"Ms. If you would like photos or footage from Sundance Film Festival please email me your information and it will be supplied.
Footage and images include:
Christian Slater
Nick Cannon
Kristin Bell
Teri Hatcher
Gretchen Mol
Keri Russell
Gwyneth Paltrow
Chris Klug -- Olympic Snowboarding Medalist"
I don't think the above in my email inbox quite qualifies as a social media press release.
Nonetheless it points out an interesting fact that when I told people that I was going back to Sundance this year (last time was '03) one common response was:
"Oh, Sundance." The shake of the head or a wistful sigh is de rigueur here. "It's gotten too commercial."
The above publicist's email seemingly confirms those suspicions that it's all about Bigger is better. Buzz. Celebrity gloss. Although they all sang the very same refrain, just emanating from a different chorus of mouths, when I held on to my Utah driver's license three months after my move to San Jose so I could get in on a locals' pass to Sundance 2003. Conventional wisdom tells you that it can't be getting any less commerical four years later.
I know how they feel, as I've felt this way: "Oh, the blogosphere. It's gotten too commercial."
"Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life." - Jack Kerouac
It has taken a small miracle for me to get back into social media. I spent the better part of the last two years "deep hanging out" which is to say I mostly engaged in live face-to-face (i.e. meatspace) interaction. In many ways, I backpacked across the Bay Area the way I'd backpacked across Thailand and Sri Lanka in winter '05.
I'm not jaded about blogging, or social media. And I'm not cynical:
"you still think all this promises revolution and change? nice to know there are believers" - email from a friend last week
Though I can be disappointed. The indie spirit that enthused the earliest bloggers and blogging seems eclipsed at times by a different ethos.
"A man who allows wild passion to arise within, himself burns his
heart, then after burning adds the wind that thereto which ignites the
fire again, or not, as the case may be." - Jack Kerouac
I didn't audibly groan but I came close when moderator Chris Anderson of Long Tail fame asked each of the panelists at the "Community Voice and Social Networking" panel in the New Frontier on Main microcinema (I adore the New Frontier concept! more later) to give an example of using social networking tools "to gain an audience." Now maybe I heard wrong but I swear Jeremy Allaire of Brightcove the day before in "The Business of Web 2.0: Media and the Net Now" panel refer to the whole she-bang as a marketing platform - without dissent or qualifications from anyone else.
So rarely is it questioned that Web 2.0, blogging, and social networking's value lies in its promotional and distribution capabilities: an amplified ripple-effect word-of-mouth network. Just like mass media, albeit fragmented.
(Now how is it that a so-called marketer sees in all this not so much as tool of promotion, but a largely untapped in its potential art medium?)
I think many of us fear that it's too idealistic to expect anything to
stay true - in this case, a showcase for independent vision in film -
for 26 years with it being eventually compromised and subsumed by the
equations on spreadsheets and the machinations of industry.
"The reading at the Six Gallery would be different from any other Bay Area poetry reading. It would be bigger and wilder and far more public. Everything would be allowed. Nothing would be sacred, not even poetry itself... [Allen] Ginsberg explained that the reading was meant to "defy the system of academic poetry, official reviews, New York publishing machinery, national sobriety and generally-accepted standards to good taste." - Jonah Raskin, American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation
That maybe we're being too idealistic ourselves. That's the natural order of things: start young and energetic and idealistic and well, you know, it's the Woodstock kids that emigrated to Wall Street. Eventually everyone sells
out when the rent is past due two months, and you licked clean the last
jar of peanut butter. More insidious, everyone knows you definitely sell out when you are flamboyantly successful.
Yeah I am totally weary of the (all too tidy black-and-white) sell out myth.
Sundance 2007 I was relieved to find was big enough to encompass celebrity gloss if that was what floated your boat and it was provocative and exploratory if that was what floated your boat. The ocean is large enough to embrace yacht and dinghy and speedboat and ocean liner and rubber duckies alike.
Going back to Sundance reminded me of the indie spirit, period. And why this blog is intended for those of the indie persuasion.
To me, indie means your impetus is a vision, and typically one you cannot shake off. The impetus chose you, grabs you, and not the other way around. The impetus is not your pocketbook. (Tara calls it mojo backed by "a higher purpose". Other musings on mojo and signature.)
To me, indie means seeing that vision through uncompromised. Uncompromised doesn't mean you're not influenced by startling brilliant suggestions and eruptions and collaborations coming from others. (Uncompromising does not mean keeping an intact ego).
When I look at a piece of art - and art to me is anything that comes from that place of inspiration, that unshakeable impetus - and if it comes from that impetus it is like a force of nature, sweeping me away like an invisible cyclone, in a breathtaking way, tottering on the edge of exhilaration and terror, beauty and awe. I sense the force kinetically, viscerally, energetically, subliminally, cellularly.
"In the lofty language of Ginsberg and Corso, the "reading was such a violent and beautiful expression of their revolutionary individuality (a quality bypassed in American poetry since the formulations of Whitman), conducted with such surprising abandon and delight by the poets themselves, and presenting such a high mass of beautiful unanticipated poetry, that the audience, expecting some Bohemian stupidity, was left stunned, and the poets were left with the realization that they were fated to make a permanent change in the literary firmament of the States." It was though Dionysus had come back from the dead, and as though art and religion were united again. And that was precisely what Ginsberg wanted - a return, as he put it, "to the original religious shamanistic prophetic priestly Bardic magic!"" - Jonah Raskin, The American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation
Commercial to me means the artist asked, foremost, "What will sell?" and that seed question begat the (oft formulaic) creation. And the end-result almost always leaves me untouched. No soulforce animates it. While others may denounce its crass commercial-ness, to me, it is inert at best.
