tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-88796699589519294462024-02-06T20:16:05.828-08:00frenetic license<i>ciro faienza<p>
filmmaker/writer/actor/artist/critic</p></i>liquidmorphemehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12523197938092158824noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8879669958951929446.post-35388116684925156322016-09-23T05:27:00.001-07:002016-09-23T05:27:17.542-07:00what i see<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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You might be surprised to see me post these pictures. I’ve said before that the simple act of seeing them is a kind of trauma, a trauma that can accumulate with each viewing, and there is no reason we should need that trauma to understand their reality. Even those people who are inured to images, or are rather not yet sensitized to them, have some empathy for what they are seeing.<br /><br />Responsible adults looking at world affairs must sometimes believe their empathy betrays them—undeserved pain that interferes with the decisions they need to make to meet their own needs. I think all of that obscures something I have noticed in these pictures, which is not the dead human meat or the destruction, but the witnesses to it.<br /><br />The face of the Turkish soldier whose job that morning was to pick up the drowned body of a 3-year-old and carry it off the beach. The 5-year-old, whose brain is an incredible organ of adaptation, better at it than you or I can ever hope to be again, learning something unspeakable about the world around him. The rescue worker who pulls a baby out of the tons of rubble of a deliberate, man-made earthquake. The father who nearly lost his family to the sea. The father who lost them.<br /><br />These people did not see sad things. Each of us has mechanisms to process and recover from basic loss and heartbreak, and they are not designed for the moments here. What these people are feeling in the pictures crosses a boundary of kind, and our language when we talk about it rarely acknowledges that. There is a paradigm we use to live and function in a most basic way as whole people, and it becomes radically altered when we witness events like these beyond the comfort of the frame. The witnesses feel something they always claim to be unable to describe to its fullest, and we tell a lie to call it grief, because it so clearly goes beyond grief. It is an encounter with the abyss. Living things were not meant to see it.<br /><br />In every good, kind, happy, or hopeful moment we create, in all our creeds and morals and philosophies and laws and religions, this is the final antithesis. This is the darkness we are trying to push back. We are seeking from birth to death to hold shut the door on that abyss, and these events which we impotently turn into headlines rip the doors wide open. They are abominations on the face of human history.<br /><br />As free agents, as members of faiths or communities, as professionals, as politicians, as citizens, as rational actors, as patriots or soldiers or consumers or thinkers, as humans, we have no higher responsibility than to keep those doors shut. None. Nothing, literally nothing, supersedes the mandate to prevent what we see in these pictures, either by what we do or what we chose not to do. It is not the egg we break for an omelet. It is in the interest of no nation. There is no hard truth that can contain it, no ethical calculus, no matter how gray or grim, that permits it, so that even our vices—our ignorance, our selfishness and greed, our willful blindnesses, our lies—are powerless, are plainly unable to swallow or excuse the moral obscenity in that candy metaphor.<br /><br /> The only thing that can accept it is madness.