The Best Liars: Self-publishing and My New Dilemma
I’ve become tainted against self-publishing. That is probably clear to those of you who read this blog, since I’ve written a number of posts about self-publishers (see this label for others), but it has now become clear to me on a different level. I’ve said numerous times in the past that there are good self-publishers out there who produce good books, have honest production practices, and are friendly. But they are an astronomically small minority when set against all of the rest who are effectively some of the best liars and manipulators of any stripe (they give FOX News a run for their money in the spin department); the good folks are like the Maldives in a global warming world–the more the sea keeps rising, the more likely those tiny little islands are going to get buried under water. (Bear with me on this. I’ll get to my fully-developed point towards the end; I need context first.) For me, this is a huge problem, because I want to be able to trust that self-publishers can all be honest people. My experiences, however, have shown that the opposite is true. I’ve been approached too many times to count by people claiming to be traditionally published, who, upon further inspection, are anything but; I’ve met people who try to tell me and others things about traditional publishing that are patently false (or not representative of anything but a severe minority), who then shrug off reality as if everyone else is ignorant and needs to learn the valuable lessons of Mr. Hoity Toity; and I’ve read dozens and dozens of blog posts and (about) books on self-publishing that make glorious claims about self-publishing, deface traditional publishing by showing only the darkest sides of the worst of them, and generally offer lists of lies, half-truths, or misdirections, which creates a vacuum that makes it very difficult to know where to look to find honesty about your options as a writer. For every one good self-publisher I have met (honest people who don’t lie about their publishing status, who are dead honest about what it takes to self-publish, who say that self-publishing is not for everyone, etc.), there are hundreds of bad ones. The fact that the second group is actively fighting to make changes go in their favor is disconcerting, because what they are ushering in isn’t a world of quality-variety, but just any-old-variety. They want a world where readers become the filter; considering that these are the same people who claim that traditional publishers publish crap, it’s somewhat self-defeating–turning literature into a game of “who has the most resources” or “who can play popularity bingo the best” is not necessarily going to produce quality literature. And all of this creates a lot of problems for me, because there is nothing within self-publishing, with the exception of the chosen few, that I feel I can trust. It’s mired in a sea of lies and misinformation that nobody seems interested in dealing with or is actually equipped to do anything about. Everywhere I look, the same things appear. It makes sense to me why so many people have come out of the woodworks with an anti-traditional view of things: when all you have to look at are half-truths or flat-out lies, you start to adopt those views too. People like me take all of this and become even less friendly to the entire industry. Maybe we shouldn’t, but it can’t be helped. I personally don’t appreciate being lied to or deceived; I want to know what I’m getting into before I actually get into it, to a certain extent (obviously I don’t want to know the whole plot of a novel before I read it). For self-publishers, this might pose a problem, particularly ones that mean well and probably are quite good at what they do (in terms of the writing). I have no doubt that I’m missing out on a great number of good books by self-published authors, but the problem for me as a consumer is that finding these gems is not an easy task; I either have to do a lot of work to find the stuff worth buying, or I have to take an unnecessary risk. Most importantly, though, is that even with this one huge flaw in the self-publishing model, there is the greater flaw of the body of unofficial representatives who have done a fine job tarnishing the self-publishing name in the eyes of people like me (and there are a lot of us). The question is: what can be done to bring people like me back into the fold? I used to read self-published novels, but after too many bad experiences, I stopped. What ways can self-publishers change the way their game is played so that people like me can feel some sense of trust in the whole “indie” thing? I have ideas, but I don’t think those ideas are favored among self-publishing types. Some folks have rejected the idea of creating a filtering system of some sort for self-published books, and others have thought me crazy for suggesting that creating your own press and not making it clear that you’re self-published is deceptive. Plus, defacing traditionally publishing is not a good strategy; it might be an effective one, but it’s also an intellectually dishonest one, since it does more to suggest that there is less “right” with the side that wants to be “right” than it does to suggest that the other side is “wrong.” Are there campaigns for self-published authors that aren’t in some way centered on or a part of the anti-traditional camp? Lastly, what can self-publishers do to make me think there’s value in what they do? I realize that writing is important to most self-publishers, but that is a reason for most writes in general, regardless of publishing status. What really makes what self-publishers do valuable to consumers? I’d also really like to know what strategies are being done to make self-publishing
