Off to Greener Pastures (i.e., Tumblr)

I've finally caught up with the times: the Blogger platform is played out. Apparently it's very 2007. I, too, am quite 2007. Hence the time lag.

Is Tumblr very 2013? I don't know. Maybe in three years I'll find out that it's quite 2010. In any case, PostLeaf is over there now.

I'm in the process of transferring some postleaf.blogspot content to postleaf.tumblr, and should have new stuff soon.

Blogger, it's been real. And virtual.

SoundLeaf (Phosphorescent, "Song for Zula")

How to make your listener be all, "I've heard this before, WHERE HAVE I HEARD THIS BEFORE... it sounds like that song, you know, the one I loved when I was in college, or maybe when I was in high school - the one with all the atmosphere and the... chord progression, and the quiet sense of majesty, and the synthesizers intertwining with the organic instruments to create a textured, gradually clarifying soundscape. Oh yeah, it sounds like 'With or Without You.'"

"Veronica Mars," Kickstarter, and Crowdfunding as Consumption

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"Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producers ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer."

- Adam Smith, economist

"I'm not going to conform to some consumer need. I believe people want to hear this kind of music, that people want to hear records that have a story. Or maybe they don't. I have no idea."

- Billie Joe Armstong, lead singer of Green Day

"I realize that people have an emotional reaction to Veronica Mars, and one that I'm grateful for, but we're trying to give good value for the money. We're asking you to pre-buy the products to prove to the studio that there can be money made. If they sold you the t-shirt and the download later, they're making profit then. No one cares that they're making profit then."

- Rob Thomas, creator of Veronica Mars

"... reunions and resuscitations aren't just about adding new wrinkles to familiar characters or telling funny jokes. At heart, they're about satisfying the eternal human urge to undo an outcome that we believed to be wrong and unfair and that continues to depress and obsess us. ... So we join forces with like-minded depressive-obsessives and try to turn a negative into a positive, to swap out death with life. We don't just do it because we loved and respected the original thing, whatever it happened to be. We do it because some part of us wants to return to the time and place associated with it."

- Matt Zoller Seitz, critic at Vulture

2

This past Wednesday, the creators of the long-dead crime series Veronica Mars announced their intentions to make Veronica Mars: The Movie. But there was a catch. They had to raise two million bucks, or else Warner Brothers would refuse to greenlight the project. So they set up a page on Kickstarter, a crowdfunding website, and asked Veronica Mars fans to contribute. By Wednesday evening, the dollar total of donations had reached two million; by Thursday evening, three million.

Predictably, there came a flood of online think pieces, most of them wondering, with varying degrees of delight or dismay, whether Kickstarter and Veronica Mars had just revolutionized the model for funding and promoting entertainment. I, for one, agree with HitFix's Alan Sepinwall: the VM campaign benefited from an unreproducible mixture of fans being well organized, actors being available, and crowdfunding being, for the moment, a novelty. The next time a late, beloved program (Terriers? Deadwood?) tries to crowdfund a feature, it almost certainly won't receive as much support.

So I would speculate that the sky is neither rising nor falling. It's changing color - slowly. And critics who say otherwise are probably just trying to raise their SEO profiles.

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What interests me, however, is whether crowdfunding will or should change the behavior of pop-culture consumers.

Is it better to buy products or back projects? Out of my limited budget for DVDs, mp3s, books, and show tickets, how much should I set aside for the unrealized dreams of Internet-savvy artists? Am I willing to invest in a venture that might never come to fruition? Am I cool with lining the pockets of entertainment executives, who will surely scheme their way into a piece of the crowdfunding pie? And hey, shouldn't those executives, flush as they are with Bieber profits, be the ones fronting the cash and assuming the risk?

Lots of bright folks seem to think so. On Twitter the comedian Mike Birbiglia joked, "Someone's gotta help these 'Warner Brothers.' It's 2 brothers, right?" Making the same point, but more soberly, Chadwick Matlin tweeted, "Is Warner Bros., a huge conglomerate, not just outsourcing its fund-raising to the proletariat? Who gets the profits? Not us." Many of my favorite critics took a similar line.

So apparently if you ponied up for Veronica Mars: The Movie, you're a sucker. A wretched proletarian, helplessly enmeshed in Hollywood's ideological state apparatus. Sure, you may have been promised a t-shirt, or a DVD, or even an invitation to the premiere - but all you really did was let a bunch of rich scaredy-cats take advantage of your false consciousness.

