http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Mon, 26 May 2003 22:50:55 EDT http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding. Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/05/26/225055.php Colin BraytonEm Clandestinidade ["Underground"] is the Portuguese translation of the title of "The Dancer Upstairs," which marks the directorial debut of the American actor John Malkovich. It's a translation that evokes the Brazilian experience of life under the dictatorship that consumed the sixties, seventies, and part of the eighties. In Spanish, it's known as "Steps in the Dance," — a translation that emphasizes the personal themes of the film. The English title has a trace of the metaphysical to my ears, insofar as we Americans, at least, refer to God as "the man upstairs." In a vaguely generalized "Latin America," ... in a nation on the brink of collapse under the influence of an organized terrorist movement, an idealistic policeman, Agustin Rejas (Javier Bardem) confronts the greatest challenge of his career: capturing the mysterious guerilla leader Ezequiel. In the midst of the chaos, Rejas finds shelter in Yolanda, his daughter's dance instructor. As Rejas gets closer to the man considered "the fourth flame of Marxism, he and the dancer he loves must choose between love, country, and themselves.. The principal theme of the film, in fact (though it's difficult to express this properly in the language of Guimarães Rosa) is the demystification of a revolutionary movement that acquires a metaphysical reputation. Its ability to paralyze the nation flows from the diabolical wit of the terrorist acts it undertakes. A group of government officials, for example, attend an avant-garde play, of that kind in which the cast attacks the audience, breaking the conventional sanctity of the proscenium arch [which is itself a convention nowadays]. They tie a willing cabinet minister to a chair and pump bullets into his head. The name of the play is "The Blackout," although one only knows this from reading the playbill in the background: the dialogue is all in accented English, with some subtitled Quechua. Every night thereafter, the capital of the nameless country [filming took place in Ecuador, Spain, and Portugal] experiences power outages accompanied by fireworks that remind you of the scene in Sâo Paulo when Corinthians and São Paulo are vying for the championship (eu sou da Fiel!). The Quecha-speaking natives speak of Ezequiel as a force of nature, or of the supernatural. In the end, the task of our hero is to demonstrate that all this is the work of a man of flesh and blood, and to do so against the will of a government that wants to answer violence with violence, terror with terror, and mystification with counter-mystification. In this sense, our hero is an admirable figure, and the plot is a very timely one for American audiences. The secondary plot, however, which deals with the personal choices he must make, and from which the film gets its title, has some disturbing aspects. One of the most powerful bits of revolutionary theatrics employed by Ezequiel is the use of women and children to carry out suicide attacks, as when a group of lovely Catholic schoolgirls pull out AK-47s from their booksacks and strafe a motorcade. There's a powerful and sustained contrast in this film between the policeman's wife, a vapid, climbing socialite who thinks only of succeeding as hostess of a women's reading circle, and the world of his ambivalent lover, the unmarried dance instructor. It's also a film that cites books quite often. Marx, Regis Debray, Tolstoy, Kant, Roland Barthes, and many others. The camera is constantly framing and panning down book-heavy shelves and desks, and many scenes begin with interrupted reading, as does the opening scene of the main action: The detective trying to decide whether to keep or store various books in order to clear out more space in his tiny apartment (from which his promotion will soon allow him to move). This decision echoes another he has made: to quit the practice of law to become a policeman. Of course, a film can only cite books; it can't incorporate their substance in the way that a novel can. It can only mention them, as a lawyer cites precedent before the court in oral argument. Here, then, is a second source of thematic tension, between thought and action — reading and dancing — added to the tension between justice and vengeance, force and reason, civil society and dictatorship. The problem is that this device does not give us much insight into the character of the detective. Books and back-narration inserted awkwardly into the dialogue symbolize his motivations, but do not make them emotionally present. I emphasize this because one of the things that made me most uncomfortable about the film was the choice that the detective makes in the end. It is a kind of "third way" between two extremes that cannot meet, represented by the lover