<br /><br /><a class="ot-hashtag aaTEdf" href="https://plus.google.com/s/%23trump" rel="nofollow"><span style="color: #2962ff;">#trump</span></a> <a class="ot-hashtag aaTEdf" href="https://plus.google.com/s/%23skittles" rel="nofollow"><span style="color: #2962ff;">#skittles</span></a> <a class="ot-hashtag aaTEdf" href="https://plus.google.com/s/%23Syria" rel="nofollow"><span style="color: #2962ff;">#Syria</span></a> <a class="ot-hashtag aaTEdf" href="https://plus.google.com/s/%23refugees" rel="nofollow"><span style="color: #2962ff;">#refugees</span></a> <a class="ot-hashtag aaTEdf" href="https://plus.google.com/s/%23Hillary" rel="nofollow"><span style="color: #2962ff;">#Hillary</span></a> <a class="ot-hashtag aaTEdf" href="https://plus.google.com/s/%23Clinton" rel="nofollow"><span style="color: #2962ff;">#Clinton</span></a> <a class="ot-hashtag aaTEdf" href="https://plus.google.com/s/%23Bernie" rel="nofollow"><span style="color: #2962ff;">#Bernie</span></a> <a class="ot-hashtag aaTEdf" href="https://plus.google.com/s/%23Sanders" rel="nofollow"><span style="color: #2962ff;">#Sanders</span></a> <a class="ot-hashtag aaTEdf" href="https://plus.google.com/s/%23election" rel="nofollow"><span style="color: #2962ff;">#election</span></a> <a class="ot-hashtag aaTEdf" href="https://plus.google.com/s/%23crisis" rel="nofollow"><span style="color: #2962ff;">#crisis</span></a> <a class="ot-hashtag aaTEdf" href="https://plus.google.com/s/%23Europe" rel="nofollow"><span style="color: #2962ff;">#Europe</span></a></div>
liquidmorphemehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12523197938092158824noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8879669958951929446.post-26976899156762987982014-09-03T19:39:00.000-07:002014-09-03T19:44:47.292-07:00editor's note: disturbing<i>EDIT: The link is now working. :)</i>
<p>A few months ago I entered my first piece of flash fiction (it’s <i>hard</i>, you guys) into a contest from Public Radio International. It didn’t place, but it was a top finalist, which got it onto the desk of Gates McFadden at her L.A. theater company for a possible adaptation.</p>
<p>That never turned into anything, sadly (I say this knowing it’s a poor candidate for adaptation), but I’m happy to say that it was just published at <a href="http://dailysciencefiction.com/science-fiction/biotech/ciro-faienza/jaes-solution"><i>Daily Science Fiction</i></a>, which is maybe one of the only homes for <b>really</b> short speculative fiction.</p>
<p>I suspect it will make someone somewhere angry, but I’m nonetheless proud of this one. Its subject matter makes the timing of the publication a little weighty, I think, but it wasn’t planned that way. I’m so glad it’s finally seeing the light of day.<br>
--<br>
<br>
c i r oliquidmorphemehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12523197938092158824noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8879669958951929446.post-90843480015801734002013-08-30T21:01:00.001-07:002013-08-30T21:31:36.762-07:00my goodness.<p>It seems I have been hired by the Institute of Contemporary Art as a visiting artist to give talks (for lack of a better word) in the galleries on the monthly no-admission days, to get people to stay for more than a fifteen minute run-through—</p>
<p><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/vWRPMW-bjyc" width="560"></iframe></p>
<p>(You see I know you were thinking it. Except you, Joss Whedon.)</p>
<p>It will also have a minor curatorial piece as I consult on which works should be featured for that day. Insomuch as it is unpacking contemporary art for a lay audience of various ages, it is absurdly suited to me. I blink in amazement.</p>
<p>Of course it’s also a relief. Even as a part-time gig it’s great to have the gratification. Visiting Artist. Speaking learnedly about art. <em>Remuneration</em>.</p>
<p>I think this means I will pick back up my Boston art review blog, Postmedium (link forthcoming). Strike while the iron is hot, etc. Expect to see insufferable commentary on insufferable art—<em>soon</em>. And starting in October, stop by and say hello at the ICA Boston on the last Saturday of the month.<br>
--</p>
<p>c i r o</p>liquidmorphemehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12523197938092158824noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8879669958951929446.post-51125712041138397172013-04-25T17:53:00.001-07:002013-04-25T17:53:13.985-07:00on books as objects, revisited.<p>At the Harvard Book Store—</p> <p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuSYK6bqfDwuvNWzIEmolt7rXhB_Z1PI-ZRg06DIUqQqAM8KEokCP-ypaN7y3qiBVX_xtSi6rkkTtGoCeese95RyMkbpzbxWS8wDqKXd6b72pRYlgm4c23oaHzE303tdOU6Y0D31EWl6TA/s1600-h/1%25255B4%25255D.jpg"><img title="1" style="border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; background-image: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; display: inline; padding-right: 0px; border-top-width: 0px" border="0" alt="1" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhP4oV9-0_ayvZIQkeLjc0JGRjFUylL39D9JTObepGrMMNnk6NAL1Az-0z0uYm1-M6JQ9iB1th836t0Awcf9PaplxDb6O3Kced6mIZfFPwEmwKK5Sn30wxIx6I-_Nh2MXtFbKz9_1D9Ch0H/?imgmax=800" width="382" height="508"></a></p> <p><em>What is this?