Friday, January 18, 2008 2:47 PM | Zeroplate I went to my first ever fencing competition today. It all seemed very complicated. What I know about fencing rivals what I know about fixing X-ray machines, so this was a good introduction. The contestant we were with was having some sword trouble so she had dropped her weapons off at the shop (humorously named the Sword Masters) early in the morning. This reminded me a bit of going to the magic and weapon shop in a video game, so it was not surprising that the guy who appeared to be the customer servive face of the shop had longish hair with a dye job, facial piercings, and that he was wearing headphones and was glued to Myspace. For all I know, homeboy is on my friends list--he clearly fits the profile! Except I hope that people on my friends list who work in service jobs have a keener sense for good customer service than this guy. After dropping the swords off at 8, my girlfriend started checking on them around 10:45. When I showed up at about 11:15, our fencer was in need of some weapons and her swords were still sitting in the queue. Captain LARP asked if we had a number and when we showed it to him, he said we were next in line. Now, I'm a fairly reasonable guy and I know that customers can sometimes seem demanding. We all get frustrated when we feel like our needs aren't being met, and it's likewise reasonable to get frustrated when someone you are dealing with seems focused on that need that isn't being addressed. But you know, that is the art of customer service: being able to at least appease the customer when you have no real way to accomplish what they want you yo accomplish. The sword master had apparently thrown a -8 against charisma because he was not interested in settling his customer's anxiety over the busted swords. When Amber told him that she'd heard the 'you are next in line' bit half an hour earlier, he put on his best condescending tone and threw out this gem: 'There's nothing I can do... Do you want to take the sword back and forfeit your place in line?' Not only was I not in the mood to be talked down to by a punk who was more interested in his Myspace profile than in working with his customers, but I got pretty incensed that he felt like he could be so cavalier when we were just trying to get an honest display of empathy. So I made sure he heard me when I said 'That's a shitty attitude!' This was apparently the last straw. Maybe he'd had a long day of people interrupting his Myspace messaging already, or maybe I just reminded him a little too much of a wizard who gave him a beat down in D&D at some point, but he couldn't take it anymore so he stormed off. When he got back, he had a fencing buddy with him, so he took the guy behind a curtain and proceeded to explain (with a prop) how he'd like to crack my skull with a hammer and how I told him he had a shitty attitude and the nerve of me and whatever. This was strike two for the guy in my book, because if there's a second rule after 'don't treat the customer like shit' it is 'don't complain about the customer in a self-righteous way in a place where he can both see and hear you.' At this point, I felt a little more confrontation might get the guy to strike three, and I was curious what that looked like. I realize that I was at this point antagonizing the guy for not much reason other than 'he started it,' but I wanted to sort of get my point across that providing good customer service, especially in a trying situation, is not really that hard if you just have a shred of kindness and if you take your job seriously. After a couple threats that I was 'really pushing him,' the guy used the hammer that he had demonstrated his skull cracking fantasy with to try and true up the blade on his pocket knife. He clearly wasn't thinking straight, as even I know from watching the Food Network that you don't fix a knife blade with a motherfucking hammer. Anyway, a couple of good whacks and the tip of his knife cracked right off, and I guess this was all he could bear. He stormed off again (strike three!) and the other guy who was working/talking during all of this asked me to leave his table. In the end, I'm sure that the people at Sword Masters are not terrible people (though at least one of them is not too handy with fixing a blade apparently--so 'Masters' they may not all be,) but they could probably stand to learn a lesson from this. As it seems like they are just about the only game in town at fixing fencing weapons at the tournament, it's likely that they'll be able to continue to treat customers with disdain, and that's a shame. I would have loved to have grabbed the swords and taken them somewhere else, but that wasn't really an option. The woman who actually worked on the swords was nice and perfectly professional and she gave us a very understanding "we're working as fast as we can" type of response that was all anyone really wanted. What we didn't want was to see a guy checking his fucking email on the clock, who appeared bothered that we were running out of time. The only reason any of us were even there was to make sure that some kids could go out on a strip, put on a mask, raise a sword and stab each other as anxious parents, coaches, and friends looked on. From what I could see, that happened a lot and the short time I spent at the competition was a lot of fun... especially watching that dude break his knife. {0} > Comments Friday, December 07, 2007 9:29 AM | Zeroplate An Open Letter to Independent Artists and Record Labels In the last decade, we've all watched in awe as the digital world has transformed nearly every facet of our lives, often in unanticipated ways. We take the portability and omnipresence of information for granted in so many ways that its difficult to remember a time when we had to wait days for someone to receive our stamped letter. People just a few years younger than me (I'm 32) have already grown up in a world so radically changed from the world that existed when I was a teen that the great divide between generations that keeps every old one from understanding every new one has gotten shorter. We don't have to wait to have children that we can't understand; our younger siblings are just as likely to to think about the world in ways that seem foreign to us as we did to our parents. Though the digital revolution has touched