Well, call me a sucker, because I plunked down thirty-five bucks for the VM Kickstarter, and I did so without hesitation. Worst of all, I still feel pretty good about it.

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In its three beleaguered seasons on UPN and the CW, Veronica Mars was by no means the best thing on television. Created by Rob Thomas (who went on to produce the wonderful, short-lived Party Down) and starring Kristen Bell as an adolescent gumshoe, the show took place in a noirishly-lit simulacrum of southern California and followed a conventional case-of-the-week structure. As with most crime procedurals, some episodes worked better than others; there are only so many new iterations of the old formula. Plus, VM suffered from the maladies common to all financially unstable TV productions: a revolving-door policy for all but a few characters; a variety of dead-end subplots; and a flailing, sputtering, drowning final season.

Yet even when its head was barely above water, Veronica Mars was a joy to watch. Bell's blend of toughness and whimsy - so misused by the romcom industrial complex - sustained the show through its fallow periods. But unlike most of her hardboiled forebears, Veronica worked well with others. The primary crux of the show was her relaxed rapport with her private-eye father; the secondary crux, her cautious romance with a spiky-haired bad boy. To her scenes with Enrico Colantoni (the dad) and Jason Dohring (the love interest), Bell brought a special sweetness, a sense of wit and play. It was clear that she adored acting with them, and they with her.

So Veronica Mars's early cancellation in 2007 was upsetting not because its last season boded well for the future of the show, but because its two key relationships never got satisfyingly resolved. And there's nothing like a lack of 'ship closure to mobilize a fanbase. For the past six years, VM enthusiasts (or "marshmallows," as they style themselves) have been clamoring for a follow-up movie. They mailed 10,000 Mars Bars to CW headquarters. They wrote fan fiction. And they circulated petition after petition after petition.

Every now and then I checked in on the marshmallows, hoping vaguely that they would be heard, but knowing full well that no studio would go all-in for a Veronica Mars revival. I mean, the show did get canceled after three seasons. And it was on the CW, for chrissakes. The poor animal had died a natural death.

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So here's what what I get for my $35 donation to the Veronica Mars Kickstarter:

1. A digital copy of the film.
2. A t-shirt.
3. A PDF of the shooting script.
4. Regular behind-the-scenes updates.

I'm most excited about the first reward. On iTunes you can download a movie for between $10 and $20. My local multiplex charges about the same for admission. So a digital copy of the VM movie, ready for at-home viewing within a few days of the theatrical release, has real value.

But this is largely beside the point. What I shelled out for, and already received, was an assurance that the film would be greenlit. Granted, I would have been more stoked if Warner Brothers had stepped up and paid for everything. But that wasn't going to happen, and I can understand why. Even now, after all of this publicity, Veronica Mars: The Movie probably won't be a hit; its audience will be zealous but relatively small. So I put down my $35 because I wanted to support a mainstream project that had no chance of earning mainstream funding - not because I thought I was feeding a starving artist, and not because I was unaware that WB suits were after a piece of my grad-student income (when are they not?). I gave my money willingly, knowingly, and with pleasure; I can't figure out why I should feel exploited.

So why didn't I donate to a more underground cause? To a poet who doesn't have health insurance? To a lovable grandmother seeking start-up capital for a cane business? After all, Kickstarter is meant to, you know, kick start underfunded careers, not to supplement already-lucrative ones.

Fair enough. But I would maintain that crowdfunding can serve the additional purpose of helping professionals continue a project of verified excellence. Rob Thomas and Kristen Bell churned out 64 episodes of Veronica Mars, most of which I enjoyed. I'm confident they can execute an entertaining feature-length film.

That said, I'm no crowdfunding utopian. I doubt that Kickstarter will transform the art-commerce dynamic, and even if it does, I don't think the little guys will be the main beneficiaries. So I mistrust the tech-friendly optimism of Amanda Fucking Palmer, a rocker who Kickstarted her way to $1.2 million, and who has become a huckster for the so-called "art of asking." If you've fallen on hard times, Palmer says, get intimate with your fans and invite them to help you: they will do so gladly. 

Never mind that Palmer got her actual "kick start" from Roadrunner Records, a subsidiary of Warner Music Group. Never mind that the label spent years disseminating her image and her recordings. Never mind that, in Palmer's opinion, she earned her ardent fans all by her lonesome, and that therefore her experience is universally replicable and not merely fortunate.

