On Selling My Comic Book Collection, Part 2

In my last post, which was way, way too long ago, I wrote some about the road that brought me to the selling of my comic book collection. Now I'll pick up with part 2...

When I first started entering my comics on Lonestar Comic's website, it was in part just curiousity. Were my comics actually worth anything? Or were they just random packages of paper, taking up space....

The answer is that they were worth something, but very few of them were worth anything much. A few of my G.I. Joe comics were worth between 50-100 dollars, as they came from late in the Marvel run and had not been collected. But most of the comics were worth maybe half or a quarter of what I paid for them, if I was lucky.

But I wasn't looking to get what I'd paid for them. I was just looking to free up space, to remove clutter, to have one less box to move the next time I changed apartments. And if I could pick up spending money while I did it, so much the better.

So I started the purge. First to go were a large chunk of the comics I had purchased since going off to college. I sold off a ton of Nu/New Marvel and countless DC reboots and "new" takes on iconic properties. I can't say I really felt anything at them going. I'd enjoyed many of them on the first read-through, but very few had ever earned a re-read or even a second thought.

Then, on a visit home, I started culling the old collection: the crappy to mediocre '90s comics that I had cut my teeth on: Spider-Man's clones, Wolverine without a nose, GI Joes fighting Transformers... I felt a small nostalgic twinge (and I held on to the first few comics I had purchased), but I never read them. They gave me a warm fuzzy feeling when I thought of them, but they just took up space in my parents' house and I didn't really enjoy the actual things. Goodbye to those.

At this point, I started cutting deeper and deeper. I said goodbye to reprints of stuff that had been reprinted in better editions and poor condition Silver Age comics that I'd purchased just to feel like I was a serious collector. These I felt more uncomfortable with letting go, but whatever the problems of the comic book market today, it's relatively easy to get quality reprints of everything from Ditko and Kirby monster comics to Flex Mentallo (!).

I'm not going to claim that there weren't moments of sadness as I did this. But this wasn't like the little kid in Puff the Magic Dragon saying goodbye to his imaginary friend. These were things that brought me very little joy, except in the abstract or in my memories. Other people wanted them and other people might enjoy them. And in return, I would get money to spend on creating new memories or received trade credit I used to get comics I had never read.

And as I went through my collection, I rediscovered the comics that I did enjoy. And even as I said goodbye to a large portion of my collection, I remembered the joy they had given me at the time I bought them.

Selling off my comics, strangely enough, made me more interested in reading comics than I had been in ages.

Blog Department of Burying the Lede, Tyler Cowen Edition

Some of you long-time "Mr. K" fans (if such a creature exists) might remember when I blogged about Tyler Cowen's writing on arts and capitalism. It won't surprise you that I continue to follow his blog Marginal Revolution, which he co-writes with Alex Tabarrok.

While I don't agree with all of his conclusions or understand some of the headier economic material, he usually has some interesting conclusions. For example, in the midst of a post about a book by Charles Murray about the upper class and middle/lower classes diverging in America, he dropped this bomb, which makes sense, but which I'd never thought of before:

 The liberation of American women also damaged the quality of public education, by removing the implicit subsidy of so many “captive” and smart female laborers. 

 Perhaps part of the reason that the quality of public education has declined in relation to previous generations, is because the wages of public school teachers were only competitive for women when they had little hope of any other trade.

I know there are arguments that, for unionized teachers, benefits are actually pretty good, but those benefits accrue after the teachers have been there for a while and penalize entry-level teachers.

I think it's a good thing that smart people of both genders can now contribute to all fields. However, I wonder if part of the knee-jerk bias against the teacher side of the education debates is due to the fact that, prior to the "liberation of American women", teaching was often identified as a woman's job and the people holding those positions for a while were often considered "old maids".

And now for something completely different...

So, I know I haven't been posting a lot lately. Part of it is because I've been busy, but part of it is just exhaustion and boredom. So I want to change things up a little, with a special experiment.

