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The Big Pool of Money experiment

At last night's meeting of the Columbia chapter of Social Media Club, I mentioned something I heard suggested in an off-hand way at the Infovalet Conference in May. What if every American paid a fee as part of his or her monthly ISP bill, and then that money were divided up among content creators?

Of course, what I found ironic about this back in May was that the people suggesting it weren't suggesting that ANYONE be able to share in this revenue. The idea was that only content creators who happened to also own printing presses and/or FCC licenses would be eligible. That's absurd on its face, which is probably why that idea hasn't gone anywhere. Try selling that politically.

But as I drove home to Charleston, I reconsidered the idea. Which is why I want you to play along in a thought experiment with me.

What if we all paid into a fund that could be distributed among EVERYONE who creates content, of any kind, that can distributed online? Bloggers, filmmakers, musicians, reporters, pornographers, comedians, ANYONE.

How would it work? How could it be administered? 

Criticism: Why it sucks

I write reviews of plays for the local alt-weekly, and I do so more out of compulsion to go places and do things and write about them than anything else. Tonight I'll watch a play. Tomorrow morning I'll write a review of it. And that might just be the last time I do it, given the direction my life is heading and my thoughts on criticism in general.

There are basically two functions of criticism, and they've always been united within the form:

1. The critic is responsible to the audience and should honestly and intelligently answer the question: "Should I devote time and money to seeing this?"
2. The critic has a responsibility to the artist -- and to art itself -- to engage in this vaguely defined, ongoing public dialog about art, quality and standards.

Great critics -- and there have been critical essays and even reviews that I would consider to be "great" -- are artists themselves. But I'm not a great critic. I'm functionally an amateur critic who has been learning on the job. I started in the 1990s with book reviews, but for the past few years I've been required to write critical things (positive and negative -- remember that "criticism" as a literary form also includes praise) about live, local performances, and I'm here to tell you that writing about people you can see is fundamentally a different beast than covering artists who work elsewhere.

Playing the Same Place

Because the ad said that Dex Romweber would begin at 9 PM, and because we thought we would arrive in time to have a drink and survey the surroundings before the show actually began, my friend Steve and I arrived at The Basement at exactly 9 PM.  Big mistake.  Save the drummer for one of the two opening duos—who was fiddling with one of her cymbals—we were literally the only people in the bar.  No other patrons, no other musicians, and no bartender.  Steve literally had to walk outside to find someone to sell us a beer.

I hadn’t seen Dex (formerly of the Flat Duo Jets) play in years, and, if no one was going to show up at this show (two opening bands before Dex played and no one was here?), I wasn’t quite sure I could stand to stick around either.  The whole thing had the feeling of a depressing nightmare from which I wanted to slink away.  And had I been alone, I may well have done so.

“What must it be like,” Steve asked, “to play in places like this for all these years?”

KK4 V.I.P R.I.P.

So a funny thing happened on the way to the beer ticket window at Kulture Klash 4: A guy looked at our wristbands and redirected us to the VIP Lounge, where free beer and food awaited us.

How did we wind up with VIP wristbands? Well, the most likely answer is there was some kind of screw-up, and we later heard rumors that something had gone wrong and flooded the lounge with people who weren't so important after all. Which I think is just divinely sweet.

But here's the lesson I hope the excellent people behind the influential Kulture Klash series learn from this glitch: You're misreading our new culture when you add a VIP room to your party.

On the Run with PURE Theatre

PURE Theatre: Episode 1 from Dan Conover on Vimeo.

Episode 1: Actors and PURE Theatre co-founders Sharon Graci and Rodney Lee Rogers start their day.

PURE Theatre: Episode 2. The Move-in. from Dan Conover on Vimeo.

Episode 2: The PURE crew gets to work unloading their gear and constructing their new theater.

PURE Theatre: Episode 3. Showtime from Dan Conover on Vimeo.

Episode 3: Sharon gets behind the wheel of the Penske for her first truck-driving experience; everyone hustles to get ready for the first performance of Vaud Rats.

