Titre
It is one of the tenets of (post)modern thought that the listener, not the speaker, determines the sound.
Here’s the straight-forward version:
I’ve been drinking James Squire recently, a drink I was not impressed by on my last visit to Sydney. In fact, I compared it’s taste to a rusty nail. In fact, at the Three Sisters, in the rain, I put my tongue on a rusty rail and confirmed my opinion. But I’ve grown to like it.
Here’s something more characteristic of me:
I have a theory that Shania Twain is Darth Vader.
Country is the only musical genre I won’t drink to, so it’s natural to consider the Popular-In-Country-Circles Ms Twain as the Dark Lord of the Sith wandering around Episode IV. Given her popularity in these very postmodern times it couldn’t be too long before the record execs broke her success out of its genre limitations. This gives us Twain as Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back, mixing it up and making it personal with our heroes in the popular music charts.
‘That Don’t Impress Me Much,’ under this theory, might better be titled ‘Luke, I am your father.’ (Nooo!)
And I like ‘Man, I Feel Like A Woman’… You know, it might just be ROTJ and Shania’s hefted the Emperor and is carrying him towards the abyss…
Shania, unlike Lord Vader, has probably not changed. The internal state of the listener changes, the sound paradoxically remains the same and yet changes.
Notice my use of a mythos. Hold that thought. This has all just been preamble.
X-MEN.
This is a continuation of what I said yesterday.
Take a snapshot of ST:TNG or its siblings; take an episode by itself. You’ve got soap. Take the series, however… While their dusty moments are soap, the dynamics are all wrong. In action the soap disappears.
All mainstream comics and fantasy television series live in the shadow of Chris [Claremont] and the fantasy television series will need to grow up, forgo their great arcs, break their deliberate stasis to be good. (Joss Whedon is a sign that the industry is changing. JMS is an evolutionary dead end.)
But can a movie, such as X-MEN, ever bring us soap?
Yes and no.
No, we could never have the real breadth of a soap in a cinematic setting, unless one is proposing a series of movies, one every few days, which could never succeed.
Yes, we could climb off our snobby horse and take back our storytelling heritage from the classicists and lit heads. We could, as appreciators of the X-MEN mythos, craft an excellent tale. It could be a dense cornucopia, an intricate tapestry, a rich meal of a film. Real references, not handwaves. (My proposal would simply be X-MEN #25.)
Could it be a popular film? Maybe. A point to always keep in mind is that, while people are dumb, a person is smart. We of the last century have been taught to be passive, second wave consumers, but we have an older, more powerful tradition of storytelling. What I propose would be a confusing mess to a passive ear, a box office flop. It would require an ear willing to listen to the story, hear the mythos, be an active participant in seeking it out.
Are we allowed to have conversations about such things? Are we raising beer to the level of wine? Claremont to the level of Thoreau? (Later.)
Am I fan? Yes I am.
Yesterday I asked the Dot Coms to remember the different, non-service- or -product-based business models. Some clarification is in order.
My reference to newspapers muddies the waters a bit. This has been the obvious business model for all Dot Coms. Unfortunately, advertising doesn’t work on the internet.
But I’m not just talking about the Dot Coms of today, who have a worse life expectancy than milk, but of tomorrow, too. The MPAA, RIAA, &c.
People who buy newspapers or watch television do not want something for nothing. They are not “pirates”.
Equally for the current television networks (also dinosaurs) as the others, fans are not “copyright infringers”.
Make a space for us. Let us talk. The ear, not the voice, determines the sound, but this does not relegate speakers to a helpless role. Because every speaker is a listener too.