www.James-Strocel.com

Posts Tagged ‘art’

When I was little, to call Michael Jackson the King of Pop was an understatement. Today, children use his name as a schoolyard insult. The media coverage of the death seems to have focused more on his work than his antics. Set to the tune of his many, many hits, he seems like less of a sideshow monstrosity and more like an old friend who was just very, very, sick.

Preliminary reports point to a Demerol addiction as the cause of death. In BC, we talk a good game about treating addiction as a disease, but I don’t think we really know how to do that. We’re still caught up with the idea that addiction is simply the product of moral failure. We don’t know the science behind it and we don’t know what’s involved in treating it. Because of that, we can’t take action to help the average addict on Pender Street, much less a heavily enabled celebrity like Michael Jackson. Perhaps his passing will help us realize how little we know and put us on a path to get the answers we need.

#iranelection was for many people the top news source for the aftermath of incumbent President Mahmoud Amedinejad’s so-called victory over reformer candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi last Friday. It’s not a new cable news channel, or even a news website. It’s what is known on twitter.com as a “trending topic”, a self-declared association of posts on the micro-blogging site. Every post with the word “#iranelection” self-identifies as having something to do with the Iran situation, be it opinions, links to mainstream news articles, or even first hand reports. It’s a new form of primary historical document, one that combines the intimacy of personal letters, the immediacy of video or sound recordings, and the openness of a mass media broadcast.

Twitter is by no means new technology. I find it very similar the web-based chat rooms I myself used in highschool. What is different about it is that it has repurposed current technology to be used in a unique way. Where other systems wanted to emphasize privacy and security, Twitter emphasizes publicity and openness. Most of the 140 character “tweets” are meant for the rest of the Twitter community and the internet at large. It’s easy to write it off as some kind of narcissistic toy, I’m guilty of that myself. However, Twitter’s status as a toy rather than a serious social networking site probably kept it from being blocked in Iran within the first few hours of the protests. Other aspects of the site, like the 140 character limit and interoperable architecture have allowed bloggers in Iran to deal with shoddy connectivity and the government’s attempts to block communication from within the country.

The result is a riveting stream of human emotion, rumor, and anonymous people from across the globe communicating like they never could before. Take a look at this feed from @Change_in_Iran

from the looks of it they are waiting to arrest all the students! it’s also explains the vans9:14 PM Jun 13th from web

some people are now parking their cars in middle of the street trying to block the vans. #iranelection9:16 PM Jun 13th from web

Police is trying to stop people from gathering around while Intel guys still holding a line in front of the gates #iranelection9:05 PM Jun 13th from web

police demanding people to move their cars and start crashing car windows. more people are coming. I will try to get a better view9:18 PM Jun 13th from web

Down with the dictator! Mousavi, Karoubi; support us! #iranelection9:30 PM Jun 13th from web

my eyes are burning hard to keep them open #iranelection9:46 PM Jun 13th from web

I’m dizzy but ok. some people are getting shelter in the nearby unfinished bank building. police arresting a middle aged man10:11 PM Jun 13th from web

@ahmadinejad no wonder you are OK Mr president 24.5M10:13 PM Jun 13th from TwitterFox in reply to ahmadinejad

it’s 9:54 AM -Amirabad street near Pasargad bank and to be honest I don’t have the courage to leave the roof right now #iranelection10:27 PM Jun 13th from web

There are more accounts like this on #iranelection interspersed with rumors of riot police stings disguised as Moussavi rallies and burning ballot boxes. Some tweets supply the Iranians with lists of proxies to get around the government’s internet filters. A hacker’s toolkit of programs to shut down Iranian propaganda websites is making the rounds. From the rest of the world, there are notes praying for the safety of the protesters, “retweets” of some of the more vital bits of news for fellow bloggers, and criticism of mainstream media outlets for their lack of coverage on the events. To see people communicate like this on such a personal level, the future of totalitarian regimes is doubtful. Any government that oppresses its own people on the basis of the threat of an external enemy cannot survive like this. The Great Satan has no horns or pointed tail, and he’s able to send a twitpic to prove it.