Cross-posted from Janet's SpoletoToday site.

Why we're not blogging here

Today my mother wrote to see if we were OK, because we haven't been blogging much. This, then, is the 21st century: "Now be sure to eat right. And wear clean underwear and a nice hat. And be sure to blog every day."

In fact, the reason we're not blogging much at Xark is because Janet and I are blogging/vlogging and podcasting our collective asses off at SpoletoToday 2008. Janet's in charge this year, which means her dream has finally come true: She gets to tell me what to do, and I have to do it.

Here are the videos I've put up so far...

Monkey: Journey to the Grocery Store

Monkey: Journey to the Grocery Store from Dan Conover on Vimeo.

The second (better) Amistad video

Amistad: Race, art, history and opera from Dan Conover on Vimeo.

Confederate kitsch quick sketch

I was down on the battery with some new pens today, so ...

And away we go

It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine. REM

Once,  the biggies controlled the pipelines, deciding whose content was disseminated and how.  But no more. Thousands of little conduits are siphoning the power from the few and allowing art and information to flow up, over, around to audiences, albeit smaller ones, everywhere.

We've witnessed the phenomenon of Radiohead's Web-only album release. Here's another example of a breach in the wall: Ingrid Michaelson.  The NY-based singer/songwriter's road to fame, if not quite stardom, ran through MySpace, where her music was found by TV types, scoring her an Old Navy commercial and a few seconds on Grey's Anatomy.  Now she's gaining traction as an indie darling, with coverage in the likes of The New York Times and  Rolling Stone. Her second album, Girls and Boys, has been rereleased and is doing nicely on Billboard.com (meaning there's radio play) and iTunes.

Why is this so cool? She's never been signed to a label.

Oh yes, the end is coming.

Art is shit; Shit is art

When you live in a city with dog owners who don't bother to clean after their pets, you can get mad or you can get creative.

These people not only got creative, they got a gallery opening today in Brooklyn.

Via my partner in design, Rodolfo Larios.

Link.

Brooks chases his Long Tail

This morning's confounder? A David Brooks column that ran locally under this headline: "Once-unifying music fragmented by society and technology."

The gist? Hipsters and technology are ruining the country. And the Long Tail (Brooks doesn't capitalize it, or explain it) is bad for the culture.

There is just so much here to discuss that perhaps a fisking is in order. But for those of you with lives and/or better things to do, I'll state my conclusions first:

Brooks' true subject isn't music or  economics or technology or even the "hipsters" who seem to bother him so much. What he's really writing about is the desire for a world that is simple, a world mediated by trusted gatekeepers and ruled by institutions that set the boundaries of everything from legality to morality to taste.

That Brooks could write this piece without even mentioning the monopolization of commercial radio betrays his selective myopia. But for the love of Gawd how do you write about "all-purpose" Rock and Roll as some canonized marketing wing of The One True Establishment without even a trace of irony?

Brooks is popular because he speaks to a common anxiety: The world is spinning out of control. Then he provides a reassuring answer: People like you who remember the old values have the right answer. He explains how things got this way: Hipsters and elites have caused a general breakdown of authority and good order. And he prescribes a solution: Stop it!

But here's the way it's going to be, folks: The world is going to change. Rapidly. More rapidly than you remember. More rapidly than you may be prepared for emotionally.  Values and ethics and cultural connections are going to be hugely important to us, as they are now, but they must be portable. Offering them as talismans against change will fail to prevent change and succeed only in damaging the very concepts you claim to hold in such esteem.

Imagining alternatives to your accepted reality is uncomfortable, but it's an absolute requirement for staying relevant in the 21st century. Our country's established conservative voices seem intent on disqualifying themselves from credibility with the next generation, and believe it or not, that's going to become a problem soon. We're going to need conservatives who understand cultural symbols, technology and change as a force of history. But that's a topic for another day.

Fisking after the jump...