the symbol of “integrity” and “authenticity”, along with hip hop, is just as guilty of payola and promotion as the songs of Madonna and J.Lo. There’s a reason you think so-and-so is cool, and the reason has nothing to do with how good it actually is. There’s a reason writers write about certain artists, etc. etc. (The writers and magazines may not have been paid off, but the popularity of something makes it a valid subject, for example.)

It’s not all bad news, though. There’s another side to it. As has been pointed out many times, you can’t make people like a BAD song. You can only get a song across if it really truly does connect to people, if they really truly do like it. What the payola does, from a very very skewed perspective, is simply reinforce what is already desired. What is already good. It weeds out the lame and the sick and dying and helps the strong and healthy. Eugenic cultural filtering, sort of.

That’s a somewhat benign view of it. But it is true that the indie promoters say they won’t take the money unless the song proves it has at least a shot. They can’t promote a total piece of crap — or so they claim. So you can only get away with shoving a couple of lame singles down the public’s throat, and then the radio programmers themselves will probably react — “keep your money, we won’t play it — it will hurt our listenership, they’ll tune out if we play too many lousy songs.” Well, maybe, up to a point. Over time you can get an audience to accept less and less. They bar gets lowered and it’s easier to break songs that are pure bullshit. But let’s believe there are limits below which the marketplace will not sink.

The other problem with the payola system is that it bankrupts the artist. Not always, but very often, these costs — hundreds of thousands of dollars — are recoupable against the artist’s share of the record royalties. If the song clicks and the record sells millions, then no one complains, as money eventually trickles into the artist’s account. But if other things happen — if the song gets plenty of play maybe everyone really likes it too, but no one buys the CD — then the artist will be unlikely to recoup those costs. So maybe the record company tries a second single, with more indie promotion expenses, which indeed may be the one… or it may simply put the poor artist even further in the hole.

So, what to do? I agree with the Times writer that if payola is going to always be with us then at least let’s level the playing field a little. The harm the present arrangement does is that it locks out artists and labels whose songs are just as good, if not better, than what is getting played, but can’t afford the payments. Things succeed partly on worth, but partly on cold hard cash. It would be nice if worth had a chance on its own every once in a while.

It would also be nice if these hidden costs were less hidden — if the artist were apprised of what was going on in his or her name and had to sign off before incurring substantial debt.

More later.

7.22.05: Bicycles, Bolivian WWF, Chinese Yuan

London — Bicycles are looking more and more like a sensible option.

From the NY Times — the Bolivian version of WWF:

Sam and I discussed the possible repercussions of the Yuan being cut free from the dollar. Actually I was asking him questions most of the time. Much of the now enormous U.S. debt is held by the Chinese in U.S. Treasury bonds or something, so they sure don’t want the dollar to sink too low. But they may look for other secure places with decent interest rates to place their cash. U.S. importers will face price hikes, as will those who outsource the manufacture of computer chips and most of the rest of the stuff that comes into the U.S.

I expect these will all lead to slow but seismic changes, changes the Bush administration has neither prepared for or thought about. This may be the end of the Iraq war right here. At 60 billion a month the U.S. will simply not be able to afford to continue it without that Chinese money flowing in — though some other excuse will no doubt be found. The Bush cronies will have gotten their slices, and will have made off with chunks of loot, but the future long term energy security and possibility of oil control will be a thing of the past. (My opinion, not Sam’s.)

7.20.05: Tech companies

Hewlett-Packard laid off 14,500 employees yesterday. Today Kodak laid off 15,000, which means that company has laid off 25,000 people in the last couple of years! Xerox, well, I don’t know the figures yet. Is Xerox still in business? Does anyone still buy copiers?

At a restaurant where I was eating dinner the other night the bartender said he used to work at Xerox. Nice place, he said. Their corporate culture was humane, welcoming. He also said they just didn’t see the PC coming. In fact, they had developed early prototype versions of the mouse, the Ethernet and other bits and bobs that we think of as commonplace now — this was way back — but it was others who eventually introduced these things to the public. Xerox boldly stuck with their copiers, though they branched out to computer printers, which are somewhat technically related.

Interesting that both Kodak and Xerox are headquartered in Rochester, a medium-sized town with a fast-flowing river, useful for power and disposing of all those nasty photo chemicals. Other than that it’s somewhat isolated, not a big rail hub or port… so what made these once giant almost monopolies emerge there? They were so ubiquitous that their company names almost replaced the generic name for a copier or a camera — the way the word Kleenex sort of replaced facial tissue.

The Eastman House in Rochester has just partnered with the ICP here in NY to put lots and lots of pix on line, hundreds of thousands. Eastman house has the largest collection of pix from the dawn of photography up until the contemporary era, after which other institutions then took the lead. So this seems like a wonderful timely idea. It’s cheaper than brick and mortar institutions and will I imagine inspire folks who’ve never seen a lot of the stuff before. Curators, photographers, scholars and plain folks.

7.15.05: Traffic Fatalities, London Moment of Silence

There was a dead woman in my neighborhood yesterday. (Veronica Williams was her name.) I came back from an errand and some meetings and the middle portion of the block was closed off. In the middle of the street a figure lay covered in a white sheet. An ambulance and some cops milled around. The medical examiner had finally arrived (after 3 hours, according to a woman who works in a nearby building.) This woman told me that the dead woman walked out into the street between two parked vans, jaywalking into the path of an oncoming truck. She was killed instantly. The truck driver, in a green shirt, paced the cordoned off area, obviously distraught and somewhat out of his mind. My informant said the truck was not speeding, that she must have just appeared and there was no way he could have stopped in time.