Yes, Palmer comes across as self-righteous and disingenuous. But she's right about one thing: artists should feel free to ask their fans for support. And fans should feel free to say, "No, Amanda Fucking Palmer. You cannot sleep on my fucking couch."

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The case of Amanda Fucking Palmer is further instructive in thinking through the potential consequences of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter. While burning through her $1.2 million, Palmer posted an account of her expenses. Wonder or wonders, she had treated herself to a bit of spending spree. $105,000 to make 7,000 CDs and thank-you cards. $250,000 for recording fees and band/staff/crew expenses. $300 for a photobook. Then, in September, she put out an ad asking for "professional-ish" musicians to play in her backing band at each stop on her tour. For free.

The American Federation of Musicians chastised her. Gawker ran an exposé. Steve Albini called her an "idiot." And Albini went on to say, with typical felicity of diction, that all of Palmer's asking and taking and using seemed "like a crazy moebius strip of waste."

Will the Veronica Mars story have the same bitter ending? Given that a mainstream film is far more difficult and costly to make than an indie album, and that over 50,000 people have now donated, I can only imagine how many contributors will eventually declare themselves dissatisfied. Maybe post-production will take longer than expected. Maybe the t-shirts will shrink in the wash. Maybe that lunatic who dropped $10,000 for a brief speaking role will show up stoned and get fired.

And maybe, most crucially, the marshmallows won't like the movie. Like many teen dramas before it (see: Buffy, Dawson's Creek, The O.C.), Veronica Mars floundered when its kids graduated from high school. A never-previously-mentioned local university had to be invented. All of the important characters had to be implausibly sent there. The show could no longer rely on the distinctive intensity of the high school setting: the shared schedule, the communal lunches, the vicious tribalism, the constant supervision.

In the upcoming movie, Veronica will be an adult, not a teenager doing a charming impression of an adult. So Rob Thomas and Kristen Bell will have to find a different angle on the VM world - and perhaps they will. Then again, they might go the nostalgia route, stuffing in too many characters, tying up too many loose ends, slipping in too many clever references to past glories. They might, in other words, make a piece of fan fiction. Which is exactly what the fan-fiction writers themselves wouldn't want. 

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And this is where the filmmaker-filmgoer relationship gets sticky: the marshmallows might start behaving like aggrieved stockholders. They invested their hard-earned cash, dammit, and all they got was this turkey of a picture? Admittedly, I myself might get a little hacked off if Veronica Mars: The Movie turns out to be dreadful. But the reality is that I own nothing, and that I didn't pay the VM team to succeed; I paid them to try.

The entertainment consumer has always been subject to risk. As we grow accustomed to YouTube and iTunes and Pirate Bay, we forget that we used to buy LPs and CDs without having heard more than a radio single. Back in 2001, I pre-ordered Weezer's much-anticipated Green Album, expecting that it would recapture the magic of Pinkerton and the Blue Album. It didn't. It sounded like Jimmy Eat World. And I swore that I would never pre-order something again.

Fat chance. This May, I will take the train to the multiplex and watch Before Midnight, the sequel to Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Directed by Richard Linklater and starring Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, Before Midnight concludes the eighteen-year-long saga of Jesse and Céline, Generation X's very own star-crossed lovers. My money is already spent, for all intents and purposes. There's no way I'm going to fail to see this film on opening day. And if Linklater had asked me for $200 to defray production costs, I would have fallen over myself trying to give him more.

Pop culture is usually disappointing, and always a waste of money. The value is in the hoping.

ThoughtLeaf (Krista Comer)

"One power of the keyword 'west' is its ability to conflate the geopolitical entity and physical topography currently referred to as 'the American West' with matters of identity, style, and cultural belonging. 'Western-ness' is highly mobile. If the term typically invokes conventional forms of masculinity, a good deal of its social force and moral credibility owes to a suppressed but sustained dialogue with that 'other' West: 'Western civilization.' Together these connotations map flexible investments in both masculine individualism, including 'wild western' bohemianism, and Western civilization's grandest claims. Since the late eighteenth century, Western forms of cultural belonging and style have been mobilized in the United States in defense of nation, home, white supremacy, and empire."

"President Bush's everyday western regionalisms - his retreat to Crawford Ranch, his invocation of the mythical line at the Alamo to separate cowards from heroes in the 'war on terror,' his posting of old-western 'wanted' lists after 9/11 - [have] renarrated 'western' to justify multiple U.S. wars in defense of the values of 'Western civilization.'"

