Soluble Fish

life, the universe and art

March 30th, 2009 § 1

My apologies to Belinda for not linking to this interview earlier. It is an interview with me about my video work – an exercise and an unexpected pleasure to articulate what I’m trying to do, my inspirations etc. Check out the other interviews on her site. Inspiring work.

Story vs. Collage

March 11th, 2009 § 1

None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did.

-Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation.

The 3-minute pop song has it’s roots in the ballad – a collage of words and sound given form with repetition and melody. We listen to most music (pick your favorite genre) over and over again not because we know what is going to happen next, but because our minds are turned on by the complexity of multiple inputs and the oceanic state beyond linear thought and meaning.

I am reading the new bio of Donald Barthelme, and getting reintroduced to his fragmented stories. For a while in the 60’s and 70’s, he was celebrated for a cinematic montage style where meaning was found (or discovered) in the juxtaposition of images, voices and genres. Everybody was doing it – The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Fellini, Godard. And then came a backlash, the collage style went out of fashion. Story and collage went their separate ways.

As I toil away at another draft of a screenplay, I get the heavy feeling (again) that the feature drama, like the novel, has lost much of its alchemical magic as an art form. I don’t think it’s a question of storytelling vs. a collage aesthetic. The traditional ballad and many pop songs, are fragmented stories. Some of the great storytellers of cinema (Welles, Hitchcock, Renoir) had a complex and somewhat fragmented style. Mainstream movies and novels have lost their power to connect to experience, which is more and more a collage-like messiness. As commercial art forms, they need to justify themselves to agents, publishers, producers and distributors. Every moment needs to be about something.

That’s why I love the fragmented messiness of net video. It is hard to find the magic and poetry, given the relentless and tiresome 20-something relationship dramas, but it is there. Here is a taste:

We Are All Publishers Now

March 5th, 2009 § 0

publishing = making public

“Today, many of the key functions that we think of as publishing are actually done by outsource firms, consultants, and freelancers…. So, if big publishers can hire all these people to work for them, can’t writers, co-ops, and scrappy indies?”

via Locus Online Features: Cory Doctorow: In Praise of the Sales Force.

This is a must-read column by Cory Doctorow. Top heavy publishers won’t be able to tinker in niche markets, so that leaves the small indies and the artists themselves some breathing room to get to the public. But still, how to market the work, cultivate community interest and get people to pay a few dollars for your fiction, music, video?

Outsourced publishing services will make it easier and cheaper to get quality work out to more people, but it will still be artists and their niche communities that will decide what has value for themselves and ultimately for the rest of us. We are all publishers now, all making public the flows of our aesthetic attention.

The Walking Man (phase nine)

January 26th, 2009 § 1

click to play

iPhone

With Joel Sugerman.

The Walking Man (phase eight)

January 26th, 2009 § 1

click to play

iPhone

With Joel Sugerman.

The Walking Man (phase seven)

January 26th, 2009 § 0

click to play

iPhone

With Joel Sugerman.

Smoke and Clouds

December 30th, 2008 § 1

The artwork as a field of potential meaning. Frustrating for some, exhilarating for others. An interview with Diane Williams in elimae.

elimae: …. Is it your aim, as much as you may be able to describe your aim, to allow the language of your fictions to achieve some semblance beyond which you intended, to become, in the manner of smoke and clouds, substances amplified beyond and abstracted from the particles of which they are composed?

Diane Williams: Yes, yes, yes, yes, this is my aim! If you have guessed this is my aim, then your question has brought me the sort of happiness I have not had in the longest time!

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Poetics
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