and the wife, with the daughter as the third term in the equation. In the end, he chooses his role as a father above all else, leaving the women — each of them deeply flawed and symbolic of the social and political ills of the established order and the revolution — behind. Women remain mere symbols in this film, just as books do. The wife and lover, respectively, are sources of disillusionment and mystification. In a way, then, the demystification of Ezequiel that accomplishes the ends of civil justice is bought at the price of a remystification of capital-M Woman. (I take it I am not giving too much away if I reveal that the dancer belongs to the revolutionary movement. I guessed this in the first scene, as I'm sure you will have). The daughter represents innocence, femininity inchoate, and therefore hope: She may yet be able to escape the forces that have so disfigured the other women in this film. As a friend of mine observed, for example, it is never explained why the dancer is afraid of the dark, a fear that makes her vulnerable to the policeman and grounds their growing intimacy.In the end, it is clear [le mot juste] only that she has chosen the "Shining Path" because of some deep personal wound in her past. [The revolutionary hijinks here are dramatized from the exploits of the Peruvian Maoist movement known as the Shining Path]. This is the central mystery of the film, I think. Revolutionary femininity in this film beats you over the head with allusions to the Bacchae, the worshippers of Dionysus who in Euripedes' playkill Penteus for spying upon their clandestine rites. The otherwise gratuitous references to Ezequiel's orgiastic practices make the reference plain. This is what bothers me. The film seems to have a sort of anti-tragic, mythographic agenda, in that the sins of the mother are not to be visited upon the head of the daughter. This will not be a case of "They fuck you up, your mom and dad ..." (Philip Larkin, "This Be the Verse.") But to fulfill this promise to the audience, it must fulfill the corresponding convention in the genre it reflects upon: The duty of representing anagnorisis — recognition, self-knowledge — as Aristotle taught in the Poetics. And yet the scenes of personal recognition pale in dramatic force to those of the film's mysteries: hanged dogs, theater as a weapon of assassination, the religion of the native people. The detective remains oddly inexpressive in the face of these, and the choice he makes is, as I've said, explained by various clumys ways of introducing back-story, rather than embodied in his face, body, words, and actions. The crucial moment of recognition remains poorly motivated For this reason, the film does not rise above the level of political allegory and an intellectual game. Not that it does not do well on that level. I agree with Roger Ebert about the contemporary subtext of the film: Ezequiel commits bold and shocking but small-scale public executions, many of helpless civilians in remote districts, but the central government is paralyzed by fear, martial law is declared and the army steps in to Augustin's investigation. The cure may be more damaging than the crime. On the other, there's an identifiable principle of plot at work here that's common to a lot of American films: the intersection of public duty and private passions. In Air Force One, to take a random example, Harrison Ford, as the POTUS, fights, not only for his nation, but to protect his wife and daughter. The plot is arranged so that the two duties, to justice and to family, perfectly coincide. Malkovich's film seems to want to reverse this motif, but it doesn't succeed. In this case, we have, in the end, a choice of private loyalties over a public duty to institutions that are either irredeemably corrupt (politics) or driven by suicidal Dionysian passion (the revolution). This leaves us lamenting, with the poet Yeats, The best lack all conviction / while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Yeats, of course, was a senator of the Irish Republic. This cop's retreat into private loyalties is an unearned appeal to our basic emotions, and plotwise, it seems like a cop-out. We identify with the cop's struggle to empower himself throughout the film, on his own behalf and on behalf of civil justice, only to see him opt out in the end when invited to stand for the presidency of the Latin American Erewhon — an absurd plot twist if ever I saw one. As I joked to the original Portuguese readership, this is just another side of the old inflated cruzeiro, rather than the new regulated currency (the Plano Real, which has itself been floated, actually). The most interesting question may be how this film is going to be subtitled for Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking audiences. The dialogue is all in strongly (and variously) accented English, which I found really unpardonalbe, despite the fact that the film was adopted from an English novel. It