Porn industry bailout? Seriously?

Now everyone has asked for a bailout. Friend of this blog Chris Moody makes a good point: who heads up nationalized porn? I vote for Sen. Hard Shaft.

Real question: when will churches be asking for the same thing? They're definitely feeling the crunch.

Set back for the Long Tail

It looks like Chris Anderson's Long Tail theory suffered a setback in the box office this year. For those who haven't heard of it, the Long Tail: "describes the niche strategy of businesses, such as Amazon.com or Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities." In other words, rather than aiming to sell a large number of a few item, businesses are increasingly aiming to sell a small number of a million items.

TIME Magazine recently noted something similar in their article:

"Oscar nominations and old-fashioned word of mouth--earned robust box-office results: Little Miss Sunshine, No Country for Old Men and, most remarkably, Juno, the teen-pregnancy comedy that, on a $7.5 million budget, outgrossed such pricey, massively promoted (and popular) superproductions as Prince Caspian and The Incredible Hulk."

But, the article notes, this year those tiny, niche movies that make ten times what they cost were non-existent. Not a surprise though:

-If you've got limited funds and have a choice between seeing a niche movie or a blockbuster, which will you go see? Box offices say it was the blockbuster at least this year.

-And let's be serious: when has there, in recent history been a year of Blockbusters like this one: A new Indiana Jones, a new Bond movie, a new Batman movie, Iron Man, Hancock--that's quite a few and that's just the top four. There were fine showings by Momma Mia! and Sex and the City as well.

Only exception to the bad showing by niche movies: Fireproof. It was made for half a million and grossed $33 million.

By prediction? This was an off-year. You'll see alot more Fireproofs...

The Watchmen trailer

This new trailer looks phenomenal. Will it live up to the novel? Well they're going to have to cut the pirates if it will make any sense, but here's hoping for a solid movie.

Our Generation, Unimaginative?

In a recent article in the Atlantic, P.J. O'Rourke discusses the difficulty Disney's had in renovating the House of the Future attraction in Tomorrowland. The problem is of course that when it came out, folks apparently were willing to accept that the 1950s was the golden age of Americana (an ideology most recently and perhaps effectively argued against in AMC's "Mad Men.")

His thesis is that Disney can't imagine what the House of the Future would look like because our culture is unimaginative. But here's an excerpt from the crux of his article, which is worth quoting at length:

Well, given the future envisioned in Disney’s House of the Future, who can blame us for looking the other way?Disney’s Tomorrowland is deeply, thoroughly, almost furiously unimaginative. This isn’t the fault of the “Disney culture”; it is the fault of our culture. We seem to have entered a deeply unimaginative era.

Let us not confuse imagination with innovation or even with progress. Man’s descent from the trees and adoption of the brilliant mechanics of bipedalism were innovation and progress of the first order. But what did we do with this progress for our first million years as humans? As best we can tell, we hung around the Olduvai Gorge and beat some rocks together to make “chopping tools.”

On the other hand, the Italian Renaissance was so imaginative that during its three centuries, practically everything worth imagining was imagined. And yet not much was actually invented in Florence, Pisa, or Rome.

Global imagination, like global climate, seems to have cycles—natural, man-made, or whatever. Sometimes what people imagine for the future is bogged down in the literal—call it “blogged” for short. The last thousand years of the Roman Empire, for example, were no great shakes. The Romans had all the engineering necessary to start an industrial revolution. But they preferred to have toga parties and let slaves do all the work.

The Chinese had gunpowder but failed to arm their troops with guns. They possessed the compass but didn’t go much of anywhere. They invented paper, printing, and a written form of their language, but hardly anyone in China was taught to read.
And here we are in 2008. Name an avant-garde painter. Nope, dead. Nope, dead. Yep, Julian Schnabel is what I came up with too. But it’s been a quarter of a century since he was pasting busted plates on canvas. He’s making movies now. And movies are famously not any good anymore. Name a great living composer. Say “Andrew Lloyd Webber” and I’ll force you to sit through Cats and Starlight Express back-to-back. Theater is revivals and revivals of revivals and stuff like musicals made out of old Kellogg’s Rice Krispies commercials, with Nathan Lane as “Snap.” More modern poetry is written than read. Modern architecture leaks and the builders left their plumb bobs at home. The most prominent contemporary art form is one that is completely unimaginative (or is supposed to be): the memoir.

To top it all off, we have just experienced perhaps the greatest technological advance in the history of humans. And what are we using the Internet for? To sell one another 8-track tapes on eBay and tell complete strangers on Facebook the location of all our tattoos. And, apparently, to tell ourselves what to do with the groceries we just bought.

Ouch. I contend that under the way O'Rourke seems to define "imagination," he might have a point. But His definition of "imagination" seems to focus solely on artistic works.

I offer three explanations as to why our generation is not as "imaginative" as others:

(1) Our imagination IS our innovation. But that "innovation" and "progress" he writes off so quickly in the
third paragraph, is an imagination of it's own. Why is imagining a
world where people can make calls, watch movies, listen to music and
write memos in a box that fits into the palm of ones hand artistically
inferior to imagining the world in dots (pointillism)?