About a month or two ago, I read a movie script by a friend of mine named Brock Wilbur. He's an amazingly talented writer/musician/actor, and the script he wrote, called Your Friends Close, combines all those sides of him into a dark, funny and eerie screenplay that's a science-fictional version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Now he's trying to raise some money to shoot this thing himself with the help of his friends. Now, I'm not involved with the actual film in any way. I'm not in it, I'm not working on it. I just happened to read the script and really liked it. I already donated to the film on Kickstarter, but I don't have enough money to make this film happen myself.

So here's what I'm going to do. Has there been anything on movies or comic books or theatre that you've wanted me to post about? Something I mentioned once but never followed through on? Then here's your chance to read that long-promised post. Here's all you have to do:

1. Donate at least $30 to Your Friends Close' Kickstarter page.
2. Then post the name you donated under (if it's different than your blogspot screenname) and the subject/topic you want me to blog on.
3. I'll write at least 500 words on the topic you want me to write about.

That's it. I'll probably be posting more content at some point, but think of this as your chance to hear my opinions about something you're interested in.

And remember, I know the people involved in this movie, but I'm not getting any benefit out of this, other than getting to watch an awesome indie film eventually.

The American healthcare system failed me...

This post has nothing to do with art. I'm sorry. I promise to resume posting on the stuff most people like to read about here soon. But this is something I've needed to say for a long time.

American health insurance has failed me again.

I've heard all the arguments for and against reforms to American health insurance. I've heard a lot of arguments for and against almost each specific reform. I'm not an economist, I'm not a politician. But I do know that health insurance is failing me, personally.

Tonight, I received an e-mail from yet another health insurance company telling me they will not accept me.

Until last summer, I worked a job that provided health insurance. When I left that job to move West, I continued that through COBRA. When the government allowed people under the age of 26 to get on their parent's insurance, I went back on my parents' plan. I turn 26 in June. I'm now looking for private health insurance. But I can't get any. I'm too high risk.

Of course, I'm "high risk" in insurance company terms. I'm the right weight for my heigh, I have low blood pressure, I don't smoke, I rarely drink more than 1 serving of alcohol a night. I haven't even ever gone to the ER since breaking my arm at 14.

However, I do have two pre-existing conditions. They're fairly mild (I've never needed to be admitted to the hospital for them) and I manage them with a few prescription drugs (all of which are on the formulary). In fact, I take a total of 3 prescription drugs, 2 of which are available as generics.

Apparently, this puts me beyond the pale for health insurers in the state of California.

Now, I haven't set high standards for health insurance. The plan I was just turned down for had a deductible of $1000 (and a prescription deductible of $7500, if memory serves). It didn't cover psychiatric treatment, or chiropractors or any other "controversial" treatments. I just wanted something that would cover me in case of an emergency and pay for a couple of regular doctor visits a year. And to pay less than $400 or $700 (those are the figures that COBRA ran me and the "High Risk" pool info I've received quoted me).

However, I'm too big a health risk for that.

I'm not asking for the government to pay for everything. I'm not asking for a handout. But I notice that the "free market" is failing me pretty consistently. And that everything that has been labelled government "interference" is what's keeping me from falling into that great big group of uninsured people that exist in the US.

If the free market can't provide options for a guy like me. then maybe the government should step in.

And if you think the stuff I've mentioned above are reasons I should be denied insurance, then you know where you can go.

As a counterpoint to Zev's thoughtful post over at On Chicago Theatre...

I suggest this article over at Slate, by Bill James trying to explain why we as a nation produce so many great athletes but don't produce very many great writers (or sub in actor/dancer/classically-trained musician/fine artist, etc.). Really... RTWT, I'll be waiting.

I don't disagree with Zev's post at all, btw. I think he points out that the best way to fix things is to actually try ways of fixing him.

I think what James points out that is useful is that, the reason we have so many great athletes is that we encourage them along every step of the way. We're all familiar with the cliche about schools building a new stadium while shutting down the arts departments. But it goes beyond that. The fact is, athletes who show promise are encouraged from a very early age and given the resources to develop their talents so that they can become superstars.

Whereas, in comparison, writers are told to go hone their craft by themselves, get really good, and then come back in 20-25 years.

