But what's on my mind today is several recent projects I've backed which are relatively modest goals (given the scope of the intended projects) by relatively well known independent artists, that narrowly meet their goals within their last day or two. The Suburbs. Rudy Rucker. Cyan Worlds. And most recently, Hal Hartley.
I'm not even that big of a Hal Hartley fan, frankly, but I recognize the value of his work and his place in the culture of something I want very much to continue: true independent film. So I made a very modest pledge and watched the thing crawl to a narrowly successful conclusion.
But it baffles me, or rather it confirms darker suspicions about the way we are in this country (and to a lesser but I fear catching-up degree this world). Which is to say we are a nation of plebs who think and act like plebs and have therefore for a solid four decades been getting delivered the everything we deserve - government, media, economy - without much of a glimmer of hope in sight. Elections are more rigged than they were in the decade I was born, wealth inequality is greater, the media is more consolidated, the economy is more brutal and less regulated. And of course the plutocrats and their higher-end lapdogs, the politicians and lobbyists and lawyers, are the engineers and villains of it. But we plebs don't deserve to get off the hook. Unwittingly, we were handed an incredible equalizing force - the information technology revolution of the last two decades - and we haven't done shit with it. Online journalism is a bizarre morass of nightmarish, Pavlovian link-baiting experiments funded by literally the scum of the earth. Personal media trends away from original content, away from content with scope, towards repetition, compression, degradation of signal. Tweet.
This is the Ned Rifle Kickstarter by the numbers: If you look at what I would consider to be normal people supporting a filmmaker, which is to say pledges 100 dollars and under - you know, those putative "1,000 true fans" - you end up with (by my hasty calculations and certain assumptions but I think a fair ballpark) 1,427 supporters coming up with $55,532 or 14% of the financing for the film.
On the other end, people who pledged $5,000 or more - what I think by any reasonable perspective on the world today you would have to call wealthy people, for the most part - you end up with 25 individuals pledging a collective $201,500: 51% of the final take.
So hooray, it got financed, another triumph of crowdfunding, except that it looks a whole lot like it might be more strictly accurate to say that, from the perspective of the narrow majority, the project got funded by 25 of Hal Hartley's best wealthy friends.
And I'm glossing that other 35% of the funding in between, 330-some people, but why not. They're the upper middle class I guess and fuck knows their relevance is in pure freefall: 1 of them will ascend into the upper reaches while the other 229 tumble into the shit with the rest of us.
What really gets to me is that pathetic number: 1,427. Not 1,500 people willing to pony up a ten spot, a twenty, fifty bucks, a single Benjamin for one of the fucking architects of the independent film movement of the late 20th. What combination of apathy, ignorance, non-belief in the significance of personal agency, just world assumption bullshit... et cetera... ad nauseam... combined to add up that sort of pathetic, infuriating turn-out.
Actually, I don't even care to speculate about it any more. Just the contemplation of it has soured my stomach and left a vile taste in my mouth. It was all said 25 years ago by a far better writer than me: 17 years later he would look back on everything that went between and declare it "17 more than I needed or wanted". In actual fact, I'm done throwing my pearls before You Swine.
I declare the Age of Blogs to be over. I'm shuttering all my extant examples of the art with the exception of Songs of Days, which I here rename the tower of reproach. If you are currently blogging I would urge you to cease operations immediately as utterly irrelevant. Time to focus 100% of my attentions on Getting Mine.
Fat Men on Horseback
Last week was a slow one for news, but for big-time politicians it was like being put out naked and alone in the jungle and being forced to watch a python swallow a pig. There was no joy in Mudville, but so what? Ronald Reagan slipped the noose, George Bush walked, and Jessica Hahn was pictured on the front page of the New York Post while on a "shopping spree" in downtown Manhattan, accompanied by "a bodyguard with a pistol tucked in his belt."