everything from cars and clocks to health care, the development of language, and the very basic pillars of our economy, perhaps the area where the change is most visible is in the world of music. Digital technology quickly brought music production to the unwashed masses so that anyone with a computer could record a song, and the internet was right behind that wave, offering each artist a worldwide distribution network for everything he ever created (no matter how good or bad.) For those of us who grew up on Vinyl, Cassettes, and CDs, we probably all remember the thrill of the first time we downloaded an MP3 of a song we just couldn't find any other way. It might have been a new artist we'd never heard of before, or a long out-of-print record by our favorite band, or a demo track from someone screaming out into the vast digital wilderness just begging to be heard. We all have that experience and we may have had different feelings about how that experience would shape the music industry in the years ahead, but I think we all realized that MP3s represented a turning point. Of course, with that thrill came the realization that something wasn't quite right. One MP3 quickly led to another and eventually we all stumbled upon something that an artist or label wasn't intending to offer to us for free: but there it was anyway. Debating the ethical decisions we were confronted with at that point will result in little useful dialog. We've turned the corner now and there's no looking back. We live in a world where the primary format for music distrbution will soon be non-physical. For those of us who have worked for a significant portion of our lives to make music and see it released on a plastic disc, suddenly our whole approach is being called into question. We have to look at the reality of this new world and find in it the opportunities that it brings that outweigh the limitations. For a boutique or small indie record label, the Compact Disc is appealing because the media is cheap and until very recently, it was the clear format of choice with nearly all consumers. A small label can invest relatively little in a short run of 300 - 2000 CDs and have a product that looks and feels as professional, presentable, and sellable as anything from a major. These products can be primed for retail with barcodes and shrinkwrap, and they can be everything that their mass-produced counterparts are with one major exception: availability. The boutique or micro-indie label that is pressing no more than 2000 copies of any single release has to deal with the gross inequity of retail distribution, and often no amount of quality, art direction, or passion for good music can make any difference there. Look at the major retailers of Compact Discs in the United States, and it quickly becomes obvious why small labels don't have a share in the game. Best Buy operates over 1,100 retail stores in the United States, Canada and China; Circuit City has 650 locations; the dreaded Wal-Mart runs more than 6,700 locations; even a small competitor that focuses on counter-cultural product like Hot Topic has 690 retail stores. It's important to understand that these chains deal with distributors of goods on a large scale--they want products that they can merchandize and sell in all of their locations, or at least in entire regions, and small labels clearly aren't even up to the task of creating the volume of product to meet demand if that demand was even created. A label that releases 500 copies of a disc has no chance at all of working with these retailers because stores don't order individually from their distributors. A network of smaller, independently owned and minded stores exists in the US, but even that network works with a particular set of distributors and with some major label product. All of this leads to a near-hopeless retail situation for small labels. Even in the best of cases, a small label that can get CDs into some of these stores in a limited number of markets still fails to have any real market penetration or recognition. The lack of a national or international retail presence reglegates these small releases to specialty sections in the few stores that will carry their records, or to boutique and often closed-ended retail locations that have no reach outside of an established niche customer base. Indie bands have long known that touring and selling merchandise is far more lucrative than selling CDs in stores, and yet our historical model for the whole industry has been one where a band released a CD, the CD showed up in the store, the song was played in a club or on the radio, and we then went to a show when the band came to town and bought a ticket and a t-shirt. If the first part of that process (retail) presents an often insurmountable obstacle, how do we expect the remaining steps to work at all? Radio promotion without retail support leads to potential customers who cannot find the record when they go out shopping--these are often customers who are permanently lost because their retail experience offers them myriad alternatives. Touring without radio/club support and press leads to bands showing up in towns where no one has the faintest idea of who they are or why paying $7 to see them would be worthwhile. Online promotion has changed some of this dynamic, but even artists who are able to build a following through Myspace pages and online word-of-mouth have to work within the traditional Retail-Promotion-Performance-Merchandise model if they expect their music to reach potential consumers. Having a popular viral video or Myspace page can augment your success within that traditional model, but it won't replace any of those key components. Just when the elements of promoting and selling a record (the sole reason that record labels exist,) appear to consipre against the indie record label, the answer begins to emerge from the haze. The move to a non-physical method of distribution is not without its challenges for a small label, but it offers a great chance to remove some of the obstacles that the historical model of record-selling presents. Since small labels have in many cases been reluctant to move towards this solution, let's look at a few of the common reasons that folks site about why dowloads as a release method aren't viable. Lack of Perceived Quality The thing that kept me from