New Yorkers jaywalk all the time — it’s almost surprising this doesn’t happen more often.

London has a moment of silence. Note the genital protection posture:

7.14.05: Jim White, Oil & Politics

Joined Yale and caught Jim White as he sang 3 or so songs as a kind of opening for the film Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus. It was lovely. Jim’s guitar playing has either improved a lot, or I never heard it so well before. The audience sat in attentive silence, which worked in Jim’s favor — in bars and clubs his subtle singing, the lyrics and dark humor sometimes get drowned out, but here everything could be heard perfectly.

The film got a pretty good review in the NY Times, though the Post apparently didn’t like it — Jim joked later that “those readers are my audience!”

An illuminating piece in the NY Times re: U.S. oil consumption, attitudes and U.S. reliance on foreign oil. If one reads even a little between the lines, the “justification” for Iraq seems pretty damn obvious… not to mention U.S. sabotage and criticism of the current Venezuelan government.

7.12.05: Marisa Monte

Got a ping recently from from Andres Levin about doing something on a Marisa Monte project and I’d gotten an e-mail from her earlier, so I stopped by his studio. It was really sweet. She had a samba groove done by a Brazilian human beatbox and wondered if I could come up with a melody or something. (I thought this is pretty flattering, a Brazilian asking me to come up with a samba!) So I improvised on the spot, and we all liked the direction. She started humming it and added her own characteristic turns and inflections (making my 8 bar melody into 11 bars, very nice, less ordinary.) Andres figured out the chords on a guitar and we all took copies and will see where it goes.

7.11.05: "Rize", Australian Lyrebird

Saw Rize, the David LaChapelle documentary, which has amazing footage, and the whole image of ghetto clowns furiously dancing is a beautifully insane metaphor in search of a connection. (He does begin with L.A. riot footage, implying that L.A. willfully ignores its black communities, and that this fierce dancing is partly the result.) But the doc is a bit shapeless — though the dancing was wonderfully edited, I thought — there were about 4 endings too many. Out of the clown dancing emerged a splinter group — Krumpers. And the ending should probably have been the big showdown between the Clowns and the Krumpers. It’s amazing, unifying and all that. But then would we have missed the footage of someone saying they are krumping for Christ? Maybe.

Watching nature documentaries with Malu.

The lyrebird of Australia imitates other birds — and other sounds as well. It puts on a real performance, clearing a space in the bush and then stringing all its accomplishments together in a 5-minute extravaganza, ending with, in this footage, the sounds of a camera shutter, a car alarm, loggers’ footsteps and finally the sound of the loggers’ chainsaws cutting through a tree — these last were perfect, impeccable mimicry, like recordings!

“Rationality will not save us” — Robert McNamara

7.3.05: Italian Radio Playlist, SummerStage Review, Freedom Tower

New “radio” stream went up yesterday. This time it’s all Italian stuff, a change form the eclectic pop mix I’ve stuck with so far. For starters, none of the Italian stuff is in English, so I may lose some listeners, at least in the U.S. But maybe not.

There was a review in the NY Times of the SummerStage show. No mention at all of the Sons Of Thunder, so I suspect the reviewer didn’t stay for the end. Maybe he didn’t even stay till the end of my set, who knows? As there was no break at all between my set and theirs, in fact I never even said goodnight, how could they possibly have missed them? Wasn’t the reviewer even curious? Whatever, he missed an important part of the concept of the evening. Too bad. The review was not positive, which was a little sad, as both the band and the public seemed to enjoy it as we stretched out in a variety of directions during these shows. The audience, to their credit, goes with it a lot of the time. Some audiences prefer old favorites, but not everywhere. That could be a factor of the venue more than the audience. An arena-sized crowd tends to be conservative. Most adjectives in the review were backhanded begrudging compliments to this effect, so maybe that says more about the reviewer than about what we have been up to for the last 4+ years.

The Freedom Tower, the building proposed to fill the World Trade Center site, or a least the most prominent one on that site, has been redesigned yet again. Apparently all the self-congratulatory design competitions and ceremonies for the site in the years immediately following the attack were just for show, as this most recent proposal has nothing to do with higher ideals of any sort.               

The new proposal is a glass tower on a massive fortified concrete base. 20 stories (!!) high almost windowless concrete. Basically, a fortress. Or a prison. It wouldn’t look out of place to have a gun turret or anti-aircraft weaponry on the roof. My daddy’s reaction was, “this says: ‘we have no faith in the future.’” I think he’s right. The site could have stood for all that is good and open and innovative about the United States. The can-do spirit, the possibility of re-invention, tolerance of all kinds of weirdos, mixtures of a multitude of races and creeds, all living together. Sometimes the U.S. is like that anyway. And the site could be a way of saying THIS is what we believe in and what we stand for.

This instead is a big fuck you to the rest of the world at the entrance of NY harbor, it says we are isolationist, protectionist and closed. As dad suggests it says we don’t think things will get better, we don’t believe good will triumph; instead we think things will get a lot worse. It’s back to medieval days for us.               

               

On a purely practical level, what kind of attack are the people who thought of this expecting? A car bomb that could somehow get across a well-protected plaza? Didn’t the previous attack come from the air?

I think it’s not really about the practicalities of security or protection, but about symbolizing an attitude, a climate of fear and of a walled-in nation.