</em></p> <p> </p> <p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWotYTBzJ-HWmK_8-nqIE7HTwTG9dVqaX9Eo9rpDbboezZ9xsL_g4-zPbIVvdV24yLeBace13HFopb0qwaMc7GfiaJZyzIQWdsgwfSYgXNCJLodJO7nCby8qmjKnlcE3-XiR6N0XJnuj8g/s1600-h/2%25255B4%25255D.jpg"><img title="2" style="border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; background-image: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; display: inline; padding-right: 0px; border-top-width: 0px" border="0" alt="2" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNa7z4hHJvElwG_JG6-y1pfk-9GiESQtwSqt4pLEtyAI1cTJh4RXmYOlcuKTmh6MVBAkM2JWZIkeDV6ZC5L5yGvnWQkULCO4TFufKxnMDEz017eH2QmnkNQxBkEDtJf8Ingtpc9MxFHfD-/?imgmax=800" width="382" height="508"></a></p> <p><em>Huh.</em></p> <p> </p> <p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyQFycpIkRtLdFvJqlcl0ROGP4ASs3mpGTMfk-kgpLZYN6oTdnd-s4623UANPHdFaVx1cTwKwt6fjWRDwT6GyKdQvfyYL0cIEQse3NLu_iIqPVTMJy2VvObDO2HgEGTyQBv6zAMLUH0AVY/s1600-h/3%25255B4%25255D.jpg"><img title="3" style="border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; background-image: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; display: inline; padding-right: 0px; border-top-width: 0px" border="0" alt="3" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihTH0wtOGmKpYnnc5xf5mI9y-fD4J6Onb5fuMsM0Bj7Pe0ziest_yj-AVjMJ2-2dG8isq351bp8M_R0vy2o6fS14RNMBGxjKRND5tdtIaM6AUn6OwWqp5wQzbsXP56H0uFNZLpaxo4B6-v/?imgmax=800" width="382" height="508"></a></p> <p><em>Sweet jebus, someone did that on purpose. Awkward people collage and blue faces in space. Let us never speak of it.</em></p> <p>Nice job, Harvard Book Store. I’ll be back.<br>--<br><br>c i r o</p> liquidmorphemehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12523197938092158824noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8879669958951929446.post-68662433301978301762012-11-16T20:14:00.000-08:002012-11-17T09:54:27.683-08:00...can you hook me up for the night?<a href="http://www.arcfinity.org/"><i>Arc Magazine</i></a> pulls no punches at battering my heart. Gorgeous. Ambitious. Principled. And it's the fiction arm of <i>New Scientist</i>, which basically makes it the new <i>Omni</i>. And <b>look</b> at the slate of contributors—Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Lavie Tidhar, China Miéville, Frederick Pohl, etc, etc.<br />
<br />
(Needs more women, but we can work on that.)<br />
<br />
I was lucky to find them at issue 1.1. Apparently so did Intel, who asked them to host the fiction competition for their <a href="http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/research/tomorrow-project/the-tomorrow-project.html">Tomorrow Project</a> (which is simultaneously as cool and wine-and-cheesy as it sounds)—a Big Idea about getting scientists and engineers together with writers, artists, and philosophers to Get Cool Shit Done. This is not unlike another favorite zine of mine, <i><a href="http://seedmagazine.com/">Seed</a></i>, which takes as its mission statement that science <i>is</i> culture and the two work best when they interact. It also reminds me of the <a href="http://www.edge.org/" target="_blank">Edge conversations</a>.<br />
<br />
So basically my Carl-Sagan-loving heart does flip-flops for <i>Arc</i> and is stupidly optimistic about the Tomorrow Project. You might think this would have led me to submit to the competition (or at least to <i>Arc </i>alone), but I've been dragging my feet finishing stuff that wouldn't fit them anyway.<br />
<br />
Here's where things get serendipitous.<br />
<br />
My wife wrote a story that wanted to be a perfect fit for the major SF zines in ways that most of her fiction isn't (she writes like Barthelme and eschews emotion like Brecht, which pretty much means <i>Asimov's</i> et al read her work like comp sci majors reading Joyce, or Harlan Ellison reading <i>Dhalgren</i>). She was really trying with this one, although I can tell you she Did Not Succeed. Those who want something concrete don't go looking in liminal spaces.<br />
<br />
Probably the sex didn't help her chances either.<br />
<br />