- Krista Comer, "West," Keywords for American Cultural Studies, pp. 238-39, 242

Annotated SoundLeaf (pomDeter = Nine Inch Nails + Carly Rae Jepsen)

How to exploit the full potential of the mashup form.



Some context might help here.

"Head Like a Hole" surfaced nearly a quarter century ago, leading off Nine Inch Nails' now-classic album Pretty Hate Machine. NIN's industrial sound wasn't new; since the early eighties, underground groups like Ministry and Big Black had been exploring the connections between electronica and punk, experimenting with layers of abrasive synthesizers, guitars, and drum machines. But Trent Reznor, NIN's founder and sole songwriter, brought industrial rock to a mass audience.

In fact, Reznor became an icon for a certain type of disaffected teenager, the type who might enjoy shouting along with lyrics like these: "Head like a hole, / Black as your soul, / I'd rather die, / Than give you control." Over the years, Reznor's brand of melodramatic angst has proven durable; NIN still has a massive, fervid, self-reproducing following. Radiohead aside, I can't think of another contemporary band that gets taken so seriously by so many.



Enter Carly Rae Jepsen. A few years ago she placed third on Canadian Idol. She wears Zooey Deschanel bangs. She makes poppy pop records, with an extra dollop of pop. "Call Me Maybe" is the poppiest of them all, and last year, even in our fractured cultural world, it was damn near impossible to go a day without hearing those pixieish vocals, those processed strings, those shy come-ons, those precise repetitions... those pixiesh vocals, those processed strings, those shy come-ones, those... "Hey, I just met you, / And this is crazy..."



Pretty much everyone ended up annoyed.

So now, with the height of Carly Rae-mania several months behind us, a little-known DJ named pomDeter has slapped "Head Like a Hole"'s vocal track on top of "Call Me Maybe"'s instrumental track to create this brilliant mashup, "Call Me a Hole." Like much of Girl Talk's and The Hood Internet's best work, it yokes together the sacred and the profane, the hip and the unhip, the deep and the shallow, the eternal and the ephemeral - and it deconstructs the crap out of those binaries.

Trent Reznor's fans tend to think of "Head Like a Hole" as a subversive text, a middle finger to the mainstream. The same fans, especially the ones still trudging through the me-vs.-world morass of being an adolescent, are likely to view Carly Rae Jepsen as an unholy emblem of corporate pop culture. But what they forget, and what "Call Me a Hole" vividly demonstrates, is that while Reznor and Jepsen may belong to different teams, they play the same sport.

"Head Like a Hole" and "Call Me Maybe" (note the matching four-syllable titles) are both in 4/4 time, and both proceed in lockstep from verse to bridge to chorus. After the second chorus, both segue into a catchy middle eight (Reznor: "Bow down before the one you serve"; Jepsen: "Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad"). And both make the most of an exaggerated quiet-loud dynamic, introducing each chorus with a blast of instrumentation: Reznor uses guitars; Jepsen, violins.

As pomDeter himself avowed, "They went together with little effort."

In short, "Call Me a Hole" takes what appear to be disjunctures and turns them into continuities. And since a lot of people are invested in the original disjunctures - rely on them, even, to maintain a sense of superiority - pomDeter's track has caused plenty of anxiety. Amid the many compliments and expressions of joy in "Call Me a Hole"'s SoundCloud comments section, there are insults, accusations, expletives, and cries of misery, a few of which I quote here with pleasure:

• "I can't unhear this! HELP"
• "To use a NIN track and fuck it up should be against the law"
• "Call me closed-minded or whatever, but I find this a bit disrespectful [of] Trent Reznor/NIN"
• "This is evil"
• "THIS IS WRONG"
• "This gave me cancer"
• "Reznor never sounded so poppy"
• "We're all going to hell, and this is the dance track that they'll play there"
• "What an awful trend, but I'm sure all her fans are ecstatic and think they're cool now"

The last comment makes me especially happy. Too often musical taste is used as an instrument of cultural distinction and social aggression, particularly among teenagers. The NIN fans go in one cage, the Carly Rae fans in another. Now I'm not saying that "Call Me a Hole" will set anyone free, but it might remind the hip kids that their cage isn't necessarily better than the other, more crowded ones.

A wise SoundCloud commenter puts it this way: "Pop is pop is pop."

Goats! Music! Goats and Music! I'm Losing My Marbles

People on YouTube like goats and the dumbass sounds they make. A couple of weeks ago, this video went viral:



I was hooked. I mean, who wouldn't be? They're goats! And they're silly and... human sounds... and... they're goats! Goats!