Or actors are told to go act for free, pay for training, and generally pay their dues before they might start getting something approaching a salary.

I'm not trying to say that the arts don't require hard work, some thankless honing of craft. But athletes work hard too, in high school and college and when they turn pro, at least when it comes to training. And schools and pro/semi-pro teams give them incentives and rewards and acclaim as they develop.

This doesn't mean "support all theatre equally" or "don't criticize bad work". But it suggests that artists and their institutions need to recognize that artists take time to develop, along with mentoring and resources.

Sure, no one would say that America has no good writers or actors or etc etc. But Bill James points out that Shakespearean London was the size of Topeka, Kansas, and gave us Bacon, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson (and that's just hitting the biggest names).

Even being conservative, that suggests that every small to mid-size metropolis should have a burgeoning literary community, at least two or three small theatre companies competing to out-do each other each season, a couple of chamber music groups or orchestras...

There should be the equivalent of at least a hundred Elizabethan Londons scattered across America. But there aren't. Maybe part of this is a difference in the national character or the modern temperament.

Or maybe part of it is that, from the highest to the lowest levels of the arts, we focus on short-term projects and goals, getting our thing done, raising our money, winning our company praise, just keeping the doors open, instead of thinking about who will join our company in the future, or create the new theatre company that.will replace ours.

Moving forward, that has to be both a subject for discussion and something to put into practice. Self-reliance isn't a bad thing to have, but community is certainly not a bad thing either.

My retro career just melted....

On top of reading The UFA Story, I've been on a "behind-the-scenes" of Hollywood kick lately.

About John Gregory Dunne's The Studio I have very little to say, other than that it is a fascinating view of how some great (and not-so-great) films were created over at 20th Century Fox, even as studio executives show an inability to relate to the realities of '60s America.

However, I also read Edward Jay Epstein's The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies. I can't really recommend it as highly as Dunne's book, because most of Epstein's book is just reprints from his Slate and New Yorker columns, with even the new material feeling short and fluffy in the way that most magazines and internet publications expect from regular columns.

The snapshots that Epstein gives of the movie industry can be fascinating. He hints at what would have been a more interesting book in the epilogue, where he breaks down the ways that the loss of foreign financing and the bank/hedge fund collapse have severely impoverished the film world (artistically as well as financially). Epstein lays out the case that the recession strikes the independent production companies the hardest, since the difficulty in securing initial funding sinks almost anything without a big star already attached.

Furthermore, even the major studios, which are slightly better off as far as actually getting their films made, but still in an unenviable position re: making a profit, are relying more and more on overseas sales, which means a swing further towards the comic book/licensed property/shoot-out/car-chase side of the entertainment spectrum. So if you were hoping that the recession would mean smaller, smarter pictures and less empty blockbuster, Epstein's not on your side.

Which, jumping back to The UFA Story, sounds vaguely reminiscent of the German film industry's problems between 1924 and 1928 (which, I remind you, was during a period of economic improvement BEFORE the Great Depression hit). To quote Kreimeier:

This risky product with unpredictable sales potential, which even on the domestic market made life hard for producers wanting quick returns, was now pulled into the malestrom of crisis-prone international finance. (123)

 Moving on from there, Kreimeier notes that the studios that managed to weather this storm the best were those with vertical integration (control of distribution and exhibition) and investments in property (studio space, equipment, movie theatres). These giant conglomerates also usually had ties to a friendly and corporatized press that printed stories and reviews that were basically glorified press releases.

That sounds rather familiar to me. Is this where the American film industry is heading for the near future?
 

Post-Christmas Wishlist, Unlikely To Be Fulfilled Edition

I actually had a pretty decent Christmas, but as I get older, the more Christmas becomes about the joys of giving than getting something. Now that I've reached adulthood and have the internet at my disposal, there are fewer and fewer things that I can't buy or at least borrow/rent.

