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Flannery O’Connor: Cartoonist

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Having crossed and recrossed Flannery O’Connor’s enduring literary wake a number of times in my life, I was intrigued when I ran across a book that detailed her more-than-passing interest in cartooning. (You can see a few of the cartoons here.)

It’s of course hard not to read O’Connor’s cartoons through the lens of her later success as an author, but as I worked my way through the book I became convinced that she had the eye and ear for cartooning, if perhaps not the signature flair. This in turn made it all too easy to suspect that what she first explored in cartoons she later explored in her evocative stories, but as soon as that thought formed in my mind I recognized it as belonging to the domain of the critic and slowly backed away.

What I was left with, then, was an appreciation for what she had created at a certain point in her life, and how that aspect of her creative life informed rather than confirmed anything else I knew about her, which was admittedly not much. That in turn reminded me once again that so much of what we think we know about anyone is only a facet, and what a horrible, self-aggrandizing conceit it is to think otherwise.

Flannery O’Connor’s pursuit of cartooning was as sincere as anything she is widely known for, and that sincerity shone through by the time I finished the book. She wasn’t interested in throwing off a few cartoons to widen or monetize her brand — which had yet to be defined — but was driven to do so internally, as part of who she was. If that reality collides with the conception of who O’Connor was as an artist, let alone as a person, that only confirms such conceptions are inherently flawed.

If you’ve ever enjoyed an O’Connor short story I encourage you to give the book a read. We are, all of us, more dimensional than our successes and failures, by which I do not mean to imply that O’Connor was a failed cartoonist. She wasn’t.

— Mark Barrett

Pono Kickstarter

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As regular readers know I have serious issues with Kickstarter, in large part because the site/service can so easily be exploited for nefarious purposes. As RPS finally (and to my mind belatedly) made clear after flogging the site endlessly, when you’re giving money to a Kickstarter project you’re not buying anything. Instead, you’re investing in something that may or may not happen, which means the people you’re investing in need to have a great reputation to go along with their great idea.

I’m genuinely glad there’s a way for independent artists and creators to bypass gatekeepers and raise money for small projects, and from time to time I’ve considered the possible utility of the site myself. That I’ve never backed a Kickstarter project before is less a sign of where my heart is than where my brain is, because I know my brain would be angry with me if I put scarce personal equity into something that never materialized. (I do that enough on my own.) Having said that, today I backed my first project on Kickstarter for reasons that have nothing to do with Kickstarter, and I think the project I’m helping to fund is something you might want to consider as well.

For years Neil Young has been griping about the quality of music in the digital age. It’s a complaint I’m not only sympathetic to, at some point in the recent past I noticed that I had simply stopped listening to music for enjoyment for close to a decade. When I tried to figure out why it became obvious that my enjoyment of music ceased when the MP3 file became the playback standard. To bring music back into my life I tried using iTunes, but that proved to be just as bad, in large part because (unbeknownst to me at the time) Apple’s default sampling rate for ripped CD’s was less than lossless. Only when I discovered FLAC and Foobar2000 and was able to get CD sound out of my digital library did I once again start hearing sounds that had gone missing.

I want to stress here that I’m not an audiophile or a purist. I don’t need an oscilloscope to know what I’m hearing. Instead, I feel it, and all I can tell you is that digital music has generally left me cold. Not cold enough to go back to the hisses and pops and turntable maintenance of vinyl, but cold nonetheless. So when I first heard that Neil Young was pushing for a new standard for digital music I was all for it. Unfortunately, if memory serves, that was also a decade ago. (Or at least it seems like it.)

Well, that day is here. Sort of. As I understand it the PonoPlayer is ready to go and Kickstarter is being used as much to sell/reserve initial/limited copies of the device as it is to raise money for future development of the accompanying service. Still, if you believe in high-quality music and supporting the artists who make it, I think it’s worth considering what Pono is about and whether you want to chip in. At the very least you can help demonstrate demand is there which might encourage the big-money people to get off their stuffed wallets and buy in as well.

As for the risks involved, I’m confident that Neil Young isn’t going to take my contribution and blow it on a new couch, or something worse. Although he might be tempted to sink it into an all-electric Lincoln Continental. (I jest.) Currently, on day one, the campaign is halfway to its initial $800,000 goal. Given that it looks like the 30-day campaign will be fully funded in a day or two, and that it’s backed by people who have reputations to protect, I think the risk of the project falling apart are pretty low. Not zero, but close enough for me.

— Mark Barrett

Bing Fails Again

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After weeks spent goading and cajoling the Bing search engine to see a web page that has been published for over two years, I thought I had finally achieved my goal.

Now, a month later, I see that Bing has once again become blind to that same page, even though Google can find it with ease, and anyone can link to it directly.

I’m not sure how a search site and it’s tech support minions can find and then lose a site after it has finally been indexed, but Bing has managed to perform that neat feat. Which means there’s really nothing left to hope for except that Microsoft will pull the plug on Bing and let it die because it’s utterly worthless for search.