"We had no idea that when we started it was going to work out. It was never intended to be commercial. It was intended to be a place of discovery... I honestly always believed that documentaries would reach a place equal to narrative film and I wanted us to be on the vanguard of that." - Robert Redford, in The Park Record, January 20-23, 2007, "Redford: It's a festival, not a market"
Here's where the myth-busting starts: An indie artist can be quite successful, quite lucratively compensated (in fact, good on ya as those Kiwis, er New Zealanders, say), and have broad universal appeal (as a literature buff, I inhaled the so-called classics precisely because of their ability to speak in a timeless mythic way).
Myth-busting: You're film can be stamped independent because of its independence from Hollywood (or whatever the normative standard is), and yet be devoid of the blood-pumping wide-eyed indie spirit.
It's the spark that drives creation that distinguishes indie from commercial.
Myth-busting: Indie doesn't need to mean relegated to niche, relegated to the obscurity of the tail end of the long tail, necessarily.
I'm particularly drawn to indie that speaks broad and grows deep and uproots the world more so than indie that nestles into a teeny (safe) nook :
"Although they ascribed to very different ideas about death and rebirth, nature and civilization, they [Beat poets at the infamous Howl reading] were bound together by a love of ancient myths and a penchant for transforming those myths to create new myths about the world. The historic reading at the Six Gallery provided the participants themselves with all the drama and excitement they needed to assert a grand cultural myth about the rebirth of poetry - the "Poetry Renaissance," as it came to be called - in San Francisco in 1955." - Jonah Raskin, American Scream
As much as I gravitate toward all nonfiction genre, documentaries can all too often evoke memories of sleeping through history class. Opening for Sundance, Brett Morgen's documentary spice things up a bit with his unconventional, non-literal take: "For his part, [Jerry] Rubin once called the Chicago 7
trial a "cartoon," and Morgen has taken him literally, rendering teeny
snippets of the proceedings in stylized form (1)" splicing together archival footage with capture-motion animation and modern music.
"I wanted to make mythology out of history. Allen Ginsberg didn't really levitate," Brett Morgen, director of Sundance's opening documentary Chicago 10, says. "And I wanted it to be relevant [to youth today]."
"The reading was an initiating event. Then and there, I set my belief in poetry as a truthful and adventurous art. It was important, I realized, to stand up in front of an audience and not write ivory tower quatrains that would gather dust in books." - Michael McClure, speaking nearly fifty years after the infamous Howl reading launched his indie career, American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation
Myth-busting: Indie can resound broadly, and be pop art.
Patricia Zimmerman in “The Times, Did They A-Change?" panel provoked appause with: "Here we have history and archives re-mixed, reactivated, re-energized. We live in a world that wants us to be nice, anesthetized, ... and numb... I admire this film [Chicago 10] a lot because it has the guts to be pop culture."
Myth-busting: Indie spirit is only for folks on the fringe. Maybe, folks,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz
- snippet from Howl, by Allen Ginsberg
The indie spirit isn't confined to a certain type of people or a certain type of budget or certain anything. All one's gotta do, should we rise to the challenge, is allow ourselves to be bowled over by unbounded indie inspiration:
"But why think about that when all the golden land's ahead of you and
all kinds of unforeseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make
you glad you're alive to see?" - Jack Kerouac
p.s. People ask me about marketing, sometimes. This private email underscores my current vibe, which overlaps a bit with marketing: "I guess my true
interest is in how [cultural] movements are born, things like civil rights
movement, sixties, Italian renaissance, etc. And how communities
come together after disaster to rebuild such as Indian Ocean tsunami,
9/11, Katrina, 1906 SF quake." In that vein, I'll be starting some pushing the edges of social media as social art Salons with Click.TV as a sponsor. First one is Feb 7th at Citizen Space at Citizen Agency.
p.p.s. Is Ze Frank selling out? ;-) I'm with Jeff: "I’m a fan and wish he’d stick with the small screen. Ze had created his own unique visual voice and his own comedy HQ." Yep. I definitely believe social, online media is a viable medium in and of itself - so I don't find the small TV analogy that helpful.
Word fetish: Impetus is... a drift, impulsion, a force that moves something along. Inert
is... indifferent, neutral, (having only a limited ability to react
chemically; chemically inactive), sluggish, soggy, torpid (slow and
apathetic) "
images Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe; The Beatles poster; Evelyn Axell's La Cible, 1970; Chicago 10 still from Variety Jan 19, 2007 review
I want to jump in the fray around Demo this week with a pre-announcement. Since everyone's asking what I'm baking these days, here's a peek inside the oven:
"New Frontier on Main is Sundance's newest venue, showcasing
moving-image [video] installations, live performances, microcinema screenings,
new media technology, and the Rabbit Hole, a DJ lounge cafe." (more in this great article, "Sundance's New Frontier preserves artistic integrity", Variety, January 17, 2007)
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