But there are things that are either in legal limbo or hard-to-find (even on the gray market or in archives) that I'd like to see:

• the notorious Rolling Stone documentary Cocksucker Blues (which apparently paints them in a worse light than Gimme Shelter!). Forever in legal limbo, because apparently it could destroy the Stones' image in a way that their last 30 years of touring and recording have failed to.
• the 1926 silent film version of W. Somerset Maugham's The Magician, assistant directed by Michael Powell (yes, of Powell & Pressburger fame!). From what I've read about it, it diverges significantly from the novel and is a possible visual and plot inspiration for several major horror films, including Svengali, and the Universal versions of Dracula and Frankenstein.
• the famous "last" film of Orson Welles, The Other Side of the Wind. The cast includes Claude Chabrol (RIP), Dennis Hopper (RIP), John Huston, Edmond O'Brien, Susan Strasberg, Rich Little and Cameron Mitchell. It's mostly been edited/completed by Peter Bogdanovich, but it's held up by legal complications from Welles' estate (or more precisely, Welles' daughter).

What films do you guys wish to see, despite similarly impressive obstacles standing in the way of their release?

AFI: Hearts & Minds, 1900s Edition

AMIGO, directed by John Sayles, 2010
Starring Garret Dillahunt, Chris Cooper, Lucas Neff and DJ Qualls [Although the main characters are actually the Filipino actors who probably won't get any billing on the poster, if this ever gets theatrical release]

In some ways, the story of how Amigo came about is the most interesting part of it. John Sayles has apparently been working on a screenplay about the 1900s for a while, during which he researched the Spanish-American and Filipino-American War.  He eventually realized that his screenplay was way too ambitious to ever get produced, so he decided to change it into a novel. While he was doing some additional research in the Philippines with Joel Torre, who is a famed actor in the Philippines,  he realized he could shoot at least the portion of the story set in the Philippines for a relatively small budget. So with the help of a Filipino poet, he translated portions of it into an obscure dialect of Tagalog while having his Cantonese actors translate the dialogue themselves, hoping they would tell him if the messed up a line. As of now, it has no distribution, so he's hoping that the Filipino community will help build some word-of-mouth.

Now, I don't want to sell Amigo short. It's just that what I just wrote up there sums up, in miniature, the problems of making movies today and the ways that directors are trying to get around those obstacles, such as filming in cheap locations and aiming at niche markets. And yet, it's also an echo of the relationship that Roger Corman (one of Sayles' mentors) had with Filipino director Eddie Romero in the 1960s.

However, I can see why this film currently lacks distribution. It's not a bad film but... well, I'll get to that in a minute.

Because Amigo's actual story is also pretty fascinating. Brief refresher, for people who aren't history buffs: at the end of the 19th century, America declared war on Spain over what are now thought to be dubious causes (such as the sinking of the USS Maine). The US conquered Cuba very quickly and the Spanish surrendered. The Philippines decided that they would revolt, so they would be democratic like Cuba, and the Spanish handed the Philippines over to the Americans, who found themselves in the awkward position of squashing a pro-democracy revolution. The fight between the Americans and the insurrectos dragged on long after the cessation of hostilities in Cuba, and sparked a major debate about American imperialism that included such luminaries as Mark Twain, William Jennings Bryan and Rudyard Kipling.

Of course, Sayles' treatment of the subject only requires you to know that the US is in the Philippines, it's a sideshow to the war in Cuba, and no one quite knows how to handle the natives now that the Spanish have left. When a small unit of American soldiers led by Lieutenant Compton (Dillahunt) set up camp in a rural Filipino village, the village headman Rafael (Joel Torre) has to strike a balance between his village's welfare and the risk of being seen as a collaborator by the insurrectos, whose number includes his brother (Ronnie Lazaro) and his son. All of this, of course, complicated by the communication gap and the long-festering envy and hatred present in any community, no matter how small.

To Sayles' credit, the movie mostly unfolds from Rafael's point-of-view. The American soldiers are definitely the outsiders, an alien element that disrupts a well-established way of life for almost inscrutable reasons. Nor is he romanticizing that way of life. He makes perfectly clear that there were tensions and problems in the community before the Americans came. However, they don't have anywhere near the knowledge or understanding to identify, let alone fix, those problems.