Inception, An Addendum: Musicology (Part Two)
Not long ago I posted the first part of an analysis of the music in Christopher Nolan’s film, Inception. Before that I had analyzed the film’s emotional over- and under-tones and had reviewed the film (giving it a glowing review, actually). Now, I present to you the second part of my analysis of the score for Inception. The Musicology of Inception: A Simple Score, or Musical Genius? (Part Two) II. A Layered Cake of Musical Notes While much has been said about Christopher Nolan’s and Zimmer’s attempt to make the music of Inception a character in the narrative of the film via “No Regrets”, very little has been said about Zimmer’s attempt to make his score reflect a key element of Inception’s novum: the dream within a dream–within a dream. This seems to me to be a gross oversight on the part of critics, particularly those that have criticized Zimmer’s limited technicality.1 For the rest of this piece, I am going to focus on “Time,” one of the most popular songs from the album, which accurately reflects what I am trying to argue. What Zimmer’s score seems to do most effectively is expand upon the notion of layering within Inception‘s narrative. Anyone who has seen the film knows that it is a sequence of things built on top of one another, all of which come crashing down in the final moments of the film. Much like the film, Zimmer’s song “Time” is also built in layers, but not in the traditional sense of layered musical scores. Most scores, after all, are layered, because they must be in order to accommodate the range of instruments that make for beautiful music. But “Time” is layered in a much different sense, because it does not begin as a sea of harmonic instruments, but as a pair or trio of sounds (a piano and one or two electronic-sounding elements to enhance the deeper tones). The song starts here because it is establishing the basic structure of the entire song, and the structure of the narrative, which we’ll come to shortly. Every 32 beats (in 4/4 time, in case you’re wondering) is a repetition of that particular layer’s contribution to the song, repeating essentially the same 32 beats through all the succeeding layers; these layers typically introduce one to four new instruments, from strings to brass to percussion. All of these elements build and build until the climax, which is a sudden tapering off of all but a reduced form of the strings, the piano at normal, and a heavily reduced monotone base beat that sits underneath the rest, almost as if it were an echo of all that came before. From there, the song is reduced layer by layer until only the piano remains. Why is all of this important? Because this is the exact structure of the movie, and not in the sense that all movies are a building and building of elements to a climax. No, “Time” is an echo, if you will, of the dreamscape of Inception. The dream within the dream–within the dream. Each addition of a level of dream is as much a repetition of what came before and an addition of something new as the song “Time.” Even the tapering off of the song is a mirror of the sudden eruption of the layers by the “kick riding” that occurs. But “Time” also has a curious placement in Inception, which says something else about how Zimmer’s score and Inception‘s narrative consist of multiple interpretations. In the film, “Time” plays from the moment Cobb “awakes” on the airplane to the moment he sees the faces of his children. To interpret “Time” in this context is somewhat tricky, because it would seem that the layering of the music is not necessarily relevant to Cobb’s final moments. Layers, however, do exist for Cobb, not simply because he is a former “architect” (builder of the dreamscapes) or a dreamscaper. The buildup of Cobb’s narrative, as I have discussed in part here, is one of psychological elements. Cobb’s relationship with his wife and his children, and even those around him, are caught in two fundamentally oppositional elements (in the sense that one is a singular, and the other is a multitude): his obsession with getting back to his children at any cost, and his obsession with the death of his wife, his involvement in it, and his need to change the course of his own history through his memories. The latter of these is most important to the discussion here. One of the important scenes of the film is also the most telling when it comes to this idea of “layering” in relation to Cobb. When Ariadne descends into Cobb’s dreams, she discovers that they are actually a buildup of his fears, regrets, and memories, the last of which have been damaged to varying degrees by the first two. The result is Cobb’s mind consists of layers (relayed through the metaphor of an elevator) that are not entirely secure, since most of them can be punctured by the projection of his wife (typically the distorted version of her, which seems to be the strongest). The fact that these issues spill over into the other dreamscapes we’re exposed to throughout the film is something worth acknowledging. Cobb’s psychological makeup, thus, is affected by its layers and the interaction of his competing desires (children and wife). While those layers are not necessarily building up in the same sense as the climactic dreamscape of the film, they are at least reflected in how Cobb’s narrative invades that dreamscape and closes in the same hurried fashion, something I noted earlier in the design of “Time.” Since “Time” is as much a reflection of the layering of the narrative as it is an introduction of tension, the end of the song and the sudden burst of emotional closure for Cobb in the end of the film go hand in hand. All that tension between Cobb and his