So it was inevitable, perhaps, that the Internet would drop into my lap the following lump of nonsense:



The goat is singing along with Usher! THE GOAT IS SINGING ALONG WITH USHER!

I need help. This is a cry for help.

On Taking Offense

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Seth MacFarlane is that dipshit you find in every frat house. You know the one. When he makes a sexist joke and someone, usually a woman, cries foul, he says something like, "Hey, lighten up. Can't you take a joke?"

This familiar type of exchange played out on a massive scale last Sunday night, when MacFarlane turned the Academy Awards into a festival of misogyny. All over the Internet, people took issue with his reliance on ye olde slut-shaming tropes. But they were outnumbered by those suggesting that MacFarlane's detractors lacked a sense of humor, or took offense too easily, or needed to "lighten up."

More than a few feminist writers threw up their hands. "I AM TIRED OF TRYING TO EXPLAIN THIS SHIT TO PEOPLE WHO DON'T WANT TO HEAR IT," ranted Lindy West on Jezebel. The New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum tweeted, "One of the annoying things about crap like MacF's Oscars is how it forces all of us female critics to pull on our Nurse Ratchet hats." Slate's Dana Stevens quickly seconded, "My white orthopedic shoes are killing me." I can only imagine.

It must be infuriating to have the same conversation over and over about sexism in popular culture; to be always on the defensive, always the Debbie Downer; to spell out in a million different ways a tricky idea that most people will ultimately reject: frivolous entertainment has a serious influence on social values.

It's not widely acknowledged that an Oscars telecast is capable of doing what literary scholar Jane Tompkins calls "cultural work." As Tompkins puts it in her classic Sensational Designs, popular culture should be understood as "providing society a means of thinking about itself, defining certain aspects of a social reality[,] dramatizing its conflicts, and recommending solutions."

So MacFarlane's "We've Seen Your Boobs" isn't just an inconsequential bit of mischief. It expresses and reinforces the harmful "social reality" that sex is a rigged competition in which "we" (the guys) win when "you" (the gals) shed clothing. MacFarlane doesn't ask us to question this dynamic, or to think about its structural similarity to rape. He just asks us to laugh at the spectacle of powerful women being shamed.

Yes, Charlize Theron and Naomi Watts were "in" on the joke. No, this doesn't let anyone off the hook.

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The above is, I believe, a reasoned critique of MacFarlane's performance. Were I to publish it on, say, Slate or newyorker.com (or some other website with an actual audience), readers might sum up my stance by saying, "He seems offended."

Possibly true. But totally beside the point. When we focus on whether I'm offended, we stop talking about the intersections of culture and politics, and we start talking about me. My indignation. My sensitivity. And if I were a woman, we would suddenly be speaking in code about my hysteria. Woops.

On Oscar night, you didn't have to look hard to find repetitions of this pattern. When Troy Patterson, a colleague of Dana Stevens's at Slate, posted an article entitled "This Was the Best Oscars Ever," Twitter user @mostlymartha retorted, "What [Patterson] calls 'MacFarlane's edge,' I call a dull misogyny shitshow. What a disappointment, Troy."

Patterson replied, "I'm sorry to disappoint and, moreso, to hear that this trifling movieland ritual upset you." It should be noted that @mostlymartha hadn't said anything about being upset. So not only did Patterson imply that it was uncool to be serious about a "trifling" event, but he gratuitously brought up @mostlymartha's emotional condition. As if her disagreement could only be a manifestation of distress.

It was a smarmy move, and she wasted no time putting Patterson on blast. Predictably, he panic-moonwalked away from his initial position. "The issues you are concerned about are serious, but the Oscars are trifling, totally, year after year." "I support your right to be upset." "Oscars = frivolous. Thinking rigorously about frivolity = serious business."

I agree, more or less, with the last sentiment. But why keep insisting that the Oscars are silly, if not to insinuate that soberly critiquing them is also silly? And why keep referring to @mostlymartha's feelings, if not to portray her views as irrational? Clever as he is, Patterson dug his own grave here. He could have had a debate about cultural politics; instead, he had one about private emotions.

So maybe I should put it this way: it doesn't matter whether I took offense to Seth MacFarlane's Academy Awards. But what might matter, in a small way, is the habit of thinking critically about the connections between entertainment and society. And I maintain (not feel) that MacFarlane's jokes, frivolous as they were, made our social world a little less hospitable, a little less wise, and a little less just.