She had trunked it after submitting it out of the market, but that didn't change my conviction that it was quite good, great even, the kind of fiction that sticks in your head, against which you measure elements of your real life (I'm biased, yeah, but I'm also a tremendously mean reader of science fiction). Then I saw the theme for the Arc/Intel 1.3 competition, which with not too much stretching fit her story. So I told her to submit it (at this point she had not yet heard of <i>Arc</i>).<br />
<br />
She won.<br />
<br />
You can see this isn't really my story and that I'm shamelessly taking credit by framing it this way, but I have once again with my editorial savvy connected an author to a market (previously Cat Valente to <a href="http://hilobrow.com/">HiLoBrow</a>).<br />
<br />
Check out the story on the Tomorrow Project site now and in <i>Arc</i> 1.4 when it releases—from Romie Stott, <a href="http://uk.tomorrow-projects.com/2012/11/a-robot-walks-into-a-bar-and-says/">"A Robot Walks Into a Bar and Says..."</a>liquidmorphemehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12523197938092158824noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8879669958951929446.post-24817547324670346432012-09-20T00:08:00.001-07:002012-09-21T11:52:56.826-07:00when festivals don’t want youA friend of mine recently did a lot of work on a very beautiful short film that has had zero interest at festivals, which has convinced him that he simply doesn’t know what they want anymore. I wrote him this e-mail to correct this idea, and it occurred to me that many independent filmmakers have had this same problem and should know this stuff if they don’t already—<br />
<br />
<br />
Luis!*<br />
<br />
I wanted to go into this a bit more in depth, because I have some resources that have been really helpful for me that I want to spread the word about.<br />
<br />
Basically what I was saying earlier is what you yourself have discovered—<b>the festival circuit no longer functions as a gatekeeper for independent film</b>. In the past filmmakers have trusted festivals to be true curators of merit, so that the vetting process conferred some legitimacy on their work and gave them exposure to (eager, willing) distributors and audiences that they would have no means of accessing otherwise. Sundance was a name that meant something to the little guy. Budgets and faces were not the concern that they were to Hollywood, and festivals were THE<i> </i>places to see something daring, groundbreaking, or unique. At the height of this system we had films like <i>Clerks</i>,<i> Pi</i>, <i>Primer</i>, <i>Run Lola Run</i>, <i>The Blair Witch Project</i>, <em>The American Astronaut</em>, Derek Jarmon's films, Greg Araki's films, etc, etc.<br />
<br />
Now Sundance has become so upper-tier that Slamdance emerged to service truly independent budgets, and even Slamdance has become a supersaturated mess. Everywhere you look in the festival world, we're seeing independent films with names behind them, because that was the only way to get them into festivals (or to secure the budget from investors that would produce a film slick enough for festivals increasingly friendly to indirectly Hollywood fare**). As the market saturates, nepotism takes over the merit system, and the hope for a micro-budget film (even a short one) with no known faces becomes slim to none. The films that are actually screened, in all the major fests, are seeded with films made by filmmakers who were personally invited to submit sans entry fee, which you can see means <b>people without connections are subsidizing the people who have them</b>. Obviously you still see a few genuine indie entries that make it in on the strength of the film alone, but this feels more and more to me like window dressing.<br />
<br />
This relates also, I think, to ballooning Hollywood budgets. I'm sure you're aware that the budgets of blockbusters are skyrocketing to get bigger and slicker spectacle in front of audiences so that the studios can turn a bigger profit on mediocre storytelling, but this effect has pulled modest budgets higher as well***. Comedies are not typically expensive films, even at their worst, but <i>The Hangover II</i> cost more than <i>Dark City</i> and <i>The Crow</i> combined (two older films in expensive genres that call for high production value). This has really changed audience expectations for how expensive things should look, the amount of lighting design and post production and reshooting that goes into even minor scenes in minor films with no need for intense visual presence, and distributors who buy things from festivals are certainly influenced by this trend. The films they looked at buying when the playing field was more level they probably wouldn't touch today.<br />