Inception, An Addendum: Musicology (Part One)
(You can read my review of Inception here and my other analytical post about the issue of emotion in the film here.) (Note: Because this particular post has become far longer than I had originally intended, I’m going to split it into two parts.) The Musicology of Inception: A Simple Score, or Musical Genius? (Part One) Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of Inception that can be easily externalized pre-DVD-release is the musical score composed by Hans Zimmer. Much of the discussion over Zimmer’s score has centered on two positions: an ingrained hatred for Zimmer’s work, often based on legitimate criticisms, and an incredible misunderstanding of Zimmer’s musical style and its importance in the discussion of Inception‘s narrative. Both issues will be addressed in these two posts on musicology. What sets Zimmer apart from many film scorers is not that he is a technically destitute composer, but that his scores seem to rise to the challenge of accentuation despite their technically vacuity, largely because Zimmer, unlike other composers, understands, on some intuitive level, that film scores must necessarily reflect the film and must impose themselves upon the film medium to amplify the effects produced by all the other aspects of film production (acting, directing, cinematography, CG, etc.). Inception‘s score, thus, is perhaps one of Zimmer’s most complicated musical achievements due to the way in which it creates a dialogue with the film; it is also a score that has already begun to rack up a considerable amount of vitriol, general criticism, and so on. Sadly, many critics have missed what makes Zimmer’s score function so well within Inception‘s narrative, which is the subject I’d like to discuss here and in the post that will follow. There are two elements that I would argue are central to understanding the relevance of Zimmer’s score for Inception: audio manipulation and musical layering. Both are also relevant to the discussion of Inception‘s narrative structure, which will become apparent, I hope, as you read each section. The best course of action, I think, is to take these in order of importance, which leaves us with Zimmer’s experimentation with audio as a starting point. I. Manipulation: Dropping the Audio Levels A less than astute reading of music in Inception would bring one to the growing presence of audio manipulation within Zimmer’s various film scores. None is more obvious than that of The Dark Knight, another Christopher Nolan vehicle, in which Zimmer was given free reign to develop a cacophony of sounds taken from a variety of sources in order to create something that could represent the feel of Nolan’s second and most famous comic book adaptation. The resulting score for The Dark Knight is, understandably, forgettable only if one is looking for familiar themes–like you might with a John Williams score–but not if one is looking for the best example of an attempt by a composer to create an exact musical equivalent for what amounts to an intensive character study–specifically, of the Joker. Zimmer, as such, is not afraid of experimentation, nor one who is new to it, something that many film composers could not say with confidence. But Inception is slightly less ambitious than The Dark Knight, though no less important in terms of what Zimmer’s audio manipulations represent. Unlike The Dark Knight, which is based on a multitude of often inharmonious sounds, Inception is primarily focused on a particular musical element: that of the Edith Piaf version of the song “Non, je ne regrette rien.” If you’ve seen the film, then you understand the importance of “No Regrets” (the English title that I’m going to use throughout the essay to save space) for the various mechanisms of the dreamscape. Zimmer and Nolan have both acknowledged that “No Regrets” is the origin of the score, although this is only obvious in the title song, which uses a severely decelerated brass blare that follows the same beat–this beat also regularly reappears at other moments in the film. The manipulation of “No Regrets” by Zimmer, however, extends far beyond multiplications or divisions of tempos, beats, and tones; for each layer of dream, there is a degradation of the classic French tune, which, as you get deeper and deeper, makes one thing quite clear: the title song is the state of limbo. Limbo, if you haven’t seen the film, is the lowest level of the dreamscape that you can enter before death. The best real-world analogy to limbo is a coma, in which one’s conscious self recedes deep into the psyche and is lost–in Inception, we’re told that staying in limbo reduces your brain to mush. Zimmer’s score is absolutely a reflection of this. For each step downward, Zimmer reduces the tempo, dampens the sound, and manipulates the actual audio to merge the spondaic tonal qualities of “No Regrets” with synthesizers and blaring brass instruments. This reduction is demonstrated quite clearly in the film as the