And the movie certainly plays to Sayles' strengths. Both the script and the direction are focused on developing the life of the village, so that, for example, when the soldiers kill the village's water-buffalo, the audience understands the tragic ramifications of this act. The long sequences devoted to the building of a house or the planting of a field help us better understand this world and what is being disrupted (or what could be built).

While Sayles sometimes hits the allegorical elements a little hard (there are more than a few lines about winning hearts and minds or how such-and-such an act isn't "torture"), he does a good job of dramatizing the plight of the village without turning either the guerillas or the American soldiers into mustache-twirling villains. There's one particularly well-edited sequence cutting between Dillahunt's reading of an order and a guerilla proclamation being delivered that drives home the utter impossibility of remaining "neutral" in a conflict where even neutrality is seen as treason. And there are a few clever scenes of Americans giving orders that are translated into cynical asides by their main translator, a disillusioned Spanish priest.

However, the movie has several major flaws. The film is filled with way too many characters, and while we see hints that the actors have done their homework and are inhabiting fully-developed characters, we are rarely privy to anything that proves this. Most of the soldiers are stock war movie cliches, who can be identified as Soldier with a Thing for a Native Girl, The Drunk, The Intellectual, the One With the Clap, the Dutiful Sergeant, and etc. Dillahunt is given a little more to go on, as a man trying his best to be both moral and professional in a situation where neither is possible. And Chris Cooper does manage to give his savage Army colonel a specificity that grounds his cruelty in the real world. Even the villagers, save for Rafael, function more as plot devices or local color than people facing moral dilemnas.

On top of that, Amigo struggles to move out of the idle hangout mode even when a different energy is called for.  When Rafael's two worlds meet for an open shooting war, the movie still maintains a leisurely "let's stay for a while and just watch" quality. The languid feel of the film sometimes works to its advantage, but other times it just makes a two hour film feel much longer.

There are other minor problems as well, such as Sayles' ending, which thematically makes sense but is executed in such a way as to make the viewer feel like Sayles is hammering the point into their head.

So, a noble experiment, but a failed experiment. I hope this signals a new, daring stage in Sayles' career and not a last desperate stab at relevance. Because Amigo inhabits a no-man's-land between the two extremes.
C+
Honeydripper
Eight Men Out (20th Anniversary Edition)
Return of the Secaucus 7

Forget it, Jake, it's Wrigleyville...

Okay, I should say: I've taken classes at iO. I was taught by some great instructors there. I met some great people there, who I'm still friends with. I might even take classes at iO West when I move out to LA.

That said.... I will not cry about the Malling of Wrigleyville. Because Wrigleyville is already a mall.

It is a mall for people from the suburbs who view a trip to the city as a chance to be assholes. It is a mall for drunken former frat-guys and their bloated female equivalents to douche-ily hit on and/or hit each other. Half the bars are faux-Irish pubs with names like Drunky O'Shannahan's or TJ McCollarpop. The only difference is that now any bars will be owned by nationally-owned companies instead of regionally-owned chains.

But what about iO, someone might cry. They're a link with history! They're an integral part of the neighborhood! They give it charm!

Other than the fact that it would be nice to not have to associate with the wretched hive of scum and villainy that are the people of Wrigleyville after every show or push through drunk suburbanites to get to class on time, I really don't think Charna Halpern, owner/manager/whatever of iO, has the moral high ground.

Because she was for blandifying the neighborhood as long as she got a primo spot. Check the date on that. January 31, 2008.

It sucks that she got cheated of her deal. And I understand why she'd want to get that sweet deal in the first place. It's hard to get space, it's harder to get more space, especially in Lakeview/Wrigleyville.

But you can't moan and cry about gentrification when you were fine with it screwing everybody except you.

This might be a bad move for Wrigleyville. This might not be a great thing for iO. But if all these new businesses crash and burn, maybe some new black box theatre company or improv troupe will move in. Or new bars and restaurants.

Wrigleyville is not a hothouse flower. It doesn't need to be coddled. If it can survive the drunken jerks & the snobs who hate them, it can survive a Target or a Best Buy.