transgresses against the translator's ethic of semantic equivalence: These characters should sound like people in full command of their own language. These government officials should speak like American or British officials one sees on television. An exception are subtitled passages spoken in Quechua, which the policeman understands. It is the Indians, in fact, who form a third term of the equation which "Dancer" refuses systematically to confront: Like the books on the policeman's shelves, the are merely stage-managed in this film, but never read, except for a ludicrous fireside scene that occurs when the policeman returns to his native village and ruins of his father's coffee plantation. You can say the same about the Spanish language : It makes frequent cameos in the film's background, in the form of signage and book covers and the mumbled words of beggars in the street, but has no lines of its own. That poster for "The Blackout," for example, surely deserved a subtitle. Linguistic difference is an extra in this film, part of the stage dressing of an ideological counter-spectacle that is as crude as the cartoonish, Hamburglar-like jail-stripes Ezequiel is made to wear in his climactic public shaming. In the end, this film is all about brains when it needs to be about genuine pain. Otherwise, there's nothing gained. It's for these reasons that I think the Brazilian translation is the best title of all for this film — a notable occurrence in a nation that routinely mangles film titles in the subtitling process! I am looking forward to reading the novel by Nicholas Shakespeare, to see whether these defects persist there. Shakespeare wrote the script, and perhaps the limitations of the genre destroyed some of the nuance of the original. I somehow doubt it. Video5640@blogcritics.org Mon, 26 May 2003 22:50:55 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/04/29/171638.php Colin BraytonNews of the acquisition of Listen.com's Rhapsody subscription music service — nominally a spin-off of the late lamented file-sharing network AudioGalaxy — now playing Iraq to Rhapsody's alliance of the willing — prompted me to wonder if anyone had ever expressed an opinion about the Rhapsody service, or had thoughts about the Real acquisition on the quality of that service. Of course they have. Audio World, for example, gave the service four and a half stars back in early 2002. That seems about right. I enjoy Rhapsody just about every day I sit glued to my machine, which is just about every day, so at $9.95 a month, the price is right. The user interface is generally very good in helping to navigate to stuff that might interest me, though the search function is a little stupid — If I type The Blind Boys from Alabama, I am not looking for Buck Naked and the Barebottom Boys — and the classification by genre sometimes make not a lick of sense. If the Gypsy Kings are a fado ensemble, then John Waters is Luis Buñuel, for example. I could quibble with the selection as well, although the service generally does you the courtesy of explaining why a particular artist is not available, and seems to do a good job of using user requests to guide its acquisitions. In the case of its acquisition of AudioGalaxy, the Christians seemed to have instilled some of their user-friendly values into the conquering Romans. Quibbles aside, I find plenty to interest me, and enjoy being able to program several hours of music at once from my easily accessible personal library of music. The front page, which offers various samplers and mixes in rotation, is programmed by someone pretty hip, and designed for diverse appeal. I may not be interested in the '70s disco mix currently showing, but, hey, here's a '70s New York underground mix with Richard Hell, The New York Dolls, Lou Reed, and early Blondie. That does not suck at all, dude! Drawback: Burning. A generous number of tracks are available to burn, but the process is so cumbersome that I have given up trying. An agonizingly slow server-side application does the ripping and will only write the file to your CD-WR. So what if you can pull those files off, re-rip them into your shared file, and commit an act of civil disobedience against the RIAA anyway? This unworkable method apparently covers all the necessary legal asses while maintaining the appearance of enlightened generosity. I've given Real Networks' various promotional offers a spin as well over the years, and detest the service thoroughly, with its intrusive advertising, its cockeyed user design, its spotty performance, its tendency to tie up 99 percent of my CPU for minutes on end for no apparent reason, not to mention the intangibles — it has no ethos at all save the plastic fantastic corporate infotainment mojo that so disgusts me. The junior Ralph Naders at E-Pinions tend to agree with me over the years. I believe the phrase "vicious, buggy spyware" gets used in there by someone. I might subtract a star or a star and