jumping feet first into the MP3 game was this nagging suspicion that the great ease with which an MP3 could be created, uploaded, traded, and copied meant that MP3 tracks would be less valuable than tracks found on physical media. To a certain extent, this fear is founded as anyone who lived through the mp3.com era of self-promotion should be well-aware. There's a near infinite supply of MP3 tracks available to potential consumers, and as Barry Schwartz explains in his book The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, this creates a new kind of problem where having too many choices leads to people who can't make decisions. At the very least, it leads people towards new systems for weeding out the tracks that are worth investigating from those that are not. Anytime there's an artificial filter like that put on the wide world of choices, its necessarily going to funnel people to similar decisions, but that may not always be a bad thing. There is a long enough tail that the funnelling effect can still help people to make decisions when faced with the prospect of downloading terabytes of MP3s to find the handful of tracks that will be appealing. But in the last few years with the rise of the iPod, we've seen this concern diminish. We're learning that people are gravitating towards these filters, and that they are surprisingly capable of doing their own filtering and at finding things that they like in the digital domain. The fact that a track is available only as an MP3 no longer has quite the stigma it once did, and in fact in a few more years (if it even takes that long,) most new consumers won't even consider the physical media as anything other than a memento or relic. Any cursory look around will tell the observer that the CD is no longer the center of the music universe. Portable CD players are becoming increasingly rare in public, and most new CD players are now fitted with a feature to play discs of MP3s to help keep the technology from being completely wiped out by progress. The MP3 is quickly becoming the defacto standard for music, so we shouldn't worry that releasing music for download will kill off interest. Small labels should just apply the same standards they would to physical CD production to MP3 releases so that the MP3 does not become an easy way to release substandard records. Lack of Fidelity Someone is getting red in the face trying to convince a friend or colleague that vinyl is better than CD right this minute. Someone else is explaining the mechanics of human hearing and dynamic range to justify the CD medium instead. And still someone else is probably chiming in that everyone is wrong--that anyone who listens to music not in Ogg Vorbis format on pig bladder loudspeakers is a fool. To all of this, I say that to the vast majority of consumers, none of this matters. Fidelity and sound quality are not the things that drive purchasing decisions. If they were, all of us who love music would have $6,000 CD players that don't have any more than a 2 digit LED display. Clearly, the mass market is interested in price, portability, and preference. Price will always be the easiest driver for purchasing decisions. I don't know how many times friends have told me that they can't make it to a movie because they are broke. One of the things that continues to drive CD sales into the ground (losing sales at a rate of something like %10 a year!) is the fact that CDs require a $15 investment for a usually unknown quantity or reward. Will I like every track on the new Dixie Chicks album? Probably not, but with a CD, I will have paid for all of them regardless. While CDs remain portable, they are easily damaged and still nowhere near as portable as an MP3 player that can be no bigger than a single 6-sided die or a couple of credit cards stuck together. People want to take their music with them, and there are now entire industries popping up to support that desire from companies making an endless supply of iPod accessories, to companies that incorporate MP3 players into jackets, stuffed animals, phones, and watches. Yet in the face of all of this, there are still people making and distributing music who have not tapped into that shift in the market. The sad irony is that the company that makes MP3 playing sunglasses will make more money from me than the companies who release the MP3s that I fill those glasses up with in many cases! Artists and labels must recognize that the average consumer is willing to sacrifice fidelity for portability and price. It's still noble to create truly great sounding records and to make those somehow available to the consumers who demand them, but such an endeavor should not come at the expense of reaching the majority of consumers who would rather have a digital file that they can play on their egg timer. Loss of Control It can't be argued that labels and artists won't lose control when their work enters the digital domain: they certainly will. No DRM scheme will survive the hackers and no work of any value will survive the thieves, cheapskates, and lazy enthusiasts who would rather not pay for things that they enjoy. By offering tracks for download, a label or artist may have to grant that they are losing some degree of control over how the work is distributed or used, but let's look at the alternative. Any CD can be ripped, encoded, tagged, and uploaded to the web in less time than it takes to actually play the disc from start to finish. While it may amaze many of us that people are motivated to do this (and to turn CDs into downloads so quickly,) we all have to understand that this does and will continue to happen. Labels with deep pockets have begun to experiment with value-added components for CDs that can't be easily replicated or distributed online: interactive CD features, bonus artwork, subscriptions and the like. This kind of approach might help to keep a disc from losing some of its sales to MP3, but such features are usually only appealing to invested fans who want to collect those additional artifacts. For the casual listener who is not yet sold on the idea of buying an album he hasn't yet heard, the inclusion of a DVD with live footage of the same songs is not likely to be a great selling point. Even vinyl-only releases aren't immune to the terror of being ripped and traded, since many DJs now prefer to spin