This is not to say that Twitter and services like it are going to replace more mainstream froms of news gathering. CNN doesn’t deserve its own #CNNfail channel for the coverage of the Iran Election. The network has to tread carefully to get the kind of access it has. President Obama had just recognized the USA’s involvement in the 1953 installment of the Shah only a week before. The US would do well to keep its distance and establish that it has nothing to do with the current unrest. Besides, it doesn’t matter whether True Blood is the higher trending topic or the mainstream media has to wait a few dozen hours to report on what it finds. That’s not what this is about. We all have an opportunity now to witness history. If we can’t take to the streets, if we can’t tend to the wounded, if can’t tweet from our laptops on the roof, the very least we can do is watch and pray that freedom wins out.

This Voltron Camera shows us how much poorer the world is now without transforming merchandise. Via Topless Robot.

It’s Yamato. It’s Starblazers. It’s one totally awesome trailer from the new 2009 series. What more do you need to know? Via AnimeVice.

Sure it’s depressing, but there’s something refreshing about this scale of financial destruction. Here’s an infographic of the largest bankruptcies in US History. Check out the full chart here. Via BoingBoing.

For those of you wondering what a bubble looks like while it’s being pierced by a BB Gun, wonder no further. Via ImageShack.

While arcade cabinets are mostly a thing of the past in the West, technology seems to be taking an alternate path as this Japanese company has developed a machine that can switch from vertical to horizontal in one easy step. Via GameSetWatch.

Dave Rosenberg’s column will fill you in on the details, but Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton had this to say in front of an audience of journalists and students at a breakfast at Syracuse University:

“I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet…(The Internet) created this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time. It’s as if the stores on Madison Avenue were open 24 hours a day. They feel entitled. They say, ‘Give it to me now,’ and if you don’t give it to them for free, they’ll steal it.”

No one argued with Lynton that media content, like Sony Pictures’ movies, were flowing through the internet without the original creators making a dime. The problem here, is that with the internet around, you CAN have the stores on Madison Avenue open 24 hours a day. The marginal cost of distributing a piece of music, text, or video is essentially zero, so you’ll have a hard time selling something that consumers know is pure profit. Instead of using the technology to its full potential, he wants to impose legal roadblocks that keep technology at the level that his business can use forever.

This isn’t the first time that Sony has caused controversy with their remarks towards the internet. Sony was also responsible for including a root-kit on CDs that interfered with the vital functions of computers that tried to play them. One of the attorneys for Sony BMG famously stated:

“When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Making “a copy” of a purchased song is just “a nice way of saying ‘steals just one copy’,”

The current controversy is reminiscent of previous legal battles over new technology, such as VCRs, audio cassette tapes, even terrestrial radio. In each of these circumstances, media companies were able to make billions without resorting to the kind of restrictions they were howling for in the first place. Why do we keep having this debate every time media distribution gets easier and cheaper?

On the surface, you could say that people don’t want to spend any money that they don’t want to, so any change, good or bad, is going to be fought tooth and nail by any business. I think the problem runs deeper than that. Most of the cries of indignation do not come from the artists themselves, but from the companies that represent them. In other words, they are the people who press the plastic discs and make all the deals necessary to get them to the stores. They are the sales people. Artists aren’t happy playing the same songs or acting the same lines over and over again, but salespeople would gladly sell you five copies of the same movie or the same album.

The real reason salespeople don’t want their business to change is that they do not consider what they do to be real work. If they wanted to do work, they would get into carpentry, engineering, or flower arrangement. Workers in those industries have to compete with each other to produce better products, but not salespeople. They’re happy to sell the same loaf of bread in a different bag, and will fight tooth and nail against doing otherwise. We as a society allow this state of affairs because we expect no better of salespeople. We don’t consider sales to be real work either. If a product gathers more sales because it has a better name or packaging, we consider it cheating. Our media is flush with stereotypes of sleazy salespeople who will do anything for a buck except work for one. We consider the ability to “sell ice to eskimos” as the mark of a good salesperson.