sounds reverberate down the levels to each group of characters until they are all aware of the impending “kick” (the act that “wakes you up”). Part of this manipulation is to denote time, since each level of dream is also on a different plane of mental time–i.e. the deeper you go, the greater time dilates. For Zimmer to play with music in this way, it signals a kind of musical composition that is not simply an accent to a visual medium, but as much a part of that medium as every other aspect. Zimmer’s score cannot be externalized entirely from the medium it was written for without removing the actual meaning and importance of the manipulated elements. As such, to criticize Zimmer for his lack of technical grace–such as in this Amazon review–is to make a grand assumption about what constitutes technicality. Zimmer’s score is absolutely composed of simple movements of notes and chords–particularly in the case of the most popular song from the album, “Time”–but that simplicity is so intimately connected to the structure of the film that its
In Glowing Support of NPR (National Public Radio)
CREDO is running a petition to be sent to the White House asking for seat recently vacated by Helen Thomas in the White House press briefing room (where you see Gibbs answering questions and what not) to be given over to NPR (National Public Radio). Other organizations vying for a spot include Bloomberg News and FOX News. I signed the petition for obvious reasons, but I did add the following statement: It should be noted that while the content of this petition denounces FOX, I personally would also denounce organizations like MSNBC, which use similar tactics as FOX News (or have, in my memory), and who I don’t consider anymore legitimate. NPR is, in my opinion, one of the last news entities that actually cares about giving us the news, rather than loading us up with opinions in either overt form or masked as news. What we need is to support those news entities that are interested in giving us information and not interested in pushing a political agenda. News should be fair. It should be balanced. It should be filled with journalists who actually research and care about finding out the truth, no matter how grim or difficult it may be. Giving NPR this seat will be a step in the right direction. Clearly I like NPR… If you want to see NPR covering the White House press briefings, sign the petition. If not, then you’re a jerk, because NPR is awesome.
Race and Not Thinking About It: Why That’s B.S.
In this day and age, it seems like we (and by “we” I mean mostly white people) make a big deal about not thinking about race. Perhaps we do this out some sort of subconscious regret about the past (white guilt, if you will) or perhaps because we actually believe that we don’t think about race. The problem is that we (and here I mean all of us of all races) often do think about race, regardless of where we come from. We can pretend that racism is over, and some of us do a fine job of sticking our heads in the sand and trying to maintain the illusion of a world of Neapolitan ice cream, with all the colors hanging out together in the same place as if there never was a time when they were all in separate boxes. But the reality is that racism never ended and that we still live in a society that thinks in racial terms (for good and for bad) and still allows people to get away with actions that are, by all accounts, about as racist as you can get, at least for a short time. Why do I bring this up? I recently made the mistake of attempting to have a rational discussion with some politically motivated individuals on YouTube about the Shirley Sherrod fiasco (which is still going on). At one point I made the argument that I am making here (specifically that “everybody makes race a part of everything, even if they say they don’t”), which set a couple of people off, who quickly acted to deny that this actually applied to them. Notice that I didn’t say that race plays a part in how we act, just that we all make it a part of everything. Looking back, I probably would phrase it differently to say this: “we all think about race, even if we say we don’t.” But the interesting thing for me about this discussion was the way these folks reacted. They spend more time trying to deny that they actually thought in racial terms than they did trying to think about whether or not race actually factored into their thought processes, an action that would, most likely, prove my point far better than to have them stick their feet in their mouths. However, instead of simply saying they were wrong or hypocritical, I’d like to illustrate the point by example (specifically, two examples from two individuals). ReligionOfNice said: That’s the worst case of projection I’ve heard yet. So when I made friends with the black kid next door because we liked to do the same things that was because of race? I don’t think so. I didn’t make friends because he was black. I pick this example because there was an obvious racial angle to be played and yet race played zero part in the decision. He was my best friend because he was. And Txbertie said: Race is only “a part of everything” to people who make it so. I don’t. I try to be sensitive to feelings and wouldn’t say things I know might be misunderstood. I certainly wouldn’t refer to “them” or “their own kind.” There was a time in my life when I could have saved myself a great deal of trouble it I’d treated a black man like a “black man” instead