(2) Our tools are new. No other generation has had so much innovation. Convergence Culture isn't a thing of the future. It's here. When I turn on my Sony Playstation 3, I can download episodes of Gossip Girl, I can download music, I can download games, I play games on Blue-Ray (as well as audio CDs, DVDs, and Playstation 1 and 2 formats--not to brag). When I turn on my iPod classic, I can also download episodes of Gossip Girl, I can download music (bigger selection), I can download games (a smaller selection). I can do all of these same things on my Mac. It's no longer a matter of whether there's a place where you can get media convergence it's about who profits from it. Are you going to get your convergent media through Sony? How about Apple? Microsoft? Fries with that?

When I was born, not only did these companies not exist, the technology didn't exist. Painting tools existed a long time before the Mona Lisa. The Printing Press existed for 400 years before we received "Les Miserables" and "Tale of Two Cities." You have to learn how to use a paint brush before you make a masterpiece.

(3) Why can't we imagine what the House of the Future looks like? With all the tools and access to built up imagination of the ages, it's hard to agree on what the future looks like. On a cultural standpoint: does the House of the Future have a husband-wife-kids nuclear family? Some would like to envision a future that does. Statistically, it doesn't look likely. Could the House of the Future have same-sex parents? Can that be done while respecting previous stages of the House of the Future? From a technological standpoint: does it look like this:

Inside it will feature hardware, software and touch-screen systems that could simplify everyday living.

Lights and thermostats will automatically adjust when people walk into a room. Closets will help pick out the right dress for a party. Counter tops will be able to identify groceries set on them and make menu suggestions.

Communications standpoint: are the kids text-messaging each other from across the room? My students do. Or have they found some new way to communicate (Telepathy sounds neat but would be lame, since you couldn't hear it in the attraction).

It's to easy to label our generation as unimaginative. Every generation has it's strengths and weaknesses. I'm sure when the "Greatest Generation" was born, the grandparents were muttering "so unimaginative..."

100 Confessions: Airport Woes

(15) I allow myself to get ridiculously annoyed at airports. There's really not an excuse. My Dad's a pilot. I know how these things work. I'm normally moderately patient in terms of travel, but airports get to me. I get anxious. And I get annoyed, especially when I get rerouted.

Here's a video my wife and I made after a recent trip home to DC that had to go through Chicago which got rerouted to Louisville, Kentucky. My wife gave a gate agent a heart attack (literally. No I'm not joking, they had to call an ambulance. Not completely her fault--he should have taken his insulin) but we eventually got home.

100 Confessions: Unfulfilling job 2

(14) I spent another summer selling knives. The summer before I sold womens shoes at Dillards, I was a sales representative for Vector Marketing which sells Cutco.

The way it works is I write down everyone I know who has a family. Then I go sell them knives and get them to give me more people to sell knives to. I was awful.

On my first sales job, I went to the home of some long time friends. To demonstrate how sharp the butchers knife was, I was supposed to slice through a cucumber. Well I sliced it and cut off the top of my thumb as well. After a frantic search for band-aids (they didn't have any) and gauze (that either), we wrapped my thumb in paper towels and masking tape. On the bright side, I did convince them they were sharp knives. And they bought some even if it was just out of pity.

100 Confessions: Unfulfilling job

(13) I once worked a summer selling womens shoes at Dillards. I was the guy forced to creep up on the ladies trying on shoes and forced to ask "can I help you with something?"--a subtle reminder that "hey I work on commission and you're not getting out of here with those Nine West until you let me fetch a couple pairs of shoes for you."

I had some serious adventures while I was there. There was the guy who figured out how to put on a woman's shoe at just the right angle so he could see up her dress. He'd come to the back and bark "thong" occasionally. There was also the former stripper I worked with who was very successful at selling shoes to men for their wives (although I'm convinced that not all the wives were excited to receive six-inch heels).

Somehow I mostly ended up with the old ladies. There was one woman who asked for an open-toe shoe who had toes crossed over each other and look so mangled that they may as well have been through a lawnmower. On that occasion, I remember I actually asked, "Ma'am are you SURE you want an open-toe shoe?" Another time I was putting a shoe on for a woman and while I was putting it on she asked, "Could you rub my bunion while you're down there?" I said no.

Occasionally, I would get to work with a young person though. One time an attractive young lady came in (yes there was flirting) looking for shoes. We looked at a bunch of shoes she wanted to see, but she was becoming frustrated and said, "I really looking for something sexy."
So I asked the question, "So is this for a girl's night out, a party--"
"Church," she said. I tried not show my surprise, but she continued naturally, "I'm in the choir and I have to wear a choir robe."

"So people aren't going to be listening to your voice, they'll be looking at your shoes?"

"Of course."

The upside of my time at Dillards is that I can start stories by saying "While I was working at Dillards selling Womens shoes..."