<br />
Even if we leave aside the enormous preference for films by straight white men, it's not just that festival screening is no guarantee your film is any good, it's also that <b>being any good is no guarantee of festival screening</b>. If you're going to be a pioneering, creative filmmaker, you need to be able to get your work out there without the help of compromised gatekeepers.<br />
<br />
I'm about to throw some resources at you that will lay out what to do, but I'll give you a rundown of what they are all going to say in one form or another—<b>you are not just a filmmaker anymore, you are a promoter/distributor.</b> Streaming and social media make it totally possible to reach your audience without festivals, but this means a lot more work than you've had to do before, work that begins in pre-production, is fully integrated with the production side, and continues long after the finished film is in the can. You may be able to hand this off to a friend, but the bottom line is generating buzz for your film and getting it in front of your intended audience is just as important and every bit as much your responsibility as actually making the film. <b>Alerting your audience to the film, getting them excited about it, and getting them to see it is integral to producing the film and should be budgeted accordingly. </b> <br />
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.thinkoutsidetheboxoffice.com/">http://www.thinkoutsidetheboxoffice.com/</a> is a good starting place. Gives a detailed overview of the problem and an excellent blueprint for solutions.</li>
<li>Follow with <a href="http://www.scottkirsner.com/fff/">http://www.scottkirsner.com/fff/</a> for case studies in successful captures of an audience via digital means.</li>
<li><a href="http://sellingyourfilm.com/">http://sellingyourfilm.com/</a> case studies in truly independent distribution.</li>
<li>Of course, all of this is more helpful if read with a detailed understanding of business as usual. For that, go here — <a href="http://tiny.cc/2kz4aw">http://tiny.cc/2kz4aw</a></li>
<li>This lady is a social media guru with a blog and newsletter with tips, tools, and insights on the right m.o. to finding an audience (or customer base). <a href="http://katrinapadron.com/">http://katrinapadron.com/</a></li>
<li>This guy is a cultural critic I follow who was asked to give a talk at SXSW about DIY promotion (something he calls shmoozitsu) — <a href="http://hilobrow.com/2012/02/22/schmoozitsu/">http://hilobrow.com/2012/02/22/schmoozitsu</a></li>
<ul><!--EndFragment--></ul>
<li><a href="http://www.vodo.net/">http://www.vodo.net/</a><br />(Combines crowdfunding with crowd-currated torrent distribution; very cool community, but obviously biases toward genre films.)</li>
<li><a href="http://beta.indiegogo.com/">http://beta.indiegogo.com/</a> (Like Kickstarter)</li>
<li>I'm also curious to see what will happen with <a href="http://mubi.com/home">MUBI</a>, if it will become a viable streaming platform for films that don't interest Neflix.</li>
</ul>
<br />
I hope I haven't overwhelmed you, but I've done a lot of work and I feel like I should share some of the fruits of my labor. Unfortunately what this has done mostly is show me what I did wrong with <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2056595/" target="_blank">Hayseeds & Scalawags</a>—</i>I haven't had an opportunity to put these ideas into practice yet, but they are a big part of the planning I'm doing for the next project (which isn't even written yet).<br />
<br />
Good luck!<br />
--<br />
<br />
Ciro<br />
<br />
P.S. Despite my festival bashing, I of course have not abandoned them completely. They are still incredible magnets for the community. I am just mindful of the fact that all filmmakers need to be putting a lot more effort into alternative methods.<br />
<br />
<br />
<sup>* Luis Fernando Midence is a Guatemalan filmmaker whose work has been featured in festivals worldwide, many of them committed to LGBT content. His short “Sin Ruta” (Without Direction) is now available free on Vimeo—<a href="https://vimeo.com/41891765">https://vimeo.com/41891765</a></sup> <br />