from a laptop rather than a crate of records. The bottom line here is that whether we like it or not, we can't stop the work from being publically traded by refusing to play game with legitimate download services. Who Will Know What This Is? Much like the inital concern about quality and choice, the concern that consumers will be funnelled away from indie product towards more common sellers is a legitimate one. However, understanding the online habits of people who purchase music downloads can shed some light on how MP3s might work for indie labels and artists. The digital store is fast replacing its physical counterpart. With myriad services like music blogs, last.fm, review websites and so on, potential customers can have a direct link to a purchase option for songs that they like immediately. The days of reading about a band in a magazine then clipping out that article and taking it to the store are all but over. While we can be fairly sure that small, niche artists are not going to go toe-to-toe with U2 and Jay-Z for download supremacy just because tracks are available on iTunes, we can be absolutely sure that they won't make a sale at all if the songs are not even available. The cost of submitting an album to pay download services is dropping and submitting to multiple services is getting easier. The default question from people I talk to about my own music has shifted since 2002 from "where can I find your CDs" to "do you have anything online?" I expect this to continue, and I think that the answer "yes, you can try out some tracks for $.99 a piece on [service x]" sounds better than "try a Bit Torrent, but realize you are stealing from me." So where do we go from here? Artists and labels have a legitimate cause for concern, but it seems clear that the world is leaving those who hesitate behind. We all need the Retail portion of the equation to work in order to make creating this music that we love any sort of viable business model. How then can we overcome some of these obstacles without completely jettisoning the work we've put in up to this point? I have a few ideas. Release More Vinyl - Vinyl sales are on the rise, and not just among the dance scene. Sure, good old fashioned wax is not available at those big retailers I rattled off before (except Hot Topic,) but it is becoming more of a presence at specialty shops. For consumers who want a physical product, vinyl has great appeal and it flies in the face of the price and portability constraints that usually drive people towards downloads. Meeting those customers demands by offering high quality vinyl releases is one way to keep the physical medium of music releases alive and to preserve that old paradigm to which we all cling. Pay Attention to Merchandise - Products that can't be downloaded and are ancillary to the music itself still have a place and can in fact be far more profitable than the music itself. While we may never stop many people from downloading tracks for free, we can offer them products that they cannot download to which they may gravitate instead. Remember that artists have always banked on concert ticket and t-shirt sales, and in the face of music that can be had for free, these other products start to look even more attractive. Of course there's no guarantee that an artist will be able to push caps, posters, and hoodies, but knowing that these kinds of objects are a serious additional revenue stream may help labels to make the right decisions about which releases to back in the first place. Be Everywhere - The limitations of traditional retail don't exist in the digital world, so why not exploit that fact? Instead of using one distributor to handle physical product sales in a region, why not use five or ten reputable download services to handle sales worldwide? Sure, this will require some additional legwork from the label, but in the end, the more available the work is from places that people already frequent (and there are lots of sales numbers to tell us which places those are,) the more likely an artist is to sell units. Go Granular - With the physical medium, a label is limited to a fixed number of products that it can physically manufacture. This limitation doesn't exist in the digital world, and the increased granularity allows for all kinds of new revenue streams. While a label or artist will likely lose out on some money when a consumer purchases only one track instead of an entire album, those sales can be augmented more easily online. Using the granularity of track-at-a-time vs. album-at-a-time sales, a label should be able to offer a wider array of quality work without having to force music into formats. Does an artist have a great single without enough material you love to make an album? Release the good stuff and send her back to work on the rest! Does one song get played more frequently than others? Convert it to a ringtone and sell that too! Does someone have a handful of remixes or alternate versions lying around that are interesting to die-hard fans but don't warrant a separate CD or vinyl record alone? Release them online at the same places that sell the original tracks! Work With Artists - It's important for small artists to understand the economics of the music industry. Those artists who aren't at all interested in the money side of things should be easy to negotiate with--pay them nothing but make their music avaialable! With reduced manufacturing costs, label budgets can be diverted into promotional activities and tour support--the things that make Retail successful in the first place! Even an artist who has copies of his album in every store in the nation won't sell many if no one who goes to those stores knows what the album is. Artits and labels should work to find new ways to make releasing records profitable, and this might mean changing the way royalties and advances are handled. Be creative, and don't be afraid to give up a little in the beginning to potentially gain a lot in the long run. There's an exciting future ahead of us. We can see it. We're already immersed in it. It's already shaping the way we make music, the way we think about commerce, and the way we interact with other fans of the things we like. We all need to learn to leverage that future to make our voices heard and to bring new music and art into the world that is worthwhile. In my