half from their aggregate rating, but then I'm particular. So will this acquisition offer the Christians another chance to civilize the Romans? I doubt it, since the conqueror this time is the Golden Horde of Ghengis Khan, whose attention is focused, not on making its customers happy, but jockeying for world supremacy with its other nominal "partners" in the died-and-supposedly-to-be-resurrected MusicNet subscription service — the Huns at Vivendi, the Vlad the Impaler crowd at Bertlesmann, the unlimited supply of Venetian pillagers of Constantinople at EMI, and so on. I could not have been more wrong when I wrote about Real Networks and its role in MusicNet a couple of years ago, RealSystems is undoubtedly the class of the field, and may be able, through its partnerships, to provide pieces of solutions to the other technical issues facing MusicNet. ... AOL's endorsement of the technology ought to count for something, in the wake of its attempt to draft the inventors of Gnutella to home brew its own peer-to-peer distribution model. As far as I can see, Real and its partners have learned nothing about what their users want and demand in the intervening months and years. Or maybe the Rhapsody buy is a sign that Real, at least, is beginning to get that way. Keep your ears peeled. Music4952@blogcritics.org Tue, 29 Apr 2003 17:16:38 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/04/21/124023.php Colin BraytonMarginalia: Readers Writing in Books H.J. Jackson Yale University Press, 2001There's an interesting discussion going on here, there, everywhere in the blogosphere about what kind of literary genre the blog might be. A full-on academic conference will soon be held on the subject, based on the idea that "digital technology has created new genres of meaning making and human interaction." This kind of breathless futurism — "where no man has gone before" — always makes me snort, although I like Digital Genres ' insistence on the point that "a cultural critic who writes about video games without playing them is as incongruous as an art historian who has never been inside a museum." I feel the same way about journalists who write about whether or not blogging is "real journalism" without engaging actively in establishing an active social network, even if they do post their own pearls of wisdom to a blog that's really nothing more than a self-promotional monologue — a "blogologue"? Although H.J. Jackson, a professor of English at the University of Toronto, does not explicitly set out to write a history of blogging before the invention of electricity, much less the rise of digital communications, I want to suggest that in some ways, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books , is just that: A careful study of the modes of social-network formation by people who circulated and annotated published material, and annotated the annotations of others, over the past three centuries. Jackson's survey of the subject is based on a careful empirical study in the archives of the English-speaking world, "the examination of more than two thousand annotated books in great public or academic libraries." Her findings are fascinating. Among the topics discussed is the death of annotation with the rise of the public library, and with it, the stern commandment drilled into all of us from kindergarten: "Thou shalt not write in library books." Consider this development in light of the disputes between proprietary and open source software projects. Thou shalt, or thou shalt not, or thou may betimes, with certain conditions, alter ye source code. Thomas de Quincey complains that Wordsworth, unlike Coleridge, abuses his books because he tears pages without using a knife, and, in the same catalogue of bad behavior, "rarely, indeed wrote on the margin of [them], and when he did, ... the comments were such as might have been made by anybody." Sounds like the reader forums at the Agonist. The chapter on "Motives for Marginalia" poses the question, "why do people write in books? For whose benefit is it done?" A number of similarities can be found for the reasons people blog. In some cases, people were writing to themselves, recording their ongoing dialogue with the author as an aid to memory, as an emotional release, or for diaristic purposes, to mark one's response to a given work at a given time in order to reflect upon it at a later time. In other, more interesting cases, marginalia served the purposes of interpersonal communication. At a time when books were published in small runs and only the wealthy could afford to build private libraries, books circulated a great deal more — much as MP3s do on Kazaa. Jackson discovers fascinating dialogues going on in the margins of books. Some of these threads are entirely off-topic, as in the practice of Victorian and pre-Victorian lovers, prevented by social strictures from conversing in privacy, exchanging encrypted messages by marking and annotating certain