"That goes with the contract," said her lawyer. "We just sold her story to a men's magazine for $2.5 million." The details were hazy, but the lawyer said Ms. Hahn was grappling with offers "in the multimillion-dollar range" from Playboy, Penthouse and Esquire for her own personal version of that famous afternoon in Florida when she was flogged and sexually brutalized by Jim Bakker and at least two other born-again TV preachers. "They had no right to tell all those stories about how I 'knew all the tricks of the trade,' " she said. "So I decided to tell the real truth about that day. It was horrible. My life was ruined forever."
Sex and violence has become an everyday thing for the 1980s generation that once embraced the Reagan Revolution. We live in savage times. Oliver North is a hero, Ed Meese is rich, and a monstrous film called "Blue Velvet" is nominated for three Academy Awards.
Two months ago, Gary Hart was running 16 points ahead of George Bush in "presidential preference" polls for 1988, and syndicated columnists were saying that U.S. Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North was so crooked that he should be stripped of his uniform before he could go on national TV and give testimony in the U.S. Congress. . . . But things have changed.
Hart was exposed by the Miami Herald for lying about his secret life as one of the dumbest townhouse Johns who ever lived and was forced to quit the presidential race and slink off to the hills like a child-raper. . . . And Oliver North went on TV last week with a sloe-eyed story of lies, dumbness and treachery in the very bowels of Reagan's White House that made him a national hero like Audie Murphy and Daniel Boone, or even Willie Sutton.
In the quick crazy window of 66 days and two moons, Hart and North reversed roles in a way that only Hollywood could take seriously — and Bush came out the big winner. Six weeks ago he was looking at the very real possibility of getting jerked out of the White House by federal marshals before he ever had a chance to hit the bricks in Iowa City and get his picture taken on Election Day with his arm around the shoulders of the legendary local sportsman and political wizard, Marcos Melendez, who can deliver more votes than the stork.
When the buck stopped with John Poindexter, it was not only Reagan who beat the rap. Bush, long known in Washington as the guiltiest man in American politics, did a trick that made every camel that ever crawled through the eye of a needle seem like an amateur. If there were any real justice in the world, George would be working with Spiro Agnew on the wrong end of some driving range in Baltimore, for $2 a bucket.
Also in the weekend news, CIA Director William Webster has dismissed two high-ranking agents for "the roles they played" in the Iran/Contra affair.
Webster was planning to retire after 10 scandal-free years as director of the FBI when the Iran/Contra story broke last November, but when he learned that his nominal boss Ed Meese had known about it all along and never bothered to tell him, he got so angry that he canceled his retirement plans and announced he was going to stay on a little longer, or at least for the duration of the scandal.
Big Bill Casey didn't mind. He was dead. And so Webster took over the CIA and postponed his retirement back home to St. Louis for "at least the indefinite future."
That is what T.S. Eliot said, and also William Burroughs. But that was a long time ago, and neither one of them ever went back to their roots, as it were, in St. Louis. It is a nice town to be from, but that bridge under the great golden arch on the west side of the Mississippi is a one-way street for the big boys. The only St. Louis native who ever went back home after getting famous was Hadley Richardson, Ernest Hemingway's first wife, and they say she didn't stay long.
People like to talk about the difference between the '60s and the '80s, and also about the difference between Watergate and this monstrous Iran/Contra mess. . . . Well, I'll tell you the difference: The criminals in Watergate knew they were guilty and so did everbody else; and when the dust cleared the crooked president was gone and so were all the others. They were criminals and they had the same contempt for the whole concept of democracy that these cheap punks have been strutting every day for the past two months of truly disgraceful testimony.
The whole Iran/Contra investigation was a farce and a scam that benefited nobody except Washington lawyers who charge $1,000 an hour for courtroom time. North's bill for legal fees will be a million dollars, which has already been covered by the private donations.
If this low-rent scandal is the best this generation can do, they deserve what they're getting and they are going to have to live with it. They deserve to be called A Generation of Swine.
Last week was a slow one for news, but for big-time politicians it was like being put out naked and alone in the jungle and being forced to watch a python swallow a pig. There was no joy in Mudville, but so what? Ronald Reagan slipped the noose, George Bush walked, and Jessica Hahn was pictured on the front page of the New York Post while on a "shopping spree" in downtown Manhattan, accompanied by "a bodyguard with a pistol tucked in his belt."