The truth is that sales IS real work. The cold calling, the knocking on doors, the networking, all of it. We need to enforce the idea that responsibility of the deal lies not with the producer, the consumer, nor market that created it. It lies with the salesperson himself. If you can’t sell this product, find a better one. If you can’t find a better one, improve the one you’ve got. If you can’t improve the one you’ve got, include a free gift. Salespeople will do what they have to do to make a living, but the fundamental fact here is that the central relationship in a salesperson’s professional life is between him and his consumer. Invoking the powers of government to maintain your bargaining position is no substitute for this kind of rapport. I’m not saying that giving movies and music away for free is the answer, but trying to hobble technology for pure profit is not the answer either.

Like most people, I have a “to read” pile of books, but unlike most people, I’ve saddled myself with a “to Play” pile. This makes me perpetually late to the party on most video game crazes, but it also keeps me from wasting my time and money on launch day hype. If a game has the kind of quality to still be generating buzz six months after release, I consider it worthy of my attention. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is one such game.

In the game, you play the role of Phoenix Wright, a young defense lawyer. The goal of the game is similar to the “Perry Mason” novel series and television show, where you would prove the client innocent by proving the guilt of one of the witnesses. Each case would start out with an investigation section, where you would question witnesses and search crime scenes for clues. Later, the action would shift to the courtroom, where you would cross-examine witness testimony and present evidence to defend your client. The story is told via animated cut-scenes and text dialogue. In terms of technological power, the game is pretty primitive. The style of gameplay is similar to point and click graphic adventures that haven’t been popular in years. The story is also a little campy, taking fantastic liberties with the way the justice system works. They use character names like “Wendy Oldbag” and “Dick Gumshoe”.  “Professor Plum” from the board game “Clue” wouldn’t be out of place here. That didn’t stop Phoenix Wright from becoming a cult hit.

Phoenix Wright has spawned 3 sequels and a spinoff to be released later this year. The first game, “Ace Attorney”, is next to impossible to find on North American store shelves due to  excessive demand. Even Capcom, the game’s publisher, didn’t expect that kind of reception. There is even a Phoenix Wright Musical produced by the all-female Takarazuka Revue that recently opened in Japan. Top it all off with the legions of cosplayers, fanzines, and even fan-developed spinoff games, Phoenix Wright is nothing less than a minor phenomenon. Why was this point-and-click adventure game succeeding where so many others have failed?

It would be easy to write of the art style as the main attraction to the game. The game is filled with clean lines, dynamic poses, and attractive characters. However, there are many games that have superior art that don’t quite make it to the level of recognition that Phoenix Wright has. What about the gameplay? Well, Bejeweled has great gameplay. You don’t see anybody cosplaying as that. Yet. That leaves us the story and characters, which people seemed to have latched on to, but the question still remains, why these characters? Other character-based games, like Leisure Suit Larry, are having a terrible time regaining any kind of stature on the sales charts. What is it about Phoenix Wright and his friends that make them so special?

For the answer, you have to look at Phoenix Wright himself. He is chock full of symbology. His last name is an obvious pun (“That’s right, Mr. Wright”) and his first name refers to his ability to turn around cases that seem hopeless, like a phoenix rising from the ashes. His hair and facial features make him look like some stalwart bird of justice, and the arm that he points out has he gives an objection is foreshortened so it looks like a giant wing. Every part of Phoenix’s character is designed to make obvious who he is and what he does, along with every other character in the series.

Now what other characters are created this way? Check out all of the people the Phoenix Wright cosplayers are hanging out with. Every major media property has characters that are easily recognizable and have symbology. Star Wars, Harry Potter, and even James Joyce’s Ulysses are all guilty of this. When it comes to American comic books, character names just cross into the blatantly literal with names like Superman, Batman, and Wolverine.

People sometimes criticize works for being obvious or unsubtle with symbology. Others say we should be free of symbols and try to create something that is truly original.  Subtlety is fine, but it shouldn’t be an enemy of clear communication. People gravitate to the easy symbology because it leaves them free to appreciate other aspects of the story. If you want something that’s truly original and free of symbols, you will be disappointed. What is a symbol but a communication of a thing that exists? We can’t create new symbols from nothing, because we’ll eventually find a way to associate the new symbols to the old and we’re back to a symbol that’s inspired by something instead of nothing.

