My friend Mer @ Coilhouse sends word of a neat interview with Alan Moore, author of Watchmen. He always has rather fucking interesting things to say about art and culture, and fucking with mediums and discussing how we tend to interpret work:
I find film in its modern form to be quite bullying… It spoon-feeds us, which has the effect of watering down our collective cultural imagination. It is as if we are freshly hatched birds looking up with our mouths open waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms. The Watchmen film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I for one am sick of worms. Can’t we get something else? Perhaps some takeout? Even Chinese worms would be a nice change.
Mer writes in response:
We’ve entered an era ruled by scavengers. We are starving for substance. Obviously, we can’t look to Hollywood schlockbusters to nourish us. Still, the platform of narrative movie making has its own profound and distinctive magic. Here’s hoping that somehow, thanks to the increasing accessibility of equipment and relative price decrease in digital film and editing software, more and more storytellers standing beyond the gates of the sausage factory will be goaded, either by hunger or the pure urgency of inspiration, into making their own moving pictures.
Let’s hope, indeed! In fact, I’m not even sure we have to hope, I think it’s kind of inevitable.
On a related note, I recently finished Warren Ellis’ Crooked Little Vein, and one passage that has struck my brain with his cane is this:
“Now holllld on. A seventy-year-old serial killer is gonna lecture me on the intynets.”
“Seventy-one. And I think it’s important you learn this for the future of your enterprise. We agree that if something is available on television and in bookstores and the papers and all, it’s mainstream, yes?”
“Sure.”
“Well, then, how can something on the world’s electronic mass-communication net not also be mainstream? It’s easily found. You told me your friend there saw acquaintances of the gentlemen from Ohio on the Web.”
“Did I? Okay. I’m a little drunk.”
“There you are, you see? It’s not that strange a world, when you can see images of men with testes full of saline just as easily as you can visit the wonderful world of Disney online. That’s not underground. It’s mainstream. Just like me.”
That is a striking idea. As an artist, if you put your work online (your music, for example), and you are now certifiably Main Stream™. Huh.
Just like every force must have an opposite and equal reaction, I wonder if the reaction to this mainstream-i-ness, if the opposite of the democratization and ease of access to tools that Meredith is talking about, is the willful abdication of communication?
Can you keep something off the internet?
Can you really have an underground art project or band now?
I’m actually thinking about trying.
Next on the reading list: A Picture of Dorian Gray.