"That goes with the contract," said her lawyer. "We just sold her story to a men's magazine for $2.5 million." The details were hazy, but the lawyer said Ms. Hahn was grappling with offers "in the multimillion-dollar range" from Playboy, Penthouse and Esquire for her own personal version of that famous afternoon in Florida when she was flogged and sexually brutalized by Jim Bakker and at least two other born-again TV preachers. "They had no right to tell all those stories about how I 'knew all the tricks of the trade,' " she said. "So I decided to tell the real truth about that day. It was horrible. My life was ruined forever."
Sex and violence has become an everyday thing for the 1980s generation that once embraced the Reagan Revolution. We live in savage times. Oliver North is a hero, Ed Meese is rich, and a monstrous film called "Blue Velvet" is nominated for three Academy Awards.
Two months ago, Gary Hart was running 16 points ahead of George Bush in "presidential preference" polls for 1988, and syndicated columnists were saying that U.S. Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North was so crooked that he should be stripped of his uniform before he could go on national TV and give testimony in the U.S. Congress. . . . But things have changed.
Hart was exposed by the Miami Herald for lying about his secret life as one of the dumbest townhouse Johns who ever lived and was forced to quit the presidential race and slink off to the hills like a child-raper. . . . And Oliver North went on TV last week with a sloe-eyed story of lies, dumbness and treachery in the very bowels of Reagan's White House that made him a national hero like Audie Murphy and Daniel Boone, or even Willie Sutton.
In the quick crazy window of 66 days and two moons, Hart and North reversed roles in a way that only Hollywood could take seriously — and Bush came out the big winner. Six weeks ago he was looking at the very real possibility of getting jerked out of the White House by federal marshals before he ever had a chance to hit the bricks in Iowa City and get his picture taken on Election Day with his arm around the shoulders of the legendary local sportsman and political wizard, Marcos Melendez, who can deliver more votes than the stork.
When the buck stopped with John Poindexter, it was not only Reagan who beat the rap. Bush, long known in Washington as the guiltiest man in American politics, did a trick that made every camel that ever crawled through the eye of a needle seem like an amateur. If there were any real justice in the world, George would be working with Spiro Agnew on the wrong end of some driving range in Baltimore, for $2 a bucket.
Also in the weekend news, CIA Director William Webster has dismissed two high-ranking agents for "the roles they played" in the Iran/Contra affair.
Webster was planning to retire after 10 scandal-free years as director of the FBI when the Iran/Contra story broke last November, but when he learned that his nominal boss Ed Meese had known about it all along and never bothered to tell him, he got so angry that he canceled his retirement plans and announced he was going to stay on a little longer, or at least for the duration of the scandal.
Big Bill Casey didn't mind. He was dead. And so Webster took over the CIA and postponed his retirement back home to St. Louis for "at least the indefinite future."
That is what T.S. Eliot said, and also William Burroughs. But that was a long time ago, and neither one of them ever went back to their roots, as it were, in St. Louis. It is a nice town to be from, but that bridge under the great golden arch on the west side of the Mississippi is a one-way street for the big boys. The only St. Louis native who ever went back home after getting famous was Hadley Richardson, Ernest Hemingway's first wife, and they say she didn't stay long.
People like to talk about the difference between the '60s and the '80s, and also about the difference between Watergate and this monstrous Iran/Contra mess. . . . Well, I'll tell you the difference: The criminals in Watergate knew they were guilty and so did everbody else; and when the dust cleared the crooked president was gone and so were all the others. They were criminals and they had the same contempt for the whole concept of democracy that these cheap punks have been strutting every day for the past two months of truly disgraceful testimony.
The whole Iran/Contra investigation was a farce and a scam that benefited nobody except Washington lawyers who charge $1,000 an hour for courtroom time. North's bill for legal fees will be a million dollars, which has already been covered by the private donations.
If this low-rent scandal is the best this generation can do, they deserve what they're getting and they are going to have to live with it. They deserve to be called A Generation of Swine.
- Hunter S. Thompson: A Generation of Swine
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