If you are trying to be creative and vexxed by the pressure to be original, remember that you can’t create anything new, you can only make new combinations of things that already exist. If you try to be truly original, you break the rules that govern the human experience, and you end up with something incomprehensible. Don’t try and make your poem, painting, or novel into something by Jackson Pollack or Walter Creeley. Deconstructionism is a failed experiment of 20th century art movements. Let’s pick up the old tools like structure, perspective, and rhyming couplet to create something that future generations will actually be able to understand.

Adam Carolla of the “Man Show” Fame now has his own podcast after a “Complex business decision” cancelled his morning radio show. As the large media concerns run out of money, we’re going to start seeing more and more experienced performers moving to where there’s less overhead, less creative interference and less calcified power structures. The show has been running for about two months now, and it’s easily the best podcast out on the net. Unlike most podcasters out there, Adam has had years to hone the art of talking into the mike. His shows rarely last more than an hour, there aren’t any uncomfortable silences or peals of laughter long enough to drag the conversation down. Adam himself has a fairly blue-collar down-to-earth outlook on life, but he also respects intelligent people when he finds them. So far he’s had people like Seth McFarlane, George Takei, and even Jack from Jack-in-the-box (or the actor who plays him. I’m not sure. The episode is so reality-bending it just has to be heard to be believed). All the while, Adam has given himself 10 months to figure out how to make a profit with his new podcast. He can’t accept any kind of money while he is working on this new sitcom pilot for CBS. In fact, the podcast is costing him almost $5,000 a month in broadband fees.

That whole conundrum gives the podcast an overall story arc if you will, and the plot reminds me a little bit of Buck Rogers. Adam has emerged from the terrestrial radio time capsule into a world he doesn’t exactly understand. For the first few episodes he was hanging on to some of the old tropes of radio, like “resetting”, where they would re-introduce the guest they had on  for listeners just tuning in. However, Adam is determined to make it in this strange new world using his old-fashioned know-how and determination. With 5 shows a week, the podcast has a professional dependability you just don’t see in other podcasts that miss shows, run too long, or just don’t have Adam’s comedic experience.

With daily downloads in the hundreds of thousands, there’s no doubt the Adam Carolla podcast will turn a profit once it’s allowed to. Adam still dreams of making his show subscription-based to keep the advertisers from meddling with his show, but I don’t think he realizes how much the game has changed. With the universe of content options available out there, bloggers, web-comic artists and podcasters cannot make any compromises on their credibility. A motivated, trusting audience is irreplacable. If some ad rep tried to walk up to the Penny Arcades and the Cracked.coms of the world and say “Oh, I don’t know, do you think you could be a little more edgy and youth oriented?”, they’d get an intern to grab a bat tell them to get the hell out of the store.

The Internet has a ways to go before it’s the center of all media, but it’s so close you can smell it. When that happens you are going to see a new era of art and literature where no one gets to be a hit simply because they’re on the big three networks or the Clear Channel. The people who focus on making their shows better than everyone else’s will succeed. That’s why I want the Adam Carolla podcast to succeed. Every medium needs it’s juggernauts to motivate the smaller operations to create an entertainment universe with something for everyone, entertainers, audiences, and even sleazy ad reps.

My name is James Strocel. I have been a card-carrying Transformers fan ever since Generation 1 in the 1980′s. I say the following of my own free will. I will not be spending any money to see “Transformers 2: Revenge of The Fallen” this Summer. If I do so, I would be positively reinforcing actions that are a detriment to the world economy and my enjoyment of giant fighting robots. I would like to present the following as evidence in support of this stance.

While I did pay money to see the first transformers movie, I came away with a number of caveats. First of all, the story seemed to revolve around the human sidekicks more than it did the Transformers who I actually paid to see. Don’t get me wrong, history is full of examples where robots play prominently in a human-centred story-arc. The anime serials Gundam and Macross come to mind. However, the human story in this case surrounded Shia Lebeouf getting to first and a half base with Megan Fox. It seemed as though the writers felt that people would have trouble relating to the titular robots of Transformers, so they added all this extraneous filler to entice people who had already paid their ticket to watch a movie about robots. I was hoping that for the sequel, the good folks at Paramount would get their act together and give the Transformers the screen time they deserve. This will not be the case. The trailer at screened at the Showest film festival spent over one and a half minutes of a two and a half trailer explaining how Shia wanted to leave his transforming corvette at home so he can go off to college and be “normal”. Words cannot begin to describe what’s wrong with that statement.