If there's anything that needs to change, it's the way that Daley & his Aldermen just rearrange real estate & zoning for these kind of Potemkin Village projects. And Alderman Waguepack is just as much a part of that system as Alderman Tunney.

Considering how much they love Guilds, you'd think they'd like unions...

So, for various reasons, I recently signed up for Actor's Access, the website showing casting calls & breakdowns for commercial/film/tv work, both union & non-union. You can set up the system to notify you if there are any casting calls matching your profile.

About a week ago, I got an e-mail regarding voice-overs for World of Warcraft. They were looking for men 25-55, able to do accents.

But what was interesting about this was that it was non-union work.

It's hardly news that video game work for actors isn't very lucrative. Take a look at this NY Times article from 2008, about the dude who provided the voice & movements for GTA IV's Niko Bellic:

Mr. Hollick was paid only about $100,000 over roughly 15 months between late 2006 and early this year for all of his voice acting and motion-capture work on the game, with zero royalties or residuals in sight, he said.

RTWT, because there's a lot of great stuff in there.

Now, $100,000 isn't a bad salary, but it is spread out over the course of three different years (altogether 15 months), and the sticking point is royalties. He put a lot of time and effort into a character in a game that has enjoyed both critical acclaim & commercial success.

And one of the areas video games have traditionally had problems with is voice acting. Rock Star, the games company that put out GTA IV are known for their careful work on characterization and voice-casting. But as that linked Guardian article suggests, Rock Star is the exception rather than the rule. And considering that even Rock Star treats actors as session players, the mentality isn't surprising.

But Rock Star was paying the going union rate for some of supporting cast ($730 a day). Hellick made $1030 a day.

The posting for World of Warcraft set the minimum day rate at $200. $25 an hour doesn't sound too bad IF they keep it to an 8 hour day. However, if it's non-union, they aren't restricted to an 8 hour day.

And context is important here. Remember, Rock Star paid $730 a day for work on GTA IV.  WOW is paying just barely above a quarter of that.

Further context: in a recent on-camera class in Chicago, a freelance casting director (who works on commercials all the time) said to not bother booking non-union work if you were getting under $400 a day. That's for regional and local commercial work that's maybe seen over a couple of states. Not a video game which sold 4 million copies within the first month of release.

In other words, a Chicago-based restaurant chain could be paying actors more for a thirty second ad than one of the most popular MMOs is paying someone for recording pages and pages of dialogue.

This is why unions matter.

Dept. of Burying Your Lede, Econo-blog Edition

Some day I will post the final part of that blogging Tyler Cowen's book on capitalism & the arts, even though by now I've forgotten most of what's not in that rough draft. Still, today he has a post about the oft-raised idea of a movie stock market, where investors can bet on a film's box-office.

And even though I have to admit I'm not as strong on some of the economic stuff, he does have a good final few sentences about how the highly variable quality of movies (which is what allows the occasional masterpiece to slip through, as well as atrocious misfires), ending with this kicker:

So much of our cultural industries have been built on consumer mistakes and those days are coming to an end, rapidly.

RTWT here (it's only a couple of paragraphs).

The Creature With a Thousand Films

I'm kind of conflicted by what I'm about to write. For I am a geek and I love the horror and sci-fi genres. And if you love horror and sci-fi films, then the man you owe the most thanks to is Roger Corman.

Roger Corman was/is not the best director or producer to work in those genres. He obviously wasn't the first. He was never the most ground-breaking one, even at his heyday. But he was probably the most prolific one*. And as Stalin once said, "quantity has a quality all its own."

Even if you think AiP/New World Pictures put out mostly cheap cash-in crap (which is true), Corman's desire to corner areas of the market that the "serious" studios like MGM or Warner wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole often produced interesting or daring work. Corman made a movie attacking the KKK in 1962 (!), when such a film could be personal and commercial risk (The Intruder). His Bucket of Blood and Little Shop of Horrors helped to perfect the dark comedy. And X, the Man with X-Ray Eyes, really needs no defense or explanation, beyond the fact that it is a well-made and effective horror film that mines the seamy side of our desires to great effect.