of treating him like a man – but even looking back at that, I could never have done it. The racists could but I couldn’t and wouldn’t. There are some subtleties of language here that you’ll likely miss without having seen the YouTube video in question, but I won’t be talking about those points here, because they aren’t relevant to what I’m arguing. If you read the above comments, two things become perfectly clear: both individuals have come at this from an entirely defensive position and both have immediately reduced their conversion to the discourse of race. It’s ironic that both individuals claim that race is not something that they think about (or isn’t something that governs their actions), yet they also immediately refer to people by the color of their skin or provide examples in which race clearly plays a role in what they have done in the past. They each assume that I’m talking about action, rather than simply constituent elements, and their words basically make my point for me: if we don’t make race a part of everything, then why is it that the color of someone’s skin is something that needs to be mentioned in a conversation or plays a role in how we decide to act in our day to day lives? The other problem I see that they both seem to take what I said to mean that to think about race is somehow racist. But I’m not talking about an issue of subconscious racism. Noticing the color of someone’s skin isn’t necessarily a racist act (though it can be, depending on who you are and how you react). The reality is that we are all differently colored, ad when you are faced with something different, you’re going to notice, much the same way that you might notice a hair style or the color of someone’s eyes or the shape of a nose or what have you. We are always thinking in terms of that (i.e. difference). It’s inescapable. These two individuals are essentially putting their feet in their mouths by trying to pretend that somehow race never figured into their assessments of the people around them. The first has already reduced his or her friend to skin color and the latter essentially admits to making decisions based on race (a good decision, sure, but the decision was clearly about race). But the denial is still there. Race never figured into their existence, or so they say. The reality? It did, and intimately so. The same has happened for all of us. The fact of the matter is, we all
What makes a good science fiction movie?
During class today, I had a discussion with my students about what makes The Hangover a fine example of contemporary comedy (not my words, per se, but that’s what we were going with in order to illustrate the topic: evaluation arguments). When I got home, I started to think about this very subject, but in relation to something a little more near and dear to my heart: science fiction. What makes a good science fiction movie? What are the criteria? Good actors? Good plot? Action? Adventure? Cool special effects? I’m not entirely sure. Now that science fiction has pretty much taken over summer blockbusters in terms of sales, it seems like a good topic to discuss. First things first, I’m going to throw out five films that I think represent the narrative breadth of good science fiction: Star Wars (A New Hope), Sunshine, District 9, Aliens, and Independence Day. Clearly I’m leaving a lot of movies out, but that’s inevitable. It should also be noted that I’m using a very broad and public definition for science fiction here, since Star Wars really doesn’t count as true science fiction (it’s science fantasy); but that’s an academic distinction at this point, and not something relevant to the discussion. So what is it that all five of these films have that make them good? It’s not action, because Sunshine has very little of it. It’s not the gritty, “realistic” feel of the films, because Star Wars very much lacks that. And, lastly, it’s certainly not because of the presence of characters we can root for, because District 9 gives us a character who represents all that is selfish and terrible about humanity until the very end. But that leaves us with an unanswered question. Are we simply drawn to the beautiful special effects? Are the plots what draw us in? Do we find the speculative elements most appealing, which are clearly lacking from non-genre productions? If it’s the last of these, then we have to ask ourselves why we like some speculative elements and not others, which, I think, leads us to an unfairly subjective space that can’t be argued out of (and, to be fair, all of this discussion is subjective, but at least something broad enough that we might be able to fairly address it). For me, I think it’s a combination of the visual medium and the complexity or speculative power of the plot. What draws me into Sunshine is the sheer emotional power of what is going on, which is also the same thing that occurs with District 9. Independence Day and Star Wars are simply a lot of fun; yes, there’s a deeper story going on there if you want to look, but what draws me to those stories are the characters and the situation, and how they both come together to produce good fun and character connections. But all of these things are varied and don’t apply to every science fiction film I’ve enjoyed. I’m not so sure I can come up with a small list of criteria that links all my favorites together. And so I ask you: what makes a good science fiction movie for you? What are you favorite movies and what about those movies draw you in?