— Mark Barrett

Storytelling and the Evolution of Mediums

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Following up on several previous posts about mediums and how mediums affect storytelling, I recently ran across an article that illustrates my claim that stories exist apart from the mediums we use to communicate them. From PCMag:

Just like soap opera characters wake up from years-long comas or return from beyond the grave, two cancelled daytime dramas are getting revived.

Prospect Park today announced that All My Children and One Life To Live will in fact get a second chance as the anchor programs on The Online Network (TOLN).

In a sense this development probably doesn’t even seem evolutionary, let alone revolutionary. And from the point of view of the end user it’s probably neither. You fire up whatever glowing screen you want to look at, you input a few commands, and voila: content. But consider what this means for television itself.  [ Read more ]

Kickstarter Caution

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A reminder today that however intrigued you are by Kickstarter, it is by now almost certainly a festering cesspool of scams and con games designed to take your money and give you nothing in return. Consider this particularly clumsy example:

Asking for $500,000 in capital funding, the collaboration with Jam Entertainment (Anderson’s company) promised to deliver a challenger to EA’s popular NCAA Football video game franchise. Perks for investors included dinner with “co-owner” Jamal Anderson, a chance to play-test the game, or a signed helmet from former Ohio State greats Archie Griffin, Eddie George, or Jim Tressel. The promotional copy suggested the game would be different from EA’s offering, thanks to the participation of former college and pro football players, and would feature every college football team—including NAIA squads—and the highest-quality 3-D models ever seen.

That is, of course, if you believe the Kickstarter page, which asserts that the graphics actually come from the game. They don’t. In fact, the funding campaign was canceled earlier today, shortly after we spoke with Anderson. He told us he had nothing to do with the project and no connection to Dirty Bird Sports.

Kickstarter acts as a match-making service only. They guarantee next to nothing, and to whatever extent they police projects on the site they do so primarily to preserve their own reputation, not your bank account. If a scam or con game gets funded and ultimately bears no fruit for the people who ponied up money, Kickstarter still gets its cut. You get to feel like an idiot.

— Mark Barrett

Mediums and the Power of Rules

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Like stories, sports are not simply constrained by rules, they are defined by them. What we enjoy and take from sports after the fact is, for the most part, a narrative almost indistinguishable from fictional ones we create or are entertained by, but because sports usually play out in real time the rules are inevitably more obvious to the audience. In recognition of the importance of rules, sports almost always feature officials who are charged with enforcing those rules, albeit as inconspicuously as possible. Without officials, most sports would descend into chaos in short order — as still happens from time time.

I’ve noted previously that even a simple rule change can have a big effect on the narrative of a sport. Three years ago the National Basketball Association decided to officially adopt a rule that had been in practical use for years. This new rule gave players with the ball the right to take two full steps without dribbling — which, given the stride-length of many NBA players, effectively allowed them to go from the perimeter to the basket without putting the ball on the floor. This, in turn, has had a commensurate positive effect on scoring, which the audience enjoys.

This year the NBA instituted a new rule about so-called flopping — the intentional faking of a foul so as to cause officials to charge the opposing player with an infraction that player did not in fact commit. The new rule is designed to punish players who routinely flop, a move necessitated by the fact that flopping has eroded the integrity of the game and the authority of NBA officials. (Even though there are three officials covering each NBA game the players know those officials can’t see everything. Fans and the media, however, often have clear evidence of a flop, particularly when an instant replay is shown. No sport can survive that kind of routine and objective breakdown at the officiating level, as waning public interest in Major League Baseball’s arbitrary and often incompetent officiating continues to demonstrate.)

In the past year I also commented on the fact that the NFL had to change a few existing rules that were eroding the appeal of its product. Specifically, the time-honored tradition of allowing defensive players to physically cripple offensive players had to be revised because of new evidence that all those “great hits” were leading to things like “brain damage” and “slow, agonizing, premature death” after players retired. While these rule changes were made in part to minimize the amount of money the league will inevitably have to to pay for crippling and killing its own employees, the changes were also necessary to protect the audience from feeling queasy about enjoying what had become undeniable if not unconscionable brutality. Even in this example, however, where outside information (medical data) intruded on the sport, all it took to solve the problem and support the medium were simple changes in the rules.

Now, contrast the above examples with what the NFL did at the beginning of the 2012-2013 season, because what the league did then affected the medium of sports itself, yet nobody at the time had any inkling of what that portended. Let me repeat that. Despite decades of experience working in or covering professional sports, all of the people who caused the problem, and all of the people in the media who commented on the problem, had no understanding of what was happening even as events unfolded week by week.  [ Read more ]

Data Rape

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Date rapists drug their victims for two reasons. First, to make the act of rape as easy as possible. Second, to make it all but impossible for victims to remember or dispute what happened. Unless a victim is willing to act on what may only be dim suspicions, subjecting themselves to the rigors and indecencies of a dubiously predisposed legal process, including invasive testing, there’s no possibility that the perpetrator will be prosecuted, let alone convicted. Date rapists can always claim sex was consensual and point to the victim’s willingness (if not eagerness) to be in the perpetrator’s company. Because the victim’s memory will be impaired due to the date-rape drug, they will be incapable of contradicting the assertions of the rapist absent any forensic proof to the contrary. Worse, if the victim doesn’t know what happened, how can they themselves be sure they said no?