And if, for whatever reason, those films just don't speak to you, then remember that Corman helped raise an entire generation of film-makers, giving them a place to learn their craft and perfect their voice. Directors like Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorcese, John Sayles, Jack Hill, James Cameron, Monte Hellman and Paul Bartel all learned at his feet or the feet of people working for him. Corman's films gave actors like Jack Nicholson, Robert DeNiro, William Shatner, and Peter Fonda some of their first major acting gigs.

But he made a lot of crap. Sometimes personal crap, sometimes exhilarating crap, but in the end, enough to keep MST3K running for years on his directorial & production work alone. And the older he got, the more of a cash-in artist he became. The Vampirella movie. The 1990s Fantastic Four movie. The endless Syfy/Sci-Fi channel re-makes and originals.

And while you could never claim he alone dumbed down the industry, he specialized in cheap, stupid movies aimed at teenagers, filled with blood and sex and rock 'n' roll (or his best approximations of them). He churned out endlessly padded films with no plot, bad science, attractive but lightweight actors,  and ridiculous costumes. He practically invented the car chase movie. Corman was no Val Lewton, taking a trashy genre and finding the beauty in it. He was a dumpster diver, who could recognize when someone threw out something perfectly good, but more likely to take a pile of junk to the scrapyard.

When you watch a summer tent-pole film that's clearly cobbled together around action sequences and catch phrases, market-tested to the 18-25 demographic, you're watching the inheritors of the Roger Corman tradition. The difference is that they are more scientific about it.

So it's easy to complain the loss of intelligent movies these days, the bad actors, ham-fisted direction & awful scripts. But that's the commercial model, dreamed up by a man who knew how to compete with TV without having to work on TV's model.

So don't complain about the culture wars. Roger Corman's Hollywood is on one side, really; the side of the consumer.

Let's give Roger Corman an Invisible Hand, everyone!

*I'm excluding people like William "one-shot" Beaudine, who were so prolific because everything they churned out was unadulterated crap. Corman certainly put out crap, but almost all his crap is at least trying to do something.

On top of the world, looking down on creation...

Yarrrr....

Up In the Air does such a good job wrapping a hetero-normative, pro-nuclear family message in a charming package for 3/4 of the film, before throwing it away with a stupid twist and a botched ending.

Still, kudos for at least letting Clooney give a convincing argument for his beliefs. And for being a film that acknowledges the economy and the definition of the American dream as having changed.

...

Actually, just reading that last part is a sad statement on film-making these days. Merry Christmas, people!

Bonafide hustler, making my name: Liveblogging In Praise of Commercial Culture

Chapter 2: The Market For the Written Word

Okay, so first, the prose style gets a little better once Cowen has a narrative to hold onto. I wouldn't say he holds interest as well as Malcolm Gladwell, for example, but neither of them is Joan Didion. Which is to say, neither is a prose stylist who uses that style successfully to convey a deeper understanding of the world around us. Gladwell is a prose stylist, but he's a little too flip with his philosophizing, trying to draw conclusions because he can. Cowen has some understanding of the big picture, but he can't use his writing to add an aesthetic dimension to his argument.

It helps that Cowen is talking, in this section, about a little-explored aspect of literary history, specifically the economic pressures of publishing in the British Enlightenment. We might have read works (by Swift or Pope) that deal with those economic issues or were written because of them, but that specific context sometimes doesn't even make the footnotes.

So this chapter is about Samuel Johnson, one of the first people to make their living solely through writing, versus Swift and Pope, among others, who believed that "fame" was the sole reason to write and that the government should choose who was talented.

And Cowen is willing to tackle Swift and Pope and bring to light their most troubling ideas. Though his arguments that Swift was a vehement establishment figure who believed in the healing benefits of central power does not seem to jive with Swift's basic misanthropy. I think he misreads at least some of Swift's work. As much as the Houyhnhnms in Gulliver's Travels might represent some sort of ideal, I don't think that even Swift expects us to totally accept them. I think there is some significance in the fact that our narrator (who has difficulty in detecting irony or recognizing the way other societies generally reflect his) ends the book currying the favor of his own farm animals. And "A Modest Proposal" is as much an indictment of central planning refusing to recognize the realities on the ground as it is of anti-Catholic sentiment.