mind, the independent labels and artists have been the only things worth following for the last ten or fifteen years. Let's all make sure that the business end of what supports those enterprises can be viable so that we'll all have better, more exciting and inspiring music to look forward to downloading tomorrow. {0} > Comments Tuesday, July 03, 2007 11:52 PM | Zeroplate Return to the Cinema And... we're back. After a long hiatus, the Zeroplate THINK page is back and I'm bringing the Movie thoughts back from the dead and incorporating them here instead. In case you missed those, peep the link: Film Thoughts by Zeroplate With no futher Adu (who gets the nod for a hat trick against Poland--take that Poland!) Transformers I did not cry when Optimus Prime handed the Matrix over to Hot Rod in 1986. This is likely due to the fact that I thought Rodimus Prime (name notwithstanding) was a much cooler design/toy than the boxy 18 wheeler Prime in the first place. It's probably also helped by the fact that the animated Transformers movie just wasn't worth getting too emotional about. I had plenty of Transformers like most kids I knew, but I never had most of the ones I really wanted--Soundwave, Megatron, Jetfire, Omega Supreme, Grimlock--those just never found their way to my house. I will always be grateful to my grandmother who somehow had Bluestreak and Jazz waiting for me under the tree in 1984 despite the fact that the toys were nowhere to be found on shelves--I still don't know how she did that. I moved to Japan in the late 80's and found out quickly that Transformers was a little different over there. There were Battle Beasts and Micro Masters and lots of things that looked more and more dubious over time. Around then, just about the only Transformers being made anymore were sets of bots that built bigger bots that somehow never managed to be as cool as the original Devastator. As I got more into soccer, music, and fretting over girls, the Transformers took their rightful place in yard sales and trash bins. When I got old enough to start collecting toys again, I never really considered going back to get Transformers because they just didn't hold the magic for me that something like Star Wars or even X-Men comics did. I point all of that out only to say that I'm not the world's biggest TransFan and in fact, I have no particular love for the property aside from memories of those toys that were waiting so unexpectedly for me in 1984. So, when I heard that Michael Bay was making a Transformers movie, my immediate reaction was 'that might be cool but it will probably be very dumb.' It took a while for info about the project to leak out but when the robot designs and casting rumors started hitting the web, the fan uproar was something I hadn't expected. So they were making Bumblebee a Camero instead of a Beetle--who cares? A lot of people, apparently, I just wasn't one of them. There was a scene in the Japanese film The Returner where a commercial jumbo jet transformed into a robot looking thing and that was the first time I had seen an effect in a film that made me think "you know, the idea of transforming vehicle/robots in a live action movie might be really fun." In fact, it seemed like a no-brainer once CGI technology caught up to the ideas, but what threatened to ruin such a movie was the backstory of a glorified toy commercial cum cultural phenomenon that people were apparently far more attached to than I knew. I'm happy to say that Michael Bay's Transformers is neither as stupid as I thought it would be, nor as beholden to the toy's shaky mythology as some fans wanted, meaning that in the end, it manages to be a hell of a fun movie. I don't know Blackout from a hole in the ground, but watching that thing transform and rip shit up was a lot of fun. The human characters (even though there were too many) didn't get in the way of the film's mammoth momentum, which was probably my biggest concern with the Michael Bay credit on the film. Bay manages to throw in a little something for everyone--there's a goofy boy who's the film's cipher; a hot (though somewhat plastic looking) love interest who actually does something more than just look pretty and need saving; there are the clueless but often funny parents that most parents who accompany 10 year olds will identify with; there are the macho and tough talking Army guys who don't steal the show from the robots but do give people like my dad someone to shout "hoo haa" to; there are funny black characters, a latino soldier who apparently said some funny stuff in Spanish without subtitles, and there's a voice from the original cartoon in Optimus Prime. I mean, this sort of thing almost sounds like it was focus-grouped together--the only thing missing is an Asian straight man who knows kung-fu and a laughably queeny fashion designer turned arms dealer. And as calculated as all of that sounds, it somehow works pretty well without really feeling like it's pandering (though the stepped off of MTV into the world of advanced cryptology crew was a stretch.) What I hope this film does is show people in Hollywood that you can blow a lot of shit up without insulting everyone's intelligence (too much). While Bay's version of the military is a bit idealistic and fetishized, it's better than the usually hapless, one-dimensional military portrayed in so many other films. The utterly unbelievable computer hackers are silly, but for the 13 year olds in the audience, they are probably relatable and I'd rather them be cool and smart than completely socially inept, greasy, and taping their glasses together to prove they know how to work a computer. I hope that people realize you need human characters with some charisma to carry all of the battling ones and zeros, but you don't have to make them overly cute or bring all of the action in the film to a stop long enough for them to drop a one-liner in order to entertain. It's very unlikely that anyone in Hollywood will learn anything from the success of Transformers beyond "lets greenlight He-Man, Sectaurs, and Thundercats triolgies right now!" but I can always hope. {0} > Comments Monday, April 24, 2006 12:44 AM | Zeroplate From the minds that brought us "Courtney, this is not a democracy, it's a cheerocracy." we now have the great fortune to look forward to "It's not called Gym-nice-tics." Bring it On