<br />
<br />
<sup>**Curiously, the big studios have begun to realize that distributing a film is actually more profitable than producing it, and many are now shifting their models to merely distribute (and provisionally finance) films made by “independent” producers (prompting me to start calling truly independent films "outsider films"). This minimizes their liability, as they can always refuse to buy a film if they don’t like it, or make the distribution deal contingent upon the film meeting their criteria (which is easier than pulling the plug on a film they’re producing and losing the money they’ve already put into it). This means that many films are now being called independent simply because of a change in business model, rather than because of the culture and ethos of the producers. It's also not a stretch to see that the studios (who have money), in shifting liability to outside entities, are forcing outsiders to carry the load for the insiders.</sup><br />
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<sup>*** I have previously referred to this as the NASA effect. </sup><sup>The budgets on NASA projects are notoriously high, and there is a reason for this that has naught to do with rocket science. A few decades back, Congress decided that contractors working for NASA shouldn't be milking the American tax dollar for huge profits, so they set a cap on the profit percentage a company could make on a government project — i.e. you can only make, say, 10% profit on a contract with Uncle Sam. To compensate for this, companies realized they needed projects with massive expenses to reap the profits they were looking for (larger number to multiply by 10%). So, the incentive is to keep costs high rather than low — a bigger pie equals a bigger slice — and budgets explode.<br /><br />Hollywood, similarly, has had trouble figuring out how to maximize their profit percentage. There are examples of cheap films raking in several times their budget in profit (e.g. <i>Blair Witch Project</i>, <i>Paranormal Activity</i>), but these examples depend on an immeasurable (from an economic standpoint) je ne sais quoi, a fuzzy artistic or of-the-moment element, that is found almost entirely in a concept's execution rather than the concept itself. Betting on this phenomenon is not good business.<br /><br />Instead, they have found that, for the most part, you are guaranteed a certain audience if the film is spectacular enough. <b>People will come to see a film, even a bad one, if the spectacle is sufficiently arresting — and the more arresting (read: expensive) it is, the bigger the audience.</b> A good example of this (though you might read the summer slates of the last 5 years as examples) is Burton's <i>Alice in Wonderland</i>, where even the executives acknowledged that the story was crap (prompting one to proclaim that, "[Hollywood] is not in the business of telling stories anymore"), but the film was nonetheless profitable. Now this profit percentage is not going to climb over a certain amount unless the film has that je ne sais quoi, which is not something an MBA can understand or predict, so in order to rake in profits, you've got to raise budgets. You'll make more money on a $250 million film than a $25 million film because you're multiplying the percentage by a bigger number.<br /><br /><b>In other words, the same thing inflating NASA budgets is inflating Hollywood budgets.</b> NASA has found this scheme unsustainable, and hence the low activity on that front. Hollywood execs, on the other hand, have a peculiar long-view myopia. They can see the long tail on revenues for individual projects (long tails being the only way you make back the budget on these gargantuan films), but they can't see the long tail of this business model on their industry. Assembling a film based on favorable criteria (i.e. what genre is it with what star, has this combination worked before, what formula can I use to predict the most favorable combination) has proven useful to the MBAs in charge, but they don't recognize that it is spending previously earned capital. People go to see a Julia Roberts movie because in the past they have liked Julia Roberts and expect a certain thing from her movies. If, as has happened with Nicholas Cage, the presence of a particular star stops being a good indicator of whether or not they are going to enjoy a movie, the audience will (eventually) stop caring about that star. And thus you've spent previously earned capital without earning any in its place.</sup><br />