The first Transformers film grossed over 700 million dollars worldwide. Anyone poke holes in my rationale by saying that Michael Bay is just giving the fans what they want. He doesn’t have to listen to me, an actual fan, because he has the numbers to tell anyone who doesn’t like his human interest stories to go to hell. If that’s the case, then I have some numbers of my own to show.

The Dow Jones has lost 50% of its value over the past year. The cascading effects of bank insolvency and freezing on lending has led to over $14 trillion dollars worth of companies being shut down. How did we get to this point? By pleasing two sets of people, prospective homebuyers unable to pay their mortgages, and investors looking for high risk and high return investments. Banks made billions by giving sub-prime mortgages to the first group and selling to the latter. People got what they wanted, but did they get what they need? Not by a long shot.

Designing our entertainment or any other product around “giving people what they want” is killing industries left and right. Pontiac finds out that people “want” extra plastic and spoilers on their cars, so they make a car like the Aztec. Papers make more money from advertising than from actual paper sales, so the pages are stuffed to foie-gras goose proportions with ads. If you run a business and are just “giving people what they want” you are abdicating your responsibility as an entrepreneur. When you try to engage all this marketing mumbo-jumbo by testing random samples with no vested interest your business, you are only fooling yourself. Entrepreneurs have a duty to make their products the best they can be, no matter what the polls say. People’s needs have remained the same for thousands of years, but what an entrepreneur does is take a small piece of the universe, be it coffee, toothpicks or even the laws of physics that allows your iPod to work and fashions it into a new frontier to satisfy those age-old needs. It’s like being in a tribe of hunter-gatherers and knowing which ridge leads to the best wild game. It would put you on the fast track to becoming chief hunter-gatherer. The very best entrepreneurs educate people. They know how to get the most benefit out of their products and they pass that knowledge on for a nominal fee.

I realize the philosophy of “giving people what they want” is not going to die over night. My absence at the theatre will be bearly noticed, and I have little hope of getting others to join me. However, we keep saying over and over that we need leadership to get us out of this crisis. We think that the leadership is going to come from our elected officials. I think that we’ll find that leadership in a decent cup of coffee, a well-made camera, or movies that don’t insult our intelligence. If we support decent leadership where we find it by our simple consumer choices, we support the very ideas and strategies that will get us out of any economic crisis.

It was time to go home. We had a rental agreement that was expiring, travel insurance that was running out, and a plane that wouldn’t wait up for us. Our two weeks away felt like the true meaning of a trip of a lifetime. We had traveled to the other side of the world, saw towering mega-cities, steaming jungles, ancient temples and forsaken battlegrounds. We had met people from completely different backgrounds than our own, tried to speak their language, and engaged in the occasional misunderstanding. There are so many more stories to tell from our trip, but mostly they are quick vignettes without any real point to them. This series on my trip is starting to give Friday the 13th a run for its money, so this is as good a place to stop as any. If I learned anything from this trip, it’s this:

• Tokyo is not expensive, they just use a lot of sales to bleed you dry.
• Marketing is not a dirty word, and there is a way not to sound desperate.
• Never give anyone directions in Japan that end in “It’s near the shrine”.
• Gindako makes the best Takoyaki in the world.
• Filipino hotels are places where everybody knows your name.
• If you have kids, let them have fun. You will too.

As a major landmark, the Tokyo Tower has seen a lot of action on TV and film. Destroying a 1000 foot tall tower is a sure way to get a rise out of any audience. The tower has run afoul of Godzilla, Mothra, Ultraman, Sailor Moon, and the many sullen psychic teenagers of the Clamp Manga series “X”. However, as Sara and I found, there is another reason that the Tokyo Tower gets the shaft so often.

We started off the day attempting to wander the gardens outside the Imperial Palace near Tokyo station, but inclement weather put a stop to that.

After a warm bowl of ramen, we decided to make our way to the Tokyo Tower. Tokyo is such a huge city that you can’t really get a sense of how the whole thing looks from any one point like you can with Vancouver or Seattle. Narita airport an hour outside of Tokyo, so we couldn’t see the city from our airplane. The Tokyo Tower’s observation deck seemed to be the best vantage point by which to get a holistic view of Tokyo.