passages in books that passed between them. Parodies were penned to mark a negative critical judgement, such as the verse scribbled onto the end of a maudlin poem in a Scottish book on the etiquette of courtship: "As large a fool as ever lacked a brain / Now hear the answer of the bitch again." Kenneth Grahame, author of the Wind in the Willows once wrote an essay suggesting the margins were more interesting than the text itself, Jackson recounts, "and wondered when the world might hope for 'a book of verse consisting entirely of margin.'" A friend promptly provided him with a blank book titled "Margins." But, Jackson says, the joke was a bad one, for a book without text is book in which no marginalia can be written — just as there could be no Web logs without the web. A central figure in Jackson's argument is, of course, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, possibly the first major author to practice marginalia as a profession. Readers and authors flocked to Coleridge with blank books for the poet and philosopher to annotate in his inimitable style, much as we blogwhores sometimes boast of the contribution of an alpha bloggers in our comments, or, better yet, of a TrackBack or some linky love from the Blogdex Top 100. Coleridge was something like a very popular poster to a user forum. To help his friend Bob Southey meet his deadline for a review of Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, he annotated the book heavily. He also engaged in the steam-age equivalent of online dating with Wordsworth's sister-in-law by annotating a copy of Sir Thomas Browne, then was so pleased with his performance that he published the introduction written on the flyleaf. He engaged in protracted marginal discussions with Charles Lamb, who later became the prime mover behind the publication of Coleridge's annotations in his collected works. Coleridge himself came to see himself more as an annotator than as a poet and philosopher, writing more for the social network of books circulating among influential people than for publication. Jackson coins a tongue-in-cheek but nevertheless useful phrase for the practices she describes: "BEPU — Book Enhanced for Personal Use." Chapter Six, "Poetics" describes what makes for a good annotator, which, as in Lamb's complaint about Coleridge, might be summed up as "tell me something I don't already know" — a comment you can read every day on Metafilter , as I know first-hand, to my own occasional chagrin. Marshall McLuhan 's dictum that "the medium is the message" is all too often cited these days, but it is just as often misunderstood when it comes to the novelty of "new media," I believe. Few casual McLuhanites recall that McLuhan began his career as a scholar of medievalism in the works of Joyce, as Donald Theall describes very well in an essay called "Beyond the Orality-Literacy Dichotomy: James Joyce and the Prehistory of Cyberspace," which you will find hosted at the EFF. Whatever the implications of multimedia for the way we receive and process information, and despite the coming of audio and video blogging — Who needs them? Where's the links? Blah, blah, blah. Ooh, bad hair day — the blog remains a literate activity. Even Netscape-Mozilla's Talkback system, which automates bug reporting in new builds of the open source browser, has deep precedents in cultural history. The Spanish writer Don Juan Manuel [1282-1348], for example, was the very first author to publicly promote a scheme for preventing the errors that accumulated as his work was distributed through the process of manual copying. In the prologue to the Libro del Conde Lucanor, he instructed readers that he had placed a fair copy of the book in the care of a certain monastery in Castille. Any reader wanting to emend his own copy need only refer to the reference copy. The process is the same, it's simply that we've automated it: My XP machine now informs me automatically of the latest bug patch from the Kingdom of Redmond. "Nothing is new under the sun," says the Preacher. That's my retort to the "new media" and the "new economy," and I'm sticking to it. The only difference is that now anyone can do it . Some say that when any idiot can do it, most of the people doing it will be idiots. This may be true, but our interactive social networks can also teach us how to be less idiotic. Sci/Tech4750@blogcritics.org Mon, 21 Apr 2003 12:40:23 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/04/17/175929.php Colin BraytonSince attending Carnaval 2003 in São Paulo, I have not been able to get certain refrains from the samba of São Paulo's championship samba school, Gaviões da Fiel, out of my head. Rio de Janeiro: samba de Noel Terra da garoa: Adoniram, o menestrel ... And Viva o Maranhão... salve a miscigenação O xaxado... o forró e o baião!" "Noel" is Noel Rosa, the legendary samba composer of the 1930s; Adoniram, "the troubadour," is Adoniram Barbosa, São Paulo's heavyweight champion