had enough going for it that while it was trite and predictable, it wasn't entirely vapid. Bring it On 2 might as well have been called It's Been Broughten, if that joke hadn't already been used in a movie that parodied the original pretty effectively. Now, from the fertile mind of a writer who obviously likes taking a worn out plot and wrapping it up in teen girl fantasy comes Stick It, a film that would be redundant even if Bring it On didn't exist. I can only imagine that some creature slithered its way out of The Hell of Spec Scripts to bring the world the idea of a rebellious former gymnast who has turned to a life of extreme sports only to be forced to return to the fluffy, goody-goody world of gymnastics by the long arm of the law. Will this rough-around-the-edges black sheep make it back in the stuffy world of rainbow colored leotards and gym-speak? Will she infuse her routines with a little of her individualism and win over the judges? Will she have a moment where she realizes that she has to do things "her way", thereby proving to her coach, her peers, and her detractors that we all need to be ourselves? I would imagine that none of us need to actually see the film to answer those questions. What got me really riled up about the flick was the following, however: First of all, does the target market for this movie (consisting primarily of tween girls and pervy old men, I'd imagine) even know who Black Flag is? Secondly, does dressing the outcast gymnast in a bogus Black Flag shirt add to her "stick it to the man" persona, or take away from it? After all, I can only imagine that the shirt is a compromise from the costume department who wanted to show their punky, x-games-ified heroine in an iconic outsider t-shirt but that they couldn't obtain the rights or agree on a genuninely punk band that wasn't somehow offensive to the studio , so we are all left with this. Maybe this is some ironic NEW band or lip gloss brand or something that is meant to rip Black Flag and I'm not getting it. Either way, have we really come to this? {10} > Comments Thursday, January 26, 2006 10:46 AM | Zeroplate Steven Soderbergh's new film, Bubble comes out this week in Atlanta and it's out on DVD next week, too. I'm a reluctant fan of Soderbergh's. When he's making smaller or more delicate films like Schizopolis or Kafka or Solaris, he's pretty tough to beat. His off-beat movies are usually pretty great, while his bigger budget, star's-name-above-the-title films like Erin Brockovich and Ocean's Eleven are usually expertly made if a little less than fulfilling. His new experiment, Bubble is something I want to see, but I can't decide if I should plop down for a ticket or just rent it next week. This is Soderbergh's big gamble, and since this is a smaller, indie-type film with no real actors shot in digital video, it's not much of a gamble at all for a guy who can call up George Clooney to do a gangster crime caper any time he needs. Still, it's going to be interesting to watch how the reaction to this gets spun, especially by the box-office obsessed media and the piracy-obsessed studios. After all, Soderbergh is gambling that a film like this can succeed with a simultaneous theatrical and DVD release: something that takes the already absurdly short window from theater screen to TV screen and makes it useless. It feels a lot like a 'what do we have to lose?' kind of moment, and that's admirable, but I wonder if there won't be some backlash. Afterall, to the Hollywood Insider's and Entertainment Tonight's of the world, Bubble is going to be a flop, regardless of the impact of the DVD. For the people who produce those shows and most of the people who watch them, Soderbergh is a director with the Ocean's franchise and some high-profile Julia Roberts flicks under his belt, and he's a guy who's made millions at the box office and won awards at the same time. A small film that's given the marketing budget equal to Clooney's catering bill isn't going to make a dent, and to the plasticine reporters on E! all that will matter is that this film didn't win the weekend. It'll be a disappointment by those standards, so the question will immediately become "did the simultaneous DVD release hurt the film at the box office?" In this case, it's not even a fair question because the box office is completely not the point here. Soderbergh could dip in and plop out one of these movies every other year if he kept doing ensemble blockbusters at Christmas, so it's obviously not about the money. On the flip side, I'm not sure what Soderberg is hoping to prove, because he's chosen such a uniquely small film to test this process out on that the results of his experiment hardly apply to the film industry as a whole. If part of the equation here is that large metropolitan markets can get a film like Bubble on at least one screen where the folks in Topeka or Springfield will have to wait for a DVD anyway, then I guess it makes sense not to pretend that the film will open on 150 screens and spread out to 2,000 through word of mouth. Still, I would think the demand for a movie like this is also highest in places like Atlanta that will be showing one print of the film, but will have it available on DVD in half a dozen art and indie-oriented rental and retail stores, not to mention every big-box bookstore. More than the movie itself, then, I'm waiting to see the fallout. I'm waiting to see what people in the trades say about Soderberg's new distribution experiment and how they will use this to prove their points either way, no matter how well the film performs and no matter what barometer is used to guage success. Personally, I think I'll probably rent it. {6} > Comments Thursday, January 19, 2006 4:47 PM | Zeroplate Unintelligent Design Whenever I learn about the way some weird function of the body works, I can't help but marvel at how 'smart' that mechanism is. Fainting is a good example. When the body gets a lot of sensory data that says it's in trouble, it knocks your legs out from under you to help blood rush to the head so that your brain won't die. I mean, that's insanely clever if you think about it, and while it's often uncomfortable and sometimes a nuisance to people to black out (while giving blood for example,) that whole mechanism is just the body's way of taking care of itself. It's as if the body