The Tower was impressive even from the ground. Seeing it loom over the gate of the Zozo-ji really captured how Japan has one foot in the past while reaching out into the future.

When we got to the foot of the tower, we finally got to see a monkey. He did some tricks while his trainer tried to play the “straight man” part of a comedy double act with him. I felt a little guilty enjoying the act because the monkey did not look like he wanted to be there, but I set out on this trip to find a monkey, and a monkey I did find.

After getting a my picture taken with Noppon, the Tokyo Tower mascot, we got in line to get our tickets. Since it was the 50th anniversary of the Tower, it was really crowded. It looked like people from all over Japan were paying a visit. We were sandwiched into an Elevator with about 8 other people. At the observation deck, smooshed up against the windows, we finally saw how big Tokyo was.

There was nothing but buildings for as far as the eye could see. There were patches of green here and there from the city parks, but there was no way to see where the city ended and the country began. It was magnificent but a little terrifying. The green hills of Abbotsford were never so far away.

There were also a few musems located in the base of the Tower. There was a trick art gallery, a wax museum, and even a 3D Yatterman anime. Even after coming thousands of miles, the setup of these museums seemed a little familiar, like I was on some sort of field trip. Now, I visited the Tokyo Tower as a tourist, and of my own free will. If I had to come here 3 or 4 times over the course of my grade school career to yet again experience the wonders of the Statistics Museum (they had one there, I’m not making this up) ,I might have grown to bear a little disdain for that orange and white behemoth. Considering that I’d be stuck up there with a class of other bored teenagers, and the wonderful memories that experience would bring, I probably wouldn’t mind sitting in a theatre watching Godzilla and his friends rip that thing to rivets.

While the Tokyo Tower was really impressive, I could understand it if people have a love-hate relationship with it. For some, it would be a birds-eye view of their city that couldn’t be achieved on any other building. For others, it would conjure memories of crowded elevators and dull field trip lectures. Personally, from now on I prefer to look at the Tokyo Tower from the exterior, and I sincerely hope it continues its prime function of transmitting all those wacky Japanese game shows.

One thing I simply had to do while in Japan was ride the bullet train. One of the places Sara simply had to visit was Kyoto. Fortunately, we were able to combine the two when we took a 2 and a half hour train ride to Kyoto.

We rode the Hikari train, which runs at a top speed of 285 km/h. Sara didn’t think it went too fast, but in her defense, the ride was so smooth you couldn’t really tell. I took some video out the window of us going top speed.

Kyoto wasn’t bombed in the second world war, so many of the ancient temples and older buildings were still standing. Kyoto was still a huge city, so we could only see a couple of key places. Sara and I decided to see the Kyoto Craft Center and take the Philosopher’s way to the Ginkaku-ji, or Silver Pavilion.

The Craft center was over 6 floors of traditional Japanese Crafts. There was jewelry, lacquered dishware, and even Samurai swords for sale. It was really geared toward tourists, but the salesmanship was so classy that you didn’t feel put upon to buy anything. Sara and I got a lot of souvenir shopping done nonetheless.

We made our way through the back streets to the Philosopher’s way, which is a cobble-stone path running along a small canal where there were shrines that were hundreds, if not thousands of years old. Kyoto as a whole was a lot more laid back than the slick neon head-rush of Tokyo.  The path wasn’t exactly straight, nor was it exactly winding. One could really get a good think in without any turns to interrupt you or too many straight lines to bore you.

At the end of the path was the Ginkaku-ji. The Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa built the temple in the 15th century as a place of rest and relaxation. I’d say he succeeded. This is what world-class serenity looks like.

Once we finished at the Ginkaku-ji, we headed back to the Heian Shrine. It was built in 1895 on the 1,100th anniversary of the city. It wasn’t as old as the other temples, but it was certainly the largest that we had seen yet.

We spent the whole day trying to cover the city, but by the time we were finished at the Heian Shrine, it was already time to go home. With so much more of Kyoto to see, we’ll definitely spend more time here when we come back to Japan.