<br />liquidmorphemehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12523197938092158824noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8879669958951929446.post-80595740892064009592012-03-29T14:39:00.001-07:002012-03-29T22:01:55.450-07:00o genre! my genre!io9'ers and those who otherwise keep their fingers on the SF pulse will have read this news already, but Christopher Priest has just <a href="http://www.christopher-priest.co.uk/journal/1077/hull-0-scunthorpe-3/" target="_blank">thrown a gauntlet</a> at the feet of the <a href="http://www.clarkeaward.com/" target="_blank">Clarke Award</a>. (You might remember him as the World-Fantasy-Award-winning author of, among other things, <a href="http://www.christopher-priest.co.uk/books/the-prestige/" target="_blank"><em>The Prestige</em></a>.) He’s said some very unkind things about the short list, you see, and more unkind things about the jury, and how unbecoming, and well I never, and won’t someone think of the children.<br />
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The gist is that this was a bad year for SF to begin with, and the jury has compounded it by selecting some embarrassingly low-brow novels to vie for votes. Speculative fiction already suffers the stigma of being stupid/silly/arcane/immature in the wider world of literature, so why reward work that simply proves them right?<br />
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I’ve written extensively about this before (<a href="http://reflectionsedge.com/index.php/2010/10/post-mortem-inside-reflection%E2%80%99s-edge-how-we-built-ran-and-learned-from-reflections-edge/#ciro" target="_blank">here</a>, <a href="http://reflectionsedge.com/index.php/2009/09/the-age-of-ra-by-james-lovegrove/" target="_blank">here</a>, and <a href="http://reflectionsedge.com/index.php/2009/08/stars-in-my-pocket-like-grains-of-sand-by-samuel-r-delany/" target="_blank">here</a>). It often surprises me that more people have not (witness, for example, how a much of a tizzy Priest has stirred). But it should be clear by now that the wall between speculative fiction and literature is maintained just as steadfastly by the genre community as it is by the literary community. To take Priest’s point home, for example, we talk all the time about Charles Stross, but the guy writes juvenile chewing gum kitsch and has a big head about it. Meanwhile literary masterworks like Delany’s <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhalgren" target="_blank">Dhalgren</a></em> go virtually unheard-of (and mostly unread by those who even know the name). Miéville, for all his sales and Clarke awards, writes unchallenging creature features, yet Genius-Grant-winning <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octavia_E._Butler" target="_blank">Octavia Butler</a> (the only author of speculative fiction to be so recognized) is rarely mentioned in SF circles, and then mostly because she’s black. I’ve never had an SF fan insist I read <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Female_Man" target="_blank"><em>The Female Man</em></a>, but countless people have thrust well worn copies of <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld" target="_blank">Ringworld</a></em> upon me, as though I couldn’t find more fully developed characters in a physics textbook.<br />
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The Clarke Award has never produced a list that might interest an English major, so Priest is probably barking up the wrong tree—people who cling to Heinlein like there are no real writers left in the world should have a venue that honors the kinds of things they want to read. But he’s right to worry about how the SF community assigns the value of <em>quality</em>. Because there is actually no difference between a brilliant piece of writing and a brilliant piece of speculative writing. In an ideal world, the people who didn’t read SF would be those who simply couldn’t tolerate the cosmetic differences, but in today’s world, the differences are not just skin deep.<br />