knows that if you black out, you can't stand, and if you can't stand, you can't pull blood away from the brain that needs to be going there. Damn smart, if you ask me. But for every curiously well-designed function like that, there's an equally dumb design idea somewhere. Take a rash, sore, skin lesion, or alergic reaction, for example. When you have some part of the body that itches, where the skin seems to be demanding attention, it's almost always the exact wrong thing to do to scratch the itch. Scratching spreads whatever it is that's causing the problem and makes everything worse. In a way, the itching sensation is probably good because it alerts you to the fact that something's not quite right, but the fact that scratching an itch yields such a satisfactory result seems counterproductive to the goal of fixing whatever is wrong. If this were smartly designed, things would feel much, much worse when you scratch them to keep you from doing it. Lots of other stuff works this way: poison tastes bitter so that we will avoid it, or rather, we are programmed not to like the taste of poison which happens to be bitter. The biological mechanics of sexual attraction are astounding and somehow work terrifically well in a species that has held on to a lot of natural fragility by enhancing life with technology. But there are times when the processes that go on behind the scenes just don't seem to help or make much sense if you imagine the body as this machine designed for a singular purpose: survival. Now none of that has anything to do with 'who' might have designed the body, or if a designer is indeed required, or what the implications are if the body is or isn't a perfect machine on it's own--that's a topic unto itself. I just found the idea of scratching an itch to be something that runs very counter to the way it ought to work. {10} > Comments Thursday, December 29, 2005 5:09 PM | Zeroplate 2005 in Review It hardly feels like we should be entering another new year in just a few days, as 2005 has come and gone without leaving much of an impression. Musically speaking, it's been a year spent writing songs and listening to them over and over trying to figure out where things are going and what we are saying with music. Empire was a fun diversion and gave me an excuse to indulge in my geekdom for a while and to hook up with Bong-Ra and Enduser for a fun pair of remixes, but it was not at all an indication of where I wanted to take things with Larvae. In fact, I had begun mapping out the trajectory of our next record before I got off on the tangent of working on Empire so the album that comes out next year will really capture over a year's worth of ideas and work, boiled down into a tiny little package. I spent most of the year listening to music about as far away as the kind of stuff that I usually get associated with as possible. It wasn't a deliberate move away from noisy beats and breakcore and hard electronics, but I just found that after a couple of tours where I was immersed in all of that, I gravitated towards music that was much simpler, more direct, and a little more earth-bound. It was a good time for me to catch up on folk-tinged stuff like Akron/Family and Joanna Newsom, and records by Hope ForAGoldenSummer and Jessica Bailiff made more repeat rounds in my cd players than anything else. Even the electronic music I liked this year had a folky, home-spun edge to it, from Boards of Canada's spectacular new record to the stuff Randy Garcia released on Nophi. I spent most of the year disconnected from breakbeats and bass warps and sampladelica and more centered on music made with guitars and real drums and voices. Yes, voices seemed to be the name of the game for me, a return to music that works on an emotional level rather than something designed solely to move feet and nod heads. I broke out my mainstay favorite album, Bowery Electric's unsurpassed masterpiece Beat on more occassions this year than any other since that record came out, and just in the last few weeks I got a copy of the Eau Claire record which is amazing and needs to be twice as long as it is. I also gave up my stuffy attitude towards Low and their insistence on certain themes and I found that I really love some of their recent music, the newest album included. Almost everything I was in the mood for involved some sort of fuzzy, warm guitar so I dusted off the one I have, bought a tuner, and tried to record a thing or two and I found that the guitar was a great new source of inspiration at times when the computer and all the sampling technology in the world just wasn't working. 2006 is going to be an interesting turning point for Larvae. The new record is almost finished, just waiting on vocals from some guests who have me more excited about this than anything else I've ever done in any band. We're going to have to figure out how to play this new material live without abandoning the guitar and voice aesthetic of a lot of it. We're going to have to find a way to keep people interested and hopefully entertained with material that's a lot more introspective and not as bombastic. Mostly it will be a time for sharing this new music with people and hoping that they can approach it with their ears and hearts rather than ideas about what we should be doing, or how we used to sound. A guy wrote me all pissed about a review I wrote of his record this year and called Larvae "a mediocre drum n bass producer" which I thought was interesting since I was up to my neck in guitar loops and vocal mixing for songs clocking in at 85 bpm at the time. In some sense though, he was right--we've never been good at making drum n bass proper and so we've never tried. Even the most floor-friendly of our tracks is filled with all kinds of broken genre rules not because we like to stir it up, but because I just don't understand that world, and I don't listen to that kind of music. While I've been off with my weirdo folk records this year, Chris has been going to metal and screamo shows and while we both still like electronic music and are inspired by it in ways, it's not the focus of what we're trying to do now. The new record should put to rest any misconceptions that we are even trying to be related in any way to drum n bass, as there's only one song with anything that could be remotely labelled dnb and it's got a specific place and purpose on the record that should make our intentions clear. 