in the cultural rivalry with Rio, and composer of the funny and Hank-Williams-sentimental "Trem das Onze" ["11:00 Train"]. The second chorus sings the praises of the Amazonian state of Maranhão, home of such native genres as maracatú and cacuriá, and lists three genres of what you might call Brazilian "country and northern" music. But the key word here is miscegenação — "mixing" — a term applied to the profoundly mixed ethnic heritage of the Brazilian people that also aptly describes the soul of Brazilian culture. It's a deeply syncretic and eclectic blending of traditions, defined most explicitly by the Tropicalia movement, founded during the early years of the military dictatorship by artists like Gil and Caetano Veloso — whose book Tropical Truths is now available in English. Despite the best efforts of gringo Tropicalists like David Byrne and his Luaka Bop label, which issues discs from the likes of Tom Zé, the Brazilian Captain Beefheart, Brazil remains a dark continent for music fans from the global North — with the exception of hardcore fans like Harvey Pekar and the erudite Daniella Thompson. On the the other hand, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it's also probably the first country in the world with a dreadlocked pop star holding ministerial rank in the government: The monumental Gilberto Gil, who finally won Grammy honors in 1999 in the World Music category for the elaborately produced but richly conceived album, Quanta. In fact, Brazilians owned that category from 1998 to 2001, culminating in an overdue tribute to the great bossanovista Jõao Gilberto. Gil now heads the national Ministry of Culture. It's like having Bob Dylan and James Brown as joint secretaries of education. So, where to begin? My friend Sergio — a São Paulo composer, magazine editor, and obsessive aficionado of bossa nova and an old-school form of Brazilian popular song called choro or chorinho, had some advice for me as I departed. "Tell those gringos back home there are only three albums in the charts right now worth listening to: Elza Soares, the Tribalistas, and Margareth Menezes. The rest is crap." Who are we to argue with impeccable taste? All three represent the stylistic miscegenção of Brazil's best music — the blending of the local with the international, the elaborately produced with the hauntingly simple, the reverence for tradition with the will to innovate in a mode that's peculiarly Brazilian. The Tribalistas could not be any bigger in Brazil right now, even though the local critics hated them. The supergroup, composed of Afro-Brazilian star Carlinhos Brown, veteran metal and art rocker Arnaldo Antunes, and the classic Brazilian pop-bossa diva, Marisa Monte is pouring out of every radio in Brazil, and the driving, earnest "Eu Seu Namorar" ["I know how to make love"] was the unofficial anthem of Carnaval in the northern capital city of Salvador this year. The B side, "Carnavalizar," is a simple, heartfelt tribute to the precommercial spirit of the escola de samba, the neighborhood associations that once gathered to sing and dance in the streets every Fat Tuesday, before enormous stadiums went up to present the carnival parades as a sort of televised Super Bowl spectacular. "Do Coccix ao Pescoço" ["between your tailbone and your neck"] celebrates the record-breaking artistic longevity of Elza Soares, a samba singer from way, way back in the day who will immediately remind you of Earth Kitt. The music ranges from a simple samba, accompanied only by pandeiro and cavaquinho — a tambourine played in a distinctive manner and a cousin of the ukelele — to a grinding trip-hop reprise of Caetano's ominous "Haiti," a dark composition about the extreme racial violence and grinding poverty underlying the official myth of the "congenial Brazilian." Margareth Menezes is another Luaka Bop protegé and a superstar of the trio elétrico, the moveable sound systems that take to the streets of Salvador every year. We caught her act at the Rock in Rio in Salvador and found the set a bit slanted toward crowd-pleasing axé, a delirious, dance-your-ass-off dance genre popular among northern youth but disdained by critics. But Afropopbrasileiros, her latest disc, finds her exploring all the nuances of her considerable range. Unfortunately, my girlfriend seems to have swiped the disc from my luggage as I headed for the airport, but believe me, I'd like nothing better than to write a lengthy analysis of every track. It's music deeply imbued with the Afro-Brazilian candomblé religion — as is the repetoire of her fellow Baiana, the gospel-trained, sweet-honey-in-the-rock-voiced Virginia Rodrigues — and eclectic Latin influences. There's an amazing jovem guarda — the new generation — to be appreciated as well. I mention only four artists in passing: Lenine, author of the maximum-funk "Jack Soul Brasileiro"; Zeca Baleiro, who deconstructs the pagode tradition and writes incredible ballads; the carioca