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As writers of literature, SF authors have a duty to put these things right. Go to.liquidmorphemehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12523197938092158824noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8879669958951929446.post-51790537872666462092012-03-26T19:14:00.001-07:002012-03-28T18:30:01.738-07:00works/progress/administrationSo the first thing is, I have been commissioned to produce a video piece for the <em>Harakiri</em> exhibition at <a href="http://www.centraltrak.net/" target="_blank">CentralTrak</a>. It has always struck me as more of a think tank than a gallery (at least as administered by art/architecture tastemaker <a href="http://www.charissaterranova.com/" target="_blank">Charissa Terranova</a>)—the sort of place that hosts symposia with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Fried" target="_blank">Michael Fried</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._J._T._Mitchell" target="_blank">W.J.T. Mitchell</a>, and work by artists like <a href="http://www.gabrieldawe.com/" target="_blank">Gabriel Dawe</a>.<br />
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So what exactly am I doing there? This is the question that wears my nails to the quick as I try to figure out what sorts of things I want to say with video. The potential to embarrass myself here might actually outweigh the prestige, which is saying a lot.<br />
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Meanwhile I sift through the remains of the festival push for <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2056595/" target="_blank"><em>Hayseeds and Scalawags</em></a>. The Dallas International Film Festival (along with countless others) didn’t want it, but the program head liked it nonetheless and wants to send it to a new festival in Oak Cliff (silver lining? I’ve always had a soft spot for fledgling venues). The question of the next project is so complicated, because this last one took a lot of work and money and has yet to show any real returns—except now as a producer I’ve got <strong>chops</strong>. Post-production houses are calling for my advice. I’m making lists of resources for other filmmakers getting into DIY distribution. I have a solid grasp of the legal needs that accompany a larger budget (the goal). So which project do I pursue? How do I avoid another “flop?”<br />
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I’ve also thought about abandoning production for the time being and devoting some real time to legwork as an actor—studying, practicing, reading plays, auditioning. I’ve got a feature under my belt (with some good work in it), but not one that is likely to be seen. Respect your art, right?<br />
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But I’m also a writer, and my creds at the moment are decent, but few. A series of <a href="http://reflectionsedge.com/index.php/author/ciro/" target="_blank">essays and reviews</a> at <i>Reflection's Edge</i>. A <a href="http://dailysciencefiction.com/science-fiction/superhero/ciro-faienza/a-theory-of-sixth-sense-aesthetics" target="_blank">piece</a> at <em>Daily Science Fiction</em>. A featured reading at the Secretly Timid <a href="http://www.secretlytimid.com/?p=319" target="_blank">podcast</a>. My short “The Sleepers” has recently been accepted by the new market <em><a href="http://www.kzine.co.uk/" target="_blank">Kzine</a></em> (from the publishers of <em>KIMOTA</em>, which got some love from Datlow in one her <em>Year’s Best</em> anthologies). I’ve got several shorts in the works, including a piece about the Etruscans, but the question mark comes in a message I got from a friend who is now a fiction editor at <a href="http://www.baen.com/" target="_blank">Baen</a>, telling me in his tough-love voice that he expects to see some novel ideas from me (as in, fleshed-out workable ones) in the near future.<br />
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This is an in if I want it (and have anything remotely appropriate for that publisher). But you’re beginning to see the problem, right? <strong>So much</strong> work to cover, and not nearly enough time. Priorities have yet to suggest themselves. Tackling all of this is spreading myself too thin, and none of it is low-hanging fruit.<br />
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I’ve joined the masses of people who have this problem. What will we do?liquidmorphemehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12523197938092158824noreply@blogger.com0