And there are hints of other problems with capitalism as supporter of the arts that this chapter suggests. For one, Cowen expresses disappointment at Johnson taking a government pension at the end of his career. But given how Johnson hustled to provide himself a living for much of his life, is it really a surprise that he would desire a reliable source of income.

Because Cowen's idea of why capitalism is good for the arts relies heavily on creative destruction. Artists will become less popular, lose their edge and give way to new forms and new artists. Which I think is great for the arts.

But it sucks for the artists. Once the skill has faded and the passion has ebbed, an artist still requires sustenance. As this economic downturn (and previous recessions and depressions) proved, even very smart, skilled businessmen stink at long-term planning. Even as it regards their own personal finances.

Creative destruction doesn't care what you did for the last twenty years. It cares about what is happening today and tomorrow. It's like Alec Baldwin's character in "Glengarry Glen Ross", it doesn't care if you're a good father or a nice guy. Or a talented artist.

So Samuel Johnson takes a pension. He's a man that's dealt with awful depression and grinding poverty for years. What's Tyler Cowen's advice for one of the greater essayists of English literature? That he should have kept being talented and never felt that exhaustion in his bones?That he should never have gotten old? That he should have died before he became old?

I'm not saying we should get rid of capitalism. It's like the old saw about democracy. It's the worst system, except for all the other systems.

But a capitalist who loves artists or a capitalist who loves people needs to come to grips with the way capitalism shows no mercy to the weak and the old. And they need to suggest what we can do, instead of shrugging and muttering something about charity and the private sector.

Money: that's what I want

Also, Tyler Cowen loves to chalk normal psychology up to economics. So anxiety of influence, egotism and idealism become an economic need to innovate. When you've got the hammer of economics, everything looks like a pro-capitalist nail.

Also, I can't trust anyone who thinks Rebel without a Cause is "unintended farce, rather than a rousing story of an angry young man" (28). Um, has this guy seen the same version of Rebel without a Cause that has been released on DVD? Or any other Nicholas Ray film, ever?

Art is a kid, art is a kid, in a bull market: In Praise of Commercial Culture

You thought I'd forgotten all about you, didn't you? Maybe even my ramblings about commercial art and the like. Not quite.

For example, I finally got a chance to take a peek into In Praise of Commercial Culture by economist Tyler Cowen (one of the influential voices behind econoblog Marginal Revolutions). Only about 20 pages in, but I still have a few thoughts.

• Cowen's writing is probably best suited to blogging. I suppose that, given the normal quality of the stereotypical professorial paper, mere readability is a rarity. But he makes Malcolm Gladwell look like Joan Didion. Perfectly adequate prose sentence plods into perfectly adequate prose sentence. For a book dealing with art, there's very little art. In small doses, clarity is fine. For an entire book, it's a slog.
• So much of it is him putting down examples of his point. "You think artists don't care about money? But Beethoven said this. And Gaugin did this. And this person died in poverty." That's only slightly exaggerated. I hope later on he gets into a specific, piece-by-piece analysis of one work of art or artist.
• To Cowen's credit, it's refreshing to see someone who points out the fallacies in all the well-crafted but contrived cultural polemics that seem to be the main way any pundit/philosopher makes money these days. He's not saying everything is perfect, but he is willing to point out that, yes, life has become less nasty, brutish and short for more people and to consign those people back to the status quo ante for some weird sense of cultural homogeny is stupid.
• On the other hand, his triumphalism really vague. Some of his points, about the decrease in prices for materials as basic as paper have opened up the art field, make sense. Other arguments seem to boil down to, "hey, people have benefited from this technology/advance, and that's because of capitalism. And since artists are people, artists are benefiting from capitalism." Which is technically true, but, well, he decided to write a book about how capitalism benefits the artist specifically. It's not titled In Praise of Modernity.

More to come. Maybe next time, I'll get to his thought experiment (in blog-form) about how just recycling pop culture every 50 years would be perfectly cromulent.