funksmistress Fernanda Abreu, whose "Katia Flavia"out-tom-toms the Tom-Tom Club by a mile; and the hypermetallic "atomic maracatú" of Chico Science and Nação Zumbi. Brazilians, obscured by the geographically challenged northern giant that stands in their light, like to joke that if the U.S. ever decided to nuke Brazil, Buenos Aires would be the first to go. You are missing some of the best things in life, however, if you fail to locate it on your musicographical map. Music4688@blogcritics.org Thu, 17 Apr 2003 17:59:29 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/04/16/101016.php Colin BraytonRegional development consultant and academic Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class — "and how it's transforming work, leisure, community, and everyday life" — is at the forefront of an influential meme that's being taken quite seriously by regional economic planners around the nation. Florida runs the Talent, Workforce, and Human Capital study group at the Carnegie-Mellon Software Industry Center. The magic formula at the heart of Florida's book is that planning communities that will attract the "creative" type leads to economic prosperity. Take as an example the creative economy conference held in Iowa in March 2003. Memphis is gung-ho. Spokane is worried about the adequacy of its "bohemian infrastructure." And on and on. Just what is the creative class, and who belongs to it? According to Florida, it's one of two major economic classes of the new economy. The service class, 55 million strong, is the largest demographically, but the creative class — 35 million strong, with a Super-Creative Core that constitutes 12 percent of the American workforce — wields the economic clout. The "core" of this class is "people in science and engineering, architecture and design, education, arts, music, and entertainment, whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology, and/or new creative content." Join to these the creative professionals, "a broader group ... in business, finance, law, and health care [who] engage in complex problem solving that involves a great deal of independent judgment and requires high levels of education or human capital." Public school teachers, corporate lawyers, and PS2 game designers in the same category? Counterintuitive. Imagine a cocktail mixer designed to break the ice between them. Florida's definition neglects an essential line of demarcation: who owns the rights to innovation? It's a topic he never tackles. To cite a regional case, for example, this argument is pretty damn hard to stomach if you're a web designer, illustrator, journalist, writer, or editor in New York City these days, where the catastrophic slow-down in advertising means a sharp drop-off in demand for what in the advertising, PR, and marketing biz are call "creatives" — copy, art, and layout. You're more likely to find the creative class meeting for coffee at a ubiquitous Starbucks after standing together for hours in line at the unemployment office. Programmers, the technologically innovative subclass of the creative, theoretically have it better: information technology remains a seller's market, with companies reporting an ongoing recruiting shortfall for IT new hires. One of the reasons, however, not often cited by human resources wonks, is that home-grown talent is expensive, and the global network economy has made it feasible to move a lot of software development offshore to nations like India. On a conceptual level, furthermore, it's hard to accept Florida's claim that the undeniable shift from an industrial economy to an information and services economy implies a parallel shift from "productivity" to "creativity." What is this "creativity" that defines the common interests of intellectual-property lawyers and freelance writers? It's associated strongly, according to Florida, with the "Bohemian" lifestyle preference of the "bobo" — the bourgeois-bohemian. Attracting clusters of bobos is good for cities and neighborhoods, because companies are more likely now to relocate where the talent pool is, and the talent pool is closely correlated with bobo tastes. Florida suggests, for example, that gay-friendliness is on the rise in certain areas of the country because of the high correlation between concentrated gay populations and bobo chic. This notion that in the post-industrial information age classes cohere around lifestyle preferences rather than economic interests determined by one's role in the process of production thoroughly begs the question of what distinguishes creativity from the old industrial model of productivity. Doesn't creative labor produce ideas, technologies, and the like? Don't creative managers direct and control this production of ideas? In the parlance of human resources, for example, "creativity" turns out to be a euphemism for "adapt or die" — the fact, cited by Florida, that "[t]he social compact — You do your job well and stay employed — is