2005 has been a weird year for me personally, full of some pretty terrific highs and terrifying lows and it's been a year where I finally gathered the courage to leave some things behind and move on with others. If anything, I think that's what the next record will be about--it's not so much driven by a theme as a state of mind. Thanks go out to everyone who's been a part of that state of mind this year, from the promoters of shows to the djs to the people listening to the myspace friends to anyone who's been involved or been paying attention--thanks! {7} > Comments Friday, December 09, 2005 10:52 AM | Zeroplate Somehow I managed to get stuck in front of 90 minutes of America's Next Top Model last night and it was one of the most gruesome and infuriating 90 minutes I've spent in a long time. The easy solution would have been to turn the TV off and do something constructive, but I wanted a little escapism before returning to work on some music. Reality television is the blistering sore on the already chapped ass of a medium that only barely passes as entertainment. I can't say that there is anything at all entertaining about America's Next Top Model, but there was something magnetically fascinating about it. The astute will recall that we released a record called Fashion Victim that had just a little bit to do with the absolute lunacy that is the fasion industry and people who associate with it and follow it. I've certainly met people who are either fashion designers or make up artists or who are otherwise engaged with that industry who have a love for the creative aspect of it and don't seem mired with all of the superficial poison that it usually swims in, but I'd imagine that those people are a small island in a sea that is otherwise polluted with the absolute worst kind of human beings who aren't actually criminals. This show, if it's anything like the revealing look at the industry that it intends to be, confirmed every suspicion I had about fashion, and strengthened my every misgiving. An entire industry built on nothing more than appearance seems to breed people who are self-indulgently cruel. It was frankly amazing to watch people who would say things that made absolutely no sense, and then watch them dig deeper and deeper into their own shit as if to hide behind it. I was reminded of the prank Sacha Baron Cohen pulled on a fashion designed on one of the Ali G shows where he would say something like "this line seems to be about openness and space" and the designer would agree, then later in the same interview he'd say "this line is all about being closed in and controlled" and the designer would agree again. It's clear from body language and from a simple understanding of the english language that a lot of what the designers and stylists and so-called experts were spouting at the girls in this competition was complete nonsense that just sounded good to them and that they ran with. Like most charlatan acts, if anyone ever questions what a ridiculous phrase like 'she doesn't have that special something' actually means, the question is met with a dismissive 'you just don't get IT' sort of response. In astrology and psuedo-science and dream analysis and lots of other hokey disciplines, the easy way to respond to criticism is to pretend to be beyond it through some logical loop hole. You are mad because you hate your father for having sex with your mother, and if you don't believe that you are repressing those feelings so there--argue with that! It's the same with these guys who prance around and fling utter nonsense at these girls who are trying to please everyone and are ultimately just being beaten into the ground for it arbitrarily. If you don't 'get it' then it's a 'you problem' and you are dismissed for being an ignorant (and probably ugly and unglamorous) outsider. Well, I tried to watch this shit for 2 hours to see what it was all about, to figure out what I was missing and to clear up what misconceptions I had about that world. All that 90 minutes spent with that show did was reinforce my scathing hatred for fashion and fasion people and the industry built on making people hate themselves. {9} > Comments Monday, November 21, 2005 1:12 PM | Zeroplate The Georgia Aquarium has been open for all of 3 hours and the place is already on my hitlist. Bernie Marcus, one of the founders of Home Depot, put up the money for the $200,000,000 attraction (that costs over $20 to get into), and who is the aquarium mascot? None other than Deepo the fish. Yes, Deepo the fish, a not-so-cleverly disguised tie-in for Marcus' company, Home Depot. I'm sure that if you look hard enough, you'll see that Deepo is just the right pantone shade of orange to reflect the corporate synergy between the aquarium and its founder and major sponsor. We can all see the marketing opportunities now as kids from all over the state are bused to the aquarium to learn about marine life and the virtue of Home Depot all at once. This sort of thing makes me angrier than most other kinds of sneaky marketing because it's an obvious attempt to snare kids in with a corporate message (that's not even related to fish!) It's an ugly world we live in sometimes, and when we raise a generation of kids who are more familiar with Ronald McDonald and Deepo the Fish than they are the presidents of their own country, we shouldn't have far to go to figure out why. {0} > Comments Thursday, November 17, 2005 12:43 AM | Zeroplate I'm not sure if everyone has this feature with their webhosting service, but I can look up the top search strings that have landed people at this domain. It's always fascinating and usually a little sad to see that as many people found the site because the word 'voyeurism' is on here somewhere as there are people who were looking for 'larvae the band that played at maschinenfest.' This month, one of the top search strings, and by god I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried, was 'bear piss movies.' I really don't want to know what that is or how that's even possibly a search that ever landed on this domain, but I'm happy to know that by writing this Think entry, I've now upped the chance that the next 'bear piss movie' fan will find us, too! {0} > Comments

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