Not surprisingly, the people most at risk for date rape are innocents who have no idea of the existence of date-rape drugs. If you’ve been around the block a few times, or gone to college, you know to keep an eye on your drink at the parties you attend. But if you’ve led a fairly sheltered life and genuinely believe that mommy, daddy, god and law enforcement are watching out for you when you venture into the world, you may not know that some of the people who seem most excited to meet you are flashing practiced smiles and reciting well-honed sales pitches designed to victimize you in ways you might object to if their intent was fully disclosed.

That charming person picking you up at the door and complimenting you on your appearance and buying you flowers or a nice dinner or taking you to their home in the country may be thinking the entire time about how they are going to put drugs in your drink and have sex with you without your consent, but they’re not going to disclose that fact. Because if they did you might reasonably object to that kind of treatment and opt out of the date, thereby denying the rapist what they want most.

Innocence Lost — Again
Hailing originally from the Midwest as I do, I have more than once been accused of being a country bumpkin. Having gone on to live in Los Angeles for a few years, and in the bustling Northeast for a few years after that, I flatter myself that those stops instilled in me the kind of street savvy and deep cynicism that allows people in those media centers to simultaneously dismiss and lampoon everyone else in the country. Unfortunately, a few weeks ago I was reminded once again that you can never really leave the turnip truck when I read a Wall Street Journal article detailing the degree to which e-readers mine personal data from those devices. Even as I know one of the main goals of any internet-connected business is the procurement and exploitation of user data, including the selling of customer information to third parties, it still never occurred to me that e-readers were mining information about the private reading habits of users.  [ Read more ]

Scriptwriting Software

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Over the past year I’ve been thinking seriously about scriptwriting for the first time in a long time. A few screenplay ideas have offered themselves up as they always do — the majority of them irreverent comedies I’d like to write mostly to entertain my dull self — but I’ve also had a stageplay nagging at me in an uncomfortably persistent manner. As professional writers do when faced with the harrowing prospect of devoting time and energy to new projects, I finally relented to inspiration and budgeted some haphazard internet surfing time to looking at productivity tools as a begrudging means of avoiding any actual work.

Scriptwriting Software in Context
Before I offer up the results of my lackadaisical survey, a word about scriptwriting software in general. Computer technology has advanced so far during the course of my life that where success was once solely determined by performance specifications and productivity, high-tech hardware and software are now indisputably fashion-first industries. Precisely because everything from processing power to storage can be had in generic abundance for literal pennies, the marketplace is now more concerned with metrics like hipness, cultural relevance and branding than reliability and usability. Even something as purportedly revolutionary as the tablet computer is, for all its hype, simply a more comfortable way to kill time on the couch, albeit with panache.

So if you take nothing else from this post, remember: scriptwriting software will not make you a better writer, a more professional writer or a more successful writer. Most of the scripts I worked on for cash money were either written on a typewriter, typed up by someone else on a typewriter or word-processing program, or written by me on a computer using a now-defunct commercial package of macros compatible with various versions of Microsoft Word. Even when dedicated scriptwriting applications hit the market I stayed with my old-school methods, and I don’t remember feeling as if my work suffered. In fact, to the contrary, I often had a sense of smug satisfaction when I encountered grumbling comments from early-adopting and agitated peers who hd slaved themselves to a fussy proprietary formatting program. Life lesson: be very leery of installing an additional layer of balky complexity between you and your work.

A decade later, when I was primarily writing for interactive companies my work flow became even simpler. I still used Word, but instead of buying a new version of macros ever year or two for each new bloated release from Microsoft, I grabbed a small set of freeware macros off the internet that covered 99% of the formatting I intended to use. Small customizations to the default settings covered the rest, and all without so much as a separate interface or complex control-key learning curve.

Whether I’m really, truly interested in writing a script (or two, or five) I don’t know. One thing I am sure of, however, is that for the time being I’ll be happier pretending those shiny new ideas in my head won’t go to waste, so looking at scriptwriting software seems a reasonable response in any case. It’s probably been eight years since I used even the simplest tools for scriptwriting, and if I’m going to revisit that mode of storytelling I should probably do so cognizant of the latest tools. Particularly if the features I care about most are available in a single product, eliminating any need on my part to create workarounds or hacks, or to once again bend Word to my rusty iron will.  [ Read more ]

Writing is Work

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Whether you’re a dabbler, seasoned pro or tortured soul, pressing keys on a keyboard takes time. The more time you have available, and the more disciplined you are about protecting that time, the more productive you will be as a writer.

PCMag.com has an article up today about telecommuting and productivity, but because all writing is work — whether you’re getting paid or not — anyone trying to find regular writing hours at home can profit from the piece.

— Mark Barrett