dead." Hey, this is a liberating thing! Creatives like sleeping until noon, and they job-hop like crazy! My ass. In terms of urban planning, the "creative economy" meme is, as far as I can see, a form of Newspeak for "gentrification," in which the Creative Class reoccupies distressed downtown areas — loft chic — and drives up the rents, relocating the Service Class to the geographical periphery. This correlates measurably with the physical marginalization of ethnic minorities, despite Florida's Panglossian assertion that workplace diversity makes good business sense because "creativity comes in all colors!" If creativity has replaced productivity as the measure of a worker's status in the new economy, then — as Prabir Purkayastha of the World Social Forum India commented in a seminar on the digital divide held at the World Social Forum in Brazil earlier this year — the economic power of this new economic elite rests on monopolistic control of intellectual property. The most egregious myth, he noted, is that piracy primarily harms artists and other creators. The percentage of revenues destined for artists, he said, is miniscule in comparison with that collected by distributors, who impose monopoly pricing on creative content. The so-called New Economy, an "information economy" based on intellectual property rights, relies on an outmoded proposition that value creation resides primarily in the labor of "creators." In fact, the percentage of revenues destined for "creators," such as programmers and recording artists, is negligible, as is the cost of producing physical copies of digital information. The high cost of proprietary software and other media is simply the result of a monopolistic cartel centered in the United States and Europe, and raises significant economic barriers to participation in the nations of the so-called global South. [From an article by Project Ciranda.] The growing class of "knowledge worker," however, who directly benefits from the monopoly rents collected by copyright holders, has little incentive to engage in traditional labor activism, he says. That is, the "creative," enjoying the kind of cultural prestige that makes realtors drool, as hyped by Florida — along with a high salary, gentrified surroundings, and freedom from bureaucratic hassles such as business-formal dress codes — is not aware that she is an information-economy proletarian. Case in point: The National Writers Union's beef [PDF] with AOL-Time Warner over the latter's policy of requiring contract freelancer writers to sign over all republication rights to their content in return for the fee they receive. Florida's aim in writing this book, he says in his preface, was to raise class-consciousness among "creatives." ... the members of the Creative class do not see themselves as a class — a coherent group of people with common traits and concerns ... we thus find ourselves in the puzzling situation of having the dominant class in America — whose members occupy the power centers of industry, media, and government, as well as the arts and popular culture — virtually unaware of its own existence and thus unable to consciously influence the course of the society it largely leads. With this I agree to a point — class consciousness is called for — but the incoherence of the highlighted phrase above is symptomatic of the problem with the entire book. Creatives lead society but do not consciously influence it? What about the RIAA, with its lobbying and its agressive legal defense of the creative property rights of "artists"? Think of the marvelous documentary film, Standing in the Shadows of Motown, about the studio musicians who contributed so much to the Motown sound. These talented creatives were originally paid a weekly salary to perform a service in the studio, although some of them later managed, independently, to negotiate some royalty participation. Service class or creative class? Or providers of creative services? Florida's argument glibly glosses over these crucial definitional issues. Books4638@blogcritics.org Wed, 16 Apr 2003 10:10:16 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/04/15/172931.php Colin BraytonAn overexcited e-mail message from the guy at Project Gutenberg says the open-source e-library could reach 10,000 volumes this year if we all pitch in. April 10, 2002 was the day Project Gutenberg reached 5,000 eBooks. By Moore's Law, October 10, 2003 could be the day for #10,000. We are just over half way — 7,661 as I write this — 2,339 to go! That will take over 300 eBooks per month; we need you to help us push our average up from 268 per month to get to 10,000 by December, 31st. God help us if the entire universe fails to obey Moore's Law: the IPO of the singularity could be delayed. And it turns out he has a bet riding on the thing. Be that as it may, learn how to participate as a part of the distributed proofreading system. Sci/Tech4630@blogcritics.org Tue, 15 Apr 2003 17:29:31 EDT